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24 posts from December 2007

Blognation ends in fire and mud...

95A061ED-E53F-488A-83BC-C29B17E05AE9.jpgAnd so it ends.

Earlier this month I had written that it looked like Blognation was in trouble, but Sam Sethi now has confirmed that with his post.

I'm not going to dignify that post with any further discussion here as there is just way too much mud being thrown around right now. There's definitely room for a higher level of professionalism on a number of different fronts.

Right now my thoughts are more with friends like (ca.blognation.com editor) Tris Hussey, who has now naturally posted that he is looking for a new role. Whatever Sam's personal failings may have been, he did pull together a great team of writers! And now they are needing to find something new just as the holidays are upon us.

Personally, I'll miss blognation. The sites had great posts on a range of topics. They brought a great range of commentary on emerging technology and were a good voice to have out there.

What a mess.

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New "Shindig" project will be open source OpenSocial implementation

3A99D7EC-F80D-4655-88EA-84A78313CC00.jpgGoogle's OpenSocial effort passed a milestone yesterday when the first pieces of code were uploaded for Shindig (tip of the hat to Mr. Topf for pointing this out), an open source implementation of the OpenSocial API. Why is this important? Quite simply, I see an open source implementation as critical for the success of any API. As noted in the Shindig Proposal on the Apache Software Foundation's web site:
Shindig will provide implementations of an emerging set of APIs for client-side composited web applications. The Apache Software Foundation has proven to have developed a strong system and set of mores for building community-centric, open standards based systems with a wide variety of participants. A robust, community-developed implementation of these APIs will encourage compatibility between service providers, ensure an excellent implementation is available to everyone, and enable faster and easier application development for users. The Apache Software Foundation has proven it is the best place for this type of open development. The Shindig OpenSocial implementation will be able to serve as a reference implementation of the standard.
The key part is that last sentence. A "reference implementation" does a couple of things. First, for developers for whom the license terms are appropriate, they can simply incorporate the code directly into their products and... ta da... they are writing OpenSocial applications. Second, for developers who can't directly use the code verbatim due to licensing, they can at least study the code and understand how it works. They can see how the OpenSocial interaction occurs in a working example. Getting an open source reference implementation out there enables developers all over to rapidly use and learn about the API. While this news yesterday represents only the very first step in the development of the project, it's a good start down the path. Now, developers can download the existing code, try it out, and, hopefully, contribute patches/fixes/etc. back into the code base. Shindig will be a good project to watch. There does not yet seem to be an official project web page, but there is a "project status page" on the Apache Incubator site. P.S. And for those wondering, "shindig" is an English word for "a social gathering" which makes it rather appropriate.

"w00t!" is now M-W's Word of the Year? Sigh...

200712130828Okay, maybe I'm just a linguistic pedant, but I just don't find myself sharing Julia Roy's joy at the fact that Merriam-Webster has annointed "w00t" (with the zeroes) their "Word of the Year" for 2007! But then again, I didn't really like "ginormous" being added to the M-W dictionary, either. I know, I know... "languages evolve"... I should just deal with it. Sigh.

To be fair, M-W is not adding "w00t" to their "official" dictionary - at least not yet - and this "Word of the Year" was "based on votes of visitors to our Web site", which of course will skew any poll that you run. (Although it is in their online "Open Dictionary".) I did enjoy some of the runner-ups on Merriam-Webster's list. Somewhat predictable that "facebook" would be on there, but fun to see "conundrum" and "quixotic".

I think, though, the M-W folks are showing their age when they talk about "l33t" being "an esoteric computer hacker language". They obviously have not spent any time with teenagers who are madly texting each other. (Although I suppose those who wish to get pedantic about Leet might say that texting and true "leetspeak" are different, but I'd argue there's a good bit of crossover.) It does, however, warm this linguist's heart to see someone actually using "esoteric". Nice word.

Ah, the joy of language! w00t!

