Category: data-and-semantic-web

Ok I'm not going weight into this because I think its personally all going to sort its self out with a hybrid mix of xhtml 2.0 and html 5.0. Gareth Rushgrove has written much more about the issue and I agree with him too. The fear and misunderstanding around this whole thing is scary. If people actually read the FAQ's they might also get it.

Does W3C plan for the XML serialization of HTML to support XML namespaces?

Yes. The HTML 5 specification says in section 9.1 “The syntax for
using HTML with XML, whether in XHTML documents or embedded in other
XML documents, is defined in the XML and Namespaces in XML
specifications.”

However, see the question below for the relationship between
XML namespaces and decentralized extensibility.

What are W3C's plans for RDFa?

RDFa is a specification for attributes to express structured data in
any markup language. W3C published RDFa as a Recommendation in October
2008, and deployment continues to grow.

The HTML Working Group has not yet incorporated RDFa into their
drafts of HTML 5. Whether and how to include RDFa into HTML 5 is an
open question on which we expect further discussion from the
community (see also the question on decentralized extensibility).

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I can't even remember when this was mentioned. It might have been at BarCampSheffield or a event before that. But the news that someone was working on a web front end/web application for tomboy notes totally shook my world.

Snowy is a online service that syncs with Tomboy notes to allow complete access to your notes online. Its uses Django to create a REST API for Tomboy notes, so other applications beyond Snowy can take advantage of your notes too. This means you can easily create a web app for your mobile phone or other devices. Hell, you could consume your notes into yahoo pipes or other mashup tools. Unfortunately its still early days for Snowy and so isn't all there quite yet. However its GNU's Affero General Public License (AGPL) and built to take advantage of developments like HTML5. So you can imagine how easy it would be to build this into google wave and many other clients. Being AGPL also means it will take a similar route to software like la.conica. I expect there will be services which will host snowy for you such as Canonical's Ubuntu One service (lets not go there now about it) and Apple's dot mac. But you can also host it yourself too, which may work better if your worried about privacy or want to share between a small group of people.

I had no idea Tomboy Notes was available on Windows and Mac too. I had only come across it when I switched to Ubuntu. I also had no idea that there was already a Firefox addon for tomboynotes but I had heard of the Tomboy Android app (which might have been the thing which got me looking a little deeper into snowy). I like Evernote, it works but I'm frankly pissed off with the evernote attitude to the Linux platform. They refuse to create a application because theres not a big enough market, but they create a windows mobile version? They also seem to be about the shiny shiny, I mean a palm pre version but not a symbian or android version? I also expect the Windows mobile version will be dropped soon as version 3 is rolled out. Anyway, I'm also getting frankly fed up of the single nature of it too. You can't share notes and its engineered that way, its part of the evernote philosophy (till a few days ago). I just think although I like evernote, somewhere along the line my relationship with there service is going to get even more broken that it is now. Its bad enough having to run Evernote through Wine or Prism, neither work well and theres no way its just a app which you can leave open.

This is why I think I should just convert to Tomboy notes now and dump evernote. The client is on almost every machine I use, its seemless on the gnome desktop. Theres already API, good syncing and the ability to get linking data versions of the notes. More and more applications are intergrating with tomboynotes. For example Gnome-Do searches and allows me to write notes super fast, Conduit can sync notes and Gwibber now allows you to save messages out to Tomboy. I have seen all types of addons for tomboynotes including the ability to even blog from Tomboynotes (which if it works, will solve one of my long running problems with linux). If I could get Evolution to work with Tomboy, I'll be dancing around the room.

So the long and short of it is that the alternative to evernote via tomboynotes is certainly possible. Some would say, well your missing lots of things evernote does but I'm sure you can either write a plugin for it or even provide a online service for it.

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I've been thinking about doing a series of blog post about software and people a head of the curve, so here's number one of many.

I got talking to Dj Adams at a recent Manchester Geekup. Dj Adams is one of those guys who I followed like jon udell and when I was getting into web development and xml. One of the things we talked about was a piece of software called Zoe.

Zoe is a web based e-mail client with a built in SMTP server and Google-like search functionality that lives on your desktop. Zoe is written in java and uses Lucene technology to provided instant searching and threading of your e-mails.

