So, I've been having some problems with the Vox service for some time,
and now I have a twine invitation, so I am going to test out Twine as
a platform for blogging.
The way I blog is that I tend to write up my blog posts in a mail
client and then mail these to the blog engine, but so far Vox as a
service has been soso.
For the next while I am going to try posting the same content to both
locations and I'll see which one I like most. Ultimately I want to
mirror this content on my own domain/site.
One of the problems that it has been having is mis-rendering html,
let's see if I can get a link to my home page working in this post,
mulvany.net
Last night I finally finished Neil Stephenson's Quicksilver. Oh, don't
get me wrong, I've read it, and the full trilogy, before, but for much
of the past year I have been re-reading it aloud to my girlfriend. She
has an eye strain which means that if she reads too much at night she
gets headaches, and so I've been doing the recreational reading for
the two of us over the past year. We started out with Quicksilver, and
made steady but slow progress through it. There have been some breaks,
a small diversion through the worlds of Philip Pullman, a frantic dash
through the last Harry Potter, but quicksilver has been the constant
through the journey, a stable rock against which we could navigate.
There have been patches which have been hard to read out loud, many
sections of the book include deep philosophical discourse between
multiple characters, and when reading making clear who was saying what
was at times a bit of a challenge, but we finally got to the last page
just before midnight last night. Now just The Confusion, The System of
the World and The Cryptonomicon left to get through!
Ahh, convergence, ahh, the ability to pinpoint your friends on your
mobile phone. I've been waiting for this to happen.
Sent to you by Ian Mulvany via Google Reader: Upcoming.org Founder
Creates Fireball (Fire Eagle + DodgeBall + Twitter) via TechCrunch by
Erick Schonfeld on 4/22/08
Remember DodgeBall, the early social mobile network that languished
after Google bought it? So does Leonard Lin, a founding member of
Upcoming.org who recently left Yahoo, where he organized Hack Days. He
helped write the code for FireBall, a clever mobile geo-location app
that brings back the promise of DodgeBall using only other existing
services with public APIs.
FireBall is a way for people to keep track of where their friends are
on your mobile phone. It uses Yahoo’s Fire Eagle as a geo-location
broker and Twitter. It is basically mashup of the two services, plus
some functionality from Upcoming.org. People add all of their contacts
on Twitter and authorize Fire Eagle to share their location with
Fireball. “Instead of creating a new service that forces you to add all
of your friends,” says Lin, “we end up using Twitter for messaging,”
When you want to find out where your friends are who have also signed
up for FireBall, you send a message to a Fireball account on Twitter.
You get back a text message with a Tiny URL link. When you click on the
link, it opens up a KML file that launches Google Maps on your cell
phone and hows you all your Twitter friends as pinpoints on the map. So
your Twitter contacts serve as your mobile social network. You can also
Twitter in your location. Simply mention a room at a conference, for
instance, and it can pinpoint exactly where you are through integration
with Upcoming.org,
FireBall launches today in a private beta for attendees to the Web 2.0
Expo. The first 100 TechCrunch readers who are attending Web 2.0 Expo
and send an email to “Fireballme+TechCrunch [at] gmail [dot] com” will
recieive an invite. Right now, the service only works in San Francisco.
CrunchBase Information Fire Eagle Twitter Upcoming Information provided
by CrunchBase
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered
Daily.
Things you can do from here:
- Subscribe to TechCrunch using Google Reader
- Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your
favorite sites
I am, one might say, a bit of an RSS junkie. It has been the main source of
news and information for me for about the last year or so, but I began to
feel as if I was drowning in it. I subscribe to something over 80 feeds,
some of which, like techcrunch, spit out over 40 or 50 items a day. A few
days away from my feed reader and there could be well over 1000 entries
waiting when I got back. I had them split down into lots of different
folders, based on interest, but it was just all getting too much, so I've
adopted a simple strategy which has totally gotten over the problem. I could
have just dropped all
I now only have 3 folders. Work Important, Personal Imortant and everything
else. I'll read everything in the first two folders, but the threshold for
getting into the first is very high, and the threshold for getting into the
second is basically personal blogs from close friends. Everything else goes
into the 3rd folder and if something doesn't jump out at me when I scan
quickly through this folder then I just delete everything. Now the time to
process all of these feeds is about 10 minutes.
I do have ideas about how to viksualise this river of information, but
perhaps I'll leave those ideas until I get a Google App account.
Nature, the company I work for, has been nominated for a Webby, woot!.
OK, so we are up against Nasa's earth observatory, and some other
great sites in the science field, but it's really nice to get a nod
and see that some other people out there like the kind of work that we
are doing. If you want to go and vote you can at this link herehttp://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/home/1.
