April 10, 2005
@ 04:47 PM

There are some words that when I read in prose, such as blog posts, immediately let me know the author is either a pretentious windbag or just plain clueless. The most recent addition to this list is Web 2.0. For an example of what I mean, read Technorati, Bloglines, and The Economics of Feeds.

I suspect a lot of the people yacking about Web 2.0 now are the same ones who were gushing about the New Economy a few short years ago.

Despite my dislike of the term, it is likely I'll be at the Web 2.0 Conference this fall.

*sigh*


 

Categories: Ramblings

Jonathan Pincus contacted me a few days ago about being part of a birds of a feather session on "20% Time" at the 15th Annual Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy. It will be held at the Westin in Seattle at 9PM on Thursday, April 14th.

It seems there'll be someone from Google there as well which should interesting. I'd like to hear how Google handled some of the issues raised in my post Some Thoughts and Questions About Google 20% Time.


 

Categories: Technology

I saw an link to an interesting site in Robert Scoble's post Paul remixes Google Maps and Craig's List in interesting new way  where he writes

What happens when you mix Google Maps with Craig's List? Paul Rademacher shows us.

This is a cautionary tale for Microsoft: them who has the best API's will get used in the most interesting new ways.

Like Ballmer says: developers, developers, developers, developers, developers...

Actually this has little to do with APIs given that there is neither an official Craig's List API nor is there a Google Maps API. This looks more like a combination of HTML screen scraping for getting the Craig's List data and good old fashioned reverse engineering. I suspect Paul didn't have to do much reverse engineering in the Google Maps case because Engadget already published an article called HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map which shows exactly how to build your own applications on top of Google Maps.

Despite that this is definitely a cool hack.

This shows one of the interesting side effects of building an AJAX site. You basically have to create an API for all the Javascript callbacks from the web browser back to the server. Once you do that, anyone else can call this API as well. I doubt that the Google folks anticipated that there would be this much interest in the API the browser uses the talk to the Google Maps server.

PS: Is anyone other reader of Scoble's blog irritated by the fact that he can't point to anything on the Web without throwing some Microsoft spin on it?


 

Categories: Technology

I just stumbled on a post by Phil Gyford entitled With great audiences where he discusses whether bloggers have a responsibility to do more fact checking once they grow to having a large audience. Phil writes

With this greater audience comes a greater responsibility. If 100,000 people are reading your words you need to be more certain about what you say than if it’s just for a bunch of mates. I can’t help feeling that Boing Boing has stepped past the hazy mark where it can get away with publishing off-the-cuff posts about events in the world without spending some of the time and money we assume those ads are generating on checking facts. Let’s look at a couple of examples that might have benefited from more research.

In January there was a post about a man who was arrested for attempting to hack a tsunami appeal website. For Boing Boing the juicy story wasn’t that the man was arrested (as reported by BBC News a week earlier) but that he was arrested for using an unusual browser, which the company managing the donations mistook for a hacking attempt. It’s a great story, but Boing Boing’s basis for this report comes from a source on an unnamed mailing list. Cory’s introduction to the mailing list quote reports the event as fact, not rumour, and this no doubt contributed to hundreds of other weblogs in turn reporting the event as fact.

Leaving aside the mindless gullibility of all these other webloggers, when readers start assuming what you post is fact this is probably a sign that you should be checking those facts a little more.

The second example is Boing Boing’s post about a high-school principal who “banned blogging” because it “isn’t educational”. Part of the blame lies with the source story at the Rutland Herald whose over-eager sub-editors misleadingly headlined the story “High school bans blogging”. In fact the school banned a single website and the principal simply issued a sensible warning about children weblogging — as with any activity online, kids should be careful with the information they make public.

