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by Carrie Bickner
by Dan Cederholm
tech-edited, 200407
tech-edited, 200403Help us celebrate over a billion links tracked!
Join us at the Technorati Users Salon tonight:
- What
- Technorati Users Salon
- When
- Thursday, March 31, 2005 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
- Where
- Chevys Restaurant, 201 3rd St., San Francisco, CA 94103
- Yahoo! Maps
- Google Maps
Technorati will provide appetizers and drinks for approximately 50 people. Please RSVP to salon-sf@technorati.com and let us know how many people you are bringing so we can plan the event space, food, and drink.
Amber and friends will be spinning at Qo?l tonight. Details:
This is not one of those "ladies night" line-ups. This is one of those "some-of-San-Francisco's-best-and-most beautiful-DJs" line-ups featuring Kat, Tamo, Seraphim, Forest Green, Amber, Anita Lofton and the fabulous Audio Angel. There's no dodging these beats. Suggestion: Bring a spare pair of shoes in case you burn holes in soles of the ones you're wearing.
See you there.
It was five years ago today that a small team of folks in Mountain View launched what was in many ways the best browser ever shipped by Microsoft, for many years perhaps the best browser shipped by anyone, and still the best browser for anyone using MacOS versions 7 through 9 (for either performance reasons, or because their Mac won't run MacOSX).
IE5/Mac had a number of firsts, in particular groundbreaking support for web standards (praised by the Web Standards Project), and innovative new features never before seen in any browser, but soon copied by many.
IE5/Mac won several awards, and was broadly acclaimed in reviews. The well respected web design periodical A List Apart published an article titled Why IE5/Mac Matters. Even Jakob Nielsen, well known expert critic of usability (and especially web usability), praised Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh for Returning Control to Users.
But IE5/Mac development is no more. Firefox and Opera have clearly superceded its standards support. Safari is a mixed bag, having implemented better CSS2(.1) support overall, and yet still suffering from simple CSS1 and HTML4 bugs that IE5/Mac (as well as every other modern browser) gets right (note the overlapping list item numbers on BookTalk, or that p {clear:left} p {clear:none} doesn't work as it should - it continues to clear left, or note the failure to use the intrinsic size of an image when referenced via the <object> tag, e.g. see this example from the CSS3-UI specification).
In the spirit of 101 things you can do in Mozilla, I'm going to publish a list of "101 Internet Explorer for Mac Innovations", to both commemorate the five year anniversary of IE5/Mac, and to challenge other browser makers to match the functionality of a five year old browser.
After the critical mass of coverage and discussions at this year's SXSW interactive conference, microformats have started emerging in all sorts of places for all sorts of purposes.
will now be added to all Prodigem torrents. Though to embed this information directly in torrents he is naturally using the torrent file format instead of XHTML, the microformats principles of simplicity and reuse of existing schemas are very much exemplified by his efforts.
Renaissance of relattribute values, including nofollow, VoteLinks, tag, and of course, XFN.
I wonder what microformat we'll see next?
P.S. I've updated my past couple of weeks of SXSW entries with all the comments and session-related discussions I could find. So for additional reading and perspectives on recent topics, check out their respective "Comments" sections.
The other day I shift-selected a whole bunch of new AIM ids/names from my iChat window and tried to copy/paste them somewhere else, like a text document. Didn't work.
But surely drag and drop must work right? Wrong again. Every attempt to drag and drop a selection from my iChat buddy list to any other application failed miserably, even to an open text window.
Shouldn't that always work? I mean, no matter what you're dragging & dropping, there's always a simple/plain/downlevel text representation of it. In this case, something simple like a list of return delimited full names and AIM ids would have been the obvious thing to insert.
No such luck.
Enough with the seemingly deliberately disabled user interface. Let's see if the programmers snuck in some decent data model access via AppleScript. Yes they did.
