Tim Berners-Lee, in a public mailing-list discussion about a very specific technical thing, elucidates something that so many people forget... Your grandfather would perhaps have suggested that an attempt to define the meaning of common words, as the Académie Française...
WebTech Category Archive
I called it
Of totally no interest to anyone, and just of passing to myself, but I so called it. WordPress is inching towards Drupal, and Drupal towards WordPress. They will never meet or overlap of course (or maybe they will one day...
What is code?
A picture is worth a thousand words... The premise of the linked article is to show how one can create a web browser in "one line of code" using a bunch of stuff that more or less comes with Mac...
no openID
Mike's posted an excellent piece on why he thinks openID is a bad idea. The problem with OpenID is that it violates one of the longest-runnings stories we tell ourselves about the Internet, from the famous New Yorker cartoon... I'd...
Alternate use
Not jogging, but a leisurely evening with friends visiting an exhibit and ChinaTown in Yokohama. (Train rides of course not account in distances.) Note: The iPod frequently "paused" the "workout"--sensing prolonged periods of immobility--hence it's shortness. The trip lasted...
Typical weekend dilemma for me...
I had planned to spend some time this weekend hacking out the "featured article" functionality for the GlobalVoices redesign. It's the last big piece that needs doing and we have a Thursday EST deadline to show off a final version...
this is the time on sprockets vere ve ... pump yoo ahp
After Jan called me a weakling in that heavy german accent that could only remind me of Hans und Franz ("you are litta giwly maan! we are gonna pump j00 up!"), because I said it was too cold to...
Second World?
Sorry for the link to a machine translation but here's an article in "Web3D-fr" ("3D Web France") about an immersive 3D MMPORG community platform... launched in 1994. Very interesting account of the business model, the politics behind the scenes (browser...
Machine Tags
super quick little PHP function to parse machine tags into an array. Barely useful. What I'd really like to see is code for querying them in a database. Flickr should share that... ;)...
What's that movie?!
Help me out here... Mid 80's, I think the main actor was a WWF wrestler (first guess was Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake, but IMDB doesn't list any movies for him). Something about aliens already here, controlling society on earth via...
EcoBlack
How the colour of your website costs the earth Changing the background colour of Google from white (ffffff) to black (000000) would save an estimated 750 Megawatt hours a year globally, thats about half the full output of a dual-nuclear...
The second most dangerous man alive
I'm wondering: - does my Nokia N80 have QR code reading capabilities? - does the Nokia N95 allow Python to access the camera and the GPS "easily" (for hacking a quick prototype) - what is the current trend, if any,...
Sing a tune
Half a bill. Viacom executives are in London negotiating the purchase of LastFM, the London based "online social music network" (read: internet radio station), according to a music business source familiar with the negotiations. The purchase price is said to...
Remix!
Holymoly. Yahoo! Pipes is like a web-based Max/MSP visual multimedia sampler/remixer/filter for web content. It's a beast. It slices, it dices, it joins and concatenates... it'll even machine translate, extract geo:data, filter by whatever, allow you to input parameters at...
Oh dotster...
An old client of mine is finally taking hold of their domain and transferring their registration to another registrar. I just got the following email from my registrar: If you are unhappy with Dotster's service please let us know your...
A bit of humor please
or "Aristotle's lost second book of Poetics: Comedy" Alot of people have been crowing about how Flickr's Machine Tags are pseudo Semantic Web and how they could have been RDF. Well, piddle, and tough luck. I'm quite excited by it...
Talking to machines
or "Flickr introduces tags to the Semantic Web" or "Folksonomies, meet Folktologies" Aaron, one of the flickereenos, just announced what they are calling "Machine Tags" Machine tags are tags that use a special syntax to define extra information about a...
Updated string 2 color
I needed to update my string to hexcolor function to also check the luminosity before returning a color cause I was often getting colors too bright to be legible when applied to text on a white background. It now takes...
Buzzfeed
Hello, what's this? "We automatically detect new buzz by crawling 50,000 of the very best web sites, blogs, and news sources. Then our technology crunches the raw data from these sites to identify new buzz that’s just starting to spread....
More IMD aggregation fun
Yesterday's achievement for IMD was a bit more straight forward: put a Flickr badge of the department's group photo pool on the homepage. Can you tell I did it? ;) To be honest the hardest part was the calculations for...
Wakey wakey
The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0 Méfiez-vous du Web 2.0 [fr] *cough* toldyouso *cough* ;) Totally unrelated; having sex on a domestic flight in America will get you 20 years in prison....
IMD group calendar solution using microformats and Technorati
I woke up this morning with, in my head, the first words from an email I had gotten from Scott last night, pleading: "*Desperately* need some kind of shared calendar capability on the [IMD] events page." "How could I do...
IRC logging, revisited
This afternoon I set up a "logger bot" which monitors and logs the GlobalVoices IRC channel. About an hour ago, Karl showed me the log he tweaked for the Semantic Web Interest Group IRC channel and mentioned how he structured...
Tumblelogs?
I'm sorry, I don't get it. Or rather, I'm sorta disappointed. As Kottke says in his quote in the Wikipedia definition of Tumblelog (jees never thought I'd quote Kottke!), this just seems to me like what Weblogs were originally anyways:...
