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Data Availablity?

[ All types of Social Software ] | Tags: dataportability  data  myspacedataportability.org   

So i read Myspace have joined the Dataportability group, but then I spotted via Techmeme that they were also launching Data availability? There seems to be little detail about the whole thing now, but it looks closely related to the Data Portability effort.

Anyway, here's part of the alleged leaked press release.

Data Availability is about enriching existing Internet destinations with social functionality and valuable pre-existing user generated content and data. By empowering users with the ability to dynamically share, those destinations will create deeper levels of social engagement and new functionality throughout their site. As the online home to 117 million users worldwide, this groundbreaking initiative enables the larger Web to leverage the highly engaged and passionate MySpace global community.

To ease implementation for participating sites, the MySpace Data Availability initiative uses OAUTH and Restful APIs as its core technology underpinnings. MySpace is using open standards in an effort to embrace the open source community and allow the implementation to be as non-proprietary as possible. Today’s announcement is the first step of MySpace’s larger data portability initiatives coming down the pipeline. MySpace is officially joining the Data Portability Project demonstrating our continued commitment to openness and open standards.

Flickr finally ends Yahoo photos

[ All types of Social Software ]

Well I guess once Yahoo moved everyone on flickr to the yahoo single sign-on, the nail was in the coffin for Yahoo Photos? Interestingly Yahoo will provide access to other services like photobucket.

Yahoo! has announced that it will shut down its Yahoo! Photos online photo-sharing service in Fall 2007. Members who have photos stored on the site will receive an e-mail during the summer asking them to transfer their images to Flickr, which is also owned by Yahoo!, or to another online gallery site. Other photo-sharing services that are set up to transfer photos automatically from Yahoo! Photos include Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Photobucket.

Yahoo! is also offering to send photo archive CDs to members who previously signed up for the New Yahoo! Photos. The discs will cost $6.95 for each 700MB of photos. Full-resolution images can also be downloaded from Yahoo! Photos albums one at a time.

When Yahoo! Photos shuts down, all images stored by the service will be deleted. Further information on the shut-down is available on the Yahoo! Photos Web site.

meta-technorati-tags=yahoo, flickr, yahoophotos

Some interesting videos I've seen recently

[ All types of Social Software ] | Tags: videos  interfaces  plasticbags  paperbags  videomixing 

So here's a couple of interesting videos I've seen recently,

Rocketboom (yep I still watch it) has a interesting short analysing the different video production used in the democrats announcements videos for the 2008 elections (can't think of a better way to explain them). They also have a good piece about paper or plastic bags and some interesting facts about the internet and china.

On10 has a long piece about the Pioneer DVJ 1000 which is a Digital CD/DVD turntable. The reason why its DVD is so you can mix video along side music. Now I've seen this a while ago but never actually seen it been used live before. Dj Ronnie G does a good job showing off whats possible. Now to be fair I wasn't blown away but made me rethink playing with Virtual Dj 4's ability to mix video at the same time as mixing music.

Large multi touch displays with Jeff Han and Phil Davidson. And I want to archive the other interface stuff which people might have missed over time. Light tracer and Afterglow use laser pens to interesting effect, MIT have something where they use a brush called I/O brush and Multitouch research.

Tom Reynolds at the Citizen Journalism conference

[ All types of Social Software ] | Tags: citizen journalism  birmingham  tomreynolds  presentation 

BarCampLondon in .Net magazine

[ All types of Social Software ] | Tags: .net  netmag  barcamplondon  geek  girlgeek  girlgeekdinner  error  apology  events  london 

Paul Annett's article on BarCampLondon made it into issue number 156 of .net Magazine (hits the newsagents tomorrow - 18th October). You can see some previews on his flickr stream. But not everything is rosey, there was a miss quote by some freelance sub-editor who rewrote a sentence by Sarah Blow, who wrote the whole lot up in a good blog post. Paul has a response...

Apologies to girls who came for the bit about "token" girl attendees - this was re-written by the mag after I submitted the article, and is not my words. It's disrespectful and goes completely against the sentiment of the paragraph, which was about encouraging more girls to attend - now it sounds unwelcoming, as if there was only one girl and her attendance was worthless.

I look forward to seeing Future Publishing's official response to this. But according to a brief chat with Sarah earlier today. .Net Magazine may be sponsoring a girl geek dinner as an apology for their mistake in the print of the last BarCampLondon female representation. Good on you Sarah...

