The Best 5 Twitter Services You Might Not Know
It took a while to find a balance of fun and utility versus timewasting, but I now love Twitter. There is just enough signal in the noise to keep me involved. I imagine most of you will have tried the service by now, but did you know third party services are being built around Twitter all the time?
Here are my five most favorite recent Twitter service finds:
Tagged Tweets - If you want to follow what is being said about a conference, news event or category, tag tweets with #keyword then check out Hashtags -

Follow the herd - Who has the most Twitter followers in the world? In your country?
Conversation Stats - See if you are one of the top 100 Twitter conversationalists, who gets more replies, how many replies do you send?- Be alerted - Twitter Tracking allows you to be notified in SMS or IM any time a Twitter user mentions a keyword.
Feed it - Twitterfeed allows you to auto-post content from your RSS feeds as Tweets. Promote your blog articles or social bookmarking links. Now you won’t be lost for something to say.
+1 Bonus: Send gifts - Do you love somebody enough to send them a Tweetgift? Very silly and pointless in a Facebook/MySpace kind of way, but fun all the same.
Know of any others? Please let me know in the comments!
Questions About Google Knol
Since the initial announcement from Google about their Knol project I have been reading the discussions to try and clear up some thoughts. If you don’t know Knol yet, here is how they described it:
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
It seems I have more questions than answers, in particular the following three:
- More or less trustworthy than Wikipedia? - Google is pushing the fact that authors will get full credit for their content, so there are both advertising revenue and ego benefits. At the same time though they say:
Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.
So potentially Google is going to rank something, with the Google good name attached, that is no more reliable than any other content on the web (ie. not). At least at Wikipedia you can go in and try to edit something that is incorrectly claimed about yourself or your company, it’s not clear what recourse you will have in this case.
Despite any disclaimers, you know there will be people who say “it’s from Google, it must be true”. Hopefully as well as having alternative points of view they have a way to make it clear these are just opinions.
- Wikipedia dupe content? - As Techcrunch say, Knol will show advertising, which will attract lots of Wikipedia contributors, but also as they point out Wikipedia content is free to copy:
Very soon we are going to see a lot of Wikipedia content moving wholesale to Knol. Wikipedia content is basically free to use, redistribute, copy, whatever, under the GNU license
How much of Knol is going to be dupe content, and as this is a Google product, will any of this copy and paste content outrank the original?
- SEO heaven or hell? - Which brings us to my final question. If Knol ranks, and especially if it outranks will it turn out to be a spam magnet and a draw for SEO’s looking for a ranking leg-up?
What do you think? Is Knol going to cause spam and plagiarism, or will it be great for competition and users?
Is a Microsoft Buy Out Yahoo’s Best Chance for Survival?
There are two sad facts in search today:
- Yahoo! has been a great company and done some wonderful things
- The “mostly not evil” Google is only increasing their domination of the market, growing to a monopoly
Yahoo! can’t beat Google. Microsoft can’t beat Google. Perhaps, combined they could give them some competition?


Yes, I know this is not an original idea, and there have always been rumors of talks, but looking over past history I think it is time someone on either side really put some thought into it.
Microsoft hasn’t had a great time, what with Vista and Office releases failing to set the world alight and Google eating into their mind share. Yahoo! … well, what good news have they had?
In fact, I am not sure Yahoo!, a company I still root for, couldn’t have created worse PR if they had tried.
- Sacked CEO Terry Semel (good thing in some respects, but not stock market crowd-pleasing PR)
- Brought back Jerry Yang (brilliant bloke but no Google-beater)
- Handing over information to China to help create political prisoners and lying to the US government about it
- Getting sued by families of said political prisoners
Yahoo! owns some great properties, such as Flickr, plus can still claim brilliant staff, such as the Zonetag team. Between them they have potential to give them a platform within reach of owning half of search (combined they would start with roughly 40% of search traffic). Microsoft is more and more looking to web delivery of software and services so the old arguments of “desktop software versus web services” is becoming less of an issue.
What do you think?
PDF Editing & Creation: 50+ open source/free alternatives to Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat is expensive, but that doesn’t mean you have to live a life without portable documents. What many people don’t realize is that PDF is a Federal Information Processing Standard, which means the specifications behind the format are widely published. Numerous developers take advantage of this fact and create programs that offer effective alternatives to Acrobat. Check out our list of these programs and take advantage of these tools that are full of some of the best PDF features and functions.