Color work
.color { float: left; margin: 0 2px 0 0; font-weight:bold; } .colorblock { width:155px; margin: 1; padding: 0; } .one { height: 60px; } .two { height: 40px; } .three { height: 20px; } dd { font-size: 7pt; font-weight:nomral;...
"Getting to know each other" UI design ideas
Quick thought about complex applications, especially web-apps, which have many features and functionalities and which are, of course, always a challenge, not just for the user but for the designers who need to make them usable. First of all there...
Breaking out of the Document
An email from Julian sent me into a whirl. If I wanted to publish scrapbook-like, and I mean really willy-nilly ad-hoc layouts... is it doable in web-standards today? I can build a CMS that takes care of navigation, blog-style, across...
Use Case Scenarios
It is SO hard for me to write these scenarios without diving into "how I would build this." I keep going over and back over and having to edit out whispered pre-suppositions of "how." This is where "technological determinism" is...
Citizendium
Very interesting: The Citizendium, a "citizens' compendium of everything," will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take...
Over mango and chocolate crepes
I coded up a little tiny PHP method that takes any text string and returns 5 usable "html" hexadecimal colors. It's not as artful as I'd have liked it to be, but then again my programming skills are not everything...
Hello, where am I?
locatr DESCRIPTION locatr is a Series 60 Python application to display Flickr photos based on your current location (using a GPS device). HOW IT WORKS locatr will try to connect to a Bluetooth enabled GPS device and ask it for...
Buy movies...
Ok here we go. Amazon just unveiled "Amazon Unbox", their movie and TV show purchasing & download store. Apple is rumored (damn near confirmed) to release their movie download service next week as well, however with fewer studios signed up...
Even better...
"Sumaato" have developed a ridiculously slick bookmarklet that uses the Google Maps API to allow even easier Flickr geotagging. A sweet feature made better by using Google's better maps ('specially for Japan ;) Seriously. Look at this photo of the...
Geotagging citizen media
To keep my mind occupied the last day or so, I have been thinking alot about how Flickr's new Map functionality might affect the whole "citizen journalism" scene. Alot of people around me have been talking geo for years,...
Automate
Flickr: Import EXIF GPS information from your camera Automagically import GPS information as geo data Some cameras can store GPS (location) coordinates in a photo's EXIF header. If you like, Flickr can use that data if it's available to place...
A little SQL help, again, please? ;D
This seems to work usually and I am always super grateful for any help. I need two queries to a standard WordPress 1.5.3 database for 1- list of the IDs and names of categories that have been posted to in...
Open Data Movement talk in Helsinki
For the last two weeks I have been dying for an excuse, any excuse, to be in Helsinki right now. The announcement of Matt Biddulph's Aula talk today comes a full 48 hours too late for me to do up...
An example of the little stuff I love doing
"Recent comments" list in the sidebar of a weblog. Before: After: Yeah, it takes more space, but it is apprehensible. There is more data, but it is better chunked and spooned out, reducing the amount of decoding you need to...
Image editing for Flickr
"Preloadr" is really quite something. It uses the Flickr API to allow you to modify any of your images, via a web interface totally in sync with Flickr's style, as if you were in a "Photoshop-like" application. Awesome job....
Yeah I'm a bit proud...
I stumbled onto Wikipedia's entry for Moblog and damn near fell over. My name's not mentioned of course, but that is my design for Joi's moblog. I did that back in 2003. Custom solution, with a fancy Python-based email-to-xml-rpc script...
Here, try this.
Give this a try, let me know what you get. First, let's search Baidu, one of the major chinese search engines, for "chocolate". Yum yum Ok now let's try... "Tianamen massacre", written in western script. Still works. Ok now try...
Yahoo! porn spam
Warning: links to pages not with photos but hardcore porn terminology... Just got a concerned email from Howard regarding the fact that one of the articles on SmartMobs seems to be a spam magnet according to Yahoo!. The fact was...
Announcing RaSP!
Hah, that sounds so official like. Back when I was a... oh wait I still am a freelancing web specialist... anyways, I built this "rapid site prototyper" in PHP. It's based on an array which one sets up to...
Medieval ballisticism
In a follow-up to my "It's not about you" post a few weeks back, Mike Migurski, lead dev on ReBlog, points me to this complaint on "The Taming of The Band-Aid", a small, local weblog about one person's agricultural efforts...
What is a "podcast"?
UPDATED (to be more precise in the answers I seek) In your mind, is it: "A podcast is like radio" ("radio" the medium, not the hardware/technoogy) or "A podcast is like a radio show" (the usage of the medium) ?...
Smart move: W3C opens China office in Beijing.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announces the launch of its China Office on 27 April 2006. W3C, through its newest Office, invites experts in China to join the international project of developing Web standards at W3C. The Office is...
Web Philo 101
Someone (Hoder) launched a missive in the GlobalVoices public mailing list stating that "[weblog search service X] sucks!" His main point of contention was how it does a poor job of tracking weblogs which aren't in english. Ensued a short...
Blocking Technorati
If you're one of the people who prefers to disallow Technorati's bot, which does not respect the robots.txt convention and it's directives (talk about a good net citizen...), you may have resorted to blocking the bot's IP, 209.237.230.104. As of...
