Category: socialware-online

BBC Scotland at bloggercon 3

Ok so I was listening to a podcast from IT conversations titled Newbies and about 50:20 in [clip with Julie] Julie from BBC Scotland Interactive takes the microphone as a crowd member. Where she talks about Island blogging. This took me by suprised because I was waiting for the 354 Bus and just never thought I would hear any one from BBC at bloggercon. Anyway what else took me by suprise.

She talks about the custom built system for blogging and the frustration with the system. And I'm glad shes very honest about it. It now allows me to vent my pain using and looking at the system for Worldservice. Thats no longer a secret too, because Julie also mentions Worldservice are looking at bring blogging to other parts of the world. Its very interesting Julie thinks other BBC blogs are not blogs because they do not allow for comments, trackbacks, etc. I would agree totally with that point.

I dont feel I am out of line saying that the scottish blogging system is not good. I understand they were under tons of pressure to roll something out for the residents of North Argyll and the experience was more important than the tool. But there moving into stage 2 now, they (we) really need to consider a professional tool. I'm in favoring Blojsom because I can make it work really nicely with our worldservice content management system. But honestly, as long as it can do things like multiple user, multiple blog, external access via xmlrpc, rss/atom. Then were moving in the right direction.
I'm feeling the need to sort out blojsom at work so we can at least get into a decent dialogue going about what we really need…

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Blogging from inside

Robert Scoble posts some thoughts about getting the green light for blogging within a company. His arguments are very convincing and worth looking at if you feel the fear of webblogging. I keep reflecting back to the fact that I am a BBC employee and my views are not all shared by the BBC. I wonder how many people would care if I did not disclose who I worked for? Anyway theres a follow up by someone from Jupiter research here.

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Ravensbourne Online learning community

After posting about Dissertation time again… and late night lectures. I have been offered the chance to try something out for the college. So if your one of my ex-students reading this, contact me via my ravensbourne email address and I will add you to the group. As it sounds, its a experimental online learning community which I will use not only for dissertation but for teaching and learning over the next year. Oh by the way this applies to 1st, 2nd and 3rd yrs mainly in interaction or subjects close to interaction.

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Blojsom events

Ever since David announced the blojsom event notification and listener API, I've been thinking about 100's of ways to use it. But before I explore the possibilites I need to at least upgrade to 2.18. And alot of you will be glad to hear that I will be sorting out my feed links which are still relative rather than absolute.

I still need to run tests on blojsom, My aim is to get blojsom to output SSI's for use with the BBC blogs. Talking of which, got some really interesting news about the BBC but I cant tell quite yet. Once I can, I will post it here first before anywhere else.

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Blojsom and Jabber make it into OSX 10.4 Server

So I woke up this morning and looked at my email before rushing off to work, and Miles had sent me a email pointing out that Blojsom and Jabber will come as standard in OSX 10.4 server, which is going to ship end of 2004 or start of 2005. Article here then during mytrain journey to the BBC via Cannon street, I see a link to Blojsom in a slashdot arcticle.

I'm so loving all this, but I'm sure David and Mark are laughing there arse's off. Good one guys looking forward to the Jabber version of Somethingme very soon?

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testing somethingme im to blog service


Somethingme logo?


So I can finally let out the big secret of the blojsom team. They've been working on a IM to blog service and this is my first blog using the service.
They've been working hard on this service since the days of Blojsim which only worked with blojsom 1.x. Mark always promised to get it working for all blogs not just blojsom, now they've done the job. Excellent work. I'm looking forward to using this on my ipaq to drop down quick thoughts into my bookmarks. And I'm rubbing my hands with glee about SMS and even MMS to blog. Allowing me to blog from my SPV as well as a GPRS connection. Tell the truth that will really open blogging up to a whole new generation of bloggers. Very cool, very cool.

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What is EBS?

Mark calls it impromptu while David calls it EBS? What ever it is, it seems to allow blogging via xmlrpc and a instant messager client. I'm left wondering if its blojsim sorted out for blojsom 2.x or something alot more. Oh my I never saw your last post Mark, yes would love to do any experiements possible with cocoon and smack if you like. Anyway I hope to know more soon, now I've made my interests public. – by the way how the hell do trackbacks work?

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turn your blog into a book. Why?

Seen on my feeds – http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/002692.html. It basicly turns your blog into a printable pdf book. First thing, I could make a xsl-fo stylesheet to do this using cocoon within a afternoon.

Query blojsom for all its entries ever written using the simple ?entries=-1 add flavor=rdf and your well away. Transform the rdf into pdf using xsl-fo and your done. Hey even write a simple webservice so you can submit a url and get a binary file back?