But Boing Boing got carried away with the newspaper’s headline, repeating it in theirs even though a cursory read of the newspaper article reveals that no one “banned blogging”. The newspaper claims the principal doesn’t think blogging is educational, and Cory could certainly have criticised him for this alone, although it would make for a less dramatic post. The repetition of the lie about the principal banning blogging, rather than his apparent opinion, is possibly also what prompted a reader to suggest people should email the principal to complain.

A professional publication should have called the school to verify the story before simply republishing it. Otherwise the publication would, perhaps, end up criticised on Boing Boing like the Indian news agencies that blindly repeated a hoax in February.

I found Phil's post via Clay Shirky's post Banning blogging, 'Toothing, and Yoz. Clay Shirky seems to agree with Phil and goes one step further to admonish bloggers who simply echo what they read on the Web without applying critical thinking to what they are reading. He also points out that Boing Boing is not alone in this behavior by writing

My employer is a victim of the half truths and rumors Slashdot spreads on an almost weekly basis. There are lots of stories about Microsoft that are now part of the IT culture which are mainly rumors started on Slashdot. A few months ago the MSN Spaces team was the target of a flood of critical posts in the blogosphere after a misinterpretation of the terms of use for the service were posted to Boing Boing. This doesn't seem much different to me than supermarket tabloids that are always reporting rumors about  Brad & Jen, Nick & Jessica or J-Lo & P.Diddy. 

The most interesting response to Phil's post I've seen is Danah Boyd's post in defense of BoingBoing (or why i'm not a journalist) which argues that Cory and Xeni (Boing Boing editors) are simply blogging as a form of self expression and the fact that they have a large readership should not be considered a responsibility by them.

Maybe I'm just a corny comic book geek but I've always felt "With great power, comes great responsibility". To each his own, I guess.


 

Categories: Ramblings

April 7, 2005
@ 02:50 PM

The final version of MSN Messenger 7.0 is out.

You can catch the offical word from the press release Global Availability of MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces Connects People Around the World. Highlights below

 MSN Messenger Makes Instant Messaging More Dynamic Than Ever

Globally, more than 155 million customers rely on the MSN Messenger service each month to connect with their friends and family and, collectively, exchange more than 2.5 billion instant messages (IMs) every day. MSN Messenger 7.0 is available today worldwide in 26 languages and introduces improved video, voice and personalization features that allow people to communicate in more meaningful ways than ever. Available for download at http://messenger.msn.com, MSN Messenger 7.0 has added new features since its December 2004 public beta release, including these:

  • Free PC-to-PC video conversation. The new, free MSN Video Conversation service,1 powered by Logitech technology, connects people with one-click synchronized audio and video, and offers full-screen video viewing - the next best thing to really being there.
  • Ability to talk over the Internet for free. MSN Messenger 7.0 includes higher-quality audio functionality so customers can enjoy free,2 real-time PC-to-PC voice conversations with friends and family around the world.
  • PC-to-mobile communications. Customers will soon be able to stay in touch by sending IMs to friends and family who aren't on their PC. Customers in selected countries will be able to send SMS text messages from MSN Messenger to mobile phones - even if the person they are sending to doesn't have an MSN Messenger account - and the mobile user can reply to the MSN Messenger user.3 This feature will be available in multiple markets this spring.
  • Greater personalization. New personalization options, including Winks, Dynamic Display Pictures and theme packs, help customers show their personality and their mood. Customers can choose from a selection of free content or get premium content from companies such as AG Interactive, the media subsidiary of American Greetings Corp., Wisepost/YNK, 3H Group PTY Ltd., Saw-you.com and Techno Design Internet Programming for a small fee.
  • Instant MSN Search capability. MSN Messenger 7.0 offers a Shared Search button in the conversation window so people can find answers instantly through MSN Search while they continue their conversation.
  • Photo-sharing options. Customers can have more fun with their friends by sharing photos during a conversation and viewing a slide show together. People can save shared photos and add pictures of their own to the photo swap session.
  • Unique presence options. People can now display a personal message alongside their Messenger name and status. The customized message can include a greeting that expresses their mood or show the name of a song the person is listening to on Windows Media® Player or iTunes Player. With one click, customers can go to MSN Music to purchase the song or listen to a snippet.

