Alex Barnett blog : podcast

Project Management as SaaS, Programmable Wikis and more

alexbarnett — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:52:00 GMT

Two new interview podcasts to share (recorded by me and Ted) for the Bungee Line:

@task (or AtTask) is a Utah-based tech company providing a comprehensive, web-based project and portfolio-management package delivered in both a SaaS and on-premise model with a very rich web API set. We talked with Nate about the evolution of their web services design and @task's future product plans in light of the market opportunities presented by the availability of the increasing number of 3rd party programmable web services.

Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO of MindTouch

Prior to founding MindTouch Steve worked in advanced strategies at Microsoft focusing on distributed systems and web services. We talked with Steve about the MindTouch platform, its rich set of web APIs and the implications of a programmable wiki. MindTouch goes beyond providing open source wiki collaboration and content management - it's delivering a leading edge application integration and development platform called MindTouch Deki. Michael Coté, an industry analyst with RedMonk (analyst firm) picked up on both the podcast interview and news of the latest release of MinTouch Deki.

(About The Bungee Line: The audio podcast for web developers, covering web API's, software development, and the creation of (extremely) interactive web applications.)

Joshua Porter - talking Social Design for the web (podcast)

alexbarnett — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:54:23 GMT

Last week I had the chance to some spend time with Joshua Porter (of Bokardo.com) to discuss his thoughts on "Social Design" for the web. We recorded the conversation and it's up now up as a podcast.

Josh has a new book coming out soon, "Designing Social Applications (Voices That Matter)":

"How do you create and launch a vibrant social web application that people are motivated to use? Getting people to participate (and stay participating) is the key to any web-based strategy, but you have to do more than simply add features. This book teaches you how. By using real world examples and a bit of social psychology theory, this book provides a solid foundation for designing your next great web application"

I miss our chats.

Podcast interviews - smart people in the world of the web

alexbarnett — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:41:00 GMT

One of the fun parts of my job at Bungee Labs is to partner up with Ted and interview some smart people in the world of the web. We publish these as a podcast series (the Bungee Line - podcast feed here) over on the BCDN blog.

If you have ideas about someone you think we should interview, let me know! We're focusing on topics we think web developers might be interested in the worlds of software as a service and web app development, in particular profiling web apis. Related topics are good too.

I've listed out below our most recent podcasts below...plenty more in the works (previous podcasts are listed here). Hope you like :-)

Alan Lewis on eBay Desktop and eBay APIs

"As product manager for eBay Desktop, Alan Lewis relies on the same web APIs that eBay makes available to all developers. In this edition of the Bungee Line, Alan tells us about what the eBay Desktop is, how it came about, and various details about eBay’s developer program and web APIs. We ask Alan about eBay’s position Oauth and on open source."

Toby Segaran on “Programming Collective Intelligence”

"Since the publication of his O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran has become well noted for his ability to explain easily-understandable algorithms for the kind of deeply complex problems involved in social applications. Toby joins Alex and Ted to discuss some of the high-level concepts that he tackles in his book."

Jon Aizen of Dapper.net

"Jon Aizen joins Alex and Ted to explain how Dapper.net provides a no-fee tool for making almost any structured web site data accessible via a REST API. In a past life, Jon was involved in creating The Internet Archive. Jon also helps the Bungee Line introduce romantic intrigue into the podcast.

Punditry Alert! At the end of this show, Ted and Alex speculate a bit about Android, Google’s open source mobile device platform, the Apache License, and whether Robert Love is involved. Please consider this as another demonstration of Ted’s idiocy, brought to you by the Bungee Line."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 2)

"In part 2 of our interview with Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, Alex and Ted ask Jeff about Flexible Payment Service, virtual user group meetings in Second Life, the Startup Project, and pry at Jeff’s views of possible futures of technologies that developers might anticipate."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 1)

"Developer evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr tells Alex and Ted about how he became a native Amazonian, his recent visit to “The Business of API’s Conference,” and a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services, including: Mechanical Turk, EC2, and S3. Additionally, Jeff explains the newly announced S3 Service Level Agreement*."

