Since we were already working on 21times.org we decided we could contribute to the effort while learning a bit ourselves. We reached out to some of the top users on Hacker News and asked if we might be able to use some of their content to create a course of motivation post to help keep people motivate throughout this month. A lot of those top users were gracious enough to let us user their content, and this was a great chance for us to test our idea.

So far we’ve received a great response. We’ve had a lot of signups and some great feedback. We’re excited to build this out further and get more courses in place. If you’re interested in getting some encouragement to get your app out this month in your inbox for 21 days, signup for free at hn.21times.org.

Here is my first draft, I’m sure this will evolve over time as things change, but hopefully the core purpose will remain intact. I’m sharing this publicly for additional accountability. If you catch me not adhering to this, please feel free to call me out.

Increasing My Attention Span

Recently I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in my interactions online. If I came across a bit of content that seemed interesting I would immediately scroll down to see how long it was, if it seemed too long, I often wouldn’t read it. It scares me that I don’t have the attention span to read through good content just because of it’s length. I seem to have grown accustomed to receiving my content in bite size portions or through video, that I no longer have the patience for lengthy content. I resolve to read content based on the value regardless of its length. I also resolve to stop watching frivolous videos (some exceptions being keynotes, lectures or sermons).

Digesting Content, Not Just Consuming

I spend too much time reading really interesting content online. Most of which is worthwhile. But just as I don’t eat just to eat, but rather to stay alive and nourish my body through the digesting of that food. I believe I should be digesting that content not just consuming it. I resolve to respond to each piece of content I consume. To digest it and make it meaningful to me. This means responding to it as if I were to post a comment or write my own blog post on the subject. I will not be posting all my responses, but at least I’ve spent the time to understand and digest the content.

Creating Lasting Content

Although a Tweet can be valuable, it can’t last. Just by the nature of Twitter things you post are very transient. I believe that is only adding to the noise, by not creating lasting value. I am going to shift my focus to more lasting mediums, such as blog posts or discussions in comments, etc.

Purposeful Sharing

There is something to be said for spreading good information I’ve found online. But too often I just spew the new found content, unfocused, into the void. I believe sharing that information should be targeted and purposeful. I should have someone in mind when I share a link and not just put it out there and hope someone finds value in it.

Removing Intrusive Distractions

I typically have a Twitter client open at all times, and another one on my phone so I’m constantly connected and receiving messages from Twitter. I also have constant access to email, the alerts constantly vying for my attention. I believe this is counter-productive and that I should determine when I will engage with that content and not let it determine that for me. I resolve to remove those intrusive distractions and instead be purposeful in determining when I will respond to them.

I have only lately begun to wonder whether I’d use Twitter if I were fully at liberty to do what I liked. In other words, I’m not sure I’d use Twitter if I were rich. Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity: it seems my middle-class existence has stuck me here.

Do you think this is true? I know that when I first starting using twitter it was an experiment in growing my network so that I could get more freelance work or get the word out on MightyBrand or other ventures. So, if I was rich would I continue to do this? Wouldn’t I have better things to do with my time? Why would I care about how big my audience was if I didn’t need anything from them any more. Sidenote: I mean this on a professional level. I’ve met some really awesome people through these social networks and that has greatly improved my life. But in the same way we don’t spend every hour of every day with our friends offline, we certainly shouldn’t feel the need to spend our days constantly connected with our online friends.

The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy.

Personally I do find myself believing in the illusion that I’m more important that I am just because of how many Twitter followers, blog subscribers or LinkedIn connections I have. I feel the need to interact with people as if people are going to miss what I have to say if I stop. The other side of that is that I fear missing out on something, I can’t stand to be away from the internet for fear of being left out of some new meme or some new app that will totally change my life.

It seems twitter and other social networks have become a way for me to act busier than I am and thereby feel more important than I am. I don’t get so much email that I can’t stay on top of it, but I do have a lot of twitter followers I feel a need to stay on top of. It’s a sad state of affairs.

