Skype, eBay, PayPal,Twitter, Facebook Mashup competition has just been announced.

The competition runs up to Sept 12th and the Skype developer's conference in Prague. Skype. The one requirement seems to be that there should be at least some use of the Skype API.

There's a public chat running here about it.

How do you tell Google not to index XML such as RSS or FOAF?

As I've turned comments off to avoid the Spam Deluge, answers on a postcard to the usual addresses
julian_bond at voidstar.com or skype:julian.bond?chat

Interesting that Google is reading large quantities of RSS and FOAF (and other XML formats) and doing remarkably little with it.

A thought for the day:

All these "Chatter" systems like IRC, Skype Chats, Twitter, Twittervision, Digg expose you to new ideas and cross pollination of ideas.

It's like they're "Serendipity Accelerators".

Reminds me from a long time ago, somebody in India telling me that India was a "Karmic Accelerator". You can read that in many different ways but mostly it's just that Travel Broadens the Mind and Extreme Travel Broadens the Mind Extremely. Immersing yourself in another country's culture is good for the soul. For a westerner, immersing yourself in really alien cultures like India, China and most of the Far East is a real blow in the head.

How to Twitter from Skype » pacificIT

OMG!

[Edited to add]. Actually this is really cool, given that Skype chats have unlimited searchable history.

I keep finding the need for a Universal ID translator. What's the LinkedIn ID for this Skype ID? What's the Upcoming page for this Myspace page.

So I've been looking at people like Wink and Opinity but they haven't got the APIs I need. They are mostly collecting the data but they're laborious and there's no obvious immediate payback for trying to remember your sign-in on all those sites.

So this morning's question was whether you could introduce some social networking to get people to help with the data entry by allowing one person to fill in the details for another. If I find someone I know on the site could I put in their Skype ID for them? This bit of data obviously has less authority than data entered by the owner. But it would still be useful.

The long term goal of this is to combine the friends/contacts list from one system with the raw data from another. Can I get the Skype IDs for all of Sam's friends? Or perhaps, can I combine Plazes or Loki's location data with my friends list on Facebook with their Twitter feeds?

As an aside, the big players buying the small players is proving a real pain. I keep hitting sites where my old login doesn't work because now I've got to combine it with a Yahoo! ID or a Google ID. After being one of the early adopters on Orkut, I now can't get in no matter which of the 5 Google accounts I try and use.

My Soul, and 10 Other Things that Google Owns is quite a good article about the Feedburner acquisition. I added this comment.

So what's missing? A key part is presence.

- Am I online? This could come from GTalk, if it wasn't so poor.

- Where am I? Loki.com does a surprisingly good job of locating me. My home location in Google Maps is another hint.

- What's my latest thought? What am I doing right now? Twitter's for sale. Will Google buy it?

- Who are my friends and followers? This is a big missing piece. Orkut-Google ID integration provides one source, but who uses Orkut any more?

And that really points up a whole area that Google ignores which is particularly important given the focus of this blog. Where's the community? I want to not just publish all the stuff above for my friends to read, but also to aggregate where all my friends are at. This comes down to two key games that people play on the net.
- "Hey, look at this!"
- "What are my friends doing?"
Does Google do anything to support these two? Or is it all a one way flow of information to Google to help them make more money?

Mahalo doesn't appear to have any RSS or an API. Or a company blog.

Why is that?

I remember when Webslog inc didn't have nay of these things either.

Maholo is an impressive effort. I'm just not sure I'd use it. Ever.

Get your head around the fact that fonts in Linux suck. End of story.

if linux fonts suck, what could be said about the mac fonts ...

hehe macs suck too

My Linux (Ubuntu 7.04) fonts are pretty much ok now. But it took this.
- Install Tahoma (stolen from an XP installation. It's not part of ms core fonts, why?)
- Fiddle with X config
- Fiddle with KDE config
- Fiddle with Firefox
- Fiddle with Skype 1.4 Beta

And OpenOffice still looks terrible.

The one thing where Linux works better than Windows is that you have fine control over what font sizes use sub-pixel rendering (Cleartype). In Windows it's either on or off. In Linux you can turn it off for 6-12 normal only (on for bold).

Inspired by Twittervision, I've been thinking too much about "Enhanced Presence".

I really want two displays and approaches. They need a Twittervision style display as well as a plain old text, web display. (And lots of REST/RSS APIs and desktop apps)
- Static Snapshot. Where are my friends? What are they doing"
- Dynamic. Which of my friends have recently updated something.

The first one is a display of all my friends at once with their last update. The second is the most recent 20 or so updates from my friends on constant re-display.

But this stuff can go much further.
- Skype and other IM systems know if I'm online.
- Google Calendar knows what I'm doing.
- Loki.com (and my cellphone) know where I am.
- Twitter has my latest thought
- Any number of Social Networks know who my friends are.[1]

I can feel a mashup coming on. ;) In the short term, there's a automatic Loki to Twitter App to be built.

Key to all this is that as much as possible should happen automatically from stuff I'm already doing rather than having to specifically think "I must update that".

As usual I'm chucking this idea out and hoping it will stick somewhere. I've tried with the Skype community but they seem to be obsessed with privacy and keep saying "Yes, but". There *are* privacy issues. Some people don't want to play. Some want to show one thing to their mates, one to their boss and another to the world. But I think Twitter and Twitterlike systems (and before that Plazes) show that there is a large number of people who do want to play.

