BabbleBlog

Once again, Babbledog is sponsoring another WebNOB! Please join us to network with folks north of Boston who design or develop web-based applications!

“Our guest of honor will be Jesse Devitte, Managing Director and Co-founder of Borealis Ventures. Jesse will give us an update on the state of the venture capital marketplace, and implications for web-based startups North of Boston and around the country.”

Details:
Jillian’s
50 Phillippe Cote St
Manchester, New Hampshire 03101
Wednesday, July 16
6-8 PM
Donations and other sponsorships are welcome.

RSVPs appreciated via Upcoming, Facebook (where there’s a WebNOB group), this blog post, or Babbledog.

After listening to a number of Twitter fans talk about the site and its recent chronic problems with downtime, I continue to wonder how a site can maintain its popularity when suffering such severe issues. What came out in the meeting is how a number of fans are flocking to the Fail Whale, the symbol Twitter uses when there’s an interruption. There’s a fan club, a line of merchandise, a Twitter account folks can follow, a postage stamp, bits on Facebook, parodies of the image, and a number of other things. In some ways, the symbol of failure is becoming more prevalent than the service. What does that say about the image Twitter chose? Maybe Babbledog needs a cool image like that, too. (But we don’t want to have to display ours as much as Twitter does.)

Don’t forget: Babbledog allows microblogging, too. Whether Twitter is up or not, give it a go! (We don’t have a character limit, but you can count to 140, if you want to.)

When Twitter is up, you can learn about cool posts through Babbledog’s Twitter account.

Today, Friday, June 20, is supposedly Take Your Dog to Work Day. For those of you who can’t actually take a real, animal dog to work, we encourage you to take Babbledog instead. It’s quite portable, won’t bark at your cubicle mate, and won’t poop on the rug in your boss’ office.

It’s also supposed to be the happiest day of 2008. Drop by to let us know how the day is going for you. Do what you can to make it a good one!

I’m having a lot of fun at the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference, especially because I get to talk to people about what Babbledog is and what they would like in a site like it. Interacting with librarians and other information professionals is nothing new to me. I’ve been involved in the association for several years because of previous jobs. We want librarians to know about Babbledog because of their nature as people who know about and want to share terrific Internet sites and because people often rely on them for good sources of information.

A woman I met last night asked me about whether Babbledog would be suitable for scholarly content, especially full-text articles from journals. Since we were at a loud reception, at first I thought she had misheard my explanation of the site and thought Babbledog was some kind of scientific database instead of it being a social news/microblogging site where anyone can post a variety of material.

“Does Babbledog have full-text? You know, because many places say they do, but they really don’t,” she inquired.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m attending the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference in Seattle. Any members of the Babbledog community going, too? Find me. Tell me what you love and hate about what we’re doing. I’ve got Babbledog lanyards to distribute.

Remember the new look we tried recently? We got enough positive feedback about it we’ve rolled it out again. Stop by to tell us what you think!

Another change that should make some of you happy is that we stopped using a percentage in the progress bar and now just show a numerical score. Just like the percentage, you get points for activities like registering, posting, commenting, voting, searching, and creating and supporting causes. Compete with other Babbledoggers for the highest score! (Why does talking about this change make me want toffee?)

Another difference you might notice is the order of the causes on the right of the front page. Instead of a popularity ranking, they’re now ordered based on to which one a thread has been most recently added. You can add items to a cause you support through the Share/Tag link.

My friend: Chat with me ’cause Twitter’s down and I need a break from work
Me: Well, you could always write in Babbledog what you would in Twitter …

At a recent technology meeting with the topic distributed blogging, people were talking about Twitter and all the down time it’s had lately. For some people, it’s a casual annoyance. For others, like one woman at the meeting, who conduct a lot of business over Twitter, it’s a hindrance. As someone working on a site some people consider to have a microblogging function similar to Twitter, my ears perked up as these users were talking about their experiences with Twitter’s outages.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, you read that correctly: Obama unseats the Red Sox. In all the talk lately about politics, you were probably expected something like Obama unseats Hillary. But, no, in this case, I really am talking about politics vs. sports.

For weeks and weeks, the Red Sox cause has been the number one cause on Babbledog’s home page because it had the most supporters. Today, the Obama cause surpassed it in popularity. Hooray for politics over sports, eh?

What I want to know is where are the Yankees fans?!? Why have none of you (and surely you are out there) created a Yankees cause? Or those of you who support other political candidates? There must be more than a few John McCain supporters.

You can find more causes by searching for them or browsing profiles. Don’t see one you like? Create your own!

Here’s another “you asked for it, you got it” change!

Profiles now have URLs that make more sense. Instead of showing you babbledog.com/user/, which won’t work when you give it to someone else to view your profile, and hoping people who view profiles will be able to deal with a long string of letters and numbers, we’ve changed the URLs to be babbledog.com/user/screenname/. For example, you can view Babbledog’s profile at http://babbledog.com/user/babbledog/.

That really simplifies viewing profiles, doesn’t it?

Keep giving us feedback! We really appreciate knowing what you like and don’t like.

We took Babbledog to the groomer and came back with a completely new look that will grow out in a few days. We hope it’s a bit more streamlined than what it was previously because we removed a few things from the front page. Take a look and tell us what you think! Act quickly because it’s a temporary experiment. Comment below, in Babbledog, or write to support [at] babbledog.com.