Distributing ideas

The site, “If this then that” offers trigger actions as a web service. It works with objects it calls recipes and channels.

Recipes are the “if this then that” relationship, and channels define the this and that. It has a long list of pre-canned channels and recipes, but sadly NOT an output RSS/XML channel.

I have today, just created a trigger that takes my blog feed and posts it to facebook. Obviously I need to test it. This is part of the exploration on how to rebuild my personal streams which have been damaged by Facebook, Google and Twitter’s attempts to enclose our speech into their “secret gardens”.

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Hurrah for Feedly

I have been playing with feedly as replacement for google reader. I am rather taken with it. It’s a browser plugin and an app. on many mobiles.


As with other replacements, I have reorganised my feed tags/categories to create better groups. I have dropped a bunch of feeds that I wasn’t reading or were broken. Its “Today” feature allows me to keep up with the news. It’s availability on the phone helps with this, because I don’t have to open a laptop, I can read my news without getting a seat on the train. Feedly encourages me to treat news as a ‘river’ and so my reader is not cluttered with loads of stuff that I might want some day which I am learning to like. It lacks the social features that google reader had at it’s best but they’d walked away from them. I have made some suggestions at their user voice site. I am impressed. I hope they adopt some of the ideas that I have suggested or supported. A twitter client would be good, but I can live without it.

My wiki project page is here…. …

Help, looking for an XML widget for wordpress

It seems the big boys, i.e. google, facebook, who it now seems own friend feed and twitter are all changing their services and APIs. Friendfeed has stopped parsing twitter because of the API changes, it also seems to have stopped polling my delicious feed. My home grown mingle is still polling my bookmarks, blogs and pictures, but it’s lost my google reader news posts and you tube favourites some time ago; google turned them off as they sought to make Google+ a secret garden. My booklist site, living social, packed in a while ago. All in all, my efforts to collect my contributions on the internet into a single place are falling apart. …

A bad week for RSS

RSSI reckon it’s been a bad week for the open web. Google have announced they’re shit canning not just Google Reader but also CalDAV and Twitter ran one of their API Version 1.0 blackouts. Both offer alternatives; I am unsure that they are as open as their predecessors. Twitter certainly are withdrawing support for RSS, and Google have over the last 18 months been rebuilding their technology as a secret garden. …

Sea Lawyering

A couple of years ago, Simon Phipps, introduced me to the idea that any system contains its own counter system, which he describes as a game. In an article I am writing, I summarise this as,

any rule set, inspires its own games

Simon explores this in his Webmink Articles,  The Sentinel Principle and more effectively in The Open by Rule Benchmark.

He also explores the feasibility of realistically building “fair use” interpreters in an article on his Computer World blog, Fair Use Robots? Science Fiction!

In this last article he talks about “Quantifying Discretion”. The difficulty in building systems to undertake this work is based on the fact that at the edge of consideration, its exceptionally difficult, and that it may be that these decisions are not best amenable to a Wisdom of Crowds or the application of machine intelligence. They are best taken by trained and experienced and independent individuals, or Judges as we might call them, although we have usually chosen to ensure that a jury of peers is involved in our courts.

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Can Free Software save the public money?

Bern City Council have adopted an Open Source software procurement policy.

This reported by long time Open Source campaigner, Simon Phipps in his Computer World blog. It seems, as in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, that this decision had a champion, in this case, a Councillor called Matthias Stürmer. Phipps story details the bureaucratic politics around the trigger decision which was the Microsoft licence renewal agreements. The size of the agreement required Council approval and the Council had been moving towards preferring Open Source IT. The Council review requirement led Microsoft to reduce the cost to a value below the review threshold and the renewal was approved without the Council approval. The Council was, it seems, unamused and took action to ensure that the policy preferences of the elected council were to be obeyed in future. Phipps reports, …

Mobile Future, can Yahoo! really show the way?

Business Insider reports that Yahoo CEO Marisa Meyer is considering giving iphones to all Yahoo! Employees. It seems she agrees with those in the company who feel that their IT department’s commitment to Blackberry is holding them back and that their engineers would benefit from using devices that they aim to deliver services to; not Blackberrys. This was known at Sun Microsystems as “Eating our own dog food” The article finished with what I assume to be a Business Insider editorial comment,

“Yahoo should be innovating for the future, and BlackBerrys are not part of the future. They are part of the quickly fading past.”

The article also states that Meyer is not so wedded to Apple, and might consider Android. The unspoken question is whether Yahoo! is part of the quickly fading past.

On another note, I use all three devices, although the Apple device is an ipod touch and since like everyone I am unhappy with what I have, and am already looking forward to replacing both the phones. …

Code is not Property: Official!

Wired reports that, three days ago,  the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal has declared that code is not property and cannot therefore be stolen; there is no intent to deprive the owner of the object’s use. They also ruled that the perpetrator, there is no doubt that the code was removed from Goldman Sachs network, could not be prosecuted under the US Economic Espionage Act since the code in question was not used in commerce. I don’t actually know what the code did, but we can be sure that it was used in commerce, or it was a regulatory compliance program. If it didn’t have one of these two purposes, Goldman Sachs wouldn’t be doing it, and wouldn’t have wanted to keep it secret.

Does this mean that only traded software can be the object of the espionage act? If so I am not sure this is where we want to be.

Part of Goldman Sachs’ problem is that they wanted to keep the code secret and there are many reasons to want to do so. However patent and copyright protection require the intellectual property owner to publish their ideas, or the expression of their ideas. Another part of the problem is that people wanted to see Aleynikov go to prison and breach of employee confidentiality wasn’t sufficient to get him there.

As techdirt.com reports in their article,

Still, the overall ruling here is good, though it could have been more complete.

I wonder if there will be further appeals, but it’s an important stake in the ground. Copyright infringement is not theft.

This was also covered at engadget.com. …