Zoe was a very interesting project but dropped development a few years ago. Looking back on it, there was some guiding principles/concepts which were ahead of the curve. Dj Adams in his blog post talks about Twitter's killer feature, Everything has a URL.

and everything is available via the lingua franca of today’s interconnected systems — HTTP. Timelines (message groupings) have URLs. Message producers and consumers have URLs. Crucially, individual messages have URLs (this is why I could refer to a particular tweet at the start of this post). All the moving parts of this microblogging mechanism are first class citizens on the web. Twitter exposes message data as feeds, too.

Even Twitter’s API, while not entirely RESTful, is certainly facing in the right direction, exposing information and functionality via simple URLs and readily consumable formats (XML, JSON). The simplest thing that could possibly work usually does, enabling the “small pieces, loosely joined” approach that lets you pipeline the web,

Zoe had this feature, now admittedly Zoe was meant to be run locally and not on a public server (there were little or no controls for privacy, it relies on other stack elements like https and certs to do that.) but it was great because every email had a addressable url. Searches and RSS also benefited from having urls which was great. At the time, this wasn't even mentioned as a feature and that might have been because one the focus was on googling email (this is pre-gmail too) and two because the urls were pretty damm ugly. If I understood Java, I would rewrite this part of the application and give it nice clean urls.

Zoe was well ahead of the curve and we're still not even there yet. Stowe Boyd got me thinking about Gabriel García Márquez's quote Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life. I like the idea that I can sometimes share some aspects of my inbox with other people. I also like the idea of being able to delicious some of the stuff I get sent. There are lots of issues around permanence, but of Zoe us just pointing the way. I can see Google adding permalinks to Gmail in the future but there needs to be a killer reason for the change. Right now I can't quite work out exactly what that is/will be.

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There's been lots of talk about this new service, which to be clear isn't a google killer. Its not even a search engine its computable knowledge engine, which aggregates knowledge from data around the web and tries to make sense of it then relays the knowledge back to the user. For me Google returns Information while Wolfram Alpha returns Knowledge.

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

I do wish it had results you could copy and a API or even a feed for results, I mean check out the results for redbull. Sweet but none of the information is actually in text. You can download a PDF but to be honest that's not much use. So technically amazing but the experience needs a lot of tweaking. Step in the direction of the Semantic web? Maybe, maybe not.

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Stowe Boyd's come up with a interesting and simple solution to the problem of multiple tags for events and things.

Today, on Twitter, I introduced a simple mechanism for asserting equivalence between tags — making them explicitly synonyms — using the equal sign '='. For example:

#web2expo = #w2e

This has the immediate impact of informing people following one tag that there is another they might want to follow too. And it shows up in searchs for any of the tags. Here's the first post in which I used tag equivalence:

[from http://twitter.com/stoweboyd/status/1649219359]

#aporkalypse = #snoutbreak = #hamdemic = #h1n1 = #swineflu = #parmageddon = #epigdemic = #pigpox

Obviously, tools that track or do anything interesting with tags could benefit from taking advantage of these synonyms. And those involved with creating 'beacons' — predefined tags, often associated with conferences or events — would be smart to start publishing the synonyms, too.

This is just another interesting example of microstructure cropping up in the Twittosphere, to help us make sense of the torrent of information flowing through the microstream.

,,,,,,,,,

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So I was blown away by a new game which revision3's Coop (ex 1upshow) previewed, according to the site, the description is this.

Eskil Steenberg is the sole developer of the game Love. He dropped by the week of GDC to give an extended demo of this 200-player, persistent, and uniquely beautiful game world in which players have complete control–even over the very landscape. Created with tools of his own making, including a 3D modeler and renderer, Love is an incredible example of just how far a solo project can go.

Its all highly impressive stuff, and so I hit the web to find out more about the game and the tools Eskil built to create the game. What I found was something very different from just a game. Eskil has a complete technical demo online which you can download and play with. The editor (Loq Airou) is also downloadable but the whole project seems to be a front for Verse. Verse being a real time network protocol that lets 3D apps talk to each other. Like a 3D aware XMPP? Blender3D already has Verse support and so does GIMP via a plugin. 3D studio max has a plug which has been built too, but thats about it for now. So back to Love, Love is a side project of Verse and so the Love engine is just a client using Verse? Its quite a bit to get your head around but currently the whole thing is freely available. Eskil has said he might make it either donation-ware or open source in the future, which is great news. I think I'm going to have a play tomorrow to see if I can get it working.

Verse sounds utterly amazing, and its good to read some of the thinking behind verse. Wired did cover this a while back but I missed it.

