Just wanted to post my extremely cryptic notes from Scoble’s keynote at the Northern Voice blogging conference. I’ll put my comments about this session and the others I’m attending later.

Scoble’s Keynote

- (Using OneNote on his tablet with handwritten speaking points)
- RSS makes connections
- RSS, RSS, RSS…
- PubSub, Technorati, Feedster can be used to stay current on a phrase or idea (trends)
- Currently uses NewsGator; if he was starting today, he’d use OnFolio or FeedDemon
- Pause while Scoble tries to demonstrate subscribing to a feed awkwardly
- 1st reference to IE7
- Publish full feeds; Scoble will not read partial text feeds
- Dave Winer called during Scoble’s speech. “I don’t really wanna talk to him”
- Scoble “just reads” - this is the most disappointing part of Robert’s talk. Other than the efficiencies that RSS brings, I think you really just have to spend the time reading or scanning posts; there’s no silver bullet to allow you to consume more information. He just wants to more than most people. Fran points out that this speech is only disappointing to me because I’m already familiar with the efficiencies of RSS. For people new to blogging and RSS, this is a revelation.
- Scoble watches his feeds for trends. He knew that iPod was going to be big. He knows the Incredibles DVD release will be huge. He knew how big Halo 2 would be. But what is the value of that? In small, direct, non-business human terms? (Business value is self-explanatory)
- ‘Microsoft can’t control me to the extent that I’ll shut up’ - the thing to remember is that Scoble is not the norm
- Kryptonite anecdote
- Scoble talking about how to handle information overwhelm, apologising for not being able to keep up with email, due to overwhelm.

Paul Thurrott very effectively points out why Wired News is quickly slipping out of my list of ‘daily reads’. For a professional news reporting organization, Wired has always been a little ‘out there’, but generally believable. Leander Kahney’s latest article (linked to from Paul’s post) takes Wired to a brand new low.

What a shame.

This is the coolest tip I’ve seen in a really long time! It has always annoyed me that there was no “No to all” option on the file copying dialog box when duplicates are found. Yes, I’m a geek. I know. But admit it, you think this is cool too, don’t you?

Just say “No to all” : Lifehacker

When copying a large amount of files from one location to another in Windows Explorer, if some version of the files already exist in the destination, Explorer politely asks if you want to replace the existing files. That’s nice, but the choices available in the dialog box are “Yes,� “Yes to all,� “No� and “Cancel.�

What about “No to all�? Say I just want to copy the files that don’t already exist, and I don’t want to have to click “No� for every file that already exists?

This collection of Windows Explorer Hacks lets us in on the secret: hold down the Shift key and click “No,� which actually means “No to all.� Not exactly what we’d call intuitive, but good to know for the frequent file movers and copiers among us.
Windows Explorer Hacks [windowsdevcenter.com]

Things to say when you are losing a tech argument.

LMAO

[Update] The above link is broken; here’s Google’s cache of that page.

Penny Arcade has this to say about the “Evil Empire” tactics of Electronic Arts (click the image for a larger version):

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

[Updated Below] I just tried to manually subscribe to Scoble’s new linkblog in NewsGator, but I received the following error message:

—————————
Error loading feed.
—————————
An error occurred loading this feed. Please check the URL and try again.

Details: The URI prefix is not recognized.
—————————
OK
—————————

That sucks.

Of course, then I tried to click directly on the link to the RSS feed, and NewsGator dutifully subscribed to it. Why the heck couldn’t I enter the URL manually?

[Update] It struck me as odd that NewsGator subscribed to the feed when I clicked on the feed’s link, since I expected to see Firefox’s standard XML display of an RSS feed. Then I remembered that some people have been championing the use of the feed: protocol prefix to denote RSS feeds. Sure enough, that’s how this link is set up. So it looks like an update is in order for NewsGator, to fix this little gaffe. [End Update]

Anyhow, it’s nice to see Scoble’s using the very gorgeous Kubrick theme that I love so much. What’s not so cool is that he’s not crediting the design anywhere on the main page. The stock template has a link to Michael (the author of the theme) Heilemann’s Kubrick page in the footer which it appears that he’s removed. For shame, Robert.

