While in Cape Town Dave showed me this video. (Thanks Dave!) I’ve now watched it over and over. It is simply brilliant. If there is one video you should watch (specially if you have or are going to have kids) it is this one!
It is a scary thought how way behind our school curriculum still is and at what pace our world is changing at the moment. I agree with Ken that conventional schools should seriously learn to adapt.
Another statement I simply LOVE is “If you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never come up with anything original.” So often we are guilty by pressuring our kids not to fail. Whether in sport or academic, we live in a society where failure and mistakes bare a very low tolerance , which is so wrong! Even ourselves. We’re too scared to do something new as we’re scared we would fail. It is sad actually!
Its a long video (almost 20 minutes), but well worth watching.
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Recently I have made a getting started guide to Afrigator. Jason Bagley did a similar post about Amatomu. One real problem is that people feel intimidated and in the dark when it comes to new technology. There are plenty of “getting started” information if you know where to look! How about we start a site/blog where we bring together all the “getting started” information? No, I’m definitely NOT suggesting a fourth blog aggregator! A basic web site/blog we can point new comers and interested people to to help them on their way with the various new services, tools and techniques.
As Tresblue says, I’m passionate about solving the skills requirements rather than solving the skills solution. So I think what we need is a proper community driven project thats aim is to expand the community and teach newbies about the wonderful worldwide web. I unfortunately do not have the time to do it myself, otherwise I would have. Besides, this is not something one person or company could drive!
Not so long ago, the Telecoms Action Group ran a campaign where community members donated a couple of bucks to run a advertisement in the Mail & Gaurdian. The Spread Firefox community did the same thing in the New York Times. Apparently it works quite well! Maybe we can do something similar?
So if you feel like or have done a basic introduction to some new technology, you submit it to the site/blog. We build a fairly comprehensive database of guides to various subjects like browsers, blogging, podcasting, photo and video sharing, aggregating, etc… We then get pledges from the community. Once we have enough money to buy ad space, we do it.
In return for your efforts, every contributor, whether they’ve contributed money or content, get some link love. (and we all know that is one thing our community love…)
If you think this could work and would be keen to get involved, let me know. I am too busy to start or manage such a project, but would love to get involved. I would be more than happy to submit my old tutorials and any new ones to a site like this.
The rel-tagmicroformat is a very basic and easy to implement microformat. It basically link together other content tagged with the same keywords. Tags are very prominent on our two local favorite sites Amatomu and Muti. Handy stuff…
When you do a blog post, you can create tags by simply entering links at the bottom of your posts. Technorati tags is very popular and lots of blogs implement those. If you look at any of my posts on this blog, you will see them. They look like this:
It does not do much apart from if you click one of those tags, they take you to the Technorati web site and shows you all the latest blog posts tagged with the same words. Cool, sure, but what has that got to do with microformats and how can that be of any use?
As you can see, you can enter some tags to tag your submission. This works fine accept a lot of people do not enter any tags and other come along and do it for them.
What Muti can do at a later stage is to rather parse the post that is being submitted and look for the rel-tag microformat. It can then put those tags in by default without you having to do it! Nice, eh?
Same goes for Amatomu although they already do something like this. I’m not sure though if they use the microformat rel-tag specification, but their tags is pretty nifty and relevant! Well done boys!
Making a rel-tag:
When you do a normal link you would do it like this:
WOW! That was simple, eh? Just be extremely cautious. According to microformat standards, the tag name is NOT specified by the word between your HTML <a href> </a> tags! It looks at the last segment of the URL. It does NOT take kind to query strings! So you cannot do your rel-tags like this:
If you use Flock to blog, then it creates those tags automatically for you. Another good reason to look into Flock
Conclusion
rel-tags is a simple format. It could become very useful once social bookmarking sites adopt the standards and start utilising them to make their submission processes simpler. The problem is to get everyone to add rel-tags to their blog posts. If these guys (Amatomu and Muti) are going to implement parsers for it, it would be useless if only 5% of blogs actually tag their posts. There must be a much greater adoption for it to become really handy!
No, no, nothing to do with any awards! That you’ll find elsewhere… This time its REAL advice for Stormhoek that can come in REAL handy for them in future! So, Graham, Chris and the boys, some feedback would be great!
In my quest to extend my knowledge of microformats, I stumbled upon a site this weekend that is a wine 2.0 site that lets you register and enable you to review your favorite wines. (See: http://corkd.com) These member reviews are then published on their site using the hReview microformat. (Cru master, you might as well listen too!)
So how can all this benefit Stormhoek? Let me give you some free advice Stormhoekers! You get some development company (like E active, for example! ) to develop you something that will regularly check your wine’s pages on Cork’d for new reviews (or other wine sites if they implement the hReview microformat). Or you implement an interface that will let bloggers submit URL’s to be pinged for the hReview microformat and save it into a review table on your database. You can then with minimum efforts keep track of what people in the blogosphere and elsewhere say about your del.icio.us, lovely wine! You can select the best reviews and have a page with links back to the original posts somewhere on your blog.
This is a very simplistic way of doing it, but it could come in handy to keep track of all thats been said of you and could work as some handy Web PR+, don’t you think?
At the present time, if you are looking for a new job, you will go to sites like PNet,Career Junction or Monster and register with them. You will have to spend quite a lengthy time creating your CV on their site. Every 6 months or so you’ll have to go to all these sites to update your CV just so things are looking current. Hmmm… not ideal is it?
Introducing hResume!hResume is a microformat that defines a standard for your CV. Now lets suppose everyone gets with the times and support microformats. Lets say someone created a site where you can create your CV in the hResume format and distribute it from the particular site. Or you can create it using this Wordpress plug-in! You will now have one CV in one place which you need to keep updated.
Now lets pretend all the eRecruitment web sites can parse and read the hResume microformat. All you now need to do is go to the eRecruitment web site, submit the URL of your CV and viola! Your CV is updated in all the sites you register with! Wouldn’t THAT be something.
One problem with existing eRecruitment web sites is that ALL of them thats been established for a long time have their own proprierty CV format. In other words, PNet’s CV looks a lot different to Career Junction’s. These sites have got thousands and thousands of CV’s. For them to change their proprierty format is going to be a BIG pain in the butt and can prove a costly exercise… Unless they can find a way of extracting data they need and convert the hResume to their proprierty formats. That could work.
LinkedIn is the front runner and already formulates profiles in the hResume microformat. There is one international site I’ve came across that supports the format called emurse. How long will it be before South African sites adopt these technologies? I’ve talked to some prominent recruiters and their feeling towards Career Junction is that you would sooner squeeze blood from a stone than getting them to play along… I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
So lets look at an exmaple that hits close to home. Lets make a cherry pie using hot ingredients off the shelves today. So you take 250ml of chopped Cherrypicka, mix in a pinch of your own blog and deep fry it in some boiling Muti.
Cherrypicka is a local new service that allows you to buy products at way below the retail price, use the product and then review it to tell others and the guy whose product it was what you think. Kick-ass idea!
Now instead of you reviewing it by sending an email to the Cherrypickas or doing it on their site, you use the hReview microformat to create a blog post (that is if you have your own blog). You then send your permalink using a pingback API (much like Technorati) to notify Cherrypicka that you have reviewed a product bought from their site. Cherrypicka’s API then parses the post, picks up the hReview and saves it to their database for display on their site. Now the product is getting double the exposure. Muti comes along and build in something that scans submissions for the hReview microformat and should it find one it “files” it in a special section on the Muti site dedicated to reviews. We can now go to Muti and read the reviews there and vote it up or down. Now the product gets triple exposure.
Google decides to implement a microformat search engine, indexes your blog post, picks up the review and saves it to their microformat seach engine. Someone goes to microformats.google.com (hypothetical, remember?) search for reviews on condoms for example and picks up the Pronto Condoms reviewed by someone who bought it from Cherrypicka. Who knows how much more exposure the product can get now?!
So how does the dish taste?! Leaves a subtle sweet taste in my mouth. HMMMM…
This is a simple example. Apply the same concept to movies that you might want to review or events that you attended. Really powerful stuff! All we need now is a local Microformats search engine…
So now that you all know exactly what microformats is (read: Web3.0 (The Semantic Web) building blocks), it is time to look at some of the practical benefits thereof.
Before I start, I should mention that Google is actually a slow adopter of the technology. They probably have good reason for not adopting the technology yet, but if you look at the benefits below, I really hope they change their minds soon! Yahoo! Localsupport it already, so I’ll play with it and do another post later when time allows for it. (Unfortunately, Yahoo! Local does not include much of Africa…)
So lets take the analogy of the 27dinner with their events published in the hCalendar microformat format. We add a new microformat called hReview which is used by all the Uber Geeks blogging about 27dinners. (From the microformats site: hReview is a simple, open, distributed format,suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses,events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is oneof several microformats open standards.)
Google now indexes the web sites and sees, “w00t! Here is some microformats on this page! Better save it somewhere special…” So it picks out the formatted data and stores it for use in their microformat search engine page. (Lets just make believe that they have a thing called microformats.google.com, since there is not such a thing yet, its only MAKE BELIEVE! Clear? Right!)
So you have heard of this thing called 27dinners and want to know a little more. You go over to microformats.google.com and you enter 27dinner. Instead of returning all other blog’s results with 27dinner in it, it will return only the results formatted. It could return a page with subcategories for formal reviews about the past 27dinners and a subcategory listing future events of the 27dinners. If it really wants to be fancy, Google will allow you to save the future 27dinner events there-and-then to your Google Calendar so you don’t double book for that date and all that without even typing anything but your search words.
In other words, microformats will allow Google to UNDERSTAND that the event details on the page is an EVENT and that REVIEWS on other’s blogs is formal REVIEWS and not random rants of how good or bad the events was or simply someone that said, “Hey, Killroy was here (at the 27dinner)”.
Oh and before I forget, my favorite browser Flock has a cool microformats extension called Flocktails. Go and install Flock then install the extension and check it out!
