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Sunday Night Techno (tonight) and Vote Amber!
- created
- 20041128T1335
- categories
- city
- music
- friend
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Stuffed yourself silly with Thanksgiving eats? Looking for an excuse to get out tonight? Then come on down to 1751 Social Club, located at 1751 Fulton just north of the Golden Gate Park panhandle, for tonight's monthly allowance of Stay Up Sundays. DJs Amber (11pm), Hoovie, Achilles and Dekota. 21+ 9pm-2:00am.
I'm still in Claremont visiting my parents for Thanksgiving so I won't be able to make it, so head on up there for me and be social! If you don't have a chance to hear her spin in person, you can still check out Amber's site and listen to her latest release: "Live with Friends and Family".
Vote for Amber!
Next, go vote! Nitevibe is conducting their 3rd Annual DJ Dreamteam Poll (San Francisco Edition). As with any DJ poll on the web, I'm asking my readers to represent. Check [x] Amber in the scrolling list and click (Continue...). On the next screen be sure to uncheck the two mailing list options so you don't get any spam.
Finally, The DJList continues to conduct their monthly DJ poll, so go to their site and vote for Amber as well. They've fixed it so that you can pick only one DJ (rather being required to pick 10) which makes it much more convenient.
- Comments
Just another night in the Mission
- created
- 20041127T1516
- categories
- city
- friends
- web
- content
This past Wednesday night we had a little adventure in the Mission, a neighborhood of San Francisco.
It all started late the night before. I IM'd a few friends about a small informal impromptu "microformats" dinner in SF the next evening. In the morning I sent an email to four and nine of us showed up that night at 6:30pm or thereabouts. Being midweek and early enough, it wasn't too difficult for Ti Couz to squeeze us all (Joyce, Alex, Adam, Kragen, Aaron, Dinah, Niall, Jason, and I) in, and we enjoyed a drink (like organic apple cider served in a small pottery bowl) and a chat in their bar next door while we waited. The savory special was smoked salmon with grilled red onion and red pepper sauce. Delicious. Amber joined us mid-way through dinner.
Everyone was stuffed from the entrees so we skipped dessert crepes only to realize as we walked out the door that we had left the restaurant with no intent of ending our conversation, and yearned for something sweet as well. Half a block away we snuck into Bombay Ice Creamery just before they closed.
As we stood outside on the sidewalk meticulously devouring our cones, we couldn't help but notice the mariachi band walking towards us on the sidewalk. They stopped about 30 feet short, and piled into a small honda civic, instruments and all. Quite clown-caresque.
Moments later, an SUV pulled up about 30 feet away in the other direction, and out jumped a couple of girls with basketballs. While the driver sat in the car, the other two hopped up onto the sidewalk, and proceeded to hold their spinning balls on the tips of their fingers and perform other such globetrotter tricks. As if on cue, the sound of "Chaka Khan" came blasting out of the open car doors. After a minute or so of alternating tricks and giggling, the girls hopped back into their SUV and drove off.
It was quiet for a moment and everyone stared at each other, as if to seek visual confirmation that we had all just experienced what we thought we had experienced. Of course we had. At that point the group parted ways, with some going to a cafe, and the rest opting to return home, and contemplate all that we had discussed and witnessed that evening.
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New 'Technorati This' favelet
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- 20041124T1832
- categories
- work
- content
After hearing all manner of good suggestions from quite a number of folks as to what a Technorati favelet should do, I believe I've successfully incorporated them into one new favelet. Take a look:
Right now there is only one favelet (Technorati This) in two variants (same window, new window), and here's how it works:
- Select any word or words. Click the Technorati This favelet to search for the most recent blog posts that mention those words.
- From any web page, click the Technorati This favelet to see the most recent blog posts about that web page.
- From a blank browser window, if you click the Technorati This favelet, it will prompt you with a dialog box where you can enter either text or a URL, and it will automatically do the respective search in Technorati.
P.S. Thanks to Derek for insisting that we create a new Technorati favelets page instead of just putting it on the home page and trying to explain in a sentence or less what a favelet is, how to install it, and what it does for you.
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Welcome Derek and Jason!
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- 20041122T2359
- categories
- work
- friends
- content
I've been really excited about this for a little while, but didn't want to say anything until their first days at work (which coincidentally was today for both of them).
