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Friday, December 15, 2006 |
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To be continued
It's time to close this chapter of my blog and begin the
next one. Here I'd just like
to thank Steve Gillmor for bringing me to InfoWorld on a mission to
explore the blog medium and to reinvent publishing. And I'd like to thank
InfoWorld for granting me extraordinary freedom to pursue that
mission. I think I've used that freedom well, and made good progress
in the right direction. But along the way my interests broadened
beyond InfoWorld's enterprise IT charter, and I began to
overstay my welcome. Take a look at this page for
example. Scroll to the bottom and you will see that one of these
things is not like the other. A video
of a lawnmower? What's up with that?
To me it's all part of a pattern. I use commonly-available
technologies in unexpected ways to tell stories that make connections,
distill experience, and transmit knowledge. Jay Cross nailed the reason
on his blog the other day: I'm "infected with Stewart Brand's memes."
Of course, most of us who hang out on the leading edge of technology
are similarly infected. So I wind up preaching to the choir. That's
fine, and I'll keep on doing it so long as we all find it worthwhile,
but I also aim to connect with a lot of people on the trailing
edge, many of whom have yet to subscribe to an RSS feed, publish a
professionally-oriented blog, or compose a new service by stitching URLs
together. I hope that Microsoft will help me to take these ideas to
the world in a big way to the benefit of all concerned. According to
the comment thread attached to my announcement,
many of you agree. So, let's do the experiment.
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Wednesday, December 13, 2006 |
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Data formats for digital democracy: XML vs CSV
As a first experiment I grabbed the DCStat reported-crime feed for
November, sucked it into Excel 2003, consolidated incidents by day,
pivoted them on type of offense (homicide, burglary), and exported
them back out as a CSV (comma-separated value) file that Swivel could
import. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
Here's one of those pivot tables in Swivel. The auto-generated charts don't do much for this style of dataset. But the point of this week's column is that just publishing a named dataset, along with pointers to the raw data, is inherently valuable.
I imported the same data into Dabble DB where it's very easy to use grouping and filtering to make views like this one. Again the point is that the views are sharable on the web. Also, in this case, invited collaborators can tweak them.
Going through this exercise, I was struck by the distance between DCStat's namespace-rich XML formats and the CSV format that web apps like Swivel and Dabble DB want to read and write. I happen to know how to use the XML Maps feature of Excel 2003 to shred an XML file but I doubt many Excel users have ever done that. To enable ordinary citizens to explore this data, DCStat might want to offer a common-denominator CSV format in addition to the XML flavors.
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Tuesday, December 12, 2006 |
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AJAX and automation
Sean McGrath's latest column puts an AJAX spin on the age-old
struggle between the human-accessible and machine-accessible aspects
of software:
Making an application easier to use almost always means making better
use of the users ability to see; to hear; to click buttons; to access
drop down menus and so on. Unfortunately, computers themselves cannot
see or hear. This results in a most unfortunate inverse
relationship. Namely, the more visual and interactive and compelling
an application is from a user interface perspective, the harder it is
to make said application do its thing without human intervention. [Sean
McGrath: AJAX and the hidden cost of ease of use]
And yet, my latest Gmail
hack was accomplished pretty easily because, without
digging into any AJAX code at all, I was able to capture an HTTP
transaction, parameterize it, and replay it.
Now in fairness, I cheated by using the AJAX interface to emit a sample HTTP
transaction that contained a lot of stuff I could not easily have
fabricated from scratch. That's why it'll take a much smarter bear
than me to incorporate my hack into libgmail. Still, if I'd wanted to
plow through Gmail's obfuscated JavaScript source code, I might have
been able to intercept and repurpose the method driving the HTTP transaction.
For these two reasons -- the transparency of the HTTP pipeline, and
the accessibility of the JavaScript object model -- I think that AJAX
is inherently more automatable than conventional GUI apps ever have
been.
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Monday, December 11, 2006 |
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Moderated 2nd-level domains
At the ICA conference in
September I had a great talk with Edwin Bruce, who's responsible for
New Zealand's e-government initiatives. Among many other things, he
pointed out that New
Zealand has an opportunity to do some interesting things with
moderated
second-level domains under the .nz top-level domain. There are
five such domains now: .govt.nz (government), .mil.nz (military),
.iwi.nz (Maori), .parliament.nz, (parliament) and .cri.nz (Crown
Research Institute).
Because New Zealand's country-code top-level domain (ccTLD), .nz, is much more
tightly controlled than, say, .us, New Zealand's moderated 2nd-level
namespace is analogous to ICANN's notion of sponsored/chartered top-level
namespace. If you're a bank or a law office today in New Zealand,
you'll probably register under the unmoderated 2nd-level domain
.co.nz. Edwin envisions aligning the existing regulatory apparatus for
banking and law with corresponding moderated 2nd-level domains:
.bank.nz, .law.nz.
