Thursday 5 February 2009

Sharing bookmarks from your blog with Delicious

For South African bloggers who want to share their bookmarks.

To provide my blog's readers with the opportunity to check-out sites I like, I set-up my Delicious account today and added its widgets to my blog. Although it seemed simple, it took over 3 hours to get the foundation right:

1 Importing all my bookmarks into Delicious from Safari was easy: 10 minutes, tops.

2 Sharing useful bookmarks took about an hour, as it took me a while to work out that a 'Bulk Edit Beta' option existed... DOH!

3 Delicious used my Safari bookmarks folder structure to generate most two-word (and more) tags. Most of these are not relevant to my blog's readers (much as I'd love to share my bank's details or fireplace choices with you ;)), so removing these redundant tags was the next step. It's a three-step process to remove each tag, though. As Charlie Brown says, 'AAAUUUGH!' That was another hour; going, going, gone.

4 Adding the widgets, testing them on Safari and Firefox and refining them took another twenty minutes.

Anyway, it's done and I'm interested if you think it's been worth the effort? Post and let me know :)!

P.S. If you're on Delicious and like this blog, please add me to your network. Ta.

Sunday 1 February 2009

DIS'-SA-TV-A

Written for South Africa's unfortunate television watchers

Like the music industry before it, the television industry is undergoing an end-consumer-focussed revolution. This is already happening in in the US through hulu.com, sling.com and Apple's iTunes Store.

There, the television user benefits in particular from:

1 Being able to pay for only the show(s) he or she wants, being able to download and view them when convenient,
2 Having advance notice of the series one is interested in, plus convenient access to an extensive back catalogue to 'fill in any series gaps',
3 Reduced (or no) advertising interrupting programming.

South Africans can only dream of such a service being offered locally... sigh! Wouldn't it be great if a future broadcaster offered to:
  • Charge you only for what you (wanted to) watch,
  • Provide a service that fitted into your schedule {versus yours into its},
  • Notified you as soon as new episodes in a series you enjoyed watching are available,
  • Made back-series and old movies readily-available,
  • Informed you if any new channels feature content that you may like,
  • And (perhaps, most optimistically) delivered a no-advertising TV service for an extra fee!

At present, I believe I'm overpaying for MNET's DSTV service. It simply does not offer good value to its pickier, low-volume users.

It's my (naive?) hope that the new entrants into South Africa's TV-broadcasting industry design their products for end-customers like me... versus its traditional benefactors; meatball advertisers :)!


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