Otavo is a new collaborative information discovery and repository site that I’ve found myself addicted to recently. I heard about it on Pete’s review of the service on Mashable, and it sounded a lot like my favorite new community, FAQQLY, so I had to check it out. But Otavo turns out to be almost the opposite of FAQQLY. Where FAQQLY is a community site that encourages people to get to know people by asking questions and has the side effect of being able to gather knowledge and information, Otavo is about searching for information by turning questions into Quests and throwing in a bit of socialization on the side.

To participate, a Quest is created by a user that other users can subscribe to either to monitor the responses or to provide answers in the form of urls and/or comments. Otavo provides a browser bookmarklet tool called the Floster that makes adding links to quests when you’re surfing a relatively simple affair. Once you’ve joined a quest, you receive email notifications if anyone adds links to it. Otavo also provides points to members for actions such as creating quests, adding links to quests, posting on the forums and inviting others to join the service. Users can also create a network of buddies on the site and even keep a blog, but there is not too much of a social aspect beyond that at this point so isn’t a community as of yet. Otavo is a good excuse, however, for me to share some of the 3500+ urls that I’ve saved in Del.icio.us, Furl.net and a couple of other bookmarking services with people who are looking for that information. In fact, over five days of questing, I hit the #1 contributor spot mainly from adding links to other people’s Quests from my archives.

So while Otavo has a lot of potential, there are still some improvements that could be made, in my opinion, to make it even more useful, user-friendly and fun:

• Links on Quests should be rateable, so that it is easy to see what links were helpful to the Quest.
• Users should receive points if their links are highly rated.
• Users should be able to comment on links in the Quest in addition to commenting on the Quest as a whole.
• A way to easily import links from bookmarking services like Del.icio.us should be provided. I may have many relevant links that could be useful on a Quest but it is time consuming and cumbersome to go to Del.icio.us, open a link, open the Floster, copy my description and tags to the Floster and save, close the window and repeat for several more links. Maybe the Floster could recognize when you are on a Del.icio.us page and add a link next to your posts so that you could just click on the link to grab the information. Since the Floster is a DHTML/Javascript floating form on the page anyway, that wouldn’t be impossible.
• Points for creating a Quest should be removed or reduced. This only encourages people to create bogus quests.
• Points should be awarded to creators of popular Quests as they gain popularity. Popularity can be determined by number of people joining the Quest or number of links and comments provided or both. Possibly one point for each person, link or comment added.
• RSS feeds should be available for Quests themselves, users’ Quest lists, and possibly for the tags that links on Quests can be categorized under.
• Adding a link that you’ve already shared with another Quest should pick up the information (description and tags) that you shared before to save you the trouble of entering it again.
• Somehow, picking which quest to add a link to in the Floster needs to be made easier… Once you’ve participated in more than 10 Quests, the list gets too long to scroll through efficiently (the questions are too long to scan easily). Also, it seems sporadic as to whether the Floster “remembers” the last Quest I added a link to, and that has caused me to have to go move links around later that ended up on the wrong Quests.
• Quests with little participation should be “promoted” in some way to make them more likely to be picked up on. If they get buried under the popular Quests, then some of the “harder” Quests might be overlooked by the ones that are easy to answer and therefore popular. Possibly there could be a list of the least participated Quests to browse through.

Overall, I have found Otavo to be a pretty compelling service and if they will add some or all of the suggestions above, then it could really be outstanding and useful. Since its still new and only been in public beta for a short while, hopefully that means the Otavo team is still in the feedback and development stage and there is more to come. I’ll be watching as it evolves and trying to defend my status as King (Queen?) of the Quest hill!

I have been terribly lax in updating my blog lately. Besides other things getting in the way, at least for the last few weeks, I’ve been distracted by a new service I found that is extremely addicting. That service is FAQQLY: an idea started by Dave Liu, a student at UCLA, and designed to be a whole different take on what makes an online community.

FAQQLY is about questions. Lots of questions. Membership is free and you are provided with your own FAQ page. There you list “Ask me abouts”, or topics you’d like to discuss and wait for people to drop by and ask you about them (or anything else they’d like). If no one leaves you a question, its not a problem! You can always draw from the “Bucket of Questions” where FAQQLY users post random queries on whatever comes to mind. The bucket, one of my favorite and FAQQLY’s most addictive features, contains everything from classic “verses” questions (Pirate or Ninja?) to the far more deep and philisophical.

