Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I found this poll on KBcafe yesterday. Its only formed of 3 questions.
At the moment the results seem to a little bias, so it really needs a little more circulation around blog space. There is also another one at the RSS weblog.
Well, well. You help but feel Yahoo are on a little bit of a roll. Acquiring Flickr.com was pretty fantastic and Kodak must be kicking themselves now. Yes its not been a clean buy with people protesting the whole big company feel. To be honest I still use my Flickr ID not my Yahoo ID. Straight afterwards Konfabulator was bought and improved. Then recently Yahoo bought upcoming.org which was not a bad move at all, specially if/when Google Calendar launches. But now del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo pool of services. Its kind of odd because Yahoo's My Web 2.0 was a exact copy of Del.icio.us, so I expect Yahoo will combine the two at some point or at least provide someway of crossing between them for a while. You can already export all your bookmarks from del.icio.us and import them into myweb 2.0. I dont believe the opposite is the same. Joshua has a short entry about joining the Yahoo family.
The question remains if Yahoo will keep it free or offer a pro version which costs. I mean a Flickr type model would go down like a lead ballon to start off with but maybe if they were to offer advanced features beyond the current del.icio.us then maybe they could charge for them. I'm not bothered really, maybe Yahoo could use it just to study there audience's useage platform which woud be a great source of information. Maybe it could be a lost leader like Konfabulator.
On the eve (maybe) or at least before Google Calendar didnt happen is put out into the public internet, the eventful seems to be scrambling for some more marketspace. In a unannounced blog move the people behind EVDB have a option to submit the event to other sites. I've not checked out what all the end result are like but if the del.icio.us/events entry is a example, its not bad. Yes it links back to the Eventful calendar but the tags and description are still pretty much there. I've already suggested a blog this option, which would save me copying and pasting. Export as hCalendar (microformat) would be useful too.
I meant to blog Eventful's new group feature which allows you to group togther peoples events via tags and searches. But honestly there blog entry says it all and all I can add, is that its great. I really need to check back on upcoming.org, see if they have improved things there.
The eventful blog has just updated and wrote a more detailed account about this new feature. And thanks Sheila for letting me know Google Calendar never quite happened as rumored. Which is a real shame, I was looking forward to seeing what Google would do differently from the others.
So I just recently downloaded the Skype 2.0 beta which supports Video chat. And deceided to go try it out, but oh no… I cant login. Whats going on I started to wonder, its not like I got the wrong username and password because I've been using Keepass for quite some time now, plus Skype saves the password if you want it to anyway. So i'm wondering what the hecks going on. 1min of searching later I find Skype Passwords Compromised?
So generally if you registered for share.skype.com then your at risk. Well thats me, after my little dabble with there developers area. Now I cant access my skype address and because I moved house and changed broadband account I cant actually retrieve my changed password. So in other words, the user cubicgarden on skype is not going to be me anytime soon. Yeah I'm pretty bitter about it all.
Something simular happened with my old cubicgarden Bloglines account a while ago and let me tell you about the frustrating emails I sent trying to prove I was the user of that account. It was insane to say the least. If Skype like Bloglines dont accept that as the registered owner of cubicgarden.com I would choose cubicgarden as a username then I'm once again stuck. There has got be a better way to do Identity online? Talking of which Dick Hardt (Sxip identity) talk at web 2.0 is interesting to say the least. I really see the need for something like sxip, as relying on your email or even a url for a id is sucky to say the least. Geez even using a hash in a FOAF file would be better than email and a url.
Can I also just say, this is another example of company's leaking your online identity. Privicy and security online, well what do you make of that improbulus?
The theme for 2006, “Building Web 2.0”, recognises the key place of standards-based and open technology in enabling the next generation of web applications. Practitioners and leaders from all disciplines are invited to participate in presenting and discussing the technology and design issues behind the changing web.
It looks like I will not be talking this time due to the lack of development in a RSS extension to better support Languages. But who knows what might happen over the next few weeks. Anyhow, I will be back as it was a great conference to be a part of last time. I expect this year will be full of practitioners and we may see even more developers from google, yahoo, microsoft, etc this time around.
- When I read postings in my RSS reader, it takes effectively no time to move from item to item because they have all already been downloaded before I look at them.
- When I open the webpage of an item from that feed it takes time, usually from 1 to 10 seconds per item.
- When I sit down to read my feeds, I typically have between 40 and 200 individual items in there. At an average load time of 3 seconds per item , that would add from 2 to 10 minutes to my reading time just in waiting for pages to load if everyone did this.
