I tried Songbird back when it was still in beta, it was back in 2007. I remember being pretty excited about having an iTunes like media player for Ubuntu Linux, but as it turned out, it was pretty buggy and the iPod add-on wasn’t very good. I have been watching the roadmap closely ever since and as it seems now, It’s only one release away from being perfect for me. So, I decided to give it another go and went ahead and installed it.

I didn’t know this, but Songbird makes it extremely easy to import your existing iTunes library, simply follow these steps and you will have your iTunes library in Songbird in a matter of minutes.

1. Go to Songbirdnest.com and download the latest release.
2. Run the installer and select the add-ons you want to install.
3. When Songbird launches it will detect and import your iTunes library.
4. In Songbird hit Ctrl+T to open a new tab.
5. Go to the iPod Device Support and MediaFlow add-ons and select install.

That’s it, you now have an exact copy of you iTunes library in Songbird. If you had any podcast subscriptions, you will have to re subscribe to those. Podcasting is not as nicely integrated in Songbird as it is in iTunes, so if you are a big podcast fanatic, you might want to keep iTunes for that.

Songbird = iTunes = Songbird

Don’t worry about using iTunes, Songbird will automagically update the library to mimic any changes you might have made in iTunes. So feel free to keep using both players until you are confident that Songbird will do the job for you.

Compared to back in 2007, Songbird is a different beast now, the interface is completely cleaned up, the library is fast and iPod support is grand. The add-ons available makes using the player a delight, I can sync my iPod, and using the folder sync add-on, I can even sync any playlist to my phone, or any other USB device for that matter.

I’m really pleased with the new Songbird and can’t wait to see what the developers have in store for future releases.

And of course, the bird is twittering away…

The new beta design of Friendfeed adds some really nice advanced filters. I’m really excited about the addition of ‘popularity filters’ as I call them. They allow you to search for conversations or posts, that have received x number of likes or comments.

Just imagine how you can put this to use in your own field. You can search everybody’s posts (or just your friends’) for keywords, and filter them in terms of popularity. You have a unique ability to catch content way before it makes it to the mainstream online media.

Full res. on flickr.

As Gavin Wray says in the comments on Michael’s post:

“Thanks for making this guide. You make clear sense out of what can seem a daunting task.”

You see it time and time again. Organisations showing terrible timing and understanding, responding to bad feedback by alienating people and ignoring the community.

If you can answer these questions by a yes or no, you have come a long way in your aproach to bad feedback. The golden nugget being: listen first, then react.

Doing a presentation on something like this might seem like overkill. But the more I prepared for this presentation, the more I realised how important this actually is.

It might just be me, but I’m struggling to understand why so many mainstream news papers still don’t link to their sources. I see it day after day, newspapers ripping off twitter messages and giving no credit what so ever. I’m just thinking, who would ever want to work with an institution who consistently pass on other people’s work as their own?

You might want to talk about your latest online project to gain the wisdom of others’ perspectives or share things you’ve learnt along the way. Maybe you’d like to provide your top ten favourite memes on teh internetz, challenge perceptions of a particular form of social media, demonstrate where an online presence works well or just spend 5 minutes educating the room about the most famous cats in cyberspace. This really is open to you – we want the event to have the capacity to be both serious and fun.

Except that I’m going to ‘pimp’ BirminghamRecycled.co.uk, I haven’t exactly decided what to talk about. – But I have come up with an incomplete list.

• Social media: a professional tool or personal pleasure?
• Journalist vs. Blogger is there a difference.
• Teaching social media – It’s not a monologue.
• News as a platform/conversation.
• Is it News or merely aggregation?

I will have to submit my idea to Shona before lunch time tomorrow. Will post when I have more details.

Dave Lee : daveleejblog.com : @davelee

Yesterday, Paul Bradshaw had arranged for blogger Dave Lee to come in and have a chat with the second years online journalism class. It was a brilliant opportunity to talk to someone who really knows about this stuff, and who’s just finished his journalism course him self.

I will try and summarize the nearly four hour class to the best of my abilities. If you’re interested in the formal presentation on blogging that Paul Bradshaw delivered to the student, then head over to the online journalism blog or check it out at the bottom of this post.