Blojsom 3.0 is ready to rock

[ All types of Social Software ] | Tags: blojsom  blojsom3   

This blog is powered by Blojsom.

ARG's and Education

[ All types of Social Software ] | Tags: ARG  alternativerealitygaming  education  crossmedia  entertainment  academia 

I saw this in my aggregator today, Calling All ARG Academia.

With the Alternate Reality Gaming Special Interest Group whitepaper still in development, we have a request from our friend Christy Dena who writes extensively about ARG at her blog Cross-Media Entertainment.Needed: Academics who have investigated Alternate Reality Games
I'm writing a section on ARGs and Academia for the upcoming International Game Developers Association Alternate Reality Game Special Interest Group Whitepaper (IGDA ARG SIG). I'm after approaches from all fields using all sorts of methodologies, and by researchers at different levels of candidacy and postdoctoral status. Since there are many investigations in development around the world I'm including unpublished insights and findings along with published ones.

Well how very interesting, this is exactly what I was thinking quite sometime ago. Using ARG's in education seemed like a logical solution for teaching and meta teaching (teaching about how to teach someone else).

The post goes on...

Alternate Reality Games have captured the imagination of players and academics from its beginning. Academics have analysed the form through comparative analysis with other arts types both contemporary and historical; have employed the aesthetics of ARGs as illustrations of cultural phenomena; have utilised ARGs to interrogate the nature of reality and fiction; utilised ARGs design for pedagogical applications and have also proposed reframings of methodologies in light of the unconventional form. Consistently, however, they have tried to understand the emergence of thisform. Some of these academics are players, some are not. Some are independent scholars, some have made ARGs a subject of a PhD, the PhD or a post-doctoral investigation. Papers have been given at conferences, in journals and articles offered online. Their investigations into what an ARGis, the implications of the form on entertainment, the design of ARGs and the creative heritage of this form provide well researched and measured considerations that offer unique contributions for the benefit of players, designers, researchers, industry and media.

I'm going to subscribe to the Cross media blog for sure, its one of those areas I would like to keep my eyes on in the near future. Maybe a trend for the near future? Talking about ARGs for a moment, I've also been emailing a guy who commented on the runaway success of Perplex City (a ARG from a couple of great and clever english guys). He was talking about the need for Grassroots ARG's. So we've emailed back and forth a couple of times so far. TJ is his name and he's wrote a couple of interesting things.

Many of the staples of immersion have been done before, but just aren't commonly done, such as the pay phone calls, dead drop of items, having characters in the game contacting players directly instead of vice-versa. I would like to see a greater emphasis on roleplayers acting as the characters, responding to emails, noticing players in the community and reaching out to them. However, the step I am going farther is to branch out with factions. A couple games have promised an open-end to the game that players can change. We want to do the same, but go farther. Instead of a simple, direct puzzle hunt, what if the players are asked to step inside, investigate and then choose sides?

This is a real neat idea, kind of build the landscape and let people choose which sides they would like to be on in the landscape. The push and pull of each side would work to build up the narriative of the ARG.

The rise of geekery in all shapes and forms

[ All types of Social Software ] | Tags: geek  geekery  geeky  lifestyle  life 

Just posted to Slashdot and Digg is ZDnet's The essence of a Geek by Matthew Broersma.

A general rise in technical literacy driven by gadgets such as the iPod could be evidence that 'geekery' as a personality trait is becoming more pervasive.

You're right about that, geek is no longer a bad thing. It's actually a very good thing to admit now. I bought a range of Tshirts from Jinx recently and I get tons of comments on them. The one which seems to get the most comments is the no one reads my blog one. The most interesting thing is actually who I get the comments from. As you'd expect most of my friends just laugh but I get really nice comments from non geeky people. Its actually tempting to buy more because their really nice on the skin and a good laugh. I mean who would have thought, Not even norton can protect you tshirt would raise a laugh from a very senior manager at the BBC?

Anyhow back to the article, before I start talking about the amount of recent interest from non geek people about setting up their own blogs. Some choice quotes...

