Coffee Klatch

Today I found out about Last.fm. I’m not sure how I went this long without hearing about it. It’s another music program, but one that’s integrated social networking tools. It can work with most music players–you just have to download the plugin and it self-detects the players you have installed.

You can use Last.fm to track the music you play, connect with other people who have similar music interests, and get recommendations for other music you might like. As with most social software sites, you can also tag songs, artists, etc., and share playlists with your friends. RSS feeds and embedding tools are built in as well and the artist info pages are wiki-based, so you can add your own information to information about the artist and their music.

My Last.fm profile is at http://www.last.fm/user/spfitzinger/. This will show the music and artists I’ve been listening to as well other information about my recent music and friend connections. If you use Last.fm or decide to give it a try, you can visit my profile and add me as a friend.

Looking for a cool Latin phrase? Maybe you’re designing a new coat of arms for your family or for a fictional persona. Maybe you’re playing Knighthood on Facebook. Well here’s one of the many excellent websites for looking up Latin phrases. I like this one in particular because the font’s not very big and they have loads on one page. It’s http://www.yuni.com/library/latin.html.

Enjoy! Utor vestri!

Okay, I got introduced to a game yesterday and I got hooked! The game’s called Tribal Wars and the short version is that you develop a village, acquiring resources, building buildings, and recruiting troops, all the while interacting with neighbors and people you meet in the game. Most people join (or create) a tribe, both for discussion and mutual protection & support. Sometimes villages get attacked and war can sometimes even be seen on tribal levels.

It’s a great deal of fun. And the best part, besides being FREE, is that things happen in real time. So if you’re building an upgrade to your Market or Warehouse, it may take a couple of hours and it really does. But at the same time, your workers are harvesting timber, clay, and iron at a rate of so much per hour (based on the levels of your facilities). The result of this setup is that you don’t spend hours sitting online playing the game. Instead, you just check in once in a while (daily, every other day, hourly if you’re obsessed ) and queue up building projects and maybe check your mail. Yes, it eventually will get more complicated than that, but for a while when you’re starting out, you’re just trying to get your village established.

Here’s a bit of their own description of the game:

Tribal Wars ist a free browser based MMOG. You can play the game from nearly any computer with internet access because there are no downloads necessary.

Your goal is to lead a medieval village to fame and power. With your help the small village will grow bigger and bigger. The population grows, production rises and trade prospers.

But not only your village grows. Neighbours are also looking to expand their influence. Troops are being recruited, villages are fortified and wild axemen plunder and kill.

You will meet other players, with whom you can fight together in a tribe.

Your village grows bigger and soon the formerly small village will conquer other villages….

I’ve already gotten a few friends hooked, um, I mean ENJOYING the game and we’ve formed our own tribe, called MSTies. If you recognize the reference to MST3K, you belong in our tribe.

If you want to check out the game and maybe give it a try, visit Tribal Wars and log onto World 3–that’s where we are. Also let me know what your username is and I’ll send you an invitation to join our tribe.

Since you occasionally interact with other players, especially those near to you geographically, I’ve already found another tribe that is from Milan and all speak Italian. Now I get to practice what little Italian I know, since some of them speak hardly any English. Che ficata! I mean, how cool!

[tags]games, online, tribal wars, medieval, MMOG, MST3K[/tags]

I found another cool Social Networking site this week. It’s very cool and free and is called Ning. What’s so cool is that you can create your own social network on their site. For Free! Whatever topic or interest, you can answer some basic questions and have your own social network up and running in minutes.

Participants get their own profiles (both for the site and individually for each group they’re in), you can send messages, participate in forum discussions, upload photos and videos, and much more. It’s a great way for people to connect with each other about a topic of mutual interest, which is what social networking is all about.

One of the best parts is that RSS feeds permeate the site, both for displaying them on your network’s main page and also for subscribing to them to follow discussions, etc. RSS feeds are a MUST-HAVE for any Web 2.0 application.

I’ve already set up two networks myself: Handbell Village and Twenty-First Century Catholicism. And there are already people signing up as members! How cool!

[tags]social networking, ning, rss[/tags]

This morning on the way to work I heard a story on NPR about how job recruiters were using social networking software to do their jobs. The example they used was Linked-In. I’ve been on Linked-In myself for well over a year now. It’s pretty cool to hear a story on the radio about software that you’ve already been a part of for so long.

Linked-In, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a networking-style platform similar to MySpace or Facebook. The big difference here is that Linked-In is PROFESSIONAL. It’s not designed for chit-chatting or making new friends (although that can happen). Instead, its focus is on making professional contacts. Which explains why recruiters can use it effectively.

