Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey

Would you like a radio station for Christmas?

I wanted to get all of my readers something special for Christmas and I finally came up with the perfect thing. I know it seems a little extravagant, but you all mean so much to me that I went ahead and got each of you your very own radio station.

And all you have to do is click a link...

Pandora

Imagine if you could create your very own radio station. Imagine that it is filled with all of your favorite artists, but also regularly introduces you to new music that you love.

Now imagine that this station has no commercials and is free, accessible from any web browser, simple to use, and very high quality. Oh yeah, you can also create as many stations as you want and share them with friends.

Pandora launched recently and has been raved about by people much smarter than me. When I finally gave it a try, though, I was absolutely amazed. If you love music, you will absolutely love Pandora.

You don't even have to create an account to experience how cool it is (major bonus points). You can be experiencing outstanding music in about a minute. Let me apologize in advance for whatever you don't get done today.

Leave a comment or send me an email and I'll send you one of my stations. And if you create some cool stations of your own, send them my way. If you're looking for inspiration, check out the comments on my post, 10 Favorite Albums of All-Time.

Merry Christmas!

Scoble on Feeds

Scoble just finished a massive fall cleaning of his blog subscriptions. He deleted hundreds of sites from his blogroll and in the process published some interesting thoughts about blogs and RSS.

1. People don't unsubscribe from dead feeds. I have seen this on a number of sites. It's strange to see a blog that said goodbye months ago yet still has hundreds of subscribers. It makes me wonder how inflated subscriber numbers are even on active blogs. My guess? Much more inflated than we'd care to admit. Are people actually reading or have they just never taken the time to unsubscribe?

2. Full-text feeds will make you a better person. That's a slight paraphrase, but let's just say that if you're going to set your content free and empower your users, don't stop half way.

3. RSS subscriptions are about who, not how many. This is the post you don't want to miss. The next time someone questions the value of blogs, share this with them. It's all about what audience you are trying to reach. Scoble tells the story of how ineffective some forms of traditional media can be. Are you chasing a microscopic sliver of a massive, largely uninterested audience?

Why not invest your time and energy in connecting your organization with the people who want nothing more than to hear your story and then share it with others?

Blogs are exponential evangelism.

TypePad...please save us from ourselves!

Writing blog posts in a browser has some nice advantages - primary among them the ability to write from any machine with an internet connection. The main disadvantage is just how easy it is to lose everything you just spent 30 minutes writing.

With TypePad, if your browser hangs, you thoughtlessly hit your back button, or you accidentaly navigate away from the page for a search or some other innocent reason, you immediately lose what you've been writing without the slightest warning.

How do I know this? Way too much experience. I've lost a number of posts, though the painful lessons have made me save a draft about every five minutes or so. Worse is that I've had to watch my family suffer - both Ben and Lori have recently lost a lot of time and creativity, which is very sad to see.

What is particularly sad is that we know it doesn't have to be this way. Many current web apps (particularly Gmail) show us how it can be done. Please Six Apart, consider these improvements to TypePad that would be such a help to your users...

1. Auto-save a draft of the post every few minutes, something Gmail introduced recently and is as smooth as can be.

2. When you Preview a post, go ahead and save a draft automatically. I asked for this about a year ago - I can't imagine why this would cause a user any trouble. Once you're previewing a post, you're certainly to the point of wanting to keep a draft of it.

3. If someone has started a post and attempts to leave the page for any reason, ask if they're sure they want to lose what they've written. Again, Gmail does this perfectly.

Ben was so frustrated when this happened recently that he went ahead and figured out how to use MarsEdit on his own so he won't risk losing anything. I hope Six Apart will add features like these soon instead of investing time in tip jars and other money-generating programs that are useful to such a small subset of their customers.

Megachurch Megatech

Ed Cone's article for CIO Insight magazine on how megachurches utilize technology is now online.  I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ed in October, along with a number of Fellowship staff, and the article turned out great. There are a number of terrific churches profiled, including Willow Creek, Saddleback, and Seacoast.

Ed - If you're ever in the Dallas area let me know. I'd love for you to experience FC in person.

Check out the full article: MegaChurch Megatech.

Yankee Google

My son Ben has been doing a lot of writing during his week off. He now has a clever collection of Yankee Doodle songs. Here's my current favorite...

Yankee Google by Ben

Yankee Google went online
Riding on a web search
Then he came back with results
In 0.4 seconds.

Yankee Google, computing
Finding all results
Yankee Google, computing
And being always trusty.

