echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

When I came across Felix's FriendVenn, I had this advice from Duncan Riley on my mind.

I now generally unsubscribe from people who don’t follow me after some time. This isn’t immediately and you have to give people some time (I usually update my follows 2-3 times a week, so I might not reciprocate for 3-4 days) but FriendFeed is ultimately a place for “Friends.” People aren’t your friends if they are not interested in following you. Of course, I still add interesting people who pop up from time to time, but after a couple of weeks if I notice they’re not interested in me, I unsubscribe again.

• Tips on handling FriendFeed

FriendVenn tells you three things; who you're subscribed to but who doesn't follow you, who is subscribed to you but you don't follow, and who you're reciprocally subscribed to. I went through and subscribed to all the people who subscribe to me that I hadn't got around to subscribing back (even Scoble, who I'd avoided for fear of noise, but not the one person with a private feed), and now I'm considering Duncan's advice.

These are the people who don't follow me back. Should I unsubscribe ?

• Aviv
• Benjamin Golub
• Bret Taylor
• Bwana McCall
• Christian Mohn
• Dave Winer
• David Recordon
• Franklin Pettit
• Louis Gray
• Mitchell Tsai
• Paul Buchheit
• Sarah Perez
• Simon Willison
• Tim Hoeck
• edythe
• engtech

Christian is a friend in real life, and doesn't use FriendFeed much. I've had conversations in FriendFeed and other places with a few people on the list. Some are big names who are probably unlikely to ever subscribe to me. But like Duncan says, if they're not interested in what I have to say, perhaps I should unsubscribe. I'm undecided.

[Update: the feeling is pretty overwhelming on FriendFeed, though perhaps I wasn't clear that my point is about having good quality interactions with people, and not some popularity contest.]

3,400 projects were nominated. 72 have made it this far. Only 12 will survive.

I've had the 2008 SourceForge Community Choice Awards badge on my site since nominations opened. I thought it was pretty cool when I found out earlier this week that Habari had been chosen as a finalist in the Best New Project category, but I was even more pleased when I got an email from SourceForge saying there had been 3,400 nominations, and we're in the final 12 of our category. I don't know many of the other projects nominated, but I guess that's the point of ...

[read more]

Michael recently suggested that I have a look at eMusic. I had a bit of a play around, worked out the pricing, thought it sounded like a reasonable deal, and signed up. When Michael asked me about it a few days later, I told him I'd already signed up. Another friend mentioned that they have a recommendation service, and that by signing up directly rather than through the service, Michael had missed out on 50 free songs. Though Michael tried to convince me it didn't matter, I decided to contact eMusic to see if they could still credit the ...

[read more]

Maybe there was some context to Loren's Technigga video that I missed. Maybe he was critiquing something. Maybe I just didn't get it. I certainly wouldn't pretend to have any idea about race politics in the USA but to me it came across as stupid and narrow, and I couldn't imagine anyone sensible doing anything more than rolling their eyes and thinking he was a dickhead. I'm sure Loren is actually fine with that. People seem to be lumping Loren's video in with what happened on Yahoo! Live with Wayne Sutton and Corvida. Though they were talking about race, ...

[read more]

[Update: OMB is a specification, not a standard.] Identi.ca launched a couple of days ago now, causing quite a stir. According to Evan Prodromou, the founder of identi.ca, as of 6.35pm EST today there were 10968 users, with the bulk of those signing up in the first 48 hours. There were posts on The Inquisitr, where I first saw the story, Mashable, and TechCrunch, and I'm sure there were many more that I didn't see. Not every story or all the chatter is positive of course, but when people dismiss identi.ca as just another Twitter clone, ...

[read more]

The beloved and I went for a walk through the back streets of Northcote and Brunswick today to visit an exhibition that a friend of ours is curating at Counihan Gallery, Embodied Energies. The works were predominantly statements on sustainability, many made from found and recycled materials, and all of them interesting. One work, by an artist whose name now completely escapes me, was a Green Waste Sorting Table, which displayed reclaimed waste that was all green; green bottles, lighters, toys, bottle tops, packaging. People were invited to bring their own green waste to be sorted into the ...

[read more]

On my ride home from the city today, just after I rode up a small hill alongside Merri Creek, my bike computer told my I'd just completed my 5000th kilometre. I've been commuting around Melbourne for more than 15 years and I've only had the bike computer for about four, so I've done many thousands more kilometres than that. Today's ride was typical; I rode into the city, about seven kilometres, and home again. It was also atypical; I was coughing and spluttering and going at snail's pace, coming out of the worst cold I've had in years, whereas normally ...

[read more]

It seems like an eternity ago that the Habari admin was replaced with Monolith, and all in all, I think it's a good thing. We've had some great additions to the Habari community who have been really kicking it along and ironing out the bugs. Though I did miss though the incoming links on the dashboard. You might call me vain, but it was nice to be able to see who was linking to my site. Sometimes they were new Habari users who were using one of my plugins or themes, and I could pop over and say hi ...

[read more]

I've updated the Publish Quote plugin for Habari, and donated it to the Habari community. It now takes advantage of features added in Habari 0.5 alpha, so that you can set a template for the title as well as the content and specify tags that should be added to your quote entries. Let me know if you have any feature requests. It would also be great to hear from anyone who's using the plugin.

It's the most beautiful time to be at the farm. The sun is shining, there isn't any wind, at least in the morning, and the nights are cool enough to have a fire. First thing this morning we went for a walk in the hills, and were greeted by two kookaburras, sitting in a tree not ten metres away and laughing their heads off. If you've never heard a kookaburra laugh in the wild, you're missing something special. Same goes for magpies, which are bountiful at the moment. There are also lots of galahs, and while they're amazingly bright pink, ...

[read more]