wake up!

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?

At BarCamp Block earlier this year I led a discussion of social media design patterns. The slides I posted were really more just about patterns and how we deal with them at Yahoo! But the group exercise was to brainstorm a huge list of social media and social networking activities that could be described and documented as patterns.

These are not the patterns themselves, but at least one pattern could probably be written around each of these gestures. We found it easiest in the brainstorm to just rattle off a list of gerunds (“adding, blocking, friending,” etc.).

The list we came up is also not exhaustive or definitive. It’s one group’s idea of the various patterns that a social system could support. The initial list was posted at the BarCamp Block wiki. Then Kent Bye, one of the participants, took a stab at re-sorting it a bit and created a visualization. He also then hand-copied it into an outline format and sent me his “version two” of the list.

Since then I’ve made a few more tweaks and have produced a version 3 outline. I’ve been working on visualizing it myself, so I turned the OPML into an OmniOutliner file and then imported that into OmniGraffle. The map is so tangled that Graffle had a hard time displaying it without crossing lines, so I spent some more time dragging the various nodes and clusters around until they were each separate. The end result is that it’s huge of course, and still by no means final or exhaustive or authoritative.

In fact, it’s decidedly not the taxonomy of social media patterns we’re working on internally at Yahoo! Think of it as an open source, collaborative work in progress. The thumbnail image above links to a full-sized PDF you should feel free to grab to get a better look at the current state of play of this idea, and if you’d like the OPML file or any other format, just drop me a note and I’ll send it to you.

When I get a moment, I’ll drop by the BarCamp Block wiki and upload the file there in several formats too, at least until someone provides a better place for hosting this project.

In New York my work laptop starting shutting itself off without warning. With the help of savvy Mac users at Yahoo I determined that it was a known bug with aging G4 Powerbooks wherein the trackpad falsely reports a severe temperature spike (“overtemp” according the log) and the system initiates a shutdown to protect itself (but not your data or your peace of mind).

As I was on the road, I was unable to get this addressed. Back in the office Tuesday I took my laptop to IT to initiate the process of having the thing condemned and replaced perhaps with my long-promised MacBook Pro.

Instead I was issued a slightly newer G4 and the local IT guy in my building started working on migrating my setup over, but the overtemp shutdown problem made this impossible. Finally, he gave me the two computers and let me have a try.

I linked them by firewire and copied things over by hand. First everything in the xian section of the machine and then the shared stuff, like - oh, I don’t know - applications, and a bunch of library settings and preferences.

As a backup I also restored my meticulously updated backup files to another folder, just in case I needed them. I learned, however, that they included all my personal user stuff (the xian tree) but none of the machine-wide stuff, like - oh, I don’t know - my applications.

This afternoon after several reboots I successfully started up the new machine and found just about every detail correct, including my desktop backgrounds (as shown above), the items in my dock, my passwords, and so on. Somewhat exhilarating for a geek like me.

Needless to say my productivity was severely hampered most of this week. I felt like half my brain was unavailable to me, like I was cooking without thumbs. I worked mostly on a PC, which is - you know - similar to a Mac, but in a thousand ways it was slightly less convenient and it lacked all my custom little touches, recent notes, ergonomic habit supporters and so on.

But I’m back, baby!

At BarCamp Block I first heard about plans for She’s Geeky, a tech (un)conference for women by women. Immediately, I was intrigued. It sounds like a great idea, I love the title, and the organizers are some of the coolest folk I’ve met on the geek circuit.

One of the prime movers is Kaliya Identity Woman Hamlin, a strong advocate of the OpenSpace unconference model for events.

She’s Geeky takes place October 22 and 23 in Mountain View, CA (near Palo Alto). Here’s a description In their own words:

This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.

Kaliya goes into some more detail about here “motivations and hopes” on her IdentityWoman blog, and addresses any concerns folks might have about exclusivity (which is a good thing, because even in this male-dominated tech world, I sometimes get that twinge of entitlement when something is for me, about me, catering to me and my ilk, etc.), saying, “My motivation is not to create an event that is ‘exclusive’ but to help create a space for women who some times are very isolated in different niches of the tech world. One women I spoke with yesterday recently found herself being one of only 12 women at a tech conference of 600.”

