I personally love the direction web applications have taken in the last few years. I couldn’t have imagined ten years ago everything that’s available online these days. I’m a member of a few of these social websites, so I figured I’d share what I’ve tried.

Last.fm:

I’m way behind on this one, as I only just started to use it a couple of weeks ago. It keeps track of every song you play on your computer and MP3 player, displaying them in handy charts. It will also recommend users who have similar tastes to you, so you can pop over to their profile and see their playlists. It even provides samples of most music and will create a ‘radio’ out of your common artists.

It’s a great way to find new and interesting music, so I’m surprised it took me so long to sign up. The only problem I have right now is that my iPod Nano usually doesn’t update my recently played list, so those songs don’t get added to my play count, which is very frustrating. It does work occasionally, just to keep me hoping.

Twitter:

This site lets you broadcast messages to whoever has signed up to listen. The messages have a 140 character limit, so they need to be short and sweet. The neat bit is you can update and receive the messages via text message.

I haven’t decided if this is lame or not. I currently have the messages popping up in Digsby, my instant messaging client, and that’s working quite well. It can be nice to break up those long work days with random messages sometimes.

Pownce:

This is like Twitter, but you can broadcast files as well. I haven’t found much use for this. I get e-mailed right now if there’s any activity on there, but I don’t use it much at all. Apparently, Digsby will be adding support for it eventually, so I might look into it again when that happens.

Flickr:

Everybody loves Flickr. They’re the quintessential example of how to do things right. I bought a Pro account with them when I first signed up, and I haven’t regretted it since. I don’t take nearly enough photos these days, but hopefully that’ll change with the new camera.

Facebook:

Yes, Facebook. Pure evil on earth, yet impossible to break away from once you join.

LibraryThing:

I signed up for this a few days ago, and I’ve added about half of my books. I’m really not sure what this is all about yet, but I basically signed up for this because I enjoy lists. Give me a beer, something to snack on, and group of objects that need itemizing, and I’m your man.

Basically you list all of your books, and then other people list their books, and….I’m not really sure what happens then. I guess it’s just interesting to compare libraries with other people. It also gives you recommended books based on what’s in your library, which could be handy.

One neat feature is that they’re adding the libraries of famous readers. I apparently share six books with Ernest Hemingway.

The one thing that worries me about this site is its focus on the books you own rather than what you’ve read. I’m currently trying to wean myself off buying too many books, and this site probably won’t help with that, but I figured I’d sign up and see what all the fuss was about.

Feel free to add me as a contact on any of these or share any sites you’ve been enjoying.

We’re going to the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium. We went the last time it was held in Seattle, and it was fantastic. The hotel accidentally labeled the conference No Stuff Just Fluff that time, but it definitely had stuff. I really picked up a lot from it.

The focus is on learning. You don’t have to sign up for the individual sessions, so you decide what to view throughout the day instead of committing at the beginning, and no one tries to sell you anything or push their products. It’s set up in a way that allows you to get the most out of it.

The conference is right in Seattle this time, instead of being in Redmond, so we’ll have more to do at night. It should be a fun weekend.

SoapBoxxer – What’s Your Opinion?

Interesting new social website. A question is posted, people choose whether they agree or disagree, and then it’s discussed in the comments.

Baidu Loves Barack

Chinese search engine, Baidu, is using an image of Barack Obama in their logo, and they have a tribute page for him as well. A bizarre endorsement…

Richard Dawkins: ‘Growth in creationist beliefs a problem for schools’

“I have spoken to a lot of science teachers in schools here in Britain who are finding an increasing number of students coming to them and saying they are Young Earth creationists. Now this is a belief that the Earth is only 6000 years old”

Digsby

Great multi-protocol, cross-platform chat client that also has Twitter, Gmail, and Facebook support.

This new version has built-in tag management, which is great. Ever since Flickr, I’ve been a huge fan of tags. It’s such a simple way to manage content. The new photo gallery tools are also interesting. I have very little storage with my hosting plan, so I just use Flickr for my photos, but it looks like a cool feature.