You can find the rest of his creations here. Does this mean I'm giving my son Google Juice for Christmas?

He also wrote an incredible poem earlier this month, E=MC Squared. I always tell people I'm easily the third best writer in the family.

Speaking of which, Lori posted a list of what each of us is thankful for this year: Counting Our Blessings. Hope all of you are having a blessed holiday!

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I hope all of you are having a wonderful day with family and friends. It's truly an amazing world we live in and a fantastic time to be alive. I'm so thankful for my family, for what I get paid to do everyday, where I get to do it and who I get to do it with. I'm so thankful for my friends and family, though many are far away. And I'm so thankful for all of you. I hope you have a blessed day filled with grateful hearts.

Our Thanksgiving is fairly simple this year. Lori is making an amazing dinner as she always does. We'll share our lists of things we're each thankful for, listen to a lot of beautiful music, light a few candles, and start our favorite holiday tradition, the book Rascal.

Thanksgiving one year ago.

I've seen the future of church websites and it's...

Jacob's Well

Located in Kansas City, Jacob's Well is a small church that was started seven years ago. The Jacob's Well website is the best example I have seen of what a Web 2.0 church site would look like [via Creative Church].

The site is incredibly clean, uses very soft, friendly colors, and features high-quality, original photographs throughout. In fact, you can count the number of actual graphics on one hand.

The community piece is where things get really interesting. When you create an account and join the online community, you can add your bio, blog feed, and your Flickr photo stream to your account. The site then creates simple community pages that group all of this member content together.

So, you can go to a single page and see a Flickr stream of photos from everyone in the church. Then you can check out the latest blog posts, whether from people on staff or people who attend. There's even a bio page where you can get to know the people in the community.

Wow! I've never seen a church attempt something like this. What's exciting is that it's equally valuable to the curious as well as the committed. If you're just exploring the church, what better way to get a feel for the community than to step into the middle of it? And if you're already a committed member, you can easily get a window into the life of those around you.

If all of this wasn't enough, the site's even built using the 37signals web framework Ruby on Rails.

Does it scale? Would something like this work in a larger community or is it most effective in small church? I don't know, but I know they've created something very special here - the first online community that is truly an extension of the best community there is, the local church.

Blog by numbers

As always seems to happen, this blog recently passed a couple of different milestones at the same time. This past weekend, LeaveItBehind.com passed 600 posts, 800 comments, and 100,000 page views. Thanks again for making this so much fun. I love to write, but it's a true pleasure to hear the thoughts and opinions of so many people that I respect.

About two weeks ago, my FeedBurner subscription hit also 400 for the first time, but that turned out to be a tease. That total, however, does not include the 100+ subscribers to the original Typepad feed. If you use a newsreader, I'd appreciate if you'd double-check what you're subscribed to and switch to the Feeds.feedburner.com/LeaveItBehind address. Every person who switches will receive a wave of positive energy and be entered in a contest to win a guest appearance on next season's premier of Arrested Development! Just leave a comment and you'll be automatically included in the drawing.

We now return to our regularly scheduled blog.

No Comment?

There have been some interesting developments recently involving comments on blogs. 37signals, whose Signal vs Noise blog is one of the top, high-profile blogs around, has decided to end comments on their site. To show just how popular the site is, that post alone has received over 160 comments.

For the past few months we’ve been pretty disappointed by the noise...An occasional cynical comment is good (and welcome!), but when 75% turn negative then it’s just no longer fun. We think that’s a shame and, frankly, we’re tired of the negative energy filling up the threads.

Ray Ozzie, now one of Microsoft's top executives, has recently returned to the blogosphere. In his initial post, he described his decision to not allow comments on his blog.

I'll be tracking the conversation by watching inbound links, rather than by enabling comments on the site. The "link mesh of conversation" is a key distinguishing characteristic of this medium, and is one that I really like.

There are both negative and positive forces that are making this more common. On the negative side is the rise of comment spam and the growing number of people who only want to find new ways to express their anger. On the positive side is better and better blogging tools that make it easy to track conversations, including trackbacks and services like Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub.

I honestly believe that comments will become far less common in the near future. Everytime a new way of communicating starts (mail, telephone, radio, tv, and email), a happy state of purity exists. Soon, however, that's replaced by junk mail, spam filters, pop-up blockers, caller ID, flashing banner ads, and 3-foot advertisements tied to your front door. At least in the case of blogs, everyone is free to have their own say, but it doesn't have to be on someone else's site.

