The web has come a long ways in terms of usefulness. The interfaces are much easier and nicer. It is easier to search and share information. But has it become too easy and too mainstream?

The comments there are a good example of why I don’t get much value from Digg. Too much noise and very little knowledge. Robert Scoble

Robert’s comment strikes a chord that I have felt for awhile now. When a medium is opened to the public and becomes mainstream, it starts to loose its effectiveness and perhaps its authority. Look at the history of the Internet. BBS, newsgroups, forums, live chat, social networking, and social bookmarking. When it was a limited group, it had some use. As it grew the voice of the masses’ was heard and it became more useful. It then became popular and mainstream. All of these mediums suffered similar histories. When they became popular and mainstream the noise grew to deafening volumes and blocked out the knowledge.

It is easy to comment and do a straight mind dump or stream of thought. No filtering needed. Who is going to know who you are. Better yet, look at myspace, et al., most don’t understand or care that their lives are an open book for those who know how to look. If you don’t care that other’s know your personal details, why would you care that they find out that you trashed talked about something you knew nothing about? We are or are becoming an open society that hides behind fake annonynimity of digital life. There is no accountability and when you can sign up for a yahoo or other anonymous email account, there isn’t likely to be any anytime soon.

It isn’t as much fallen from grace as it has gone the way of most mass media and popular Internet services.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, social networks, social bookmarking, Digg, MySpace, Responsibility, accountability, audience

I have been loosely following the conversation about River of News, between Robert Scoble and Dave Weiner. I am biased. I like my desktop applications. I always have. But I saw Robert’s comments about trying it and seeing how much easier it was to keep up with the news. Like most, I have a bunch of blogs that I keep up with or try to. Like most, I find that keeping up with it to be difficult. So I wanted to try something that would help me with that.

On first try and look, it took a little bit to get used to. But once I adjusted to how the river worked and google reader handled it was easy to fall in love with it. It works very much like a desktop application. I use it from home and from work, with no configuration and little trouble. I started to use it religously, keeping up with things and finding news items of interest. I could easily share items and mark them to read later, I can even categorize them. All was good.

Today I had read an article and wanted to get back to it. Problem, I forgot to star it and/or tag it. How could I find it again when I wasn’t even sure what feed it was from. I’d have to sort through hundreds of new items to find it. I needed a search button. This made me think about what I use news aggregator for. I tend to skim the news and mark it for later read. I also categorize stuff for easier retrival. So far so good. I also like to use the computer for repeated tasks; I want the computer to search for items that I might want to read. A watchlist. I can’t find either of these functionalities on Google Reader. Things that I would consider to be essential.

Also, my problem with online applications in general still is that for something like this, if the site is down or I am not online I can’t read news. If I use feed demon, I still have everything I need.

Overall, I like what the Google Reader team has done. It is very easy to use and well laid out. The functionality of mobile phone use and bookmarking etc are nice, I’d rather have seen search and watchlists more. Hey Google team, get the search and watchlists working and away to download your news if you want to and you’d have a smash hit.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Reader, Review, News Aggregators

I was going to site down and talk about how web sites tend not to remove users or give them an easy way to opt out, like Jeff points out about Linkedin. I also figured it was a good way to start the review process of the next editor in the series, Blog Jet.

I had downloaded it a couple of months ago when I was looking at editors. I had installed it, but never got a chance to use it. You guessed it, when I opened it up this time I got the message your trial period has expired. We are all developers and need to make a living and be compensated for our time. I am not against that at all. I like making a living, but please, please if you are going to use modal’s give me an option out.

There was a lively debate over at Coding Horror about the misuse of modal dialog boxes. This a clear case of such. Not only does it stop the workflow, I get it I need to purchase the application now, but it doesn’t let you escape either. Clicking the ok button launches your browser to their purchase page, as does one of the other links. The other link brings up the registration page. No countdown to let me know it will exit (it never did for me.) and no button to exit. I eventually had to bring up task manager and kill the process.

I am leaning towards not even reviewing the application because of this. What do you think, should I still include it in the review?

Technorati Tags: Design, Usability, Review, Blog Editors, Development, BlogJet

In the first part of this series, I reviewed Microsoft’s Live Writer. Live writer is a brand new product and still in its beta form. In this article, I review an established Post2Blog 2 currently in RC2.

This window’s only editor, from ByteScout has a solid history with me. I had originally been blogging with it when I was trying out different platforms and services. It requires 11 Mb of memory to open and an average document like this, is only 17 Mb of memory to run. The full install takes 27 Mb of disk space and is quick and simple. Setting up your blog is simple if you are on one of these platforms: Blogger, Movable Type, Typepad, or Wordpress.

The editor’s interface is simple to navigate. Everything is laid in an intuitive manner, with most things visible. The drop down options under some of the buttons, I found useful but it took a little bit to get used to it. There are still some features that don’t work, like stuff under the Publish button and Microsoft Word integration. The Microsoft Word integration was a nice feature in version 1 and I hope they can get it working for the final release of version 2. The application is rounded out with a nice array of tools that are designed to help the user out.

The formatting features work mostly as expected and better than Live Writer. Lists, font styles, and block quotes all work well, but setting the font face is quirky like in Live Writer. In Post2Blog it works just the opposite of Live Writer, you can’t change the font face and size until after you have typed something. Here again though, it would be nice if there was a way to set the default font face and size for a blog.

Drag and Drop images where you want them and then right click to get their properties. If you want to resize just change the size right there by dragging the corner. Unfortunately, the rest of the image manipulation is not as powerful as in LW and lacks the special effects. The UI for the images uses drop down menus, I liked the icon buttons for alignment in LW better. Links are pleasure here. Copy the url to your clipboard, highlight the text you want to make into a link and do a ctrl + k and viola it bring up the tool with all the info filled in. Add an alt tag and select if you want it in a new window or not and you are done. Simple.

Kudos to ByteScout as well for the multiple options to save. They give you the option to save locally, publish, and publish as draft. I tend to work at multiple machines, but find the standard Wordpress editor clunky to use. Spell check works, but its not integrated with the Microsoft Word dictionary so you will have to keep two updated.

The category tool/widget is easy to navigate and use. Alphabetically sorted and check boxes make it a powerful tool. Updating the list is done nicely with a link or a ctrl+b. Maybe its the API’s that don’t support it, but neither LW nor Post2Blog support creating categories on the fly. I will have to investigate that as this series progresses.

Finally its integration with IE, Firefox, and Outlook make a nice way to keep a blog updated quickly. Though as a corporation I would be wondering about Outlook integration. As a basic editor its not bad. You get all the basic functionality and some added nice features. It being called a release candidate I think is a bit optimistic. Live Writer’s beta felt more complete than this RC. With a price tag I don’t find it a worthwhile purchase.

Part 3: My Recommendation

Technorati Tags: Blog Editors, Reviews, Wordpress, TypePad, Post2Blog, Movable Type

I will have a full review of Post2Blog shortly, but I wanted to give some initial feed back here. I like the quick snippets feature, though the first time that I typed in Post2blog and it filled in a paragraph of text it was very surprising. The formatting of text is quirky in similar way to Live Writer, in that to change the font you have to have text already there. Otherwise, it is very similar to Writer. The image functions aren’t as nice or intuitive as Write, but once you get the hang of it is not too bad. Although I do miss the extras like drop shadow in Write. Post2Blog does have some nice features that aren’t include in Writer. The table editor is a nice feature, but again doesn’t work as smoothly as I had anticipated. Quick Snippets takes some practice to get used to and the More_Text_Tag is a nice feature too. More to come later…

Technorati Tags: Blog Editors, Post2Blog, Reviews