This wouldn't be an option in the US, at least not under our
ccTLD. For example, .law.us is currently held by Neustar, but .bank.us
is owned by Vishal Ved, 9335 Lee Highway, #1213, Fairfax, AL. So if we
wanted a system like the one Edwin proposes, we'd need to do it under
a new TLD.
I'm sure that's unlikely for all sorts of reasons, and what Edwin
proposes isn't even happening yet in New Zealand where it pretty
easily could. But it would be interesting to see this model tried
there. Are there other ccTLDs where it's farther along?
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Saturday, December 09, 2006 |
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Bombshell aftermath
Reading through the comments attached to yesterday's
announcement made it clear that I left a few critical questions
unasked and unanswered. Rather than continue that thread here, I'm
transplanting it to a new incarnation of my ancient personal
website. It used to be udell.roninhouse.com. Now it's jonudell.net, where I display my past
record for inspection, and this blog for new
thoughts and dialogue. I hope you'll join me there because during my
sabbatical, from Dec 15 to Jan 15, I'll be laying the foundations for what
I want to do next, and I'll appreciate all the help I can get.
For my last week here, I'll stick to InfoWorld-related knitting. But I
can't resist pointing out my favorite of all the heart-warming
reactions that poured in following yesterday's announcement. It's a
3-second video from Andy Rush, one of the switched-on instructional
technologists I met at the University of Mary Washington back in
May. Andy, you made my day!
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Friday, December 08, 2006 |
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A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft
For today's podcast
I decided to interview myself about my upcoming new gig. It's a short
episode, under six minutes, and the transcript follows.
Note: I actually meant to push this to the server later today, to synchronize with a message that will be forthcoming from Jeff Sandquist. But a mis-click on my part pushed it sooner, which means Jeff will be a bit surprised when he wakes up. Trust me, though, this is something I've been thinking carefully about for a long time, and it's very real.
Q: Your new job is with Microsoft?
A:
That's right. My last day at InfoWorld will be Friday Dec 15. On Jan
15, after a month-long sabbatical, I'll become a Microsoft
employee. My official title will be Evangelist, and I'll report to
Jeff Sandquist. He's the
leader of the team that creates Channel 9 and Channel 10,
websites that feature blogs, videos, screencasts, and podcasts for
Microsoft-oriented developers.
Q: What will your role be?
A: The details aren't nailed down, but in broad terms I've proposed to
Microsoft that I continue to function pretty much as I do now. That means
blogging, podcasting, and screencasting on topics that I think are
interesting and important; it means doing the kinds of lightweight and agile
R&D that I've always done; and it means brokering connections among people, software, information, and ideas -- again, as I've always done.
Q: Why are you doing this?
A:
I'm often described as a leading-edge alpha
geek, and that's fair. I am, and probably always will be, a member of that
club. But I'm also increasingly interested in reaching out to the
mainstream of society.
For those of us in the club, it's a golden age. With
computers and networks and information systems we can
invent new things almost as fast as we can think them up.
But we're leaving a lot of folks behind. And I'm not just talking about the
digital divide that separates the Internet haves from the have-nots. Even
among the haves, the ideas and tools and methods that some of us take for
granted haven't really put down roots in the mainstream.
Over the years I've evangelized a bunch of things to the alpha-geek
crowd: Internet groupware, blogging, syndication, tagging, web
architecture, lightweight integration,
microformats, structured search, screencasting, dynamic languages,
geographic mapping, random-access audio, and more. There's a purpose
behind all this, and Doug Engelbart saw it very clearly a long time
ago. The augmentation of human capability in these sorts of ways
isn't just some kind of geek chic. It's nothing less than
a survival issue for our species. We face some really serious
challenges. The only way we're going to be able to tackle them is to
figure out how to work together in shared information spaces.
I've chosen to align myself with Microsoft because I think it has the scale,
the resources, and the
business incentive to help me empower a lot of people to learn how to do that.
Q: Why now?
A:
At the Emerging Technology Conference in
March, Microsoft's incoming chief software architect, Ray Ozzie,
showed how LiveClipboard, the 21st-century version of the Windows
clipboard, could enable collaborative sharing of information, and
creative recombination of services, across all operating
systems, web applications, and desktop applications.
Kim Cameron, Microsoft's identity architect, is taking a similar
approach in the domain of identity, privacy, and the control of personal
information.
Jean Paoli, Microsoft's
Office XML architect, continues to pursue his lifelong dream of
empowering millions of people to create and use smarter documents.
Jim Hugunin, who created both Jython and IronPython,
is making my favorite open source scripting language, Python, a
first-class citizen of the .NET platform.
