Category: socialware-online

Being a geek girl in a male dominated geek world?

Ok i'm late to the party, but its time to reclaim the word Geek! I mean have you looked at the Flickr Geek clusters recently? I'm sorry but all the people I've known who are self described geeks do not have terriable dress sense and are really passionate and interesting people. The killer thing is also that Geeks usually hold down a good job and earn quite good salarys.

So I can not work out for the life of me why all the geek girls I've met are single? And from talking to them its not because there not trying. Someone female and single who would rather be annoymous sent me a link to the Geek girls are sexy photo pool. Then compared it to the Geek boys are sexy group. Yeah she's right, the boys are letting down geek culture. Not good, even I'm not doing my part. But it gets worst… I was sent a link to Geek guys are sexy. Something needs to change…

Cafe Geek now thats a concept worth exploring…

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Finding RachelC and my own blog mistakes

I just spent about 10+ mins looking for a decent picture of Rachel Clarke. I want to remember what she looked like as I spoke to 2 women at the last geek dinner with the name Rachel, no offense Rachel I'm pretty sure I remember you but wanted to be sure. So I looked through her flickr stream and blog and the best I could do was this picture. But just above it was a blog entry (dont worry it all relates) about mistakes bloggers make by Jakob Nielsen (I stopped subscribing to his alert boxes since I learned about RSS, and Jakob still has no RSS! Crazy but true).

  1. No Author biography – Yep I'm now going to sort that out. Its one of those things I've been thining about and i'm going to link to my o'reilly profile tonight
  2. No Author Photo – Dont worry the profile has my photo and I use the same photo across all my social networks
  3. Nondescript Posting Titles – I'm not so bad about this. I sometimes do get quite abstract with the titles.
  4. Links don't say where they go – no i'm really good about this and I use to add more titles for addional info.
  5. Classic Hits buried – right hand nav is very clutterd but the posts are quite clean and I tend to only to the key things.
  6. The Calandar is the only Navigation – Nope got, tags, rss and the post amounts
  7. Irregular Posting Frequency – No problem there, think the longest I've left the blog unposted is a week and a bit, if i'm holiday I will say so
  8. Mixing Topics – I'm not buying this for my blog so much. I mix topics but the categories can help somewhat.
  9. Forgettting I write for my Future Boss – Oh no, I know for well I'm writing for my next boss, no problem there.
  10. Having a Domain Name owned by a blog service – Indeed, cubicgarden.com is mine and mine for ever!

So back to RachelC and number 2. Rachel says this,

No Author Photo. mmmm – not sure if I want one of those. I'm one of the people in the photo a few posts down and I'm occasionally in my own photos on Flickr. Otherwise – I'll think about this.

Well sorry to tell you Rachel, I looked through your flickr pictures and tags and couldnt find one of you at all. Dont take this to heart (take this whole blog entry with a little tongue and cheek on my behalf), its been great looking through your stuff online and its made it clear to myself what I need to do for my own profile online. I'll see you at the next geekdinner Rachel.

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The game: Lost

Riven screenshot

I was listening to the excellent Pop!Tech live stream over the weekend and one of the things I heard which I need to blog at least was the thought by (i'm sure) Edward Castronova that Lost takes most of its queues and ideas from games? The example he gave was the trend setting Myst and Riven games. And honestly when he said that I instantly started thinking about screenshots like this type of thing. But Edward was more getting at the depth and interactivity (yes you heard me right) than anything else. One of the points included the numbers which keep appearing throughout the series, something which encorages extra thought and people to do things like this and this. This type of behavour tends to be more common with games. When IT Conversations puts the audio online I'll put a link to it and it will all make a hell lot more sense, than me trying to do it from memory.

Without indulging my Lost thoughts, I find this all pretty interesting when you read Lost Boy's blog post about Lost: the game. The linkage between games and lost is all there and when you think about it more it makes more and more sense.

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PIM Overview please enable URL’s

PIM Overview

Quick thought, I was messing around today looking at new widgets for Konfabulator for my laptop and workstation computers. I havent really messed with Konfabulator since Yahoo! bought it, I just simply downloaded the updates and kept all my old widgets the same. Anyhow, I had a good look through them today and found this really nice one by Yahoo called PIM Overview.widget. What it does is look at your Outlook or Ical file and displays the data as a Windows mobile type today screen. This is great if your running Outlook as it just picks up the outlook pst file and goes from there. If your using ical you need to point to a place where the ical files actually exist. Luckly I've been playing with Mozilla Sunbird, so I was able to point to somewhere on the local machine.