I have no doubt that She’s Geeky will be a watershed event and I look forward to reading about it and studying its impact.

Maybe everyone else in the blogosphere knows this already but I just read that Dave Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati: Technorati Weblog: A Change In Seasons

Looks like Tantek’s timing was impeccable.

I first met Dave during the dotcom bust when blogging was booming (again) on the backs of a lot of underemployed folks, myself included. I was working hard, updating Radio Free Blogistan three to seven times a day, hanging out on the #joiito channel on irc, and going to various blogger dinners and shmoozes here in the Bay Area.

I met a lot of folks with interesting startup ideas or who were looking at various ways of turning their passion for blogging and or social networking into businesses or publications or both. Dave’s idea was simple to explain and easy to understand, so I wasn’t surprised to see it get funded and take off.

I’ve got other friends working there now - some of whom I introduced to the Technorati people. I guess I consider myself a friend of the company, if that’s even a possible thing to be, and I’ve hesitated to complain or criticize too much when I’ve found the service sluggish or otherwise frustrating.

I applauded their recent redesign and I still visit the site when I am in the mood for some egosurfing (usually disappointing) or to see who’s been blogging about the Yahoo! Pattern Library recently.

It sounds like Technorati is having a tough time right now. Valleywag reported something like eight layoffs in addition to the CEO vacancy, and people don’t seem to talk about how Google or Yahoo! should buy Technorati so much anymore.

(Disclosure: I work at Yahoo but I have absolutely no knowledge regarding acquisition plans or lack of them for any startup out there.)

I’m sure the next thing Dave does will be interesting and I wish him the best.

AppleInsider | Multi-touch video iPods to arrive in August - report:

During a private meeting last month, Apple’s traditionally tight-lipped chief executive Steve Jobs all but broke the silence on the future of the video iPod. Speaking to employees at the Apple Town Hall, he said a division of the company was hard at work on next-generation iPods that, like iPhone, would run an embedded version of the Mac OS X operating system.

Picking up on Jobs’ comments were Wall Street analysts such as Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, who in a report to clients earlier this week suggested that the current iteration of iPhone represents much of what Apple’s flagship iPod line will soon be.

“Specifically, we expect Apple to release high capacity iPods based on OS X sometime during or before Macworld ‘08 in January,” he wrote.

If it’s got wifi (hmm, and especially if I can add Skype), then I won’t need an iPhone.

If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By here’s your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing and drinking free drinks sponsored by startups and web behemoths.

I just don’t post to RFB much these days. Nor do my other contributors. Does that blog need to continue? Should I put it to rest? I like the “this day in” stuff from the past, but of course a lot of it is dated. Is there any value to a legacy blog-on-blogging that doesn’t even have a post about, say the recent beta release of Vox from Six Apart?

Plus what do I do with the moderate traffic pointing there from Google? Redirect it to x-pollen?

Likewise, do I need to keep supporting The Power of Many till the end of time? I swear, next book I write I’ll blog about it in an existing blog instead of spawning a new one. If the book needs its own website, it can get its blog content by republishing a feed from my main blog on the topic, along with a set of delicious bookmarks tagged with ‘presence’.

I would like to recommit to blogging here daily. I’ve been neglecting the personal side of my life blogwise, at the expense of professional concerns and the occasional political or other current-affairs type posting.

I miss the daily journaling aspect of blogging and I think it’s helpful - for me, at least - to reflect on a daily basis on what’s going on around me.

If only my minor email lossage of the last week had been the end of the story, but through superior advanced dimwittedness, I managed to lost my entire personal computer archive (email, desktop wiki notes, and all documents) since roughly December of last year. It feels a bit like having a house burn down. You keep reaching for missing objects and then feeling their loss all over again.

I am in fact posting this from the Apple Store in Emeryville, where I've spent perhaps 20 hours over the last three weeks trying to diagnose and fix the problems with my iBook.

Wait, I think I'm next. More to come.

I managed to wipe out all the mail in my inbox since August 9. (Don't ask.) If you've emailed me in the last 12 days and you don't hear back from me about whatever you emailed me about, that's probably why. Feel free to contact me again. Thanks.

