Category mashing

From file systems to microcontent data silos

Recent comments on the iPad made me realise something: Apple is very slowly moving away from a generic file system to microcontent silo’s. I am not sure about the how and when, but I recognise the following steps.

I think it all started with the Address Book application. This standard address book already existed during the NeXT-period. This application allows a user to manage contact information about persons. For each person (or business) the application creates a card. These cards are stored in a data silo (AddressBook.data). This data silo is a closed one, i.e. I am not able to look into it, but through the AddressBook application. As other applications also like to use address information, Apple created an API in order to get access (and change) this data. So what one sees here is a closed data structure, which is only accessible through Apple created and authorised API’s. Note that in NeXTstep this silo was more open, i.e. one could see the individual cards as separate files.

With the introduction of MacOSX a more structured approach towards file organisation was chosen. We saw the introduction of standard folders for Pictures, Movies, Music and Documents. This approach is also inherited from NeXTstep, but has been extended to more file types. Naturally the corresponding application such as iTunes and iPhoto stored their data in these folders.

However there is no guarantee that users did indeed store their corresponding data in these folders. When starting iTunes for the first time, it asked the user if it should consolidate all the music files of the users. This implied that all the files iTunes could find would be copied into the iTunes music folders. And there is still a preference for making a copy of music files when importing. And iPhoto has taken a similar approach to images. In addition iTunes and iPhoto force a detailed folder structure.

In the beginning we only had open silo’s. Users could still access the individual files through the Finder. A drawback of this is that users can corrupt the database. So for iPhoto Apple closed this hole (I am not sure at what version of the app this happened). They hid the photo file structure in a package, which is not easily accessible. In the file browser a user will see just a single file for the entire library.

With the closing of the images folder structure a real data silo has been created. As images are no longer easy to access through the browser, another access method is required. For their applications, such as Pages, Apple introduced the Media Browser. Through this Media Browser window users can access the data silos of iPhoto and iTunes and the Movies folder.

Unfortunately this is only a limited access to the images and music. It could be extended to the whole pictures and music folders. Also the usage of this media browser approach seems to be limited to applications created by Apple. As a solution to this Karelia introduced the iMedia Browser. With this iMedia browser one can access the entire pictures and music folder.

The number of microcontent types which have a corresponding data silo is slowly growing. The iMedia Browser added the microcontent type links. This window pane maps the bookmark folders of various web browsers. Also iTunes added a whole series of subcategories for ‘music’ (audiobooks, movies, iTunes U, applications), which diluted the idea of the music folder. However with time the iTunes app enlarged the coverage of this data silo to other MicroContent types. I am not sure whether this is a good thing though.

In addition to these Apple data silo’s, we have also application specific silo’s. Thus an application such as MacGourmet has it’s own database for recipes, which is not sharable with other recipe applications.

With the advent of the iPhoneOs we see another closing step. No longer a file browser is available to the users. There are only application specific data silo’s. No longer the user can mess with the files. If an application would like to use another data silo, it has to go through Apple defined API’s. This access method might entail a privacy risk, which need to be closed. This security risk also exists under MacOSX, but seems less relevant because less application are installed.

It seems that Apple has created some other data silo’s, but it is unclear which without access to the developer tools. Hardcore users are able to access the folders and files on the iPhone. The usage and access to this folders is deemed illegal by Apple.

The iPad seems to extend the idea of data silo’s to any document type. The idea seems to be that each application has it’s own silo. Naturally the iPad knows the standard MicroContent types as pictures and music. But we also see YouTube Video’s and iBooks. This is a fairly logical extension. However they also use the idea for more generic document types, such as presentations. The application suite iWork for the iPad also supports a media browser, so there is a method to mix MicroContent types.

For users I guess this is all a good development. Things will become much easier. I hope however that an extra method, such as tags, of organising files will introduced. I have doubts whether the current approach is sufficient when there are lots of files (or should I say MicroContent Items?).

