Nate Koechley's Blog

Yahoo! 360 Launch, with Overview and Thoughts

Yahoo! 360 launched and began its invitation-only beta period today. Yahoo! 360 is a new product that allows you to easily share stuff with the circles of people in your life. It's a social site, letting your connect with family, friends, friends-of-friends, and new people with whom you share interests.

Eric has a nice post up called Why 360 is not a Blog, and Jason has some good comments on target audience complete with a plea to invite your mom. Troutgirl wrote a thoughtful piece too that's well worth reading.

So far I've been very impressed. I guess I'm what Jason has called a capital-W Weblogger of sorts, but I recognize that this service is for a different part of my online life. Not necessarily a place to build my career, forward the Debate, or even publish my complex travelog, it's instead a great place to spend time, share things frivolous and intimate with friends and family, and benefit from my off-line connection online.

I can only imagine that this will spread its reach and therefor its value. Already you can share quick blast messages and longer blog (or journal) entries, as well as personal messaging. Photo sharing is integrated, as well as your music from Yahoo! Music LaunchCast station. Groups are there, and definitely some other things I'm forgetting about right now.

One of my early favorites though is over in Yahoo! Local (the web's best yellow pages and location based search). Here you can see your relationship to the authors of user reviews for things including restaurants, parks, dentists and mechanics. If you look around the Yahoo! network it's easy to see many sites where Y~360 may add significant value. As I said in the comments on Troutgirl's entry, I can definitely imagine sending a message to a friend (or friend-of-a-friend) that's written a review to ask follow-up questions on restaurants, dentists and mechanics.

All and all, I offer an unqualified congratulations to the entire 360 team: Well done.

(And it's LSM too! With Progressive Enhancement and Unobtrusive Javascript!)

Let me know if you're interested in an Invite, I still have a few left.

Internet Explorer and Accessibility

From the IEBlog:

Today I wanted to talk about three aspects of accessibility as they relate to IE and Windows in general. First is access to the Windows OS for individuals with disabilities, second are a couple of hints for users of screen readers using IE in XPSP2 and finally is a request for feedback to help guide our development in IE7 and beyond.

While it's fun to pan Microsoft, and particularily, in my circles at least, Internet Explorer, I have to give them some credit for leaving comments enabled on their blog. It would be even better if they responded to some of the comments - a comment is more valuable if it initiates dialog - but at least they're doing an ok job experimenting in the blog space. It can't be a bad thing.

Blogging and Culture at Yahoo!

Mark Jen was fired from Google for blogging. The is old news. What's interesting now is that he reports on his conversations with two prominent bloggers (and yahoo employees) about blogging at work, yahoo's policy/stance on worker-blogging, at last week's 106 Miles community meeting. It's nice to see that Yahoo gets blogs and blogging.

after dave's talk, i met russ. he apparently had been doing contract work at yahoo and just recently joined there full time. i took the opportunity to chat with him a little bit; mostly, i wanted to know why he chose to join yahoo out of all the other companies in the area. immediately, russ focused in on the culture and working environment. i thought, wow, a place that's working on bringing revolutionary web technologies to the masses and a great atmosphere? sounds like a dream come true.

then, i met jeremy zawodny. since my story had started making rounds with the press, i had been compared to jeremy and scoble, but i had never expected to meet them in person. we got to talking and he shared with me his experience at yahoo, which also sounded great. jeremy told me that yahoo is extremely blog friendly and that posting their personal work experiences was perfectly acceptable - given, of course, that confidential information and NDAs aren't breached. i left with his contact info and an invite to tour the yahoo campus.

FeedBurner Stats, Podcasts, Specialized RSS Clients

podcast_growth
Originally uploaded by natekoechley.

Feedburner, an RSS feed tracking company (that I use to understand my RSS statistics and readership), has been releasing some very interesting statistics recently. This batch provides some insight into the Podcasting space:

• Since the beginning of 2005, the number of podcast feeds managed by Feedburner has more than doubled from 871 to 1746.