- Most excerpted feeds are really excerpted. Here’s a real world example of something that came down a feed, the information I was given to decide whether I want to pursue reading this or not:
While Wharton claims he may now have been “assimilated” into the culture of Action Greensboro, I seriously doubt it. While I, too, attended last night’s follow-up meetin
- If you knew how often I looked at the first 18 words of your post and decided that although I care enough to subscribe to your RSS feed I don’t care enough to chase this post down, it would probably hurt your feelings. Sorry kids, you have to make tough calls in this life.
- I’m actually becoming a full-text hardass again, and by the end of the week will be purging out all the excerpted feeds from my newsreader. If you don’t care enough to make it easy on me trying to follow lots of information, I don’t care enough to read your stuff. That’s harsh, but quid pro quo often is.
My first thoughts are right on Dave, I'm with you but I cant quite bring myself to be that Harsh. For example, Microsoft watch from Mary Jo Foley. I cant unsubscribe because its really timey content. I mean compare it to the unofficial microsoft weblog's content. Enough said… In the mainstream RSS space you just have to expect headline descriptions, very few dare do full text, and so it would be difficult to just remove them all. Some others feeds worth mentioning include infosync which is not the full text but damm putting medium resoultion pictures in with the description is a great idea. I would say its one of the most beautiful feeds you can get if your a gadget geek. Saying all that, they could take the route of Inhabitat, which has beautiful pictures and full text.
So generally, I agree with Dave, but I wont be so harsh. Its all about the content.
Firefox 1.5 is released, hooray! And its the same as Firefox 1.5 RC3 which I've been using for a while now, hooray again… But not with full support for SVG 1.1 Full, Tiny or Basic profiles. This is a crying shame but still marks another step forward for SVG on the desktop. The full version which supports SVG is still in development and should be available in Firefox 3 according to SVG news. At least SVG is doing much better in the mobile space, almost 100 phones and counting.
If you want to see whats possible with Firefox 1.5 and SVG, do check out the Canvas painter demos which are poping up everywhere. Vladimir has a link to the best ones.
Taken from the BBC Backstage mailing list
The Washington Post has launched a remix site for their content – unofficially called the mashtingtonpost.com
Adrian Holovaty introduces it on his blog
This is great news for all, but means backstage now has real competition. Luckly our content is so much better *wink, wink*
I would not be suprised if others follow suit, but the big question is if either the BBC, Washingtonpost or anyone else makes the big step to syndicate fulltext via RSS for non-commercial use. That would be a commitment to its audience and remix culture.
Talking of which, you will be happy to hear there is a Backstage meetup now. The full details are available here on the backstage blog and of course on Ben's personal blog.
I've added it to my eventful calendar which you can subscribe to if your interested in events like this.
But dont forget to get yourself signed up here before its too late.
The man behind Reader2, myprogs and tagfacts is in the final phase of testing Myfilmz.net. Go check it out, same login applies if your subscribed to any of his other tools and it looks to have all and maybe more features than listal.
Its based on Amazon again, which is great but means you will have problems adding brand new films just out in the cinema. But I blame IMDB (i mean Amazon) for this. When is IMDB going to open there doors to Webservices and expose a ton of Webapi's? Even RSS would be a start.
Andy Santo asks So are we cool again now?
It will be interesting to see how the “Web 2.0” crowds reacts to the new “Windows Live” and “Office Live” offerings… Sometimes I think that many of them are too young to remember how Microsoft turned on a dime and conquered the previous internet platform space back in the late '90s. The new services are a clear statement that we don't plan to go silently into the night this time either.
Yes your cool now, but cool and interesting is not long lasting. By the way, the pictures come from this Digg story, dont forget to digg it.
In an effort to push things in the proper direction, a small group of individuals and companies began working on ways to structure information, in an attempt to prevent SDL (Semantic Data Loss) and create better search in the process. The history here goes back quite a bit, so I'll skip to the end, which is often called datablogging, microformats and/or structured blogging, all of which attempt to make the process of capturing the meaning of content easier both for the producer and the consumer. Things were moving along nicely in that direction; Google Base, however sends a proverbial “Make your time” to all those services, since Google Base essentially allows content producers to explicitly tell Google what all those little bits of data mean and how to interpret them.
Greg is right, but this is the dilemma. Google is offering a solution to put large amounts of structured data online while Databloggling hasnt gone that far and Microformats for as much I love them are still a second thought when blogging. I mean I'm a xml guy and I usually write the text, add the basic links, etc then some tags and maybe trackbacks. The adding of microformats usually comes afterwards, imagine what most people do.
We really need to start adding microformats to the Blogging applications, and soon.
I'm going to start using Microformats a lot more from now on forward. I've setup Wbloggar with a load of custom tags and hope to use them when blogging. I want to use it as a experiment to see how practical it is to use Microformats in everyday life. I even looked back into XFN, for describing relationships. I'll come back to how well it goes, but I'm considering using ecto instead as I heard it can have scripts which mean I could put in a real form instead of just code.