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing • type • audio • bookmark • video
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Drops in the Wave

@jurijlotman asked me to have a look at #googlewave (should have a look at microsyntax as well). So I had a look at the video. For the moment that is the only thing we have access to. It looks like a very interesting approach to communication and interaction. We are really talking realtime Internet here. Slowly the real time Internet is for me becoming the Web3.0 subject. But have a look at the video for yourself.

The question is however the relation between MicroContent (the drops) and Google Wave. And I am inclined to concluded that there is no relation at all. The most important aspect of MicroContent, the permalink, seems to be missing in Google Wave. Google Waves is all about creating, sharing, editing and extending waves. These waves seems to be very large documents, which can be distributed to multiple readers and authors. It was not clear from me whether I could use parts of a wave in another one. This would imply referencibility and an important MicroContent aspect.

The other aspect is structure. Out of the box there does not seem to be any, although one can add it later on (example with forms in the video). However a piece of text can be split and be edited by multiple persons, so each piece of text could be seen as a piece of MicroContent. One can also add links, images and videos to the text to create rich text. The editing by multiple persons reminds of a Wiki, which did not have much to do with MicroContent either.

The examples of Twitter integration show that #googlewave can support MicroContent and add new levels to create mashups and threading. In order to be a good MicroContent environment also importing and exporting should be supported, which seems to be already partially done through the api’s. So for a final assessment we have to wait. It looks very interesting and can give a new idea to documents and wiki’s.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing
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OLE anyone?

Does this still exist? Is it used? On Windows?

All I know that it is not available on MacOSX. It was available on NeXTSTEP, but got lost in the transition. It was mashing avant le lettre in some sense.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing
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Mail Photo Browser

The Photo Browser Window shows the images that can be found in the iPhoto-database. The window is limited to a Lists-pane (at the top) and an Items-pane (at the bottom). The size of the window can be changed to view more or les images in the Items-pane.

The Lists-pane shows all Lists, handpicked and smart, Events, etc that are also found and defined in iPhoto (no Albums though). The Events-list even changes the content of the Items-pane to mimic iPhoto’s behaviour. Thus moving the mouse over an events image will present the images pertaining to that event.

And finally there is a search facility (title, description, keywords and rating) for quickly finding images. The window also supports videos, but these have to be in the iPhoto supported format.

The only thing that I miss is access to the Pictures folder and the image scaling.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • mashing ,

mail

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Friendfeed

I am trying to figure out the friendfeed service. The service allows you to follow MicroContent posts from friends, yourself and the world. However it is limited to those that subscribed and added their personal feeds to friendfeed.

When a user subscribes he can indicate the services that must be combined. The service supports twitter, amazon wishlist, delicious, last.fm, stumbleupon, flickr, etc (28 services at the moment). The service makes it very easy to add an rss-feed, you just have to specify your username. As they do not check the password of the corresponding service, you can just mix and match whatever you want. And in addition one can just add any other rss-feed, by typing the corresponding URL.

This makes it just a personal rss-aggregator just like Yahoo Pipes. Only the functionality is more limited, but much easier to use.

What the service makes interesting is that you can also find aggregated feeds of other users. And you can make imaginary friends for feeds of those that did not subscribe yet to friendfeed. I like this feature as you not have to do the aggregation of your friendfeed’s yourself. And this is an easy place to find them. Often I am not able to find all the feeds of someone as they are not readily published somewhere.

Naturally the problem is that you are already subscribed to a lot of information of your friends, so this only will double your information overload.

By the way, friendfeed republishes everything again as feeds, so you do not have to go to the site again.

Now I have to wait until all my friends subscribe, so I can aggregate their stuff. ANd in the mean time I create new subscriptions and new feeds for new services.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • mashing
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Toward intrinsic flow

Now that I looked at several applications, which work with photos and have the intention to support story creation, I start to wonder what I am looking for. The applications that I looked at put the context and the story line outside the photos. It is up to the author to do the authoring of the story. Thus the author arranges the photos on album pages in the order he wants, adds context, such as explanatory text and embellishes the presentation with extra imagery, animations, etc.

And the story line is strictly linear, going from page to page in an album, or from photo to photo in a slideshow. If we are lucky the application can populate an album through an iPhoto Album, thus setting the order of the images. And if we are lucky the title and caption of photos are used to add text to the album.

I see this as a move from an extrinsic to intrinsic story flow. Where we first had to all the work by hand, the applications can now give us a hand by populating the possible flow. And with the increasing number of image we now generate each year (I am now in the 700), this help is really needed.

This automation can only work if we increase the amount of metadata associated with each photo. This metadata can be the title, the date, a caption. But also locations and sorting through events or hand-picked albums. Next step is to annotate the things in the image itself.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing
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iWeb story line support

iWeb is Apple's application for creating web-sites. It is not an application that I use, I am a Sandvox user. I had a look at it, to see how they support story lines in photos. Using iPhoto one has the possibility to export a set of photos to iWeb, where the photos turn up as photo album.

As usual in web publishing applications the photo album in iWeb is pretty straightforward. The main web-page shows all the thumbnails in an album. Clicking on a photo opens a new page with that photo and optionally a thumbnail list of the next ten photos in the album. The user has then the possibility to click on the next (or previous) button for the next photo. Or he can click on a thumbnail to go to another photo.

The story line is that of the original sequence of imported photos. The user can re-arrange photos on the album page in order to adjust the story line.

The context of the album comes from the titles of the original photos and from text that a user can add to each web-page.

It is also possible to view the album as a slideshow. The photos are then show in turn for a short time. Each photo is shown with the title. The viewer has the ability to stop the show, select another photo or go to the next photo. This is a quite neat web implementation.

It might be possible that other web-sites themes offer other story line possibilities. I just checked the

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • mashing
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Microwebbing memories

For a while I am at the look out for MicroWeb applications or services. I see the MicroWeb as the next step from MicroContent itself. MicroContent concerns itself with creating the basic records, such as blog-items, audio, video, recipes, places, etc. microwebbing is concerned with creating the connections between individual MicroContent Items.

Progress has been slow for a while. Naturally there has been a lot of action around mashing. However often these mashups can be seen as rudimentary microwebbing. And on the client side not much was happening either.

So I was very happy to come across the MacOSX application Memory Miner. Memory Miner calls itself 'digital story telling' software, which is a good description. The idea of this application is to tell the story of your family based on pictures. For this it uses images of your family, the persons in your family and places. And also the time an image was taken plays a role as well.

The user can add images from the iPhoto library that it deems relevant to Memory Miner. On an image the user can indicate the persons visible by drawing a square around them (similar to Flickr). These persons however are taken from the AddressBook. And the user can assign a place to a picture through integration with Google Maps.

The application can import gedcom files in order to define persons and/or define the relations between persons. When one just uses the AdressBook one can define the relation through a pop-up list: select son, father, etc.

And finally the application uses to the date of the images to create a timeline of your family, your relations, etc. It has interesting search possibilities. So one can look for images with certain persons, in certain places and in a certain time-range. It is possible to publish timelines to the web.

I will do some work on my images and create an example. You can however have a look at the introductory video of the application.

Thus this application creates an extra layer on top of all the images, address cards, we have stored on our computer. It does remind of the 'old' photobooks, where one documents it's holiday, the events of ones life. But fewer and fewer people seem to this anymore. And even fewer annotate the images for posterity.

Memory Miner can help here and the idea can be extended to many other areas as well. I'll get back to that. I see Memory Miner as an exciting example of the next step of MicroContent towards to the Semantic Web.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing
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Listphile

I started playing with the Listphile service. This service allows a user to create and manage Lists of Items. One can create either some standard lists, such as text, people lists, video lists, images lists and an atlas. Or one can add fields at will to create one's own list. In order to experiment a bit, I create a list with sundials. I added some fields to the standard atlas list to suit my need.

This service offers many features of desktop MicroContent Clients, so I will discuss the service using that checklist.