• Four different rss aggregators specialized for podcasts are in the Top 50 RSS Aggregators list. This illustrates a trend that's sure to continue... There are already clients specializing in aggregating video -- how long until photo-specific show up?

Thanks for sharing, Feedburner, it's a great post. Thanks also for the interesting and valuable service you provide.

Analyze HTTP Headers and Smart Keyword Search with Firefox

There are several good ways to check out a file's HTTP headers. Tonight I was using http://www.forret.com/projects/analyze/, which is just a simple web form that you enter your URL into.

I know there are more snazzy ways, including Firefox's great extension LiveHTTPHeaders, but sometimes an always-available web page is a fine solution. And, while I totally love the ability to extend and modify Firefox with the ever-growing supply of extensions, I've been trying to keep my browser as lean as possible by only installing ones I really need. For services that require a query to be submitted -- a map request, dictionary lookup, feed subscription or web search -- I've been opting lately to set up Keyword Search in Firefox (as I described several months ago).

(In addition to having less extensions, I find it's just significantly faster to trigger these actions form the keyboard.)

With a few keyword shortcut's set up, my hands are liberated from the mouse to the efficiency and speed of the keyboard. My browser begins to resemble a command line interface. In addition to my newest, headers http://www.yahoo.com, I use these others constantly:

sub http://natek.typepad.com

subscribed to a feed -- fastest possible way to subscribe to an rss feed with bloglines (please don't ruin bloglines Ask!)

ys northern california hiking trails

returns Yahoo Search results page -- 100s of times a day.

wiki Thomas Frank

returns Wikipedia encyclopedia entry -- lots of info types are best answered by an encyclopedia

map [[701 N First Ave, 94089]

returns a Yahoo Maps -- always need for a map

dic efficiency

returns dictionary.com definition

the excitement

returns thesaurus.com entry

by natek

returns my company's intranet (backyard) results -- for looking up coworkers

amaz Talib Kweli

returns Amazon search results -- to grab a book cover or album track listing

imdb War of the Worlds

returns an Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) search

how to change your car's oil

returns detailed instructions from ehow.com

techno mobilemonday.com

returns blogosphere info on who's talking about http://www.mobilemonday.com/ right now?

Did you notice the ones for Bloglines (sub)? It's great. I am generally motivated to subscribe to some feed while in the midst of being excited or engaged by the content. This time of highest engagement is the time when you least want to interrupt the session to go subscribe -- this shortcut allows me to nearly-instantly subscribe in the heat on the moment.

(In case you're curious, I was looking at headers tonight to verify that the file expiration dates were distant, so that the files would be cached by the client until then.)

Metafilter Tags

Matt Haughey writes: "Jumping on the delicious and flickr bandwagon, I've added tags to MetaFilter"

Creating Personalized Feeds with Delicious

I have found this a useful way to use http://del.icio.us, the excellent social bookmarking site that is based on tagging.

Let's review quickly. I post all my bookmarks to delicious. They are all viewable by the public. Mine are here: http://del.icio.us/natekoechley. One great thing about delicious is that every page on the site - every node - has an RSS feed. If all my bookmarks are viewable on the web at /username, then the feed of that content is /rss/username.

Looks like this:
http://del.icio.us/natekoechley
http://del.icio.us/rss/natekoechley

The second thing that's great about delicious is that I can quickly and easily annotate my bookmarks with tags. For example, I have bookmarked Industrial Drawings from the Smithsonian. In addition to storing the URL, I have tagged it with the following words: industrial, drawings, smithsonian, museum, design, art, history.

Each tag becomes a node.  When you are viewing my total collection of bookmarks, my username "natekoechley" is the node. It is likewise possible to view all my bookmarks for a particular tag, such as
http://del.icio.us/natekoechley/art
http://del.icio.us/rss/natekoechley/art

If you want to widen your view, you can view all "art" bookmarks for everybody on the network:
http://del.icio.us/tag/art
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/art

There is no limit to the number of tags you can have, either in general or with a single URL.

