Archive: February, 2009

I’m in Seattle. Dopplr tells me that Bobbie is showing up in Seattle on the last day of my visit. I send Bobbie a direct message on Twitter. He tells me the name of the hotel he’ll be staying at.

I use Google Maps to find the exact address. All addresses on Google Maps are marked up with hCard. I press the microformats bookmarklet in my bookmarks bar to download the converted vcard into my address book. Thanks to MobileMe, my updated address book is soon in the cloud online. My iPod Touch gets the updated information within moments.

I go to the address. I meet Bobbie. We have coffee. We have a chat.

The World Wide Web is a beautiful piece of social software.

One of my resolutions for this year (and the year before) is to try reduce the amount of jet fuel I’m responsible for pumping into the atmosphere. So far, my speaking schedule for the year looks reasonably in-keeping for that aim.

Next month I will be flying to Austin for South by Southwest. I wouldn’t miss that for anything. Like last year, my plan was to go but not speak. Like last year, that plan has changed. Tantek asked me to join him on his microformats panel to talk about some of the things I’ve been doing on Huffduffer.

I can’t resist the opportunity to ramble on about my newest toy. I’ll be blabbing on about Huffduffer closer to home when I give a talk here in Brighton on the third of March at £5 App. The last £5 App event was amazing, featuring a crowdsourced adventure game, fighting sumo robots, duelling bluetooth phone lightsabres, and augmented Christmas reality.

When I get back from Southby, I’ll be popping over to Frankfurt at the end of March for the European Accessibility Forum where I’ll be wearing my moderator hat for a panel on accessible web applications.

In April I don’t even have to leave the country. I’ll be speaking at an inaugural grassroots event called Bamboo Juice down at the Eden Project in Cornwall. What a great location for a geek gathering! And the event is priced at a very affordable 99 quid too.

June is when things get a little crazy. First of all, there’s UX London in the middle of the month. I won’t be speaking but I will be helping out and doing my bit to make sure that everything goes smoothly. I’m excited, and slightly intimidated, to be involved in such an intense, intimate three-day event. If you’re thinking about going, I suggest you sign up by February 25th, when the early bird pricing ends.

Shortly after UX London, I’ll be popping over to Boston to speak at An Event Apart, a conference where the bar is set scarily high. I’m already panicking about meeting the event’s very high standards.

Then, literally right after that I’ll be going straight back to London for @media. I’ll be fulfilling my now-traditional duty as moderator of the closing hot topics panel—always a good opportunity for some mischievous fun.

I know that looks like quite a hectic schedule but compared to last year, it’s positively relaxed. And most of those events are reachable by train rather than plane.

I do have one other long-distance flight lined up but it’s for pleasure, not business. Tomorrow Jessica and I are flying to Seattle. It’s going to be a short trip but I hope to meet up with some of my Seattle-ite buddies while I’m there. Get in touch if you’re going to be around.

I’m gratified to see that my thoughts on archiving my data—prompted by the shutdown of Pownce, Magnolia, Ficlets, etc., etc., etc.,—are shared by others. But it’s all well and good for me to talk about how I’m backing up by using APIs, RSS, PHP and other non-trivial technologies. As David said when he bookmarked my post:

Now if someone would build a backup-to-local system that I could use…

Paul has been thinking about how to build it:

Now I’m wondering: is there a space for a piece of user-installable software, like Movable Type or Wordpress, that aggregates their data from sites across the web, and then presents it as a site? If there is, is it even possible to write it in a way that anyone who couldn’t have written it themselves can even use it? Can I write it just for myself in the first place?

Meanwhile, Mike points me to an impassioned post by Jason Scott prompted by the callous, heartbreaking closure of AOL Hometown. That’s right; AOL.

And before you sneer at AOL people, these people who trusted AOL: how about your Flickr? Your Facebook? Whatever the hot new wig-wag that you’re dumping hours into without thinking about it? What, you’re paying for something? Check this recent event out, paying subscriber: you have shit. Because of a cascade of EULA and Best Practices, and most importantly, a complete disregard for the importance of this data, we’re going to let it happen again. And again. And again.

Read his post and then read the follow-up: Datapocalypso! wherein he proposes an A-Team for rescuing data:

They’d go to a site, spider the living crap out of it, reverse engineer what they could, and then put it all up on archive.org or another hosting location, so people could grab things they needed. Fuck the EULAs and the clickthroughs. This is history, you bastards.

It’s still early days, but Archive Team now exists.

Since Magnolia went down, taking everyone’s bookmarks with it, I’ve been through a mild Kübler-Ross cycle.

