Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
When I first saw the particls sidebar I though oh great another sidebar to go on top of my Yahoo widgets and Pigeon sidebars, I'll stick to the scrolling ticker which I actually like. But I have to admit I'm starting to use the sidebar more and more. So who knows maybe I might switch over one day. Anyway its another good reason why you should try out Particls.
meta-technorati-tags=particls, sidebar, rss, aggregation, relevence
…but wheres the FOAF? via the Dopplr blog
If you’d like to try importing from GMail, Twitter, a local vCard file or using a contact list from a site supporting the HCard/XFN microformats, please try out these new capabilities and send us feedback.
Plaxo support would be nice but at least I can export everything out of Plaxo as Vcard and other formats.
I decided to split up my posts about the girl geekdinner because something happened later when we got to the pub in Victoria afterwards.
Walid from Trustedplaces.com was showing me some of the new features there planning. Obviously these are not to be repeated so I won't. But we got talking about the Trusted places taste tester and Walid pointed out a site I've never seen before called Imagini. Now how we got on to that subject is about profiling. I was suggesting to Walid it would be great if you make the profiling data available to the user so they could tweak it or share it. Glyn asked about the business motivations for doing so. I didn't really have a answer except it would be very cool.
So why?
Well imagini tries to map out who you are by asking you about 13 questions. Its results are poor and very general. But worst still is once you've done all that work, you get rewarded with a widget, some facts about yourself according to them, some travel sites you might like and being added to their facewall. The author calls it VisualDNA, theres lots more about VisualDNA including this part which talks about the reasoning behind it.
Did you know that businesses around the globe spend a staggering $18 billion per year on market research, trying to work out better ways of understanding what we all want? On top of this, about another $350 billion is spent every year advertising to persuade us to buy what’s been produced and available…
We think that this is totally outdated and simply not a sustainable way to carry on. It just makes sense that the future must be about producing less whilst meeting peoples needs more. We believe that the changing way in which we are all using the internet will make this possible by enabling people to get together and share information about what they like, want and need.
Our view is that the way to start assisting this process is to open up a completely new method of communication – a language that everyone who can see can interact with and understand – a language of images that enables people to understand each other in a different way.
The reason we have chosen images as a way of doing this is because about 90% of the way we all communicate is non-verbal. This 90% is made up of all sorts of different components that include many visual aspects such as who we look, act and behave.
This may sound cool but I'm left thinking, what else is it for me?. Now imagine it created a APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) file along with everything else. Then that would be something special.
This got me thinking too, what if other more established places like Trustedplaces, Last.FM, etc also gave away a APML file as part of the profile of each user?
One of the things I loved about APML is the Implicit Data (U-AR) and Explicit Data (I-AM) elements. You can just imagine how simple it would be to output APML from something Last.FM. (whats below isn't true APML markup, just my lazy json like writing)
Implicit (U-AR) last.fm {
concept{ Ferry Corsten = 0.87 }
concept{ Armin Van Buuren = 0.90 }
concept{ Sugar Babes = 0.1 }
concept{ Lemonhead = 0.00001 }
}
Anyway thinking about Glyns question about the business angle, I still don't quite have an answer except to say I've been following Steve Gibsons Security Now which recently has been talking about multifactor authentication.
Well I was thinking APML could be useful for 1 and 3 but started thinking about a 5th factor. Something you know about someone. So a question could be does friend1 prefer ferry corsten, Armin, sugar babes or lemonhead? Maybe? or Maybe not?
Anyway I look forward to seeing more applications and services using APML or something like it. I think there's business reason behind APML but I can't put my finger on it right now. Hopefully someone like Trusted places gets it before Digg who just annouced something similar to trustedplaces.
The private alpha ends today. Yep the guys from Faraday Media have made Particls available to anyone who wants it. Go get it now.
For those who don't know Particls is an extensible attention platform. It learns what you like to consume and gives you more of that. I have been using it for quite some time now and have found it very useful.
So Particls is the biggest step forward in the debate over attention. Some of the scenarios people have talked about can be played out in Particls. For example if Particls knows what your browsing about, it can throw up an alert from a site owner suggesting a 20% discount if the person buys that item they were searching for on ebay.co.uk right now. And thats just the start of things.
I once outlined a scenario where Particls is looking at your Microsoft Money account and whats in your Amazon wishlist. It notices you always get paid on the 28th of the month. So through clever logic pops up alerts with discounts for some of your items on your wishlist when you have enough money to pay for it.
This is quite scary but possible. And raises the issue of people taking control of their attention data. Which is where APML fits in perfectly. One of the things which always impressed me with Particls was the ability to look at the result of their I-AM/U-AR engine in XML and adjust it accordingly. This means you can just erase a large section of your personal attention data without too much hassle. It also means you can import from something else like another attention engine or your keywords from your lifestream for example.
So enough chatter, you can download it for the PC here or check out options for the Mac while they develop their native mac version.
So during Xtech there was certainly some underline tension between different tribes (as Molly calls them). XHTML 2.0 working group vs the newly opened HTML 5 working group, old skool application developers vs the nu fashion framework developers vs the rich internet application designers, xml lovers vs json lovers. But one of the most interesting clashes was the Microformats tribe led by Jeremy Keith vs RDF/A lead by Steven Pemberton. When I say clash I really mean a little ribbing here and there but yes it was noticeable. There wasn't a showdown like BarCampLondon2, no that would be silly (smile).
Well its not over by a long shot. When Jeremy shot the video above using my camera at the end of Xtech, I was impressed. The fact it can be done with one extra plugin is great and testment to the Microformats movement. However in the same breath, I was talking to Andy Budd and as he had attended the session about XHTML 2.0? session. He had a new respect for the hard work and hard decisions the W3C have to make everyday, he just wished it could be more open and a little quicker. Another thing happened just after Xtech to do with this debate. Uche who wasn't at Xtech (missed you Uche, but met your friend) posted up a blog entry to put some dynamite in the debate. Tom Morris has a good response to Uche.
I did a interview with Steven Pemberton and Michael Smith both of the W3C, I want to put it up but it needs a little editing and encoding. I ask some tricky questions including the debate over microformats but whats interesting is Stevens point about the Canvas element. Apple developed the specification then tried to pass it through the W3C. The W3C looked at it and pointed out that it was totally in-accessible. This is the reason why the W3C are very important when looking into the future. They have the long term view in their sights. We may moan about how slow things develop but there quite accepting of Microformats now, and I'm sure even Steven will smile when he see the video from Jeremy.
We're all working in the same direction, lets never forget that…
So only 2 days after my presentation at Xtech 2007 about user generated pipelines and how Microsoft have got something in store in this area. Microsoft release details of Popfly,
Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications.
There is a screencast which shows pretty much everything you can do at a basic level with Popfly. There's also some more focused videos here.
The service is split into two, one a application the other a service.
It looks good and works well. Almost anyone power user will get the hang of it within minutes but there is almost enough to keep more advanced users going for a while. However it falls down in the same places as Yahoo Pipes. No access to the local file system again. Theres even bigger problems when you compare it to my core principles of user generated pipelines.
Popfly only manages to get Graphical and Sharable right. This is worrying but its still in Alpha, so who knows what might happen in the next version. Till then, there is a blog for the team and a few screenshots even.
meta-technorati-tags=popfly, pipelines, pipeline, usergeneratedpipelines, flow, xtech, xtech2007, xtech07
I have uploaded my presentation, pipelines: plumbing for the next web fresh from the first day of Xtech 2007 today to Slideshare.
The general view is that the presentation went down well and made sense. However I think people really wanted to see something which worked instead of slideware.
Well not only eRDF but RDF generally, while reading Jeremy Keith's post about machine tags.
For now, I’ve gone ahead and integrated Flickr machine tagging here… but this works from the opposite direction. Instead of tagging my blog posts with
flickr:photo=[ID], I’m pulling in any photos on Flickr tagged withadactio:post=[ID].Now, I’ve already been integrating Flickr pictures with my blog posts using regular “human” tags, but this is a bit different. For a start, to see the associations using the regular tags, you need to click a link (then the Hijax-y goodness takes over and shows any of my tagged photos without a page refresh). Also, this searches specifically for any of my photos that share a tag with my blog post. If I were to run a search on everyone’s photos, the amount of false positives would get really high. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature of the gloriously emergent nature of human tagging.
