Category: Good things

Seth Godin maintains that to succeed in today’s market you need to standout — to be a purple cow. And now, it’s not enough to stand out — you need a big moo. His latest book, The Big Moo, brings together 33 purple cows — everyone from Mark Cuban to Daniel Pink; Robin Williams to Dave Balter. Each contributor adds a pearl of wisdom to the strand, making for a lot of little sound bites on how to be remarkable.

I had pre-ordered the book on Amazon, got it Wednesday and opened it last night. It’s a very quick read. The Big Moo is not steeped in deep theory, just gut-level advice from people how are out there being remarkable in their own way.

Each of the 33 entries are uncredited. You know who contributed, but you don’t know what they contributed, so you get to guess who wrote what.

And all of the proceeds go to charity, with proceeds going to go JDRF, Acumen Fund, and Room to Read.

Amazon: The Big Moo

Managing bookmarks (“favorites” for those of you raised on Internet Explorer) has long been a pain in the ass. The problem is compounded by running multiple computers and multiple browsers. I routinely use two computers, a laptop for work and a desktop at home. On top of that I use both Firefox and Internet Explorer (don’t ask). If you’ve ever seen the look of total frustration on my face via the webcam, now you know why — I’m searching in vain for some site I ran across, but now cannot find.

Well I’m happy to report that those frustrating days are completely over (leaving me more time to be frustrated by other problems). I’ve found del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us isn’t new. I heard about it quite awhile ago but never really checked into it until recently. I wish I had jumped on it earlier, because this site has completely changed the way I view bookmarks.

What is Del.icio.us? Besides the clever name (yes, the URL really is http://del.icio.us), it is a fabulous way to store, retrieve and even share bookmarks. To use it most effectively, you add to shortcuts to your Links bar in the browser(s) of your choice. Post to del.icio.us saves a website address for future retrieval. Rather than require folders or categories, del.icio.us uses tags. You can create tags on-the-fly and use as many as you like for an entry. my del.icio.us lets you browse your saved bookmarks, regardless of what browser you’re using or what computer you’re on.

This is where it gets even more interesting…

You can share your bookmarks. In fact, to see mine, click to http://del.icio.us/bigblueball. By default, this shows the most recently added sites. Beneath each link you’ll see how many other people have also bookmarked that particular site. Over on the right, you’ll see all the tags I’ve used. You can view them as a list or in the cloud view that has been popularized by similar sites that support folksonomy-style tagging.

It gets better. To view all the links for a given tag, just click the tag (try spanish). Notice the URL format. Now if you want to see all sites tagged with “spanish” across all users, change the URL to simply http://del.icio.us/tag/spanish. Nice, eh?

Finally, you can retrieve any of these pages as RSS for use in an aggregator, portal or blog. Yep, it’s as simple as http://del.icio.us/rss/bigblueball. So go sign-up for del.icio.us, then swing back here and let me know what you think.

I stumbled upon a great website experiment in prediction markets. I was first introduced the the concept of prediction markets in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds. What is a prediction market? It’s a speculative market where people buy and sell shares in pretty much anything. It’s been used to predict the outcome of presidential elections with uncanny accuracy, since it does not factor in who the “investor” wants to win, but who they believe actually will win.

The Buzz Game creates a virtual market where anyone can sign-up and begin trading. There is no cost, and you start with $10,000 to invest. The markets are based on O’Reilly’s Radar – a blog that tracks emerging technologies – and uses Yahoo’s own Buzz factor to determine the value of each share. The more someone searches for something, the greater the “buzz” (relative to the other “things” in a given market, of course).

Visit The Buzz Game, setup an account and see if you can track what’s buzzing better than me — I’m up $248 in just a few days. Oh, be sure to check out my favorite market: instant messaging.

While playing around with Gada.be, I discovered that BigBlueBall was mentioned on Wikipedia. It’s a brief mention on a disambiguation page, but it was cool to see that someone had added the not-quite-one-and-only BBB. Thanks, fans!

Gada.be is a new meta-search project from Lockergnome’s Chris Pirillo. Gada.be (pronounced “gotta be”) is a very clever tool. It’s not quite a search engine, yet it as elements of that.

What does Gada.be do? Well, you give a keyword or two and it returns results in neatly formatted XML. It pulls those results only from sites that provide XML data. I categorized the results by the source; a kind of search aggregator, and gives you the option of viewing different flavors of search results.

When you search, it actually crafts a URL using your keywords. For example, searching for ‘bigblueball’ gives you this:

http://bigblueball.gada.be/ — a very simple URL format. Short and sweet is Gada.be’s credo, because Pirillo wanted to make sure it worked on his PSP as well as other mobile devices. In fact, the name ‘Gada.be’ was chosen specifically because of how simple it is to type in on a mobile phone — 4232.2233 (smart move).

So our search for bigblueball finds results from a wide range of sources, including Digg, Flickr, MSN, SeekItAll, Plazoo, Ice Rocket and others. Not a comprehensive result set like you’d expect from a full-fledged search engine like Google (where the same search returns about 139,000 hits).

If you scroll to the bottom of the gada.be search results, you can perform the same search on different sets of sites, including blogs, entertainment, geeky, health (“Doctor, I’ve got big, blue…”), jobs, multimedia, news, photos, random, research, shopping and social. One of the more amusing searches was using ‘bigblueball’ on the photos category: http://bigblueball.gada.be/p

One other interesting thing about Gada.be is that it allows you to output results to OPML. This is interesting because it allows you to roll your own search aggregator for use in a portal like Yahoo 360 or Microsoft’s not-so-secret start.com. So you get new stuff from a wide range of sources without having to ferret them out yourself. As convicted felon Martha Stewart would say, “It’s a good thing.”

Gada.be is in beta right now, so you expect changes and occasional glitches in the service.

Interoperability is the holy grail of instant messaging. It’s been long promised, and long sought after by consumers. The fact that instant messengers don’t interoperate is absurd, really. Just imagine if I couldn’t call you because you used a different mobile phone network. Hard to imagine, right? Incredibly, instant messaging fans have suffered incompatible IM networks for years.

Now BigBlueBall reports that Yahoo and Microsoft have decided to make their instant messengers work together, allowing users on MSN Messenger will be able to exchange messages with users on Yahoo Messenger (and vice versus). The deal is supposed to be announced Wednesday and reportedly includes voice as well as text messages.

All I have to say is… IT’S ABOUT TIME!

Most blogs and websites employ some method to track how many visitors they get. Usually those stats include information like where they came from (the referring link), if they used search terms via Google or another search engine, and their approximate geographic location. I recently ran across a new service being called ClustrMaps that adds a neat visual twist to that data.

ClustrMaps creates a little thumbnail image that shows the relative geographic position of each visitor to your site. You’ll find the thumbnail in the column next to this article. Larger red dots indicate a greater number of unique visitors from that location.

In my own case, I found it interesting that my blog apparently has no interest to anyone on the African continent. Maybe it’s time to add a post about the South African jazz scene?

ClustrMaps provides a slick way of seeing where your readers are coming from, and the basic service is free. Check it out.