Been offline (mostly) since yesterday afternoon, with a few brief intermittent moments of access, during which I usually sent a big pile of queued up mail and tried to complete a few web-service-y actions.

Line problems with my SBC DSL are the problem. I have to prove this every time by jumping through all the troubleshooting questions with "Amber," up all night working on the subcontinent (my trouble ticket starts with the letter "W as in vhiskey").

I'm down on Lakeshore, logged in at Starbucks, having deposited a check and mailed some bill payments (only one more cycle this year!), and I'm thinking about getting a haircut but have to be back home between 4 and 8 to meet the SBC line repair peeps.

It's been very frustrating being offline for the last twelve hours, for both of us. B has become accustomed to universal 24-hour wireless broadband and was in the middle of posting a new photo essay at True Dirt.

So, I will take a deep draught of onlinearity for the next half hour and then go back to the off-the-grid world at least until dinner with some of the most on-the-grid folks within reach of Berkeley this evening.

My room at the CheaperNearby hotel naturally offers no high-speed access and sadly I can't get my modem to work with it either. Fortunately, Roadrunner offers pay-for-use wireless service in the RiverCenter mall attached to the Marriott, so I can briefly check mail and get a message out to the wider world before heading to the next panel discussion at this conference (the joint American Culture Association, Popular Culture Association, and Southwest/Texas ACA/PCA conference in San Antonio).

Also, I have a partially completed post from the airplane written in ecto, but I can't get back into ecto without a serial number, although I did make a contribution when it was called kung-log so I'm not sure if I am really required to pay up. In the meantime, that post is stranded and won't show up till I sort that out.

At least now I can submit the chapter I've been working on later today just by coming back here to the mall.

I noticed there are some interesting discussions related to weblogs going on here. Most of them conflict with the Grateful Dead program, but if possible I will try to drop in and meet some of the academics studying or working with blogs. Who knows, maybe some of them read RFB.

When inviting friends to an orkut community, the interface should remove from the list friends who are already in the group, and maybe even let you know which you have already invited, in case they silently declined to join in which case things could get awkward.

More: Brian Dear has some impressions of orkut too.

Scot Hacker reminisces about the early days of web design in Remembering Netscape

Related: Stephen Mack's Requiem for Mosaic

After a few half-assed attempts to make FOAF files and read up on the enthusiasts of this genre, I got lost in the thickets of RDF or otherwise distracted and waited for someone to build a nice interface ontop of these useful personal triplet schemas.

Looks like someone did.

Someones rather. So, the second I get a moment free (ha!) I’ll go back and start re-reading the documentation and the available wisdom, and reviewing the FOAF explorer site and other people’s uses of and extension for FOAF and try to get with the program.

We don’t need no stinkin’ Friendster!

Every few years some new technological framework comes along to challenge Microsoft's dominance of the desktop. Since the advent of the Internet, Microsoft has managed to fight off Netscape (IE), Java (.Net), application service providers (Hotmail), remote process calls (SOAP), and U.S. antitrust law (Bush).

OK, I'm waving my hands here. Not all these things are comparable, obviously, even putting politics and law (social code) aside. This article by Elwyn Jenkins at Microdot News (Why Microsoft Must Compete with the Google Operating System) makes an interesting case that Google is putting together what the author calls a knowledge operating system, or KOS:

A KOS handles the storage and retrieval of information organized [such] that knowledge can be built using both the storage and retrieval mechanisms.... Having purchased Pyra a little over eight weeks ago, Google has in place the core components. Using a browser, a knowledge worker can create information pages organized into reverse chronological order and save these as a blog. Through the fact that a blog is an organized and regular way of storing web pages, Googlebot has a good chance of discovering and indexing these pages very close to the time they were created. Through careful wording of the blog titles and other fields, a blogger can greatly influence the way that page is represented in the Google Database. Using a free site search tool from Google, I can also now retrieve the information using keywords and full-text searching for that information the knowledge worker stored.

Apologies for the butt-ugly design choices visible right now here at X-POLLEN. I'm trying to track down a CSS (style sheet) error, and it helps me visualize the various design blocks to give them distinct colors and ugly borders.