Some of the best features from several popular community services are combined in FAQQLY. It has the topic agnosticism and the social fun aspects of MySpace.com, but where MySpace is more of a wild and crazy frat party, FAQQLY is more like a dinner party with your friends with polite and stimulating conversation. It is also similar to Yahoo! Answers in that you can ask about anything you want, but you seek out people to query who have already expressed some kind of knowledge in the area you’re curious about (through their topics list) and so generally will get a more relevant answer, or at least an interesting discussion. Because of the structure imposed by the FAQ the ugliness of MySpace’s user customized layouts is avoided, and because there’s a bit more personal accountability for questions (since FAQs are focused around people) it avoids the random stupidity and sometimes incomprehensibility of questions and answers that pervade Yahoo! Answers. These aspects seem to encourage a slightly more mature (mentally if not by age) membership, which is one more reason FAQQLY is attractive to me.

Friends lists are maintained as in most social networks. Once you are friends with someone there are several other features that are available between you. You may ask for Help, which is basically like posting a question to everyone on your friends list, and you may also create “Shares”, which are postings about items that you are willing to give, trade or lend to your friends. The Shares (and to some extent the Helps), are designed to encourage you to meet your friends in meatspace. While this is a something that I can see as being popular among the younger crowd such as those still in high school or college, I doubt that it will work as well for the older folks. One thing I actually like is being able to get to know people from other countries or even different states, whom I will probably never have the chance to meet in real life.

Built with Ruby on Rails, FAQQLY is agile development in action. Just in the few weeks since I’ve been a member there have been at least 3 site updates and several new features added (including the Bucket). Dave and the FAQQLY team are very open to suggestions and feedback and they are continually making updates and improvements to the site. As it evolves, I believe FAQQLY has the potential to be a really useful community as well as an entertaining one. I’ve chatted with some of the team about implementing groups, which would end up being similar to a topic forum. People could ask for help from many potentially knowledgeble people once they are in place, but still have the questions show up in their personal FAQ as part of the sum of their knowledge.

FAQQLY is a good alternative for people who might want to blog but can’t decide what to blog about. I always hoped that my blog would be a place where I could get conversations started on topics that I was interested in. But the only way to have conversations is to have enough people around who might want to talk with you. Either you have to bring the people to you (generate large amounts of traffic) or go where people are (join a community). If you are interested in lot of unrelated topics and post about all of them, its hard to draw a regular audience for your blog, and if you join an online community, its usually goal or topic focused so your other interests aren’t appropriate for discussion. FAQQLY solves that problem by giving you an audience that’s ready to talk about almost anything. Your FAQ could also be seen as an aggregator for your participation in groups. FAQQLY is a one-stop shop. I find that more satisfying than just participating in many different forums on many different sites with many different logins and passwords to remember. Potentially I would only have to come to one site to find information on many topics as well as be able to help others by sharing my experiences and lessons learned as well.

Of course, everything is dependant on how big and diverse the community at FAQQLY is. Right now, its largely homogenous; having spread through word of mouth from Dave to his friends to their friends, but it is growing every day and starting to differentiate. Currently very few of my interests have matches when I search on them, but I have managed to find a few kindred spirits.

FAQQLY is a brilliant idea and if it continues to improve at the rate it has been then I expect great things. At the least it’s been very entertaining, at it’s best it could be my favorite social and information discovery site. So sign up and come ask me a question!

A few weeks ago I got a beta invite to Dabble DB. I tried it out and I was simply blown away. I haven’t been so impressed with the comprehensive usefulness and ease of use of an online application in a long time.

Its so easy that my nine year old son, Avynn, was able to create a database to track his test scores for the Accelerated Reader (AR) program at school with minimal assistance from me after we had a 15 minute conversation about what a database is. He created a table (termed a Category in Dabble) of books and one of his AR test scores, set up the relationship between the tables and created a view that grouped and totaled the results by quarter (displayed below). It took us about 45 minutes to build including the painfully slow data entry skills of a third grade typist!

I had already played with Dabble DB for a while before the experiment with my son and managed to create a database application to maintain a customer database for a friend of mine with 6 tables each with relationships, some with more than 1 per table, and 11 views with grouping and aggregation in under 4 hours. It’s something that my friend would easily be able to make immediate use of and easily add any missing data fields and relationships. The orientation, learning curve and jotting notes for feedback took up the majority of the time I spent on it. I could easily recreate the entire application in about 1.5 hours if I needed to do it again. I was amazed at how easy it was.

Here’s part of the email I sent back to the developers (Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton) after that project:

First I want to say thanks for the invite! And second I want to say OH MY GOSH this is an awesome application! I am so very impressed. And I’ve beta tested a lot of things. This is the most useful, functional and well thought out beta I have seen maybe ever, especially among the class of app it is. Relational databases are not easy things to create and maintain, but you guys have done a really excellent job making it simple, quick and even fun (in an extremely nerdy way)!