Downloadable PDF Creators
These simply and emminently usable programs will allow you to quickly create your own PDFs.
- CutePDF: Create a PDF file from almost any printable document. CutePDF has an open SDK and doesn’t bog down their software with popups or watermarks.
- PDF reDirect: The freeware PDF reDirect offers loads of robust features, including PDF creation, previews, encryption, and more, that go a long way to replacing Adobe.
- doPDF: Install doPDF as a virtual PDF printer driver, and you can create PDFs using your printer function.
- CC (Free) PDF Converter: This printer driver can be used to create a PDF file from any printable Windows application.
- PDFCreator: Use PDFCreator to create PDFs from any printable program, as well as encrypt and autosave files based on predefined terms.
- Open Office: Open Office has a PDF export feature that allows you to define compression levels as well as handle thumbnails and hyperlinks.
- Scribus: Use this desktop publishing program to create interactive PDF presentations and forms.
- HylaFAX: HylaFAX is an open source fax server that can be configured to deliver in PDF.
Online and Desktop PDF Editors
PDF manipulation is easy and free with these tools.
- PDFescape: This online PDF solution is a reader, editor, form filler, and form designer. All you need to use it is a JavaScript enabled web browser.
- PDFedit: Use this editor to manipulate PDF documents, with an option to do your own scripting and plugins.
- Multivalent browser: Although not a pure editor, this browser allows for minimal editing in the form of creating annotations. In addition, it includes several command-line PDF specific tools which allow for things like merging, compression, and extraction.
Viewers
If you need a simple way to open and read PDFs, look no further than these lightweight viewers.
- Sumatra PDF: This Windows PDF viewer is light and minimalistic. It’s even designed for portable use, so you can run it from a USB drive.
- FoxIt Reader: The Foxit PDF viewer is an all time favorite (especially of Digg users). And has a strong set of features (with a very competitive price
) - PalmPDF: Use this PDF viewer for Palm OS devices.
- Evince: Gnome users can take advantage of Evince, a document viewer that supports both PDF and PostScript documents.
- Preview: Mac OS X comes with Preview, an application that displays images and PDFs.
- ePDFView: This lightweight PDF viewer uses the GTK+ and Poppler libraries.
- Okular: This document viewer for KDE 4 supports PDF, PostScript, and lots more.
- Xpdf: Xpdf, available for nearly any Unix OS, is a PDF viewer that allows you to read encrypted PDFs, extract images, and more.
Compatability
Make the PDF format compatible with HTML, XML, non-proprietary formats, and more using these tools.
- PythonPoint: Use this tool to create presentations that can be opened with any PDF viewer.
- AxPoint: Create PDF slideshows from XML using AxPoint.
- DocBook XSL Stylesheets: Create and store documents in a presentation-neutral form that can be published in HTML, PDF, and more.
- Unipage: Unipage turns any page, online or local, into an HTML file that can function as a portable document. Although Unipage is currently only available on Windows, additional OS and browser support is coming soon.
- EasyPDF SDK: The easyPDF development toolkit helps you create PDF functions with minimum effort and very little code.
- KWord: KWord is a word processor for KOffice, and it offers a PDF import function.
- PDFlib: The PDFlib development tool offers a way for developers to PDF-enable software and create PDFs on their own server.
- Ghostscript: The Ghostscript software can interpret PostScript language and PDFs interchangeably and convert them to faster formats.
- Mozilla Archive Format: This extension can save pages in MHTML format, which creates a portable document of the page.
- Pstoedit: This program converts PostScript or PDF files to other output formats such as WOMF/EMF, PDF, DXF, CGM, and HTML.
Command Line Manipulation and Editing
These editors won’t be used on your desktop as you would use Acrobat or any other PDF application. Rather, you can use these offerings to build into your own apps so that you can automate the PDF creation and manipulation process.
- PJ: Etymon’s PJ, the parent of PJX, is one of the earliest open source attempts to make PDF’s more accessible. PJ is a class library in Java that allows parsing, manipulation, and generation of PDF files.
- PDFlib: The PDFlib development tool offers a way for developers to PDF-enable software and create PDFs on their own server.
- mbtPdfAsm: The mbtPdfAsm application is an in line tool for assembling and merging PDF files, extracting information from them, and updating PDF metadata.
