As always I find myself bouncing around the web and finding new and interesting tools. It’s no secret that I read a lot of news and blogs online, and I find a lot of interesting services that way. As a blogger it’s also the best way to find new tools to make blogging easier.

Bill at bill2me.com mentioned that he was using coComment which allows you to easily track all of the blog discussions you participate in. When new comments are posted to the threads you have been tracking, it also makes it easy to return there to continue the discussion. coComment also has a Firefox extension which makes automatically alerts you to new comments. Right now I am trying it out and I have to say that I enjoy using it. It allows you to keep up with the discussion in a timely manner and make comments when they are still relevant to the conversation. By following up on discussions you can also drive traffic to your blog.

Eenie, meenie, miney, mo.

RIM is releasing about three hundred BlackBerries this year and Boy Genius was nice enough to break them down and let us know which device is which and which ones will have the features that we are looking for. He also differentiates between the prosumer devices and the devices intended for business.

According to his research I should be waiting for the 83xx which will include a Camera, WiFi, and GPS. Which BlackBerry are you getting?

[Link to RIM's BlackBerry 8300 Lineup : The Boy Genius Report]

Recently I realized that I barely spend any time on MySpace. I still respond to emails I get from friends there and friend requests, but I don’t just hang out to see what’s going on. I definitely don’t play with the instant messenger features anymore because they’re just sub par and I find that most MySpace users that I socialize with don’t use them. The shine has well worn off for me.

I guess that the MySpace folk are starting to realize this as well. They’re planning on launching a social news site, much like Digg, so that users can submit and vote for news articles. Personally, I don’t see this encouraging me to spend more time on the site. Using MySpace for your up to date news coverage is no better than listening to High School bathroom gossip. I also hope that the level of commentary from MySpace users will be more mature than that of the vast majority of Digg users. The thought of another avenue for a bunch of teenaged guys to tear each other to shreds for no reason does not strike me as entertaining. Unfortunately I think it will go the way of most MySpace pages — littered with grainy video and audio tracks that automatically play pasted over swirly animated backgrounds with unreadable text.

At any rate, check out this Wired article and let me know what you think.

[Link to Wired News: Exclusive: MySpace News Pics]

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger asked his readers about their feed reading habits. In particular he wanted to know what makes people unsubscribe from a Blog feed. I have been cleaning out my Google Reader lately and I have found myself unsubscribing to feeds for the following reasons:

1. Partial Feeds: I still click through to the originating site even if I’ve read a full feed. Partial feeds seem like a cheap way to force me to do something I already do so I just unsubscribe to pages that use them out of spite.
2. Poor Grammar: Mine is not perfect, nor is my spelling, but seeing bad grammar and poorly constructed sentences on a regular basis makes me lose respect for the author. A lot of the errors I see could be corrected with a quick run through the spell and grammar check on Microsoft Word so there is very little excuse to post before checking.
3. Repetitive Posts: I know that sometimes the media gets carried away with certain topics (Anna Nicole, Oscar Coverage, etc.), but I expect more from a blogger. Unless your blog focuses on a specific topic, I don’t want to see 10 posts on a specific topic over the course of a week.
4. Off The Topic: When topic focused blogs go off topic and stay off topic for a while I just lose interest. If it is a topic focused blog I signed up to read posts on a specific topic and related items.
5. Furry Friends and Cute Babies: I don’t want to see pictures of your kids or your pets unless they are doing something that is really special. I set the bar very high when I use the term special — that video of a cat sitting at a piano and attempting to play was on the low end of what I consider special. Truth be told no one really wants to hear about your munchkins or pets unless it is a blog that regularly features appearances by them. If I am subscribed to a blog with this kind of material, I most likely know the blogger quite well.
6. Regurge: Please try not to regurgitate stories you found on the last ten sites you visited when you were reading through your own feeds. Chances are I’ve read half of them or I subscribe to similar feeds and will get to that news from an official news source as well. Not every tech site has to report on the newest USB gadget as soon as it drops. Go for a weekly roundup of new gadgets if that is not the primary focus of your blog.
7. Miscategorization: Don’t try to pass your blog off as a tech or gadget blog if you only make one post about a gadget every week or so. If it’s a personal blog, don’t be embarrassed to let it be a blog about you and your experiences. Don’t try to pass your opinions off as fact or try to spin them as real news either. If you think your readers are fooled, you’re wrong and Fox News already does a better job of it.
8. Video Clips: If you are going to post links to video clips in your blog, at least put some text in the blog post. Spending an extra second to tell the viewer what the video is about should be common sense.
9. Excessive Updates About the Blog: You don’t need to tell me about every update you do to your theme, how you’re changing your blog, and constantly apologize for being offline or for not posting constantly. We are human and most bloggers work alone. We understand that your posting frequency will change depending on what is going on in your life. If you want to put some ads on your blog to pay the web hosting bills, more power to you. If you made a change that may have caused down time or screwed something up for the readers, by all means explain yourself. Just don’t do it every day.
10. Blogging about Blogging: Don’t do it. I’m guilty of it as well and I’ve made an effort to stop it. Blogging about blogging is the snake eating its tale (ha ha).