Don't do evil
Oops, seems in their fervor, the community has forgotten to define *what is evil*. Last year Google hired the bipartisan lobbying firm Podesta Mattoon, whose lobbyists include Daniel Mattoon, a Republican and longtime friend of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and...
A little Flash help please?
So um... I have this Flash-based IRC client that we--GlobalVoices-- need tweaked a bit, both aesthetically and there's a strange behavior we would love to see straightened out... I know exactly zip about Flash. It seems the source is Flash...
Summing it up
My post on "it's not about you" the other day sparked a good thread of debate which culminated in Hugh staking some key points, and Karl responding very clearly and directly, and in my opinion, right on the money, so...
Say it like it is, brotha!
Joe Clark drops one hell of a rant about everything from web acessibility, web 2.0 and stooped conferences. And really, the Pied Piper of Ajax, Jason Fried, is principally responsible for this mess. I’m getting a bit tired of having...
It's alive!
Before leaving for Tokyo, I mentioned how I was looking forward to getting back to Montreal for the summer. More specifically, what I told a few people in person was I was particularly looking forward to watching, and perhaps being...
It's not about you
At least not the way you may be led to believe it is. With apologies to Stewart and Caterina, the whole Flickr team and all the folks involved in this "Web 2.0" stuff, who, for the most part, are truly...
Adding missing features
I spent the end of this past summer building the USC Interactive Media Department's website/weblogs/aggregator system. As I said back then, it was a heck of a fun project and I realize now that it gave me many of the...
Virtual Real Estate
From Dav's Flickr stream: Dav laments and sells his Second Life plot of land because of the overdevelopment in his neighborhood over the last year. Amazing! Dav, I'll come visit your new waterfront spot!...
WordPress Loop hack/replacement with logical operands for multicategory listings
I just posted this on the WordPress support forums, see if it gets me anything. If you here have any thoughts please please please get in touch. :) Hi gang, While poking around for this post, I discovered that WP...
Happy 2nd Birthday Flickr!
Mosaic: Happy Birthday Flickr!Originally uploaded by jbum. Wow, I totally missed it this year. Happy birthday gang!! Thanks SO much for this wondrous world of marvels. I moblogged Stewart, Ben and Eric introducing Flickr at ETech 2004, and I was...
On the success of weblogs et al
The success of all these things such as weblogs, websyndication, etc, is directly attributable, I think, to one basic fact: weblogs are basic, rudimentary Content Management Systems. At risk of over-simplifying, I say that human intellect, human intelligence itself, in...
Some cool obscure web politics and geekery
While I was out to dinner, I was alerted via IM to two interesting things. First, the BBC has become a member of the W3C. That is fantastic news. Especially with this past information in mind. And, while already 3...
Comparing
Long story but yesterday over lunch with my new good friends John and Colin, I committed to building this side-by-side comparison of Google China and Google in Chinese for the OpenNet Initiative. The reason for doing this is explained thusly:...
Backchannel
Justin's made his backchannel experiments an official project at the USC IMD, where he is studying. Having experienced several types of backchannel setups myself, though never of the intensely focused and tweaked 14 screens of the ZML, I can say...
Dynapfffffff~~~
Remember I asked about "when was the last time you wrote out an entire webpage" a few weeks back? Good lord that was still in this same month! So much has happened since then... I remember discussing this at Laika...
It slices, it dices...
This is getting kinda absurd... Quitomzilla helps you quit smoking while you surf the web or wait for new emails, showing the cigarettes, money and time you have saved since you quitted. Yes, a webbrowser extension, which aids you in...
Tim Berners-Lee's weblog
TBL created the web. Now Tim Berners-Lee has a weblog. Good first post too! (I'd quote here but you really need to read the whole thing... to give you a little history lesson. ;)...
Dynamo
For some, if not many of you reading this, the answer to the following question is "never." But I pose it anyways, really addressing the rest of you. When was the last time you wrote out an entire webpage, in...
"after building up a fan base on the internet"
Sheffield rock band the Arctic Monkeys have topped the UK singles charts with their debut track, after building up a fan base on the internet. "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor" trumped pop trio the Sugababes after...
Look! Up in the sky!
FlightAware. Wow. (ugly but ... hell there's alot of data, and it is blazing fast.) How live is FlightAware's tracking and status data? The data displayed on FlightAware is typically six minutes delayed from real time. How often does the...
Madonna 2.0
It's flash! It uses email for submission! But it's got tags! Ladies and gentlemen, Madonna 2.0! via Karl via Laurent...
,tools
This is very very cool to me and one of those "duh! of course! simple brilliance!" Emulating W3C ,tools with mod_rewrite Basically, it allows a visitor to use their browser's Location input as a CLI (Command Line Interface) to any...
LibriVox
Friend Hugh started up a neat "sorta Project Gutenberg for audio books" called LibriVox. The project has gotten some good traction and attention - Hugh was invited to the recent Open Library launch shindig by Brewster Kahle - and he's...
BBC catalogue begins development
Biddulph and Hammersley are on the case. Screenshot 1 (Searching for "John Peel") and screenshot 2 ("John Peel's contributer page") I think I would have dropped everything to play on this project too. Sigh. ;) My favorite line in Biddulph's...
Immersive Web
About a week ago I went for chinese food with Michael. We hadn't seen each other in a few weeks and Mike had just returned from what seemed like a very exciting trip to Europe. He recounted parts of his...
