Ianforrester

Lightweight Attention Preference Markup – examples one

Ok so here's some rough and ready examples of how LAPM could work. Do let me know which one you prefer and why. I'm sure I'll add some more soon too.

<div class="profile"> <div class="apml"> I like <a class="explicit" title="Playing and Watching Volleyball" rel="4.0" rev="concept" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/Vollyball">Vollyball</a> and <a class="explicit" title="playing and watching Basketball" rel="3.0" rev="concept" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/Basketball">Basketball</a>. I am a socialable <a class="explicit" rel="5.0" rev="concept" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/geek">geek</a> who mixes work and play together </div> </div>

//embedded RDF style 1
<div id="#me"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/Vollyball" rev="4.0" type="concept:explicit">Volleyball</a> </div>

//embedded RDF style 2
<div id="foaf:me"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/Vollyball" rev="concept:explicit" class="4.0">Volleyball</a> </div>

// Creative Commons style 1

<div id="openid:http://www.cubicgarden.com"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/Vollyball" rev="explicit:4.0" title="concept">Volleyball</a> </div>

// Creative Commons style 2

<div id="openid:http://www.cubicgarden.com"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/Vollyball" rev="concept-explicit-4.0">Volleyball</a> </div>

// Rev with a Rel

<div id="openid:http://www.cubicgarden.com"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/Vollyball" rel="tag" rev="concept-explicit-4.0">Volleyball</a> </div>

// Rel concept instead tag

<div id="openid:http://www.cubicgarden.com"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/Vollyball" rel="concept" rev="explicit-4.0">Volleyball</a> </div>

// Rel concept with a class for amount

<div id="openid:http://www.cubicgarden.com"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/Vollyball" rel="concept" rev="explicit" class="4.0">Volleyball</a> </div>

// Rel concept, this time I've swapped the class and rev

<div id="openid:http://www.cubicgarden.com"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/Vollyball" rel="concept" class="explicit" rev="4.0">Volleyball</a> </div>

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BBC.co.uk 2.0, why it will happen

So since my post in reply of Jason's post there's been a lot of discussion and conversation. Technorati as usual doesn't quite get as close as Google. Either way, its the emails and im's I've been getting which are also interesting. Most people have been really supportive, while others have been less that supportive. They felt I was slagging off the BBC and making things worst by talking about my own views. I mean how dare I express my own personal views on my own personal blog right? The same blog which has the subtitle, The views and thoughts of a dyslexic British designer/developer. Anyway, its late again but I'm going to finish what I was writing before as somethings were not explicit.

When out and about people ask me many things about the BBC, one of which is about the iplayer. Even in Boston, people once they know you work for the BBC wanted to know more about the decisions which formed to create the iplayer. They ask if I use it myself and I say no. Most ask why, and I try and explain my media consumption diet in a short period of time. But the main point is people ask, I'm sure all BBC employees get this? Its great, people are very interested in consuming BBC content and services but are very puzzled about the whole DRM issue. They ask why would a public broadcaster apply DRM to its content? Some more clued up people ask the same question and then point out that our analogue and dtv content has no such restrictions. Yes the BBC puts out press releases and has a official website with discussion boards (not indexed by google), but people still ask. So I put across the point of most of the content we play on TV, we only have broadcast rights to and that indies own a good proportaion of the content rights which goes out. However the question remains why DRM?

Some of my non-supporter, seem to think its just the geek world which are upset about this. Well we have to remember its the geeks which are fixing and installing stuff on their parents computer come Christmas time, geeks that are willing to test drive a beta service/product like iplayer and finally geeks who lead the way into the mainstream market. So thats a sure reminder not to just write off this stuff to geeks. However what also prompted my other post was this video by Robert Llwellyn. Its a rant and his own view but its interesting to note, like I have done up till now, Robert bundles the iplayer into one. Yes and that is the vision but has also wound people up royally. So to explicit here, when I say iplayer is a mess and I'm sure when most people say they hate the iplayer, its not because of the system behind it or the interface or the delivery system or even the quality of the video. No its all down to the DRM. The DRM is so attached to the iplayer, and because of it over 2mins of Roberts rant was about DRM in iplayer.

The iplayer team have worked damm hard on a good solid product/service and are hearing lots of negative comments about the iplayer when actually people mean the DRM. However, because the whole service is robustly built, I'm sure it will out live its current form and who knows whats around the corner?