So check it out. You never know when you’ll need somebody who knows somebody you need.

Here’s a link to my profile. Be sure to invite me to join your network if you sign up for Linked-In (which is, of course, free).

[tags]social networking, social software, technology, linked-in, NPR[/tags]

I‘ve been on MySpace for about a week and a half now and I have to say I’m less than thrilled. The strength of MySpace is in networking, of course. Anyone can join and it’s easy to set up a customized space.

What I don’t like is how unsecure the system is, how anybody can set up fake profiles, how many of those fake profiles are used to build a network of “friends” who will then follow their links to porn sites, and how nasty so many of the members’ sites look. There are lots of ways to customize your site and it’s easy to add bits of code, sure, but most of them result in web pages that are hard to read and WAY overly busy.

In contrast, I recommend to you a system that is well-organized, classy looking, and quite secure. It’s called Facebook and it’s “an online directory that connects people through social networks.”

What makes it more secure is that your profile is tied to a particular network. The networks are based off of high schools, colleges, and places of employment. ALL of those are based on email address domains. So you can’t sign up with hotmail or yahoo or even gmail. It’s based on the domain of the school or employer and they support over 2,500 colleges, 22,000 high schools and 1,000 work networks. If yours isn’t listed, you can request that they add it. Now, you CAN change add a gmail or hotmail or whatever account and make that your default, but you have to start by joining a network that’s based on your official email address.

Privacy is customizable, too. You can choose to only show a “limited profile” to some people or totally block them, making you invisible to them on Facebook. You can also choose whether anyone can view your profile, or only people in your network. Same is true for who can add you as a friend and who can view your photos.

You can still browse or search for friends, and you have lots of ways to show your connections to people. There are plenty of communication tools built in, too. You can even organize events, join groups, and upload TONS of photos. The limit is 60 pictures per album, but I don’t know if there’s a limit to the number of albums. Plus, you can tag and comment on your photos and others’ photos. That includes clicking on people in the pictures and attaching their names (if they’re in Facebook). Any picture you see, you can mouse over the tags and see a box pop up on the photo, telling you which person that is. If you click on the tag, it will take you to that person’s profile. Pretty slick!

So if you’re looking for some kind of social software for staying in touch with people or looking for old friends, I highly recommend Facebook to you. It’s much more professional, organized, and secure.

If you sign up with Facebook, look me up!

So, yes, I finally got on MySpace yesterday. In general, I had been rather turned off by the chaos I saw and heard on so many people’s pages. Semi-transparent text boxes with busy backgrounds so the text is hard to read. Lots of chatch everywhere (chatch is short for tchatchke, a Yiddish word meaning ‘frivolous decorations’). Often loud music assaulting you without a visible way to turn it off (until you know what you’re looking for and scroll down sometimes). All in all, any decent web designer’s nightmare!

And, of course, if you’ve heard about it in the news, you may think of it as a teen site where kids chat and get inappropriate suggestions made, endangering the kids. But it’s really just like any other tool. How it’s used is based on the people using it. And there are all kinds of 20-, 30-, and 40-somethings that are using MySpace to stay in touch with friends, search for long-lost friends, and taking advantage of the built-in blogging software to set up their own blogs.

So it IS a good way to connect to people. Of course, I won’t be using the blogging element aside from pointing to THIS site. And I’ve already begun reconnecting with friends, too. Pretty nice. I was also able to find a theme that I could use that wasn’t very busy, looked nice, and was easy to read. You can visit my MySpace page here: http://myspace.com/pfitzinger and if you’re already on MySpace yourself, add me as a friend. If you’re NOT on MySpace, visit my page and click on some friends’ links (and THEIR friends’) to see what can be done and how people are connecting.

And if you don’t have much time to spend on something like this, that’s okay. It’s easily usable without customizing and investing tons of time. Give it a try!

There’s a new web browser coming out that will change how you search the web, bookmark sites, and sharing multimedia. Another in the series of innovative social software programs. It’s called Flock and it’s just become available in beta.

Here are basic characteristics. It’s built on the Mozilla engine (like Firefox). You can drag and drop to share photos, with built-in support for Flickr and Photobucket. You can build your own personal aggregating news service with the click of a button. Search the web as you type. Blog easily, dragging images or text snippets from any website. Build your own collection of favorites that’s easily synchronized between multiple computers, tagged, and shared with others.

Take a tour to see all the features. Then you can get the free download.

