adrian's wall

I've just tried creating an item in Google Base of a new item type Spatially Referenced Photo with: two details called geo lon and geo lat ( I tried including the colons but it strips them out ) with values of type Number a label of geotagged - unfortunately the label was rejected as 'misspelled' I've asked for an exemption so here's hoping... Update: as of Nov 21, 2005 6:42 PM Google Base does like 'geotagged', check out a Google Base item pointing to a geotagged Flickr picture of the Mill Race in Cambridge. Tags: geotagging

So, before hard evidence comes to light, let me speculate... I can submit structured data to Google Base for them to do with as they please. No doubt there will be a facetted-browser for users to search through that data and maybe even an API. But will third-party search engines be able to index any of it? Web sites can be crawled/scraped, blog publishing provides a pinging mechanism. Will Google Base provide a mechanism that doesn't fall foul of Google's terms and conditions of use?

Well Google do seem to be trying to do things to limit the problem of spam blogs hosted on blog*spot. They've introduced a 'type in the letters' test when posting to a blog that looks suspicious. Of course if you're posting via the Blogger API then its just rejected. More recently I note that the Atom feed for a blog*spot hosted blog has a <summary> tag with all the markup removed. By contrast a blog that is FTPed to an alternate host has a <content> tag with markup present. UPDATE: seems to be back to normal - I know it just looks like I might have flipped the 'summary' switch but...

There doesn't seem to be many rules/conventions governing what you get when you request a feed representing the on-going results from a search. For example at the botton of a Google Blog Search page you can get an RSS or Atom feed with 10 or 100 items. With Technorati you can add a search to your Watchlists and then get an RSS feed. In Bloglines you can subscribe to a search but you never see the feed itself - or at least if you try to edit the subscription you don't. However I am more interested in the feed itself. They all work fine if all you want to do is subscribe to them in a news reader, but what if you want to process the results further? Such feeds supply the necessary <link rel="alternate" type="type="text/html" ... but couldn't they also supply the associated third-party feed itself? Consider the simple example of looking for 'geotagged' blog entries: its easy enough to get a set of references to blog entries which match t...

CNV00014-1 Originally uploaded by acuth . So Flickr knows how to post to Blogger! geo: ( 47.3399 , 0.5116 ) tags: geotagged geo: ( 47.3397533 , 0.5108643 ) Check this out on mylocalguru

Looking over my previous post on hReview, I have to confess that it doesn't look as supportive as I had intended. So here - with my apologies - is a mark two... hReview defines a microformat that can be used in both traditional web pages and blog posts. It can do this because it is essentially self-contained and makes no assumptions about how the content is published. This post considers the question of whether microformats, in general, should take advantage of different publishing techniques and, if so, how. I start with the observation that a number of the elements of hReview would appear to mimic elements familiar to typical a blog publishing environment. For example comparing hReview with Atom (0.8) : hReview Atom summary title reviewer author contributor dtreviewed published updated permalink id where required fields are shown as field-name . The question arises about what should happen if an hReview is published as [part of] a blog post? For example what...

I'm glad to see that Bloglines intends to do something about search this summer . Afterall web-based news aggregators have such potential; they have a far more intimate understanding of what a person is interested in than any web-based search engine and they have access to a far more complete set of data than any desktop-based news aggregator. Clearly some of it is going to relate to improving the results that come back from the 'search' box. Here's hoping that includes a personalised component. By their very nature news aggregators make use of a user profile; specifically a personalised list of subscribed feeds. Furthermore a feed seems to be a new and useful unit to work in. There are things I can say about my relationship to a feed that I cannot say of individual posts. For example I might wish to say 'ignore any unread posts more than two days old' for some feeds. Obviously such an ability would not only relate to search, it would have a direct impact o...

What Unicorn? - an hReview Jun 1, 2005 by adrian cuthbert product Blade Runner ★★★★★ I managed to see the director's cut of this film with an individual who asked at the end 'What Unicorn?' - you know who you are! <div class="hreview"> <h2 class="summary"> What Unicorn? - an hReview </h2> <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050601T2121"> Jun 1, 2005 </abbr> by <span class="reviewer fn">adrian cuthbert</span> <span class="type" style="display:none">product</span> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/" class="item url fn"> Blade Runner </a> <blockquote class="description"><p> <abbr class="rating" title="5">&#9733;&#9733;&#9733;&#9733;&#9733;</abbr> I managed to see the ...

Blade Runner is one of my favourite films. Tags: this_is_an_hreview_2 <p> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/" rev="review">Blade Runner</a> is one of my favourite films. <br/> Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/this_is_an_hreview_2" rel="tag">this_is_an_hreview_2</a> </p>

microformats may well represent a path from where we are today to the [lowercase] semantic web. If so, one of the first waypoints along such a path could be the emergence of aggregators capable of taking advantage of suitably marked-up content. Applying a 'microformat' approach to tagging, Technorati introduced the rel="tag" approach to marking-up tags. Technorati also supply the corresponding aggregation service, e.g. see posts tagged with microformat . Given this minimalist approach to tagging, the hReview specification comes as something of a surprise. It seems to represent a format developed independently of the environment in which it is most likely to be used. The rel="tag" approach makes a major, simplifying assumption. This is that the tag refers 'to a major portion of the current page (i.e. a blog post)' . I am assuming that it could apply equally to a blog entry in an RSS/Atom feed. Thus an aggregator can associate a tag with two p...

This is a test post in support of SmartLink of which more later... I've encoded an event based on hCalendar , namely Web 2.0 Conference : October 5 - 7 , at the Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA An example of a page with more events encoded in hCalendar can be found here

This is a test post in support of SmartLink of which more later... Without giving away too much, here is my UK test address CB4 0WS .

In a previous post I tried to describe how I thought technologies like SmartTags and AutoLink ought to behave. With greasemonkey in Firefox I've been able to build a proof-of-concept demonstrator. For the moment I'm calling it Smart Tag/Auto Link. SmartLink is based upon the idea that content authors should mark-up content that can be 'smart-linked', using standard XHTML constructs. This has two advantages: it effectively provides an 'opt-in' mechanism for content providers it doesn't require 'magic' to identify what can be smart-linked and thus provides a much more extensible approach. of course there is one fairly major disadvantage: there isn't any suitably marked-up content out there, with the exception of some test posts I've put together for the purpose. Getting Started If you want to know a bit more about SmartLink then click here . Alternatively if you want to see how SmartLink behaves and you're using Firefox t...

This is a test post in support of SmartLink of which more later... Apple I found this address on their web-site: 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino, CA 95014 There are listed on the Nasdaq with a stock symbol of AAPL .

This is a test post in support of SmartLink of which more later... Google I found this address on their web-site: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 There are listed on the Nasdaq with a stock symbol of GOOG .

This is a test post in support of SmartLink of which more later... I've never lived in the States so when I'm short of a test address I always resort to Beverley Hills 90210 , how sad is that?

This is a test post in support of SmartLink of which more later... One of my favourite films is Blade Runner , I'm pretty sure I prefer it to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from which it is derived.

So here's my Technorati Profile

In all the debate about Google's AutoLink feature I've seen virtually nothing about how the AutoLink/SmartTag (AutoTag anyone?) concept could be made to work better with the notable exception of Don Park who was right on the money weeks ago Fixing AutoLink . Obviously there are points of principle that need to be debated; the right of an author not to have their content altered and allowing users to escape from a mass of inward-looking links. But rather than complaining and hoping the problem will go away, how about trying to address these issues by building a better AutoTag? Require authors to opt-in by requiring them to make their content explicitly auto-taggable. For example have them mark-up such content [see previous post ] <span class="autotag" type="address"> This is an address </span> The first time auto-taggable content of a particular 'type' is found, ask the user if (a) they want such content auto-tagged and if so the...

RSS/Atom is the proof that, given the right incentive, people/systems can be developed to publish semantically marked-up content. Building the semantic web, however, seems to have fractured into two; build it using the correct technologies (RDF + OWL) or bootstrap it by encouraging people to semantically mark-up some of their content. Jon Udell, as far as I understand the argument, has been consistent and imaginative in his support of the latter. He has suggested that what is needed is some mechanism to reward those people that go through the pain of marking-up their content. I just wonder whether an appropriately implemented 'AutoLink' capability could do that? The need for an 'appropriate' implementation is, in part, a response to the furore that has arisen from Google's toolbar (e.g. Dave Winer's Google's toolbar and content modification ). IMHO this isn't a question of whether the reader is prepared to accept having the content they are reading modi...

This is a small post that contains an address. I found the address on Google's web-site: Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 USA My question is will people be able to auto-link it? And the answer is YES!

In some quarters speculation has been running rampant about 'What is the hidden intent of the Mac mini?'. Some have pointed to the appearance of Mr Ando of Sony at MacWorld as being significant. To my mind the missing ingredient of any truly distributed home entertainment system is the remote control . Using a remote to manipulate menus on your TV is just plain silly if you are trying to get music stored on your 'digital hub' to play on speakers in the kitchen. The remote needs to have a screen. As well as a screen, it needs just a few controls to manipulate the menus - not a tabletPC, not a PDA with a stylus and not a mobile phone. Enter the gaming consoles. Who has user interaction with screen-based, domestic mobile devices sorted out better? A Wi-Fi enabled PSP might be overkill but it would be a start. With a price in excess of $249 for the Wi-Fi option it also looks pricey, until you see what Sonos is all about and how much they charge for a remote...