I am becoming quite obsessive about sites that provide RSS feeds but only a line or two. Some drive me up the wall when they only show the head title and nothing more. The whole point of Syndication is syndication surely? I understand that news sites want to drive people to the site. So take BBC for example, there feed only shows the headline and a brief paragraph of text. Fine, I can live with that…
But I can not live with sites like xbox-scene.com which only show the title or much worst still ftrain, Jono the blog and demosgreenhouse. I'm sorry but for example Douglas Rushkoff supplys a full feed without any trouble and he's blog is read by many many people. Techdirt Corporate Intelligence is a another example of how easy the temptation of full feeds can be…
I dont really understand the reason except advertising for not showing all the content in a feed?
Author:
Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser.
Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io
Amazon search – A9
So Amazon have launched there A9 search engine, and I've been checking it out.
First thoughts, its a little large and the style is down a touch from even all the web. Certainly not your google or teoma. But how good is it? Well its a odd beast. A search for cubicgarden my own site gets results close to google, but check out that url! a9.com/cubicgarden.com. Wow now interesting… No query strings for A9 it would seem.
http://a9.com/cubicgarden : A9
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=web&cs=utf8&q=cubicgarden&_sb_lang=pref : All the web/Fast
http://s.teoma.com/search?q=cubicgarden&qcat=1&qsrc=0&Search.x=0&Search.y=0 : Teoma
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=imdb&btnG=Search : Google
Interesting enough Teoma looks at my mixes and finds some lostfeeds stuff, some comments I've made on city of minneapolis and built for the future. While All the web does pretty much the same, but avoids the nackerd lostfeeds links. Google and A9 generate almost the same results except… 1,510 for cubicgarden. (0.09 seconds) from Google and only 52 for A9… Looking at the results too, A9 picks the best ones of googles selection. Even when you get close to the end of 52. I'm still getting good results. Noticed the querystring finally gets used via pages.
So yeah I'm basicly saying this A9 stuff is good, and I havent signed in yet…Which you need to do to use search history and other features. Nice url by the way amazon.
Copyright vs Community publicity
Lots of Tutorials
PHP5 and XML?
I keep meaning to have a complete look at the advanced features of PHP5 when it comes to XML. So this is reminding me to do so.
OQO maybe not vaporware
Guys in the BBC saw a arcticle in the latest Wired about the OQO. Havent checked it out for a while, interesting to see there now using a built in keyboard with a 5 inch screen, use to be 4 inch and no keyboard. Shame there still using USB 2 and no 802.11g. Che found more upto date info on TechTV. And of course theres lots of photos on the OQO site.
New mobile RSS readers
Read on my feeds a while back, there are some more RSS readers for PocketPC, Smartphone and even the palm.
Nokia Lifeblog is now here
Just a quick note to say Nokia's Lifeblog is now nearing its launch date.
Audio searching with speechbot
I have no idea what to make of Speechbot. This is so typical of the cutting edge work HP research labs are doing. I havent done any real research into it but even the concept alone makes me feel very sick.
Ok I've just done tests, and it couldnt find for example Mpeg4, which it should have found if its indexed content from streamingmedia.com. However streaming did match 200 items. Wow, the show me extract part is pretty slick… It also seems speechbot isnt working on semantics. As its picked up non streamingmedia.com content too. HP Labs have done it again… Kudos from the BBC.
Take this for a great example.
Search for any words with streaming in it like above. And got a link to public interest transcript, here is the section taken from the actual stream. Yes believe it…
Skype comes to Pocket PCs
Just read on infosync, Skype is coming the PocketPC. And now I'm interested… Just wish Skype used standards like H323 or even SIP.
Skype Technologies, the company behind the increasingly popular Skype P2P Voice over IP (VoIP) application for Windows desktops, today launched a beta version of PocketSkype for the Windows Mobile 2003 platform. Owners of Wi-Fi enabled Pocket PCs with 400 MHz or higher processors can now make free, unlimited and unmetered calls to friends, family and colleagues using Skype on the desktop or similar devices.
PocketSkype retains the same core features of regular Skype software including free Skype to Skype worldwide calling to any Skype user, ability to participate in free Skype conference calling, instant messaging, access to the Global Decentralised Directory, online presence and contact lists. Skype Technologies recommended that a headset be used with the software to achieve the best quality.
Wlanevent.com
This is the way forward, sitting in a seminar with tons of wireless around me. Looking at my scanner, theres actually 5 just in this area. There was 20 hubs on the way from the registeration part to the seminar. Anyway I some interesting things i heard…
UltraWideBand isnt the same as Wimax, duhh me! Ultrawideband can support 1.2 gigabits download and 480 megbits upload per node. Its 802.15.3 and is currently made up of 3 different types. UWB Wireless Lan, UWB Electric and UWB Cable. The Wireless Lan is obviously your usual Wireless for home and office use. The Electric, is a rival to the Home plug standard. And the Cable is used for home to home and metro area networks. Almost cable rival to 802.16 – WiMAX. On the UWB Electric front, you can get up to 100megabits a second if all the items communicating are using the same electric point. If it goes through the house electric system, it drops down to 20megabits per second.
The talks then went into Wireless Mesh technology from locust. Which is interesting, but I'm more interested in how to do it with free or opensource software, hardware. Some of the Applications of Mesh technology are vast networks, tempory networks and self healing meshes.
The public sector, commercial ISP's and Coop community's are very interested in using them more. Some places which have already done this…
Hayfiled derbyshire, North Norfolk, University of putra,
Fastline internet in louisiana, Vivian Louisiana, British Army Base in germany, Lauris provence in france and Drymen in scotland.
The only other thing of real interest was the white hat wireless hacking was kinda of lame, but the actual guy did know a lot and was well worth talking too.
Microsoft’s Apple store killer?
I've noticed Microsoft are working on a all you can listen type system for there next online music store. When I first read it I was thinking, humm not really interested. Till I read this and thought this would be great as a digital dj… and hey who really wants to own tons of tunes?
Online-music insiders have debated for years about whether future services will ultimately resemble a traditional CD store–requiring consumers to purchase each single song–or a new model in which subscribers pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to all available music, without the right to keep the music after they stop subscribing.
XPdesktop Environment
Need to keep an eye on this for my debian box, because this will make my life so much easier when trying to work out where things are in Debian.
20th May: Copyright vs Community
Things have got bigger, alot bigger… Not only do we have the one and only Richard Stallman at 1400, we now have the recently moved to London Cory Doctorow from the EFF at 1630. and the legendary Fravia from Searchlores at 1100.
Found a useful video of Cory talking earlier this year at an american university.
Let me just clear it up again…
Fravia, Stallman and Doctorow on the same day in Ravensbourne College… Boy oh boy this is going to be the best day in Ravensbournes history. Even beating all the Rave on air's I reckon. But on with the plan…
higher level aggregation
The higher level aggregators have started coming about. One of notice is Kinja which uses xhtml 1.0 strict and css in its site. But doesnt give off another feedm which is a real shame. So I count this as more a end of the line aggregator, kinda of like google, etc. Still prefer bloglines, but ultimatly the best is still something like flock, which gives off a rss feed too. I have started using cocoon's aggregator, which is pretty awesome too. Specially because any one with a bit of xsl can knock out decent feeds.