Okay, here’s another cool technology thing I’ve found recently. It’s in the category of Social Software (like the other links I’ve got in the category in this blog’s sidebar). It’s called CommonTimes.

CommonTimes is an interactive news website that allows you to select the top stories and add your own comments. You can create your own channel and also share stories with friends. You can even create/join groups of people with common interests and see what they are reading.

It’s a GREAT concept and works very well. There are several other news-related “community” programs out there, but I think this one is by far the best.

New stories get ranked by how many times they’re read, but you can also sort by most recent, most discussed, or most bookmarked (that’s when people have added the story to their own news “channel”). All the stories that you add or bookmark get added to your channel. You can add news stories from any web page you’re viewing, even blogs (including your own). The main site and all channels are full-text searchable and can have tags applied by anyone. The tags work like they do with Flickr or any other similar program, and each page has a tagcloud for that “channel.”

One other cool thing is that everything on CommonTimes has RSS feeds! So you can subscribe to channels that you’re interested in or share your own feed with others.

It’s a very interesting and fun way to read the news and share it with others. And since other people are sharing news stories that THEY have read, it’s also a great way to find out about news that you may not have heard about otherwise.

Getting started is simple.

1. Drag the Save to CommonTimes link to your browser toolbar.
2. Visit http://www.commontimes.org/ and sign up to create your own channel.

That’s it! Give it a try!

Oh, and once you do, be sure to add me to your list of “friends” on CommonTimes. I’m the bunny with the pancake on its head. If you click on him, you’ll get my channel and there’ll be an option at the top to add me as a friend.

In conclusion, here are “Ten Ways to use CommonTimes:”

Ten Ways to use CommonTimes

1. Keep up with the latest news throughout the day.
2. Share what you’re reading on the Web with other CommonTimes readers.
3. Create a channel with your favorite news clippings and share it with your friends.
4. Follow our most popular stories.
5. Follow news from a specific section or topic with our RSS feeds.
6. Share news stories with your colleagues, friends or affinity organizations.
7. Remix the News to your own liking.
8. Share interesting stories with friends via email.
9. Share your thoughts with other users on the news of the day.
10. Put headlines from your channel or our sections and topics on your Web site or blog.

Tags are one of the hot new features online. Basically, a tag is a descriptor (metadata, if you will, that is added to something like a picture or web page or what have you so that people can find it. Flickr is a superlative example of tag usage. People can view pictures and apply tags that describe the picture in a way that’s meaningful to them. Then they can browse Flickr to find pictures with particular tags. Pretty cool! I haven’t used Flickr myself much (at least for posting my own pictures), but the tags are a very helpful element of navigating and organizing pictures.

Anyway, tag CLOUDS are a result of the proliferation of tags. A tag cloud is a group of tags that are all displayed together and that show the particular keywords that occur most frequently within the groups of tags being searched. The more frequently the term is used, the larger the text of its tag. Typically a tag cloud can be derived from either a collection of all the tags used (e.g., a collection of photos) or an examination of all the words used in the posts (e.g., an RSS feed).

Now you can create your own tag clouds based on RSS feeds. Whether it’s just one feed or a huge group of them, TagCloud.com will check the feed(s) and create a tag cloud for the most frequently used terms in the body of the articles being posted (not the lists of links in a sidebar).

And even cooler? You can click any of the tags to bring up a list (with snippets or initial paragraphs) of all the posts or stories that used the term. Just think about the possibilities here! You can create a tag cloud for one or more of the major news websites and then get a snapshot of what terms are being used the most in current news stories. And then you can click the term to get summaries and links to all of those stories. That was the original purpose for developing TagCloud, but there are many other uses that continue to add value to the Internet in possibly unforeseen ways.

It’s a whole new way to keep up with the current issues of the day. Or to see a visual representation of the core concepts of someone’s blog. Plus, they give you code to put into the head and body of your web page if you’d like to display the cloud on a web page. Or you can link to their site where they display it for you.

For example: http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/LibBlogs/default/50 is my tag cloud for a dozen of the library-related blogs that I read the most.

And http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/Headlines/default/50 is a link to a tag cloud for a collection of all the major network news sites (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, Yahoo News, and Google News). The actual Tag Cloud shows the most recent information every time it is loaded, and right now it looks like this:

FYI, my personal blog’s tag cloud is here and my professional blog’s tag cloud is here, and it’s very different from my personal blog, as I would expect. (My personal one is having issues, so it won’t load right now.)

So stop by TagCloud.com and give it a try. It’s free and quite informative!

Current music: Soundtrack from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring