Alcides Fonseca

In the US and some other countries, tipping is almost mandatory and represents the major income for waiters and several other professions. If it works there, why shouldn’t it work on the Internet?

Well, Alper and some friends decided to make it true and have launched recently their startup. TipIt.to is a simple way of donating whatever you want, even cents to some website. That way you could surf the web, express you tips to this and that website, and when it reaches some value like 10€, pay it all. It might look a small account to you, but website owners will certainly like all those small tips together.

I really like this system and that’s the way I could see the Internet flowing. I also like advertising, but in some cases it’s just too intrusive. I would like to set like 10 euros per month to spend on Internet sites that make my life easier (or happier!) and give them away per cents, according to how much I like the websites. It would be awesome for OpenSource projects and for Music Artists, since I may want to download their music from some P2P network illegally and be able to contribute to the author.

But working with money online is not easy. There are a lot of suspicious users that don’t trust their money to anyone. This might be a problem. Another one is the social culture. Tipping do vary from region to region and it might work fine in the US, in Europe it might not, we’ll see…

Voltando ao concurso Audax, há uma coisa que o destingue relativamente aos concursos dos outros canais. Enquanto por norma esses têm um jurí, mas a decisão é feita pelo público, no Audax a decisão é puramente do júri. Concordo com esta decisão pois quando se falam de coisas sérias como empresas e o futuro de pessoas (e não de prémios enormes em reality shows). No entanto seria interessante saber a opinião do público sobre os vários concorrentes.

Ora foi exactamente isto que o Celso se propôs a fazer e está agora disponível em TopAudax.com onde podem votar no empreendedor que vos conquistou com a sua ideia. O conceito é bastante simples e funciona ainda como registo dos vários projectos apresentados.

Toca agora a ver o melhor concurso da história da televisão nacional e a votar depois no Top Audax!

Ideias3 is now one year old and this weblog will also be in a few days. Since its beginning, I’ve been using it as the center of my web activity. It has my hCard, it is my OpenId, it has my XFN friend list, it has me links to all my social profiles. Although typing in your browser’s address bar “alcides fonseca” would return this website, I guess that having my identity outside ideias3 was important, and now my web presence is pointing to alcidesfonseca.com.

Although the old url is still active and redirecting to here, I’d appreciate you link to this new address now. I’ve just changed a few lines in a few templates (and APML and FOAF) and this line helped a lot regarding the database. Now I am in the quest of changing all my web profiles with the new email and website. I’m curious to see how technorati deals with it.

Changing your personal details everywhere is always painful (I’m hating it, and I’m fearing changing my address when I move to my new house two streets away from current one) but I believe the social web may help this. I had this conversation with Bruno and I guess it could work in a year or so: I have a new email and url. I change my hCard in this new website. I ping technorati’s kitchen or pingerati for both urls. Both those services propagate the pings to popular services like twitter, flickr, etc… They notice that alcides.ideias3.com is redirecting to a new url, so they change it from my profile, and then they update my details from the hCard, since I use alcidesfonseca.com as my main identity page (or as my OpenId). And that way, everything is updated everywhere, with just one change and one ping!

Just a final note: I now enter my email address without any spam protection. I guess it is already somewhere in the web my plain email address, so I don't care anymore. Gmail works fine as a Spam blocker (I've stopped using my MSN address because I still get too much spam).

A Segunda Grande Maravilha da Internet faz hoje 7 anos. Quem mo lembra é o Ciberesfera. Mas uma das Grandes Maravilhas da Internet porquê? Bem, eu considero que a Internet está ainda nos seus primórdios e até ao momento há dois marcos bastante importantes na sua história. Os critérios que aplico são a sua influência global, e não apenas nos hackers e novos geeks.