For the machine tagging, I can be a bit more confident. If a picture is tagged with
adactio:post=1245, I can be pretty confident that it should be associated with http://adactio.com/journal/1245. If any matches are found, thumbnails of the photos are shown right after the blog post: no click required.I’m not restricting the search to just my photos, either. Any photos tagged with
adactio:post=[ID]will show up on http://adactio.com/journal/[ID]. In a way, I’m enabling comments on all my posts. But instead of text comments, anyone now has the ability to add photos that they think are related to a blog post of mine. Remember, it doesn’t even need to be your Flickr picture that you’re machine tagging: you can also machine tag photos from your contacts or anyone else who is allowing their pictures to be tagged.
I like the idea of using your blog entry url as the predicate for the N3 triple (sorry) machine tag.
I was reading Tom Morris thoughts about attention. First up I thought damm I missed another Beers and Innovations (I actually need to pay attention to the upcoming events calendar in Outlook more often). But more deeply Tom's thoughts about some attention bundler.
I've just installed the Attention Trust tracker in Firefox, which is churning out (not particularly well-formed) XML of everything I browse (there is a button to toggle if I don't want it to record my clickstream).
It would be trivially easy to write an attention tracker which would turn this XML file in to RSS, OPML, RDF etc. I'm excited by the new features in XSLT 2.0 that allow grouping (xsl:for-each-group).
An application I'm thinking of building would be called my “attention bundler”. What it would do is take everything I've been browsing, pull other data that I've been producing (last.fm, del.icio.us, Flickr, my blog etc.), mix it all up, produce some interesting results and upload them. It'd be a desktop application – perhaps just a button on my Dock which I could hit from time to time and all sorts of magic would happen.
Is this too geeky? Of course. But that's one way in which we can research how others can use it. We piece together geeky stuff, then test it out, and if we like it, make user-friendly versions of it.
I've been tempted to install the attention tracker too but I use Touchstone which doesn't exactly do the same thing (small picture attention) but kind of does (larger picture attention). One of the biggest things I like about Touchstone is the APML file which gets created. Its an aggregate of your attention instead of a log of your attention which isn't so useful. It also creates a RSS which is uploaded every hour or so to the internet(known as the pebble output adapter). I don't know how the relevencey and attention engine is working but its finding some good stuff and highlighting it to me.
However I wouldn't mind if Touchstone or something else could read my user generated feeds (couldn't think of a better name) as Implicit Concepts. Using a attention bundler it would be trivial to pull in all my user generated feeds and then do some transforming so they were put into the APML file which Touchstone uses. So simple if I got time I might have to set it up as a local cocoon pipeline. I would prefer to do this remotelyonmy server but getting the server to effectively pick up my local APML file and write it back is not trivial. If Touchstone could remotely read and update a APML file it would be much easier. (any thoughts Chris Saad?) Ether way, it would be cool to just build a prototype to get a feel how hard it would be to write, I could certainly do some local syncing to Jungledisk and Jungledisk will sync it to Amazon S3 a bit later.
Time to crank open Synctoy then.
One last word of caution about Attention. This time from the backstage presentation. The attention engines around me are so good at filtering out stuff I'm not interested in, that I didn't know about a major train crash till someone told me about it a couple of days afterwards as I was getting on a train. Epic is here? Funny enough, I found out more about the football and world events by my taxi rides recently that anything else. Is that a good thing or bad,hummm don't know.
meta-technorati-tags=epic, attention2.0, attention, apml, attentiontrust, touchstone, epic2015, xml
I was reading Antoine Quint about his speaking engagements and saw he will be talking at Xtech 2007 too. Putting SVG and CDF to Use in an Internet Desktop Application sounds interesting enough, but then he goes into detail.
The goal of this talk is to present how client-side XML technologies (SVG, (X)HTML, XUL, CSS, RDF, DOM and ECMAScript) were put to use to create a killer, multi-platform desktop application built around the Internet allowing television-watching via peer-to-peer networks: The Venice Project. The main points of this presentation will be to illustrate how the various XML grammars were put to use for different tasks, all within a unified XML presentation layer:
- SVG, DOM and ECMAScript for finely tuned, animated and highly interactive user interfaces that scale gracefully to any resolution and screen aspect ratio
- HTML, XUL and CSS for flexible control of the display of text content coming from remote data sources
- RDF, SPARQL and remote requests for data retrieval
The common thread within this talk will be to show as well that this technology mix is directly applicable within browser-based Web 2.0 applications as well.
Holly crap, Joost not only uses XUL but also SVG (only learned that 5 days ago) and RDF technologies. All I can say is Wow! Now I'm very impressed. This is a real good example of how standard technologies not only work together but interop with each other, nicely.