The first check is whether the Items in Listphile are MicroContent. Indeed these Items support structure, are flexible (one can extend them) and offer some MicroWeb possibilities through links. There are standard fields, such as titles, descriptions and tags. And each Item has a permalink.

The interface consists of only 2 web-pages: a View-pane and a Items-pane. The View-pane shows a single Item, the location is shown on a map. The Items-pane can be set to maps, lists or thumbnails mode. There are limited sorting possibilities. A separate page is available for a tag cloud.

The service has standard Item functions for viewing, adding, editing and deleting Items. There are only limiting functions for a List itself (editing title, address, etc.).

There are only limited functions for importing an exporting, i.e. no importing and exporting only as RSS and embedded Lists.

The fact that this service is on Internet allows to add some news features. A List can be a social List. This means that multiple authors can work on a single List (still have to check this out). And to help here one has the possibility to see authors and what has been edited. There is some moderation and access control. It is also possible to comment on an Item or author.

I miss the import and export possibilities. I would like to exporting as KML and OPML. I am now locked in. The service is still in beta and I did see some minor errors, but overall it works great.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • widget • field • location • tag • mashing • type , listphile
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Google Map ratings

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing • type • review
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Ted Talk on Photosynth

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing
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My Google Map

I have been playing with Google Maps and used it to map the trip we made today. Looks nice. For such a long trip I did not bother to follow the roads exactly.

I like this method for creating maps of trips a lot. Still have to think about the relation with MicroContent.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing
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Yahoo! Pipes

One of the main events last week in the MicroContent world was the introduction by Yahoo! of Yahoo! Pipes. It surely is not a service for the fainthearted, it is really a geek service. But interesting nevertheless. It is bit hard to get to know the service.

Yahoo! Pipes works only with a single MicroContent Type: blog Items. The service allows the to mix and match these MicroContent Item by using the information in the structure of the Items. And this probably can become pretty complex. And the output of the service is always an RSS feed (or the corresponding web-page).

I started with a simple pipe: the aggregation of my three MicroContent feeds. You can find the corresponding RSS-feed here. While creating this piper I found several errors with my existing RSS 2.0 feeds. Th errors have been repaired now, although there remain problems with certain characters. Yahoo! Pipes only uses and republishes the description fields of Items. It turned out that I did not used those in my feed. What I did now was to put the first 200 characters of the content field in the description field. I have no idea what the correct way to go is. It seems that the description field only contains a summary. I also am unclear between the dc:date and pubDate fields, which I used for sorting the feed.

This is really a very simple pipe, it will get more interesting once the results of a yahoo query are used as input for fetching Items. It will be much more dynamic. I like this pipe, which uses the NYTimes as input to search Flickr. Also the pipe that searches for apartments near parks is interesting. These pipes show that Yahoo Pipes is not really limited to the blogs, but can do interesting things with locations, images and classifieds as well. It is just getting the right feeds and making the right queries.

You can browse the most popular pipes yourself if you want to have an impression of what is possible.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing • type • blog
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True Multimedia Documents

[Inspiration Marc Canter]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing
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Widgets predictions

Erick Schonfeld predicts that 2007 will be the year of the widget.

I agree, I will add this to my list of predictions as well. Widgets point to something new, another way to re-use data. The idea of widgets is nothing new. Yahoo had it already many years ago and could be used to create a personal start-page. But that was only limited to widgets and data offered by Yahoo. The new thing is that one can mix data from multiple services. This is not very new either. I had weather and statistics widgets on my homepage many, many years ago.

Many of the ideas in widgets have been around a long time. I find it difficult to grasp what it is now different. One thing that is different is the visibility. It is now much more common (although far from mainstream) than before. There are many more widgets around. I find the most interesting the de-coupling of widget-code and data. Thus one can define a RSS-widget separate from the data. This can be extended to the enclosures in RSS.

Widgets are still a bit gimmicky. When will they be more useful on an enterprise level? For my business site, I only use Google Maps as widgets..

[Inspiration Marc Canter]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • widget • mashing
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