Now Using Twitter

I'VE STARTED TO USE TWITTER. I plan to use it for microblogging -- the brief, remaindered links that I have usually stored up and then posted in bulk, leaving Seat1A for longer items. I've updated my blog template to include the five seven most recent posts to my Twitter feed, and if you'd like to follow my feed you may do so here.

While Twitter is a recent Web 2.0 rage, the user community is still comparatively small. Still, usage has increased dramatically of late, and I'm starting to notice more of the geeks in my circle using Twitter. One of these is Michael Hyatt, who is not a personal acquaintance but someone whose blog I follow. He recently posted a Twitter 101, which follows two other posts on the topic. The Wikipedia article on Twitter also is a nice primer.

Frankly, I just love the ability to post via a text message from my phone. I so often see random things on the road and think, "That's a great Seat 1A post." Now I can fire it off with a simple text. The 140 character limit is also a nice creative constraint, forcing a sort of blog haiku form.

LEE LEFEVER has created a marvelous little video explaining the wonders of RSS syndication and RSS agregators called "RSS in Plain English." Anybody who spends more than five minutes a day online should watch it (Al & Gwen, John, Shannon, others ... this means you), and you may click below to do so (original post here). While on the topic, a few days ago I revisited Google's aggregator, Google Reader (which Lee's video highlights). I had played with it some months ago, and found I didn't like it as much as Bloglines. Not the case anymore, and with the improvements they've made in visual style and ease of use, I think it's my new reader.

Click To Play

Current Photo RSS Feed

I've configured my home page to produce an RSS feed of the current photo. Those of you using RSS aggregators--and who have the inclination to see my humble photographic efforts--can now subscribe to the feed and see the latest photo when I update the page.

The current photo is a detail of Ghiberti's doors to the baptistery in Florence (the "Doors of Paradise"), and the current photo RSS feed is here.

For those of you not using an RSS aggregator but reading blogs, it's really time to get with the program. Click a button and you can "subscribe" to any web page that uses a technology called "RSS" (which stands for "Really simple syndication"). When the site updates its page its RSS feed sends a signal to your aggregator that says "Hey, I have new content," and very often, sends the new content along as well. This makes staying current with web pages very easy: You don't have to remember to check in with Seat 1A--when I add a new post, my RSS feed will alert your aggregator and send the new post along for you to read (or, in the case of the current photo, see). Really great technology.

(As an aside, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention I was seatmates with Dave Winer, the creator of RSS. A genius, and he's really done the Web world a favor in RSS.)

Blogs aren't the only sites that produce RSS feeds to which you can subscribe. Most web pages now do (they typically display an icon to indicate they have a feed, often like this one), including every news site in the known world (NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and likely, your home town paper). For an aggregator I use Bloglines, with which I keep up with 107 different web sites. It's free and web-based, which means there's no software to download and you can log in and read your feeds from any computer with an Internet connection. I use Feedburner to publish Seat 1A's RSS feed (even though the TypePad service publishes one automatically), and my feed for the blog is here.

CellarTracker!

HERE'S SOMETHING TO GO SEE: CellarTracker! -- an online wine cellar management program. There are several such services out there, but I've been using CT for around six months now and it's by far the best in its power and flexibility. What's more, because it's on the web an not your PC, you're able to access your list of wines from any computer with an Internet connection or web-enabled phone (very handy when you're at the wine shop wondering how to best surprise your wife with your lack of self control).

One of the great things about CT is that it's a community-based model. Unless you mark your holdings as private, you're able to see other users' cellars, and they yours. This is very useful: Say you find a wine you like and enter it into your database. CT then shows you all the other users who also hold that wine; browse their holdings for a while, read their tasting notes, and you can very quickly find other wines you're likely to enjoy trying. The community model also makes data entry VERY easy: Every wine entered by every user (and there are 12,000 users and 2 million bottles in the system) is in the shared database; for most wines, entry involves typing in the UPC code, and the software automatically pulls the rest of the information -- maker, vintage, appellation, year ... all of it.