A Primeira Grande Maravilha da Internet foi (e continua a ser) o Google. Refiro-me aqui ao Google como motor de pesquisa e não como empresa nem a todos os outros produtos que tem. É verdade que a sua fortuna se baseia na publicidade online, sobretudo com a introdução de publicidade contextualizada. mas para o utilizador final a marca google está e estará sempre associada à página de entrada do browser. Ou à barra no canto do browser. Ou a qualquer caixinha onde possam colocar umas palavras e encontrar sites relacionados com essas mesmas palavras. Numa altura em que a Internet se estava a tornar demasiado grande para os simples directórios (Como o SAPO em tempos o foi!) e o Google apareceu como uma página que nos levava ao que quiséssemos encontrar. A interface minimalista e a linha mágica de Javascript (e um bom marketing por trás, digo eu) deram ao Google a preferência dos utilizadores e hoje em dia é sem dúvida o motor de busca mais usado. Revolucionou uma geração: a minha. Quando a Internet chegou a preços decentes à minha terriola (a.k.a. 56kbps) todos os nossos trabalhos de pesquisa foram feitos graças a essa página do Google. Belos eram os velhos tempos em que podíamos colocar http://www.google.com na bibliografia! Depois as outras gerações começaram a aprender. Muitos negócios fazem-se através da Internet e o primeiro passo para essa globalização é sempre dado a partir de um dos vários domínios do Google. Hoje em dia está tão integrado na nossa cultura que se tornou um verbo em várias línguas.

A Segunda Grande Maravilha da Internet, a tal que faz hoje 7 anos, é a Wikipédia. Tal como o Google, é um dos sites mais usados pela população em geral. De momento substitui-me as chamadas “bíblias” das cadeiras do meu curso. É usada diariamente por uma data de estudantes como ferramenta de ensino, e por outro tipo de estudantes, que apesar de não andarem num curso, continuam a aprender a vida toda. Qualquer curiosidade é esclarecida prontamente e em várias línguas pela Wikipédia. E há um factor chave aqui: a qualidade. Apesar de ser um projecto que se baseia na boa vontade dos participantes, conseguiu atingir um nível que acaba por ter uma qualidade superior a enciclopédias tradicionais. E muito, muito mais artigos.De facto considero um marco na Rede não só pelo que atingiu, mas para mostrar o produto de uma sociedade muito vasta. O poder da Partilha. E com um resultado brilhante! Com a qualidade, vieram os links da Internet para os diversos artigos (como os que se encontram neste post), e hoje tem quase sempre os primeiros resultados no Google. E agora todos usam.

Aposto que muitos de vós se interrogam porque não considero as Redes Sociais a Terceira Maravilha. Não digo que não o serão, mas de momento ainda não as considero como tal. Para além de existirem diversas redes sociais, e cada uma é mais usada em alguns sítios do que outros ( Hi5 em Portugal, Orkut no Brasil, Facebook e MySpace nos EUA, etc..), ainda não está bastante divulgada nos diferentes extractos etários. São sobretudo usados por jovens, e enquanto não chegarem massivamente ao resto da família, não lhes vou dar essa importância. No entanto estão sim a caminhar para lá. E já o facto de saber de namoros que acabaram por causa de perfis do hi5…. Quando as redes sociais estabilizarem daqui a um ou mais anos, voltamos a falar nisso.

Para já, parabéns Wikipédia!

Following up with this post, James Bennett really does it well.

He explains the problem (the lack of a universally good standard gateway for dynamic languages and webservers), the objective (the change to long-running processes) and the solution (Languages guys and hosting working together to provide a better way for programmers like me to easily deploy stuff to the server and whatever magic is behind to be correctly handled by the hosting guys).

I know that DH guys really want it, now it’s just a matter of fact they can get along with RoR and Django guys to do some real work.

A little background here: I have worked for a long (maybe too long) time with PHP and for a year now I am doing all my web development with Python with Pungi, my microwebframework. Since my early days at Terràvista I’ve always used shared hosting. It fitted my needs for PHP and MySQL support.

I am still on shared hosting (ideias3 is hosted at dreamhost) and I keep planing to use since it’s way cheaper. I am enjoying Dreamhost, I have all the stuff I want there, (virtually) unlimited storage that I don’t imagine using even 50% of it. It also comes with some goodies such as Jabber and SVN support. Of course I would like a dedicated server, where I could run my own stuff (jabber bots, experimental stuff) and even a git server (yeah, I am planing to move some of my code to git). But I don’t want to afford that, and for running PHP apps, dreamhost is doing fine. I have a bunch of e107s and Wordpresses there. None of them are vital information. If you are looking for a stable hosting forget dreamhost. Has too many downtimes in their machines and runs a bit slow sometimes.

