Archive: November, 2006

I’m sitting in on a Semantic Web Think Tank today which is conveniently happening right here in Brighton (in the same building as the new Clearleft office). I’m really enjoying it so far. I’m just taking some time out to blog this and demonstrate hCalendar at the same time.

In need of an entertaining read, I recently picked up the book Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz-Smith (of Gorky Park fame). I enjoyed it far more than I anticipated.

I’m not a huge fan of crime fiction, although I have read plenty of Hammett and Chandler in my time. But there was something about Cruz-Smith’s book that I found very appealing.

Halfway through reading the book, I figured out what it was: Wolves Eat Dogs is a Cyberpunk novel. It happens to be set in present-day reality but the plot reads like a science-fiction story. For the most part, the book is set in the post-apocolyptic landscape of Prypiat, near Chernobyl. This post-apocolyptic scenario just happens to be real.

The protagonist, Arkady Renko, is sent to this frightening hellish place following a somewhat far-fetched murder in Moscow. Killing someone with a minute dose of a highly radioactive material just didn’t seem like a very realistic assassination to me.

Then I saw the news about Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy who died this week, quite probably murdered with a dose of polonium-210.

Truly, as William Gibson said:

The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.

The cyberpunkish quality of Wolves Eat Dogs prompted to go back and revisit some of Gibson’s work. I re-read Virtual Light (possibly the only science-fiction to name check Brighton’s pier).

It’s interesting charting the inverse relationship of Gibson’s projected timelines with his dates of publication. Neuromancer, his first novel, is set in a relatively far future. His newest novel, the equally superb Pattern Recognition, is set in the present. At this rate, he’ll end up writing historical fiction. Mind you, he’ll have a tough time competing with Neal Stephenson in that genre.

Vitual Light was originally published in 1993. It’s especially interesting to read again now because the story is set in a projected future of California in 2005. I had to smile at this descriptive passage in chapter eleven (emphasis mine):

Allied’s best-looking thing on two wheels, no contest whatever, DuPree was six-two of ebon electricity poured over a frame of such elegance and strength that Chevette imagined his bones as polished metal, triple-chromed, a quicksilver armature. Like those old movies with that big guy, the one who went into politics, after he’d got the meat ripped off him.

Who could have predicted that “that big guy” would be governor of the state in 2005?

Truth really is stranger than fiction.

It’s been a good conference year for me. I’ve had the good fortune to attend and speak at some excellent events.

It’s a great way to travel. I get paid to go somewhere exotic and then speak on subjects that I love speaking about anyway. The highlight of this year was going all the way to Australia for Web Directions where I nattered on about Ajax.

Much as I love travelling to conferences, I take special pride when a conference takes place in my adopted hometown of Brighton (with the exception of the Labour Party conference). Most Web conferences in this country take place in London. That’s just the way it goes.

Following in the tradition of dConstruct, a major Web conference is about to hit town. Flash On The Beach will be taking over the Brighton Dome complex from the 4th to the 6th of December.

This looks like a biggie. There will be three tracks of talks over three days, all based around the subject of Flash.

One of those talks will be delivered by yours truly. I’m going in to the lion’s den to give the provocatively-titled presentation, Ajax: Flash Killer?

This should be interesting… if the term “interesting” encompasses “scary.” I’ll be putting my cards on the table and making it very clear that I’m not exactly an expert in Flash; in fact, I haven’t done anything in Flash since version 6. But I still think it will be interesting for Flash developers to hear from someone in the Ajax camp.

Oh, and just in case anyone thinks I’m going to be cheerleading for Ajax, that’s not my plan. I come not to praise Ajax but to bury it… sort of.

In any case, this will be a very different crowd than I’m used to addressing and I’m very intrigued as to what reaction I’ll get. I’ve got one week until my talk so I’m now in the stage of major panic.

