OurSpace – One Small Step in Commons

Who would really enjoy this book?
An art history, marketing, or communications professor who doesn’t yet grok the significance and importance of Creative Commons.

In all honestly, considering the 2007 publication date of the OurSpace by Christine Harold, I was hoping for a deep dive into all the culture under the Creative Commons license. Harold starts that conversation, after a deep dive into the history of the Situationalists, Adbusters, and some fairly opaque rhetoric. While I found both the first 2 enjoyable from an art history perspective (even if their tactics seem juvenile and parasitic), the latter détournemented me all around. As if there is only one Culture.

I found the pranks and hoaxes chapter amusing ( Sasha Baron Cohen amusing), where Harold illustrated how pranksters used the sound bite and specatle bias of broadcast media to distributed performance art pieces. Also know as ‘getting the media to cover fake stories’. But, I still don’t think the joke is funny. See, I have hope the confrontational tone and parasitic mindset around the natural instinct to maniuplate cultural artifacts is limited to history books like Harold’s. I have hope that 10 minutes from now the symbiotic relationship between corporate marketing culture and our marketing culture will be legitimate.

Or at least, we’ll be waving to each other from across the commons.

Twitter Ends Friendship

In a move that should rock the ‘social network space’, Twitter just removed the vague, confusing, juvenile label of ‘friend‘, replacing it with the more descriptive ‘following‘ 1.

Aside from the label being more accurate 2 it creates a nice symmetry with ‘followers‘. You and I could say ‘friend‘ is the overlap between the two, but as Biz states, it’s not for a server to define.

“After careful consideration and user testing, we are no longer going to define people as your ‘friends.’ – Biz

The /following and /followers listing is also nicely cleaned up. Insted of the confusing ‘add‘ and ‘follow‘ links, ‘follow‘ is only offered for the people that you’re not (but are you). Within /follows a radio button specifies if you’ll get ‘notifications‘ 3.

Now, if we could finally kill off ‘user‘.

1. As of this writing, the URLs have yet to update.
2. Only ‘stalking‘ would be more accurate.
3 Still not a great label, I say ‘stalking‘ is appropriate here.

Elsewhere:
Robert Scoble outlines how to be his “friend” (Hint: live in Facebook) that’s after this childish outburst:

“He didn’t add me as a friend to his Facebook network…..they wouldn’t get access to my walled garden.”

Oh no, do you mean to say your feelings toward someone else aren’t reciprocal? Welcome to being an adult.

Steve Rubel laments the changing definition of “friend”.

The current usage of ‘friend’ in these ‘social networks’ is simplistic, heavy-handed, and juvenile. Even in IRL, relationships are more nuanced and asymmetrical (e.g. “fuck buddy”, “stalker”, “BFF”) – if these networks want to be relevant in a decade, they need to reflect the actual relationships. But then, most adults don’t need training wheels on their bikes or chaperones when they go out.

5k – 28:11

Nike Bug was off by 150-220 meters tonight. So no pace info. Grumble, grumble. I re-calibrated it during the cool down walk, so hopefully it’ll be better on Thur.

Why Browser-based Feed Readers are Free

“I +love+ the new Google Reader app on Facebook. Interesting that most people only have around five to 10 feeds.” – Robert Scoble

I now understand why start pages (NetVibes, PageFlakes, iGoogle) have traction. A volume that low has a lot of flexibility in presentation – and comparatively light on server resources. Things get interesting once feed quantities hit triple digits – it stops being live bookmarking and more like email.

I’m running in the St. Anthony, MN VillageFest 5k on Aug 4. Same neighborhood, different route, more…

I’m running in the St. Anthony, MN VillageFest 5k on Aug 4. Same neighborhood, different route, more people, and much earlier in the morning. If you’re in town – join me.

UPDATE 4 AUG 2007:
Results of my run and impressions of VillageFest 2007 here.

PodcampMN at Flat Earth on Aug 25, 2007

Yes, it’s official.

PodcampMN, August 25th, the Saturday before Labor Day, at the Flat Earth Brewery in St. Paul.

The goal is to try to accomplish some real, dirty, uncomfortable work… as Eric Rice describes it.

If you haven’t yet, add your name and other things you’d like to both share and learn about to the wiki:
http://podcamp.pbwiki.com/PodCampMinnesota

Thanks to Philip from WhatAlesThee.com and Jeff @ Flat Earth for making this happen.

How to Construct an RSS 2.0 Feed for Faster Parsing

I’m parsing more and more RSS feeds and I’m seeing some very basic problems. While the feeds are valid, they’re obfuscated. Harder to parse – not by poor tag usage – but by misusing the content within the tags.

Here’s a quick run down of the tags as documented in the RSS 2.0 Spec and my interpretation of them.

Item Tags
One or both of the following are required by the spec:
title, description
I’m fine with encoded HTML. I’m fine with using the first 50 characters or so as a title if you’d rather not use title (it is overrated). I’m not cool with having author or pubDate info in either of these tags. Just makes it harder to parse.

and then any of these. I consider the first 4 required:

author
A special place for the author. Author info doesn’t belong in the link, description, or title – it belongs here. If there’s author info, the author tag should be used. (Twitter, Twittergram)

link
The URL pointing to this specific item, most likely something that’ll load in a web browser. Not a tinyurl or another redirect, this should be the permalink at the originial source (Feedburner)

guid
A unique string identifying the item. For simplicity in publishing this tag may be identical to link, doesn’t have to be. For example, in Twittergrams, the guid is a tinyurl. Still unique, but not technically the link.

pubDate
At some point, every item was published – so it has a publication date. Put it here, in RFC 2822 format, e.g. “Thu, 7 Apr 2005 01:46:36 -0300”. In my aggregators, I don’t guess what the publication date is, I set it to Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 2, so items don’t show up in reverse chronological order, but they’re still in the system.

enclosure
One enclosure per item. Thanks. Other tags aren’t duplicated, no reason to duplicate this one. Remember, any file can be an enclosure. Not just audio and video files (Flickr).

source
The URL of the site the items was originally published at, think of it as a more general link. This one should be used more by aggregators.

category, comments
I have no qualms with how these tags are used. Yet.

Elsewhere 18 Aug 2008:

“Microblogs absolutely need GUIDs….Since every microblog post originated somewhere, I believe this GUID should almost always be the URL of the individual message on the originating service.” – Dave Slusher

1. I argue link is the URL attribute of the Twittergram’s enclosure
2. Specifying ‘now’ sometimes backfires, bringing old posts back from the past.

5k in 27:40

Held a firm 8 mn/mi for 2 ks before needing a 5 min refresher. I picked the pace right up again, hoding it for the duration of the run. Ending with a 8’51″/mi average. No 7s this time – and I can feel the difference – less of a driving rhythm, more on autopilot.

Idea for a new biathalon: run 5k then give a over-tired toddler a bath.