RSS Feed
Getting Close
I'm close to launching the beta (or is it alpha?) of the new website I've been working on. It is a guitar/music related site with some social net functions.
When I say I've been working on it, I mean I have been spending less time working on it and more time re-thinking it. I have been wanting to do a site which presents content in a more graphically oriented paradigm. Unfortunately, after reviewing the terms of many of the major web APIs like google and flickr, it was apparent that the terms were too restrictive to allow use of other portals' media in the way I envisioned. Maybe I will take about this more in a later post.
So instead I am going to try out a site which is a mix of portal type content and social content. This should allow me to experiment with algorithmic filtering and possibly offer additional possibilities if I can get grow a decent body of social content.
rk
Blog Neko Case For A Good Cause
Here's a chance to not only download a great tune but also help out a great cause.
“People Got A Lotta Nerve,” the first single from Neko Case’s forthcoming album Middle Cyclone (out March 3) can be played at imeem:
People Got A Lotta Nerve - Neko Case
and downloaded from here:
http://www.anti.com/media/download/708
Also, for every blog that reposts the song and/or iLike user who adds it to their profile, Neko Case and ANTI- will make a cash donation to Best Friends Animal Society.
The promotion will run from January 13 to February 3, 2009. More information can be found on Anti's Blog.
rk
Social Networking Platforms: Part 1
Recently, in preparation for my next project, I have been researching Social Networking platforms because, as you may have noticed, you can't make two clicks on the Web without running into a discussion of Social Networking and Social Media.
For anyone active on the Web as either a user , author or web app provider, the concepts and value of social applications is quite well known by now. But I think it's fair to say that there are still challenges and opportunities in terms of platforms. Anyone looking to provide a social application, or any Web application for that matter, needs to consider at least two major issues:
- How to leverage existing Web platforms and tools.
- How to support and interface to other social Web tools.
Both issues are becoming increasingly more important over time. The first issue is important because as both user familiarity and the variety of social applications increase, so will the expectations for sophisticated but usable features. Anyone, individual or team, will find it increasingly more impossible to be competitive and agile if they are rolling their own platform.
The second issue is a major challenge being faced not only by startup entrepreneurs but also the current giants of the Web such as Google, MySpace and Facebook. It is not uncommon for users to be active on several, if not dozens of, Web apps in order to manage their own information as well as their interaction with content providers and other users. At some point it becomes infeasible as well as undesirable for a user to manage all of those accounts and profiles. Major portal providers are fully aware of this and are trying (desparately in some cases) to consolidate a variety of different social services under one umbrella. Naturally, each portal wants it to be their umbrella, and unfortunately it is highly unlikely that any one of them, not even Google, will ever dominate all other Web apps, both current and future.
Portals such as Google and Facebook are providing APIs and ways for developers to write "plugins" to their platforms. This is a step in the right direction but is still a problem if the portal "owns" all the data or has too much control over the interfaces. True Web integration is only likely if:
- Different organizations can champion different best-in-class (or most-popular-in-class) features and functionality.
- Different types of content is decentralized, i.e. it can be owned and managed by different organizations in different databases. For example, it should be possible for one (or ideally) a few websites like Flickr to manage users' photos, and have other websites interface to and access those other sites as opposed to trying to duplicate this functionality or data content in their own databases and web apps.
In summary, anyone who is considering providing a website or Web application these days needs to consider platforms and how they address the two major issues above.
rk
Django Comments: New, Improved And Working Again
I finally got my blog comments working again. I, like many other bloggers, inevitably had my site fall victim to comment spam. Trying to do a quick fix for this soon put me in a spiral of versioning issues so I simply chose to disable comments until I had time to figure it all out.
A major part of my problem was due to Django (the platform I am using) versioning issues. This is no fault of the Django team--I had simply been merrily running along on a version which was getting progressively out of date and also had accumulated a number of customizations along the way. Getting up to date was not a casual exercise.
Also, the Django comment system had itself changed along the way. For anyone using Django who may be in a similar situation, I recommend seriously looking at these links:
and
Porting your apps from Django 0.96 to 1.0
The good news is that the core Django comments framework now includes built-in spam protection and other improvements so I can avoid the customizations that were causing problems before. Also, not having comment capability was killing my (easily killed) blogging enthusiasm, so this should improve my blogging productivity. rk
Pause To Reflect
Lately it's seemed like a good time to take a moment and reflect on what project I want to do next. It was about a year ago that I created the picobuzz site. I was generally using that site as a way to get experience with "Web 2.0" apps and technology such as Django. I was happy that I launched it, but the expansion ideas I had didn't pan out and I have taken it as far as I want.