J.J. Allaire is creating a
blog-writing tool that will enable millions of people to publish
data that's reusable and intelligently searchable.
Bottom line: This isn't your father's -- or maybe your older brother's
or sister's --
Microsoft. Initiatives like these matter, they're solidly in line with
my own agenda, they're being pursued in very open ways, and I want to
help move them forward.
Q: Are you selling out, joining the
Evil Empire, and turning your back on principles you've always
championed?
A:
Wait until the evidence is in, then decide for yourself. I've been in
this game for a long time. I think my record of pragmatism and
agnosticism speaks for itself, but sometimes I like to
recall what Tim O'Reilly said in his foreword to my 1999
book on Internet groupware:
All too often, people wear their technology affiliations on their
sleeve (or perhaps on their t-shirts), much as people did with chariot
racing in ancient Rome. Whether you use NT or Linux, whether you
program in Perl or Java or Visual Basic - these are marks of
difference and the basis for suspicion. Jon stands above this
fragmented world like a giant. He has only one software religion: what
works.
I claim that was, is, and will continue to be true. If it
stops being true in the future, I expect you to hold me
accountable. But meanwhile, I hope you'll suspend disbelief until the
evidence is in.
Q: Will you be a blogger? An analyst? A developer? An educator?
A multimedia producer?
A:
All of the above. The title "evangelist" doesn't quite capture that
whole range of activities, but these are the things I do, and plan to
continue doing.
Q: Will you become Microsoft's next Robert Scoble?
A:
The way I see it, Robert played a key role in a grand experiment to
make Microsoft's development processes more transparent. Channels 9 and 10,
and the hundreds of Microsoft blogs throughout the organization, are
evidence that the experiment is succeeding.
I've proposed a different experiment. I'll continue to be a channel
for alpha geeks. But I also want to become a channel for a whole lot
of civilians in the mainstream. And above all, I want to build
bridges between these two groups.
Q: Will you continue to use Firefox, Gmail, and OS X?
A:
Sure. I'll also continue to use Microsoft technologies as I always
have, and I'll keep on pushing the boundaries of cross-pollination and
interoperability. The most powerful mashups don't just mix code and
data, they mix cultures. I hope this will be an opportunity for me to
do that in a way that benefits everybody.
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Thursday, December 07, 2006 |
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General-purpose intermediation
The solution I cobbled together speaks volumes about the fundamental openness of Web applications. To find out how Gmail creates a distribution list, I logged in, created a list interactively using Gmail's form, and captured the resulting HTTP transaction using one of the handiest tools in my Web developer's kit, Firefox's LiveHTTPHeaders extension.
The next step was to replay that transaction outside of the browser. I
rearranged its elements -- an URL, a chunk of HTTP POST data, and a set
of HTTP headers including a cookie packed with crucial name/value
pairs -- as a command-line invocation of another of the handiest tools
in my kit: curl. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
In this week's column, I discuss how the ability to capture and replay
HTTP traffic enabled me to discover and exploit an implicit Gmail
API. But there's a general principle underlying this hack, and it
seems to me that after all these years we've barely begun to exploit
it.
Consider the scenario described in this
item, for example. I would love to be able to recapture the
sequence of HTTP transactions behind a particularly
interesting search scenario, but I never logged them. In the comment
thread, aristus notes that one solution is a Firefox plugin called slogger, which I've
used on and off since, let's see, tap, tap, tap, October
2004.
I haven't used slogger for a while because
it quit working for me on OS X a while ago, and I haven't been able to
resurrect it since. But slogger notwithstanding, there's a much deeper
and more general thing that ought to be happening on every web-enabled
system. It
ought to be trivial to attach an observer and/or filter to HTTP
pipelines. Among other things, it could shovel data into
a search engine so that I could instantly recall a remembered
transaction by search term, by date, or by site.
I mentioned this on a recent call with the folks reponsible for
Vista's desktop search. When they mentioned extensible "protocol
handlers" I got really excited, imagining a general mechanism for
echoing HTTP (or SMTP) traffic through a search indexer. It turned out
that isn't what they meant. They were talking about supporting file
formats, not protocols. But I've always thought echoing HTTP or SMTP
traffic through a searcher is a great idea, and I still do.
HTTP intermediaries are also an incredible untapped resource for
developers and testers of software running in environments that range
from plain old HTML-over-HTTP to formal XML web services. For the
latter domain, the folks (disclosure: my friends) at
Mindreef are
doing really interesting work based on the ability to capture and
replay SOAP packets.
I've long envisioned a general-purpose ipchains-like capability,
for all operating systems, that would make it trivial to attach
observers, filters, and transformers to bread-and-butter protocols
like HTTP and SMTP. Is it just me, or is this a gigantic missed
opportunity?
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