Shelley Powers published a short tutorial on accessing Newsgator via its API and PHP. I’m working with the code and fleshing out a wrapper library I hope to release shortly. I’m fairly sure using Newsgator judiciously will help alleviate the hosting problems I’ve been facing as Philly Future grows, and allow me to add some interesting new features. We shall see.
Tag Archives: programming
Yahoo Rethinking homepage complexity
This according to PaidContent. Take a look at this comparison of Google and Yahoo thru the years.
In other Yahoo! news it joins MSN and Google in working with Chinese authorities to diminish individual freedom in the pursuit of commerce.
Jesse James Garrett interviews Flickr’s Eric Costello
It really is a must read. It follow’s Flickr’s evolution from a game engine to what it is today and why Flickr has made the decisions it has in features and feel. I think it boils down to: “It’s the Users stupid”.
Flash 8 poised to take on Web video
Flash 8 poised to take on Web video | CNET News.com
…The company has promised big changes in Flash 8, and many of them center on its video capabilities. Flash 8 boasts a new codec, On2 Technologies’ VP6, that both companies claim will provide dramatically improved quality over the Flash 7 video codec. Flash 8 also supports alpha transparency, which lets authors combine Flash video with text, vector graphics and other Flash elements.
But while Macromedia touts Flash 8’s new video bells and whistles, those betting on a Flash video ascendancy point to longstanding Flash benefits, particularly its cross-platform reach.
Because of its small size and its being bundled with Microsoft Windows and other operating systems, Flash is almost universally distributed. More than 98 percent of personal computers connected to the Web have some version of the Flash player installed, according to Macromedia, and more than 100 equipment manufacturers are building Flash into their devices.
In several demonstrations of Flash video in recent months, Macromedia has mocked the experience that some Web surfers go through when trying to access RealNetworks or Windows Media video clips. In the demonstration, the people trying to access the video are confronted with dialogue boxes prompting the download of large players. Then they have to choose bandwidth speeds and other options.
Flash video, by contrast, is “playerless.” That means video clips play embedded in the Web page, and Flash developers can design their own interfaces and determine their own buffers and other technical settings.
Macromedia’s potential competitors say the software is too lightweight, failing to offer an array of features important to both media purveyors and consumers.
“Flash doesn’t have digital rights management, and studios care about DRM,” said Michael Schutzler, senior vice president of media for RealNetworks. “We are focused on intellectual property that has value, where DRM matters. Flash is fine for ads, but none of the studios are going to do this.”
“I don’t think there’s really direct competition between Flash video and Windows Media,” said Kevin Lynch, Macromedia’s chief software architect. “The direction we’re headed with Flash video is aiming at Web video, video embedded on Web pages. That’s a different segment than downloadable videos, full-length movies, and Windows Media is supplying features toward that model.”
“While I never discount Microsoft and doubt that Windows Media Player will get knocked out of the marketplace by Flash video, I also know that some leading brand sites are already voting for Macromedia,” said Harley Manning, an analyst with Forrester Research. “And I think that more will do the same when the new player and tools arrive. At the very least, this will force Microsoft to think differently about some aspects of their product.”
Motherhood and Apple Pie
lesscode.org: Motherhood and Apple Pie [@lesscode.org]:
The internet is not an accident. The internet was not bound to happen. There was no guarantee that the internet would reach its current state as a side effect of emerging digital processing and communications capabilities. We did not recover complex alien technology.
The internet, that place where all eventual business will be transacted, all content and media will be distributed, all correspondence will be exchanged, all history will be recorded, and all pornography will be is being admired, has a design – and its meant for exactly these purposes.
Many of the principles that led to this design are still with us today, although I would challenge you to ascertain them by observing the mainstream technologies being peddled by leading vendors, publications, and analyst firms. Those who rose to power in a much different environment, where the short-term profits of disconnected, dead-end business software was deemed more important than laying a fertile ground where millions of new ideas (and hence new profits) could bloom.
But the dead-end has long been reached and so these industry leaders have turned their attention to this new place, built on principles and values very different from their own, and have somehow reached the conclusion that this thriving ecosystem must be re-arranged such that they have somewhere to place their baggage. Instead of embracing the people, principals, and technologies that gave rise to this phenomenon they have chosen to subvert its history and to implant the ridiculous notion that it is â€Ŕincapable of meeting the stringent demands of the business community.â€?
Not only have these business radicals claimed the internet as their own but they have also somehow gained the confidence of all the worlds industry in their ability to deliver a new and sparkling internet, one no doubt capable of reproducing the complexities and flaws that plague existing mediums so as to make it feel more like home. They’ve brought their own principles and agendas, asserting them as obvious and correct while ignoring the wisdom we’ve gained and shared and gained and shared over years of collaborative practice and observation of working systems at this scale.
A great essay. I don’t agree with some of his conclusions, but it and especially its source material are must reads.
What is Logo?
My first exposure to programming was Logo in Junior High. I gotta download a copy and see if it is still a relevant teaching tool today. What normally pops into my head when folks ask what is a good language to learn programming with, I tend to veer towards either Python or Java.
Logo Foundation: What is Logo?
“Logo is the name for a philosophy of education and a continually evolving family of programming languages that aid in its realization.”
– Harold Abelson Apple Logo, 1982This statement sums up two fundamental aspects of Logo and puts them in the proper order. The Logo programming environments that have been developed over the past 28 years are rooted in constructivist educational philosophy, and are designed to support constructive learning.
