The LumpCast

Mostly Podsafe Music and My Thoughts

Archive for category Social Web Tools

Parakey Bought by Facebook

Jul 25

Posted by Lumpy in News, Social Web, Social Web Tools, Software, Tid Bits and Web Drippings

I know I mentioned Parakey before but I think it was over at lumpyscorner. Parakey is a new application being developed by the brainchild behind Firefox.

Parakey is supposedly going to make interacting with the web as easy moving files around on your desk top. The day I heard about it, I signed up. (As of date, I have heard nothing heard nothing of it actually being released.)

Yesterday I heard they were bought by Facebook. Now I admit that I was reluctant to create an account for this popular social network because it seemed like more of a hassle and redundant for a blogger. The reality is I simply received too many invites to not concede.

Buying a product that is supposed to make the web seamlessly integrate with you desktop is brilliant business-sense.

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Tagyu is no more

Oct 30

Posted by Lumpy in Social Web, Social Web Tools, tags, update

In the past I mentioned the tagyu service here. I mentioned the plugin for Word Press and using it on my blogs. This is of note: (from Adam’s Site)

It was a good run, and the technology has some exciting implications. But in the end, information retrieval is expensive — the server power required is enormous. Although Tagyu was bringing in enough revenue to cover costs, it didn’t afford any room for growth.

Tagyu was never really a consumer play — the target market was companies that need classification services. The process of managing the technology, looking for funding, and working on sales turned out to be too much for a single entrepreneur to manage. Lesson learned: for a enterprise software startup, you need multiple founders or the funding to hire some help.

I have something else in development — something I’m very excited about. More on that in a day or so.

Additional Note – The keyword generator portion of the Word Press plug in still works for yahoo.)

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Bits from the Web

Oct 23

Posted by Lumpy in E-books, KM, Knowledge Management, Social Web, Social Web Tools, Tid Bits and Web Drippings, connectivety

This looks interesting, a competitor to Wikipedia?

Here are some more of my recent finds:

Read the rest of this entry »

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A Simple Feed (RSS) Filter

Jun 2

Posted by Lumpy in Feeds, Feeds (RSS), Social Web Tools, search

I found this;ReFilter, a simple RSS filter. It is a simple feed filter. Enter the feed URL and a key word or phrase and get the relevant results. It seems to work well even via my modem.

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Tagging Mania

Jun 1

Posted by Lumpy in Feeds, Feeds (RSS), Social Web Tools, Tid Bits and Web Drippings, connectivety, delicious, search, social Networking

I have written a few posts on tagging and I have received a good bit of traffic on the post. More importantly, I have received comments and e-mails on the subject as well. Web conversations are great learning medium. I am flattered and thankful. I even received some "kudos" from Bill Ives in this article. The best part of this whole experience is that some real conversations happening. Ideas are being shared. This is good. I have a full schedule today dealing with some health issues and relocataion but I had to put up a quick post on this topic. It is usually better to keep a conversation going rather than give it a pause of scilence.

I have also continued to use the "stalking" and filtering methods discussed in this great article; The Several Habits of the Wildly Successful Delicious User. My delicious list is in exponential growth!

Feeds (RSS) and tagging go hand in hand for sharing knowledge. I put up a post on one specific use of using delicious tags to generate useful content regarding our podcast. You may want to read that post. It is also an article on "getting things done".

I have been doing much reading on the subject of tagging and I shall have more to say in the future. For today, I thought I would quickly share my links on the matter with three simple scripts. What follows is taken from my delicious account and the links are arranged by the most recently added. The beauty of this method is that the list will update automatically every hour. I hope it is of help and look forward to feedback so I may learn even more. As usual, thanks much for reading.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tagaholics Unite! — More on the joy and chaos of tagging

May 25

Posted by Lumpy in Social Web, Social Web Tools, Web Impact, connectivety, social Networking

There has been much discussion about tagging and using it for other purposes. I am still sifting through a barrage of links on the many aspects of this subject. I thought putting up a few links here might generate some discussion and brain food.