After a couple of hours of wrestling with AppleScript, I give you, the iChat buddylist to hCards AppleScript, open source licensed under a Creative Commons by-2.0 license of course. Requires MacOSX, iChat, and BBEdit. If you don't have BBEdit, you can try it for free with BBEdit Lite (Note: I tried to use the built in MacOSX TextEdit application, but it too was seemlingly deliberately disabled, as it has been coded to specifically restricted one to saving a plain text Unicode file as RTF or Word format. Hello? Why not let me save it as a .txt or .html just like BBEdit does?)
So try running the script. You should see a new BBEdit window open up with a bunch of HTML (note: valid XHTML strict unordered list of hCards). Save it somewhere, and try viewing it in a browser. Feel free to post-process with any nice XML/XHTML tools. Or just click on a name to open a new chat with that person. Either way, you've now got the ability to turn your buddy list (stored in some proprietary format somewhere) into an open standards based microformat that you're free to do with as you please. Enjoy.
My time is running out at the hotel so this will be brief. Last Tuesday I saw the first part of the panel on Web Design 2010: What Will the Web Look Like When It Turns 20?. I really like the interplay among the different panelists, and John Allsopp makes a great moderator. Portions felt more like a discussion of what will interactive technology look like rather than what will the web look like, but being that this is the SXSW interactive conference, that seems appropos.
I met up with my fellow panelists for my last(!) panel: How to Leverage Decentralized Social Networks which was way too long of a title and should have simply been titled "Decentralized Social Networks". So that's what I titled my presentation notes: Decentralized Social Networks. This was a great panel to close on. The panelists asked many challenging questions, questioned assumptions, and yet, pointed out some optimistic possibilities for the potential of decentralized social networks like the XHTML Friends Network (XFN).
Afterwards, Halcyon's panel, then the Kevin Smokler dinner, and the Bruce Sterling event (thanks to Wes Felter for rides to/from!). Finally Eric and I went back to the hotel for some more work. We finished writing up and submitted a proposal for a WWW2005 Dev-Day track.
I ended up getting up a bit later than desired on Monday and thus was a little tardy to the Does Design Matter? panel which was insightful, fun, and entertaining (what was that weird popup thing that Zeldman brought up on screen while Joe Clark was talking?). The second panel I attended was one of the best panels of the whole conference: Blogging While Black. I really appreciated the perspectives shared by the panelists, and the crowd as well. As someone who gets a particular hybrid of treatment (I'm fairly "white looking", but my name/ethnicity certainly isn't), I've often struggled with one perception when people first meet me, and then another when they hear my name, and then another when they get to know me. After attending this panel, I felt a little less alone. Thanks and well done panelists. Check out Kevin Lawver's excellent wiki page with notes and follow-ups on the subject.
Grabbed a quick lunch at Las Manitas (The Avenue Cafe) with Jane and Eris and about a half dozen other familiar friendly faces who were already there, and headed back to grab a seat for the Keynote Interview: Ana Marie Cox (AKA Wonkette). A few choice quotes (edited):
"i am sort of a cyber-libertarian."
"more a**-f****** in the whitehouse, not less."
"more whitehouse correspondents naked"
Ana Marie was quite funny. The interviewer on the other hand seemed to be a bit too pleased with the sound of his own voice.
And afterwards I experienced one of those too many good panels to go to experiences, and caught only portions of:
This was a great discussion. It was constructive, it was inclusive, it was frank, and it was informative. Given recent comparisons between SXSW and ETech, I can't help but wonder if there would ever be a similar panel titled "Where are the Women of Emerging Technology?"
Matt, Jay, Dunstan and I met to prep for our panel: How to Trick-Out Your Blog. Overall I think we did a decent job of covering the basics, and a few advanced tricks that hopefully brought them within reach of more folks. One of the challenges with a session like this is that you inevitably end up with more cool things to show-off and explanations thereof than you have time for. For my part I didn't get to cover simple blog-tricks like putting a Technorati This link in your blog home page and post templates to quickly and easily add Technorati conversation tracking to your blog. Not to mention a Technorati Searchlet for quick searching of either your blog or all blogs.