Googoomania
Some people... Walid Elias Kai, who has a doctorate in search engine marketing, and his wife Carol of Kalmar, Sweden, have named their son Oliver Google Kai...
Absurd development
(I'm getting tiiired of this...) I'm looking at SynchroEdit, a development project to allow "synchronous editing for the web". Let us, for one second, forget that the web was conceived to be two-way, synchronously editable, from day one. (Hah! Tim...
I was worried but now I am relieved
This will sound like ass-kissing but I assure you it's not. Joi finally posted a really great entry after a long quiet period. (I know I know, research. Daijobu.) More than that, it runs parallel to my suspicions regarding "what's...
A slight detour
RSS et al are merely a temporary detour, a quick outgrowth which we needed to bring us back to the Web. Consider this: syndicated items do not have URIs for their "locations" in the feed. They always point back to...
Yahoo acquires Upcoming.org
I'm drunk so I'll do this. Cue Star Wars "The Imperial March" Yahoo! acquires Upcoming.org dum dum dum dum da-dum dum da-dum... inside joke: (Hey Mike, synchronize yer calendars! Here we go!)...
The best thing about "Web 2.0"
The absolute best part is this: when Bubble 2.0 comes around and sweeps by, the whole affair will have been so thoroughly documented, annotated, tagged, conversed about, permalinked and RSS'ed... that the future Web 3.0 Blowhards will really need to...
My other new blahg!
Yahoo! SiteExplorer Michal: there's no escape. bopuc: .htaccess [1] robots.txt [2] Michal: sudo apachectl stop [3] bopuc: hehehe ACL [4] i don't want to stop talking, I want Them to stop listening ;) Michal: ha, yeah The popular misconception is...
Real browser war
I thought of doing this recently. I can't imagine that no one has suggested it earlier. The amount of times I have heard web developers curse Internet Explorer, only to then sigh, shrug and say "but it's the client's site...
Patterns in Google/Yahoo hirings
Karl has been scouring the web for the last few days looking for all public reports of people hired by Google and Yahoo... and has added them in the comments of my previous post on the subject. It's a loooong...
Google swallows the internet whole, and you with it
First, it was about "indexing" all of the web. Then, it bought a small chunk of that web (Blogger). Then Google said "hey, there's more than the web out there!" and Google Mail was pushed out. Quickly followed by Google...
Quiennes mas macho?
"Advancing the Effectiveness & Sustainability of Open Education" ($250.00 USD) o "Web 2.0" ($2,795.00 USD) Gee. I wonder which would be far far far more interesting, stimulating and worthwhile... $600cnd flight to Salt Lake City... hrmmm......
That was quick!
"Apple supports video podcasting" Seems they "turned it on" without telling anyone. Told. you. so. :D...
My new blog
Well, here it is. My new blog, complete with Atom & RSS feeds, language [fr] switches [de] and "references"... I think I will call it... "Xanadu"... yes... that sounds right. A centralized master document of all the web, tailored to...
Trust
"Lead Camino developer Mike Pinkerton has announced that he has accepted a position at Google." Public (and there are more such announcements coming) Micah Dubinko -> YahooXForms Specification Editor TV Raman IBM -> GoogleParticipant of many W3C working groups...
Relate
Slowly, they are learning. See, look! TagHop: Taghop allows you to relate categories on the web. If your "Technology" category is related to someone elses "Software" category, then link the two. Someone else may relate their category to the same...
Break it down, build it up
(just a quick note.) Existant data-object storage and retrieval systems: - Hard hierarchialization ("taxonomies", "categories with parent/child relationships") - Analytico-synthetic ("Faceted categorization", "Semantic Web") - Unstructured labelization ("Tags", "Labels") - Statistical extrapolation ("Keywords") - Unstructured data ("Full text search") [Disclaimer:...
Immersive
I spent the most part of the last... dunno, lost track... 6 weeks? working on the University of Southern California's Interactive Media Division's website, which we launched last thursday morning at 5am EST. (I went on a 4 day celebration...
The right tool for the job
Ethan Zuckerman wrote up a lengthy post part of which was an extension of a conversation-slash-debate we sort of have been having since I started working on Global Voices. The thing is, I agree with everything he says, more or...
Bravo
"World Wide Web Consortium Marks Completion of Quality Assurance Working Group with New Recommendation" The Quality Assurance (QA) Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) concludes its work this month with the completion of the Specification Guidelines W3C...
Judge a book by it's thumbprint
A few months ago I enabled a feature on Joi Ito's weblog which I called his "blog thumbprint". What it is, is a weighted list of the most frequently used words in the entirety of Joi's blog, with the text...
News, maps, tags, viz
Michal switched his News Project source from Google "In the News" to the Del.icio.us "Popular" feed and called it "Vox Delicii". Michal is also one of the guys behind Mappr, which mapped Flickr pics based on place-name tags. Aaron's done all...
Fu
Wherein all things can be likened to kung-fu movie story lines / ancient chinese philosophy. The Wu Wa Wei Clan are warrior monks who live, study and train in a temple over on the mountainside. One of the nearby villages...
Oh yes.
My my. Two groups of system-defined and managed "cross posting slugs" (for reBlog goodness via slug-based RSS extraction1), author specific "tags" AND suggestions, based on all three arrays. You, whoever coded the del.icio.us tags UI on the post page,...
