Kiel’s blog

Now that Joost has opened up to a more 'open' state of public beta, anyone got a invite to help a Joost - less guy out?

I tend to think that big companies are under the impression that the can either make content for web 2.0 or make infrastructure. Frankly, I think we got pretty lucky with dogspace, mostly people don’t want they're social networking to be too heavily reliant on any one company. As for being content: its a bit hit and miss. People (clients) seem to be under the impression that you can make something ‘go viral’ where as really all you can do is make something that you think follows the patter of what goes viral and hope for the best. Any number of things could stop it from being successful. For the second, they would rather belong to something who’s purpose it was to connect people (myspace, flickr, facebook) rather than to advertise one particular brand (dogspace, coke.com.au etc) at least by and large. Many many people try out these social sites, but in the end they USE facebook and myspace almost every day.

I think most companies havn’t yet realised that they can actually PARTICIPATE in this new web social space, rather than just hang on the peripheries. If fictional characters can have a web identity, why cant nokia or coke? Make a flikr page with photos that nokia took at gigs they had. Make the photos high res, and let people use them in mash ups. Why cant nokia licences something under creative commons? Have a facebook page. Have a myspace page, but don’t pretend that somehow this is ‘coke’ the person, make it clear its a bunch of the designers from coke, and that this is some of the things that they like.  The ‘new’ web is about people interacting, but companies are still just kind of watching.

I’m excited by the possibilities (then again, I’m pretty geeky) 

http://kiel.tumblr.com/

on

http://tumblr.com/

I had the best/worse idea ever today.

Why has no one ever combined paint-ball and go-carting? It would be like a mad max theme park. Sure people would die, but still.

So cool.

I did a brief presentation at work today, and these were my "show notes":

OSX 'Killer Apps'

Quicksilver:
http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
your do everything app, that really should have been in the box
find some great 'how to's on 43 folders:  http://www.43folders.com/topics/quicksilver/

Growl:
http://growl.info/
The ultimate notifier. Fully customizable notifications for all of the best programs in osx. Transferring lots of files via ftp? growl can actually speak to you and tell you its done, if you so desire.

Transmit:
http://www.panic.com/transmit/
the ultimate ftp program on any platform. Hooking into just about every part of osx (widgets, dashboard). Transmit can handle the simplest tasks elegantly, and the most complicated tasks with ease

Textmate:
http://macromates.com/
I'm using it right now :) The ultimate text editor. A plethora of languages, especially flash and html, inbuilt to give you hints, auto formatting and help as well as so many little things, you wont fully understand till you try it.

Automator:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/automator/
Comes with the OS , and is totally underrated. learn to use it to save yourself literally hours of work down the track.

Helpful commands:

Text
⌃A        move to beginning of paragraph
⌃K        delete text to end of paragraph
⌃T        reverse characters
⌥⌫        delete word to left
⌥⌦        delete word to right
       
Text Field
⌥←        move one word left
⌥→        move one word right
⌘←        move to beginning of line
⌘→        move to end of line

Screen Grabs:
Full screen (Save to Desktop)                 CMD+Shift+3
Full screen (Save to Clipboard)                 CMD+CTRL+Shift+3
Select region (Save to Desktop)                 CMD+Shift+4
Select region (Save to Clipboard)             CMD+CTRL+Shift+4
Select item (Save to Desktop)                 CMD+Shift+4 then Spacebar
Select item (Save to Clipboard)                 CMD+CTRL+Shift+4 then Spacebar

Showing off:
hold shift while minimizing, maximizing, using expose or opening dashboard :)

Not much is better than free, but sometimes 'free' is synonymous with 'crap'. Not with Readymech.

My workspace is never going to be the same.

I'm rather fond of skeltron.

So I'm working up a description of how I'm implementing GTD with more than a little help of a moleskin and David Seah's nifty little forms, but frankly, I haven't got the time right now :)

I want to do it right with pictures and plans, and thats going to take time. Also I kinda have to finalize the system, so I may just leave it a week or two to see if this is going to work for me at all. So far so good though.

Consider it a next action.

Not only that but everything you THINK you could EVER know is a dot too.

Don't understand? Neither do I. But its well explained in this simple animation

well... simple-ish.

Thanks to lifehacker for a link to something pretty damn cool.

Here's me.

After playing with it for all of 10 mins, It seems pretty damn cool. Especially since I haven't been able to work out what I want for Christmas. I'd say this will replace my half hearted amazon wishlist.

Seems like shopping is the perfect thing to put into the social space. Just wish I'd thought of it first. Seems like a solid business idea based or "find this item at" links.

Clever.

I'm all about the syncing. I want all my information to be available to me all the time. I don't think it should be that hard, but I understand to do it well its going to cost me. What I get excited about is when the places I store my data get together.

And thats going to happen now, with Spanning Sync

Check out the blog, and you'll see that they're in private beta, and I just got my invite. I'll give it a full review soon, once its all setup.

I'm interested to see how this will fit in with my new found GTD fascination.