Category: social-hardware

Rather than reading student synopsis, I've been put off track by looking at the future of peer 2 peer networking. Then I looked at Slakinski log which talks about the release of Nucleus which is a RSS aggregator that focuses on Bittorrent files embedded in them. Very cool, even Harvard Law is following this area with enclosures. I'm interested if anyone has brought Enclosure to RSS 1.0 and ATOM? If not I think I may do it myself, as one of the great reasons for RSS 1.0 is its modules which could include a whole number of things, or so I was led to believe. I mean even the ability to use namespaces is an advantage surely?

Anyhow this is all really interesting stuff, and it seriously reminds me that I need to fix my apache cocoon to take advantage of this great idea. I mean for example it wouldnt be that difficult to search through a load of torrents and make rss files with enclosures to then syndicate onwards. This would be great because then you could do mass filtering and even create a webservice. Think of it as Suprnova but with no front end. Tell the trust some must have done this already? Oh and heres a good article explain it all.

I was also reading Steve Mallett's blog about the future of the semantic web, specially in the light of RSS and Torrents.

Now, would you rather publish your book review using Amazon's form or the weblog you use many times a week? Would you like to write your book review on Amazon and then write again on your weblog that you wrote a review – possibly writing the review twice? How about your local bookstore? Are you going to write one for them as well?

It got me thinking about this DIY model. Steve makes many valid points but the one which strikes home is the one about Social software. I signed up to Orkut and got pretty sick of filling in information which I didnt really want to give in the first place. I tend not like to commit to different services now, I mean flickr was the last one I signed up to, and even then I'm not using it alot. I put myself in the bloggers and geek girls are sexy groups, for all of 1 day, I thought it would be good idea to contrbute pictures in a group fashion, but i got bored – quickly…
Steve ends with Own your data. This future is here and is evenly distributed. I have to agree up to a point, I find it hard to believe I'm still hosting cubicgarden.com on my 512k broadband connection. Hows that for owning your own data?

By the way a google one query return

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I'm currently making changes to cubicgarden.com. First thing you will notice is the added Anyone else [ blogging it? ] and related pictures? links underneath each post. I've also extended this out to the bookmarks which has related links to http://del.icio.us instead of http://www.flickr.com. By the way for those people asking why I'm using feedster over daypop, technorati and blogdex? Well feedster seems to be much more configurable and exposes more rss than the others, plus it loves cubicgarden.com. Does a much better job than even google. Oh yeah plus its the only one which realises that 80.177.x.x and adrenalin-online.demon.x.x is all part of cubicgarden.com. By the way you may be interested to see how cubicgarden is doing on the blogshare market

So whats it all about? Well I'm still fighting with myself about using external web services for my personal data. Even my personal bookmarks which I dont mind sharing with the world, I cant help but get worried about trusting to a beta service like del.icio.us. Flickr I cant trust all my photos with anyway because I got so many and there huge in size (1.5 gig of space used so far) and I'm not paying for flickr to store that. I think the RESTful nature of these services are good enough and passing the title around is a good start. I may start using the metadata feature in Blojsom soon because I want to pass more semantic information than a title around to these services. Ideally I really need to get XSL in between or into VM templates.

The other thing which is changing is, I'm removing myself from the XFN sphere – soon. I never used it and using decent metadata and FOAF I can do a much better job, oh and theres been some debate about XFN's effectiveness. I think if there was a blog (xmlrpc) client which came with XFN built in I would use it much more. I keep looking out for wbloggar 4.0 but its always in beta, I keep thinking I should really 1. find something else which at least supports xhtml 2. runs on the pocketpc2003 os.

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I cant remember where I first heard about this first but I've been meaning to try it out for a while now. Usually I tend to use mailinator.com or now dodgeit.com to create a temporary account which I tend to use again and again as I make the username and password easy to remember. For example today I was trying to get into the guardian.co.uk site and so I tried to setup an account with the email address – guardian@dodgeit.com with the password of password (hehe). But someone had already done it before. So I simply requested the password again, and waited till the guardian sent the email. Easy

But even that can be a hassle, so bugmenot is ideal. Its basicly a huge database of username and passwords which people donate for others to use on registration sites. Good idea, well thought out with plugins and bookmarklets.

The bugmenot official response to the fact there webhost also hosts the neonazi group combat 18.
I've decided that its better to go through the little hassle of using dodgeit or mailinator than to promote the clinical response of freespeech from bugmenot.

