“The Future of Web Apps” Podcasts

Carson Workshops have put up a series of podcasts from their “The Future of Web Apps” summit. I haven’t listened to them yet, but everybody is talking about them.

They had a few probs meeting demands for the downloads, so it might take a couple of days to succeed in downloading them.

Using Google for site security testing

The Ethical Hacker has a set of top ten searches you can perform with Google to see if you site leaks security information. It all starts with using the site: prefix to target your site, then see what you can find.

The future of TV: Democracy

Democracy Player is a new free video player and downloader that (given a decent broadband connection) gives the first gimpse I’ve see of the post-broadcast-tv world where you choose what you want to watch without it being painful to do the selection and downloading. Fabulous fun.

And just like TV, if you’ve got stuff downloaded, it just plays video clip after video clip. And downloads in the backgound and all that sort of goodness.

But that is not all. This comes from the Participatory Culture Foundation, the software is open source, and there are other tools to make it participatory:

• Broadcast Machine is used to make channels of your own videos and photos - and it makes distribution by BitTorrent really easy.
• Video Bomb is a collaborative filtering internet video site. The more bombs, or votes a video gets, the higher up the list it gets.

This is a nice set of tools. And it really does point the way to the future. Give us all lots of bandwidth and connections to anwhere in the world, and we no longer have to live with those few free-to-air channels. We have choice. And we can take part by making and adding our own channels. I like it.

Blog Design for Beginners

Here’s a nice article on Blog Design for Beginners from Darren Rowse’s Problogger. Problogger is a great resource for people trying to make money out of blogging itself.

State of the Blogosphere part 2

David Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere part 2 is out.

Presence Labs launched

February 14, 2006:  Today I’ve registered Presence Labs for business in Western Australia.  It is a new ‘imprint’ if you like, or business name, of our lovable old owl, Barking Owl Pty Ltd.

Presence Labs has a strong focus on the online, and on presence online, be it personal, social or business presence.  Our technologies are the web, the Internet, messaging, tags, RSS, social software, content management and agile development.

We speak and understand Web 2.0 but we don’t necessarily believe it all, if you know what I mean.

RSS? for everything?

If you believed the hype, you’d be figuring that RSS is the answer to every communications problem we have. We’ll just stick everything in RSS.

Truth is, however, RSS by itself gives you little more than a way to make useful lists of things. Powerful, yes. But you and I both know that making lists or reading them isn’t the holy grail.

Great. We have ways of passing lists of stuff to each other. What do I do with these lists when I get them. Read them?

Can we do more?

Yes. Think of RSS as a nice set of standard for passing lists of things to each other. This is bedrock technology, or infrastructure.

Aggregation comes to mine immediately. Put lists together, do some work on them, make something more valuable, useful and meaning-rich than a bunch of lists.

Or feed these lists into some more processing to make something new.

So now, we need to focus on the receiving side of RSS, rather than the transmitting side. It is now so easy to make lists in RSS form. Now let’s put some effort into decoding, processing, working with the data. And not just output more mashed-up lists. Let’s see some action!

SEO “Too good to be true”

I’ve always felt that wealth and success from (little more than) seach engine optimisation was a bit too good to be true. At best, SEO turns into some kind of game where you are trying to expose the ’secrets’ of the search engines and beat them at the game.

Seth Godin put it all so eloquently in this post on his blog:

Getting traffic is a little like getting a date. You can probably manipulate the system for a little while (I had a roommate in college who was great at it) but self-reinvention is a markedly better long-term strategy.

As in, be your best and attention will come to you.

State of the Blogosphere, Feb 2006

David Sifry has published his latest State of the Blogosphere. Highlights:

• Technorati is tracking 19.6 million blogs.
• The total number of blogs is currently doubling every 5 months
• up to 8% of new blogs are fake ’spam’ blogs
• 9.2 new posts are created per second

That first post

“Testing one, two, is this thing on?”

This must be the eighth or ninth blog I’ve started, and each time there is that issue of getting past the first post.  I think the more blogs entries you’ve written, the more you are used to having something in the past, lower down the page, to refer to and build on.

But here I am again, starting another blog, introducing a new concept and business.  Read up from here to find out about Presence Labs.