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Marc's Voice
Home LANs + Broadband + Devices

Monday, July 14, 2003
 Don Park 

This is Don Park talking.....

SVG Moving Again.

SVG has been dead in the water for some time, but now there are signs of some movement.  Most importantly, Adobe has released a pre-release version of SVG Viewer 6.0.  FYI, SVG Viewer is an IE plug-in for displaying SVG graphics within web pages.  I hope they keep their asses moving so that all the SVG fanatics don't end up looking like fools.  Apache's Batik team has also released the final version of Batik 1.5, a Java implementation of SVG renderer.  You can find source, binaries, and list of changes here.  Yes, it is slow so get a fast machine if you want to sell it upstairs.

If the nonsense above made you wonder what SVG might be, it is an XML-based vector graphics format whose capabilities overlap Flash and Postscript to varying degrees but has a lot more.  As you know, a lot more can be a blessing as well as a curse.  We'll see how the future turns out.  Frankly, I like SVG in the same way as a fireman might smile while watching surfers frolic on the beach as the firetruck rushes by them.

Someday.  Someday.  Hopefully on a Sunday.

[Don Park's Daily Habit]

I can't get that SVG shit to work - to save my life.  I have tried several times now - as I REALLY wanna see FOAFnaut work.  But alas.  To me - that's technology that sucks.

Billboard Liberation Front: Apparel Apparent. Our beloved Billboard Liberation Front struck last night in San Francisco. The target? A particularly homoerotic Banana Republic ad campaign. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott) [Boing Boing Blog]

Adam Greenfield in his wrap-up on the moblogging conference held in Tokyo recently: "I know in my bones that the act of self-publishing material from mobile to devices to a shared global network, and retrieving similarly user-generated material, is going to be one of the defining cultural features of the next few years." [Corante: Corante on Blogging]

Right on to Adam. This is Marc Canter coming to you - live - from my apartment on the Embarcadero in San Fracisco, CA.   It's Bastille Day, 2003 and mobloggers around the world are enjoying brie cheese and Champagne - celebrating theliberation of the people of France.

Now imagine me singing that to you - via Audblog or some other audio blogging service.   AOL's blogs are gonna work from cell phones too.

 Joi ito 

This is from Joi Ito.  It's from his RSS feed that includes not only the original post, but all the comments and trackbacks - as well.   My contribution is the real-time poem I commented.

I often do real-time poems - just to clear out the old subconscious.  It's the Dada in me.

Joi also put up a shot of his buddy Noboyuki Idei in his moblog......

And oh yah - Happy bastille to day to Marc barrot and all my other French friends.  Storm the barricades for me - well yah?  I want ALL you Frenchies to know that some of us Americans really appreciate you standing up to Bush.  And I never called them French Fries anyway. I call them Pommes Frites.

Happy Bastille Day!.

 
Lots of Cheese and other goodies at the French Embassy Bastille Day Party this evening. I have no idea who invited me, and I was worried that I wouldn't know anyone. Luckily I knew a few people and got to chat with Idei-san. We talked about blogs. I asked him to be my guest blogger.

Happy Bastille Day!


Comments (4)


◊----»
On July 15, 2003 12:22 AM Anil said:

You're just trying to compete with Lessig. You should really aim high and try to get Fabio to guest blog.


◊----»
On July 15, 2003 12:59 AM Jake of 8bitjoystick.com said:

Sacre Blu!


◊----»
On July 15, 2003 01:05 AM François Granger said:

> I have no idea who invited me

I must confess that I don't have any influence on the French Embassy in Tokyo. but anyway, French people are nice ;-)


◊----»
On July 15, 2003 02:46 AM Marc Canter said:

Oh boy it's true.
he's got a home grown crew,
of some funky punky rappers,
who delight and say things true.

So as our fine French friends,
delight and eat some cornish hens,
then their cel-a-bration party,
will bring peace and fun for you.

So is it French Fries now?
Or a case of Raging Cow?
'cause this freedom fries agenda,
is reaking of 'publican row.

So as an American supporter,
as we put our land in order,
we should eat as much French pastries
as our tummies will disgorder.


Trackbacks (0)

By Joichi Ito jito@neoteny.com. [Joi Ito's Web]
 Clay Shirky | faces 
Steven Johnson on There.com and Avatars. Steven Johnson reviews There.com in his Discover column, picking up on the Lawley Law, 'It's the faces, stupid" and talking about emotional communication using avatars:
Avatars in There convey emotions through both facial expressions and body gestures. When your on-screen representative frowns, his shoulders sag along with the corners of his mouth. The prototype version offers more than 100 different emotional states to choose from—everything from surprise to anger—and Melcher says the plan is to release 10 new emotions per quarter.

[Corante: Social Software]

I didn't write that (what's above.)  It came from Clay Shirky as part of the Corante: Many-to-Many social software column.)  You'll notice how there's a {bracketed} credit at the bottom of each excerpt I do.  That's MY blogging style.

But it causes ambiguos reading patterns - as people start fof reading and they're not sure who is doing the writing. I actually like that level of ambiguity - and I also like posting the entire contents of most posts - rather than 'just' sending you there.

That's MY style of blogging. It's driven by the fact that I'm not afraid to load up my page. I don't use dial-up. Never did.  Always been an always on kind of guy - since 1994.  BUt to facilitate the better communication and "kum-bah-yah" ness of my blog - I will 'try' and annotate more clearly - who's saying what.

Anyway back to Clay's post on There.  Needless to say I totally support anybody using faces.  Unfortunately the rumor mills are full of bad news about There.com and that they've applied for all these patents and their attitude in general is just - well let's be polite and say: "snobby".

