Author: Ianforrester

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

Books delivered to your news aggregator

Dave dropped me a email today pointing me at Amazon RSS.

Another Amazon Web Services experiment. The idea is this: say you're interested in books about weblogs. Wouldn't it be nice to have an RSS feed for all weblog-related books at Amazon, so that when new books became available you'd know about them? Thanks to the magic of web pipelines (Amazon >> XML over HTTP >> XSLT >> ASP >> RSS >> Your News Aggregator), it's become a pretty trivial thing to put together.

Yep this a fantastic use of standard technology, all i need to do now is swap the ASP for XSP…

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HP demos BlojsomIT!

HP have just realeased a demo of there blogging app, blojsomIT!. At the moment it does a small amount of things but the next step SemBlogIT! looks to be really powerful and clever app which could come in useful later.

I have set it up for testing here. Obviously you need a user name and password to use it unfortually. But you can try out HP's own here.

I hope to add some serious feedback once I try it out over time.

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Syncing my 3g phone

Ok i'm little pee'd off with my 3g phone at the moment. I have quickly realised that the Nec e606 has bluetooth and not my e808. So I have to sync everything over a pain in the arse usb cable.

And that would be great if it actually worked. But at this moment it doesnt. It moans that the phone is locked and I will not beable to transfer anything. So even after looking through the pdf which are the cd, and following the procedure to the exact letter, it still does not work.

Has anyone had this problem before? It doesnt look like it, but its a new phone and 3g is only in a few countrys at the moment. So I could be waiting ages for help.

What also drives me nuts is that there are very few specs on the phone its self, is the browser a wap, xhtml, chtml browser? I have no idea, all i know is that I cant seem to connect to any other websites or wap sites. Maybe its a walled garden, but why would they provide a enter url option?

I have no idea, all I know is I cant install any j2me files at this moment.

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Testing the textism plugin

Dont mind me, I'm just testing textism and html input in Blojsom using Chronicle lite.

h2. This is a title

h3. This is a subhead

This is some text of dubious character. Isn't the use of “quotes” just lazy writing — and theft of 'intellectual property' besides? I think the time has come to see a block quote.

bq. This is a block quote. I'll admit it's not the most exciting block quote ever devised.

Well, that went well. How about we insert an old-fashioned hypertext link? Will the quote marks in the tags get messed up? No!

“This is a link (optional title)”:http://www.textism.com

An image:

!/common/textist.gif(optional alt text)!

# Librarians rule
# Yes they do
# But you knew that

Some more text of dubious character. Here is a noisome string of CAPITAL letters. Here is something we want to _emphasize_.
That was a linebreak. And something to indicate *strength*. Of course I could use my own HTML tags if I felt like it.

h3. Coding

This is some code, "isn't it". Watch those quote marks! Now for some preformatted text:


	$text = str_replace("
%::%
","",$text);
	$text = str_replace("%::%
","",$text);
	$text = str_replace("%::%","",$text);

This isn't code.

So you see, my friends:

* The time is now
* The time is not later
* The time is not yesterday
* We must act

Ah it does work and only requires a small amount configuring. Great stuff…

http://blojsom.sourceforge.net/plugins-textile.html

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3g in the palm of my hand

So finally I got my 3g mobile phone yesterday. Its from three and I picked the NEC e808 which has 2 full motion cameras, 64meg and a full qwerty keyboard. Hence why its quite big, everyone yesterday said Its too big, its far too big. But come on guys its got a full keyboard and its the first set of 3g phones, what do you expect? More information to come, specially if i can get mobblogging working with it.

By the way this was posted via Chronicle Lite, a java application which works on all platforms which blogs via xmlrpc perfectly. Now if I only get textism working inside of it.

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AMD 64

AMD Ready To Rock MML2 With Athlon 64!
Mobile & Desktop Version Of Athlon 64 For All To See
Perhaps the most anticipated announcement at MML2 is AMD's intention to show publicly, for the first time, the Athlon64 desktop and notebook systems. Through what can only be described as a Herculean effort by both Philip Stein and David Makin from AMD, MML2 attendees are going to get the chance at 10PM EST this evening to see the new Athlon64 desktop and notebook systems in action.

YES you read it correctly, Desktop and Notebook with 64bit processors!
Will AMD beat apple to the first 64bit laptop?
If AMD get this right, we could be talking some serious damage in the apple and intel camps…

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Digital Shoplifting

Japan's Digital Shoplifting Plague – Fantastic use of camera phones, I love it!

It's becoming increasingly clear that we live in a world where the majority of people simply don't understand “digital”. Over in Japan, the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association is on the warpath trying to stop browsers in bookstores from taking camera-phone photos of their magazines, calling it “digital shoplifting”.
As an example, they say that a woman may flip through a magazine and see a new dress or hairstyle, and snap a photo to send to their friends to ask what they think. The magazine publishers are angry that this is (they believe) taking money out of their pockets. Of course, that assumes (probably incorrectly) that the person would have bought the magazine in the first place or that they wouldn't then go and buy the magazine anyway.
Meanwhile, bookshop employees say they'll have trouble stopping this activity, since they can't tell whether someone is just sending a text message or if they're using the camera phone.

