Month: September 2005

Tagging up facts with tagfacts?

Just when you thought it had all been done. Dima Kuchin builds TagFacts, a tag based tip, tricks and hints service. I honestly do not know what to make of the service. Its a lot to get your head around. But I can instantly imagine some uses.

For example, I'm always looking for little snippets of XSL, JS or Cocoon code to do certain little tasks. Once I use them, I dont formally store them anywhere. So i'm always looking at my previous xsl to work out how to do something. If its something big, I may put it on my blog. But the small pices are usually lost till I need them again. With TagFacts, I can now store them and retrive them quickly. This is pretty what Dima is doing himself.

Although the appeal is not as great as reader2, it could have some long term appeal and become a place where people look before hitting the newsgroups and forums?

It could become a resource like wikipedia, but in actual fact its the total opposite of wikipedia. See rather then collabative working on the same fact, the collaboration comes from the choice of tags. Tagfacts will work best when you have trusted friends on it, so I could check out how Mr M Kay reverses a XML tree.

There is however something which I cant quite get my headaround. Each fact is so different and could actually be wrong. How is it possible to work whats poplar? There is also no commonality between facts except the tags (in reader2 the isbn is used while in del.icio.us the link is used), this strikes me as quite a difficult thing to keep a track of in the backend. Anyhow, I'm sure Dima has it covered.

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Shared ownership house buying update

So in case you didnt know, me and Sarah are going through the final stages of buying our first house via shared ownership. Its going but not quite quick enough in our view but hopefully we will have a moving date really soon.
We've already started boxing stuff we dont really need in the next month, and planning out how were going to paint and carpet areas of the house. As you can expect, Sarahs in charge of that stuff while I'm charged with getting our internet, internal and av networks up and running. So I've been charting it out, because I've always had the computers and cinema systems together in the same room from a early age. It use to make sense because I would have TV capture (PVR) and TV output options. But now we have decided to move the computers out of the living room and into the spare bedroom. The only machines downstairs now will be laptops and the xbox. This is difficult because the xbox runs really nice on a 100baseT cabled network, I really dont want to push it on to a shared wireless node.
So it looks like were going to have a combination of wireless and cables. We thought about putting wireless access points on each level of the house and hoping one in the loft, spare bedroom and living room will be enough to cover the house. But with no power up in the loft thats not going to happen quite yet. I'm also planning on setting up switches upstairs and downstairs, so the laptops can be plugged into a solid connection for large transfers or when firends come around with there laptops with no wifi. The connection between the switches will be a good quality 100baseT ethernet connection, otherwise seperate bridging wireless points will be needed.

So generally, the house buying is going, but just not anywhere fast. We hope to be moved out by mid Novemeber the latest.

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Podcasts I’ve heard this week

Damm you Evil Genius, that's exactly what I was going to say on my blog…

mention three shows from IT Conversations, two I loved and one I hated. The two I loved:

One was Jason Fried of 37signals giving a talk about the lessons learned building Basecamp. I agree with a lot of the philosophy about doing things cheap, avoiding the pressures of VC money, iterating often, etc. It sounds like all the good stuff of agile development without the woowoo bits of extreme programming that make me itchy.

The other was Doc Searls who talked to Sig Solares, the guy who kept his data center in New Orleans going through the hurricane and flood. It was fascinating on a technical level and horrifying on a human one.

The one I hated was the Larry Magid interview with George Gilder. I've heard multiple podcasts with Gilder recently and he strikes me as one of those pundits that people pay attention to but I'm not exactly sure why. Even though I overlap with his opinions on many points (citizen media being a big one), I find listening to him highly annoying. Mostly, his depth of criticism seems to consist of making up goofily insulting nicknames for the things he doesn't agree with, like “fool cells.” Thank you, Deep Thought. His shallow dismissals for spurious reasons some technologies makes me nervous when I hear him high on technologies I am also high on. It makes me think that maybe I'm actually wrong, if I'm on the same side as him on that point. I heard him on the Gillmor Gang a few weeks ago and had a similar reaction to that.

I would also add that George sounded so sure of himself and ever so arrogant in the interview with Larry, and it was pretty much the same with the Gillmor Gang too. I'm off the guy and I've only heard him talk twice, maybe not the best thing to admit if I ever meet him but thats how I feel right now.

Jason from 37signals was breathtaking to hear, when I started listening I was thinking oh no not another sells type pitch. But before long I was listening hard and really taking in some of the things he was saying. Really worth the time to hear this podcast I would say.