I hope I won’t be so nervous and worried that I won’t be able to enjoy the other presentations. The line-up—with the exception of my aberrant presence—looks amazing. Hillman Curtis, Brendan Dawes, and all the other superstars of Flash will be there. Todd Purgason—whose work I’ve admired for many, many years—is speaking on the last day of conference. And, get this; Neville freakin’ Brody is also speaking on the final day of the conference! Those two are worth the entrance price alone. Speaking of which, if you sign up before November 30th, you get in for £399.

Alas, I won’t be able to hear what Messrs Purgason and Brody have to say. I’ll be ducking out of the conference early. I need to catch a flight to Berlin where I’ll be sitting on the jury for the Biene Web awards.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining. Once again, I have the opportunity the travel to an exciting far-off place. I just wish it didn’t have to be during the one time when Brighton is the very place where any self-respecting designer would want to be.

Portrait of an Elderly Man by Rembrandt is remarkable not just for its treatment of light and shadow but also—as Jessica pointed out—it must be one of the first recorded instances of iPod earbuds in western art.

I’m not the only one thinking about portable social networks:

• Derek suggests a definition list of relationships, which I personally think is unnecessarily complex: the same information can be encoded in the rel attribute of a humble hyperlink.
• Thomas points to some specific cases like moving from Myspace to Facebook: see? it’s not just about early adopters.
• Phil Gyford talks about organising a network into groups for selective portability.

There are some good comments on these posts ‘though I keep noticing the trend for things to get too complex too quickly. Tom Carden mentions FOAF but I have a number of issues with that:

1. Publishing XML is hard, certainly harder than publishing HTML.
2. Out of sight is out of mind. I’ve actually got a FOAF file here at adactio but I haven’t updated it in years. Invisible metadata rots.

A lot of people are talking about the need for some kind of centralised service (ala Gravatar) for storing a social network. But surely the last thing we need is yet another walled garden or roach motel?

I’d much prefer a distributed solution and, frankly, I wish Gravatar had gone down that route given its often slugglish ways. I realise that a centralised service is needed for people who don’t have their own URL but it should, in my opinion, be second choice rather than default.

In any case, I think we may be barking up the wrong tree with all this talk of needing something new. Personally, I don’t think the solution need be complicated it all. It’s within reach right now and it doesn’t require the creation of any new service.

Suppose, just suppose, that…

• my Flickr contacts page,
• my Last.fm contacts page,
• my Cork’d drinking buddies,
• my dConstruct Backnetwork
• and any other contact list on any other social networking site

… were marked up with XFN (update: or more importantly, hCard—see below). Now all I have to do is provide one of those URLs to the next social networking site I join.

Far fetched? Two of the sites I listed are already walking the walk. All that’s needed is for the sign-up form on the next fadsite I join to at least include the option of importing a buddy list by pointing to a URL.

Sure, it won’t work perfectly. People might have different names from site to site. But that’s okay. It’ll work good enough. It will probably get 80% of my contacts imported. And that’s a lot better than the current count of zero.

We don’t need yet another centralised service. The information is already out there, it just needs to be explicitly marked up.

Once you populate a network on one site, that information should be easily portable to another site. That’s doable. It isn’t even that hard: all it requires is the addition of a few rel attributes and possibly some hCard encoding.

Let’s not go chasing a complicated solution when a simpler one will do.

So here’s my plea—nay, my demand—to the next Web X.X social networking doohickey that wants me to join up:

1. Give me a simple input field for entering a URL that lists my contacts.
2. Parse that URL for people and relationships.
3. Voila! I’ve added a bunch of friends. I may repeat from step one with a different URL.
4. Markup my contacts on your doohickey in an easily exportable way.

Who wants to get the ball rolling? Why can’t this become as ubiquitous as gradients, closed betas, giant text and wet-floor reflections?

For all the talk of social media and the strength of weak ties, there isn’t much action being taken to really try to “harness collective intelligence®”. Within the confines of their own walls, these Web X.X sites might be all about social this and social that, but I want to see more sites practice what they preach on a wider scale… the scale of the World Wide (semantic) Web.

