Tag Archives: jeremy-keith

How the people of CERN work »

October 4th, 2012

Jeremy Keith, after visiting CERN in Switzerland:

“According to most established social and economic theory, nothing should ever get done at CERN. It’s a collection of thousands of physics nerds—a mixture of theorists (the ones with blackboards) and experimentalists (the ones with computers). When someone wants to get something done, they present their ideas and ask for help from anyone with specific fields of expertise. Those people, if they like the sound of the idea, say “Okay” and a new collaboration is born.”

I love this way of working. It reminds me a lot of how Valve works and also how this little team is being set up.

Tubes by Andrew Blum »

July 3rd, 2012

Andrew Blum, in Tubes:

“For all the talk of the placelessness of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.”

I must get a copy of this book. I found it via Jeremy Keith’s nice post about visiting the Heart’s Content cable station recently. I love how Jeremy wishes (and actually does) visit some of the places that are vital in the birth of the telegraph and Internet.

Most people in this world couldn’t describe to you the way the Internet works. Some, though, could more than likely describe to you the way a telegraph works. At least as its basic “sending Morse code over a line drawn between two locations” description. When people think of the Internet they do not think of it as a physical network the way they do the telegraph. But they should. You should.

I think it is great to remember where we’ve come from and also that the Internet is still, and will be for some time, a huge series of cables and routers and boxes and boosters and buildings and the list goes on and on. To understand the network is to be a better developer.

Export your Delicious bookmarks using Terminal on Mac OS X

December 21st, 2010

Reading Jeremy Keith’s recap of the fact that Delicious is shutting down being sold off and that he wanted to pull all of his bookmarks off of the service and onto his site reminded me that I wanted to do the same thing.

His example shows an easy way to grab all of your Delicious bookmarks off of the service. Only, if you are a Terminal newb you may not have any idea what just happened after you run his suggested command.

So, my suggestion is to run the following command. First, open Terminal by opening the ~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app or simply type Terminal into Spotlight and hit Enter. Then, run this command.

curl https://username:password@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all -o "delicious.xml"

That -o flag, or option, tells curl that you’d like to save the file. The filename that you’d like to use is in the quotes. Now, you’ll have a single XML file saved in your Home directory called delicious.xml with all of your Delicious Bookmarks.

What you do with that is up to you. Just about any text editor will allow you to read the .xml file.

Oh, and like Mr. Keith I’ll be posting all of my links back onto Delicious as well. I just have to write a quick plugin for WordPress. I’m sure I’ll find time for that sometime in 2011. I’ve never thought of doing that (no idea why) but I am going to start. I don’t know what the future holds for Delicious but either way it is fun and easy to “dual post” the links.

Regarding blog comments, again

March 13th, 2009

I’m behind in my reading and even further behind in my writing. Which is why I’m just now finally writing about something I’ve wanted to since earlier this week even though the original post was written in late February. Ugh.

Alex Payne, one of the many talented people behind Twitter, recently wrote on his blog his thoughts on blog comments. In a nut, Alex felt that by leaving comments off he’s elevating the level of conversation. That, if he had comments turned on, there would be less than desirable comments written on his blog. That, by turning comments off, it forces people to reply to his blog posts from their own blog. Since people don’t want to write stupid things on their own blog the level of conversation would automatically be risen. Smart.

Alex isn’t the first person to share this sentiment. I’ve written about blog comments in 2004, again in 2007, and have thought about it many times since I began blogging around the turn of the century. In 2004 I was commenting on the indirect benefits for turning off comments. The main benefit I highlighted was that by not allowing comments, you’d be forcing people to link to your site from theirs, creating more link backs to your site, increasing your blog’s audience, and improving your site’s Pagerank on search engines. All very good things for any writer. I suppose those benefits really just improve Alex’s reason. Improving the conversation while at the same time doing well for yourself.

In 2007 I was, in an ironic sort of way, responding to Jeremy Keith’s thoughts on leaving blog comments off. He said that he didn’t like having them on because of they were “examples of antisocial networking”. He made examples of YouTube and Digg being saturated with worthless comments. I’ve recently reread my post and I think I worded my response quite well, so if you’re interested, give it a read.

I think my thoughts hold up, two years later, that Digg and YouTube are, well, Digg and YouTube. Digg, generally speaking, is meant to act as a human filter for the world’s news. The comments on a Digg are, for the most part, about whether or not that particular news item, link, photo, video, or whatever should be worthy of being on Digg at all. Digg has gotten so much better than it was when it first reached critical mass. YouTube, however, still has a lot of maturing to do. The community is so vast that as you browse around the site you will see that thoughtful videos usually are rewarded with thoughtful responses while not-so-thoughtful videos are not. The nature of the beast I suppose.

There are edge cases, of course. Where you have a thoughtful video that gets the attention of the trolls. Where dumb people with nothing to do flock to a particular video and, for no other reason than their own personal entertainment, tee off in the comments in a tirade of incredibly distasteful, worthless, and (even I’ll admit) humorous commentary.

I suppose my main reason for agreeing to disagree with Jeremy was because, well, my site isn’t that popular. This isn’t Digg. This isn’t YouTube. I don’t have the problem of having millions of troll-like morons looking for an excuse to yell things like “first” or, well, any other worthless response (let alone the off-color ones). If I did I’d probably deal with that in my own way. This is, afterall, my house. I very much doubt I’d ever turn comments off entirely. One of my core beliefs, which I mentioned in my 2007 note, was that I thought of blog posts as the beginning of or the response to conversations. I still feel that way. I wouldn’t write anything on my blog, ever, if I didn’t in some way want someone to think about what I’m writing about and, if they chose to, respond to it. That is why I write.

Daring Fireball, one of my favorite Weblogs of all time, which made my Best of 2008 list, and is run by my friend John Gruber, also leaves comments off. John, who recently linked to Alex Payne’s thoughts, has covered this topic a few times. Based on what he’s written publicly about this topic I can safely say that he is in agreement with both Alex and Jeremy. And he has reason to. Jeremy’s main point about how there are too many worthless comments out there has a lot to do with scale. Daring Fireball has enough scale, though no where near the scale of Digg or YouTube, to create those types of moderation problems for John. You see, John curates Daring Fireball like a rooftop garden in a busy city. He cares for it. Every pixel. He cares for it as though it has very limited space. He uses that space efficiently. It is like he needs to get the greatest quality vegetables possible from the absolutely least amount of area. Besides John’s writing it is probably the biggest factor in the success of Daring Fireball. With as much traffic as he gets (which is about 1.2M hits per month according to his Sponsorship page) he would probably run into the problem of trolls. When John goes off on jackasses (which are some of my favorite posts, by the way) I’m pretty sure other jackasses would chime in.  With regards to Alex’s main point, about the fact that Alex really enjoys well thought-out discussions rather than terse commentary, John also tends to link to many people that mention his site in thoughtful posts. John enjoys good writing as much as anyone. In other words, I can see why blogs like Daring Fireball leave comments off.

TechCrunch, one of the most popular blogs right now, has comments on. It has some troll activity. It has some comments that, in my opinion, aren’t worth all that much. But, some people have used the comment area on TechCrunch to do a great job of responding to not only TechCrunch’s commentary but also to the TechCrunch audience. Gary Vaynerchuk, someone I consider a dear friend, runs a Web site called Cork’d. (You can read my interview with Gary about Cork’d, if you’d like). When Cork’d got hacked, and TechCrunch promptly reported on it, Gary took the opportunity to directly communicate what was going on through his own blog and through TechCrunch’s comments. I’d love to hear Michael Arrington’s thoughts on comments on TechCrunch and why they’ve chosen to leave them on for the majority of their posts. I’m positive he has an opinion on this matter.