Tags in MT admin interface
It took a few hours but I've gone and done it. I hacked out the "suggested tags" UI goodies from del.icio.us and grafted it into the Movable Type admin's "Edit Entry" template. Now for my purposes, the "suggested tags"...
How da??
Somehow, I find myself in the unenviable position where I, a non-programmer, must figure out how to do tag intersections in PHP + SQL. How's that for meta? :D And it's such a beautiful day outside......
CC license jurisdictions
After my "set your Flickr license to Creative Commons!" post the other day, Mikel pointed out jurisdiction issues. I pinged Joi about it and he gave me a quick cryptic response (WiFi in airplanes rots your brains!), but one which...
Flickr & Creative Commons
Help push the more widespread awareness of the use of Creative Commons licenses on Flickr. You can copy and paste the code below into your Flickr Profile's "Describe Yoruself" field: ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please consider changing your Flickr photo license option...
Bit Torrent Opera
Yahoo/AP reports: The upcoming Opera 8.0.2, now available in a test version, will try to make BitTorrent downloads seamless, just like any other download using HTTP or FTP for transfers. The exception is the appearance of a warning that users...
Microsoft says
Teach your kids the basics of safer blogging before they start Dated July 7th, MS published this article in their "Security At Home > Child Safety" webzine. Interestingly, much of it applies to everyone, not just kids: - Ask yourself...
Remote backup script...
I've got an idea for a shell script/program that would be very useful to me, and probably countless others. In fact I bet countless others have already coded something like it up... Requirements: I don't care what programming language it's...
Some Soundsystem
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah... yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah... yeah, hey, hey, hey, hey Everybody keeps on talking about it... nobody's getting it done I'm gettin' tired, tired, tired of listening, listening... knowing...
Wordpress weekend
OMG! I can write plugins!!! ... ... ... OMG! I HAVE TO write plugins... ;p Yes, I will be releasing two things:a WP plugin that extracts media file URLs from posts, allowing you to link them with a nifty icon...
Little PHP help pleeeease?
I'm wanting to write a little function to use in a WordPress template which will do the following: Taking an input haystack (which would be an entire weblog entry), find the first occurrence of the needle ".mp3". First chop off...
A brief history of Podcasting
The first Podcaster The first Podcast Celebrity. Coca Cola anybody? Most ironic thing heard on a Podcast Today: "Indie nine one one, the best in unsigned, independant and undependant music... Sponsored by Audi!" - Indie911 Podcast Channel This must...
WOah
This may be old news but it's new to me; as Francis says, No joke. WebObjects is included with Tiger. For free. Amazing. While this *is* cool, it's sad too. Nevermind that the learning curve is high, it goes up...
Del.icio.us hash
A month ago, joshua mentioned an easy breezy little addition one can do to one's site to allow users to easily del.icio.us bookmark entries on one's weblog. In some cases though, you might like an easy way to see how...
It's damn hot
So Karl and I moved from the sweatlodge-like Laika to the air conditioned Java-U on St-Denis where Oblivia was. Logging into the free wifi network I spot something familiar in the URL. "Helloooo... what's this..." I made this! A long...
Atmospheric stabilization in folksonomic tag clouds
Visual display of how choice of tags on a URL stabilizes over time on Del.icio.us. I blame "suggested tags" ;)...
Playing Flickr Peepshow
Playing Flickr For one week in May, the diners in Restaurant 11 will be confronted with the photos the users of Playing FLICKR select. By sending a keyword through SMS, users can request all photos on the flickr.com database that...
Backpack is the new Flickr
For the last 6 months it's been "Flickr this" and "Flickr that", "like Flickr does it!", "we want it more like Flickr..." Don't get me wrong, I do so very very much love Flickr. Really. I'm just saying Backpack will...
Talkr
It's not April Fool's is it? Damn, I didn't think so. Talkr provides a service that allows you to listen to your favorite text-only news sources rather than read them. If you can point us to an RSS feed (a...
Google aquires Dodgeball
"On May 11th dodgeball.com was acquired by Google!" The people at Google think like us. They looked at us in a "You're two guys doing some pretty cool stuff, why not let us help you out and let's see what...
CMS themes = money
I found this funny. Looking at my "montreal" tag flickr stream I notice a picture of Guy Kawasaki. Hunh? Oh I see, it's one of these blog/flickr marketing tie-ins. I've done one or two of those myself. Feels slightly dirty...
The troll pile
I'm writing up a proposal for a potential client (weblogs / community site) who realistically will probably get a fair amount of trolls posting, at least initially. This worries them somewhat, but they are willing to hear any thoughts &...
Seekrit... aaagent man
Dav says he feels Agents will make a comeback. I agree 200%. We should talk Dav... ;)...
Graphical Command Line, precursory
I've been composing a post about "Graphical Command Line" interfaces, which what alot of "AJAX" enabled features on websites are, and what Quicksilver, a Mac application, is... but it's getting so long and involved and I just don't have the...
Say it ain't so, Joe, please, say it ain't so...
Gaaaaahhh U.S. Senator Evan Bayh is a heartland Democrat with a proven and broad appeal, and a history of advancing progressive values in a heavily Republican state. First elected Governor at the age of 32 – the youngest in the...
