Microformat conversations

I've been having lots of conversations around microformats recently, with a gallimaufry of thoughtful and interesting people. Deeje has been experimenting, Suw has implemented events, and Danny O'Brien said

'RDF was the LSD of the 90s'

Technorati Tags: microformat, tags

Talking about tags and microformats

Back in April, I attended the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, which included some coverage of tags. they just posted presentations there that only work in IE6 here's a direct links to Windows media files for:David Weinberger's 'From Trees to Tags'
Me reporting back on the Tags Birds of a feather discussion


Last week at Where 2.0 I was chatting with Chris Pirillo about tags and microformats, when he produced a pair of microphones and started recording.

Technorati Tags: hCalendar, microformat, podcasting, scs2005, tags, where2005

London calling

James Lileks talks of England's spirit revealed through Holst. My internal soundtrack was by Elgar, but reading blogs I heard the sound of The Clash coming through.

London calling to the faraway towns
Now war is declared and battle come down

I heard about the London bombings through wikinews and blogs. I watched people trying to make sense of these attacks together, collecting facts and telling their stories. Calling out to us.

London calling to the zombies of death
Quit holding out and draw another breath

And calling out defiance, pride and history too, whether from near or far.

London calling yes I was there too
An' you know what they said - well some of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
An' after all this won't you give me a smile?

I never felt so much alike...

My father and sister both went through affected tube stations that day. That bus blew up right outside my old office in London.
I'm proud of England's response, and that people are getting back to work and play. I intend to do the same.

Technorati Tags: london bombings

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.

Technorati Tags: hCalendar, microformat, geo, where, where2005

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

Technorati Tags: gnomedex, hCalendar, microformat

Microformats gets .org-anized

I'm at Supernova today speaking with Tantek, Rohit and lots of other microformat adopters.
We've just launched microformats.org as a home for this new movement.
The conference tag is supernova2005.
Tantek's Supernova Microformats slides
My Supernova Tags slides

Technorati Tags: microformat, Supernova, supernova2005

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.

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.

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.

Technorati Tags: tags, tagtuesday

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.

Technorati Tags: iPod, movie, podcasting

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.

Bacon Bacon Bacon

Andrew and I made a movie while cooking breakfast the other day:

Download Bacon movie here.
It's in homage to the badger movie

Technorati Tags: bacon, breakfast, creative commons, egg, movie, mushroom

Pulp's Common People meets Tank Girl

Pulp's Common People meets Tank Girl
You either just said "Yes!" or "Huh?" Anything I could say in either case would be superfluous.

Solving Lileks' dilemma

James Lileks has been writing on the web for years, and is consistently brilliant. Tonight he posted a dilemma he has:

I have this template: title on top, illustration, text below, navigation button on the bottom. Everything I’ve done has been a tweak of that basic idea, and it gets irritating; you see the picture, scroll down, read the text, scroll back up to see the picture again, scroll back down to click next. What if –

Nah.

No! What if I do the unthinkable, and make the text a graphic? I’m still playing with this – it’ll mean larger file sizes, but maybe I should start to think ahead to a day when the majority of visitors have modems faster than a cold slug on sand. Here’s the old version. Here’s the new idea. It's still too busy, but you can see what I'm aiming at. It means more work – an incredible amount of work, frankly – but it makes the site look more like the book version I’d love to do.

Now Lileks is used to the tables and spacer images layout model, but there is a way he can have his text and his layout without making everything a graphic - HTML + CSS.
I spent 15 minutes in BBEdit and CSSEdit to make a 21st century XHTML+CSS version.
Note that it is simpler HTML than his old version, but has the approximate layout style of the new version (I'm an engineer Jim, not a typographer). I even got drop shadows in Safari.
I have nothing against DreamWeaver - friends of mine work on it - and I'm sure it can do CSS too.

Done right, this should actually be less work than either of Lileks’ alternatives.

My tail is longer than yours...

This is a belated response to Dave Rogers and friends, which started out in Shelley's comments, where I said:

The long tail is not a myth, and the many do outweigh the few. Pick a few words around a topic that you are interested in and search for them at Technorati and see who you find.
The top 100 is not the most interesting page on our site by any means. I wrote about this before - Call off the Search

Dave replied:

I think Kevin misunderstands the use of the word "myth" in this context. Whether or not "the many do outweigh the few," it is the few that most profit. If the Top 100 is not the most interesting page on Technorati, then where does it rank in Technorati's hierarchy of interesting pages? Second? Third? Why is it on the front page at all if it isn't very interesting? Is it not in Technorati's interests to maintain the attention of those in or near the top 100 to influence their attention-directing authority for Technorati's advantage?
Finally, why can Technorati claim to be "the authority" on what's going on in weblogs, and then specifically disclaim any responsibility to anyone who relies on that "authority?"

I still have hope that Kevin Marks will reply, it is the weekend and he probably has a life, but so far, nothing heard.

Mike Sanders in Main Stream Bloggers (MSB) Assert Their Authority:

It didn't take long, but the Main Stream Bloggers (MSB) are asserting their authority.
Last week I wrote:
The long tail is a blogging myth in which the heavy-traffic bloggers try to convince the little guys, like you and me, that we are really the important ones in the blogosphere. And we should keep on blogging and linking to the big guys, since collectively the bottom 99% has much more viewership than the top 1% - or something like that.

then characterized my statement above as a decree. I don't follow this; the Top 100, like most of the rest of Technorati, is a reflection of others' links. Mike doesn't understand the difference between a gaussian and an exponential distribution either.