OAuth Podcast

alexbarnett — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:45:00 GMT

Chris Messina (aka FactoryJoe), Larry Halff (of Ma.gnolia) and Eran Hammer-Lahav accepted our invitation to join Ted and me and discuss OAuth in our latest Bungee Line podcast.

What is OAuth? From OAuth Getting Started - Part 1, here's the jist of it:

"OAuth allows you to share your private resources (photos, videos, contact list, bank accounts) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out your username and password.

...Users don’t care about protocols and standards – they care about better experience with enhanced privacy and security. This is exactly what OAuth sets to achieve. With web services on the rise, people expect their services to work together in order to accomplish something new. Instead of using a single site for all their online needs, users use one site for their photos, another for videos, another for email, and so on. No one site can do everything better. In order to enable this kind of integration, sites need to access the user resources from other sites, and those are many times protected (private family photos, work documents, bank records)."

Adam Kalsey, summarizes it well:

"OAuth aims to standardize the way in which different consumer systems share data. The goal is to allow a person to give an application access to do some things on your accounts at other sites, but not everything. It’s role-based authorization for APIs."

OAuth is a big idea, but is it a "solution looking for a problem to solve"? I don't think so. The problem for end users today is real, i.e. authorizing one service to access your data by another service for use by the first service, securely and with control. For developers wanting to develop apps and services that create value through the use of customer data stored on other services, there is no standardized means set of protocols to lean on. Instead, developers need to waste time learning a new way for their app to be authorized to do so for each service provider, having to jump through the various specific means and idiosyncrasies of each service.

The current way is broken - too many means to the same end, for end-users, for developers leveraging service APIs and for the service providers themselves wanting to extend their services through web APIs.

OAuth is getting the attention from a number of people and services such as Six Apart and others ("Digg, Jaiku, Flickr, Ma.gnolia, Plaxo, Pownce, Twitter, and hopefully Google, Yahoo, and others soon to follow") have committed to run with it. This is good news, but we need to get the word out there and help make developers' lives easier. So, go listen to first OAuth podcast and evangelize OAuth!

Topics covered:

Background on Chris, Larry, and Eran
What problem is OAuth trying to solve?
What is the current identity landscape - what are the alternatives, and why is OAuth a better way for all?
How does OAuth work, who should use it?
What's the development experience like?
What's the end-user experience like?
What's the relationship between OAuth and OpenID?
Where is OAuth today?
What will it take for OAuth to succeed?
Who's backing OAuth - adopters?

Podcast with Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! - Part 1

alexbarnett — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 02:47:00 GMT

The latest Bungee Line podcast is up - this time an interview with Jeremy Zawodny, an 8-year-veteran of Yahoo! and currently a member of the Yahoo Developer Network team.

Lots covered, so much so that we had to break up the interview into two parts, Part 1 and er, Part two.

In Part 1 we discussed:

Yahoo!'s Zimbra acquisition
the Yahoo! Mail Web Services APIs
Jeremy's take on the Business Week article discussing Yahoo! Openness
the fruits of Yahoo! Hack Days and the Internal Yahoo! Hack Days initiative
Yahoo! Geocoding API
Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library
Yahoo!'s AJAX API for Maps

Part 2, we talk about about some of the recent topics Jeremy's been covering on his blog...will let you you know when it's up - in a week or so.

Podcast with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com

alexbarnett — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:38:00 GMT

A couple of weeks back John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com joined me and Ted for a chat to discuss the state of web APIs and the API trends as he sees them.

We've now recorded the conversation and published as the first of a newly launched Bungee Line podcast series.

Topic covered include Facebook APIs, Amazon's recently launched Flexible Payment Service (FPS) , Google Base, Microsoft's Astoria and relational-data-in-the-cloud programming models and services, SaaS models and API SLAs, REST vs SOAP, "Closed is Still the Old Closed" and plenty more.

Thanks to John for his time.

Astoria podcast - Jon Udell interviews Pablo Castro

alexbarnett — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:13:00 GMT

Here's something I've been looking forward to for a while - Jon Udell interviewing Pablo Castro on the topic of Astoria.

