Archive for August, 2008
« Previous EntriesFlickr Releases Handy Embeddable Slide Show
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
Yahoo’s photosharing service Flickr is one of the more wonderful things on the web and today the company made a small release that a lot of people should enjoy quite a bit. There’s never been a really easy way to embed a nice slide show of your photos off site, until now.
The new Flickr slide show (example below) is available for the photos on any page you’re looking at, meaning you should be able to display your friends’ photos, photos with a particular tag etc. We are happy. Thanks to the fabulous photographer Scott Beale for pointing to the new feature release.
The above are the latest from my personal account. I’ve tested it and privacy settings appear to be respected. A couple of changes that would be nice would be a link in the player to each photo’s page on Flickr and the ability to turn on captions.
I’ve been posting to Flickr far, far more than ever before now that I’ve set up posting from my phone. To do that you go to the settings tab, find the post by email address, make that a contact on your phone and send it there by MMS. I’ve also been uploading a lot of screenshots using the wonderful Mac app Skitch. I’ve also got my Flickr account tied to my account at FriendFeed, which gives me more reason to post photos since I know more friends will see them.
How about you? Tips on making good use of Flickr in general and the new embedded slideshow in particular would be great to share in comments.
Originally
from ReadWriteWeb
by
reBlogged
on Aug 21, 2008, 4:55PM
Openness and Innovation Presentation at Media Futures 2008
Thursday, August 21st, 2008Yesterday I had a lot of fun at the Media Futures 2008 conference at Alexandra Palace. The panel I was on was called Openness and Innovation, and included Robert Cailliau, Ian Forrester, Matt Webb and myself. The chair was Bill Thompson.
My slides are here:
Originally
from XForms and Internet Applications
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reBlogged
Microformats and RDFa are not as far apart as people think
Thursday, August 21st, 2008The BBC have caused a bit of a storm recently by announcing that they won’t be using the hCalendar Microformat on their pages. The reason is the well-known problems with accessibility. One of the proposed solutions is to look at RDFa.
Confusing syntax with vocabulary
Whilst the BBC obviously understand their web-pages, and are conscious of the issues of accessibility, they may have demonstrated here a bit of a misunderstanding of the semantic nature of the web. And in my view, most of the follow-up discussions I’ve seen fall into the same trap.
The main point is to not confuse the syntax used to convey information, with the information itself–the vocabulary. The reason I think this is what is happening is that when the BBC say “we’ll be looking at the possible use of RDFa”, they may have missed the point that when you use RDFa, you still need a vocabulary, and if one doesn’t exist, you’ll need to create one.
It would be far better to look at the Microformat that is already in use (in this case, hCalendar), and see if it can be tweaked to make use of the generic nature of RDFa–but that requires a new approach to both Microformats and RDFa.
So before panic takes hold of the Microformats community, or smugness grips the RDFa one, let’s try to get underneath what these two technologies are actually about.
Microformats are about vocabulary
Microformats were devised as a way to let authors add little pieces of semantics to their documents, in such a way that applications could make use of them. An application might be a search engine that can improve indexing and search, or a browser that can display extra information based on the embedded values.
There are three key advances that Microformats made. The first was to say that you can still do useful things, even if you only have a small amount of information. This was pretty radical, since up until that point the semantic web seemed to be an ‘all or nothing’ proposition. (For many people it still is.)
The second was to say that we should be able to publish semantic information in the same easy way that we publish web-pages–through content-management systems, blogs, and so on.
But the third advance is perhaps the most important; Microformats essentially said that we can teach end-users about a specific set of terms that help them do something useful, without having to teach them ‘big picture’ stuff. This meant that authors could be taught just enough mark-up to add contact details, events, licensing information, geo locations…and so on.
Problems with Microformats
Microformats opened the way for a new approach to the semantic web, but it does of course have its weaknesses.
The first is that it ‘overloads’ many of the HTML attributes to carry semantic information, in such a way that they can interfere with the normal use of the attribute. This is why people are now having accessibility problems, because some of the attributes are trying to play two or three roles.
The second weakness is that mixing vocabularies starts to get messy; because each Microformat is a combination of vocabulary and syntax, then it is actually quite specific, and they can therefore interfere with each other.