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Twittering the *production* of live TV... the fascinating intersection of new and old media (Newmediajim and the Today show)

200712120454This morning on Twitter I was just struck by the fascinating intersection of new and old media. Jim Long, aka "newmediajim", is a cameraman for NBC based in Washington, DC, who twitters what he is doing and takes us along on often fascinating trips behind the curtains of production of NBC programs and footage. Being in DC, he is often shooting interviews/footage of various political figures and now and then he takes us along virtually as he travels to places like, oh, Iraq! (as part of the camera pool)

Anyway, this morning Jim was twittering about doing live shots of Tom Costello for the Today Show. As you can see in the screenshot I've included here (click on it for a larger version), Steve Lubetkin, meanwhile, was watching the Today show and at one point asked Jim a question about what he was seeing in realtime. Now, Jim didn't immediately reply (I mean, come on, the man does have to be doing his job!) and for all I know may not even follow Steve, but I thought it was an interesting sign of what could be happening through media such as Twitter. It was even more entertaining later to see Jim's tweet about his shadow being on Tom's coat.

Jim is telling us a story in small 140-character or less bites... and here we do have the opportunity to weave our own comments into that story.

Fascinating space we're in right now...

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Humor - the Web Economy BS Generator...

200712120641I don't know how long this site has been out there, but I had a great laugh this morning when Neville Hobson pointed out the existence of the "Web Economy BS Generator". The scary thing to me, of course, is that as I pushed the button multiple times, I did see phrases that I have actually seen or heard in marketing presentations or materials! Fun, fun, fun...

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VOTE here for your favorite Social Search site in the Open Web Awards

Voting is now open for the "Social Search" category of the Open Web Awards (described here).  Please vote for your favorite site!  The 10 nominees are listed below and you will be able to vote up until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th. At that point, the top 3 choices will be selected and we’ll move into the final round of voting.

For more information, see the post on Mashable.com kicking off the voting in this category.

Mashable Open Web Awards
Category: Social Search
Sponsors:
Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable
Web Poll by Vizu

VOTE here for your favorite social news or social bookmarking site in the Open Web Awards

Voting is now open for the "Social News and Social Bookmarking" category of the Open Web Awards (described here).  Please vote for your favorite site!  The 10 nominees are listed below and you will be able to vote up until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th. At that point, the top 3 choices will be selected and we’ll move into the final round of voting.

For more information, see the post on Mashable.com kicking off the voting in this category.

Mashable Open Web Awards
Category: Social News and Social Bookmarking
Sponsors:
Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable
Web Poll by Vizu

VOTE here Applications and Widgets in the Open Web Awards

Voting is now open for the "Applications and Widgets" category of the Open Web Awards (described here).  Please vote for your favorite site!  The 10 nominees are listed below and you will be able to vote up until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th. At that point, the top 3 choices will be selected and we’ll move into the final round of voting.

For more information, see the post on Mashable.com kicking off the voting in this category.

Mashable Open Web Awards
Category: Applications and Widgets
Sponsors:
Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable
Web Poll by Vizu

MarsEdit supports Tags in WordPress 2.3!

3556F7EF-9D29-46AB-B0E7-D22339A82D50.jpgOver on my Voxeo blog site, we are using WordPress MU which is based on WordPress 2.3 and includes a very nice "tags" feature in addition to categories. This allows you to do things like have the "tag cloud" that you can see in the right sidebar of our "Speaking of Standards" blog. It's quite nice but in working with the blog site, we ran into one major annoyance - none of the offline blog editors on the Mac seemed to support WordPress 2.3 tags. This resulted in a bizarre posting process where if you wrote the post offline you then needed to login to the site to go back and add tags to the post. Thankfully, a quick search brought me to a post back in September indicating that marsedit already supported WP 2.3 tags! All that is required is to go into the View menu (when writing a post) and choose "Keywords Field". When you enter in keywords, those are then automagically mapped to WP 2.3 tags when you publish the post. VERY nice!

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VOTE here for Mainstream and Large-Scale Social Networks in Open Web Awards!

Voting is now open for the "Mainstream and Large-Scale Social Network" category of the Open Web Awards (described here).  Please vote for your favorite site!  The 10 nominees are listed below and you will be able to vote up until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th. At that point, the top 3 choices will be selected and we’ll move into the final round of voting.

For more information, see the post on Mashable.com kicking off the voting.

Mashable Open Web Awards
Category: Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
Sponsors:
Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable
Web Poll by Vizu