But what I dont get is, why is there no option to look at a remote calendar? A simple URL out to Eventful or even Upcoming.org would be so useful to people who dont use Outlook and may not use a application as such. This would make so much sense for Yahoo! as Konfabulator is now a Yahoo application and Upcoming.org is a Yahoo! service. I mean what more of a reason do you need Yahoo? Hell, I might even try doing it myself, I've been meaning to build and hack a few widgets for a while.

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New social software i’m using

Simac : Semantic Interaction with Music Audio Contents

I've been checking out the huge range of Web API's available recently for a project I have in mind. But I've been sidetracked by two new social software/networks.

The first one is upcoming.org which is a place to publish events. It support RSS syndication through-out and ical for events which are easily synced with modern Calendar applications like Sunbird and Apple iCal. Like most social software my events and stuff is public. I'm now checking out eventful which someone recommended to me over upcoming.

The second one is SIMAC: Semantic Interaction with Music Audio Contents. Its self described as “foafing the music.” I call it Audioscrobbler with extra semantic meaning. Interestingly, it actually uses Audioscrobbler, webjay and your live journal or home made foaf profile (Its about bloody time!) to build up a profile of you. I'm sure someday it will be possible to enter your blog url and it will work out the rest – maybe? But back to audioscrobbler a second. Simac, actually uses your standard audioscrobbler plugin to collect your music information. Which for me is great because I can now update last.fm and simac at the same time but also still use the audioscrobbler webservices.

The transision from Audioscrobbler to Last.fm has been a odd one, and honestly the recommendation and tagging in Last.fm is ever so backwards. On the other side, Simac is much more logical and is doing a much better job recommending new music to me. However the interface for Simac really needs some greasemonkeying around. Unlike other social software, there seems to be no rss, webapi or public profile, but then again Audioscrobbler has all this. Now if only pandora was built on top of simac and acted like a plugin in iTunes we would have something very interesting.

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Tagging up facts with tagfacts?

Just when you thought it had all been done. Dima Kuchin builds TagFacts, a tag based tip, tricks and hints service. I honestly do not know what to make of the service. Its a lot to get your head around. But I can instantly imagine some uses.

For example, I'm always looking for little snippets of XSL, JS or Cocoon code to do certain little tasks. Once I use them, I dont formally store them anywhere. So i'm always looking at my previous xsl to work out how to do something. If its something big, I may put it on my blog. But the small pices are usually lost till I need them again. With TagFacts, I can now store them and retrive them quickly. This is pretty what Dima is doing himself.

Although the appeal is not as great as reader2, it could have some long term appeal and become a place where people look before hitting the newsgroups and forums?

It could become a resource like wikipedia, but in actual fact its the total opposite of wikipedia. See rather then collabative working on the same fact, the collaboration comes from the choice of tags. Tagfacts will work best when you have trusted friends on it, so I could check out how Mr M Kay reverses a XML tree.

There is however something which I cant quite get my headaround. Each fact is so different and could actually be wrong. How is it possible to work whats poplar? There is also no commonality between facts except the tags (in reader2 the isbn is used while in del.icio.us the link is used), this strikes me as quite a difficult thing to keep a track of in the backend. Anyhow, I'm sure Dima has it covered.

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update – Socially sharing everything?

Ok I keep adding more to the previous blog entry, so heres an update.

I've been playing with Listal and BlinkList after the recent comments. There both pretty good, BlinkList is certainly a whole lot futher down the line than Listal or even Reader2 and Myprogs. But seems to be a straight replacement to del.icio.us, de.liri.ous, furl, etc. It lets you easily import thses too. I'm currently quite happy with del.icio.us and am thinking waiting till Yahoo's My Web 2 and other bookmarking services show something different they can do.

Listal is a little scatty because it can do so (maybe too) much? Flickr works because its all about photos, del.icio.us works because its about bookmarking resources online. Listal does Bookmarking, movies, books, music, etc. Its useful to have the ability to create a list about anything but you loose the fundmental social aspect of a social tool. Reader2 works because every resource must have a ISBN and del.icio.us because every resource has a URL. Listal has so many different types of resources to work around I cant see how it would be possible to keep track of them all. Its easier to match people together based on one common resource. I also dont get the artificial barriers it throws in. Talk about driving the complexity up! Why is there a difference between Region 1 and Region 2 DVDs? I assume because the database pull is different, but why display that to the user? Anyhow, I dont want to seem too harsh in my comments, as I've only played with it for a few hours.