After the interview Jon wrote:

"I’m not even close to being an expert in the underlying data access technologies, including ADO.NET, the Entity Data Model, and LINQ, so parts of the discussion quite frankly went over my head. Nor am I yet familiar with the tooling that’s required to wrap this kind of services layer around a plain data source. But I’m 100% clear that it’s a good idea, and a great example of RESTful web services — a book that Pablo Castro says is “required reading” for members of the Astoria team."

If you like the sound of Astoria keep an eye on Pablo's blog.

Scalability at Amazon (notes)

alexbarnett — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 13:17:00 GMT

Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com spoke at Supernova 2006 on the topic of Scalability at Amazon and the talk is available as a podcast at IT Conversations (thanks to James Governor for the link).

I made some notes as I listened this morning and thought I'd share:

A services business. Amazon.com is a platform. NBA.com is an application built on Amazon.com
If your online business is successful and you experience a 1000-fold increase in traffic you want your site to stay up! Building, operating and maintaining infrastructure that can be ‘always on’ and scale and is hard. Wouldn't it be nice to pay-as-you-go, rather than investing your capital up-front?
You need infrastructure that can incrementally scale. In 1995 Amazon.com had 1m books in its catalogue. That was the beginning. Now it has 35 different stores, not just books. Growing our business is not just a matter of buying bigger databases. Amazon has gone beyond that point.
Internally, Amazon is now a completely service oriented architecture (SOA).
A single Amazon.com page is made up of 100 to 150 individual web services.
What does 'scalability' actually mean? It means that if you add resources to the system the performance needs to increase proportional to the resources that you’ve added. Many of the academic algorithms don’t work like this. Many of the two-phase commit traditional transactional stuff doesn’t work like this. In general, the load on the network relevant to the application increases more than the magnitude of n. It doesn’t mean just handling more requests, it also means handling larger datasets. It needs to be able to add nodes to the system to achieve fault tolerance. It means that if you add bigger nodes you should be able to take advantage of more processing and more memory. It means that the more bigger nodes you add, the fewer people you require to actually maintain them and that as you add more nodes that system should not become more unstable. It means being more cost effective.
Target came to us and asked 'we really love what you've done with Amazon - can you do that for us?' Our interaction with Target made us realize we could become a platform rather than just a single application. Different sets of Amazon Enterprise web services: content generation and discoverability; identity; inventory management; fulfillment and customer service; order processing, payment and fraud protection. You can mix and mash these services.
Those services that are consumed by partners are guaranteed as 'always on'.
Cost effectiveness is scale.
Unexpected uses and applications built on top of our web services that we couldn't predict.
Our goal was expose all the atomic pieces that Amazon was really good at and to do that at scale and as web services.

Call me on Blog Talk Radio

alexbarnett — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 02:22:00 GMT

I'm on Blog Talk Radio on Wednesday night, Dec 13 at 6pm PST / 9pm ET (Thur 2am GMT) and will be interviewed on the Alan Levy Show.

It's a live streaming show with phone-ins, the Dial In Number (347) 677-0649. I have no idea what we're going to talk about (just the way I like it!), so you could help out by calling in and asking a few questions...

btw, If you can't listen live, it will be archived.

Hope to hear from you!

Alex Barnett Podcasts

admin — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 19:58:00 GMT

Alex Barnett Podcasts - I like podcasting, here are the links to them.

2008 - Podcasts for the Bungee Line

Nate Bowler, CTO of @Task, July 20 2008

@task (or AtTask) is a Utah-based tech company providing a comprehensive, web-based project and portfolio-management package delivered in both a SaaS and on-premise model with a very rich web API set. We talked with Nate about the evolution of their web services design and @task's future product plans in light of the market opportunities presented by the availability of the increasing number of 3rd party programmable web services."

Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO of MindTouch, June 20 2008

"Prior to founding MindTouch and Steve worked in advanced strategies at Microsoft focusing on distributed systems and web services. We talked with Steve about MindTouch platform, its rich set of web APIs and the implications of a programmable wiki. But MindTouch goes beyond providing open source wiki collaboration and content management - it's delivering a leading edge application integration and development platform called MindTouch Deki. Michael Coté, an industry analyst with RedMonk (analyst firm) picked up on both the podcast interview and news of the latest release of MinTouch Deki."

