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.