As you can see, each node - tag - get's it's own RSS feed. This is the functionality that creates my personalized feeds.

Great Firefox Resources

Here are two great sites reviewing tips, tricks and extensions for the Firefox browser from the Mozilla Foundation. (You are using Firefox, right?)

First is the thorough article from Scot's Newsletter. Well written, it includes Firefox Extension Recommendations and Firefox Customization Recommendations. The extensions are grouped by type, including "tab-browsing" and "UI-fixing", as well as broad groups for "tried 'em, like 'em" and others.

The second article is "Secret's of Firefox 1.0", from Windows Secrets Newsletter. This one is focused on tweaks available through Firefox's about:config interface. Check it out for many speed tweaks.

(both via)

2014 EPIC - The Future of Online [Media]

Go watch this flash movie right now. (Or the first time you have 8 free, it doesn't have a pause button.).

It's the history of the media wars, with a dateline of 2014. What happens with Google, Amazon, Blogger, Microsoft, Friendster and TiVo play together? What happens when search, news, shopping, social networks, blogging, camera phones, recommendations, filtering, archiving, the long tail, and everything else that's ALREADY in motion congeals?

Remember that feeling you got when you "got it" in the first Matrix movie? I got that feeling watching this. Remember that feeling you got when you actually realized that scale of the Internet, and what it will eventually enable?

Go watch it.

It's not clear how you're supposed to feel when it's over. Sounds pretty cool. Sounds pretty scary. Come back here and leave some comments after you've watched it. Technorati lets you monitor it as it spreads across the Web.

(I guess this was on metafilter in mid November, but it's new to me today.)

Wikis, RSS and Wikipedia history visualization by the Media Lab

Jeremy Zawodny writes Why do Wiki RSS Feeds Suck?. I'm a big fan of Wikis. Jeremy writes that he's not. His two reasons are 1) he "find[s] the markup annoying"; 2) Change notification, especially when offered by RSS, "all suck".

The first is quickly disposed of: Wikis generally allow HTML or XHTML markup in addition to their own markup. If you don't like Wiki markup, don't use it. (The system is converting it to XHTML anyways, so you can view-source grab it.) Wiki markup is there for people who prefer it.

His second issue is that Wiki change notification (RSS or other) is often nearly useless. I generally agree: either it's too technical, or it's too vague. Too specific, or too broad. My work Wiki, for example, only allows you to subscribe to changes in general -- the entire Wiki -- not to a particular page.

While the notification could be better, perhaps the information is of a type not suited to per-instance notification. RSS is a natural medium for "change notifications", but not necessarily for "change visualization". The MIT Media Lab's Fernanda B. Viégas, in collaboration with IMB's Martin Wattenberg, have done some beautiful, insightful and important work visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. That have mainly focused on the interactions on Wikipedia, which are massive, controversial at times, and exceedingly active. Check out their gallery, it's pretty sweet. It's amazing that in some cases, 20-word sentences have each word contributed by a different author. Also, that files that have been exited tens of thousands of times will still retain unchanged content from initial authors. (I saw them present this work at CHI2004 in Vienna.)

Blog Torrents, P2P and the Development of De-centralized Media

Broadband Daily posts an interview with Nicholas Reville of Downhill Battle, which just recently released Blog Torrent, a very exciting new initiative:

Blog Torrent is a key first step of our plan to make software that builds participatory culture. Video (specifically television) is a huge part of culture. But it's still an extremely top-down medium-- even as the tools to make high quality video and animation have become extremely cheap, very few people watch any significant amount of video other than what's on networks and cable. We think homemade video can compete directly against professional television, especially as reality shows have brought down viewers expectations about the production values needed to make engaging TV.

