Web-Services

The highly anticipated last.fm/audioscrobbler web services are now live (in beta). For now they seem to consist of XML serializations of a variety of user, artist, tag, group, and forum data, but with far more data than they’ve provided in this form before. As I discuss a couple of music-related projects with friends, I’m sure these’ll come in useful. I’m a little surprised not to see FOAF profiles listed within that page (instead there’s a less standard XML offering), especially since FOAF is available, but it may be that they’re holding off because RDF is to come soon. ...

I wanted to get a few thoughts on this written up, and thought this as good a place as any to post it… Once the code is a little more stable, I’ll probably post it somewhere for others to use. The first phase of the " Collage" experiment has been very successful. Less than a week after the festival it had indexed around 1400 postings, largely made up of over 1100 flickr photos. It’s helped us get a good overview of online discussion of Greenbelt and provided a great supplement to the photographs and reviews already gathered on the festival website. On top of that, it required very little attention over the festival weekend, which is a benefit not to be underestimated. And ‘greenbelt2005’ rose as high as #3 in the top tags of its given week on flickr. ...

Greenbelt is Europe’s leading Christian Arts Festival, and an event I’ve been involved in for over a decade now. This year, we’re trying something new (to this event) by encouraging everyone who attends the festival to tag materials relating to the festival with the tag ‘greenbelt2005’, focussing primarily on flickr, del.icio.us, and of course technorati. We’ll soon be offering a simple interface to explore the contributed content through the festival’s website, but my hope is that we will be able to open up the data we collect to introduce more people to the concept of a ‘remixable’ web. It’s all very last minute, and details are still being worked out, but I’m excited by the potential to open up the concepts to a new audience. Any suggestions of ways to work that out or examples of other projects that have opened up content to a broadly non-techie audience would be much appreciated. ...

A couple of weeks ago I attended my first Grand Rapids Perl Mongers meeting in order to hear a presentation about the City of Grand Rapids’ efforts to build a GIS driven by perl and hosted on linux. The presentation was interesting, though the coverage of the technology used didn’t dig much deeper than “we used perl and linux because they’re free and we had staff who advocated them” and “this is all done in perl,” and I didn’t get a sense of a broad vision for the future potential of such a system (by contrast, the Mayor’s speech when launching the latest phase of citywide WiFi testing demonstrated a broad vision for enhancing city services through the use of pervasive technology). ...

For the past few weeks I’ve been meaning to play with myGmaps, and last night I finally got the opportunity. I’d introduced a map view to Grand Rapids WiFi a few months ago, but I’ve never been entirely satisfied with the map in use or the flexibility of the zoom, so I decided to explore what it would take to move that data onto a google map. Generating the required XML was very straightforward. Between this piece at Engadget and the tools at myGmaps it was very simple to add a new Smarty template to the site and get everything up and running. It’s a shame google didn’t go with some more standardised vocabularies (it would be wonderful to be able to pipe the existing RDF version of the site straight in), but at least the format is simple. ...

In between frantic work periods (there’s a chance I’ll launch/complete five sites this week…) I’ve been exploring the new features at upcoming.org. The site’s potential has certainly taken a leap forward with the addition of REST-based webservices, tags, SMS alerts, and private events. It’d be great if as a next step we could see some geolocation data added for the venues listed, making it even easier to integrate with other tools/sites like the ones I was describing previously. In an ideal world, we might even see the site picking up its content from feeds scattered around venue, fan, and other sites, but for now we’re still lacking the standardized vocabularies to smooth that process. In the meantime, it shouldn’t be too hard to write a script that parses local feeds and uses the event.add call to ensure they’re on upcoming… ...

Discussion of ’the Semantic Web’ and ‘Web Services’ rarely dies down, but it seems like there’s been more than usual of late. As analysts yet again predict that this year will the “The Year of Web Services” more people are beginning to agree that such hype isn’t making any real impact on the use of service-based architectures. One of the better comments of late is Danny Ayers’ call to start seeing web applications as “features of the web” rather than standalone entities. The Semantic Web will never evolve if we merely see web services as ways to escape writing certain pieces of code ourselves; we need instead to be trying to grasp at how the whole might work. ...