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!

Blogger Doom 3

Blogger Doom 3

Okay okay, calm down, kids. We can work this all out.
RoSco, like the rest of us, is human and clearly has moments that inspire the need to get some aggression out. Instead of pissing off one’s readers, why don’t we set up a weekly scrimage for bloggers to to it out on each… in 3D?

Hey, the idea’s not original, but I’d be down for some good-old-fashioned blog’em up fun!

Who’s with me? Anyone?

[Original image courtesy of About.com]

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!

Will Pate joining the Flock

Will Pate & FlockWill Pate of Canada‘s first day on the job starts today at Flock.

His role will likely be similar to parts of mine, given the mantle he’s taken for himself:

Community Ambassador
They let me choose my own title, which turned out to be more difficult than I expected. “Community” had to be in there because that’s what my focus is: getting people excited about using Flock. “Community Director” didn’t work because you can’t direct a community of the type we deal with. “Community Manager” sounded too stuffy. I took a cue from my colleague Chris Messina, Open Source Ambassador at Flock, and chose that word. I like ambassador because it implies goodwill, diplomacy, and a mission of relationship building. I’ll be talking more soon about what exactly I’ll be doing, but that should give you a general sense for now.

Will’s going to make for a great addition to the Flock family and I know that he and I will have a great deal to discuss and stew on as I transition into my old consulting role.

That and I’ve gotta make sure that he becomes Flock’s de facto Pinko Marketer.

Meaning; innovation; the change we want to see in our world

From the NTEN conference in Seattle, Leda captures something:

But no one else here is talking about meaning, or innovation, or anything having to do with the change we want to see in the world, and in our lives.

And it doesn’t have to be that way.

She has more worth a read.