Published on Sunday, May 18 2008
I presented yesterday at BarCamp Boston 3 on the topic of WPBook, the WordPress plugin for pulling blog posts into Facebook and letting people comment on them with their Facebook identities.
Here’s the presentation file: WordPress to Facebook and Back (Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license)
As always, you can get the latest code here, or see it in action on Facebook.
I found it was very difficult to do a 30 minute presentation here – 45 would have been better, and an hour would have been perfect. I should have spent more time focused on three key aspects: the core WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the bigger picture of how they relate to each other.
That way I could have shown, for example, the WordPress loop and how that works, and some of the Facebook PHP client, and how a user’s request goes through Facebook to your WordPress blog and back to their browser.
I’ll try to set a bit more context in my Twitter talk later today, though 30 minutes will be a challenge there as well.
Published on Thursday, May 15 2008
(Update 5/17 – 0.7.1 is now available – bug fix release).
I’ve spent some time over the past few nights revising the wp-book plugin, which lets you bring your WordPress (self-hosted) blog into Facebook as an application, and I’ve published a new 0.7 version.
Read more…
Published on Tuesday, May 13 2008
Updated 5/31/08 – Like The Wealth of Networks, Two of these books are also available online: Two Bits and The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It.
Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.
It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.
What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?
Published on Monday, May 12 2008
Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) is quickly rising to the top of my summer reading list (about which more to come in a later blog post). The distinctions he draws (based on his recent talks, see video here, here, and here) between sterile and generative platforms, and the concerns he raises about contingently generative or tethered platforms, seem to me right on target, and consistent with the issues Tim O’Reilly has been raising (along with, of course, many others) about how to translate the freedom behind free software and the openness behind open source into a world in which services and data live in the cloud.
One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube‘s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause – both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].
Two things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Miro and Kaltura.
Read more…
Published on Thursday, May 8 2008
At last month’s North Shore Web Geek Meetup, I met Gal Arav, the creator of Newsflashr (and formerly creator of InstantBull):
Newsflashr aggregates feeds from a large number of news sources, and lets you scan the headlines from those feeds as a tag cloud (what are the interesting terms which appear frequently in the headlines in those feeds) as well as in a list sorted by Alexa rank.
It’s the kind of site you can spend a lot of time in, if you’re a news junkie, playing around with different sorting options and looking for trends in the data.
Here’s the tag cloud, for example of the “elections 08″ topic as I am writing this post:
You can also switch into feed view, in which case you’re arranging feeds on a grid, as you might in something like pageflakes or netvibes.
Worth a look if you’re a news junkie or just obsessed with the upcoming election.
