Laughing Meme

Online Community Summit pre-meetings kick off today, through the 5th.

Then CommunityNext runs the 5th and 6th.

While Graphic Social Patterns will be on the 7th, 8th, and 9th

At the Margins, Fri Sept 14th, ATA, 7:30pm. Shorts. “Golden Kitchen” sounds particuarily intriguing to me.

Close to Home, Fri Fri Sept 14th, ATA, 8:30pm. In particular “Un Hombre Tranquilo”.

ID Docs, Tue Sept 18th, 6:30pm for free BBQ. El Rio.

One thing you notice showing up to these parties is you see the same (lovely) faces over and over. Figured it should be possible to take that knowledge of who is in the scene to mine the event sites for the “Social Web”, all those nifty Webbish events happening all over. (native to a Web of parties?)

Turns out there is a nearly 1 to 1 correlation with Upcoming Popular except where Upcoming Popular is better. Yet more proof that index funds beat managed funds every time.

Ah well, it would have been nifty. (and might still work for a different scene)

Yup, I saw the Michael’s coverage of Google Calendar aka CL2. From what little information we’ve got sounds like they’re doing a huge amount of it right.

Personally most intrigued by the idea that they’ll “combine their event creation feature with a web crawl and parsing of event data”. We ask a number of things of our calendars (well at least three), and one of the most important and least served to date is synchronicity.

update [6 hours later]: Well, some of it right at least.

I’d submit that the $1,200 Esther Dyson shindig at Stanford today was actually When 2.2, having coined the term to describe the Saturday morning calendar track at Foocamp.

The big news is the Google Calendar no-show. Also on people’s minds where is Chandler?

Perhaps the most striking feature of When 2.0 at Foocamp was how different the understanding of events each person brought to the table. Some people where talking events as social objects, others time management, perhaps as part of data management sync problem, and Esther was excited about time aspect of search. There was much talking past each other.

Oren’s weblog has the best coverage to date.

Fort Point Holiday Sale: Friday, December 9, 11am-7pm, Saturday, December 10, 11am-5pm

Museum School 25th Annual December Sale: Thursday, December 1, 12-8 pm (Opening Celebration: 5-8 pm), Friday, December 2 - Monday, December 5, 12-6 pm

MassArt’s Annual Holiday Sale: December 5th - 10th; 10am - 7 pm

In other news, it really should be easier to add events to Upcoming, and Markdown needs support for microformats

Congrats to Andy, Gordon, and Leonard, and about damn time. I first saw Upcoming almost exactly two years ago and thought “Wow, now that is how to do calendaring.” (and apparently I was jealous even back then!) Good luck!

Now we can all speculate on what calendar.google.com will be, but I’m thinking this round might be going to Yahoo.

update: And dear god, where I can get some of whatever Gordon is on, Upcoming and Ning!?!? No kidding “bred for skill in magic.”

update2: Flickr, Upcoming, and Ning, all built on PHP.

My Foo Camp report back is a little late coming I know, but a few quick scribbles (if I had more time, I’d write less).

A great time was obviously had by all, except for the handful of souls who were too cool for it. I was not among those, self proclaimed web fanboi that I am. To the extent I had no agenda for the weekend it was a wild success, to the extent it could have been even better, I’ve got a few thoughts.

Squid Labs

Squid Labs are my new heroes, its one things to do inscrutable and mind altering hardware hacks, its another to incorporate training, and knowledge sharing for all ages as a core component. Instructables is an awesome attempt to open source knowledge, while Howtoons are just brilliant. The work by Saul Griffith, on self-replicating machines made me wish my math was better, a hard feat. The reality enhancing devices had more of an “oh wow” factor, but what really sealed it for me, is they all travelled up in a modded school bus, full chopped up bikes.

Microformats

I felt like I saw early potential in microformats, and yet am also sort of late to the koolaid drinking party. The best definition I ever heard of artificial intelligence is that AI is the technology that is perpetually 10 years away, in the sense that once a problem domain has been solved (I believe the germane example at the time was computer vision) it is no longer considered AI. I wonder if the Semantic Web is a similar movable feast, and microformats are one of the first spin-offs.

I was impressed by Tantek and the other folks I met working on microformats in that they deeply understand the power of reuse, and more importantly understand that the social hack they’re pulling off is significantly more difficult then the technical one, and more important. That community/communication focus makes me think microformats will be a winner, and hCalendar is certainly the first standard I’ve ever seen that could enable a simple “add this to my calendar” technology.