Maybe you can help. The problem is in the left two-thirds (links) area of the page. The banner (across the top) and what Movable Type calls the content div (the main area taking up the right two-thirds of the page below the banner) are working more or less as intended. I'll be tweaking the colors soon, but the various boxes appear where I expect them to with the propertiies I've given them.

It's over on the left where something is wrong. The whole links panel is supposed to show the same background color as the content area (as around the search box), but it's showing me a whie background right now. It's also supposed to have a dotted border, I think, and that's not visible either. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Via MediaSavvy (a site whose brand combines two of my favorite buzzwords of recent times), I found this article called The Web's Hippie Period is So Over. It's an amusing take on the usual web dev chitchat, despite its ahistorical spin on the recent past.

Gerry McGovern, the article's author, is a content guy, web consultant, and author (hey, just like me!). He says that hippies (which he weirdly defines as graphic designers and programmers) may have pioneered the web when it was as creative free-for-all, but that the time for experimentation has ended and it's time to clean the stinky hippies out of your Augean Stables of a server room and put soberminded writers and content strategists in their place. Or something like that.

Where to begin? For one thing I think we writers may have preceded the graphic designers as adopters of the web. Maybe I should be positive and mention what I agree with.

A very interesting bunch of people was attracted to the Web in the early days. They loved its lawless nature; it allowed them to experiment and express themselves.

Can't argue with that.

These people tended to be techies and graphic designers.

Techies, sure, and graphic designers definitely saw the potential early, at least before a lot of consultants got it.

What you need today are writers and editors.

Sure, that's true for the content-heavy aspects of the web. One thing McGovern doesn't seem to realize is that the web is also used now to develop rich database-backed interactive applications. The web is not merely a publishing medium as we writers saw it when it first emerged. Yes, there is copy, nomenclature, information arhcitecture, and content management issues involved in launching even a web app, but the role of techies (technical architects, DBAs, coders, production folks) and designers (including visual designers but also user-interface designers) has not withered away, even with the proliferation of cookie-cutter, box-driven portals.

The Web was marketed as very complicated. It's not. It's about publishing. It's about communication. The Web is made up of content, and information architecture (IA) is the discipline of organizing that content.

Simple in concept maybe, but often complex and idiosyncratic in implementation, if my experience is any guide. And much as I may wish it were true, the web is not "about publishing." That's a writer's-eye view and reductive in the extreme.

The technical elements of a Web site are largely solved. The graphic design elements are relatively minor. The day-to-day job of the average site is writing and editing.

Uh, sort of. You don't need to convince me that the ongoing life of a website involves mainly content (and sometimes user) admin, occasional database maintenance, and a revision cycle. I've evangelized about the need for building the content-management back end into something as robust as the cosmetic front end of any website because it's true that day-to-day maintenance in the long run takes much more manhours and management than the initial launch of any site that's more than just a billboard and a maildrop.

Let me tell you about writers and editors. They are generally technophobes and couldn't care less about HTML or Java. They care about words and communication. They are a very different breed from those who built the Web.

Well, that's a stereotype. And it's true that writers and editors should be enabled to do their work without having to understand how the technicalities of writing and editing have been implemented under the hood. But some of us who helped build the web were (and are) writers and editors.

In fact, if I were going to characterize web pioneers and distinguish them from today's web professionals, I'd say that in the early days we rarely specialized. We did not have the luxury and we early adopters of the web were generally interested in the whole shmear: look-and-feel, navigation, content, structure, and so on.

Overall, McGovern seems to conflate the web as a expressive medium (which it is, or can be) and the web as a business medium (which it also is, or can be).

Business, we now know, is about making money.

You don't say!

A chaotic intranet is a productivity drain.

This is true. Near the end of the brief article, he talks briefly about intranet consolidation (IBM going from more than 7000 intranets to just one.) This is another hobbyhorse I'm happy to ride. Internal websites (sometimes called enterprise protals) should be consolidated. They are not the place for free expression and experimental creativity. But whoever said they were?

It's time to organize your content in a professional manner.

Doy!