Blog posts

There have been rumours upon rumours that facebook was going to launch something for musicians soon, and that they were also readying a new advertising system. Today it turned out that not only were they doing both, but both are part of the same strategy. Announced by Leah Perlman on the Facebook blog, facebook’s new ads system breaks down into two parts: “Brands” can now create Facebook Pages, which combine some of the functionality of a personal profile with that of a group. For “brand” you can also read company, artist, campaign, or nearly anything else that might want to advertise. “Social Ads” allow Facebook to target ads at people based on their friends’ activities. So if I were to make a certain purchase, mark myself a fan of a band, or rent a given DVD, and facebook knows about it, facebook could tell my friends about that and sell them a related product. David Emery was quick to write up some thoughts on how this development could impact and help bands. While the immediate option to create a clear presence for something people might be “passionate about” is clearly significant, he’s absolutely right that it’s the “Social Ads” that have the potential to truly change the social advertising game as they leverage data more completely than has been done before. The intrusive possibility of them is potentially quite scary and as clear leaders in the field, we can only hope that facebook are making privacy central to this new approach. ...

With a few projects coming to an end it turns out I have some time on my hands that I could do with filling with some paying work. I’m an experienced web developer, having been building sites and applications for eleven or twelve years now. I prefer to work with Ruby on Rails, and have been doing so for two years, but am comfortable in a range of environments and want my tools to match the project as well as possible. I frequently find myself working with drupal, and as an eight-year PHP veteran, that’s okay. ...

Restful Open ID Authentication in Identity A rails plugin combining restful_authentication and an OpenID consumer (tags: authentication openid plugins rubyonrails) Creating Printable Documents with Ruby I’ve been implementing PDF output for a rails app today. This was very handy. (tags: pdf rubyonrails)

Race/ethnicity and parent education differences in usage of Facebook and MySpace. Many-to-Many: More data for danah boyd’s research into racial/class factors in take up of differnet social networking sites. (tags: class economics ethnicity race socialnetworking socioeconomics) US Congress | drupal.org “Application Module that imports and manages Bills from the U.S. Library of Congress website as CCK nodes.” (tags: drupal government participationtools) Legislature | drupal.org “A generalized database for storing legislative data, such as bills, politicians, and votes.” (tags: drupal participationtools politics) Welcome to Debatepedia! - Debatepedia ...

blog.pmarca.com: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web Probably the best write-up on on OpenSocial so far. It seems like it may be a step in the right direction, but most of the information so far has been too confused. Done right, a way to write apps that run across the social networking sites would be great (tags: google opensocial socialnetworking) EC2 on Rails “a Ruby on Rails virtual appliance” – looking forward to playing with this ...

Amazon Dynamo: The Next Generation Of Virtual Distributed Storage A much easier to digest summary of amazon’s “highly available storage system” than Werner Vogels’ paper. (tags: amazon databases dynamo performance scalability)

Dopplr Blog » In rainbows Deceptively simple and quite lovely use of colour to supplement the written content (tags: colour dopplr navigation sparklines) Unworkable private sector ideas ’too often used in the not-for-profit sector’ - Third Sector “Neither profit nor market share are relevant to what we do, yet this doesn’t stop some folk from applying it.” – worth considering where else that applies beyond fundraising (tags: branding fundraising marketshare strategy) W I L C O: Tour Dates ...

Judging the Candidates by the Company They Keep Interesting study of the political stances of various candidates based on which other websites visitors to their sites frequented. Sadly appropriate that Hillary Clinton is considered more conservative than a Republican candidate. (tags: data politics uselections uspresidentialelections) Safety Fears Prompt New Crossing (from Haringey Independent) Great news for those of us who frequently cross Endymion Road (tags: harringay localnews trafficsafety) Murder Suspect Caught Through MySpace Wow (tags: fordevblog myspace socialnetworking) The Leaves Of The Tree Are For The Healing Of The Nations ...

The market for books about mashups has become fairly crowded over the past few years but none have really enticed me as from a casual look most seem more interested in following the trend than offering solid information. Thankfully PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects manages to slide in a good number of practical programming tips as it works its way through a variety of services. The book dedicates the majority of each chapter to more general concerns than just interfacing with the system in the chapter’s title. So Chapter 2—“Buy It On Amazon”—spends most of its time exploring XML-RPC and REST approaches and building tools to work with those different styles of interface. Similarly the next chapter spends most of its time introducing WSDL, XML Schema and SOAP before showing how they can be used with Microsoft Live Search. ...

On Tuesday evening I found myself at a google/ demos event, How Has The Internet Changed British Democracy?. Unlike most discussions about the net and democracy I’ve attended, the panel here was very ’establishment’, consisting of Demos Director Catherine Fieschi , Spectator Editor Matthew D’Ancona, Stephan Shakespeare, the founder of online polling agency YouGov, and BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson. Tom Watson MP was detained in the House of Commons, or he would have joined the panel. ...