June 13, 2006
Annotation Microformat
I was reading a book today. This particular book has been borrowed from a friend, so I didn't want to mark in it. However, the book was good enough to merit buying, and marking, myself. But what if I want to underline and doodle on the pages now, but have the marginalia be digitally searchable and transferrable to other books? Sounds like a web service.
My ideal use case: a web service that may be queried by etext readers to pull down a store of my personal annotations for a given book, which the reader then accurately layers on top of the actual text. Microformat captures underlines, marginalia, etc.
The chief problem: how to create something that will do the layering described above accurately and decomposing gracefully?
Posted by Noel at 05:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 20, 2006
Brainstorming the Social Bookmarking Law Firm Intranet
How can social bookmarking benefit the lawyers and their staff? Thanks to Jon Udell for asking the question. My beginning thought is this: if I gave my users a social bookmarking button on their IE toolbar (no, not those buttons), what would compel them to begin using it, and what sort of compelling network effects would emerge upon use?
Posted by Noel at 05:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 23, 2006
Fast Action: Rojo, a Web Feed Reader
For the uninitiated: RSS readers let you pull all your favorite blogs and web sites that offer feeds into a single place that is updated when the sites are updated. It's like a webmail account that gets a new message when a site you've subscribed to adds new content.
After my Onfolio beta expired last fall, I was faced with a choice: fork over $25 for a single-platform RSS reader, or jump into the tempting waters of platform-independent, web-based RSS readers. I did a cannonball, transferring ~150 feeds from Onfolio to my first choice, Rojo (thanks to both readers' OPML export and import tools, the transfer was painless).
Once I got my feeds into Rojo, I started tagging them with a vocabulary of ~10 phrases, and they started sorting themselves automatically into the proper buckets. Now I just click on a tag, and all the recent stories from the feeds with that tag appear in a nice newspaper format, with ajaxy-liscious controls and a nice read/unread distinction. If I want to subdivide multiply-tag, explode, or consolidate my tags, it's a simple matter of clicking an icon and typing.
Now I can check my feeds from anything with a internet connection and a browser. World, I will remain on informed and aware of your events, no matter who's OS I use!
Adding new feeds is easy. My home and work browsers have a nice javascriptlet that auto-discovers any RSS feeds for the page that I have pulled up in a tab and adds it to my feed list. Managing/tagging/deleting feeds is easy as well using the manage page to collapse, untag-retag, and delete feeds.
There are little touches all the way through Rojo that keep me happy. The url for your feeds is rojo.com/subject/tagname/recent. The feed auto-discover defaults to Atom feeds if more than one is available. You can't accidentally delete a tagged feed. The Rojo team is continually adding features and refining the interface.
There is one big drawback, a related annoyance, and a smaller nitpick. The big drawback is that I've seen Rojo take up to 8 hours to pick up a new story from a feed. For feed junkies, this is a deal-killer. I like everything else so much that I don't care, but please Rojo, give me my new stories ASAP! 8 hours is like getting an invitation to a party that just ended.
The related annoyance is that Rojo appears to mark things as read/unread based on the timestamp of the feed's story, not on whether it was picked up by the reader when you clicked "Mark As Read". This means that some new stories slip under my feed-radar because they get picked up 8 hours after they are published, and 6 hours after I clicked the Read button, retroactively marking them as read when in fact I haven't even seen them!
The other nitpick: sometimes feeds that I'm not subscribed to show up. Then they leave. At the moment, I somehow am subscribed to Fark. My intelligence and happiness are suffering.
Posted by Noel at 05:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 14, 2006
Scratch My Calendaring Itch
The deal is, I'm helping a couple Worthy Causes set up a web presence using Wordpress. A vital part of reaching people and informing them is a calendar. The requirements are two-fold:
- Events should be viewable in a little box on the side of their Wordpress-powered blog, and clickable for more information. Bonus for offering several different ways to view/share the calendar (eg a monthly box with events, a list with time, day, and month of upcoming events, etc). Bonus for mousing over a calendar date triggering those sweet little ajax zooming window thingies with the event details. Bonus for offering a sign-up and reminder email/sms on the click-through. A final bonus for nice RSS options for subscribing to a calendar or specific types of events.
- Events should be easily added/edited/administered. Ideally, you could post to the calendar through the Wordpress posting interface. Bonus for posting new events via email/sms, and for keeping track of who is coming or interested. Minus points for having to go to an external site, but not a deal-killer as long as it's easy.
Solutions? Not so much. I've looked at 30boxes (promising but not there currently), a few wordpress plugins, and others. Nothing quite hits the mark. Paran0id's Calendar plugin for wordpress comes the closest, and I might hack his php a bit to get something workable.
I'm not the only hapless do-gooder out there. Joel Spolsky, with a different set of requirements, isn't happy with his options.
Posted by Noel at 05:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 12, 2006
The 3000 Day Web Page
Don Knuth wants to know what he needs to do in order to ensure his web page is readable for the next 3000 days. His old (and curious) DTD for his web site was , which he has used and validated since 1996 (!!!). That DTD was deprecated recently by the W3C, and now Mr. Knuth wants to know if he must sacrifice a week otherwise spent toiling on his life's work to the vagaries of the W3C's fashionista Web 2.0 policies.
Turns out there are two issues. First, Knuth was using an old-and-busted, non-standard DTD that wasn't even available on the web anymore (which means any new web browser would not be able to guarentee support). One point from Mr. Knuth. Second, the validator folks removed the DTD without notification, when they knew that the DTD would work most of the time and was pretty close to other, standard DTDs. One point from Web Standards.
What did I learn? Standards are not possible at the beginning of something new, but they need to happen, and when they come, make the compliance process as friendly, verbose, and easy as possible.
Kudos to Dare Obsanjo for spotting and blogging this thread.
Posted by Noel at 05:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack