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Don MacVittie asks vendors: Don’t tell us how you can control other vendors' tools; tell us how you’re making it easier to manage yours.

with Ethan Zuckerman This is a draft of a chapter from Chand’s and Ethan’s forthcoming “A Field Guide to Social Media,” coming next year on MIT Press. We’d love your feedback on what we have so far, so please share your thoughts in the comments. When we set out to write this book, centered around […]

I’m working on two kits at once: A Lego Technic Perseverance kit, and a “hello world” spoon using a beginner’s whittling kit. They could not be more different, yet I can see why both deserve to be …

When a codebase is large and complex, it's risky to big changes. Here's a structured way to approach the problem.

Last month ago I wrote a column for Wired.com, Rebooting web comments, that attracted some unsavory feedback. Had the flamers read beyond the second paragraph they might have seen that I wasn&#8217…

We need hubs that syndicate to and from personal clouds. It will do wonders not only for academic discourse, but also for the entire web, writes Jon Udell.

If I were czar of the Net (were such a thing even possible) I wouldn't require use of verified identities. Rather I'd want to ensure that everyone, identified or not, can own and control their online speech, writes Jon Udell.

Update: For a simpler formulation of the ideas in this essay, see Doug Belshaw’s Working openly on the web: a manifesto. Back in 2000, the patterns, principles, and best practices for buildin…

Today we do business the hard way, using phone calls and faxes and piles of papers on our desks, and we do it poorly. I'm hoping our personal clouds will enable us to do it easily and well.

Why don't things like syndicating health information work yet? Sure, our systems aren't ready. But neither are we, writes Jon Udell.

In a world full of services like delicious, FriendFeed, and Twitter -- services that can route feeds of data based on user-defined vocabularies -- you don't have to be a programmer to create useful mashups. You just have to understand, and find ways to apply, something Jon Udell calls the Principle of Informal Contracts. He expands on the concept in the second part of his elmcity series.

Last week I mentioned three ways for elmcity curators to categorize events: If a source iCalendar feed uses the CATEGORIES property, they’ll be included. If all of the events from a feed can …

A recent Twitter exchange reminded me of a 2005 blog post that included this Ray Ozzie quote: Each fall, as I manually enter the entire Celtics season schedule, my company’s holidays and my c…

In 2001 I was among a community of early bloggers who came together around Dave Winer’s Radio UserLand, a tool for both publishing and aggregating blogs. To the world at large, blogging was r…

As I build out calendar hubs in various cities I’ve been keeping track of major institutions that do, or don’t, provide iCalendar feeds along with their web calendars. At one point I ma…

It’s been a while since I hung up my spurs as a columnist, and lately I’ve been missing the opportunity to write regularly for a venue other than this blog. So when Mike Barton asked me…

Yesterday’s stream of notifications brought two links paired with invitations for me to comment. The first link points to a NY Times story about how AVOS, the new owner of Delicious, plans to…

Yesterday I interviewed Hugh McGuire about LibriVox for next week’s ITConversations podcast. In the course of our conversation I was reminded that LibriVox catalog pages — like this one…

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for folks who care about RESTful web services. Dare Obasanjo kicked things off with a couple of items about the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) and Goo…

This week’s ITConversations podcast with Rohit Khare focuses on a topic that is near and dear to my heart: syndication. For both of us, that is the real substance of Facebook. Says Rohit: Ima…

Ray Ozzie joined me for this week’s Perspectives show. It’s available there as audio plus a text transcript, and you can also watch the video on Channel 9. Ray opens the conversation by…

Something about the title of this week’s Perspectives interview, OpenSearch federation with Search Server 2008, has been nagging me ever since I wrote it. In the interview, Richard Riley and …

When David Stutz left Microsoft, he wrote a parting essay that invoked a new kind of Internet-oriented operating system characterized by “software that runs above the level of a single device…

An essay on the impact of commodity software on Microsoft

I’ve cobbled together a way to turn an Internet data feed into a video crawl that can run on my local public access cable TV channel. Before explaining how, I need to explain why. Here’…

If you check the elmcity.info events page for March 7, 2008 you’ll see that Beau Bristow is performing at Keene State College at 8PM. The Eventful item that has syndicated to the events page …

As several folks rightly pointed out in comments here, a community site based on tagging and syndication is exquisitely vulnerable to abuse. In the first incarnation of the photos page, for example…

If you were tuned into the blogosphere back in 2001, you’ll recall lots of chatter about RSS feed validation. RSS came in multiple flavors. Anyone could whip up a feed purporting to be in one…

In my last entry, I sketched a strategy for maintaining lists of the Eventful and Flickr accounts that I consider trusted sources for the elmcity.info event and photo streams. I didn’t spell …