The third weakness if that because each vocabulary also requires ’syntax’, then even if a perfectly usable vocabulary exists, it has to be ‘converted’ to be a Microformat.
RDFa is about syntax
RDFa started life at around the same time as Microformats, and holds with many of the same philosophies–that the semantic web is never going to happen unless metadata is as easy to publish as a web-page, and that authors should have an easy way to add information without having to understand the ‘big picture’.
But RDFa set out to address a slightly different set of problems; instead of defining new vocabularies, it sought to create a generic syntax that can accommodate any vocabulary, allowed multiple vocabularies on a page, and did so in any mark-up language.
And whereas the Microformat community took as a fundamental principle that they wouldn’t modify HTML at all, we took advantage of one of the key extension mechanisms of HTML which is that unrecognised attributes should simply be ignored by an HTML parser (i.e., they should not throw an error). So by adding a handful of new attributes to HTML and XHTML, RDFa doesn’t interfere with the existing uses of attributes, such as for accessibility.
Microformats and RDFa
Ultimately, if people can put their prejudices to one side, there should be no reason why these two ground-breaking technologies can’t work together.
To illustrate, take the rel-license Microformat. It’s a nice, simple, self-contained document about how to use the license value in @rel and @rev. To specify the license of a current document, an author can add something like this:
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" rel="license>cc by 2.0</a>
This is perfectly valid HTML, making use of @rel with @href, and it’s nice and easy to explain–the key component of Microformats.
But it’s not widely known that this is also perfectly valid RDFa.
However, RDFa takes this a step further, and provides authors with the ability to talk about other things, not just the current document.
Individual licenses for images
A common situation is to have a number of images on a page, and to want to indicate the license of each of them. With RDFa you now can.
Imagine we have this image in our page:
<img src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/detached/2529217704/" />
Our previous example of a license link needs only minor modification to make it refer to the image:
<a about=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/detached/2529217704/” href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB” rel=”license> cc by 2.0</a>
It’s difficult to argue that this is complex, since it’s only a minor change for authors.
Extending rel-license
But there is no reason why this formulation shouldn’t also be included in rel-license; after all, the key purpose of a Microformat is to promote re-use and provide bite-size pieces that authors can quickly learn and put to work.
rel-license could remain ‘the last word’ on the use of license in @rel and @rev, but it could also provide information about how to use license in HTML, XHTML and RDFa. That way there is only one place that authors need to go.
Solving the BBC problem
I said at the beginning that the BBC still needed to create a vocabulary, even if it adopted RDFa. In other words, it may gain a solution to the accessibility problem by dropping hCalendar, but it loses the advantage of having a community-maintained syntax.
That doesn’t mean we have the answer straight away, but I strongly suggest that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
The Microformats community is responsible for getting many people to look again at the semantic web, after having been put off by the more theoretical approach. But it needs to build on this success, and look at updating its formats to make use of the new attributes and generic parsing algorithm provided by RDFa. That way it can solve its technical problems, and continue to lead the way in defining ‘agile’ vocabularies for the semantic web.
And whilst the RDFa community has shown that it is possible to have a syntax that supports the ‘full’ semantic web, without it needing to exist in a separate space of complex mark-up and extra documents, it should remember that a generic syntax is nothing without vocabularies.
I’ve just started work on an exciting project to mark up job vacancies in the UK public sector, using RDFa. And although the use of RDFa will make it very easy for departments to publish the metadata, it’s still going to require the creation of a vocabulary of terms. I’m going to be looking all over for suitable terms and vocabularies, and I’ll certainly be looking at how Microformats might fit in.
Originally
from XForms and Internet Applications
by
reBlogged
Social Gaming @ Interplay tomorrow, meet Under the Radar CEOs
Thursday, August 21st, 2008InterPlay: the Business of Games on the Social Web has assembled an all-star cast of speakers, including CEOs from Under the Radar | Social Media and Entertainment presenters MochiMedia and past presenters Bunchball and Kongregate. Other speakers on the roster include: Mark Pincus; CEO and Founder, Zynga, Shervin Pishevar; CEO and Co-founder, SGN, Dan Ogles; Co-founder, Conduit Labs, Matt Mihaly; CEO, Sparkplay Media and VCs Ping Li; Partner, Accel and Jeremy Liew; Partner, Lightspeed Ventures.
