philwilson.org

Amazon have added some Ajax magic to their recommendation pages, letting you rate and indicate an item’s status (rating, owned, rubbish) in-line, without having to refresh the page, and it’s a massive improvement in usability. I’m really quite impressed.

A few days ago, Dave Winer posted some Guidelines for validating OPML. I know, hilarious, but if you can stop laughing for a second you’ll notice this:

A subscription list document is a possibly multiple-level list of subscriptions to feeds. Each sub-element of the body of the OPML document is a node of type rss or an outline element that contains nodes of type rss.

Just recently I contacted Rojo because they were using exactly this attribute in exactly the same way that Dave Winer describes, which means that Atom feeds are marked as type="rss", which is not only misleading but actually meaningless. I think it’s wrong. Just to be clear, I think it’s a sociological and technological way (and I accept that it could be entirely unconscious) of attempting to sideline Atom via technologies that he has massive sway over.

Sphere is yet another over-hyped vapourware – sorry, stealth-mode – “Web 2.0″ company.

It is a blog search engine focused on discovering high quality, relevant blogs on a timely basis.

Hahaha! I look forward to your search engine not finding anything that’s not in a blog! I can’t wait to sample the delights of not finding some authoratative and informative on a site not powered by Movable Type! I burn with anticipation at not being able to discover vital details in an O’Reilly article! Dear lord, I really can’t think of anything worse. Even more different search engines for different types of content. That’s just what we really need.

On the other hand, I look forward to them gaining lots of attention and hype from the inward-looking nerd crowd (where “echo chamber” is apparently a point completely missed) and then trying to sell their IP.

In a related aside, “Sphere” is possibly the most Web 1.0 name I’ve yet heard for a Web 2.0 company.

Argh, I’ve been trying to bite my tongue because it sounds so petty but it should be “there are more than 18 million blogs” on the About Sphere page, not “there is more”.

Got a site which only provides an RSS feed? Do you wish you could have an Atom feed of it, but don’t have mad XSLT skillz or somewhere you can host your own PHP conversion script? Fear not, because under the hood, Google Reader is all about the Atom, baby.

For example: I have a del.icio.us account, del.icio.us is gracious enough to provide me with an RSS feed for my account, Google Reader converts that internally into Atom. Voila. That URL is eminently hackable, just use http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/ followed by the URL of your own feed.

What’s nice to note is that in this case it actually retains the tags, using the category element. Lovely.

Much respect goes to Robert Sayre, who spotted this.

I’ve not seen any fanfare for this one (oops, it was announced on Blogger Buzz), but here it is nevertheless: Backlinks

Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. … For the curious, this feature is based on the link: operator of Blog Search.

I’ve enabled this on my blog, but it doesn’t currently appear to be doing anything, despite there being at least a couple of people who’ve been foolish to link to me at some point, as the aforementioned Blog Search points out.

It’s new, so I’ll give it time. And then probably disable it.

The feature I’m still really waiting for is the page where you can follow conversations on other Blogger blogs where you’ve commented. That surely can’t be hard? Machine intensive, possibly; but not hard (after all, Flickr does it with its “recent comments” and “photos you’ve commented on” pages).

A few weeks ago I read this article: IM War and I’ve been meaning to blog about it ever since.

Events have overtaken me though, and yesterday Yahoo and Microsoft announced that they will be connecting their IM networks so that users on one system can communicate with users on the other via text and voice messages.

It seems to me that this could go two ways. Either it’s a huge lockout move designed to let the MS and Yahoo systems federate whilst locking out every other third party client, or it’s the first step towards opening up their networks. Which one do you think is more likely?

Rather unusually, Slashdot has some good commentary (so long as you’re only reading comments with a score of 4 or 5 of course).

I’ve already sworn to never use MSN Messenger ever again, so if they do indeed go for lockout, I’m going to try as hard as I possibly can to move every single one of my contacts over to Google Talk, because at least from there we have the chance of open communication.

via Alice comes a link to Videogame Aesthetics: The Future! by David Hayward, which is an excellent overview of where games have gone, and where they could still go in terms of graphical style and presentation, with some great screenshots of classic games which use a unique style to their benefit.

I regard it as some matter of pride that I’ve played and loved all of these games (the ones which have been released that is, Okami and Shadow of the Colossus are both on my most-wanted list though) except for F.E.A.R. (which I’ve never played) and Mono (which I’ve never even seen before).

In fact, this relates to a post I made back in May where I espoused that stylised games always seem more fun and more enjoyable than their ultra-realism-seeking counterparts. The two main reasons for this seem to be (and David mentions them both in his article) firstly the uncanny valley (which despite what David says, CGI films are capable of suffering from, witness The Polar Express as mentioned in its Wikipedia article and elsewhere on the web) and secondly the application of the uncanny valley principle to the world and the rules that govern it, i.e. the more like “our” world a game seems, the more we expect it to behave like our world, so when it doesn’t it’s reminding us that it’s just a game. Some of the best games (such as Mario 64, The Wind Waker and Ico) are ones which create an entirely self-contained world where our brains aren’t hampered by analogies to the real world and so are able to believe in the game completely.

Anyway, that’s getting off the point slightly. Here’s to good-looking, imaginative game aesthetics. Hurrah!

I still haven’t got around to looking properly at Yahoo!s new offerings, or any of the left field things like Chris Pirillo’s new toy. There really is a lot of new stuff appearing around the blogosphere (Steve Rubel is one good source of links), and so many acquisitions – bubble city.

Bubble city is right. There’s a lot of hype, a lot of new applications, but few of them are actually a) useful or b) any good. It would be healthy for a lot of people to recover their perspective, except that of course, because it’s a bubble where everyone is making (or trying to make) money, it’s not in their interests.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t some good work going on, and that the web isn’t getting exciting again (see native SVG and ECMAScript 4 XML in Firefox 1.5; the work of the WhatWG including the <canvas> tag; Greasemonkey; the Atom Publishing Protocol; IE7, and so on), but there are also a lot of people churning out poor-to-average webapps and hyping themselves and others up beyond belief.

Or maybe I’m just bitter that I’m not getting some of that filthy “Web 2.0″ lucre, eh?

It seems so obvious, I don’t why it didn’t occur to me before – my phone can take video and it has a bluetooth connection (which I use all the time for transferring photos to my PC), thus making it the perfect portable webcam device.

Mobiola is a piece of software which lets you use these features of your Symbian phone to good effect. It’s free for a 30-day trial, during which connections are limited to 5-minute bursts, and thereafter it’s $20 for life, which isn’t bad I suppose, but I always feel slightly cheated having to pay for mobile software which probably isn’t going to last me very long (due to the neverending upgrade cycle) and probably only does 70% of what I’d like it to do.

The same applies to Mobiola – whilst it’s a cool application of the phone’s features, the app isn’t really good enough to pay for, mainly because the video quality is so low. This is obviously because the PC part of the software updates the view from the webcam in real-time and there’s a bandwidth cap on how much data the phone can transfer to make these feasible.

What I’d really like to see is the option for a higher quality of video, buffered and maybe saved to the PC for viewing later, rather than displayed in real-time. Also, it doesn’t allow you to zoom like the built-in video recorder does, which was the first thing I tried to do, so that would be nice. Still, it’s a great example of the flexibility of these devices.

(thanks to kokeshi for pointing this out)

is on http://www.google.com/reader/.

and yes, it’s goddamn terrible, etc. but one thing – this is from Google, right? Where’s the search?