Now it’s just a matter of time before developers make the shift.

As luck would have it, Instapaper Free makes a great reading source for your iPod or iPhone. I’ve been using the free instapaper web service for about half a year now and frequently find something online I’ll flag to read later with the keen bookmarklet. Then, when I have an Internet or phone connection, I can sync my articles in the app on my iPhone. Instapaper even reformats the articles for mobile consumption using something similar to Arc90′s Readability bookmarklet.

Of course, now I’ve finished all my saved articles and am left wonderig what to read next. I have a few books loaded into Stanza, but I’m right in the middle of another book and don’t feel like switching. So I’m blogging. From somewhere above Quebec. The iPhone WordPress app keeps getting better.

Update! While writing this post I was thinking, “gee, this’d be cool if I could get this content onto my Kindle”. Sure enough, there’s an experimental option on the Instapaper page to download any folder’s most-recent 20 items in .mobi or ePub formats. Nice!

Sure enough, the good people at Automattic have already done this and it’s been available for quite some time. It is a bit of a n3wb mistake not to have noticed it earlier, but that’s ok. I am comfortable in my ignorance.

Prepare yourself for more blogging!

Last.fm has never had a public radio API, although we’ve tolerated third-party clients using the undocumented calls that our client uses. This is finally about to change – we’re going to make a public, documented streaming API available to everyone who has an API account.

This will block out existing apps like Songbird and Fire.fm to name a couple.

Way to go.

I’ve mentioned my enthusiasm for Last.fm recently. It’s an interesting service whose value isn’t immediately obvious when you first look at it. It plays music? You think. Why would I want to tell them what I’m listening to? You ask. Aren’t I just giving them information for nothing? You wonder.

The value becomes apparent when Last.fm begins to get to know you. I woke up Thursday morning with 4900 plays on my profile, all from iTunes or my iPod. I figured this was going to be the day I cracked 5000 so, to make it interesting, I connected to the Recommended station through the desktop software and started listening. There were a few skipped tracks in there, but amazingly, I came away with 89 tracks that I did not hate. That is a pretty impressive hit rate. You can see the playlist of recommendations but may need to be a subscriber to view the contents, which kind of sucks, but I guess there are limits to how much sharing you can get away with for free. In any case, here are a few of my favorites:

Fluke: A trio of electronic musicians from the 80s, their career spans over 20 years. Similar to The Crystal Method, Junkie XL or Underworld, the tracks I heard were interesting and had some depth to them.

Calla: an experimental, post-rock band with elements of (or inspiration for) I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, Arab Strap or Blonde Redhead, they struck me as dark, noisy and worth digging deeper into.

stellastarr*: an American indie band based out of New York City. Comparisons to Interpol, The Stills and the Dears abound.

Elefant: A relatively new band in the vein of Interpol and stellastarr*. I liked what I heard.

It’s hard enough to find new bands without trusted recommendations. Having a system that can recommend music you’ll like with a fair degree of success is definitely cool.

Here’s the playlist:
1. The Walkabouts – Devil in the Details 4:25
2. Fluke – Bermuda 7:55
3. Swervedriver – Sci-Flyer 5:13
4. Elefant – Love 4:01
5. The Constantines – Million Star Hotel 4:41
6. Galaxie 500 – Blue Thunder 3:49
7. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – Spread Your Love 3:44
8. Jason Collett – These Are the Days 3:00
9. Shriekback – Lined Up 4:05
10. stellastarr* – Somewhere Across Forever 3:40
11. A Place to Bury Strangers – To Fix The Gash In Your Head 3:48
12. Swervedriver – Duel 6:20
13. XTC – Making Plans for Nigel 4:14
14. Fluke – Snapshot 4:08
15. Adorable – Still Life 2:38
16. The Constantines – Time Can Be Overcome 5:43
17. The Watchmen – Any Day Now 4:39
18. The Psychedelic Furs – Pretty in Pink 3:56
19. Cuff the Duke – Take My Money And Run 2:54
20. Gang of Four – Glass 2:28
21. Memphis – Into The Wild 3:27
22. Pavement – Baptist Blacktick 2:02
23. The Diableros – Olympic Island 4:07
24. stellastarr* – In the Walls 3:48
25. Amy Millan – Come Home Loaded Roadie 3:57
26. Moist – I’m Going To Judo Chop Your Boyfriend 6:12
27. Belly – Pressure 4:35
28. The Wrens – Nightswimming full track 4:30
29. IMA Robot – Disconnect 3:30
30. The Unicorns – The Unicorns: 2014 (demo version) 3:35
31. Delays – We Together Make A City (Love Made Visible) (Torchteam Remix) 5:01
32. The Stranglers – Golden Brown 3:25
33. Nada Surf – Concrete Bed 2:23
34. Big Audio Dynamite – Rush 4:15
35. Calla – Mayzelle 3:13
36. Swervedriver – Rave Down 5:06
37. Pavement – Shoot the Singer 3:15
38. Swirlies – Pancake 3:14
39. The Telescopes – You Set My Soul 4:00
40. Airiel – Stratosphere 5:51
41. Enon – In This City 4:00
42. Modwheelmood – MHz 4:42
43. Sufjan Stevens – Ring Them Bells 6:20
44. BT – The Internal Locus 10:25
45. Ochre – Oneirist full track 2:08
46. Ochre – Sosacharo 6:39
47. The Cinematics – A Strange Education 5:24
48. Lilys – Day Of The Monkey 3:48
49. Architecture in Helsinki – Do the Whirlwind 4:38
50. M. Ward – O Lazy Days full track 3:19
51. Calla – Love Of Ivah 5:15
52. Jesus Jones – International Bright Young Thing 3:11
53. Les Savy Fav – The Year Before The Year 2000 4:10
54. Wisp – 1stop 2:05
55. Simple Minds – Don’t You (Forget About Me) 4:19
56. Plaid – Light Rain 3:49
57. Nada Surf – See These Bones 5:10
58. Abfahrt Hinwil – Tech7 3:56
59. Bedhead – Beheaded full track 4:43
60. Secede – Born in a Tropical Swamp 9:26
61. The Flashbulb – Lawn Wake IX 2:35
62. The Wrens – Destruction/Drawn 1:29
63. Guided by Voices – Hold on Hope 3:33
64. Wisp – Congratulations 4:15
65. Starflyer 59 – Underneath 4:35
66. The Telescopes – Flying 2:53
67. Simple Minds – Alive and Kicking 5:26
68. Superchunk – Pink Clouds 3:23
69. Julian Cope – Sunspots 5:15
70. Working For A Nuclear Free City – Troubled Son 2:44
71. The Divine Comedy – Diva Lady 4:16
72. Plaid – Squance 5:00
73. Ester Drang – Proustian Moments full track 4:05
74. Nada Surf – Blankest Year 2:12
75. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions – Rattlesnakes 3:26
76. Chris Clark – Bricks 2:40
77. Dinosaur Jr. – Freak Scene 3:36
78. Bola – Versivo 7:51
79. The Dismemberment Plan – A Life of Possibilities 4:33
80. Loop – Spinning 6:29
81. Lloyd Cole – Woman In A Bar 3:36
82. Proem – Invisible for All 3:51
83. Pretty Girls Make Graves – Bring It on Golden Pond 2:57
84. Jega – Phlax 3:51
85. Venetian Snares – Hajnal 7:44
86. The Music – Welcome to the North 5:09
87. Rogue Wave – Lake Michigan 3:48
88. Clark – Dew on the Mouth 1:05
89. Pop Will Eat Itself – Ich Bin Ein Auslander (Loved track) 4:00

PS, not a single member of Coldplay was harmed in the writing of this blog post.

Normally I do my blogging with Ecto. It’s decent software though still in beta for version 3.0. I like Ecto a lot and will likely continue to use it. I enjoy using external apps for writing – call me old-school. I can take it.

So it is with some interest that I’m trying out ScribeFire. This is not a simple “here’s your blogs post page in a sidebar” kind of extension. This is a full blog-editing application built in XUL and embedded within Firefox. It appears to have a bunch of other features as well, allowing you to publish web-pages to a variety of sharing services like Digg or Facebook. It also has del.icio.us integration allowing bookmarking bookmarking and tag-searching from within it. This feature alone is useful as del.icio.us hasn’t updated their Firefox add-ons as of this writing for version 3.0. That said, the del.icio.us integration in ScribeFire feels a little crude.

