My Death of the RSS Newsreader

Posted on January 2, 2011 by tom

I’ve been saying for a while now, that in terms of “information revolutions” we’re on the brink of the third wave. The first was about simply accessing information , the second about publishing information and the third is about manipulating or routing information (or data).

For years I’d assumed that RSS would play a part in the arrival of the third wave, but where have all the online RSS readers gone? Is Bloglines still “live”? What happened to Rojo? I remember a number of contenders, including desktop apps like NetNewsWire and the like but it seems now that there is only Google Reader left.

Other newsreaders like Rojo used to let me re-publish or share my news, but Google Reader doesn’t. And to be honest Google Reader is crap. Although using browser plugins like Feedly massively improve the experience of RSS it’s just not as automatic or fun as tools like Paper.li or how I imagine Flipboard (I don’t have  an iPad).

And although I have more control over an RSS account than what appears in my Paper.li or Flipboard pages, RSS feels more clunky. Images are often still shown as links, sites that post every few minutes flood your news and in general it just feels like you are too close to the technology.

Added to the clunk, is the fact that once you have a few hundred subscriptions in an RSS reader exactly where your news is coming from becomes mystifying. Especially if you’ve subscribed to a few aggregated feeds. It doesn’t feel like you are routing or even in control anymore. RSS starts to feel like an albatross.

As an experiment, I recently swapped my subscriptions (by exporting our subscriptions as OPML) with Andy over at Offmessage to see if someone with similar but different interests would enliven RSS for me. What I found was that amazingly, with almost a completely different set of news sources, the news felt the same. Or to put it another way, even with all of Andy’s lolcats, I didn’t feel I was missing out on any news, it was just coming to me via a different route.

What all of this is saying to me, given the fact that one of my roles is about sharing “best practice”, is that after years of being an ardent fan of the possibilities of RSS, I’m now doubting if it is worth the effort. RSS hasn’t delivered, RSS Readers (and by that I mean Google Reader) doesn’t do what I wanted, it isn’t putting me in control of anything, it isn’t delivering any magic and I can pretty much get “good enough” news in plenty of other ways.

A large part of this ennui with RSS has to be that, my interests are always shifting and I feel weighed down with usability or information architecture stuff, things I was interested in pre 2000. I’ve moved on but my RSS Reader hasn’t and it’s become too big to prune…. AND it doesn’t do anything to help me, it just sits there, spewing crap at me. You’d really think that Google Reader would do helpful things, like categorising news feeds, or noticing the ones you focus in on, or SOMETHING helpful.

Part of the “craft” of creating an enjoyable RSS experience is that feeds have to complement each other, there’s no point having information fire-hoses obscuring the infrequent writer. It takes time to create your own personal newspaper… and it’s almost impossible to create a collection of feeds for someone else, I’ve tried many times.

So there. You might still find RSS useful for you, well done, but given my current disappointment with it, especially from an evangelising perspective, I’m looking for a whole new way of being kept up to date. It probably will be Twitter-based, either that or paper. The walk to the newsagent will do me good.

Actually, maybe it’s just, for me, a death of news per se. If I see another “10 ways to XYZ” article again I think I might lose it. Rather than blaming Google Reader for being rubbish and slowly suffocating all the (better) competition there was, I need to look to myself and realise most news IS CRAP… and spend less time worrying about it.

But if you want to send me your exported OPML file, I’ll give it a whirl for a week and see if I feel news inspired by your picks of the internet. It can’t be worse than Andy’s pictures of cats…. can it?  I’ll let you know how I get on.

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Illuminating York 2010

Posted on November 1, 2010 by tom

It’s the time of year when I moan about the overall rubbishness that is Illuminating York ( see my 2009 review here.. missing images though) and I’m going to say the same things all over again, so I’ll keep it brief.

1. Projecting something onto the minster doesn’t make it art. The candy coloured installation that was projected onto the minster (was that last year?) was brilliant because it was both sensitive to architecture in some way and because it made you think about the minster differently, it made you look again. This years projection onto the Rose window was a nice piece in itself (about 10 minutes of radio 4 poetry and pentacle-like roses growing up and down the side of the minster) but it really felt like a Powerpoint presentation.

