island⁹⁴

Two weeks ago I launched a new website at Brompt.com. It’s a web-based service for unreliable bloggers (like myself) that sends you an email if you haven’t posted to your blog in a while. It’s sort’ve like HassleMe, except Brompt actively scans your blogs RSS feed to only send reminders when you’re lax (as opposed to just sending you a reminder every so often).

It’s very practical, but I also think Brompt is really interesting conceptually too. Everyone talks about RSS as just a means to aggregating content, but there is so much other interesting metadata in an RSS feed too.

Right now the site is just the barebones service, but I’m planning on adding some statistics and such so you can track your unreliability. It’s a fun project with a lot of possibilities.

Community technology is great. It is incredibly refreshing to be reminded on a daily basis that, as a developer and technologist, I don’t know crap about how everyday people view and use technology.

Two weeks ago I was in Washington, DC for the CTCnet Conference. While there I helped John Lorance of CompuMentor give a presentation on how Community Technology Centers and nonprofit orgaizations can use “Web 2.0″ services and tools like Flickr, del.icio.us, wikis, mapping, et cetera, to improve their programs and better fulfill their missions.

At the end we opened the floor to questions and comments. An attendee stood up and said that he had always been worried that with computers and machines growing ever smarter and more powerful, one day they would overthrow mankind. But, after seeing these new Web 2.0 tools, he is relieved that humans will always stay one step ahead of the machines. Hallelujah.

I made this drawing using Inkscape, an awesome open source illustration program.