Posts from February 2006

Josh turns ten today.

I remember when I turned ten, almost 35 years ago now.

I grew up an army brat and at 10 you got an ID card. Everyone in the army and their wives and dependents over the age of 10 carry an ID card.  It gets you into the commissary, the post exchange (PX), the recreation centers, etc.

When I got my ID card, I was free to go places by myself.  It was a big day.

Josh isn’t getting an ID card, but he’s getting a new drum kit.  I hope he’ll remember this birthday as fondly as I remember my 10th.

I installed a new Firefox extension yesterday called Foxy Tunes, which puts the controls for my music players right onto the lower right of the Firefox browser.  That’s a nice trick.

But I’d love it if they supported Rhapsody and the last.fm player.

And what about lyrics, recommendations, tags, etc?

Does anyone know of a similar Firefox extension that has more functionality?

I don’t watch much TV, largely because it doesn’t really fit into my busy day.

But that means I miss a lot of good stuff.

Not anymore thanks to people like ToastyFun and others who record it, YouTube and other services who host it, and friends like Raj who tag it for me.

Here’s what I am talking about.  Sigur Ros played on Conan the other night.  I missed it on TV but not on the Internet!

You may have noticed that the bottom of this post has a few new links, like email this post, add it to delicious, number of technorati links (when there are links), subscribe to this feed, and digg this feed.

A few of these were on my blog already, but Charlie and I had hacked them into our typepad templates.

You don’t need to do template hacking anymore now that FeedBurner has launched a great new service called FeedFlare (which comes with a companion service called SiteFlare). 

Here’s the deal.  The whole thing is built around an open API so anyone can create a flare.  For example the "digg this feed" flare was not built by Digg, it was built by a guy named Ross Belmont.

FeedBurner already has over 101 suggested "flares" and more are getting built every day.  Go take a look at what you can now add to your feed, your website, or your blog.

All the blogger or the website operator needs to do is put a small snippet of FeedBurner code in their template to activate SiteFlare.  FeedFlare comes standard on any FeedBurner hosted feed.

Then you go into the FeedBurner configuration page, select what "flares" you want, and you are done.

Now all the website operators and bloggers can leverage the work of developers who know how to use the Flare API.  It’s the beginning of a new ecosystem for blog and feed metadata sharing and FeedBurner is powering it all for free.

Obviously FeedBurner benefits by making life better for their customers.  And the metadata that all this generates will be valuable to the web services who participate in the "flare ecosystem".  So its a win/win for everyone, the web sites and bloggers, the third party web services that can now show up on the blog and feed, and FeedBurner too.

I you want to enable more interactivity and data sharing on your websites, your blogs, and your feeds, go check out FeedFlare and SiteFlare at FeedBurner.

One of the many bands I have discovered on last.fm is Wolf Parade.

They are from Canada and sound a bit like Arcade Fire, but they are not a "clone" and I like their music a lot.

My favorite song is called Shine A Light and here it is:

Wolf Parade – Shine A Light

It seems like we are now pretty much on an every other week schedule for our family podcast, Positively 10th Street.

We always do it on Sunday evenings and last week we had the Super Bowl festivities and Jessica’s birthday dinner.  Next week we’ll be away skiing on President’s weekend.

So we had to get a podcast in this Sunday and we did it.

Topics of discussion were why the kids never get a snow day, even when it snows 27" in one day, my thoughts on DEMO, and a bunch of other stuff.  The kids are getting pretty comfortable with the podcast format and were really being themsevles on this show which made for some fun moments.

Here is the song list:

Josh’s Song – Birthday – The Beatles (of course)
Fred’s Song – When The Sun Goes Down – The Arctic Monkeys (of course)
Joanne’s Song – Wonderwall – Ryan Adams (Oasis cover from The OC soundtrack)
Jessica’s Song – Hey There Delilah – Plain White T’s (discovered on MySpace of course)
Emily’s Song – Upside Down – Jack Johnson (of course)

Listen Live Here

To listen in iTunes or on your iPod, get iTunes version 4.9 or above, then select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and then enter this into the box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Positively10thStreet

Josh had a birthday party today with eleven other fourth grade boys.  When it snowed 2 feet over the past 24 hours, we decided to bag our original birthday party plans and go sledding instead.

Our favorite sledding hill in NYC is Suicide Hill in Riverside Park at 91st street.  It’s a steep pitch that ends in hay bales at the bottom to stop people from hitting a fence.

It was mobbed today but not too crowded.  The heavy snow had been packed down by the time we got there around noon.  We had three kinds of sleds and all worked great.  The speed was fast but not too fast.

Everyone got full of snow and had a great time.

We sledded for an hour or so, then grabbed a bite to eat, and then headed home to eat some birthday cake. 

It was a blast and a great impromptu 10th birtday party for Josh.

I wrote the initial Spying On Myself post in January of this year.  I outlined why I think spying on yourself is a developing trend in web services.  It’s a theme I intend to keep tracking.

I took the time to read Seth Goldstein’s post on /Vaultstock today. This was a meeting of about 30 people who are using a /Vault from Root.net to track their Internet clickstream.  I wasn’t at /Vaultstock but I do have a /Vault and here is a view of it from earlier today:

As you may be able to see (sorry that the picture is hard to read), my top web destination is none other than this blog, followed by Amazon, Yahoo! search, and Flickr.  Two ad servers also make the list, Doubleclick and Atlas.

Seth’s post is interesting reading as it talks about where all of this is headed.  My favorite line is from r0ml Lefkowitz, Chief Scientist of Root.net who said:

At the other side of each commercial interaction you have there is a
company’s CRM database maintaining a record.  What would happen if you
had access to a copy of this data and could share, for example, your
Barnes and Noble purchase history with Amazon, or your Costco purchase
history with Wal-Mart?

That maps pretty well with what Charlie is looking for, which is the ability to show his entire clickstream when visiting ecommerce sites to obtain a better personalization and recommendation experience.

This is all interesting stuff and I am excited to be using a /Vault and learning more about my web usage habits.  Hopefully there will be interesting applications of all of this shortly.

  Jefferson Library 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

We are having a blizzard here in NYC today.

It’s Josh’s birthday party so we are taking 11 ten year old boys sledding in the park.

Should be a blast!

Check out my flickr photos of my walk with Lucky in the snow this morning.