Next year, if Illuminating York has another “something projected onto the one building we can think of” then heads should roll. From the top of the minster hopefully.

2. Why can’t these pieces be made at least semi permanent, so that the Illuminating York event could get bigger and better each year? This would also prevent lazy artists from “projecting something onto the minster” because that would already be covered. It would take more collaboration and organising than turning up with a van and some scaffolding and a projector.

3. Will someone tell the Tag Tool people that it’s crap, please? That’s maybe too harsh (except it’s not), but the hostage walk around the Treasurer’s Garden was painful. With only one way round everyone was gagging to leave the lack of spectacle. I’m surprised there wasn’t a stampede with people trampled underfoot.

4. The colour experience caravan sounded interesting but they closed the queue realising that they couldn’t get people through quick enough. Sigh.

5. There was  a big ball with some random film projected onto it. Again, this felt like it had arrived on a van, been set up and left to underwhelm. The film clips had no cohesion or story and bizarrely it seemed that no effort was made to adapt what was presented onto a sphere… except maybe the eyeball blinking – I quite liked that.

I really do think that Illuminating York both could and should be something special. But it really isn’t the reason to visit York that the tourist office claim it is. It is always a disappointment ( see a comment from last year). What is the cause of the complete lack of spectacle? Is it just lack of budget… Maybe it’s Health n Safety ( gone mad ) and doing anything interesting would probably be a health hazard? Is it lack of imagination? York has more than just a minster, there are hundreds of better, or at least different, sites to host unusual installations.

What I did find interesting is that some people started to play with their shadows accidentally cast on the minster… It’s worrying when the audience are more creative than the artists – don’t you think?

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Sociable Innovation and Neanderthals

Posted on October 20, 2010 by tom

I went to a public lecture at the University of York on Neanderthals last night, it was about using archeological evidence for signs of caring and even love in earlier times. It seems that a large part of the research has to be about understanding both the similarities and differences between the Neanderthals and us.

Neanderthals were shorter, stockier and stronger than us. They also travelled less far and had smaller, more compact social groups.

Interestingly, they were less attached to objects – you might call us in comparison materialistic, treasuring beads, shells and small sculptures. It becomes easy for me to imagine them as being more spiritual or arty and finding us frivolous, and perhaps composing a complex song to sing around the fire with their big hairy lungs.

The most striking difference to me was that their technology didn’t develop for hundreds and hundreds of thousand years. Neanderthals flint tools stayed the same. I guess you could call them very traditional … inward-looking on a bad day.

With the arrival of homo sapiens however, our tools changed in a comparative whirlwind, developing new approaches and refinements.

So, we don’t know if the Neanderthals were thicker than us. They might not have been, and the fact there’s 5% of their DNA in ours, they maybe weren’t as distant a cousin as we’d like to think. We don’t know if they were any less dextrous than us either. But what we do know is that man travelled more, probably met more people and had a richer social network. It seems we were more curious and happy to explore and meet people.

So, the rise of man and the disappearance of the Neanderthal might not be because we were more intelligent (we might not have been) or more skilled (again we might not have been), we definitely weren’t stronger either …  but because when we had a good (or bad ) idea twenty other people got to see it rather than three. So, human ideas themselves might not even have been better than Neanderthal ideas, but more people were exposed to them, able to use or adapt them or refine them.

I find that idea stunning, that it’s potentially not how good the idea is, but how far it can travel easily that creates innovation and development, don’t you? Say it again… it’s not the quality of an idea that counts – it’s how many people it can touch that determines if it’s a good idea.

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Killing Joke – Absolute Dissent

Posted on September 22, 2010 by tom

splash_kj_newalbumLess than four days to go until Killing Joke’s new album, Absolute Dissent, is available for download and I already love it.

Someone on Twitter said that it was all a bit meta, listening to Killing Joke sound as if they’ve been influenced by the bands they’ve influenced. Whoever they were, I know what they mean… The Great Cull reminds me of the Queens of the Stone Age somehow, This World Hell sounds like a Norwegian metal band covering a Black Sabbath song. It even has a single bended guitar note and a bluesy-like riff towards the end, which is dangerously close to ROCK for Geordie if you ask me.