Installing Energy Blue theme on Windows XP standard

Microsoft released a very nice updated theme for Windows XP, but only made it available to Tablet PC users. Justin King explains how to apply the very stylish Energy Blue theme to standard Windows XP installations.

I just received an email from Flickr, stating that my account has been reduced from Pro status to Free status. What pisses me off is that in the email, they say that they usually warn people ahead of time before this happens, but with the holidays blah, blah, blah, basically “tough shit”. What I heard? “You’re not important enough to us to treat with respect.”

Now, I didn’t pay for my Pro account - I earned it. I got 5 of my friends to sign up for it in a very short window of time to earn my Pro account, because I believed in their product. Now I regret that I did that. I don’t want my friends to be associated with a site that treats people this way.

For the record, here are the contents of the message that I received:

Subject: Flickr Pro Account Expired

Hello Friends and Flickrrs!

We’re writing to let you know that, not only do you rule, but your Flickr Pro Account has expired. We usually let people know this a week in advance, but things have been nuts — nuts! — here at Flickr HQ (in a good way!) and then the holidays happened.

Your Flickr account has reverted to a Free Account, which means that you can upload 10 MB of photos a month, and only the last 100 photos are visible in your photostream.

ALL your photos are still there, and will be restored if you upgrade to a pro account!

There is more information here:
http://www.flickr.com/upgrade/

There are a lot of fantastic features, upgrades and improvements coming with the 1.0 release, so stay tuned.

This is the last email you will receive about this, unless of course you resubscribe, at which point we’ll probably send you another email to let you know when *that* account is expiring.

Joy!

Caterina, on behalf of Flickr

———————————-

PS: I am writing this from my personal account, so please don’t write back here. If you have questions, check out the help page here:
http://www.flickr.com/help.gne

At this point, Flickr can kiss my ass. I won’t be recommending them to my friends, and I will be warning any friends that I know currently have Flickr accounts to beware. This is very not cool.

It looks like I’m not the only one that views podcasting as traditional radio’s worst nightmare. Todd Maffin links to a few different concerning reports - concerning, that is, if you’re part of traditional broadcast radio.

At Buzz’s prompting in an email this morning, I have downloaded and installed the new MSN Toolbar Suite Beta with desktop search functionality. Although I understand that this thing has impressed Scoble (not surprising) and a few others, it may suffer from the Desktop Search on training wheels that Google’s Desktop Search also suffer’s from, which is that there doesn’t appear to be any way to edit a list of known plain-text file extensions that the user would like to index. Both Copernic and X1 have this invaluable feature.

One feature that none of the desktop search companies seems to have figured out is that indexing when a computer is on battery power is a Very Bad Thing. Why can’t they check to see if a computer is on AC or battery power, and only perform indexing when on AC (or at least give users the option)? This just seems like common sense to me, but has been completely overlooked in all of the Desktop Search suites I’ve tried.

I have to say that my brief experience with this new MSN Toolbar hasn’t been wonderful. There’s no obvious preview functionality like both X1 and Copernic offer. For me, that’s two strikes already against it. We’ll see how long it lasts on my system. The one thing going for it is that Buzz says that hooks have been provided to allow ActiveWords to build an agent to allow ActiveWords to have unfettered access to the toolbar’s search capabilities. That intruiges me.

By the way, ActiveWords rules.

[Update] Marc’s mini-review of MSN’s Desktop Search sums up my thoughts perfectly. Decent enough beta, but not good enough for prime-time.

Hot on the heels of Google’s new Suggest functionality comes a plugin to add that functionality to Firefox’s integrated search. Note that this plugin does not currently support keyboard navigation, but it’s still well worth using.

Someone has decided to capitalize on EA’s terrible reputation with these new shirts at CafePress, sporting the phrase “I worked 90 hours a week at EA, and I didn’t even get this t-shirt.”