[Link to What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?]

When I first started blogging regularly I purchased a license for Ecto which is an amazing application. I started using it on OS X, so I was a bit disappointed in the Windows translation. Most applications that start on the Mac platform don’t quite translate to Windows just because of the limitations of the operating system. At any rate, since I moved back to Windows (temporarily) I have struggled to find a good desktop blog editor.

A while ago I went through almost every free and low cost blogging software package that I could find for Windows. I found a software package with a good interface, it ran slowly. If I found one that was good all around, the price was too high. For kicks and giggles I figured I would try Windows Live Writer because other people seem to like it, and I also found a quick and dirty article on getting it to work with the Wordpress Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in. It causes me physical pain to say it but I like the software and it works well for my purposes. Furthermore it’s free. It also has a growing library of plugins which will encourage versatility. I just hope it doesn’t become bloated like Microsoft applications tend to get after they have been around for a while. I also hope it remains free.

Do you use Windows Live Writer? If so what do you think of it? Do you use another application I may be unfamiliar with? Let me know about it.

I have been using Google Docs and Spreadsheets since it was available to Gmail users. I actually wanted to try Writely, but signups had already been shut down by the time I got to it due to the Google takeover. I waited a while and when Writely had been Googlized I jumped at the chance to play with it. When Google Spreadsheets became available I made sure I took the time out to play with that as well. I think the idea of having a portable office suite has always been appealing to me for several reasons:

• I’ve had a few catastrophic data losses over time.
• I like to be able to access some documents no matter where I am.
• Constantly synchronizing documents between my laptop, desktop, and my file server is tedious.
• The ability to work on group projects without emailing files back and forth saves time and reduces the risk of virus transmission.

Since the beginning Google Docs was always slow to me. I thought it was just normal because the applications were somewhat complex and script heavy. I also had quite a difficult time downloading my files and deleting files from the site. It took so many clicks to move files around that it’s always been a point of mild frustration for me. I never thought anything of it until I tried ThinkFree Office. After only an hour or so of playing around with their applications, I cleaned out my Google Docs archive and moved everything to their site.

There are a lot of things I like about ThinkFree, but these are the most important to me:

• The site responds quickly and the applications are snappy.
• The aesthetics of the site are very good and the layout is well thought out.
• There is a PowerPoint compatible web application along with a Word Processor and a Spreadsheet application.
• It takes very few clicks to upload or download single or multiple files.
• There are AFFORDABLE desktop applications which you can purchase that coincide with the web applications for working offline.

So far I am very impressed with the suite. I am going to try to spend more time editing documents within ThinkFree Office on the web so that I can see how it reacts to heavy use and more complex functions than I have used before. I hope that the applications continue to be this usable as the suite grows and I hope that the desktop based versions of the applications stay affordable as well. I would also like to see a Mac version of the desktop suite. Once that is available I would have to say that ThinkFree Office would be a very hard competitor to beat in this particular software market.