I am very happy to report that Jason DeFillippo (of blogrolling.com, blogging.la etc.) and Derek Powazek (of fray, sfstories, etc.) have joined Technorati. See their announcements.
The thing about working with a great group of people is, that you attract even more great people. Jason's been a web applications development whiz for quite some time, and Derek's creative genius has been shaping some of the nicer corners of the web for almost ten years now. One thing in common: usability and user centered design skills.
I've known Jason for a little while, he was one of the beta testers of XFN 1.0. And Derek and I actually went to the same highschool (though just enough apart that we didn't meet until a few years ago at SXSW in Austin, TX). Derek lives close enough that we'll be taking the N-Judah MUNI from the same stop to work every day. And Jason has just moved up to SF from LA.
Congratulations and welcome on board. Looking forward to building even more powerful, usable, and friendly services at Technorati with you both.
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Cafes cutting off the power
- created
- 20041122T2212
- categories
- cafe
- city
- content
I finally have enough datapoints on particular phenomenon to claim trend or perhaps pattern.
Cafes (often wifi cafes) are cutting off access to their power outlets.
The first instance of this that I encountered was at Cafe Borrone, a nice cafe next to a nice independent bookstore (Kepler's) in Menlo Park. One of the few oases in the Peninsula desert (the other being Coffee Society). I've been going to Cafe Borrone for many years now (less frequently in recent months, now that I live and work in the City), and several years back (I don't remember exactly when), I remember plugging my PowerBook into one of their very few outlets, and being promptly told by the wait-staff that I was not allowed to do so. They were almost rude about it.
Somewhat annoyed (because after all, I almost always bought dinner and coffee for around $10 before sitting down to eat and work on my laptop), I eventually devised workarounds, e.g. leaning my backpack against the outlet (thus hiding it and my power supply), and then placing books/papers over the power cord feeding into my laptop. They don't have wifi though. But I did write a whole bunch of IE5/Mac code there, and even checked it into CVS using my Ricochet wireless modem and service.
So yes, that was perhaps five years ago (Ricochet service was later terminated 2001-08-08, sigh. Though I used it until the very last minute from a hotel room in Washington DC, but that's another story). When I visited Cafe Borrone recently and openly plugged in, I didn't get any complaints. Maybe they finally know me well enough to not hassle me about a little juice, or maybe they've just chilled out a bit.
Next: The Dana Street Roasting Company in downtown Mountain View has had free wifi for quite some time now (a few years?). About a year or so ago, they put these signs above all the outlets that basically said something like "plugging into the outlets is prohibited". They're still there AFAIK.
And most recently, The Canvas, which also has free wifi (though they dabbled with turning it off), turned off their outlets, according to Niall Kennedy who was there to witness it.
So is this just a series of isolated incidents, or is this indicative of a larger trend? If you know of any other cafes that turn off or forbid power outlet usage, please blog a quick note and link back here so the talk bubble in the comments can find you.
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Four months at Technorati
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- 20041120T1807
- categories
- web
- blog
- work
- content
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I've been at Technorati for just over four months and what a wild ride it has been. We've worked with CNN to produce the Politics site for the DNC, and at the same time reskin the Technorati main site. Politics site update for RNC. Updated XOXO and Attention.XML working drafts, Attention Query API service (was at http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/AttentionQuery), and OPML->Attention.XML proof of concept. hCard and hCalendar experimental drafts. Keyword search rewrite and search results redesign. Technorati's Top MP3s page, and even more than I can remember at the moment.
Most recently (a little over a week ago), a few of us worked hard to dramatically improve the one thing that has been my pet peeve since I started — search results responsiveness, especially with "popular" URLs/blogs. If you've complained in the past about Technorati being slow, or providing empty results, believe me, we've heard you, and we've taken some major steps to addressing those issues. So give it another try. Go ahead and try any URL.
One aspect of this change is that if there have only been a few new links to a site in the past week, we'll show you those first, since people come to Technorati most often to see new information, and then present you with an option to view older links.
Finally, as Ross announced, Blogware V1.21 has been released with a couple of very cool features that take advantage of integrated Technorati support:
- Technorati Post Cosmos links for each post
- An option to "Search all blogs" for those popular search boxes more and more people are putting in their sidebars.
