friendfeed – Climb to the Stars

Catching up With Backtype [en]

[fr] BackType: pour voir les commentaires que je fais dans la blogosphère, l'impact "social" de mon blog, les derniers tweets qui le référencent, et un plugin WordPress (TweetCount) qui va remplacer TechMeme pour moi, simplement parce qu'il liste effectivement les tweets référençant l'article en question, ce que TechMeme ne fait pas.

: Image via CrunchBase

A few weeks ago I read that BackType was going to discontinue the BackType Connect plugin that I had used some time back here on CTTS, which prompted me to (a bit hastily, I’ll admit) make a comment about how you’re really better off not relying on a third party for hosting your comments (which is not what BackType does, my bad).

The BackType Connect plugin took offsite reactions to your blog posts (tweets, for example) and published them as comments. I have to say I was never really really happy with the plugin: installing it made me realize that most mentions of my posts on Twitter were retweets (or spambots) and that I didn’t want to mix that kind of “reaction” with my comments. At one point the plugin really stopped working (or gave me some kind of grief) and I dropped it.

I actually liked BackType a lot when they started out, and I owe them big time for saving hundreds of my blog comments when I dropped my database early 2009. Even though I wasn’t using their plugin, I was unhappy about the announcement — and even more unhappy when I discovered that my user page had disappeared (yes, the one displaying all the comments I’d made on other blogs and this one, which replaced what I’d used coComment for).

BackType, however, did something I liked a lot, and wished TweetMeme had done: allow me to see all the latest tweets linking to Climb to the Stars. This prompted me to take a closer look at what BackType was actually still doing, and report my findings of interest back to you, dear readers.

Good surprise: BackType actually does still allow me to track comments I make all over the blogosphere — but it uses my URL rather than my user account to identify me.
Already mentioned: tweets linking to my blog. Including old ones.
The social impact of any URL: tweets, comments and friendfeed mentions over time, complete with mugshots of “top influencers“.
TweetCount plugin, which is probably going to replace the TweetMeme plugin I was using until now, because BackType actually lists tweets linking back to a post (compare with the TweetMeme page for the same post). I’ve always found TweetMeme a bit too close to Digg and TechMeme (you know I’m no fan of the race for popularity or breaking news). TweetCount counts a few less tweets than TechMeme, and I suspect its results are cleaner.
If you like displaying tweets mentioning your posts on your blog, you should also check out the BackTweets plugin.

Does BackType do anything else that seems precious to you?

Conversation fragmentation is still an issue in today’s blogosphere, but tools like BackType (and even the Facebook Like button!) are helping is stitch the different pieces together.

Conversation in Comments vs. Conversation in Twitter [en]

[fr] Twitter n'est pas en train de tuer les conversations dans les commentaires des blogs. Le bavardage s'est déplacé dans Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook -- mais quand certains disent que la conversation y est meilleure, ils ignorent le fait qu'il y a plusieurs sortes de conversation.

Hey, another “vs.” post! It must be because I get tired quickly of people comparing apples and oranges, and saying that we’re not going to eat apples anymore because we now have oranges.

A good year and a half ago there was some talk around the fact that the conversation had moved out of blogs and into Twitter and Friendfeed.

That’s not quite true: some of the conversation has moved from blog comments into the stream. The chatter, mainly.

Just like, when comments first started appearing on weblogs (remember those times, folks?) — well, some of the conversation that was happening from blog post to blog post moved into the comments.

But there was already conversation. Blogs without comments are still blogs.

So, what has happened? The more immediate, chat-like conversation has indeed moved out of blog comments and into Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed-like services. The short one-liners. But the real value-adding comments, those that make the conversation meaningful, those that actually discuss in depth what the blogger wrote, or contribute something beyond “great post” or “load of horseshit” — those are still there in our blog comments.