1. Denial. “It can’t be that all the data is gone. They’ll recover it.”
2. Anger. “I want my freaking bookmarks!”
3. Bargaining. “Isn’t there something I can do? Maybe there’s some API hacking that would help.”
4. Depression. “Why do I bother contributing to any social websites. Our data is doomed in the end.”
5. Acceptance. “C’est le Web.”

I also experienced déjà vu at every stage. The only difference between the end of Pownce and the end of Magnolia was that just one of those pieces of plug-pulling was planned. From the perspective of the people running those services, that’s a huge difference. From my perspective as an avid user of both services, it felt the same.

Actually, things turned out okay for my Magnolia data in the end. I was able to recover all my bookmarks …and it wasn’t down to any API hacking either. My bookmarks were saved by two messy, scrappy, plucky little technologies: RSS and microformats.

Google Reader caches RSS feeds aggressively. As long one person has ever subscribed to the RSS feed of your Magnolia links, you should be able to retrieve your links using Google’s Feed API—‘though for the life of me, I cannot understand why Google insists on marketing all these APIs as “Ajax” APIs, hiding server-side documentation under “Flash and other Non-Javascript Environments”.

If that doesn’t work, there’s always the regular HTML as archived by Google and the Internet Archive. Magnolia’s pages were marked up with the XFolk microformat. Using tools like Glenn’s UfXtract, this structured data can be converted into JSON or some other importable format. As Chris put it, Microformats are the vinyl of the web.

Magnolia’s bookmark recovery page uses a mixture of RSS and XFolk extraction tricks. I was able to recover my bookmarks and import them into Delicious.

But what’s the point of that? Swapping one third-party service for another. Well, believe me, I did a lot of soul searching before putting my links back in another silo. Really, I should be keeping my links here on adactio.com, maybe pinging Delicious or some other social bookmarking site as a back-up …what would Steven Pemberton do?

In the end, I decided to keep using Delicious partly out of convenience, but mostly because I can export my bookmarks quite easily; either through the API or as a hulking great hideous HTML bookmarks file (have you ever looked at the markup of those files that browsers import/export? Yeesh!)

But the mere presence of backup options isn’t enough. After all, Magnolia had a better API than Delicious but that didn’t help when the server came a crashin’. If I’m going to put data into a third-party site, I’m going to have to be self-disciplined and diligent about backing up regularly, just as I do with local data. So I’m getting myself into the habit of running a little PHP script every weekend that will extract all my bookmarks for safekeeping.

That’s my links taken care of. What about other data stores?

• Twitter. This PHP script should take care of backing up all my inane utterances.
• Flickr. I still have all the photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr so the photos themselves will be saved should anything happen to the site. But it would be a shame to lose the metadata that the pictures have accumulated. I should probably investigate how much metadata is maintained by backup services like QOOP.
• Dopplr. Well, the data about my trips isn’t really the important part of Dopplr; it’s the ancillary stuff like coincidences that makes it so handy. Still, with a little bit of hacking on the Dopplr API I could probably whip an export script together. Update: Tom writes to tell me that Dopplr does offer data export in the form of an .ics file.
• Last.fm. Again, like Dopplr, I’m not sure how valuable the data is outside the social context of the site. But again, like Dopplr, a bit of hacking on the Last.fm API might yield a reusable export script.
• Ffffound. I don’t use it to store anything useful or valuable. That’s what tools like LittleSnapper are for. Update: Hacker extraordinaire Paul Mison has whipped up a Ruby script to scrape ffffound and he points me in the direction of ddddownload.
• Facebook. It could fall off the face of the planet for all I care. I’ve never put any data into the site. I only keep a profile there as a communication hub for otherwise unconnected old friends.

As for my own sites—adactio, DOM Scripting, Principia Gastronomica, Salter Cane and of course The Session and Huffduffer—I’ve got local copies which are regularly backed up to an external hard drive and I’m doing database dumps once a week, which probably isn’t often enough. I worry sometimes that I’m not nearly as paranoid as I should be.

What happened to Magnolia was a real shame but, to put a positive spin on it, it’s been a learning experience not just for me, but for Larry too.

One of the coolest things I saw when I was at PaperCamp was Tom’s microprinter:

…an experiment in physical activity streams and notification, using a repurposed receipt printer connected to the web.

Now there’s a wiki where people—like Roo Reynolds—can come together and share their experiments in microprinting:

Hackers across the country are buying up old old receipt printers and imaginatively repurposing them into something new.

It’s such a great little step on the way to a Web of Things. Here’s another such step, from Fluid Interfaces, built for less than $350 using a webcam, a 3M projector, a mirror and a mobile phone:

Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they’re done.

Sounds like a way of levelling up in the game of being Matt Jones:

He sees mobile as something of a super power device and described something he calls “bionic noticing” - obsessively recording curious things he sees around him, driven by this multi-capable device in his pocket.