I've asked my fellow panelists to blog the rest of their tips and explanations for how to trick out your blog, and will post links to them here as I get them.
Went to Me-kong River for dinner with a large group of folks which took longer than expected. Ended up missing Vox Nox and arriving late to the Blogger party. Walked over to the Side Bar for the Gawker gathering where suddenly I felt very tired and overcrowded. Bumped into Ana Marie Cox and had Dan Cederholm take our photo with my new camera (old one broke on the flight over, bought myself a new Canon SD300 (which works great!) from Best Buy the next day). Hopefully I'll get a chance in the coming weeks to post a few of the amazing photos that this camera took.
Having two panels on Sunday meant I didn't get to see much else. However I did make it to the tail end of Eric Meyer's most excellent Emergent Semantics presentation (SXSWi description). I really admire Eric's informal style of presentation where he basically makes the whole crowd no matter how big feel like they're part of a nice informal fireside chat. At least until one particular loud individual rudely and disruptively heckled Eric over and over during the question and answer portion. I'm not going to name names, but everyone who was there knows who I'm talking about. It's always easier when people show their true colors isn't it?
I missed Malcolm Gladwell's keynote because I was getting prepared for my own 3:30 session. And afterwards, having not slept much the night before, I don't actually remember attending any of the 5pm sessions. Attended my first WaSP meeting later that evening, which had the unfortunate distinction of having to turn away Robert Scoble (I think this had more to do with the disruptive (see above) person that Robert was with than any desire to not have Robert learn about any deep dark WaSP secrets - hint, there really aren't many). Of course the semi-inflamatory CNET article that followed didn't help matters. One of the things that I'm working to try and change at The Web Standards Project (WaSP) is (IMHO) an apparent anti-Microsoft bias, because such a bias (whether real or perceived) does nothing to further the cause of web standards.
Finally, I enjoyed a peaceful dinner with a bunch of folks at a nice pizza and pasta place a few blocks up Red River street. I vaguely remember trying to have conversations afterwards in the Hilton lobby but dozing off so I made my way back up to the room and slept for something like nine hours straight.
Saturday's sessions started with Jeffrey Zeldman's most excellent opening remarks: Will The Last Blogger Out Please Turn Off The Lights? (n.b. I think I am the last blogger left at the Austin Hilton at this point). I happened to be sitting with Matt Mullenweg, and saw him literally jump out of his seat when slide 20 came on the screen: Is there a Mullenweg
in the house?
The only sad part of Jeffrey's talk: we missed you Carrie and Ava!
Afterwards I caught part of Blogs and Blockades: Forging a True Global Internet, as I'm personally interested in the potential that blogs bring for yet another avenue of public self-expression and communication. Of course I had to also hop over and check out Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith in How to Bluff Your Way in CSS which was quite entertaining.
Following that, No Absolutes: Social Software and Shades of Trust which was an interesting talk which drew a very diverse audience, from web designers to security types, and as such I think it was a bit of a challenge to keep everybody happy. One thing that really struck me about this panel was the user-centric perspective conveyed by both Mary Hodder and Ka-Ping Yee, who since then has written a heartfelt testimony of how one can feel like an outsider at SXSW (Ka-Ping, for the record, I don't typically update my blog 2-3 times per day (per week if I'm lucky), nor do I have the time to read 50-60 blogs per day (not to mention comment on them!), nor have I had time to take full advantage of Flickr, Pubsub, and delicious, nor have I written any books).