I see a parallel here with the distinction I make between live-tweeting and live-blogging. I’m not anti-Twitter or anti-anything: I love Twitter, and use it for more than my fair share of chatter. But the chatter of today most often has lost its appeal tomorrow, and will not take the place of deep conversation that one can catch up with even once it has gone cold.

This, by the way, is also the root of my dislike of threaded conversations on blogs.

FriendFeed's Missing Feature [en]

[fr] FriendFeed, c'est bien joli, mais ça n'a jamais pris chez moi. Une chose que j'aimerais pouvoir faire (gravement!) c'est de visualiser tous les éléments de mon lifestream qui ont bénéficié d'un like ou d'un commentaire. Ça, ça serait du feedback utile qui me ferait visiter le site régulièrement. Après, qui sait, du moment que je suis là... j'y ferai peut-être un tour!

Every now and again, I hop over to FriendFeed. A couple of times a month, maybe. I like that FriendFeed gathers up all my stuff in one place (mainly Tumblr and Twitter these days).

Why don’t I head over to FriendFeed more often? Well, to me, it’s a bit noisy, and populated with “Social Media Experts” (legitimate and less legitimate). To keep in touch with what people in my world are doing, I have Twitter. To stay tuned to what they’ve found or are publishing, there are blogs and tumblelogs. I guess I just haven’t found a place for FriendFeed. I don’t want to have to “dive in” and look at everything. I also regret that there is a tendancy there to “like” or comment based on the title, rather than reading the whole thing. It’s not a crime, but it’s not really my cup of tea.

I think lifestreams have three main purposes:

first and foremost, for the person “owning” the lifestream (it makes us “feel” good to know that all the stuff is gathered somewhere, that there is a central repository of our expression online)
second and secondarily, it offers a “starting point” for somebody who has newly discovered another person online: if I start on FriendFeed, I can get a quick glimpse of what kind of things they blog about, if they tweet, if they have a tumblr, etc.
thirdly, FriendFeed can serve as a more global “catching up” place for people like me who don’t really read blogs and are generally pretty bad at staying in touch, and who wake up one morning thinking “Gosh, I haven’t heard about Josh for ages, I wonder what he’s been upto?”

Unless there are people out there stalking me, I am probably the most interested person in my lifestream.

What would make me go to FriendFeed more? Make it more about me. Each time I go to FriendFeed, I head to my lifestream page to see if people have liked or commented upon my stuff. There is a link I want to click, but that link is unfortunately not there. It’s the link that would show me my items which were liked or commented upon by others. And maybe (why not?) give me an option to filter “only liked and commented upon items” when I’m in “friends view”.

And it’s all very nice to allow me to filter an individual FriendFeed by source, but how about letting me filter the whole darn mess of my “with friends” page to remove all the Twitter and Tumblr feeds, for example, as I already get them elsewhere? Or show only del.icio.us links?

Maybe the layout of the feeds could be improved — I find especially difficult to sift through the stuff I want to ignore as is. And as for FriendFeed through Twhirl, well, sure, it’s running on my desktop, but I never look at it because way too much stuff goes through it each minute.

Give me some control, please.

So, recap, here’s what FriendFeed could change to have a chance of getting more pageviews from me:

let me view just my items which were liked/commented upon (instead of just letting me see my likes and comments, which is good, sure, but doesn’t do the same thing at all)
let me filter out for my “with friends” page certain services, like Twitter and Tumblr, or view only one or two services at a time.

Thanks for listening!

Edit, 10 minutes later: a list of “people who are subscribed to me but that I’m not subscribed to” would come in handy, too.

Disqus Plugin Aftermath: Removing Duplicate Comments [en]

[fr] Comment se débarrasser de 5000 commentaires à double dans sa base de données WordPress!

Now that Disqus integrates Friendfeed comments, I could be tempted to give it another try, if I hadn’t spent an hour yesterday cleaning up my database because of an earlier attempt to use Disqus on this blog. After the story, how I did it — in case you’re in the same mess and could use the help.

