I’m going to try an experiment on all of you. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, much. I’ve just installed Panels, which is a newly launched beta service, on this blog. Panels adds, well, panels to your blog links. From their blog: With the addition of panels to your site/blog your readers are given all the… Read More
Hear Me Now, Read it Later
I saw this post on RWW about Read It Later several weeks ago. I guess Read It Later has been around for a while; it’s a nifty little Firefox add-on that allows you to mark links to read later. Simple enough. Plus it syncs between multiple browser instances, allowing you to have a consolidated reading… Read More
Two New (to Me) iPhone Apps
This blog continues to draw iPhone traffic, so here comes an iPhone post to keep you interested. I installed two new iPhone apps today. I Can Has Cheezburger As I probably mentioned in the past, I tend to install apps, test them for a while, then remove them. Very few stick with me for very… Read More
Mix: Year One
Mix is one year old today. Seems like it’s been around forever, at least to me, but you’ll recall we launched it to very little fanfare at the beginning of OpenWorld 2007. Mix didn’t really get much promotion at all until Marketing decided to solicit session ideas from the community for OpenWorld 2008 back in… Read More
Get Satisfaction’s Ads
I found this nugget in Paul’s Google Reader Shared Items feed: “Get Satisfaction Launches Socialized Ad Policy“. As previously documented here, we like what Get Satisfaction does, and even though ads usually put me right into a coma, my curiosity about how ads could be “smart” (from Paul’s note in Reader) overcame me. Turns out… Read More
FriendFeed Brings the Firehose to IM
Last week, FriendFeed added an IM feature, allowing you bring the information firehose into your favorite IM client. I’m a fan of FriendFeed, but it’s very hard to control the noise level. Typically, each person you subscribe to has several streams of information, e.g. a blog, Twitter, Google Reader, etc., making the amount of noise… Read More
Defrag Debrief: Tuesday
I had planned to do the Defrag recap in a single post, but it got really long. I guess my memory isn’t totally shot yet. So, this is part two of my Defrag recap. Part one is here, if you’re a glutton. Tuesday Tuesday was shorter for both Paul and me, as we had planes… Read More
Defrag Debrief: Monday
Looks like I got out of Denver right before a cold front came through, dropping the temperature significantly. Not that the weather is all that great here in Portland. So, Paul and I were at Defrag Monday and Tuesday, as was Bob, who has done a good job of recapping in near real time. Overall,… Read More
Defrag08 Presentation
Defrag 08: Is that Good? View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social_networking oracle) I presented the above at Defrag 08′ in Denver yesterday. The idea was to take some known concepts around understanding networks and apply them to how we manage a community. This is new ground for us at the lab, but… Read More
An Interesting Week Ahead
No, I’m not talking about the US election, which I will be so happy to see in the rear view mirror. I’m talking about conferences. Paul and I are at Defrag in Denver Monday and Tuesday. Paul is giving a session this afternoon, and though I haven’t seen the slides yet, it’s going to be… Read More
Celebrating Carl’s Life
As Joel announced yesterday, Carl’s family will be holding a memorial service to celebrate his life Thursday, November 6 in Riverside, California. In lieu of flowers the family has set up a Memorial Fund in behalf of Carl’s daughter, Destany. Donations to Carl’s Memorial Fund can be by domestic or international wire transfer or by… Read More
I Am Now Intrepid
I dumped Windows for good back in July and have been running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on my Dell since then. I love Open Source, and for the most part, I’ve enjoyed running Ubuntu. I’ve found it to be on par with XP for stability and superior in usability. Before you quibble with the stability… Read More
A Posse, I Has One
The sadly unfortunate and untimely death of one of our own has me waxing philosophically about our “community”. Those of us who blog about Oracle (or even just blog in general) form a loosely-coupled community of like-minded individuals, i.e. we don’t agree on everything, but we can all agree that blogging is important. I’m impressed… Read More
Google Web Search RSS, Finally
Previously, I’ve listed the methods I use to keep track of all the information floating out in the ‘tubes. One method I didn’t cover is using search, duh. I didn’t cover it because one glaring omission from Google’s web search has been RSS feeds for keywords. If you’ve ever tried to monitor a keyword search… Read More
LinkedIn Launches OpenSocial Apps
Did you notice that LinkedIn debuted their applications platform and some very serious business apps yesterday? LinkedIn continues to chug along as the business social network, and their launch on OpenSocial is of interest to us because of our own work to do this on Connect and their business focus. So, I did a pretty… Read More
No, We’re AppsLab, You Have the Wrong Number
Yesterday, Google announced Labs for Google Apps: Google is making it easier for business customers and schools using Google Apps to also take advantage of our innovations and ideas that aren’t quite ready for prime time. We encourage your organization to experiment with the Google Labs features listed below to improve how you communicate and… Read More
Remember Music Videos?
My latest Intertubes distraction comes courteousy of MTV. Hard to believe, considering how far out of their core demographic I am, and yet here we are. Anyway, the network rolled out MTV Music earlier this week. It’s an archive of music videos, remember those? MTV infamously strayed away from playing videos in favor of reality… Read More
Geolocation: Cool or Creepy?
Location aware services and apps are white hot right now. Cases in point, two new iPhone apps: Google Earth and Brightkite. I can’t seem to find any use for Google Earth beyond the obvious eye-candy, cool factor. This has always been my complaint with Google Earth. It’s nice to look at, but not very useful.… Read More
We Miss You Carl
Carl Backstrom died in a single car accident early Sunday morning. He was 35. Earlier today, the news trickled through several of our Twitter feeds, as a nurse involved attempted to find and notify Carl’s friends. Carl was an avid APEX evangelist and blogger, snowboarder and generally well-liked, nice guy. Carl read this blog and… Read More
AppsLab FAQ: What if Someone Says Something Negative?
It’s been a few months since I did an FAQ post. This one has been on my list of to dos for months, and since I’m not doing as much community management as I did in the past, I wanted to crank out a post before I forgot all the content. The focus of this… Read More