And if you listen very carefully you can just about hear Kylie Minogue doing her breathy backing vocals on European Super State in the opening disco sequence. I reckon.

But then again, Killing Joke always manage to sound like more like themselves than anyone else, Depth Charge is a riff-driven punk anthem with old skool coughing up flegm and worrying vocal ticks. It sounds like he’s blowing raspberries in the opening few bars. I hope he is. There can’t be (m)any songs out there with a deliberate fart sound included. I love the synth drifting in and out (which should be higher in the mix) and Jaz’s distorted lyrics which are almost like a new Wardance.

The thing that strikes me most about this album is the thing that I like about all the best Killing Joke albums. It is the meeting of four distinct characters, Jaz, Geordie, Paul and Youth. For me, when that balance was altered it all started going a shade Duran Duran, until Pandemonium even.  Youth’s bass is brilliant throughout, and just like when I was trying to work out how to play the bass lines on What’s This For? a lot of the time you can’t work out what the hell he’s doing, but you can feel it, it’s the perfect foil for Geordie’s uniquely thinned discordant sound.

And in Endgame, at the beginning are they singing “meow… meow!” … Go listen. I can imagine them in battered and burned Sylvester the Cat outfits with Jaz dressed at Tweetie Pie staggering out of a mushroom cloud of dust …  for some reason.

Like all of Joke’s albums, I tend to be agnostic about half of the songs on each… this is no different and a like that. To me it means they’re trying, experimenting, getting it wrong sometimes.

If I had any criticisms of the album it would be that I wish, every now again Paul would up the tribal style he made his own for a few bars ( if only for old times sake ) and that Jaz’s “mouth of hell” synth sounds, the sort you get on the Pandys or Unspeakable is missing or just too low in the mix.

I also think European Super State could have been much, much cheesier, with a huge arms in the air intro (say at least 5 minutes)… and it needs disco hand claps… and probably hot pants.

So, here they are roughly in my order of preference…

European Super State
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naUAuptzUb4&feature=related

End Game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4ompm4PQk4&feature=related

Depth Charge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a95Npoa6aCo

The Great Cull
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPN7EvbrCp0

Fresh Fever
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x3UiDR1jUY&feature=related

Here Comes The Singularity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc-YDG7GG0s

The Ghost of Ladbroke Grove
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZOOYFO5ee0

Honour the Fire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LemzpnB-HWc

In Excelsis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T869Obl03oE

The Raven King
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VQwX9h6kWo

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Funny Sort of Day

Posted on July 8, 2010 by tom

Today someone wrote to me asking if I’d be up for writing a detailed usability review of a site and that they’d need it by Monday… for free.

Someone else wrote asking (very nicely) for advice in selling photographic prints. I haven’t a clue as it happens, so go buy one… his site only gets a few hits a day…

I learned to play Democracy by Killing Joke on the guitar as I watched swifts (I think) reel above me in sky, eating flies I imagine.

Someone else wore socks that were designed to look like bowling shoes.

For most of the day I felt guilty.

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Killing Joke – In Excelsis

Posted on June 22, 2010 by tom

Anyone that knows me knows that this year I have been completely obsessed with listening to Killing Joke. I’ve listened to an album a day for almost every day for six months on my walk to work. I’ve even been studying Killing Joke albums that I loathe, the ones between 1983 and 1993 when Jaz Coleman had a bit of a breakdown of sorts, had his hair permed, grew a moustache, thought the world was about to end and Killing Joke the band went all Simple Minds on me. Bad times, bad albums… still.

I don’t consider myself the OCD type at all but I have to admit that it has to be slightly obsessed, to listen to stuff you don’t like in the hope that somehow you learn to love it. It’s like torture. You can browse both the good and the bad Joke stuff on the Dipity timeline I made of Killing Joke’s career here… or in my You Tube Killing Joke playlist here (which also has relevant bands in too)… ahem… Not obsessed at all.

I don’t really know why I like Killing Joke that much. Of course, everyone has the band, which for them just seemed to have meant so much, you know, when you were 14 or 15… don’t they? For most people I guess they grow out of it, or the band turns crap, like Adam & the Ants and Death Cult did or they break up or music simply starts to matter less.

