Monthly Archive for September, 2005

Web 2.0 mememap overview

Published on September 29, 2005 in Web2.0. 7 Comments

After I saw Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 mememap (via readwriteweb.com) and Dion Hinchcliffe‘s visualisation of Web 2.0, I realised they didn’t cut it for me. They were somewhat confusing and chaotic. So I decided to make one myself.

So here it is: Peter’s effort for a better Web 2.0 mememap visualisation:

Web 2.0 overview - mememap

Some examples:

  • HousingMaps (mentioned on The Economist) takes the houses on Craigslist (“USER DATA” and “METADATA”), gets the geo-coordinates for each address (“ANNOTATE”) and shows them on Google Maps (“VISUALIZE”)
  • Plazes.com takes your network topology and the address you attach to it ( “METADATA”), geomaps it (“ANNOTATE”), and shows you who’s near to you (“FILTER”). It also show your Plazes on Google Maps (“VISUALIZE”).
  • Matt Biddulph takes a list of people (“USER DATA”), uses the Yahoo Search API to find their page in Wikipedia (“ANNOTATE” with other “USER DATA” thanks to the Yahoo! “AGGREGATE” engine) and then looks for links to the other people in the list (“METADATA”). He then uses this information to create a map with arrows between the names (“VISUALIZE”). I particularly like this one, very inventive!
  • Pixagogo Maps takes your images (“USER DATA”), allows you to add tags/labels to them (“METADATA”), and again maps them on to Google Maps (“VISUALIZE”)
  • extispicious takes your del.icio.us tags (“METADATA”) or Yahoo pictures (“USER DATA” but also “AGGREGATED”) and draws a tag cloud (“VISUALIZE”)
  • Writely offers editing of user documents (“USER DATA”) with a WYSIWYG Ajax editor (“RICH UI”) and allows for tagging (“METADATA”). This is not really a “remix” kind of service, but it qualifies for Web 2.0 nevertheless.

The image falls under my Creative Commons blog license, i.e. you can use it in any way you want, except for commercial stuff, and you have to mention your source (this page).

All input is welcome, since this is only the first version (let’s call it v0.1).

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WizaRSS: a wizard player based on RSS

Published on September 28, 2005 in RSS. 4 Comments


I had an idea recently that I probably won’t be able to work out, so I’m just gonna throw it here and see if anyone feels like putting the nuts and bolts together.

It’s about step-by-step wizards (i.e. the “Next-Next-Finish” idea). Please follow my thought process:
(a) I’ve made a pretty popular wizard for podcasting with Blogger and Smartcast one year ago; (b) I also have been following Jon Udell’s efforts with screencasting (and also more on mastuvu.typepad.com) and (c) I recently have made a project based on photofeeds.
Well now, eventhough I am wary of seeing everything as a nail just because I have the RSS hammer, I think there is a nice synergy possible.

Imagine a generic wizard visualizer. It takes as input an RSS feed and considers each of the RSS items to be a step in the wizard process. It then shows each step in a userfriendly way: either as a kind of slideshow, with “next” and “previous” button, or as a timeline, with zoom-in on a specific step if you click on it, or … All AJAX, CSS and multimedia wizardry is possible. That is purely a presentation-layer issue. Once the wizard content is made, the rest is make-up.

Some examples/remarks:

  • think of a “photofeed” wizard: an image is shown for each step, with some HTML text underneath.You could zoom in on the picture. I have made a demo of such a feed on wizarss.blogspot.com and a stub of what such a generic wizard visualizer could look like: WizaRSS stub.
  • think of a “podcast” wizard: for each step, there is an audio clip of 10-60 seconds explaining in simple terms what should be done (with a small Flash MP3 player in the page).
  • think of a “screencast” wizard: for each step the screencast is shown to make things more tangible.
  • another type of visualizer could convert the RSS to a SMIL or ASX multimedia playlist.
  • a good wizard player would have templates, or customizable CSS stylesheets
  • anyone could make a nice wizard with Blogger (and Feedburner SmartCast). Like: recipees, how-to-repair-your-bicycle, bonsai-101, …
  • since RSS is reverse chronological, the last step is listed as most recent, so as the first item in the feed

All feedback is welcome!

Update: Pascal already has a WizaRSS Powerpoint-like S5 presentation player!

PS: I create a new blog on Blogger, and within 15 minutes I have a comment spammer. Some morons scraping the “Recently Updated” on the Blogger homepage?

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RSS is a hammer

Published on September 28, 2005 in internet, RSS and Web2.0. 1 Comment


We’re all excited by the promises of Web 2.0, we’re all awaiting the next really neat remix application/service of data, meta-data, analysis and presentation. But let’s not fall for the “I have a hammer, so all problems look like a nail” trap. According to me, Dave Winer goes one step to far when he says:

(on Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Meme map)
Web 2.0 is really simple, it’s RSS 2.0.
on scripting.com

Similarly, in a comment on the excellent “The Web 2.0 is here” article, Scott Johnson writes:

Ajax is where it’s at. Ajax is the driving force behing 2.0.
(on web2.wsj2.com)

It’s not because you have particularly strong feelings about one building block of the Web 2.0 temple that you can simplify the whole thing. RSS is important. Ajax is important. And so are REST/XMLRPC/SOAP, KML, social software, folksonomies, contextual advertising, “Long tail” logic, Creative Commons, … It’s the sum of all these forces that hint at a future “Web 2.0″ that’s bigger and brighter.

In the mean time, since I don’t think Tim O’Reilly’s chart is very clear, and even Dion Hinchcliffe‘s effort is not 100% clear, I’m working on a visualisation of Web 2.0 on my own.

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Blogging, it’s all about conversations

Published on September 27, 2005 in Belgium. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

Les Blogs 2.0

And talking about blogging is something I will do a lot in the near future:

Anyone has an interesting conference in Rome or Madrid coming up? We’re running out of Indian summer here.

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