{Thursday, June 30, 2005}

 

Geo microformat at Where 2.0 today


June 30, 2005 - 18:15 - 19:15 - Geo microformat BoF meeting - at the Borgia Room, St Francis Hotel, San Francisco, CA
From GeoURL to vCard, people are publishing geo and location information on blogs and the web in many different ways. What are the advantages and disadvantages of all these various current practices? Is there a possibility of proposing a simple microformat that addresses today's practical needs while allowing for more precision and flexibility in the near future? Join us in a discussion of current formats, current needs, and what we can do to work on defining a geo/location microformat.

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{Saturday, June 25, 2005}

 

Gnomedex calendar the microformat way


Watching the reports of Gnomedex, I heard about a demonstration of extended RSS processing that the Microsoft IE team did regarding a calendar. Dare Obasanjo explains:

Dean then started to talk about the power of the enclosure element in RSS 2.0. What is great about it is that it enables one to syndicate all sorts of digital content. One can syndicate video, music, calendar events, contacts, photos and so on using RSS due to the flexibility of enclosures.

Amar then showed a demo using Outlook 2003 and an RSS feed of the Gnomedex schedule he had created. The RSS feed had an item for each event on the schedule and each item had an iCalendar file as an enclosure. Amar had written a 200 line C# program that subscribed to this feed then inserted the events into his Outlook calendar so he could overlay his personal schedule with the Gnomedex schedule. The point of this demo was to show that RSS isn't just for aggregators subscribing to blogs and news sites.


Now, being able to subscribe to an event calendar is very handy, but there is a much simpler way - using hCalendar and Brian Suda's x2v calendar parsing tool.
I adapted the conference calendar page, to add an "hevent" to each session ( with help from Ryan and his hCalendar creator).

Now you can subscribe to it directly using the x2v link. This is available today, not in a future release of IE, and you can easily add events to your blog or webpage this way for people to subscribe to





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{Monday, June 20, 2005}

 

Microformats gets .org-anized


I'm at today speaking with Tantek, Rohit and lots of other adopters.
We've just launched microformats.org as a home for this new movement.
The conference tag is .
Tantek's Supernova Microformats slides
My Supernova Tags slides

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{Wednesday, June 15, 2005}

 

First Tag Tuesday
Kevin talking about tags
Originally uploaded by niallkennedy.
(From the tag tuesday blog)
I got a lot out of the first Tag Tuesday, and met lots of people with interesting ideas. As requested, here are the slides I projected on the ceiling.
Eran Globen took good notes on me and Stewart speaking down by the bay, before tsunami warnings broke the meeting up.

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{Monday, June 13, 2005}

 

Using the DMCA for good


Donna's posting of EFF's legal guide for bloggers reminded me that a DMCA takedown can be used for good as well as evil.
There are spammers who copy entire blog posts from others to act as fresh bait for their search spoofing tricks.
This is commercial use, and a violation of most CC licenses (and indeed default copyright).Stephanie Booth recently did this to a spammer at www.famous-people.info who plagiarized one of her posts which mentioned Jennifer Garner in passing, on what was a Google Adsense supported spamblog. When she sent a DMCA notice, they took down the page and apparently lost their Adsense status.

Danny Sullivan has a similar problem.

I have heard it argued that using the DMCA for this is encouraging reliance on what is in many ways a bad law that should be repealed, but in this case I think it is very positive, as it reinforces the 'everyone is a publisher now' worldview that CC and EFF promote. The DMCA's most pernicious aspect was the distinction between "professional" businesses who are allowed to copy video, and the general public, who aren't. Copyright makes us all publishers by default, so we should take advantage of this.

How to do it:
If you look up the IP of the server: >ping www.famous-people.info
PING famous-people.info (65.77.133.197): 56 data bytes then whois 65.77.133.197 that IP address, you can find the host ISP, and send them a DMCA takedown notice, which they have a procedure in place to deal with.

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{Thursday, June 09, 2005}

 

Tag Tuesday


With many thousands of users adopting tags, we thought it would be a good idea to gather tag developers every month to exchange ideas, and encourage code that works well together.

Our inaugural meeting will be:
June 14, 2005 - 6:30 - 9:30pm - Tag Tuesday First meeting - at Gordon Biersch, 2 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA USA
Meet other Bay Area tag developers, and hear Stewart Butterfield of Flickr and Kevin Marks of Technorati talk about tags.


Also, there is a new Tag Tuesday blog.

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{Tuesday, June 07, 2005}

 

WWDC Keynote in chunks


Jobs demo'd Podcasts with chapters in iTunes, so how about his keynote with chapters too?
WWDC 2005 Keynote with chapters

Here's Apple's tutorial on how to make chapters - QuickTime has had this feature for over 10 years, so we can only wonder why Apple don't use it themselves.

As to the topics of the speech, running bits of Mac OS on Intel has been going on since 1996; the tricky part of it is getting endian-flipping right when serialising to disc, as Greg Chapman's technote from 2000 makes clear. You don't know you have it right until you have written and read files both ways between different endian architectures.

Chapters in podcasts is a good idea, but this needs a bit more to be actually useful - it needs iPod support (the skip button going to the next chapter), and we need the info back from the iPod about which tracks and chapters have been played, and which ones skipped. With that there are a lot of interesting things that can be done.

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{Thursday, June 02, 2005}

 

Missing the point completely



Scoble issued an invite to Bitman's place, a site supposed to teach children about computing.

So, always keen to find something interesting for my boys, I had a look.

The first 'game' is 'configure the computer system for the characters'. You get some virtual money and have to choose a system config (CPU, RAM, drive, Fan, video card etc) for different uses.

Hello?

This is exactly what is totally bloody annoying about buying PCs
You pick a bunch of components and the bloody thing flakes out because of some internal dependency between them.



This is not teaching about computers, this is teaching how broken the Wintel purchase process is. Sorry Robert, go buy that team Logical Journey of the Zoombinis and get a sense of how you teach through play.


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