I'm flying!
Whenever I imagine I can fly, I immediately think "Ok, so, where do i go? How do I get there?" I imagine myself bopping up and down, "zooming in" and "zooming out" until I find where I wanna be. A...
Google Maps application contextualizes real estate
This is stunning. By combining Google Maps and craigslist housing listings you get a very quick visual contextualization of the economic distribution of population for a city; which the affluent neighborhoods, which are less so. Not that that is necessarily...
Yahoo! Term extraction for MT
So Jonas has gotten this working for WordPress, but I have some ideas of how to use it, somewhat differently, with Movable Type. I couldn't code Perl (or anything else really) to save my life so here is just the...
Mark my words
(pun title intended) Tags* are Frameworks for Describing Resources... It's gonna happen, oh it's SO gonna happen. Actually, it's happening now. It's not the big software companies, it's not the big media companies. It probably won't follow any current specifications,...
Google who?
I was having this very conversation yesterday... with two separate people. Will be interesting to watch this "battle of the titans"....
Employee of the month
Click opera - Employee of the month: "People are strange when you're a stranger," sang Jim Morrison. They're even stranger when you're scrolling around a 1051x1557 pixel employee photograph on a corporate website. Brilliantly, Momus deconstructs what otherwise would just...
Let's expand on folksonomies
First of all, purely for background and some interesting ideas, the Wikipedia definition of "taxonomy". Taxonomy (from Greek ταξινομία (taxinomia) from the words taxis = order and nomos = law) may refer to either a hierarchical classification of things, or...
Folk taxonomies
Fun with Hierarchical Controlled Vocabularies Very cool, and could be very useful when everyone cools down from "OMG tags!" syndrome. Tags are great, and "folksonomies" are neat but I think, and surely others do too, we will not truly see...
Politically correct in Quebec
(or "baladi-balado") Ok some background. I live in Quebec, a predominantly francophone ("french speaking") province ("state") of Canada. The francophones here are ridiculously anxious about protecting "their culture" (while they love nothing more than buying american products and seeing their...
Tagsurf
Just came across Tagsurf. Haven't wrapped my head around it yet but having registered and logged in (the registration process is made difficult by a barely legible capcha), it looks to be very powerful. I guess one way to describe...
Wallpaper advertising
I damn near just fell off my seat. I have never seen a website's background be used for advertising before... "Evil genius". I feel ill....
Now what?
So AOL has updated it's Terms Of Use for AIM: Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title...
The chinese are coming!
What will happen to Google Rank when 5 billion chinese go online and, god forbid, start blogging......
Music makers WANT to share
Creative Commons search index breakdown: It appears that people licensing audio have chosen to offer more liberal terms than average while those licensing still and moving images have chosen less liberal terms than average. And THAT, my friends, is VERY...
Non-Disclosure Agreement
After not even hearing the words for well over 3 years, today I was faced with no less than two prospective NDA's to sign. I haven't yet. Reading over the one I did get sent to me, I am struck...
I think...
bopuc: I got a machine And I took over the world In one weekend I took over the world With my machine I did it because I was looking for a project And it was either Take over the world...
Area bagel
or "What do Amazon, A9 Search, Yellow Pages, 90210, and the Mile End of Montreal have in common?" Trying to see if I had a connection, I hit my A9 bookmark. It worked. Once there I noticed a prominent link...
RSS 1.1
The Spec The Guide How to start using it. I've heard some of the bigwigs are "backing it"... ;) As soon as I have confirmed RSS aggregator support, I throw the switch... and let y'all know too... :)...
Today
Overnight, I moved this site to a new, way faster server. This will allow me to start building on it again. In the move I decided to ditch my photo galleries because, well, I didn't like them and they took...
Input output, part 1
I've been thinking a lot lately about this thing we call the personal weblog, especially the evolution I see, working exclusively on other people's, in how they are used and how their owners want to use them. It comes down...
Firefox share grows 35% in a month...
Firefox's Share of Browser Market Grows 34 Percent in One Month, According to WebSideStory: The U.S. browser usage share of Firefox, the upstart Mozilla-based browser that has become a champion of the open source movement, has grown by more than...
Tags... no! Semantics! No! Ontologies!
Or something like that... I've been ranting about tags, Ado spoke of APIs, Leonard digs in with facets and triplets, and surely there are looooads of other people talking about all of this, and have been for a long time....
Tags, ontologies, community and feedback
"Com' follow me now!" Thinking hard about tags - the new black as Ado says - and various conversations I've had recently, mostly with Karl, about ontologies, explicit relationships (hah!), etc. Say I have a bunch of files that I...
Into the wild
Adriaan, the erstwhile developer of such sweet apps as ecto and 1001, today has released two of his little Perl scripts for Movable Type: the Technorati Plugin and the last.fm script. Both of these have been running, beautifully, on Joi's...
Relate
I want all my data to relate. I want to connect Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to Cornelius' Wataridori (because played back-to-back they are a force of nature, IMHO). I want to relate that relation to a friend's...
Firepoop
I can't seem to get Firefox to work on my machine. Immediately after launch, the only item in the top Menu is "Firefox" (no "File, Edit etc...") and essentially the keyboard is disabled (I can't type a URL into the...