I’ve been playing with it for a few hours today, setting up a project that I’ve had in mind to do for a friend of mine and I’m amazed at what I have after my relatively small amount of effort. During the whole experience, I kept saying, “well, X is cool, but I wish it could just do Y… that would make it even better.”, and to my amazement, after poking around a few minutes more, I’d find that I can do Y!! I started out with a big list of enhancements and by the time I was done whittling out the stuff that was there anyway, I’ve only got 5! You guys rock!

Dabble DB came out of beta last week and I think that it is a great alternative to anyone who’s now using more than one Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a Microsoft Access database to keep track of their information. Dabble DB is friendly enough that anyone who can handle creating a spreadsheet and certainly someone who’s using an Access database can easily set up their own Dabble applications. Heck, if my son can do it, then just about anyone can! No longer will small business owners need to rely on their brother-in-law’s programmer friend to set up a small database for them. As one of those potential programmer friends, that’s probably not good news for me wanting to pick up some side work, but oh well, more time for my own pet projects. Of course Avynn’s leet database services are for hire if you need them after all!

This is the first in a series of posts I’m going to write about my experiment with the Shangri-La Diet which has been emerging as a controversial way to lose weight within the blogsphere. Why would I want to try it? Weight has always been an issue in my life and I’ve always been trying to find a way to control it, and I enjoy self-experimentation.

About 3 years ago, I was 100lbs overweight. I lost 95lbs faithfully and strictly following the Atkins lifestyle. I’ve been maintaining for almost a year and a half now, within a 10-15 pound range, but I’ve never really managed to get all the way down to my goal. I “cheat” a lot more than I did before maintenance, usually taking at least one day a week to eat whatever decadance I’ve forbidden myself for the rest of the week. So I’ll gain a couple of pounds from that indescretion and spend the next 6 days being “good” and work it off again.

Overall, I have been happy with my low-carb experience and it’s a very effective and powerful way for me to stay fit and healthy. Despite what the popular media tells you, living the Atkins way is actually a very healthy lifestyle. In a nutshell, I consume a large amount of healthy fats and the food that I eat is higher in quality and nutrition density than the food I ate before. After all, when you’re going low-carb, you’re basically giving up the highly processed, trans-fatty, high-fructose corn syrup laden crap that makes up 80% of the diet of most typical Americans.

But still, there’s that last 10-15 lbs that I just haven’t been able to get rid of. I kept telling myself that I’d bite the bullet and go on Induction (the first, most restrictive phase of Atkins) again for a couple of weeks and try to shed that weight, but I’ve put it off mainly because I’ve just been lazy and not as disgusted with my body as I was before I started Atkins.

So that’s why I was interested when Tad said: “Well, I’ve found my new diet!”. He has a few more pounds to lose than I have, and his extreme pickiness about food has prevented him from doing Atkins and several other diets he’s looked into. So if he’s interested in something at all it’s got to be easy to follow and not too crazy as far as what you are allowed to eat. And I think the Shangri-La diet fits the bill.

What is the Shangri-La diet? It’s a new method of controlling your weight that Seth Roberts discovered through self-experimentation and observation. The gist is that you take a tablespoon of unflavored oil or 4 tablespoons of sugar dissolved in water twice a day with a buffer of an hour before and after the dose with no food and drink other than water during the buffer. Yes, it sounds insanely pointless, too simple and counter-intuitive. How can you lose weight by eating more calories? Especially of fat or sugar?

The premise is that your body has something conceptually like a thermostat that it uses to regulate your weight. There is a “set point” which is the “temperature” that the thermostat is set to and your body is constantly adjusting your hunger, turning on the heat (hunger) or the A/C (loss of appetite) to cause your weight to stay at the set point. When your weight is higher than the set point, you aren’t hungry. When your weight is lower than the set point, you want to eat. To control your weight, you have to be able to move your set point to where you want it to be and effectively reset your hunger thermostat. Once your set point is where you want it, you will be compelled to take in as much or little food as you need without discomfort of hunger or extra effort of eating special foods to maintain that weight.

In the book, Roberts focuses on the psychological aspects of the diet, his theory of flavor/calorie connection and how it affects our hunger and calorie consumption. He doesn’t go into much detail about the biological aspects how the diet works, other than through illustrations of scientific experiments in an appendix that seem to confirm the hypothesis without necessarily explaining it. But I’m the type of person who likes to know how things work and I’ve been giving this a lot of thought.

I am certainly not a medical professional, so I can’t be considered an authority, but I will take a stab at a theory on how the diet works biologically anyway. I have read Roberts’ book and did some reading based on the short paragraph in his book about the hormone lepitin. While doing that research I came across references to insulin and so did a refresher on some of the things I learned about how insulin affects the way you process food from my research on Atkins/low-carb diets. If someone has some additional insights or corrections here, I welcome the clarifications! I’d like to know as much as everybody else how it really works and someone with the proper credentials should be able to work it out.