I’m in the midst of drafting a new personal online code of conduct for myself to try and climb out of the “bog” and see what lies beyond.

Not only does BlueSwarm collect that information and display it in one easy to use location, we also do sentiment analysis and calculate an authority/popularity score (called a buzz score) for both the author and the item.  This way you can see what’s important to you.  You can sort by positive or negative items, by how popular the item is or by how authoritative the author.  That way you can get to the information that matters to you most, quickly and easily.

Once you have a chance to see what people are saying about your brand, you’ll want to be able to easily respond to these items to keep the conversation going.  BlueSwarm makes it easy to flag items for later follow up or to respond to them via twitter without having to leave the site (and we’re going to be adding even more ways to respond soon).

This is just the start.  We will be adding more services in the next few weeks, more ways to respond, display and interact with the data, as well as more ways to collaborate and share that data.  We hope that you find BlueSwarm useful, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly or anyone else on the BlueSwarm team if you have any questions, feature requests or bug reports.

It’s certainly not anything life changing, but it was a fun application to build and design (yikes! I said it! I design the site, so forgive me if it makes your eyes bleed). Let me know what you think and feel free to comment here or contact me if you have any bugs to report or any features to suggest.

There are a lot of applications for this and with the ever increasing amount of javascript bookmarklets the fun has just begun. Here are my top 10 smart keyword, obviously some of these would require you to sign up for the service being discussed. The bookmarklets are being display as links due to display issues, to snag them just right click and copy the link location or bookmark it.

1. Lorem Ipsum
url: http://www.lipsum.com/feed/html
keyword: lorem
Takes you to 5 paragraphs of dummy text, done.

2. Del.icio.us
url: http://del.icio.us/{username}/%s
keyword: dl {search term}
Allows you to search your delicious bookmarks.

3. Wikipedia.org
url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go
keyword: wp {search term}
Searching of wikipedia.org.

4. Amazon.com
url: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%s&x=0&y=0
keyword: ama {search term}
Search amazon.com.

5. Twitter
url: http://twitter.com/%s
keyword: tw {username or blank for your home}
Look up a twitter users’ profile or leave blank to access your twitter home page.

6. PeqURL
url: PeqURL bookmarklet
keyword: purl
Shorten the url that you’re currently viewing, complete with a super slick thickbox-esque window.

7. Laterloop.com (save for later)
url: LaterLoop bookmarklet
keyword: later
Save the current page you’re on for later reading.

8. Add to Mixx.com
url: Mixx bookmarklet
keyword: mixx
Add the page you’re currently on to Mixx.com.

9. coComment tracking
url: coComment Bookmarklet
keyword: comment
After you’ve written your comment but before you submit it, trigger this keyword to track it on coComment.

10. Localhost
url: http://localhost:8888/%s
keyword: lh {site directory name}
I keep all my projects I’m working in my local htdocs folder, this allows me to access them quickly rather than typing out the entire url. Works well if you develop locally.

Leave a comment with the ones you use the most!

Here is a couple of the features currently available:

• Complete control over the look and feel of the site via CSS
• Add/Edit/Delete web pages
• A blog, which can be used for project announcements or news
• Embedded maps on the page
• Clean, semantic, micro formatted code to aid in SEO.

I hereby present: Craigslist.org OPML Exporter

Hopefully some of you will find this useful.  Please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions or suggestions.

A friend and colleague David LeMieux has made some significant progress on this bookmarklet and has released it for all to use.  Unfortunately due to the aforementioned browser limitations this bookmarklet only works in Firefox 3 Beta 5.  But if that’s what you use for testing then it’s a great tool to add to the arsenal.

If any readers have any ideas on how to make this more cross browser compatible your suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated.  This doesn’t seem to be a difficult thing to achieve, but it does require a more skilled developer than myself.

I want to give a big thanks to all that spent any amount of time trying to get this working.  A special shout out to David LeMieux and Ryan Cross for their help in thinking this through and for the time they spent making some great progress on it.