[1]Which again raises the need for a universal ID translator and ID aggregation. What's the Skype ID for this facebook ID? What's the Twitter ID for this Google Calendar ID? And then a "Friends" aggregator. This ID has these IDs as friends and those IDs as followers via these SNs.

Phil K Dick's Essay from 1978 How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later on the nature of time, reality and everything. But mostly about Kosmic Koincidence Kontrol.

Was Phil Dick made mad by seeing to much truth? Or did he just get sucked into that thought vortex that happens at about 2am on a combination of weed and alcohol? That Star Wars moment from the film "Human Traffic".

The bit that really tickled me was the story about the German translation of Ubik. Phil was writing about the meaning of the Logos and quoted the (St James Authorised) biblical verse "I am the Word". The German translator missed the source and translated this as "I Am The Brand Name" As Phil says, Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as:

When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.

Now there's an idea to waste a few hours meditating on.

Just had an email from somebody commenting on posts I did in 2004 about "Personal Identity Servers". It's now mid 2007 and since then this has pretty much happened with OpenID. There are OpenID libs you can run on your own server. All we need now is services that actually work as OpenID consumers that can use the identity information. It would still be good to see things like Wordpress having OpenID baked in both as Providers and Consumers.

The generic "About Me" page in common blogging platforms hasn't really happened. I really don't understand why not.

And we still don't have good ways of aggregating all our activity on all the different systems we use. The portal based "Start pages" with all their widgets are becoming more and more sophisticated but to my thinking they're back to front. They do a good job of collecting all the things *I* want to read about the web. They do nothing about collecting all the things *others* want to read about *me*.

Make have a build your own barin machine projec for flashing LEDs in your eyes and and beeping in your ears to induce a trance. MAKE: Blog: Hack Your Brain - Make Video Podcast :

Weird Deja Vu here. I built a very similar brain machine from a circuit published in the print version of bOing bOing. It's like being in the early 90s all over again.

Next stop, "Smart Drugs". Know where I can score some Modafinil? Are Durk and Sandy still alive? Have they cheated the ageing process? Inquiring minds want to know.

Pandora shuts box on users outside US | The Register : Pandora.com, the popular net radio station that helps users discover new music and build custom playlists, will block most people outside the US from accessing its service because of legal pressure being exerted by record labels.

This makes me so angry. But then I use Last.FM so what do I care.

Burningbird » Accessibility, Microformats, and RDF as the Bezoar Stone :

"Ohmigod, an asteroid is going to hit the earth and we're all going to die!"
"It could have been worse. It could have been RDF."
"You're right. Whew! I was really worried for a moment."

OMG! It could have been write only data.
OMG! It could have been mesh structured data.
OMG! It could have been Yet Another Profile Exchange Format.
OMG! It could have been academic wanking.

RDF is such a wonderful idea. So why is it so hard and have such bad press? And why after all this time aren't there parsers baked into all the major languages?

daylightsavings.jpg

LOL. "You would think that members of congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hours daylight would have had on our climate."

Tonight I'm on the Panel of the Mashup Identity 2.0 event. I remembered going along to the first event but I couldn't remember when it was. I knew Sam Sethi spoke, so I googled for Mashup Sethi. The third link was to my own blog about the event. Voidstar - Mashup, Microsoft and Marc DonchaJusLoveIt?

Somewhat ironic then that the piece was a rant about Microsoft's Cardspace/Infocard and it's support for open standards when tonight's event is bound to mention it. Subsequent to my goading of Marc at that event and Kim Cameron, I got to meet Kim later that summer and some PHP support has appeared for cardspace. However, OpenID has grown like gangbusters in the same time and interest in Microsoft's approach feels like it's waning.

Meanwhile Google is coming up on the rails. See Sam on "GailStorm".

It looks we might be having a geek dinner after the event tonight. Try and find me, Paul Walsh, Sam Sethi or Paul Miller after the main event.

Slashdot | Safeguards For RIAA Hard Drive Inspection is an article about the procedure whereby an RIAA court case goes about forensic checking of your hard disk for "infringing files".

Let's ignore for a moment whether possession of files is equivalent to sharing. My problem with this is the question of where a specific file came from. Someone I Know (SIK) has 10,000 MP3s in their collection. This is a big mix of:-
- Files ripped from CDs bought years ago and now stacked in the attic or just plain lost.
- Files ripped from CDs bought from Amazon.
- Files ripped from CDs bought 2nd hand on eBay.
- Files bought from legitimate places like eMusic
- Files bought from questionable places like AllOfMp3
- Files ripped from Last.FM streams
- Files collected from friends via portable hard drives
- Files downloaded by things like Soulseek.
Now SIK is an obsessive so the tags have all been cleaned up with anything identifying where it came from removed.

How would the RIAA go about proving where any single file came from. And equally how would SIK go about proving that a specific file was obtained legitimately and legally?

Twittervision now has an API. http://api.twittervision.com/api.html and my info is at
http://api.twittervision.com/user/current_status/jbond.xml

That's Rich Presence including location info. This is where SkypeWeb should be going.

Note here that this is very Web2. It's a third party API created by mashing a Web2 site's API with Yahoo Geocoding.

Yet again I find myself suffering from Twitter and Twittervision envy and thinking again about MoodyVision; an equivalent using Skype's Moods, Presence and Profile info. And for other IMs as well.

On the downside, what we have here is Yet Another Profile Transfer Protocol. I have to confess I'm getting deeply depressed with the industry's inability to come up with a definitive Profile Exchange
schema.