Again, I’ve been blogging for 10 years. Longer than it has been called blogging. Longer than there has been any form of personal content management systems. This topic of comments, and whether or not to have them on my site, has been debated in many conversations with other bloggers at blogging meetups and conferences, with myself in the shower, with the road while I’m driving, in my own brain, and many other places over those years. I struggle with it. All. The. Time.  My strategy, as of today, is that if it even became a problem where I began to regret having comments on – where the comments I get on my site do not have a value to quantity ratio that I’m happy with – or when my goal is for people to link to my site from their own sites for the sake of getting linkbacks – then maybe I’ll turn them off. But not until then. And neither of those situations have happened in all of these years and I doubt they will any time soon.

I’m just happy to know that other people think about these sorts of things still too. That, even after 10 years of publishing on the Web, we’re all still struggling together with the same fundamental issues that the Web, in all of its social greatness, has imposed on our efforts of sharing ideas. No matter how good the tools get, no matter how many people jump online worldwide and join the conversation, we will always have the decision to make of how we’d like interact. What we’re comfortable with for us, for our companies, and for our Web sites. The learning curve is, as far as I see it, infinite. And I’m okay with that.

Jeffrey Zeldman: The vanishing personal site

April 30th, 2008

Jeffery Zeldman on the trend of personal sites, or the one-stop URL for each person’s published goods online, going the way of the dinosaur and how more and more people are publishing their goods on many different services.

I’d be remiss not to mention my goal of Bringing it all together and how I’m getting pretty close to my personal online publishing Utopia.

Jeremy Keith wrote about his personal efforts, and the efforts of a few others, and how the strategies all differ. It seems that there are few different ways to go about “bringing it all together”, you just have to choose which one you like the best.  Here is a short list:

  • Publish only on your own site.
  • Publish everywhere but aggregate back to your site.
  • Publish everywhere but link from your site.
There might be a few strategies I am missing, but these seem to be the most common I’ve seen lately.  I am attempting to live by the first strategy on the list, though things like Twitter I tend to keep on Twitter.
What strategy will you choose?

Source: Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site

One possible benefit from disabling comments

August 20th, 2007

There has been an ongoing discussion as to whether or not blogs should always have comments enabled to allow its readers to be part of the conversation. I myself firmly believe that each blog post should be thought of as a starting point of, or a response to, a conversation.

Some deal with this issue from an ideological perspective in that they disable comments because they feel that people will behave differently when commenting than they would if they wrote from their own Web sites. Jeremy Keith recently said:

“Choose a random video on YouTube or a random story on Digg, read each and every comment and then tell me that the comments contribute to any kind of community discussion. They are shining examples of antisocial networking.” — Reflection

I feel this is a blanket statement, which has some validity, but I do not believe that YouTube or Digg comments are completely “examples of antisocial networking”.

Sure. Many comments found on Digg threads are a bunch of teenaged boys (the proof is in the statistics) yelling back and forth about whether or not that specific article is digg worthy – but I believe those threads are there exactly for that reason. Should the commentary on Digg be about the article itself? Or should that conversation be reserved for the article’s origin? I believe it is up to the community to decide and it seems like they have.

Not that Jeremy’s point isn’t a valid one. Someone leaving a comment on my blog may indeed be a little looser with their speech than they would if they were responding, like I am right now, from their own Web sites. And if the author of the site is not willing to weed through the comments – then perhaps it is best to disable the comments for that very reason.

But I believe there is a completely different angle to consider.

One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site. It is always nice when someone writes a blog post in response to something you said or wrote and have them link to your site or post as a way to direct people to the rest of the conversation. I’ve been fortunate to have a fair amount of people doing that very thing with some of my posts here on my personal site – and everytime I enjoy it when they do. I wonder, if I disabled comments, would the number of “linkbacks” increase because I was no longer providing a way for the conversation to continue on this site?

