Another Way to Share

By | November 22, 2011
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I am increasingly enjoying using the Google clipping tool Google Notebook. I like anything which lets you grab content from the web — I put together a list here a few months back which I’ve just updated; a collection of more socially oriented tools is here.. Well, here’s another: Jeteye .

Basically Jeteye is a download that allows you to not only save clips of text from the web but also images, including video, audio and animation. You can then make Jetpaks™ — an awful name for what are customized Web pages collecting stuff together like everything you need to know about Condoleezza Rice. Useful if you need to create a quick and dirty collection of stuff to share.

Reservations? It does feel a bit top down, as if the company’s trying too hard to impress and be cool. First off, you can win prizes — to me a sign a company’s got cash to burn and is trying to reach critical mass in a hurry, without necessarily having too much confidence it can do it via quality. Secondly, the front page is a bit over the top, as other reviewers have noticed. Finally. the language on the About page is a bit too breathless:

Our company stands for freer communication on the web — how we move through it, take from it, add to it, own it, and affect it — how we pull information and contribute thought, experience, opinion, and depth; expressing the possibilities, challenging the status quo and delivering a way for everyone to actively inhabit the web.
Jeteye

Built as a platform for communication, Jeteye changes how we interact with what we find on the web, providing us with transparent tools to gather, build and share what we collect.

Challenging the status quo? Still, it’s worth a try. Sort of halfway between a MySpace page and something like Clipmarks (which has another facelift, I see. Looking a lot tighter.)

Living With Ads

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

Amy Gahran over at Poynter blogs some more on annoying ads and tips on how to get rid of them. She also refers to John Battelle’s suggested alternative to IntelliTXT “to break out keywords for a given article in a separate box, and run that box at the end or to the side of the article? This addresses the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup problem (your advertising peanut butter is in my editorial chocolate….) but retains the power and reader service of the system.”

Good idea. I love good ads, from Amazon’s “you might wanna read this if you read that” and Google’s AdSense (sometimes). So how about leveraging the very cool Sidenotes thing from arco90.com. Very nice, intuitive and so long as there aren’t too many of them (and they’re relevant) something I could live with…

The Law of the Missing Remote

By | November 22, 2011
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There must be a law that describes this, but I can’t find one. We have four air conditioners in our flat, and four remotes. Each remote used to sit snugly in one of those wall clasp things, and everything was hunky dory. No missing remotes, no mess. Until one of the remotes broke, so now we have three, to operate four units. So now, of course, the remotes have to be moved around to operate air conditioners in other rooms. So now we have no idea where the remotes are. We are now, one week into this crisis, down to one remote. I have no idea where the other ones went. What is this called, when the removal of one item triggers a collapse in the order of all the other untis?

I assume the same would happen if you have five remotes governing four units. Quickly you’d stop looking for the remote in the wall clasp, and start leaving the remotes around anywhere, thinking “Hey, we’ve got plenty of them, why bother to put them back?” So after a while you’d be down to fewer remotes than there are units.

I can think of 100 ways to solve this problem, but not one that isn’t hopelessly nerdy, involving string or rubber bands or something to keep the remotes in place. When you have to start stringing your remotes to the devices you’re trying to control remotely, they’re not remotes anymore. And you’re a nerd.

It’s a Dawg’s Life

By | November 22, 2011
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Byron, the man who invented possibly the most important contribution to food preservation, the Clip n Seal, is now writing about dogs for Seattle P-I. Oh, and blogs. (Shameless plug, since he mentioned this humble blog in his book Publisher & Prosper, which I haven’t read yet, but must rock, otherwise why would he mention Loose Wire?):

City Dog Life is a blog about life with urban dogs. Whether it’s spending most of their days under a desk, minding the studio, sniffing the factory floor, barking at delivery drivers, or going to doggy day care, urbanized dogs always have something going on and that’s what we’ll blog about here.

Sounds more exciting than my life. I knew I shouldn’t have tried to become a writer.

USB, Off The Cuff

By | November 22, 2011
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Always looking for a new way to carry my USB key drive. Here’s another option (via Ubergizmo):

Cuffs

Designed by Berlin-based Tonia Welter, the cufflinks are a prototype, but with plans to build with a capacity of up to 1 GB. A bracelet is in the works, which looks not unlike Imation’s Flash Wristband’, and will be released by Koziol in the autumn. Koziol currently sells Neil USB Station, which, er, “positions a USB port on your desktop, putting an end to acrobatic antics underneath it. One end of the the cable is simply plugged into the computer. NEIL keeps the other end on his back as he waits patiently by the keyboard, ready for take-off!” No, I don’t know what it means either.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, how about a USB Memory Stick, fresh from the wood?