inkdroid

So it’s been noted elsewhere that the latest ajaxy application out of google labs (Google Calendar) lacks support for the hCalendar microformat.

Perhaps it’s an oversight–but with all the high profile exposure microformats have been getting lately it’s kind of hard to imagine. But people have deadlines and some things just can’t make it into the first release–even at Google. The main thing, as Mark Pilgrim says is:

Sniping from the sidelines makes us look petty and insular. Instead
of making assumptions about big bad evil Google ignoring open
standards and locking users in, have we tried opening a dialogue?

I don’t know anyone at google so I feel like I’m doing my part by just blogging about how *awesome* it would be if they marked up their calendar data using hCalendar. As a full featured calendaring application on the web, Google Calendar could really enable downstream applications like the LiveClipboard if they simply added some class attributes and spans to the data they are already displaying.

In the long run I imagine it’s in Google’s best interests to promote microformats since their infrastructure would allow them to take best advantage of a system of distributed metadata. Here’s to hoping that it’ll be layered in sometime soon. In the meantime Scott and Mark have the right idea!

By the way, being able to enter a quick event in free text and have the time/location/description parsed as opposed to tabbing around in a complicated form is very nice.

Reading 2.0 slipped under my radar, but I guess that was the idea: to let people from O’Reilly, Los Alamos National Labs, OCLC, The Internet Archive, Adobe, Yahoo, Harvard and Elsevier hobnob away from prying eyes. I haven’t seen any audio/video for the event but Tim O’Reilly has a nice fly on the wall summary of what went on.

It’s refreshing to see library technologies/concepts such as OpenURL, OCOinS, OAI-PMH, FRBR, METS and Dublin Core starting to be talked about in the context of a larger information environment. For example I had no idea that Yahoo is harvesting data from the Internet Archive using the OAI-PMH protocol. And I didn’t know Yahoo is starting to leverage microformats, but should’ve guessed considering the recent news about Flickr starting to use hCard.

All in all these are exciting “lowercase semantic web” times we’re living in. And it’s interesting to watch some of the things people you know have worked on starting to catch on. Hopefully Reading 2.0 was just the start of this ongoing collaboration. Case in point, I just heard Robert Sanderson say in #code4lib that he’s visiting the a9 folks to talk about opensearch and sru. This is just the sort of cross-fertilization we need going on in library land.

Thanks to a ping from Dan I just finished listening to an inteview with David Sivers of CDBaby over on Venture Voice. Sivers talks about how being a musician and working briefly in the music industry informed his decision to build CDBaby.

The interview spans a ton of subjects from what’s wrong with the music industry and what to do about it; how being in a circus informs your business acumen; why rejecting venture capital can help you focus on what really matters; and how a lot of heart and hubris can get you really far. Really refreshing (and funny) stuff.

CDBaby is now the single largest digital catalog in the world, and provides a gateway for independent musicians into distribution chains like iTunes. They started with three people sharing a 56k modem in Woodstock, NY. What a fun story.

Ari Paparo has some interesting notes on what made delicious succeed where his company (doing essentially the same thing in 1999 with 13 million dollars) failed. Two things that really resonated with me were: defaults matter and folders suck.

Ari’s site blink.com made bookmarks private by default but allowed users to share them–whereas delicious makes them public. This encouraged looking at the bookmarks globally as the purpose of the service, whereas with blink it was an afterthought.

What Ari says about why folders suck was so good I’m going to take the liberty of just quoting a big chunk of it.

We believed that users would not only make their folders public, but also would categorize those folders into a directory structure. We called this the “Public Library” and created a Yahoo-like node structure on which users could post. This could have made sense since categorizing folders would be less work than categorizing individual bookmarks – after all, the folders were already “categories” of a sort.

There were several severe problems with this folder-based approach. First, people are very bad and inconsistent at organizing things. One day etrade.com will go into the “finance” folder and another day it will go into the “favorite links” folder. We were taking this fundamental flaw and squaring it – asking users to use graph their existing categorization onto a second arbitrary structure within the public library. Does my “finance” folder go into the “Business” directory or the “Personal” directory?

Then there was the issue of how deep to go when categorizing folders. If I’ve got a folder of “online brokerages” do I put it in the directory at the level of “Finance” since my folder is in a sense a sub-category of finance, or do I put it within the pre-existing “Finance -> Brokerage” directory? Users were confused, and with good reason.

Even librarians aren’t always that great at categorizing things. We need lots of rules, and don’t always remember to follow all of them. It’s a tricky business :-)

Case in point I don’t even use the tag “taxonomy” consistently (see screenshot above). delicious has a new feature that provides guidance on what tags you’ve used, and how many times — when you are typing in a tag. This is extremely handy for displaying just how inconsistent I am…and how to improve the quality of my tags.