In the spring of 2004 I published a poorly written post entitled: “Disabling Comments, The Pros” wherein I spoke about a few sites that were good examples of this “theory” at work. Some of the most popular personal weblogs to date have been those who rarely, if at all, enable comments on their posts. I don’t believe this to be “the formula for creating a popular personal blog” but I believe it may help in some cases.

I leave comments enabled because I suppose I’m not as strict as Jeremy. I don’t care if my readers (all 11 of you) comment in a little different form than they would if they had written an entire response on their sites. So I guess I’m willing to moderate, though I very rarely do, in order to keep the conversation somewhat centralized.

What do you think? Have you ever considered turning off comments? Why? You may answer in the comment form below. ;)

Live from SXSW in Austin, TX

March 8th, 2007

Below, in order, are my notes, thoughts, and random pieces of media that I’m collecting at this year’s SXSW. You can subscribe to my blog with this feed, and keep up to date. Each time I update this page, I will mark the date, time, and location that I am updating. Each date and time is hyperlinkable (not a real word).

Thursday, March 8th

12:33pm – In preparation of the trip from the northeast, to south by southwest (fittingly) – I picked up some shorts and got my hair did (photo). I managed to get these two tasks done fairly quickly and get back to my office for a few “last minute” things that I need to get done before we set sail.

Right now I’m waiting on the WineLibrary TV crew to get their latest episode completed. I’m helping them integrate their show with Viddler‘s system so that they get the most benefit out of it. Yesterday’s show was a huge success and today we’re hoping to add even a little more value for the Vayniacs.

People are really coming around with how Viddler works in situations like this. I think WineLibrary TV’s episodes are the perfect candidate for Viddler’s technology. Check out this comment.

“Man, after being a naysayer yesterday, I have to say that these new tags are awesome, and I’m now a total convert!” — Kent I

As this service matures, I think many people will start to enjoy interacting with their video in this manner. Stay tuned – because today’s episode should have a few new features that I think their audience is going to love.

2:35pm – I think it is amazing how many people are going to this thing. I’ve gotten more instant messages and emails today than I have in a very long time, and most of it is about trying to get together in Austin. In one hand; exciting. In the other; overwhelming.

I’m still going over our itinerary with a fine toothed comb. I have a lot of friends that are speaking on panels, and it’d be really nice to see all of them on stage, but I doubt I’ll get to see anyone since they are mostly there for “Web dev stuff” and my primary focus will be on Internet video while I am there. Well, back to the calendar.

4:20pm – I had the privilege of helping to prepare WineLibrary TV Episode #196 using some new Viddler features. Things went really smoothly and so far it seems that their audience really enjoys it.

Now I’m packing my suitcase, going to see if I can get a small nap in this afternoon before I pack up all of my “technology stuff”. I have to leave at 4:00am..

10:51pm – Just packing up my “tech stuff”. Heading to New Jersey in 5 hours or so to catch a jet plane to Austin, TX. My next update will probably be from an airport or something.

Friday, March 9th

11:02am – On Continental Airlines Flight 350 at 34,000 feet: Our ride this morning was, well, interesting. I was supposed to be the navigator for Mike and I to get to Viddler HQ, pick up Rob, and head to Newark, NJ to catch our flight.

Mike and I got to talking and I managed to allow us to pass a few exits, a few times, so we did a lot of U-turning. Then, after we finally met up with Rob – we were on our way to Newark International Airport and Rob forgot his wallet. Another U-turn.

Morgan Spurlock and I

Morgan Spurlock and I
Newark, New Jersey

We finally made it to the airport, all of us having to pee like crazy, and managed to get on Mike’s flight (we were on standby for this flight). Mike is about five rows behind me right now, looking at some girl in a rather inappropriate way probably, and Rob is next to me (photo). Next to Rob is a nice guy named Jeremy who is also heading to South by Southwest with Morgan Spurlock (of SuperSize Me fame), who I had a chance to meet and have a short chat with. (I will upload a photo once I dump my cameras contents).