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Socially sharing everything?

Just recently I've been checking out the social bookmarking/media web. The first major addition is YouTube.com which is everything Flickr is but based around video clips. It supports a set of Web APIs, RSS feeds and many social possiblities. Uploading video is a pain and enter metadata for clips is somewhat a pain compared to Flickr, you must fill in at least 3 pieces of meta (title, description and a set of tags). I got a feeling that Youtube wont be popular till video capturing is popular on mobile phones and digital cameras. Flickr was well timed for this expansion. As usual you can check out my public page here.

The other 2 Social networks I've been dabling with is myprogs, del.icio.us for software and reader2, del.icio.us for books. Both written by Dima Kuchin from Israel and coming to the UK really soon it would seem.
Like Youtube, they falls into the trap of entering metadata. Reader2 does have a google and amazon lookup, but its not great. I would expect once you have the ISBN of the book, all I would need to do is enter my tags. However, the copy item feature is good if a little fussy to use. It would be really great if Reader2 supported Amazon Wishlist and Myprogs could read your start menu or something via a downloadable application?
I'm kinda of looking forward to a movie version of these social bookmarking, which will save me building a personal store using cocoon or some other open source tool. I thought about using imdb to do this, but I still do not see any web api or even rss feeds for getting my data in and out. Unlike Youtube none of these services have public web apis but theres enough RSS feeds and I'm sure it will come over time. Just like how I hope Digg gets its act together, I'm not going to visit the website everytime I want to digg a story forever.

While I'm talking about social software. Has anyone noticed how Clusters or Bundles are starting to emerge out of the collaborative tagging. So for a good example, here is a search for social on Flickr. On the left hand side you will see a link to the Social clusters. Heres a Nature cluster, City, Phone and even the xbox. Interesting and popular is also becoming well used cluster types.

Following on from the comment by Tim at LibraryThing.com
I have started looking at LibraryThing and comparing it with reader2. My first thoughts, is that its not as sweet looking but thats not a big problem because it actually has lots of ability to customise it. I just wish they would adopt a tableless design like reader2.
On the plus side, theres already the ability to import data from del.icio.us and export data as csv. I expect XML output wouldnt be out of the question but worst comes to worst, I could get Cocoon to transform it to some xml format. I also have to give Tim a thumbs up for pluging into the Library of Congress and building a much better book adding system. It also supports tags with commas instead of spaces which seems to be consistent with where every other tagging system are heading. Reader2 doesnt but has much more fluid interface (Ajaxy) for entering tags and other metadata.
Like Reader2, there is no WebAPI but worst still there no RSS feeds which I can find. This is deeply off putting and has stopped me adding more content for now. So generally I think LibraryThing is good if your a serious book collector (the revenue model seems to match this too) but for myself the lack of basic RSS feeds is off putting simply because I cant extract my own content out easily.
If your interested in checking it out, heres my profile and heres my books.

My mistake Reader2 does support a slight export via javascript as well as RSS. I swear this was not available yesterday. Quite amazing to see the other language versions poping up now.

If you want support for your language, mail me and I'll arrange it.
Russian, French, Spanish, Dutch and Chinese languages are already supported.

I would like to ask Dima Kuchin why he choose to do this. Wikipedia takes this approch too, but Flickr, del.icio.us and other just let people from all countries get on with it. Maybe with time there will be a way to aggregate tags from other languages together but I expect this will some time…

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Skype opens up

Skype

Just as google talk hits the news, Skype unleashes a response which answers a few of the questions about Skype and its openness.

Skype has a present to give back to the internet for all of the amazing support we have received from the internet community. We are announcing two new initiatives that make Skype and the Web a little more interesting and open up new possibilities for the developer and partner community. After all � sharing is good

The full text is here. Theres also a developers area and a official skype blog. Which is weird because I kinda of assumed Skype Journal was almost it. Skype is also tipping its hat to the community efforts through there extras gallery, which is really a large directory of links.

For those wondering about Google Talk vs Skype, check out this good summary of the difference from a normal user point of view.

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