When 2.0

Saturday morning we did a mini-calendaring track. Michael Radwin, Adam Trachtenberg, Larry Wall, Ray Ozzie and I spent an hour riffing on timezones, leap seconds, and the dismal state of calendaring libraries. (It was also noted that the Olson database might have a “Postel problem”, in that it is unspecified what happens when the maintainer dies)

We were joined by Andy Baio (Upcoming), Brian Dear (EVDB), Jesse Vincent (Reefknot, Data::Ical), and others for what I think will be an interesting ongoing conversation about the future of calendaring.

What take away was of the morning session was that it would be simple, and very easy to build a RESTful web service access to the Olson DB, keyed by region, lat/long, street address and the desired date. You could even support 304s as all the various change information is captured in the timezone files. Personally I’d also like some way of surfacing the rich, and eccentric commentary also contained in the files.

Other hilights were Quinn’s functional body mods talk (scary cool, get her to give you this talk), the potential of seriously messing with the mobile carriers, meeting a bunch of virtual friends/heroes IRL, Mark Fletcher’s talk on Bloglines’ crawling architecture, Segways, ice cream sundaes, free books, and generally incredibly high level of articulate, communicative geeks.

Self Organizing Technologies (for Humans)

Saul’s presentation on teaching machines to self organize was brilliant, and yet, to me, ironic. By sitting there learning about his work, I was missing half a dozen other sessions I would have killed to be in. FOO Camp is billed as a “self organizing” event, and to the extent that O’Reilly does a good job of providing people, space, food, and something like a rough skeleton it, this is true. But the techniques it used, could use an upgrade, it was very much “Self Organizing 1.0″

But not all self organizing is a like. Burned into my mind is the rugby scrum the first night, as 200 geeks pressed into a small space, trying to desperately scrawl and juggle their ideas across the grid. Many events that shouldn’t have been scheduled against each other were, and if you weren’t willing to push, and kick shins, then you didn’t have much say in when you’re session would be scheduled for. This is the kind of thing that gives anarchy a bad name.

I’ve seen it work better, any number of communities have better techniques, and groups like Aspiration and Blue Oxen are in the business of organizing self-organizing events. If I were to lead a session next year it would on “Self Organizing Technologies for Humans”.

Other report backs

• David Weinberger did a great job of reporting on Foocamp, unfortunately he doesn’t have category archives, so I’m linking to his stuff via Technorati. (anyone know if there is a way to see limit viewing tagged items by website on Technorati?)
• Check out the foocamp05 Flickr stream, Brian Sawyer was a good early uploader

On the wiki

• FooReview - manual trackbacks
• SlidesAndStuff

Bypassing the generally poor website, Jasmine and I were able to acquire a printed guide to the CyberArts festival (running for 2 weeks, started last Saturday). There are several themes beyond the traditional video art running through this years festival that I find interesting, in particularly public art working with idea of place, e.g mapping, GPS, and WiFi.

We kicked off yesterday with the opening of “Digital Disclosures”. And here are our (largely uninformed) picks for the rest of festival.

Ongoing

OnePixel - “A ‘Performance Map’ by Steven R Holloway, One Pixel Boston demonstrates that the spirit of a living place cannot be appreciated without direct experience.” [more]

DeCordova - not in Boston proper, the Lincoln located sculpture park has several very interesting sounding exhibits running through May 1st, including Train by John Klima, Sound installation by Carrie Bodle examining the use of sound in mapping wikis, and installation by Yoko Ono contemporary Nam June Paik

Itinerant by Teri Rueb - “blending voices of characters both fictional and first person… a walk through downtown Boston with head phones and a GPS-equipped pocket PC… monologue as it unfolds according to the correspondingly rational and irrational design of the city’s streets.” Reminds me of Talking Street

Wed., April 27th

Floating Points 2 - Networked Art in Public Spaces. 7pm

Fri., April 29th

Lecture by Debra Singer, former curator of the Whitney. 6:30pm

Tue., May 3rd

Beyond the Digital Print - Boston Public Library.

Slowly digging myself out of the back log from a week offline (expect lots of MLPs).

One thing that happened last week was the release of two very rich new modules for RSS (2.0) that are being batted around the Net this week (both via les).

The Reviews (RVW) namespace “is intended to allow machine-readable reviews to be integrated into an RSS feed, thus allowing reviews to be automatically compiled from distributed sources”.