Personal- blog under your own name

Unless you know for a fact that your blog will only be temporary, like some my semester specific blogs, then you should always be blogging under your own name. If you want to set up a personal blog to aid your journalistic perspective and employability, your blog should be regarded as a permanent thing of your life, – It’s not just while you’re a student! A blog titled ‘Student Life’, might pretty quickly become hard to justify once you graduate and want to focus on other things. Blogging under your own name, let’s you change your blogs focus so that it suits your current position and interests.

Portfolio – Having it all under one roof

If you want to show of your work, CV, testimonials etc. do it on a separate page on your blog. Don’t have these things on a completely separate website, it’s all part of who you are, and I’m sure if you ask Dave, he would tell you that your blog is the biggest part of your portfolio. Chances are; future employers will google your name, and you don’t want them to either miss your blog or your portfolio, so keep it all on the same site.

Passion – Do it because you love it

This one is hard to fake, this is the fuel of your blog and what will keep it going. My guess is that since you want to be a journalist you have a passion for writing or recording stuff for others. If you don’t, then maybe you should reconsider your journalistic future. There are too many easy excuses for not participating journalistically in social media. But maybe the most important concept in this whole article will be passion. If people know you are committed and love what you do, then they will keep coming back. Remember, you are writing for yourself, not in the comfort of some large corporate machine that you can hide behind. If you don’t like what you do, it will show. Same goes for the reverse, people will pick up on your passion and will be more inclined to engage with your content.

Professional – Your boss WILL read it

It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes professional, but I like to think of it as two things in regards to blogging. First of all, don’t write anything you wouldn’t want your boss or mum or anyone else not to read. But don’t be afraid to write something if you feel you have a valid point. The other thing is to keep it useful for your readers, also the ones that are not directly interested in your personal life. I don’t like telling what topic to blog about except; don’t blog about what you had for breakfast, dinner and son on. If you do, at least turn it into something that’s relevant and useful to your readership. You will write some of your best blog posts, when you can turn events from your personal life into something interesting for your readers. – Even if it’s just something that sparks an idea in your head. But keep it on topic and control your ramblings, although I know that’s hard :)

Perfection – I ran out of ideas for ‘P’

Find your focus, as Dave talked about in the session, he started blogging about journalism but found that it was too broad. You don’t want to compete with all the big guns on broad topics, narrow it down and keep it focused, think of how YOU can add value to a story, not how Wikipedia can.

Post regularly, don’t go stall for three months at a time, find your own rhythm. You will find that the topic and the format of you blog will naturally give you an idea of the best posting interval. If your blog posts are one paragraph with just a link, then several updates like Martin Stabe does is fine, but if you write longer blog posts then once every week or fortnight might be enough. Speed is important, but don’t rush anything out unless it is absolutely breaking news.

Learn from the best. People usually struggle to come up with ideas for what to blog about, especially in the beginning. Pick a few of you favourite blogs and try and see what format they adapt, what tone do they use, how they link and how they make use of multimedia. Also look at the topics they cover, how they structure their headlines engage with readers etc.

Don’t just blog. Blogging is so much more than just writing your blog posts. Try to use 50% of your time on your own blog and spend the other 50% on other blogs leaving comments and engaging with the community. This will help you keep a finger on the pulse, give you ideas for blog posts and will show your passion for what your are covering. Here is a great quote from ‘Save the Media ‘:
“Using social media as a journalist and engaging the community means more work — but it adds more value, too. ”

It doesn’t have to be writing. You don’t have to limit your self to writing, if you are more of a photographer, radio or TV -person, then start a podcast, video blog orphotoblog, what ever suits you.

I highly recommend you keep an eye out for Dave lee’s j Blog & make sure you follow him on twitter. Dave is just out of University himself and does some great blogging on both his on personal website and the BBC Internet blog .

But how do you actually explain twitter to someone who’s never used it before? Well, Paul gave students 10 people to follow trying get everything going, which for the most part went pretty well. Unfortunately @chloebb got confused over @replies and actually following people. She was probably the busiest tweeter of the bunch but the tweets ended up like this:

Joanna Geary picked up on it and thought she was being spammed by a twitter bot and @paulbradshaw eventually ended up apologizing and everyone was happy again.

