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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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Quick Fix: Make FriendFeed Bookmarklet Work As Advertised in FireFox 3

FriendFeed is the current “coolest app ever” on the Internet for good reason. It’s a simple central location for all your online social activity. It doesn’t require you to stop using your old sites. It just aggregates everything you and your friends are using in one convenient location. It’s also got an impressive pedigree in that its been created by 2 people who brought us Gmail and Google Maps. You can read more about it on Wikipeida, in Louis Gray’s series on using FriendFeed, and of course the FriendFeed Web site itself.

As I use Friend Feed more, I kept trying to use the Bookmarklet to share sites. It’s billed as the easiest way to add content to your FriendFeed. See the video on the FriendFeed page about it.

My bookmarket would never work as advertised though. It required me to log in every site even though I had already logged into Friend Feed. Since I keep a complex password, this really annoyed me. This also prevented me from ever sharing a link in a room on Friend Feed. A room is basically a group dedicated to a topic.

What was the problem? In FireFox 3 you can easily shut off access to third-party cookies and I use that option. In theory, this prevents cookies from sites you didn’t visit from being able to track you.

The problem with this is that FriendFeed is seen by Firefox as a third-party cookie when I used the bookmarklet which meant that it wouldn’t allow the cookie that had my login credentials to FriendFeed to be used I tried to add a site to my FriendFeed stream.

To fix that, you need to add an exception to the the no-third-party-cookies preference. Open your preference panel in Firefox (called Options on the Windows side, I believe) and open the Privacy tab.

I’ve marked in this screen shot where the unchecked third party cookies option is. Now select the “exceptions” button.

In this window, just end “friendfeed.com” in text field and click the “allow” button. You’ll now see “friendfeed.com” listed as an allowed third party cookie. Now your FriendFeed bookmarklet should work across any site as long as you’re logged into FriendFeed. If you see the “share to” option in the bookmarklet, you know you’re logged in. Here you can choose your main feed or any room you participate in.

If you added me to your FriendFeed yet, check out my feed and add me if you’d like at http://friendfeed.com/johnfmorton. 

How to see where people click on your site and what to do about it.

Do you ever wonder how people use your site? I’ve seen site stats for years, but I like pictures and that why I was excited when I discovered Crazy Egg from reading yet another great post on Chris Brogans blog. (Question: Does Chris ever sleep?) If you have any site online, you owe it to yourself and the people who visit your site to give Crazy Egg a look.

Want to see it in action? Using Crazy Egg I did a short test on SuperGeekery, shortly after posting my previous post to this one. From the screen shot above of my Crazy Egg dashboard, you can see during the 3 days I ran the test, I had 40 visitors to the site with 15 additional clicks down deeper into the site.

Where did those visitors click? Crazy Egg provided this “heatmap” of where people clicked. You can see people click on the search field quite a lot to give it focus so they can enter a search. How should I use information like this? I should probably give focus to this text box. (If it’s working as planned, the search box already has focus. You can tell if your cursor is blinking in the right hand column.) In a future update, I’ll probably make the search bar easier to spot as well.

Since I can see people clicking over to my portfolio site, I should probably make that an easier link to click as well. That’s how I try to make a living, so that would be a good thing. Warning, sales message ahead: Please feel free to get in touch with me if you’ve got advertising, strategic, or development work. (grin).

Since I’ve just got a small site, the free version was plenty for my person use. I’ll recommend it to future clients though. Give Crazy Egg a spin. 

Dealing with my Internet-induced ADD

I just finished this month’s cover story from The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The basic premise of the article is that due to the Internet, the amount of content available and how content is presented on it, the way we consume information has changed to such a degree that it may be altering our ability to process and ruminate on larger ideas. Our brains may be physically changing, thus “evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’”

In what turned out to be ironic, I felt I didn’t have time to read this article. It was just too long and I had too many things to do so I converted it to an audiobook file and listened to it instead on my iPod. If a 4000+ article sounds like it’s longer than you’re likely to read, you won’t get any flack from me, given the state of information overload. You can download my audiobook file I created here. It will work in iTunes.

Listening is one way I try to manage the volume of stuff I want to read. I subscribe to The New York Times audio digest through Audible and have that news read to me while I’m running errands as well. It’s one way I try to manage what I think of as Internet-induced ADD. Since one more acronym won’t do that much more damage to already fried synapses, I’ll just call it IIADD.

Note: Although, I didn’t intend for this to be a “how to” post, converting text to an audiobook is not difficult. I use a free script that installs a service on the Mac that will convert selected text into a spoken audiobook that I can listen to on my iPod when I’m running between errands. You can learn more about it here. This conversion utility only works on Macs, although there might be a Windows and Linux solution out there.

While reading, or, rather, listening, to the article, I thought about my own experiences as a fully immersed net citizen. Since I’m online so much, I fight the distraction of a wealth of tempting content every day. Email, news sites, Twitter, Facebook, Friend Feed, Podcasts, Google Reader, YouTube, etc. There’s an unbelievable amount of stuff I want to read, listen to, or watch. Although I love to read, the volume is exhausting.

