Category: xml and web 2.0

The joy of Cocoon, XML technologies and beyond

For quite sometime I've been talking and pushing the use of Open RESTful API's. Its so easy now, sign up get a API, Development, Session, etc key and your pretty much away. The only question then is what framework you choose to develop in?
I personally use Apache Cocoon because it allows me to do almost anything I like and its completely dependant on XML technologies like XSL. One of my aims back in 2002 was to use XSL as a tool for almost anything I needed to do again and again. Well it that aim is very real now. For example I was creating quite a few emails with slighly different information in each one. Well I thought about using copy, paste, find and replace. But no need I just wrote up some really simple xml files which contains parts of the infomation then a sitemap in cocoon using a little bit of simple logic to read the URL string and certain parts as a variable for the XSL. Before you know it (timed myself, it took only 45mins with instant message interuptions) I had what I wanted. The only thing which was missing was for the pipeline to send a email at the end. I still had to copy and paste the result into a email. So how would I solve such a problem?

Well from my understanding of Servlets, it shouldnt be too difficult to send messages/streams from Cocoon to a SMTP JAR which sits in the same servlet container? But I'm still a little unsure of how this is exactly done. The other thing I could do is to create a email file which Thunderbird would pick up and send or at least put in the outbox with little user interaction on my part.

Anyhow, one of the issues with cocoon for the longest time was getting content in to it. Yes you have many different neat ways like the Directory reader, Zip reader, standard xml reader, image reader, JSP reader, hey there was even a Database reader which would create a connect to any SQL database. But theres so much more needed in this area, for example a while ago I was looking for a way to analyse lots of CSS and in the end we had depend on a Perl lib which understands CSS and then had to be written to XML before it could be pulled into cocoon. Now theres nothing wrong with this method but you would think a CSS reader would be useful. Along with a EXIF reader which I swear would be so great. All the metadata is sooo useful!! However its all changed now thanks to webservices. I could upload all my pictures to Flickr and use there REST API to pull the metadata out and into Cocoon. And this is the thing, its pretty true of a lot of things now. Want to get the weather in Tokyo? Just grab it from somewhere else, I bet its also more effective than doing it yourself too. And I wonder where things are going with this? Will we get to a point where it will be more effective to get the date or even the time from a webservice?

So the input side is covered, the internal transformation is pretty much there now with XSL 2.0 and Cocoon. But what about the output? Cocoon can output or serialise to almost anything you can think about including SVG, PDF, OpenOffice, Zip, Text, XML, HTML, XLS, etc. But this is the thing which needs the most development at the moment. The user interface for services are still pretty poor. So what options do you have? Well my fav is still SVG but still there very few browsers which support this natively. Which will always be a problem. Then theres the whole Flash thing, which I still really really hate but have accepted a tiny bit in the absence of SVG for some things. There's also tons of Javascript + XHTML solutions being used now, which I'm actually thinking is not so bad now (A lot of these solutions are using standard DOM's which makes them work across all new and coming browsers). XML.com has a really good piece about client side processing using Sarissa which I have been messing with recently. XMLHttpRequest has made a huge difference to what can be done on the client side and has issued in things like google maps and google suggest.
Then of course if you want to get really rich theres a whole host of technologies just on the horizon including XUL, XAML, XForms, WebForms2, sXBL, etc. Being a opensource kinda of guy, i'm gunning for XUL with Xforms and sXBL with SVG for my own applications. Can't help be interested in XAML though…

Following on, I've been reading a couple of thoughts from others out there. http://www.Peej.co.uk dispells the meme that REST is not ready? Theres a great little quote from Mark Baker in the same entry.
The same tools that create Java servlets could be used to build REST-based Web services, Baker says. “They follow the HTTP specification, and by following it, they implicitly are following the constraints of the REST style,”
Bang on the money! I was explaining to David the other day over a drink why PHP is great but Servlets are just well different. You cant really compare them, it would be better to compare JSP with PHP but servelts are logically different and simple just like RESTful services. It fits perfectly with the next generation of web 2.0.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Living in the long tail and the emergence of tagging

I have been meaning to blog about Stephen Downes' community blogging presentation for quite some time now. I've already touched on the Long tail stuf through the blog and recently in the Why I still listen to Dave Slusher's podcast entry. And Stephen's presentation was the spark for me adding more metadata to my RDF RSS feed. Anyhow here's some great quotes which should spur you to listen or read the presentation.

in Canada we have socialists and socialists always say, “We represent the working class” and that's kind of like the socio-economic way of saying “We represent the long tail.” And they come out with these platforms and these policies that identify with the working people. Ask any of the working people, they don't want to be working people. And so, they're more likely to choose policies that support the rich people, because they all want to be rich, and when they're rich, they don't want to be pushed back into that long tail again. So I don't see a virtue in the long tail.