I think the effects of the diet all have to do with influencing the functions of of lepitin, a hormone that tells the brain how much fat your body is storing, and insulin which directs how you utilize and/or store the calories that you ingest. I think that the set point itself is related to an acceptable ratio of lepitin in your bloodstream (your hunger thermostat will be triggered when the ratio is off balance) and the diet works by “tricking” the function of insulin, keeping it from switching from utilizing calories for energy to storing calories as fat for a longer period during the day resulting in a suppressing of your appetite. Tricking the insulin functionality consistently eventually causes your the acceptable ratio of lepitin to be changed so that your set point is lowered. And with your set point lowered your body doesn’t think you need to store as much fat and consume as many calories so you lose weight.

How does the insulin tricking function work? I think this is where Robert’s flavor connection comes in. When you eat something with a strong flavor association it triggers your brain to release more insulin to take care of the incoming food. When you eat things that have no flavor, there is no extra insulin released, but the insulin that’s already in your bloodstream continues to work on the energy release function instead of the storage function. Now I can see how that works for oil, but not so sure about the sugar water. So maybe I have it all wrong…

But maybe I have a partial clue. Regardless of how it works, it does seem to be working for many people who have tried it. And so I’ve decided to try it myself. So far it’s working for me too. I’m on the 7th day since I started and I’ve already lost about 2lbs.

My goals are modest:

• I’d like to finally get to my original weight goal, and potentially another 5lbs beyond that.
• I’d like to be able to incorporate more fruit like bananas and apples into my diet on a regular basis, currently something I can’t do with the low-carb regimine.
• I’d like to be in complete control of when and how much I eat and not be ruled by hunger. For instance: if it’s not convenient to eat lunch at 11:30am and I have to wait till 1:00pm, I don’t want to be hungry in the interval.

If Roberts’ diet can do all that for me then I’ll be happy. So I’m giving it a month and using the oil method. If it doesn’t work, no harm done. Oil can’t be a lot more low-carb! If it works, Woohoo! Shangri-La found!

Results:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3, I’m done.

A while back I wrote a post about how using VMs has made my life as a developer significantly easier. Two of the items on that list were things I hadn’t tried yet but just assumed were possible: loaning my VM with a co-worker if I was on vacation so they could continue work in my evironment and bringing my VM home on my portable harddrive instead of my laptop. But I wrote too soon (and I apologize for not testing that first!). When I finally decided to try out the VM at home, I ran into problems with Windows activation. And this issue would rule out the loaning to my co-worker scenario as well. Apparently VMs virtualize all of your “hardware” except for the processor in your host computer. Since the processor changed from my work computer to my home computer, it triggered the activation.

Now, for work, I have an MSDN license and could potentially get a volume license which would eliminate the re-activation, but I have several problems with that solution:

• I spent a large amount of time setting up my base VMs and then configuring the development environments on copies of them. I don’t want to (nor do I have time) to start all over again building my chain.
• I didn’t just want to use this for work. I wanted to install Windows XP with my personal retail license in a VM and be able to carry around some personal apps on it.
• I just have a problem with the fact that I’m one person using one VM with a retail licensed copy of Windows and I can’t move the VM from machine to machine on a frequent basis (multiple activations would cause you to be locked out pretty quick with a retail license). I don’t think that kind of usage actually violates the intention of the Windows EULA and might fall under the wide umbrella of “fair use”, but it’s certainly not piracy, and shouldn’t be penalized as such!!

So I did some research and came up with an extremely cumbersome potential solution that was a variation on an activation file restoration procedure (which I won’t expand on since I was advised of legal repercussions) and asked in a VMWare forum if anyone had tried my solution or knew another workaround. Someone responded with a quote from the Windows EULA:

The term “COMPUTER” as used herein shall mean the HARDWARE, if
the HARDWARE is a single computer system, or shall mean the
computer system with which the HARDWARE operates, if the HARDWARE
is a computer system component.
…
you may install, use, access,
display and run only one (1) copy of the SOFTWARE on
the COMPUTER.

These statements above are contradictory as far as VMs are concerned. What is a COMPUTER really when you’re talking about a VM? It’s only because the processor is used by both the guest and the host that they might be considered a single COMPUTER. This leads me to think that VM use under normal circumstances is in violation of the EULA: if you’re running a VM with an installation of Windows on a Windows host, then you have two copies of the SOFTWARE running on the same COMPUTER. So is the VM a COMPUTER itself? I’ve seen many people ask “If I have a VM do I need a separate Windows license for the guest OS or can I use the host’s?”. And though I’ve seen different answers, they’re all basically either someone getting no official answer from Microsoft or someone saying that, yes, you do need a separate license, which indicates the VM is it’s own COMPUTER.

