Blog posts

Shortly after writing my previous entry on consumerism, I began reading Jedediah Purdy’s “For Common Things” and was reminded of an aspect of ‘our logo’ thinking that I had neglected to cover. Purdy discusses the idea of the “Free Agent” (the wealthy individual able to entirely construct their own identity) extolled by Fast Company and Tom Peters’ corollary idea of “Brand You.” The concept of personal branding in the self-promotional sense has been around throughout history but, as Purdy highlights, its contemporary articulation involves building the fiction of the ‘autonomous’ individual, one whose pursuit of success trumps any concern for the public sphere. ...

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with The Image Shoppe, the Grand Rapids design and communications agency behind the Local First materials, among other things. Between other projects we’ve been working on redeveloping their site and the first phase of that is live now. As time allows we’ll be adding more work samples, so keep an eye out for that. And after a local process of revisions we now have the new Calvin College International Admissions website live. I’ve worked with the admissions staff to completely rework this aspect of their site with a wealth of information aimed at students living outside the US and Canada. The image gallery work I talked about a few weeks ago is part of this project, but will actually sit elsewhere in the Calvin site so isn’t live yet. ...

Services_Technorati 0.6.3 has just been released. The main change this time around is that the suite of unit tests are now complete for basic queries. I may add more at a later date to test handling of optional parameters, and more will be needed once Attention.XML support comes online, but for now they do their job. Following the completion of the tests I found a few little bugs which are now corrected. They mostly related to the testing of parameters and the building of cache filenames. I also added a patch from Ryan that improves the cache checking. ...

Responding to an article in Slate about Newsmashing, Alan Taylor wrote a post entitled " newsmashing with delicious" talking about the possibility of annotating web pages by posting comments in del.icio.us’ ’extended’ field. These annotations could then be retrieved by any visitor to the site using a bookmarklet that will retrieve the del.icio.us entries for a given URL. As someone points out in the comments on that post, there is some resemblance between this and the ’technorati this’ bookmarklet that lets you quickly find incoming links to a given URL. Unlike technorati, this method makes it easy to quickly comment on a URL without having to make use of your own site. (and you can of course then retrieve your del.icio.us RSS feed and use it on your site). While this doesn’t allow the precision annotations of individual page elements discussed in the original Slate piece, it could well be an interesting tool. ...

I’ve been really enjoying watching the use of the web around the UK General Election. From what media coverage I’ve been able to glean, it’s not seemed so heated as the blogging-focussed US election furore, but instead a number of sites have appeared that focus not so much on expressing opinions as to provide a space for conversation. Much conversation, particularly political discussion, is a fleeting thing. With a few exceptions, the news media and ’the public consciousness’ have short attention spans. While many of us would like to find ways to use new technology to support a deepening of public debate that will necessarily require a lengthening of such debate, some things that are only of short-term interest deserve to be captured and there’s a possibility that by doing that we’ll learn more of how to engage those longer-term discussions. ...

I’ve been really enjoying watching the use of the web around the UK General Election. From what media coverage I’ve been able to glean, it’s not seemed so heated as the blogging-focussed US election furore, but instead a number of sites have appeared that focus not so much on expressing opinions as to provide a space for conversation. Much conversation, particularly political discussion, is a fleeting thing. With a few exceptions, the news media and ’the public consciousness’ have short attention spans. While many of us would like to find ways to use new technology to support a deepening of public debate that will necessarily require a lengthening of such debate, some things that are only of short-term interest deserve to be captured and there’s a possibility that by doing that we’ll learn more of how to engage those longer-term discussions. ...

After far too much time battling interface oddities at expedia.com I am delighted to be able to say that I have booked flights to Greenbelt! It’ll be another whirlwind trip, arriving at Heathrow early Friday morning and leaving Tuesday lunchtime. But so long as I’m armed with a plentiful supply of sleeping pills for the flights, I’m sure it’ll all work out wonderfully.

Services_Technorati 0.6.2alpha is now available through PEAR. Despite the minor version number increment, this version contains quite a few changes. The class no longer instantiates its own cache object, and instead the factory (which should be the default interface to instantiate an object) will accept a pre-existing cache object. For the purposes of forward compatibility, the factory also now takes an argument to specify which API version should be used. ...

A few days, Tantek posted about the latest microformat specification hReview, a set of attributes that can be applied to an html document to indicate it as a review and describe its content appropriately. I responded and skimmed the spec, intending to offer some comments before it went public. In the end, work intervened, and the spec is now publicly available on the technorati wiki. Tantek and Niall have the announcement. My main cause for interest is Grand Rapids WiFi, where reviews are currently available in RDF and HTML formats. In contrast to the RDF representation, the HTML is considerably lacking in the semantics department. In general, hReview looks like it will be an excellent way to add semantic data to that markup and I’ll probably make those changes over the weekend. ...

A few posts in the past few months have touched on the dilemma of those seeking a post-consumerist way of living. In response to a piece Ed referenced I explored a little of the difficulty of breaking free of consumerism’s more insidious traits without simply slipping into an identity simply defined by a different set of consumerist choices, and in response to Thomas Hine’s book “I Want That”, I talked of how a phenomenon he warned could similarly be a more minimalist consumerism might also be an example of a more conscious way of living. ...