(Anti) Social-Lists 7/20/08

Here is the weekly installment of my favorite reads/finds of the week.

• There Was a Class War and the Rich Won It - Ian Welsh of Firedoglake discusses how worker’s wages have stagnated over the last 30 years while productivity has gone up. Basically, we are learning less and working harder to make someone else wealthy.
• Slogan Train Wrecks - Taste My Nuts - Jonathan Fields encounters a nut stand with a funny slogan but one that is not really going to help sell nuts. An example of bad branding.
• The Twelve People You Meet on Twitter - Funny because it is true. I definately started out as The Ghost but now I hope that I am a mix of most of the other types. Which type are you? If you see yourself in one of those types and don’t want to be seen that way, do you plan on making a change?
• Ever Feel Like Giving Up - all the time Chris, all the time. Chris Guillebeau discusses how traveling can frequently be lonely and confusing. The article easily translates to your own life experience.
• 11 Ways to Build an Extraordinary Life - Steve Olson lists ways to create an existence worth living such as being true to yourself and staying out of debt. I hope people read and practice this when young because I spent much of my life learning these lessons the hard way.
• Bike, Meet the City. City, This is the Bike - A vision of bicycle-centric rather then car-centric city from World Changing. I frequently imagine how enjoyable the city would be if all the cars were suddenly gone.
• How to Host Your Own Lifestream with Sweetcron - Sarah Perez, of ReadWriteWeb, previews Sweetcron, which will be a self hosted lifestream that stores online activity in a database and will be fully searchable. This may be exactly what I’m looking for in a personal lifestream.
• Mount A Camera to Your Bicycle - I’m don’t have the talent for a lot of DIY projects but if I had an extra camera, I would definitely do this. Be sure to watch the video of the camera in action.
• Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog - a short online musical brought to you by Joss Whedon and starring Neil Patrick Harris. Don’t think I need to say any more - go watch it!

Get Invited! - 4 Ways to Obtain Access to Beta Sites

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A number of online services launch in Beta and require an invitation to access them. Here are four ways to obtain a coveted invite

• Twitter - if you have a large enough following you can request invites. I have given and received beta invitations via Twitter
• Invite Room on Friendfeed - Mark Krysnky created an invite room on Friendfeed where invites can be offered and requested.
• Mashable Invites - Mashable has a beta invites site. You need to register and then you can offer your extra invites and request invites for sites that you want to access. Some of the lists are long but I’ve never found it to take too long to get an invitation.
• Invite Share - Invite Share is updated with new sites that frequently but for the sites listed it does not take very long to get to the top of the list. Priority is given to those who give out more invites. It is also necessary to register with this site. I’ve received invites very quickly through Invite Share.

Keep in mind that all of these sites work best if you are a good citizen and give out as many invites as you request.

If you know of any beta invitation sites, please let me know in the comments.

photo credit: Sarabbit

Swurl My Online Activities

Swurl is another online aggregator of online activity. This visual lifestream pulls in information from delicious, flickr, yourtube, twitter, flickr and a number of other services. Swurl has been extensively reviewed by Lifehacker, ReadWriteWeb, Lifestream Blog, and Ars Technica so I’m not going to go into all the details here.

Out of the many services of this type popping up lately, Swurl is one of my favorites. My favorite feature is the timeline. It places your online activity in a calendar view, which reminds me of the tumblr archive, and goes back as far as your data does. Mine goes back to 2001 as that is when I started using the Amazon Wishlist and apparently my oldest bookmarks are from that year. The images for videos and flick photographs show up in the timeline making it even more visual. One feature I would like is more customization for each service. For example, twitter tweets could be a particular color or delicicous bookmarks could show up with the favicon. Currently bookmarks and wishlist items say Link and the name and tweets say Status and then the text of the tweet. There needs to be something more visual to differentiate between the types.

Swurl also also you to customize your site a bit. You can add your own banner and change the background color. I would like the links to be customizable as well as my banner is green and doesn’t look as good with the blue theme of the site.

The one feature, however, that I really really want is a way to integrate the timeline with my own website. I don’t really care if it’s a plugin, widget, badge or embed code but I would love for the timeline to be accessible here. Add the ability to set the time frame, such as last week or last month, to the site integration and Swurl would be just about perfect as a lifestream.

My Swurl is available at http://kwbridge.swurl.com