For a few years, an interest in computers and technology became inextricable linked with wealth and power - geek became chic. Technology companies suddenly became the focus of the kind of attention that had been reserved for the music or fashion industries. In the UK TV makers even went so far as to create a hip series, Attachments, based around the antics of a tech start-up

Funny you mention Attachments, I was just talking about in this post about Geek sitcoms.

IT industry analyst James Governor of RedMonk, claims that while it may not yet be cool or trendy to admit, a degree of technical sophistication has become expected. He claims that increasingly, "we're all geeks" - even if a lot of people don't care to admit it. To illustrate his point, Governor recalls a recent conversation involving his wife and some of her friends - mostly women who would probably describe themselves as non-techies. One of the women pulled out a new Windows Mobile smartphone while protesting that she wasn't "a geek". Governor then politely enquired whether she had her email sychronised to the device - she did. This then initiated a conversation about mobile phone design - the last thing the technical analyst was expecting given the company. "You expect to have that kind of conversation with guys, but not with women," Governor says.

Although I'll leave the obvious sexual stereotypes alone for now (the women I know are equally geeky and I'm sure to meet even more at the girl geekdinner), James is right. It still makes me smile when I hear non self described geeks friends talk about their mobile phone and it's features in a way which would be frowned upon by their peers if it was about a car. Geez even my mother was giving it the big geeky one about her next washing machine over christmas.

A recent survey by the Sci-Fi channel discovered that an increasing number of women could be included in the ranks of a new demographic it nick-named "New Geek". The research revealed that a third of the UK's total 6.9 million geeks were actually female. "Whereas once geeks were seen as solitary, embarrassing and uncool, the statistics show that New Geek is chic, popular and hugely influential," the researchers claimed.

Enough said really! Hey and lets not forget that third is growing all the time. Don't forget the findings of this survey recently.

Somewhere along the line, geek also seems to have lost most of its negative connotations — unlike nerd and anorak, which still tend to be used as insults. The word's reclamation was probably a more or less deliberate effort on the part of geeky technology types who began using it to refer to themselves, say some. "It's a taking-back-the-language thing," says Jez Higgins, a freelance developer. To some degree "geek" overlaps with "hacker", a word used as a badge of honour to mean a particularly adept programmer, though "hacker" has some extra moral implications that "geek" lacks. Most would agree that Bill Gates is a geek, but few would class him as a hacker, due to the perecieved quality of his company's technology and his taste for world domination. "He doesn't have the hacker's ethos," Higgins says.

Indeed, one of the best things a culture/movement/community can do is take back a negative word. Its what black rappers and gay people did in the 90's. I'm not saying taking back geek is on the same level but it shows a certain maturity in the culture that it's able to do that. Hence things like Geekdinner, Geekcamp, etc. I'm a self described geek and have been caught saying that x is so geek recently. Instead of that x is so cool. Geeking out is another word which use to be quite negative and now has been reclaimed as something good. Even Geekhag is a concious thought that being a non geek but hanging aroudn with geeks is a good thing. I expect that word to circulate more, and remember my wife was always a self described geek hag.

This shift isn't a one-way street, however — we may be coming to resemble geeks a bit more, but through the growing importance of design, technology is also changing to be a bit more human. Strangely enough, many have found the emerging crop of digital video recorders, such as Sky+, far easier to use than the traditional VCR. Gadgets such as the iPod employ complex technology — it's even possible to install Linux on one — but they employ very simple interfaces. The iPod's success was crowned at the end of last year with designer Jonathan Ive receiving a CBE, and many see such products as the direction geek culture will take next. A new crop of influential programmers, such as 37 Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson or Ubuntu Linux's Mark Shuttleworth, are not even particularly geeky. "These kinds of people are where the next great successes are coming from, they're great designers and great coders, and also uber-communicators," says Governor. "Great design is a way to create huge new markets, and that is a lesson IT is learning."

And a good point to end on. Geek isn't limited to IT. I can argue that Dj's, Designers, Chef's, etc are some of the most geeky people I know. The fact remains that being smart and knowing your stuff is now a good thing. And honestly thats a good thing. I just hope it translates down the line to children in school who sometimes act dumb with their peers so they can fit in (unless they are very strong willed). Can you just imagine a school where not know your stuff will turn you into a outcast? Yeah I can't quite see it yet. But hey I can dream...

Tape it off the Internet, no really do!