James Bond: Casino Royale is currently playing on the screen as I am listening to Dan Benjamin interview Cindy Li on the latest Hivelogic Radio. I’m going to finish listening to Hivelogic Radio before I move onto watching the latest episode of Heroes that I downloaded before I left.

4:38pm – @ SXSW – 2nd floor: – Just got registered. Going to see if we can fit in a panel here at the convention center. The first panel we wanted to see is at a different place. :(

6:14pm – From the back of Austin Cab 451: – Rob and I are in Best Buy parking lot, in the back of a cab. We just bought some things we needed for the HD camera (since we now have a press pass), and we want to be able to tape some of the panels we’re attending.

I was twittering with Chris Messina and I saw him and Tara sitting at a table. If it wasn’t for them I would have never figured out that there was “big bags” to get full of cool trinkets. Most of them are purely marketing material, but that’s cool. There was piles of papers that people threw out of the bags onto the tables.

I just met up with David Seah just before leaving the convention center. I did an interview with him while he was trying to put together some legos. Video coming soon.

9:21pm – At the Double Tree Room 609: – Just got back to the hotel after eating at The Boiling Pot on 6th. Very cool place, nice and spicey. Alex, Rob, and I ate crawfish, potatoes, corn, and other stuff that was spilled out all over the table. Sound familiar Eliza?

Now we’re trying to get our Internet connections working. Here are some photos that I took today.

In the taxi

Rob and I in Taxi

In the line

Rob and I in Line

Interviewed David

David Seah

The Capital Building

The Capital Building

The Capital Building

Wanna ride?

Pile of food

Our food

Crawfish

Poor guy

Friday, March 9th Gallery

I have some more photos, but I’m only going to do a few a day until I can get home and have the time to go through them all.

Saturday, March 10th

8:43am – At the Double Tree Room 609: – Woke up fairly refreshed this morning. Definitely need some breakfast and a coffee before heading to SXSW. Anyone having breakfast anywhere?

10:15am – @ SXSW 2nd floor – Room 12AB: – In the Video is worth more than 1,000 words panel. Going over some of the trends, some of the history, and some of the future of social video.

11:13am – @ SXSW 2nd floor – on the floor: – Panel is over. Met Chris from Adobe. Still can just barely get the internet. Port 80 sucks.

11:56am – @ SXSW 2nd floor – Room 19AB with Jeremy Keith and Andy Budd: – Just published my interview with David Seah on the Viddler blog.

7:10pm – @ Logan’s on the Sixth: – Ate some dinner, talked to my brother-in-law on video chat for the first time. Having a Logan’s Lemonade, very good. More video on Viddler coming soon! Stayed tuned.

8:05pm – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609: – Dumping photos, video to our hard drives. Checking a few things, getting a shower, short nap – then off to see the Ze Frank + BuzzFeed party, then to the Virb party till 4am supposedly? Should be fun, we’ll shoot video.

9:15pm – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609: – Just posted our Saturday lunch update, and our Saturday night update to our Viddler blog. Here are some photos from today.

Alex

Chris and Rob

Shawn Grimes

Jonathan Snook

Matt Mullenweg

Greg Storey, Paul Nixon

Anton Peck

Lunch update

Nathan Smith

Erik Sagen

Tag, You’re It

Overlooking Austin

Mike Stickel

“Niero” Gonzalez

Free beer w/ Zach

MeToday

Saturday, March 10th, Gallery

4:14am – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609, after the Ze Frank party: – Ze Frank, BuzzFeed and another company threw a party at the Molotov Lounge. It was pretty good, Ze did a funny bit on airplane safety (which will be on Viddler later). Then there was free drinks for a few hours. Thanks to all the sponsors, it was a cool place to hang for a bit.

Here are some photos of the people I met at Ze’s little bash.

