Archive: August, 2006

Upcoming.org has rolled out some changes. The visual design has been tweaked, particularly on the events pages.

The colours and typography are looking very good indeed. The change to the way attendees are listed inline doesn’t work quite as well. I’m not the only one who thinks so. But instead of just bitching about it like me, others have provided mockups as part of their constructive criticism.

While this latest update is one of the biggest changes that has been rolled out on the site, it certainly isn’t the first. In fact, Upcoming seems to be in a constant state of gradual change and improvement.

There’s a lot of talk these days about iterative design, but Upcoming is one of the few places where I’ve noticed it in action. The design has been improving gradually and almost imperceptibly. Did anyone notice when the top banner changed from being a solid colour to a gradient? I wish now that I had taken screenshots of Upcoming every few weeks. They would make for an interesting time-lapse movie.

The Yahooiness of Upcoming is beginning to make itself felt. You can now migrate your Flickr buddy icon over to Upcoming. Also, if you tag photos on Flickr with “upcoming:event={event id}”, they will show up on the corresponding event page. Then there’s the maps integration.

Both Upcoming and Flickr are now making use of Yahoo maps. The Flickr map exploration page is, like so many things on Flickr, a real time-sink. It’s fun browsing photos with the added context of location.

But — and it’s a big but — Yahoo’s mapping data for Europe is particularly poor. So don’t expect too much detail when you’re browsing holiday snapshots from Brighton. I blame crown copyright myself (though I do wonder how Google has managed to get such detailed data).

As part of this latest iteration, Flickr are moving away from using tags for geocoding:

As a bonus there will be no more need for the unsightly “geotagged/geo:lat/geo:long” tags cluttering up your photos - we’ll offer an automated way to remove them all once the development community has had a chance to make the necessary changes to their code.

I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. There’s nothing wrong with using visible geographical co-ordinates. I’d prefer to keep my meta-data visible, thank you very much.

One of the sponsors of this year’s d.Construct is a local company called Madgex. Glenn Jones works there.

At the Clearleft office warming party, I chatted with Glenn about what form the sponsorship might take. Rather than go down the usual schwag-based route, Glenn was determined to do something useful, like build an app. He started telling me what he had in mind. The more he told me, the more excited I got.

Glenn has been working feverishly on the project and it’s now ready for unveiling. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…

The d.Construct06 Backnetwork

You know the way that a backchannel develops at most conferences? IRC, iChat, and all that. Well, this is a backnetwork.

It’s a social network app, but a genuinely useful one. For a start, it’s all based around a single focal point: the d.Construct conference. Everyone using the backnetwork has something in common. They are all attendees of the conference. This network is closed to the outside world.

I’ve seen some other events attempt a kind of pre-conference network. The South by Southwest website last year had a section for maintaining a profile and connecting with other attendees. But these connections were very simple. As with most social network sites on the Web, either someone is your friend or you have no connection to them whatsoever. That isn’t a very accurate reflection of reality.

Instead of inventing some new proprietary schema for representing the connections between people, the d.Construct backnetwork uses XFN — XHTML Friends Network. The relationships represented in XFN map remarkably well to an event like this.

Here’s my profile. You can see all the people that I’ve connected with (friends, acquaintances, colleagues) and all the people who have a connected with me. Based on these connections, I even get a cloud of names with the sizes indicating the strength and reciprocity of that relationship.

But here’s the best bit. I can take this information with me. Instead of being yet another roach motel or data silo, the backnetwork actively encourages me take my data with me. There’s a pre-formatted XFN list that I can cut and paste into my own site. Or, if I want, there’s an OPML file of all the feeds from people in my network.

As with most social network sites, you have to go through the process of filling out your details before you can start using it. But here again, you are actively encouraged to then take this information with you. I can cut and paste my hCard or simply download a vCard via Brian Suda’s hCard converter on Technorati.

You can specify how you want sensitive data like emails and telephone numbers to be treated. You can make them public, you can not reveal them at all, or you can allow only your friends to view them.

There’s a lot of microformatted goodness throughout the backnetwork and constant encouragement not just to put data into the system, but also to take it away with you. The result is something that’s fun and useful before, during and after the conference.

Before

In the run-up to d.Construct, you can find out who else is coming. If you know any of the people, you can connect with them. There’s even a Google Maps mashup so you can see where people are coming from. You might even find people coming from the same town as you and make travel plans with them.

There’s an aggregator that pulls in any relevant blog posts written by attendees. You can subscribe to the aggregate feed or take away an OPML file with a list of all the sites.

During

The aggregator is going to be very handy during the conference as a way of following any liveblogging. There’s also a really nice photo page that pulls in Flickr pics and displays them in a lightbox.

There will even be an Ajax chat room opened up on the day.

After

Once the conference is over, you’ll probably want to revisit the attendee list. You will undoubtedly want to mark a lot of people as “met”. Heck, you may even make some friends. You’ll certainly have made lots of connections. And if you didn’t manage to exchange business cards, you can grab each other’s hCard or vCard instead.

There’ll probably be plenty of post-conference blog chatter to track through the backnetwork. If you want to add your own impressions of the panels, you can post straight to your blog or you can add a review through the backnetwork. You can fill out a form and submit your review. This is formatted in the hReview microformat so that, once again, you can take it with you. Just copy and paste the review into your own site. You can even specify a creative commons license while you’re at it.

Microformats

The backnetwork is using microformats all over the place: XFN, hCard, hReview, rel-license and rel-tag. It’s quite remarkable how useful this turns out to be. It makes it so, so easy to take your data with you. Your contact details, relationships, and reviews are yours for the taking.

This is something you can see on a lesser scale on the d.Construct website. The list of speakers has been marked up with hCards. The schedule for the day is an hCalendar. There’s a link off to Brian Suda’s converter on Technorati so that you can subscribe to the calendar, put it on your iPod, your mobile phone, whatever you want. If there are any changes to the schedule, the page will be updated and the change will be reflected in the subscribed calendar. There’s no need to maintain a separate file like Michael had to do for Reboot or Jon did for @media.

If you’re coming to d.Construct, you should have already received an email with an activation code for the backnetwork. I suggest you use it. If haven’t received your activation code, you’d better let Andy and Richard know.

If you aren’t coming to d.Construct, you can still browse the backnetwork and track the blog posts, reviews and photos as they come in. You just won’t be able to add your own profile or define any relationships with the attendees.

If you want to know more about the technologies driving the backnetwork, check out the “about” page. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m really excited about this application. I’m like a kid with a new toy and I’m loving it.

I’m enjoying the process of putting together the d.Construct 2006 podcast. It seems that other people are enjoying it too.

I wrapped up the latest episode with a call for feedback. I’ve added a link to Odeo on the podcast page so that you can record a message for the podcast.

I’m intrigued by the idea of using audio to leave feedback, add comments and ask questions. This is something that Tom played around with a while back. I like the context that’s added just by hearing a person’s voice. It’s like a gravatar times ten.

On Odeo, everyone knows you’re a dog.

Don’t be shy. Record a message, add some text if you want, and hit that big “send” button. If you’re coming to d.Construct, tell me your hopes and fears for the conference. If you can’t make it to d.Construct, make your presence felt by leaving your thoughts on APIs, mashups, Web 2.0, and anything else you feel like talking about.

If this little experiment works out, maybe I’ll end up using Odeo as a feedback channel for this journal. I have some other feedback and commenting ideas that I’d like to try out too. Watch this space.

If you’re using either the Flickr or Del.icio.us APIs, be aware that some changes have been to both recently.

Cal Henderson announced on the Flickr API mailing list that…

…the API endpoints have been changed from https://www.flickr.com/services/ to http://api.flickr.com/services/

The documentation will be updated by and by. If you’re making use of the Flickr API, now would be a good time to go in and rewrite those URLs. I’ve updated Adactio Elsewhere to use the new URLs. There are no plans to get rid of the old endpoints but all developers are encouraged to make the change.