- PDF::API2: PDF::API2 offers a “next generation” tool for creating and manipulating PDF files.
- PDF Clown: The PDF Clown is an open source library which includes capabilities such as document splitting, merging, and more.
- iText: iText is an ideal library for developers seeking to automate PDF creation and manipulation.
- FreeDist: This freeware distiller can convert files into PDF as well as compose multiple files to one PDF in a specific order.
- Pdftk: This toolkit offers command-line functionality for lots of features, like merging, form filling, and encryption.
PDF Creation Libraries, Scripts and Systems
If you’re a developer and you want to move beyond the capabilities of a desktop PDF creator, these libraries, scripts, and systems will help you incorporate PDF creation into your own applications.
- CUPS: The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) is primarily a system for enabling a computer to act as a print server, but which has a robust feature that allows PDF exporting.
- Lout: This document formatting system, the implementation of which is referred to as Basser Lout, can be outputted in PDF, plain text, and more.
- Indexed PDF Creator: This tool automatically generates a keyword index for PDF documents which allows readers to quickly locate specific words and phrases in a document.
- Cairo: Cairo, a vector drawing library, allows creation of PDF documents.
- LyX: This document processor which is particularly popular amongst the scientific community offers PDF exporting.
- Fly2PDF: You can create PDF documents directly using this ActiveX library.
- PDF Creator Pilot: Use this library to create PDF files from popular programming languages like Visual Basic and ASP.
- XeTex: XeTex is a typesetting program that offers PDF creation.
- FPDF: Use FPDF to create PDF files with PHP. You don’t need PDFlib to use it.
- Inkscape: Inkscape is an open source vector drawing program that offers support for PDF exports.
- PdfTeX: This typesetting program can output PDF files and allows a number of features like links and tables of contents.
- ReportLab: This library offers a PDF generation solution specifically suited for web publishers, developers, and creative designers who are looking for a high-speed automated PDF generation.
- Tiny RML2PDF: You can create a PDF document from RML with this tool, giving it the appearance of a printed document.
- HTML_ToPDF: This PHP class allows users to convert HTML to PDF files quickly and easily.
Other Tools
Get even more function from your PDFs using these tools.
- Skim: For OS X, Skim is a PDF reader with features that allow you to take notes and highlight on any PDF file.
- Notepad Generator: This tool makes it easy to create a PDF notepad, and it’s fully customizable.
- PDFmap: PDFmap offers automated generation of interactive PDF maps.
With these tools, you should be able to go way beyond Adobe. Even better, you can do it for free and have the option to customize your experience using their open source status.
Should Google Have a “People Search”?
I was just reading Aarons comment on my last post and it got me thinking. First, in case you missed it, here is what he said:
while Google makes it pretty easy to find someone, I think the search engines are going to get even better at this. They’re going to have to with millions of people starting their own sites on domains that don’t sync up with their real names.
Why hasn’t Google already done more in this area?
Search Google for my name right now and you get the usual mix of sites and personas.
Anyone who has been on the web for a while will probably also have a mixture of various profiles, their own blog, perhaps their employer, etc. What you do not see is my Facebook, LinkedIn, etc profile. While those services are, at least in part, meant to be “people discovery systems”, I have no motivation to send them “search juice” by linking to them.
Google sates as their mission:
to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
I think having a useful interface for finding people online would not only be cool, but incredibly useful. While others have attempted this in the past, Google could actually do it.
Yes, they have a phone book, and Yahoo! has their equivalent, but those are hardly what I am wanting, and not particularly useful for the majority of the world either.
I can see it being a tab, like “Images”, to differentiate between trying to find the person/profile/site of versus places that mention the phrase “Chris Garrett”. Multiple results could be listed showing either profile photograph or website snapshot along with whatever contact or bio details they can find.
What do you think?
WordPress the New Facebook?
Could WordPress be the New Facebook?
Let me right off clarify that headline; I don’t mean privacy-selling-money-grabbing-zombie-biting-waste-of-time. I mean could WordPress be the new darling of the Social Networking field?
Chris Messina wants it to be. He’s started a project called DiSo (”distributed social networking”), to build an “inside out” Social Network.
What’s wrong with Facebook, you ask? Ignoring for the moment the horror that is Beacon, many people have been abandoning the service because it just isn’t useful. Worse than that, it is an increasingly time-wasting activity.