On a related topic, I'm deeply considering building a special feed for all the recommended podcasts I hear. I was trying some new social podcasting service (cant remember the url right now) which claims to do just that but fails because it assumes all podcast feeds are attached to one person. So subscribing IT conversations really screwed things up. No I'm considering using listal.com or something else to say yes I recommend this single podcast. The idea would be that if I recommend a couple a week, it would slowly build up to a highly recommeded best of what i'm hearing type feed.
On how I do this, I've got a few thoughts. I could just setup another del.icio.us account and only post urls to rich media or I could add a special tag which I identify as this is a recommended podcast. I would then take either of the feeds and using xsl transform it into another podcast feed. I know I could use something like feedburner to do this, but I really want to just bookmark it and know it will end up in the other feed without any more human intervention. I was also considering doing a cross check with my audioscrobbler/last.fm feed to get more data.
Natrually any feed I would generate, I would also process into xhtml so it can appear on the side bar of the site. Which would be more useful than just copying my recently listened to audioscrobbler list as it does currently. It would be great if Itunes actually had a easily accessable xml based api which I could get into. Then I would be tempted to use the itunes rating system to rate podcasts.
I'm sure Steve Gillmor would also find such a API useful to get feedback on IT conversation programming. I'm currently I do go to the site and vote for some stuff, but not even 20% of what I actually listen to. If the vote system was de-coupled into itunes or my RSS aggregator I would vote on everything I heard. Its a bit like the Digg problem really. To actually digg a story you have to go to the site. There's seems to be not trackback or simple restful url I can send the data too at the moment. There's certainly a gap in the market for audioscrobbler plugins to send rating data to its self, which could actually give a little more focus on the podcasting listenership figures. I'm actually sure someones thought of this too, but I guess the differences between rating systems in windows mediaplayer, itunes and whatever else makes things difficult, but not impossible.

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Google blog search launches

Google Blog search

I'm still playing with it, but google blogsearch just launched. Its pretty fast and seems to be indexing pretty well. The Atom and RSS output is pretty useful and outputs the basic amount of metadata, no A9 open search extension used. Google have applied a simple CSS transformation to the Atom feed but not to the RSS feed. Theres no advertising yet, but there is a related blogs feature which isnt included in the RSS or Atom.

Is this the end of Technorati, Feedster, Blogdigger and other feed based aggregators? I dont personally think it is but we may see a shake up or at least much more creative risk taking in the very near future. But then again, theres nothing stopping google mixing up blogsearch with maps to create blogdigger's local feature. Ranking blogs to create there own Technorati Top 100 or Feedster 500. Hey may google will tie up there video service with blogs for some interesting views on the content.
But lets not forget, Yahoo still has its hand to play in this field and I think theres will be the most disruptive.

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Torrents and the long tail

So today I finally found the pirate bay's RSS feeds. They must have just launched them, because I've looked hard before. There quite plain RSS2 feeds but enabled across all the different genres of the site. You can all access everything via rss.php which delivers all the newest torrents regardless of category. I cant seem to find a way to get the Top 100 yet, but I'm sure its coming. Ben Metcalfe has told me RSS has been enabled for quite some time. So with that information I checkout the news page and he was right. Seems to be enabled since at least June. Oh well at least its been blogged now.

On another branch, I was looking through my Torrent RSS feeds and saw “Pump up the volume.” Some of you will instantly think about that film with the same name and Christian Slater. But no no, i'm talking about a Pump up the volume: A History of House. Its a documentary on Dance and House music by Channel 4. See i've been meaning to show Sarah it for years as shes American and lived in small Citys during her teenage years. So has little concept of what Dance music is and where it came from.
If Channel4 had made this available via DVD to buy, I would have bought it at some point. But its too late now, because its here on UKnova. One word for Channel4, Longtail. Maybe they could have done something simlar to PBS with there NerdTV? I'm hoping the BBC take the PBS NerdTV example as a good way to serve the longtail.

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I love rollercoasters

Are you ready to scream?

I've ridden some of the best but I had forgot how fun it was to ride a new one till today. A friend of ours was going to Thorpe Park for her birthday and asked if me and Sarah would like to come along as her husband did not really enjoy rollercoasters. I guess Coasters is one of those subjects we just never got around to talking about. So it was a bit of a shock when we explain how much we adored coasters.

