But, for the most part, Google Reader in the browser works just fine. ReadAir on the other hand, lacks a major feature: keyboard shortcuts. I don’t even think about it anymore, it’s just j, j, j, j, j, k, j all day long. I can’t imagine having to give them up just to use an AIR app.

That being said, it seems that adding keyboard shortcuts to the app is an upcoming feature, as is an offline mode, continuation, and alternate themes that don’t make it look like a Mac app (thank god). Maybe I’ll just have to check back later, then. (via DownloadSquad)

Nice tip!

(img via)

He Beat Me To It!

• Mark Evans Tech: “So Much to Do, Not Enough Time!”

More:

• Video: Merlin’s New Time & Attention Talk
• Content is King. Or should I say Tyrant?
• Our cup runneth over with Web 2.0 goodness. How much can we drink, though?
• Too Many Choices? I’ll Help!

Do you agree with this? If not, you can join the debate going on at the web site CreateDebate. The site aims to take the classic internet flame wars and turn them into a more civilized event. Debates can spring up around any sort of topic and the homepage features the hottest ones. Expect to see topics involving religion, politics, morality, and, yes even Mac vs PC. (PC is winning right now!)

Each user on the site has a profile, which automatically builds itself over time. Your allies, enemies and hostile relationships are tracked and a news feeds provides personalized updates. Debates can be sorted by most heated, most arguments, most recent, etc. and there’s even a handy "Research" section which can help you craft your arguments. Within "Research," there are articles you can click on to become the focal point of a new debate. Each article has a little RSS feed icon next to it - different colors for different blogs. It’s subtle features like this that make CreateDebate stand out as one of the better debate sites.

I’m opinionated, but I like debating via a blog platform myself. However, I can see where this site could appeal to casual internet "arguers," who like to just pick a topic and riff on it. The site is also well designed, so it’s easy to navigate through the myriad of debates going on as well as access the other features, like your own profile for example - a feature that’s often, surprisingly, hidden on some of today’s services. There’s also a Facebook app to check out, which extends CreateDebate out into your social playground. If this sounds like your kind of internet fun, you’ll definitely want to try it out. 

Which reminds me…seriously, what is up with Trillian Astra? I’ve been waiting on that for a year. I’m beginning to think it doesn’t really exist!

Android Developer Challenge I Winners Announced

The Android Developer Challenge is a two-part contest whose goal is to encourage developers to build apps for the new Google mobile platform, code-named "Android." In this first round,  "Challenge I," submissions were accepted up until April 14th. Yesterday, the top 50 entries were announced. Each of these application authors received $25,000 to fund further development of their app. We’ve dug through the list of winners to pick out our favorite apps and the ones we’re most looking forward to. Continue reading »

Digg Townhall #2 Wrap-Up

Last night was the second Digg Townhall, a live session hosted online by Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson. Like before, Kevin asked Digg users to post their suggestions on Digg as to what topics should be covered. (The thread is here). Now that the event is over, we can review how well those questions were addressed. Continue reading »

RSSmeme Launches API, Provides Filtering Tools Galore

Benjamin Golub has been busy. He runs the site RSSmeme, an RSS aggregator that displays the top Shared Items items from Google Reader users. For a brief time, RSSmeme was the only Google Reader aggregator in town after ReadBurner closed up shop. But not too much later, ReadBurner was purchased and relaunched (our coverage), putting the two sites in competition once again. However, it looks like Golub has no plans to slow down with RSSmeme’s development. He has recently released an RSSmeme API, which allows for all kinds of new filtering options, a mobile web site, and much more. Continue Reading

Nexus Graphs Your Facebook Friends and More

Looking to visualize your Facebook friend graph? You can with a Facebook app called Nexus. This app is a friend grapher that displays a visual analysis of your Facebook connections. But it’s not just a pretty picture: in addition to viewing how your friends are connected, you can use Nexus to discover what interests your friends share and which of your friends are the most similar to you. Continue Reading

Wikipedia Gets Published - Should Writers Get Paid?

