Blogging Roller

• Charlie Rose - A conversation with Marc Andreessen
  Great interview covering social networking and internet tech in general


• Fred Stutzman: How Facebook Should Address User Rights
  "If Facebook were a country, it would more accurately resemble North Korea or China than the United States."


• The Angry Drunk: Scoble Just Doesn't Get It
  "Social Networking is not Marketing; but the inability to grasp that fact is the defining characteristic of the New Media Douchebag"


• Eclipse Plugin Central: plugins resource center and marketplace
  "OSDE is the Eclipse Plug-in for developing OpenSocial applications"


• Engadget: Texas Instruments and Wind River do up Android right
  "what basically amounts to the ultimate Android device"


• InfoWorld: Mozilla backs move to decriminalize iPhone jailbreaking
  "Consumers should be entitled to use any software program they choose"


• Engadget: Android Market allows returns, but not sexy stuff
  "Google maintains the right to forcefully remove an app from your device whenever it feels like it"

Aaron Swartz: As chaunceyt pointed out, the new stimulus bill's implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS:

For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

Pretty amazing to see a government so tech-savvy.

Uncle Sam should contact Manning, who, I'm pretty sure, has stacks of RSS and Atom In Action available for a very good price.

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We've got a date and a venue for BarCamp RDU 2009, so mark your calendars:

BarCamp RDU 2009 - August 8 at Red Hat headquarters in Raleigh, NC

More information and registration coming soon...

For the past five months I've had the pleasure of mentoring two San Jose State Univ. graduate students, Ganesh Mathrubootham and Tanuja Varkanthe, who are working on a project for classes CMP 295A and B. They picked one of the projects that I first proposed for Google Summer of Code and then for Glassfish's student outreach program, Media Blogging for Apache Roller. It's turned out to be a major project and the central new feature in the upcoming Roller 5.0 release. [Read More]

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I started a new blog on this site to explore what's possible with Google Friend Connect (GFC). It's called the G Friend Connect blog. I've added the GFC Members Gadget and I replaced Roller's built-in comment macro with the GFC Wall Gadget. In theory, if you have a Google, Yahoo or Open ID account, you should be able to login via a gadget, make friends with other site members and leave comments. If you have a minute or two, try it out. Join the site and leave a comment. That will give me (and you) a better idea of how things work.

So far I'm not particularly impressed with the Wall Gadget as a comments replacement. Here is an example. It doesn't support rich-text editing, no HTML is allowed, the comment area is too small and there's no preview button. Maybe that's why it's called a Wall Gadget rather than a Comments Gadget. Or maybe I'm just not doing it right.

NCSU and IW3C2 Sign Agreement: It’s official! North Carolina State University and the International World Wide Web Steering Committee (IW3C2) based in Geneva, Switzerland, have reached agreement to host the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010) at the new Raleigh Convention Center on April 26-30, 2010. The general conference chairs are Michael Rappa, director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, and Paul Jones, director of iBiblio.org at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

Awesome news, but slightly old. I didn't learn about it until I got the WWW 2010 Facebook Group invite from @smalljones himself.

From the Roller project blog:

Ganesh Mathrubootham has been doing great work on the Media Blogging for Roller project and helping out in other ways in Roller development and support. So in January we nominated and voted him in as Roller's newest committer. Welcome Ganesh, we're very happy to have you on the team.

I've really enjoyed working with Ganesh and his project partner Tanuja over the past six months, so this is great news. I'll tell you a bit more about the Media Blogging for Roller project in one of my next blog posts.

You may remember that my dad, Charles Johnson, was working on a book that explains the science behind photography, from "quantum mechanics to physiology and art appreciation." He's finished now and while he negotiates with publishers he is making a limited number of copies available on CD, mostly to his photographer friends.

The book is beautifully illustrated with color photographs, diagrams and lots of equations. Yes, I said equations; you'll need to brush up on your physics and calculus to really appreciate the entire work. I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters and the later chapter on appreciation of art in photography, but I have to admit, I haven't read the whole thing.

I'll try again when I have the printed edition

You can download a detailed table of contents via his blog photophys.com. He'll also be making selected chapters available there to get feedback; the first is How to get really high magnifications.

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The day before the layoff axe fell at Sun, I blogged about my upcoming Shindig for Blogs and Wikis talk at ApacheCon EU in March. Since then, I've been working almost non-stop on finding a new gig and have had little time to work on my presentation. That's not good, because I have fairly ambitious plans for this talk. I'll explain.

I want to be able to show how to add social features including OpenSocial support to a blog server and a wiki server by using plain old Shindig and then Project SocialSite. I'm targeting Roller and JSPWiki because they're the blog and wiki source code bases that I know best right now and they're both Apache efforts, but the same techniques should work with other systems like Wordpress or Drupal. If I have time I might be able to demo those too (but I wouldn't count on it).

I'm not sure how far I can go with plain old Shindig because, like most blog and wiki servers, neither Roller nor JSPWiki has detailed profile data, social relationships or activities. I should be able to get Google Gadgets working via Shindig, but OpenSocial Gadgets will take a lot more thought and effort.

I'm much more confident in the Project SocialSite approach. SocialSite provides for storage of detailed profile information, groups, activities and app data as well as the necessary UI. I'm confident enough that I'm going to deploy it on this site. So, stay tuned. I hope to have something to show by the end of next week.

Oh, and by the way. Today is the last day to register for ApacheCon EU with the early-bird discount. So sign-up already!