Reading The Atlantic article made me evaluate one of my daily routines. If you follow my Twitter feed or read much of this blog, you know I own a Kindle and I receive the Wall Street Journal on it every morning. I actually subscribe to both the web site version of the Wall Street Journal and the Kindle version. The content on the web is a much richer experience with video, photos, links to related articles and more. The Kindle version is very bland by comparison. It doesn’t even have any photos. Just words. Many, many words. Occasionally, it will feature a simple line drawing of a person but that’s the extent of the visual stimulation you get.

The Kindle’s limited screen real estate dictates that the newspaper’s content be delivered in a linear fashion. There is a single column of text listing the headline of each story in the day’s paper and, for major stories, a summary paragraph. I start at the beginning and work my way to the end. If a headline or summary interests me, I have only one place to click and that article takes up all the screen. When I’m finished, I go back to the list of articles. Simple. A black and white screen with only words is not the only anachronistic part of my Kindle experience. I also don’t read my Kindle at my desk. I’m usually in a chair by my window with a cup of coffee, sitting quietly, reading for about an hour. (Below is a small gallery of Kindle screen shots. Just click on any image to see a larger version.)

Since I’m also a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal’s web site, I’ve tried to read the daily paper online many times but I’ve never been able to consume and successfully digest the same amount of information sitting in front of my computer even though there is a rich experience right at my fingertips. The level of distraction and the habits I’ve formed online are working against me.

Since most of the information I want to take in can’t really fit into the Kindle’s framework, I’m constantly trying to manage my IIADD.

As I write this, Google has added a feature to their Labs version of Gmail called Email Addict that “lets you take a break from email and chat by blocking the screen for fifteen minutes and making you invisible in chat.” Hitting refresh gets you right back in though.

For even more “freedom” from distraction, check out Freedom, a small piece of software for the Macintosh. For a donation of just $10, you can disable “wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for up to three hours at a time.” Now you know, the price of freedom is $10. For me, that’s also the price of getting work done.

I’ve also mentioned Write Room in an earlier post called “Can’t my computer see I’m working?” as one way I try to shut out the distractions when I write. I’ve been using that particular tool less recently, but I still find it useful for some situations.

I guess to close this long post, (and thanks for reading this far, by the way) I love to hear from you if you’ve got any special tricks for dealing with IIADD. Personally, I’m fighting that physical change in my brain the article from The Atlantic that started this train of thought as hard as I can.

Update: A day after I posted this, The New York Times published “Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast” about technology companies dealing with the issue. I especially like the idea they mention of “Zero E-mail Fridays.”

Amazon, what’s wrong with the world today and how can we fix it?

If you have a Kindle from Amazon, there’s a feature feature called NowNow. You ask it any question and 3 real people, hired by Amazon, search for an answers and send them back to you. (The service is free for now, but it’s listed under the experimental label in the menu.)

I’ve used it several times and the answers have been surprisingly good. Today I asked a question without any definitive answer, “What is wrong with the world today and how can we fix it?” Keep reading for the 3 responses I got.

There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>

Traveling Through US Customs? Your Data Is Not Safe.

When I travel, I usually have some sort of computer with me, whether it’s a laptop or something simpler like an iPod. Just over the past few days, after returning from an international trip, I learned of a new ruling that says that US Customs now has “the responsibility to check items such as laptops and other personal electronic devices to ensure that any item brought into the country complies with applicable law and is not a threat to the American public,” according to Lynn Hollinger, a Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman. (via the Wall Street Journal’s Business Technology blog.)

What does that mean? The ruling seems wide open for interpretation. Obviously, you can’t bring in some sort of terrorist plans on your laptop. I don’t know anything how terrorist work. Maybe bad people bringing data across the border on laptops is a big problem.

What’s another way to read the statement from the Customs spokeswoman? Complying with applicable law means not breaking copyright, right? What if you’ve put some movies on your laptop that you’ve ripped from some of your DVDs? That breaks copyright. That’s illegal under the current law. What if you’ve got MP3’s you can’t prove aren’t stolen off the Internet on your iPod? Does that count? If you read the Customs Agent’s quote, it seems to. It at least gives an easy excuse to detain you. According to the Guardian, the UK news site, US Customs “can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days.”

A recent article from Ireland’s RTÉ, US seeks intrusive copyright powers, suggests that the copyright protection issue is actually the reason behind this new practice. “More worryingly, the treaty suggests that customs officers should be given the right to search laptops and media players for pirated material. Such officers would be able to confiscate and destroy anything they believe to be pirated, fine the owner and confiscate the equipment.”

For some reason, this story hasn’t gotten much traction in the public sphere, so I wanted to mention it here. If you’re traveling, since this is now the law, you’ve got no choice but to deal with it. One way of doing that is not bringing anything on your laptops or other devices across the border that you don’t feel comfortable having Customs go through in minute detail. Password protection won’t protect you either. According to the same Guardian article, “the border agent is likely to start this whole process with a “please type in your password” and if you refuse, you could be refused entry into the country.

What should you do? Luckily, there are a couple blog posts dealing with this exact issue that you should check out. The first is from CNET, Keep your data safe at the border, and the second is a followup to that post at Crunch Gear, Locking down laptops from the TSA Customs, with a tip for Mac users.

By even raising this issue, I think it’s obvious that I don’t like this situation. If you’re a US citizen, it’s your responsibility to contact your elected officials and tell them your thoughts on the matter. To contact your elected officials start at the Contact Elected Officials page at USA.gov. In the meantime, you’ve got to deal with the current state of affairs and act the best way you see fit. Good luck.