technology

Dana Blankenhorn graciously apologizes for his piece saying that Evan should resign from blogger. Well done Dana.

In

delicious! on Flickr Fred Wilson, Howard Morgan, Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Peter Gadjokov…

Congrats to Joshua on delicious funding. [delicious-discuss] big news

Having now looked at the way people are using tags on wists, it seems like the most useful way to avoid tag overload is to bundle tags into search so that search is the gateway to both full text search and tags i.e. tags are a way of narrowing down structured searches. This means that we can probably drastically simplify the Wists interface. Currently working on full layout control via the url so that you can create cut and paste javascript code to place Wists galleries on your site, rather like Flickr’s badges. More details on the wistsblog.

The long tail is jagged, fractal

Having sold our cars and packed all our belongings into a massive truck we moved to NY this week. The curious thing is that it feels better to have a bag of clothes, a cellphone and a laptop and nothing else, which begs the question as to why I ever buy anything. Now that I’m here I’ll be working on Wists in earnest – have setup a blog: wistsblog and will be fleshing out faq’s and general Wists info, over the next week or so.

From Joshua’s list, looks like delicious have added ‘metatags’. del.icio.us/joshua Although we implemented from get go in Wists – Joshua said that he had been thinking about this for a while – so is good news all round. Hopefully sharing metatags amongst multiple systems will be good for everyone, since its looks like some standard metatags such as location= are emerging. Delicious continues to rule!

Thanks to some fantastic work by Adam Michela at Axentric, there is a much improved ‘add to Wists‘ bookmarklet which can be installed from here, or reinstalled via the help menu in Wists. The new ‘wistlet’ has the following features: Now grabs CSS background images. Removes duplicate images. Allows choosing a thumbnail screenshot of the page itself, if you don’t like any of the images shown. Best of all, it is remotely updatable – so we will be able to add new features with you having to re-install. NB: the new bookmaklet works with most browsers and versions, except for Safari – the original bookmarklet is still available via the Wists help menu, for Safari users.

We’ve added a global search feature to Wists. The search will look up users, tags and individual item titles and descriptions all at once – returning the results for each, separately. – So there are no parameters and advanced search settings. Again the rule is: have the user do the least work. Because tags tend to have multiple variants with the same stem, e.g. Lifehacker, Lifehacks, Lifehacking, Wists search will return everything starting with ‘Lifehack’. However, because people have tagged things separately you can still filter by one tag in particular. I can see that perhaps using search and tags with extensions to common word stems might evolve some interesting patterns. For example, if I wanted to start a list of restaurants for my friends I coud tag as ‘restaurant_dgfriends’ and filter by that in a search for restaurant. I’ll have to think about it – but the next step…

New Features: (The overall aim is to make as much as possible one or two clicks or automatic, based upon normal interaction with the product, from building a network of friends and groups of tags, to publishing – as things like tags fill up we’ll overlay tag management on top – again hopefully making that as automated as possible.)

Noah and Evan’s Odeo launches – a turnkey service for publishing and subscribing to podcasts. I’ve had a sneak peek and it confirms two things: 1. Blogger was not a fluke success, 2. Evan only works with really good people like Noah. Odeo is a beautifully designed application.