Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2

Snackr Will Chomp Away At Your Life

Ok, the warnings were explicit everywhere I looked. I picked up this from rexblog.com, who picked it up from Read Write Web. I guess that makes both sites pushers.  I should have listened. I didn't. I downloaded and installed Snackr, which is an Adobe Air app that creates a river of news that scrolls up or across your screen from an opml file of feeds you provide. Yep, it is addictive.

Click on a feed as it scrolls (streams?) by, and the scroll stops and you get a popout window with the info you're looking at (full text if that is what is available in the feed, partial if not.)

Damn. More time lost.

Technorati Tags: Snackr

Steve Rubel's Knowledge Ninja Program

I'm going to have to look at this more closely. Steve Rubel has pointed out some helpful tips to using Google Reader and Gmail to help manage knowledge flow. There look to be some good ideas there and I'll be trying a few of them out in the next few weeks.

Why Technorati Fails

Cruising my feeds last night I checked the Technorati Search feed I've set up for Tablet PC. Here's a screen shot of what were 20 of the same.

There is no news here, other than that this kind of thing just continues, and the other search engines are just as guilty.

Technorati Tags:  technorati

Google Reader Now Has Offline Capability

Tonight is a night for trying out new software and services it seems. Just read on Scoble's blog that Google Reader now has offline capability. To use it you need to download the new Google Gears (Beta of course) plug in. Google Gears is an open source method that provides offline capabilities to Web apps.

After trying out the offline feature (that icon could be a little less subtle by the way) I like it a lot. Reminds me of using Onfolio, which has never been the same since being subsumed as a Windows Live Service. As a matter of fact I don't know if it even exists anymore. No matter. Google Reader seems to fill both the online reading and offline reading chores now.

Yet Another Fun Security Bill In The Works

House Rep Lamar Smith of Texas just can’t get enough of a good thing. He’s proposed a new bill that would require ISPs to record all users’ surfing activity, IM conversations, and email traffic and apparently hang on to it indefinitely. Of course the bill has a name like “The Safety Act” and seeks to aid the fight against child porn.

The privacy rights screamers are screaming on this one. (Good thing.) But it is all for naught. If the government doesn’t already have this stuff, Google does.

Via Crooks and Liars

Sunday Morning Reading

Some Sunday morning reading to share.

The only thing worse than the Christmas Creep is the Presidential Politics Creep. I'm waiting for the day that someone announces their child will run for president 42 years later the day after they are born.

Some interesting (and entertaining) reading on the PPC:

Howard Fineman looks at the Democratic field as a High School Musical. On many levels the analogy demeans high school musicals.

S.V. Dale in the Washington Post speculates on what things would have been like if we had elected Jeb instead of W.

The Red Tape Chronicles says Spam is worse than ever. My InBox attests to that. I still think we should pass a law to have some sort of violent, vicious, capital punishment for spammers. Actually, I think we should do this for the idiots who keep clicking on the stuff that makes the whole enterprise viable.

Congress wants to blame grassroots organization for their problems. This got picked up this week and of course turned into Congress wants to outlaw bloggers. As ill-conceived an idea as the original was, it has a point. I wish we'd all quite pretending that political and governmental operations were somehow separate from the human need for greed and ego. Then when we hold the mirror up, or expose a problem, we could do away with the feigned shock.

Dave Winer (and others) are leading a discussion that says our current RSS readers are broken because they remind us how lazy, or behind we are when we see how many feeds we haven't read. Just asking, but isn't this like an elected behavior that we engage in? Michael Parekh (as usual) has a good round and comment on the discussion.

Interesting Net News Before the Holidays

A couple of interesting stories broke today, the last news day before the holidays that has everyone up in arms. And if all looks as it appears to be they should be. Coincidence? Who knows.

Microsoft is filing for a patent on RSS. Of course Dave Winer is a bit miffed and certainly should be. The patent thing, like the copyright thing, like most things of this ilk have gotten way, way, way, out of control and way, way, way, away from the original intent of those who drafted the laws in the first place. There ought to be a law. No, wait a minute. That would probably be just as abused by greedy humans somewhere along the line too.

And the other story concerns a Texas federal judge who says that "deep linking" or "hyperlinking" (you know the whole foundation that the Internet is built on) is unlawful and violates copyright. Watch out for this one.

Adding A Gada.Be Widget

I've been experimenting with Chris Pirillo's Gada.be metasearch tool off and on. Recently with TypePad adding a Widget feature to their blogging platform, I read about Gada.be's new widget and thought I'd give that a try. It seems to work quite well as a widget. It works even better as a Meta Search tool that searches across a number (200) of sources. Now if I want to do a search on say, TabletKiosk eo, I can link to this result. You can find the Gada.be widget in the right sidebar.

That's the second widget I've added this week, the first being Freedo Style's scrollling feed headliner. I'm running several of my favorite Tablet PC feeds through that at the moment hoping that will be of use to folks. You'll also find that in the right sidebar.

Let me know what you think.

Trying Out Freedo Style

So I get an email from a reader and fellow Toshiba M200 Tablet PC user, Jason, who has been working on a neat little feed display gadget called Freedo Style. Jason asks me to give the BETA a try and I have installed it in the right sidebar under Tablet PC News. You can't miss it, it's the scrolling window with feeds from some of my favorite blogs and sites that cover Tablet PC, and UMPC news and views. Looks cool and we'll see how it does. Now you can check a number of feeds right here on Life On The Wicked Stage. Thanks, Jason.

Memeorandum Steps Up To The Plate With Baseball Mashup

Just when I've sworn off of baseball due to my continued disastisfaction with the whole steroids mess, Memeorandum has come up with a mashup that delivers an outfield full of baseball news. I'm sure BallBug will be handy and popular. Especially when it starts running the weekly/daily drug report on who's in and who's out.