Month: December 2005

Geekdinner with Scoble and Dotben

Ben and Scoble pause for a quick photo

So the first Geekdinner I've been to which was on a weekend was great fun. The conversations I had were fantastic through-out the night. I met some great new people and spent a lot with Sheila chatting away about life, XML and the universe. So odd meeting someone so on your level its actually pretty spooky.
The Geekdinner should have been renamed the Geekdinner with Ben Metcalfe and Robert Scoble, Z list meets A list but it works out ok this time.

Anyhow, so it was great catching up with Scoble again. He obviously didnt remember who I was at first but he actually did remember after a couple of seconds once I mentioned RSS and working for the BBC World Service. Can I also say did anyone get a picture of Scoble doing a flaming shot at that champagne bar we all went to afterwards?

The Sheila and Myself at Geekdinner

So this is how the night went. I got to the Texas Embassy about 6:30pm, after finding somewhere just around the corner to park. I was hoping to get my hair cut but it never quite happened due to Saturday football crowds through Charlton, I must remember that next time.
I was at the bar and heard a couple of guys talking about Google Books and it actually turned out to be one of the guys behind Searchengine Watch. I also got talking with a student of Computer Science from De montfort. I and he was concerned that his course was not teaching anything about webservices, internet conectivity or even modern developent methods. And actually I got speaking to another student who had the same problems. Geez no wonder a lot of computer science students have such closed minds to such things?
Moving on. I'll drop out the conversations I had for now, as I want to elaborate on quite a few of them.

So after dinner which was the usual Tex-Mex type thing, Robert and Hugh did a little speech and actually opened it up to the crowd of about 150. The rest of the time was spent talking and drinking. By the time we got thrown out of the Embassy, the plan was hatched to head up to a Champagne Bar in Soho and Microsoft paid for us all. Yeah expensive champagne for about 30+ people, cheers Microsoft. After about a hour or so, we were being kicked out again. So Me, Sheila and Shahid from google ended up at a coffee bar in Soho and geeked about XML and related technologies. Its so great talking out loud about this stuff. XML will rule the world…

The champange bar afterwards paid for my microsoft

There's a Flickr pool for fun photos from the night.

So about those conversations.
Well he's a few I remember, this is good for my own memory as well as it might be of interest to others.

Talking to imp, she told me there was a problem with trackbacks on the BBC creative archive site and even on my own. I assured her that Trackbacks do work on cubicgarden (I get enough spam to know this for sure) but honestly I've never seen any from Haloscan.

I met Tim from dotnetsolutions, he's one of the guys from http://www.DHTMLcentral.com. It was quite late but from what I can gather there doing lots of Ajax type stuff now and leaning on there DHTML past to do creative and useable things. I've not really looked at that site for about 6/7 years but I do remember going there for scripts when Netscape 4.x just came out. That was also the days when I never use to think about cross-browser scripts and web standards. Gald things have changed for the better.

Trying to explain to Sheila what OPML was without any tools except handwaving while walking up a packed Saturday night charing cross road. Chris from Microsoft seemed to think it was a great standard, while I was trying to explain its not really a standard just happen to be the default way to share Blogrolls and subscriptions. I was going to mention XBEL and XOXO but never quite got around to it. I also noticed Uche has wrote a few XSL's to convert between OPML and XBEL and XOXO.

A brief talk and handshake with Dan Gillmor who of course wrote the hughly successful We the Media. I should have talked longer but I was just coming back from the toilet and caught him while he was making a move to leave it would seem. I know the Global voice's people were at the geekdinner but I didnt really get a chance to talk to anyone except Lucy Hoberman (BBC Creative R and D) before we went to the champagne bar and met Nicole. Nicole is a german woman who podcasts and blogs in German and English. We had a very interesting perspective talk about the differences and how your percived when writing and talking in another language online.

Spent quite a bit of time talking to Kosso and Dr Jo Twist about various things.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Yahoo! buys Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us

Well, well. You help but feel Yahoo are on a little bit of a roll. Acquiring Flickr.com was pretty fantastic and Kodak must be kicking themselves now. Yes its not been a clean buy with people protesting the whole big company feel. To be honest I still use my Flickr ID not my Yahoo ID. Straight afterwards Konfabulator was bought and improved. Then recently Yahoo bought upcoming.org which was not a bad move at all, specially if/when Google Calendar launches. But now del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo pool of services. Its kind of odd because Yahoo's My Web 2.0 was a exact copy of Del.icio.us, so I expect Yahoo will combine the two at some point or at least provide someway of crossing between them for a while. You can already export all your bookmarks from del.icio.us and import them into myweb 2.0. I dont believe the opposite is the same. Joshua has a short entry about joining the Yahoo family.