The most exciting part of this new version, however, is that they’ve finally stopped the visual editor from raping your HTML. This has haunted me in the past, so it great to see them address it. This, along with the new full screen editor, shows they’re trying to smooth out the writing process, which is something I’m glad they’re focusing on.

Here’s a preview of the new dashboard and photo management:

Tonight wasn’t a complete waste, though. I pulled out my new crock pot for the first time and made a huge batch of chili. After nine hours of what I can only imagine is some kind of black magic, my dinner was ready, and it was delicious. I used this recipe, and I’ll be making it again.

If you frequent more than three websites, you should really be using RSS feeds. For those who haven’t heard of it, RSS allows websites to publish content to feeds that can be monitored for updates by feed readers (aggregators). If this seems confusing, don’t worry – you don’t really need to know how it works, just how to use it.

As an example, if you add looselogic.com to your feed reader, every time I write a weblog post it will automatically display in your reader as an unread entry. Once you’ve finished reading it, you can mark it as being read, much like you would within an e-mail client.

The first decision you need to make when choosing a feed reader is whether to use a web application or a local application. I prefer to use a web application for this, since you can access it from any computer and keep your settings. With a web application, if you mark everything in your feed reader as read at home, when you check it at work those entries will still be read. If you use a local application, you’ll have to install it on each computer you want to use, and they won’t be synchronized with each other.

The two web applications I’ve used are Bloglines and Google Reader. I started with Bloglines and recently moved over to Google to give it a try. Both applications are great, but I like how Google only marks the posts you’ve scrolled over as read, where as Bloglines will mark the entire feed as read as soon as you click on it. Luckily, you can export your feeds, with any directories you’ve created, into an OPML file that can be imported into other readers, so trying a few different applications is fairly painless.

Below I’ve listed how I’ve set up my RSS feeds, to give a better idea of their utility.

Announcements

Feeds of news releases from various companies.

Comics

The web comics I read. Most websites these days have both their comics and their news postings on the same feed.

Cooking

Cooking-related feeds. Mainly food weblogs that post recipes every now and then.

Education

Not the best category name, but this basically consists of feeds for random informational sites. Some examples are Word of the Day, Your Daily Art, Mirabilis.ca, and I Did Not Know That Yesterday.

Gaming

News feeds from gaming sites. Gaming news, reviews, announcements, trailers, demos, etc.

Literature

News feeds from, you guessed it, literature-themed sites. Random literature articles, book reviews, writing tips, that sort of thing.

Loose Logic

The feeds from this very site. One for the posts, just to monitor them, and one for the site’s comments.

Music

Music news and weblogs.

News

World and local news. Still trying to find the right sites to use for this, to get the most news with the least amount of spam. BBC News and CBC are two good starting points. Both sites offer a full list of feeds, from headlines and world news to local and special-topic news.

Personal

All of the non-commercial, variety weblogs I frequent and Twitter.

Personal Development

Do It Yourself, personal finance, and life hack sites. Any of that Getting Things Done, personal development hogwash.

Photography

Photography weblogs, my Flickr comments feed, and the feed for my Flickr contacts’ photos.

Randomness

Just randomness, really. Digg, Metafilter, and their ilk.

Theatre Showtimes

The showtimes for my local theatres, provided by iSnoop.net.

Travel

Travel-themed weblogs.

Video

Video weblogs, such as Ask a Ninja and It’s JerryTime. For when I’m very, very bored.

Work

Work related feeds.

I wouldn’t typically have the time to read everything listed here. I’ve often, in the past, set up a similar schema using bookmarks, but it was just too cumbersome to browse through all of these websites once a day. Since setting them up using RSS feeds, it’s a breeze. I check it a few times a day, read everything that’s been updated, and I’m all caught up.

RSS feeds save me a lot of time, and I’m constantly finding more uses for them. If you subscribe to a useful feed that I haven’t mentioned, let me know!