Update from John Musser of ProgrammableWeb, April 14 2008

"ProgrammableWeb’s John Musser returns to the Bungee Line to give us an update on the API action of early 2008. Alex and Ted apologize for the unfortunate audio treatment to the Bungee sound in the previous episode, promising “never again!” In related news, check out the new intro music for our “Cool Web Tips” segment."

Developer Community Management with Jono Bacon, March 14 2008

"There are few developer communities as large and distributed as that of Ubuntu, perhaps the most popular brand of GNU/Linux distributions available today. Jono Bacon is the first official community manager for Ubuntu. He joins to tell us what he has learned in his 18 months of working with this vast and disparate community."

Social Design with Joshua Porter, Jan 30 2008

"Joshua Porter is a usability consultant, web designer, researcher and blogger specializing in the art of social design for the web whose experience includes five years at world-renowned User Interface Engineering. Josh’s blog (Bokardo.com) is a must-read favorite for UI and web designers and is finishing up his first book, to be published in the next few weeks (details below)."

Alan Lewis on eBay Desktop and eBay APIs, January 15 2008

"As product manager for eBay Desktop, Alan Lewis relies on the same web APIs that eBay makes available to all developers. In this edition of the Bungee Line, Alan tells us about what the eBay Desktop is, how it came about, and various details about eBay’s developer program and web APIs. We ask Alan about eBay’s position Oauth and on open source."

2007 - Podcasts for the Bungee Line

Toby Segaran on “Programming Collective Intelligence”, December 13 2007

"Since the publication of his O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran has become well noted for his ability to explain easily-understandable algorithms for the kind of deeply complex problems involved in social applications. Toby joins Alex and Ted to discuss some of the high-level concepts that he tackles in his book."

Jon Aizen of Dapper.net, November 17 2007

"Jon Aizen joins Alex and Ted to explain how Dapper.net provides a no-fee tool for making almost any structured web site data accessible via a REST API. In a past life, Jon was involved in creating The Internet Archive. Jon also helps the Bungee Line introduce romantic intrigue into the podcast.

Punditry Alert! At the end of this show, Ted and Alex speculate a bit about Android, Google’s open source mobile device platform, the Apache License, and whether Robert Love is involved. Please consider this as another demonstration of Ted’s idiocy, brought to you by the Bungee Line."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 2), October 7 2007

"In part 2 of our interview with Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, Alex and Ted ask Jeff about Flexible Payment Service, virtual user group meetings in Second Life, the Startup Project, and pry at Jeff’s views of possible futures of technologies that developers might anticipate."

OAuth Podcast, with Chris Messina (aka FactoryJoe), Larry Halff (of Ma.gnolia) and Eran Hammer-Lahav, November 3 2007

"OAuth is a big idea, but is it a "solution looking for a problem to solve"? I don't think so. The problem for end users today is real, i.e. authorizing one service to access your data by another service for use by the first service, securely and with control. For developers wanting to develop apps and services that create value through the use of customer data stored on other services, there is no standardized means set of protocols to lean on. Instead, developers need to waste time learning a new way for their app to be authorized to do so for each service provider, having to jump through the various specific means and idiosyncrasies of each service."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 1), October 18 2007

"Developer evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr tells Alex and Ted about how he became a native Amazonian, his recent visit to “The Business of API’s Conference,” and a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services, including: Mechanical Turk, EC2, and S3. Additionally, Jeff explains the newly announced S3 Service Level Agreement*."

Interview with Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! - Part 1 and Part 2, October 1 2007

Part 1

"Yahoo!'s Zimbra acquisition, the Yahoo! Mail Web Services APIs, Jeremy's take on the Business Week article discussing Yahoo! Openness, the fruits of Yahoo! Hack Days and the Internal Yahoo! Hack Days initiative, Yahoo! Geocoding API, Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library, Yahoo!'s AJAX API for Maps"

Part 2

"What Mash lets you do, Hadoop and Yahoo!'s formal involvement, the WebOS meme, something Jeremy feels strongly about :-) That was fun. Watch out for the discussion on "Meta-API Providers"... More APIs...From b2c APIs to b2b APIs, plus Pipes and democratizing the mashupshpere"

Interview with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com, September 19 2007

"Topics covered include Facebook APIs, Amazon's recently launched Flexible Payment Service (FPS) , Google Base, Microsoft's Astoria and relational-data-in-the-cloud programming models and services, SaaS models and API SLAs, REST vs SOAP, "Closed is Still the Old Closed" and plenty more."

