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June 04, 2006: Phil’s Links for Sunday, June 4th

It seems I always end up either starting a post that I never finish or collecting a pile of URLs I want to write about and don’t. Rather than let them go to waste, I thought I’d try something I’ve seen used to great success on other blogs — the link dump post!

May 31, 2006: A Great Idea. On Paper.

Seth Godin’s experiment in using humans as content aggregators has been taking a few rough shots lately. Squidoo is a site that offers individuals the opportunity to collect knowledge on any topic, become recognized experts on the topic, and maybe make a little money along the way if their Lens gets enough traffic (I earned about $.02 myself so far, not ready to quit my day job). Michael Arrington has been the most vocal critic of Squidoo, writing on TechCrunch, “Squidoo may generate some content creation growth, but I don’t see it generating serious page view growth under their current model.”

May 30, 2006: Making the Easy Things Hard

Steve Ballmer has announced again that Windows next generation operating system Vista might be delayed past the January 2007 date set the last time he announced it was behind schedule. At the rate Vista keeps getting delayed, we’ll all be driving hover cars, running Mac OS XX before the install of the Vista update. Part of the delay, I’m sure, is that Microsoft hopes to make Vista as easy to use as the Mac OS, which as you know people that love it just can’t stop talking about how easy it is to use.

May 25, 2006: Nike and Apple Want to Get You in Shape

In what I think is one of the most interesting uses of the iPod yet comes the announcement that Apple and Nike are teaming up to turn your iPod nano and a pair of Nike+ shoes into your personal trainer. A small attachment that fits on the nano and a transmitter put inside specially designed Nike running shoes get you ready to go. Your nano displays stats like calories burned, distance and pace. The cool thing, though, is your iPod will be talking to you at the same time…all while listening to your own mix of workout music. The Sport Kit is going to cost $29 and the Nike+ shoes range from $85 to $110 which is about what you pay for a pair of shoes these days anyway.

May 22, 2006: AIM Pages Not Quite Ready to Kill MySpace, or Anything

AOL launched its MySpace killer last week and after using it for just a short time — mostly because there wasn’t much of anything you can do at this point — I have to say I’m less than impressed. AIM Pages more resembles something from 1996 than 2006, even the AJAX edit mode does little to make this a beta worth playing with at this point. AOL has a nice advantage in the fact they have a huge userbase for its messenger, get all those people to create an AIM Page and MySpace will look like the worst $500 million ever spent.

May 19, 2006: From the Web to Desktop Using the Apple WebKit

In what is surely an odd and likely isolated occurence, I’ve recently come across two applications that take a Web-based application and create a desktop application out of them. I can’t imagine that Web 3.0 (or whatever the next big thing will be called) will be a flood of Web-enabled applications that all exist inside of their own exclusive browsers. What makes this possible though is Apple’s WebKit that makes it incredibly easy to build an application using the core of Apple’s Safari Web browser. The first thought that ran through my mind was, “why in the world would a person even want to do this?” After using them for a few days though, it has given me something to think about.

May 14, 2006: ShinyLetter: Converting Email to Snailmail

When I first ran across ShinyLetter I didn’t quite know what to think. ShinyLetter lets you compose a letter online and for two dollars they will print and send your letter through the good old postal system. But how hard is it to sit down, pull out some paper and a pen, write your letter and mail it yourself? Once I thought about it, I figured that unless you have stamps and envelopes on hand, it could be more work than a lot of people care to put into it. Even with that in mind, this site is taking niche marketing to new heights targeting the incredibly lazy and people who don’t own printers but have mail to send.

May 11, 2006: JotSpot Family: A Wiki For Your Family

The last time I tried Jotspot  was over a year ago and I wasn’t very impressed. It had just launched, didn’t work very well with a Mac and overall I didn’t see what Jotspot offered that other wikis didn’t. Since that time though, the Jotspot team has been hard at work releasing wikis geared toward specific uses like a call log manager, meeting manager and twelve other business and community geared applications. Last night I decided to try out the Jotspot Family wiki which they offer for free unlike the others that start at $9.95 for 10 users and a limit of 100 pages. I’d have to say I was pretty impressed with what they’ve done since my last visit.

April 29, 2006: Beeplet: Another Online Reminder Service

I’ve grown quite fond of using HassleMe for daily reminders in my inbox but the new Beeplet looks pretty promising. While still in beta (but isn’t every Web2.0 app?) Beeplet allows you to receive reminders through email, RSS or both and IM looks to be added in the near future. You an also tag your reminders which is nice if you plan to create a lot of them in order for you to create some sense of order to your tasks. Unfortunately, Beeplet does not yet allow the creation of recurring reminders like HassleMe does, which for me is a deal breaker for switching services. HassleMe’s killer feature is the fact that you can set fuzzy, recurring reminders to occur at intervals of your choosing. Right now though if all you need is reminders for one-off events, Beeplet would be a good choice.

April 27, 2006: A Small Update To Our Homepage Today

Today we introduce a few changes to our homepage and introduce a couple of new elements. The biggest change we made is moving the category and archive links from the sidebar to a new and improved big footer. This gave us room to better show our portfolio which, until this point, was hidden away like a DVD Easter Egg you might find by clicking the correct combination of six clicks. Now our portfolio is front and center so you shouldn’t have any trouble locating it or ever wondered if it even existed. You can also now subscribe to our blog via email. If you do, you’ll receive one email a day with all of that day’s blog entries. Our RSS feed is still available, but we wanted to offer the email option so that those of you who prefer email can still subscribe. We hope the changes make for a better experience when visiting our site.

April 21, 2006: Gather and Analyze Information with Sidewalk

When FeedRinse was launched, I was excited because it meant somebody close to home had finally released a Web2.0 app. This past week saw the launch of the first Fargo-based Web2.0 entry, as far as I am aware of anyway. Sidewalk allows you to very easily set up a form and collect the data on a hosted server. Not only do they sport a 2.0 design, but the domain name is something to drool over, captureimportant.info…how great is that?

April 21, 2006: John Gruber Makes Daring Fireball a Full-Time Affair

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is one of my favorite blogs, in fact, it probably is. I can’t think of another that I would rather take with me to a desert island. I have religiously read Daring Fireball since discovering it a little over a year ago. He almost exclusively writes about the world of Macintosh, but does manage to sneak in other nerdish topics from time to time. But it is his take on happenings surrounding Apple and the Mac that leave me eagerly anticipating his next post. The problem has been the posts were sparse, maybe two in a week if you were lucky. On Thursday, he announced that he had quit his job at Joyent (they make a pretty nice product btw) and was going to work full time on Daring Fireball. This is great news for the Mac community, but also the blogosphere altogether. Gruber has a great writing style and tackles issues head on, always with an interesting perspective on the topic at hand.

I wish you luck, John. I can’t wait to read you every day.