Niall Kennedy's home on the web
Feedster announced its contest winners today. Two out of three of my picks were correct.
Feedster’s contest seemed like a developer relations failure. The submission date and announcement date were moving targets, and when the winners were announced there was no explanation of the tool beyond a link to the author.
What are your thoughts? What would you like to see from a developer contest?
Technorati is hosting a developer chat on IRC this Wednesday night at 7 p.m. San Francisco time (03:00 UTC). If you are working on an entry for the developers contest ending this Friday the chat is a good opportunity to receive live answers to any problems you may have. Join #technorati on irc.freenode.net.
I will be in the chat room and try to answer any questions or explain how the site and services work. Any really difficult questions will be left to the Technorati employees to figure out.
Opera released a beta version of its Opera desktop application last week. The new version features improved RSS handling including address bar support similar to Apple’s plans for Safari RSS. A user can choose between RSS feeds declared as alternate links of type application/rss+xml.
After you subscribe to one or more feeds a Feeds menu appears showing your subscriptions and unread items per feed.
The Opera RSS browser treats each RSS item as a mail message, complete with the e-mail address of the item’s author. I did not check to see which RSS element is pulled here but I presume it must be author. After each post is a bar for a user to respond to the post via e-mail.
Opera also has special behavior when an address book entry matches the RSS link element and item author. In the screenshot above, Opera ties together Jeremy’s weblog and Jeremy’s entry in my address book. The man icon next to each entry lights up and Jeremy’s picture is at the top of the viewer. Jeremy asked for some screenshots so here you go!
Overall an interesting take on RSS aggregation from a bootstrapped mail client perspective. I would like to see better interaction with community comments instead of sending an e-mail. I could always parse the e-mail and post it to a comment script, but it would be nice if the aggregators played nice with feedback.
I tried to leave a comment on Marc Canter’s weblog in response to his post reacting to requests for reasonably priced geek dinners, but his weblog is not setup correctly. If you want to use TypeKey you have to edit your Movable Type weblog preferences and add your TypeKey token. You’re not enabling a conversation!
I was motivated enough to post here since Marc unfairly targeted some people trying to make the event work for everyone.
Tantek’s idea was to try somewhere new and to make the event as inclusionary as possible. He’s been to geek dinners all around the Bay Area so I think his suggestion was more out of familiarity than his own convenience. You know all the good eats, but somewhere between $20 and $40 the geek dinner idea lost a following.
Joi’s dinner was $35 plus tax and tip. The menu at LuLu looks within the price range of many people if there were individual bills. $15 pizza should be pretty acceptable.
Yet all these points were lost in your post, bringing us nowhere closer to getting some coolio people together Thursday night to talk about whatever is on geeks’ minds. Last year at the Cheesecake Factory in Palo Alto you brought the family and a few people asked if you were comfortable having so much information about your family online. FOAF and XFN coexisted nicely, people were aggregated, and everyone went home full and happy.
LuLu will be new enough for most people. Most of its plates are in the same range as Cheesecake Factory, so Scoble’s $40-$60 estimate seems a bit high if people just pay for what they order or consume. $16 for rotisserie chicken or a pizza, or $25 for some squab.
No one will be chastised for going lower priced menu or lower cased semantic web. Do what works for you. You can view the ongoing conversations the next morning in RDF, XFN, or in your Technorati, Feedster, or PubSub results. Can you dig it?
Today Six Apart moved into its new offices. No more interviews at the Tokyo Star, or driving to work for a lot of people. Moving into new space closer to home must have a big “we made it” feeling and make you realize how you have created something where there was nothing before. Congratulations Six Apart, and may your new pad be full of many bits of moving type.
Forbes has a brief article about RSS feeds changing the business landscape.
Some inaccuracies in the article:
“Instead of searching for information, you get RSS to push it to you.” RSS is a pull technology, not push. A user requests the data and is sent a response.
“Technorati.com is now monitoring more than 5 million RSS-enabled blogs.” Technorati claims to watch over 5.2 million weblogs, but Technorati builds its database primarily by parsing HTML. Technorati is not a RSS-based searcher as the article claims.
The Technorati Users Group went well. Nine people learned new things about Technorati and five Technorati employees had a chance to interact with potential power users. I enjoyed making it all happen.
I tethered myself to a projection TV and stepped through my prepared slides — my first time using the S-Video output on my PowerBook. I highlighted some features of the Technorati web site, showed how to create a watchlist, introduced the developer wiki, and showed the API responses. I briefly showed the Java SDK and an application I put together just minutes before the meeting.
I did not record any audio or tune-in to the IRC channel; I was too busy trying to make things work locally. 21st Amendment is a noisy space so I found myself yelling a bit to reach my audience.
It was good to have Technorati employees present but it is certainly not a prohibitive factor to forming a users group. You could put together a users group in your own city as well. If you are interested in discussing users groups or developer events leave a comment or drop me a note. I am sure I will have more reflections after I have gathered more responses.
FIFA announced an insurance fund to compensate clubs for injuries sustained by their players at the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Each national association will contribute 5% of its prize money to the insurance fund for a total of $13 million. The surplus will be reimbursed after the tournament.
it’s good to see assurances to the companies sponsoring these athletes and their long-term development. The World Cup would be very different without club soccer and the two need to learn to get along.
Tonight is the first ever meeting of the first Technorati Users Group at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment in San Francisco. I will give an overview of Technorati and dive into its APIs. We will meet upstairs in the loft area.
Everyone in attendance will receive a Technorati Users Group founding member t-shirt. You could also win one of two books. Good beer, good food, and a chance to learn about a service you can use for free. Come on down!
I put together some slides to cover the basics of how Technorati works, how you can access their data, and what is available over current APIs.
If you cannot make it tonight, join #technorati on irc.freenode.net to join the conversation. If anyone brings an iSight we can try to broadcast video over the open access point. Otherwise I will try to record the audio and make it available after the event.
Questions? Lost? Give me a call. My cell number is 415.425.2417.
San Francisco Business Times writes about Six Apart’s planned move to San Francisco next month. Some interesting statistics:
