Rebecca D Reeve's Blog

I’m hardly the first person to use these sites, but these are the ones that have caught my attention over the past couple of weeks.

Pluggd: text tagging for videos

WHY? This was the most compelling demo at SF New Tech’s most recent event (other than the cuddly Pleo). You’re watching a 45 min clip from CNN but you just want the news about Iraq. Pluggd inserts text tags in the video at the points where Iraq is mentioned, as well terms they deem relevant like “Iran”, “war”, “terrorism”.

Diigo: social book marking site, also allows users to annotate websites and share with others

WHY? My laptop was taken from me before its time last month, and besides missing having a laptop period, the things I miss most from my clunky old Dell are, in order, (1) the graduate school dictionary I compiled of all the esoteric terms I was reading, (2) my bookmarks, (3) travel photos.

Diigo is my second try at using a bookmarking site. I used Del.icio.us for a while a couple of years back and abandoned it after a few months of use. The unforeseen laptop tragedy has given me a new appreciation as to why it’s useful to have your bookmarks stored online.

TweetClouds: Tag cloud of all terms you use on Twitter

WHY? You don’t already spend enough time thinking about yourself. Visual summary of what you’ve been writing about.

I’ve been using Twitter for just over a month now, see my TweetCloud here: http://www.tweetclouds.com/user_pages/ldpodcast.html

Someecards: Writers from The Onion write egreeting cards.

WHY? You need a laugh and/or another distraction at work.

Seeqpod: Find exactly the music you want, stream it to your computer, build playlists

WHY? You want what you want when you want it without having to download songs and viruses to your computer.

San Francisco Web 2.0 Crawl Calendar: Calendar of all Web 2.0 Expo events happening next week

WHY? Some events aren’t listed on Facebook. Thank you Search Marketing Salon for putting this together.

Ze Frank’s videos occupied many hours of my time while I was working in the basement Learning Center office at my university in Montreal. His videos warmed the evenings spent in that cold, dark, cement room.

For one year — March 17, 2006 to March 17, 2007 — he filmed one video entry a day, M-F. His video journal was one of the first widely popular blogs that involved audience participation; he also created an alternative advertising model that involved yellow duckies.

I have not heard of Ze since his last post in March 2007, until this week. One of my Twitter friends wrote something about thanking Ze Frank for orange, and today someone emailed a link to one of the funniest videos:

the show with zefrank: 11-27-06

* Is there a stuffwhitepeoplelike post on Scrabble yet?

Why, I wondered, was Ze suddenly showing back up in my life after a one year hiatus?

Two Google-seconds later I had my answer.

Ze has created the ColorWars 2008 on Twitter. Team Orange, Blue, VERY Green, and on. Players join a color team by choosing a color follow, and voila! you’re a team player! There’s something about Bingo challenges, but with my diminished attention span I can’t be bothered to follow through to figure it out. Point is, user-created challenges, games, and merriment are on Twitter.

GaryVee launched GDP08 (Good People Day) on Twitter today, April 3, a little experiment that saw hundreds (thousands?) of nice messages tweeted about others deemed to be good people.

I hear blogging about blogging is in poor taste. I’ll end here.

Learned a valuable lesson about Javascript and Wordpress today — they don’t mix — and Ze don’t do Java.

Regardless, glad to have some Ze back in my life. Go Yellow!

Maintaining a personal brand via social networks is a given in an era of constant connectivity; to be absent from these forums is to be absent from the conversation (and therefore irrelevant?). If you’re not keeping up on producing blog content, managing your RSS feed, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Linkedin, Seesmic, Friendfeed, et al., you’re not fully engaged.

Social media stress…only in San Francisco, home to what I’m guessing is at least 90% of the ‘250′.

Being overwhelmed by social networking options isn’t a new theme, but it’s also not one that’s going away.

This line in Candide resonates loudly:

“…even in those cities which appear to enjoy peace, and where the arts flourish, men are more devoured by envy, cares and anxiety than all the tribulations visited upon a citadel under siege. Private griefs are crueler even than public miseries.”

While the world of social media isn’t quite ‘private’, the stress you’re feeling about it is likely internalized and not a broadly shared public concern. What I take away from this is that if we’re not (appropriately) wringing our hands about public sins, our concerns are bound to be about something closer to home. Being involved in an industry with a self-appointed 250, these private envies, cares and anxieties are something I hear about frequently.

It’s interesting how cyclical all this social media experimenting has turned out to be — after being more than satisfied with my Facebook interaction for the past many months, and then recently joining Twitter in order to communicate with SXSW attendees, I’m back to blogging after an eight month hiatus. The above quote wouldn’t fit into the Twitter or Facebook status fields due to character limitations, never mind that they are an inappropriate venue for these comments anyways.

Last week during her demo at SF New Tech’s Online Video event at Dolby Theaters, Cathy Brooks of Seesmic, said that not all mediums will work for all people and that some people will just never be comfortable in front of a camera. There is no one-size-fits-all medium that will serve everyone’s needs, and so that’s why we continue to be served up with a proliferation of choices on how to connect.

Maybe the fatigue people are feeling with social networks is exactly what’s needed to bring about a round of winners in a crowded space. Will the result be the adoption of OpenID, a handful of super-portals, or will Internet audiences go the way of cable audiences, increasing segmented by a desire for niche networks?

I imagine this will take many more rounds of discovering, experimenting, and learning before any answers become apparent.

Updated: Cory Doctorow on “The Future of Ignoring Things”.