Back in August, I installed the Disqus plugin for WordPress. Things started off not too badly, though I was a bit concerned that the plugin seemed to have duplicated all the comments in my database. It didn’t seem to show up on the blog though, so I didn’t worry too much.

After a few months, I was a bit frustrated with Disqus and the plugin (which was clearly an older version than the Disqus plugin available now). Moderating comments through the WordPress interface seemed to work erraticly, and some spam just wouldn’t accept to stay in the spambox. I never really tried to identify the exact problems too closely, I have to admit, but things were not really working how I expected them to.

Then a few (unrelated) people told me they had completely failed to comment on my blog with the new system. At some point, I got fed up and uninstalled it. Unfortunately, the duplicate comments which had been hidden from view remained there after uninstalling the plugin, so all the old comments appeared on the blog twice. I let the problem sit for a long time before attempting to fix it — wild hope there might be a ready-made script out there I could just run& in vain.

Here’s how I tackled the problem this week-end and ended up removing the duplicate comments without too much trouble, through PhpMyAdmin (PMA for short).

In PMA, I made sure that duplication seemed constant — it was
I discovered that the duplicate comments had “DISQUS” in the user-agent field
I dug around until I identified the last duplicate comment (when I installed the Disqus plugin, actually; I sorted the database comments table by comment date to do that)
I did a search, selecting comments which were younger than the last duplicate comment date AND had “DISQUS” in the user-agent field (the date bit is important, because comments posted while the plugin were active have “DISQUS” in the user-agent field but are not duplicates)
Then, I deleted everything that came up in the search — about 5000 comments (it helps to tell PMA to display 3000 lines per page when doing that :-))

Hope this can help somebody, and remember: always back up your database first!

Secrets of my Online Presence Revealed! [en]

[fr] Un tour d'horizon de la façon dont je gère ma présence en ligne, des outils que j'utilise et à quelles fins.

I was having a chat with Kevin this morning, and realised that though the way I had organised my online presence seemed obvious to me, it could hold some interest for other people. So, for your enlightenment and enjoyment, I am sharing with you the secrets of my life online these days and how the different tools and services I use fit in.

The backbone of my online presence is my blog Climb to the Stars, which you’re reading. That’s where my thinking goes. This is, I hope, my contribution. I don’t write here as often as I’d like to.

Aside from Climb to the Stars, I have a professional website (a bit static and inevitably out-of-date, but it’s a start). I’m intermittently active on project-specific blogs of mine: Going Far, Going Solo, eclau, Coworking Léman. I’m also involved professionally on two blogs which aren’t mine: Fleur de Pains and the ebookers.ch travel blog, both in French. At some point I did a podcast with my friend Suw Charman-Anderson, Fresh Lime Soda.

As you can see, blogging in the traditional way is far from dead for me.

My photos are on Flickr (thousands of them), most of my videos are on Viddler (a few dozen). I use Skitch to take screenshots (= photographs of my life in cyberspace) but I publish them to Flickr too.

Another very important way of “being online” for me is Twitter. Using Twitter has brought about a change in my online habits: I’m on IRC way less than I used to (still there, on irc.freenode.net, but idle and disconnected usually) and I’ve more or less loss the use for my Cheese Sandwich blog, where I used to write more “uninteresting” and personal stuff. It remains online, of course, and every now and again I write something in it, but Twitter turns out to be a better outlet for these short snippets of life I used to post there. Another “new” tool (new in the sense that it wasn’t around when I started blogging nearly 9 years ago) that has also reduced my need for a second, “personal” blog is Facebook.

I know a bunch of techy-type geeks are poo-poohing Facebook now (after the honeymoon), but I’ve actually become more involved in it during these last months, as a greater and greater proportion of my offline friends (people who don’t have blogs, don’t IM, haven’t heard of Twitter) are joining it. I use Facebook and Twitter in parallel, but I guess for me the major difference between the two is that I reach a very different audience. Facebook also has some measure of privacy, and I’m connected to way less people than on Twitter, so you’ll often find me a little bit more personal over there. That’s also the reason why I don’t crosspost my status messages between the two services.