Because the meaning of a post is not simply contained in the post. And this is where we have lots of trouble with meaning, because we all speak a language and we all understand words and sentences and paragraphs, and we think we've got a pretty good handle on how to say something about something else, and we have a pretty good handle on how to determine the meaning of a word. What does the word 'Paris' mean? Oh, no problem, right? 'Capital of France.' Right? But, you know, it might also be, 'Where I went last summer.' Or it might also be, 'Where they speak French.'

When we push what we think of as the meaning of a word, the concepts, the understanding that we have, falls apart pretty quickly. And the meaning of the word, or the meaning of a post, is not inherent in the word, or in the post, but is distributed.

We can't just blast four million blogs, eight quadrillion blog posts, out there, and hope Technorati will do the job, because Technorati won't do the job, because Technorati represents the whole four million things and I'm not interested in three million nine hundred and ninety-nine of those. What has to happen is this mass of posts has to self-organize in some way. Which means there has to be a process of filtering. But filtering that is not just random. And filtering that isn't like spam blocking. Filtering has to be a mechanism of determining what it is we want, because it's a lot easier to determine what we want than what we don't want.

So how do we do this? We create a representation of the connections between people and the connections between resources. The first pass at this I described in a paper a couple of years ago called “The Semantic Social Network” and the idea, very simply, is we actually attach author information to RSS about blog posts. It kills me that this hasn't happened. Because this is a huge source of information. And all you need to do is, in the 'item', in, say, the 'dc:creator' tag, put a link to a FOAF file. And all of a sudden we've connected people with resources, people with each other and therefore, resources with each other. And that gives me a mechanism for finding resources that is not based on taxonomies, is not based on existing knowledge and existing patterns, but is based on my placement within a community of like-minded individuals.

Great stuff, well worth reading and theres tons of links to learn more from in the page. Very cool presentation, even though I dont totally agree with everything said. The emergence of tagging is something well worth considering into the future. Even Miles has talked at great length about community driven tagging with aggregation playing a role in bring sense or even meaning to resources. Honestly we're not that far off the semantic web in my eyes.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Why I still listen to Dave Slusher’s podcast

I stopped listening to Adam Curry's Daily Source code quite a while ago. Tell a lie, I do still download the podcasts, but Blogmatrix's Sparks usually does delete the files before I get around to listening to them. At first it was interesting, well produced and a great chance to get a feel for what was going in the podcast world. However podcasting has moved on, theres a lot more choice and there is no need to know whats going on as such. (Its a bit like a blog about the blogosphere, however I do listen to blogosphere radio now and then). Anyhow around the same time as listening to the Daily Source code, I was listening to Dave Slusher's Evil Genius Chronicles.

But why am I still listening? Well simply, Dave Slusher's podcasts have a much higher level of quality and narrowing that Adam's. I mean he knows whos listening and does not do this general radio style which I and others tend to hate. The Daily source code is a radio show as a podcast, its so general and does not take advantage of the nature of podcasts. Someone once said recently, Its NOT everybody (mimicing adam's voice). And in that statement, says it all. Dave Slusher plays music he loves and talks about subjects which interests him. Adam servers more like a radio dj reporting things which he has heard and been given. Yes he has a huge audience. Yes I do not like the music Dave plays, but screw it. Dave has a quality audience and the narrow band idea tied up.
Dave actually explorers this futher in this post and this podcast. And honestly I've been thinking about this whole area myself…

Its all about metric's, and Dave took the words out of my mouth.