[ All types of Social Software ] | Tags: internet  p2p  torrent  bittorrent  socialsoftware  socialtools  iptv  longtail  tv  beta  web2.0 

Thanks to a comment by Duncan in my kill TV post a while ago, I've now checked out Tape it off the internet.com. Although its not actually a web 2.0 application or social tool yet. Its got a lot of potential as idea at least. They seem to have a lot of the simple things right, for example there is a post about why recommendations could be important when you drop off the schedule. There right, when you drop off, you end up relying much more on friends recommendations and what people and things around you say. So for example me and sarah have become big fans of Firefly and Serenity, browncoats some would say. The reason I engaged with Firefly and the movie serenity was a couple of things. My friend doug, a lot of blogs about the treatment Firefly got from Fox and what tipped the balance a Wired article. I was recommended Lost by my buddy Waheed and Prision Break from Tom but another way I gage interesting shows is by torrents which have lots of downloaders times by the time it was published. Some Torrent sites make this easy to sort by, others dont. It would be nice to have a webapi for these things sometimes. But back to tape it off the internet, another thing which made me shake my head in agreement is the friends x episode tracker. Its best explained in the post.

Let us take the problem outlined below, that of different friends of yours not all being on the same episode of a show, making conversation about said show... delicate to say the least, lest you drop a clanger of a spoiler.

Seriously this happens all the time, i usually have to ask what episode someone is on before talking about it. Lost is a nightmare right now because a ton of people are on the UK series which I believe is coming to the end of series 1 soon. A couple of friends have seen the whole series 1 but not started on 2, and then about 3 people I know are fully up with ep5 of series 2. So guys behind the idea, when's the vaporware going into Permanent BETA with a Open API, tagging and tons of Ajax? hehe...

Blogs? whats that then?

[ All types of Social Software ]

So just recently the British mainstream media have been touted a survey where they have discovered less of the British public know about blogging than dogging. In Blogging vs Dogging (yeah the title says it all really) the facts of the survey are teased out and require a subscription... More than 1,000 people were surveyed, which included taxi drivers, hairdressers and pub workers for the advertising agency DDB. Seven out of 10 people don't know what a blog is. While 40 percent say they understood the expression dogging. 10 percent said they knew about podcasting. 56 percent said they were aware of happy slapping. Less than 10 percent of people surveyed were aware of Flashmobbing. My thoughts on the survey... First up, its a survey of over a 1000 people. I'm not a big fan of these survey's and wonder about where they get the people from, I mean how many people do you know who were involved in these surveys? So I take these things with a huge chunk of salt. That a-side, blogging the word and movement is still in its early years. Paul explained it best the other day, "10 years ago, people never heard of the internet, now look where we are today." And you know what Paul is so right, who gives a crap what people say right now. Its going to be huge and there is nothing which the mainstream media can do about it. Surveys, jokes, off the cuff remarks are all part of a dying beast turning in its grave. A couple of related Cluetrain's #20 - Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them. In the same way, I'm now laughing at this survey. #57 - Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner. Luckly working for the BBC, I'm seeing this happen more and more. #72 - We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it. Self explaining I would say. Blogs may just be "inarticulate ramblings of wannabe journos" to some, but to a growing audience of socialable internet read/writers its a revolution. In actual fact, we like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

Mark just does not get it, why big media is in trouble

[ All types of Social Software ]

First a quote from Mark,

Just because you can do desktop publishing on your laser printer doesn’t mean you’re going to replace the local newspaper.

I was almost going to scream after hearing the above and lots more just a moment ago. I'm seriously suprised Rob Greenlee didnt ring the "what on earth are you on" alarm. Has Mark Ramsey never heard of concepts like the longtail, emergence, community cooperation and open source? Rightly so, the correct answer to the statement was - dont bet on it! Luckly Doug broke his silence in his usual news update and expressed the fact that "Mark doesn’t get it!" Its also nicely covered here if you don’t want to hear two lots of podcasts in one go.

Trackback Spam, easily solved?