Mobile Internet Radio
This afternoon an acquaintance sic'ed a local journalist on me for my opinion on digital/satellite radio. She also mentioned Internet radio and how I currently use it. My first thought went to those silly "Internet stations" listen in iTunes and...
Little SQL help please?
Hoping one of you can help me out with this... Say I wanted to have a list of the 10 most frequent commenters on this weblog, sorted by number of comments each has left, and selected by the commenter's email...
[this is aaron]
Because, while I can respect it, Aaron's quiet, "I'll be over here" demeanor drives me batty sometimes, I am going to take license and point out his freshly published résumé. While I'd love to expound on how he's actually publishing...
Ping me
So I was thinking about how I could be notified of the continuation of weblog comments threads I'd participated in. I thought "hey, I have a URL...
Some of my favorite geeks
have been mightily busy![Apologies to anyone offended by that term...]Aaron finally fixed his "I-roll-my-own-thank-you-very-much" weblog and immediately posted about some of the wikkedly neat stuff he's been toying with over the summer.
Comment Preview Javascript
To see what we're talking about, try typing a comment on this entry...[Merci Karl!]
Tail wagging
As Joi links to me from his entry on Chris Johnson's Wired article "The Long tail", I figure I should riff a bit on what I see in all this and why I reminded him of Momus' excellent "Pop Stars, nein danke!" article.
LionShare
LionShare technology (which is currently under development) will provide tools for the exchange of academic, personal and work-related materials on an officially sanctioned and secure P2P network among participating groups and institutions around the world.... This will extend LionShare's capabilities to a global scale by creating collaborative networks that will enable individuals from a diverse range of institutions to connect to the same secure P2P system.Re-read that stripping out the focus on academia and institutional uses.
Pre Announcement
So I am running late on this little "thing I wanna do" so I am going to make a quick pre-announcement here right now.Basically I am starting a small "Weblog Services" business.
Traceroute
6 if-8-1.core1.montreal.teleglobe.net (66.198.81.1) 23.254 ms 14.18 ms 10.804 ms 7 if-2-0.core2.newyork.teleglobe.net (64.86.83.226) 99.625 ms 138.619 ms 261.615 ms 8 if-9-0.core3.newyork.teleglobe.net (64.86.83.158) 117.682 ms 126.477 ms 102.5 ms 9 if-8-0.core2.losangeles.teleglobe.net (64.86.83.174) 86.923 ms 84.187 ms 85.992 ms 10 if-8-0.core2.paloalto.teleglobe.net (207.45.222.26) 98.09 ms 102.803 ms 101.986 ms 11 ix-9-2.core2.paloalto.teleglobe.net (207.45.196.70) 98.785 ms 99.088 ms 97.628 ms 12 ten8-1.paix-osr-a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.37.21) 98.298 ms 98.072 ms 98.468 ms 13 unused.ntwk.msn.net (64.4.63.74) 97.871 ms 99.846 ms 103.086 ms 14 gig3-47.bay-6nf-srch-2b.ntwk.msn.net (64.4.62.9) 105.528 ms 105.453 ms 107.239 ms Just ran the ablove Traceroute on the IP of what I knew to be a search spider, picked up from my access logs.... Well, this tells me Teleglobe, a (what I believe was originally) Montreal based company has provides the bandwidth for at least one of Microsoft's MSN data-centers.
One feed to unite them all
/me kicks himself for above gratuitous use of pop cultural reference. So I finally got fed up and hacked up a PHP script that generates a single RSS 1.0 feed containing the 20 most recent entries to my weblog, photolog and links.
Flexible rate experiment
Some context: I do freelance web specialist work: web design, architecture, etc... I'll often take on small jobs for extra disposable income (or paying off the debts incurred from thinking I have disposable income... heh.) You know, those little brochure-type...
Whoops
I don't usually mention technical details about this site here but, um, comments are back up. (I was being spam flooded the other day and quickly renamed the comment script... and promptly forgot to name it back...)...
1996 all over again...
I was thinking about writing about this but Tim Bray brought it up (and is in a better position to do so...) ongoing · Party Like It's 1996! I'm a major admirer of Safari and of its primary author Dave...
Friendster: more faster, less java...
I just logged in to friendster to see to my extreme surprise files ending in .php! They redid the system in PHP! Oh and did I say it is WAY faster? Zing!...
Death in the age of Social Software
Following the dreadful email mentioned in the previous post, I was contacted with the following suggestion: ... should we put something onto the bulletin board at Friendster for the non-bloggers who know her there? It seems like a grim task,...
Evil genius
[this is aaronland] proof of concept : what's on first? Mad scientist Aaron polls the New York Times for metadata keywords, matches them to http://del.icio.us/ "tags", crosschecks those against http://www.flickr.com/ image "tags"... RDFs it all and spits out a nifty...
How to Care for Your Web Designer
Eris Design | Standards in Design. Standards in Life It is important that you carefully read this manual. A well-cared for Designer will be a loyal new asset to your website for many weeks and months to come. All current...
What do you call it when
This morning, out of the blue, old buddy Michel IMs me this: i had a friend who had a cool idea for something that'd be kinda like friendster, but for books, music and dvds and stuff. so basically a group...
Conference schedules
I'm sitting here trying to plan which panels and sessions I'm thinking of attending at ETech next week and it is a huge pain in the ass. Not the "choosing what to attend" part. The planning part. Sure there's a...
