Saturday, February 21, 2004Lots of interesting FOAF activity lately, seemingly spurred on by the ETech presentations. Danny has already blogged pointers to the Guardian coverage and the videos of the presentations.
Elsewhere I see that flickr now supports FOAF through it's profile service. I've not looked at the site since I signed up and played a few days ago, probably time to dive back in again. There are some interesting services springing up.
The Trust and Reputation in Web-based Social Networks project deserves your support. Part of Jennifer Golbeck's dissertation the intention is to capture trust metrics from people's FOAF files to generate some views of the trust relationships. There are examples of how to hand-code the trust statements in your FOAF description. Or you could use the Trust-O-Matic.
While you're editing your FOAF description you might want to read through Christopher Allen's Hand-crafting my FOAF article which includes some good pointers on generating your FOAF description. It's worth dusting off your self-description to make sure you're using the latest terms, do it now to avoid being pestered![Lost Boy]
What were we talking about?
Monitors built into the booths at Buck's.
The guy with his back to us - is Jimmi Johnson - my partner at Broadband Mechanics.
I was sitting in that same booth recently - with Tony Perkins.
Tell Ralph Nader Not To Run In The Election. I just sent this letter to Ralph Nader's exploratory committee. The email is info@naderexplore04.org, in case you want to let them know what you think. Please do. Dear Ralph (and his committee), Please don't do this guys. I can't believe you would all risk the safety of our country and the world, by doing anything that could jeopardize removing President Bush from power this year. Even though I have mixed feelings about his not pulling out the day before the election in 2000, I've been defending Ralph over the last few months, and telling people that he eventually would come... [On Lisa Rein's Radar]
I sure hope Ralph isn't that stupid. His rep is near zero right now - if he'd run again - he's going to hell.
This week Convoq launched their flagship personal web conferencing service, As Soon As Present (ASAP). The launch is a milestone for the web conferencing marketplace which has to date been characterized by enterprise-focused price points, despite software experiences that have not yet graduated into the modern age of rich client interfaces and experiences and presence-enabled communications.
Convoq ASAP breaks a lot of ground in the convergence of presence management, rich media instant messaging and multi-participant web conferencing, and do this with an economics for the mass-market. For less than $100 per year, users of ASAP can conduct an ulimited number of meetings with up to 25 participants. Comparative pricing from Microsoft LiveMeeting (Placeware) and WebEx is in the tens of thousands of dollars.
This approach to the market reflects Convoq's philosophy that real-time, rich media multi-participant online collaboration is ready to be an everyday productivity application, not a stovepipe system that is limited in its use to those "premium" sales calls or online demos. The focus on making real-time collaboration more common is reflected in Convoq's thoughtful embrace of productivity-enhacing presence and convocation management features, helping either large or distributed organizations gather the right people at the right time in online settings.
If you or your organization makes regular use of instant messaging and web conferencing in a professional (or personal!) context, I'd encourage you to evaluate Convoq ASAP.
As a board member of Convoq, it's very exciting to see this innovative communications service launch -- congrats to the entire Convoq team! I can also say that while the 1.0 product accomplishes a lot, this team has an incredible vision and roadmap for where to take online communications and collaboration, so please stay tuned.
Congrats to Chris and Jeremy and all the folks involved with Convoq. I was a beta tester - and it works. [Though it should have been built in Laszlo instead of Flash.]
:-)
I was just watching The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and it had a story on the marriages between same sex couples happening here in San Francisco. I totally forgot to post about this! Check out the story here. In it there was a short statement from Mayor Gavin Newsom:
We made a statement and I think we have reignited a fundamental debate, and that's about discrimination, whether or not the city and county of San Francisco is going to discriminate against same gender couples.And I don't think there's anyone in good conscience, and I mean this sincerely, in good conscience that can tell me that denying the same rights that my wife Kimberly and I have to same sex couples is anything but discrimination.
Let me just say that I think we have the coolest mayor on the planet. It takes major cahones to take on your own state government, and really the entire nation since this is making national news. For those of you out of town, this is the guy that was portrayed in the last election as the overly conservative candidate. LOL. Here's more in the New York Times, and a great commentary in the Chronicle.
Man, I'm proud to live in San Francisco.
