The Utah Blogger dinner for August 2007 is going to be this week, August 30th @ 6PM. Get all the details here. Come one come all.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Facebook Applications zuPort for Flickr and YouTube
If you use Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, you will want to try the Facebook applications zuPort: Flickr and zuPort: YouTube.
I was looking for a way to share my Flickr photos without having to upload them to Facebook, or send a Friend to Flickr just to view the pictures. zuPort does all I wanted. New photos show in my mini-feed, and if you click on one of the thumbnails in the feed, it takes you to a viewer in Facebook, not Flickr. Seamless in my view.
zuPort: YouTube accomplishes the same thing, seamlessly integrating your YouTube videos into Facebook. It's great not having to leave Facebook just to view content. That's what makes Facebook applications so cool.
Try these applications out. They are one of the reasons I continue to use Facebook.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Single Life Stream feed via Yahoo! Pipes
I forgot to mention in the post about my new Life Stream, that I'm using Yahoo! Pipes to create one single RSS feed made up of many individual feeds.
Yahoo! Pipes rock. It's not the end all, but I'll tell you what, the interface is incredible. It's a complete WYSIWYG editing interface similar to Visio. Drag and drop functionality. Wow.
Here is a link to my pipe which I use to feed my Tumblr blog.
Giving props to my Peeps
This weeks props go out to my Sister In Law V, Cameron Reilly and the band Metallica.
Sister-in-law V, thank you for introducing my girls to the wildly popular book series by Stephenie Meyer; Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse. They can't put them down. I bought several copies, of each. Apparently you should read these books too.
My next prop goes out to Cameron Reilly, founder and CEO of The Podcast Network. I can't possibly know how much work goes into running a service like TPN. I know Cameron has many people helping him and it shows in the quality of podcasts and vidcasts his network hosts.
I've had the pleasure of hosting a podcast, The Jazz Show, on TPN for a while now, and I've given Cameron more than his fair share of headaches I'm sure. But one of the things that Cameron has taught me, by example, is the sheer will to succeed. He runs a global business. He lives and works in Australia but a majority of podcast's are produced by people in other countries. He's a great mentor, coach and example. Get to know Cameron. And if you have a podcast you think would fit in with the rest of the shows, let Cam know.
My last prop goes out to the band Metallica. I recently watched the DVD Some Kind of Monster, which is a documentary of the band and the making of the album St. Anger. Even if you're not a Metallica fan, this movie is a must see. It goes behind the scenes of the worlds biggest heavy metal rock band of all time. See the contrast between the youthful "I can do what ever the hell I want" to the matured "I have a family and I need to set my priorities".
Having watched this movie some 10 times, (mostly for the music), I've learned a great lesson from these guys. You may become a rock god, in what ever you do, but everything comes with a price if you don't stop and occasionally smell the roses. It will come around to bite you in the ass. You will have to make a choice, and the choice may not be what you want. Thank you for letting me see the human side of your life.
Moving my feeds to a Life Stream
Just like Steve Rubel, I've been creating a Life Stream. It's actually more like a big bucket that collected all the various RSS feeds where I submit content. This includes Flickr, my blog, Twitter, Facebook and del.icio.us. I have others, such as blip.tv, but I'm not sure I include them all.
I want to be part of all the really cool social networks, but I also wanted to give everyone who cares a place to get all of my various posts. Thanks to Tumblr and Feed Burner, I've pretty much solved the problem.
The only real drawback is Tumblr doesn't allow for comments. I'm ok with this because Tumblr's not really an interactive tool it's a Super Aggregator. If you want to comment on my pictures, click through to them. If you want to comment on my latest blog post, click through to it.
Tumblr also provides a mobile version of your site. If you go to www.thomallen.com/mobile on your PDA browser you get to see a mobile friendly version. I can also publish to my Tumblr with my mobile device. Very cool.
Now I have one RSS feed, but the ability to send people where they want to go. Steve mentions using Tumblr for a specific feed or subdomains. For example, you could go subscribe just to my Flickr photos at photos.thomallen.com. This would point to my Tumblr that just displays the photos. You could do this for Twitter or any other number of sites that publishes its own feed.
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