Impressions Scholarcast

New words from the Internet are getting stranger by the month. Now we have ‘bacn’ the descriptor for non-spam, but low priority email messages. At the ‘official’ bacn site they expand the definition:

Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

There is a lot of bacn in my inbox, perhaps up to 20%. We need a new and intelligent mail filter. This should keep the AI guys busy.

Thanks to Mike Gunderloy of Web Worker Daily for telling us about this. He’s not a fan.

If you’re like me and are members of a growing list of social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and the like you regret the need to maintain separate lists of friends. It is painful to register and recreate your friends list on every new social site. Thus I very much support the idea of OFF (Open Friends Format). This is discussed fully in a Mashable article which states:

Each time you sign up, you’re faced with starting again from scratch. And while Facebook has made moves towards openness, it remains a data silo like any other, claiming ownership of your “social grid” (friend network) and other data despite having no real claim to it.

OFF will fulfill a similar need to OPML and RSS feeds. OPML allows an aggregated list of RSS feeds to be exported and imported between RSS feed readers. In a similar way OFF would allow the free exchange of friends lists.

As it happens the very recent release of the Windows Live ID API has anticipated this need to some extent. Windows Live ID is the successor to Microsoft Passport and presents a RESTful service. It is possible on your own web sites not only to authenticate a user’s Live ID but also to access, with the user’s permission, the list of contacts (friends) from the Windows Live Messenger contact list.

Updated: 18 August 2007 at 15:35 , 20 February 2008 and 14 May 2009

In a surprising development I was alerted today by our Vice-Chancellor, Robert Stable, of a blog entry by Duncan Riley from March 2005. Duncan’s entry is entitled ‘A Short History of Blogging‘ and when talking about the word weblog states:

The first use of the term weblog in relation to the delivery of content on a website comes from the delivery of a paper titled “Exploiting the World-Wide Web for Electronic Meeting Document Analysis and Management” by G. Raikundalia & M. Rees, two lecturers from Bond University on the Gold Coast, Australia made to a conference on August 14, 1995.

[Gitesh was a successful PhD student of mine and researched the topic of automated electronic meeting software and associated processes.]

These historical notes have also found there way into a Spanish version.

We used the term WebLog in the title of our paper presented on 21 August 1995 at the QCHI’95 Symposium held at Bond and organised by Sandrine Balbo and myself. Sandrine sent the QCHI’95 notice to the news.announce.conferences group on Usenet on 6 August 1995. The title of our paper was ‘WebLog: exploiting the Web user interface for document management in electronic meetings’ [a scan of the paper is now available on epublications@Bond].

The QCHI presentation was a precursor to our more extensive paper at the combined AUUG’95 and Asia-Pacific World Wide Web 95 conference at Darling Harbour, Sydney, where our paper was presented on 19 September 1995. Our paper is available on the CSU web site even though the figure images have not stood the test of time.

Duncan admits Gitesh and I didn’t actually use the word weblog in the Sydney paper but we did describe a web-based system that is remarkably like the weblogs we know today:

“a Web browser access to various meeting document information, such as minutes, tabled documents, reports and document indexes. Applications are being developed to take standard electronic meeting log files, postprocess them in a variety of ways, and generate a series of indexes and summary files. These files are formatted in HTML and exploit hyperlinks to the full in order to relate the different types of information.”

It is interesting to note that Robert naturally uses a Google alerting service for “Bond University” and this picked up a blog entry by Johanna King of the University of Oregon for her class in Communication History with Professor Kathleen Ryan in the School of Journalism and Communication. Johanna quotes from Duncan’s blog entry.

Update: On the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Bond the creation of ‘weblog’ is slightly misquoted as ‘blog’ in a BrisbaneTimes article.

 A new blog from the GigaOM stable on software trends called not surprisingly ‘The Future of Software‘ is starting to give us a collection of short, insightful glimpses of the rapid pace of software reshaping brought on by Web 2.0. A synopsis gives the flavour:

• Collective et al. Titled the 7 Cs of software the article adds to collective the descriptors: cyborg, closed, composed, choreographed and cognizant. Few of these adjectives immediately spring to mind but all offer a valid view of new trends.
• One Tiny App at a Time. This supports the stand I have been making for almost a decade – better to build software out of a possibly large collection of tiny web apps each offering tightly focused functionality but can be mashed up for more complex tasks. It echoes the motto of my Ajax tools (On-the-Dot Software) which is ’small, lightweight and really useful’.
• REST. The web services war is over, REST has won. Controversial but increasingly true – even Microsoft, a huge supporter of WS-*, has become RESTful.
• Data 2.0. Relational databases are becoming sidelined. New name-value storage mechanisms, so important to Web 2.0 and social media, are taking over, and don’t map well to RDBMS.
• Browsing encompasses all. The browsing contagion is spreading to the desktop and to mobiles, so the web combines three software spaces into one.

All of these short articles are worth the read, and we are promised more every few days.

I mentioned in an earlier post about the AideRSS service that it promised to reduce the volume of blog entries. I have been using it for 2 weeks on about 6 or 7 of my most populous blogs. I checked my reading trends today:

Visual inspection shows a significant reduction. Looking at the figures shows that in the last 30 days I have read 2,760 entries from 61 feeds which is a 20% reduction, so I expect to achieve near 40% in a complete month.

I am quite pleased with this outcome because I feel I have not missed out on important posts but that AideRSS is giving me the cream. So I will continue on this path for a few more weeks.

I guess it is just over 10 years since XML came on the scene. In recent times I have heard the expression ‘plain old XML’ increasingly mentioned. However only in the last two weeks, and in almost every presentation at Tech-Ed, have I seen this phrase reduced to ‘pox’; but pox seems to be the accepted abbreviation – get used to it.