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Agglom : Easily Publish and Share Multiple Browser TabsAugust 18

“Agglom’s basic function is that you can publish your current browser session to the web, requiring little more than a single click…. The saved session then becomes available in three formats: as a web page that displays the links, as a URL slideshow, and as an RSS feed.”

Every couple of weeks I scan Mozilla’s Firefox Add-on site for new additions. I’m especially attracted to the ones that affect browser tab behavior. Last week, while I was actually looking for a Firefox 3.0 compatible alternative to SessionSaver, a little gem popped up that I hadn’t come across before: Agglomerator. Contrary to many browser add-ons that I only keep enabled on my system for a few hours, I’m finding Agglomerator and accompanying service Agglom.com promising enough to stay.

Agglom’s basic function is that you can publish your current browser session to the web, requiring little more than a single mouse click. Shared links can be multi-media or just plain web pages. I created a simple one from Chris Brogan’s personal-branding posts. An even richer example of what Agglom is capable of doing is this Agglom set I found, with videos, photos, links and other resources about Olympic ‘pool shark’ Michael Phelps.

Agglom hands-on
If you’d like to experience hands-on what Agglom can do for you, just read this paragraph. Start by signing up for an account on the Agglom service. Then, install the Agglomerator add-on and restart your browser. Now a new, modest toolbar button becomes available, labeled “Share session”.

Next, make sure you have a bunch of tabs open that you’d like to save as an organized set. Press the Agglom button to save any or all of the tabs you currently have open, then label this custom tab set with a title of your choosing, assign tags as you see fit and lastly publish the set as a private or public list. The saved session then becomes available in three formats: as a web page that displays the links, as a URL slideshow, and as an RSS feed.

Agglom slideshows
Besides the ease with which you can publish collections of URLs, I am particularly impressed with how slideshows are implemented in Agglom. Any set you create on Agglom automatically has a slideshow attached to it that uses the original URLs.  At the moment Agglom slideshows are not progressing automatically. From what I understand the Agglom developer is planning to add this feature, depending on user feedback. Here’s what the Agglom slideshow interface looks like:

What else?
Agglom sessions can be easily changed: you can change the sort order of the links by drag and drop, you can add new links and remove old ones, change their title and URL and adjust the privacy settings.
Public Agglom session links can be accessed through their URL by anyone—no Agglom account is required.  Agglom users can leave comments on the lists that you share and even submit suggestions for improvements to the owner of any list. Here’s what an Agglom page looks like in edit mode, in this case for an Agglom set I created from David Tebbutt’s series of posts on how to handle the press, Media Skills 101:

Company background
Agglom is the prodigy brainchild of 23-yr old Enrico Foschi, an Italian web developer living in Bray, a town close to Dublin, Ireland. Enrico launched the first version of Agglom just over a month ago and has improved the service at an amazing pace since then. Here’s a 3-minute video from Agglom’s early days, in which Enrico explains what the service does:

Supercharging Summize Searches in Firefox and FlockMay 10

There are several ways you can integrate the superior Twitter search engine Summize into Firefox or Flock, turning your browser into a very efficient Twitter research tool. In this post I discuss these three:

• adding the Summize search plug-in
• creating a Summize quick search command
• using the SmartSearch add-on to perform in-context queries

Summize Search Plug-in

Add Summize to your Firefox search bar by clicking on the “Install Search Plugin” link on the Summize home page:

The search plugin is available for use immediately after installing. To enter a Summize query, put cursor focus on the search bar with your mouse or press the Ctrl-K keyboard shortcut. Then type your query as usual and press Enter.

Summize Quick Searches
Besides performing searches from the search bar, Firefox also offers the browser address bar to execute search commands. It comes in handy if for some reason you’d rather not change search engines from your search bar. The functionality to search from the browser address bar is generally called Quick Search. In our case you would type in something like “s Obama”, pr

Those heart-felt comments…March 12

I believe my first post on this WordPress blog attracted more comments already than any of my posts on my previous blog hosted with TypePad. Rather unoriginal, the first post defaulted to the title “Hello World” and it sparked an avalanche of reactions from a handful of people around the globe. I knew they were sent by just a few people because their identical IP addresses were shown in the Comments section in the WordPress Admin panel. So apparently these people run a Google search for “Hello World” blog posts and then submit their compliments in bulk about the well chosen theme and topic of my blog. Sure, I’ll get Akismet in place.

Once I’ve figured out how to successfully import my old posts here, I’ll probably transfer them so that I can terminate my contract with TypePad. I have been wanting to get rid of TypePad for so long but would rather not lose my content. TypePad doesn’t just host CleverClogs, but also AWesome, my first attempts at blogging ever about ActiveWords. I also ran a bunch of other experiments. It will take me a while to get up to speed with WordPress.

The pieces on my previous blog were usually quite lengthy and required lots of research and preparation. Sometimes I’d work on a post for a whole day. I’d like to use this new blog to practice writing shorter articles, so that the barrier to actually start writing becomes less high.

So, please animal with me while I get to know this bear

Meebo Integrates MeBeam Video ConferencingNovember 19 2007

As of today, users of the web-based instant messaging client Meebo can instantly open a live video conferencing session with each other, neatly integrated into the Meebo chat window.
From its launch in September 2005, Meebo has developed into a full-fledged multi-protocol chat client. In the very beginning it impressed heavy chat users a lot because of its Ajaxy look and feel and of course because it offered web-based access to the four leading IM networks from one interface. After that, the Meebo developers started their mission to adding numerous new features:
- Jabber support, allowing Gtalk users
- password encryption
- universal sign-on
- extensive localization
- public chat rooms
- widget
- iPhone app
- file transfer
- Firefox add-on

Twitter to Skype Mood Message using TwypeOctober 13 2007

“Twype allows you to grab tweets from *any* Twitter account (there’s no
authentication) and lets you publish that stream as Skype mood
messages. Twype only works from Skype for Windows PCs.”

A new Skype add-on named Twype was just released by its developer Julian Bond. I’m very excited about it because it offers tremendous opportunities and because it fulfills a desire I’ve felt for years ever since I started using Skype. Let me explain what Twype does with a mix of screenshots and text:

Nothing special so far. To have this tweet and all my subsequent ones appear on my Skype mood message, I installed Twype using the direct download URL. Note that Twype will only run from Windows PCs and that you’ll need to put it in your start-up folder to make it run every time you use Skype.

After installing Twype, Skype will prompt you to confirm that you approve the Twype add-on: