in gravyland

Scouta.com launched!

We’ve launched scouta.com, our online media social recommendation engine.

It makes it easy to find and enjoy and share online audio and video without searching and spending your life watching the currrent hot top 10. How about some media that is recommended for you, based on what you’ve already liked?

Try it out…

Why not have a play with scouta.com and join up as a member.

Test from flock

I’ve just installed the beta of the Flock browser to try it out. Firefox has been getting a bit hopeless lately. Lots of spinning beachballs, if you know what I mean.

Blogged with Flock

Preparations for travel

We can’t really put it off any longer.  Gotta start packing in the next couple of days because the container arrives (for our packing pleasure) on our doorstep in five sleeps!
Busy today.  So here’s a point form update:

• Registered our UK company, Presence Labs Limited.  More on that on the Presence Labs blog.
• Spent a lovely couple of days down south around Margaret River and Dunsborough catching up with old mates and drinking too much of the local cordial.
• Working away on a few projects and tidying up a lot of old paperwork that is worth sorting out before packing files into archives or leaving the country.
• The Philosophy Cafe podcast for the ValuesHacker podcast didn’t quite work.  A great debate, but no recording to podcast.  More podcasts on the way sometime soon.
• On the way to the UK, we are stopping in Hong Kong for a few days, then in Italy for a week or so, before arriving in our new home, Brighton, on May 16th.  Not long now.
• While on the road, you might be able to work out where we are from this link at plazes, which ought to give a map of where the laptop has connected from.

That’s enough for now.  More later.

Presence Labs

On February 14th, I registered a new business name for a new organisation, Presence Labs, to operate under the umbrella of our existing Barking Owl and carry into the UK sometime soon.

Presence Labs is my new business focussed on Internet presences of all kinds, and particularly building tools to enable websites for the read/write web, blogs, RSS, tagging, social software, user generated content and all that stuff we tend to lump together under that (dare I say it) Web 2.0 word. Let’s call it next generation online presence or something.
And, of course, a new business needs a new blog and domain and website:

presencelabs.com

So, step over there for a look, if you please.

Online Social Networking 2005

I’ve just registered for the Online Social Networking 2005 conference. This is a wholly online conference running for a couple of weeks discussing all aspects of online social networking.

It should be really interesting, both for the discussions of social networking and the experience of an online conference.

OSN2005 will be a summit for all those interested in working with social networking processes, tools, and media. In addition to attending many workshops, panels, and presentations by leading experts and practitioners, attendees will have the opportunity to be part of a community with a significant role in defining the future direction of online social networking. If you want to help shape this industry, come to OSN2005!

During the OSN2005 summit we will co-create and publish a manifesto describing what we want and need from online social networking tools. What are the key criteria for choosing and assessing OSN products and services? What gaps exist in currently available software and related tools? What needs to happen before it’s common knowledge that OSN products and services can deliver significant value? What are the most promising developments in the OSN industry?

NoNoNoFollow or let’s enjoy nofollow and do more!

There’s a bunch of folk moaning about the implementation of the rel=”nofollow” attribute on the NoNoFollow site. They argue that for standards and other reasons the rel=”nofollow” is a bad idea.

Seems to me these folk are being very conservative, in their thinking.

These convervatives seem to be a bit stuck on the idea that a link from one page to another is something sacred, that the web will never change, that page rank is some gift of god or something. Grow up.

In my reality, page rank is something that the search engines developed for themselves in secret and change at will to make their searches perform the way they want them to.

I say that any extra information we can add to a link is a good thing. The more (optional) stuff we can add to a link to indicate the intent of the author of the link the better. This gives more traction for the search engines.

Also, we have to do something. If we just left page rank and links as they were, we would slowly fill up the web with page-rank-seeking spam. And then the value of all links would be diminished until links become mostly useless. Then we’d have to start again with a new linking system and come up with something nofollow-like.

Scoble had a good go at answering the 13 reasons against nofollow. What he said. Let’s not be conservative about this. Let’s change things. Let’s experiment.

ABC TV Guide in RSS

I just noticed that ABC TV now provide a TV guide in RSS. Drop into your news reader and off you go. They’ve cleverly put the program name and time in the title so you can see the TV times at a glance.

Creative Commons for Australia!

According to the Australian, Creative Commons licenses for Australia were launched this week and will be available later this month from the creative commons website.

This is great news. It is the first good thing to happen to copyrights in Australia for some time. It feels like a little bit of an antidote to the Free Trade Sellout Agreement,

Here’s a first hand report of the launch from David Jacobson. See also his highlights of the Creative Commons and Open Content Licensing conference proceedings. Thanks for putting them up, David. I really wanted to get to the conference and just couldn’t get there.

rel=”nofollow”: Yes. More Please!

Scoble gives more info on the rel=”nofollow” standard and how the search engine & blog tools folk are moving quickly and working together to implement it:

Thanks Google (and MSN and Yahoo).

Oh, and, did anyone notice how Google got its competitors to do something without needing to get a standards committee involved? All within hours?

Hmm, why doesn’t everything in the industry work like this?

This is a win all around. It slows down the spammers, allows bloggers and others to point to things without increasing page rank. And that is like having another kind of pointing.

Here’s the next step: Let’s have an attribute where we can give a qualitative or quantitative description of how much whuffie we want to give or not give to a link. A bit more work in the search engine, but not much. I’d like something like that to have more than one dimension and I’d love to see it qualitative, emotional even. How about an attribute like rel=”opinion:good but too expensive” or rel=”opinion:i love it” or more boringly: rel=”opinion:5/10″ (half good) or: rel=”opinion:-5/10″ (half bad). I like using words to describe this stuff, other wise you need to come up with multi-dimensional measurements. Maybe google would even let us write python expressions as opinions.

