Archive for the 'RSS' Category

Two new toys: Nabaztag and Chumby

Published
by
Cloud
on 15/7/2008
in Electronics, Internet, Photos, RSS, Social Media, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

As you may know, I’m a bit of a gadget freak. I haven’t gotten around to blogging about my Nokia 770 internet tablet (which I got cheap last year and happily use to check e-mail and listen to internet radio via radioten.com) or my little wifi-enabled Nikon S51c digital camera, but last week I acquired two new friends in my office, a Nabaztag and a Chumby.

The Nabaztag is a wifi enabled “rabbit”, that can read out text and RSS feeds, plays music, displays lights to represent different conditions (e.g. weather, new mail), and it has an RFID reader in its ears which can enable the detection of different objects (e.g. it could read an RFID-enabled book to you if you wave it by the ears of the rabbit). While some aren’t happy, I think it’s a cool device with many applications for those who may not want or need a video interface. My Nabaztag is called Babbitty.

The Chumby has been touted as an Internet alarm clock, but it’s much more than that. It has a touch screen which displays and allows you to interact with a set of multimedia widgets which can be grouped into channels. For example, my default channel shows my Flickr photos, tweets from my Twitter contacts, an NHK-style clock, and news from the BBC and the Onion. There’s even a talking Tim O’Reilly widget in there somewhere! I got it from international-orders.com, and named it after me (Cloud)!

You can see them both above. I haven’t gotten them to talk to each other yet, but many things are now possible…

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #7

Published
by
Cloud
on 5/4/2008
in Blogs, DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, Internet, Ireland, NUI Galway, Podcasts, RSS, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Software, Web 2.0 and WebCamp
. 0 Comments

20080403a.png It’s been three months since my last round-up of all things SIOC-ed, so here is entry number seven in the series:

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

XTech 2008, May 6th-9th 2008, Dublin, Ireland

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/1/2008
in Blogs, DERI, FOAF, General, Internet, Ireland, Podcasts, RSS, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0 and Wikis
. 3 Comments

Call for Participation for XTech 2008

Proposals for presentations and tutorials are invited for XTech 2008, Europe’s premier web technologies conference. The deadline for submitting proposals is January 25th, 2008.

XTech 2008 will be held from May 6-9th 2008, in Dublin, Ireland.

XTech’s theme this year is “The Web on the Move”, focusing on the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet. We will explore the benefits, issues, practicalities and fun of a web built on open standards, open source and commodity technology.

XTech presentations should inspire, educate and challenge. Your audience will be people like you, responsible for steering the technological direction of their organizations and the web as a whole.

Last year’s schedule can be viewed on the XTech 2007 web site.

Please direct any questions to the conference chair, Edd Dumbill.

View the calls for participation and submit a proposal

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Social platforms
    • Design patterns for social software
    • Social network interoperability
    • Internet application platforms (Facebook F8, OpenSocial, etc.)
  • Identity management
    • OpenID
    • Practical security
    • OAuth
  • Ajax
    • jQuery, YUI, other toolkits
    • Offline applications
    • Comet
    • Professional Javascript
    • Flex
  • The web of data
    • Collective intelligence
    • Semantic technologies
    • Search
    • Markup and meaning
    • Freebase, Twine, Google Base
    • The place of XML on the web
  • Data and databases
    • Client-side databases
    • REST-oriented databases (e.g. CouchDB)
    • XML and RDF
    • Messaging architectures
    • XQuery
  • Operations and programming
    • Web application frameworks
    • Virtualization and appliances
    • Application scaling
    • Multicore and concurrency oriented programming
  • Mobile devices
    • Commodity mobiles
    • Android, iPhone
    • Hardware hacking and personal prototyping
    • Geolocation
    • Getting the mobile mindset

(Note: DERI will be a co-host of this event.)

Zimbie - notify and get notified about content via IM

Published
by
Cloud
on 9/8/2007
in General, Internet, Ireland, RSS, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

I was talking this morning to Sean from Zimbie, a spinoff from WIT’s TSSG group, about their Zimbie applications and services. Although it took me a while to get my head around it, and it is still in early stages, Zimbie is a nice idea whereby you can send notifications via IM to anyone who is interested in your blog or other online content (at the moment, it mainly works through RSS updates but I am told it will be extended to include other update methods). Think Twitter or Jaiku via IM, except for any content (not just microblog entries).

So how does it work?

Client. Basically, there is a Zimbie client and a Zimbie bot. I am not sure if the client application is needed for those who don’t want to run Zimbie bots, but it acts like a normal Jabber IM client. It uses Jabber, so is compatible with Google Talk, but has yet to be extended to other IM protocols.

Bot. The Zimbie client is required if you want to set up Zimbie bots (”Zimbots”). The idea is that you create a bot that will notify anyone who adds the bot to their IM contact list about any updates to your site (or set of sites). So, in the screenshot below, I set up a Zimbie bot for barcampgalway at gmail dot com. Then, I configured the bot with details of my RSS feed (in this case, for the BarCamp Galway blog). Anyone who adds barcamp at gmail dot com to their contacts lists in their Jabber-compatible IM client will be notified when the BarCamp Galway blog is updated. Voila!

20070809b.png

My impressions…

The Zimbie client is easy to install and use. The Zimbie bot, less so. It works just fine, and the Zimbie bot demo video does a good job of explaining how to set up a bot, but I think that this may be a bit complicated for most, and editing XML is okay for someone like me, but may not be to all tastes. I also assume you must either leave your Zimbot running or else people will only be notified of updates when you start your computer / Zimbie application running again, but that’s not a big issue and will suit most.

But it is still an early release, and it’s really nice to see applications and ideas like this coming out of research institutes. Well done, and I wish all at Zimbie success with it. You can keep up to date with developments at the Zimbie blog.