Hey ya!
iTunes Music Store RSS Generator So I grab the URL for the top 10 selling tracks. Guess what's number one currently (must have iTunes installed)?...
Live comment previews
Very cool bit of code: // hicksdesign :: Live Comment Previews. Does what it says. Check it out. I think I may try this out if/when I get a minute again... like maybe some time next year... ;) Thank you...
Ohhhh design
I few years back I worked in an honest-to-goodness (emphasis on the goodness) design firm. Small, cool, fun, good friends, great space... sigh... Back then, I was surrounded by design. Everyday I'd check out the various design websites and the...
Standards compliant Slashdot
Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards: A List Apart Seems Mr.Frommelt already did the really hard part. Now somebody just has to implement. Another worthy job would be to do the same for some of the more popular Wiki distributions. I've...
Holy Stylesheet!
CSS House (3D Border Demo 2) by Chris Hester You may not be able to see this (depends on browsers) but here is a red brick house drwan entirely with CSS. Link via Tantek...
The Library of Am'zon
I was going to write something about this new Amazon feature which searches the contents of books now and not just ttitles, authors, etc... But Wired beat me to it. In fact, apparently they beat themselves to it, which is...
Locales for PHP on Jaguar
Enable setlocale and strftime PHP functions on your MacOS X.2 Does exactly as it says. Merci SÈbastien....
Stats - beautiful, scaleable - stats
history flowvisualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors Aside from being quite beautiful, I find these rather fascinating. Context derived from patterns are central to how I think. Perhaps how we think? Hmm. More food...
Fixin' Safari
Oh joy! The one silly little thing that was keeping me from using Safari full time as my personal browser was the fact that Safari didn't like something in MT's bookmarklet javascript. This evening I spent all of 45 seconds...
IRC to weblog
Over on Joi Ito's IRC channel, I expressed the desire to have an ongoing log of the goings-on. It caused some heated debate and Joi decided we should discuss it and come to a decision via his Wiki. So here...
Happy to be there...
WWW2003 Community Coverage I love this phenomenon. Though of course I would LOVE to actually be there, the fact that attendees at these things live blog and that the IRC sessions are logged (chumped?) and posted to the web... well......
Something about FOAF
Etiquette with friends & relationships in FOAF? and A module for defining relationships in FOAF...
While we're on the topic... (RSS)
Joi Ito has gone and done it. He bought and read Ben Hammersley's new O'Reilly book "Content Syndication with RSS", Of course this means I have to run out and get it too (shame on me for not having it...
Kansei Engineering
incorporating affection and emotion into the design process. "Kansei is a japanese term where the syllable kan means sensitivity and sei means sensibility. It is used to express the quality of an object for producing pleasure through its use."...
Finally the "R" word...
Joi Ito finally said it; the R word: Revolution. In his case he speaks of Japan and it's political/economic systems, but I've been itching to hear it lobbed about here in North America, and more specifically, in the U.S. Helloooo...
Digital Identity
This is a hot topic with many implications and applications. Most of the time when DigiID is mentioned, it is in context of government programs to give everyone universal identification. The fear there is of course centralized governmental control of...
Le Web c'est des humains
"The Web is humans" Indeed, when one considers the Web as a force for expression and communication, especially in the context of Weblogging, we can begin to not only see the truly biological characteristics of the Web, but also gain...
© —> CC
Lawrence Lessig shook the very foundations of the Manufactured Reality. Hallelujah. A trully powerful and engaging orator, masterful presentation giver, he had the room enthralled, shocked, scared, outraged and entertained. This was THE historic event of the convention I felt....
Between the (style) sheets
One of the best panels so far was this morning's "Between the (style) sheets" featuring Jeffrey Zeldman, Tantek Çelik and Eric Meyer. All three did a great job of showing off the power, and yes the relative ease of using...
User style sheets
I asked Tantek about how easy it would be to develop a web-browser for web developers / designers where one could really see what was going in terms of the positioning and the layout (rollover highlighting of boxes, coloring of...
Alexa = Amazon + Google
Alexa Web Search This is... interesting. A webservice combining Amazon-style services with Google search functionality. Users can rate search results... they also have some stats screens.. Top500, Movers & Shakers... I wonder if DayPop, Technorati et al may not be...
OPML to scetch out HTML document structures
Mr. Winer, in telling us about the work on some new templates he's doing for some site or another, gives us this: an OPML outline of the html structure of the template. Brilliant. He just made the cost of OmniOutliner...
XBEL pleeeaaase!
It seems we'll need to evangelise XBEL to the folks at Mozilla and at (gulp) Microsoft. Oh how I would love it if Mozilla and IE allowed me to store all my bookmarks and borwser histories in XBEL format in...
Ok I'm still new to this bit but...
I just poked around with Apple's iCal and AddressBook.. and well... yeah bravo they are using the "open standard" (are they?) VCARD and ICS formats respectively... But... but... I mean I cracked these files open (they are text files after...
XMail or XMbox ?
I'm trying to pull together some of the very knowledgeable resources I have to try to get an XML DTD for mail off the ground... The currenly widely used "mbox" standard is just screeeaaaming to be put into XML... Francis?...
Boris
Anthony
New Comments
Archives