Nemesis Inferno really brough back my desire to ride more exotic coasters, and from the picture it looks like one I heard about a while ago is coming to England next year. From a little browsing around it seems the unknown coaster's development name is stealth but looks like a carbon copy of Cedar Point's Top Thrill Dragster. Going on estimates it seems Dragster is 2 times the height but 60+ meters in the UK is pretty good going and I'm wondering how they got the planning permission for such a tall structure, so close to Heathrow airport? To get a feel for how this amazing roller coaster will look check out this shot from the top of dragster, this one from the ground and this one from the side. Thorpe Park isnt the only one doing this type of ride, Warner Bros are building Superman: Escape which is seems to be the same height, same designers and looks like this. So even at half the height its going to be one hell of a Hydraulic launch ride.

On another note, Oakwood is also building a secret rollercoaster which seems to have a few people interested. Plus its good to finally see Drayton Manor build another decent coaster to go with the slightly aging but still only english stand up coaster – Shockwave

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Should we solve one click subscriptions by turning the html off?

Thinking about RSS in a slightly different way is Bill de horas (found via Paul James).

at some point weblogs flip over and the HTML website bits will become secondary fluff to the XML content, like how PDFs are secondary web fluff to HTML today

It certainly looks like the first site is actually down at the moment. But even the title and quote raises a load of questions which I've been thinking about.

When (if ever?) will RSS, Atom, or something reading out grows HTML browsing?
Will it be via RSS, Atom, Web Api's, Webservices or something else?
How will the write nature of the web fit with such a change?
Is it worth having a specification beyond XHTML 2.0 in the light of this title?
Should the w3c push for a standard of RSS or go along with Atom?
When will the first lot of RSS only services and sites (maybe not the best term now) emerge?
Is content negotiation really your friend or actually your foe?

Maybe some of these questions are answered by the post, but I still cant access it. Here's the google cached version.

So now finally seeing the entry fully, heres some more thoughts…
Bill certainly thinks along the same lines as Miles. But he certainly does make some good points.

While the browser wars continue on their merry percentage-driven dance, it all seems somehow kind of pointless and wistful, like having a really satisfying argument over the pros and cons of various 8-track tape players, while the rest of world are sucking down MP3s into their iPods.

Indeed, the upcoming browser wars is largely irelevent for a small but growing group of internet users.

The idea of turning off the website for this place and just serving up the feed does not look unreasonable at this point. I'm betting 90% of traffic to the archived html files here is only driven because the permalinks and trackbacks point there instead of direct to feed entries. It's slavish. Honestly, permalinking to a html file is starting to look more and more like a bug. Why not point to the XML entries? (Answer: I'm not sure, but in my case it might have something to do with having a Perl Deficit).

Good point, but RSS archiving is pretty important when you consider this point more deeply. I guess it would make sense for myself to link directly to the blojsom entry files which are simply subset xhtml files. This would also make sense if you consider client side transformations.

The frontpage would be the feed, the archives would be Atom entries, and instead of a “subscribe to the feed” buttons, you could have “read this stuff in a browser” buttons

Nice idea, I love the idea of a view this with a browser button.

Web browsers are still good for the following however:

1. Testing webapps
2. Shopping
3. Posting to delicious
4. Search forms

That list is pretty much what Miles came up with too. How odd… But following on.

1 is a self-fulfilling prophesy (or a death-spiral, I can't tell). 2, well, Better Living Through Shopping obviously, but it's only conditioning to be unlearned – how long can it be before I start buying stuff via an aggregator? 3 and 4 represents feature deficit in today's aggregators, insofar as they they don't have much by the way of tool bar goodness. A Mozilla based aggregator will eventually fix that right up.

Mozilla based aggregator, how great would that be? And before anyone replies, I'm aware of Sage, newsmonster and a couple more. The ability to shop or transact within a rss aggregator is the next logical step for paypal/ebay, amazon, etc. Its also interesting to see this already happening when you consider the field bigger than simply aggregators. You know little applications/widgets which interact and transact with Amazon and Ebay webservices.

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The new simple API, RSS and Atom?

A Web API lets you use a web site’s computers, data, algorithms, and functions to create your own web services. Google, Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo, and many other web services have APIs.

RSS is like an API for content. RSS gives you access to a web site’s data just like an API gives you access to a web site’s computing power. Most important, RSS gives you access to your data that you have locked up on a web site.

Every Web 1.0 company will have to decide what content they will open with RSS. For example, Amazon already makes their content like their book catalog available through their API. But will Amazon open up user-contributed content through RSS?