-

Older podcasts:

Search & Enjoy! (Podcast) The Power of Search and Recommendation, June 6 2006

"Speakers from Microsoft, Blinkx and Last.fm discussed issues of content regarding search, recommendation, the semantic web and the ownership of data in the Web 2.0 era at Content 2.0 on 6th June 2006."

-

Microformats Podcast, March 31, 2006

"Here's a great podcast for you. All about microformats..."

Guests: Tantek Çelik, Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare. I think it's safe to say these guys know a thing or two about the web and microformats.

-

OPML Podcast, March 10, 2006

"It's all about the draft OPML 2.0 spec and a few other things thrown in such as structured blogging, OPML tools, namespaces and microformats."

Guests: Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea.

--

OPML and Reading Lists Podcast with Danny Ayers and Adam Green, Feb 12, 2006

"Last year Dave Winer started to push the idea of Reading Lists for RSS. More recently, the idea of Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing (or Grazing Lists / Glists) has been kicking around.

Its likely that Reading Lists support will become a common feature of Feed Readers / Aggregators."

Guests: Danny Ayers, Adam Green and Joshua Porter

--

Attention podcast : Attention with Steve Gillmor, Feb 08, 2006

"Steve has been leading Attention conversation for some time now. In 2003 he, along with David Sifry (CEO of Technorati), initiated the attention.xml efforts and has since taken on the role as president of the non-profit Attention Trust."

Guests: Steve Gillmor and Joshua Porter

--

MSN Search Champs podcast - Privacy conversation Jan 26 2006

"I attended the MSN Search Champs today....and what a day. Given the recent news and concerns around the data MSN Search, Yahoo and AOL provided to the government, there was a session set up where the 57 bloggers / online experts at MSN Search Champ were invited to discuss the topic with senior MSN management (Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi and VP Chris Payne)."

Guests: Fred Oliveira, Dion Hinchcliffe, Joshua Porter, Chris Pirillo, Thomas Vander Wal and Brady Forrest.

--

Attention podcast: RSS feedreaders and aggregators Jan 22, 2006

"I asked two of the RSS industry's leading lights to join me for a call and share their perspective on the question of where Attention is going with respect to RSS feedreaders and aggregators: Nick Bradbury creator FeedDemon, part of Newsgator (Nick also developed Homesite - sold to Macromedia - and Topstyle) and Kevin Burton of Tailrank (also co-founder Rojo)."

Guests: Nick Bradbury, Joshua Porter and Kevin Burton

--

Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger, Dec 16, 2005

"You might have heard of the Structured Blogging initiative announced earlier this week by Marc Canter and others...there was certainly plenty of buzz and reaction to the news, but not all the reaction was rosy."

Guests: Marc Canter and Joshua Porter

--

Identity Podcast with Kim Cameron and Dick Hardt, Dec 09, 2005

"A couple of weeks ago Joshua and I had a conversation about attention data (as podcasts).

In that conversation we kept touching on the topic of online identities and their management, so we thought we'd invite two pioneers of the identity space, Dick Hardt and Kim Cameron, to a podcast session and discuss how they saw the connections between these two related topics: attention and identity."

Guests: Dick Hardt, Kim Cameron and Joshua Porter

--

OPML = Attention Data, Attention Engines and Tailrank, Nov 12, 2005

"Although we met briefly last week, Kevin Burton and I didn't manage to get enough time to discuss some of the things on our mind at the time, so we got a Skype call together and posted it as a podcast (.mp3, 42mb).

We focused the discussion around what he calls Meme Engines and I call Attention Engines, Tailrank (Kevin's latest project), OPML, RSS and Attention.xml"

Guests: Kevin Burton

--

Web 2.0 podcast, July 01, 2005

"Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb and I had a Skype chat this evening and recorded the call Talked about Web 2.0, attention.xml, a bit about RSS, APIs and more."