Update

Following on from some comments and Twitter chat, I wanted to clarify a few points:

1. Yes, social networks differ depending on context. That’s why I want the ability to point at more than one URL. If I join up to a new music site, I might want to point to my Last.fm contacts, but not my Flickr contacts. If I join a new site about food or drink, I’d probably want to point to my Cork’d drinking buddies, but not my Linkdin network. Or I might want to point to any combination thereof: Flickr + Twitter - Last.fm, for example.

2. The issue of whether the people you’re adding even want to be your friend is a red herring. That’s an issue regardless of portability. I can quite easily add people as my friends on Flickr who don’t want to reciprocate. The same goes for Twitter. Portability will allow me to add friends en masse but it won’t ever automatically add me as a friend to the people I’m importing: that’s still up to them.

3. No, this won’t move 100% of contacts from network to network. But it will move a lot. My user name is adactio on Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, Upcoming, Technorati and Cork’d. I suspect a lot of people use the same user name across sites. For sites that use real names, there’s an even greater chance of portability.

4. None of this portability is irreversible, it’s just a shortcut. If I get false positives—people imported that I don’t want as contacts—I can just remove that relationship. Likewise if I fail to import some people automatically, I’ve still got the old-fashioned way of doing it by hand (which we all have to do now anyway).

5. Forget about XFN for a minute. The important thing is that I’m pointing to a page and saying, “any people listed on this page are contacts I want to import.” Now, there is no <person> element in HTML so how does it know which strings are people? Well, we need some way of saying “this is a real name”, or “this is a nickname”. We have that already: class="fn" and class="nickname". These are properties of hCard. So I guess it’s hCard usage that really matters. That said, XFN can added an extra level of granularity: contact vs. friend, at least. But I stand corrected: the really important formatting issue here is marking up “who are the people on this page?” rather than “what are the relationships on this page?” The URL itself contains the information that everyone listed is a contact.

Just take a look at these URLs:

• http://corkd.com/people/adactio/buddies/
• https://www.flickr.com/people/adactio/contacts/
• http://last.fm/user/adactio/friends/

A semantic consensus is already emerging across sites in URL structure:

http://site name/[people|user]/username/[buddies|contacts|friends]/

All that’s needed is to explicitly mark up any people on those pages. That’s easily done with hCard. All these sites have to do is edit a template. For extra relationship richness, XFN can help.

I was updating my schedule over on the DOM Scripting site and I thought I’d share a little tip for any microformateers who savour typographical correctness.

Most hCalendar events have both a start date (dtstart) and an end date (dtend). Both use the abbr pattern:

<abbr class="dtstart" title="20061122">November 22nd</abbr>
<abbr class="dtend" title="20061123">November 23rd</abbr>

Date ranges like that are often written as:

November 22nd–23rd

Or:

22nd–23rd November

Either way, that piece of text features a range of dates. The correct punctuation for a closed range is the en-dash. If you’re marking up an event in hCalendar, try to to use the corresponding HTML entity:

<abbr class="dtstart" title="20061122">November 22nd</abbr>
&ndash;
<abbr class="dtend" title="20061123">23rd</abbr>

The HTML entity is –. In decimal that’s –.

For more information on en-dashes (and em-dashes), read The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters) over on A List Apart. For more general typographical tips, try Reading Design by Dean Allen and Typography Matters by Erin Kissane, both of whom are great writers. And, of course, there’s Richard’s excellent practical guide to web typography.

If I come across any other typographical titbits for microformats, I’ll be sure to flag them up.

Twitter has suddenly taken off, at least amongst my friends. Who knew that a site could still be popular without amending the end of its title from “er” to “r”? It’s been fascinating to watch the usage grow.

Apparently it’s been pretty popular in the States for a while already. Brian was telling me how popular it was at the Future of Web Apps summit in San Francisco. I only discovered it a few weeks ago, which I mentioned in my post about my life stream. That may have prompted some people to investigate but I suspect that the real Typhoid Mary was Dunstan’s message about moving from Apple to Flickr, which acted as a vector for European infection.