That was last weekend when I was suffering from food poisoning, and I saw this needed a considered response, rather than a dashed-off one, so I put it off. Dave prodded me again this weekend:

Technorati, again, as near as I can tell, is held in positive regard, at least by the members of the "A-List." I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this was an act of inspired genius to create a list that simultaneously flatters the egos of the people most in a position to criticize the company, draws attention to itself, and exploits the attention-directing "authority" of high attention-earning webloggers (the A-List) to draw even more attention to itself. I'd say probably not, since it's been done before; but it's still a pretty effective way to garner attention and achieve a measure of insulation from criticism.

But here we are a week later and I find myself talking to myself. Neither Keven Marks nor Dave Sifry deigned to entertain my questions. Perhaps I wasn't obsequious enough to merit being taken seriously. Perhaps I lack sufficient authority. I'm absolutely certain there's a "reason." But I don't think there's any explanation that can restore the fiction that "markets are conversations."

Well, I'll try. I got into blogging in the first place after following the Cluetrain writers here. In particular, Chris Locke goaded his newsletter readers into starting blogs, and I did so. My first few posts had a similar blustery tone to the one that Dave and Mike have employed with me here, pointing out where I thought others' pronouncements were unsupported or based on misreadings. That Mike thinks I am now a 'Main Stream Blogger' gave me pause, as I feel I have been having a conversation with those who are interested in some of the same, often esoteric, things as I am. What I found over time was that neither obstreperousness or obsequy added value, but considered discussion did. I found that things I wrote could be reflected back to those I cited, and they would sometimes respond, or others would join in. When I met the people I'd been reading and writing with face to face, the conversation was easily picked up and carried on.

By tracking people linking to me or mentioning my name, Technorati helps me in this distributed asynchronous conversation (thats how I found Mike and Dave's comments, after all). However, as I've said before, "I can read your thoughts, as long as you write them down first". In order to be in the conversation, you need to be writing and linking. Perforce, this means that those who write and link more, and are written about and linked to more, are those who most see the utility of it.

As blogging spread from ten thousand people writing about technology to ten million writing about their lives, their interests, their hopes and fears, characterising any of it as 'mainstream' is a readers choice, as you can only focus on a few narrow tributaries of the Mississippi of writing that surges through our computers every day. Technorati's top 100 list, and listing of the number of inbound links and blogs by search results is a way for you to see how others have linked before - you can click on the little speech-bubbles and see what they said in linking to them, we expose that directly. The top 100 are not some fixed group, they come and go, but in general they link a lot themselves, and write frequently.

Dave continues:

Markets are about exchanges of value, and those with something to sell will always seek to manipulate the buyers' perception of value. Even if that means pretending to be engaged in the latest hip, trendy, feel-good, manufactured belief system created to garner attention and manufacture the perception of authority for its authors.

Markets are indeed about exchanges of value, but the market price is an emergent property of this spontaneous order of transactions between individuals, an information network that defies representation and measurement. A market is a spontaneous order, as is a conversation. The subtleties and complexities of these interactions are a source of fascination for me, as they do defy easy representation or theory, and we know that the analyses we can derive from blogging are only partial reflections of a complex reality, but we hope that they may be found useful, and that we can improve them and add to them over time.

He concludes:

If this criticism garners attention, that is not my intent. My intent is merely to state the truth as best I can perceive it. Any effort to engage in a conversation regarding whether or not Technorati believes "markets are conversations" at this point is merely a further effort to manufacture and shape perception. Hopefully that will inoculate me from having to engage in any pointless, back-and-forth, damage control efforts with either Mr. Marks or Mr. Sifry. If all of you would continue to do me the good favor of ignoring me, I'd appreciate it.

Bullshit. Of course you wanted my attention, or you wouldn't have repeated it in different places and phrasings. So quit the passive-aggressive reverse psychology posturing and think a bit.

Of course conversations are meant to shape perception; if they didn't there would be no point. Doc Searls and David Weinberger express this well, and differently. Doc explains that the root of information is that we are trying to form one another. David points out that without each other we are not human - look at children raised by wolves, and says we are writing ourselves into existence online.

Blogging is an arrogant act, as you say, Dave, and a personal one, but we are accountable and responsible to one another, and we reveal a lot about ourselves by writing continuously over time.

A while ago Dave Rogers wrote:

To be as authentic/truthful as possible, corporate Web sites must be shaped--as are all conversations--by the voices of the participants. And because the best conversationalists are also the best listeners, this requires Corporate sites that demonstrate that the company knows its visitors--not as mere statistics, focus groups or fat wallets, but as living, breathing, unique individuals--each of inestimable value, not because of what they can give to the company but because of who they are. As Tom asserted, these are sites that "have an interest in what the world says"--not just themselves.

We're trying to build a site that reflects what the world says, but it will also reflect what you look for within it. The web is Caliban's mirror, and Technorati a magnifying glass in front of it. If you don't like the reflection, you can change where you look, but you can also change what we reflect back with your writing and linking.

Technorati Tags: long tail, technorati