If I was gonna start a news business tomorrow I would start a news business designed to produce not one new bit of news, but instead to aggregate news for individuals in ways that matter to them. — Clay Shirky (1′18”)

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

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(…) the technology that Dropbox has mastered is so important that there should be an open source equivalent that we can all deploy, so we can have Dropboxes for sensitive info we don’t want to share with them (…)

I’m a happy Dropbox user myself and I went looking for options. Well, there isn’t an out-of-the-box open source equivalent to Dropbox but you could easily build one:

Now we have is a simple Dropbox style app that is lightweight, with a functional back-end running rsync, which is a known stable app that will scale, and while it doesn’t provide the front-end and web view that Dropbox does, that could be an easy part for a UX developer to tackle (…)

Read the original post: Afternoon sellout notes.

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The DecentralizedAddresses extension is in development and is available on github for anyone to contribute. As my JavaScript skills are not very good, any help would be highly appreciated.

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I want to throw some ideas out there about how it can someday be done in a decentralized fashion using open technologies such as WebFinger, Portable Contacts, AtomPub, and Activity Streams. (And maybe Salmon. Read on.)

The proposal would let you address any user of any application in a complete decentralized way.

And not only is this process fully decentralized (i.e., there doesn’t need to be a Google in the middle), it delegates very well, so that domain owners wouldn’t have to implement it themselves — but they could later if they wanted to.

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If you’d like to send a private message to someone, type @ and use Gmail’s autocomplete feature to find the email address of your contact.

In practice, you address other users by typing an @ symbol followed by their e-mail address, like @user@example.com. This is exactly what I proposed a while ago as an easy way to address any user on any Web application:

Afterthought question: can this microsyntax be expanded to @user@application so that we can finally address any user on any Web application easily. I’m thinking about that.

For now, you can only send messages to other Google Buzz users but I’d expect this syntax to be used to address users of other supported destinations (twitter et al).

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Great post by Pedro Pinheiro about making a business around art. I particularly like this excerpt:

For free? Why?

Because the money to be earned is not on things that can be copied. That’s a lost battle. If you’re a musician, you can make more money on concerts and events. If you’re a photographer, more money can be made by shooting specific assignments for customers, or on photography workshops. If you’re a writer, you can make more money by participating as a speaker at conferences. The era of making something and just making your livelihood from just that is nearing its end. And getting your creations known to the widest possible audience is the key for getting work that can’t be replicated.

Read the original: Pedro Pinheiro: My artist’s manifesto.

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A microsyntax approach would be something visible in the stream, like including a prefix in front of an @mention or retweet to denote original or desired client:

dabr@pigsonthewing Nice profile!

Here, the implication is that I am referring to Andy’s profile on the Dabr client.

I disagree with the proposed syntax format and propose a new one: @user@client. Here’s my rationale behind it:

1. It doesn’t break any functionality (just like the proposed syntax): user will still be able to see this tweet as a mention;
2. It adds new functionality: if client is also a twitter user it will also be able to see this tweet as a mention and act upon it, if desired;
3. It’s more meaningful than the proposed syntax: you can read it as “user at client”. In the original syntax, saying “client at user” just seems awkward.

Afterthought question: can this microsyntax be expanded to @user@application so that we can finally address any user on any Web application easily. I’m thinking about that.

Read the original post: Twitter URLs: Are Microformats The Answer To A Real Problem? on /Message.

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the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used – but it’s an important step none the less.

Read the original: The Day The Highway Went Coast-to-Coast: 70+ SocNet Feeds Normalized by New API on ReadWriteWeb.

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In order to actually make a dent in Google’s market share, Bing would have to pay such exorbitant sums to so many different news companies that it would be difficult to recoup its investment. Bing certainly get some marketing buzz out of any such move, but that’s about it.

Here’s a list of links about this:

• Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact on FT
• Thoughts On A “Killer” Bing-News Corp Deal & The Myth Of An “OPEC For News” on search engine land
• Microsoft Offers To Pay News Corp To “De-List” Itself From Google on The Business Insider
• Will News Corp move its content to Microsoft’s Bing? on The Guardian

Read the original post: Bing Tries To Buy The News on TechCrunch.

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Check out my foursquare profile and friend me!

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