The Podcast Alley fracas is mostly culture clash between the old methods and the new context. The more I think about this, the more I think the focus on the sheer size of listenership is taking the worst of the old situation and applying it to the new world. We don't need to think in channel-limited scarcity mode any more. It made sense when you could only have so many FM or AM channels max in any market, but it doesn't make sense when you have a nearly infinite variety of channels.

I dont really care whos number one on podcast alley, it makes no difference to who I listen to. But I do understand that old/dead media still does metrics by quantity not quality. This is echoed by Doug Kaye who is the owner and creator of IT Conversations. Who has a couple of times asked for listeners to vote on podcast alley, saying IT Conversations should be in the top 50 at least. While he and others (like myself) who listen may not care about what position its at, advertisers will be more interested if its closer to #1 at podcast alley. Its just the way they do metrics at this moment. The question is what can be done about it? Well there's hope from Doug Kaye. But in his answer, lies the actual issue…

I pitched the idea of a ratings system like Amazon, Netflix or IT Conversations, but as he pointed out, that doesn't work for his site. Chris can't just publish an 'average' rating for each podcast, even with some minimum number of votes required. Why? Because a podcast with five votes of “five stars” each, would then be rated higher than one with one thousand five-star votes and just one four-star vote. It's not a problem for IT Conversations and these other sites because 'ranking' isn't as important as the how-good-is-it rating for each item.

Why is the ranking system on IT Conversations, Amazon, IMDB, Netflix, etc not as important as the one on podcast alley? Is it because people realise that you can not compare one thing against another? That views are subjective and relative? What if the Daily source code is number one? Does that actually mean its better than IT Conversations? or vice-a-versa? What does being number one actually mean?

I blame the old/dead mediums for not growing up and moving on. THERE IS NO SCARCITY, anyone can podcast or write a blog, and the abundance of the internet through networking keeps the statement true. Its time to reconsider your metrics, because once again THERE IS NO SCARCITY and its no good trying to create a artifical scarcity. And the other point worth making…

The podcast infrastructure is very open to narrowcasting (I'd go as far as to say it is optimized for it). The popular podcasts in sheer volume of “units shifted” will always be the more general ones. However, a podcast that serves a small niche audience and serves it superbly well will always be lower in total downloads but could be very high in the axis of serving the needs of the listeners.

This was made very clear the other day when Doug Kaye asked listeners to send emails to people who could/would be interested in Underwriting with IT Conversations. With IT conversations narrowcasting to its target audience the Underwriting Campaign was a good success because of a quality audience. What more could a advertiser in the IT world want? Dave agrees…

People keep talking about how advertisers and sponsors want to see “big numbers.” I'm not so sure that is the best way. It is certainly not the only way. If a company has a product or service that is related to that niche interest, they might be getting a much better deal in sponsoring that podcast. The high affinity the listeners have for the show coupled with the focus of the interest may make it a great deal and a more efficient use of sponsor dollars that a general purpose show with a huge listenership.

There are no simple metrics to measure the relative affinity your audience has, or to determine the aggregate influence your listeners wield. In contrast, it is fairly easy to count concurent streams or determine download numbers so that will be what things are based on. This focus on volume, on popularity, on being the top in some ordered list – it all reflects vestigial thinking from the old way of doing things.

And in that lies the problem, its hard work. Its not something you can just count and be done with. I would go as far as say this is exactly what the long tail is all about. Of course large easy to count figures work well in the start of tail but as its spreads into the long tail you need to start thinking differently. Start thinking quality conversations with a your audience, not the old style everybody style broadcasts of yesterday. I know theres been some reaction to the long tail idea. One I heard recently was from Stephen Downes talk at northern voice where he asked, who really wants to live in the long tail?

So people talk, and people have talked a lot, about the long tail and they've said “Worship the long tail, mine the long tail, the long tail is where the action is.” And all of these people who are talking about the value and the virtue of the long tail have the unique pquality of not being part of it. I live in the long tail. And I can say from my own personal perspective that people who are in the long tail would probably rather not be part of it. They simply want to be read.

