I just saved yet another link in my Delicious account, and suddenly thought — “man, it would really suck if Delicious one day disappeared and I lost all of this”.
Indeed.
According to my stats, I have 1,164 bookmarks, mostly with descriptions and manually crafted (to some extent) titles, 1,813 different tags in use, with some being used 187 times. That’s a lot of rich, valuable data that I’ve collectively invested a lot of time in. I want control over it. I want insurance.
I’ve been doing a lot of work with LiveJournal/WordPress lately, and have been seeing that there are some passionate LJ users who are loyal to the platform largely for a few specific reasons/features. It seems like those features would mostly be pretty easy to replicate on WP though, given its flexible plugin system.
The main features that LJ supports that WP is (or was) “missing” seem to be:
Music is important to me. Not because I have any musical talent (at all), or because I work in the music industry (or ever have) or even have friends who are musicians (although I do have a couple). Music is important to me because I listen to it almost every waking hour, and need it to concentrate while I’m working.
According to iTunes, I have just under 6,000 “items” in my music library. That’s 16.5 days of music, playing 24/7. I like to find new music, and have pretty eclectic musical tastes (literally everything from The Corrs to korn appears in my library). I’d like a tool that helps me do a few things: (more…)
I just thought of an interesting delivery mechanism that could help people actually get through an eBook (or any longer electronic text for that matter). Basically the idea would be that rather than throwing the whole book at someone and leaving it up to them to read it, you would deliver it piece by piece so that they only had to consume small chunks at a time. There are 2 ways that I’m thinking this could work; email and RSS.
For either delivery mechanism, the user would go to the site, purchase a book, then select their options for how and when they’d like it delivered. Some of the important bits would be:
Once you have those options configured, you’d get your periodic email (or feed, via a customized URL that would point to your specific delivery configuration) containing the current portion to read, and you would want some options in each payload I think:
This probably isn’t a business, but it’s a feature that would be pretty cool for existing eBook retailers to offer. I’d be happy to make it for someone if they want it 🙂
UPDATE: DailyLit