-Russ By russ@russellbeattie.com. [Russell Beattie]
Paul Boutin, 2/21/2004; 10:11:09 AM. Gavinmania!. Derek Powazek to Gavin Newsom: Let's Never Fight Again
The guy still creeps me out a bit. I think it's the hair. But he, like me, watched the President's State of the Union speech. And he, like me, thought: This means war.Only, yaknow, I have a website, and he has, well, a city.
I'm starting to like this Newsom guy. If he goes a little lighter on the product and actually does something about the homeless, I may just vote for him next time.
(NY Times photo by Peter DaSilva)
Josh Benson at the New Republic bucks the conventional wisdom that Newsom has blown his political career:
Of course, it's possible that Newsom is simply playing local politics, shoring up his support among left-leaning voters who almost sent his Green Party opponent to City Hall last year. But it's unlikely someone with Newsom's political ambitions is thinking so small-time--a biting cartoon two years ago in a San Francisco weekly parodied the inevitable rise of "Governor Newsom, Senator Newsom, President Newsom." Instead, Newsom may be anticipating the day when gay marriage is commonly accepted, and an early champion of civil rights will be well-regarded by voters. That day may be years off, perhaps even decades. But Gavin Newsom is only 36 years old. He has plenty of time to wait.
---------
While I was off-line - something amazing happened in this dear city.
We're finally standing by our ideals!
Ted responds to danah......
But I like the iChat pictures.... Danah is getting weirded out by the iChat buddy icon pictures. It was interesting to read her account of why, because I've recently discovered that I actually like the pictures (to my surprise).
For a long time, I thought the buddy icon thing was just kind fo dumb, and I didn't really know any people who took the time to chagne the default buddy icon. But OS X wants your picture, and once it gets it, it's plastered all over. iChat, Address Book, Mail.app. And I've found that those pictures help me -- they're not just eye candy. When I open a message in Mail.app and keep following the thread, I can easily tell who the message is from. I like it more than I thought I would.
In iChat, the pictures in the buddy list take some of the work out of figuring out if someone is online. Since I started at OSAF, I've entered into a culture that is more realtime oriented. The ASF is predominantly an e-mail culture, but OSAF uses IRC a lot. So I've started doing more IRC, and more iChat. I normally have 6 IRC channels open (3 OSAF, #joiito, #groovy, and the ASF members channel). I also have had as many as 3 iChat sessions. When you have that much comm going on at once, I find that the cues provided by all those little iChat pictures really help to keep things straight (Actually, I wish IRC clients could do this, too). Of course, with that much comm going on at once, I don't have time to think of any of the issues that Danah wrote about in her post.
Maybe a bunch of pictures that weren't pictures of the person I was talking to would work to disambiguate the conversation, but I've noticed a difference between non-picture icons and picture icons, and the picture icons do have to seem more of a draw.
Or perhaps there's nothing really deep here and it's just matter of personal preference, and Danah's preferences reach a deep level of emotional consciousness that mine do. But it is interesting to ponder. [Ted Leung on the air]
Marc here........
I have often said that someone's face is a powerful form of communication and identification.
But as danah points out, it's a freeze of one emotion or expression, thereby being embarassingly out of sync with any other state you may be in (sorry that's you're sick danah - get better!)
But does that mean we abandon faces altogether - use live cameras - or something else?
Those who have seen me on Tribe or Orkut know that I often change the avatar I use to represent myself - if for no other reason - I get bored looking at the same me. I haven't gotten into trying to express moods (like LiveJournal does) or other state driven representations.
Let's hope that future imaging and conferencing systems combine the familiarity of seeing real-time presentations of ourselves, with some sort of flexiblity and control over these images - so folks don't get 'weirded out'.
February 20, 2004
Advice to social networking services
Over at Life With Alacrity, there’s a long, thoughtful post giving advice to social networking services:
Endorsements are a best way of doing reputation for now. They is also is imperfect and vulnerable to reciprocity games, however, as least you can see if two people are playing that game just by looking at the endorser and endorsee. If you find too much reciprocity you can basically ignore both players.
I’m skeptical that all of this advice will be taken by the for-profit networking services, because the net effect will be to reduce the leverage of sites over their users. If, however, we do end up with a standard for linking such networks, a lot of what’s here will be valuable. [Many-to-Many]
Congrats to Joi for getting yet another esteemed laurel in his virtual hat.
Yet he refuses to go along with the IMDB's business model!