Stephen certainly has a point, but I don't believe its as simple as wanting to be read. For example, if I simply wanted to be read I could host cubicgarden.com on a dedicated server and spam all friends, family and there friends about it. Yes I would be read, but honestly knowing I'm read by people who are my peers and also my worst enemy's as such is much more interesting and also much more manageable. Imagine getting 100's of comments per entry? Is that better than recieving that one which points you in a direction you never considered before?I certainly think so and its the reason why I listen to Dave's podcast (with even the music i dont really like) over and beyond Adam's.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Adding more metadata to RSS

I just added a whole load of extra metadata and content to my RSS 1.0 feed (RDF). So first thing which you will notice is comments and trackbacks are added so there is no need to visit the XHTML site unless you actually want to comment back and even then you could use the WFW:comment system, which I honestly have never really looked into. I also added a comment count before the actual comments, so you can skip around the RSS easily. This will also mean I need to get harsh with spam as I dont want spam in my RSS too. So I'm turning off trackback autodiscovery if I get any more spam.

Then I added the Creative commons licence to my RSS feed, which was easy enough. Ben Hammersley has a complete guide on how to do this with RSS 1.0. But this is where I got stuck, I was listening to some podcasts from Northern voice and heard Stephen Downes' Community Blogging session which talked about alot of things to do with the longtail, tags, metadata and emergence. But he also suggested people should link or put FOAF content into there RSS feeds. And I just thought this was fantastic! It makes so much sense, so I went about trying to link my FOAF profile into my RSS 1.0 feed. Well its not as easy it would first seem. I tried to work out how to link rather than just add FOAF to directly into the RSS. And in the end came up with this.

< foaf/images/emoticons/silly.giferson rdf:ID=”Ian Forrester” >
< rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://adrenalin-online.demon.co.uk/profile/foaf.rdf"/ >
< /foaf/images/emoticons/silly.giferson >

Which sits in the channel block. While this may not be ideal, its seems better than anything else i've seen. Now if I can only get feedburner to pass on the feed without interfering with the metadata.

Update – My friend David showed me evidance that my new changes to the RSS feeds are causing problems. So I've decided i'm going to remove the extra comment and trackback fuctionality from the RSS 2.0 and ATOM versions. Which means if you subscribe to the RSS 1.0 version, you will get trackbacks, comments and lots of other juicy bits and bobs. The change back should happen tonight which will be the morning of the 2nd March for most of you. Till then, my feedburner one is still turning out standard RSS combined with my bookmarks. Thanks David, if anyone else is having problems please leave a comment…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

XTECH 2005 schedule is now up

This years conference looks to be a very good one. There are already a couple of suprises presentations which brought a rye smile to my face. The first one has to be Dodds presenting just before myself. I usually read Leigh Dodds' blog at least once a week on my way into work, and I've always nick named him lost boy since.
Anyhow, people keep asking me for my paper, while I'm not going to post the whole lot I'm going to take some cues from Lost boy and post bits up as and when they come. Till then here's the basic description or abstract.

Open Data: RSS Syndication For A Worldwide Audience

The challenges faced while syndicating RSS to a global audience of people and machines. Can we syndicate in every single language, how does internationalization work in meta-data, and what does this all mean for the semantic web?

Some other interesting presentations I spotted.

And I swear thats only Wednesday and does not include people like Micheal Kay and Tom Loosemore. I'm really hoping they do a good job of recording these sessions and hopefully pass them on to IT Conversations for podcasting and archiving after the event. There are so many I would love to hear and see, I'm really looking forward to speaking and hearing from others in the world of XML.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Contacts and owning your own data

John Batelle, Marc Andressen and Dan Rosenzweig talk about lessons learned

Oh I'm in such a funny mood after listening to Harry talk about the joys of Mac for 30mins earlier last night. And its getting very late now, but I had to write something about these contact sharing services which are bouncing up everywhere.
Bebo, Plaxo and Ringo is one of the three on the tip of my toungue which I remember. How much of a pain is it to use these services when they do not interoperate at all. Hello Gap in the market. Wouldnt it be great if there was a service which interoperated with not only your outlook contacts but your mozilla, ical, etc contacts and stored them in an interopable format like RDF (yes you can see where I'm going with this) Friend Of A Friend has been used in social networks for quite some time now, why dont these contact services use FOAF profiles which people put on there blogs? Why should I need to enter in the same contact information into different services? Hell why do I need these services when I have a FOAF profile? As someone once commented Here's to owning your own data

