Blog – Page 73 – Niall Kennedy

Ask Jeeves adds bookmark tagging

Ask Jeeves announced a new version of their MyJeeves personalization portal today. Ask Jeeves now allows users to tag a saved bookmark for easy classification. The latest release of MyJeeves also support hierarchal folders if you would rather have a well-defined layout.

You can add a saved bookmark to your MyJeeves repository through the Ask.com search interface or by clicking a button on the Ask Jeeves toolbar from any web page.

Future versions of MyJeeves will enable users to sort and search by clicking these tags, which will also be shareable with others.

It’s good to see more companies adopting tagging as a classification option for its users.

Del.icio.us takes funding

Joshua Schachter announced del.icio.us just closed a funding round led by Union Square Ventures. Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young round out the investment group.

Interesting mix of investors. Amazon has now funded two tagging companies in 43 Things and del.icio.us. Esther is involved with a lot of hot new media companies. Bob Young is the founder of Red Hat. Union Square has a few investments in targeted marketing companies that will help del.icio.us maximize their advertising revenue.

Thad White of Yahoo! Mobile

The final presentation of the night was from Thad White of Yahoo! Mobile. Thad demonstrated Yahoo!’s send-to-phone features allowing a user to browse Yahoo! content on their computer and send the content to their mobile phone using a SMS message that includes a URL.

Tim mentioned that Yahoo! concentrates its development effort on the Series 60 platform because of the openness of the platform. Yahoo! is able to easily access information in the device’s native address book, calendar, and photo storage without extra programming.

Thad’s entire presentation and question and answer period lasted 24 minutes and 33 seconds. The audio is available as a 11.1 megabyte MP3 file.

Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol

The second Mobile Monday presentation was by Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol. Funambol develops Sync4j, an open source server built on the SyncML synchronization standard. Funambol employs developers in Italy and business development and sales staff in the United States.

SyncML is an open standard to synchronize contacts and calendar data among other things. Palm recently announced it would discontinue HotSync in favor of SyncML. Funambol will launch a Sync4j portal next week for free storage and access of calendar and contact data using SyncML for synchronization.

Fabrizio’s entire presentation and question and answer period lasted 16 minutes and 27 seconds. The audio is available as a 7.4 megabyte MP3 file.

IBM’s Igor Jablokov on Voice XML

On Monday, April 4, I attended Mobile Monday at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale. The first presenter was Igor Jabolokov, Director of VoiceXML Forum and an employee of IBM.

VoiceXML attempts to decrease the space between licensed content and users. IBM would like to encourage people to pick up their phone before they go to their laptop. Voice as a user interface makes a lot of sense. As we have seen with the deployment of broadband, the less barriers that exist between a user and his data the more likely he is to make purchases and use online services.

IBM’s multi-modal business unit promotes an interface of XHTML, VoiceXML, and XML Events. Using the VoiceXML namespace developers can specify voice prompts within their XHTML markup activated by an XML event. VoiceXML is built-in to Opera 8 and it is a part of all Honda navigation systems.

Igor’s presentation and the question and answer period lasted 29 minutes and 47 seconds. The audio is available as a 13.5 megabyte MP3 file.

Buzznet presentation at Mobile Monday

Jeff Clavier and Marc Brown of Buzznet were the third Mobile Monday presenters. Buzznet is a photo sharing service and platform based on a LAMP architecture. Buzznet showed off some of their different methods of making money as well as their new mobile application.

Buzznet currently sells cobranded sections of their site for organizations interested in community photography features without building their own solution from scratch. Buzznet will soon offer a deployed version of their software integrated into the larger Buzznet community for companies interested in more control over their photo community solution.

The coolest cobrand the team demonstrated was the Ventura County Star community photo blog. The photo blog accepts photo contributions from Ventura County residents and sometimes includes the photographs in the county newspaper. Creating a community photo site allows the Star to interface with its community and acquire photographs from locations and events without a staff photographer on duty, allowing a breadth of coverage and the ability to obtain photographs of breaking news stories such as a train wreck or fire.

Buzznet partnered with BellStream of Finland to extend the Blogia application and brand it as a Buzznet mobile application for Nokia Series 60.

Buzznet’s entire presentation and question and answer period lasted 24 minutes and 48 seconds. The audio is available as a 11.7 megabyte MP3 file.

Guinness Believer event

Tonight I attended a Guinness Believer event at the Merchants’ Exchange in downtown San Francisco. I received a constant stream of Guinness marketing from a hired non-Irish actor in exchange for all the Guinness, Harp, and Smithwicks I could drink from the tap, bottle, or can.

There was room for about 100 people in the room and about half of the available seats were filled. The presenter was a paid Jewish actor who does not drink. It would have been nice to have an Irish person present or at least have a marketer realize why a Black and Tan is not mixed with Smithwicks (there is some history behind the drink).

