The Next Web

The perfect lifestream is a simple one

Written on February 22, 2008 – 11:11 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

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I recently started working on a personal blog, just to aggregate all my online content in one place. So let’s say that we meet for the first time and you want to know what I’m doing, I can just tell you to surf to one spot where all my work is presented.

During the designing process, I soon faced the problem of integrating all these services like Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Del.ico.us etcetera etcetera. How can I aggregate all those different types of content without turning my blog into widget paradise?

The answer turns out to be simple: use an escaloop badge. It’s nothing more than a feed aggregator that presents the content in a clean and simple way. Just like the visualization of the service:

Escaloop is a personal side project by German Yahoo coder Carlo Zottmann. I hope he supports his side project with a pretty solid server, since escaloop might get a bit more popular than he thought it would.

By the way, if this article brought you in a lifestream-state-of mind, check out this useful lifestream post on ReadWriteWeb.

aggregate, escaloop, germany, howto, lifestream, tool

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LinkBlip makes your digital life easier by tracking links

Written on February 18, 2008 – 5:37 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

A 25-year old web developer from Seattle just made my life as a blogger somewhat easier. On a daily basis I send out approximately ten emails with questions, meant for CEO’s, fellow bloggers and entrepreneurs, you name it. Because they’re all suffering from the information overload, some emails might be left unanswered. There’s of course the build-in read notification, yet it’s generally experienced as annoying and it creates a weird feeling of obligation. Now this guy from Seattle, Matthew Inman, created a service that makes it possible to monitor links I’ve send out.

In just six hours he built LinkBlip, a service that generates a trackable link. Just copy/paste it in your email and you’ll receive an email when the recipient has clicked on it. Now you at least know whether the unanswered email was seen by the recipient or not. Moreover, you know where he or she is based. It looks something like this:

There’s one downside to this service. The evil-minded now have a new way to bully someone with a enormous load of emails. All they have to do is submit the email addresses of potential victim and then post it on Twitter or something like that. Maybe Matthew will sacrifice one more hour of his spare time to build some sort of security measurement.

How to, lifehacking, linkblip, tool

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