Web – Page 53 – Changing Way

Sharing

Sharing is on my mind this morning for a few reasons. I was uploading some photos to Flickr this morning, and my daughter asked me what I was doing. I told her that I was sharing them, so that family and friends in Philadelphia, California, and other places could look at them.

She protested that she wanted to look at the photos. I told her that I was sharing them in a way that allowed other people to look at them at the same time as her. I managed to stop myself launching into an explanation of the non-rivalrous nature of digital works. She is, after all, only three, and seemed convinced that I wasn’t taking anything away from her in order to share with others.

One of the things I talked about with the students in my Blogging and Business course on Saturday was Creative Commons. I used as an example this blog, which has a sidebar heading Sharing rather than Hands Off.

Nokia N800 as Firefox Computer?

Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic, like many of us, can do much of his digital work and play in his browser.

my digital day is currently spent in the following apps: WordPress, Yahoo Mail, Bloglines, 30boxes and Google. And they all run perfectly well in Firefox… I want a Firefox computer. A nice, sleek, solid state notebook with a big screen that you open up and it just runs Firefox. I bet this could be had for a reasonable price, it could have a nice long battery life and start up almost instantly.

I feel the same way, although I’d be inclined to go for the portability of the Nokia N800. But will Firefox be ported to it? Could I learn to live with (or should that be in?) Opera?

Flixster

Flixster is a movie social network, recently written up on TechCrunch and on Read/Write Web. Each of the writeups focuses on Flixster as a social network centered on movies.

That is of course an accurate way of looking at Flixster, but I’m inclined to come at it from the other direction, and look at it as a movie site including social networking. So my main point of comparison is IMDB, which is mentioned by neither TC nor RWW.

RWW does make the comparison with a couple of other movie sites: “the recent hit movie Dream Girls has been rated by 4,600 Flixter users… 5,000 times on… Fandango and only 300 times on AOL Movies.” IMDB has 6,300 ratings of this movie, and so is not so far ahead of Flixster.

I find IMDB annoying, partly due to its ugly layout, and partly due to its requiring registration to see the message boards. Flixster’s layout is more appealing, and it appears to require registration only for the things that it’s really needed for (e.g., My Friends’ Reviews).

So, a tentative thumbs up for Flixster as a movie site with social networking.

Web Identity, ClaimID, Technorati

As someone who has multiple blogs and other web-things, I’ve long thought that it would be good to have one identity. By that I mean at least two things: a userid/password spanning the web-things; and a page linking to my various web-things.

This post is about the latter. I’m currently using claimID. If you click on the link (or, currently, the link under the “About” heading in the sidebar) you’ll see links to this, other blogs, and other web-things. The trouble is, I can’t “verify” most of those links. In particular, I can’t provide to claimID, and hence to people visiting my claimId, that I really am the author of this blog. The claimID verification process requires that I place code in the header of the web page, and WordPress.com won’t let me do that.

Technorati, on the other hand, does let me “claim” this blog by including a chunk of code in a post. So, by pasting in the provided code that links to my Technorati Profile, I can convince Technorati that this is my blog.

So why not just use Technorati for my ID page? First, it doesn’t set out to do what claimID does. That’s not a criticism of Technorati. Second, its record for doing what it sets out to do is rather spotty. That is a criticism. Now, let’s see if it’s currently deserved…

Wal*Mart Video Downloads, and Cyber-Snobs

Wal-Mart’s new video download service got a lot of criticism on blogs yesterday. For example:

These blogosnobs are missing the point. The fact that Wal*Mart’s video download page doesn’t work in Firefox is irrelevant to 90% of web users, and to at least that percentage of Wal*Mart customers. They get their browser from Micro*Soft*Mart. This majority doesn’t whine when some obscure option doesn’t work, unlike the above-quoted opinionated outposts of openness.

DSL > Dialtone

We don’t have landline phone dialtone right now. But we do have DSL, even though it comes over the phone lines. But my wife is on the phone, via the cellphone. If the battery runs down, there’s always Skype or Gizmo.

Most of the time, I don’t like phone calls. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t answer the phone unless I knew who it was, and really wanted to talk with them at that moment. If it’s important, they’ll leave a voicemail.

Come to think of it, I like having DSL and no dialtone. I certainly prefer it to having dialtone without DSL.

By the way, we get (or don’t get) dialtone and DSL from Verizon.

Yes I am, perhaps belatedly. I’m spending too much time playing “guess which of the people I know are already there.” I’m not sure whether LinkedIn is best described as a social networking for professionals, or professional networking for the online.

Web Identity

So there are all these web services, each of which requires a name and password to log in, and invites the creation of a profile. This leads to what I’ve termed Multiple Identity Disorder. Frank Gruber (via Read/Write Web) notes that products have emerged in an effort to help users better manage and display all of their profiles in one place, and reviews some of the products.

Multiple Identity Disorder is, I think, one of the issues for the web in 2007. I know that I’m making my own case worse by starting yet another new blog. I’m treating it using claimID, as you can see from the About page of this two-day-old blog. Of course, I may have switched to a different prescription by the time you read this…