So Ben Metcalfe asks the question Does presentation matter anymore?
This is exactly what me, Miles, Harry and Dave talked about one night over dinner. Honestly I think it does but as Ben identifies its moved around the chain now. If we take it that RSS has a huge audience and that its not changed a lot from its current form (aka no JS, CSS, Ajax, etc in RSS or ATOM) for a moment. The presentation shifts to feed promotion and the news reader style. For example Great News which I'm using for my desktop aggregator supports CSS and I can actually define a style sheet per feed if I want to. This was useful today when Google news was delivering me all the WorldService and ArabicTV stories, as I could use the brief stylesheet to show a lot of entries on one screen. While I use the readability stylesheet for reading Ben's blog and most of RSS content.
But it goes deeper than that, design isnt just about presentation. A designer should have a hand in the structured elements of the RSS feed, the useability of how its pushed and pulled around the internet and the accessability of the feed and its content. Its what I prefer to call the whole process the Flow of the content. Its part of what I do and I feel its part of the emerging role for new media designers. I mean is it too much to ask for a designer to build a client side XSL page for a RSS feed?
Just stepping away from the world of huge RSS audiences now. There something which smart designers understand well. The media, there designing for. web media isnt print media. Sounds obvious, but were talking about the vision for how the site should look and work being thrown out the window. I'm not talking about just browser quirks, screen resoultions and font size differents. I'm talking about the range of toolbars, extensions and the like which deconstruct the website beyond the control of the tightest web designer. Then if you go down the Greasemonkey path, you have something where you can actually share your deconstructions. Smart designers understand and embrace this and actually push for CSS driven sites to make this even easier. There are a few even testing the waters with Client side XSL transformations for all content with CSS for style.
I've included a screenshot of how I currently see BBC news story pages and how its meant to look. I custom built this simple script because it makes loading up bbc news stories from my RSS reader quicker and is easier to read for myself. Others would disagree, but then I would suggest you write your own greasemonkey script.
So back to the question, yes presentation does matter and the role of a designer is very important but like everything, roles shift with the times and media. Branding is another issue which I wont go into right now either…
I found this great little post about WIndows Longhorn/Vista's redline designs. Ryan suggests Redlines are a throw back to another generation of design, and I have to agree. Dactylx asks this question in the comments
I'm down with that idea, but then how do you as a designer communicate how the design should be rendered to a developer? What can we use to replace the redlines?
and Ryan replies with a slightly optimistic but good answer.
Here is the first step. Do not separate the teams. There should be no technical team and design team working separately (on different floors or on different continents). They should sit right next to each other and *understand* the problem just as great as the designers. Design is manifested in code, so if the coders don't understand, then the product is inevitable to fail.
I'm once again in total agreement, in my experience the best projects are always when everyone is involved in the problem. Not passed around like a rugby ball on a winters day.
So at long last Flock is out in a form that the general internet public can download and play with. And honestly after all the hype and secret squirrel secrecy, its a bit of a let down. Let me outline what it is and what it does differently.
He's my screenshots of the Flock and everyone's Tagged Flock pictures.
It looks to be a Deer Park alpha build of Firefox (might be wrong but its at least a beta) with additional features. What are the extra features? Well…
Add a blogging tool,
Add del.icio.us bookmarking but remove regular bookmarks,
Add a Safari RSS type aggregator and remove livebookmarks,
Add a nice, well designed skin and little tricks here and there.
And you pretty much got Flock.
I think if Greasemonkey was not available I would be very much more impressed. But lets be clear, its a early alpha and can be steered in different directions. I like that fact they have put del.icio.us bookmarking deeply inside and its certainly better than the firefox plugins you can get which do simlar things. But the flickr intergration feel more like a poor after thought in comparison. Its nice to have a blog app right there, but right click and blog is a little sucky and I couldnt get it working for Blojsom under the Atom, moveabletype or even metaweblog API's at all. Which is strange because I thought at least metaweblog would work. I checked the blojsom logs after David's comment, nothing is coming through from Flock or any other besides my own wblogger client. Oh yeah heres the nasty html error I get. Try and make some sense of that…
So at the end of the day version 0.4 alpha is not bad, I won't replace firefox because Flock is certainly not amzingly stable. People have already took pictures with boxes being cut off and the like. Here's a few of my grumbles. It could be that I'm running Flock on my tabletpc computer but I dont think so. Greasemonkey can do a lot of the little tricks Flock has, but there not as smooth or well thought out. Flock is worth keeping an eye on for later.