But wait.  The Google Chrome OS may give that old PC a second life.  Google is claiming that the Google Chrome OS is being built to target the netbook monitor, but that should mean it should help infuse new energy into any old Pentium 4 PC running Windows XP or even Windows 2000. 

And that’s exactly what I’m planning on doing with an Windows XP system I recently built.  It has decent specs.  A Pentium 4 2.25 GHz Processor with 1 GB of RAM.  I originally purchased it around 2002, then put it into a closet when I bought a new Vista capable desktop.  Just recently, I dusted it off, reinstalled the operating system and put it into use in an office where I’m doing some contract work.  Two big things I’ve found out in the past month:

First, even Firefox tends to bog the machine down.  Sure I’ve got a lot of extensions running, but its pretty clear that much of today’s software wasn’t built with older processors in mind. 

Second, I’ve yet to install Microsoft Office on it.  It’s been a month and to be honest, I didn’t think I’d make it this far without having to cave in and load up Office.  In fact, the Office DVD is currently sitting within my eyesight.  Collecting dust on the corner of my desk.  Instead I’ve been easily getting by with Google Docs.

Go I’m fairly certain I can get by with GMail and Google Docs; Meebo.com for IM; Pandora, Hulu, and Netflix Watch Instantly for entertainment; and the other 500+ bookmarks in my browser. 

I’m with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch:

The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.

I’ve agreed with that sentiment for a long time.  It’s one of the reason’s I pursued a career in web development.

Now, I disagree with the ridiculous statements that many blogs are making. The Google Chrome OS is not a stake to the heart of Microsoft’s business.  This is a very cool possible step forward for technology.  But not a groundbreaking move that will make a big dent in Microsoft’s OS business.  I think Fake Steve Jobs did a good job of keeping things in proper perspective.

You also may not have noticed, but nobody uses Chrome. I mean think about it. Do you know anyone who uses Chrome? Really?

Now Fake Steve’s post is rich in comedy and snark, but he’s right.  Mainstream America is not using Chrome simply as a browser.  There’s no way their going to flock to a Google Chrome Operating System.

But me?  I’ve got another reason to keep my old PC’s around. 

As I just read on ReadWriteWeb, Intense Debate has announced a new Plugin API, that will allow third party developers to add additional features to the core commenting system.   They are launching the APIs with plugins for PollDaddy, Seesmic, and YouTube.

Very cool.

First, the influence of Automattic (who bought IntenseDebate last year) is clear. For years, Automattic has been developing the core WordPress platform with a philosophy of focusing on making the core product excel at what it is supposed to do: help people easily publish content on to the web.  Simultaneously, Automattic has nurtured a plug-in community that encourages the development of add-ons to extend WordPress functionality in ways I’m sure Autommatic never imagined possible.  These plug-ins can convert WordPress from a simple blogging system into robust content management systems, even customer relationship managers.

So hopefully history will repeat itself with Intense Debate.  Intense Debate will focus on making the core software excellent.  A community of third-party developers can write software to bolt on functionality for Facebook Connect, Twitter (yes, there’s the obligatory Twitter reference required of every blog post about social media), Yelp, and whatever else can be imagined. 

So what’s it really mean?

Near-term, I still think that systems like JS-Kit offer more immediate functionality.  But with this development, Intense Debate positions itself to grow like a weed.  I also like that you can control which features you want activated within your commenting structures and which ones you don’t.  Not every site using IntenseDebate will want people to submit video comments with Seesmic.

Maybe I did pick the correct blog commenting system.

And I have to admit, this is going to help.  A lot.  One of my main getting things done strategies is to actually unplug the ethernet cable or turn off the wifi radio.  That works pretty well when I have some web development work to to or when I need to focus on writing a blog post.  But until now, it would never work for dealing with the messages piling up in GMail. 

The video below shows how offline GMail will work and Google’s announcement blog post has the instructions for enabling it.

Tim O’Reilly on Why I Love Twitter – Great post from a great thinker on the web and emerging media

The Beginners Guide to Promoting Your Blog by Jason Falls – if you’re new to blogging (perhaps we built one for you), Jason has a post that’s worth your time.

Social Web’s Big Question: Federate or Aggregate – Om Malik reflects on online identity managment as Facebook takes the wraps off of FB Connect

Life is Binary, neither is the Social Web – A really fantastic post from the always insightful Deb Schultz.  Best line: “..looking at the current version of the web with an old media lens ain’t gonna fly.”

Gorillaz Avatar Maker – Check this out if you feel a need to refresh your Twitter avatar.

I’d rather not launch into a tutorial on using Pipes (that’s a whole series of blog posts in itself), but here’s a few links for you to check and learn more about using Yahoo! Pipes

• 5 Minute Intro to Yahoo! Pipes – Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Introduction to Yahoo! Pipes – Mr. Speaker
• Yahoo! Pipes and the Web As Database – ReadWriteWeb
• Start Data Plumbing with Yahoo! Pipes – Webmonkey
• Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web (Video)
• Pipes Tutorial (YouTube Video)

But back to building our intelligence dashboard.  Where does Yahoo Pipes come into play?  It already came into play yesterday when we added a YouTube tag watcher for Tesla Motors.  Today, I’m going to add a monitoring tool for watching submissions to crowdsourced content engines like Digg and Reddit by using a previously made Pipe called Social Site Submission Watch Dog.  Head over there, insert teslamotors.com into the URL field for the pipe and click Run Pipe.  As we did n the previous post in this series, we grab the RSS results of the pipe and add the feed to our NetVibes dashboard.