It seems a debate is brewing in the "Wikipedia-sphere" surrounding the commercialization and the soon-to-be-made profit from the voluntarily written and edited online encyclopedia web site. For the first time, a major publisher has made plans to print out and sell popular articles from the site, leaving many wondering if the content’s writers are being scammed out of royalties to which they are due. Continue Reading

How To Find the Top Twitterers in Your City

While it’s fun to follow some of the bigger names on Twitter like Scoble, Jason, Leo, and Kevin, it’s even better when you find others with similar interests with whom you can have real conversations. And even better than that is finding others to connect with from your same hometown. Connecting with other locals is something that the site TwitterLocal has helped facilitate for some time, but now they’ve added a new feature for finding top local Twitterers: a TwitterLocal Leader Board showing a city’s top tweeters. Continue Reading

It seems only fair that I follow up a bit on the great big debacle that was my recent Wikipedia post on Read Write Web. If you missed it, let me catch you up: Apparently, I should be disappointed in spreading this FUD, I have no understanding of how open content works, I need to get real, I spread stupid, negative publicity, I need to think before I write, it was a parade of nonsense, etc., etc. Sigh. Of course, amidst the haters, there were some those who agreed with me, but their voices weren’t quite as loud.

I’ll admit, the article was meant to stir the pot a little. So sue me. At the time, I thought I would just throw a controversial topic out there for discussion and see what people think. Unfortunately, people who disagree with an article tend to comment more than those who are neutral or those who agree, something I’ve stated before.

Unfortunately, with the way I wrote the article, this pot-stirring came across as 100%, pure personal opinion, especially when I said this:

But let’s be honest here, if the writers thought that the content they were contributing was to help a commercial publisher make a buck, and not part of a movement to “let information be free,” would they still have given so much of their time on a volunteer basis? It’s one thing to see Wikipedia distributed to the developing world, like when SOS Children’s Village, the world’s largest orphan charity, distributed Wikipedia CDs to Africa, but it’s quite another to know that you’re making money for someone else…for free.

That was meant to spark the debate (it worked), but as to my true personal opinion? Well, perhaps it’s a bit more malleable than the hard line I took at the time.

So, to follow up on the issue, a bit more thoroughly, I’ve since spoken with Mathias Schindler, a member of the board of Wikimedia Germany and the person who had some part in the development of the project to create, publish and distribute the one-volume edition with Wikipedia content, which took roughly three years.

He was disappointed in the turn the debate took, especially in the comments, and wanted to know if we could discuss it further. I readily agreed.

The Bertelsmann Project Is Not a New Idea

First of all, he wanted me to know that the Bertelsmann project is not entirely a new idea. In Germany, he says, they have a history of successful projects involving adapting Wikipedia content to other media, including CD-ROMs and DVDs.  For example, a DVD project helped to start a new Wikipedia project on person data, a new kind of authority file. The file later helped a lot in a cooperation between Wikipedia and the German national library.

Schindler uses this example to illustrate, how, in the long run, projects can help do more than just make a few bucks. Although getting paid is nice, he says, Wikipedia has been completely honest from the start: You are free to use the content for any purpose, you don’t need to pay for accessing or using the content. If you contribute, you will have to allow other people the same kind of freedoms you are enjoying.

In fact, this Bertelsmann project isn’t even the first time German Wikipedia content has been put to print. Nor is it the first time that publishers have attempted to make a profit for themselves: products at Directmedia, for example, were primarily designed to make profit for the publishing house. However, reading through that page of print editions, specifically the Directmedia one he referenced, I see a section entitled “Reactions.” And reading through that, I see that it states:

News of the latest Directmedia endeavor was recently reported on the popular website of German newsportal Heise [1], and posts to Heise’s discussion forum revealed a range of reactions to the possibility of a print edition.

Since I’m trying to be more thorough this time, I click through to the link provided by the [1].  On the Wikipedia page, the “range of reactions” they cite include things like environmental issues and whether Wikipedia is ready for print, but reading through the linked page, translated from German to English, I see that a discussion thread very much on this same vein of compensation….at least as far as I can tell considering the translated version. GNU is mentioned. So is Red Hat. (see “not a good sign” on this page). So it appears that there are a few other people who share these concerns after all. 

Future Implications

If the project is successful, additional volumes could be printed. It’s even possible that other publishers would follow suit. If that’s the case, then Schindler will recommend to the publisher to think of innovative ways to support Wikipedia and the people who made it possible - the authors. In his opinion, it would make more sense than sharing revenue if Bertelsmann tried to bring its own unique skills into Wikipedia, helping to develop an open source tool-set for publishing Wikipedia content or allowing its staff to spend time in contributing content to Wikipedia under free licenses.

Well, that sounds good, but what I wanted to know, though, is this: how do you really know that the current Wikipedia contributors will remain happy to contribute if a for-profit industry starts up surrounding their efforts? Are they really all that selfless?

