by Andy DeSoto on August 15, 2008
I‘ve been planning an article on how an online community might revitalize itself for some time now, but why go into detail when I can just give a fantastic example?
Yesterday, a “manga face” meme swept through the communities on Pownce, Plurk, and other social networking sites. Using the free cartoon/manga face generator Face Your Manga, dozens and dozens of users participated by crafting their own faces and sharing with the community. In particular, Pownce’s OAuth integration made for an unusually excellent medium.
Taking it a step further
However, the manga-faced exploits would have stopped there if it were not for the efforts of developer Leah Siddall, creator of the reply-tracking Bownce (which really ought to be implemented within the service proper). Using everyone’s manga images and a little bit of programming trickery, she created the Pownce Yearbook, a graphical compilation of users’ faces.
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by Andy DeSoto on August 14, 2008
Lifestreaming has been a popular topic on andydesoto.com over the last few weeks, ranging from excitement over the soon-to-be-released Sweetcron to appreciation of FriendFeed. It’s been big in the blogosphere, too, apparent, for instance, in Read/WriteWeb’s recent post “How To Lifestream From Your iPhone.” However, in order for the concept to really take off, it’s going to require one important thing: simpler multimedia content generation.
What do we have now?
The value of lifestreaming is that it aggregates multimodal content into one “stream.” Unfortunately, our options are pretty limited when it comes to different kinds of media. Here’s a short list of what we have at our disposal:
- video
- photographs
- audio
- text
- location
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by Andy DeSoto on August 12, 2008
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the age of DISQUS, it was the age of Tumblr.
Over the past two days, two highly-regarded and much-loved Internet services released updates: Top-notch global commenting system DISQUS and microblogging/aggregation tool Tumblr. Unfortunately, in the world of incremental updates, all is not created equal, as these two very different releases have demonstrated. While DISQUS released a brand new update chock full of features users have been begging for for weeks, Tumblr provided its loyal fanbase with something bigger.
What’s new with DISQUS
As Inquisitr mastermind Duncan Riley quips, “The last excuse for you not to try Disqus has just been hit on the head.” It’s true, too. The bevy of new features included in 2.0 includes:
- true import and export of comments
- synchronization between DISQUS and WordPress
- faster speed and more accessible interface
- a new “comment blog” concept
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