Elistic gives you the ability to create lists containing any type of text content, organizing them using a free-form tagging system, and “linking” your entries to other users’ entries as you see fit. Elistic offers RSS feeds for all of its hosted content, and I’m working on an XML API similar to that offered by del.icio.us to encourage creative development of extensions.

It’s a pretty simple system, but I believe that it creates the potential for rich social interaction — one could conceivably use Elistic to host a blog, or a discussion group, or a communal mind map… It would thrill me to see people eventually using it in ways that I had never considered. I hope you’ll check it out and tell me what you think!

There are a couple reasons why I waited until now to start telling people about it. Most interestingly, I wanted to perform an experiment to see how effective del.icio.us would be as the sole promotion tool. Friday morning, I added Elistic as a del.icio.us bookmark and tagged it with a few values that I thought were appropriate.

Within a short while, the bookmark had been picked up by a few more people, and people were starting to sign up at Elistic. By the end of the day, Elistic had about 50 unique visitors, and about 200 more throughout Saturday, all from one link on del.icio.us. Of those 250, ten people created an account and started experimenting with it.

I don’t know that this proves anything other than del.icio.us is a success as a useful social bookmarking tool. Not that I didn’t know that already, but it’s fun to see it in action, anyway.

The other reason that I kept quiet for a couple days was becuase I wanted a chance to start nice and quietly to make sure things were working. I have already found and fixed a couple minor problems thanks to the interest of one particular user. But it seems like things are running more ore less smoothly, so if it sounds interesting, why don’t you check it out? I’d love to hear what you think I can do to make Elistic a more interesting and useful service.

For now, my new favorite use of Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/mullet

Since the bookmarklet actually makes a behind-the-scenes HTTP call to wikipedia, it can be a little slow depending on the site’s response time. Maybe I’ll add some kind of “waiting…” indicator in the next rev, but for now, just hold on for a few seconds and you should see the information show up near the top of the screen.

It hasn’t yet been hammered in terms of testing, but it works for me in Firefox, Camino, and Safari on a Mac (sorry, no IE), and the numbers agree with those Clay’s script. Let me know via comments if it works for you if you try it out in any other browsers, or if you have any trouble.

To use, drag the link below onto your bookmarks or your bookmark toolbar. Then navigate to any normal Wikipedia article and click on it.

Wikipedia Edit Count

Fortunately, the nature of innovation is such that people build on the ground-breaking ideas of others, and now we’re starting to see people come up with ways to actually do something, like share musical tastes or trade business contacts, with social networking services.

Well, here’s another one. 43 Things allows you to form networks based on common personal goals. If I want to learn Spanish, I can mark that as my goal and I’m instantly connected to everyone else with that interest. Each goal has a blog to which its participants can contribute, so you have people sharing their advice and experiences.

It’s pretty interesting so far, as I’ve been exploring and marking so many of those things that I’d love to do and never get around to. One small issue that, since the interests are user-contributed, I’ve noticed is that there multiple goals that basically mean the same thing, which could cause missed potential connections if the participants of one don’t know about the other. Still, having the possibility lends to the free-form spirit that allows interesting unexpected developments in group-based technology.

It’s in beta and is currently invitation-based, so if you want to give it a spin, send a comment with your email address (it won’t show up on the blog) and I’ll send you an invite!

In a trend that extends their pattern that started with email of taking a new, exciting, open means of communication and trying to ruin it, spammers are forcing weblog authors to take action to prevent their pages becoming filled with crap. Comments add a unique flavor to blogs. They allow readers to participate and feel some ownership. Anonymous comments, where allowed, create still another dimension. But when you allow just anybody to add whatever text they want to a public forum, you’ll inevitably wind up, as I did this morning, with pages full of ads for free online poker.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good card game as much as the next guy, and heck, dealing with comment spam makes me feel like I’m one step further toward becoming a “legitimate” blogger! But this is the wrong forum for it. So what’s a guy to do? You can go the Slashdot route and simply allow anonymity but create a mechanism for self-regulation. Or you can go to the other extreme (a la boingboing) and disallow comments completely. In both of those examples, that choice largely defines the feel of the entire site. And neither really works well without a huge base of readers — let’s face it, my DSL provider’s not particularly nervous by the amount of traffic this weblog gets (who did that poker company think was going to see their spam anyway?).

So while I had tried for a short while to embrace the freedom that comes with anonymity, if you want to comment now you’ll have to register with typekey first. It’s not too tough — give it a try. If there are any real people reading this, I’d love for you to say hi and let me know you’re there! And if you’ve ever had to deal with the same problems, let me know how you solved it.

Soon after, I saved up enough money to buy a Commodore 64 and a 1200 baud modem (hook the phone line right in–no handset necessary!), and discovered the hidden world of the Bulletin Board Systems. My life was quickly consumed calling BBSs, reading and posting in local message forums, playing door games, and chatting live with sysops. This was an entirely new way to communicate and interact with people, and I felt like it could change the world.

As the Internet gained in popularity, so did the face of online communication, and I soon was blessed with email, newsgroups, web-based forums, cool social networking tools like (the now defunct) SixDegrees.com, and massively-multiplayer online games–all examples of using computer networks for communicating in new ways.

I must confess, though, that for the past few years I haven’t kept up with many of the more interesting innovations in the field, so I was pleasantly engaged once I started using Bloglines to manage some RSS news feeds and started reading some interesting weblogs on the side. Turns out we can use this (relatively) new term, “Social Software,” to refer to any type of software that allows group interaction.

It seems like a cool side effect of this blanket term, now that we’re associating these varied tools with each other through their common attribute of online interaction, has been the emergence of a sort of Social Software meta-group consisting of people who, like me, are excited by the effect it’s having on the way people communicate, and are using tools like weblogs to talk about it. It makes it easier to stay on top of the developments in the field that might prove to alter that effect in interesting ways. As an aside, it was very cool to stumble across a one-time professor of mine (and one for whom I have much respect) from RIT, who seems to be a prominent member of this community.

Now I’m more or less caught up. I’m starting to keep track of my bookmarks on del.icio.us, and hey! I’m even writing in a weblog! So I’m starting to think about the ways I can apply some of my own creative energy to the space. One of the reasons that I became a software developer was to help build tools like this (the other was video games–what kid doesn’t love them?), so I’m excited to begin experimenting with some cool ideas of my own. As time becomes available, I’m considering starting an interesting project that provides community-building tools to java-based web developers, but I’ll be writing more on that later…

Anyway, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is a (multi) nation-wide event in which many thousands of insane people each try to write a 50,000-word short novel, from scratch, in November. After excitedly reading through the site, including many of the forum posts, I found myself halfway through a detailed plot outline before I started thinking rationally about this. 50,000 words in 30 days? That’s 1667 words (or nearly five pages) a day, with no break.

I can’t even manage to take a vitamin every morning for a week!

I do think it’s a very cool idea. This is a terrific use of the Internet to bring a large group of like-minded people together to do something passionate and downright amazing. And the support network they’ve built around it is nothing short of stunning. There are local events organized throughout the month just about anywhere you might find yourself writing a novel.

In junior high school, I wanted to be a pulp novelist for a short while (yes, the random obsessions can be traced back at least that far). While the career plans eventually changed, I never did lose respect for the written word, though I more commonly find myself on the reader’s side of the relationship. If only for the sake of my erstwhile self, I would love to participate, but I know I just won’t make time to commit to such a large undertaking this year. Oh well, there’s always next year!