But my question really is why? why oh why would you want a book of your entries? Saying that I'm use to reading on screen so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask the question? By the way I'm reading Cory Doctorow's Standard Eastern Tribe on my ipaq and its an excellent read so far (page 63/128)

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Opera, blogs and fravia

Opera - simply the best internet experience

I was talking to Fravia about browsers and blogging over dinner with Richard Stallman yesterday, we went to the Star of India in Old brompton Street, near Earls Court, West London. Good food but I unfortually didnt feel too well the day after.

Fravia made an interesting statement on Thursday. Opera know what he does but they dont really care because the publicity of using opera is more than enough for them. And on that point I have to say Opera 7.5 is the best browser for advanced web searchers and developers… Some of the noteable features of 7.5, RSS newsfeeds directly in the browser, IRC chat client like Mozilia, better opera mail with spam filtering, New skin and Kiosk mode. Now if only there was a upgrade option I would be very happy.

Screen shot of Opera 7.5

Fravia mentioned Amazon's A9 search engine in the event. And how it displays the 5 or 10 texts lines before and after your search. Now with automation it is possible to grab the whole book. I never really thought about it but it makes total sense and means yes you can grab almost any book in Amazons store…

I questioned Fravia about blogging and syndication. He felt, he couldnt quite make up his mind on blogging. He felt it might isolate pages off, and so many blogs are written using blogger, typepad or moveable type that they were too simular. I see what he's saying but the instant semantic nature of blogs allow for advance searching beyond the logic of most search engines at the moment. Saying that I did notice Yahoo now searches and knows what RSS is. I've promised to write a piece about the advantages of searching in a blogging landscape very soon. The thing I love is when you add up other technologies like XFN and FOAF with semantic blogging, you got somekind of landscape to search in. Wont even get started on xlink, xpointer and xpath search engines.

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London Bloggers getting together [attended & enjoyed]

Ok I hope to write something here really soon about the event last wednesday. Till then check out the photos of the event, as I didnt bring my camera and it was too dark for my smartphone. I am not happy with that photo of myself. I mean any shot but not when my mouth is wide open please.

I left work at about 19:10 and made my way up to the meeting place through convert garden. On the way I read that Moveable type 3 was out and thought…who cares? Obviously I'm not a MT user and dont really care too much. I think David sums it up best. If you're abandoning moveable type 3.

Anyway back to the event. I got there about 19:30 and got a drink straight away, well actually someone else bought me a shark. If I could remember who it was I would credit them here. Then got talking to Seyed Razavi. I never knew who he was so just chatted generally about alot except actual blogging. My memory gets a little hazy about then. I remember seeing most people run towards Cory when he dropped in. I did shake his hand and he seem suprised that I was the Ian who's been writing to him for the last few months.

I sat with another celeb blogger PixelDiva. I tend to read her blog on and off and did tune in to her spot on Radio 4 a while ago. I'm glad to hear she was very down to earth and very chilled out about the whole radio show. I met lots more people, too many to mention. Ambalance driver who blogs his days, need to find that site! Didnt talk to Tom coats, he was too busy surrounded by a group of people all the way through the event. Missed Annie who won a blogging award for her site. Honestly I never seen the site till recently and thought why would it be interesting? then actually got kind of hooked and thought about doing a simular thing myself about people using technology. Sure I'll catch a few people toothing but I've seen some very interesting uses of technology while going to work everyday.
Other people worth mentioning include a student from Westmister college who understood the whole teaching and learning issue to the T. He actually mentioned Learning about learning while I talked about educational blogging. A guy who was working on a system to rate music, I suggested using metadata in blogs and looking at the slashdot methods. And all the people who stayed till midnight… Good night all round when's the next one James.

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Clogging up the web with RSS

Wired are running a feature about RSS readers clogging up the web.
This kind of ties to my cutting rss short.

TeledyN's Murphy runs one of the most popular open-source Linux sites (which he started in 1994). He was one of the first to offer an RSS feed in 1999 when Netscape introduced the format. By late last year, Murphy's website would run out of bandwidth by 8 p.m.

Murphy's problems arose because he, like many bloggers, included most of his site's front page, including graphics, in the RSS feed, allowing users to read his entries in whole without visiting his website.

In contrast, most news sites, including Wired News, want to bring readers to their websites, so they serve up only a headline or a couple of sentences along with a link to the full story.

I think the feature is valid but blog software should include something like the conditional get helps with the badly written rss readers.

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