Bill Streeter

John Gruber

Irina Slutsky

Ze Frank

Jeremy Keith

Mike Stickel

Shaun Inman

Adam Michela

Peter Flaschner

Garret Murray

Ze’s Party Gallery

It was really great to finally meet everyone. It kinda makes me wish we all could do this every month if for no other reason than to bounce ideas off one another and chat about the stuff we love. The world is such a small place, thanks to the Internet, yet it remains so large that I feel as if I am going to lose “contact” with everyone the moment I leave South by Southwest. We’ll see…. I guess I can still Twitter spam for Adam.

Sunday, March 11th

10:58am – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609: – Stayed up until 7am playing around with something “special”. Alex and I will put some polish on it today/tonight and release it. It is the culmination of the brain power of myself, Rob Sandie, Adam Michela, Peter Flaschner, and several other contributors. Should be fun.

Now I have to get over to the conference center so that I can show up fashionably late to the second panel of the day after finding some coffee and a muffin or something.

1:14pm – @ PF Chang’s for lunch: – Spent most of the morning getting things prepared for the rest of the day. Had a great discussion with Molly about some of the stuff she’s able to accomplish with Microsoft, I definitely wish her all the best with everything professional and otherwise.

Now we’re eating and planning the rest of our day.

4:50pm – @ SXSW Ballroom F: – Waiting for the next panel to start, so I might as well fill you in. (I won’t have time for many links or photos so I will update this from the hotel later). I finally was able to meet up with Irina Slutsky to do The Vloggies Show (which is a new show she is doing so be sure to stay tuned as it will air this week). Spoke to a guy from Microsoft about Expression Web… he said there was a lot of things going on in the pipe and that the initial release is only the beginning. Being an ex-Frontpage 98 user, I hope they are able to build something that is relatively solid for their audience.

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks.com asked what the little black guy was in the big bag you get here at South by Southwest. I figured it out. If you go to the exhibit hall, find Vital Stream’s booth, you can throw it at a dart-like board and win a shirt. I got a bulls-eye on the first try and won a shirt.

We only were able to attend one or two panels so far today, and hopefully tonight we’ll be able to see Morgan Spurlocks doc “What would Jesus Buy”.

11:28pm – @ Hilton Lobby: – Just had a nice conversation with Irina and two guys that did not give me their cards because they had run out of them (if you are reading this, email me your contact information). Talking about ad networks and how to display ads based on content within a video on Viddler rather than just the content on the page. Pretty cool stuff.

We’re sending all of our HD video that we’ve captured to a professional video editor, so I am excited to get all of that back and have it up on the Viddler blog soon enough. If anyone would like to do an interview, or has not signed my shirt, please grab me. I’m hoping to have content being published regularly over the next few weeks.

Monday, March 12th

3:00am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – After hanging in the Hilton’s lobby for a few hours I heard through Twitter that the 9rules crew was hanging out in the bar. I ran over, had a drink with Molly (thanks for the shot Molly), Paul Scrivens, Mike Rundle, and Mike’s fiancé Eleni.

Back to work though as we headed for our hotel and I featured a video that was taken during one of the panels here. Rob and I managed to record many of the panels we went to, and we’re hoping to get that video up slowly over the next few days. We have someone helping us with that too, which is great – because Rob and I are stretched pretty thin.

Even though I am starving, I am going to head to bed and see if I can’t get up on time tomorrow.

10:22am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – Awake. Slept in a little, somehow our wake-up call never happened. Today will be another busy day. I didn’t have the chance, nor the energy, to go through all of my photos from yesterday and get them posted, but I will try to do that if there is any downtime during the day.

Remember, if I “know” you, but I have not met you yet, please make it a point to run over to me. I’d like to meet everyone at this opportunity. I’ll be the blonde guy in the Viddler tshirt.