Update, I just finished listening to a IT Conversation podcast titled Lessons Learned, Future Predicted by Marc Andressen and Dan Rosensweig. One of them (i think it was Marc) talks about how the client walled garden is a mistake and the real walled garden is now the data.
Roughly this is the key point, Not a blockquote sorry…

Its striking if you list the amount of things you can't do. There's no personal service on the internet, yahoo or anyone which allows you to get your personal profile out and import it into some other service. Theres no job service which allows you to do that. All the search engines which track your search history and take that somewhere else. You can't take your Amazon recommendations and take them somewhere else. Your ebay repurtation, or even your mail. You can't take your online mail from one provider to another. its difficult or impossible. Its striking the pattern which is being setup, the level of lock in which is being setup which makes perfect sense from a business stand point. But it is some kind of propitery lock in which is as strong as the lock in you use to have at the software level.

Marc – It is the form of locking for the next 10 or so years…. Doug Kaye later presses both the panel guests about open data and attention data. but does not really get a answer worthy mentioning. However someone talks about FOAF and how a couple of services support it for importing and exporting. I can also say Audioscrobbler also supports FOAF exporting now. Here is my FOAF profile from audioscrobbler which is nothing like my own personal FOAF profile. Enough said really… By the way Its also interesting that Bebo and Ringo are running on the same software or are the same company!. I guess this strikes myself as the example Dan talked about, where AOL would not allow interop between AIM and ICQ even thought they owned both services! Crazy! own your own data because these services cant even get the simple things right.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

cubicgarden burning


feedburner

So many people read my blog through RSS and I would like to offer a more reliable way of reading cubicgarden. So I've enabled a feedburner feed which should be more reliable than accessing the site directly. I have enabled a couple of nice options to the feed which includes my del.icio.us bookmarks. However dont expect any of the other tacky feedburner options on cubicgarden any time soon. I mean come on who wants a reader counter on there blog? Anyhow, I may add flickr pictures too but I'm not using it enough at this very moment. Even though someone keeps suggesting I should do so. And he's kinda of right, I got 3g, a powerful camera phone and a mobilogging enabled blog. Hummm we shall see…

Oh yeah and while talking about cubicgarden.com, I need to apoligize for the server being down over the week. I had huge electrical problems and they should all be fixed now. I'm also upgrading bits and pieces of the server software and hopefully optimising its general operation. There may also be an long time waiting upgrade to my broadband coming which will make things much faster. Oh one last thing, I know theres been issues with serving up the actual html pages of cubicgarden recently, I have removed the stylesheet switcher for now cleaned a couple of things up. But you shouldnt get any more problems, if you do delete all cookies from adrenalin-online.demon.co.uk. Then try again… At some point I'm hoping to really clean up the html pages and make them truely xhtml 1.1 valid (currently its all there except I got paragraph's and blockquotes inside of elements which do not allow it).

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

RSS Syndication for a Worldwide Audience

So I finally got around to checking my email tonight and jumped for joy when I read one from XTECH.

Dear Ian,

Congratulations! Your submission “RSS Syndication for a Worldwide Audience” was selected for presentation at XTECH 2005 taking place at the RAI Centre, Amsterdam, 25-27 May. Your presentation is currently scheduled for Wednesday, 25 May.

— Snip —

Thank you for your submission. We look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam .

— Snip —

This is great news for BBC World Service New media and the BBC as a whole. I would like to say a big thanks to everyone who has supported me so far, including Sarah and even Joel. I think this will be a great place to discuss the need to look beyond Latin based languages for RSS syndication, and explain the issues which come with internationalised RSS and in turn international RSS adoption. This is indeed the year of RSS! on a side point its great to see a very useful wiki for the event too. I have already setup myself up and

I forgot to say that the Keynotes for the conference which was announced a few weeks ago are some of the most cutting edge and smartest people in the industry at this moment.
Paula Le Dieu, Co-Director, Creative Archive, BBC
Jean Paoli, Senior Director of XML Architecture, Microsoft
Mike Shaver, Mozilla Foundation and Oracle
Look forward to seeing you all there…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

social networking and data mining

Audioscrobbler sent me a email today to notify me that Tim had selected myself as a friend of his for audioscrobbling. Yes this is correct information but I had not really looked into the friends option of audioscrobbler. And it made me think about the whole friend of a friend dynamic and why should I fill out foaf information for each silo webservice like flickr, audioscobbler, amazon and del.icio.us?

Someone once say asking for someone to be your friend was not a good way of doing things in the social networking space. It doesnt lend its self to the offline world either. I would kinda of agree but no one has really come up with an alternative. I know FOAF allows you to just add people without asking them first which can be kinda of cheeky but seems more reasonable to me. I mean I could say someone is just a contact, friend or family member if I like, that someone may say I'm there worst enemy or good friend in return. I dont really care if you see what I mean. In my scope there a contact while in there scope i'm a good friend. Where things get complex is when you try to build meaning out of these abstracts. A machine could come along and say well no human's going to add enemy's to there FOAF profile so it must be a friend? Or it could do some serious analysis on the terms used between us and decide to not link us because its not sure what the relationship is. And honestly that wouldnt be such a bad thing.

In Microsoft Wallop, I have a link to a couple of people who simply commented on my blog posts, nothing more. But Wallop adds those people as friends? Now I understand the reason for this, as these people have contacted me so they must be friends of somekind right? But what if they simply wrote comments to wind me up or slag me off? Then I would be pissed off to know there now friends! However this is hard work for the machine to work out whats positive and whats negative, so I guess it relys on me to manually delete or remove them? Which I guess is fair…

But lets move out of the usual social networking applications like wallop, friendster, etc. And think about all those other social applications. And when I say that I mean from email to instant messenger to blogs to flickr. Thunderbird which I use for my email at home, has a nice feature called collected addresses. The idea is that anything I reply to will be added to the collected addresses and never end up in the junk box. Makes sense I would say but not flawless, for example if I reply to a automated email when I join a forum or something, its added to collected addresses. But say I remove myself from the list 2 days later, well the address is still in my collected addresses. Once again i could remove it myself, but I'm human and I forget to do such things. I think there is some projects going on in the closed and opensource worlds regarding machine intellengance which keeps a record of what you do and what you reply to etc but across your whole desktop. Even though it fills me with a little terror, i'm sure there will be secure and privicy assured versions which you can control. I'm envisioning something like zonealarm which tracks what I do with people on my instant messeger list. For example during work time I will ignore most people because I'm working. Wouldnt it be nice if this application could block certain people from sending me links during this time? Then unblock them when i'm less busy. And thats only the start…

When I usually reply to peoples blogs aka leave a comment, its because I think I have something which could move the entry along or general yep totally agreement and alternativly i disagree comment. If this application could tell the difference (hey it could simply ask me, like Zone alarm does) It could track the name of the owner of the blog and effect the way I deal with instant messeges, emails and other requests. For example writing a positive comment on scott's blog should automaticly add his email to the collected addresses in thunderbird, put his blog into a browser zone which allows for popups and flash useage (I'm using Flashblock which I adore), automaticly allow his skype and im addresses to contact me without authorisation. Obviously these should be manually overrideable and you should beable to change levels of trust as such. Another example where this would work. I use Tesco.com for my food shopping. They have this bizarre system where popups are used to display goods with all the label information which is useful. They also send confirmation emails when there going to send the food and what there going to send. Now I think its not crazy to say if I trust the email from tesco.com then I trust the popups too. And if you move this into the mobile world for a minute. Then it wouldnt be too much to say I also trust tesco.com to send text messages to me and call me. Yep text/sms spam is becoming a problem in europe.

Back to the first thought, Tesco may not be my friend but theres a certain level of trust I allow for when dealing with them. I know Tesco mine my foods list every month and they then profile me and send certain discounts and offers to tempt me to buy more. Fine, but I dont want Asda (Wallmart) to do the same! In the same way you can block people on im and disallow cookies on certain sites I want to see the same happening across my interfaces I use. If I'm ignoring someones emails, it might right to say I would like to ignore there calls and texts. This may mean there not a foaf and that I dont want anything to do with them ever? who knows, were only human and I certainly change my mind all the time. But if I do, I should not have to unblock im's, unblock text's and phone calls on all my phones and change the email filter.