Back in May, the Del.icio.us team announced that all API requests would need to go over SSL:

If the old URL was http://del.icio.us/api/posts/get, the new URL will be https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/get

I missed the memo so, like Dom, I was caught out by the change. On Adactio Elsewhere, I switched over to using PHP’s curl functions to retrieve the XML files and that seems to do the trick nicely.

If you’re tinkering with either API, take note of these changes.

Ever since I switched over to a new CMS back in February, I’ve been tagging all my journal entries. Until now, I haven’t been doing anything with those tags apart from exposing them in category elements in my RSS feed. Now that I’ve got a good head of steam going with my tags, I’ve decided to play around with them a bit.

Each journal entry page now shows the tags at the end of the post. These are linked (using rel-tag of course) to an aggregate tag page that shows any other posts with the same tag. Pretty standard stuff.

But then I thought it would be fun to tie the post in with other things I’ve tagged, not on this site but on Del.icio.us. Under the heading “Related”, you’ll find links to the same tags for my del.icio.us links.

Rather then sending you off to Del.icio.us, I’m using the Del.icio.us API to bring the results back to this site. Using a bit of Ajax, these results are displayed without a page refresh. I’m using Hijax so if JavaScript is disabled, the links will still work.

I’ve got a nice little progress bar going while the request is being sent, and a bit of a colour fade happening when the response comes back. The results themselves could probably do with some more styling. Right now I’m just displaying them in a regular unordered list of x-folk entries but I think they might look nice if they were more comment-like in appearance.

After the Del.icio.us links, I’ve got the same tags pointing off to Technorati. Again, instead of sending you away, I’m pulling in the results with the Technorati API. In some ways, these results are more interesting than the del.icio.us links because, instead of just showing things that I have tagged, this shows results from everywhere. The results are constantly changing. Right now I’m using the search query, but I must look into the experimental tag query.

I’m also using the Technorati API to find any blogs that are linking to the current post. This works like Trackback. If you want to respond to a post I’ve written, just blog about it. As long as you include a link back to the post, your entry will now show up in the results. It won’t be instantaneous, but if your blogging software is set up to ping Technorati when you post, it should show up pretty fast. I’d be interested in finding out just how long it takes for the API to reflect recent pings. If you blog about this post (with a link), try coming back to it and using the Technorati link to see how long your post takes to show up.

The Technorati API isn’t the most full-featured and sometimes it just seems to not respond. The Del.icio.us API allows me to do quite a bit with my own links, but doesn’t offer any access to other peoples’. Still, by combining the two with the tags for any particular journal entry, an interesting picture emerges.

I have some other ideas for making individual journal entry pages more interesting. None of them involve the addition of buttons that invite the reader to add the page to Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl, Magnolia, Blinklist, or any other others I may be forgetting.

A few days ago, I got an email through Flickr from someone at the Daily Telegraph asking me to get in touch with them urgently. I gave them a call. It turned out that they wanted to use some of my Flickr pictures in an article for the travel section.

I told them that would be fine. I also told them that they didn’t even need to ask: all my pictures are licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license. They weren’t familiar with this so I sent them an email with some links and further explanation.

It strikes me that Flickr could be a very valuable resource for newspapers and magazines. The advanced search allows you to search specifically for Creative Commons licensed photos that can be used commercially.

The paper came out today and, sure enough, my pictures were in the travel section, duly credited.

Funnily enough, this was the second time in one week that I had been contacted by the mainstream media. Matt Bradley from the Christian Science Monitor called me in the run up to a story about Little Green Footballs. I had to confess that I haven’t visited that site in years, and I have no intention of going back to it. My explanation for abandoning the site is linked from the Wikipedia entry, which must be why I got the call in the first place.

I guess I didn’t have any good soundbites though. None of my pearls of wisdom made it into the finished article.

BarCamp London will take place on September 2nd and 3rd. It’s a happening, maaaaan!

This should be a lot of fun. If you want to come along, put your name down and read the rules.

And Lo! The halls of Yahoo! doth resound with with the gnashing of hacking and wailing of geekery.

It was fifteen years ago today Sir Tim taught the planet to play.

What a short, strange trip it’s been. Here’s to the next fifteen years. Who knows what wonders they will bring?