iKOZ

Dave’s been pointing a guy called Phil Jones recently. He has some interesting ideas and clearly thinks alot about stuff. He’s a professor. Probably paid to. Cool! Today Dave posted a response to some of the points Phil has been raising.

One snippet here caught my eye:

I think DMOZ and Yahoo’s directories are the wrong model, that this all needs to be opened up. There’s no single home page on the web, so why should there be a single home page for the global directory. Let a billion flowers bloom. May the best root win. May there be as many roots as there are points of view.

Now, I like that. Alot. It’s actually more or less the very model I am trying to work towards in thinking about and building a ‘platform’ on which to run a system like podcast.com, for example. Or ‘treedia’ – or feedgang – or feedhive – whateverlist (hmmm). Also, I’m trying to build it based upon ‘standard(ized)’ formats which already exist.

I have built many systems in the past based on made-up bespoke xml formats which I created to do what I needed an app to do – this for example, uses ‘OPML’ and ‘RSS’ (and time events), but none of it actually IS OPML or RSS. But they would have done the trick in retrospect. As would a load of other formats : SMIL, etc.

SMIL gets me thinking about the multimedia systems on the web I have always envisioned (I wrote and sold a SMIL based multi-user publishing system call Smibase a few years back – that’s how I ended up at the Beeb). MPEG4 does this too, or will more once we see more tools to ‘orchestrate’ content. Quicktime also has huge untapped power as a multimedia application wrapper – did you know you can embed Flash inside Quicktime and have the QT ‘talk’ back and forth to the Flash ‘track’? You can. It’s pretty cool. BUT the tools out there to manipulate such formats are few and far between. LiveStagePro was one I used a few years ago to come up with a solution to put up-to-date news on massive screens in UK railway stations. I ended up going back to Director10 (which I hadn’t used since version 4!!) and built it in Lingo, with a WYSIWYG Flash based back end.

The point I’m trying to make is that there’s all these great formats out ALREADY. But people will keep reinventing the wheel and trying to come up with new formats, when I think what we should be doing is building TOOLS to test/evolve/bolster/work the formats we already have. I’m usually pleasantly surprised when I do that. But I admit to ‘making stuff up’ if I can’t find things or am pushed to find a solution (which I know can be fixed later on by someone who rally knows that part of the system – if need be)

And about ‘winning’: Dave and I once had a chat where the subject of ‘heroes’ came up. I think Dave would like to be ‘a hero’ of sorts. And to many he is. My take on it is that you don’t need to be the winner to be the hero or the ‘legend’.

It’s about hearts. Not prizes. They last longer (we pray).

Ha! Did that get your attention? Check out this great video which I found on Google Video, while testing out their Video RSS feeds. Heheh. It’s quite funny. The video that is.

I thought it was also quite cool that Google announced their use of Yahoo’s Media RSS extension in a Yahoo! RSS group ‘rss-media’. And thanks to this I’d noticed the media:group addition and added support for that in my ‘stuff’.

I’ve been seeing a few movies people have been making via World Of Warcraft. It’s great! In fact I still need to get up the video captures of our New Years Eve in Second Life. Partying on down in cyberspace.

I think we’re going to see ALOT more of this kind of stuff. ie:people using gaming worlds in totally creative ways. (Not that SL is that kind of game, but you know what I mean)

I really want to get my hands on that Spores game… oh boy…wow!

This caught my eye (on a branch on treedia. heh). Something called FeedBlitz has added OPML support. Now, I’m sure this has plenty of uses for those odd people who decide to fill up their email inboxes with link emails and subscriptions, but to me, these kinds of services are (to me) what this whole thing is all about. It’s about keeping STUFF OUT of your inbox!!

Aggregators, grazers, whatever you want to call them, help you do that. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that there are some good reasons for subbing to a mailing list these days – but it’s very ’0.5 – 1.0′ activity if you ask me) OPML can play a great part in helping the organization and taxnomy that we all find so comforting.

Great post over here from Chris Pirillo about OPML. I think there’s going to be a whole lot of new info emerging to explain OPML to the masses. I’m putting together some info over here too, as it happens.
Another VERY COOL thing is that the OPML output from Chris’ Gada.be metasearch site works in the OPML and RSS system I have cooking here. Veeeery nice

I think maybe I’ll drop Chris a line and ask if I could incorporate a gada.be search into ‘treedia’ That would be cool. I can’t imagine he’d mind.
BTW: I think I must have some kind of cyber-mind-meld going on with Chris at the moment, as the other day I was thinking about adding favicons to the output pages of treedia/podcast.com searches, after realising that the browsers supported them in html (when did that happen? was I asleep?). Then, lo and behold, Chris posts to his blog about the very same thing. Weird. Cool!

Do all browsers support a .ico image in the html as an img tag? If so, this makes life very cool, because people (was it MS?) decided to make sure that to have an icon in the address bar of a browser, while on a webiste, the image MUST be called favicon.ico, and stored in the wbe root. Therefore it’s a cinch to find them Hurrah!

Mike Kowalchik’s Grazr is getting quite bit of attention. Good stuff too! I like it. I met Mike and Adam last time I was over in Boston – and ate my first snail!

One thing about the Grazr I like is the side to side navigation of it. When I first started trying to build an OPML powered navigation and content system, I used that paradigm. When I showed people like Dave, the reaction wasn’t all that great. I explained that it’s similar to the navigation and browsing mechanism of an iPod (I don’t own one, btw). Side to side – up and down, etc. People get it. MILLIONS of people get it. AND they seem OK managing hundreds or thousands of files through that teeny window, using that navigation principle.

I developed some cool demo mobile apps for news reading a couple of years ago which use that too, and for the same reason. It works.

But, something was bugging me. People already know how to use folders, finders and explorers, etc. So I’ve been testing out coding the same experience. It’s interesting and very rewarding when it works. But I think there’s still plenty of wiggle left in these concepts. Let’s evolve the paradigm. Remember the first time you saw Gmail? All that content flipping around the browser with no reloads? Wow! I would say that Gmail helped fuel the whole AJAX craze.
Now. I’m slightly worried that poeple are out filing patents for OPML and RSS systems, which is really going to be unhelpful, especially at this nascent stage for OPML. And I’d like to know if anyone knows about about any. I have heard that there are some being filed.

It would be best to know what these are as soon as possible, now wouldn’t it?

I’m going to see if I can dig out all my early work

Wow. This does look incredible. It’s a game where you start of as ameoba and ‘evolve’ to a creature of your design. Eventually you form tribes and cities and then whole planets. But it doesn’t stop there. You then go on to control the whole Universe! I am gobsmacked. This video demo given by its creator, Will Wright (of Sims fame) shows how utterly god-boggling this game is set to be. When is it out? I want it! I want it now!