The question remains if Yahoo will keep it free or offer a pro version which costs. I mean a Flickr type model would go down like a lead ballon to start off with but maybe if they were to offer advanced features beyond the current del.icio.us then maybe they could charge for them. I'm not bothered really, maybe Yahoo could use it just to study there audience's useage platform which woud be a great source of information. Maybe it could be a lost leader like Konfabulator.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Ben and Mena and the internet conversation

ben and mena on technorati

I've been amazed by how the Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe exchange has blown up. Here's the movie if you dont know what I'm talking about.

So generally Ben was talking on the backchannel of the Les Blogs conference on his laptop. Mena was giving a talk about being civial and gentle to each other. This rubbed Ben and others up the wrong way and so Ben made his feelings known on the backchannel. However Mena saw the comment from Ben where he said Bullshit and procceed to stop her talk and ask the person named dotBen to stand up. Ben stood up and defended his view of the presentation while Mena took it very personally and started to question Ben about what his problem was. Yes she used F*ck and As*hole while addressing Ben.

But please please, go read Ben's complete entry about the whole thing and of course Mena's entry which seems to skirt over the issue a little. Even the Dave Winer has waded into the conversation.

In my usual style, I've got to highlight some of the best comments and views I've read around the whole incident.

Jem stone's post which was the first time I was aware of what had happened. Great picture by the way!

Liz Lawley's comment to Ben's blog entry.

Nobody seems to be acknowleding the huge power differentials that come into play there, and it’s simply *not* the same thing as making comments in the backchannel. For her to comment on and respond to Ben’s remarks are one thing (although civility in her response would have gone much further towards furthering her call for civility from others). For her to swear at him from the podium and and call him out is something quite different.

It’s also worth saying that there’s a difference between saying that a speaker’s remarks are bullshit, and saying that a person is an asshole. One is about content, the other is about personalities. I think Mena crossed a line there.

Ben replys

Ian Betteridge's pretty funny reply to Dave Winer's comment.

Nick S hits the nail on the head. Dave W can dish it out – preferably when he’s got some fauning acolytes around – but he can’t take it. The fact that he can call you a coward for having moderated comments on your blog while not having comments on his at all is typical of combination of hysteria and hypocrisy that characterises half of what he says.

And that he’s now claiming that the invention of the blogosphere is down to him having comments on his blog is classic Winerism. Dammit Dave, why don’t you just go the whole hog and claim the invention of the internet, the internal combusion engine, and gunpowder is down to you too?

Mena on stage

The Register for there usual funny but well crafted entry.

The Blog Hearld for there first piece but for also stiring things up in Sixapart vs the BBC. Please, this is stupid.

A kinder, gentle blogosphere by Stowe Boyd.

Its even been dugged but the score to date is only 3 to date. Well its good to know its all dieing down now.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Calendaring interoperation with eventful?

eventful interop with others

On the eve (maybe) or at least before Google Calendar didnt happen is put out into the public internet, the eventful seems to be scrambling for some more marketspace. In a unannounced blog move the people behind EVDB have a option to submit the event to other sites. I've not checked out what all the end result are like but if the del.icio.us/events entry is a example, its not bad. Yes it links back to the Eventful calendar but the tags and description are still pretty much there. I've already suggested a blog this option, which would save me copying and pasting. Export as hCalendar (microformat) would be useful too.

I meant to blog Eventful's new group feature which allows you to group togther peoples events via tags and searches. But honestly there blog entry says it all and all I can add, is that its great. I really need to check back on upcoming.org, see if they have improved things there.

The eventful blog has just updated and wrote a more detailed account about this new feature. And thanks Sheila for letting me know Google Calendar never quite happened as rumored. Which is a real shame, I was looking forward to seeing what Google would do differently from the others.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Compromised passwords and your idenity online

So I just recently downloaded the Skype 2.0 beta which supports Video chat. And deceided to go try it out, but oh no… I cant login. Whats going on I started to wonder, its not like I got the wrong username and password because I've been using Keepass for quite some time now, plus Skype saves the password if you want it to anyway. So i'm wondering what the hecks going on. 1min of searching later I find Skype Passwords Compromised?

