Blogging Roller

Another batch of social software related links today, but today it's all about Google's new OpenSocial APIs (link to go live tomorrow). I waded through 20 or so posts today and the links below are my favorites. Gotta say, I'm really looking forward to getting the details tomorrow, understanding how Roller can play and seeing how AtomPub fits into the picture -- and I'm assuming it does since GData has been mentioned (see the Brady Forrest link below). After reading Marc Andreessen's post, which is the first link below, I think it's possible that Roller could act as both a Container and as a provider of Apps for other Containers. I wonder, could OpenSocial provide the UI widget API that Roller needs? And, will Roller's rather limited user profile data be enough to allow Roller to act as a Container? If so, I might be doing some late night hacking this weekend.

• Marc Andreessen: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web
  "An open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers: Containers -- social networking systems and... Apps -- applications that want to be embedded within containers"
• Brady Forrest: Google Announces the OpenSocial API
  "The open API will have three parts People, Storage [and] Activity stream. All of these calls will have a GData counterparts"
• Fred Stutzman: On OpenSocial
  "It's unfortunate that Google, rather than a standards body, is at the center, but perhaps this will outline a standard way forward"
• Danny Ayers: Google's OpenSocial coming tomorrow
  "Will this stuff be truly open, usable as linked data (with appropriate authentication) or will it still be hogtied within those partners' environments?"
• Valley Wag: What OpenSocial will look like on LinkedIn
  "Here are screen shots detailing how one such partner, LinkedIn, plans to incorporate apps"

Some reading on Facebook and enterprise social software from my del.icio.us bookmarks collection:

• Tim Bray: The Intimate Internet
  Bray on Facebook: "Twitter hits that 80/20 point, bringing me that news without all the Facebook bullshit and lame groups and dorky apps and stupid ads and data lock-in. "
  
• Fred Stutzman: The Directionality of Social Network Platforms
  Stutzman on Facebook: "the ecosystem needs more than fluff, especially if we're going to start talking about the "social operating system."
• Phil Windley: What's wrong with Facebook
  Windley on Facebook: "social Webs will require similar attention to the structure that emerges from social activity, not nagging people about it";
• Doc Searls: Too much face(book) time
  Searls on Facebook: "If you're waiting for me to respond to a poke or an invitation, or a burp or any of that other stuff, don't hold your breath."
• Read/Write Web: Big Vendors Scrap for Enterprise 2.0 Supremacy
  "The [products] remain complex and broad in scope - which in many respects goes against the grain of simple and easy-to-use web 2.0 products."
• Personal InfoCloud: The State of Enterprise Social Software
  "Nearly all of the enterprise software product companies are claiming understanding of Web 2.0, but none execute well on it"

It's been over a month since the last Roller Strong, so now I'm really glad I didn't call this thing Roller Week. Anyhow, in this installment I've got news about including new releases, a big new Roller customer and upcoming Roller-related events. I'll start with the release news. [Read More]

That was the only complaint the kids had about the They Might Be Giants show last night, their first "real rock concert" as they called it. Otherwise they loved it. My brother and I took Alex (10) and Linus (9) to the show at the Carolina Theater in Durham. They had a great time, pogoed around like the rest of the crowd and didn't get to bed until after 1AM.

I loved the show too. The last time I saw TMBG was probably before you were born; just the two Johns with a guitar, accordion, saxophone and a jam-box playing a drum tape. This time they had a full rock band with an amazing guitar player but unfortunately, no horns. They put on a solid show, played a wide variety of songs not weighted too heavily to their latest release, The Else, which was good and bad. Good because they've got a giant back catalog of kick ass jams. Bad because we've been listening to The Else and the boys really dig Bee of the Bird of the Moth -- guess they needed the horns for that one.

Here are some related links: There are still about 20 shows left in the TMBG tour. David Menconi of the Raleigh N&O blogged about TBMG and scored an interview. And Pat Mueller remarks on the nerd-fest that is the TMBG audience.

Matt Raible gave a talk today at the Colorado Software Summit on integrating Roller with LDAP and CAS. He also has provided some nice notes on that and running Roller on Geronimo:

• Roller 4.0 with LDAP and CAS
• Roller 4.0 on Geronimo

Matt had to make a couple of tweaks to get thing going with Roller 4.0 RC8 and a couple other problems have been found, so you can expect RC9 shortly.

<img align="left" hspace="10px" src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/acus2007_125x125.png">

ApacheCon US 2007 is only about 20 days away. I'm getting psyched up to do my Roller and blogs as a web development platform talk again (and thinking about topics for ApacheCon EU 2008). There's still plenty of time for you to register and attend. And Apache fans, please grab a banner and help promote ApacheCon on your project site and blogs.

I'm back from ConvergeSouth 2007 now and caching up on email, blogs, etc. I enjoyed day two as much as day one. Here are my notes, quotes and paraphrased thoughts from two of my favorites sessions on Saturday, Social Networking and Corporate Wikis. [Read More]

Joe Cheng posted another entry in his series explaining the details of AtomPub support in Windows Live Writer (WLM), titled WLW+AtomPub, Part 2: Authentication.

Wondering what WLM looks like? Travelin' Librarian has a nice set of screen-shots of WLM on Flickr including shots of the installation process, HTML mode, preview mode and more. Looks pretty sweet.