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I partly talked about this before but theres been a series of updates which I couldn't help but blog about.

So I was talking to Miles about a client which could support much more that Microblogging and we were suprised that no ones actually built a clever client app which supports Microblogging + RSS + XMPP? Well the closes we can find to that idea is a OSX application called Eventbox. Actually this blog entry does a much better job explaining what it can do, and what a difference it means for advanced users.

If you imagine the dashboard of Facebook (credit to Stowe Boyd) but under your control using the services you prefer. Fan of Flickr, just add them and the RSS feed. Prefer photobucket use that instead. Its a bit like the life streaming services such as Plaxo, Mybloglog and Friendfeed. The application/client should be clever enough to look at the service and work out through maybe some discovery service/xml whats possible with the service. So for example adding Twitter will allow you to post and read, while a flickr feed won't. It would be cool to also finally start adding some of those comment services into the mix, so for example allow backtype comments if you start adding stuff to a RSS feed from a blog. Hell why not add a proper metaweblog/atom Blog editor too maybe?

Anyway, Eventbox is close and seems to be on the right track and I was starting to get worried that once again the linux platform would be left behind in this area. But I was wrong actually deadly wrong because under my own nose was Gwibber.

I've been using it for a while now and its actually fended off competition from Air apps like Twitterdeck (far too twitterfied) and Twirl (crashes a lot) for my ubuntu desktop. But what shocked me today when talking to Miles was the new supported protocals it has. I had done updates and never knew about the new features.

So now theres support for,

• RSS/Atom
• Digg
• La.conica
• Twitter
• Pidgin
• Ping.fm
• Facebook
• Jaiku
• Pownce
• Flickr
• Indenti.ca

So most of the Microblogging services including the recently defunked Pownce and open source La.conica. RSS including automatic discovery for Digg and Flickr. Then some of the interesting ones, Facebook with the ability to also send messages into the Facebook paywall. Ping.FM support, means you can send from Gwibber to all those other services such as Brightkite, Rejaw, etc, etc. But the one which is strange and most exciting is Pidgin support. The problem is, there is no documentation for the Pidgin part and the account says you can send only. So after some playing around, I worked out that when you send a message on Gwibber, it will also set the status of Pidgin. This is cool, but I also want the ability to recieve XMPP messages straight into Gwibber.

Actually Gwibber has the structure to really move forward. I've already seen multiple types of authentication from username/password to a Oauth like facebook auth. Each protocal gets its own colour which you can set and you can enable recieve, send and search on each one (protocal supporting). Search works well, but I'll like to see some kind of watch or a pounce system like you get in Pidgin or Specto. Finally it would be useful to support the Newsgator API (yep I switched from bloglines to newsgator) for RSS, so you can properly manage the RSS and not end up reading the same news over and over again.

Technorati Tags: gwibber, microblogging, linux, client, stream, flow, eventbox, xmpp, twitter

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One of the things I really missed out on but have been following is the developments around the open stack. I kind of prefer social stack but I can see a lot of benefit to open over social. Anyway, this work has been pioneered by some really good guys including David Recordon, Chris Messina, Sebastian Küpers, etc, etc (sorry to many names to list). Today I was struck by Jyri's blog post about Chris Messina's talk at some event recently.

In his presentation at Friday's event, Chris Messina demonstrated the use case of subscribing to someone who lives on a foreign Web service.

In what follows I'll expand on Chris' story by discussing another use case, where you add the
foreign friend to your address book without needing to go to their site.

Imagine I want to add a friend, David Recordon to my contacts. I
know his email address, so I click 'add contact' in my client and enter
his email.

My client translates David's email address into his OpenID URL, probably using a method called Email to URL Translation.

Now that my client knows where to find David on the Web, it goes out to David's URL and fetches a little file that contains machine-readable pointers
to David's public profile and the photos, status messages, bookmarks,
blogs, and other feeds he publishes. The enabling standards at work
here are likely to be XRDS-Simple and Portable Contacts.

This loop is simply referred to as 'discovery'.

Once my client is done, it is ready to display its findings to me.
Here's a mock-up to illustrate what I might see (the same mock is in
Chris' slides):

After selecting David's contact information and some of his feeds, I
click 'Save', and a subscription request is sent to these services. They
return a few of David's most recent public updates to me.

The next time David logs into these services, he sees a standard new
subscriber notification. His service can perform discovery on me to
display my name and profile summary to him, and allow him to
reciprocate.