How else are they gonna make money - but from their database entires?
I was excited when I got my entry in the Internet Movie Database. I was thinking about how vain it was to be excited by this. It felt like being in some sort of elite Orkut. Just like Orkut, there was a "click here to add photo".
*click*
$35 - Submit a Person's Headshot or a Film's Poster*click*
Replace the "no headshot" or "no poster" icon on their main page with a headshot/poster or change the current headshot/poster to a new one.$10 - Submit a Gallery Photo for a Film or Person
Add an image to your film's "studio stills" gallery or your personal "publicity photos" portfolio.
Why Do I Have To Pay?Ahh, the business model. ;-) By Joichi Ito joi_nospam_@nospam_ito.com. [Joi Ito's Web]When you use this service you get to make sure the image you want is on the first page people see when they look you up or look up your film, and/or that there are images you have chosen in the photo gallery.
Without this service, you leave all the decisions of what is used, when it is used, and if it is used, entirely up to fate and our editors.
There are many factors that make it just too expensive for us to provide this service for free, so we have to charge you for it or not provide it at all.
Stop crying about Tony Perkins—he just lapped you.
Posted Feb 19, 2004, 2:44 PM ET by Jason Calacanis
You can say what you want about Tony Perkins, and a lot of people do, but he is doing something truly unique and of value over at AlwaysOn. A lot of people were getting all weepy about Tony being able to describe himself as a blog, or wondering outloud about whether he really understood the medium. Clearly he was an interloper!
Others cried about how Tony’s site looked like one big advertisement for the participants. A fair critique since you have so many service folks posting to promote themselves (i.e. lawyers, accountants, executive search folks, etc.)
However, the bottom line is that Tony really is the first person who has pulled together a professionally produced blog (like Nick Denton, Rafat Ali and Weblogs, Inc. are doing,) a business social networking site (like LinkedIn and ZeroDegress,) and finally a user-based blog platform (like Moveable Type or Blogger.)
Now, putting these things together is not Tony’s idea, and Tony’s feature set doesn’t compete with any of the sites I mention above on a one-to-one basis (i.e. TP’s social software can’t touch LinkedIn or ZeroDegrees.) The idea to combine these platforms has been out there since the start, so I’m not giving Tony any credit for the idea. However, you have to give Tony credit for actually doing it.
Brian and I have been thinking about user-blogs and social software for Weblogs, Inc. since we first came up with the idea. I’m not convinced that what Tony’s doing will work on any grand scale, and I’m certainly not convinced he is going to get people to pay (although the self promotional service folks will pay to be on there all day long talking about themselves,) but he is going to be the first person to find out.
Ideas are a commodity, execution is everything.
Rock on TP!
PS – Tony, you gotta upgrade the software and servers—the site is still a total dog! [The Social Software Weblog]
I consulted on this project for Tony and gave him lots of ideas - some of which he's implemented. I even introduced him to Jesse Tayler - of NetModular - who built the social network for him.
Once the AO Zaibatsu gets its technical act together - this is gonna be a model community that will mesh into a global, always-on world of interlocked - FOAF based - social networks.
Whether they be content based, dating and mating sites or listings bureaus - there's plenty of room out there for LOTS of different social networks.
Let's just hope that we all can live and work together - and use FOAF to do it!
For all of your perusal, I present an RSS feed (being displayed in my Radio aggregator) of Paul Martino's FOAF Tribe. The feed spits out the message board posts of the Tribe FOAF Tribe.
This is really really important folks. Congrats to Paul and Brian for this!
This message just in:
dear you,
i've tried to ember the sounblox on my blog (
http://carnefresca.splinder.it), fortunately i succeeded and i've found it gorgeous. i'm just writing to tell you how enthusiastic i am about your mp3 player. my blog is hosted by a free webspace and most application are simply too heavy and i find many problems in putting them into my blog, but soundblox seems to fit all my expectations and more. i really appreciate your work, i just wanted you to know it. thank you. Carnefresca at http://carnefresca.splinder.itCongrats to the team at Laszlo: Grig, Lyndon, Antun, Peter, Sarah, Brett, Max, etc.
I'm back
I've had a hell of a week - and my blog is kind of broken.
We've identified the 'challenge' and this blog post is the beginnings of my return.
ActiveRenderer has been turned off - as part of the debugging process.
Lots of coolio posts to catch up on.
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