For another perspective, read Shel Israel's recent post about what he sees as a drop in the number of hostile comments he sees.

And feel free to share your own perspective, right here! I don't see myself ending comments anytime soon.

My so-called (online) life

After two hard drive crashes in the last six months, I decided it was time to re-evaluate how I work. I lost a few files that I can't recover and thousands of files that can only be replaced by investing a huge amount of time (primarily photos and MP3's). One of the hardest things to lose was my blogroll. In this new world, losing your subscription list is a lot like losing your address book.

Of course, much of this could have been avoided by regular backups, but I am surprisingly bad about that for someone who has worked in technology for as long as I have.

The loss of data was accompanied by something almost as significant - the loss of the tools I use everyday. When you rely on desktop applications, losing them for 1-2 weeks at a time is a major inconvenience. When you get them back, you have to start from scratch, installing, updating, and customizing them just so.

So, I've set out to actually learn something from these experiences and make some changes. My main decision has been to move my life online. I want to access all of my core data and applications from any machine with a network connection. And if my primary machine goes down, I want to grab another machine and get going without missing a beat. Lastly, I want to be agnostic about which operating system I use. The following tools allow me to be 100% productive whether I'm using a Windows, Macintosh, or Linux machine.

Lists and Information

Backpack. This has been the most significant change over the past two months. I now use Backpack to keep track of nearly everything in my life, from website redesign projects (shared with the web team) and brainstorming for the new year to the Blogging Church book project, Christmas lists, and car maintenance. Once you upgrade to a paid account, you will constantly find new uses for it. You'll have enough pages to start new ones whenever you're inspired and the file storage feature is very handy.

Backpack is easily the one application, online or off, that I can't live without.

Writing

Writeboard. This has been a radical change, but an exciting one. I am now writing Blogging Church using Writeboard. 37signals has been writing their upcoming book on Getting Real using Writeboard; hopefully our book will be the second.

Why the switch from the desktop? First, I trust their hard drives more than my own (and I can easily export copies at any time). Second, the revision history is so simple and elegant as to be highly useful. Third, I can now work on the book anytime from anywhere (with an internet connection, obviously). Fourth, they've integrated Writeboard into Backpack, so my one Backpack page for the book now contains notes, a chapter list, attached documents, and links to each individual chapter in Writeboard. Oh, and it prints beautifully.

What's missing? Word count, spell check and auto-save in case your browser or connection has trouble.

Newsreader

Google Reader. I never thought I'd use an online newsreader. I have been a huge fan of NetNewsWire for two years, I think it is easily the best overall newsreader, and was convinced that there were too many advantages to a desktop application. More and more, however, I want to be able to access blogs and other feeds from any machine. I also want my subscription list and saved articles to be safe and secure.

I have used Bloglines off and on, but have always found it very frustrating. In fact, I'm amazed that it is as dominant as it is. I experimented with Newsgator's online edition, but it didn't make much of an impression (their Outlook edition, however, is sweet). Finally, I decided to give Google's new reader another try. I used it for 15 minutes when it first launched and didn't like it at all.

This week, though, I gave it another 30 minutes and became addicted. The flow takes a bit to get used to, but it quickly becomes very simple. The desktop feel and keyboard shortcuts make it fast to work with. Use j and k to move up and down through your posts, spacebar to keep reading a long post, r to refresh for the latest news, and s to star a post to save for later. Unlike most readers, you can easily see all of your new posts in one view (similar to a river of news) instead of being forced to click on  each of you feeds like email folders.

They could make adding a subscription more intuitive, and the default sorting is crazy (relevance?), but I'm happy to say it's everything I need.

Email

Gmail. I've been using it since the day when invites were being purchased on eBay and I couldn't be happier.

Bookmarks

Del.icio.us. When you use multiple machines, you inevitably face the browser bookmark problem. You bookmark a great site when you're doing research at home, but that doesn't help you much at the office the next day. Del.icio.us is an easy way to bookmark sites, tag them in any way you like, then find them later.

Software

For the small desktop applications that you can't do without, here's a great way to get back in business quickly following a crash. I created a page in Backpack to store all of my apps in one place. I've uploaded the install file for each application and then created a note for each one that includes my license, purchase date, and other pertinent details. This way, I don't have hunt through receipts and emails trying to track down all the information. I can go to one page and be up and running in minutes.

I hope this lists is helpful for those of you thinking about moving more of your work online. If you have tools and sites you love, post a comment so we can check them out!