Right to address, if I should be talking on my blog about this stuff. This seems to rub a lot of people up the wrong way., some seem to think I might be bigging myself up at the expense of the BBC. Well I'm not and I'm not going to let you guys bring me down. I love working at the BBC and love my job, its ground breaking and I go places and speak to people most never get a chance. So, I want to make meaning and I believe the BBC is capable of moving into the next curve with its unique funding model. Unlike Jason, I think its unique public funding model will be an advantage over the advertising or subscription models. Oh at the same time can I make it clear I was disagreeing with what Jason was blogging about. So why write anything at all? Its the Cluetrain effect. Things have changed. Take a look at the difference between the Newswatch and the editors blog. Its not so much about the layout but more the conversation or voice. So rather than talk any more, here's a few Cluetrains which sum up what I'm getting at.

#3 – Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
#10 – As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
#12 – There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
#14 – Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

#34 – To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.

Some good examples, Wikipedia entry on the iplayer, Imp's ultimate review of the iplayer, E-petition and Currybet's first 14 days.

So at the end of day, iPlayer is just the start (and in beta), over the next few months you will see a BBC which will silence its critics and launch a range of services which will impress. Transparency and conversation is important and it will take time for everyone to adjust but with time… BBC 2.0 it will happen. Look at projects like Backstage, Innovation Labs, TV Backstage, BBC Blogs, etc… to get a feel of the changes starting to happen.

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Diggnation Live in London

So thanks to the guys at Carsonified, Revision 3 finally (50+ episodes later) landed in London and did a live version of Diggnation in front of 1000+ people after the first day of the Future of Webapps conference. Honestly the only way to get close to describing how mental the atmosphere was in that arena is through pictures (mine and everyone elses) and videos. I'm really happy it went down this way, if I me and Kathy had got the guys over, we would only have got a venue which would hold about 500 people max. Anyway back to yesterday I have a ton of videos and shot in HD with my shakey hand which I still need to upload but others have already done so. As the guys would say, good times… good times.

The offical video is now out on revision3.com

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bbc.co.uk 2.0: Why it isn’t happening and shouldn’t happen

Jason who now works for Google instead of the BBC had some crushing words to say about the BBC's online future on his blog. I hadn't noticed because my RSS Owl is playing up (yes I'm going to write a bug request for this problem) so I've missed a lot of what my friends have been writing about. Anyway Jason makes the point that the BBC's web efforts are doomed to fail because we are a broadcasting company with broadcasting type funding in a nutshell. So when I first read his blog entry, I was going to respond on the backstage blog but felt the backstage blog wasn't the right place to reply, as some of these points are my own view and not of the BBC. So I may just link to the post on backstage and leave it as that. It won't spend much time on the front page either because there will be posts from the Future of Webapps Expo tomorrow.

Here's some choice quotes.

Moving away from the economic analysis of the situation facing the BBC, we can see the tide already turning. The BBC was an innovator in radio (2LO – in beta 1922, v1.0 when licenced in 1923) then TV (BBC Television Service – beta from 1929, v1.0 release 1946) but not now in the online age. Sky Anytime, 4OD, and ITV.com's video revamp have all launched before the BBC's iPlayer service (iMP beta 2005, iPlayer in beta, v1.0 not released at time of writing) showing commercial efforts in this field have trumped the BBC. One person working on the project called it “worse than boo.com”. With the lead now lost, how can they pull it back?

Frankly and I'm sure I'm breaking some part of my contract here. iPlayer is a mess and I can't / won't defend it on my own blog. Everyone I speak, asks what happened? Why would the BBC put out iplayer and think it was acceptable? Even in Boston the developer of Miro/Democracy player was asking me seriously why would a public broadcaster do such a thing? I don't have an answer, I really don't. In the first BBC Backstage podcast, Dave Crossland answered Tom Loosemore's question if the BBC should have done nothing over releasing iplayer. He answered yes, do nothing because it was morally wrong. Well thats his view but lets be honest would we better off if we didn't do iplayer? I actually think so. Tom Loosemore was right, we do need to deliever to those who don't understand bit torrent or simlar technologies but I wonder how many of us we're eating our own dogfood?

Lets go through the some of the principals of Web 2.0 and the BBC…

Rich user experience: archaic BBC tech standards say that you can't rely on javascript/flash to deliver content, and pages need to be below 200kb in size. Buh bye innovative user interfaces, widgets/gadgets, Google or Yahoo Maps style interface, or YouTube for that matter.

User as contributor: BBC requires moderation of content before publishing it – see above for 606 example.

Participation, not publishing – as above.