Guest: Richard MacManus

-

Attention podcast with Joshua Porter, Nov 26, 2005

"About OPML, Attention, and empowering people."

Guest: Joshua Porter

--

Search & Enjoy! (Podcast) The Power of Search and Recommendation

admin — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 20:44:00 GMT

"Speakers from Microsoft, Blinkx and Last.fm discussed issues of content regarding search, recommendation, the semantic web and the ownership of data in the Web 2.o era at Content 2.0 on 6th June 2006."

I was on the panel with Matthew Ogle of LastFM and Surunga Chandratillake of Blinx TV, two UK companies doing some very cool stuff in the area of collaborative filtering as content recommendation systems.

FORUM: Search & Enjoy! The Power of Search and Recommendation
Featuring Suranga Chandratillake of Blinkx, Alex Barnett of Microsoft, and Matthew Ogle of Last fm, chaired by Mike Grehan of Marketsmart Interactive
http://www.archive.org/download/content2pointzero/07-c2pz-007.mp3
Filesize: 36.2 meg
Length: 1.15.17

You can listen to the podcast here and a detailed write up here.

I was invited to discuss Attention and My Data. The word Attention (with a capital 'A') had been mentioned a number of times during the day and I took the opportunity to define the concept as I understood it. The My Data notion combined the Attention Data idea with topic of customer data ownership and its portability. I asked both Matthew and Surunga if they were thinking along these lines and they both confirmed that they absolutely were.

Matthew explained how they are planning how LastFM users will be able to export their playlist and associated metadata away with them (which tracks they listen to, how long, times of day, frequency etc) and plug them into other services if that what users want to do. I loved that.

Surunga said he also support this 'my data' approach in the context of Pico but pointed out some of the privacy issues associated with allowing this level of flexibility.

He also made a great point re: the wishlist analogy I've used as attention data. I had talked through the scenario where a user could take their wishlist from Amazon and plug into another booksite, such as Barnes and Noble online to get pricing on those books and recommendations based on the wishlist. Surunga suggested that we should be able to use that same wishlist in any service that was capable of recommendation - the point being that the books you read would be a great pointer to the kind of video, podcasts, blogs and audio content that my be of interest to you.

I really enjoyed the session, starting off my piece by explaining that I was at the conference under false pretences - I wasn't there to pitch Microsoft products of MSN Search or the new raft of Live services, but that I had been invited to the conference because I had been blogging and talking about Attention and the 'my data' stuff and the organizers liked what I wrote. I later found out from the organizers that Microsoft UK pr team had seemed bemused as too why I had been invited to talk and not one of their senior MSN EMEA VP superstars. The power of blogs indeed...

OPML Podcast

admin — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:30:00 GMT

Here's an OPMLish podcast for you, recorded tonight with me, Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea.

It's all about the draft OPML 2.0 spec and a few other things thrown in such as structured blogging, OPML tools, namespaces and microformats.

We had Adam along today as he's been experimenting with OPML in recent months at his Darwinian Web blog. John Tropea also joined us...John runs the Library clips blog where he has been documenting, extensively, the various OPML experiments and tools that have emerged over the last year.

As usual, show notes below. Enjoy!

The podcast (.mp3, 58 min, 13mb) can be downloaded here, show notes below.

OPML 2.0 Podcast - Alex Barnett, Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea

Intros
On the Dave Winer's announcement of the OPML 2.0 Draft - Good? bad? ugly?
Data types within OPML (08:30)
Namespaces in OPML (11:30)
Attention, Attention.xml, namespaces and OPML (13:30)
David on Adam, Adam on OPML and Annotated Reading Lists (19:45)
Structured data within OPML, , Grazr, and Microsoft with OPML (24:15)
OPML Tools: Bitty Browser, Grazr mini, Optimal OPML Browser, OPod and OPML Renderer (30:00)
My Bio as an Outline, The Software I Use and Declarative Living (34:30)
OPML, Structured Blogging and Microformats and Namespaces aren't mutually exclusive (36:45)
What are biggest problems are technologies solving? (42:45)
Michael Arrington's Edgeio, structured blogging, my data and distributed data (45:00)
OPML Camp and who's coming (54:30)

Tags: OPML RSS, attention.xml, microformats, Attention, structured blogging, technology, web podcast,

Microformats Podcast

admin — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:26:00 GMT

Microformats Podcast

Here's a great podcast for you. All about microformats...