Can tags be use to auto discover hierarchies? That is a very good question. The issue is that there is a difference between tagA –> tagB and tagB–>tagA. Nonetheless, associations are clearly there and can be made. The issue seems more of how well they can be made and used.

As I said though, I still am digging through this. Here are some more links and, hopefully, I can get some input as I dig further and think on it more. One thing for sure though, I have become a tagaholic… I am becoming even more convinced that my bold bullets in this past post are very, very true. I have also become a rather addicted "delicious stalker", which is a person who follows and learns from the tagging of others by adding them to their network.
(I added Mr. Kasley to my network taking the total up to 16.) But it is going to get worse… I have discovered tagyu!!! I don’t know how I ever missed it.

Here are some links, some for brain food and others to hook you on tagyu.

  • Extracting Semantics from Folksonomy – The link points to the Google cache, I don’t know why but I can not seem to connect to the original post. It is a very good quick look at some of the issues on the subject. Do not miss the two links at the bottom either.
  • Library Thingy is now using both tags and subjects.I am simply going to describe this with a quote from the article.

    "Now you can look at a book and see both the user-created tags as well as the librarian-assigned subject headings. This puts us in the middle of the age old debate: tags or subject headings? Folksonomies or taxonomies? Ok, maybe the question isn’t quite that old, but it’s certainly debated. Subject analysis is a fuzzy discipline – decisions on "aboutness" are hard. But is it necessarily a question of one over the other? Can they work together at all? &quot

    ;

  • Tagyu.com – Paste in text and get tags back.
  • The State of the Union tagged – Some one used tagyu for the State of the Union Addressees for the past three presidents.
  • A bookmarklette for tagyu
  • Movable Type plugin for tagyu up and running at Lumpys Corner very soon
  • WordPress Plugin up and running here!
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Delicious vs. Search

May 19

Posted by Lumpy in Feeds, Feeds (RSS), Social Web Tools, connectivety, delicious, search, social Networking

In the past, I have penned a few articles on tagging. I also admit that I was somewhat lagging in grabing my Cyberboard and surfing that particular wave. In an attempt to deal with repeated insomnia due to sinus problems, I have been doing a lot of catching up on the topic. There has been a great deal of web discusion on the topic. I have read about the cognitive aspects of it, the social aspects, it’s lacking any benefit to search engines and it’s benefit to search in specific situations.

There is no doubt that tagging is currently all the rage amongst the webbites of the world. It is also just as certain that there is much debate over the long term usefulness of such and endeavor regarding information and knowledge management. The above links discuss the popularity of tagging and it’s usefulness (,or lack there of,) in searching the web. I am going to very briefly summarize them as follows:

  • It is not a replacement to search.
  • It is a viable alternative to search.

Bold bullets eh?

I really feel it is true though. I am finding myself searching far less often. Before I dive more into the topic, I would like to suggest a good post of links on tagging. Read this and the related links. More importantly, read this post on using delicious and I think you will quickly get my point. (Be sure to read the comments as well.)

Search will never be replaced. In the past, I have often searched the same topic over and over. With the applied use of the delicous suggestions above, I have saved that time. I simply use my delicious network and inbox to automatically deliver the said items. Now, the time issue is keeping up with that inflow.

I tag more and search less. If we all do that, we will all search less. I put this post up to get opinions. Please feel free to leave a liberal amount of comments.

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Google Buys Writely

Mar 10

Posted by Lumpy in Google, News, Social Web Tools

I just read this and thought it merited a quick post.

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Foldera.com

Mar 9

Posted by Lumpy in Social Web, Social Web Tools

I heard about this service at Anecdote, more specifically, in this article. The service is called Foldera and had 400,000 sign ups in it’s first day of existance.

I am now on the waiting list to try the service. I have not yet tried it but still feel it is worth a mention.

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Sociable Buttons for WordPress

Mar 7

Posted by Lumpy in Social Web, Social Web Tools

Sociable is an nice Word Press Plug in. It is how I get all the buttons in at the bottom of each post.

The only issue with the plugin is that it created invalid code. I have run into issues like this before with the catcha plugin and simply fixed the matter. I fixed it and put it up for anyone who wishes to use it. You can get it here. (Right Click and Save As)

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