Lots of other features (pasted from the CT home page, and you can click the picture above to see a full-sized version of my CT home page):

Cellar Inventory Management

• Report and search by producer, vintage, varietal, drinkability, etc.
• Purchase price and valuation data (locale settable)
• Consumption history
• Barcode support
• Restaurant-quality printed wine lists
• Per-bottle location & bin tracking
• Personal tasting notes
• Uploadable label images
• Wish lists and shopping lists
• Track pending deliveries (a.k.a futures)
• NEW! Automatic valuation of your cellar (read more)
• NEW! Express import tools for existing spreadsheets (read more)

Tasting Notes

• Record your own notes
• Group a series of notes into tasting events
• Read community tasting notes
• See what others say about wine in your cellar
• Automated integration with Stephen Tanzer's IWC (for co-subscribers)
• Store other professional reviews and scores (in compliance with copyright)
• Community bulletin board

The report features are especially useful. You're able to add and consume bottles with a click, so rather than poking through your inventory to find what you still have and what's worth drinking, you can go to CT, run a drinkability report for, say, reds, and instantly see what's ready to pull. It's really very slick. And while it's free, donations are encouraged, and franlky, deserved: I made a donation within several hours of finding CT, and use it to manage all the bottles in our modest collection. Check it out.

Update: While pulling the Technorati tag code for this post I found this interview with CT founder Eric LeVine. I was impressed with his bio when I found CT. Short story: In software early; Lotus, then Microsoft; fateful trip to Italy where he discovers a passion for wine; writes a software program to manage his cellar; makes it web based and collaborative so his friends can use it; retires young and makes CT his full-time job; rides into the sunset. Great story and an interesting guy.

Tags: cellartracker, eric levine

Google Mobile Website Formatter

THIS SITE IS A GODSEND. Courtesy Google, it formats any website to be quickly viewed on a mobile phone / PDA web browser. It's now the homepage on my Treo, which can now load the CNN home page in about five seconds. Wonderful.

Tags: google, mobile browser

Picasa

I USE OUR MAC AND IPHOTO to manage our digital photo library and it’s great software. I occasionally need to process digital snaps on the road with my PC laptop, though, and for that I use Picasa. It’s quite handy, easy to use, and makes photo processing a snap. Read more reviews on the Web. Oh, and it’s free (in addition to being another great product from Google, and part of the Google Pack).

Many PC users don’t know about Picasa, and instead use the usually awful photo software that came with whatever digital camera they own. It’s a shame. If you don’t plan to get a Mac, check out Picasa.

Tags: picasa

Google Pack

A FEW DAYS AGO I wrote about Google and how they never fail to impress. They've done it again with Google Pack, a free, one-click, auto-updating set of essential software for Windows PCs. Google Pack includes:

• Google Earth - 3D Earth browser: Zoom from space to street level — tour the world; Find maps, driving directions, hotels, restaurants, and more
  
• Picasa - Photo organizer: Find, edit, and share your photos in seconds; Easily remove red eye and fix photos
  
• Google Pack Screensaver - Photo screensaver: Enjoy photos from your personal collection; View pictures full screen or as a collage
  
• Google Desktop - Desktop companion: Find all your email, files, web history, and more; Get all your personalized info in one place with Sidebar
  
• Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer - Search toolbar: Search from any web page and autofill forms; Block annoying pop-ups
  
• Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar - Web browser, Mozilla Foundation: Browse the web quickly and securely; Switch between pages quickly with tabbed browsing
  
• Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition - Antivirus utility, Symantec: Protect your PC from viruses, worms and Trojan horses; Includes 6-month subscription to protection updates
  
• Ad-Aware SE Personal - Antispyware utility, Lavasoft: Safely detect and remove spyware; Protect your privacy with powerful features
  
• Adobe Reader 7 - PDF reader, Adobe Systems: View, print, and search PDF files; Launches up to 50% faster than Reader 6.0

Savvy PC users are already using much of this software -- I already use Ad-Aware, Firefox, Picasa, Norton, Google Earth (amazing), Google Desktop, and Adobe Reader. If you're not, you should ... especially Firefox, which is significantly faster, safer, and less annoying that Internet Explorer. Ad-Aware is another essential. Run it once a week and it keeps your PC free of spyware (also increasing the running speed of your PC in the process ... 30 or 40 malicious spyware programs running in the background eats up a lot of processing power).

Even if you already use some or all of these programs, Google Pack has a very nice updater that ensures you have the latest version, and will continue to do so over time. Very highly recommended.