All of these happened with Killing Joke, but in 1994 whilst I was stripping wallpaper, they got back together again and started making that strange discordant noise that only they can do … listen to Whiteout (spotify link) or Exorcism (spotify link) from the Pandemonium album and tell me it’s not the most noisiest fantastic din ever created). The latter was recorded in a Great Pyramid and has coughs in (like a lot of Killing Joke songs)  dontchaknow.

I mean, try to these two live songs below on YouTube (only 87 views btw), Requiem (one of their first) and Total Invasion (one of the most recent) and they’re pure punk… with a hint of disco. Guitars you can dance to. If you wanted.

I relax to this (The Hum from Revelations). Killing Joke are my whales singing… my birds tweeting in a forest… by a sea with crashing waves…

And so, on the longest day (yesterday), Killing Joke have release an EP called  In Excelsis (go listen for free) which I’m not so sure about.  It has a dub track which is fun and Endgame sounds to me like Lemmy from Motorhead (no bad thing) but it’s not quite Killing Joke, or rather the Killing Joke I love which falls between 1980 – 1984 and 1994 and now ( please don’t listen to Love Like Blood or Sanity or America which are so bad I still get embarrassed for them). I’ve give it another few thousand listens before I pass judgement but at the moment… I’m slightly disappointed…

Anyway, I have been both worrying about my ever increasing Killing Joke obsession and at the same time writing a TV script (a bit like those wonderful Rock Family Trees show) to explain “Why Killing Joke Are Ace” to my mate Dave because I’ve got tickets to see them in October and he needs a little persuasion that they, and not Pink Floyd are the best bend that ever walked the earth – even if they did go a little potty in the 80s… I mean, who didn’t?

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Collaborative Tools Project Report

Posted on June 6, 2010 by tom
Spheres of Collaboration, CTP Report and Use Cases

Spheres of Collaboration, CTP Report and Use Cases

All about the Collaborative Tools Project… as a PDF.

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7 Steps Towards Collaboration

Posted on June 6, 2010 by tom

7-steps-to-collaboration

I’ve been thinking about how best to “tell the collaboration story” from a practical standpoint. And it occurs to me that often people look at the tools and approaches and ask “what’s in it for me?” … when the better question might be, “what’s in it for everyone else?” …  The irony here being that you are one of “everyone else”… like everyone else.

The source Omnigraffle files are here if you’d like to extend or improve on them. My goal was to, around the outside show some real world practical examples of stages of collaboration, from twitterfalls (or instant backchannels) to examples of social networks like LinkedIn or Mendeley that clearly demonstrate “what’s going on”… but ran out of time.

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Plone’s Steep Learning Curve

Posted on April 16, 2010 by tom

Warning: This isn’t really a blog post it’s just a long boring moan

Almost 10 years ago, this blog was developed in Zope. It wasn’t big or clever and it’s why (to this day)  my URLs still have “/Articles/” in them. That was a Zope folder and I thought it made sense to name it properly with none of this lowercase nonsense. And then (was it 2003ish?) Plone came along and although I tried and tried and tried, Plone beat me… I didn’t get it. To be fair Plone didn’t offer me what I needed, which was a simple prototyping environment, I really didn’t need workflow or roles or permissions…. I just needed python at the end of a URL.

Feeling more mortal than I’d like after failing to get to grips with Plone, I sloped off elsewhere… doing more UI or usability work and much less development in general, but using still python for unusual web crawling projects. When tools like TurboGears came along I tried them, occasionally I had another run at Plone, I mean, how hard can Plone really be?

Then Django made web development both easy AND pythonic. Django has its quirks but, and this is probably because Django grew out of the publishing industry, the documentation is lots of different shades of lovely. And the documentation works (often because it is tied to version numbers of the software).

Now I know that Plone is a different beast from Django completely but I now really want and need to learn it and so this week I’ve been sitting down, gritting my teeth ( not a requirement I know but it helps) and doing Plone tutorials. So far, it’s not been all good… Did you catch my classic English understatement then?