When I built Pungi, I made it in order to work through CGI since it would run (almost) everywhere. Those are my needs! I later implemented a Fast-cgi MVC way of running it (inspired a bit by web.py, Django and Nuno’s dispatcher) but I went through hell to get it working. Buzzwords is the only project that runs it. I’m back with CGI, I know it’s slow but I don’t feel it. Since I only use it for simple applications (that’s the target of pungi) it runs fine without any trouble.

I’ve set up Django in my Leopard and it was pretty easy and I know it’s possible to run django applications on Dreamhost but they don’t offially support it. Even web.py is too troublesome to install. So I’m sticking to old CGI with pungi for my websites. I know it’s sad, but it’s what runs smoothly in my shared hosting.

We also have a bunch of Rails applications running in Dreamhost, Sérgio’s blog, TwitterNotes and some projects still in dev stage. Once in a while the application stops and we need to manually reset the fast-cgi process. I say “we”, but it’s all Sérgio’s work, since he is the Ruby on Rails guy here. Well, there is a post on DreamHost official blog in which the lack of shared hosting support in Rails is a real problem. I agree: Rails will never be the next PHP if they can’t support it. John Gruber explains that the power of Rails is in being easy to code and not to deploy(as in set up environment and all). You can’t have both.

There are a few PHP MVC frameworks (Symphony, CakePHP and CodeIgniter) that do more than the 20% features of Rails that 80% of programmers use and works almost everywhere. Alhouth I hate PHP for its nasty syntax and language nature and evolution, the modphp for apache is the key for a quietly FTP-upload-only deployment. That and hKit are making me wondering if I should get back to do some PHP5 stuff again.

One of AJAX developers’ first stresses was cross-side scripting. With all these data APIs that are available in XML or JSON, one could easily fetch it with a XMLHttpRequest and parse it right on the client. There are a few hacks around this, being the simpliest a “small proxy script” in the same server your application. Other solution used by many websites that isn’t as simple, but easier to distribute is including code with the script tag since it allows code from other domains. So this is a demanded features.

According to W3C Access Control working draft, Firefox 3 now supports cross-site XMLHttpRequests. You can set a resource to be accessible for all other domains, or specify the ones allowed through the HEADER or the XML way.

I believe now the code will be more equaly distributed between the client and server. Browsers that support Javascript should run in computers with some processing capabilities (even iPhones, Android, WM and even normal phones that will be supporting javascript in a few years) and I can even see some Javascript-only applications using CouchDB as a database (with read-only privileges for external connections).

Only waiting for Microformat support to come out :) And by the way, FF3 is already my main browser in the mac!

On the mac, due to the lack of del.icio.us integration with Camino, I switched to Firefox3b2, that is not yet perfect for me (Where the hell is the Microformats support?) and still lacks the del.icio.us integration (that I am handling with favelets), but looks pretty cool, is fast enough and supports this new coolnamed Mozilla service: Weave.

Weave is a service that hosts your favorites (that now have tags) and web history and soon a lot more (integration with your other plugins?). Mozilla starts off providing users other than software, they are offering services, that might lead them to a prosperous future in the 2.0 era. And will they take del.icio.us place for online bookmarking? I guess not. Although Labs.Mozilla is the only provider of weave services for now, they intend to opensource it, and delicious, magnolia and other online bookmarking services will make use of it. And then the competitions wouldn’t be for the best browser integration, but for the best social networking features and innovative experience.

This (temporary, I guess) lack of social features, is what keeps me from using weave as it’s meant to be and keep using del.icio.us (that has a new PHP version coming up for ages now).

Following my last post on Playful IAs, I found an interesting book on how social websites are games (or almost). Websites like Digg, Youtube and Facebook (the case studies) are built so they are not only useful, but also entertaining.

Some social networks work almost as a mmorpg where users have ranks, manage relationships, set trends, etc… And you can have the feeling of winning or losing too. Have this in mind the next time you use of this websites.

I recall Marco, in his Game Design presentation, saying that games must be addictive to be successful. Not addictive in a sickness order, but leaving a feeling in the player that he will want to play that game later on, or even buy the sequel. That’s exactly what web developers want for their sites. Visitors are wanted regular, that’s what generates statistics (for advertising purposes) and the community you need and target.

The book is available for free and it is a great learning tool to improve your website in order to be more fun. The author has also started a blog that I have already subscribed.

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.

My last post on microblogging mentioned Tumblelogs and that a lot of people are starting to use them instead of traditional blogs because they can share more types of content in a easier way.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, my friends, but I won’t be subscribing your tumblelogs. I subscribe a lot of stuff and I just don’t have the time to go through all the junk stuff you log. I do believe they might be useful for you, but I don’t see other people following yours. Ok, unless they have too much free time!

I value traditional blogs a lot since I get a lot of content from it, specially opinions and cool links. That’s right, if I want to highlight some link or picture or video or any other thing that really matters to me, I blog it and that’s it. If you don’t want to give you the trouble for that: a) Install Flock, makes blogging everything much easier and please do write something about it, or else it will be a tumblelog running on a blog. b) del.icio.us it tagged as “for:alcidesfonseca”.

Oh, and when writing this, I found out that Veronica Belmont has the exact same opinion on this!

Open up the websites of your favorite web2.0 applications or social networks. Take only one second looking at each. Finally you’ll probably take the conclusion that there are design patterns in all of them. The squared corners, the reflection, gradients, badges, you name it… And every new web2.0site that comes up has this proven-to-work design. But this is not innovative in any way, is it?

Elliot Jay Stocks has a pretty awesome presentation on this called Destroy the web2.0 look that he gave at Future of Web Design. If you are a webdesigner, this is a must-read! If you are not, well… read it anyway!

I strongly agree with Elliot, since I’m tired of seeing all these websites look the same. If they want to have their own identity and not yet another web service, they have to engineer their own design. Web2.0 is not about that gradients or squared corners, it’s about focusing the web on the users and the relations between them (in my humble opinion). Of course there are several things that come from this, one of them being the simpleness of the design, so that the content is not obfuscated. But there are unlimited ways of achieving that, you just have to let your inner artist do his thing.

Well, all this time ASP.NET has been forgotten for real. Ruby on Rails, Django, Symphony and many others implemented something developers just loved: MVC. As Django’s co-creator Adrian noticed in Snakes and Rubies (and RoR’s David agreed) is that the MVC pattern has the obvious advantage of having both webdesigners and developers working on the same project only on the stuff that matters to them.

When I tried to do something cool using ASP.NET, it just didn’t fit my needs. It wasn’t MVC nor had the AJAX support I could have from rails, for example. I wished Microsoft (or anyone) had this awesome MVC framework!

Well, they have answered my prays: Scott Guthrie announced in his blog that yet this year the ASP.NET MVC Framework will be released and in the first half of next years it will be launched as a ASP.NET feature. I can’t say I’m not happy about this (obvious) decision to move ASP.NET into the MVC pattern! But somehow I just feel like Microsoft is always a step behind in this new web2.0 age.

Until now, if you wanted to create a social network for your self, the answer was almost certainly Ning. Today there are over 115,000 networks there and it’s growing.

When it was launched, October 4th 2005, it was a revolutionary idea that Fred best-described in TechCrunch:

In the recent past, every time a web2.0 service is launched, some opensource alternative is also released. Well, yesterday I found an interesting article in the .net magazine where it lets you host your own social network. It’s easy to do, you’ll just need a PHP+MySQL server but that’s what it gives you the power over Ning. You can change it around the way you like and add or remove more features, and so on.

I don’t believe this is a Ning-killer since the average Joe doesn’t have a hosting account, nor time to set it up and hack around. He’ll just go over to Ning, create a social network and play around with the theme editor. And users of multiple networks will share their Ning ID!

Hoje, na secção “I had this coming!”, o SAPO lançou o Spot, a nova rede social. De inovadora não tem nada, é apenas um hi5 bem feito como ele deveria ter sido desde início. Uma coisa simples e que permita aos utilizadores associarem-se.

No entanto o facto de ser do SAPO trás algumas (e importantes) vantagens: integração com os outros serviços do SAPO, como blogs, fotos, tags e vídeos. Interessante foi também o Sapo (web)Messenger que incorporaram na área de cada um!

Mais uma coisa que despertou o meu interesse foi o facto de o Sapo ter tido a coragem, como muitos não têm, de incluír outros serviços (concorrentes) nos profiles, nomeadamente o Flickr, o Youtube e o Blogger! É de louvar esta atitude! Deixam ainda um espaço para um outro feed, que no meu perfil foi o deste blog.

