Posts from 2010

A couple of TED 2010 highlights that I stumbled on today. First Tim Berners-Lee reports on year one of his “More Data Now” campaign. Next I finally got around to watching Gary Flake on the data visualization features of Microsoft Livelabs Pivot (which I first saw reported on Swansea Yammer network a few weeks ago).

Try to find 30 minutes to watch all three videos then reflect like I did on what might be possible when Pivot and linked data colide!

It could be revolutionary – both for the citizen and for education!

Links:

- Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web (TED2009) - Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide (TED2010) - Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration? (TED2010) - Making Data Public (Video), Time Berners-Lee and Prof. Nigel Shadbolt at the launch of data.gov.uk. (The Guardian) - data.gov.uk – UK government data online - Linked Data – linkeddata.org

This last week or so I’ve been watching a lot of Yahoo! YUI Theatre videos on JavaScript, starting with Douglas Crockford’s excellent five-part series Crockford on JavaScript and ending yesterday with Christian Heillman’s inspiring talk on YQL and YUI. This has inspired me to explore how I can use YUI (a JavaScript library) in the next version of my Proman dissertation project management application which will be needed for 2010-2011 allocation round in May. If it works out, there’ll also be some new teaching material for next year’s Web Applications module (EG-259).

I’ll post more in the under the tag YUI on the Proman, Man blog as I get to grips with this stuff.

Just a quick post to tell you about a new (to me) social network notification service called ping.fm. Just by connecting to your favourite services you can update them all from a single web site. I’m using it in the HEFCW Peer Support project to post messages to Ning, Facebook and Twitter. Many other services are available including LinkedIn, Yammer, Flickr, Posterous, Blogger, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. Other features:

- You can also distinguish between micro-blogging, status updates and blogging, - ping.fm automatically shortens URLs, but at the moment it doesn’t seem to shorten tweets and link to the full text. - You can post to all your social networks, select particular networks or create groups of networks that you want to update together.

There’s also a mobile version at m.ping.fm and an iPhone version at i.ping.fm.

Finally, It’s interesting to note that ping.fm is a service brought to you from the people that brought you pbWiki.

Today I got a reminder from Google that the annual domain registration for my semi-defunct Google Apps account was due. Having also seen a service email from Blogger.com telling me that FTP support was being withdrawn and suggesting that I consider using a custom domain, I thought I’d take the opportunity to renew my domain and use it to host this blog. Sort of like a vanity plate for the Internet age! So from now on you can access my words of wisdom at blog.cpjobling.org. Please update your links: you can still reach me via crispyj2.blogspot.com which will redirect you.

Sometimes you stumble upon things on the web that are quite breathtaking in their simple cleverness and sheer elegance. I discovered one such resource today while reading the current draft of what may well become a seminal text on the emerging HTML5 standard. Chapter 2 of Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into HTML5 is all about supporting the transition as browsers start to support the new HTML5 elements canvas, video, local storage, web workers, offline web pages, geolocation, input types, placeholder text, form auto focus and microdata. This can be done by using JavaScript to interrogate new properties and functions that these new features will add to the DOM if they are supported by the browser, and this is the subject of this chapter. The beauty of it though is that, because this is a web page, written in HTML5, these very same tests can be and are be performed on any user’s browser that visits this page as shown in the illustration.

I spotted this feature while browsing the site with my iPhone, and then I thought I’d check it out with my other browsers. It works, and it is so elegant! I’ve summarized my findings in a table here, and the real beauty of this is that as each new generation of browser is released, I can simply go back to Chapter 2 and see at a glance what’s changed!

This and other HTML5 goodness recently discovered on the web can be found in my delicious bookmarks collection.

A new BBC/Open University documentary series on the World Wide Web started last Friday on BBC 2. It is called “The Virtual Revolution” and is hosted by Guardian Technology journalist Dr Aleks Krotoski.

It is interesting not so much for its technical depth (which quite frankly is quite shallow) but for its introduction to the social/political/commercial issues surrounding the Internet and the World Wide Web. Plus it has interviews with many of the pioneers and entrepreneurs who were involved in its development.

The series is available to watch again on the BBC iPlayer and there is a supporting web site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/) that has lots of further information.

I am urging all my ICCT students to watch it!

Welcome to the blogging exercise ICCT class of 2010. Please leave the link to your new blog in the comments.