I started with Professional Plone Development book, it’s title seemed to have all I want… except the professional bit I guess. To begin with, I couldn’t get past the first three lines of code, which gets easy_install and installs a Zope Skeleton. I couldn’t do this because I was working on a Mac with python2.5 and 2.6 and Plone only works on 2.4. So I tried to get 2.4 and make it the default python but it’s harder than it sounds. Wrong libraries get loaded, paths are wrong and there seems to be a history (and related mess) about what is the best way to distribute python code… I gave up…

Next I thought that with a copy of VirtualBox and Ubuntu I would be able to run a virtual machine with Plone on it. This kind of worked but the install was lengthy and getting my cursor back from the VM was a black art and usability nightmare so I went with VMWare. Wouldn’t it be possible for there to be VMs for Plone with all the right versions of everything with everything in the right place? Anyway… back to the book…

I then get to what is maybe the fourth line of real code to use in the book…

paster create -t plone3_buildout myproject

… and I have no idea what paster is, or what it does. I thought it might be one of those websites that you paste code onto and share (and then run) … I have no idea what a plone3_buildout is… or what -t is for…basically, a whole heap of concepts are dumped on me that I have no idea about. Why is there a tool called paster anyway? Why isn’t this part of Plone itself (a bit like the ./manage.py do_something format that python uses?

Then we move into a discussion about getting Eggs from the Cheese Shop? …and PyPi and aargh! The language and metaphors are a mess!!!  OK, I’ll admit, until now I’ve hated eggs because they rarely worked and a folder of code seems a much more sensible way of dealing with things, I’m starting to see why Eggs are important but can we now start again with the whole terminology thing. What started out as funny is now, frankly, not.

Then, whenever I want to install any extra bits to Plone it seems that there is “more than one way to do it” with a Buildout or old fashioned folders in the Products folder. Can’t we, for the sake of a tutorial pick one and stick with it.

In the book we are then invited to write Unit tests before we’ve written any code? Now don’t go getting all purist on me, but the Unit Tests didn’t work, were complicated and frankly…

The then shows Code fragments that break across pages making them un-copy-and-pastable (they lose tabs too) which makes every line a chore.

The buildout.cfg file/ approach is introduced with no explanation and looks slightly familiar as a format, but do tabs matter? I’ve no idea… I added comments that broke the buildout process (yes).

Then using /bin/buildout -No doesn’t work…some product complains about needing to go online

I’m still with the book an the example is Creating a “Policy Product”… A what? At this point I’m not sure if a Policy is concept from Plone or what..

I then found a bug in the code in that I found a permissions module that’d been renamed from something much longer meaning it couldn’t addPolicy(). Now at this point I’m guessing that my version of Plone isn’t compatible with the tutorial.. maybe because eggs have automatically updated themselves… who knows.

And so.. after much sweat and tears… the first code from the first chapter wouldn’t install.

I moved onto another book from PACKT… and found similar problems.

Moving to the hopefully more up to date online tutorials, I then decided to follow the DVD Collection Archetype creating tutorial, only changing the names/namespaces to be something I actually need ( a “Minutes” object for recording meeting notes). It didn’t work and I couldn’t work out why.

Giving up on writing my own Products, I thought it might be best to install some other ones and see how they work and hope that would bring some insights..

I tried…

Faculty Staff Directory (wouldn’t install). I’ve left a traceback on their Issue Tracker. I really want to use this product.

Feedmixer (wouldn’t install). Thought this would be easy. Again, I’ve left a report.

Collective GEO … yay! … This worked almost first time and I now can add coordinates to any Plone object and have it displayed on an OpenStreetMap. THIS is what Plone development should be like… thought through and reliable.

And now I’m getting random …

ImportError: cannot import name IObjectMovedEvent
… errors and no ideas why… What it something I said?

So… after a couple of weeks of getting stuck into, but mainly stuck by Plone I need to take a breather and start again.

Plone people, there really is a need for …

  • A version of Plone that exactly matches clear and simple tutorials. Being simplistic isn’t the same.
  • Stopping the assumption that I’m a unix master. I’m not, but I’m willing to learn the bits I need if you take it slow.
  • A re-thinking of terminology used for the various bits and bobs (I mean… “paster”…? wtf?)
  • Some consensus about “the best way”… I don’t want confusion I want guidance from people who know better
  • The UI of the management screens in Plone could do with a big hand. Currently it’s like a tool shed with all the tools laying on the floor, on the bench on the window sills. Maybe building some helpful help text into these screens wouldn’t go amiss. Maybe group some relevant tools together.
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Maps, Mobile and Instant Backchannels

Posted on April 14, 2010 by tom

Whoo hoo! Doing OpenStreetMap based stuff in Plone works (thanks to some pointers from Giorgio Borelli). Here’s two offices, mine and Alistair’s in Heslington Hall added to the University of York map. Perfect!

Interestingly ANY Plone object can have coordinates (rather than there being a separate Location object type).

geoinplone

My interest in showing maps within the Collaborative Tools Project isn’t actually rooted in maps as such, although they are lovely things… maps aren’t they? What I’m also interested in is…

Flashmobbing and “Good Enough” User Generated Mapping Data

Parts of the University’s campus are very well defined in the OpenStreetMap map and other buildings such as the recently finished Berrick Saul that I look out on are missing completely. I suspect the trails on the map are the result of a StreetMap Party (but I don’t know) where mapping nuts gather with devices and leave their trail(s).

This is fascinating firstly because it happened in the first place, but also because it’d be great to help make it happen again. Or to put it another way, the University of York is awash with energetic young people with a GPS device in their hand… surely with a little gentle persuasion a little effort from a lot of people, say, adding a room’s geographic location could add up to something bigger, better and more useful… Like for example…

…Accessible Maps

There is a project looking to marry the maps that our Estates dept have, with data about the paths, roads and layout around the University to create something that is helpful to people with disabilities. It’s a lot of  (technical) work but I believe that in the meantime we could have a prototype (maybe an iPhone app) that gave enough information to help shape the design of a better system.

Or to put it another way… I suspect that, in order for map to be genuinely useful, it needs to be mobile (and probably not paper) and allow user contributions “Don’t go this way – there’s a massive puddle of duck poo!” etc.

Which leads on to…

… Instant Backchannels…

Or put it another way… Have you ever been at a presentation where the presenter has announced a hashtag that the audience can use to collect tweets from everyone? It’s quite an interesting experience, for the presenter it can be a challenge receiving instant feedback but it also gives everyone outside the room a flavour of what’s going on inside the room.

“Instant backchannels” can be a mess to invoke … almost as if once everyone is in on the secret it works magically, but if they aren’t it can’t. For example, people in the audience might need a twitter account, and to know about tools that pull hashtags searches together… I might want the backchannel displayed alongside (or over) my slides being presented… I also might want some “background” material available too in say a wiki. I’ve even remotely attended conference sessions where the presenter’s talk is video streamed (I think with uStream) and I even got to ask a question via Twitter.

So I thought how easy would it be to create an Instant Backchannel for every room in the University? The idea being that it was there, all ready to go whether you use it or not. The point being that it probably wouldn’t get used much, but when it was, it would be invaluable.

What’s most interesting (to me) is that in order to work it doesn’t require accurate geographical data, it only needs a list of room names BUT the geographical location can be added later, as an when… as simply as tapping a button on your iPhone. It might look something like this…

instantbackchannel

So there… a very simple idea that might help people find their way around campus, participate remotely in presentations, get in touch with people who aren’t in their office, find information or people based on the discussions that other people had in a room the week before you were in it…

…that involves Crowd-sourcing the geographical location of important places, QR codes to bring the digital into the real world and back again, twitter, mapping, iPhone or mobile apps, accessibility issues and user generated “good enough” content.

Sounds like a plan.

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Tweaking Cyn.in’s Features

Posted on April 13, 2010 by tom

Cyn.in is a great platform for collaboration but I am looking into how it might be adapted to be a better fit for the University of York’s needs.  What I need to do is work out which features …

  • should be rolled into the development of Cyn.in. A good example of this is the UI for the Home Page when we have more than 40 spaces. It’s already apparent that you need a very different user interface for working with 4,000 people as opposed to 40. It would be good if Cyn.in “adapted” based on usage so that as the site gets bigger and more complex, the UI reflects this. One very easy (and cool) addition might be an “I’m going” button on events.
  • already exist and are are about integration. Good examples of this are the FeedMixer product for displaying RSS feeds and the Faculty / Staff Directory product which lets people add more information about themselves in their profiles. the Anz.Jabber instant messaging product has caught my eye too.
  • can be easily developed myself (or with a little help from my friends). I am currently looking to maybe use Archetypes to create a Location content type. There are others out there such as PloneWorldKit (uses Flash) and GeoLocation (uses GoogleMaps?) but I’d quite like one that worked with OpenStreetMaps and has less strict GEO-focussed functionality.