2:46pm – @ SXSW Room 12AB: – Just ate lunch at the Spaghetti Warehouse for a discussion about OpenID. Very interesting stuff and I am definitely going to recommend that Viddler make it part of their development roadmap. For anyone that has not looked into OpenID be sure to do so, especially if you’d like to be prepared for the future of online, cross service, authentication.

On my way back from the lunch, I saw Paul Nixon running and we both said I should have been running with him. Damn him and his Nike+ package and the motivation to run while in the Texas heat.

Right now I’m in an interesting panel about whether or not User Generated video is considered film or not. Sounds really niche, and it definitely is, but it is also incredibly interesting as a discussion topic – and I never ever thought it would be.

Tuesday, March 13th

Photo description

Robert Scoble

10:33am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – Good morning! Sorry that I haven’t updated since early afternoon yesterday but things went a little hectic there. After watching Luke W‘s panel on the various interface libraries (which was absolutely packed and should have been much longer), I needed to be outside in front of the convention center to go to The Salt Lick, which is a BBQ pit about 45 minutes outside of Austin, with Robert Scoble, Chris Aarons, Sarah Beck, and Patrick Nichols of AMD, an extremely nice gentlemen from AT&T’s Web department, and Jim Posner from IBM who was in Apocolpse Now (more on all of this later).

After that I headed to the Great British Booze up, which was just about ending at the time. I hooked up with the entire Forty Media crew (there is a lot of them), and went to the next party where I ended up spending most of my time talking to Larry Halff about all things Ma.gnolia and Ruby on Rails. It was a great discussion and having never used Ma.gnolia – I can say that it seems like a service I should have been using for years. I’m going to give it a try the moment I can find some free time with wifi (aka: when I get home).

So now I gotta hop in the shower because Rob and I are going to do a Lunch Meet.

2:03pm – @ In the Hilton Ballroom, 6th Floor, for Will Wright’s keynote: – Our lunch meet got postponed by a few hours. Hard to get everyone in one place at the same time. So Rob and I are recording the Will Wright keynote. I am definitely looking forward to seeing a demo of Spore.

Tuesday, March 14th

10:44am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – The demo of SPORE was really awesome. Will Wright’s keynote alone was very good, but the demo just tops it off that Will actually does what he feels.

I have a ton to more write about. I’ve kept this “live blog” as up-to-date as I could considering the circumstances with time, internet connectivity, etc. So instead of writing a huge wrap up to what is already one of my longest posts ever, I will be writing single entries that highlight very specific panels, discussions, lunches, and parties after I get back home to Pennsylvania.

As a short overview of what happened since yesterday’s keynote – We recorded one or two more panels, went to Logan’s again for dinner, then hit up the VIP at the Media Temple party.

After that it was a bunch of sad goodbyes, as most of us know that we’ll only be in contact virtually for awhile… but overall the experience was good.

Thanks to all that kept up with me over the conference. Those that came over to say hi, those that signed my shirt, those whom I met for the very first time, and those that I will be friends with for a long time to come.

Sorry to any of you that were looking for me, or didn’t have a chance to talk to me for whatever reason… send me an email and maybe we’ll get together sometime.

Stay subscribed, a ton of stuff to come.

[tags]sxsw, austin, texas, pennsylvania, new jersey, travel, conference, festival, live, winelibrary tv, viddler, photos, video, robert sandie, alex hillman, rob sandie, john gruber, shaun inman, ze frank, adam michela, mike stickel, ma.gnolia, larry halff, openid, the salt lick, bbq, robert scoble, amd, chris aarons, Bill Steeter, Irina Slutsky, Jeremy Keith, Peter Flaschner, Garrett Murray[/tags]
[slug]live-sxsw07[/slug]

Re: The usefulness of Microformats

December 4th, 2006

Kyle Kneath recently wrote I just don’t get this whole Microformats thing and I wanted to take a minute to respond to him.

