Secrets of the City

I’d love to see where people are coming from, either by registered members or by the Aggregator.

Rex, since when has anything on the internets been useful? Regardless, it will lead to mindless entertainment… and that’s what blogs and the internets (all of them) are about, aren’t they? As long as people like you and all of us bloggers are around, no one at work shall be bored.

Ponies for everyone!

Fixing up the joint before cutting out?

It’s called frappr.

For example here is the Minnesota Audi club.

Once again, thanks for the pithy smugness.

But no, I’m not trying to create a large-ad-network-supported, external-to-my-user-data, non-specific-to-data-type ugly mapping interface for anyone to throw their miscellanous noise at. That’s Frappr.

Rather, I want to integrate aggregated sources with content (blog posts) with user data supplied on this site.

If we give you our cell phone numbers can you do a “Where are we now” moving mashup via GPS? Now that would be reeally handy, say on weekends for those of us MNSpeak contributors who are stalking each other.

Excellent idea, but it’s a little to big for me to pull off as a side-project. But if you don’t already use it, try Dodgeball. (As most people know, it’s owned by Google, which is investing huge in mobile right now.)

Frappr is pretty cool, though I think it would work better for a national scale, since it just maps zip codes.

Here’s another simple feature I’m thinking about:

“Update me (via email) when this post gets a new comment.”

Why not just RSS for comments?

I know you’ve said before that you want people to visit the site, but it sure would be handy.

Unfortunately, the give/take with comments in RSS would be ads in RSS, which I’m not sure I like. (It also means I need text versions of ads.)

To answer your question: I don’t think I would use a navigational tool for the blogs here. They’re all local, you know? But maybe it’s useful for people living outside of the metro looking for news updates. Then again I have to wonder how many people read MNSpeak for that.

Yeah, I wonder if it’s only useful as a gimmick.

I wonder if concentrating on mapping events (like Yahoo is testing with Upcoming.org) would be any more useful.

Checking mnspeak from outstate – just fyi. Map me 56579

MNSpeak frappr is up to 4 add yourself rmf.

I’d like to see the aggregator search improved – maybe highlight the searched words or something. Nice to be able to pick up the chatter about a particular subject without having to wade through the entire aggregator. When I search a term, I just get a shortened version of the aggregator, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out or find the searched word or phrase half the time. Hell, even a search for CJ gets no results, and everybody loves her.

Then maybe offer persistent searches vis an RSS feed or delivered via email, while we’re wishing.

Now there we go — feature requests that have something to do with this actual site.

Alex, your wish is my command. I’ve got it highlighting for you — here’s a “Vikings” search. (The site search, which actually includes The Aggregator search at the bottom, also has it now too.)

Currently, The Aggregator only stores a couple days of entries from each source (200+ of them), so the reason for nothing coming up when searching for “CJ” is that no one in the local blogosphere has apparently mentioned her in the past few days. I’ve considered making The Aggregator store data permanently, but there’s an inevitable disk space issue…

I like the RSS feed search idea… would the results be MNspeak results or Aggregator results?

mnspeak results. glad i waited until now to check here; the new site search is almost perfect.

“would the results be MNspeak results or Aggregator results?”

Both, I suppose – search looks great, nicely done.

It will shortly be revealed that CJ is running off with Frank Vascellero .

A map would be great–help folks thinking about a move outstate to see what goes on there! Learn who’s blogging from Grand Marais, say.

55719 & 55746