10 days ago I threw up another Drupal site for the Feet Forward Motorcycle Community. It's been quite interesting watching some totally non-tech users getting to grips with it. They're coping pretty well.

I wanted to bolt the simple html editor into it an hit a small problem. As usual Drupal has got suitable hooks to bolt in, but it wanted to put the toolbar above the title of the field. I also had to hack common.inc a bit to get the required hooks into the <textarea> tag.

Following a post on Buzzmachine.

For a long time now, Ecademy.com has had a field on user records that we call "50 words". This is exactly personal tagging. And we export this in our FOAF. Given the sudden explosion of tagging in the blog world, I've been trying to grok how to make this more explicit and get those tags out of Ecademy and into the outside world to places like Technorati. But here we're talking about relatively static data about users rather than the dynamic data of blog entries and the various blog aggregators and search engines aren't very interested.

Something that would kick this up a gear would be MT, Blogger, Wordpress plugins that made it easy to build an "About Me" page. Over time this could morph into a personal identity server a la LID. It should provide lots of API hooks (like FOAF) in the same way that Blog entries provide RSS/Atom. If this happened, then a "50 words" tag field in the plug in would make good sense.

What do you call a collection of Apple Fanatics? A Zealot? Well I'm surely not the first but from now on I intend to call them "Pod People".

Why is it that any criticism of Apple or Apple products results in a whole lot of Pod People piling in and accusing the author of being Anti-Apple as though this was something evil?

Come on guys, Apple products suck just as badly as the whole of the rest of the IT industry, just in new and innovative ways. They're very pretty and all. And most of it is pretty good. But they're still over priced, under specced and have lots of weird new ways of sucking.

Well that didn't work, so let's try another one.

This is a test to see if this post ends up in Technorati. Here's a Technorati Tag.
ecademy.
.

What bothers me about this is whether it's ok to have invisible technorati tags. eg
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/voidstar" rel="tag"></a> because I don't want to clutter the page with technorati tags, if I've also got an internal tagging UI. But until I actually get a post to show up in Technorati I can't tell. I could ask of course...

This is a test to see if this post ends up in Technorati. Here's a Technorati Tag.
voidstar

Here's one of those should exist problems.

Start a search for your favourite band. Specify .Mp3 only. Get the results as an RSS feed. Use your podcaster to collect the feed and treat every entry as an enclosure to be downloaded. Voila! One week later you're well on the way to building your own local archive of every instance on the web. Now instead of music and mp3, try .torrent of videos of your favourite TV show.

There's clearly a lot of problems with handling duplication and managing disk space. But right now, with MSN doing RSS output and Yahoo already doing it, the potential is there. The next problem is that I had a look at the advanced search settings in Google, MSN and Yahoo. In all of them, file format is a drop down list with only a few entries although you can use command line style parameters so a search for Alias (the TV show) torrents http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=alias+filetype%3Atorrent does appear to work.

What's interesting is that some of these searches produce almost no results. So http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=def+jam+filetype%3Amp3 has a single result from Japan. Which makes me wonder. Does Google really not index Mp3s or the ID tags inside Mp3s? Or is it really the case that there's only a single Def Jam .mp3 or audio/mpeg on the web?

Spy Blog: SMS disaster alert and warning systems - don't do it ! is a good summary of the issues with trying to implement my suggested SMS-Tree early warning system.

I do think though that some of the problems are overstated. The major one seems to be that an SMS tree is no different from email spam, and if you received an email spam warning of the Tsunami you wouldn't act on it. I think the biggest difference here is that one level down the tree you are receiving the SMS from a friend not from some arbitrary spammer. And the high level of manual intervention at every stage would work to verify the system and provide natural cut offs for "Crying Wolf".

"A self selected SMS flash mob "warning" system is no substitute for a proper Civil Defence and Emergency Services system, and tempting though it is to some people to create one, you should be kicking your government for proper resources for the latter and not be wasting time and lives on the former." I'm deeply distrustful of the ability of Governments and centralised bodies to build big systems n time and on budget. My proposal was really a straw man for bottom up and de-centralised systems as an alternative or parallel development. I happen to believe that bottom up systems can be built faster, cheaper and more effectively. But maybe this one was made of straw and has been comprehensively burnt. After all, he's pointing out all the problems that I knew would come up and had tried to deal with by at least having a central clearing house and having the first layer of the tree be trusted individuals.

RSS Feeds for Search Results

This appears to work in each of the Beta search sections simply by adding &format=rss on the end of the URL. So with MSN and Yahoo both doing this, Google is now the odd one out. Unless of course you host a copy of GNews2RSS.

What's interesting here is that it looks like it may be possible to do the same trick on the image search, although every time I try I get a "The MSN Search (beta) is currently unavailable." message that feels like it's covering up a software crash.

Of course the catch in all this is that Googles news output is still considerably better than Yahoo's or MSN's.

Bloggerheads (UK) - I am Jack's complete lack of surprise

Fascinating. The UK political Blog aggregator I threw together one weekend is distorting the Google view of UK Politicians. Several of the proxy blogs stalking MPs now appear in the top 10 links for the MP's name via their feed display in the aggregator.

With an election coming up, the Aggregator and each proxy blog need your help in terms of links in and content. Of course I'm assuming here that you think it's a good thing that each MP and prospective MP is more famous on the web for the Blog that fact checks their arse rather than their own boring and useless website.

Have you taken digital photos of an Ecademy Event?

Then please post them to Flickr with at least one of the tags being "Ecademy". [from: JB Ecademy]

[from: del.icio.us]

Details about Podcast audio manipulation using Audacity [from: del.icio.us]

Note to self.
http://www.musicplasma.com/
http://www.music-map.com

peer to peer broadcasting of sound and video compatible with shoutcast [from: del.icio.us]

20 years old today.



It's sad that the promise of battery powered personal mobility is really no nearer than it was then.

Now what I really want is a recumbent bicycle with a battery powered booster engine. In can be had but for £1500 upwards. [from: JB Ecademy]

Rather cool, nerdy comic. Thanks SuW. [from: del.icio.us]

Distributed BitTorrent [from: del.icio.us]

Oi!

You lot out there on the web.

Stop writing so much!

I can't keep up.

Just heard of this.

Text the word "DONATE" to 83321. The whole £1.50 is donated to the DEC disaster fund.

Do it now.

Tell others. [from: JB Ecademy]

Yay! lightweight decentralized identity [from: del.icio.us]