Having said that, yeah, I can definitely see what Ping is talking about, and the sense of intimidation as well. I certainly felt some of what Ping is talking about when I first attended SXSW three years ago. But it was more than overwhelmed by all the amazing people I met who befriended me and welcomed me to an amazing group of folks. So I stick with it. Follow up in email with the folks you met during those few intense days. Take some of that energy back with you and tap into it during the year, and just keep in mind that the people you met probably went through a lot of the same at some point past and can sympathize. And check out Kevin Smokler's 10 Things I Learned at SXSW 2005 which makes some excellent recommendations like #4. Go with a friend
.
Saturday sessions over with, I stopped by the "web standards meetup" at Buffallo Billiards where it seemed like half the conference had been transplanted. Oops I forgot to eat. Except for a banana that I saved from the free meal ticket that United gave us for the flight delay. Ordering food at Buffallo Billiards seemed too complicated, too slow, and too unsatisfying. So I ran out of there with Eric, Matt, and Eris and we went hunting for a real sit down meal. Just across two streets the Driskill Bar & Grill delivered. One omelette, large dinner salad, and chocolate cake later, and I was fueled to go. Eric and I headed back to the Hilton to work on our presentations, and I knew I was going to need some caffeine get my two sets of slides done. It's amazing how much kick a mocha can have when you haven't had coffee in a while. And you already know the results. I just wish I had photos from The Elements of Meaningful XHTML presentation. If anyone took some, could you please post them to Flickr or email them to me (tantek at this domain)? Thanks!
In response to my rhetorical question "What was I thinking?", Doug Bowman reminded me that last year I said two panels was too much and that I wasn't going to do that again. Oops.
One of the things you sacrifice by doing a panel at SXSW is typically the chance to attend two whole slots worth of panels. Obviously you can't attend other panels while giving yours (although I overheard one panelist remark that they finished their session early so they could catch the end of another panel), and in addition, you have to show up for the hour before your panel to prepare in the green room, which conflicts with a panel unless you're "lucky" enough to have the first panel of the day. None of my panels had the early bird slot, so four panels, times two means eight slots worth that I missed (at least for the most part).
And this was a bad year to miss panels. I mean not only were there great panels, but more often than not, great panels happening at the same time, so even if you weren't on a panel, you still had tough choices to make. I heard more than one person express frustration that they couldn't be in two places at once.
Note to self: Next time propose only one key session, and instead of proposing additional sessions, encourage and help some of the excellent panelists from this year propose/organize their own sessions next year.
For some reason after finishing two sessions, SXSW just got busier and didn't really let up until this past weekend. When I wasn't squeezing in a session or two, I was working out of my hotel room, teleconferences etc.
Having mostly caught up on critical emails, past experience has taught me that if I don't writeup the sessions etc. that I attended now, before I return home, I'm probably not going to get a chance (especially considering my insane schedule this coming week, with way too many work meetings, and my friend Vadim's wedding next Saturday).
So here goes.
I just wanted to quickly post a link to my slides (also licensed CC-by-2.0) from The Elements of Meaningful XHTML talk. Thanks to everyone who came to the talk, and apologies to anyone who wasn't able to squeeze in the overflowing doors. I was blown away.
Phil, of course you should hyperlink (at least a portion of) a "blog quote" to the source as well. The presumption here is that folks already know to do that (are doing it), but may be missing the other semantics that they should be capturing with their markup. I don't think there is one precise way for a blogger to hyperlink a blog quote (some link a word like "wrote", some link the entire quote, some add a link titled "link" just after the quote, etc.) and therefore that is left as an exercise for the blogger.
Late yesterday afternoon Thomas Vander Wal asked me kindly if I could substitute for Stewart Butterfield (who unfortunately missed his flight, and will be sorely missed here as well) on the SXSW panel titled How To Leverage Solipsism. The assumption was that well, the panel is about tags, and hey, I probably know something about tags. I think I was experiencing a moment of weakness (or perhaps ego), and accepted, which was questionable, considering I still had work to do for the three panels I'm already signed up for.