A couple of other things are causing me to stop and reflect:
- I read Tim Ferriss' book: The 4-Hour Work Week, which I highly recommend to anyone. I read it when it first came out, so this is not a new thing, but the result is that since then I have been questioning my life decisions a lot more. This is generally a good thing, but has a side-effect that it occasionally results in bouts of metaphysical waffling.
- More recent and significant: the financial market meltdown. The project I had been working on recently involved extending my picobuzz engine to aggregate financial buzz from sources like Twitter and create sentiment indicators. Thanks to the market meltdown(s), I lost not only my interest in the project but also what working capital i had. And it's not really challenging to read the market sentiment these days. I will probably continue to tinker with this in the background (because the markets will come back), but I don't think there is not much to do at the moment.
So with good reason (as well as my entrepreneurial ADD tendencies) I am looking to turn my attention to other ideas and interests. I am keeping my eye on ubiquitous computing developments but I feel that will be a slow development process. Also I think the interesting developments will tend to involve hardware which is harder to do as a parttime project.
Hence, I will likely stick with Web apps--something involved with meaningful content and social value. Check back for further developments.
rk
InfoWorld: 10 future shocks for the next 10 years
On its 30th anniversary, InfoWorld is not only looking back, but looking forward with this article. 10 future shocks for the next 10 years.
Sexed Robots
Sexed Robots is the title of a project by artist Paul Granjon. The robots are autonomous wheeled vehicles fitted with nylon male or female nylon genitalia. According to the project description:
They are programmed to explore their environment, occasionally entering a "in heat" mode, where they will try and locate a partner in the same state. If a partner is located, the robots will attempt to mate.
What's the point, you may ask? Well, other than art not needing a point--or at least a practical purpose--Granjon is interested in exploring the co-evolution of humans and machines.
If Granjon wants humans to interact with machines in this way, they are going to need to look a lot less like his robots, and a lot more like Summer Glau in the TV series: "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles":
Here is a link to the Make post on the project which I will include simply because of the title: "Bots wander around aimlessly and then mate." Don't we have enough things on the planet already wandering aimlessly and mating?
rk
Clean Web 2.0 Design
I recently ran across this Web 2.0 how-to design guide, which I found to be an excellent article on clean interface design. The guide is geared toward popular Web 2.0 website design aspects, but the principles are sound and generally evolved well before websites, 2.0 or otherwise.
The author Ben Hunt gives much credit to Apple for the current cutting edge of design goodness. I would have to agree given not only Apple's proven design track record in general, but also their website's design in particular, which employed advanced graphic design principles while others were still using <frame>s.
rk
Moving Into The Cloud
This post from Geoffrey Long talks about the continuing formation and use of the "Cloud" (as in Cloud Computing) but also gets the distinction between that and Ubiquitous Computing:
"...I conflated the terms 'cloud computing' and 'ubiquitous computing', but in retrospect I should pull the two terms apart somewhat...."
Geoffrey's discussion of his experiments to sync his information in the cloud to his local environment is worth a read and points out one of the many issues we will be wrestling with as cloud computing and ubicomp become more prevalent. Having just watched the movie "Live Free or Die Hard", where cyberterrorists threaten to hack and take down the information infrastructure of the U.S., I think the discussion of centralizing information is far from being done.
rk
Wifi Photo Frames
FrameChannel is a free web service that allows you to manage content on your wireless picture frame. From their website:
Once you set your frame up with FrameChannel and subscribe to channels of your choice, your frame will automatically update when changes to these feeds are made. For example, you will be able to see your new flickr pictures on your wireless frame as soon as they are updated on your flickr account!
Actually, you had me at wireless picture frame. I had been waiting for such a thing a while back and now it seems like a number of WiFi capable digital photo frames have emerged on the market. The company lists the variety of wireless and other picture frames their service can work with here.
The other thing that caught my eye is the statement:
Friends and family can contribute content directly to your frame, updating family photos in real time.
This feature is actually of great interest to me as it is an application I envisioned earlier this year when I was trying to help my father set up and use a digital photo frame. My father has always been mechanically gifted but has little desire to log onto a computer or the Internet. The prospect of getting him to further somehow transfer digital photos to his frame is just a non-starter. So the only option that left me with is occasionally sending an SD card of photos by snailmail. It would be nice, I thought, if I was somehow able to get his computer to transfer incoming photos to the digital frame automatically. It seemed like it would be easy enough to piece together the necessary software bits, but they would depend on having the necessary WiFi or Bluetooth wireless capability in the photo frame.
Fortunately, the emergence of WiFi photo frames from various vendors means I won't have to do this nontrivial hardware hack of a digital photo frame, and now thanks to FrameChannel I won't even have to write the software. I will definitely be shopping for a couple of these WiFi frames in the near future and giving FrameChannel's service a test drive.
Of course, the fact that FrameChannel has tackled the main applications for this just means that I am now free to consider less obvious Ubicomp applications of the technology.
rk