Schindler points out that the concept of open source is not a new thing and that some of the contributors turn their reputation of having written a brilliant piece of software into a well paid job.

He adds,

You don’t need to be selfless in order to contribute to Wikipedia (of course, it never hurts).

Today, Alex Payne confirmed on the Twitter Dev mailing list that from now on users marked as Spam on Twitter will have their accounts suspended entirely for violating the Terms of Service. He also confirmed that they would avoid the headaches Facebook has had (aka Scoble’s account being suspended) and contact the owners beforehand to let them state their case.

Jesse welcomes the practice and I do, too. Best to start young with a no spam allowed policy before Twitter grows to MySpace portions and gets filled with unscrupulous users.

So what’s new with the comments system?

A quick overview of the changes:

1. Speed: Comments load faster. The comments load as the page is displayed - no more AJAX loading.
2. Lightweight UI: No boxes around nested comments and user profiles with permalinks to the comment are listed to the left.
3. New Filters: At the top of the comments, there are two new filters: "only mine" and "only friends" which filters the comments and replies section to display only yours or your friends’, respectively.
4. New "Controversial" Sort: In the sort drop-down box, there is a new sort called "Controversial," which will show the comments that have the most diggs and buries.
5. See Buries: You can click on the Digg count on each comment to see how many Diggs and Buries there are.
6. Change Your Vote on Comments: You can now click on the opposite thumb and recast your vote on a comment.
7. Easier to Reply and Manage Comments: There’s a bigger submit box, longer edit times, and a delete button to remove the comment.

Unfortunately, the update is still "coming very soon," so it hasn’t launched yet.

You can watch the video about the new comments system here:

Call me old-fashioned.   While I think all this Web 2.0 (or 2.5 or whatever number you kids are up to now) is great and all, I still prefer email as my primary tool for getting things done.  In particular, I use Outlook because of its rich features and its ability to easily tie together my email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and other information.  I use several plug-ins that help me with all of that, too.  I still subscribe to several email lists for content on all sorts of content.  So I use email for more than just personal information; it’s a source of incoming content for me.

But I also read a lot of blogs, which are slightly less old fashioned than email, I suppose, and I am lazy enough that RSS appeal to me greatly.  Why should I have to navigate to 50 different websites when I can have the content delivered to me, much like my email lists?  But that’s not the end of my laziness.  Why should I have to use a different application for email and RSS feeds, too?

Here’s my thinking:  Blog entries are usually bits of discrete content, just like emails.  So why not treat both as messages and deal with them in the same way?  I had tried a couple of different Outlook plug-ins back when I was running Outlook 2003, including an old version of Newsgator, that would let me read RSS feed entries as emails.  With Outlook 2007, that feature is built-in, and works pretty darn well.  I can read the entries just like emails, and I can forward them or reply back to the blog author (most of whom are people I know and are therefore in my Outlook contacts) right there.  Very slick!  One issue I have found with the built-in Outlook RSS feed service is that it is not able to handle feeds that require digest authentication (that’s where you pass your login credentials to the site).  Unfortunately, a lot of my friends use “friends-only” locked LiveJournal accounts which require that digest authentication.

The solution has turned out to be the latest beta version of Newsgator Inbox, about which I first read here when Sarah blogged it.  Now I should mention that the version you would download from their site has a bug that prevents the digest authentication from working.  But when I and a few others posted about the problem on their forums, they quickly (I mean really quickly, like in one day) put up an interim test build that resolved the problem.  Nice customer service!

So now, I have all of my feeds and various email lists all in one place, along with my personal correspondence, of course.  But it gets better.

Not only do I use Outlook, but I pay for a hosted Microsoft Exchange email account.  So all of my email is really sitting on the Exchange server.  And so are my RSS feeds because I’ve configured Outlook to store my feeds in folders that are on the server.  All I have to do is keep Outlook running on my desktop PC so that the feeds are pulled in periodically and synced up to the server.  Maybe someday Microsoft will add RSS feeds as a server-based Exchange plug-in…

So now I can access all of my email and all of my RSS feeds from my desktop PC, my Tablet PC, my Windows Mobile phone, or any other computer with a web browser via Outlook Web Access (OWA).  And it’s all synced automatically, so any email or RSS message I read or delete is marked as read or deleted on all of my devices everywhere.   And, since it’s all on the server, it’s all backed up for me, too.

Sometimes being old fashioned and lazy works out really well.

This was a guest post by Perry Reed, Twitterer, and LJ and Spaces blogger.