Sociosophy

I love a good blog thing. By thing I mean tool, widget, add-on, whatever. Disqus is a good tool thing indeed. With RSS readers being very available, and me using (my personal favorite) FriendFeed to check out blog and micro-blog RSS feeds from people I know… Disqus seemed like a natural adoption for me… Thus, I’ve installed it on both Sociosophy and my personal blog, and LOVE IT ALREADY!

Comment replies, little avatars, and feed feeding awesomes, all rolled up in to a super simple install. How can you go wrong?

Bloggers, especially those savvy in the world of FriendFeed (or SocialThing, or Tabber, or MyBlogLog, or… wherever else you aggregate) should grab this add-on, pet it, stroke it, make it happy… and it’ll return the favor in form of awesome all over your blog. It’s good times for sure… Here’s a poach from their About page:

Disqus launched into public beta on Halloween 2007. Since then, Disqus has grown to power the discussion on more than 4,000 blogs, newspapers, and websites.

I’ve always been a fan of early adoption, and though I’m well beyond “early”, by comparison with the gazillions of blogs that don’t have Disqus? I feel like one of the cool kids… You should too. Go get it.

Flixwagon is a service similar to Qik that allows you to post video live from your Nokia 3G enabled phone to the Internet. There are some interesting differences between the two of them that I found in the trial moments I spent on Flixwagon.

1. Flixwagon videos stream to the web, and stay on your phone. (+)

… Ok, that’s about it, actually.

I’ve only really been in one situation where I thought it would be awesome to have the video I just streamed up to Qik available to me for preview… But then I found out that Qik has a mobile site that I can watch what I just posted, and that eliminated that mess.

Given the “me being spoiled” with Qik factor, I don’t really see the benefits of switching services. Besides, there’s no means for me to post the video to Pownce, Mogulus or Seesmic via Flixwagon. In the end, I’d prefer to use Qik’s service for streaming, even if Flixwagon is the new and “improved” with the fancy feature of keeping it on the phone. That’s just my opinion though, I recommend downloading them both and giving them a try. Pick the one that makes you feel more awesome.

Really… I like the Internet, I really do. So I take it personally when something offends the quality of all things I find great on my quest through Al Gore’s playground. As a result, I really didn’t want to write about ZKOUT, given the happy-go-neato disposition I normally try to find with most applications that don’t really fit my fancy… This one fell short of providing benefits, but most of it’s just in the look and feel. Here’s the rundown:

The Good:

• They have a mobile version (m.zkout.com) which is always a nice doo-dad.
• FLEX! I love FLEX stuff…
• Upload photos feature
• Profile creation, woohoo
• Location-based interaction, bonus.

The Bad & Ugly:

• Lack of 3rd party social network integration
• The interface could use some work
• … maybe a little more than “some” work.

I hate to sound like a complainer, so, some input about the interface: The buttons don’t really do much for me. The layout of the features isn’t really all that intuitive. Actually! It reminds me of the older version of drs2006.com … ah I miss that site. Running Internet Radio was fun back in the day. You rookie podcasters don’t know squat about awesome guerrilla non-terrestrial radio. Lemme tell ya.