I thought the talk went reasonably well (here is the IE5/Mac 'PageHolder' page: Leveraging Tags I used to give my opening statement, licensed CC-by-2.0), though there was at least one strong criticism. I thought the points I had made (or tried to make) about decentralization and users owning their own data were well received, but apparently at least some of things I was saying didn't make sense to at least some of the smart folks in the crowd.
There's only one point in Liz's post that felt inaccurate:
... using the technorati tag for sxsw2005 in a blog entry provides "unprecedented" aggregation, but this is exactly what trackback provides. O'Reilly did this last year by allowing people to trackback to conference session pages.
Trackback, though a useful peer to peer protocol, is quite different than tagging. Here's a short list:
That's all. Overall I enjoyed the panel and the questions that were asked (there were quite a few good ones!)). I'll be watching the Technorati Cosmos of the panel for more feedback.
Thanks for the great session notes Chip!
A couple of months ago the WaSP invited me to join their Steering Committee. As readers know it's been a very busy past couple of months, so it has taken me some time to carefully consider the offer and come to a decision.
Effective today, I am publicly accepting the WaSP's most honorable offer to join up and help fight the good fight for standards that ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all
.
I've had quite a long history with the WaSP, much of it long ago, and always from somewhat of a distance. Here is a short summary:
I am honored to be invited to work with such an incredibly smart, passionate, and hopeful group of people. I myself am hoping that I will help add some new perspectives to the organization from my experiences with the browser development side, and am very much looking forward to helping the WaSP continue to make a difference in the fight for web standards.
In the past couple of weeks, Technorati launched a couple of nice features:
Go to any Technorati Tag page, e.g. Technorati Tag: Design, and you'll notice a new line just below the number of posts and blogs:
Related Tags: Marketing, technology, Web, CSS, Art, Web/Tech, Internet, Trends.
The new related tags are listed in order of how often they show up in the same posts as the tag itself.
Technorati Tags are built on the rel='tag' open standard which any content developer can implement on their site using any tag-space of their choice, any tool vendor can support the automatic creation of, and any search engine can aggregate and index. Related tags are yet another example of what can easily and rapidly be built upon open standards that extend today's web and encourage decentralization of information.
Technorati has extended its quickclaiming feature originally launched a couple of months ago to now support the popular WordPress open source blogging tool, version 1.5 and later. This means it's easier than ever to claim your WordPress blog.
Thanks to everyone who made it out last night to dinner, and the follow-up at Gingerman's. Everyone should have at least one birthday where they are required to whack a pi?ata until it spills its tasty insides. I'm sure we'll be seeing the photos soon.
The list of speakers for SXSWi is the most impressive I've seen in the four years that I've attended. They'll be speaking on a broad variety of subjects, and to get the most out of their sessions, I strongly recommend reading (or at least skimming in the time remaining) their respective books to get the most out of their talks and presentations. Here is a start (from Z to A):
Know of other books by SXSW speakers that you recommend others to read? Let me know so I can add them to the list.
Not long after the previous post, the guy in the suit told us they're going to do an aircraft swap. They're sending a plane to SFO from Orange County that should show up just before 3pm. But while waiting for the new plane they kept trying to fix the current plane in case they finish repairs before the new plane arrives. And they succeeded. Once we were airborne it was a nice smooth flight. I got a ride to the hotel from a fellow SXSW attendee, unpacked, and got back to working on my presentations etc. It's definitely worth it to get here a day early ― it lets you focus on the tasks at hand, and just get acclimated before things kick into high gear.
I made it to gate the requisite 20 minutes before departure time for my flight, United Airlines #6472 from San Francisco to Austin direct. Within minutes the flight departure was delayed 45 minutes. Now it's past that later departure time and they've delayed it another hour.
After the first delay I decided I had time to go grab breakfast/lunch. Unfortunately the Jamba Juice in terminal 3 and its neighboring food places are under some sort of construction. Heading back toward the gate I happen upon an eatery preparing hot sandwiches. I opt for the smoked salmon panini and a Dole 100% orange juice. The thought starts going through my head that this delay seems all too familiar, yet I brush it aside, not wanting to dwell on the possibility of repeating last year's misadventure.