Constructivism views knowledge as being created by learners in their own minds through interaction with other people and the world around them. This theory is most closely associated with Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, who spent decades studying and documenting the learning processes of young children.
…The Logo Programming Language, a dialect of Lisp, was designed as a tool for learning. Its features – modularity, extensibility, interactivity, and flexibility -follow from this goal.
For most people, learning Logo is not an end in itself, and programming is always about something. Logo programming activities are in mathematics, language, music, robotics, telecommunications, and science. It is used to develop simulations, and to create multimedia presentations. Logo is designed to have a “low threshold and no ceiling”: It is accessible to novices, including young children, and also supports complex explorations and sophisticated projects by experienced users.
The most popular Logo environments have involved the Turtle, originally a robotic creature that sat on the floor and could be directed to move around by typing commands at the computer. Soon the Turtle migrated to the computer graphics screen where it is used to draw shapes, designs, and pictures.
Some turtle species can change shape to be birds, cars, planes, or whatever the designer chooses to make them. In Logo environments with many such turtles, or “sprites” as they are sometimes called, elaborate animations and games are created.
HonorTags and Citizen Journalism
Jeff Jarvis’s lists the first duty of a news editor in citizen journalism to “Aggregate, organize, and highlight the best of newsroom and citizen media”.
That’s *exactly* what our volunteer editorial team attempts to do at Philly Future. You can be the judge whether we are successful or not. Doing so requires tools and knowledge to use them. The tools we have are evolving, but are not yet where they should be.
One of the evolving tools we have is the practice of self tagging our own writing and photos with terms that make it easy to aggregate them – to pull them together for use. Folksonomies – collections of these collaborative categorizations – and tools that make use of them – are springing up all over the web
If it wasn’t for this practice, we would have had a near impossible time bringing together our regional web’s coverage of Live 8 . Technorati’s Live 8 aggregator, which brought together a tremendous amount of posts that were tagged as relating to Live 8, and Flickr, which had photos tagged as relating to Live 8, helped to identify relevant posts for review to highlight them at Philly Future.
Our Live 8 Philly coverage will continue to grow long after the event – specifically because of Technorati, Flickr and Philly Future’s own aggregator, which has who we consider the best bloggers in our region in it.
Philly Future attempts to be a tool that brings together the best of our regional web. Opinion, news, information, and more. It’s a daunting task for a volunteer effort. One of the issues we face is finding and attempting to discern if someone is posting something that is a factual news item, or an opinion piece. Reading is the ultimate arbitrator of this, but how to locate these posts initially is very difficult and flawed.
Think about it. How did you find *this* post? Probably from your aggregator. Or another blogger. Maybe a blogroll. What if no one linked to me? What if I had posted a quality piece and had no initial audience among those who are already well read? If I was some feed in a larger aggregator – that no one referenced – this post would easily be missed. Part of the din.
Clay Shirky wrote, way back in 2003, a piece that keeps getting overlooked in some places
“Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality”. Essentially, you must be linked to from those that are already linked to, in order to garner initial attention and traction. Shelley Powers has wrote extensively on this subject.
I took part in a related discussion at Jeff Jarvis’s site the other day. A great quote from Jeff: “I have to constantly kick myself to stop thinking of blogging in big-media terms, to stop judging it by the top of the power law and in silly lists, to stop assuming that bloggers want to do what media does (emphasis mine – Karl), to stop thinking that blogging has to be media, to stop thinking of blogs as publications and remember that they are people.”
Me too. He’s absolutely right. A tool to help combat that is to know a little about what the intent of a blog post is. What is the author attempting to achieve? Share his opinion? Post a news item? Do some activism? Tags can help here.
Look – we can rely on those that are already well linked to for telling us what is the news. For telling us who to read. For telling us what is important. Or we can search. Search for the new voice. Search for the new perspective.
Let those that are creating their own content tell us their intent.
Tags help us to do just that – help us to know the intent of an author. In Technorati, Flickr, and del.icio.us they help us to filter based upon the author’s choice – not some “authority’s”. This helps a host like me find content that I am looking for.
Still we have a long way to go – this volunteer still needs to read far too much to tell ya the truth. And it’s growing by the day.
That’s why I when I saw Dan Gillmor’s post about his group’s concept to help – HonorTags – I became very intrigued and did some thought. I believe – after the team has some discussion – we will use these within Philly Future to help folks identify – for themselves – what they consider the intent of their own writing. I believe it will help readers – and editors – know whether an author wants them to consider a post in different important ways.
Self-tagging is imperfect, for sure. It can be easily abused. And I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject. But I welcome any new tools in my belt that can make life easier. I think this can be one.
A Few Google Map Hacks
O’Reilly: Glenn Letham: Hackers Tap Into the Functionality and Simplicity of Google Maps.
Many fun things to try here.
Shorter careers than athletes
In 2000, near the end of the high-tech boom, industry CEOs convinced Congress to nearly double the number of H-1B visas, allowing up to 195,000 skilled workers from India and elsewhere into the US. Some engineers contend that those CEOs kept many of those H-1B workers while cutting higher-paid US citizens.
“About 80,0000 engineers were unemployed a few months ago. If you take out the H-1Bs who came in, you’d have jobs for all of them,” the IEEE-USA’s Bryant says. The organization is lobbying Congress to lower the number of H-1B issued.