Google Reader’s tag sharing feature allows people who use Google Reader to satiate their RSS appetite to share certain tags with anyone and everyone else. I’ve started a system where I use the first name of friends with whom I want to share items. It saves me from having to ask them to sign up for del.icio.us, and all I have to do is send them the link once and request that they bookmark it.

After noting that the URLs for these “nametags” had a similar structure, I decided to replace the name with another tag of mine, the “mac” tag. I was immediately taken to a page that had all my items that were filed under “mac.” There’s just one problem. I have never told Google Reader to make that tag public.

Is this a bug in Google Reader’s implementation, or is in just an artifact that occurs as a result of the social nature of the webapp? Surely Google should not mislead its users into believing that certain pages are not public when in fact anyone with whom you have shared a tag link can access your other tag pages.

The reasons behind today’s incidents will almost certainly never be known.

What will be known and remembered is that Virginia Tech’s students, faculty, and staff are now forever changed. Let today’s events serve as an explicit reminder of the tragedy that is able to be wreaked upon us, but also let us stand strong, let us never forget the fallen, and let us show our Hokie Pride through all we do, forever and ever.

Peel for OS X is a beta music blog client that aggregates mp3 files from user-specified music blogs, and allows you to view the music blog right there in the app. While it is great software, using it for one day has made me realize that a lot of potentially deal-breaking features are missing from this piece of software. Thankfully, this is the reason public betas were invented, and, without further ado and in no particular order whatsoever, here is my wish-list for Peel:

• Better Flagged Songs Management

  I want a central location (separate window, source list, whatever) for all the songs that I have flagged. Sometimes I don’t have time or I don’t want to download a song, but I’d like to flag it in order to deal with it later. I need to be able to see all flagged songs, regardless of the music blog from which they originally came.

• Downloads Window

  A window would be much easier to manage and visualize than those small progress bars that are currently in place. Additionally, it would be nice if there was a way to scan the download directory to see if the downloaded songs are still there. The check mark that appears next to a downloaded song will always remain present, even when the downloaded song has been removed from the hard drive.

• Search

  Let me search for artists, songs, music blogs (on the web, not search for local files), and, while we’re at it, make adding blogs easier. Get website titles automatically, and don’t make me enter a title just to add a new music blog. Handle feed URLs as well as music site URLs, too. Peel crashed while adding a Wordpress RSS feed to the source list.

• Better iTunes Integration

  Please let me add Peel songs to a specific playlist. I don’t want these singles mucking up my pristine album-only music library. I spent way too much time tagging my music library to have it littered with improperly tagged music. If you give me the option to add to a playlist, I can reduce this mess a lot more efficiently.

• Better Playback Controls

  Allow me to shuffle songs, both within individual blogs and globally. Make the spacebar a play/pause button, and reflect that in the Controls menu.

Last.fm support would be awesome, too.

I haven’t seen a good joke yet. Lame.

Ben Folds played last night in the Burruss Hall auditorium on campus. I have known about and listened to Ben Folds for quite some time (when he was still with his Five), but I’m not too familiar with a lot of his music right now.

Folds is an extremely talented musician, and that may be an understatement. His song-writing skills elicit notions that maybe, just maybe, the mass-produced pop music of today’s scene leave a lot to be desired. His music is upbeat, even poppy, but it’s intelligent, humorous, and witty.

The evening was opened by a musician named Eef Barzelay, and while he made the crowd laugh with his pointed songs, something about his sound seemed to be off. Maybe it was his overly harsh acoustic guitar tone, or maybe the loudness of his microphone, but something was definitely unusual about his set.

The Ben Folds show was great, with the obligatory Bitches Ain’t Shit cover, and a rendition of The Postal Service’s Such Great Heights. At one point in the show, Folds slowed it down for a few songs. After making it clear that he wanted to get through the song Gracie with no “hootin’ and hollerin’”, Folds must have started the song over five or six times, but we all eventually got through it.

Folds’ backing band was amazingly talented. To be able to generate that sort of sound with three musicians and no guitar is incredible. Folds’ new synth (complete with obligatory Final Countdown riffage) added a new element to the show.

It was a great show overall, and I left as a bigger fan of Ben Folds than as I entered.

Patrick Wolf’s latest album The Magic Position is super-catchy eighties-throwback clap-along fun! Every time I hear the title track, I smile. The video is great, too, especially when he does his little double step at the beginning of the chorus. I think Wikipedia hit it on the head with their folktronica classification.

I recently reinstalled OS X, created a Windows partition with Boot Camp, and installed Parallels. I normally wouldn’t have done that, but there are some Windows-only programs that we need for classes, most notably LogicWorks. This screen shot should speak for itself.

… is what I feel like the writers of the show are right now. An as-yet-to-be-seen magical BOX?! Ahhh!

I have added a del.icio.us “thingy” that posts my daily del.icio.us links to my blog. I have been trying to add a pithy description to each of my links so as to explain them in a little more detail than is possible with just the page name. Enjoy.

Flickr just announced a new feature set for organizing photos: collections. Collections are sets of sets or even other collections, up to five levels deep. This has been a long requested feature, and I’m glad to see that Flickr has finally added this functionality to their great photo organizing app.