But as I said, the flight has now been delayed another hour. And just like last year, there is some sort of maintenance problem, the kind folks at the gate have not heard from the mechanics at all, and thus have no updated status.
Bad sign: they're now handing out lunch vouchers if you're cranky enough to the gate attendants. I'd like to see if it was possible to get some statistics on the reliability of this particular flight, e.g. how many days out of the year does it depart on time or say less than hour delayed, or over an hour delayed, or just plain canceled.
...
It has now been an hour since I started writing this post and there is still no new information and there's a guy with a suit (some sort of supervisor type person) at the gate on the phones. I do not like this look of this. No, I do not like the look of this at all.
Starting this Friday, hundreds if not thousands of very interesting people will converge at SXSW, most of whom have never met each other. There are numerous panels, a dozen of which are about blogging in one form or another, and perhaps a half dozen of which will be discussing, using or at least mentioning XFN. Furious blogging of the week's sessions, events, interactions, observations, etc. will commence shortly.
Before the insanity starts I want to introduce folks to what is perhaps the simplest, easiest, and most minimalist use of XFN there is: met-rolling. Similar to the practice of blogrolling (the act of creating and maintaining a list of links to blogs you read in a sidebar of your own blog), met-rolling is the act of creating a list of links to the people you recently met, associated with an event, or perhaps a day, and explicitly saying so using the XFN 'met' relationship.
Many bloggers' blogrolls already double as met-rolls; you might have noticed how many links in blogrolls have little asterisks (*) next to them, a popular convention adopted by the blogosphere to indicate that you've met that person in your blogroll. There are already numerous tools that make it one-click easy to do this with XFN. E.g. if you're using WordPress or blo.gs simply check the [x] met checkbox next to the people you met. If you're a paid Blogrolling user, edit your links to people you've met and simply add rel="met" to the
"Extra Link Attributes" field in the "Advanced Options" section of the
"Edit Link" page.
Met-rolling is more than just asterisking the folks you've met in your blogroll. Met-rolling is also the common practice of listing all the folks that you just met at a conference, or a geek dinner, etc.
This is trivial once you've written your list of links to people you met. Simply add rel="met" to each hyperlink to a person you met. For example, I just noted that I'd met Eric Miller and Dan Brickley. Here's what that code might look like:
Designing with Web Standards
Taking Your Talent to the Web
The Art and Science of Web Design
The Zen of CSS Design : Visual Enlightenment for the Web
Designing CSS Web Pages
CSS Cookbook
Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design
More Eric Meyer on CSS
Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer's Edge
<ol>
<li><a href="http://www.w3.org/People/em/">Eric Miller</a></li>
<li><a href="http://rdfweb.org/people/danbri/">Dan Brickley</a></li>
</ol>
To make this a met-roll simply add rel="met" to each hyperlink, like this:
<ol>
<li><a rel="met" href="http://www.w3.org/People/em/">Eric Miller</a></li>
<li><a rel="met" href="http://rdfweb.org/people/danbri/">Dan Brickley</a></li>
</ol>
And you're done, that's it! Now whether you're at SXSW, or ETech or any other conference, you can easily use XFN when you blog your lists of people you have met. And yes it is perfectly ok to simply use the XFN 'met' value and ignore the others (of course if you're curious, or daring, or both, you may want to take a look at the other values and see if any of them interest you). It doesn't mean you're not friends or anything else. It just means you chose to communicate that one aspect (that you've met) and nothing more.
Now if you want to style those met-roll links with asterisks as other bloggers do, simply add this line to your style sheet:
a[rel~="met"]:after { content:"*" }
Finally, as a real-world example, here is my met-roll from the recent W3C meetings:
Here are people that I saw but didn't have chance to meet up with at this meeting in particular, but had met before (which makes me wonder, would it be useful to have an asymetrical "saw" value in XFN as a softer version of "met" that implies you saw them but didn't actually meet?) Update: Jonas convinced me that a "saw" value doesn't make any sense:
And as usual I'm sure I'm forgetting folks, because it's already been almost a week since. Did we meet at the W3C meetings and is your name/URL not in the above list? Send me your URL so I can add you to my met-roll.
Last week I attended the W3C's All Group Meeting and Technical Plenary at the Hyatt Harborside hotel in Boston.
Monday and Tuesday consisted of CSS working group meetings (in room Britannica A on the 1st floor), which at times were joint meetings with other groups.
One of the key things we did was discuss priorities for the coming year or two. We used the following method: everything started out as "low" priority, and anyone who asked for something to be "medium" or "high" priority got their name written next to the item with an expectation that they would help drive the item. People took this seriously enough to result in a very reasonable distribution between few high priority items, several medium and low priority items, and a few items which the group was even willing to acknowledge should be abandoned or even obsoleted because either there wasn't anyone in the group who wanted to work on them, or such documents were simply not even worth the group's attention span to bother discussing. There were two conclusions in the group that I was particularly happy to hear: nearly everyone (or perhaps everyone) agreed that it was a high priority to advance CSS 2.1 and Selectors through minor outstanding edits/ revisions and the write and publish a decently complete test suite to gauge and encourage interoperability.
That first night (Monday), we had a bit of an adventure. We took the "T" (Boston's metro/subway) into Boston and after a chilly walk ate at a decent Italian restaurant. My friend Chris and his girlfriend met us there. We ducked into a nearby cafe afterwards for some dessert, only to step outside afterwards into a snow storm. I see snow (especially falling) so rarely that it still seems quite novel and somewhat entertaining. It really started coming down as we made our way to the nearest "T" station. Thick snowfall at night makes for interesting flash photography. Upon arriving at our destination "T" station, we noticed something very strange.
It was snowing indoors. There we were, several fairly intelligent folks, some with quite a bit of physics and chemistry under their belts, unable to explain how it was possible that it was snowing
inside a building with a closed ceiling, closed walls, closed windows. I got photographic proof. We decided to call it a glitch in the Matrix and felt some comfort in knowing that the universe is apparently not bug-free.
On Tuesday night a bunch of us took the complimentary hotel shuttle to the airport so we could eat at a Legal Seafoods Restaurant in the airport. The United Airlines Terminal specifically. The lobster bisque was actually quite good.
Wednesday was the plenary day which felt a bit rushed. Maybe I was just too busy with too many other things like answering work emails, editing wiki pages, following along in IRC etc. The evening reception took place in the large plenary hall which I think was a bit too big. I noticed that in many cases, folks in the same working group would cluster at a table (we were no exception) and not interact much with other clusters which was a little sad. Past plenaries' receptions took place in a crowded enough space that you had no choice but to bump into random people (and introduce yourself) on the way to get tiny little bites of food from the platters spread through the reception rea.
Thursday I hopped between a few different groups such as the GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) working group (in Chesapeake 305, 3rd floor), and the SWBP (Semantic Web Best Practices) group (in Grand Ballroom C, 2nd floor). Some of the discussions were quite interesting, remarkably practical even. It's always fascinating to observe other working groups' meetings, because you realize quickly how different the cultures are among working groups, and how broad the spectrum of opinions are in each working group. In particular I attended the Semantic Web Best Practices meeting to hear different perspectives. It's quite interesting to compare and contrast principles and goals with efforts like microformats.
That morning I finally got the chance to briefly meet Eric Miller. We met up again at lunch where we had the chance to talk of a great many things. We found ourselves strongly agreeing about the greater value of decentralized "tagging" solutions (such as Technorati's Tags which uses the rel='tag' format which not only works on any website but works for any tagspace as well) in contrast to the various centralized tagging solutions which not only require you place your "tags" on a single site, but require that your "tags" use a single proprietary tag-space as well.