So you can’t have it both ways: that’s just not fair to consumers. It either is an independent COMPUTER or it’s not. If it is, then I should be able to use my licensed copy of Windows via a VM hosted wherever I want because the VM is a self-contained COMPUTER. If it’s not, then I only need one license to run a VM with Windows on a host of Windows since they’re both on the same COMPUTER and it still shouldn’t matter whether I used my VM on one or more COMPUTERs as long as each COMPUTER had a valid license for Windows.

To me, not being tied to your hardware is a major promise of Virtualization! Yeah, VMs are great for enterprise-level server resources allocation and for Q/A testing and for IT departments to deploy to workers as a replacement for PC images, but they have so much potential for consumer applications as well. Being able to wrap up things in a nice tidy package and have them accessible as long as there’s hardware close by that can run them is liberating and opens up so many possibilities.

• If a VM is not an independant COMPUTER, then you could release things such as Virtual Appliances for Windows which are currently only possible under Linux and other free OSes.
• Software vendors could release demo versions (or full for that matter) of their software on VMs which would mean no installation and uninstallation hassles for users and ensure that the environment was properly configured to best show off the software.
• Companies could save hardware costs for their telecommuting employees by allowing them to just use a VM on their home computer for VPN access and the company’s licensed software.
• And, of course, there’s still the idea of travelers not being required to carry a laptop through airport security.

But those possibilites and many more are currently eliminated by Windows activation.

TAD always tells me that I should write a letter to someone when I get upset about something, so this time I decided to take his advice. Here’s my request to Microsoft:

Yay for Google! They’ve got another winner. I’ve been playing with GCal all morning and I’m pretty impressed. There’s still some room for improvement, of course, but Google has fixed one of my main peeves with 30Boxes: setting up repeating events and altering a single instance or the entire series is easy!

What I like:

• Creating calendars for different aspects of your life is easy
• Setting permissions on those calendars (and events) at different levels is fairly easy
• Typing in some keywords in the title when creating an event automatically populates some fields (similar to 30Boxes) such as when I type in “Weekend trip with friends in Sedona”, Sedona gets placed in the Location field for me. That’s nice.
• You have an Agenda view of your dates which is like a list of all most recent upcoming events on your calendars. This alternate view is nice and very useful for forecasting availability over more than one month or viewing annual events (like on your Birthdays calendar).
• Showing and hiding the different calendars is just a matter of a click, and this comes in handy especially for the Agenda view.
• Being able to share calendars with select people and give them rights to manage the calendar entries as well is a wonderful feature
• Duplicating events between calendars is just two clicks
• There is a URL based API you can use on your blog/website to create events with one click, so that you can publish an event that other people can instantly add to their own calendars.
• You can set up reminders to be sent in advance of events, selecting time periods from 10 minutes to 1 week, and the reminders can be sent as email, SMS to your mobile phone or as a popup window (assuming you have GCal open on your desktop).

What needs improvement:

• There’s no html view of your public calendars (to non Google users).
• Finding other people’s public calendars is not easy or intuitive… I still haven’t figured out how to do it without having the url for the calendar’s RSS feed
• There’s no integration with GMail even though the help says there is… this may be a timing issue as they roll updates out to the various Google servers
• There’s no integration with the Contacts in GMail… most of my events revolve around people I know so I would like to see those connections between my contacts and events
• There needs to be a way to add TODO list type functionality to this. So the tasks can show up on your Agenda, but not necessarily be bound to a hard completion date
• There needs to be a way to “share” an event between two calendars instead of just “duplicating” it, so that if you change the event it gets updated on all the calendars that reference it
• There should be a programmatic API for adding calendar entries to public calendars or calendars that are shared with you. For instance, to allow people to come to your blog and propose a date for a meeting or other event and have it posted to your public calendar for your site. Basically the opposite of the way the published event button works now.
• There should be a way to set up more than one reminder for an event, such as for a birthday, to get a reminder at 2 weeks from the day and another at a week, just to make sure that you actually get a present in time!
• You should also be able to set up the delivery type for each reminder. Currently you set that at a global level, but I’d rather set it so that each reminder might be delivered differently (mainly split by the period of time…).

What’s ripe for 3rd parties:

(put on your developer hat!)

