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Kari Byron news highlighted links: Whatever happened to Greg and Heather Mroz? LiveScribe pens and "community notes"? I think I have "Social Media" figured out! What is "social media" good for? Fumbling with Foursquare Pairing YouTube with other website content? Any help with the Exchange Web Services edition of... Another Blogger RSS hiccup? Goodbye, Half.com! Matthew Lesko (the "Free Government Money!") guy follow emlarson at http://twitter.com earlier posts: 09.2002   10.2002   11.2002   12.2002   01.2003   02.2003   03.2003   04.2003   05.2003   06.2003   07.2003   08.2003   09.2003   10.2003   11.2003   12.2003   01.2004   02.2004   03.2004   04.2004   05.2004   06.2004   07.2004   08.2004   09.2004   10.2004   11.2004   12.2004   01.2005   02.2005   03.2005   04.2005   05.2005   06.2005   07.2005   08.2005   09.2005   10.2005   11.2005   12.2005   01.2006   02.2006   03.2006   04.2006   05.2006   06.2006   07.2006   08.2006   09.2006   10.2006   11.2006   12.2006   04.2007   05.2007   06.2007   07.2007   08.2007   12.2007   01.2008   02.2008   05.2008   06.2008   07.2008   08.2008   12.2008   01.2009   02.2009   03.2009   04.2009   05.2009   06.2009   07.2009   11.2009   12.2009   02.2010   03.2010

11.30.2009 Fumbling with Foursquare I keep hearing how cool/revolutionary/hip this "Foursquare" thing is, so I figured I'd give it a try. Perhaps part of my problem is that I've got a Blackberry which, for some reason, doesn't yet have a Foursquare client. It works fine from its web browser, I'm told, but... this doesn't make much sense to me. Question: Does the Foursquare client for other smart-phones have some sort of geo-location feature (using cell towers or such)? Because, when using the web browser on the Blackberry, all it does is narrow my options down to the "Twin Cities" (which, if you don't know, is pretty big). I'm 0 for 3 in the Foursquare locations I've searched for, and the search process seems really awkward. When it finds something, the results seem random; that's probably because the locations are manually entered by other Foursquare members, but it seems to lead to a mess. For instance, this morning, I was at the Holiday station in Eagan. There are three Holidays in Eagan, in fact, but none of them appeared in Foursquare search. What did turn up was permutations of "Holiday Gas," "Holiday Station Store," etc. -- some with locations in their title and some without, some with complete addresses and some without. What I want is an app that behaves like your contacts on your phone: Based on cell-tower location, a list of known sites is populated, and as you type parts of the name ("Holiday" or "gas") it would narrow down the list. Plus, I'd like some sort of "scrubbing" of the data on the back-end, so that duplicate entries are matched and removed. Is that something that other incarnations of Foursquare do and I'm just suffering on a bad client, or is what I'm dreaming of just way too complicated for today's technology? posted by emlarson @ 10:43 AM   4 comments - click here now and add your own! 11.26.2009 Pairing YouTube with other website content? Here's something I'm pondering in my spare time -- and I'm hoping that some of my web geek friends can pitch in with some suggestions. The background: I love the 1980s. And 1990s. And nothing captures the spirit of those times like commercials and TV news clips. Thanks to my pack-rat tendencies and the miracle of home DVD burning, I've been able to go through my ancient VHS tape archive and put clips up for all to see on YouTube. But I also own the BigHair.TV domain (where nothing sits at the moment) and I'm hoping to build out a site that features (but isn't limited to) that video content. For instance, I'd love to track down some of the old TV personalities for "Where Are They Now?" interviews... but if it's written rather than video, it would need to be posted somewhere other than YouTube. But, I don't want to be manually "maintaining a blog" -- I don't want to have to post something to the YouTube channel, then go to the blog and write a post about it. Somehow, I want the YouTube content to be pulled into the site automatically (though, admittedly, I don't really know what "the site" would look like at this point). I can't be the only person thinking about this kind of thing -- a web site whose main (but not only) content lives on YouTube. How would you build something like that? posted by emlarson @ 10:55 AM   0 comments - click here now and add your own! 11.25.2009 Any help with the Exchange Web Services edition of Entourage 2008? For Mac users who are trying to get their e-mail from a Microsoft Exchange server, the new (new-ish) Exchange Web Services of Entourage (Entourage EWS) held a lot of promise. And it works great... as long as you don't need your calendar or contacts. That's quite a limitation... and I don't think it's supposed to be that broken. Any suggestions? Here's the situation: If a contact or calendar item is "born" in Entourage EWS, it syncs to the Exchange server just fine. And if you delete that item from another client -- from Outlook Web Access (OWA) or Outlook 2007 on Windows, then it disappears from Entourage EWS on the Mac. But if you create a calendar item on something other than Entourage, it never makes its way into Entourage. That's bad. You can watch Entourage EWS "poll through" all your calendar and contact items -- it says it's downloading them, but they never actually appear anywhere. I turned on logging and see a lot of the following in the huge resulting log file: m:GetItemResponseMessage ResponseClass="Error" m:MessageText An internal server error occurred. The operation failed. /m:MessageText m:ResponseCode ErrorInternalServerError /m:ResponseCode m:DescriptiveLinkKey 0 /m:DescriptiveLinkKey m:Items / /m:GetItemResponseMessage ... [ 689611us, d 0us] Entourage Exchange Web Services: Engine [Exchange folder Calendar]: Reading remote record 722 [ 689611us, d 0us] Entourage Exchange Web Services: CSyncEngine:: FetchRemoteRecords Continuing from recoverable error On and on and on it goes. So, obviously, there's some sort of error cropping up as it tries to read these calendar (and contact) items. Is anyone seeing the same kind of behaior on their Entourage EWS? Or, put differently, has anyone actually gotten Entourage EWS to work with calendar and contacts? posted by emlarson @ 3:36 PM   0 comments - click here now and add your own! 11.24.2009 Another Blogger RSS hiccup? Yes, it's been ages since I've posted anything here -- sorry! A quick update which will be meaningless when examined decades from now... but which makes for a slightly pertinent question at the moment: Did anyone see all of my old posts re-populate the RSS feed a few days ago? When looked at from my Yahoo! feeds page, it says that everything I've written in the past year was written "5 days ago"... which it wasn't. Odd... posted by emlarson @ 1:44 PM   0 comments - click here now and add your own!

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