Other features such as “can I have a taxonomy of jargon-related abbreviations and acroynms that get appended or search-and-replaced when editing a document”… seem hard to define and even harder to work out if they are a low-level feature request to Cyn.in or something I could easily create myself. This isn’t essential, but it would be nice and could be made to work for peoples’ name, locations (such as room numbers) etc.

Another feature I find hard to explain is to do with how groups (and Spaces) are administered. I would quite like to create a Group/Space that automatically has a “private sub-space” … but that this isn’t set to be the default (otherwise people tend to work away in privacy and obscurity). I’d then like a “knock to join this group” button which the administrator manages. The alternative to this is a massive top-down administration overhead that I just don’t think will work.

One feature I would definitely like is the “First Use Ten Second Tutorial”… so that having accepted an invitation to a Cyn.in community you are presented with a one-page (maybe two) tutorial saying “this button does this… and don’t swear please (or similar)”…

Lastly, as I said, I don’t think the design of Cyn.in’s Home Page works very well for larger organisations and yet vanilla Plone does have a “Dashboard” screen. I like the notion of a personal dashboard where you can decide which portlets to show (or have them pre-configured for you). This, in one fell swoop solves the problem of “Fire Hosing”… it opens up the possibility of adding Google Gadgets (say for email or calendars)…

So in a nutshell… I need to…

  • Attempt creating a new Archetype based object type (this may  be useful as a Minutes object for recording meetings).
  • Add Location abilities (collective geo looks good but I can’t contact them)… this just needs to be very simple
  • RSS Feedmixer and portlet
  • Anz.Jabber for instant messaging (even if just for status … i.e “is online”)
  • I tried at the WebServices product but get an error when I call it. This might be handy for hacking and integration (not essential).
  • integrate Faculty / Staff Directory (does it do Twitter accounts and Blog URLs? If not needs adding)

And finally I need to work up and discuss with Cynapse some UI ideas, particularly with regards to the Home screen.

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The Best Collaborative Tool?

Posted on April 12, 2010 by tom

After lots of trialling with lots of people the tool that shows the most promise has the worst name… Cyn.in. Coming a close joint second were SocialText, Confluence and LifeRay.

Why did Cyn.in pip the others at the post? There are lots of reasons…

cyninscreen

It’s open source (and built on Plone). The importance of this can’t be stressed enough for me. It buys the project the ability to benefit from other extensions and development work. I’ve already seen an XMPP (instant messaging) plugin that we’ll be able to slot in. It also means, ironically, that we don’t have to make a decision about which tool to use just yet, we can continue trialling Cyn.in for as long as we like, even getting to grips with what it is like to bend and extend. And lastly, open source is a good fit ethically.

It’s not based on a per-person pricing model. Because I am planning to create a collaborative environment where it is easy to invite collaborators in, I’m expecting that people will set up projects that maybe only run a few months – and maybe some people in those projects might be invited in to “cast an eye” over sketchy, unfinished work.

Its user interface, which is based on jQuery is by far the most instantly usable and likeable. This can’t be stressed enough – people actually like it. And for me, seeing how well the wiki interface behaves is delightful being able to link from one page to another without any special codes or URLs is refreshing.

I am now getting to grips with Plone. I may be gone sometime. I’m trying to work out how hard it would be to mine some data from social media sites and research repositories and create a sort of discovery engine for people at the University of York (see below). I’ve done the mining and the visualisation bit, now I just need to figure out how to save objects in the ZODB and how to create Products in Plone.

If anyone knows of any good resources/books for learning Plone, please pass them on… So far, the two books I’ve tried have left me a bit cold with code that doesn’t work very, very early on in the “Getting Started” chapters (sigh!). Wish me luck…

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