taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Last week I got a very nice mail looking to plug a new music site:

‘I’m not sure if this would interest you at all but wanted to pass on the link to a new website called YouBloom.

It’s a new social networking and e-commerce website set up with independent artists in mind - to help them to make make real money (unlike MySpace etc which just make money from the artists)! It was set up by Irish Musician Phil Harrington and is backed by Sir Bob Geldof.

Admittedly I am involved with the website. I have been helping bring artists on site for the last few months, since I was introduced to the concept by a friend, but would love for you to take a look at the site anyway - even if it turns out to be of no interest to you.’

I normally wouldn’t post these, but I’m a sucker for flattery ;) and the poster had taken the time to read my blog a little. It also looks like the site allows bands to offer free MP3 downloads of their tunes, which IMO is a key factor for bands trying to get promotion.

Tags: music, plugs, social-networking, youbloom

• ExMH dependencies in fink : a few bits and bobs required to get this excellent (though ugly) UNIX mail reader app working on MacOS
  (tags: exmh mail macos porting fink)

• metamail for OSX patch : fixes this ExMH dependency to build on OSX
  (tags: metamail macos exmh)

• Salon.com Life | Old people Facebook disasters : “The funny thing about Facebook is that you’re there with your colleagues and your friends [...] and the next thing you know, you’ve forgotten that your status update is all about how hung over you are.”
  (tags: salon funny facebook privacy generation-gap age 30s online-life life social-networking)

• Stanislav Petrov Day : last Friday, but worth celebrating. on 26 September 1983, a little-known Russian military officer averted global nuclear war, by disobeying procedures and correctly identifying a missile-launch report as a false positive. phew!
  (tags: stanislav-petrov war nuclear russia cold-war 80s anniversaries history)

Tags: 30s, 80s, age, anniversaries, cold-war, exmh, facebook, fink, funny, generation-gap, history, life, macos, mail, metamail, nuclear, online-life, porting, privacy, russia, salon, social-networking, stanislav-petrov, war

Ohloh is fun — a social networking site for free software and open source developers! Well, I guess Advogato was there first, but this is quite a bit more web2.0-compliant. ;) There are some cool features, like neat Sparkline graphs of commits per person over time. nifty.

Here I am, and here’s the Apache SpamAssassin project page.

Tags: coding, contributions, fun, ohloh, open-source, social-networking, software

Ross Mayfield:

Every time I see Gabe Rivera of TechMeme, I ask for the same thing — MeMeme. Give me TechMeme where the core index is based on who I read, about 150 people at any given time, to show me what my friends are interested in.

Funnily eough, that is exactly why I wrote SpicyLinks!

It works pretty well — in fact, nowadays I don’t really bother reading slashdot, Digg, Reddit, et al, particularly frequently, because I know that all the really interesting stuff will be at the top of my newsreader in the SpicyLinks feed.

Anyway, I’ve been calling SpicyLinks a ’summarizing aggregator’, but the discussion that arose from Ross’ posting inspired me. A little bit of hacking has come up with an interesting twist: take a del.icio.us social network, a CGI script called deliciousnetwork2opml.cgi, and 15 minutes hacking on SpicyLinks to support inclusion of OPML via a remote URI, and hey presto — it’s now a social-network summarising aggregator. ;)

Tags: aggregation, delicious, hacks, link-blogs, rss, social-networking, software, spicylinks