Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I was alerted to bank of ideas by a yellow post-it type of note on reader2 just recently. It's a social network for ideas and community voting, says the about page. What I find weird is the choice of using a social network instead of a wiki or forum, like many other projects do? Odd, but a interesting decision.
This is the first time I've ever downloaded something which was labled something else on bit torrent, maybe this is a growing trend? Has anyone else experienced this? I noticed the torrent in question has been removed from the piratebay. But I had already almost uploaded 3 times the contents of the torrent without knowing by the time I had got home today. So sorry to everyone else who was also duked. But to add aditional insult, I also downloaded Prison Break ep1 too, so I ended up with two of the same file. You can tell I was very very pissed off. At least Tom's recommendation for Prison break was a good enough choice to finally calm me down. Certainly no Oz, but interesting none the less. I'm just waiting for Fox to ruin it with some 24 type government propaganda.
Obviously he will also be doing some presentations and interviews around the BBC before. So if your a BBC member of staff working on the 13th October, try and keep your calendar clear on that day, so you can either attend a session in White City or Bush House with Tim. If your interested but have never heard Tim talk before, please check out this recommended podcast by Paul
So after a long wait details about Windows Vista's RSS ability are starting to emerge. Amar Gandhi (Group Program Manager of the Windows RSS team) presented “Windows Vista: Building RSS-enabled applications” at PDC 2005 just a few days ago. Sean is planning on putting more details on the Longhorn Team RSS blog soon. But till then I found the powerpoint presentation from Amar Gandhi online. Now if anyone has a video of the demo's that would be great.
On a related tip, Microsoft and Amazon have got together to launch A9 Open search into IE7. Two huge megacorps working together with open standards, this can't be happening? Or can it?
Maybe the reason the UK public are a little behind our Amercian cousins when it comes to being across blogging is because it’s not very ‘British’ for the common man to stand and up and ‘have his say’ on something.
And as you have predicted, I have to agree. But I'm not so sure its quite as simple as to blame our British culture. I feel Geek culture is still kinda of looked down on while America geek culture is much more prolific. I'm not saying that's the only reason either but it like broadband pentration, etc have there part to play in the sum. But lets not forget the ability for the British to quickly change like in the case of House music in the late 80's.
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.
So generally, the house buying is going, but just not anywhere fast. We hope to be moved out by mid Novemeber the latest.
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.
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.
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.