The social gaming space is becoming the proving ground for advertising-based business models, virtual economies and social network driven market reach strategies. The panel discussions will cover these topics and a lot more, should be a great event. Tickets are still available but it’s likely this event will sell out so hustle up and get your game on.
Originally
from Under the Radar Blog
by
reBlogged
on May 21, 2008, 7:15PM
Hot Dealmaker of the Week
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
Originally
from Under the Radar Blog
by
reBlogged
on May 22, 2008, 8:46PM
Startups - You ARE the Experts!
Thursday, August 21st, 2008I’m in the midst of pulling together the questions for our fireside chat speakers at Under the Radar. The fireside chat is at the end of the day, and its a panel comprised of some pretty impressive online ad gurus. However, I’d be remiss in not reaching out to our network of startups, as you guys are the ones who are feeling the pain of trying to get in the door with advertisers (brands) and agencies.
Below is the panel and description. Here’s what I want to hear from you:
- If you could ask the panel any question, what would it be?
- What are your biggest pain points for startups when it comes to dealing with advertisers and agencies?
- What are the pressing issues for startups with ad-based business models?
* Be forthcoming - we’re not afarid to ask the tough questions!
Panel details:
|
Chris Colborn, EVP & Chief Experience Officer, R/GA
Tom Bedecarre, CEO, AKQA
Jeff Stiers, SVP, Business Growth - North America, JWT 
Scott Schiller, EVP, Sales, GLAM MEDIA
Originally
from Under the Radar Blog
by
reBlogged
on May 23, 2008, 12:07AM
1 Week Left - Meet Google, Fox Interactive, WSJ, Disney & More!
Thursday, August 21st, 2008Under the Radar is coming up next week - if you haven’t registered yet, you have just 1 week left to take advantage of $100 off the door price.
You can REGISTER HERE.
Here’s the details:
Under the Radar: Social Media and Entertainment
June 3, 2008 | 8:00am 6:00pm
Microsoft Campus| Mountain View, CA
350 Attendees, 40 Presenting Startups, 1 Day
JUDGES & PRESENTING STARTUPS:
Tom Bedecarre, CEO, AKQA
Joe Bellissmo, President, Nesting
Guy Ben-Artzi, Founder and CEO, Mytopia
Prakash Bhalerao, Chairman and CEO, Verismo
Bryan Biniak, CEO, Jacked Inc.
Rick Bolander, Partner, Gabriel Venture Partners
Ryan Born, Founder, AudioMicro
Brad Bostic, President / CMO, ChaCha
Vineet Buch, Partner, BlueRun Venures
Joey Carson, CEO and President, Hollywood Interactive Group
Peter Chane, Group Business Product Manager - Open Social, Google
Chris Colborn, EVP & Chief Experience Officer, R/GA
Joe Drumgoole, CEO, PutPlace
Ben Elowitz, CEO, Wetpaint
Sean Glass/Johannes Larcher, Chief Strategy Officer and U.K. Managing, Pikum
Lowell Goss, CEO, Loud3r
Elie Habib, President and CEO, Vusion
Rob Hayes, Partner, First Round Capital
Lewis Henderson, SVP, William Morris Agency
Bradley Horowitz, VP Product Management, Google
Shankar Iyer, Vice President, WebEx Connect Ecosystem, WebEx
Brad Jefferson, Co-Founter and CEO, Animoto Productions
Sean Kelly, Co-Founder, Dizzywood
Jack Kennedy, EVP Strategy & Corporate Development, Fox Interactive
Chad Kinzelberg, Partner, Scale Venture Partners
Patrick Koppula, CEO, ffwd
Albert Lai, CEO and Founder, kontagent
Robert Lane, President/CEO and Co-Founder, Overlay.tv
Charlene Li, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
David Marks, Co-Founder and CTO, Loomia
Dave McClure, Startup Advisor & Angel Investor, 500 Hats
Keith McCurdy, Co-Founder, President and CEO, Vivaty
Ellen McGirt, Senior Writer, Fast Company
Peter Molettiere, Senior Mobile Games Operations Manager, SNAP Mobile - Nokia
Avi Muchnick, CEO, Aviary
Gregarious Narain, Co-Founder LifeGrams, Lil’Grams
Rafe Needleman, Editor, CNET/Webware
Joshua Newman, Director - Digital Media, Twentieth Century Fox
Jason Oberfest, VP of Business Development, MySpace
Marty O’Keefe, Director - Business Strategy & Development - Entertainment & Devices, Microsoft
Paul Remer, CEO, Keibi Technologies, Inc
Mark Rutledge, COO, MovieSet Inc.
