Whether creating content is your job or just a hobby it's useful to follow and interact with your various online communities.  Most webapps send email notifications to let you know when someone has favored or commented on your content but that can be overwhelming.  Here's a trick I use to stay current with site activity without the email clutter.  Turn off email notifications and subscribe to activity feeds instead.

Today Twitter rolled out the new "lists" feature to the remaining tweeters who were not already part of the beta and at first glance it's clear that Twitter lists will drastically change the way we view our social network.

Download the script

5/30/2009 Updated to work http://friendfeed.com (non-beta)

The new Friendfeed UI beta opened to the public on Monday 2009/4/6 and has been getting great reviews from many tech pundits. The UI is so good that I'm thinking of switching from my current favorite FF tool Twhirl to the web UI. The only problem with the web UI is that it's designed to be used in a large browser window. I prefer this type of content in a slim window off to the side of my desktop. Resizing the window results in the sidebar menu squeezing out the content.

New Friendfeed UI doesn't work in a slim window

To remedy this I wrote this "Friendfeed Mini" Greasemonkey script. This is my first GM script so please comment if you find bugs or have any suggestions. It's a work in progress but it's usable. Note: The script is for the beta site. I'll probably need to update the script when the new UI comes out of beta.

My last post focused on SEO drawbacks of framed URL shorteners which is mostly a concern for content creators. I later realized that URL shorteners which frame entire pages, like the Diggbar and BurnURL, are even worse than I originally though. These services are not only stealing page rank points (and arguably stealing content) they are shifting the third-party distrust to the target site and essentially become a man-in-the-middle.

The bloggosphere is abuzz today about the new DiggBar but I have my reservations about the new, admittedly cool, multi-purpose link sharing tool. The concern is its impact on SEO ranking for links shared using digg short URLs. URL shorteners like is.gd are popular on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed because they look better and save characters. Most URL shorteners use an HTTP 301 redirect to forward browsers to the final URL which is the method recommended by Google. The DiggBar URLs on the other hand point to digg.com/<code> and use framing (nested iframe) to display the target page, a technique that was considered to be a cheap dirty trick to steal content back in the '90s. Example: http://digg.com/u13iq.

framing increases Digg's page rank, not the target

Framing has its advantages, for instance adding a digg button to any page, but it's bad for SEO page rank because search engines will see those URLs as links to digg.com, not the actual page. I thought that Digg might be checking the user agent string to detect the Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp or other indexers but after testing with the User Agent Switcher Firefox add-on and with Javascript completely disabled, DiggBar URLs always use framing.

If page rank is important to you I would suggest that you not use the Digg URL shortener. Instead, choose from one of these that use 301 redirects.

Social media junkie or not, any geek loves it when all the pieces of a technology come together just right. Thanks to some great online services like FriendFeed and a Drupal module appropriately named FriendFeed You can aggregate your tweets, diggs, pictures and even comments on blogs, into clean HTML and RSS for easy consumption.

Some of my friends on the Twit Army have been asking how I was able to override the source string when posting microblogs. Here's an example of what I mean.

This is a normal post from the web

This is a post from curl with the custom source

This is easily done with the command line tool "Curl" and the Laconica API

They say you should never use the email address provided by your ISP as your primary email since ISP email addresses are not transferable between ISPs (as phone numbers are in most countries).  Unfortunately there are some times when you can't avoid using provider email such as on mobile phones, so if you ever decide to change providers you can take your number but you'll still need to inform everyone of your new mobile email address.