As a blog-editor, it seems pretty feature-ful. It supports editing pages in WordPress (a feature only recently added to Ecto) and embedding flickr or youtube links. The included search tools for grabbing images from flickr or videos from youtube does seem a bit limiting though. They are basic and you might do better to actually find the content you were interested in on those services yourself.

ScribeFire feels like a very reasonable blog-editing application. It gets the job done and seems to support most of the editing features I would want. Edits are easy (I’ve edited this twice now) and the sharing integration for Digg also feels pretty decent. Because it’s built on top of Firefox, a lot of the integration with third-party sites is essentially seamless, allowing you to use your login credentials for those sites right in Firefox. Awesome stuff!

Technorati Tags: blogging, wordpress, firefox, extensions

Let’s paint a hypothetical picture, 5 years down the road:

del.icio.us: Five years from now, the yahoo! acquired bookmarks service has been rebranded as Microsoft Windows Live Favorites and is tightly-integrated with IE9. Users have options to sync their bookmarks with the Live service and can view bookmarks in the Xbox 720′s Xplorer browser (for a low-per-use cost of only .05 points per visit). Microsoft Windows Live Favorites only provides legacy support for “alternative” browsers (outdated versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera) and users refusing to use a Windows Live Passport are unable to access their bookmarks. RSS reading has been dropped in favor of Microsoft’s Live Channels format.

flickr: Gone are the somewhat clumsy, but usable Flash components of flickr (rebranded as Microsoft Live Photo.net), replaced by all new Silverlight components. After the initial roll-out of Silverlight 1.0, the subsequent version 2.0 saw little support for Firefox, Safari and users of Mac and Linux, despite the best efforts to implement an open source version on those platforms. Feature parity is expected sometime around Q2 2014. New features include online photo editing with photopaint.net and the addition of home movies. Users also have access to their photo libraries on their Xbox 720 and Zune players and can upload photos directly from their Microsoft-powered smart-phones. Former users of flickr from before the acquisition have largely moved on after a considerable legal battle to force Microsoft to have their pictures removed after a number of people complained about seeing their photos show up in Microsoft ads on MSNBC. The new Microsoft Live Photo.NET EULA is 27 pages long and no longer provides CC-Licensing support as an option.

Yahoo/flickr Groups: Yahoo Groups and flickr have had vibrant user communities dating back over 10 years. Some suggested that these were the real reasons Microsoft put in its bid 5 years ago to purchase the Yahoo! machinery. Now, 5 years later, Yahoo and flickr groups have become tightly-integrated with MSN Messenger and members of groups can easily chat with one another online, share pictures, home movies and discuss topics of interest. Of course, most groups are also havens for spammers and automated bot systems that fire messages soliciting users to visit penis-enlargement sites, online casinos and adult match-making services. Then there are the viruses…

Zimbra: Just before MSFT acquired Yahoo!, Yahoo had acquired Zimbra. The little online mail and calendaring system that won the hearts of many and the inboxes of more than a few companies. Zimbra’s server tools, now rebranded as Outlook Online has been wedged into Exchange server. The web-front end has been remodeled using Silverlight and is now Windows only. Previous versions of the tools have been end-of-lifed. Windows Smartphone users can access Outlook Online services through Outlook Mobile. Other office apps have been integrated online as well and Yahoo/Microsoft have a subscription service for hosting all of your online office documents which can be shared with other Yahoo.net users and groups.

Yahoo! Maps are available directly on vehicles equipped with Microsoft’s SYNC (now known as Windows Auto) as well as on Zunes through the Windows Live Wifi services.

Alright, enough navel-gazing. Yahoo.NET is now People Ready. I get it. As a user of del.icio.us and flickr, I’m pretty concerned about my data and where it could end up. Currently it’s there and pretty easy to get at. Five years from now I can imagine it being much harder to extract. I don’t want Silverlight apps.

I should also say that Microsoft isn’t stupid. I have no doubt that the real reason they’re interested in Yahoo! is because of the users they already have. Driving them away en masse would be bad for business, and at the price they’re reportedly paying (upwards of $45b), they’re going to want Yahoo! to be a money-maker.

Finally, I’m just going to link to a funny blog post: What if Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

It’s rare, but once in awhile, you hear something come out of the canadian government that actually makes sense. It’s very nice to see that our privacy commissioner has some excellent people guiding her through the current morass of copyright crap that’s being forced down our throats by all the big media heavy hitters.

Way to go, Privacy Commish! Now, about that Facebook…