As cool as this list of features is, it isn't exhaustive since it doesn't mention features that shipped in the beta from last year such as setting your online status on login, gleams or contact cards.

I definitely have been overusing features like showing the name of the song playing in iTunes, Dynamic Display Pictures and Winks. This release is off the hook. Grab it.  


 

Categories: MSN

April 7, 2005
@ 02:29 PM

As some of you may have noticed the MSN Spaces homepage changed last night. It is officially out of beta and there have been a few enhancements to the service made in the transition.

You can catch the offical word from the press release Global Availability of MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces Connects People Around the World. Highlights below

Over the past year MSN has seen consumers' appetite for richer, personalized online communications services surge globally, as evidenced by the rapid growth of MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces. Since the MSN Spaces beta version was introduced in late 2004, more than 4.5 million Spaces have been created, making MSN Spaces one of the fastest-growing blogging services in the world.

...

MSN Spaces Offers Consumers Easy Way to Connect and Share Photos, Music and More

With today's launch, MSN Spaces, a blogging service, will now be available in 15 languages and 30 markets worldwide. While MSN Messenger enables people to connect in real time, MSN Spaces augments their IM relationship by enabling people to connect on their own time, letting friends and family know they have something new to share via "gleam" notifications on their MSN Messenger contact list. MSN Spaces is a dynamic online scrapbook where consumers can easily post blogs, photo albums, personal music lists and more, essentially telling the story of their life. Customers have control over whom they share their Space with: limiting it to a few, sharing only with those on their MSN Messenger contact list, or opening it up to the worldwide Internet.

But enough of the official spiel. As always the good stuff is to be found in the blogs. One of the changes made is that about 50 new themes have been added, providing users with more choices when deciding to customize their Space. Karen has the low down in her post new themes!. I saw a bunch of complaints while Spaces was in beta about the available themes being "ugly". A number of the new themes are quite simple yet elegant which I'm sure will appeal to the aesthetic folks out there.

We've also made some storage improvements as Mike points out in his post More storage, better comments... and more! . Specifically we've tripled photo storage space from 10MB to 30MB and there's no longer a length limit on comments. Also URLs in comments are automatically changed to hyperlinks (with rel=nofollow applied).

My favorite changes are the RSS & pinging enhancements which I had some input into. As Mike writes

Clicking on the orange RSS button or the "Syndicate" link above will no longer spit out raw XML to your readers using a modern browser.  Instead, they will see a "pretty printed" RSS feed with a link to learn more, subscribe in My MSN, or subscribe in an aggregator supporting one-click subscription (feed://) 

To see an example of what this looks like in practice, check out the RSS feed for my Space. If you are wondering what RSS readers support one click subscription, the list includes ShrookRSS Bandit, NewsGator, NetNewsWire, FeedDemonAwasu, SharpReader, FeedReader, WinRSS, VoxLite, and NewzCrawler.

Another cool RSS enhancement is that the number of comments one each post is now provided using the slash:comments elements. Now users of aggregators like RSS Bandit can track the comment counts on various posts on a space. I've been wanting that since last year.

Last year, Spaces sent pings to Weblogs.com when new posts were created. With last night's release this list has expanded to include Feedster, Technorati, PubSub, and My MSN.

Enjoy.


 

Categories: MSN

Yesterday I saw the post entitled Running RSS Bandit on linux? where the author wrote

I am seriously thinking about throwing windows out of the window and moving back to linux for my home desktop.
The programs I use the most, like Eclipse, Firefox or Thunderbird, all run perfect on linux.
But there is one thing that is keeping me from switching right now: I am pretty hooked up to RSS Bandit, the C# based rss aggregator. One very nice feature is for example the possiblity to remotely storing the read state of the feeds.
Now the problem is that this application needs the .NET framework to run. I know there is a linux alternative for the .NET framework called Mono, but I don't have any experience with that.
Maybe this is a silly question, but would it be possible to make RSS Bandit run on linux using Mono?