Estou bastante intrigado para saber como se vai sair este novo projecto da malta batráquia, visto que a maior parte dos utilizadores já utiliza o hi5 (onde por acaso o SAPO é o motor de busca para Portugal) e custa-me ver as vantagens que apresenta para o utilizador comum (=MSN+mail+hi5+google). No entanto se tiver sucesso, este irá-se espalhar aos outros serviços. E como será que irão divulgar isto?

I’ve already posted a bit on this matter, but web2.0 isn’t static and things evolve. Here’s how I see the scene now:

• Twitter: THE microblogging
• Jaiku: personal aggregator
• Pownce: twitter with steroids
• Tumblr: miniblogging

But things are changing! Starting by Twitter, it has stalled in my opinion, in their basic concept: only microblogging. When all other services are getting into images, videos, links, musics, quotes, you name it, Twitter spend their efforts in stabling their service (and at TwitterNotes we still get a lot of errors from Twitter!).

Jaiku has recently been acquired by Google and I guess it will have to do with the rumored gPhone! If so, Jaiku’s success will be proportional to gPhone’s.

Pownce hasn’t released the API yet, but they’re still working on new features. I guess if they had better applications (I don’t use the AIR one because it doesn’t minimize to tray!) it would be a nice service to use within small teams.

Tumblr seems to be reaching version 2.0. More features AND dead-simple go pretty good together.

A few days ago, Tiago introduced me Soup.io, another microblogging service that joins all of the others together. It seemed to me that it doesn’t bring anything new, but looked nice and it’s a nice way of having everything together. A Scrapbook as they say.

Moments ago, I was discussing with Armando about what platform would be “the chosen one” or at least how would this ones evolve. He believes that Tumblr will be the more used within sometime, but I have my doubts. Everyone (Ok, geeks and web2.0 people) is already using Twitter, have their profiles and network there. It will be hard to change everyone to a new service if the difference is not notorious, and at this is moment I don’t believe it is.

We also discussed whether it would be nice for Twitter to do trackbacks to blog posts since nowadays more and more people are using twitter to comment blogs. I usually only link it, I comment there is it is small or if I can make a nice big post out of that, I’d blog about it. But what about miniblogging (as I call tumblr and soup.io), they might deserve a trackback… What do you think?

I am a avid reader, before I fall asleep, I always read a bit unless I really like the book and then I read it all in a row. No they aren’t computer-related books, they’re mostly fantasy books but once in a while I take a look around one off-theme. Tolkien, Julliet Marillier, Homero make my evenings worth it!

Some time ago, Veronica suggested in Pownce to create a fantasy & sci-fi book club. I just loved the and idea, and more the fact that people are using this services to create this kind o connections on shared interests. Even the name was decided on Pownce!

Today the first book was released for discussion in the official blog SwordAndLaser.com but the discussion is happening on its Ning Social Network.

If you are a fan of Fantasy or Sci-fi books, why don’t you join us?

Web applications are borning everyday and in somehow the process to launch them seems very similar, so from what I’ve seen, I’ve written my plans for a generic web2.0 application:

• The Idea - Yeah, I know it sucks, but you'll need that. Really, you cant skip this step!
• The Blog - Before you start to do anything, start a blog where you post any idea. The first posts will have no comments, but with a little SEO magic, you'll get there. Don't forget to post updates frequently.
• The development - This is the boring part of the task, but people say that making it with a small team makes it kinda fun. If I were you I'd use Django or Rails because they come with some buzz. Ok, and they are pretty awesome frameworks too.
• Microformats - Make sure people can use your content in other ways than predicted. Don't forget to include XFN (portable social networks) since all web2.0 applications have a social network included.
• OpenID - Yes, this is the future of "Login/Logout/Sign up" and means less stuff to handle on your side, and will make users happy. If you are targeting a non-tech public, you should enable traditional authentication and make it work as a OpenID provider.
• OpenSearch - Many forget this, but I find it very important, since it integrates your site search with browsers (for example). It will help users to remember them can search for stuff in your application
• Public API - Provide everyone access to their data through Webservices or REST. It will also allow developers to do their mashups and desktop applications that will give you more buzz! And happiness to users!
• Design - KISS. Soft gradients and round corners. Personally I dont like corners too round. Oh, and use famfamfam icons :P
• Go Beta! - Doesn't matter if your product is ready, you should launch in beta. In one way, it is kind of cool to have that badge, but in another you can have bugs or even scaling. It's a good policy. Have in mind using private invites, so you don't have a boom of accesses.
• Talk to TechCrunch - You will need to buy better hosting soon, so you talk to TechCrunch to post about you and from them on everyone will use your website.
• Sell to Google - Google will approach you and you will sell it. You will then live happy ever after in the Bahamas (or not!).

