Library clips

Googol Deskbar - I’ve blogged a few times about how the Google deskbar is an absolute essential for my daily browserless search, and that it’s no longer available unless you download the Google Desktop…unless you go to PCWorld.
Anyhow the Googol Deskbar is the new alternative, I haven’t checked it out, but it sounds like a winner.

WP-Offline - Not long ago I posted about the Google Gears browser extension enabling you to read content offline and synch back when you are online, so far you can see this in action with Google Reader.
Now there is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to read offline, not just the latest, but all the blog posts from a blog in one click…of course this has nothing to do with synching, it’s more focused on one-click offline reading…I wonder how you delete the data off your PC once you are finished.

Click Comments - a cross between voting/rating and comments, leave a one-click expression of what you think of a blog post, see some related tools. [via TC]

blogTV - another live streaming service akin to kyte, UStream, stickam, PocketCaster, YouCams, operator11, mogulus, veodia, justin.tv…see a review and comparison. For audio streaming we have BlogTalkRadio and Talkshoe.

Vyew - web conferencing…check out the features in a comparison chart. Session results are saved as a VyewBook, and can be embedded as widgets called Vyewlets. Here is a complete list of features…it’s got a wiki feel with the whiteboard and the fact you have a book in the end which can keep being reviewed, and you can live chat and talk, you can collaborate on documents like the many Office 2.0 services (real-time and synchronus), screenshare…it’s got it all.

If you know about Twitter you know about Twittervision, a cool mashup where you can watch Tweets from the public timeline on map (also see Twittermaps).

Problem is that you can’t limit this view to only your Twitter friends, well now you can as shown by James Corbett…it works by reading the Geo (location) element in the RSS feed.

Mind you this isn’t like Twittervision, it’s just a simple way to see mapped Tweets, I guess you’d have to refresh the page…in all it doesn’t seem to work very well for me.

All techie for me, but it’s easier to mash it up, I’ll repeat the steps:

1. Go to your Twitter page and click the “with friends” tab, scroll down and grab that RSS feed
eg. twitter.com/johnt/with_friends…here’s the feed twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/10120.rss

2. Go to GeoRSS Readers converter webpage and enter your feed in the box provided (if this box is populated just paste your URL over it)

This is the URL I got exploreourpla.net/georss/http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/10120.rss

3. Go to Google Maps and enter the URL into the search box

That didn’t work, but this URL did
ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS?feedUrl=http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/10120.rss

So here it is.

Lately I’ve been writing on blog communities and networks, and one such community was taken from Nancy White (I haven’t read her post about this as it is a dead link, but it is refered to in another post), that is the Hub and Spoke community that revolves around one blog.

NOTE: not to confuse this with SNA Single Hub and Spoke temporary step of Network Weaving as outlined by Valdis Krebs and June Holley. This refers to a hub weaver connecting isolated clusters in order to open the gates to information flow, basically connecting the clusters.

If you have a community of people, around your blog or would like to encourage one, what are the options…

Options

Create a forum eg. TechCrunch

Create a group eg. SMT Facebook Group

Join a blog community eg. MyBlogLog, blogcatalog

Create a social network eg. mashable

Memetracker view of your community eg. Mashtracker

MoveableType4 is becoming more social, from Read/Write Web:
“In effect this means that readers can become members of a website, with rights to post alongside authors - including sharing photos, videos, and audio. There is also a new ratings framework and later in the beta period more community features are promised.”

The ultimate is the social network choice, but is only viable if your site is sticky and people will actually go to the trouble of living in a profile. Registering to comment to a forum is one thing, but creating a social profile feels a little more committed.

Preferably you’d want a social network or group page intergrated into your blog, here are some choices anyway…

SOCIAL NETWORKS
KickApps, Ning, elggspaces, People Aggregator, OpenServing, VisiblePath, Kwiqq, me.com, Haystack Networking, Carmun, CrowdVine

GROUPS/FORUMS
QuickTopic, Get Vanilla, Groupee, Google Groups, ezboard, vBulletin, Bordee, Facebook Group, Meebo Rooms, Zpeech, Tangler

For other ways your blog visitors can communicate with you (the blog owner) or with other visitors, please see my post,The various ways visitors can communicate with blog owners…this delves into contact forms, ratings, chat, video, voice message, message board, SMS, etc…