I chat on IM a lot, and now on Facebook too. For me, it’s the necessary one-on-one complement to the rest of my rather public life online. I don’t use Skype much (usually upon request, or for certain people I have on Skype but not on my IM list).

For many years now, I’ve been storing my bookmarks on del.icio.us. I’m not somebody who enjoys organising things in hierarchies, so the tag-based mess over there is fine for me. Feedburner inserts a daily summary of those links in my RSS feed. I’ve tried Diigo, and liked it, but for some reason it didn’t stick and got lost in a browser upgrade. Maybe I’ll try again one of these days. I have a very passive account on Last.fm, and the obligatory YouTube, DailyMotion, Dopplr (etc.) accounts, but I’m not very active on them.

I have a VodPod account which I use a bit like “del.icio.us for videos”, but which I’ve fallen out of love with because it keept logging me out and wouldn’t let me log back in (with OpenID) in the pop-up window. So much for one-click bookmarklet publishing. In the video department, I also have a seesmic account, where I am intermittently active. Huge bursts during a few days/weeks, and then nothing at all for month.

I’ve always wanted a way to collect all the stuff I do/publish online into a single lifestream somewhere. I’m not sure anybody would actually want to follow it, but I guess it helps me feel “whole” rather than scattered all over the place. I tried out Suprglu for this ages ago, and was happy with it until the service didn’t seem to be able to follow anymore. Then I used Jaiku for that purpose, and briefly Tumblr (but I was feeding Tumblr into Jaiku too, so it was a mess and I stopped quickly).

Friendfeed came along and seemed the ideal lifestreaming application. SocialThing looked promising, but like Diigo I guess, it didn’t stick for me. I tried being active on friendfeed, but it didn’t really stick either (a few things bother me: I can’t have a summary page with just the items of mine which were liked or commented upon; it’s also very “noisy” for me, in terms of the amount of data it displays, and it displays it in an incomplete form, forcing me to click and come back, click and come back& anyway). So friendfeed sits there, happily lifestreaming me to the world, and to the sidebar of Climb to the Stars.

One old obsession of mine has always been comments. Way before cocomment, I had a tendancy to keep copies of my long comments elsewhere, or bookmark them. I now use backtype to capture my comments. (I also have a Disqus account but it’s pretty passive.)

I’ve recently become much more active on Tumblr, where I have a tumblelog, tentatively named Digital Crumble. As with many tools, I had an account for a long time before finally “getting it”. I’ve found a good handful of interesting people to follow and reblog, and I use it to publish all sorts of random “secondary” content: short notes, my comments (imported via backtype), my screenshots (via Flickr), my collected videos (via VodPod, but probably in future directly through Tumblr). But mainly, I use Tumblr to publish quotes. I’ve always been a note-taker. When I read a book, it’s with a pencil. When it’s only, I highlight paragraphs I like and with the click of a bookmarklet, send them to Tumblr, complete with an automatic link to the source.

This is one of the reasons I use feedly as my feed reader (when I use one), as it allows me to publish quotes and annotations to Tumblr.

Digital Crumble is quickly becoming an important companion to Climb to the Stars: Climb to the Stars for my stuff, and Digital Crumble for things that others have said or created.

I will spare you the long list of services I have an account at but don’t use actively (plus, I’m sure as soon as I’ll hit publish, I’ll think of something I should have included).

I hope this little peek into my online life will have satisfied your curiousity about the life of the pink-haired online geek :-).

FriendFeed Appeals to Women, Too! [en]

[fr] Quelques commentaires sur FriendFeed, un nouveau service de lifestreaming. Et en réaction à une liste de "blogueurs élite" quasi entièrement masculine, allez -- une liste de femmes de mon entourage qui sont sur FriendFeed.