Check out Ross Rader's blog for an example of both.
It's been an exciting four months, and there's more to come soon.
- Comments
BloggerCon: Overload
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- 20041106T1400
- categories
- blog
- work
- content
Here are a few of my snippets of notes and followup comments from the Overload session earlier today at BloggerCon.
Robert Scoble asked:
Right now my aggregator is in alphabetical view. Why?
Why can't I reorganize based on Technorati's linking info?
Aggregator developers: check out the Technorati API documentation (formerly at http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/TechnoratiApi) for how to call the Cosmos API (formerly at http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/CosmosQuery) to get this info.
Or order by most recent.
Aggregators: Use Technorati's Attention Query API (was at http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/AttentionQuery) for to retrieve and sync your feed roll, specifically, your Attention.XML.
Order by my friends.
XFN provides this functionality simply and easily. Read this information from
blogrolls, or from Attention.XML which supports XFN.
Order by who has posted most frequently. Or least frequently.
More excellent uses for Attention.XML.
Matthew Mullenweg pointed out:
Technorati inbound links can be used for ratings.
Another person said they wanted:
... a review system based on my social network.
A review system? How about we start with the simplest of reviews, from Roman times: thumbs up or thumbs down. Hint: Tivo has already proven that this is plenty sufficient (and easy to use) for anyone to both use and be quite happy with.
How do you do "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" with blogs, posts, or web pages in general?
That's exactly what Vote Links is for. Annotate your hyperlinks with either:
rel="vote-for"if you like something, orrel="vote-against"if you don't.
Technorati is conducting a Vote Links experiment as we speak.
Now, on the whole
based on my social network
piece...That's another great use for XFN.
What do my friends think of this movie?
What do my neighbors think of this restaurant?
What do my co-workers and colleagues think of this new standard?
You don't need to boil the ocean with ontologies. Just handle the common cases people want and they'll be more than happy.
Another person asked for:
...blog social networking hybrid...
WordPress is an open source blogging tool that has built-in support for XFN social networking.
MetaFilter is a community weblog service where members can filter and re-order comments according to their XFN social network.
... would like to see social networking introduced into Bloglines...
Hey Bloglines folks (Nice to meet you at BloggerCon, Mark), how about annotating your feedrolls with XFN social relationships? No need to adopt another language or keep separate files, just work the way you do today, and let the user annotate their feeds with a simple set of XFN relationships.
Someone else remarked:
... the major overload is not in feeds or posts, but in comments. I can't figure out which ones are on what topic, which ones are by smart people.
This is an excellent point, and totally expresses some of the challenges I have encountered while reading some of the excellent posts on Doug Bowman's Stopdesign site or Dan Cederholm's Simplebits, especially his Simplequizzes. Dozens if not over a hundred comments with no clear way of following the thread of discussion or filter by relevance etc.
Another person bravely admitted:
... we need to diagnose the problem and it is blogaholism...
Robert Scoble followed up:
Why do you think I'm wearing a t-shirt that says "blog addict"?
and:
... since I started blogging and reading blogs, I don't watch much TV.
Indeed. Well maybe except for the occasional episode of tape-delayed "Enterprise".
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Technorati update and BloggerCon
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- 20041105T1750
- categories
- web
- blog
- work
- dinner
- content
- We just did a fairly major under the hood update (with a few nice UI improvements as well) to the Technorati main site. Probably the most dramatic improvement is our completely rewritten keyword search functionality. E.g.
Technorati keyword search for 'election'
Freshest results only minutes old.
The timing of this update is no coincidence — BloggerCon starts tomorrow. Kevin and I will be at the dinner tonight at Ming's shortly. See you there or at Stanford tomorrow.
Update:
David Sifry has written an extensive post detailing most of the updates to Technorati.com.
- Comments
VoteLinks experiment
- created
- 20041101T2339
- categories
- blog
- work
- govt
- content
- Kevin's been busy hacking up a VoteLinks experiment. Check it out:
- Technorati Bloggers' Votes counted (Alpha)
Blog your vote by adding a
relattribute to your hyperlinks with the valuevote-fororvote-against. e.g.: - Comments
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