Joining me are Tantek Çelik, Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare. I think it's safe to say these guys know a thing or two about the web and microformats.

As usual, show notes and link to download below.

Enjoy.

Background

Last week I met with Tantek Çelik and the Mix06 event in Las Vegas where he, Marc Canter and Joshua Allen organized a Structured Blogging and Microformats 'birds of a feather' non-official event after the main sessions were over.

Tantek and I met up the next day and agreed we should get a podcast together on the topic of microformats. I asked him to invite a couple of others along for the call and he arranged for Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare to were kind enough to join us, two people who have also been intimately involved with the development of this exciting new area of microformats.

The Guests

Tantek Çelik is CTO at Technorati. Prior to his current role, Tantek was representative to the W3C for Microsoft where he also helped lead the development of Internet Explorer for Macintosh. He also spent four year at Apple and has been instrumental (along with others) in making microformats what is today.

Dan Connolly is Technical Staff at W3C, where he edited the HTML 2.0 specification with Tim Berners-Lee, was chair of the W3C Working Group that produced HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0 and collaborated with Jon Bosak to form the W3C XML Working Group and produce the W3C XML 1.0 Recommendation. Dan is also very involved with the W3C's Semantic Web initiatives (RDF, OWL and SPARQL). Dan blogs too.

Rohit Khare is Director of CommerceNet Labs, a non-profit investigating and promoting decentralized electronic commerce. Rohit started KnowNow in 2000 after working at the W3C during the 90's and is today working with the microformats folks as part of his work at CommereNet Labs.

Huge thanks to Tantek, Dan and Rohit for their time.

So, on to the podcast (under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License)...

Download

Microformats Podcast - (51 mins, .mp3, 12mb)

Show Notes

Introduction
What are microformats and history? (5:30)
The 'we' in microformats: microformats community, wiki, mailing lists (10:30)
Why bother? What's in it for whom? What do we have to gain with microformats? (13:30)
- Less effort, more benefits
Scenarios - the soccer season (21:00)
The schema design philosophy - Microformats are based on real world examples (26:50)
The evolution of microformats (30:00)
- If there a hundred microformats, something has gone wrong
- Widely adopted Link microformats: (rel tag).
- Compound microformats: hCard implementations (sharing contact info) and hCalendar implementations (sharing schedules)
- Experimentation - Remixed microformats: hReview and Listing examples
- Making the simple things easy
Interop with other formats (34:00)
Ray Ozzie's Live Clipboard demo (screencasts) and microformats - the cut and paste (semantic) web (37:00)
- Microformats-REST
- Pasting 'live' and RSS-enabled network pipe system
- Tantek's Updates - Live syndication and packaging of data formats
Getting the semantic web. What does it mean? What does it enable? (46:00)
- Microformats - an onramp onto the semantic web future
Final thoughts (48:30)
End (51:00)

Find out more about microformats:

microformats community and wiki
join the microformats mailing lists

Tags: microformats, semantic-web, technology, web, podcast, web 2.0

Reading Lists and OPML Podcast

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 19:33:00 GMT

Last year Dave Winer started to push the idea of Reading Lists for RSS. More recently, the idea of Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing (or Grazing Lists / Glists) has been kicking around.

Its likely that Reading Lists support will become a common feature of Feed Readers / Aggregators.

I think this space is getting interesting, so does Joshua Porter. So we thought we'd invite two people who've been giving plenty of thought to this area, Danny Ayers (I can spell his surname correctly these days) and Adam Green to join us for a podcast on the topic (.mp3 43 mins, 11mb) . We also invite James Corbett, who's been doing a great deal with Readings Lists and Feed Grazing, but unfortunately could not join us.

I've been following Danny Ayers' blog (Raw) for some time. Danny is a Semantic Web developer and technical author and co-author of Beginning RSS and ATOM Programming (which you'll find at practically every bookstore that has a Computers / Software section). We touched on the Semantic Web in the podcast.