So generally if you registered for share.skype.com then your at risk. Well thats me, after my little dabble with there developers area. Now I cant access my skype address and because I moved house and changed broadband account I cant actually retrieve my changed password. So in other words, the user cubicgarden on skype is not going to be me anytime soon. Yeah I'm pretty bitter about it all.

Something simular happened with my old cubicgarden Bloglines account a while ago and let me tell you about the frustrating emails I sent trying to prove I was the user of that account. It was insane to say the least. If Skype like Bloglines dont accept that as the registered owner of cubicgarden.com I would choose cubicgarden as a username then I'm once again stuck. There has got be a better way to do Identity online? Talking of which Dick Hardt (Sxip identity) talk at web 2.0 is interesting to say the least. I really see the need for something like sxip, as relying on your email or even a url for a id is sucky to say the least. Geez even using a hash in a FOAF file would be better than email and a url.

Can I also just say, this is another example of company's leaking your online identity. Privicy and security online, well what do you make of that improbulus?

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

XTech 2006: Call For Participation

There is a Call For Participation if you want to join XTECH 2006, You have until January 9th 2006.

The theme for 2006, “Building Web 2.0”, recognises the key place of standards-based and open technology in enabling the next generation of web applications. Practitioners and leaders from all disciplines are invited to participate in presenting and discussing the technology and design issues behind the changing web.

It looks like I will not be talking this time due to the lack of development in a RSS extension to better support Languages. But who knows what might happen over the next few weeks. Anyhow, I will be back as it was a great conference to be a part of last time. I expect this year will be full of practitioners and we may see even more developers from google, yahoo, microsoft, etc this time around.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Full over excerpted feeds

From Dave Slusher the evil genius and his post titled excerpted RSS feeds

  • When I read postings in my RSS reader, it takes effectively no time to move from item to item because they have all already been downloaded before I look at them.
  • When I open the webpage of an item from that feed it takes time, usually from 1 to 10 seconds per item.
  • When I sit down to read my feeds, I typically have between 40 and 200 individual items in there. At an average load time of 3 seconds per item , that would add from 2 to 10 minutes to my reading time just in waiting for pages to load if everyone did this.
  • Most excerpted feeds are really excerpted. Here’s a real world example of something that came down a feed, the information I was given to decide whether I want to pursue reading this or not:

    • While Wharton claims he may now have been “assimilated” into the culture of Action Greensboro, I seriously doubt it. While I, too, attended last night’s follow-up meetin

  • If you knew how often I looked at the first 18 words of your post and decided that although I care enough to subscribe to your RSS feed I don’t care enough to chase this post down, it would probably hurt your feelings. Sorry kids, you have to make tough calls in this life.
  • I’m actually becoming a full-text hardass again, and by the end of the week will be purging out all the excerpted feeds from my newsreader. If you don’t care enough to make it easy on me trying to follow lots of information, I don’t care enough to read your stuff. That’s harsh, but quid pro quo often is.

My first thoughts are right on Dave, I'm with you but I cant quite bring myself to be that Harsh. For example, Microsoft watch from Mary Jo Foley. I cant unsubscribe because its really timey content. I mean compare it to the unofficial microsoft weblog's content. Enough said… In the mainstream RSS space you just have to expect headline descriptions, very few dare do full text, and so it would be difficult to just remove them all. Some others feeds worth mentioning include infosync which is not the full text but damm putting medium resoultion pictures in with the description is a great idea. I would say its one of the most beautiful feeds you can get if your a gadget geek. Saying all that, they could take the route of Inhabitat, which has beautiful pictures and full text.

So generally, I agree with Dave, but I wont be so harsh. Its all about the content.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Firefox 1.5 now out but with limited SVG support

Firefox 1.5 released

Firefox 1.5 is released, hooray! And its the same as Firefox 1.5 RC3 which I've been using for a while now, hooray again… But not with full support for SVG 1.1 Full, Tiny or Basic profiles. This is a crying shame but still marks another step forward for SVG on the desktop. The full version which supports SVG is still in development and should be available in Firefox 3 according to SVG news. At least SVG is doing much better in the mobile space, almost 100 phones and counting.

If you want to see whats possible with Firefox 1.5 and SVG, do check out the Canvas painter demos which are poping up everywhere. Vladimir has a link to the best ones.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]