Based on this idea, shouldn't we be forced to claw our own eyes out? Or, at the very least, have all magazines and books wrapped in black shrink wrap to prevent someone from (gasp!) actually seeing any part of it before buying. Perhaps it really is time for someone to invent the DRM helmet and make sure that anytime you see anything, you get charged for it.

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The case for educational blogging part 2

Been thinking hard about blogging for students again.

How am I going to put all this into action?

I think I need to write a paper and presentation, as that is only thing managers and course leaders seem to understand.
What i should do is use main parts of other peoples presentations as the base of mine. I've been looking at the blogtalk 2003 presentations and theres a lot in them i can use to explain the basics and advanced concepts of blogging. Then I can use my personal experience with the last project i ran to put the killer blows in? Hummm maybe i should start writing the paper now rather than talking about it…

the draft outline i've drawn up so far in outline (opml format) and
html for those without a outline viewer

Interesting maybe i should sign up

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The case for educational blogging part 1

Its starting, the students are starting to stir…
I noticed a post on our internal newsgroups today, i have omitted some items for speed and convence of this blog

Hello CNDI / CHIRP people,
Just had a fantastic idea which i think might improve
convergence between departments and collaborative working
between students here at college.
Many departments require or reccommend that students keep a
journal or research log of their work… a great idea for
sorting ideas, have been keeping a paper based one for ages.
Howeverf, keeping a notebook of things which intereset you
seems fairly insular, and does not encourage interaction
between students with similar research interests.
Therefore, don't you think it would be cool to set up a
weblog server, upon which students could enter their
research sources and thoughts on relevant subjects onto
their blog, which is fully searchable, and available for
everyone at the college to see?
that way, if someone is
researching the Bauhaus, for instance, they could search the
blogs for it, and share their research sources with other
students. also, for instance, if a Graphics student was
researching the work of Peter Saville, and a Fashion
student was researching his influence on fashion promotion,
the two could get in touch and share information easily.
Do you think this is a good idea? obviously there would be
some issues concerning plaigarism, but none more so than two
students discussing work offline.
Should be technically
feasible too, applications such as Movable Type should make it
fairly simple (which is more than can be said for the video
over IP idea i posted last term)
see ya,
Tim

Great piece which made me think good and hard
Some extracts…
It made me think of weblogs. Initially, weblogs caught on with geeks and kids. These geeks and kids weren't at all interested in ROI, knowledge management, or even in defining what it was they were doing.

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Education blogging

Steve Cayzer from HP labs in Bristol, emailed me back with some great links and advice on semantic blogging in the context of education. I've added a lot of them to my feeds.

Oliver Wrede and Kieran Shaw's weblogs are a great start.
Then I found tons of useful links here SeBlogging, been here before for the blogtalk 2003 paper but never had a delve around.
Also found educational bloggers network but it seems very american. Looking for UK or at least european based.

I love this so much, i had to quote it…
Using the Internet as a teaching tool can expand the classroom beyond discussion daily interactions. The purpose of this weblog is to give students in my 4/5 class an opportunity to respond to prompts and their peers' thinking in a new format.

By presenting weblogs to my students, I will enable them to interact in a new way. One students thoughts can be entered into the weblog and saved for another student to respond to at a later date.

In addition to enriching class discussions, this weblog will help students understand the expansiveness of the Internet. Too often, students ask if they can “play” on the computer. My goal is to help them discover the power of computers not as a toy but as a supply of knowledge.

I'm going to write a damm paper one day in August I think… Here are some issues tackled.
RSS: The Next Killer App For Education
Student publishing and privacy
A great collection of blogtalk presentations from this year, I so wish I'd had gone. Maybe next year?

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Mozblog, blogging over xmlrpc

this is a test post from mozblog

Mozblog allows me to connect directly with blojsom using the blogger API over xml-rpc. Its kinda of works but doesnt. As far as I got on my screen remotely I cant read my posts because it ignores all html files and only sees text files. So I could change my html files to text i guess.
Also when I hit publish, it throws a error, but still publishes it. Very weird error about objects…
Mozblog does support per entry metadata, so I can now start adding more details to each blog, expect more in this area soon…
Oh and it supports not only BloggerAPI but Metafilter and a couple others. So you can use it for anything from Moveabletype to Blojsom.

A few moans…
It does allow you to ftp your images to the server if it does ftp, but why not also support webdav?
And what makes it difficult for me to even think about deploying this in ravensbourne is the server address, username and password are all tucked away in the settings. So unless we can get moz reading its preferences from LDAP, basicly it wont work in the college.

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Java server based RSS aggregator?

Ok I had a try writing my own rss aggregator in xsl and it only works if your inside my network, which is a shame. So I'm now on the look for a java servlet rss aggregator.

Interesting enough the older cousin of blojsom, bloxsom does have this already. Blagg News aggregator for the Bloxsom weblogging system.

Tempting to put a application on the server though… Seems to be quite a few .net ones. I cant believe no one has wrote a server based one for java yet! Specially with things like this done Java Collect

2 hours later after searching, I found it.
Flock is an RSS aggregator written in Java. It is a server-side web application accessible with a browser, similar in spirit to AmphetaDesk
Subscriptions are stored in an OPML file, yeah!

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