Since then, people have been steadily signing up. At the same time, the site has been rolling out updates at a very fast pace. It’s a lot of fun watching an app get iterated on a daily basis.

The usage of Twitter is, um, let’s call it… emergent. Whenever I tell anyone about it, their first question is “what’s it for?”

Fair question. But their isn’t really an answer. You send messages either from the website, your mobile phone, or chat. What you post and why you’d want to do it is entirely up to you.

The usage seems to vary between the States and here. While Americans are doing a lot of updates from mobile, my comrades in the Greenwich Mean Tribe are more likely to update from the website or chat. That means that the US stuff tends to be a bit more outdoorsy than the European updates sent from geeks sitting at their desks.

Overall, Twitter is full of trivial little messages that sometimes merge into a coherent conversation before disintegrating again. I like it. Instant messaging is too intrusive. Email takes too much effort. Twittering feels just right for the little things: where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking.

It’s strangely compelling watching messages from other people come rolling in (the page updates via Ajax). Twitter is simultaneously a complete waste of time and a genuinely rewarding experience. I guess that describes most of the best social websites.

The site has many problems, but given its rapid iteration cycle, I suspect that these will soon be sorted. Tantek pointed out problems with the sign-up process. I have issues with the Ajax implementation:

1. It uses a href="#" in places spit
2. There is no instant feedback when you submit a message. Update: one hour after posting this, I noticed that the submit button now changes to being disabled as soon as you click it. Coincidental rapid iteration or SWAT-team style response to a feature request?
3. While there is a setting for enabling and disabling updates to mobile, there is no corresponding setting for disabling updates to chat.

Jon points out a more pervasive problem. Twitter is yet another social network where we have to go and manually add all the same friends from every other social network: Flickr, Upcoming, etc. This is something that Derek talked about in his talk at Web Directions.

Here’s what I want: when I go to the latest social networking fadsite, I want it to ask for my URL. Then it can go off and fetch my hCard and XFN list. A pre-filled form for my details and a pre-filled list of potential contacts can then be presented to me.

I’m not saying that this should be the only way of signing up but wouldn’t it be a nice added extra for those of us already using microformats?

I’ve always been a space geek. Therefore, I’ve always wanted to go to the Kennedy Space Center. There’s a museum there and a bus tour you can go on. The tour stops five miles away from the launch area and while you can’t go into any buildings, the activities within are explained to you.

I fulfilled a fantasy this week. Not only did I go to Cape Canerval but I managed to get an “access all areas” look around the place.

It’s all thanks to an engineer called Benny who listens to Paul Boag’s podcast. In a startling revelation, it turns out that Paul’s listeners are in fact rocket scientists. The NASA “friends and family” day just happened to fall right at the end of Refresh Orlando. Benny invited Paul along. Andy and myself invited ourselves along.

As it turned out, there hadn’t been one of these open days since 2001. We were very, very fortunate and privileged to be allowed behind the scenes at NASA.

In contrast to the regular tour, we drove right up to the launch pads, including launch pad B, which had Discovery rolled out and ready for launch on December 7th. We also got to go inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, something that is normally not allowed. It’s incredibly huge. I mean this is seriously big. Imagine a really big building and then imagine it being bigger.

Best of all, we went inside the orbiter hanger. Endeavour was inside. A space shuttle… a freakin’ space shuttle! That was just so incredibly cool, I can’t even begin to describe it.

I hope I’m not coming across as gloating here: I really just want to share my excitement. It was quite an experience to get so close to the ultimate geek toys. The only way it could have been any better was if Jessica could have been there. Soulmate that she is, I think she might be an even bigger space geek than me.

Clearly, my descriptive powers aren’t up to the task of cataloguing the day’s sights, so I’ll just point you to this photoset on Flickr.

Thanks, Benny!

Whereas the first day of Refresh Orlando had a lot of good inspirational talks, day two had a lot of good hands-on practical advice. The mobile Web, accessibility, JavaScript, and UI design were all covered thanks to Brian Fling, Jared Smith, Nate Koechley, and Cameron Moll. Excellent stuff all ‘round.

The conference has now drawn to a close. It’s been a funny little event. It started off looking like it might be your typical formal, somewhat stiff hotel-based mini-conference. But then it also had an ad-hoc grassroots feeling to it, too. On the one hand, there were good facilities provided (Wifi, power sockets, etc.), but on the other hand, it felt like it was kind of self-organising. The organisers took a very hands-off approach, which generally worked fine although there were times when a little more guidance would have been good.

This was the first Refresh Orlando conference so I guess it’s still finding its feet. I suspect any future events will be more clearly geared towards being either more structured and slick, or go the other direction and become more like a Barcamp.

The nice thing about this conference was its intimacy. Like Barcamp, there was a limited number of people (between fifty and sixty) gathered together in the same place for a couple of days. The crowd was smart, eager, and relatively diverse (for a Web conference). As always, it was the conversations that were had after the presentations were done that really made the trip worthwhile. That’s where I usually find most of my inspiration and this time was no exception. Impromptu geek lunches and dinners were the order of the day.

Now it’s time for me to leave the sunshine state. I’ll be catching a flight back to Gatwick later today. I’ve met some great people — some for the first time, some with the pleasure of reunion — and I’ve topped up my creative juices nicely. Time to get back to work.

Day two of Refresh Orlando kicked off with a talk by yours truly on microformats. I think it went pretty well. I made sure to allow time for some questions and some great questions were asked. I hope I managed to answer them okay.

I put together a list of resources that gathers together a lot of the tools and implementations that I talked about. The whole thing has been recorded (touch wood) so I’ll be sure to create a transcript of the audio once it becomes available. Then you’ll be able to hear how I managed to squeeze in the word “crunk” at the behest of Jina.

I don’t know why I should be accommodating to her. She’s the one responsible for my ritual humiliation last night.

A very large crowd of us descended on a Japanese restaurant. At one point, Andy turned to me and said, “By the way, if anything happens to you tonight, it’s not my fault.” My suspicions were immediately aroused but after a while, I forgot about the strange remark.

Sushi was consumed. Conversations were had. Then the drumming started, the costumes appeared and the singing started. “Oh”, I thought, “it’s somebody’s birthda… waitaminute!”

Needless to say, it wasn’t actually my birthday but Jina thought it would be amusing to watch me endure the birthday ritual. I spent the rest of the evening — at Howl At The Moon — trying to get revenge but she remains resolutely impervious to shame or humiliation. All I ended up doing was staying out too late in a noisy bar the night before giving a presentation first thing in the morning.

On the plus side, I got a nice card out of the whole thing.

The Refresh ‘06 conference is underway here in Orlando, Florida.

I flew in with Andy, Paul on Monday (and boy are my arms.., etc.). The next day, we went on a pilgrimage to the Universal Studios theme parks. Seeing as we’re a bunch of big girl’s blouses, we steered clear of the scary rides like The Hulk but we did enjoy the cool simulations, especially the immersive three-dimensional Spiderman experience. This must be a pretty good time of year to visit. There weren’t any big crowds and we never had to wait too long for a ride.

With the fun out of the way, the business begins. Yesterday was workshop day. Andy did a half-day on CSS, which was really informative. I followed up with a half-day on Ajax. I felt a bit bad about jumping right over the JavaScript and DOM stuff and diving straight in with XMLHttpRequest, but time was of the essence.

With that out of the way, the socialising could begin earnest. The geeks began to arrive from all corners of the country. Now those geeks are gathered together in a room listening to words of wisdom from the speakers.

The WiFi is kind of flaky so I may not be able to upload any pictures to Flickr just yet, but there are plenty of power strips which is always a good sign.

I’m in Edinburgh. Jessica is here for a translator’s conference and I thought it would be fun to tag along for the ride, seeing as I’ve never been here except for an in in-utero visit which doesn’t really count.

