Social Clouds, XML 10 Years Old, and Honourable Mentions

alexbarnett — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:51:00 GMT

The Social Cloud

Kevin Marks is a software engineer at Google, was principal engineer for Technorati and one of the founders of Microformats. In this video Kevin talks about the big picture re: the phenomenon of online social networks in a presentation called The Social Cloud. Great backgrounder to the topic. More Lift videos here.

My Open ID?

Chris Brogen asked Question about OpenID:

"I’ve chosen to use the Wordpress.com installation of OpenID. I tied it to my Wordpress.com account and have so far used it in only two places. I’m thinking that every time I offer up an OpenID, I’ll point to that one. So far so good, right? ( To get up to speed on OpenID, go here).

What happens if Wordpress.com folds? What happens if they change their mind and start charging me, or I leave them for someone else, or whatever?"

Good question, to which you'll find multiple useful answers provided in the post's comments.

Semantic web enablement

The XML spec first public draft was November '96, the final release as a 1.0 was Feb 1998. XML was ten years old Feb 10, 2008. Tim Bray provides a history of the people involved and the events leading up to the birth of XML in his XML People.

Semantic news discovery

Silobreaker "provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user."

I need to play more to find out how useable / useful this service is, but I like the idea.

Honourable mention

RIA Weekly #06 - What’s Behind Code-Behind, JavaFX with Adobe tools, Microsoft/Yahoo!, and other acquisitions. The Redmonk podcast with Michael Coté and Ryan Stewart (Adobe). Topics include Kevin Lynch as new Adobe CTO, JavaFX vs. Silverlight vs. Air, code-behind annoyance, Google's Android, and the Oracle / BEA deal. I get an honourable mention on the show.

Random but good

Visual Music Instruments - via Kevin Kelly. No manual required, but it would probably help.

Redmonk, Guinness and random stuff

alexbarnett — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:58:00 GMT

In San Francisco last night, catching up with the Redmonk folks celebrating their 5th birthday (thanks to James for inviting me). Caught up with some industry legends - Steve Gillmor, Chris Messina, Dan Farber and Ryan Stewart, and made some new friends there too, e.g. Ed Hermannn - the guy who created Wii interface into an SAP app). .The Guinness is good at the Shields.

Right, so here's a bunch of random stuff that's been capturing my attention the last week.

Firstly - weird:

Synthetic Biology: The conclusion of the very beginning
"The question is not so much whether synthetic biology will remake society, but who will be in control when it does."
Contact Lens or Computer Display?
Augmented reality - here we come.
Jedi Ginsu Knife Brings Out the Chef/Jedi in You [Lightsabers]
I want one of these.

Next - wow:

Amazon Web Services Make Earnings News
“Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), up more than 30,000 from last quarter."
Amazon Earnings Call Details: Web Services Use Up More Bandwidth Than Amazon.com
"startups and other companies using Amazon’s Web-scale computing infrastructure now bigger collectively than Amazon."

Next, next - quite right:

YouTubers given share of ad cash
Share the love (and the cash).

~~Next, next, next~~ - useful:

UI-patterns.com
via ksharkey: "The purpose of this site is over time to fill some of the gaps - especially by providing code examples as to how how the different patterns can be implemented: to join theory with practice."
Short Bits: CableCARD, Beta Testing
links to everything you wanted to know (and can never know) about the nightmare that is CableCard (I need to angrily rant on this topic one day)

Alex Barnett blog : redmonk

Social Clouds, XML 10 Years Old, and Honourable Mentions

Redmonk, Guinness and random stuff