Technology Commentary

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…

Today I created a private blog site — that is, Internet-accessible but SSL-and-password-protected — and realized that there was no easy way for most people to subscribe to it. Even if t…

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 …

Sam Ruby offers the following advice to those of us who would like to improve the interoperability of iCalendar feeds: Identifying real issues that prevent real feeds from being consumed by real co…

In a 2003 InfoWorld story on the globalization of software development I asked Andy Singleton to share his thoughts on distributed software development. He has continued to refine and reflect on hi…

Last month, in a series of entries, I laid out the case for an effort — inspired by the RSS/Atom feed validator — to create a similar suite of tests and tools for iCalendar feeds. I&#82…

Hello from somewhere over the Philippine Sea! My watch just nudged me to get up and walk around. My phone tells me that I am connected at roughly 10 Mbps. I am having a WhatsApp conversation with f…

My friend Allen Helton asked what I meant when I said, “APIs reduce everything to a transaction” on LinkedIn recently. He was curious whether I meant this conceptually or technically. To be honest, I mean both. I purposely leave it loosely defined, and wield it in many different ways. I do this simply to get people thinking about the nuance of digital transactions we often take for granted. I just want people to ask questions like Allen is doing, and pause from time to time to think about what a “transaction” means to us. I feel we’ve done quite a bit of thinking about what transactions mean in our physical world, but I think we have a huge amount of discussion ahead when it comes to what it means in a digital world.

Doing what Java never did

Explaining 10 must known query methods to fetch single records