It's rather flattering to know that at least one person finds RSS Bandit useful enough that it's all that's standing in the way of switching operating systems.

With regards to whether it is possible to run my favorite RSS reader on Mono, I doubt that will be possible. We use COM & Win32 interop in a bunch of places including when communicating with the Internet Explorer component.

 


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

I've slowly been appreciating the wisdom in using REpresentational State Transfer (REST) as the architectural style for building services on the Web. My most recent influences have been Nelson Minar's ETech presentation entitled Building a New Web Service at Google and a discussion on the XML-DEV mailing list last week.

The REST architectural style was first formally defined in Chapter 5 of Roy Fielding's Ph.D dissertation. It's principles are succintly distilled in the Wikipedia entry for REST which currently states

REST's proponents (sometimes referred to as RESTafarians) argue that the web has enjoyed the scalability and growth that it has as a result of a few key design principles:

  • A fundamentally stateless client/server protocol: each HTTP request/response pair is complete in itself, and participants are not required to take additional steps to track states (though in practice, many HTTP servers use cookies and other devices to maintain a session state).
  • A limited number of well-defined protocol operations: HTTP allows very few verbs, the most important of which (for REST) are GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. These correspond fairly closely with the basic CRUD functions required for data persistence.
  • A universal means of resource-identification and -resolution: in a RESTful system, every piece of information is uniquely addressable in a single namespace through the use of a URI .
  • The use of hypermedia both for application information and application state-transitions: the resources in a REST system are typically HTML or XML files that contain both information and links to other resources; as a result, it is often possible to navigate from one REST resource to many others, simply by following links, without requiring the use of registries or other additional infrastructure.

These principles can be further distilled to the simple phrase, "Just use HTTP". However the problem with this is that lots of people actually don't use HTTP correctly. This ranges from the fact that many HTTP-based systems don't support the DELETE and PUT to the fact that many services based on HTTP ignore the specification that HTTP GET requests should be idempotent and safe. About the latter issue, the HTTP specification states

9.1 Safe and Idempotent Methods
9.1.1 Safe Methods

Implementors should be aware that the software represents the user in their interactions over the Internet, and should be careful to allow the user to be aware of any actions they might take which may have an unexpected significance to themselves or others.

In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered "safe". This allows user agents to represent other methods, such as POST, PUT and DELETE, in a special way, so that the user is made aware of the fact that a possibly unsafe action is being requested.

...
9.1.2 Idempotent Methods

Methods can also have the property of "idempotence" in that (aside from error or expiration issues) the side-effects of N > 0 identical requests is the same as for a single request. The methods GET, HEAD, PUT and DELETE share this property. Also, the methods OPTIONS and TRACE SHOULD NOT have side effects, and so are inherently idempotent.

There are a number of reasons for HTTP GET requests to be both idempotent and safe. Being idempotent means that various caching systems between the user and the web server from the browser cache to caching proxies can cache the request without worry that the web server was supposed to service that request. And as Sam Ruby pointed out in his post AJAX Considered Harmful being safe means unsuspecting grandmothers and bots everywhere cannot be tricked into modifying online databases simply by following a link.

However a number of web services that have been held up as examples of RESTful APIs actually violate these principles. These include the Bloglines sync API, the Flickr API and the del.icio.us API.

  1. An example of where the Bloglines sync API uses HTTP GET requests in a way that is not idempotent or safe is the getitems method which has a parameter to "mark unread items as read".

  2. An example of where the Flickr API uses HTTP GET requests in a way that is not idempotent or safe is the flickr.photosets.delete method which deletes a photo set.

  3. An example of where the del.icio.us API uses HTTP GET requests in a way that is not idempotent or safe is the http://del.icio.us/api/posts/delete function which 
    deletes a post from delicious.