Adam Green started programming in 1980, is co-founder and CTO at Andover.Net (later acquired by VA Linux in 2000 - hey Adam, buy me a beer...;-) and now a full time technical blogger at Darwinian Web. Thanks to Danny and Adam for their time today.

As usual, notes and links to related stuff below. Enjoy.

Reading Lists (OPML) podcast : Danny Ayers and Adam Green with Joshua Porter and Alex Barnett

download (.mp3 43 mins, 11mb)

.Notes:

What are Reading Lists?
Why are we getting excited about Reading Lists (04:23)
Dynamic Reading Lists (06:50)
Feed Grazing and River of Feeds model (08:30)
Danny on OPML - here under false pretences
Feed Readers as Data Browsers (12;20)
Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing based on Attention data - Attention intersection has to come soon (14:15)
Dynamic Reading Lists and Grazing Lists are the same thing (but different) (16:35)
Hierarchies, feed lists in RDF and the Semantic Web (Let's re-invent Gopher!) (18:50)
OPML Sampling: J Wynia's OPML Sampler (23:30)
Reading Lists as programmed content by others - Top 10 Sources (25:00??)
Dynamic Reading Lists as Attention-based recommendation system (27:30)
The Web as a data web, Semantic Web
RSS readers/aggregators as Semantic Data Web browser (SPARQL / RDF) (33:00)
OPML, RSS, Reading Lists and simplicity (35:30)
Where's the Semantic Web Demo? (37:30)
Summing up (41:00)
Bonus links: It's going to be a big year for OPML and It's going to be a big year for HTML.
End (45:30)

(I didn't cut the bit at the end of the session as I got a chance to ask Danny about Italy and Derbyshire - these two places rarely mentioned in the same sentence so I thought I'd keep for posterity ;-)

Update: Joshua has blogged it.

Tags: RSS, OPML, Reading Lists, Semantic Web, RDF, Attention, Web 2.0, podcast, web, tech

Attention Podcast with Steve Gillmor

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:37:00 GMT

When Joshua Porter and I started our non-formal podcasting efforts a while ago, we made list of the people we'd want to have on our 'show' and talk to.

High on both our lists was Steve Gillmor. So we were thrilled when he accepted our invitation to join us for this podcast (mp3. 58 minutes, 14mb) and discuss his Attention ideas with us.

Steve has been leading Attention conversation for some time now. In 2003 he, along with David Sifry (CEO of Technorati), initiated the attention.xml efforts and has since taken on the role as president of the non-profit Attention Trust.

He is also a contributing editor of ZDNet and host of the podcast series The Gillmor Gang.

I remember when I first came across his Gillmor Gang show while it was originally hosted at IT Conversations. I was in heaven - people talking about technology stuff I was really interested in...I've been hooked ever since. So it was little weird doing the show tonight - it felt like I was listening in on one of his shows and had to remind myself that I had to talk too ;-)

Anyway, the podcast we recorded tonight was a cracker. Steve's level of thinking on Attention topic is deep and knowledgeable - it was fun trying to keeping up with him. Thanks to Steve for his time.

Attention podcast : Attention with Steve Gillmor, Joshua Porter and Alex Barnett

download: mp3. 58 minutes, 14mb

Notes:

What is Attention and Attention Data? (2:45)
The Attention Market (9:20)
Communicating Attention (12:00)
Attention data recording and feedback - Eric Horvitz - Model of Attention and Marc Smith - AURA: The Advance User Resource Annotation System (14:00)
The ROI on Attention Data (16:20)
Defining the Attention Problem (17:30)
Infinite information and finite time (18:30)
RSS the Attention enabler (22:50)
Monetizing Attention data (27:10)
The cycle of RSS consumption
Attention for the masses and the edge cases (35:00)
Attention value exchange and Root Markets - (38:40)
Being marketed information (43:00)
Getting my data in and out 46:11
On Gestures, Gesture streams and GestureBank (47:50)
Summing up (53:00)
End (58:19)

Update: Joshua has posted his thoughts on our time with Steve.

Related: My Attention writings

Tags: Attention, RSS, attentiontrust, attention.xml, podcast, web 2.0