*Scroll to the bottom of the post for **The List**.*

[Brian Solis on bub.blicio.us](http://bub.blicio.us/?p=781) joins [Louis Gray](http://www.louisgray.com) in commenting upon the fact that [“elite bloggers” are joining FriendFeed](http://louisgray.com/live/2008/03/elite-bloggers-joining-friendfeed-in.html) in respectable numbers. [FriendFeed](http://friendfeed) is a lifestreaming service, which allows you to aggregate all your online presence and publications in one place.

The first such application I bumped into was [Suprglu](http://steph.suprglu.com/) (just checked, it’s still running, wow!), [two years ago](http://steph.wordpress.com/2006/02/05/meet-suprglu/). I was happy with it for some time, and then disappointed that it had too much of a lag (they didn’t have much resources, at least at the time).

Then came [Jaiku](http://steph.jaiku.com/), which I liked, but I never quite got used to the layout and the fact that only titles were posted. [Tumblr](http://steph.tumblr.com/) entered my world at about the same time, and for a while, I wasn’t sure how to use both these tools without being redundant. I finally decided that [Tumblr wasn’t for lifestreaming](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/09/23/finally-getting-tumblr/). At that point I was also on [Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=503315010), and the newsfeed there was pretty nice as a lifestreaming service. Then the apps arrived and [things started to get ugly](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2008/01/09/facebook-foire-aux-applications/) — but I still like my newsfeed, particularly as it does some editing for me (selecting stories I’m likely to find relevant, based on a magic mix of criteria including my “thumbs up/thumbs down” ratings on existing newsfeed elements).

Lifestreaming has two purposes:

– gather all my stuff in one place, so that I can point people to it
– gather all the stuff of all my friends in one place, so that I can follow them all together (this is more presence-like).

For the first, nothing beats (to this day) [Jeremy Keith’s lifestream](http://adactio.com/extras/stream/) in readability. I keep telling myself I need to [grab the code](http://adactio.com/journal/1202/) and do it for myself.

For the second, I’m ambivalent. I like jaiku, but I find it not very readable. The Facebook newsfeed is more readable and is edited down to a readable amount of information, but not everybody is on Facebook, and it’s not public. FriendFeed is promising, in that it’s rather easy to set up, but I don’t find it very readable, and it would need some editing features (so I can filter out stuff manually, of course, but also some automatic editing which I could turn on and off).

So, I like FriendFeed. I wish they’d make it easier to add people, though. One quick example. Here is a screenshot of the listing of my “followers” (=people who have subscribed to me):

There is no indication of if I’ve subscribed back or not. Compare with Twitter:

This, in my opinion, is a user interface problem that has been “solved”. If you create a new social tool, please don’t give us an interface which looks like it ignores existing solutions to obvious user headaches, like figuring out if you’re following back people who are following you (there is a higher chance that the people you want to follow will be amongst the people follow you already).

So, I’m looking forward to seeing where this will go. As such, I’m not actually using FriendFeed so much as sitting on it, waiting to see when it becomes usable.

**Coming back to the two posts I mentioned at the beginning of this article**, my initial reaction while going through the list of “elite bloggers” using FriendFeed was “hmm, I’m not in it”.

Well, of course. I mean, I’m quite lucid about the fact that all this blogging and online presence does have at stake (amongst other things) receiving a certain amount of recognition — and although I’m reasonably good at not letting this kind of motivation drive my activities. But it’s there, somewhere in the background. I’ve talked about this a lot in French, I realise — particularly in [interviews I’ve given to the press](/about/presse) and [talks](http://stephanie-booth.com/speaking) about blogging in general, but not much in English. Anyway, I’m not dwelling on this as it’s not my main point, but I always have this little secret hope (that I’m not overly proud of) that I’ll “make it” into this kind of listing. But enough with that.