Just before leaving I had a good conversation with Dan Brickley about different ways that XFN relationships could be expressed in RDF so that formats like FOAF could make use of XFN directly. We discussed a number of different approaches and debated their merits. I believe I took good enough notes to actually write up an RDF Schema for XFN at a later date. The other interesting thought that came to mind is that it should be theoretically possible to provide an automatic interpretation of an XMDP profile in terms of an RDF Schema so that the work that many folks are putting into creating such profiles could be reused by even more communities. Again, something I've noted down enough details to work on later, but I just wanted to at least note the idea for future reference.
Periodically it seems I end up in a state where my mind is so busy with so many things, including a number of things I've been meaning to blog about (some of which need to be blogged sooner rather than later in order to be of any relevance), that I hit some sort of a limit where my mind becomes so cluttered with the backlog that I lose significant amount of efficiency in getting the things done that I need to get done.
Sometimes I find that I can make progress against the backlog very late at night (in the wee hours of the morning). I'm not sure why. There is something about the level of quietness. Perhaps it's the thought that nearly everyone within a several mile radius is asleep and thus can't be a source of distraction. Perhaps my mind is just tired enough to be able to only worry about the backlog in small enough approachable chunks.
This is also the night before I fly to SXSW, and I'm not nearly done packing nor even preparing, partly due to those above-mentioned inefficiencies. So I'm going to do my best to blog my way through this backlog, in the hopes that externalizing these lingering thoughts/memories will relieve me of the responsibility of having to keep them all in my head.
One of the nice things about attending these W3C meetings is that it's an excellent chance to try out new versions of browsers, because if you have any suggestions, you can typically give feedback straight to the browser vendor in person.
So I downloaded the latest version (7.54) of the Opera browser for OSX, installed it and tried it out. Not bad. Quite snappy.
So here's my one customized Opera hack so far: adding Technorati Search to the search box in Opera's browser toolbar. These instructions are for MacOSX but similar steps should work on other platforms.
(Yes, a ".ini" file. And I thought ".ini" files were an exclusive Windowsism. )
[Search Engine 32] Name=&Technorati URL=http://technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?url=%s&sub=opera Query= Key=t Is post=0 Has endseparator=0 Encoding=utf-8 Search Type=0 Verbtext=17063 Position=-1 Nameid=0
Note: double check that the previous entry in the "search.ini" file starts with [Search Engine 31]. If it has some other number then use that other number, plus one, instead of "32" in the text you pasted in.
And that's it.
You should now be able to choose "Technorati search" from the Search box dropdown menu near the right side of the browser toolbar. Type in some words or a URL and press return and watch Technorati real-time web search results show up in your Opera browser!
David Berlind nails it. He's written an excellent article on social networks and XFN titled Will social databases give way to social protocols? . I tried to excerpt the key/interesting portions of the article and simply ended up with quotes from nearly half the article. Maybe I'll try a few key points:
Like I said, David Berlind gets it. So instead of spending hours and hours on "umpteen" social networking services, why not simply:
<address class="vcard">
<a class="url fn n" href="http://tantek.com/">
<span class="given-name">Tantek</span>
<span class="family-name">?elik</span>
</a>
</address>
Ecto users, if you want XFN support, go to the Ecto forum and request it! Adriaan wants to hear your voice.
Once again it is time for the annual W3C general assembly, also known as the Technical Plenary Day.
The first session is about extensibility and version control for data formats. How do you fix/evolve formats and have things still work? Or at least not break?
There are a number of ways to participate and follow the discussion. The Technorati Tag for 'W3C' has a bunch of photos from the past two days of working group meetings (including one of yours truly) and several posts about W3C.
Anyone that wishes can join the IRC chat:
See the agenda for the day for the list of talks and topics.