“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.”Jeff Zeldman, standards guru

I saw the link to the bring down IE 6 site today via our friends on Twitter and simply had to announce our support for such an initiative.  IE6 while once the browser to which all others were bench marked, is now, frankly the bane of an Internet Start up’s existence.  It might have been great once, but all good things must come to an end, and for IE6, that time is now.

For Faraday Media, IE6 support has never been a priority, since our users and visitors are overwhelmingly Firefox users, so unofficially, we’d already been on this bandwagon.  Today, it’s official.

If you’re chained to IE6 due to some corporate SOE policy, you have my sympathy.  If you’re using IE6 voluntarily, then you only have yourself to blame (just for you, here is the link to Firefox).

I really encourage other start-ups to stand-up and vocally (and officially) join the movement.

Our new header image is design by one of our developers Andrew, and symbolizes millions of “Particls” of data - many isolated, but then coming together, forming streams of information.  I love it.  What do you think?

From the day we launched Particls 1.0, people have always been excited with our approach to Attention Management.  And while we certainly don’t consider it to be a failure, we always felt that being a Windows only desktop client, with some complex UI challenges, that there was something too difficult for many users to grasp.  There was effectively three paradigm shifts (Aggregate Everything, Rank against interests, Variable interruption based on relevance) and this was a too much for a lot of users to wrap their heads around – ultimately creating a ‘barrier to entry’.

We switched over to a web-based solution, cutting Particls in half.  The Attention Management Engine was removed and eventually became Engagd, and the visualization and alerting engine became what we called ‘Particls 2.0’.  We’ve been working on these two platforms for quite some time, but as the economy turned, and faced with ever increasing costs and minimal resources; we decided to find another way - to work with fine scalpels instead of axes like we once did.  A limitations of resources always forces companies to focus on what really matters – and we choose to use this economic downturn as an opportunity instead of allowing it to consume us.

In order to reduce complexity and scope, we’ve diverted all resources onto a new project we’ve been internally calling “Particls Fountain”.

Particls Fountain will eventually become what we wanted Particls 2.0 to be, but rather than building from the bottom up, we’re building it from left-to-right. Right

From the Public Google Group:

This comes with a very large fore note: This is a very early draft only, and nothing is set in stone. Given that the community is obviously itching to start seeing APML 1.0 progress, I felt that it would be an appropriate time to release this and assist in structuring the discussion. I intend to follow this with a few more emails that detail individual sections I believe need substantial addressing.

APML version 1.0 proposes a number of substantial changes over the previous 0.6 version, with some of the changes including, but not limited to;

• The Addition of an ‘Entity’ node to describe (People, Businesses and other non-metaphysical interests.
• The Addition of a ‘Location’ node to outline places of interest.
• The inclusion of an rdf:about node attribute to allow for richer RDF-type ontologies without reducing the “simple” nature of APML.

APML has come a long way since its inital conception a little over 2 years ago.  And I am very proud to be involved with a community of people all dedicated to creating an open format to give attention back to the people who own it.

The

As part of our efforts, we’ve finally had the opportunity to give Particls and the Engagd platform their own dedicated servers, effectively quadrupling our processing capability.  This will allow us to service our partners and customers with increased reliability and confidence.

We’ve taken the opportunity with the new servers, to finally move our blogs off Blogger and onto a hosted WordPress solution, giving us far more flexibility with our blogs and presentation.

One problem, however, after we upgraded to WordPress 2.6, was that when we changed the permalink settings (to something more tollerable than ‘?p=x’) suddenly, index.php worked fine, but any other page reported as ‘not found’.  After serverl long hours Googling for the answer, there was lots of “answers” for WordPress on Apache (specifically about correct access to the .htaccess file and ensuring the correct PHP/Apache modules are installed) - but none about how to solve these issues on IIS.  It turns out that there are a number of known issues with 2.6 on IIS, which are now solved with the release of

Otherwise track #fom08 on the various social networks.

• Twitter Bot (Updates about all services and the blog)
• Profiler Changelog RSS Feed
• ItemRank Changelog RSS Feed
• APML Changelog RSS Feed

Does asking for a nomination make us uncool? Hopefully not

• Better error handling and correction.
• Blank documents not longer return a exception message, and instead return a blank form of the requested document.
• Better profiling results.
• Faster, more immediate profiling.
• ItemRank is far more stable and reliable with its ranked feeds.
• Many other enhancements.

When Chris and I founded Faraday Media, it was of extreme importance that just being another startup was not enough. We had to do something meaningful. Something significant. Not happy with fame or glory, we wanted to grow as people - giving back to a medium which had fed us for long time. To take the internet to a new place, just like Google had done nearly a decade ago. Its been a long road for Faraday, and while it hasn’t always been easy, Chris’ drive and aspiration has bought us to new and extraordinary heights, time after time after time; often at great personal sacrifice. I could never ask for a better CEO, or friend.

It’s no secret that Chris and I are the best of friends and it makes me very happy, to congratulate him on being selected as one of the 30Under30’s for Anthill, the leading entrepreneurial magazine in Australia.

From the website:

At 26, Chris Saad is one of Australia’s most impressive young web entrepreneurs. His theory and practice around web standards - specifically ‘DataPortability’ and ‘Attention Management’ - have gained significant traction and are set to have a profound impact on the evolution of media in the digital age. Saad has co-founded several web-related companies and organisations, most prominently Faraday Media in 2006, of which he is CEO. Faraday Media is developing Particls, a technology that learns user habit and taste and delivers relevant information to them via news crawler, SMS, email, flash visualisations, etc. He also co-founded the Media 2.0 Workgroup with 14 industry ‘commentators, agitators and innovators’. There’s no shortage of ideas or energy in this

As I wrote there:

Personal Media includes your friend’s shared items. It includes the comments you leave on blogs. It includes Social Media. But it also includes private updates. Updates from your Intranet. Updates from your family. Updates from broadcast media. Updates that matter to you - no one else.

Personal Media is about recognizing that people are social and private. They are interested in personal experiences.

Check it out.

NineMSN Program Manager Paul Keen has written about a new NineMSN site feature that has the potential to dramatically improve the news reading user experience on their site.

They call it the “What’s Happening Now” module. Think Facebook News Feed for a news site. It logs and lists events such as new stories, first comments and other changes to the site in ‘real time’ in a reverse chronological order.

This is another example of how flow based presentation can improve visibility and usability when it comes to consuming large quantities of content/interactions.

Well done to Paul and the NineMSN team for this innovative approach.

You can also watch the DataPortability keynote on Christian’s blog.

Here’s a bit of info about the conference from the website:

The Next Web Conference is THE European conference for industry thought-leaders, leading web-companies, innovative Startups, visionaries and real Web savvies. This third edition will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on April 3rd & 4th, 2008.