<img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1321/1366689098_8323af9281.jpg" alt="Screen-shot of Windows Live Writer" />

I'm in Greensboro today, a couple of hours away from home, attending ConvergeSouth 2007 -- "the annual tech users' conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. A combination of a blogger-con and a creativity center." Here's a summary of notes and quotes I scribbled in my notebook on day #1. [Read More]

<a href="http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/What%27s+New+in+Roller+4.0 "> I'm working on documenting the Roller plugin system, comparing it to similar systems (e.g. Wordpress and Confluence) and coming up with some proposals for improvements. As part of that work, I've come up with a list of the plugin types supported by Roller 4.0. [Read More]

RSS advistory board: The RSS Profile makes it easier for feed publishers and programmers to implement RSS 2.0, offering advice on issues that arise as you develop software that employs the format. For 18 months, the board worked with the RSS community on interoperability issues, receiving help from representatives at Bloglines, FeedBurner, Google, Microsoft, Netscape, Six Apart and Yahoo. The profile tackles the most frequently asked questions posed by developers:

1. How many enclosures can an item contain?
2. Are relative URLs OK in item descriptions?
3. Is it OK to use HTML in elements other than an item's description?

For the answers, read the sections on enclosures, item descriptions and character data, respectively. Sam Ruby announced this morning that the Feed Validator now tests for conformance to the profile, offering 11 new checks for improving interoperability.

Kudos to the RSS Advistory Board. The RSS Profile is an excellent guide to publishing RSS. Plus, it's very nice to see the confusing parts of RSS clarified and to see those clarifications linked to from the RSS spec.

Just got it today to replace my old handed-down '91 Honda Accord. Favorite features: 49 MPG and an audio jack for my iPod. As far as I can tell, my employer Sun offers no incentive for buying a hybrid but the IRS offers a $2100 tax credit for the Civic Hybrid which is not bad at all.

Joe Cheng: I’m starting a (hopefully short) series of blog posts documenting the specifics of how the upcoming AtomPub-enabled release of Windows Live Writer will behave, and what AtomPub-enabled blog* servers can do to ensure the best interop with us. I also hope other blog client implementers can learn from our experience and consider using the same rules and behaviors we do when implementing their own AtomPub support.

Very nice. I'll be watching this one closely, looking for ways to improve Roller's and ROME's AtomPub support.

Google Blog Search turned up this nice article on creating custom modules with ROME by Sujit Pal, and a nice mini-review of my book:

Sujit Pal: "However, Dave Johnson's book provides a lot of background information and a lot of nice examples in Java and C#. I would highly recommend it to anyone who needs to get up to speed quickly with ROME and RSS/Atom."

It's good to see people are still buying and finding the book useful. It's been out for over a year now, but I don't think it's really out of date at all. I've been keeping the examples up-to-date as part of the Blogapps project and even enhancing them: the example Atom protocol client code from the book is now part of the ROME Propono project.

I just made the files for Apache Roller 4.0 RC8 available for testing and called for a 2nd release vote (RC7 as the first). If we can get a couple more committers to test and sign-off on the release, we could possibly get it out this week, which would be nice. I've been spinning RCs since August 13.

We spent most of the day today at the state fair. Kids loved it. Parents endured it. We saw the bunnies, roosters, cows and pigs. We avoided the fried-thing of the year. We used up a fist-full of pre-purchased ride tickets and learned that the dubious safety factor makes the rides much more exciting than the big sturdy ones at the theme parks.

In June Peter Reiser blogged about a Social Networking application developed by Sun's Customer Engineering group in Community equity - a way to measure Social Capital for an enterprise. This past week at Sun's Customer Engineering Conference in Vegas (tag: cec2007), the application went live for the 4,000 conference attendees. Check out Peter's latest blog Community equity in action for the details and some screen-shots like this:

<img src="http://blogs.sun.com/peterreiser/resource/200710130254-tm.jpg" alt="screenshot of Community Equity" />

For more recent posts about enterprise social networking, check Ed Cone's CIO Insight article Social Networks at Work Promise Bottom-Line Results and Brian Russell's post on the same topic.

ZDNet - IBM forging developerWorks: IBM is quietly transforming its developerWorks site into something more like Sourceforge, with more public-facing features aimed at expanding its reach to all open source developers.

I haven't heard about this one before. The quote is from an ZDNet blog post about IBM striking deals with Krugle and Koders, open source code search/annotation engines.

I've been in crunch-mode working on a new project, but I've been trying to keep an eye on what's going on the world of Atom Publishing Protocol or AtomPub as the cool kids call it. Here's a wrap-up of some of the AtomPub news I've picked up on the past month or so. [Read More]

I just happened to be looking for air show opportunities this morning and found out about the Pope AFB Airshow and Open House, which is happening today and tomorrow. What luck! So I packed up the kids and drove the 1.5 hours from Raleigh down to Fayetteville.

We parked at the Ft. Bragg fairgrounds, took a bus over to the base and despite the waiting in line and the heat, we really enjoyed ourselves. We saw several aerobatic displays, T-33, F-15, F-18 fly-overs and a Heritage Flight* with a F-15 and P-15 flying side-by-side (see below). We got to walk through several C5A and C130 transports and check out tanks and other armored fighting vehicles. There were also some vintage planes on display: a B-25, a Japanese torpedo bomber, P-40 Tomahawk, Hawker Hurricane and others. Very cool stuff (yes, I'm one of those pacifists who is fascinated with military history and hardware, kinda like this guy).

I wasn't able to get many good pictures because of my crummy little camera, which seems to be going bad. I uploaded some of best shots to my Flickr account and tagged them with <a href= "http://www.flickr.com/photos/snoopdave/tags/airshow/">airshow. Here are a couple of my favorite war birds, a P-51 Mustang and an F-15 Eagle:

* There's a nice gallery of previous Heritage Flights here.