• An HTML view of your public calendars. Someone out there will build this soon, I’m sure.
• Wordpress/TypePad/Blogger widgets to incorporate your calendar
• A manager to sync your events to and from GCal other services like Eventful, Trumba, and even 30Boxes.
• An Outlook add-in that automatically (or easily) publishes your events to GCal

Overall, it’s a great start and it’s going to be a lot of competition for some of the other options out there. Even with the issues I mentioned, I’m still pretty excited about what I’ve seen so far. I can’t wait to see what they do with it next.

I take lots of short video clips with the handy video feature of the camera I carry around in my purse, but never feel comfortable uploading the “raw” clips to YouTube, Vimeo, or the other service out there. I don’t have any video editing software on my PC mainly because I can’t justify the cost of the decent editors so if I want to polish anything I have to jump on my son’s iMac and use his iMovie app which, though very powerful, I don’t like using for two reasons: 1) in the most recent version, they have changed the output options so it’s extremely confusing to get the quality/filesize combination that I want and 2) any use of the Mac is a frustrating experience for me because I’m so completely PC indoctrinated that the supposed “intuitive GUI” of the Mac is not intuitive at all.

Enter Jumpcut. Mike Arrington and Pete Cashmore had reviews of this site last week and I thought I’d give it a try with a clip I shot yesterday at a RC Airshow that I attended with my family.

Overall, using Jumpcut to upload and edit the clip was a good experience, though I encountered a few usability issues, I was still able to add a couple of effects and some titles to my short clip of some RC aerobatics. Here are the pros and cons:

Pros:

• Accepts most major raw video formats, like AVI (what my camera uses) unlike some other services. Though they said that they’ve seen problems with AVIs, mine worked fine.
• Uploading can be done by email attachment so you can email yourself video from your cameraphone
• There is direct import from Flickr for pictures (to create slideshows or mix with your clips)
• I didn’t see any limitations on how much stuff you can upload. I would be pleasantly suprised if things remain that way, but for now that’s a nice feature!
• Adding titles and effects was relatively easy once I’d figured out the steps
• Titles, effects, transitions, audio, etc, can be placed on a clip and controlled by sizing a slider bar, a nice intuitive way to do things once you realize that’s what the bar is for.
• The preview feature is very handy for testing out the entire effect of your additions to clips
• There are lots of ways to share your clips with the world and with your friends/family, including integrating it as an object in your blog (as above).
• Remixing other people’s clips into something your own looks like it might have some interesting potential

Cons:

• There’s no way to review the FAQ’s or Quick Guide once you’re in the editor: the footer links on the rest of the site don’t appear on the editor page. This makes it difficult when you’re learning and not sure what everything does from the tooltips.
• Uploading a clip while in the editor didn’t give me enough feedback to know that my clip was in the process of being uploaded and I ended up aborting the upload. I had to go back to My Home to upload my clip and see the progress.
• Sometimes the effects simply did not get applied. Even when I added them and they appeared in the effects list. I had to remove the effect and re-add it before things corrected themselves.
• There needs to be persistance of entered data even though the user has encountered an error. When publishing my finished clip, I carefully and thoughtfully filled out the title, tags, description and several other fields on the publish page. When I tried to save my information, I got an error saying that one of my tags was shorter than 3 characters and was not allowed, but it also got rid of all the information that I had entered. This was more than a little annoying since I hate duplicated effort and I’m sure that my second set of entries wasn’t as nice as the first.
• There is no way to download your edited video that I can tell, and even if you could, it would be in Flash format.
• Where is the RSS?? I want to be able to subscribe to “directors” and tags for topics that I’m interested in so that I can be updated when new content appears.
• There doesn’t seem to be a way to resize the blog widget for your video. That’s unfortunate since it kind of wrecks my layout being about 100px too wide. It would be nice if it was adustable (considering that the clip doesn’t even fill the whole width of the widget anyway!)

Despite the cons, I was able to register on the site, upload a clip, add a title and two effects and publish it in about an hour. I think now that I have the learning curve down, I should be able to do the same thing in about 15 minutes or so. That’s about the right amount of effort that I’m confortable with for publishing clips to the web. Jumpcut certainly isn’t a tool to produce professional quality video, but for the purpose of polishing and remixing some less-than-professional clips from my small camera or phone with the intention of quickly and easily sharing them with friends, family and blog visitors, the service fits my needs pretty well. I think I see more video in my future!

Bonus: Here are a couple of other videos on Jumpcut I thought were creative:
Save the Peeps!
Box-Car Racers

Today Pete had an article about the financial viablility of web based “home page” services such as Netvibes, Protopage, Favoor and others. Personally, I haven’t figured out what the usefulness is, myself. I just don’t get them.