Kyle is doubting the usefulness of Microformats, and is also saying that he thinks the learning curve is too hard because of the documentation making things “too hard”. First I’ll address his comments on the documentation being much too difficult to follow:

“Maybe it’s just me — but I feel like the microformats crew are actively trying to make this an elitest club. I’m not very stupid (I don’t think) but when I first started researching microformats it took me ages to really understand it. It turned out to be dead simple.

You can see the documentation (featured to the right) is quite brief for simple formats like hCard. Wait a second… are you serious? This page is reeee-diculously (and needlessly) long and really needs to be cleaned up. It’s like a giant newbie-scaring-machine. hCard is dead simple to implement; a couple of paragraphs should suffice with two or three examples.”

I could not agree more with Kyle on this. The documentation for Microformats, in reality, is all spec information. There is a definitive need for someone with any type of documentation experience to get on the Microformats Wiki and really make some “Microformats for Dummies” type of documentation.

Someone on Kyle’s comments suggested just getting Jeremy Keith to spear-head the effort. Well, Jeremy is already a microformats “evangelist”, but I can see their point. He has the ability to make things that seem difficult, dead simple. Perhaps he could take some time to edit the heck out of the wiki and/or just add a series of pages explaining each Microformat in human language.

Onto Kyle’s other gripe; the usefulness of Microformats. I disagree with Kyle on this point. Microformats can be, will be, and already are extremely useful. I feel a little weird saying this since I have yet to really take full advantage of Microformats on my site here – but it is definitely in my plans. Kyle didn’t really expound on his reasons why he thinks Microformats are not useful until one of the very last comments that he wrote (he doesn’t have permalinks on his comments so I will copy it here):

“But… again, you seem to have proved my own point with “We haven’t figure out how exactly that will help us” — that’s my entire point. I’ve been following microformats since Tantek was talking about them years ago. An yeah, Tantek is a cool dude… but is it enough of a reason to use them?

I honestly haven’t found it.

I use web standards because it helps me work faster produce more maintainable code and standardize my practices. I can’t say the same for microformats. The best I could say is: “I use microformats so that the extreme minority of my browsers, who have an extension installed, who are looking for specific metadata, who have scripts installed to interact with their other data management applications can more easily add me to their address book.”

Oh, and for those pushing hAtom… the last thing we need in this world is more syndication formats :) ”

His argument here is really way off. When he says “we haven’t found ways” he really means himself. I think if you ask the folks at Technorati, and the people that have invested millions of dollars into them, they’d disagree with Kyle too. Microformats is just really starting to take off (if people do not use them, they are indeed useless but as more people use them, companies like Technorati can really build useful tools). There is no one definite useage for each Microformat, however each have their own implementation. The biggest advantage I see? One content delivery system for almost any type of data. I don’t need to create a vCard for my about page, I just need to add a few classes to the information that is already there. This brings me to his second point that falls short.

His argument that “…and for those pushing hAtom… the last thing we need in this world is more syndication formats”. Perhaps he hasn’t delved into hAtom much, but it isn’t another syndication format, it literally takes the place of Atom (which is becoming increasingly popular and is starting to become the syndication format of choice of some of the larger companies that have tons of data to syndicate [ see Nail Kennedy's article about feed syndication formats and their usage]). Also something to remember is the hAtom is currently in draft format, but imagine if if you had a blog and you didn’t need to serve an HTML version, RSS 0.92, RSS 2, and Atom version of your site. You could just serve the HTML version and all of the data you wish to syndicate – to different applications and services, could be parsed from that single delivery system. This is the biggest advantage of Microformats in my opinion.

The documentation does need a serious look, and update, to make it a much less steep learning curve. Broader usage will come of that, and in turn more uses will reveal themselves from a growing user base. I suppose Kyle’s post really cuts right down to the root of the Microformats problem – explain them better, and they’ll be used.

[tags]microformats, kyle neath, tantek Çelik, jeremy keith, hcard, hatom, rss, atom, feeds, syndication, technorati, html[/tags]
[slug]re-microformats-useful[/slug]