The absence of posts on this blog is due mainly to the fact that it's time for a makeover. The current layout cannot efficiently display all I want to put up here. Here's a mini-manifesto about where I want to take the site.
- I want to have an efficient top page that gives a snapshot of all the available information (blog posts by category, new bookmarks, articles etc.) and gives readers easy access to what they are interested in.
- I want to have page dedicated to new bookmarks. There is just too much to blog about, but I add bookmarks to del.icio.us for anything I find interesting.
Here are some of the interesting things I wanted to blog about over the last few weeks but never made time to.
- The first Red Herring Japan event brought together an amazing group of Japanese entrepreneurs, many of them bilingual. Thanks to all the organizers for their great work. I would definitely like to attend again next year.
- On a smaller scale, the monthly Tokyo2Point0 event I started for the internet and Web 2.0 community in Tokyo in collaboration with Fujimamas and now supported by Ultra, Super, New is going well attracting around 50 people each month.
Interesting tools and web sites I've been using:
- Needless to say, Facebook is booming and shows no signs of slowing down. By opening their site to widget developers and through good site usability they have really created a viral system.
- Plaxo continues to make interesting moves. Version 3.0 seems to have been in beta a bit longer than I would have expected. They had some issues with Google sync. They are making moves into the SNS space, but I think they will stick to their strengths and allow people to maintain and share their own information. I guess you could call this semi-distributed contact management. What they really need now is to start adding fields so that people can add their own IDs on SNS systems to their contact information. They have started this in a limited way but few of the major SNS services (such as LinkedIn, Xing and Facebook) are supported.
- Me.dium looks like an interesting tool, that somehow links your browsing activity with your network. I still don't quite get it, but am testing out a widget below.
- Other interesting Web 2.0 sites are appearing all the time. Some of them, like matching teachers and students are almost obvious ideas (once you've heard of them, of course :-) . I probaby register for about 5 new sites a week.
- Lijit is one site I'm interested in. The concept of being able to search all my content and my network's content is interesting. I keep going back to the site, but somehow it's just not clicking. Perhaps they should just consolidate and simplify the search Google style and focus on presenting the results effectively. It just seems over-complicated.
- Hubdog is one of the more useful RSS tools I've seen. I can subscribe to Podcasts from my PC and automatically have them downloaded to my Windows Mobile device.
- Blogrovr is becoming one of my all-time favorite browser (currently Firefox) add-ons. You add a list of favorite blogs and when you visit a site it pops up an non-intrusive Window with related blogs posts. Very useful.
- The Yoono add-on is also a favorite I've stuck with for quite a while. I don't use most of the clipping features, but the Yoono toolbar displays a ticker of sites similar to the one you are on. Not sure quite how it works but very useful when you are doing research or looking for sites of a certain type.
Well that's all I can remember off the top of my head. I may update this post. Comments and other recommendations appreciated.