Over at Deanspace (which is doing a surprising amount of interesting hacking) the Datebook Schema Embedded in RSS (DBRSS) is embedding an vocabulary for discussing very complex information about events including recurring events, location info, event planning (tracks and costs), scheduling (rsvp) requirements, and convener info.

It is awesome to see people really pushing the boundaries of syndication, thinking about new and creative applications that can be enabled by sharing more data in more structured ways. Which is why I felt a little odd at the very similar disquiet both these specs caused in me. As I was struggling to articulate it, I found Bitsko’s Is a Feed the right place for your Data? which sum up the unease quite nicely.

Review data has permanence, it has linkability, it has searchability, it has reusability — why is it locked in a syndication feed for use pretty much only by syndication clients?

(this is less true of events, and perhaps DBRSS is less covered by this critique)

Its a HyperTextual World

Bitsko proposes “freeing” the review information by giving it its own url, and syndicating a link to it. I think this is brilliant, the information at the end of the URLs is a real untapped source of descriptive power, which is why I loved Kevin’s proposed mod_link. (though no one else seemed to) Bitsko demonstrates how if you moved the structured data (e.g. a machine readable review) to its own URL, you could link to it transparently from an HTML document, or any of the various syndication formats, well worth a read.

Don’t Forget the People

A while back I started writing an article I hoped to pitch to XML.com on designing RSS modules. I never finished it (and XML.com published so many RSS articles, the market seemed played out) but the central idea of the article (in retrospect) was about striking an aesthetic balance in namespaces between readability, and structure. A good rule of thumb is:

Include just enough information in a feed so that an item could be displayed in a meaningful way without having to fetch the remote resource.

There are a few reasons for this

• RSS has proven that human readable formats get faster uptake; design for the “View Source” style of learning.
• Fetching and parsing a remote resource is hard for beginners to do well, like all the neophyte PHP hackers in the world who are just wanting to do something quick.
• Strikes a balance between current, and future usage patterns

Externalizing Reviews

Taking the Reviews namespace as an example, as I imagine myself trying to use it, I think I would want to at least know the title of book as well as the title of the review. This changes the RSS item to read “I am syndicating a review of this book, more information at this URL” instead of just “I am syndicating a review at this URL“.

I support Bitsko’s idea of giving microcontent a home of its own, but lets not sap all of the semantic meaning out of the feeds while we are at it.

Externalizing DateBook RSS

Similarly the bulk of the DateBook schema could be moved an external resource, and the feed could syndication a link to this resource , and the most basic of event information (which is the idea behind modevent). DBRSS even has the advantage that unlike reviews, there are already a number of calendaring/scheduling formats available, and there is no need to invent a new one. (I’m assuming DateBook schema is something new, the name makes me think of an attempt to XMLize the core Palm calendar, but the fields don’t match at all)

Depending on persuasion you have a choice between iCalendar, RDF Calendar, or xCal.

Transient Metadata

You’ll notice (or at least, I notice) that this is a different approach then what I took with my rough sketch of modweather (an admittedly much simpler namespace), where I packed all of the information into the feed.

The difference is current weather conditions (and even forecasts) are about the most transient information imaginable. They are also laden with some of the worst, most obscure formats to ever reach wide circulation. There is no added benefit to giving the current weather conditions for this instant in time a home of its own.

More on DBRSS

I think the story on DBRSS is less cut and dry then RVW, I’ve certainly felt the tug of a richer event syndication format myself, perhaps one less unencumbered by Calsch’s years of work. A couple of quick thoughts that came up looking at it.

• Durations instead of endtimes is a seductive choice, but I’ve found that if you’re storing your events in a SQL datastore, endtimes are much more useful.
• Tracks I don’t understand, and seem a little off to me. It seems like an attempt to cram a calendar into an event.
• Wouldn’t it be better to use a geo vocabulary to describe the location, rather then larding it into your calendaring one?

Inspired by a post to the python-list about using spambayes to classify defunct or out of date event listings,(via Uche Ogbuji), and a recent chat with Kendall I started playing with using it to identify spammed or inappropriate listings on Protest.net (and by extension other open publishing web applications). Initial progress was not promising. I think it’s going to be need more time then a distracted afternoon at Coffee Exchange when I was really supposed to be working on a cover letter or revising the resume.

The net simply wasn’t converging (learning) fast enough to get useful results. I think that I need to spend some time thinking about my token choices, which will be substantially different then those used for email, to really get this to work.

Deep down I really feel like these learning, emergent technologies are going to be an important enabler for the new wave of web experimentation going on under the moniker “social software”.