Brian Junyor

Here I am testing out my new Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000. I want to start doing some video blog posts and video calls. Remember: be kind, I am camera shy!

Removed Google Reader stream
Removed Twitter stream
–> Replaced both with friendfeed stream. friendfeed displays my shared content from around the web, including my shared items from Google Reader & my updates on Twitter. friendfeed is a keeper, but might build a widget..see below.

Sidenote: The friendfeed embed script doesn’t seem to render properly in IE6. It required a change to the stylesheet (inline changes at this point) to redeclare width & to set the overflow as hidden. Ex: <div id=”some_div” style=”width: 400px; overflow: hidden;”> I’ve checked out 2 different widgets, but neither worked well with my current theme and didn’t display thumbnails.

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.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study(pdf) in May regarding the different search and purchase strategies used to buy goods online. Jack Loechner at The Center for Media Research has already done a good job of recapping the study, but two call outs of particular importance to me were:

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’ve tested out Flock before, but only briefly.  I’ve decided to give it a more in depth try and see if I can get to like it.  Flock is built off of the Mozilla engine, but it is tailored to a more social crowd. 

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.

I mentioned on Twitter that I was looking for a better way to stream music from Sirius.  Even though I have a Stiletto, I find that it is more convenient to listen via the computer when I am in my home office. Sure I could listen to Pandora, last.fm, yahoo music, or a multitude of other streaming music services — but, I am big fan of the Sirius music formats and have developed a familiarity with their rotation and DJs.  I have Sirius radio in the car and at the office and I wanted to continue it into my home.

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.