Enable the long tail – BBC tech has limited ability to cater for large amount of content in the first place. CMSs are disparate and clunky, content distribution network is run off one single, overloaded computer (!).

Radical trust – this simply doesn't happen at the BBC, see 606. Not even to employee's, see first point.

Right so, point one. The BBC Standards and guidelines are under consistent review and lots of those archaic are being shifted as our audience become more internet savvy. Backstage also doesn't have to live by those standards and guidlines. Jason is right publishing is cheap and free, we need to reflect that. Yes long tail, we need lightweight cms which don't require a room full of people to understand how it works. Trust I won't talk about right now.

Anyway, there's lots more I want to say, but its late and I got a early start tomorrow at FOWA. So I'll finish off later (maybe Thursday).

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Bloglines officially announce APML and OpenID support

Bloglines announced today that OpenID and APML is in the near pipeline. Cheers Chris for the heads up on this.

Today is our first release devoted to supporting OpenID for Bloglines Classic and Bloglines Beta. In the near future, Bloglines will also support consuming OpenIDs and OpenID 2.0 which was just released this week.

Now our more technical users will know right way what's going on and will be excited. In that case, you can go to id.bloglines.com and get started. Note – OpenID is just the beginning of us working with true open standards. Other formats getting our attention include oAuth (Open Authentication) and APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language).

I had never heard of oAuth before but it looks good and could be a killer solution for use with something like Keepass. I'll be checking it out more in the future. Hummm, imagine using the bloglines sync with oAuth too.

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I’m just glad someone still working on the Xbox 360

A long time ago, a hack was found so you can play copied games and backups on a Xbox 360. So the hacking went dead except for a little blip here and there. Well now it turns out that people have already got Linux on it and have been working on running unsigned code on it. Maybe I wrote the platform off too soon?

From Xbox-scene.com,

Since we have an exploit in the hypervisor (kernel 4532 and 4548) and recently found a way to downgrade to these kernels, some hackers over at the XBH forums are working on a way to boot homebrew code on the Xbox360. Linux was already done via the linux bootloader, but for homebrew we'll need another bootloader obviously that will allow to boot 'unsigned' xbox 360 code.

If this works, then I wonder if someone will convert xbox media centre over to that platform too? Imagine Linux, PC, Xbox, Xbox 360 and PS3 all being choices for XBMC.

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Lightweight Attention Preference Markup

So this is the 2nd time I'm writing this because I forgot to save the entry when I upgraded the memory on my Dell. Yep 2gig of memory instead of 1gig now but still no decent Blogging tool for Linux. Wblogger and Ecto would have automaticlly saved the entry every few minutes or at least asked me what I should do with the unsaved entry before terminating and throwing my words to a black hole. Anyway enough moaning…

Previously I promised a couple of things in this entry…

First up, I'm going to standardise some way of linking FOAF, OPML, OpenID and APML together. I expect I'll keep this very simple using the link element in (x)HTML or somehow combine this into a Hcard profile. Next up a APML microformat or APML lite for sure. I'll try it as I've been studying the others and the general methology of Microformats and I think it could be done. So I'll suggest it and draw up how it works and submit it for lots of review. I'm now exploring how to get APML out of Amarok and RSS Owl.

So how far have I got so far?

One : So I have linked all three (APML, FOAF and OpenID) together using links on my blog. So if you look at the source you will now see this. Which is cool but I think we can do better.


<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server"/>
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://cubicgarden.myopenid.com"/>
<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="http://www.cubicgarden.com/webdav/profile/foaf.rdf"/>
<link rel="meta" type="text+xml" title="APML"
href="https://apml.engagd.com/apml/www.cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden"/>

When I say do better, I've been looking around a couple of things. First up is a better way to do the basic link element so it can be turned into a RDF triple later. It was found while looking at RDF/A examples which will be explained later.

When a meta or link is used within another meta or link, the internal triple has, as subject, the external triple. This is reification.

<link about="" rel="[cc:license]" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/"> <meta property="dc:date" content="2005-10-18" /> </link>

which yields:

[ rdf:subject <>; rdf:predicate cc:license ; rdf:object <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/> ] dc:date "2005-10-18".

Now I'm not that keen on the syntax, but its not over complex and I guess you could do something like this.