Technorati Tags: Google Pack

del.icio.us Content

FIRST, HAPPY NEW YEAR. Here's hoping for a peaceful, prosperous, and joyful 2006. Kate and I are back in PA, and are looking forward to enjoying the bowls today.

Second, I posted a few weeks ago about how I'd begun using social bookmarking site del.icio.us, and my affinity for the service only grows. Since the service is social, I've added two sets of del.icio.us content to Seat 1A: A list of the last 10 pages I've tagged, and my "tagroll" of tags I've created. Both are in the far right-hand column. You may also see my full list of bookmarks here.

It's Del.icio.us

I'VE BEEN USING THE social bookmarking site del.icio.us for a week or so now, and am finding it nearly indispensable. In simple terms, with del.icio.us you keep your Web "favorites" or "bookmarks" on a web site, rather than in the menu of your browser (or AOL). That way you have access to them from any computer with an Internet connection. To help with sorting and finding, you also categorize your bookmarks with "tags," one-word descriptors that group your bookmarks.

Example: You might find a great site on Lincoln and the civil war. You want to come back later, so you bookmark it (which takes one click of the mouse), and add tags of "civilwar" and "lincoln." These tags then show up on your del.icio.us page as categories -- click the "civilwar" tag and all your civilwar bookmarks pop up.

Here's the cool part: All del.icio.us users have access to all other del.icio.us users' bookmarks. So I can see what other people have tagged "civilwar," which takes me down a trail of many new sites I'll likely find of interest. I can also see which sites are most popular (have been bookmarked by the most people), which helps one judge quality.

This article does a much better job of explaining del.icio.us than can I. And if you'd like to see what I have bookmarked at the site, you may do so here.

Flickr Interestingness

FLICKR IS A GREAT SITE. If you've not been, it's a photo management site that also allows you to easily share your photos with friends, or if you choose, the entire world, and it's free.

Flickr makes it easy for you to share and see others' photos through the use of "tags." Example: As people in Hurricane Katrina's path upload photos to Flickr, they "tag" those photos with the word "Katrina." This makes it easy for other people to see Katrina photos: They simply type "Katrina" into the search field of the home page and *presto* -- there are all the photos that other users have tagged "Katrina." It's a cool, and powerful, example of disintermediation: who needs "official" photojournalism outlets when all of us can be photojournalists?

Flickr also integrates easily with blog software of all stripes. I use it's email post feature to post photos from my phone to Seat 1A (as I did here). It's seamless: take a photo with the phone, attach it to an email sent to a special Flickr address and voila, the software automatically posts the title, photo, and any text to the blog.

A great way to get the flavor is Flickr's Explore page. I've also added a TypeList in the first column at right, toward the bottom, which automatically posts thumbnails from the three most recent photos posted with the "Interestingness" tag, which Flickr assigns to particularly interesting photos.
If you like photography as creator or admirer, you'll love Flickr.

* This is scheduled post written earlier.

Currency Convertor

FOR THE INTERNATIONAL TRAVELER: XE.com has a nice currency converter online.

FlightAware

FLIGHTAWARE: THE GREATEST FLIGHT TRACKER OF ALL TIME. Flight tracking, data on peak hours by airport ... an amazing array of information, well displayed. Click the picture for a screen cap of the individual flight tracking feature. And it's free. (Via Lifehacker.)

iKey

THIS IS A COOL INNOVATION. I love the idea of being able to record with my iPod.[1] When we help clients prep for an important speech or begin to plan a large comm campaign we typically engage them in a long interview about goals. An iPod would be a great way to capture that conversation -- it would be with you all the time, and the digital format makes it portable to others.

Or capture a family history interviews with parents / grandparents, then email it to the family, post it as a streaming audio file / podcast on your web site ... lots of possibilities.

1. What's more, it works with any USB device ... so you could record directly to a USB thumb-drive, PC / Mac, etc.

Badwidth Speed Tests

TEST THE SPEED OF YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION AT CNET. I've used this page in the past, but had forgotten about it. Noticing this morning that the Wall Street Journal loaded in about one second prompted me to go back. My results: 3.6 megabits (about twice as fast as a T1 line). Awfully good for a cable connection.

