Phil Bradley's weblog

Rummble - for people and places you love.

For people and places you love.. Fair play to Rummble for sorting out their issue earlier in the day (see earlier post), and so it's only fair on my part to give them a proper review. It's going to be hard for Rummble to get over the 'Oh, it's another location check in service' attitude. However, a big difference between them and their competitors is the rating system and what they call 'trust networks'. The idea is that it works out who you trust for diferent types of content - so the more you rate things, the more networks you can access, which in turn increases what you can discover.
This means that you can discover interesting things from thousands of people, not just a single small network.

Rummble works with your smart phone, which also then allows you to take a photograph of something to share at once on Twitter, Facebook and other usual suspects. Their archive goes back to January 2007, so they've obviously been around a while. I've not tried it myself, but the interface screenshots look nice and clear (nice to see the geolocation shots are UK based as well!) Having looked at the team page I'm assuming that they are a London based organisation, which is a nice change, and (exploring the site as I type) their London office is at Clerkenwell Road.

They certainly seem to have a following - there's a live Twitter feed for mentions, and it was ticking over nicely while I was on the site. They have a few friendly quotes from Mashable, TechCrunch and The Guardian as well (but guys - you need to add in the links to the reviews as well, so we can read the rest of the good stuff!)

So, if you're looking to try out one of these services, and want to do something a little bit different, give it a go. Especially if you're UK based - give some love to the UK resources!

Bottom line: interesting twist on the concept, brownie points for flexibility, adaptability and friendliness!

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Rummble - most unwelcome welcoming screen ever?

I saw a reference to a site called Rummble which looked interesting, so clicked along for a look, only to be presented with this opening screen:

How insanely ridiculous is that? Whoever heard of having to have joined another resource in order to view another site (software excluded obviously). Moreover - how unfriendly is that? It's not even 'you can connect' or 'your experience will be better'. No, it was 'requires that you Connect'. My immediate reaction was 'thanks, I'll go elsewhere'. I wonder how many other people think the same, and move on at once?

Of course, the stupid thing is that you can just close the dialogue window down and look at the rest of the site. I can then look at their video, follow the link to their blog, read their about page and so on. However, since they require me to do something else, they're clearly not that bothered that I find out more about them, or tell anyone else. So I won't. :)

Bottom line: Rummble: most unfriendly site on the web?

Social media bars: value and use

You may recently have started to see various different footer bars appearing on pages that you view. These are generally known as Social media bars or footer bars. I've written an article on my website (both links are the same) that looks at exactly what these things are, what they do, options, how you install them and listing the main contenders. It's worth reading the article if:

• You're a webpage/site author
• You run a weblog
• You want to upgrade/update your website and you're not sure of how to do it

I was suprised at just how easy it was to create these - and I've done examples of the 3 major contenders in the area on my site for you to take a look at. I can pretty much guarantee that if you're capable of reading this, you could create and use one of these yourself. There's also a poll in the footer bar in the article - I'm torn between two, and I'd be interested in your votes!

spellr.us | Automated Website Spell Checking

spellr.us is a website tool that automatically spell checks websites and provides a monitoring service that regularly checks your website for spelling mistakes. It's in closed beta at the moment, but you can request an account and they come through fairly quickly. I played with it a little and it's very fast. It pulls up errors which it lists by error, rather than by page initially, and offers to show you your pages with all the errors on them. The language dictionary is US, but you can add to 'My Words' which is logical. Wasn't too sure about some of the terms they picked up - they didn't like weblog, blog, internet (lower case I think), webpages, podcasts, favourites (UK spelling), spyware and a few other technical terms.

I was impressed with the speed and ease of use. The display of results was fine, but I'd have liked some more native understanding of internet related terms. Would I pay for it? (They're looking at pricing models at the moment) No, not a chance.

Ajax Whois 2.0 - fast domain name search and whois

Ajax Whois 2.0 - fast domain name search and whois. This is very helpful if you're exploring domains. It allows you to see if a domain name is available, and if it isn't, you can get information on who it belongs to. It also links into a site called Statsaholic which looks a little like Alexa in that it does a people count of monthly unique visitors, and terms that draw people to a specific site.

Sky One - how bad is the website?

Just how bad IS the Sky One website? It doesn't work properly with Firefox, it keeps crashing, spews out error messages like a kid on Easter Sunday who has eaten too much chocolate, doesn't load properly in the first place, appears to be consistently overloaded and is, not to put too fine a point on it, pants.

Statsaholic: Website Statistics and Website Traffic Graphs

Statsaholic: Website Statistics and Website Traffic Graphs. Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic) blends Alexa website traffic graphs with a lightweight ajax-enhanced interface to satisfy hard-core traffic chart junkies – aka Statsaholics.

LabPixies - Coolest Gadgets On The Web

LabPixies - Coolest Gadgets On The Web. Add a bunch of funky widgets to your pages.

Topicalizer - The tool for topic extraction, text analysis and abstract generation

Topicalizer - The tool for topic extraction, text analysis and abstract generation. Pop in a URL and it'll come back telling you lots of funky stuff about the page you've given it. Frequency of keywords, readability and so on. Useful for SEO/SEM.

Leafletter

Leafletter is a web based application which enables users to create miniature web sites ("Leaflets") and embed them into social networks, blogs, and other web sites with ease.

A Leaflet is a miniature Flash® based web site that can be displayed anywhere HTML is welcome. For instance, a Leaflet could be distributed to the About Me section of a MySpace Profile, the body of a Blog Entry, and in the Portfolio section of a photographer's Personal Website, all simultaneously.

At least, that's what the email that I got said. I watched the demo, and it looks good. I tried it out, and started by adding a Flickr image, but the whole thing hung up on me. This could simply have been a bit of a glitch. If anyone tries it, and it works for them, please leave a comment!