This is both a question to the community and a test of seesmic’s new WordPress video conversation plugin, so please do reply using video if you can!

Currently there’s 73 sidebar users, so I thought it would be good to ask…

To get the ball rolling, I like the sidebar because I can leave it open while I work so I don’t miss any interesting conversations, and it saves me time from having to go back to the main seesmic site and check through what I’ve missed.

It will be even better when recording works, which should be soon now as the migration to the new API servers has been done.

I look forward to your video responses!

Tagging your seesmic videos is a topic which has been discussed by the community on many an occasion. When the subject was brought up again a few days ago, I decided to have a play with some code and implemented tagging on the sidebar. Here’s how to use it:

To view all tags, click the “Tags” menu option. This will bring up a “tag cloud” of all the tags, with the most popular tags displayed in a larger font.

Hovering your mouse over any of the tags will show you how many videos have been tagged with that word or phrase.

Clicking on any of the tags will bring up a list of videos tagged with that word or phrase, with the most recent at the top of the list.

When playing a video, clicking the “tags” link displayed in green under the video player will bring up a list of tags associated with that video.

If it’s someone else’s video, you’ll just see a list (see image on right), if it’s your own, you’ll be able to add and remove tags (see image below).

On the image to your left you can see this is my video, so I have a text entry field where I can enter a tag.

Also you can see there’s an X by the side of each tag, which when clicked will remove that tag from the video in question.

Tagging is a great way of finding relevant videos so do have a play and let me know how it goes.

I have some ideas on some cool stuff to add to this functionality - a “my seesmic tags” widget for your blog is one, and an API for others to plug into the tag data.

More ideas welcome of course!

Enjoy.

Did you know you can have the sidebar as a desktop application?
Mozilla Labs Prism enables you to create desktop applications from webpages and works particularly well with the seesmic sidebar as it is a webpage displayed in your sidebar.

If you have Firefox 3 then you can install Prism as an extension otherwise you can download it here.

When it asks you what URL you want to use, enter the following (this will change once I’ve moved everything over to the new domain but I’ll let you all know!):

http://purkiss.com/seesmicsidebar

Some of the colors are different, at some point I’ll enable customization of color schemes by the user so you can have it to your liking.

Enjoy! Would love to hear if you do use it and what you think of it…

Thanks to Matthew on the dev team for getting the ‘Inbox’ timeline working again with the new API.

I’ve also changed the ‘Sent’ timeline so you can see private direct messages you’ve sent.

For both of these, you’ll need to log out then back in to the sidebar to see them working.

Firefox 3 is now up to beta 5 and nearly ready for release!

Until version 0.2 of the sidebar code comes out, here’s how to get the sidebar working (and many other extensions) working in the beta version:

• Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
• Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.
• Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.
• Restart Firefox.

Thanks to this article on lifehacker for this useful trick!

On Sunday the seesmic API server went down and a new server was brought online earlier than expected along with an updated version of the seesmic API.

In-house infrastructure developer Bear helped me get the sidebar functionality working as much as possible with the new API but we still haven’t figured out getting the Inbox timeline to work. Should be fixed soon though, so apologies for the down time!

The good news is that hopefully the new API is the one with the recording details in it so hoping to get posting and replying to videos over the next couple of weeks. I’m not a Flash developer but seesmic’s very own Critter has offered to lend a helping which is great.

Apart from that, as usual, if you have any requests for what you would like to see on the sidebar, let me know either by (email) steve (at) purkiss (dot) com or post a response on the blog somewhere.

Thanks to seesmic resident and graphic designer Tracy Apps we have a new header image.

Tracy literally pulled out the stops as she is currently migrating ISPs and delayed her ‘unplugging’ in order to help out!

I’m also grateful we don’t have to look at my ugly mug with my eyes closed and now have a nice raccoon instead

Thanks again Tracy, I hope your ISP move goes smoothly and I’ll get cracking on that food order service plugin for the sidebar right away…

At last, a whole site dedicated to everyone’s favorite sidebar for firefox, flock, and now seamonkey!

The sidebar allows you to watch conversations from seesmic whilst you continue to browse other sites. It’s also got some extra features like the ability to add website links to your posts, hide qik videos, and soon it will be able to record too.

I’ll be moving posts over from my personal blog, plus adding lots of info on functionality, installation, and other groovy stuff.

Keep up-to-date with developments by subscribing to the RSS feed and following @seesmicsidebar on twitter.