Someone told me that the average time spent on a web page is seven seconds, that includes looking at all ads, photos and reading content. To be honest, I probably belive this statement to be true. There are some exceptions though, some articles I want to read later, in detail, but not right now. This is even truer when the evening rolls around and I’m on instant messenger and friends send me links, or when checking silly things friends send me via email.
There are countless social networking solutions to help you tag sites to visit later, the biggest is probably del.icio.us, followed by Digg, but these tools, along with countless others available are designed for you the user to share the content with someone else. What if you don’t want to share the content, you simply want to access a particular website again without the pain of sending yourself an email or book marking a site in your browser to forget about it later.
My solution for the last two weeks has been Instapaper. Instapaper is a bookmark applet; you add their icon to the bookmark toolbar of your browser and when on a site you want to read later, click it. The applet will then save the link and a short description to your Instapaper site to be viewed and clicked on later. One of the best parts of this service, besides being free, you don’t need to give an email address to create a username! I did create a username and password since I use it at work from time to time when browsing websites on my lunch hour, my Macbook and when at friends houses to retrieve sites that I know I saved there.
There are a lot of really neat details about Instapaper as well, including the ability to use this on your iPhone. Read the FAQ to use the service better, faster and be more productive.
Oh yea, did I mention that it’s free? There aren’t even any ads on the site!
I just logged into MySpace today to, well to check MySpace out and saw something kind of unusual an Amber Alert. Back in January I told you that MySpace was going to add Amber Alerts, Right above where it says Hello, Mike Panic (once you are logged in, above your default photo on the left) was a link that said,
ATTENTION: There is an Amber Alert in your area.
Please CLICK HERE to find out more information.
Now I’m very aware that MySpace is far from secure and peoples accounts get hacked or taken over on a daily basis, usually due to password phishing, but I know I didn’t login anywhere unusual. Intrigued, I clicked the link and the screenshot to the right came into view. Please note that the screenshot I took is real, those kids are missing, it is not false information.
This is a great thing for MySpace to offer to utilize this system, there are millions of people online daily and hopefully this will bring more attention to child kidnappings. It is sad to see it actually in effect now though.
Offical Amber Alert website: http://www.amberalert.gov/
1. 4 people, 1 bottle Captain Morgan, west San Francisco, 8pm
2. Best long island ever, Amber, Castro 8:30pm
3. Gay Bar, “officially drunk” thank you for the free drinks “Chad”! 9pm
4. Gay Bar, dancing, more drinks, french man, french kiss.
5. Burrito at the expense of gay booty call 11pm
6. 10 minutes of hell in friend’s 4 inch heels
7. Gay Bar, dancing, drinking…. Bars close… “WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?!?!?!?!?!?”
8. Flirting with cab driver gets me to The Tranni Shack.
9. Drinks, dancing.
10. Too drunk to notice drive by… busy. (making out in middle of street)
11. Leave friend with police…
12. Pass out in hallway
13. Breathalizer, 10am… .15
*No persons were harmed in the making of this glorious, glorious evening*
Randomn3ss is taking part in Blog Action Day, which is fast approaching. Since the start of the contest to win a Nalgene Refill Not Landfill bottle, I wanted to try to encourage more blogers to take part in the event on October 15th. The video below should hopefully help you understand a little more what exactly the event is all about. Even if you don’t have your own blog, you can still participate by blogging on my MySpace or other social networking site, which will help bring awareness.
This wouldn’t bother me so much except for the fact that Digg apparently chooses what sites it does and doesn’t want to promote certain stories. The “Digg-effect” has made unknown sites popular and decent money makers overnight and in some cases increased readership 10 fold. For Digg to decide who does and does not get traffic, even though in most cases it isn’t abusing the Digg algorithm is a poor choice on their part.
Late yesterday afternoon social news site Digg went offline, as mentioned here. I wasn’t able to follow up on the article as I was traveling out of town, but Digg is now back online. Strangely enough, I don’t see anything in the official Digg blog about the site going offline and no one in the blogsphere really seems to have said anything. If you have noticed a change, please let me know.
