David Herrold

Decentralize me, please.

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Social Networking, Technology, Usability

Our content is becoming decentralized…and we love it.

Most bloggers I know are tangled up in multiple social networks, photo sharing sites, messaging services, networking sites, bookmarking platforms and a plethora of addictive attention-grabbing web services.

The concept of a “web presence” has changed so drastically over the last several years it’s become difficult to tell people “where” you are online. Blogs or personal home pages used to be our single point of existence online. These were the places we could refer colleagues, friends, family, etc if they wanted to see “our website.”

That’s not the case today.

Our lives are now split into dozens of different networks and spread across the internet like strategically placed digital confetti. We are on Facebook to connect with old friends and meet new ones. We are on LinkedIn to find jobs and stay connected to our business contacts. We are on Flickr to share our lives in photos. We are on Twitter because we have five spare seconds in line at the grocery store and saw something funny we need to share with the world. We are on Del.icio.us to keep track of all the amazing links we find and StumbleUpon to share them with the world.

Like a cheesy Zen proverb, we’re everywhere.

This is both frustrating and fantastic at the same time.

The fantastic part can be found in the amazing services we have access to for free. These services have connected old friends, gotten people out of foreign jails and made grandparents smile at newborn baby photos.

The frustrating part is trying to pull it all together. Some sites are friendly and speak to other sites; but most don’t. More often than not, our collection of platforms and services float like little islands unconnected in any meaningful way. We are forced to keep asking the same friends to connect with us on multiple services.

Some very smart people are working on pulling it all back together, but it still appears to be stuff of dreams at this point.

For now, many of us simply link all our networks, sites and services somewhere on our blog (as I’m doing in the right sidebar of this site). It’s not ideal, but until someone figures out how to bridge our isolated islands in a meaningful way, it’s what we’re forced to do.

What do you think? Will we end up with connected islands?

Photo by Harris Graber

Tags: Blogging, del.icio.us, facebook, flickr, linkedin, open social, openid, social networks

I (heart) Skitch

Posted by Dave | Filed under Blogging, Design, Software

I installed Skitch this evening and I think I am in love. Seriously.

I haven’t been this impressed with a piece of software since I first played with FireFox.

Skitch is an amazingly intuitive screen capture and image editing application for the Mac. But there’s a twist. Skitch integrates with FTP, SFTP, Flickr, .Mac as well as the iSight camera. You can also post images to the social Skitch website in your Skitch account (here’s a link to my page). You can then easily embed the Skitch image from your Skitch page with the click of a button. Very impressive.

Mac-based bloggers (and there are a lot of them out there) are going to eat this up with spoons.

This could spell the death of Command + Shift + 3 for screen capture on a Mac. I’m sure I’m not the first person to pour a little malt liquor on the grave of that 3-button-plus-mouse-click pain-in-the-ass. But I’m one of the happiest.

One for me, one for my homies.

Tags: Blogging, image editor, screenshot, skitch

Google Reader goodies

Posted by Dave | Filed under Blogging, Software

Google added a nifty new feature to their reader recently that allows people to share the feeds they read via a little badge on their blog or website. Here’s how you can do it too…

• Open Google Reader
• Go to your shared items
• Click on the “Put a clip on your site or blog” link at the top of the page.
• Configure the color and number of items you’d like
• Copy and paste the code into your blog
• Now go share those cool posts about LOLcats with all your freinds.

P.S. - I opted for a simple link at the bottom of the site for my Google Reader shared items.

Tags: Blogging, Google, RSS