The best thing is probably just to throw yourself in there, not being afraid of what you might or might not say. Focus on understanding the basics will probably be the best way to go, start following a few people. Don’t start out by following 2000 people as long as your account is relatively new. If a new user who only has a few updates starts following 1000′s of people, it’s usually a spammer who just hope people will auto-follow back. Understand that twitter is a social network more than a publishing platform. It’s strength lies in instant discussion and the ability to dig into ongoing discussions in real time. It’s a stream of commentary and open discussion between people, imagine a busy conference where you just pick and choose who you want to listen to. Any time you log onto twitter, you get a snapshot of the world at that particular time.

Twitter is really great for learning by doing, and I think that’s the best way to go. You pick up on things that are going on and respond to them in your own way. But if you are stuck and don’t really feel comfortable just throwing yourself to the masses, try creating a twitter template. Basically picking 5 twitter users that you enjoy or you know are popular (they must be doing something right), analyse their tweets and see if you can find a pattern and replicate that with your own tweets.

A few templates worth highlighting from twitip.com:

@kevinrose wrote -> Lunch then movie at home, relaxing weekend. http://twitpic.com/zeeb
Template – What I’m doing -> picture

@tferriss wrote -> Experimenting w/ various ways to start a fire in a fireplace. How about a Coke can + bar of chocolate? http://tr.im/2nor Your tips + tricks?
Template – Ask question? Offer potential answer (or title) -> link -> question?

And a few I just made up to get you networking:

Aptana – Web Development Environment

Aptana has just recently overtaken Dreamweaver as my editor of choice. It comes in two versions; a free and a paid. The differences can easily be overlooked and seems to come down to support requests. The interface is clean and doesn’t look too boring which can often be the case with open source software. The team behind aptana have recently added support for PHP which I have been wanting in some time. I didn’t make the switch fully until they added PHP support. PHP support comes via a plugin and is really easy to install. It is probably not completely up to scratch if you are a hardcore PHP developer, but for us humans who just wants something to edit our WordPress files,Aptana is perfect.

Aptana, My Favourite IDE

There are several cool features supported in Aptana and here are just a few of my favourites:

• Syntax highlighting
• Auto Code completion
• Easy tag wrapping
• Auto indention
• Auto source formatting

The Pro version, though not free, still checks in way cheaper than Adobe’s DW at $99 with upgrades costing $79. The main focus of the app is on Ajax development, but it is more than adequate for web designers HTML work and CSS coding. One thing I like about the paid version and which might just make me buy it, is the built in FTP feature which by the way works better than the one in Dreamweaver.

FTP Software

Even though I like the built in FTP feature of Aptana and Dreamweaver, I still need a standalone FTP client for those unrelated files and WordPress zip files that needs uploading to various hosting accounts. The one I currently use is a Firefox add-on called FireFTP and it does the job just fine. It doesn’t have any fancy features, but it’s stable and reliable. Not much to say about it, it just works.

Word Processing and Spreadsheets

None of us can live without some form of Word processing software, spreadsheets are used by many for budgeting and invoicing, so pretty essential. The only ones I really have experience with, mainly because they were too good to get rid off, is Google Docs and Open Office. Open Office is a fully fledged Office Suite right up there with that of Microsoft Office. And despite recent actions, Open Office is a very popular and widely used Office Suite. Google Docs run in your browser and can be accessed from anywhere. I normally use it for writing things like blog posts and documents that I would like to have access to from anywhere.

I also like that Google Docs doesn’t apply an insane amount of styling to my documents when it comes to copying and pasting them into WordPress. It’s nice that you don’t have to go through each paragraph to remove font styles.

Email

This might seem like an obvious one, but if you use Microsoft Outlook, you might not know that there even exist any other software for managing your emails. Up until a few months ago I liked to have a desktop email client, but now I have completely switched to Gmail for several reason. Mostly because of it’s great search features and labels, but I also got tired of having to keep several computers in sync. I wanted all my email to be available to me anywhere I went. If you want to use a desktop client and have all your emails synced at all time, I recommend Thunderbird in conjunction with Gmail. Simply use Gmail as you email hub and use IMAP with your Thunderbird client. This way you will always have all you email in sync across all your PCs and still have it all in Gmail. I had this setup for quite some time, but found myself simply using Gmail exclusively, so I ditched Thunderbird in the end.

