Category: What I do

Dries takes on the old guard

Dries, on meeting with the Flemish Radio- and Television Network (VRT), who will be using Drupal:

I’m going to tell them that traditional media has no choice but to move forward. I spent the last 5 years of my life developing software that enables individuals to publish and share content on the internet. Soon, amateur content providers will have very powerful tools to compete with traditional media. I’m going to tell them that we are reshaping the future of news, information and journalism, and that, if they want to avoid getting left behind, they have to position themselves at the forefront of citizen journalism, take part in it, and embrace new internet technologies.

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.

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)!

ALE: Ajax linking and embedding

Those Zimbra guys are so clever. Via O’Reilly, AJAX Linking and Embedding (ALE) “provides the ability to embed rich content into an editable document and to then interact with and edit that content in much the same way as it is done with traditional office suites and applications in a desktop environment. A key difference is that … the embedded objects are AJAX components that are embedded into an editable HTML document.” Download the 0.2 spec and check out the hosted demo.

PBWiki hits 50,000 wikis

50K Wikis!Hometown hero (created by a small team of folks lead by David Weekly of fame) has hit 50,000 PBWikis (what’s a PBwiki?).

You’ll note that almost all the wikis that I use today are PBWikis: Barcamp, Munified, Coworking, CivicForge, Mash Pit and the new Micro Microformats wiki.

Why? Ease of use, simplicity, speed… and the right subset of features and a simple interaction model. It feels solid. It looks good. It does what I want it to do (I’m also watching Stikipad as it offers Textile).

And now it looks like I’ll even be getting to do some work for the team on some upcoming usability and design tasks. Not to mention microformats integration. Nice.

Bonus: So I’m curious — what features do you look for in a wiki? What’s missing from your experience? Essentially, if you ever had a wiki feature request that you’re dying for (or something you never want to see in a wiki again), what would you say?

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!