Alcides Fonseca

Community & Customer Service – The video of an interesting talk with Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress, Gina Bianchini from Ning, Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency and Patty Roll from Timbuk2.

Ruby and RDF - What about creating RDF statements using Ruby's beatiful syntax?

Why Joost will loose to Miro – A nice article showing why in the near future Miro is the best choice for P2P video.

Why I Unfollow People Who Use Hashtags On Twitter – A negative view of Twitter microformat Hashtags. I do use them sometimes, but most of the time, I guess I’ll agree with Dave Coustan.

DataPortability and me, JB – Another video by John Breslin on DataPortability and a bit of RDF and SioC. I really liked it!

We have old Gravatar, hAvatar, pAvatar (discussed here) and now we have Openvatar.

This last one is based on OpenID, but uses email as the identifier… This makes no sense!(Read comments) and is centralized! OpenID is all about using your own URL as you main identity (although email seems possible too) so you should fetch your avatar based on your URL. Both pAvatar and hAvatar do that correctly, but hAvatar uses another piece of technology I love (and makes all sense together with OpenID) that are the microformats (hCard in this case).

So I’d like all this not-that-good solutions to stop coming, and that we all focus on adopting the one that makes sense to the majority of people.

Or just yet another post about the future of webstandards after th dark IE8 news. I understand their point that they will broke the web if they follow standards, but following standards is the right thing to do. Luckily this seems a temporary issue for proper websites because HTML5 will work correctly without any stupid little tag.

So what about this post’s fancy title? Well, I found this post that is working almost as a chain post or meme from developers who support the Web Standards and have set their personal deadline for 1st January 2010 to stop caring about non-standard stuff in webpages they author. From now on, I am one of them.

Oh, and I can’t wait for HTML5 to come out!

Some interesting links for the week:

Folksr is a project that intends to gather people’s votes through their microformated links. You login with your openID, and from then on just add rev=“vote-for” and that’s a vote! Of course this is only for geeky people. But an interesting proof of concept anyway!

MOAT is a way of giving meaning to tags (via URLs). Its a cute project, but I don’t know if it will be useful. Anyway, there are already public servers and a Drupal implementation. Wordpress already in the TODO list.

Gravatar is attached to your email address and is not open nor distributed. The future is URL-based and distributed. There already two alternatives: pAvatar that seems more (unnecessarily) complex to implement, and hAvatar is just the photo on your hCard. Pretty simple hein? I just got one problem: When more than one hCard are present in the page, which one is the author’s? Tantek uses the class author, but I don’t find it in any other website. Any tips?

After the RSS feeds being restored, I took the chance to add some new stuff to my online identity. I use this URL as an endpoint to all my online activity. My hCard information is here, my XFN friend list is here, the links to all my profiles in several online services/social networks are here. It even works as my OpenId.

For the past days, I’ve been checking up on FOAF. There is already one opensource social network accepting this format to import all your information. There is a bit of discussion between XFN+hCard versus FOAF since the two of them represent your personal information and the relationship you have with others. I believe more in the microformat way of displaying data, but FOAF follows RDF standards.While Dan Brickey, one of the authors of FOAF, believes there is space for the both of them, I still have my doubts… Either way, I did my own FOAF file with basic info and then linking to the FOAF files extracted from my last.fm, twitter and flickr profiles. If you want to make yours, you can write by hand or you could use FOAF-O-Matic. For wordpress users, there is already one plugin.

If you are interesting in learning about RDFa (a formal way of defining everything! in semantic web) and a bit about FOAF, make sure you see this simple video.

Next, I decided to implement my own APML file from all the tags I use in my blog. The result is already linked in my head tag and I am waiting to use it in some projects. Imagine filtering through your feeds based on what you post (that is probably what you like!). Yes, there is also a wordpress plugin for this too. And then I just adapted the code to serve as a tag cloud in the sidebar. But the evening hacking wasn’t finished until I add the last delicious entry for each tag page.

I hope in less than 6 months I have a daily usage of this stuff I’m working on. It would be a shame if when I register in a website it doesn’t import all my public info :(

I’ve posted a while ago about APML, a format that stores the attention you give something. Today I’ll show you how to get your own personalizes music magazine thanks to this format.

I assume that you have a last.fm account like I do or a Pandora account, If no, get one, scrobble around a little and come back then.