My, what a place! The architecture here is extraordinary. Wherever you look, there’s invariably a building or ten steeped in history.

I’m staying in a hotel in the new part of town. New is relative. This is the Georgian part of town. Just about every house is built in that classical Georgian style that Dublin likes to pride itself on (sorry Dublin, you’ve got nothing on Edinburgh). The cumulative effect is like stepping back in time.

Then there’s the old part of town. Here, the feeling is medieval. Stone buildings, narrow alleyways, winding steps, and of course a great big huge castle overlooking everything.

After meeting up with Alan White for a chat yesterday, I went for a wander around the old part of town. There’s a real pleasure of discovery in coming across the house where Boswell met Johnson, or going into the Writers’ Museum in a narrow 17th building.

I haven’t been able to capture much of this city’s splendour in pictorial form because the weather has been fairly drab and rainy. It all adds to the atmosphere, I suppose.

Actually, I’m kind of glad that the weather has driven me back to my hotel room to take refuge. I can stop procrastinating and get on with last minute preparations for the Refresh Web Standards Conference in Orlando, Florida next week. I’ll be giving a half-day workshop on Ajax and a presentation on microformats. If you want to come along, there are still tickets available for a mere $395 — and that includes an open bar at the end of each day!

So tomorrow I fly back from Edinburgh down to Gatwick. Then, the next day, I’ll be back in Gatwick to get on a transatlantic flight to the sunshine state.

Right now I’ve got old buildings and bad weather. In another two days I’ll have new buildings and good weather. It seems that never the twain shall meet.

Joe Clark has some ambitious plans. He’d like to write a standards for captioning and dubbing. He’d like to develop training courses for those same disciplines. He’d like to design and create new fonts specifically for captioning.

The problem is… how is he supposed to put these plans into action? After all, like the rest of us, Joe needs to earn a crust. I’m sure we all have a wishlist of things we’d like to work on… if only we had an independent income.

Well, Joe is taking steps to achieve his goals. But he needs your help.

Introducing Joe Clark Micropatronage

Joe says:

Micropatronage is a form of fundraising in which many donors give small amounts of money. You can donate as much or as little as you want to support me for a limited period of time (nominally, four months) as I try to raise about $7 million Canadian for an accessibility research project.

Wait! Before you think that Joe has completely lost his marbles, let me clarify something: he doesn’t expect to raise $7 million through this micropatronage. Instead, he simply wants to have an independent income for four months while he goes about raising the money he needs. In other words:

You aren’t funding the project; you are not contributing to the $7 million. You’re funding me while I try to raise the money for the project. You are supporting me, not the project.

So Joe isn’t looking for $7,000,00; he’s looking for a far more reasonable $7,777. That’s a pretty modest amount to live from for four months.

I’m supporting Joe. I really want to see Open & Closed Project get off the ground. I’ve already contributed a little something through Paypal and I plan to do so again over the course of the next four months. I encourage you to contribute as well.

If you want to show your support for Joe’s effort, you can grab some of the wonderfully droll banner ads written by Joe and designed by Antonio Cavedoni — the generous Italian gentleman who once gave me a piece of Parmesan the size of my head.

Go on… help Joe follow his dreams.

I’ve been playing around with Twitter, a neat little service from the people who brought you Odeo. You send it little text updates via SMS, the website, or Jabber. It’s intended as a piece of social software, but I think it has potential for more selfish uses.

Every time I ping Twitter, the message is time stamped. Every time I post a link to Del.icio.us, that’s time stamped. Every time I upload a picture to Flickr, a time stamp of when the picture was taken is also sent. Whenever I listen to a song on iTunes, the track information is sent to Last.fm with a time stamp. And of course whenever I blog, be it here, at the DOM Scripting blog or Principia Gastronomica, each entry has a permalink and a time stamp.

Just about every time somebody publishes something on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull in all these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline of online activity?