[ All types of Social Software ]

Seems cubicgarden is actually getting its first hit of trackback spam. People never ever believe me when I say cubicgarden actually gets a reasonable amount of readers (mainly through the rss) but this proves its easy to find and also a target for spam bots. its really easily solved, but I'm going to hold off for a bit to see how this trackback spamming progresses. I could use the open proxy moderation plugin which is pretty harsh or the Trackback moderation plugin. Someone once mentioned somewhere that most spam bots dont leave any referer, so maybe someone will build a plugin for blojsom which ignores trackbacks without a referer, if thats actually possible?

metadata raises its head again

[ All types of Social Software ]

I've been thinking long and hard about the issue of photos and metadata, since using Flickr and considering the ideas open source metadata. Theres a large article in this months wired by David Weinberger which focuses my thoughts on the topic.
I'm still using pixory which doesnt have great metadata support but at least it has permalink urls, dynamic image scaling, sharing support, upload and download features (wish it was webdav over ftp). Its just a shame I'm having problems installing it on the Mac using Tomcat 5.27 at this moment.

I kinda of hoped all these problems would go away with time because we would have metadata storing file systems like WinFS which got dropped from Longhorn a while ago, DBFS which is coming to the next KDE I heard and of course theres Apple Tiger one as well as ReiserFS (which was ment to have metadata or/and db like features).
Even the newly launched Google desktop would be a good step in the right direction, but its much deeper than all this and not even the largest corps with the largest pockets have it solved. I also have to ask if this the best way to go?

Adaptive's path's Metadata for the masses raises the open source type way, forward. But points out the confusion and chaos which can happen when people start using tags which are simular but not. Following Weinberger's blog, Udell's certainly on the right path in my mind. And refering back to Harry's idea of the web 2.0 needing a decent interface, maybe that might be the problem full stop. Humans are too lasy to put in decent metadata, computers do not put in decent human acceptable metadata. Why not trick humans into putting in decent metadata by there collective actions. Maybe google desktop isnt such a bad idea now....

Projectsyzygy is now complete

[ All types of Social Software ]

Looks like the Alternative reality game - project syzygy is now ready to be played? There is a link which goes on to http://www.perplexcity.com/. Which then has cgi to take email addresses. I shall sign up soon, but before I do I'll be checking out the new forum on unfiction.com. Oh by the way, did anyone else see there is a image map on the image which clicks through to this http://www.perplexcity.com/indexB.html and that leads to the first image.

Good to see theres a primer for newbies like me. And as someone else pointed out, its almost impossible keeping up with two ARGs, so I'm giving I love bees the boot now. Oh by the way theres a arcticle on Wired about the ending of i love bees, which I got from Slashdot. The general view is that i love bees sucked as a ARG but was a neat advertising campaign for Bungie. I think it also was good way to push ARG's out into the mainstream, not to say that it wasnt already.

Enclosures, Links and mobile clubbing

[ All types of Social Software ]

Paul sent this around the office today. Its a link for the London pillow fight club, a take on fight club I'm assuming. But what I found more interesting was the mobile clubbing site. Bit like the ARGs, I've always heard about mobile clubbing but never really looked into it with any depth. Might have to give it a go one day soon.

In blojsom theres 4 types of content syndication available to you, RSS 0.91, RDF 1.0, RSS 2.0 and ATOM 0.3. Well I've got rid of the RSS 0.91 icons and prefer people grab the others. But realisticly its all the same content at the moment. However I'm going to start experiementing with Enclosures in the RSS 2.0 feed. It relates back to some thinking earlier. At the same time I'm thinking of trying out Greg G's idea of using the Link element in ATOM to do the same. The first piece of content I'm considering adding is related pictures based on not the title but metadata which I'm going to add to every blog entry in the near future. So if theres metadata and the flavor is RSS 2.0 or ATOM it will add an enclosure to pull in a picture from Flickr. For example on this post I've added metadata dance (meta-keyword=dance). Which when searched in flickr will generate this page. So I will grab a random one and attach it as a image file. What would be better is if I could filter by cc only licenced photos. Shame Open photo doesnt have a better system behind it. I'm also considering putting cocoon somewhere in the middle of the process so I can use xsl to transform content rather than using vm templates. One of the things which has made me think about this area more is this posted by doc searls.

By the way this would be the search string which would be generated - http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nc-sa-2.0/tags/dance and I would take a random photo in this example. And the end result photo would be this sweet photo. Now I just need to work out how to do this using the webservice API's and without transforming html pages.

Been explorering RSS 1.0 (RDF) spec for the ability to add extra content. Looks like it can be done easily.

