It would have been fruitful to have installed a monitoring app on my system to determine what I have given up over the last 5 months.  I suspect now that Wikipedia, Snopes, and Facebook have taken the brunt of the loss. 

The last time I posted my stats (June 18th) I had read 4,672 items from 110 subscriptions, starring 22, sharing 217 and emailing 4 over the previous 30 days.  

In the last 30 days, I have read 6,053 items (29.5% increase)  from 116 subscriptions (5% increase), starring 56 (154% increase), sharing 209 (3.6% decrease), and emailing 34 (675% increase).

I have also noticed that what I am sharing has changed a bit over time.  Initially I was focused on GTD and lifehacks, now I don’t really have a strategy other than sharing what I find interesting.  

Recommendations weren’t in my top 10 last time, now scobleizer.com’s recommendations & chrisbrogan.com’s recommendations are high on the list.  Probably one of the reasons I find FriendFeed & Twitter so interesting. 

I am not sharing items more frequently than I used too, but I am starring & emailing them more often.  I typically star items to reread and/or research and email those that someone else will find interesting.  While I add feeds on a regular basis, I also prune them frequently too and have resulted in only a net gain of  6 feeds during the last 5 months.

There is a tech focus to what I am reading & sharing right now,  it might be time to expand my RSS subscriptions.  However,  most of the non-tech info (politics, sports, news, general interest) I read comes from FriendFeed and Twitter, so maybe I don’t need to broaden my RSS horizons just yet. 

If you are a Google Reader fan, it’s worth taking a look at your trends, if only to get to know yourself a little better.

Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web.

You can even create your own download day certificate.

tip to lifehacker.com

A great marketing startegy for Mozilla that generated quite a bit of buzz and 8m+ downloads in one day.  It’s not all puppies and rainbows as Drew @ Downloadsquad points out in his post, “Mozilla Firefox breaks non-existent world record – nobody cares“, but as marketing campaign it was spot on.

I’ve already written before about how much I like Windows Live Writer and I am still using Flock, but I’ve found yet another blogging tool that I find both easy & convenient to use. ScribeFire is a Firefox extension that adds a blog editor right into the browser.

Firefox is my portable app browser of choice, but I think I will test out whether or not I can add this to Flock when I get back home. Flock already has a built in blog editor — so it might not work. I will give an update after I attempt it.

Other news of note: Today is Firefox 3 Download Day and Flock has released Flock 2 Beta 1 using the same technology that powers Firefox 3.

List of services mentioned in the video:

YouTube
Ustream
Mogulus
Stickam
Skype
Pamela for Skype
Yahoo Messnger

Ustream also supports embedding your videos on another site, something that I couldn’t figure out how to do with Mogulus. I could embed my Mogulus channel, but if you are not live and don’t have loops setup, it isn’t very useful. If you want to see my video there, you’ll need to head over to my Mogulus page and click “On-Demand” and select the clip to play.

I like Ustream better, but you be the judge. In addition, I’ve posted the blip.tv upload from my AT&T Tilt that I mentioned on the Ustream vid. Oh, and remember, I am a newbie – so be kind if you comment.

Ustream
Live Streaming by Ustream.TV

Blip.TV

Tags, Archives, and Contact info removed from sidebar
—> They are incorporated into the tabbed box at the top right.

Removed/Readded/Removed/Undecided on the ShareThis widget.
—> Caused slow page loads & is blocked by websense, need to find an alternative. That’s why you see a blank space under leave a comment & before Related Items. When I think about it though, do people actually use the “share this” button on web sites?

Updated Related Items display
—>Now inline versus bulleted text.

Dropped Lijit Search
—>I was torn on this one. I really like the widget, I like the company, and I like the concept. However, I found that I used it more to display my social homes than for searching. In a perfect world, I would have kept it , but I just couldn’t figure a good way to integrate it. They still get the big recommendation from me.

Added a Social Homes plugin & widget (hacked & edited)
—>More customizable as a simple social homes display than lijit. You can get the original wordpress plug by Elie Zananiri from silentlycrashing.net. I hacked it to add a couple of new social network, i.e. Mento. [I freaking love Mento, only use del.icio.us now to back my links from Mento]

Considering Disqus
—>I don’t have that many folks who post comments, but I like the community idea. Am not sure if I really want to direct people to another site.

That’s about it for now.

1) Participation after the purchase is surprisingly rare.
2) That the “growth of broadband adoption at home and the buzz about online participation in a Web 2.0 world, widespread activity in this arena might be expected. Yet the data in this report do not show this; there is clearly distance between the number of those who contribute and those who lurk.”

I do like the people sidebar and the post to blog feature.  In fact, I am using Flock’s built in blog editor to write this.   I did a screenshot of the Flock logo with the Vista Snipping Tool and pasted into this post (which prompted me to upload to Flickr and the slapped it in the post).  That’s pretty cool, but I would rather host images for blog posts on my site rather than through a third party.  That’s a personal preference, but I think it should be an option.  I would have used the drag and drop feature, but their logo has some transparency going on that would have looked like crap on my blog.

I see tags, but no support for categories.  Scratch that, after I hit publish, it prompted me to pick my categories.  Now my complaint is that you can’t strike through text using the GUI, I had to edit the source.  There is an option to turn off the “blogged from Flock” footer, but I have left it on for this post.

Honestly, I don’t know how often I will use the Flock’s built in editor as I like Windows Live Writer and the WordPress interface, but I like having the option.

We will see if I can stick with it a week and whether or not I still like it then.  So far, so good.

The standard interface provided by Sirius is web based and resides in a browser window.  That might be fine for some, but I don’t like having a tab or window open for some web app that really should be running in the background.  It might be a personal prejudice, but I can’t handle it. So I went off in search of something better.  There are aren’t many options out there, maybe because I am part of a small niche market.   

Luckily, while searching the siriusbackstage.com forums, I found a nice little program that suits my needs very well.  stream_On is a desktop streaming application for Sirius. 

stream_On provides listeners with features that are not available through the Sirius online player, such as uninterrupted (all day) listening, song and artist alerts, full channel listings, instant artist biography retrieval, son info, and lyrics.

Screenshot of stream_On (preferred)

Screenshot of the Sirius web interface (yuck)

stream_On is a beta release and as such it has a few rough edges.  If you are installing on Vista you will need to manually open the firewall to allow the program to access the internet.  You will also need to download a third party app on the stream_On website if you want to minimize to the system tray instead of the task bar.

I have been using stream_On for several hours last night and this morning and am very happy with it.    The author is also working on a version 2, but has stated not to expect it anytime soon.