That’s it! Pretty simple, hein? Missed something? Go ahead and comment about it :)

Early this month, Jeremy Keith posted about a invite-only gathering Microsoft threw in London. Jeremy shows a critic look on this event that was really enjoyable! You should really read it.

The post includes notes of the presentations he attended, including Lars Lindstedt, researcher at Microsoft, Brent Hoberman, CEO of lastminute.com and Steve Balmer himself. Apart from this, there was a Silverlight demo that included mashups with Virtual Earth and Flickr. Seadragon and Photosynth were also shown. Microsoft is really trying hard to get to the web2.0 guys.

At the end there was also a interesting discussion
Saul Klein, Ben Way and Cary Marsh, moderated by Ryan Carson that you can read in his post too.

Microsoft has now realized Web2.0 huge success and that are (now) small companies that are making the difference (apart from Google). They want to be the platform on which startups build their web applications (IIS, ASP.NET, Silverlight, ...) but seems to be failing. Let’s see if the take any action in order to provide better solutions that are available by OpenSource tools.

This is the title of Kars Alfrink‘s presentation at the Euro IA Summit 2007. Unfortunately I wasn’t there and I only read the slides with transcript, but I enjoyed it a lot.

Kars defends that desktop web applications can be compared a lot with games and that they can be developed in order to be more playful. He complains that most applications out there are designed to fulfill the goals that they are pointed, and not to provide some fun to users while doing it. By learning some gaming techniques, developers might do some interesting applications, not thinking about its purpose, but about its experience.

One good example of this, is the Disco, a disc burning software for the Mac. This application actually smokes while you are burning your CD and you can interact with it by moving the window around or blowing into the mic.

Take a good look at his presentation and next time you do some application (as I will), think of the IA as a game that is meant to be fun! And share your results of course :)

A small rant: No, this is not yet another post saying that Google just bought Jaiku and asking why haven’t they bought Twitter. I’ve seen hundreds of posts like this in the last day and only one or two really commented it. Maybe I should refilter my subscription list.

Now to the point: Google is taking over our world step by step. First searching, then advertising, e-mail and now news-reading and who knows what can be next?
Today while reading my feeds, I saw this mockup that really impressed me:

This is what I have requested! Just a simple OS (yes, Linux based will be O.K.) not for mobile (and why not too?), but for desktop where it could integrate all it’s services. Is it hard to do? Well Google stocks crossed $600 so money is not their problem. They have 13,786 full-time employees and a lot of them are genius. So why are they not launching fantastic applications? I mean, they do, but that’s not as much as I would expect from some big company like them. Things are not that hard, there are user demands for new stuff, so why is Google waiting for?

Any thoughts on this?

Universities are know for their scientific researching and for being the firsts to touch the future. Unfortunately, I don’t see this much in Portugal. In spite of many universities are adopting Moodle, just because they need to do remote teaching, not because they are getting into the true e-Learning, where just like in web2.0, the process is focused in the user (student in this case). It’s also one of the Bolonha Process main pedagogic ideas. This is pretty far from happening, at least in my university.

Simple things like blogs about some subject in some course would make students more interested and make them learn more about it. Social networks would also be very interesting gathering students from all over the world focusing on some specific subject. Reading Four Starters blog I found out a pretty cool idea: “you could use your student card to get discount at a cinema, an OpenID from your university would show that you are a student.” And maybe login into that universities social network.

