digital guerrilla

Thought I’d do a brief write up of the mashed up input/output hub that is my blog.

Via SMS, email (plugin here), website, or ecto (which can be accessed via bookmarklets in my browser), I post directly to the blog.

Via SMS or website (including a couple of third party sites designed for the iPhone), I post to Twitter which is then grabbed by the blog and entered as a post (plugin here).

If I’ve added any links to del.icio.us within 24 hours, they are posted to the blog.

If I email a photo to flickr, I can specify that it be forwarded to the blog (theoretically zooomr does this as well, though it’s never worked for me).

Once the blog digests all of that incoming content, it then spews it back out to my accounts on Livejournal (plugin here), Facebook, and MySpace (plugin here) along with a “new entry” tweet and the standard RSS feed.

My motivation in writing down all of these details comes in part from a conversation with a friend the other day about finding a similar way to collect all of the stuff that you guys put out there on the web. My original thought involved setting up a subsection on my site for that, using some sort of blog or CMS software, but then I found Spokeo. It checks about 30 sites (everything from LinkedIn to MySpace to Amazon Wishlists) for your contacts and, while it takes a good deal of time to organize all of the profiles it finds, it works fairly well after that. It doesn’t update quite as often as I’d like (and there’s no way to adjust the timing) and misses updates, but it’s very very promising.

And while I’m at it, I’m going to go ahead and recommend two other sites/tools that I’ve been meaning to rave about for a while. First up, Sandy, which markets itself as a digital assistant. Basically, you send a message to the service via email (or Twitter or Jott, which I’ll be covering next) and Sandy then stores that information and sends a reminder if necessary. Everything can be tagged (or not) for easy access later. You can even have her send reminders to others. I’m not explaining it to well, but check the examples on the site. This is now where a large part of my memory is stored (the rest I load onto 30boxes).

The second service I found because I knew somewhere on the internet there had to be something exactly like it and sure enough I was right. One day I was walking to the book store and wanted to post something to my blog, but I didn’t want to stop and type it in. I realized what I needed was a service where I could call a number, have the call transcribed, and then sent out via email. While I discovered several ways to achieve that, Jott was the best. You call a toll free number (from your phone only) and leave a 30 second message. Magical robots then transcribe it (doing a bang up job in most cases) and then store it, or send it out via email to whoever you specify, or send it off to certain websites (including Sandy, 30boxes, Twitter, and Livejournal). One of the times it most impressed me, I heard about a website on NPR that I wanted to check out later. I called up Jott and recited the domain name including the “dot org” part. It recognized what it was and so mashed it all into one word (and spelled it correctly too).

So that’s how all of my stuff gets to you via email, websites, SMS, or even voice. Now I just need to find the perfect way to aggregate all of your stuff.