The result looks like the image below.  The Social Site Submission feed is in the top of the third column.

Before I forget, I should mention that you can see the work in progress by going to http://www.netvibes.com/shinynewtoy

The next step is to add some rich media results to this, by grabbing tag search results from Flickr and YouTube. In addition to providing monitoring information, this will also help make the dashboard more visual appealing and engaging – potentially paying dividends down the road when sharing the dashboard with executives a little less familiar with social media tools and web monitoring.

Let’s work on adding Flickr first.

Go to Flickr.com and search tags only for “Tesla Motors”.  Now there’s no RSS feed link for these search results, but you can use the NetVibes Flickr widget to insert the images into the dashboard. 

You’ll then go to NetVibes and..

1. Click Add Content
2. in the search box in the Add Content drop down, search for Flickr
3. Add the Flickr module to the dashbard
4. Edit the Flickr Module and type in “Tesla Motors” in the Tag field
5. Change the layout to Thumbnails
6. Choose Open Pictures to “Full Resolution”
7. Click OK

Now onto YouTube

This is going to utilize Yahoo Pipes.  (More on what pipes is in a future post)  Specifically, this pipe that converts a results of a YouTube tag and converts it into an RSS Feed.    Once you’re there, insert “Tesla Motors” into the tag field and click run pipe.  The results will give you an option to grab it an RSS feed.  Just like adding RSS feeds of Twitter search results, we need to copy the link location of the URL and add it to NetVibes.

After a little rearranging of the NetVibes modules, our dashboard now looks like this:

This is part 1 in a series of building an intelligence dashboard using NetVibes. 

What’s an intelligence dashboard?

An intelligence dashboard helps you keep your pulse on…well, there’s a lot of things you can keep your pulse on.  In this series, we’re going to build an intelligence dashboard to assist with monitoring Tesla Motors in various online communities and the web, in general.  There are tons of tools at your disposal to assist with tracking who is talking and writing about Tesla Motors (or another company or keyword).  Some of those tools are http://search.twitter.com (formerly Summize), Google Blog Alerts, Flickr tag search, and Technorati.  An intelligence dashboard will help bring all those sources into a single view.  So instead of having to regularly visit a number of sources, the dashboard will provide one destination that allows you to monitor a firehose of information from all across the web.

Why NetVibes?

NetVibes is a web-based swiss-army knife in many ways.  It is extremely similar to MyYahoo! or iGoogle start pages, but with a large ecoystem of widgets that extend its power.  Certainly, there are many solutions for customizable start pages and power dashboards out there, but I’m using NetFlix for its ease of customization and ability to integrate different types of content. 

I will say that iGoogle is looking more and more promising recently and it might be a tool worth checking out for these purposes.

Let’s get started

First things, first If you don’t have a NetVibes account, head over there and set one up now.

Today, we’re going to add RSS feeds to help monitor Tesla Motors in Twitter, Google Blog Search, and Technorati.  You can watch the video below to follow the steps we take to add RSS feeds of search results from each source into our dashboard.

Basically, the steps to take are:

1. Visit http://www.google.com/blogsearch, search for “Tesla Motors”, copy the link location of the RSS feed for the search results, and add that URL to your dashboard in NetVibes by selecting “Add Content”, then “Add a Feed”
2. Do the same with http://search.twitter.com .  Look for the “Feed for this Query” icon on the search results page to grab the link location.
3. And again at http://www.technorati.com .   The URL of the feed can be found behind the icon labeled “Subscribe”

Once you’ve done that, you now  have a dashboard with 3 different sources for monitoring in a single view.  Pretty easy, huh?  Tomorrow, we’ll add some rich media sources to the dashboard.

Good old handy RSS

As you’ll quickly see, we’re going to use a lot of RSS feeds in this process.  I’m sure you’re pretty familiar with RSS, but If you aren’t check out this video by CommonCraft.

The video below provides a quick intro to the new dashboard coming in WordPress 2.7.  The changes to the dashboard are dramatic and will require adjustments from even the most experienced WordPress users.  I will say that the automatic upgrade feature in the beta works smoothly.  Keeping WordPress sites up to date should be easier than ever. 

There’s a number of other items coming with version 2.7 as well, including:

Upgrades and installs over secure FTP
Add media without creating post
Quick Edit inline editing
Shortcuts menu
Comment reply from admin
XMLRPC Comments API
Revised Dashboard
Comment threading and paging
API additions
Navigation expand/collapse in two directions
Bulk editing of posts
HTTPOnly Cookies
Automatic upgrade
Screen Options to hide/show modules/columns on screens
Plugin browser/installer
Inline PHPdoc documentation
QuickPress
New design/layout
Drag and drop on dashboard and post screen
Sticky posts

Why does this matter?  The biggest reason would be page load times.  If you have a number of unused id and class definitions in your CSS file, they’re doing nothing but adding time to your page loads.

So what’s the best way to keep that CSS file feeling tip-top?  Enter Sitepoint’s Dust Me Selectors extension for FIrefox.  What it does is scan your CSS and XHTML and provide you a report of used and unused selectors in your CSS file.  You can set it to run for a single page or your entire site.

I recently ran this on the CSS file for Red Pill and found out (much to my horror) that there were more unused classes and ID’s than there were selectors in use.  So using the report that the Dust Me Selectors extension, I started going through our CSS file and making changes.  Helpful hint, best to comment out lines in your CSS file carefully.  The report you are given provides you line numbers to go straight to, but if you’re deleting lines from your CSS file, the line numbers will change, and the report becomes less of a utility and more of a treasure map.