Design & Art Work

This is an area where I haven’t completely managed to get rid of Adobe’s flagship Photoshop, but I keep making an effort in order to save some cash. As you are reading this article, I assume that you use Photoshop and are looking for an alternative.

The GIMP is pretty popular but very different from Photoshop

There are quite a few on the market but none exactly like Photoshop. The obvious alternative is the GIMP, and by using GIMPShop you can imitate many of Photoshop’s features and get the apps visual appearance to resemble that of PS. You can even get a script to add the same keyboard shortcuts to GIMP, but it is still not Photoshop, and you will have to make an effort if you want to completely make the switch. But if you need the money it’s definitely an alternative.

Other options include Paint.NET (Windows Only), Blender for 3D creation and Inkscape for an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. I don’t have enough experience with these tools to offer any commentary, so if you have any, leave them in the comments.

Invoicing & Time-tracking

We all need something to keep track of our time, and invoice clients. For that task I use Freshbooks, you are limited to a few clients at a time with the free version, but that is not a problem for me as I usually only work with one client at a time. You have great time-tracking abilities and simple elegant invoicing, which you can even brand in the free version which I like. You can provide your clients with a login so they can track the process and save you all those email updates.

Multimedia Playback

No one can work without some noisy distractions and for most of us that includes listening to a lot of music. You are probably using iTunes which is of course free, but not really open source.

If you want an open source iTunes alternative, I recommend checking out Songbird, it has been in beta for several years and has just recently been released in a stable version. My favourite is MediaMonkey which comes in both a free, and a paid version, but both great alternatives to iTunes.

Being a web designer, I probably tend to notice the visual appearance of profiles a little more than the average Twitter user. When I run into a cool looking Twitter profile, I almost always find myself clicking on to the authors website and for the most part end up actually following.

Twitter has found a way to let people customize their profiles, but only to an extend where it still looks clean. They have found the magical middle ground between the messy MySpace profiles and the über clean Facebook pages. The limitations of a changing a few colours and only use one background image, encourage creativity.

Anyway I love Twitter and I love great looking Twitter profiles. It was actually @MakeLiterature who inspired me to do this blog post, as I think their list could use some additions, although I won’t go as far as listing my own profile ;).

As Twitter is currently as (or more) popular than Digg, I was surprised to find that my poor google skills only turned out a few blog posts on this. I have already mention one of them, there is Gopal also who listed his 12 favourite Twitter designs, only to realise two weeks later that he had 15 more. Lee Munroe also has a nice list although I don’t know if they are all original creations.

The Finalists

I wanted to narrow my list down to 10, but I started out with a few finalists:

• @benek from BenekDesign.com
• @divvoted from divvoted.com
• @jakemarsh from TheJakeMarsh.com
• @pixellent from styledeficit.com
• @justtweetit from JustTweetIt.com
• @imjustcreative from ImJustCreative.com
• @chricoyier from css-tricks.com
• @Nabbit from nabbit.com
• @chrisbrogan from ChrisBrogan.com
• @waynesutton from SocialWayne.com
• @SeanMcColgan from ForwardslashMedia.co.uk
• @bzkicks from BZKicks.com
• @MtTweet from MrTweet.net
• @mashable from Mashable.com
• @garyvee from GaryVaynerchuck.com
• @problogger from ProBlogger.net
• @keylimecreative from KeyLimeCreative.ca
• @939design from 939Design.com

A pretty neat list with a few ‘Twitter Celebs’ worth following if you don’t already. It’s by no means a complete list and I have probably missed quite a few genius designs, if so drop me an @ replay on Twitter (@kasperbs) or leave them in the comments.

Best Twitter Designs/Themes

So here are the ones to beat, in no particular order. Let me know who should be the winner!

@939Design

I stumbled upon 939design by accident and I absolutely loved the colour scheme. The wooden floor effect works great and the fact that the logo is on the right makes it stand out.