Some interesting questions were asked this weekend. So I guess the correct question should be: “Why do you Muti?” Is it solely to drive traffic to your site? If that is the main reason then you are doing it for all the wrong reasons, since it is bad mutiquette to Muti your own content. So if it is not to drive traffic, why do you Muti?
Is right reason to see what others find interesting? Although a good and noble reason, I don’t think its a good enough reason since not many people find stuff I’m interested in interesting. We’ve all seen why Digg has become the center of social bookmarking rants and we should really be careful of this not happening to our local favorite.
How can we prevent this from happening? Lots have been said about Technorati and how crappy it has become, but there are lots of great features that could potentially make Muti great! Two features I love is 1) Watchlists and 2) Tagged feeds.
1) Watchlists works as follows: You specify a keyword or a URL and that gets saved with your profile so you can visit your watchlists and it should show you the latest results tagged with your specified keywords or the latest submissions by the specified URL. All it really is is a saved search on specific tags (or URLs). A simple concept, yet not often implemented.
2) Tagged feeds: You search for specific tags and can RSS feed them to your favorite feed reader for the exact same reasons as watchlists.
This would ensure that I get relevant content that would be to my liking. I’m not into politics at all. I do not necessarily want to see political submissions. I can filter it out by setting up technology specific whatchlists which is to my liking. This might make the adoption of Muti go a lot faster, since newcomers might visit Muti once and see nothing of interest to them there and leave only to never return!
Another benefit this could hold is to filter out spam. Tyler had a f’king great idea to tag spam submissions with the tag “spam” so it can be identified. Now tag “spam” is too general, since I might submit something related to spam and tag it likewise. What can be done is to tag it with “mutispam” and set up a watch that would never show me submissions tagged with “mutispam”. Great idea, but what if some asshole go and tag everything but his own posts with mutispam? So the plan is not foolproof. (As Tresblue loves to quote: “If you think your plan is foolproof you have seriously underestimated the ingeniuty of fools!“) We need to find a way to work around it and find a suitable solution.
The bigger Muti gets the more we will run into some new obstacles. Its how we are going to overcome those obstacles that will determine the success of Muti. And knowing Neville, he will always be open for suggestions.
PS: Kudus to Google for their Cricket World Cup logo!!
I went to muti.co.za yesterday morning and again this morning and just realised, I’m going there right reason! I go there to see what is happening. What is news and news worthy. If you have a look at the stats pages, you will see that this week alone there was 109 submission (at least by the time I was looking) and most of the submissions was on things I like and find useful! I have most blogs feeded to my RSS reader. It is easy for me to stay on top of whats new(s) in the blogosphere. Trawling through the news sites is a little more work. I have them fed too, but they have a lot more to go through. Now, I rather go to Muti and see they’ve got a lot I’m passionate about covered! I’m really starting to see the value in it and starting to love it! (Well, I’ve always loved it, but you get the idea.)
What I’m finding interesting is the Stats page (on the main menu bar). It is interesting to see who is submitting what and earning how many kudus. Maybe it would really do Muti good if they got onto the competition bandwagon like Quirk did with their SA Blog Awards logo competition and get a company to sponsor some prizes for the top submitters and top kudu earners in a month. April will be a great month.
“Don’t be an April’s fool to miss this one…”
Oh, and note to Neville and Quirk and everyone else having communities voting for something, the muti platform could work great. Neville, how about you create subdomains for competitions, submit the nominees in there and let the voting public go like/dislike on it.
Let me explain:
We have the SA Blog Awards happening.
So you create a voting station for the competition at sablogawards.muti.co.za
You submit all the nominees in there and tag them appropriately.
We the public can vote our favs up or down as we like them or not.
Maybe it would not work EXACTLY with the same model muti is currently working on, but that can be tweaked! It will do wonders for Muti’s exposure…
Dave actually had a brave, wonderful idea with muti too…(Therefore this post. Credit goes to you, buddy!) Thanks Dave, you actually got me thinking about this. I will let you tell the folks the idea…
Since you were born, you have been experimenting with almost everything. You did silly things all in the name of (human growth) sience. Sometimes painful lessons were learnt. Most of the times new, great things were discovered.
I apply this in my daily life. I have never stopped experimenting. (Must add I keep the experimenting to my work, since thats my passion.)
Recently, I rediscovered Linux. Ubuntu to be exact. I’m loving every minute of it! A while back I talked to Neville Newey and ever since he told me that Muti was done in Python, I got that restless feeling in my ass. I am now spending “waiting time” looking deeper into Python.
Lucky for me Ubuntu with their Synaptic Package Manager made it extremely easy to set up CherryPy (CherryPy is a pythonic, object-oriented HTTP framework.) So, I’ll be experimenting forward with CherryPy, Django and the likes. I’ve heard NOTHING but great things about Django, by the way. Wins all the web framework shoot-outs. Even kicks the mother of frameworks’ ass! (Ruby on Rails)
Well worth a look into, I’d say! And for my loved ones, don’t look so scared! I’ll experiment in my own free time. No projects will be jeopardized due to my experimental fetishes!
We add a new microformat called 
