Category general

Visited Countries Namespace

Now that I made a first step into FOAF with my personal FOAF-file, I started investigating possible extensions of this namespace. I came across the possibility to add the countries that one has visited created by Morton Frederiksen. This seemed like an interesting extension. And with World66 it is possible to create a image of the world, where the visited countries are coloured red. You can extract the country codes from the World66 HTML-snippet.

It is easy to add the extension to my FOAF-file. In my case it is the following code:

<foaf:Person 
     xmlns:iso="http://www.daml.org/2001/09/countries/iso-3166-ont#" 
     xmlns:visit="http://purl.org/net/vocab/2004/07/visit#" 
     xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" 
     xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"> 
<foaf:name>Arnaud Leene</foaf:name> 
     <visit:country> 
          <iso:Country rdf:about="http://www.daml.org/2001/09/countries/iso#FR> 
               <iso:code>FR</iso:code> 
              <iso:name>France</iso:name> 
          </iso:Country>
     </visit:country> 
.....
     <visit:country> 
          <iso:Country rdf:about="http://www.daml.org/2001/09/countries/iso#NL> 
               <iso:code>NL</iso:code> 
               <iso:name>Netherlands</iso:name> 
          </iso:Country> 
     </visit:country> 
</foaf:Person>

Morten defined the term visited rather strict:

A country that a person has slept in at least one night, not at an airport or in transit to another country.

I agree with him that you must be a little bit strict. For example I have been to Ireland, but I only have been on the airport Shannon changing planes. So even for me that does not count as a visit. A very similar thing happened to me in Bahrein. I arrived there in the morning after a very tiring flight and would only leave again in the evening. I could stay in a Hotel away from the airport, so I did go through customs and made a taxi drive to the Hotel. We were however very tired and slept a lot. It was very hot so we did go only a little bit outside. In short we did not see much,we did not stay a night, but we did sleep! So In Morten’s definition it does not count as a visit, but to me it does. I admit that it is on the edge. And what about very small countries such as Vatican City or Monaco. You can visit those countries in a day. So to me those count as a visit as well.

But I also want to add this information to my aboutme-webpage. I want to be able to extend such a list of visited countries just by creating a new weblog-entry. I have two possibilities. This first one is adding each country as a bookmark with a link to an authority, such as Wikipedia. Or add a new section to my main aboutme-page. I decided to go with the bookmark solution.

I do not think that the visited namespace can be used for other Microcontent. Or can microcontent visit countries as well?

Now only an export function from pMachine to FOAF. And what about visited provinces in the Netherlands or Departements visit� en France?

Categories/tags: general , FOAF Countries Visited Namespace
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OpenPerson = FOAF

I added the OpenPerson to my overview of MicroContent examples. I see a profile, read metadata, of a person also a a form of MicroContent. It can be published and can have a permalink. With all the Social Networking Services (SNS) out there, I noticed that I entered the same information time and again. That should be much more simple. By giving a SNS a link to a standard profile on my site, it should get a good headstart. If a SNS would like to know more of me, I could enter it on the SNS or add it to my profile. Another requirement is that I want to publish the information myself and not give it to any SNS as their property.

So I started dabbling with my profile information. First I created a public readable webpage with information about me. Then I used Foaf-o-matic to create a first version of my FOAF-profile. Now I am struggling to have the same information in my FOAF-file as on my webpage. My personal information is really a weblog with each piece of information a separate weblog-entry. So what I ideally would like to have is that my weblog-software would create a RSS-feed with my FOAF-profile in it. At the moment this is not possible.

Now is the question how to extend my FOAF-file with all the namespace extensions that have been suggested. I do not see an easy solution at the moment, it all requires starting up my TextEditor (how old-fashioned). Next step will be to synchronise all the public profiles (see on my webpage for a list) with the information on my webpage. It seems that you can publish an enormous amount of yourself.

I will also create a FOAFnet-file when I can find the necessary instructions.

Categories/tags: general
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OpenImage metadata

Marc Canter gives an example of the metadata that could be produced with an image. It is really very extended, I am not going to quote it all here. I guess it can be found somewhere on the FOAF-pages. I especially like the effort to add metadata describing the content of the image. In the case the names of the persons and links to their homepages.

Categories/tags: general
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Lacking Microcontent standards

Ex- and importing weblogs from one tool to another stays difficult, tells Shelley Powers. Several remarks are made in this web-log entry:

- existing Weblog-standards are insufficient.

. categories give much trouble.

- not all tools support relevant im- or export formats.

- Movable type is the best format supported. It can be the inspiration for a Microcontent standard.

I think there is not much that can be done about such a situation. You live on the cutting edge. Exporting is not the first priority of new weblog-tools providers. This is a situation where standards for weblog-formats follows reality. People start with implementing a tool and start only later thinking about interoperability. What you really need is someone to follow all developments and create a Microcontent standard for weblogs. This could then be used by any tool developer and added upon by a tool developer. With such a feedback loop one might hope that the standard follows reality more closer. But there will always parties behind developments. If all tool vendors would be able to export into a key/value XML-format, already much will be gained. And that is the same as telling the world what your dataformat is.

[inspiration Marc Canter]

Categories/tags: general
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Syncato Weblog-entry

In this webpost Kimbro Staken mentions the minimum number of fields needed for a weblog entry (item):

• title
• description - the content of the webpost (can contain HTML-markup);
• category - a category assigned to the item;
• pubDate - the publication date of the item;

Shouldn’t there be a difference between publication date and creation date? The number of fields are indeed very few. I only miss the permalink, to make it really microcontent. This could be the minimum number of required fields for the Microcontent family. Although then the category-field could be made optional.

