Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

but i didn’t - tough luck

nite

Wow. I have been part of the alpha trial of socialmedian for a while. Today they moved to Beta.

Today Robert Scoble followed me on socialmedian. Cool!

Here is my spyjournal socialmedian news site, and here is Roberts.

So what is socialmedian?

socialmedian is social news network that connects people with personalized news and information. socialmedian enables you to easily keep up-to-date on the news that matters to you and to people who share your interests. (from the FAQ)

Basically you can create news streams of relevant information to a news topic or category of information. So in my case I have created numerous channels including Drupal, Excel, Microsoft Office and Windows Home Server. As I and other people find news articles or websites relevant to these topics we can add their RSS feeds or the individual page or article to the stream. This can be done as simply as clicking a link on a tool bar. In addition, socialmedian will also recommend sources for you to add based on the topics you have entered for your News Network.

Beth may not be as Internet-geeky as some of us, but she certainly is a geek, she is actively involved in plenty of social networks, and she does blog. So she made the cut for our series!

Name: Beth Snow
Screen Names: drbethsnow - or - Beth77
Personal Blog: drbethsnow.wordpress.com
Social Networks: Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Flickr, Friend Feed, identi.ca, Last.fm, MyBlogLog, Technorati, Twitter. I'm also a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists: http://improbable.com/2007/07/13/beth-snow-joins-lfhcfs/  and the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique.
Current Employment:  I run a research training program in gender & addictions and I teach nutritional sciences courses at the University of British Columbia; I also teach science to elementary school kids as a "Scientist in Residence".
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

What is your reason/motivation for blogging?

I mainly write things that I find entertaining and, somewhat surprisingly to me, others seem to find what I write entertaining as well.  So now my motivation is writing to entertain & build community, as well as because I just like to write.  Oh yes, and to win friends and influence people.

I got this email today from the Live Mesh Team.

I am now using Live mesh to keep folder synchronised between my laptop, my pc, a clients machine where I work regularly and my virtual machine where I do my Office 2003 development. It has made me way more productive. Live Mesh is awesome!

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce the release of our next update, available later today. We are making Live Mesh available to more people and we've greatly streamlined the sign-up process. We've also made a number of general performance improvements. See below for the details, and thank you for using Live Mesh.

Version numbers

• Live Mesh software: 0.9.3103.9
• Live Desktop: 0.9.3103.9

Fixes

• Raised the limit on the total number of customers we'll allow to access the Live Mesh Tech Preview.
• Expanded availability: you can sign up directly, with no waiting list, if your country/region is the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, or New Zealand.
• Removed the limit on the number of Live Mesh invitations you have. Invite new friends and family members to the Live Mesh Tech Preview.
• For our customers in countries/regions other than those above, we've greatly simplified the waiting list process. You no longer need to sign up through Microsoft Connect. You can sign in with your Windows Live ID on www.mesh.com, click Sign Up, and you'll automatically be notified once Live Mesh is available in your country/region.
• Improved the performance of peer-to-peer synchronization.
• General performance improvements.