David may also choose to allow me to see some of his private information, such as his contact details. The enabling standard here is of course OAuth.

I have never needed to join any of the services David uses; in fact,
I don't even need to know their names. It is irrelevant to me if he
uses Twitter, Plurk, or Friendfeed to publish his status updates or
prefers Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa for sharing his photos. All I care about is seeing his updates and being able to respond to them using my own client.

Information wants to be free, and social objects want to travel.

The thing this reminds me of, is when Tim Burners-Lee wrote about the Semantic web and how agents talk to services, etc. You can follow how it works without even knowing the different technologies too well. So while these guys figure out the webside of things, these other guys earn a mention for there work on the services stuff and Controlyourself for there work on openmicroblogging.

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A friend of mine Mike Lott sent me a link to lifehacker where they talk about Tarpipe.

Tarpipe streamlines your updates to various social web sites, creating simple or complex workflows to update several buckets in one fell swoop. Let's say you want to do something simple like upload a new picture to Flickr and then tweet about it on Twitter. Normally you'd need to upload the photo to Flickr, find the URL of the pic, run it through some sort of URL shrinker, and then update your Twitter account with the shrunken link to the Flickr page. It may not seem like all that much work, but Tarpipe can tackle this entire process in one step—all you have to do is send one email.

Tarpipe creates custom email addresses that, when emailed, run through a pre-defined set of actions to update any service you define. Creating a custom workflow will look very familiar if you've ever used Yahoo Pipes, but rather than creating custom RSS feeds like Pipes, Tarpipes creates custom social media workflows. The site supports integration with Pownce, Flickr, PhotoBucket, Tumblr, Plurk, Evernote, Delicious, TinyURL, FriendFeed, Twitter, and tons more, so if you use more than one of these sites, Tarpipe could come in really handy.

And seriously…

I've not been so excited since Ping.FM (no Pixelpipe didn't excite me).

These guys have done everything correct like ping.fm. Every chance they have to use Oauth for authentication – there using it, OpenID is the default way to join up and get a account and they support everything from Twitter to Indeti.ca. The use of email to control everything is a little odd, but there is support for a API. I'm sure Instant messenger and other methods are not far behind. Most of you already know I favor pipeline interfaces for complex operations and until now I've been pining my hopes on Conduit which supports much more services but is really a syncing application rather that a Pipelining application. Anyway, I've only played with tarpipe for a few minutes, so I'll hopefully have more to say and show once I get going tomorrow.

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I think Stowe Boyd is a very clever man he's thoughts behind social tools run very deep. And rightly so, while the rest of us were trying to grapple with social anything, he coined the term social tools and understood the power of these tools and the conversation. I kind of liken him to people like Doc Searls and Howard Rheningold but instantly more accessible.

A lot of people don't like his presentation style which is more a jumble of mini-thoughts and pointers. So when someone pointed me at Phil Windley's piece about Stowe's latest thought, I knew what the bulk of the post would be about.

Although Phil may not have enjoyed the talk much, I certainly did. It also got me thinking.

He shows his desktop: Snackr,
Friendfeed flow UI, Flickr, Twitterfox, and so on. These are all
flow apps. There are dozens of streams now and there will be lots
more in the future. These differ on the basis of the social
interactions they enable. There will be 5 or 6 themes, but lots of
implementations.

This leads to a model called “lifestreaming.” People are continually
broadcasting their life to groups of friends and even strangers.
People know where you are and ask you questions about things in your
life because of life streaming.

If you take a look at one of my desktops from yesterday when I was watching the us elections (go obama). You can clearly see some common elements between Stowe's and mine.

In Stowe's talk and screenshot he's got the friends activity stream as a page up on the right but using rss there's no need to have that at all. Actually I noticed my microblogging client Gwibber supports not only microblogging services but also Facebook and Flickr. I think with some hacking around in the Python code I can get it to have a generic RSS input too. Another interesting element is snackr, which is the scrolling rss driven marqaue at the bottom. If we could get Gwibber to spit out rss too, that would be cool for snackr. But I can't help but feel the guys are Faradaymedia have already venutured into this area before with Touchstone/Particls. Unfortuelly having the attention engine on your machine wasn't the best of ideas. Which is where a combination of something new I also heard about at Web 2.0 expo could come in useful in relevency area.

Not one to hide my ideas but this time, I want to try hacking around with some software to see what I build either into Gwibber or Snackr.

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