the elmcity project
DESCRIPTION
Series of talks given in London, July 2007TRANSCRIPT
Events in Keene, NH: Spring 2005
Events in Keene, NH: Summer 2009Built on Microsoft Azure
Data flows in from: Eventful.com Upcoming.org A curated list of iCalendar “feeds”
Data flows out to: HTML, XML, JSON, iCalendar
Not a databaseNot a destination site
A syndication hub
Actually, a growing collection of hubs
Intertwined history with upcoming.org
2
1
3
From groupware to social information management
2009 iCal
RFC2445
1999 NNTPRFC 977
“It was one of the books I'm proudest of publishing, despite its commercial failure. It was just too far ahead of its time.”
- Tim O’Reilly, Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?
elmcity ?
outcomeyear standard project
publish subscribe aggregate
RSSRadio UserLand NetNewsWireBloglinesGoogle ReaderMany others
NetscapeRadio UserLandMeerkatBloglinesTechnoratiPlanetMany others
Radio UserLandTypePadWordPressMany others
ICS
CalagatorelmcityOthers?
Google CalendarOutlookApple iCalLive CalendarDrupalOthers
Google CalendarOutlookApple iCalLive CalendarOthers
RSS feeds, iCalendar feeds
The standard is 10 years old!
But it was late to the personal publishing party.
It only recently become possible to publish an iCalendar “feed” using:
Google CalendarOutlookApple iCalDrupal
And hardly anybody knows this.
Why iCalendar? Why now?
Right thing: Feed. Wrong way: RSS.
The date and time must be here, right?
Wrong. It’s nowhere to be found. (RSS link just points back to page)
Bookmarking metadata in Delicious
Step 1: Designate a Delicious accounte.g.: prescottaz, for Prescott, Arizona
Step 2: Bookmark a metadata URLe.g.: http://delicious.com/prescottaz/metadata
Step 3: Tag it with location, timezone
… are also controlled in Delicious
Other metadata defaults…tz=Easterntitle=event+calendarcontact=nobody_yetimg=http://elmcity.info/media/img/keene-night-360.jpgcss=http://jonudell.net/css/elmcity.css template=http://jonudell.net/tmpl_events.tmpl radius=5
Bookmarking feeds in Delicious
http://delicious.com/elmcity/trusted+ics+feed
Default event URL and category. (Individual events often don’t provide, will inherit, can augment.)
Trusting contributors1. Curator monitors RSS feed for previously unseen contributors (e.g., to Eventful or Upcoming).
2. Clicks through to view contributions to that service.
3. If deemed trustworthy, bookmarks contributor’s URL in that service, assigns (revocable) trust tags.
Other possible ways to curate metadata
Fielded Wiki?
{{ElmcityAggregator|where=keene,nh|tz=Eastern|radius=15|title=Events in and Around Keene}}
Semantic wiki?
Goal: Support any source of name/value pairs that people will happily use.
Open infrastructure
Collaborating in FriendFeed
Where do iCalendar feeds come from?
Sometimes curators create them.
Sometimes curators can find them.
In RSS terms, the iCalendar ecosystem is at roughly a 2001 stage of development.
Guerilla feed creation: FuseCal
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20090704BEGIN:VEVENTURL:http://www.stonewallfarm.org/events.html
Guerilla feed creation: FuseCal
Most calendar info online is HTML only.
FuseCal finds titles, dates and times.
And exports ICS.
Guerilla feed creation: MySpace1. Visit myspace.com/lonesomelake
2. Open the all events link: http://collect.myspace.com....69161&n=lonesome+lake
3. Give it to FuseCal
4. Filter the results by Keene
5. Export the iCalendar URL
6. Add that URL to the Delicious registry with these tags:
trusted ics feed url=http://fusecal.com/calendar/ical/4001823?h3-00163e2867e6 category=music
Now, even though MySpace does not export ICS, or do location query, wehave this band's Keene events flowing through the hub.
Guerilla feed creation: Finding implicit recurring events and making them explicit
1. Robot searches Google and Bing for: {every|first|second|third|fourth|last} {monday|tuesday|wednesday|thursday|friday|saturday|sunday} keene,nh2. Curator eyeballs results looking for recurring events3. Sample result text, from a PDF file:
NSD – 2009_02_Issue.indd Recreation Center, 312 Washington St., Keene, NH. Western Style Square Dance Apparel ….. “We have a dance every first and third Saturday, no matter what!!!”
4. Actual source of date/time info5. Implied recurring event made explicit
Guerilla feed creation: Light up hidden feeds
Google CalendarMost Drupal sites. Some library systems.Assorted other content management systems.
A variety of popular web calendars do offer ICS feeds, including:
The operators of these systems typically won’t know that.
Curators can bring this hidden feeds to light.
Just by bookmarking them!
Downstream syndication to the web
Syndication to community cable TV
Chess club
High school principal
Traveling minstrel
Square dancers
True stories
Chess club: Right time, wrong place
Keene Sentinel: Monday night chess club, 6:30 PM, Best Western Hotel
Eventful.com: Monday night chess club, 6:30 PM, E.F. Lane Hotel
Nope.
It moved.
The chess club does not expect to be the authoritative producer of a feed about itself.
The newspaper does not expect to consume such a feed.
Both expectations need to change.
High school: “We posted weekly.pdf to the website. Isn’t that good enough?”
Communications Committee, Tuesday at 5:30, Cheshire Career Center Conference Room, KHS
DTSTART:20080617T173000 SUMMARY:Communications Committee LOCATION:KHS , Cheshire Career Center Conference Room
ICS
The difference matters.
Our educators need to understand it.
And then teach it.
Computational thinking
More computational thinking
Indirection: Please don't give me a copy of your information. Give me a link to it instead, so I can respect your authority.Syndication: Your HTML and PDF pages won't flow through the syndication network. Your iCalendar feed will.Structure: If you make me guess the date and time, I'll guess wrong.Abstraction: We can use any URL as a rendezvous for social information management. We can even invent imaginary ones just for this purpose.Query
Q: Which Eventful venues are feeding into the Providence hub? A: http://delicious.com/mashablecity/venue=eventfulQ: What are the government-related feeds for Prescott? A: http://delicious.com/prescottaz/category=governmentQ: Where is music happening in Huntington? A: http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/whyhuntington/html/music
“Lohan may have been bored, but she wasn’t dumb. She tagged E! correspondent Ben Lyons and gossip blogger Perez Hilton in the photo’s caption.”http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/06/17/2009-06-7_lindsay_lohan_posts_topless picture_on_twitter.html
Lindsay Lohan posts topless picture on Twitter
Computational thinking in the mainstream
Because Keene’s aggregator subscribes to Eventful events in Keene, Beau appeared on the calendar – without effort, without even realizing it.
What if the other 20 cities on his tour were listening to their channels?
Minstrel: Beau Bristow in Keene
I’m looking to partner with:
NewspapersLibrariesSchools
More info:
http://elmcity.cloudapp.net
http://delicious.com/judell/elmcity+azure