Day: June 30, 2008

Today, I discovered Blog Networks after reading Sarah Parez’s posting “Blog Networks like MyBlogLog for Facebook” on ReadWriteWeb. Blog Networks is a new Facebook application that allows you to embed your favourite blogs (including your own) into your Facebook profile so that your friends can read and rate your thoughts and the thoughts of others that you value. An interesting feature is that the easiest way to claim ownership of your own blog is to get your friends to verify that you own it which is both a social and viral way of getting the word out.

The picture illustrates my set up with ReadWriteWeb, O’Reilly Radar, Technology in Teaching, Lifehacker and of course Fresh and Crispy. Blog Feeds comes with a set of popular widely read blogs to choose from and you can easily add your own or other people’s. Presumably, friends see and can comment on the latest articles in your minifeed. If nothing else, it’s be a useful way to share RSS feeds without mentioning RSS!

Last month Google hosted the first of its Google I/O conferences in San Francisco. I’d like to report that I was there, but I wasn’t (although I did watch the keynote the day after it was given). The video recordings of the speakers (hosted on YouTube) and their slides (mostly shared on Google Docs) that have been on-line for a few weeks now. With term finally over, I can become a virtual conference delegate and today was my first chance to catch up with some of the more interesting talks. If you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ll note that I watched/will be watching:

• Steve Yegge’s presentation on Server-Side Scripting with Rhino [more philosophy than technology]
• Guido van Rossum’s demonstration of the Google App Engine
• Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman (Google) telling the world about Google’s open source project hosting platform
• Aaron Boodman’s and Chris Prince’s talks about [Google] Gears and its potential for implementing parts of HTML 5 and extending the web browser
• John Skidgel and Lindsey Simon on engaging web app users [with Google App Engine, but I’m sure that the lessons are universal] and
• Josh Bloch on the new Effective Java book.

There are lots more talks to view and lessons to be learnt, and it’d be great if more big companies and conference organizers did this sort of thing.