My first peeve about web home pages is that they take a long time to load. I don’t use any page as a default in my browser. When I open a browser, I generally am after some kind of information and I already know the url I’m headed for, or I am going to Google to find it. I want the browser to open fast so I can get where I’m going. Few things annoy me more than if the browser has a home page specified and I have to wait for it to load before I can even type in my url (it will overwrite what I’ve typed once it finishes loading the page and I’ll just have to type it again unless I’m patient). And web home pages take a long time to load because of all the widgets and modules.

My second peeve is that I don’t gain anything from another RSS aggregator and there aren’t really any other useful widgets. I have RSS feeds funneled to my mail service so that I only have to go one place for incoming information. Yes, I know I can set up my “home page” to have a widget to view my inbox but I still have to click on it to open my mail program so what’s the point? As for other widgets, I don’t have time to play games and I don’t need the weather reports (I can look out the window).

Which leads to my last peeve: widget screen real estate is so limited for the useful tools (like search, inbox or even flickr feeds) on home pages that I don’t want to use those tools on the home page. I’d much prefer to use those tools on their native sites so that I can focus on them and the task at hand without the distraction of other stuff on the page and the limitation of having to scroll for full functionality.

So, I haven’t figured out a good reason to use these services. And this is an opinion of a very techy/geeky/early adopter type person… Isn’t it way too complicated for the “average” guy who’s still daunted by (if even aware of) RSS feeds? I will be surprised if any of these services survive the next year or two, with the possible exception of the early players in the space (such as Netvibes) just because of the novelty.

I’d like to hear of some innovative uses for these things… Maybe they’d be useful as a way to aggregate info and “share” it with others? Ehh, no… SuperGlu, PeopleFeeds and Squidoo bascially do that… What else could you do with them? Anyone have some suggestions?

I have spent much time and looking for the perfect (at least for me) online bookmark archive and I still haven’t found it.

I received a beta invite to Ma.gnolia a few weeks ago and tried it out. My initial response was the same as Pete’s:

“So yes, it’s a good effort - but also a completely unimaginative one. ”

Ma.gnolia just doesn’t offer (at least yet) a lot to compel me to switch from the two main services that I already use the most (Del.icio.us and Furl).

But maybe there is some hope for Ma.gnolia.

Since I already know what I’m looking for in a bookmarking site, it didn’t take that long for me to check for some things and then send their tech support a pretty long email with questions and suggestions. A representative named Todd replied and his response was friendly. He seemd to genuinely appreciate the feedback and sounded like their team might actually take some of my recommendations into consideration. We’ll have to wait and see. I’m not ready to make the move yet until I see some innovation.

Ma.gnolia reminds me of Furl with tags instead of “topics” (folders). I give them major props for saving a private copy of the pages you bookmark, but that seems to be the main feature it offers that other services don’t (besides Furl and Clipmarks).

It’s not really designed for info-discovery, which is what Del.icio.us does a good job with. I think some of those info-discovery features are there, but they’re not promoted very well:

• The “latest” and “popular” lists of incoming links are in the sidebar on your main archive, under the space hogging “add a link” box (that should be less prominent because 99% of the time you’ll add links with the bookmarklet), and shown in small fonts, so I didn’t even see them until the second time I came to the site. There needs to be a separate space, a whole page with the ability to see older items as well, devoted to these things because they’re important… they’re not sidebar items.
• You can use a url to see a list of links under a tag and even a combination of tags like you can with del.icio.us (ex: http://ma.gnolia.com/tag/css+design) but nowhere on the site did I find information telling you that feature is available… I just tried it and it worked.
• They have a “group” feature that is relatively unique but no way to browse a list of all groups… you have to use the search and hope that you typed the right keyword.
• They have search, but no way to specify what kind of search… it searches everyone’s links… what if I am just searching in my own archive?

And my other beef (after asking in email) is that they aren’t planning on offering a browser toolbar like Furl (which is nice because it has a search bar right on it) or Clipmarks (which lets you choose parts of the page to save). The explanation was that toolbars aren’t available to everyone and they are often targets for hacks and exploits. While that may be true, they are also potentially incredibly useful depending on what you do with them and would be another thing to make Ma.gnolia’s service stand out from the pack. As for the bookmarklet that’s available to capture bookmarklets, there’s no innovation there either. You get can’t even really be put in a pop-up window like I prefer because the page isn’t laid out compactly so you have to scroll a lot to get to the entry fields and tags.

It’s unfortunate since I was really hoping there’d be more to set Ma.gnolia apart. Maybe now that they’re getting beta feedback their developers will try to add some more innovative features instead of just trying to depend on the fact that their site looks nice to entice people in. I’ll keep watching and hope it will continue to evolve.