Has anyone else experienced any problems logging into MySpace? Right now I can’t log in at all, but it does acknowledge that my account exists. Earlier I was able to log in but all of my Friends were missing (deleted profiles) and my profile had been reverted to how it looked when I first logged in. At another point in time when I logged in, my profile was in tact but I couldn’t access the new message I logged on to get.

Anyone else? Bueller?

I have been addicted to web syndication since the moment I read about the concept. I have been using a feed reader (mostly desktop readers until Google Reader’s second incarnation came long) for almost four years now (scary). It all started with Shrook on the Mac which I fell in love with. It also helped me to find topics to blog about initially and saved me a couple of hours a day trying to find the news stories I was really looking for.

I remember when my OPML only had 20 or 30 feeds in it. I am currently subscribed to 193 feeds in Google Reader right now. I recently removed the 15 or so job board feeds I read regularly because I am currently employed and don’t need to read them everyday. I’ve also started to get rid of feeds that seem to only provide me duplicate information (I recently dumped Engadget for Gizmodo which is far more sarcastic and punchy). A few months ago I dropped all of my feeds based on Windows related topics which cut back about 15 or so. I realized that I just wasn’t reading the content because I had no love left for Windows.

I used to read the feeds of all of the old TechTV personalities especially shortly after the mass exodus and before it became G4. I haven’t kept up with them for about two years now with the exception of Leo who is unavoidable especially if you are a Mac user or fan. Right now I seem to be finding and subscribing to more DIY, GTD, and blogs run by individuals than anything else. My reading habits seem to change like the direction of the wind.

I am going to try to cut back on my feeds and purge the feeds of sites that aren’t updated on a regular basis. I have also noticed that the time I spend reading feeds in Google Reader is getting longer and longer each day. I spend far too much time during the day stopping to browse the feeds. I am going to limit my feed reading to twice a day and see if I can make it through the withdrawals. Wish me luck.

After a couple of weeks of use I decided to remove the Snap website preview functionality from my site. I don’t mind it personally, but it gets tedious after a long day of browsing. It is a great idea for sites that are very link-heavy like Wikis so that the reader can catch a glimpse of where they’re going before they click on a link. I just don’t think its right for my site. I would like to enable it on a link-by-link basis but I think that would become tedious after a while.

There are enough people out there that are uncomfortable with Snap, and I have no idea how a screen reader would react to it. For now I think that it could work against me and annoy readers enough for them to leave without subscribing to my feeds. That’s a risk I’m not willing to take.

Apparently Google is trying to open an online bookstore which will bring the eBook back into the attention of the public. I love the idea of eBooks, but I am not ready to go that way until a solid eInk based eBook reader is introduced to the American market. Sony introduce the Librie eBook Reader to the Japanese market over a year ago and it was received with a resounding thud. Sony imposed too many restrictions on the reader, used draconian DRM measures, and essentially tried to force readers to purchase eBooks that would self destruct through the Sony bookstore. The unfortunate part of it is that the reader was well built, had a good form factor, and the battery life and readability were amazing due to eInk. Hopefully since Google wants to get involved
this time the hardware companies involved will take into consideration what the public actually wants and needs in a reader, rather than what they can put in the device to allow it to line their pockets more heavily.

My eBook reader would have to have:

• A small form factor (the size of the Librie was perfect for me)
• Wi-Fi for downloading books on the fly
• The ability to read PDF, DOC, RTF, TXT, and various other common document files (including secured docs and pdfs)
• A formidable amount of upgradeable memory (4gb plus)
• Web Browsing
• RSS Aggregator
• Backlight
• The ability to use both rechargeable and standard batteries
• The ability to read multiple types of eBook formats with or without DRM
• The ability to be used in tangent with multiple eBook services

I think my needs are a little more advanced than the average reader so I don’t anticipate that all of them will be met by the first few readers to hit the market (especially not the ability to be used with multiple eBook services). At this point I don’t think I would be so concerned with price provided that the readers that came out could accommodate my needs. I would easily pay $500 for a tweaked Sony Librie just as long as I am not tied down by DRM and locked into shopping for new books at one store.