My second reaction was: **where are the women?** Now, sorry to pull the whole “sexist” card — and those who know me are aware I’m far from a flag-carrying bra-burning feminist (though who knows, in another place and time, I might very well have ended up burning underwear in public) — but when lists of “influential/elite/top whatevers” show up and women are totally unrepresented in them, I think “ah, another guy who is mainly interested in what other guys have to say, and who might suggest at some point that we need to talk about the problem of ‘women in technology'”. *(Nothing personal, Louis — this is more about my reaction than about who you are.)*

So, in an attempt to encourage you to check out **some of the women in my world which I have found on FriendFeed**, here is a list of Some Women On FriendFeed. And yes, I’ve put myself in the list, of course. **Oh yeah, this *does* have a taste of linkbait.** But I won’t be offended if nobody picks it up. So, here goes.

– Ambiome / [Ambiome[Dot]Net](http://ambiome.net/blog)
[http://friendfeed.com/ambiome](http://friendfeed.com/abiome)
– Cathy Brooks / [other than that…](http://www.otherthanthat.com/)
[http://friendfeed.com/cathybrooks](http://friendfeed.com/cathybrooks)
– danah boyd / [apophenia](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/)
[http://friendfeed.com/zephoria](http://friendfeed.com/zephoria)
– Dannie Jost / [uncondition](http://uncondition.blogspot.com)
[http://friendfeed.com/dannie](http://friendfeed.com/dannie)
– Dori Smith / [Backup Brain](http://backupbrain.com)
[http://friendfeed.com/dori](http://friendfeed.com/dori)
– Emily Chang / [Strategic Designer](http://emilychang.com/go)
[http://friendfeed.com/emilychang](http://friendfeed.com/emilychang)
– Gabriela Avram / [CONIECTO](http://coniecto.blogspot.com)
[http://friendfeed.com/coniecto](http://friendfeed.com/coniecto)
– Gia Milinovich / [Gia’s blog](http://www.giagia.co.uk/)
[http://friendfeed.com/giagia](http://friendfeed.com/giagia)
– Hillary Hartley / [static{fade}](http://staticfade.blogspot.com)
[http://friendfeed.com/quepol](http://friendfeed.com/quepol)
– Laura Fitton / [Pistachio Consulting](http://pistachioconsulting.com/blog/)
[http://friendfeed.com/pistachio](http://friendfeed.com/pistachio)
– Lilia Efimova / [Mathemagenic](http://blog.mathemagenic.com)
[http://friendfeed.com/mathemagenic](http://friendfeed.com/mathemagenic)
– Lisa McMillan / [Lisa McMillan dot com](http://lisamcmillan.com)
[http://friendfeed.com/lisamac](http://friendfeed.com/lisamac)
– Nicole Simon / [Cruel to be Kind](http://crueltobekind.org)
[http://friendfeed.com/nicolesimon](http://friendfeed.com/nicolesimon)
– Stephanie Booth / [Climb to the Stars](http://climbtothestars.org)
[http://friendfeed.com/sbooth](http://friendfeed.com/sbooth) *whoops, sbooth, not steph!*
– Suw Charman-Anderson / [Strange Attractor](http://strange.corante.com/)
[http://friendfeed.com/suw](http://friendfeed.com/suw)
– Tara Hunt / [HorsePigCow](http://horsepigcow.com)
[http://friendfeed.com/missrogue](http://friendfeed.com/missrogue)
– Virginie Pfeiffer / [Mistress of the Web](http://mistressoftheweb.wordpress.com)
[http://friendfeed.com/vivipfeif](http://friendfeed.com/vivipfeif)

*Self-promotion: follow me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/stephtara) or [FriendFeed](http://friendfeed.com/steph) and don’t forget to [blog about](http://going-solo.net/support/) [Going Solo](http://going-solo.net), or even [register](http://going-solo.net/registration)!*

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