Some time ago, Sérgio, Fábio and I had this project to make this social network for our department including AJAX webmail and feed reader (we don’t have such) and also get users to exchange interests and ideas. Unfortunately they weren’t very convinced with our project and we let it go. They don’t see the advantages in the new web…

Há um bom tempo atrás os portugueses tinham como principais portais o SAPO, o IOL, o Clix e o Terrávista. Este último sobrevivia do tempo em que era o único site português a oferecer alojamento grátis, e onde por acaso eu fiz o meu primeiro site! O SAPO evoluía do directório/motor de busca que era e ao ser adquirido pelo grupo Portugal Telecom, passou a entrar no mercado dos ISPs, onde se lançaram a Clix e a IOL (quem não se lembra de jogar ao disco com os cds da Clix…)

O Terrávista foi morrendo, na minha opinião por não fazer acordos com fontes informativas como os outros fizeram. O IOL, aquando da aquisição do grupo Media Capital, perdeu os sites das rádios do grupo para a Clix, o que fez com que perdesse bastante popularidade juntamente com o facto do serviço ISP ter acabado (Mas parece que agora já tem blogs!). O SAPO? Bem, esse tem-se mantido na crista da onda.

Quanto ao Clix, a meu ver, depende dos clientes de ISP que ficam com o portal como homepage, dos acessos do Expresso, Público, Exame Informática e Visão, e dos ouvintes das Rádios da Media Capital ( Comercial, Cidade, Best Rock, RCP, etc). Quanto ao Cotonete, penso que o boooom já foi quando estava no IOL.

Mas últimamente o Clix apostou em certas áreas e algo me diz que está a entrar na web2.0, tal como o SAPO já o fez há muito bom tempo. Primeiro lançou uma versão do Opera para eles, o que considero uma boa aposta sobretudo para os home users e a integração com os conteúdos do portal! Agora recentemente incluiu na sua rede o Mingle, uma rede social em flash, cujo público alvo me parecem os putos, e o Palco Principal que é também uma rede social, mas dedicada à música e que eu sugiro vivamente.

No entanto, penso que ainda faltam à Clix vários serviços e quem sabe uma autenticação igual para todos os sites da rede (e baseada em OpenID). Para os próximos tempos, prevejo um blogs.clix.pt, mas é capaz de ser só ideia minha. Veremos.

Nokia has released the beta (even in that is very web2.0!) of their social network targeting mobile phone users. It allows everyone to share their audio files, images, videos ,documents applications and games from (almost) any phone! With a nice and simple look that everybody feels in love with, it is a very attractive website for you to spend your time. And better, since it’s targeting mobile phones, there is the website version for your mobile phone and even a app for you to take MOSH along with you for everywhere.

I really think that this is a huge step towards the web2.0 everywhere. While social web users are people that spend most of they time in the Internet, now it will embrace people who don’t have that time, but keep attached to their mobiles phones. Web2.0 buzzword “mobility” has just gained another value.

Nokia has innovated in two other points. First, it allows contents for other brands, that might make it more universal and bring new customers to Nokia. Another point is the fact Nokia made it possible to share applications, games and images that are a income source for Mobile Operators and some niche companies (Like Jamba). This might be an issue in the future (as it was in the past when Symbian phones appeared) but I believe this is the right path.

I hope this website goes live soon so I can get some pretty nice content for my TyTN.

Já aqui tenho falado do PalcoPrincipal, um projecto que vou acompanhando desde que o conheci no Take Off. Hoje falo aqui de bandas e músicas que descobri neste portal e comunidade musical.

Gram Positivo – Feel so fine

Eu sempre gostei de vários tipos de música, desde opera, clássica até ao Hardcore e J-Pop, mas nunca me interessei pelo Funk. Ao navegar “ao calhas” no Palco, descobri esta música que simplesmente adorei! Suave e animada, já está na minha playlist e espero que venham a Coimbra tocar brevemente! Se gostarem, vejam as outras músicas da banda.

Gota – O que tens na alma?

Na verdade, esta música não foi uma descoberta, mas uma redescoberta. Eu tinha a sensação que já a conhecia, mas não sabia de onde até que o Diogo Laginha me disse que era dos Morangos. Um POP totalmente normal, mas não deixa de ter harmonia esta música. Se gostarem, saibam que já têm um disco à venda nas FNACs!

Blindfold – Fallling wor(l)ds

Esta bem tem uma sonoridade entre o rock e o metal que nunca tinha visto, mas me lembrou de bandas como os Korn e até Limp Bizkit que já não ouço há muito tempo. Recomendo vivamente a quem gostar de sons sóbrios e mais pesados.