Hugh said it better than most. Darren Rowse and Brian agree. Rather than be the source of “User Generated Content” for someone else, many bloggers are now returning to their roots and putting their energy back into their own site, where it makes most sense and the pay off is greater.
I am a blogging advocate. It’s what I do, I teach it and live it. Even so I can see a place for the Social Networking site because of the way they bring people together. People go to Facebook or MySpace because that is where everyone goes. It is like eBay, or the popular bar in town, it might not be the best but because everyone goes there … everyone goes there.
What blogs currently lack to overcome this is an easy way for users to traverse the connections, to surf friendships and find those degrees of separation contacts without having to give over our privacy to one particular corporation or another. Previous solutions such as the XML based FOAF etc hasn’t really taken off quite yet, it could be DiSo provides the foundations to have the best of both worlds, anything-goes fully owned blogs with the connectivity of a single Social Networking site …
Being a Mac Guy One Year On

A year ago I bought my first Mac. Looking back on the year, my Apple-using experience was not at all what I had expected it to be.
My motivations for moving to Mac were twofold; 1) I was developing for Apache, PHP and MySQL, and 2) I received regular Microsoft operating system betas through my membership of their developers MVP program, and I didn’t like what I saw.
At the time I had struggled for a month to get my wifi network talking to Ubuntu with no joy. Really, had Ubuntu provided a store selling compliant hardware I might not have even tried the Mac. As it is, neither the Linux community (seemingly split evenly between extremely generous and helpful human beings and people who despise n00bs) nor network hardware retailers could help me. For a supposedly free operating system it was becoming expensive in time and money so I shot for the Unix-based operating system and hardware combination I knew would work; the BSD-based Macos.
The Apple Store experience was a joy. Without visiting other stores for comparison I have no way of knowing if this particular store is typical, but it was great going to a computer store with a nice non-pushy atmosphere and staff who actually knew about the products they were selling. Contrast this joyful experience with the grunts and extended-warranty pushing PC stores, it was an early indication that Apple had some things right.
I almost got sucked into the style over substance element of Apple fanboyism. Those iMacs do look lovely, don’t they?
While it took some getting used to the Mac way of doing things, one motivation to stick with it was Vista. Everything I had anticipated in the betas and early conversations came to pass. Vista sucks. My one Windows machine still runs XP. I haven’t even bothered trying to “upgrade”, and it makes me thankful for the Mac.
I had been using PCs since I was 15, I had grown up with the Microsoft way of doing things. Of course it was going to take some adjusting. Having said that, there is a lot said about Macs that isn’t true. While the operating system does seem more stable, software crashes just as often, especially Firefox. I don’t always find it any more intuitive than Windows, some things such as getting peripherals to work are actually easier on Windows as of course the manufacturers will put more effort into pleasing the larger customer base.
Using the Mac has been fun. I have found though many Mac fan-boys are quite strange, as you would expect, but it is funny the negative reaction I get lugging my Macbook around airports. You see, I own the cheaper white Macbook, not the nice shiny silver pro model. At the same time I get snorts of derision for owning an Apple emblazoned laptop, I get the “Oh, it’s only that one” talk from the Apple snobs. I have even been told that the model I own is for girls, whatever that means.
That said, while Vista is still a mess and Linux is beyond my meager nerd skillz I am happy to stick with the Mac. It seems according to CNET I am not alone in jumping ship …
According to a recent study by research firm ChangeWave, Apple’s Macintosh line of computers is well on its way to gaining a sizable portion of the computing market in the coming months.Polling customers about their computer buying preferences over the next 90 days, ChangeWave found that 29 percent of respondents claimed they would be buying a Mac over that period, while 24 percent will buy HP desktops and 31 percent will buy Dell desktops.
Amazingly, just two years ago, only 16 percent of respondents indicated that they would plan on buying a Mac notebook, while 11 percent claimed they would buy a Mac desktop.
But perhaps most important, Tobin Smith, founder of ChangeWave pointed out that, “these are not just the Mac-heads who are buying.” And most consumers (24 percent) are choosing Macs because of Leopard and their distaste for Vista.
The last point is particularly telling in my opinion. As I mentioned before, I grew up with Microsoft software. Microsoft has been a huge part of my career, up until a few years ago their .NET platform was crucial to my employment potential. Now the only Microsoft product I use is Word.
