Toys

Here’s some stuff I’ve been playing with that I’ve been meaning to post about:

First is MyBlogLog, which tracks links people follow from my blog site.  It also tells me how many page views were served from my site. Since I serve full feeds this doesn’t capture all of my link traffic (I miss everything that isn’t clicked directly from the site itself), but I get enough direct site hits to extrapolate these data to my subscriber base. If you want you can also put up a chicklet on your site that shows your most popular links.  It’s easy to set up (you have to embed a small amount of code on your site) and intuitive to use.  Some more flexible reporting and perhaps different UI for reports would be helpful, but I’m sure Eric is working on those.  If you blog and you care about user stats (what am I saying - all bloggers care about their user stats!) this is a great tool to have.

I’ve written a few posts (here and here and here) that reference better ways to view information. While the UI of TagCloud is pretty lacking its still a HUGE step in the direction I’m talking about.  You can point a bunch of blogs to this tool and it will pick out the overlapping words.  Yah – this needs a NLP engine to really be useful and pull out full concepts rather than single words.  Still it’s a great idea. Now they just need to make it look more like this. (thanks to Walker for pointing me to this site)

Last is Smartfeed which unfortunately I can’t play with directly because I’m lame (of course you already know that) and have an old, monochromatic, can hold phone numbers and play some stupid ‘snake’ game but not much else, phone.  I met Kevin Cawley who wrote it, however (he lives in Boulder and he let me play with it on his phone).  It’s an interface for downloading podcasts onto Windows Mobile Edition powered cell phones. I’m starting to get more on the podcasting bandwagon (at least for some things – by the way, Newsgator released a podcasting client that rocks and that I’m now using as my main podcatcher) and as soon as I upgrade my phone I’m all over it.
 
Any other cool stuff out there?

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[Pauly D]

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