More from the BlogTorrent site:

What is Blog Torrent?: Blog Torrent is software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol. Blog Torrent is easy to install on your website: we don't use MySQL so installation is as easy as uploading a folder to your web host, and all administration happens in the web interface. Blog Torrent is easy for users: even if they don't know what bittorrent is, they get an installer that downloads the file they want. But most of all, Blog Torrent makes publishing with bittorrent painless. Just click "upload", pick a file, and you're done. This is our preview release and it has a lot of bugs and rough edges... but we're smoothing them out for the next version, so stay tuned.

Why does Blog Torrent matter?: Making it easy to blog large video files means that people can share their home movies the same way they share their photos or writings. It lets people create vast networks of truly peer-to-peer video content-- video that was made by individuals and shared with individuals, no bandwidth budget or distribution deal needed.

We'll definitely be seeing more torrent news lately, and this convergence with the blogging world / blogging technology can only help.

BitTorrent, and BitTorrent Clients

I'm been investing a little time lately trying to learn more about BitTorrent. BitTorrent, a P2P distribution tool, is unique and potentially superior because it allows many people to download the same file without slowing down everyone else's download. (More: Wikipedia | Y!Search). This background and client review will be a precursor to an entry on BlogTorrent that I'm still working on.

Traditional P2P distribution (Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa) let you download an entire file from another person on the network. BitTorrent is different. With BT, you initially download only a small map of the file. This map describes the many tiny files that comprise the complete file. This map file is called a tracker.

Once you've downloaded the tracker, a BitTorrent client takes over. The client coordinates the separate but concurrent downloading of each small file. It always choosing the fastest source. This is a faster and more stable process, capable of handling feature-length movies and other multi-gigabyte files.

Another distinction between BT and more traditional P2P technologies is that with BT, things go faster when more people are on the network. This is the opposite of other technologies, that bogged down on popular files. By definition with BitTorrent, if you're downloading you're also potentially uploading. The more people that want a particular file, the more people that have the file. More requesters equals more providers. And more providers equals a faster experience for everybody.

If you're looking for a BitTorrent Client, I've posted personal research from my hours spent looking for the best one. I'm just sharing, I don't profess to be an expert.

How To: Subscribing to Blogs / Feeds

Note: I sent this email to my dad this morning. It's republished here for two reasons: 1) Hopefully it will be of interest or assistance to somebody else. 2) This is, I guess, the first installment of "how to actually integrate feed reading into your daily online life" series. This one is rough, but I wanted to throw it up as-is to help me bust through my writers block on this subject.

Hey Dad,

I have a blog to recommend (many actually, but we'll start with this one). John Battelle writes about the search industry, and is very well connected to its pulse. I try to read five or six others that cover the same topic, but when I have to pick just one, it's his. As with many blogs, it serves as a proxy for it's like-minded blogs. If something interesting pops up on one, it's usually echoed or references on the others. Plus, he's a professional writer and generates lots of unique, insightful content:

http://battellemedia.com/

The process I use to subscribe to blogs follows:

1. Have a http://bloglines.com account
2. Browse to an interesting site (like http://battellemedia.com or http://natek.typepad.com)
3. Click your "Easy Subscribe" bookmarklet from either your Bookmarks Folder or, more commonly, your browsers Links Toolbar.

   ("Bookmarklets" or "favelets" are special links that -- generally containing a small bit of Javascript instead of a URL -- perform little tasks. As with any bookmark, you simply drag a link to your Bookmarks Folder or Links Bar.) This page has the Easy Subscribe links to drag to your toolbar (depending on browser) and more of a description: http://bloglines.com/help/easysub)

4. Choose which of the available feeds to subscribe to.
   • Sometimes there will be a "full articles" feed, a "summary" feed and sometimes a "comments" feed. (I always go for the full feed.). Of all the options you're presented with, this is the only one that really matters since it actually represents different blocks of content.
   • Other times, as seems to be the case with the first two options on battellemedia.com, they're just different technical formats (.xml, .rss, .atom, .rdf). If this is the case then it's pretty trivial -- they're all basically the same -- and you're safe picking ANY of them.
   • Other times (this is the case with the 3rd and 4th battellemedia options) they are third-party-generated feeds. In this case, these are provided by Technorati and Feedburner. If given a choice, I try to get the official feed from the site itself. But it's pretty trivial again, and any of the four options will get you the same content.
5. Enter your preferences (like which folder to store the blog in, notification preferences, descriptions, etc)

That's it. Pretty soon you'll be reading scores of feeds like me. (view my blogroll -- a blogroll is the term for the list of blogs somebody subscribes to.