Project Syzygy

[ All types of Social Software ]

A new game is starting and the puppet masters are based in London. I'm hoping they will build on a lot of the new and interesting technologies and cultural differences there is in europe. Its starting soon and you need to drop a email to curious@projectsyzygy.com address if you want to be involved.

First thing guys, what is up with this metadata? - < meta name="keywords" content="TE OE K MQD J JE IFUDT JXU HUIJ EV OE KH BY VU IU BBYDW IKWQ HUT M QJUH EH TE OEK MQDJ JE…" > and why is there a wrongly writen fibonacci sequence? More clues and thoughts can be found in the unfiction forum.

Jeanine Salla the Sentient Machine therapist (i love bees)

[ All types of Social Software ]

A Puppetmaster flung back the alternative reality game universe today. I've always heard of it but not really looked into it. I am currently getting involved in the ilovebees.com game, which started with the Halo2 trailer. But I may have hit the ARG market too late because the big guns are starting to take notice. Yahoo, However the social aspects are kinda of being talked about at Smartmobs and blogged of course.

So what is this all about? Well for a histroy lesson its worth checking out unfictions introduction. It talks about the first major game which was AI's Beast. And Majestic by EA was ment to bring forward a new movement in the game industry but was closed down due to September 11th. Thinking back, nokiagame was my first contract with this genre of gaming. Its not the same, but drove my attention to unfiction games.

Ok so whats the big deal your thinking? Isnt this like Flashmobbing some of you may be thinking? Well I think this huge and untapped as of yet. Yes it can be used for marketing and advertising but I've already got a idea up my sleeve for education. And goodness think about the massive amount of stats one game could generate. I'm sure marketers would love a bit of that. Whats really odd is that it has not hit this side of the ocean hard yet. Most of the games have been played in America and centre around american culture. Only I love bees has made its way across the ocean, but I do hear that there is plans a foot to change the situation - not to start rumours of course.
From a gamers point of view the tools are there to be much more organised. I do believe the unfiction forums is one of the first I've seen with RSS per topic and per post. There using IRC, Wiki's, Email and Forums to get sorted on games, while the game rules are being bent in anyway possible. Number 8 is very interesting indeed, being a selfcailmed hacker of some sorts. The ability to reverse engineer files, turn over weak websites, cause transformation effects and ultimately peer around the curtain is too much of temptation. But the Unfiction community looks down on such underhand conduct, and weed out people who do so. I actually almost got involved in Project MU but I remember it being very american bias.

From a puppetmasters point of view, things are very interesting. They can use equal tools to the gamers to origanse themselves. But they need to use higher level security as the arms race for information is on. Also the presure to build bigger and better games must be huge. One of the things I thought about is relating the truth and the unreal. You could set a game in current times and use real permalinks with sites which are simular but unreal (i think there already doing this?) I also havent seen much in the way of Blogs being used? I can imagine teaming up with multiple bloggers to fill the blogsphere with unfiction news, forcing gamers to look inside rss feeds and special search engines like Feedster. I mean think about it, you could drop stuff into a picture and put it in Flickr and only the clued up would catch on. Talking of which, the internet has moved on and so could the games, why not use RESTful webservices where you have to fiddle with the urls to get what you want out?

I find the social aspect of the unfiction games very interesting and I love the way the gamers think out the box to outsmart the puzzles and puppetmasters. But equally the puppetmasters scour the internet to eves drop on IRC chats and follow threads on forums to see when puzzles are near to be finished and by who. They build up profiles and change the paths according to whos involved. Anyhow, tomorrow I will be joining the I love bees game tomorrow at 6pm to answer a call in Soho from our pupptmasters. I reckon it will be inside a cafe not in a phone box.

An account of the i love bee game I took place in today, from Flidget Jerome.

Today's axon hunters were Diandra, cubicgarden, Sarah, Rogue Element, bcriswell, Miles and myself. Cubicgarden should be along later with pictures.

Bcriswell had a GPS unit with him, and located the coordinate point on the triangular traffic island in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. There's no phones anywhere near there, so we're taking this to mean we're meant to go underground.

There's 14 phones in total in the row Rogue Element already reported about. Starting from the right, we're missing for sure the first, second and sixth in the row. We also lost control of the 4th and 13th for some of the time we were expecting Melissa's call.

So yes we failed, but the seven of us did a good job to cover the 14 phones which were public. Maybe next time...

