UberNoggin

I watched a video from Tim Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week, over at his blog. The video is an interview with Robert Scoble (a most wonderful Ubernoggin!) about how he manages to effectively read over 600 RSS feeds a day (see my earlier post about RSS feeds ) and blog about what he learns.

Scoble’s advice is interesting. He talks about the importance of RSS feeds for maintaining personal connections and following people he’s interested in. He also talks a bit about how he skims blogs and what he’s looking for as he skims. It’s worth a view even if Tim can’t hold a video camera (Tim, you’re still brilliant! Get a tripod).

Another interesting thing to look at is the hosting site Tim is using for his video. It’s called Viddler and it’s the first video service I’ve ever seen that allows viewers to add tags and comments to the video stream itself. The comments pop up as the video play. It’s handy and a great way to add another level of interactivity to a video.

This one is my fav. I almost spit coffee on my keyboard when I read it.

On another cool info note, check out the new widget in the sidebar here on Ubernoggin. It’s called Auto Roll from Criteo and it displays blog that are similar in content. I’ve found it pretty accurate and interesting in the few days that I’ve had it there. It’s suggested some blogs that I hadn’t heard of that I have, of course, since added to my ever growing RSS reader.

Well, after more than 48 hours our fictional MySpace girl has only 11 friends. We signed up for ten or more “friend trains” and got little to no response. I’m thinking that this is a sign that the “I have a million friends on MySpace” movement has sucked the real interaction out of the site and might mark the eminent demise of the site. On the other hand, maybe the rush to get tons of empty friendships might be what’s actually dying hence the lack of response on the trains. Regardless, I still predict that the new applications on Facebook will make it far more powerful and more useful than Myspace.

The folks at Gizmodo claim that Microsoft will unveil a new product tonight at midnight. Coming from the development division that brought us the Zune (total failure) and the Xbox (turned out better than we thought), this new product isn’t making me hold my breath but my curiousity is piqued.

Tune in later to see more news.

UPDATE:

MIcrosoft releases “Surface” and it’s sweet! I don’t want to wait years for it to hit the commercial market! I want it now!

Mark Bell (www.storygeek.com) and I are currently writing Second Life for Dummies. At the end of the book we’ll be listing a few top ten lists. I’d really like these lists to reflect, not just what I find interesting and useful, but also what others find as well. So here it is, your turn to speak up and nominate your fav SL spots. Leave them as a comment with a SLURL attached. Feel free to nominate as many as you want and pass this link on to others so they can come by and nominate places. These should be “don’t miss” spots of any kind: best shopping, best build, mot creative space…anything and everything!

I was a bit of a slacker with sources on my PowerPoint for last Friday’s Best Practice conference in SL so I’ve received a few requests for sources. I’ll give you one better. I’ll give you my whole research bib. I tend to maintain one big one in a spreadsheet that allows me to draw on all the sources I have indexed for various projects. This lets me compare sources and ideas that I might not have thought of as being connected. I’ve been working on this baby for years. It’s a bit sloppy and has some “intellagirl-ese” in it but you’ll find the sources I mentioned on Friday and maybe a bit more that you’ll find useful so have at it!

Bibliography is here.

Powerpoint is here.

I read this article in my feed the other day about companies who offer to provide thousands of MySpace friends to folks who are willing to pay. This got me thinking so I did a quick Google for “MySpace friend train” thinking I would find these companies. What I found instead of dozens of pages of sites who offer a bulletin to post on your profile that lists the other recent folks who have joined the train (most of which have “whore” or “pimp” in the name) and offer your profile in among the others.

Typewriter and I set up a quick mock MySpace page with a free stock photo for the profile pic and nothing else in the profile. Then using the friend ID of our fake girl we added the profile to about ten of these trains and posted their adds in our bulletin space on the profile.

Stay tuned to see how this turns out. Type and I have bets:

• Type: 100 friends in 48 hours
• Intellagirl: 1000 friends in 48 hours

I’m obviously more optimistic about these networks or pessimistic about the somehow vain need that teenagers have for quantity of friends over quality. We’ll accept any friend offer we get over the next few days though we delete Tom so as not to skew the results.

We’ll keep the profile name a secret for now. More on this later so stay tuned!

Typewriter (www.storygeek.com) and I have been talking lately about research methods in Second Life. As in all research, it difficult to balance between personal privacy and research interests. Just how do we get info from people who are trying to just live their lives (first or second)? This got me thinking and wondering about some small sample I could do that might yield something interesting.

I decided to do a quick analysis of a random group of people who had been in Second Life about the same amount of time. Since you can’t search for people by SL birthdate I decided to use last names because they are tied to the windows in time in which the name was available. In addition, I’ve always been interested in whether people feel a kind of familial tie to people in SL who have the same last name. As soon as you see someone who shares your last name you know something about them: they joined within a few months (or less lately) of the time you joined.

I took an hour and searched for every one with the last name Tully, recorded their SL birthdate, the number of groups they belong to, whether they’re partnered, whether their account is verified or not, and whether they have any info on their first life tab. There are currently 242 folks in SL with my last name. All registered between February 2006 and April 2006 (March 13, 2006 is by SL b-day). I put all of this info in a quick spreadsheet and this is what I found:

Assuming that joining groups implies some of kind of SL participation I put the group numbers and birthdays on a graph. It seems, with an exception or two, that people who created their accounts in March 2006 are more likely to have joined more than 5 groups. What does that mean? Does it imply that people who joined in March were more likely to stay in SL and become involved? Perhaps. Now I wonder if there was a news story or some other impetus in March that encouraged a certain type of person to join. I was urged by a friend to check out SL so this will take more research.

Other info I found out:

· Only 3% of Tullys are partnered and only two Tullys are partnered to each other. I don’t know how this percentage matches up against other last names and the overall percentage of partnered folks in SL.

· 45% of Tullys have unverified accounts. Does this imply that they never got really involved? Involved enough to want to buy L$?

· Only 19% of inverified Tullys have any info on their 1^st Life tab.

· 90% of Tullys have no information on their 1^st Life tab.

· 73% of Tullys joined no groups at all. Assuming that no groups means that they didn’t stick around in SL this percentage is almost equal to the percentage of active SL accounts vs. total number of accounts which might imply that the percentage of people who stay after creating an account hasn’t really changed over time but I’m not sure.

Again, this is only a quick, sloppy study and it creates more questions than answers but I find some of the info that it yields very thought provoking.

I’m eager to hear what all you Ubernoggins think.

As is usually the case, it’s Saturday and I’m finally making time to look through the tabs of great stuff I’ve had open in my Firefox window all week.

Lifehacker, which always delivers the UberNoggin goods, has created a Better Gmail extension that makes Gmail even better than it already was. I especially like the conversation preview and the colored labels. In my constant efforts to make technology actually do my work for me, tools like this are certainly helpful.

Go check it out! 

I get super excited when I see a creative application of a technology for something other than it was created for (the definition of hacking I first learned way back when computers were run by gerbils on a wheel but I digress). Check out this method for using Twitter to create a free help desk management system from the Desktop Samurai.

As those guys on the Guiness commercials say “Brilliant!”