This is a quote from this post titled RSS is an API for Content, which is part of the series – RSS is the TCP/IP Packet of Web 2.0. I've been kicking the same idea around for quite some time now. The overheads of SOAP and XMLRPC are already quite clear and although there really good, there too heavy weight for most general use (which makes up most of the use of webservice use out there). Using a range of RSS or ATOM with Namespaces, Microformats and RSS-extensions its possible to model most syndication type content. I've wrote examples of SMIL and SVG in RSS which a newsreader will still accept as plain RSS. Theres tons of tools and frameworks for RSS, much more than SOAP or XMLRPC. Imagine trying to parse SOAP with a lightweight Javascript library… But I'm going on. This isnt about webservices, this is about the pipelines of the net being RSS.

Someone once said, they dont visit sites which dont have RSS. I laughed then, but now I dont. I wouldnt dare join a service or site which doesnt support good clean RSS/ATOM output. Its important to get my data out on my own terms, but I would also like to get my attention data out. This is the next step but RSS will have a role to play in this too. I remember listening to a podcast (cant remember which one) where they spoke about how the public will be expecting tools and services like they experience online. Its happening, I've noticed a large amount of discussion about gmail vs thunderbird just recently. Why is search online better than search on the desktop or on your companys intranet?

Blogdigger has a good entry explaining why there using RSS through-out there system.

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Apple nano, phone and itunes5? What a disappointment

So after all the usual marketing hype, Kevin was right. Cingular will sell the iTunes shuffle Motorola phone. Theres a replacement to the ipod mini called the ipod “Nano” which has a colour screen and is very light and very thin. Oh an theres iTunes5 which syncs with outlook and has a few extra features. Yeah big deal… If your interested, Engadget had a live blog for the event, which included a ichatAV call to some stars and lots of Steve Jobs type charisma.

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What’s your next cellphone? Asks Engadget

It’s been over a year since we last took everyone’s temperature on this topic, so we figured it was high time we did another Ask Engadget where we asked everyone what their next cellphone was going to be.

I'm going back to the Windows Smartphone/mobile platform for my next phone. Maybe the Windows mobile Treo might be a idea but will it support 3G/UMTS? douhtful… Something is certain, the next phone will have to support a high rez screen. I've been comparing my 320×240 screen with some of the latest Nokia's and i'm totally shocked by the quality of the Sanyo S750.
Some things I dont want on my phone, playback buttons. I honestly dont care if my phone has play and pause buttons. Clam style.
Some things I do want on my phone, SD or MiniSD storage. Windows Mobile or some open Linux operating system, USB type connection, 2+ megapixal cameras with unlimited video support (unlimited capture to storage card).

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Get lost? sorry i’ve already seen the directions…

Lost

The UK seems to be gripped in a Lost frenzy at the moment, I would just like to put my hands up and say I watched the whole first series a few months ago. Its well worth watching and I would like to Thank Waheed for turning my attention to this very good series. This certainly replaced 24 as my american TV series of choice now.

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Blame it on July 7th?

Canary wharf in the fog

Saturday night after my friends party, I decided to popup to the Isle of dogs, where Canary Wharf and the other tall buildings of the docklands sit. I had my digital camera with me and decided it would be a great night to take some pictures of the warm but slightly cloudy night. The low bearing clouds have a interesting effect on the lights of tall buildings. So I was scooting around the complex taking pictures when about 40mins in, a dressed up security guard told me to stop shooting under some made up July 7 law. I instantly questioned this made up law and he was kind of thrown off guard with my questioning, so changed his tone and said I needed a permit to take pictures around there. Yep well it seems the July 7th attacks has the other Canary Wharf security so worried that they let me drive up and take pictures in the middle of a road and park my bike next to the security office. Seriously after talking to this jumped up security guard, I drove off to get a permit at 3am just to spite him. When I arrived at the security office, the managing security guard told me the dressed up security guard only controls one of the smaller buildings and I was allowed to take pictures of any of the buildings as long as I dont take pictures of the entrances and exits.
So the facts of the matter was this jumped and dressed up security guard got touchy that I took pictures of his building next to the DLR station and made up some crappy story to stop me from taking pictures. Yeah well he was lucky I was too tired to go back and tell him where to stick his story. To be very fair to the rest of the security guards throughout the complex, they were pleased to help me take the pictures and were all very accommodating.
Its just a shame the pictures were not as good as they could have been…

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update – Socially sharing everything?

Ok I keep adding more to the previous blog entry, so heres an update.

I've been playing with Listal and BlinkList after the recent comments. There both pretty good, BlinkList is certainly a whole lot futher down the line than Listal or even Reader2 and Myprogs. But seems to be a straight replacement to del.icio.us, de.liri.ous, furl, etc. It lets you easily import thses too. I'm currently quite happy with del.icio.us and am thinking waiting till Yahoo's My Web 2 and other bookmarking services show something different they can do.