Categories/tags: general
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Syncato

I cam accross several posts referring to Syncato. Their explanation is very oriented to the technical. It is however very interesting. It is the way to go and it is what is needed for Microcontent. I still have to look at it further if it really can be used as asuch.

Categories/tags: general
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Microcontent Popularity

I came across an old entry on Tom Coates website. The entry discusses the value of webposts that only contain links. He argues that these links mainly help to boost the popularity index of those links. It shows that people like to vote on microcontent they like. In order to vote now, you can add a weblog entry with comments (that is the nice way) or create a post with many links (not so nice) or add the URL to del.ico.us. You can always see how popular your post was by looking at the number of views of the post.

But why not create a more public service to register popularity. Add a slider to your weblog entry, so that people can indicate how much they liked it. This is then registered centrally on a voters aggregate site as an OpenReview. Something for Technorati?

Categories/tags: general
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Quick Definition

Philip Pearson did some quick thinking on microcontent:

Microcontent ... small content. Bits of content. Content that you can aggregate.
 
There’s the data, and the data format: the storage format and the transmission format. And the presentation format.

I am not sure why he wants to describe the storage format.

Categories/tags: general
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Google Alert

I created a Google Alert on various microcontent related keywords. I get now all all links of Google on this subject. Many of those links I have not seen yet. I will comment these and add them this weblog. For many this will appear as old news, but I want to do some homework.

Categories/tags: general
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OpenListings / OpenAds

Marc comments on a blog-entry on John Battelles blog. In his blog he introduces the of ads that are published by advertisers as feeds and can then be subscribed to publishers. In this sense it is very similar to OpenEvents that I blogged about before. However the financial model behind is most interesting. It introduces a model for microcontent that requires payment before it is published.

Categories/tags: general
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Digital Lifestyle Aggregation

Marc Canter referred in one of his posts to a post on Jason Kottke weblog, who quoted Harold. I found some interesting things in this blog entries. Let me start with Harold’s quote:

I’m beginning to think that feeds (and content tagging) should be the starting point, not an offshoot. Until now, our tools have produced web pages then feeds. I’m thinking we need tools that create feeds and then let us combine them into web pages.

.
I fully agree. I am starting to create all my websites as weblogs in some form or another with pMachine. Basically this implies that each webpage consists of multple entries (a weblog), which can be ordered in some way or another. This does not always have to a time-ordering as is usual in a standard weblog. I can chose another ordering as well. I decide however the order. These entries can be published as a feed, which I do create for most pages/logs. These feeds allow others to take my content and incorporate it in other webpages. Some of the feeds are static, i.e. content does not change, and other feeds change constantly as I add new content. These feeds are not really the source of my websites, but they could be theoretically. The pMachine system however allows me to mix multiple logs stored in a MySQL database and create a webpage from it. But whether this content is stored in a SQL-database or a RSS-feed does not really matter.

Jason Kottke adds to this that also other content, which you create with other sources should be mixed into your website. I agree. I would however like to make a distinction between content you create yourself and content created by others. Content created by others should be integrated into your website through a feed. For content created by yourself you should try to keep it in your own hand. pMachine gives the idea that any content could be published through that system. Each micro-content type could lead to its own feed with its own format, which is where the standardisation effort comes in. The content you produce should however be published with the same system, otherwise you are not able to manage it. The distributed storage solution suggested by Leo Kottke seems a bit to complex. However with good feed standardisation it could be possible.

Marc adds to that, that one is working on many components in order to achieve this goal. I get the impression that the emphasis lies on aggregator services. Keep all the content you create with a single reliable provider and publish your (micro-)content as a feed. If you want to be a part of a social network aggregator service, just hook up your micro-content feed to the service, but never give away your content. We need an environment where the creation of such hook-ups is easy.

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Marc’s Roadshow

Marc is coming over to Paris and organises a dinner of microcontent, etc. He asks people to come. I’d love to go there. The meeting seems to be however a bit small versus the expenses I have to make. It is a pity. I would love to meet these people (and get the T-shirt).

Categories/tags: general
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New weblog

I introduced a new category on this weblog: Micro content. I am starting to get interesting in this subject and started to gather news and links around it. Micro Content is for me anything published by a person, which is a small piece of content. Usually this person is a consumer, an end-user, who gets in on the action of publishing content. The content can be anything: a weblog, a book review, a bookmark, a review (of a book, sundial, product, etc.), his music, a music list, etc. There is no limit to this content listing. The content is typically very small in terms of number of bytes.

Usually this content is free to be used by other services, when they consent to the rules of the publisher. A Creative Commons license might be used here.

The content might be published using a syndication format. such as RSS. This makes it easy for other services to create for instance networked services. The RSS feed can be adapted to a OpenContent XML format, so that the various fields get more meaning and the networking gets more interesting.

I will try to extend this rough description in the future as I add content to this category. If the category grows out of control I will move it to a separate weblog in the future. We’ll see what happens.

Update: I decided to create the new weblog and I moved this entry to that weblog.

Categories/tags: general
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OpenAnything

In the theme of Open your information, I found this log entry. Jeff Jarvis wants all of his information to reside online. This will allow it to be accessible from his clients machines and possibly for his friends.

I like the idea.

Categories/tags: general
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