Revolotion – Someone Will Shine

Se eu mandasse nos Morangos, adiciona esta à playlist da próxima série. Um PopRock simples e bom de se ouvir. Nem sei como é que ainda ninguém os descobriu e levou a uma editora.

Chauffeur Navarrus – Maldição Edit

Com o Jazz normalmente sou muito esquisito, mas esta banda com um nome bastante interessante foi aprovada. Cantado em português e com uma combinação dos vários instrumentos que nos dá um resultado fascinante, é uma das razões por que agradeço a existência do PalcoPrincipal.

Bem, esta foi a minha selecção das melhores músicas que descobri no PalcoPrincipal, que dificilmente encontraria noutros sítios. Desafio-vos a se registarem e irem descobrindo novas bandas, quer pela navegação, quer pelas bandas amigas de cada banda ou pelas sugestões dadas pelo próprio sistema e escrevam, como eu fiz, nos vossos sites/blogs. Caso não tenham um, o PalcoPrincipal fornece um a cada utilizador e a cada banda. E pelo que sei irão ter novidades para breve…

In the last days I’ve been using Outlook 2007 because it is the only decent app that syncs perfectly with my PocketPC. In my opinion, it is kind of heavy, I dont like the interface pretty much, and I dont have POP3 sync with the PDA. I also wanted a web-based version to see in the lab computer. Then I decided I would change to Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Reader because they had a web mobile interface that worked pretty fine in PocketIE. Said goodbye to Flock (we spend wonderful time together…) and installed Firefox 2.0 and the basic addons.

First thing I noticed in Google Mail and Reader was that “Google design” I really hate. Solution: Installed Stylish and then some skins to make it usable to me. Then I noticed Greasemonkey also had the same skins, so I changed the plugin, and now I have the theming + some hacks in one pluggin.

Google is the number one big company when coming to Web Apps, but as they did with Google Desktop, GTalk or GMail mobile ( btw JAVA, so it sucks on Windows Mobile), they should get a desktop application where we had Calendar, Reader, Mail, and maybe others, all together and syncing with the mobile versions( and no, I can’t use POP3 with most of clients, because I have a few other accounts in gmail, and it answers always through the default address).

I am working on a web-based application that will have all the things I use in my department (webmail, sftp, calendar, news, etc) all together, and then I will abandon google stuff, that I dont like using much :/

EDIT: I have tried pyRfeed and after a few hacking, it worked. Not very nice now, but I'll keep an eye on it in the future.

Y! Pipes, MS Popfly and many others are giving users the power to mix content from their sources and produce their own results.

Well, StarWars isn’t getting old and it’s refreshing its look from time to time. Now, after the blog, they’ve come up with Star Wars MashUps, where you can mix video, images and music from both your PC and classic StarWars content and add the special effects Lucas has always provided us.

Checkout the cool short movies made and do your own ;)

In SAPO homepage, I saw a link to FCP Blog and even I don't take much attention to soccer ( I really don't like the trillions spend on such a sport ) I gave it a look and I was amazed by the widget the F.C.P. made so its fans could have their results on their blog and they advertised some of their services.

Regarding my interesting experiences with OSes, after some help from linux experts, I couldn't boot from XP, Mac OS X86 still can't recognize my LAN board nor Wi-Fi adapter and Linux only supports 1024x768 maximum and no wireless. As I need XP to work, I'll move back and probably try to reinstall mac OS X86 just for fun. Cant wait for new macbook and macbook pro to be released!

Lex linked me today this project from UA students.

At first sight WallRight seems to be just a flash version of paint, but if you dive deeply into the site you'll see that is a colaborative painting (other people's paint will have their IP on real time drawing) and it's actually being painted on a wall! (Check the gallery!). And things like colors and temperature matter!


Thumbs up Diana, Flávia, João, Luís and Nuno!

In this evening I've been updating my website adding some sections related to social networking services {links:'del.icio.us',photos:'flickr';twitter: true;music:'lastfm'}. I believe you can know me better with all this stuff.

I also changed the font to a more readable one. Hope it fits your screen and eyes.

Have fun ;)

source: Wollzelle