I wish them the best of luck.

THis is from Adam.....

outliner hacking. Good afternoon from Belgium, home of the European Government. 

hacking my outliner 

I've been hacking away at my outliner all day long with results being posted on the dutch blog. What I want to achieve is an ouline for each day. Each node in the ouline should become an item in my RSS feed. I can actually get some of that working, but then it seems impossible to insert a comment link unless configured by hand at each posting.

The comment links I can do without, and predict we eventually will switch most comment people to their own weblogs and connect them with "trackback" or something similar. For now I'm happy enough just being able to subscribe to someone's weblog. Eventually I'll see a comment or response show up in my aggregator or referrer logs.

Somehow this all feels like I want a mix of Manila's static rendering and homepage editing with Radio UserLand's outliner so I can edit (and move) posts up or down with their associated comment links, permalinks and anything else definied in an item template. I want to use rules in my outliner and would like to user radio as the engine to get it all published, including a non funky rss feed. I think this is similar to the set up for Scripting News, but without the comment links, which need a new unique id (postID?) generated on the fly. Can my outliner do all this?
[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

This is me now....

Someone shoudl tell Adam about Marc Barrot's activeRenderer.  It's a totally coolio outline renderer which can do everything Adam wants and is designed specifically for Radio.

Hello from Dean for America. Hello from the Dean for America campaign. Governor Howard Dean will be posting later today, here and at the official campaign blog, Blog for America. It's our policy that whenever Governor Dean posts anywhere on the Internet, his posts will also be crossposted to our site.... [Lessig Blog]

OOOPs - maybe somebody didn't get the message.  When you say "Howard Dean" is gonna be blogging, that means Howard Dean - nto some hired lackey.  If he's too busy, then get him a blackberry, 3650 or something.

Don goes off and Paolo points to it.....

End of politically correctness.

Don Park: Here are some straight fast balls to clear up the confusion: RDF is fucked up, MT is fucked up, Six Apart is fucked up.

"The emperor is Naked!" ";->". [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Here's some more Don's pure out and out RANT:

IMHO, RSS 2.0 is not going to go away and RDF is far from being finished nor popularized. Aside from all this, Dave deserve far more respect than some script jockeys who prefers to argue like sea-lawyers while blinded to the fact that truth is not always at the end of a string of arguments and that most ideas, regardless of their beauty or simplicity, can't be stretched enough to match the complexity of reality over time.

Now back to our commentator..... (me)

OK - so I've changed my blogging style. I don't like it - but everyone was complaining that they couldn't follow who was saying what - and once those compliants reached 6 (more than one hand's worth of fingers) I decided I should listen.  So now - all posts will be painfully annotated (until I get tired of it.)

So here we are - back at the battles of purity, innovation and standards.  I for one am not afraid of Microsoft - but I think "we" as a whole should be.  As much as I like Scoble, he's clearly just a pawn in a bigger game.  They tell him they want Longhorn developers - but their job is to keep us vertical.

What will Microsoft say/do when they realize the People's Mesh is as horizontal as it comes?

And this 'move forward' break things stuff - well I have to assume that SixApart will NOT break existing aggregators.  Whatever is going on internally in those feeds - I don't care. No end-user cares.

If they 'f*ck over developers, they'll be hurting their biggest supporters.  But you know what?

It's happened before and it's gonna happen again.  And as Paolo points out - the Emperor has been naked - for years! But (for some reason - and it's probably Mena's cute little smile) I don't think that's gonna happen.

Now Anil - that's another story. He's got some sort of demonic thing going on there - and one day - it's gonna come out.  But I trust Ben and Mena. 

:-)

This is from Don Park.....

Pictures from Jing Jing.

I went to Jing Jing tonight and met some bloggers.  Not as many people as last one I attended, but a nice group of people.  I had fun.  I will update later with links to pictures taken by others.  More Dan Dan Noodles for Don Don!

[Don Park's Daily Habit]

So who's Don?  I see a Dave and a Dan - but where Don?

 Don Park | Echo | Matt Webb | purl 

Matt Mower talks about what Don Park said.....

Smart PURLS for Permalinks.

Not so permanent permalink.

Joi stepped on an interesting blog-related problem when he was preparing to migrate his blog to TypePad.  It is a common problem, but it took me by surprise too.  Duh.  The problem is, as I call it, not-really-permalinks.  When you change blogging service provider/software or domain, your permalinks no longer points to your old posts, causing links from all the posts that reference your posts to be broken.

While most engineers would reach for a solution by reflex, I am busy thinking about how effective it is as a barrier-to-entry.  Opposite side is just as important: how effective an incentive is zero hassle migration?  So far, my answer for personal blogs is "important only to a small fraction of the market", meaning it is a serious problem only for blogging elites.  For business blogs, my answer is "important but less important than price."

Note that marketing can inflate the seriousness of the problem or the solution.

[Don Park's Daily Habit]

I tried to think of a way of addressing this problem last year, something along the line of using smart PURL's.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Now I get my say.........

I've been thinking about this challenge for a couple of years.  Remember I'm Mr. Lock-in guy (via my first life.)  So how do you 'move' from one blogging tool environment to another?

The data structure and API issues are pretty much worked out.  Anil told me they (SixApart) would have a feature to 'import' entire archives from.... wherever.  I wonder how teh otehr blogging tool vendors will approach this issue.

But Matt's suggestion of using purl seems right on.  At the time of export - walk through the entire database and map all local URLs to purl.  Then re-insert.  Relatively simple.


Updated: 9/17/2003; 12:23:21 PM.