Other Ways to Subscribe

If you're using bloglines but not the Easy Subscribe Bookmarklet you can go directly go to http://bloglines.com/sub and enter the URL of the site or feed. This is less efficient for me, because I have to leave the interesting site to subscribe to it... On the other hand, if you have the bookmarklet on your toolbar you just click-subscribe immediately from any cool site.

Part of the thing with reading blogs is that I'm always discovering interesting new feeds to subscribe to. The easier it is to subscribe the better! The downside is that I sometimes end up with tons and tons of blogs. To combat this, I keep a special folder that new feeds go into as a form of initial probation: "Blogs I'm Considering". If I continue to be interested in that feed on the next weeks, it gets upgraded to it's rightful place in my personal hierarchy of feeds.

OR, If you prefer to read your feeds on http://my.yahoo.com you can go to http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/cstore and enter the URL of the feed or site. After adding it, it'll show up on your personal My Yahoo page.

Digital Web Magazine: a Fast Company's 2005 Fast 50 Nominee

If you don't read Digital Web Magazine, you should. If you do, you should leave a testimonial over at the Fast Company's 2005 Fast 50 - their 4th annual - where Nick Finch, DWM's publisher and driving force is nominated this year.

"Podcasts: New Twist on Net Audio"

Wired has a nice overview of iPodding - which hopes to do for online audio content what TiVo did for television.

Known as podcasting, the technology is a new take on syndicated content feeds like RSS and Atom. But instead of pushing text from blogs and news sites to various content aggregators like FeedDemon and Bloglines, podcasting sends audio content directly to an iPod or other MP3 player.

The article is a few weeks old, but I just bumbled on it again so I thought I'd point it out.

Housekeeping

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Web Visions Presentation

First Things First: IA and CSS

With apologies for the delay, here are links to the presentation Christina Wodtke and I delivered at the webvisions 2004 conference this past Friday in Portland, Oregon.

listening to anil dash

I'm sitting in the web visions conference in portland, listing to anil dash talk about blogging... I coulding resist blogging about him talking about blogging... (from my Treo 600)

Everything TypePad!: Setting up the QuickPost bookmarklet

Everything TypePad!: Setting up the QuickPost bookmarklet

Setting up the QuickPost bookmarklet

Bill Gates discusses Blogs and RSS

Bill Gates talks clearly about the benefits of Blogs and RSS:

"This (weblogs and RSS) is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they'll wonder why I didn't put their name on it. But, then again, I don't want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I'm saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.

Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don't know to come visit that Web site, and it's very painful to keep visiting somebody's Web site and it never changes. It's very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it.

And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you're interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn't interfere with your normal Inbox.

And so if I do a trip report, say, and put that in a blog format, then all the employees at Microsoft who really want to look at that and who have keywords that connect to it or even people outside, they can find the information.

And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail -- that it's too imposing -- and yet the drawbacks of the Web site -- that you don't know if there's something new and interesting there -- this is about solving that.
The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it, and we're progressively getting better and better at that by watching your behavior, ranking things in different ways."

Categories Defined

The world I live in is full of information. I spend my days thinking, reading and talking. There is so much information -- it's ALL information -- that handling it and making sense of it become the real challenges.