By no means am I a Mac power user. I can still work the PCs most geeky innards far better than I can the Mac. In fact I still feel completely square one with the Apple machine. Tiny issues like inserting a CD but not being able to see it in finder, or finding I can’t pick up a supposedly wide open wifi hotspot, leave me stumped. For all Apples trumpeted ease of use, I find Microsofts help documentation more helpful.
I have to think while many people are pointing to Steve Jobs as the savior of Apple, I think in large part Microsoft handed success on a plate by fouling up Vista. Had Vista launched in a vacuum we would have had to have taken what was on offer, but by launching a sub-par and over hyped OS into a world that was already looking to Apple favorably, it could have been a major blunder.
Microsoft could still reset their course. For all the headlines, Apple hasn’t made that great inroads into the PC market, and for all the hype, the latest upgrade to Macos didn’t exactly set the world alight. There is only the backup software that appeals to me, not that much of a step up is it?
Let’s not forget either the growth of Linux on the desktop and the flood of cheap Linux-based computers threatening to take over the bottom end of the home market, even Walmart got in on the act!
It seems the next decade could be any for the taking. Which is all good. Keeps techy life interesting!
Interpreting Feedback for Web Services
Your customers and community are in charge, after all without them you have no business. It is therefore extremely important to encourage and listen to feedback. I was sent a link to the following presentation from the Future of Web Apps conference in London.
As well as being an excellent presentation, it also introduced me to the Slideshare service. Slideshare is like YouTube for powerpoint - a great way to publish your presentations for sharing on the web, two great resources for the price of one!
Secrets and Paranoia at Wikipedia
You have caused too much harm to justify us putting up with this kind of behavior much longer.–Jimbo Wales
What was the crime that this Wikipedia editor was guilty of? The story reads more like a high-school cat-fight more than the inner workings of the worlds biggest online encyclopedia.
Giano II it seems had provided the damning evidence in the form of a reproduced email that showed
- Wikipedia is not as open and free as users are led to believe.
- Jimbo Wales is apparently on the side of the paranoid ruling elite rather than Joe User.
Doesn’t sound like the Wiki we all know and love, does it? Well, ok, a growing number of people don’t love it at all, and in fact hold it under a great deal of suspicion, but that is getting ahead of ourselves.
Wikipedia is supposedly a site based on the ideals of cooperation, freedom of speech and friendly collaborative knowledge-building. Great and laudable ideas. The site has been hugely successful. In fact the site is referenced so much that many searches in Google provide Wikipedia as the first result.
Anyone is supposedly allowed to edit the content. The whole idea of a Wiki is that you or I can see something that needs correcting and just do it. No waiting for helplines and support tickets. Which is good because people believe in what is written so much there is a great responsibility on the part of the editors to get their facts right. Wikipedia stories could make or break a reputation.
That’s the idea, but in fact more people are coming out with stories that suggest Joe User has very little ability to do more than minor tweaks and in fact a cabal of powerful users control the site, paranoid and drunk on their own influence.
The quote above was Jimbo Wales attacking a previously respected user for revealing an email proving the existence of a secret mailing list that was being used to wield power in private. So much for “open”, eh?
Basically, Durova’s email showed that Bang Bang was indeed a wonderfully productive editor. She was sure this was all a put-on, that he was trying to gain the community’s “good faith” and destroy it from within. We’re not joking. This sort of extreme paranoia has become the norm among the Wikipedia inner circle.
Just to repeat, it seems Durova believed being a good editor was evidence of evil intent. Yeah, I had to read it twice too.
Where does that leave you and I? Can we trust Wikipedia? In many cases Wikipedia is the best source of information so what choice do we have?
- Check facts - Wikipedia content is very often gleaned from multiple sources or just plain made up, and by the nature of the type of site is rarely professionally compiled, so you should always check facts anyway
- Simply human - This argument is no doubt the first and will not be the last. When people get into positions of power they often act like this and get paranoid to protect the power once they attain it. Any other site would have the same issues.
- We provide the authority - Most webmasters never consider the fact that it is the users and other site owners who make Wikipedia what it is. If we didn’t contribute, patronize and link Wikipedia so much then it wouldn’t hold the power it does.
- Isolated or institutionalized? - The issue comes down to if this is an isolated case. You can be sure there are a lot of people watching the site for abuse. Once a site is so visible the web community becomes their checks and balances.
Do you trust Wikipedia? Please share your thoughts in the comments …



