May 2009

links for 2009-05-19

I love my s34n.com redirects

If you follow me on twitter you might have seen me sending out a bunch of links recently that begin with s34n.com. Thanks to the fine folks at Hover I’ve got my own URL shortener now and I love it! I was thinking of using seanbonner.com for it but s34n.com was shorter and kind of cool so I went with that, but so far it’s been endlessly awesome. In addition to keeping links I send out kinda self branded, it also makes them super easy to remember later on without having to look anything up. For example if I wanted to meet someone at Scoops and they didn’t know where it was I could tell them to check out s34n.com/scoops or if I wanted to recommend the Neil Strauss book I recently I read I could just point to s34n.com/emergency.

I’m totally digging this and can’t wait to have an arsenal of links at my disposal for any situation that comes up.

Urban Journal Launches

Urban Journal

Behind the scenes here there is so much being worked on and I’m really excited to launch something we’ve been working on for a few months in one form or another. After reading Emergency and spending some time really looking into a lot of the issues it brought up, Jason and I realized that most of the “survival” info that was out there was focused on being in the wilderness or jam packed with “The Dems are in the white house now, clearly the country is going to fall apart any moment, let’s all buy ammo and pray until that happens.” Not that there is anything inherently wrong with either of those approaches, but they just aren’t very appealing to me as someone who lives and frequents major cities the majority of my time.

Due to this, we felt there should be a site with a strong focus on big city survival and disaster prep. With Metblogs we’ve seen a lot of things happen out of no where in our cities and seen what people had to deal with through their own eyes. This often made us think of how we would have responded if we were in that situation and more often than not we would have been very unprepared. So today we’re launching Urban Journal – a site that will both chronicle our own journey to become more prepared as well as provide useful info and tips for other city dwellers who don’t want to be caught by surprise. It’s a little bit of a different direction for us at Bode Media but we’re excited about it and looking forward to seeing where it leads. Hope you enjoy it!

Some thoughts on #fixreplies

Note: If that title makes no sense to you then you should probably skip this entry. If you are on Twitter and the title makes sense to you but you don’t know exactly why then prerequisite reading is a series of posts by @Biz on the twitter blog: Small Settings Update, Whoa, Feedback!, We Learned A Lot and finally The Replies Kerfuffle. It should be pointed out that this is exactly how a company/service should be interacting with it’s customers/users.

In the most recent post Biz starts off saying:

We removed a setting that 3% of all accounts had ever touched but for those folks it was beloved.

I find that figure hard to believe, of course they know better than I do but I know I used it and tend to think most of my friends did too, at least the uproar I saw in my own stream and the replies that were sent to me when I was talking about that make me feel that way. Biz goes on to note it was a setting that most people never changed from the default. If I remember correctly that wasn’t always the case and originally everyone saw all replies all the time, then they added the option for you to only see certain one and possibly changed the default at that point. I’m not sure about that but it’s neither here nor there honestly, the only important fact is they changed something with replies that seriously impacted some of their users.

Twitter / Peter Rojas: r @seanbonner Seriously, t ...

I understand why they did it from a use standpoint and I’ve certainly heard people asking for similar changes so I thought I’d discuss a little about how I use replies and what might be good directions to go from here. I’m sure twitter has their own plans already in some form of motion but just for discussions sake I’m doing it anyway.

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TYSON

I saw the posters for Tyson all over Toronto last weekend and thought to myself that I should check it out but after I talked to Glen the other day I ran out and saw it immediately. He wrote up a post advising everyone to do the same thing and I couldn’t agree more. The whole time I kept finding myself staring at the screen saying “wow” or just being blown away in general. I was growing up when Mike Tyson was the champ and played a hell of a lot of Punch Out at one point in time so I definitely had my own opinion of him but this shattered that in so many ways, and confirmed it in many others. Super amazing insight in this one and worth sitting down and watching.