@Benek

The default Twitter design is nice and clean in itself but a little personalisation doesn’t hurt :).

@Divvoted

There seems to be a trend in web design at the moment leaning towards hot air balloons and parachutes. Divvoted certainly make great use of this trend which is why they have earned their place on this list.

@Pixellent

Pixel drawings are always fun, and even though there are a one or two free pixel Twitter themes on the market I haven’t seen this before.

@Nabbit

Nabbit is an online music service with quite a few followers. I love the use of green on the web and this just feels so fresh!

@WayneSutton

Wayne’s Twitter profile was definitely on my top 3 list. Twitters clean layout don’t lend it self well to ragged edges, but someone forgot to tell WayneSutton.

@MrTweet

Apart from offering a great Twitter app, Mr Tweet also has a sweet design. I love animations on the web, maybe because I’m not an artist myself.

@Garyvee

Gary Vaynerchucks profile was my favourite for a few weeks, it’s clean, simple and perfectly branded for his popular Thundershow.

@ProBlogger

Darren Rowse is one of the few blogs where I actually read every single post. His Twitter profile grabs attention and is very cleverly designed. One of the only ones I have seen where the sidebar isn’t coloured.

KeyLimeCreative

Probably my favourite from the bunch. Obviously I love green and limes are just delicious :).

All right… Time to rip the list apart, who did I forget and who shouldn’t have made the list?

A now, completely empty inbox. Pretty scary huh?

A Solid Inbox Strategy

I didn’t want to just clean everything out; I also wanted to get some sort of strategy in place so that I wouldn’t end up in the same mess in a couple of weeks. I adapted/extended Gina’s ‘Trusted Trio’ to better suit my needs. Gina is very tough with her: ‘Just Three Labels’ system, but unlike me, she probably have several hundred emails to get through every day. I like things to be a little bit more organised so I sat up a few more labels to help me out..

Spring Cleaning

First of all I completely molested Gmail’s search box and filters to get rid of everything I didn’t need. I deleted all the crazy Facebook, Flickr and other completely useless notifications from eBay and PayPal. I made sure I didn’t delete my sent message by putting a ‘–in:sent’ in most of the queries, but take a look at the syntax and try for yourself. Filters are pretty handy if you want to quickly get rid of all your junk. The favourite query for me was ‘in:anywhere –in:sent -kasper’ my first name filtered out an insane amount of SPAM. Obviously this wouldn’t have worked if my email address had been kasper@gmail.com.

Labels: Three or Ten?

The perfect Gmail setup

I filtered my ‘All Mail’ folder down to 524 of which a few hundreds of them, were ‘Sent Messages’. I set up 10 static labels and a few dynamic ones which I intend to use for things such as clients and stuff that will be relevant for a while but can eventually go into the archives.

As you can see I have the ‘Trusted Trio’ at the very top, the prefixes for all the categories are just to keep them in order.

1. -1FollowUp is for messages that take more than 2 minutes to respond to, if it takes less, just respond on the spot. The idea is to keep your inbox empty at all times.
2. -2Hold are emails that you want to keep around for a few days or possibly a week or two.
3. -3Archive is for everything that you want to keep but doesn’t need right now. Bee crude and delete 95% of all your emails, – you know you will never need them.

If you are happy with this ‘three labels and out’ then, you practically don’t need any more. Gmail’s search feature is so exceptionally powerful that no labels can make up for it.

I also created the ‘Grumpy Quartet’ and the ‘Dynamic Trio’. The ‘Grumpy Quartet’ is for emails that will definitely come back and bite you at some point in time. This is where I save all my family and friends messages, just to prove them wrong whenever they try to convince me that they emailed me the correct date and time when they did not. It’s for all my Uni work that I need to get around to at some point, and for the receipts you can never find when you need them. I also occasionally like to save a few fly fishing notes in there.

The Dynamic trio are taken care of by filters; they don’t go into my inbox but are still marked as unread. Just set up a filter like ‘From: @ebay’ and filter those into your eBay Label. The ‘Social’ label takes care of all my Facebook, Flickr and Twitter activity.

My inbox is now completely empty, it’s a pretty lonely sight at first but I’m sure I will get used to it.