* * *

Hmm, this site reports a transfer rate of 4.8 megabits / second, which is really cooking. I wonder why the difference?

* * *

But Speakeasy's site is easily the coolest one out there, reporting download and upload speeds. And it gives me a report (from a server in Washington, D. C., of 5.2 mbits download and 3.4 kbits upload. I didn't know my upload was so much slower than my download ...

MapStats

THIS IS NEAT: I've added the BlogFlux MapStats tracker to the blog, which plots the geographic location of recent visitors on a Google Map. I can see that this morning I've had a reader from Lambeth, London, U.K., and another from San Jose, CA. Maybe not useful (although the stats feature is quite good), but cool for the geek factor alone.

THE LATEST RELEASE OF FIREFOX IS OUT IN BETA. I've been using it (v 1.5) for a week now, and it works great. Stable, and faster than before. IE is unbearably slow by comparison. Get it here.

ALL THE BLOGS FIT TO QUERY, at Google's new Blog Search search page.

MINDJET HAS RELEASED A BROWSER-BASED VIEWER FOR MINDMANAGER which seems awfully slick. Can't get it to work in Firefox quite yet, but it works great in IE. I've used MM for a while now but have longed for a way to put maps easily online. Problem solved! (To see examples, follow the link.)

A COUPLE OF LINKS I've been meaning to post for a while:

• www.fly.faa.gov: The web site for the FAA's air traffic control system. Especially handy: their text-only site designed for mobile devices. Great knowledge to have on-hand while standing in an airport trying to separate delay spin from confusion from reality.

• www.whytuesday.org: Move election day to a weekend and significantly boost voter turnout. Why Tuesday? From Wikipedia:

This rule was instituted by the U.S. Congress in 1845, and the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November was chosen to keep the election day from falling on November 1, All Saints' Day, a Holy Day of Obligation for Roman Catholics.

If you've not noticed, it's no longer 1845 ...

• www.traffic.com: I love this site. Provides up-to-the minute traffic information for 25 major US metropolitan areas, including maps of delays, accidents, and other incidents. A great feature: "My Traffic," which allows you to create a sort of dashboard of drives you frequently make.  For example, I've saved drives from our home to PHL airport, to 30th Street Station in downtown Philadelphia, to Citizens Bank Park, and from a client's office in Minneapolis to MSP airport. By visiting the site I can instantly see the time each drive takes, the average speed, slowest speed, and overall delay, if any. What's more, it's a free service. Essential.

 

ALSO COURTESY LIFEHACKER, an SD card that flips in half and fits your USB drive. Very cool (and I'd like one myself).

Feed Google News

THIS IS GOOD NEWS: Google News is adding RSS and Atom support. Add Google's (aggregated) headlines to your favorite aggregator now. Think of it as aggregation-squared.

Running ...

Running a million miles a second this week, but didn't want to give the appearance that the blog was falling into disinterest (at least for me). Lots to post about ... couple of new wines, some thoughts on Getting Things Done, and some observations on how the airline industry is about to undergo a major system shock ... when I'm able to sit down in front of the PC / Mac later today and tomorrow. Until then, go check out Konfabulator. It's now free (having been purchased by Yahoo!), and it's been a great little addition to my desktop (I use the stock, calendar, weather, WiFi, and traffic widgets).

Storm Mapping

Those who work with me know I'm a big fan of Mindjet's MindManager mapping software. It's useful in all kinds of settings, including, it appears, managing post-hurricane recovery efforts at the FAA.

Technorati Tags: MindManager FAA

Wiki Power

Back in the saddle after a wonderful vacation with Kate. Thanks for being patient through my infrequent posting and photo/moblogging.

Tough day yesterday for London. In addition to displaying the bulldog spirit of the London people (a colleague in London emailed me with "The buggers missed me again!", noting that the response would be a "big night in London" followed by terrible hangovers today), the event also displayed the responsiveness of new media. The Command Post had the news up at 5:36 am and it developed from there as bloggers around the world triangulated the official news, photos, and first-person-blog attempts, and it was just one of many hundreds of blogs contributing to the coverage.

Most impressive to me, though, was the article created about the event at Wikipedia. In the course of just a few hours, laypeople around the world created an amazingly accurate and useful reference about the attack. If you've not seen it, go see it now. As you read it, remember: there was no plan, no centralized editor. The article "emerged" though collaborative, web-based, decentralized activity.

If you're not familiar with wikis (a great tool for internal collaboration and knowledge management, BTW) learn more here. (We use a wiki at CRA as our on-line knowledge management / policy and procedure / event design tool, and it's been incredibly useful. You just have to learn to be comfortable with a lack of centralized control.)

Technorati Tags:  wikis London bombings

The Power Of Snopes

Today I received this email from a good friend:

Have you heard of this?

MARS SPECTACULAR!

The Red Planet is about to be spectacular! This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.

The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification.

Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m.

By the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30 a.m. That's pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month.

NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN

The first place I (and most of the more experienced surfers out there) check when items like this ... and anything else that seems strange, like "Your eBay account has been suspended" emails ... cross our in-boxes is Snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Page. Snopes is one of the most valuable sites on the Web, and it's testament to the size of the Web that more people don't know about it.Type in your search and bunk or debunk a rumor, legend, claim, or strange email in an instant.

In the case of the message above, it's a bunk / debunk combination. The message is true, but the August 27th in question was in 2003. And the legend is hot at the moment: it's currently #9 on Snopes list of the 25 hottest urban legends currently circulating on the Internet.

fly.faa.gov

A site about which more business travelers should be aware: The FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center. Current status on all delays for all airports in the U.S. There's also a text version for web-enabled PDAs and phones here.

Out The Window

Although I'm a blog snob who's used Movable Type installed on personal servers for some time, I'm really coming to like TypePad (which I'm using to publish Seat 1A). It's easy, comes with a nice set of templates that are just configurable enough to put your own stamp on things (although the most expensive option is fully customizable in look and feel), and has plenty of bells and whistles. One such bell is the "Photo Album" feature, which lets you easily create photoblogs from your own digital stills. I've put one together, called Out The Window, here.

How To Cruise Online

A beautiful day here in Southeastern PA. A resplendent blue sky, and we woke to the sun streaming through the trees ...

Being a bit of a geek by nature, I'm often asked about how I use technology (frankly, I think the more interesting question is how not to use technology, but that's a post for another time). Several on-line tools I think everyone should use with regularity:

1. Firefox. While each browser has its fans, in my view (and the view of many others) Firefox is simply the best way to browse the web. It's small, free, extremely fast, and perhaps most important, significantly more resistant to spyware and popups (no popups, in fact) than the others, and especially, Internet Explorer. If you're not using Firefox, you're making your browsing much more difficult than it need be. When you finally make the switch, be sure to learn about the search engine feature ... a spectacular tool.
2. Wikipedia. If you followed the spyware link above, you've already seen Wikipedia. It's an on-line encyclopedia with a half-million entries that ... get this ... anyone can edit (including you). Counter to what you might expect, the quality of information is actually excellent. Indeed, the quality is so good, and the vandalism so low, that economists are studying wikipedia to learn why such an open system doesn't dissolve into chaos (one reason: economically speaking, it's more expensive in time and energy to vandalize a wiki than it is to fix the vandalism).
3. Google Maps. When I show people Google's on-line map service it never fails to blow them away. Graphically it's much easier to use than the other on-line map tools, its driving directions are excellent, and it integrates seamlessly with Google's yellow pages listings making the location of places of interest a snap. What's more, the "satellite" view is absolutely the stuff of science fiction.
4. Bloglines. If you read blogs or news sites with any regularity, Bloglines is an invaluable time saver. It's a website that allows you to "subscribe" to other web sites you visit often. It then lists these sites in the left-hand column, and indicates if that site has new information. If so, you can click on the site's name, and the content pops up in the right-hand column.
   
   Example: You subscribe to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, David Allen's site, and Seat 1A sites simply by pasting or typing their web addresses into the subscribe field. Now when you want to catch up on these three sites, you go to your Bloglines page, which tells you there are four new stories at the Journal, two at the Times, and that David has a new post up as do I here at 1A. If there's nothing new, it tells you that as well, and you don't waste time visiting the site. In geek parlance Bloglines is an aggregator of RSS, Atom, and XML feeds. That doesn't need to mean anything to you: all you need to know is that it's easy, valuable, and free.