PtwoP

Today I went to a really great talk by a guy called Michel Bauwens who spoke on the implications of various kinds of topology, especially P2P, within various aspects of humanity. He is an interesting man and had a lot to do with the development of the P2P Foundation. He spoke about how P2P systems have a few intrinsic advantages over some of the other, more common system topologies. He also tied his suggestions into reality and gave examples of areas that could benefit from this methodology.

All in all it was really interesting and I will be going to another talk by him at RMIT tomorrow. (Todays was at Melbourne University)

The Beach on the Weekend

Recently I actually started on my Individual Project for my last semester at university. The start has included revisiting an old blog of mine and making a new google group. Soon it will also involve getting the projects moving.

In any event I did not go the the beach on the weekend

The love of Gmail

Recently a video competition started involving making videos of the human passing of Gmails around the world and through various situations. I think it sounds quite interesting and I am quite certain I will enter a few pieces.

Does any one else want in?

Also, I am glad to say that I have started the forum for my Individual Projects stuff and so far there are four members.

8 Women

There is a really great movie called 8 Women.

That is not all.

I am thinking about changing some things in the world. Primarily I am thinking of either reinvigorating my For the Work of the People blog for the purposes of schools stuff. Do you think that is a silly idea?

Also, there is a new tool I came across called 8 Apps it seems really nifty and it seems like the ideal tool to solve the problem I am working on in Individual Projects at the moment. If I get an account I will invite some people.

Starting to Code

Work on my personal portfolio website has started. I am doing it using the Google Mashups Editor and, if everything I think is true is actually true, it will be able to compile a number of RSS feeds in a way that allows me to have a portfolio a lot like the one I described a few posts back.

It is not even close to finished and at the moment I do not even have a publicly viewable prototype but hopefully it will keep rolling along.

Google Reader Comments

I am really into Google Reader and use it for a couple hours a day to help me read many hundreds of posts. For this it is a really great tool as it brings all of ones blogs and other RSS or ATOM feeds together into one place and allows really quick navigation vial keyboard shortcuts. It does not stop there as it also lets its users star, share and tag posts. The shared posts from a given Google Reader account appear like a simple blog or can be syndicated as a feed.

This is all great and wonderful but a problem, in my opinion, occurs when users want to incorporate some of their own information, for instance as an introduction to a given article on a shared feed or as comments to any article in their reading list. To do either of these things a user has to travel to an external website and use a inconsistent pipeline. Google Reader has further issues in that even bars the user form seeing comments on articles they read without traveling to the source of the content.

I think allowing of additions to posts in the form of both comments and sidecars to shared posts would be really convenient and would allow the Web 2.0 concept of social web to be more strongly upheld. I think the same is true of reintegrating existing comments into the feed view in Google Reader, without doing this I think we are taking steps away from social web ideals which seem to reduce the engaged nature of the social web.

Here is my main shared feed.