Laughing Meme

Okay PMOG is super early in its life, but it intrigues me on a couple of levels (not the least of which is the engaging archetype art).

However there are some things about it which are broken. Not surprising in and of itself, but in the process of trying to report said broken-ness I ran into a larger problem.

No community space.

There is a Google Group but it’s a moderated announce only kind of thing (HINT: thats what you’re blog is for!) not a public discussion space. No message boards, no wiki (though presumably we could start one, Twitter Fan style), no groups.

Someone needs to see Andy’s talk about group forming, social software, and out of band spaces.

Especially for a game, a social game, an experimental game.

Uninstalled for now, in an attempt to reduce unexplainable spinnies.

Playing a bit with OpenID, created an account with JanRain, and was presented with the below captcha. Really changed the whole value propisition of OpenID for me.

Microphones need visual feedback on whether the speaker is speaking into them. At conferences you’re dealing with amateur speakers, and they seem to have no problem greater then that of speaking into the mike. A little bar, a light that goes on and off, something ambient and subtle.

James Holderness (check the comments)

Do you ever think maybe the Apple guys are just winding you up? Nobody could possibly be that stupid.

Maybe, though I tend to share Phil’s skepticism. Lets start the with the name, “photocasting”. Worst name I’ve heard since “MacBook”. I’d speculate that Apple’s marketing department recently started outsourcing to Engineering, except I’d be slandering my own profession. That’s a minor thing, aesthetic really, but dear god, how could they screw up the RSS? Again? (especially as I know people at Apple who are not only smart and clueful, but get XML)

I mean the iTunes name space was a train wreck. (though truth be told podcasting for some reason produces the scariest, wackiest feeds on the planet, at one point roughly 1/3 of the feeds Odeo was crawling had serious errors)

User agent detection? Of RSS? In 2006?!? Come again?

Embedded CSS? Misformatted dates? Random, namespace-less new elements (PhotoDate?) A new standard for including comments within an item.

See Phil’s comment, Sam, Dave Winer

Hey Apple, consider hiring someone who knows something about syndication, it’s worth it.

Take a look (unless of course you’re using Firefox).

update: [2005/01/18] MarkP on “photocasting”. It’s not just bad, it’s spectaculary bad. (via)

Yelp gets feeds just right. I’m not sure I’ve ever said that before about anybody.

They’ve got:

• a feed of my reviews allows me to re-purpose the content I create (No RSS, No Content Creation],
• a feed of my (as yet non-existent) network’s reviews
• feeds contain the full content of my review (again my content, I created it, give it to me)
• rich feeds; they use the geo namespace to embed lat/long
• Both RSS and Atom 1.0 feeds

Very nice.

A minor nit. These are feeds of reviews, not feeds of places, so it makes sense that the rating is included in the title of the entry, but I’d still like to see the rating and location’s name presented in separate structured elements as well (say for example I want to syndicate my reviews locally, and display a graphic of the stars)

Also per category feeds might be useful.

I’ve had a todo item “Check out PrinceXML” since seeing it mentioned in ALA’s Printing a Book with CSS.

So I got so far as figuring out it wasn’t opensource, and seeing that the price was $349 dollars. Definitely makes me think I should probably shuffle that “Learn XSL” up the todo list again.

Still I’m very intrigued, and will probably download the trial version when I’ve got enough free time that I can pour some into learning a proprietary tool.

Anyone else played with it?

So much happened in the last 3 weeks while you’ve been deprived of my piercing insights, its hard to know where to begin catching up.

To me the most exciting news is that Jasmine now has a blog, brandxculture (pronounced ‘brand and culture’). Truth be told she has had it for a while, but only recently officially launched it.

My favorite posts so far are

• Perish or Thrive
• Granny’s revival
• Brands are like personalities