This isn't to say all popular web services held up as RESTful APIs actually aren't. The Atom publishing  protocol is an example of a RESTful API that actually honors the principles behind  HTTP. However there are a number of plain old XML (POX) web services which people have begun to conflate with RESTful services which led to some confusion on my part when I started trying to figure things out in this space.

A good place to start when deciding to design a RESTful system is Joe Gregorio's article How To Create a REST Protocol.


 

Categories: XML Web Services

In his post Waiting for Attention… or something like it Steve Gillmor describes our conversation at ETech and responds to some of the thoughts in my post Nightcrawler Thoughts: Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down and Attention.xml. My post ignored some of the collaborative aspects to the solution to the attention problem that Steve would like to see. Specifically

First I go to my reputational thought leaders, the subs and recurring items that bubble to the top of my attention list. It’s a second-degree-of-separation effect, where the feeds and items that a Jon Udell and a Doc Searls and a Dave Winer prioritize are gleaned for hits and duplicates, and returned as a weighted stream. In turn, each of those hits can be measured for that author’s patterns and added in to provide a descending algorithim of influence. All the while, what is not bubbling up is driven further down the stack, making more room for more valuable content.

It’s important to remember that this is an open pool of data, massaged, sliced, and diced by not just a Technorati but a PubSub or Feedster or Google or Yahoo or any other service, and my inforouter will gladly consume any return feed and weight it according to the success (or lack of it) that the service provides in improving my results. Proprietary services can play here as well, by providing their unique (and contractually personalized) streams as both a value proposition for advertisers and marketers and as an attractor for more users of their service.

The part of the attention problem I focused on in my previous post was "Based on my reading habits, tell me what new stuff I should read" but Steve Gillmor points out that the next level beyond that is "Based on the reading habits of the people whose opinion I trust, tell me what new stuff I should read". People already do this to a lesser extent by hand today. People who subscribe to Robert Scoble's link blog or various individual RSS feeds in del.icio.us are basically trusting a member of their social network to filter out the blogosphere for them.

Once one knows how to calculate the relative importance of various information sources to a reader, it does make sense that the next step would be to leverage this information collaboratively.

The only cloud I see on the horizon is that if anyone figures out how to do this right, it is unlikely that it will be made available as an open pool of data. The 'attention.xml' for each user would be demographic data that would be worth its weight in gold to advertisers. If Bloglines could figure out my likes and dislikes right down to what blog posts I'd want to read, I find it hard to imagine why the Bloglines team would make that information available to anyone including the user. For comparison, it's not like Amazon makes my 'attention.xml' for books and CDs available to myself or their competitors. 

By the way, why does every interesting wide spanning web service idea eventually end up sounding like Hailstorm?


 

One of the things I have found most interesting about watching MSN Spaces over the past few months is seeing various communities beginning to form and watching regular people use their space to communicate that their thoughts and experiences with others. As with all communities there are the negative elements, various trolls who go around criticizing people's posts or who go around impersonating others in various comments.

Another interesting trend I've seen in a couple of spaces is a some resentment from adults that there are so many teenagers using MSN Spaces. The most significant manifestation of this being the Space titled Are you looking for adults and their spaces? where one enterprising MSN Spaces user has begun cataloguing various spaces whose authors are 18 and over.

Among the spaces listed on that page are a couple of my favorites. A few of the hundreds of spaces I've found interesting since the beta launch are below

What I like most about these Spaces is that their content is [mostly] not what you find in the Technorati Top 100 list which is dominated by men talking about technology and politics or women talking about sex. The above spaces just have regular people sharing the interesting and the mundane in their lives which sometimes do involve technology, politics and sex.

Perhaps it's the rise of reality TV that's made me find such spaces so very interesting. Of course, if you want technical content you can always check out the spaces of John Kountz or Scott Issacs.


 

Categories: Mindless Link Propagation | MSN