The projects I take at work, and the questions I choose to think about are generally extremely interconnected. When I'm thinking about XHTML markup, am I not thinking about the internet? How does the realization of something differ from the design of something? Does it? In the world of news web sites, how exactly is the Sports section different from the News section? News related to sports is still news, right?

Anyways, I write all this because I'm starting out with this new blog (thanks for visiting!), and deciding how to categorize it is both an important and a difficult question. Here are the categories I'm going to use initially. I suspect they'll evolve over time, but this is my best first effort:

• Accessibility
• Back-end + PHP + MySQL
• Blogging
• Browsers
• CSS techniques
• DOM + Scripting
• Design thinking
• Events
• Humor
• Information design
• Knowledge + Content Management
• Life and such
• Mark-up techniques
• Other user agents
• Photos
• Politics + News
• References
• Rules-based design
• Sandbox
• Safe keeping
• Search engines
• Stuff + Things
• The Internet
• Tools + Software
• Travel
• Web standards
• Yahoo!

I must give broad credit to those that came before me. I borrowed categories from D. Keith Robinson at Asterisk, Richard Rutter at clagnut and others. (Lots of the categories come from my blogging experience behind my company's firewall.

For more information and thinking on categories and taxonomies, check out this article by Lars Marius Garshol: Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Making sense of it all. I'll probably point to this article again in the future, but it's relevant to this post, so enjoy!

cheers, nate

Feature Complete - A Definition; or An Exploration of Varied Knowledge Management Systems at Yahoo!

This content has been censored during migration from my behind-the-firewall blog to this public one.

Feature Complete

All features planned for the release have been completely coded, unit tested by the developer, and checked into source control, ready for the build. We often differentiate between Feature Complete Checkin date, and Feature Complete Build date."

Prior to Feature Complete (or FC) the focus of the project is on the development team, who is busy implementing the feature set based on the PRDs and (if we have them) Functional Specs and perhaps other specs. After Feature Complete, the focus of the project is on the testing, the fixing and verifying of bugs. The focus during this time is on the bug queue in Bugzilla, and the Bug Council meets daily to prioritize, assign, and defer new bugs as they're reported.

This content has been censored during migration from my behind-the-firewall blog to this public one.

PS: All this makes me think we need a unified understanding of our knowledge management tools.

momo: collection of well designed blogs

This is a nice collection of weblog designs.

http://larsholst.info/blog/2004/02/11/well-designed-weblogs-volume-2/

this is additionally interesting since most weblogs are all LSM/CSS and are good testing grounds for what's visually possible with LSM/CSS.

Add to My Yahoo

I guess the syntax is:
http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://www.foo.com/feed.xml

Excellent.

RSS Primer

This is another overview of RSS. Might be good howto for some:

http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/

How Many Feeds?

How Many Feeds?

This is an iteresting post of methods of consuming content... of interest, "E-mail is the last thing I check during the day."

..and: "I never go to any web site on my own anymore (if I'm not doing research, of course). All the information I want to read comes into my aggregator. And, if I happen to miss something, I can probably deal with it. I think that my feeds run the gamut of the type of information I want to read. And if I miss anything in the field of librarianship, someone else is bound to pick it up and post it to their weblog. I'll then read it in my aggregator. The power of linking, my friends.

Democratizing the Media

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Democratizing the Media, and More

The competition finalists are citizen-activists, and their work is just one more public demonstration of a still underappreciated evolution. Personal technology is undermining the broadcast culture of the late 20th century. It's putting tools that were once the preserve of Big Media into the hands of the many.

Post to MovableType or Typepad from FeedDemon

Post to MovableType or Typepad from FeedDemon

This content has been censored during migration from my behind-the-firewall blog to this public one.

How Aggregators fit into your life and work.

Beating Information Overload with News Aggregators -- although written in the content of law information, this article shows how to use Aggregators, Blogs and RSS to stay ahead of info overload, while consuming and actioning on a greater overall volumn of info and sources.

"Blog This" bookmarklet

This content has been censored during migration from my behind-the-firewall blog to this public one.