Blogger

Today I tried leaving a comment at Yahoo's search blog. I filled out the info fields, entering the address of this blog in the weblog field (http://web201.blogspot.com) and hit post. I was quite surprised to be greeted by the following screen:


If you look at the line of text starting with "Your comment could not be submitted..." you'll notice that Yahoo is objecting to the fact that my blog is hosted at blogspot.com and I'm told to correct the error and repost. I suppose I could transfer my blog to another company's weblob servers to satisfy Yahoo's request and to have my comment posted there, but I opted against this.

What are the alternatives? Yahoo's Search Blog could institute a slightly more demanding authentication scheme. Currently, a commenter is asked to type the word "Yahoo" in an input field. And they wonder why they're getting spam? How about a captcha or something?

Another alternative is to use Yahoo Mail's spam filtering tools. Anything's better than blacklisting an entire domain!

When these kinds of things happen, I just get depressed about the Internet and technology in general. Can't someone spend a little bit more time thinking things through?

(I ended up posting, but entered my website instead of my blog address instead.)

MultiBlog

Another little experiment:

I've set up a blog that anyone can (anonymously) post to. Why? To see what the YubNub community (and hopefully many others) are thinking about, worrying about, hoping for, love, hate, etc., etc.

This is currently done via YubNub using the tell (or netsend) and look (or netread) commands. For example:

tell I'm listening to some old David Bowie and I'm loving it.

This will (almost) immediately post the "I'm listening..." message to the MultiBlog.

look

This will forward you to the MultiBlog website to read the posts. If you're not familiar with YubNub, see my YubNub post. (These commands must be typed in to a YubNub command field.) Also, if you subscribe to the RSS feed you can avoid the "look" command altogether.

If anyone wants to help spruce up the site's graphics or template, please contact me.

Have fun!

Cellphone Dreams

Last night I had a strange dream. Someone asked me to do a web search on my cellphone. I slowly went through some tiny screens and finally got to Google. I entered a search term (I wish I could remember what it was) and selected "Search".

Cut to the next scene, where all of a sudden the someone and I were now huddled about some kind of very old micro-computer looking at a screen which seemed to be displaying Gopher or Lynx.

Does this say anything about the future of web access via mobile phones?

I hesitate to jump into either of the two futurist camps. One which says that the PC is dead. And the other which says that the cellphone is the future of web access. I have no doubt that handheld devices will play an integral part in our lives, but I can't see the PC leaving us any time soon. Evolving, yes. But dying? No.

For the future of mobile web access, I prefer to imagine a device made of electronic paper which unfolds/unrolls to the page-size of a standard hardcover book (or larger), which hooks up to the web wirelessly, is touch-sensitive, and is very easy on the eyes, both in terms of design and display quality.

I think that was my first tech dream.

My del.icio.us attic

I think I use the del.icio.us social bookmarking service as much as the average user. "I gotta read that later..." "I definitely gotta check this site out..." "That looks kinda neat..." I bookmark all this stuff, and what do I do with it? Nothing!

Well, that's a mild overstatement. I do occasionally search for a site within my del.icio.us tags, but this typically occurs only when I remember that I had previously bookmarked it. So, this is like putting a bunch of paraphernalia up into the attic, and afterwards, never rummaging around up there. I need someone to climb up to the attic on a regular basis, dust off a few boxes, and present me with something of interest. Why did I put them up there in the first place?

With this in mind, I'm working on a del.icio.us randomizer. Some kind of tool that will alert me in some way about the neat links I've bookmarked there.

Codename: randel

More info once it's close to being done...