Category: design

A million cool things

I need to get this out of my system so that I can get back to real work, but damn, there’s plenty o’ cool things in and around the web-making world lately. A sampling of what’s new and decent that you, yes you, dear reader, might check out:

In the WordPress plugin category:

In new web apps:

In the Hack MySpace corner:

In “software you haven’t heard of but should try”:

  • Pastor — still the simplest way to store your usernames, passwords and serials
  • Virtue — multiple desktops, now in active development again (r122)
  • Endo — from the 4-letter-name app creator of 1001 and Ect, a slick newsreader
  • Journler (via Greg Elin) — not the most pretty, but very functional journal (oo! with tags!)
  • Pyro — neat use of Webkit for one purpose: showing Campfire chats (via SvN)
  • Corripio — super simple tool for grabbing album artwork
  • CamiScript — add Applescript support to Camino (script repository)

Got anything you’ve come into recently that you want to pass along? Always looking for the latest and greatest, so drop a note in the comments.

Where it’s at

Pinko Desktop Wallpaper

Or perhaps where I’ll be at… specifically, tomorrow night. Namely, at Net Squared‘s Net Tuesday event at Varnish Fine Arts. And who will be speaking? Well, my PiC for one… and my ex-boss Zack Rosen of CivicSpace and Adam Frey of Wikispaces (whom I’ve not met but heard great things about).

Not sure about the others, but Tara says she’ll be speaking about:

[convincing] non-profits to Go Pink(o) at Varnish Fine Arts. I’m going to go through some of what you’ve already read here and on the wiki and then apply the theory to non-profit marketing. Personally, I think it’s even more applicable for a not for profit campaign. When you already have an engaged sponsor-base and an enthusiastic army of volunteers, all sorts of beautiful Pinko community messaging can and will happen.

So there ya go. Your Tuesday is now apportioned!

Rashmi Sinha announces D Camp

dcamp v4Last week Rashmi announced D Camp — a Barcamp-styled ad hoc gathering of folks to be held at Ross Mayfield‘s SocialText HQ in Palo Alto May 12 and 13. The event is dedicated to discussing and presenting on design and development:

D is for designers and D is for developers. We hope that this event will attract both designers, developers and anyone else who cares about the user experience. We hope that we will address issues of mutual concern together under the same roof and help build connections between the various communities that care about User Experience.

Scoble also name-dropped… literally — forgetting to mention Rashmi. Ah well — missed a perfectly good opportunity to give props to, as Tara put it, “the brilliant, young woman who is actually putting this together” (emphasis mine).
Hop on the mailing list or wiki if you want to pitch in. As usual, sign up on Upcoming. And — Rashmi’s also look for sponsors and a decent logo (mine’s only a placeholder)!

Powazek said it best

User Generated Content

Derek makes a great point. Of course, this point has been made before, only now we have an alternative phraseology (that no doubt will be corrupted all the same at some point): “authentic media“.

I dig it, but perhaps we could go a step further and make it totally off limits, calling it “amateur content”, in the nothing-is-worth-doing-unless-you-love-it kind of way.

Think about it this way: friends don’t let friends monetize friends. You’ve gotta be an amatuer to do it for something other than the benjamins. I mean, who wants to create “professional” content? Exactly.

Still, let’s use “authentic media” for now and see how it goes. And we can all be happy amateurs creating authentic media together.

I need a Mapendar!

Mapendar sketch

Ok, here’s an idea for some ingenuitive masher.

I’m a visual person. I suck at planning when I can’t visualize the what and where of what I’ll be doing (or what I’ve done). In that single respect, thank Ford for Web 2.0 making things a degree more designerly!

Anyway, here’s what I want.

Take Google or Yahoo Maps. Take my Upcoming feed (or just grab a microformatted event listing like the one on Tantek’s site). And sure, grab a list of free or open wifi hotspots from Plazes. For bonus points, cross-reference the data with my Trazes and Dodgeball checkins to let me know when and if I or my friends have been there. Oh, and yeah, grab stuff from my Flickr stream and hey, Riya? could you like do some searching for photos from the events that I didn’t attend but was watching on Upcoming? Yeah, tanx. And heck, let me throw random things at it like my PiC’s feed or listing of upcoming Barcamps.

Oh, and Flock? Could you like toss in my browser history sorted by geolocation and where I published various blog posts from? Sweet.

Now, I want to see this stuff all pulled in together and tossed on a map. I want 30boxes without the 28, 29, 30 or 31 boxes. I want a big effin’ map (I know Jeremy Kieth can help). And I want to see time represented like sheet music (credit goes to Greg Elin for that idea).

Oh, and please note, this is not a business. It’s an interface.

…Alright, fine, it’s a big old Attention Aggregator — except that it can look into the future and tell me where to be, when. Which makes this what?, an Intention Aggregator? Anh, whatever. It’s a Mapendar and I want one!

MicroID – Identity in a shade of microformat

Doc points to microformat-compliant MicroID (“Small Decentralized Verifiable Identity”) by Jabber founder Jeremie Miller:

…a new Identity layer to the web and Microformats that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere. The technology is radically simple and capable of empowering new and unique meta services with only minor effort.

I read over the description, but I still don’t quite get it.

A simpler solution (for web authors at least) is reciprocity using XFN. Essentially if I have access to two websites, I can link between them using the rel="me" microformat — very similar to what Technorati does with its claiming snippet.

So one rel="me" link implies an unconfirmed relationship, two or more confirms, for the purpose of building an exploratory network (non-authoritative), a relationship. Add in an

and you can start building an ad hoc profile that will result with a profile like the one I’m building on ClaimID.

So the way I see it, MicroID allows me to lay ownership to any piece of arbitrary content on the web, provided I can set the class of the object. In cases where that’s not possible, I’m not sure MicroID will work.

With the rel="me" solution, you can claim URLs that you can create links with rel values. Neither is perfect but both are decent uses of microformats for faking identity.

Update: change MicroID from a “.com” to a “.org” . Thanks Kevin!

Flock ETech presentation available

Flock eTech 2006 slides available

I exported a Quicktime movie of my slides from ETECH (click to advance each slide). I’ll be doing a vidcast of the presentation in a week or two so you can get the full effect (and hopefully I’ll be able to share it in multiple formats).

For the two Demo Time slides, here’re the scripts I would have used if the network would have been less flaky:

Demo One

  1. on a friend’s page, hit the star
  2. rss reading
  3. topic aggregation (om and techcrunch)
  4. now click through to a one of the pages
  5. open the technorati topbar to see what’s going on

Demo Two

  1. open photo browser — look for etech
  2. photo uploading — ok i want to upload my own photos
  3. history search (to find something to blog — like the techcrunch page we saw before)
  4. blogging workflow (of page found through history and then drag in uploaded photo)

Leave me comments if you have any questions.

Update: By request from the management, I decided to remove 3 slides at the end of the presentation about “getting laid” since without context from the in-person presentation, it may seem a bit more lewd than intended.