Technology

I've been sitting here today reading tweets and posts from folks preparing for tomorrow's twit-out as they try to synchronize their twitter and friendfeed / jaiku / pounce / brightkite / other messaging platform lists and it's occurred to me that we've created nightmare when it comes to managing our social graphs, the process of re-adding all your friends / buddies / people you follow / etc is painful at best and impossible at worst.  As I join new services I find myself bouncing into my favorite followers websites, friendfeed, etc to see if they have mentioned using whatever the new service is.  To be honest a good part of the reason people don't leave twitter is they don't need to recreate their social graph elsewhere.

Several folks have been asking me as of late why I manage http://seanreiser.com in Drupal and not Wordpress or another blogging platform. And instead of re-answering the same questions I decided it was time for another "inside baseball" post. This is not a feature for feature Drupal vs. Wordpress post. Nor does it consider wordpress 2.5 since I have never really evaluated it.

OK, just joined brightkite (http://brightkite.com/people/nibbler) feel free to add me, if you want.  After using it in Austin, TX this coming week I'll write up how I feel about it.  Although if people could stalk me before, now they can show up where I am at any given moment.

Now, all I need is the API so I can really play.

As regular readers of my blog know I'm using Drupal's ActivityStream module to power the Life Stream page on my site.  I've wanted to add an activity stream block and remove the twitter / lastfm blocks for a while now, but haven't gotten around to it until tonight.  It's a short function but I figure I'll post it in case someone else is looking for it.

Just add the following function to activitystream.module

Some posts this evening about a twitter boycott scheduled for 5/21 to protest the outages at twitter.  Where I'm all for protests that have some meaning, I really don't understand this one.  As far as I'm concerned a protest makes sense when a company's customers feel that the company is willfully mistreating them.  A perfect example of this is the livejournal protest from last month.  LJ users felt that adding adverting without notifying them was unfair and protested.  Whether the protest was successful or not, is another question, not for this post.

So, I might seem to be the most fickle blogger on the planet but I am turning Disqus back on. There are a few things driving this:

Although this mentions Religion, it is really a Tech / soc networking post.

The other day I had a "conversion class" at Church with a group of people who are looking to either be received into the Church or for Adult Confirmation.  As we were leaving I mentioned to a couple of folks that someone reached my blog by goggleing "tom synan conversion" (Tom Synan was the Priest running the class), and I was curious if it was one of them.  Their answer baffled me, "I've never really understood, what's a blog"?  I resisted the urge to say "google it" and I did my best to explain blogging and the basics of social media. 

There are currently 3 feeds that I'm building and hosting here that I'm moving over to feedburner (mostly to preserve bandwidth).  I'll be setting up redirects but for now they are just being replicated.  The new links are as follows (I've updated the original posts as well):

So in the last few weeks I've taken on a few projects involving comments on seanreiser.com and it seems that they are conflicting with each other, and I've come to the decision that where I like disqus, I have to go back to the default Drupal comment module.

One of my tweeps @AnnOhio sent me a post card from her travels and while I was looking at it a flashed back to the QSL cards that HAM radio operators use.