Listal is a little scatty because it can do so (maybe too) much? Flickr works because its all about photos, del.icio.us works because its about bookmarking resources online. Listal does Bookmarking, movies, books, music, etc. Its useful to have the ability to create a list about anything but you loose the fundmental social aspect of a social tool. Reader2 works because every resource must have a ISBN and del.icio.us because every resource has a URL. Listal has so many different types of resources to work around I cant see how it would be possible to keep track of them all. Its easier to match people together based on one common resource. I also dont get the artificial barriers it throws in. Talk about driving the complexity up! Why is there a difference between Region 1 and Region 2 DVDs? I assume because the database pull is different, but why display that to the user? Anyhow, I dont want to seem too harsh in my comments, as I've only played with it for a few hours.

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Ajax powered BBC News RSS Reader

Nigal Crawley is looking for feedback on his BBC backstage prototype. Its a web client which will pull a RSS feed and display it as a neat little ticker type box. Just the kinda of thing our partners would love to see intergrated into there sites. I dropped Nigal a quick email asking if he's considered building a Widget out of it and if it would support multiple encodings and right to left languages like Persian and Arabic?

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Socially sharing everything?

Just recently I've been checking out the social bookmarking/media web. The first major addition is YouTube.com which is everything Flickr is but based around video clips. It supports a set of Web APIs, RSS feeds and many social possiblities. Uploading video is a pain and enter metadata for clips is somewhat a pain compared to Flickr, you must fill in at least 3 pieces of meta (title, description and a set of tags). I got a feeling that Youtube wont be popular till video capturing is popular on mobile phones and digital cameras. Flickr was well timed for this expansion. As usual you can check out my public page here.

The other 2 Social networks I've been dabling with is myprogs, del.icio.us for software and reader2, del.icio.us for books. Both written by Dima Kuchin from Israel and coming to the UK really soon it would seem.
Like Youtube, they falls into the trap of entering metadata. Reader2 does have a google and amazon lookup, but its not great. I would expect once you have the ISBN of the book, all I would need to do is enter my tags. However, the copy item feature is good if a little fussy to use. It would be really great if Reader2 supported Amazon Wishlist and Myprogs could read your start menu or something via a downloadable application?
I'm kinda of looking forward to a movie version of these social bookmarking, which will save me building a personal store using cocoon or some other open source tool. I thought about using imdb to do this, but I still do not see any web api or even rss feeds for getting my data in and out. Unlike Youtube none of these services have public web apis but theres enough RSS feeds and I'm sure it will come over time. Just like how I hope Digg gets its act together, I'm not going to visit the website everytime I want to digg a story forever.

While I'm talking about social software. Has anyone noticed how Clusters or Bundles are starting to emerge out of the collaborative tagging. So for a good example, here is a search for social on Flickr. On the left hand side you will see a link to the Social clusters. Heres a Nature cluster, City, Phone and even the xbox. Interesting and popular is also becoming well used cluster types.

Following on from the comment by Tim at LibraryThing.com
I have started looking at LibraryThing and comparing it with reader2. My first thoughts, is that its not as sweet looking but thats not a big problem because it actually has lots of ability to customise it. I just wish they would adopt a tableless design like reader2.
On the plus side, theres already the ability to import data from del.icio.us and export data as csv. I expect XML output wouldnt be out of the question but worst comes to worst, I could get Cocoon to transform it to some xml format. I also have to give Tim a thumbs up for pluging into the Library of Congress and building a much better book adding system. It also supports tags with commas instead of spaces which seems to be consistent with where every other tagging system are heading. Reader2 doesnt but has much more fluid interface (Ajaxy) for entering tags and other metadata.
Like Reader2, there is no WebAPI but worst still there no RSS feeds which I can find. This is deeply off putting and has stopped me adding more content for now. So generally I think LibraryThing is good if your a serious book collector (the revenue model seems to match this too) but for myself the lack of basic RSS feeds is off putting simply because I cant extract my own content out easily.
If your interested in checking it out, heres my profile and heres my books.

My mistake Reader2 does support a slight export via javascript as well as RSS. I swear this was not available yesterday. Quite amazing to see the other language versions poping up now.

If you want support for your language, mail me and I'll arrange it.
Russian, French, Spanish, Dutch and Chinese languages are already supported.

I would like to ask Dima Kuchin why he choose to do this. Wikipedia takes this approch too, but Flickr, del.icio.us and other just let people from all countries get on with it. Maybe with time there will be a way to aggregate tags from other languages together but I expect this will some time…

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