When I got my new laptop a couple of months ago I decided that I would do things right this time. As a developer I have special needs out of my work computer. It has to be able to to support development on several different projects at a time, some of which have conflicting prerequisites as far as the environment is concerned. So I have begun using virtualization with VMWare as a way to make life easier.

This is very much still an experiment for me and I’m learning what works best as I go along. Creating a VM for each of my current projects was a no-brainer. I love working in the VMs for development for several reasons:

• Now it doesn’t take me 2 or 3 hours to reconfigure my laptop to switch tasks and work on that web project that has some 3rd party tools that conflict with that winform project that uses different versions of the framework they both share and the source control providers that they don’t. It’s just a two-minute procedure of suspending one machine and opening up up the other. Presto chango!
• It’s so nice at the end of the day to not have to shut down all my development tools (Visual Studio, Query Analyzer, Enterprise Explorer, etc…) and turn off the computer. I just suspend and close VMWare and shut down the host (which goes considerably faster since I don’t have 200 services running in the background like I do in a development environment). And when I come back the next day I start up literally exactly where I left off.
• Creating a new development environment takes so little time. I already have several “base” VMs with varying configurations that I can just clone and customize. And I don’t have to worry about any conflicts with what I already have installed.
• If I have to turn over development to someone else on my team, all I need to do is put the VM (or a copy of it) out on a directory where they can grab it and get started. No configuration issues of setting them up on their machine! (Note, this would probably end up being a temporary situation, such as when I’d go on vacation, since the OS is licensed to me, though it might not be an issue since everyone on my team has an MSDN subscription through our company…)
• Telecommuting without VPN access, (heck, without even lugging my laptop home) is easy now! I have all my VMs and shared data on an external portable 100GB harddrive. I just unplug that sucker and take it home. It’s light and almost small enough to fit in my purse. Then I just plug it in on my home computer and run the VMs from home! Fortunately I am not travelling out of town on this assignment but if I am later, this will definitely be nice for getting through airports. No laptop to be hassled with in the security checkpoints. Admittedly I have to make sure I have local copies of the databases that I need to develop against, but that hasn’t been an obstacle yet.

Figuring out what to do with my “office productivity” software and personally licensed software is another story. Contrary to Jeff Atwood’s interesting proposal that all software will eventually be packaged and run through VM’s I haven’t figured out how it will work for particular varieties of applications. (more…)

I was deliciousing today and saw a link to a beta site called Stiki Pad. When I clicked on the link it was an email signup form with the tagline “Launching (very soon)”. I read the blurb and sent my email and started adding the site to my own del.icio.us archive. When I hit save and the page refreshed, it was live! I guess they weren’t fooling around with the term “very soon”!

So I signed up and started playing with it. I’m pretty impressed.

I’ve toyed with wikis before and I’m always looking for new ways to store and organize the information I gather. My fascination with informatics software started when I was introduced to Microsoft OneNote. The free-form note storage with tabbed pages and deep searches was great, but code snippet tab-stops were destroyed by the automatic formatting and that was a problem since a lot of things I wanted to store were code. I found Instiki and played with it for a while but I didn’t like having to start the Ruby WebBrick server every time I wanted to use it. I was completely fascinated with the micro-content wiki variation TiddlyWiki for several months, and even created a version of it that allowed you to tag your entries but for some reason or another I just quit using it after a while. I didn’t want to go to the trouble of hosting my own wiki online mainly because most of them run on Apache servers. But Stiki Pad requires no independant hosting or setup and looks like it will be a good alternative for me.

Besides the fact that the site has a nice, clean, pleasing design, there are several things about Stiki Pad that make it stand out beyond the things that you’d expect from a wiki service:

• You can access your wikis by defining your own subdomain. For instance: I could create macrolinz.stikipad.com
• *You can associate your own domain with your wiki
• *You have almost complete control over the look and feel of your wiki: You can style your wiki using CSS and set up templates which control the whole page structure if you want to reuse a format you’ve created that was useful
• You can tag your wiki pages
• *You can monetize your wiki by displaying your Google Ads!
• *You can upload files to store on their servers so you can store more than just textual information
• You can grab your data as RSS, HTML or PDF (Stiki Pad is not a walled garden)!

There is a free account but some of the advanced services (*) are only for paying plans. The plans look fair except possibly except for the bandwidth restrictions. And the amount of storage could potentially be increased, considering that the standard for most services that offer online storage is at least 1GB for free these days. Don’t plan on using this site as a substitute for a blog if you expect to get any significant amount of traffic. But for personal use, keeping family and friends in touch and keeping small groups of people organized and collaborating, it would be a good choice.

In all this seems like a very interesting service that I plan to find some good uses for. Today was a good day for delicious surfing!