Microsoft Wallop!

[ All types of Social Software ]

Got an invite to join wallop through Marc Smith who gave a presentation last week inside the BBC. And I have to say without going into much detail, its looks pretty amazing. And it actually works really well in Opera and Firefox. Except when uploading files it would seem. Anyway I will play with it more later...

This is my RSS feed of Wallop, which is basicly Cubicgarden running through Wallop then out again. For some reason it adds all this crazy styling stuff to it. Bad Microsoft, bad! I swear pictures are coming soon, just having problems uploading them at the moment.

Exploring the Bittorrent and RSS relationship

[ All types of Social Software ]

Rather than reading student synopsis, I've been put off track by looking at the future of peer 2 peer networking. Then I looked at Slakinski log which talks about the release of Nucleus which is a RSS aggregator that focuses on Bittorrent files embedded in them. Very cool, even Harvard Law is following this area with enclosures. I'm interested if anyone has brought Enclosure to RSS 1.0 and ATOM? If not I think I may do it myself, as one of the great reasons for RSS 1.0 is its modules which could include a whole number of things, or so I was led to believe. I mean even the ability to use namespaces is an advantage surely?

Anyhow this is all really interesting stuff, and it seriously reminds me that I need to fix my apache cocoon to take advantage of this great idea. I mean for example it wouldnt be that difficult to search through a load of torrents and make rss files with enclosures to then syndicate onwards. This would be great because then you could do mass filtering and even create a webservice. Think of it as Suprnova but with no front end. Tell the trust some must have done this already? Oh and heres a good article explain it all.

I was also reading Steve Mallett's blog about the future of the semantic web, specially in the light of RSS and Torrents.

Now, would you rather publish your book review using Amazon's form or the weblog you use many times a week? Would you like to write your book review on Amazon and then write again on your weblog that you wrote a review - possibly writing the review twice? How about your local bookstore? Are you going to write one for them as well?

It got me thinking about this DIY model. Steve makes many valid points but the one which strikes home is the one about Social software. I signed up to Orkut and got pretty sick of filling in information which I didnt really want to give in the first place. I tend not like to commit to different services now, I mean flickr was the last one I signed up to, and even then I'm not using it alot. I put myself in the bloggers and geek girls are sexy groups, for all of 1 day, I thought it would be good idea to contrbute pictures in a group fashion, but i got bored - quickly...
Steve ends with Own your data. This future is here and is evenly distributed. I have to agree up to a point, I find it hard to believe I'm still hosting cubicgarden.com on my 512k broadband connection. Hows that for owning your own data?

By the way a google one query return

More changes to cubicgarden

[ All types of Social Software ]

I'm currently making changes to cubicgarden.com. First thing you will notice is the added Anyone else [ blogging it? ] and related pictures? links underneath each post. I've also extended this out to the bookmarks which has related links to http://del.icio.us instead of http://www.flickr.com. By the way for those people asking why I'm using feedster over daypop, technorati and blogdex? Well feedster seems to be much more configurable and exposes more rss than the others, plus it loves cubicgarden.com. Does a much better job than even google. Oh yeah plus its the only one which realises that 80.177.x.x and adrenalin-online.demon.x.x is all part of cubicgarden.com. By the way you may be interested to see how cubicgarden is doing on the blogshare market

So whats it all about? Well I'm still fighting with myself about using external web services for my personal data. Even my personal bookmarks which I dont mind sharing with the world, I cant help but get worried about trusting to a beta service like del.icio.us. Flickr I cant trust all my photos with anyway because I got so many and there huge in size (1.5 gig of space used so far) and I'm not paying for flickr to store that. I think the RESTful nature of these services are good enough and passing the title around is a good start. I may start using the metadata feature in Blojsom soon because I want to pass more semantic information than a title around to these services. Ideally I really need to get XSL in between or into VM templates.

The other thing which is changing is, I'm removing myself from the XFN sphere - soon. I never used it and using decent metadata and FOAF I can do a much better job, oh and theres been some debate about XFN's effectiveness. I think if there was a blog (xmlrpc) client which came with XFN built in I would use it much more. I keep looking out for wbloggar 4.0 but its always in beta, I keep thinking I should really 1. find something else which at least supports xhtml 2. runs on the pocketpc2003 os.