The technology is already in place. Most of the services I mention above have APIs. In this case, a fully-blown API isn’t even necessary. Each service already offers an easily parsable XML file of activity ordered by time: RSS.

At the recent Take Back The Web event here in Brighton, Rob Purdie talked about RSS being the vaseline that’s greasing the wheels of Web 2.0. He makes a good point.

Over the course of any particular day, I could be updating five or six RSS feeds, depending on how much I’m blogging, how many links I’m posting, or how much music I’m listening to. I’d like to take those individual feeds and mush ‘em all up together.

There are a couple of services out there for mashing up RSS. FeedBurner is probably the most well known, but you are limited to a pre-set choice of RSS feeds that you can mix in. RSS Mix offers a more open-ended splicing service but it seems a bit confused when it comes to date ordering. There’s some other service I was playing around with last week but for the life of me, I can’t remember the name of it. All I remember is that it had an extremely annoying interface full of gratuitous Ajax.

I’ve mocked up my own little life stream, tracking my Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, and blog posts. It’s a quick’n’dirty script that isn’t doing any caching. The important thing is that it’s keeping the context of the permalinks (song, link, photo, or blog post) and displaying them ordered by date and time. What I’d really like to do is display the same information in a more time-based interface: a calendar, or timeline.

Annoyingly, the Last.fm feed of recently listened to tracks disappears if you don’t listen to anything for a while. Grrr…

Update: Here’s the PHP source code.

I’m in a lovely little cottage in the town of Ironbridge, the self-styled birthplace of industry. This is the setting for the current Britpack geekend, and the turnout is pretty darn big.

We’ve been doing some touristy stuff; strolling through the quaint village in lovely weather, eating pub lunches, going to the Enginuity part of the museum of iron, and this evening we went to a fireworks display at a Victorian town.

Of course, the real reason for travelling all this way is to feed our latest dirty habit: playing Werewolf with fellow geeks. That’s what we did tonight, ensconced in our cosy cottage. Now, with the air thick with paranoia and recriminations, I think I’ll call it a night.

Before leaving tomorrow, I must remember to actually walk across the eponymous iron bridge and take some more pictures.

When Eric and Tantek where in Sydney for Web Essentials 2005 they went off on a little jaunt that Eric dubbed urban spelunking. They went in search of locations from The Matrix, which was filmed in Sydney, donchyaknow.

“That looks like fun”, I thought. When I found myself in Sydney for Web Directions South, I resolved to follow in the footsteps of the futuristic hero dressed in black… no, not Neo; Tantek. I used location information gathered from Tantek's photos to find some street addresses. I also managed to find a couple of locations of my own.

Off I went with Jessica in tow and camera in hand. The resultant photos are up on Flickr. Evidently, I'm not the only one who got a kick out of this: the pictures have been dugg, sending their viewing figures into five digits.

For anyone else who wants to do a Matrix tour of Sydney, here's a list of locations and time stamps from the movie. They're all geotagged and encoded in hCard so you can go ahead and extract that data.

Microformats seem to be showing up in more and more places lately. Chris spotted hCards in the new .mac web client.

Just this week, Last.fm announced a raft of updates including an events section that uses, yes, you guessed it, hCalendar. I did much the same thing when I added events to The Session recently.

I had been eagerly awaiting the unveiling of events (and accompanying microformats) on Last.fm since having a chat with some of the developers at that Opera shindig. I really like the implementation. If you follow through to an individual event, you’ll see some clever use of CSS to auto-generate a gig poster. Nice!

It’ll be interesting to see some mashups of Last.fm with Upcoming. With every event tied to a location, there’s also plenty of room for doing some fun mapping stuff. It would be nice to have an API to access the event data, but having all the events marked up in hCalendar means that we can start playing around with the data anyway.

Thinking about it, gigs are just about the perfect piece of data to play with: there’s always a date and there’s always a geographical location. Surely somebody will build a concert Mapendar?

At the very least, I expect we’ll see a time/location Podbop-style channel on Last.fm before too long.