Thanks to tastebroker, a project by Paul Lamere of Sun Microsystems, you can export your music attention data into a APML file. If you use last.fm, it will be located at http://TasteBroker.org/apml/last.fm/YOURUSERNAME and if you use Pandora it will be at http://TasteBroker.org/apml/pandora/YOURUSERNAME. You will need your APLM url later. In tastebroker you can also get your APML for you del.icio.us account, but it won’t be useful here unless you only bookmark music-related stuff.

Finally enter Idiomag.com, a daily music magazine that focus on the music YOU like. Just write you APML URL in the input field, and click GO. Have fun with the mag that you will like for sure!

Note: If you get a "Oops" error message, try the following URL: http://research.sun.com:8080/AttentionProfile/apml/music/YOURLASTFMUSERNAME. It worked for me!

Ever wanted to host your own Facebook or Hi5? Have the benefits of a social network, but without outsourcing it to 3rd parties like Crowdvine or Ning?

I’ve already posted on creating your own social network and mentioned Elgg, an OpenSource SocialNetwork that includes features such as:

• Blogging
• File repositories
• Podcast and full RSS support
• Tagging
• Profiling
• Communities
• Multilingual

And two that caught my attention:

• OpenID support
• Importing content

OpenID is a obvious advantage comparing to hi5, Facebook or even other social networks. It allows you to have your own Identity shared by all your social networks (if you want). But what about importing content? I really thought they were thinking XFN, hCards and other microformats, but no. They are using another standard: FOAF. The Friend of a Friend standard is a XML-RDF way of expressing connections between people and information about them. And it’s even compatible with OpenID.

But personally I believe more in the hCard+XFN solution. It allows you to have your data encapsulated in your content, and not a separated XML file. You write the code once, and it’s readable by both people and machines. I guess those two tribes should gather and pick on a real solution. It’s been so hard for people to start adopting this kind of standards that if there are two to choose from, we will never have that decentralized social network we all dream of.

Web2.0 has brought a great amount of data and people have the need to gather the ones that matter for them in order to consume. For now, you can have all the info in netvibes (or other widget system), you can have them all in your RSS reader (since all the information cames up in RSS nowadays), but it is a pain for those who have a lot of interests to catch-up with everything happening on the web. People came up with a lot of complex GTD ideas to make it possible. As for me, I just read blogs through Google Reader and for all the rest (twitter, photos, videos…) I use Flock, which is a great social browser.

There is now a format that joins all this information with a level of interest for you. It’s called APML and it stands for Attention Profiling Mark-up Language, that work as a OPML not only for feeds, but also for other data and gives them a attention value for tags. It’s the Web2.0 Folksonomy in its best shape!

But of course all this standards don’t mean a thing if there aren’t uses for them. You can check some examples of APML usage as I did. One of the tools that interested me was Particls, one cool sidebar that shows content that is relevant for me (you can set it up by using tags and adding your own feeds). It also orders news by the interest they have to you. It’s definitely a anti-GTD application, but might be useful for you if you are a journalist or you activity needs you to be in constant track of some themes.

Douglas Vos said it:

Ok, so we people who believe in Standards should wear a ugly blue beanie and put a photo in Flickr. Ok, I believe in standards but I do not believe this is going to help, I’m sorry but I don’t. But if instead of hanging around with a blue thing on our heads, we would change our websites or applications or whatever to support standards correctly? Or if your work already follows all the imaginable standards, why not do some charity work and help other websites to reach that level? Or even change a large website that has not the W3C word in it.

(via Jeffrey Zeldman)

Since I moved from Flock to Google Reader I felt the need for a desktop solution to read my feeds. I’ve tried pyRfeed but since then there was no real evolution in the project. I know I could read GoogleReader’s reading list ATOM but if I use it in some desktop feed reader, it doesn’t sync with Google Reader so I can read it n my mobile.

Last week I was thinking of making my own feedreader web.based that supports syncing with another desktop feedreader. Just like IMAP works for email, this new protocol would work for Feeds. It would allow client readers to mark as read/unread, to flag (or star) items and even manage subscribing feeds. If it works, maybe I will have success making popular feed readers adopt it.

So if you are interested in this subject and want to help, you have my contacts on the top-right of the page.