I always enjoy seeing people from a product’s country of origin at events, or at least someone with a passion for the product. Last year I was lucky enough to test drive an early production model Volvo S40 T5 after speaking with some of the Volvo staff direct from Sweden. I learned a lot about the brand, its direction, and their core values. There was a distinct national pride from the Swedes about their new Volvo.

I would have created a more interactive event. Want to show off the features of your new bottle? Show a cross section of the inside and let people play with the nitrogen widgets. Teach people how to pour a perfect pint and let them pour one. Conduct blind taste tests of bottled Guinness and Guinness from the tap.

I had such high expectations for the event but I was let down.

Open source communities

I attended the “Meet the Community” panel at the Open Source Business Conference today in San Francisco. After reading the list of panelists I knew I just had to be there. Pictured above from left to right is Larry Wall of Perl, David Wheeler of Bricolage, Chris Hoffman of Mozilla, Brian Behlendorf of Apache, and Josh Berkus of PostgreSQL.

I was hoping for a session about how thriving communities create good business and for each panelist to share some good tips about maintaining the community. Every member of the panel loved mailing lists and considered mailing lists at the core of their development community.

Brian Behlendorf stated that the first allegiance of an Apache developer is to their identity as an Apache developer. Their employer is a secondary identity most contributors choose not to mention in the Apache community. The committers may leave their current employer yet continue to contribute to the project, often supported in that effort by their new employer. Apache is fortunate enough to have developers earning a professional engineer’s salary to produce software given away for free.

The panel agreed the best way for a company to contribute to an open source project is to hire an engineer and get him or her on the project mailing list and contributing. In some cases a company will approach an open source project with money to spend but no engineers to dedicate to the project in the short-term. Bricolage has had companies sponsor the development of specific features by distributing money to freelance developers all over the world that would love to spend more time coding Bricolage. David is usually able to convince companies this effort makes a lot of sense because the changes will be committed to the core of the project and create a much easier upgrade path for the sponsoring company since they will not have to apply their patches to each new release.

Larry Wall mentioned the debate of whether it is better to have an open source project that is like an encyclopedia, where people can contribute their bits wherever they want or like a poem, where an author maintains a precise order and vision for the entire piece. Larry is a believer in the code is poetry model, especially for coding a language such as Perl.

Legal issues present a significant challenge to open source organizations. Foundations are created so no developer loses their house over a patent dispute. The legal community is now starting to provide legal assistance open source projects through groups like OpenBar and the Software Freedom Law Center. The EFF maintains a cooperating attorneys list to solicit assistance for worthy causes. Lessig asked the open source crowd earlier in the day to calculate the total amount they spend on cable television every year and donate a similar amount to the EFF.

I bumped into Ross Mayfield before attending the event. Ross does an amazing job providing transcripts of the conference sessions he attends and provides a detailed transcript of the panel on his weblog. Ross asked a very good question about how companies evaluate when a project should be open sourced or created and maintained entirely in-house.

Overall a very informative discussion from an all-star panel.

Correct time zone data in Movable Type

Daylight Savings Time went into effect at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning for most of the United States. Most people set all their clocks forward and did not give much thought to how their weblog tool is configured to communicate time to the rest of the world. My weblog is now communicating a UTC time zone offset of one hour less than reality, and it bothers me. I will explain why this happens and teach you how to fix your Movable Type weblog to display the correct time offset year-round.

Movable Type requires a timezone weblog setting of “the timezone where you are located.” A server offset is stored in mt_blog.blog_server_offset and applies to all weblog posts in templates using time zone data. Your RSS and Atom feeds are now providing an incorrect time of authorship if you live in an area of the world affected by daylight savings. Your weblog’s default template uses the time format of “%X” for HTML representations of time and does not include a time zone offset. All you have to worry about is your feeds.

So how do you fix it? Edit your weblog configuration by selecting “Configuration” from your main Movable Type screen or “Weblog Config” within your weblog. Pay no attention to the Movable Type time zone text in parenthesis since it is most likely incorrect for half of the year. If you live in the United States visit Time.gov to confirm your UTC offset. Change your weblog setting to the correct UTC offset — UTC-7 (Mountain Time) for Pacific Daylight Time — and rebuild your feeds by choosing “Rebuild Indexes Only” from your rebuild screen.

Your feeds will now display the correct time for feed readers around the world while still maintaining your time of local authorship.

It is a totally geeky thing to worry about, but it helps readers viewing your weblog through an aggregator identify the correct time of publication however they choose.

Yahoo! Term extraction API

Yahoo! now offers a term extraction API call for content analysis. You provide Yahoo! with some text and Yahoo! returns what it determines are significant words or phrases in order of significance.

Using this API call a developer could pass a weblog post to Yahoo! and receive an ordered list of suggested tags for that post. Combine the results with Technorati’s top tags API call and you can choose to include only the most popular contextual responses.