But really, the idea is to make sure that we can give our feelings about a link. This helps humanize the web even more. And the search engines will need these sort of clues to make the web smarter, easier to use and more human. How about it?

Nice comment spam solution: rel=”nofollow”

Google has just implemented something new that is really going to stop comment spam:

Any link with a rel=”nofollow” attribute included will not be used in page rank calculations. So adding this attribute to any hyperlinks given in blog comments will stop the comment spammers because they won’t get page rank from it any more.

Hooray. SixApart has already announced support for MovableType and TypePad and say support for LiveJournal is coming soon.

No word about Wordpress yet. I’m sure we’ll see something in the next 24 hours.

Wonderful news. The comment spam has really been getting me down.

thanks Joi

Delicious Monster

Here’s an inspiring story in Wired news about a small company called Delicious Monster that uses a Seattle coffee shop for their offices.

But read on beyond that bit and hear their vision for their Delicious Library software. Today, Delicious Library is software to help you catalog your library of books, DVDs, whatver, and manages borrowing for you. But beyond this, they see your personal library as something you’d share with a community of like minded people. And then with some location awareness, you’ll be able to find out if your neighbour has a copy of that book you are looking for, and maybe borrow it from them. I like it, especially for bring social software to bear on a local issue.

Blog shy (two week short form blog entry)

Golly, another 2 week gap between entries. It intrigues me why I get stuck sometimes and blog entries don’t come easily.

So, here’s two weeks worth of blogs in one:

New Years happened. Doesn’t that seem like a century ago. A big party, lot of fun, people, lots of talking. From a week or two weeks later it seemed a bit empty somehow. Perhaps I was looking for something a bit more soulful, a bit more of a ritual. I’m glad to be in the new year. 2004 sucked a lot in many ways.

I had a great time down south after new years, catching up with good friends and having a holiday for a couple of days. Everybody was in a holiday mood.

Look, every time I go fishing I catch absolutely nothing. This has been going on for a while. What god have I offended? Or is it really true, as Kimmy claims, that I don’t really want to catch a fish anyway?

Bill Gates said silly things, calling us free culture creative commons folk communists. Now we are creative commies. Thanks for the meme, Bill. I’ve got a T-shirt on order.

I’ve got lots of new innovation going on in my work life. A couple of interesting new highly secret projects that might be really big one day :-) haha. We’ll see.

Apple are beating up on mac websites that publish rumours of upcoming products. The EFF jumps in to help the websites. Silly Apple.

Then Apple releases new products at Macworld. Gizmodo shows off a couple of cool fake Apple ads that are funny. Despite Apple’s litigious behaviour which deep in my creative commie heart I should punish them for, I immediately order an iPod shuffle.

Flashmob in Perth!

Perth’s First Flashmob is on today!

1pm outside the London Court Clock on the Hay St Mall.

I won’t be there, unfortunately. It sounds like lots of fun.

See details here

thanks Tama

Creative Commons conference in Brisbane, Jan 2005

The QUT faculties of Law and Creative Industries are running a conference called ‘Open Content Licensing (OCL): Cultivating the Creative Commons’. And Professor Lawrence Lessig is coming out to do the keynote. I’m making plans to be at this one.

More info here.

Perth Blog Feeds update

As you all probably know, the aggregated Perth Blog Feeds were broken for a bit there. While the html version was working ok, the RSS 1 and RSS 2 feeds failed to validate and would break some news readers.

Well, I’ve made some progress with the planet aggregation code and now it works a lot better. Pardon me while I go into a bit of technical detail here. The dc:creator elements in the feeds were occasionally getting stray greater-than or less-than symbols in them, making validation break and busting news readers. I added HTML escaping into the template for the dc:creator elements, and now that problem has gone away.

The original source of the problem hasn’t gone, however. You’ll still see the occasional stray greater-than or less-than symbols showing up in some posts in the feed. There is some interaction between the source feeds and what comes out of the aggregator leading to stray stuff getting left in the feeds.

Strangely, it gets a lot worse if I include the feed from Robert Corr’s Kick & Scream. Why? Not sure. Nothing about his feed looks strange or broken. I’m not sure, will diagnose that one next.

They Rule

They Rule is an interactive Flash website that lets you graphically navigate the directors and links between the top corporations in the US, playing a kind of six-degrees with companies and company directors.

I think we need one of these for Australia. Would be interesting to see the concentration at the top of our biggest companies. And let’s map in political donations and ex-directorships as well. It might not be a pretty picture.

(via Boing Boing)

Perth Blog Feeds are Go

New! We now have an aggregated RSS feed of Perth Blogs listed on the Perth Blogs . You can now pop either of these two feeds (below) into your feed reading software and enjoy a list of recent Perth blog entries.

RSS 1.0

RSS 2.0

I have to add blogs manually at this point, so I’ll try and keep up as new ones come along. But for now, it works nicely. Enjoy!

Thanks to Rich for the pointer to planet planet which does the hard work of aggregating so smoothly.

Perth Blogs Wiki

At the blogger meetup last night we decided we needed to do some thing to raise our profile as a group. Announcing the Perth Blogs wiki, which is a shared place for Perth bloggers and a definitive list of Blogs in Perth.

If you have a Perth blog, please add yourself to the list. If you don’t, wander over anyway and have a look at who else around here is blogging.

Coming soon — an aggregated RSS feed of Perth Blogs. Stay tuned.

Last night’s meetup was excellent. Read the reports by Rich (with photo!) and Mark.