Recently in geekery Category

There is a very real prospect that the sweet sweet deal the Mediajunkie publishing empire has had these many years with Tiedrich and associates may need to replaces by something inevitably not half so sweet.

What this means is that I may need to find a new host for my multiple and various web experiments. I don’t need things to be up 24/7 as long a I have long-term persistence, but I do like to have free rein (within reason) and unlimited domains (or close to: 10 is not enough, 100 is more than enough).

I’m working on a little comparison spreadsheet. In the budget range I’m looking at there seems to be roughly two tiers. Oddly, the cheaper-tier providers offer more generous limits, so I’m probably missing some important factors.

Advice?

Designing Social Interfaces - Rough Cut | O’Reilly Media
Originally uploaded by xian

The unedited, 500 page first draft of our book is available now in PDF format for review by anyone who can’t bear to wait till September for the first (“real”) edition to come out.

Yay!

gee and i’ve only met barlow once
Originally uploaded by xian

was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?

These are the slides I worked from today in my talk at Yahoo! Open Hack Day 08, Design Hacks with Stencils & Patterns:

hackday stage
Originally uploaded by xian.

I’m going to name the robots Foo and Bar. We still haven’t announced the musical act that will be performing on this stage tonight.

So far I’ve heard Cody Simms and Neal Sample (Cody and Neal, hmmm….) give a great overview of YOS (with great visuals by Micah Laaker), and am now listening to Allen Rabinovich explain how to hack with Flash and Flex.

At 2pm I’ll be talking about patterns and stencils and how they can help coders build better interfaces.

Twitterific would like to use your current location!

Shazam didn’t recognize John Cage last night.

Facebook is slick.

OmniFocus is my new Obama.

Google app is weak (brings up a tiny serp?) but at least it exists.

Pandora would be perfect if faster and also not crashy.

You had me at NYTimes.

Loopt does what now?

Holy Christ that was a giant pain in the ass.

On the bright side I may have gotten a whole chapter for my book on presence, all about what it’s like to have a longstanding web presence offline for six weeks or more. As far as the Internet is concerned you might as well be dead.

Maybe I’ll get some more blogging in now that I am alive again.

Did you hear me?

I… AM… ALIVE !!!!1!

This blog, this domain, and all of my other Mediajunkie domains are going offline for about a week. We are retooling our server, migrating from RHL to Ubuntu, and generally tightening up security.

If I have a burning need to blog while this site is down, I’ll do it over at Vox.

See you in about a week or so.

Or should I perhaps have found an anecdote with a bazaar in it for my title? I’ve been enjoying watching a lot of my fellow Y!OS cow-orkers “decloak” if you will and proudly announce to family and friends that yes, this Yahoo! Open strategy is what we’ve all been working on:

My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson. Here are my slides.

| View | Upload your own

UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):

At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)

I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.

In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.

For now, here are my summit talks:

| View | Upload your own

and

| View | Upload your own

Anil Dash blogged recently about adapting the embedding method used for rich media on personal / blog / social sites (most common use case: embedding a YouTube video on a MySpace page) to simple text quoting. He has added an embed code to each of his entries and I’m going to paste it in, inside a blockquote tag pair, at the end of this post.

His commenters talk about how re-blogging hasn’t really taken off. This was one solid feature of Radio Userland, although I didn’t like the way it would quote directly, with no offset, which led to people naively presenting quoted content as if it were their own.

This may be technical overkill or a brilliant way to take advantage of existing folkways and habits. For now, I’m just participating in the experiment:

If you’re interested in social web design, how to model identity, presence, and reputation, and how to create and align incentives with the behaviors you wish to encourage in your online community, then join Ted Nadeau and me for a Core Conversation on the topic of “Online Identity: And I do give a damn about my bad reputation” at South by Southwest interactive this March, in Austin, Texas (of course).

UPDATE: Alex Lee in the comments asked me when my talk is scheduled for. It’s on Tuesday, and I think it’s in the morning but not sure about. Will update with exact info when I have it.

UPDATE II: It seems that we will be doing our core conversation in a late slot (5pm) on the last day (Tuesday, March 11) of the interactive portion of the conference. I say if the conversation is good, let’s continue it into the evening over food and libations. Maybe we’ll even launch a startup over beer and barbecue.

Just when I was really starting to enjoy not blogging, I find myself compelled to ramp up the post-o-matic for the new year.

I was just writing a comment on a recent blog entry from Chris Messina and decided to use my OpenID identity attached to this blog (although actually brokered by MyOpenID.com, which presented me with a choice of profiles to share with Chris’s site, telling me

A site identifying itself as http://factoryjoe.com/blog/ has asked us for confirmation that http://xian.myopenid.com/ is your identity URL.

The site also asked for additional information. It did not provide a link to the policy on data it collects….

So I figure I ought to notify Chris that his site is not providing such a link to his policy, presuming he has one, and to ask in a general lazyweb sort of way, what the standards are for the inclusion and formatting of such a statement of policy.

Remember when I said that an iPod touch with wifi and Skype (or similar) would obviate the need for an iPhone?

Well, according to the unofficial Apple weblog, that day may be closer than ever:

[iPod] touch hacker eok has ported Samuel’s SvSIP to the iPod. SvSIP uses the SIP protocol to connect to other participants and to allow you to talk over WiFi…. eok has been able to both send and receive calls and promises screen shots as soon as possible.

I was running a search on a labeled group of messages (from a mailing list) in my mailbox, looking for just the unread ones, but I was also doing something else at the same time (actually two or three other things, drinking coffee, firing up a YouTube video, looking for a file on my desktop) and I ended up typing “is:unclear” instead of “is:unread.”

But maybe a good email search could find the messages in your inbox that are unclear?