	<link about="." rel="[foaferson]" href="http://www.cubicgarden.com/webdav/profile/foaf.rdf">
	<meta property="apml:profile" content="https://apml.engagd.com/apml/www.cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden" />
	<meta property="openid.server" content="http://www.myopenid.com/server"/>
	<meta property="openid.delegate" content="http://cubicgarden.myopenid.com"/>
	</link>

But I guess getting all those openID parsers to change now will be a nightmare, so to be honest I'm happy either way. But I think it does make sense to link everything in the HTML rather that rely on a OpenID parser to look at the HTML then find the URL for the FOAF file and then parse through that to find the Open ID url. Yes I already know you can put OpenID in FOAF thats why I'm saying its not a good idea, but there is no harm in having it in the FOAF optionally. Which is what I'm going to do, but I've recenly seen how out of date my FOAF file really is, so I'm going to try and update it soon. If anyone knows how to get FOAF out of Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Linkedin, Dopplr, Upcoming, etc that would be useful. O'reilly's connections network use to allow for FOAF but somehwere along the line seems to have died or closed down, because I tried to find it and login, so I can at least start somewhere. So generally number one is done.

Two : So the huge challenge of building a Microformat for APML, so people can easily put in there preferences without building a very complex xml file. Because lets be honest, like RDF and other XML's this stuff was never meant to be built by humans. Also I like the idea of using standard HTML elements and attributes so people can instantly try this stuff out. I saw recently on the microformats blog that there is almost 450 million? examples of Microformats now and its growing everyday. Its not hard to see why when you consider how it is to try out some of them. For example adding a tag is as simple as adding another attribute to a link. Some of the other microformats are a little more tricky but generally with a example in front of most people they can work it out quickly. So whats the W3C's answer to Microformats? Well RDF/A which is a unified framework build around putting semantic meaning into HTML. A while ago it was meant to be for XHTML 2.0 but its been brough forward which is great news. Because the only other alternative seemed to be e-RDF which no one could work out if was royality free or not. Ok I have to admit I'm writing this entry over a couple of days. So I found my way on to the O'reilly connections network again. So you should be able to see my public view here. Anyway the point is that they already have FOAF, which makes my life slightly easier that starting from scratch again. Going back to APML, I'll try modeling it with RDF/A and see what happens. So far I think my plans is to keep the explict and implicit context and maybe attach it to a openID or unique ID. I'm not going to include stuff like the source because its too complex and not that relevent for a lightweight version of APML. I mean if you really want APML, just use APML. If you want something to indicate your preferences (< href="http://www.tommorris.org/blog/">beyond a link) in HTML, what I'm brewing up might just be right for you. I've also decided to call it LiteAPM, as in Lightweight Attention Preference Markup for now.

Three : Ok I'm not being funny but where the hell does Amarok store its configurations and database? I think I've found RSSOwl's basic configuration stuff but content i'm not so sure about yet. But then again I've not really tried really hard yet. I can't find a mention about Amarok anywhere. So I hit the web and found a way to pull almost anything I want out of Amarok via the command line. So honestly all I really need now is to learn how to program Perl or install something like XMLstarlet, and learn how to use stuff like the cron and unix pipes. Wow now I can do all that stuff I've been talking about for a long time. Stay tuned…

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Never say never, yes Ian Forrester did buy a iphone…

Yes I did get one, but I never said I wouldn't so there. And just to prove its not fake, thats my SPV M700 in front of the iphone, plus more photos. When do they hit the UK again? I'm expecting comments, so I'll say nothing more.

Sorry guys, its a hoax. I did buy a iphone or more but its not for me. Why would I buy a iphone? Even when faced with one in my hands and a cheap price I still didn't want one. I was actually tempted to get a Microsoft Zune because I saw one for less that 175 dollars. I enjoyed winding you lot up…But yes that wasn't just a box it was the real thing and I did spend about 20mins playing with it in the shop. I'm either going to get a Samsung F700 or that iphone like Nokia. The touch is too much like my current phone and its 2nd gen still sucks.

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Full write up on the wealth of netwoks conference

I wrote my notes up here on Backstage.

The TTI Vanguard is one of those groups who run conferences you hear about but never get the chance to attend. In actually fact it might be membership or invite only like the Churchill Club. The people who attend and speak at the conferences are simply leaders in their fields and make a special effort to make such conferences. Boston plays host to the wealth of networks conference which includes great speakers such as Dr. Eric Miller (Zepheira), Clay Shirky, Dr. Henry Tirri (Nokia), Nicholas Carr, David Prior (general dynamics uk), Andrew McAfee (Havard) and Yochai Benkler who actually recently wrote a book which influenced the whole conference.

Read the rest here

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