iconolith

Swurling, Tumbling, and Stumbling

There is a theme(me) emerging among the services that allow you to easily aggregate online services you use together. Swurl, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, they all evoke images of wild flailing and unbalance. How appropriate that they are reflections of our online attention.

I just signed up for a Swurl account and have been poking around the service to see what it can do. At first it seemed very much like Tumblr, which I have been using for a while now, but there are some notable differences. Swurl can only import certain types of feeds, as opposed to Tumblr which can handle just about anything. Swurl also has a commenting feature (titled Recent Conversations) that is really quite handy, and heaven knows I’ve often wished Tumblr had a native commenting feature. Swurl also creates a Timeline page for each user that visualizes their online activity. It’s nothing fancy, but interesting to look at and easy to scan. I’m not quite sure if it is a good thing to see the time I’ve spent online since 2005 in such a condensed format. In a way it is almost sad.

Swurl is very new, so I’m curious to see what sort of features they will be adding. I’d be very glad for the ability to pull in my blog feeds and my shared items for Google Reader.

Stixy for Web Development

If you are a web developer who works with clients from a distance, Stixy is a tool worth looking into. Need reasons?

• it’s free
• it enables collaboration/sharing on projects
• it’s well-suited for visual presentation

How?
Sign up for an account. Create a Stixyboard for the project and invite your clients to join the space. All they need is an email address. Now everyone has access and can share files and leave comments:

• Clients have a way to send content to you, in one spot, without cluttering email or learning how to FTP
• You can post analysis, sitemaps, navigation schemes, wireframes, and template proposals
• Clients see progress and leave feedback

No, it doesn’t solve all problems, but does solve some very irritating ones.

Publish PDFs Online With Issuu

Issuu is a web-based service that allows you to upload a PDF document and share it online. Issuu takes the PDF and converts it to a “magazine” style display in Flash format. You, or anyone else, can link to the PDF, embed it in a web page, post to facebook, orkut, blogger (and more) - or view it on the Issuu site and leave comments.

There are some VERY interesting and inspirational works people are posting as sketchbooks, portfolios, and magazines, like this beautiful sketchbook of Napoli, belonging to Simonetta.

Link to fullscreen document: :/Film/: Magazine

Or embed on a site: