Weekend Reader – friendfeed, blogging, technology, programming, wordpress

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. You can follow this list of links as I post them on Friend Feed or on Twitter. Or you can get the weekly update by subscribing to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

• [BLOGGING] Exposed – Blog-Post Confidential, nytimes.com
  • From the article: ” I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way.”
• [BLOGGING] Stop asking, start filtering, a.wholelottanothing.org
  • Filter out the PR companies, for they are dumb and don’t let us unsubscribe.
• [BLOGGING] Video Comments? Blow Me., expertidiot.com
  • Video comments are the stupidest feature ever and this sums up my opinion of them.
• [CODE] Blogging Horror, girtby.net
  • Has Coding Horror jumped the shark? Jeff responds in the comments.
• [DIGITAL CULTURE] Gilligan’s web, roughtype.com
  • Counter argument to Clay Shirky’s pro-internet piece from last week.
• [FRIENDFEED] FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function, louisgray.com
  • How to use hide as your information filter
• [FRIENDFEED] FriendFeed Friday Tips #2: Using the Bookmarklet, louisgray.com
  • More ff tips from lg
• [FRIENDFEED] Keep Your Eyes On FriendFeed: It May Be The Google Of Social Networks, webomatica.com
  • Why Jason things Friend Feed is one of the social apps to watch for 2008
• [FRIENDFEED] On FriendFeed, We’re All TV Channels, bhc3.wordpress.com
  • Great analogy. I wouldn’t worry too much about your ‘channel’ — just be yourself and they people who find that interesting you probably share interests with.
• [INFORMATION OVERLOAD] Too Many Choices, Too Much Content, readwriteweb.com
  • Dear Internet, give us a better way to filter information than “turn off the computer”.
• [LIFEHACKS] Grocery List Templates For Healthy People, smarterfitter.com, via:lifehacker.com
  • Great little Excel template for those often shopped for items
• [PIRACY] Understanding Anti-Piracy Enforcement, torrentfreak.com
  • An attempt to clear up some of the FUD.
• [SOCIALMEDIA] Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?, gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
  • Are social media sites useful for anything other than sucking up your time?
• [SOCIALSOFTWARE] Designing for the Social Web: The Usage Lifecycle, bokardo.com
  • Your users are at different stages in adopting your software, make sure you target each stage in your messages.
• [STARTUPS] How to be authentically fake, ricksegal.typepad.com
  • Don’t use stock photography and claim its team shots of your employees. This is the future of visual search engines.
• [TECH] Early Adopters Are Useless, technosailor.com
  • Needs more meat, but has some good links.
• [TECH] Looking back at mesh 2008, mathewingram.com
  • Collected links to the Mesh 2008 conference
• [WEB2.0] How to Build a Social Web App, simon.incutio.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
  • These are the most amazingly concise notes I’ve seen of social web app best practices by the guy who made delicious.
• [WORDPRESS] 13 of the best WordPress plugins, davidairey.com
  • Plugins for Self-hosted
• [WORDPRESS] How To Protect Your WordPress Theme Against Upgrades, themeshaper.com
  • I didn’t know that you can essentially derive a new theme off of an existing WordPress theme.

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.

• Filtering Reddit and Hacker News

  What’s wrong with all of these “social web application sites”:

  People who waste their own time have, in effect, more votes than people who value it – to elevate bad but popular ideas and irretrievably sink independent thinking.

  It’s analogous to what’s wrong with the entire massively online roleplaying game genre (eg: World of Warcraft) in that success is a greater factor of the time invested than of skill or talent. Many social web applications add extra features to keep the users interacting with the site, even if this interaction offers dubious value to their lives.

• Weekend Reader – blogging, twitter, marketing, funny, lifehacks

Tags: blogging, friendfeed, programming, technology, wordpress