Not exactly sure what is comng, but social news site Digg is currently offline for updates. Perhaps the much anticipated update allowing pictures will be added.
Flipping through channels the other night I found myself watching an interview with Kevin Bacon, don’t know what made me stop at that channel, perhaps because I couldn’t get over how old he looks. In any event, he was talking about his new project, Sixdegrees.org, a site listing more than a million different charities along with a full listing of celebrities who associate with each one. In a portion of the interview, Kevin went on to explain that this was done for a few reasons, one of which was to show how involved a lot of celebrities really are in giving back, even if the press doesn’t always publish it. The site itself states,
You’ve probably heard of the Six Degrees concept. Any one person (including me, Kevin Bacon) is connected to any other person through six or fewer relationships, because it’s a small world. SixDegrees.org is about using this idea to accomplish something good. It’s social networking with a social conscience. Through this web site, you can support your favorite charities by donating or creating fundraising badges — as well as check out the favorite causes of other people, including celebrities.
This is a great concept; Kevin Bacon is the perfect person for this, especially after the game 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon got well known more than a decade ago, and to raise awareness for the millions of different charities out there. It also includes the social networking element, which is the new buzz of the moment on the net. I’m not a fan of a celebrity starting a charity for the sake of starting one, I personally belive there are entirely too many out there and they should be consolidated down, however this site starts to bridge the gap and shows similar charities inside the six degrees concept.
There seems to be an endless supply of social networking sites launching daily onto the Internet, all-trying to capture people to create content. Some are successful, like MySpace, which have millions of users, while others like Twitter just seem to fall by the way side.
Onto the scene comes Gleamd, social networking meets Digg meets celebrities, all with a shiny Web 2.0 name lacking a vowel. The concept, at least what I can tell from the press release as there is no about page, is that users add famous and not so famous people to the site with a snippet of information about them and then vote them to the top or front page or something. The problem I’m seeing is that none of the information on these people is anything original, for the most part it can all be found on the Wikipedia, and the vote system ala Digg is getting played out. It works very well on Digg, but even there it has been proven to be somewhat easy to manipulate.
My guess is that this site is trying to bring awareness or popularity to stars as they rise and gain them more fans while at the same time introducing them to the mass media. The problem is that the site is almost too dynamic, users can, in my opinion, manipulate it entirely too easily. It wouldn’t be hard for a group of users to push any star they wanted to the front page daily while leaving horrible comments for other stars and pushing them to the bottom of the pile.
From a user standpoint, the site is lacking in a few areas, most noticeably a search feature. Other things that should be included are some form of about pages to help describe what exactly the site is along with a contact page. Additionally, there are no RSS feeds for anything on the site, somewhat disappointing. There is a positive note about the site, it is clean and laid out very well, the colors work, although a bit boring and it doesn’t seem to be monotized, as in there are no ads on it. This leads me to think one of two things could be in the works. First, they are trying to actually build a buzz and content prior to making money, usually a good thing, or, sadly they may be building the entire site, content and user base for the sole purpose of selling it in the rising Web 2.0 bubble.
My personal opinion, I won’t be visiting the site again, it has no real value to me as a user, and I’ll stick to using Wikipedia for finding information on people.
Way back in June I asked that you Get at me on Twitter, a new service from the creator of Blogger. In a nutshell, Twitter is a for of social networking that one can do from their cell phone and have it broadcast to anyone who subscribes to your list. These messages are called Twits.
I think the service appealed to me because I could send short messages from my cell phone, via text messaging, and have them appear here using the Twitter applet that was once installed in the right sidebar. The problem was no one cared, it bored me and I just couldn’t explain what the service was well enough, partly because I don’t think there is a big enough market for it.
That said, If you are on my Twitter list, don’t expect to get any messages from me, sorry. I’ve long since deleted the number from my cell and have no intentions of logging into the site again. If you have a passionate reason why I should give it a second look, by all means share it with me. This is one social networking service that I don’t see catching on in mass.
I just logged into 
Flipping through channels the other night I found myself watching an interview with 
Onto the scene comes 
