This is how Safari has been displaying Technorati for the last few days. It only happen with Safari, only on one of my Macs, so it's something broken here. No clue of what it could be.

I have subscribed to Twitter a couple of days ago and since then I've been tracking a few friends. It's nice to keep track of what your friends are doing (for example I discovered that Euan is doing everything but working for entire days ;-) and I don't see a scalability issue: you can't have that many friends you really care about.

This kind of applications could be very interesting also in working environments, helping teams to synchronize their efforts.

I only whish that I had not to rebuild my social network every time I subscribe to one of these services. ;-)

Tags: Twitter

About collaborative blog tagging, EirePreneur says that it can already be done with Google Reader.

What I have found myself doing more and more of late is using the tag feature of Google Reader to create personalized tag feeds for some of my contacts and colleagues.

Quite interesting, I haven't seriously looked at Google Reader tagging yet. But this is not very collaborative: it allows you to recategorize other users' posts with your own tags, while I would like a Flickr kind of integration, where everybody (or maybe only some buddies) can tag any post and tags are visible on the original blog.

Anyway, Google is definitely another important player and it's interesting to notice that they are looking at tags, even if the fact that they don't support Technorati tags is quite dumb imho (Google Reader should recognize the tags that I add to my posts, while apparently it isn't).

In this very interesting post about folksonomies, David Weinberger uses Flickr as an example of a successful working folksonomy. I agree: tags work on Flickr. What I like most about Flickr is that my friends can tag my pictures and I can tag theirs, it makes the whole system work better and helps categorizing the archive from different points of view (both Aristotle's and Plato's).

Unfortunately this collaboration doesn't exist in the blogosphere where tagging is limited to blog authors. We have added collaborative tagging to some intranet blogs and the results are interesting, but this would really bloom on the world wild web.

Technorati probably has the technology and interest in developing such a system. It could be linked to single blog posts with some simple javascript calls just like the new tracking widget does. Added tags would end up living on Technorati servers and not on mine, but it's something I could probably live with, especially if Technorati would give me back a map of my tags in some standard format (once upon a time we used OPML for something similar).

Tags: Blog, David Weinberger, folksonomy, Technorati

Found this on my LinkedIn page today:

I'm trying to replace the old spammy trackbacks with the brand new Technorati link count widget. We'll see if it works (well... while you are reading this you could try to link this post just to check, uh?).

Tags: Blog, Blog reactions, Technorati

Yesterday I was trying to help a friend to get on-line. I told her that the best email option would have been creating a Gmail account. But visiting the site I realized that Gmail is still a "by invitation only" service: you can't get an account unless somebody invites you. Which is kinda hard if you don't have an email account. I was able to create an account inviting myself using a secondary email address, but it's hardly something a regular user would do. Well... they're still in beta after all.

Tags: Gmail, Google

After reading this post from Robert Scoble, I'm giving Google Reader another try. I have been using Bloglines for a couple of years now, and the first time I checked this latest version of Google Reader I didn't like it. But I can't remember why. So I'm giving it another try, and after about 24 hours I must say that so far I like it. It's offering a true river of news visualization (unlike Bloglines, which groups posts by feed). I haven't found a mobile version for Google Reader (I didn't look very hard), and of course I would love to have a "post to my blog" button next to each post. At that point we would more or less be back where we were with Radio about 5 years ago.