So back to Tim a second. When Tim adds me to his del.icio.us, his flickr, his email, his im. I honeslty dont want to keep authorising him. He's a good guy and likewise he shouldnt need to authorise myself when he's already added me as a friend in audioscobbler. Does Flickr trust audioscobbler enough to allow friends on that to be friends on flickr without the usual authorise this person? No, or not at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future? (Because I added a picture from Pmtorrone to the top of this post mean he's trusted or not? And exactly how much trustworthness will he have? Now thats a question not worth thinking about at this stage)
I swear to you theres a serious link with Attention.xml, FOAF and all of what I'm talking about – but alas its late and I cant think of it right now. There are too many questions and not enough answers in this post!

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Google Maps supports XML output

Google maps beta

Well well, after only a couple of days at the most? Google maps has been found to give off simple XML when you add ?output=xml to the query string. So for example – http://maps.google.com/maps?q=minneapolis&output=xml will give you the centre and span geo's of Minneapolis in North America. Its not alot of information I grant you that but its not bad at all. Here's Sarah's home town – http://maps.google.com/maps?q=racine&output=xml. I honestly think this is what Web 2.0 is all about, a data only/machine readable view of a servie. So where from here? Well first some more data would be great, not to say you couldnt just query another service for information but its google and its free for use – not even a api key in view. A public schema, no matter how simple it may be. It would be useful in the case of a error like this – http://maps.google.com/maps?q=15%20Kings%20close&output=xml. Jon Udell goes into more depth and builds a simple XSL to demostrate whats possible. I am tempted to do something with it myself but it supports nothing outside of North America, which is little use to me. Till a european service is open, here is some interest queries…

Pharmacies in Chicago
Walgreen's pharmacies in Chicago
Sex shops in Minneapolis
Churches in Racine, wi
Racine to Minneapolis and the interesting XML version
There's lots more comments on google maps at slashdot as usual.
Seems SVG is only mentioned once, while its being used in backend map building all around the world. Damm I wish I had the time to build prototype using SVG and the google xml.

Google Maps XML output has now been disabled. Oh well it certainly was fun while it lasted.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

CSS 2 XML idea

At work recently, we've been thinking about managing CSS. It may sound quite a simple task but actually we have 43+ stylesheets and there all slightly different. They've been managed and edited by different people and we've been keeping it all logged in some kind of spreadsheet. Not great, but it will do. Well anyway i'm doing some tidying up and doing some comparisons between different styles. And I started to think about how to go about this when I thought wouldn't this be so much easier if it was all structured content? (Well yes CSS is structured but not in a form where I can consume it with XML tools)

After a couple mins of conversation with work friends, Tom mentioned a Perl Lib which could read CSS. Which lead to the conclusion that once in Perl, it would be easily serialized into XML where I could do all manner of analysis, charting and what ever else we choose to do with it. But wait it doesn't stop there, it not only allows us to manage CSS but also generate CSS using XSL. Pretty useful I would say. Anyway, I've convinced everyone involved we should open source the Perl code, XML schema and idea for anyone to use. So I'll drop some links in once we got something going… I'm highly suprised no one had already done this and opened into on to the web, I would love to see a Cocoon reader for CSS.

And at long last everything you need to get started… Thanks Tom for the great work, comments to the usual place

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

RSS 1.1 draft available now

As mentioned in few places including Sam Ruby, Miscoranda and Cafe con Leche. There is a draft version of RSS 1.1 available on a creative commons licence. The official specification is a bugfix rather than a real change. My own feelings are the same as Elliotte except of course the very end…

As if RSS 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0 weren't enough to deal with, now there's RSS 1.1. I think the authors are missing the forest for the trees here. While there are some small improvements in RSS 1.1 relative to RSS 1.0 (which is a completely different beast than RSS 0.9x and RSS 2.0), they are simply not outweighed by the cost of expanding market confusion and incompatibility. Oh well, maybe if we're lucky, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and convinces the world to just move forwad to ATOM leaving RSS in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Oh thers already a RSS Feed validator and RSS 1.0 to 1.1 converter.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

IMDB webservices, when amazon when?

I was listening to a podcast today from Jeff Bezos at web 2.0, and I heard Amazon were developing there webservice more. So I zoomed over to the Amazon webservice blog and nothing except typepad users can now get there wishlists. Which generally pissed me off and I dropped a bad temper comment, which I wish I didnt. However I did look around for the Alexa and IMDB webservices and instead found this and this which made me feel a whole load better.