Mike Samson and Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founders, CrowdSPRING
Scott Sangster, Director of Strategic Planning and Development, Walt Disney Internet Group
Robert Scoble, Editor, Scobleizer/Fast Company
Dan Schiappa, GM - Strategy & Business Development - Entertainment & Devices, Microsoft
Scott Schiller, EVP, Sales, GLAM MEDIA
Eddie Smith, VP Marketing & Business Development, Social Media
Srinivasan Sesh Seshadri, Chief Technology Officer, Kosmix
Jeff Somers, CEO, PluggedIn
Jeff Stiers, SVP, Business Growth - North America, JWT
Jonathan Strietzel, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Big Stage
Ian Swanson, CEO, Sometrics
Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, Wall Street Journal/All things D
Ophir Tanz/Ari Mir, CEO, Gumgum
Hubert Thieblot, CEO, Curse Inc
Jeremy Toeman, Marketing Consultant, Stage Two Consulting
Dean Valentine, CEO, comedy.com
Mikael Vinding, Chief JYGYnaut, JYGY / StreamVerse, Inc
Eric Wheeler, CEO 33Across
Rick Witham, Channel and VC Relations, Forum Nokia
Justin Wong, Vice President of Business Development, Mochi Media
Jennifer Zanich, CEO, Xumii
Tony Zito, CEO and President, MediaForge
Tim Zuckert, President & CEO, Shift Control
…AND MORE!
View Event Schedule
View Fireside Chat Lineup
Originally
from Under the Radar Blog
by
reBlogged
on May 28, 2008, 12:51AM
10 Free Passes for Starving Startups at Under the Radar
Thursday, August 21st, 2008Our very generous sponsors for Under the Radar (WebEx, Vencorps, Microsoft, Userplane and Limelight) have donated conference passes to 10 starving startups who want to attend the Under the Radar conference on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View Ca.
In the comments section, give us your best answer to this question and the 10 most enlightening responses will get the loot:
As an entrepreneur, what are the 3 biggest “pain points” you struggle with that we should cover at future events?
Cut off is end of day Friday.
Originally
from Under the Radar Blog
by
reBlogged
on May 29, 2008, 10:41PM
Follow updates for Under the Radar on our Twitter feed
Thursday, August 21st, 2008If you want to track what’s happening, you can follow our twitter posts at
https://twitter.com/UTR08
Originally
from Under the Radar Blog
by
reBlogged
on Jun 2, 2008, 7:06PM
Under the Radar Winners!
Thursday, August 21st, 2008We’re happy to announce the winners from today’s Under the Radar | Social Media and Entertainment event. Congratulations to all the companies for a great show.
Category Winners:
VIDEO
Judges: Vusion
Audience: Verismo
SOCIAL NETWORKING
Judges: Vivaty
Audience: Vivaty
CONTENT
Judges: Curse
Audience: Curse
PUBLISHING
Judges: Keibi
Audience: Keibi
TARGETING TOOLS
Judges: MediaForge
Audience: MediaForge
MEDIA TOOLS
Judges: Crowdspring
Audience: Crowdspring
GAMES
Judges: Mytopia
Audience: Dizzywood
CREATION
Judges: Big Stage
Audience: Animoto
Overall Audience Choice Winner: Crowdspring
Judges’ Choice - Best in Show Award: Dizzywood
Thanks to our sponsors:
Microsoft
Webex
OpSource
Gunderson Dettmer
Limelight Networks
VenCorps
Nokia
Text voting powered by Mozes.
Originally
from Under the Radar Blog
by
reBlogged
on Jun 4, 2008, 2:06AM