At ETech This Week

I've just gotten settled in my room at the San Diego Marriott for ETech 08. I had planned to write about what I was looking forward to most and what talks I was excited about, but I'm really just too tired right now to think.

I left my flat in London this morning at 08:30 GMT, and am writing this at 21:00 PST. I didn't get a chance to really sleep on the flight over so I've been up for about 22 hours right now. I flew from London Heathrow to LAX, and then drove down to San Diego.

It's funny, the part of me that grew up in America doesn't think of the 200 mile drive to San Diego as being much of anything, but the part of me that has lived in Britain for the last few years thinks that was an insane thing to do after an 11 hour plane ride.

Right now I would tend to agree with the British, I was really tired on the drive down, and am happy that I don't have to fly back out of LAX.

Anyway, my dinner just got here, so I'll keep this short. If you are at ETech this year and would like to meet up send me an email or leave a comment on this post.

Google Talk Chatback for domains

The Google Talk team released a chatback service the other day, but it's not readily apparent how to use it if you host your domain in Google Apps. There is a link in the FAQ, but for future reference you can do it by going to:

http://www.google.com/talk/service/a/DOMAIN/badge/New

You can see the results with my hutchison.org Google Talk account on the right had side of this blog or below:

Wish I could run my blog with FriendFeed

Most of the time when I have something to point out online, I do it through one of the many sites that I interact with during the day. I might post something on twitter, or share something in Google Reader, but those things never make it back to my blog (except in the piece on the right that says "Blogs by Allen". What I would really like to do is bring all of that stuff back to my blog, along with my comments on them.

FriendFeed comes close to that. I can share something on Google Reader and then comment on it in FriendFeed, but that still doesn't end up on my blog, and so the conversation is split between multiple places.

I wish that FriendFeed had an API that I could use to make this all work. For now though, maybe the right thing to do is just point people to my FriendFeed and leave it at that.