Just got home from work and Jeffrey Barr dropped me a email, next time I should think before I comment, as I've now been told!

Hi Ian,

Thanks for your comment. The Wishlist content is available via our
API. For example, here is a REST request to retrieve my personal
list

The “1G7V8WTVT8NPP” in this request is the Id of my wishlist. You
can use the Customer Content search to locate any public wishlist,
like this

Using the same API you can also get to a list of all content
(lists, reviews, and so forth) created by the user.

Does this answer your question?

Jeff;

Well yes it does, I cant help but feel this wasn't very clear at the time when I was looking at the Amazon webservices. Anyway thanks Jeffrey for the quick reply, and i'll be using it.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Audioscrobbling now

Ages ago I heard and looked at Audioscrobbler and wrote it off because I didn't like the idea of sharing my preferences in music with the public. However looking at it again almost a year later I'm using it. The fact the data is licenced under the Creative Commons License (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike), speaks volumes to my ear. Plus of course its all anonymous statistics, but it would be nice to get just your own data once in a while. However theres a ton of things I really want to change…

Firstup, what is up with < No Title > in the rdf feed? Why not have the track title or something instead? I was going to complain about the fact the submission engine seems to ignore podcasts but I was wrong thank goodness. Here is the Jeff Bezos (web 2.0) submission, which I was listening to at work today. Its a real shame audioscrobbler cant tell the difference between a podcast and a music track. Will Jeff Bezos ever have top fans? groups? top songs? Dont think so. I only just sorted the itunes audioscrobbler plugin proxy settings yesterday so Adam Curry's daily source code is not listed. I think it would be very interested to see who else is listening. Check out the Gilmor gang and ITconversations. So at least people are listening and audioscrobbler is doing something with it.

Ok next major thing, scream! I only listen to music and podcasts at work from my computer because I cant do it any other way. However at home I listen to stuff through my xbox media centre and when on the go through my ipaq and smartphone. So all that information is just lost, which is actually bulk of my listening! So ways forward, a audioscrobbler plugin for xbmc anyone?. For the mobile devices, theres already talk about capturing this data and then reporting back when the device is synced or online. Dana Greenlee talked about the problem with revenues when comparing streaming against download and she suggested something simular. And i'm starting to think this is going to be a bigger issue soon. Not only for revenue but for the audience and broadcaster. For example, if I the adam curry or mr evil genius knew how many times I fast forward there music, it may have some bearing on the next show? I douht it, but that information to gage how popular a tune could be. Am I right in saying Apple think they will sell another 4 million ipods next year and there will be millions of mp3phones sold next year. Who wants streaming audio on your phone when you can carry your own content with you? Yes I know you can justify your revenue with streaming but lets get creative and do something where all those offline device stats can be taken if the person opts in.

The whole last.fm thing is interesting but also kinda of iffy for me. I know the people behind this project, they were MA students and staff and it started out as a project in the college. And through a little bust-up, the project went off on a commercial tail. What happened next? who knows, who cares. Just gives me a funny feeling about seeing it. I dont think I'll be using it anyway because it relies on streaming which bugs me for the reasons above.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Blogdigger groups World Service feeds

BBC World Service RSS 1.0 feeds grouped together in Blogdigger.

Its quite something to see all the rss 1.0 feeds in one go. Its quite something to search through them in one go too. Up untill now, I've been using rssowl newsreader to search though so many feeds, but this is something else. Here's a couple of searches I've tried already.
A search for IBM brings up a Turkish and Vietnamese story. Of course a search for Bush brings back a load of juicy results. However blogdigger does not seem to do other languages very well for example Americk� spolecnost is turned into this – Americká společnost which obviously matches nothing. and thats only czech. I thought I'd give my favourate language service a go too. a search for CMS.NET finds the correct story, however in the same story �ng Fraser returns nothing and changes the characters to �?ng Fraser. Bit of a shame, but I'm sure it will change in time.

I thought I'd check a couple of other aggregators and syndic8 and it seems the feeds are being polled. With closer inspection it seems syndic8 doesnt like the feeds alot. No metadata? Whats a company to do? Anyhow this kind of information is useful for thinking about what should happen next.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]