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I've got a presentation coming up tomorrow and I'm just adding the finishing touches now. Now this is quite interesting and a lesson to myself. In one of my slides.

Minning against searching

Google and other search engines work on page-scraping technology. Google will for example ignore html metadata.Technorati, Daypop and Feedster work on content syndicated rss feeds only. Minning content like this, better represents BBC content as it keeps content in context.

I've been searching for images using google image search but the results when looking for certain subjects or topics are not good. Gogle relies mainly on the image filename and webpage it sits in. Well thats ok, but Flickr does a much better job because people actual asign metadata to the pictures. Then I've been thinking actually this is better way to get pictures because you can see the copyright licence straight away, for example Perfect morning by Bmann has a creative commons licence. I love flickr so much that I've actual signed up myself, wont be put too many pictures up because I'm not totally sure about storing personal data on a beta service (much my same problem with Gmail and del.icio.us). But I'll put up some photos which I dont mind other people using, glad to see flickr makes it super easy to do this. I picked Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike for obvious reasons, and incase you didnt guess my flickr address is http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubicgarden/ and http://www.flickr.com/people/cubicgarden/. Good to see Flickr is making use of all the backend data (EXIF, XML, RSS) as well as making great web interfaces. Just dont understand why there using Flash 7 to display images?

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I've now got Firefox on three different machines which I use everyday. But my problem is that each one is slighly different because I dont have the same extensions and themes on them. Of course I still use Opera, but with my GNU/Linux setup at home now, I've decided to not install any Open/Free software on it. Which was a problem at first but I've pretty much made Firefox work like Opera now.

First up the ones which make Firefox like Opera for me
Nuke Anything 0.2 – Adds a Remove this object entry to the right-click context menu, which will remove an object from a webpage temporarily. The effects can be undone by reloading the page.

Paste and Go 0.3.1 – Lets you paste an URL from the clipboard and directly load it.

Mouse Gestures 0.9.20040902 – Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard. You can also use “rocker” gestures.

MiniT (drag+indicator) 0.3 – Adds tab dragging with drop place indicator.

Image-Show-Hide 0.1.3.2 – Adds an icon to toolbar. By clicking this button (Or “Shift+B” shortcut) you can simply turn on|off images on all web-pages and (optional) autoreload current page!

QuickNote 0.5.9.2 – A note taking extension with advanced features.

ReloadEvery 0.3.2 – Reloads webpages every so many seconds or minutes

User Agent Switcher 0.6 – Adds a menu to switch the user agent of the browser.

Sage 1.2.2 – A lightweight RSS and ATOM feed aggregator.

Single Window 1.4 – A simple extension that allows Mozilla to fully utilize the built-in tabbed browsing behavior, compatible with Mozilla, Netscape, and Firefox. Singlewindow has only two options: * Single Window Mode — Traps links that would normally open in a new window

And ones I just love
EditCSS 0.2.2 – Stylesheet modifier in the Sidebar.

BBCode 0.3.2 – Adds BBCode/HTML/XHTML formating to the context menu for forums like Mozillazine. Based on Cussers pastequote extension.

Delicious Delicacies 0.1 – Restores our favorite cookie placeholder text.

Wikalong 0.9.5 – A roaming wiki embeded in the sidebar of your browser, indexed off the URL of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the Internet.

FoxyTunes 0.5 – Control any media player from Firefox and more… [Windows/Linux]

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I was flicking through some of my feeds today and came across Kevin rose's Dark tips. Thought I'd check out a few of the sites while I was waiting for something else to be done . DodgeIT – free email with no login caught my eye, and I thought this is going to be some rip off mailinator service. But to my great suprise – this one offers RSS as well! Damm, how good is that? I love mailinator but this is so barebones and quick and the rss is the final knife in the heart.

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I'm thinking about running Zoe on my cubicgarden server. I've set it up on my Laptop already and its pretty sweet. Can not believe its only on 0.59 and it already very feature rich and stable.

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Freecycle is basiclly made up of many individual groups across the globe. It's a grassroots movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns.

It sounds great but doesnt pull it off in the same way as for example meetup.com does. or maybe I was thinking of meetup.com but crossed with the concept of giving away stuff. Oh well maybe it will mature (saying that there's already 300 people signed up in London alone). I certainly dont want to be joining up to any more yahoo groups thank you.

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