Looks like superfeedr does what it says on the tin but I need to understand that API to make it practical.
another quick post
September 1st, 2009How quick for this post
September 1st, 2009How quickly will this post be found, real time?
Real Time RSS PubSubHubBub
September 1st, 2009I am trying out Superfeeder right now. How long before this blog posts is found and I am notified. Real time, 1 minute time, 10 minute time. I’ll post the answer later.
Open Whuffie
August 31st, 2009I was asked this questions on Twitter: How do you ascribe a value to the original tweet without measuring its effects?
The question was put by @bureauista in reply to a tweet where I said, ‘yes, but for me the original tweet is the most valuable Whuffie score, how the info. impacts other life(ves) is still unclear’ in reply to @bureauista tweet, ‘a person’s RT score is a kind of whuffie’.
(I’m not sure how I would have said all that in less than 150 characters.) I have been brewing a blog post entitled Open Whuffie for a while now and I think this blog post might start to answer the opening questions too, here goes:
Open Whuffie is the working title I have in my head for a project to create a opensource Whuffie currency. Wikipedia gives us an opening definition of Whuffie, but I like to go back to original place where the word originated for me, the novel by Cory Doctorow, Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom. Here Whuffie is described as a number displayed on the forehead. I just accepted it was a number but I have started to question if that has to be the case? But for now Whuffie is going to be a numerical digit, much like we see in the stock markets of the world today.
The currency of stock markets (including futures exchanges) is money. Money, cash, pounds, euros, dollars, yen, etc. Numerous currencies, made numerous by the accident of country boarders or even new ‘virtual’ currencies segmented by information walled gardens or silos they operate in. Whuffie is universal, the currency of all life.
In theory this implies that all life is connected to all other life at all times. When new information is authored/created then it will affect all life, and that will range from a direct affect ( e.g. a RT in twitter) at one end of the rainbow to butterfly effects at the other (the chase for a pot of gold is not required anymore). The timing of any effect could be real time to a future time but refer back in time too. What do we mean by life anyway? I am sure we could go on listing variables that whuffie could include for a very long time. And addressing these endless possibilities is the challenge to be grasped in measuring Whuffie, it will mean something different to everyone at the same time.
An attempt to be a bit less woolly in addressing the original Q. The original tweet is more valuable than the RT’s in terms of Whuffie score. Who knows? More accurately I should have said, the original tweet has a whuffie score, the RT might be more valuable as its ‘new information’ value (yes, even thought it is sort of a copy), who knows? The nub of the point I was attempting to make was that the original tweet does not require any RE-tweeting to have a Whuffie score to give it a measurement. Why? In theory, given we know all other information in the universe, we can ‘measure’ the affect this new information has had. Sure, hyperlinks have made more visible the intangibles of yesterday (influence, social capital, call it what you may) but we can free ourselves of hyperlinks, just like monetary capitalism can from ‘banking transactions’ to propel us forward to an Attention Economy.
It’s a start, and hopefully I’ll get round to setting up an OpenWhuffie project wiki and devoting more attention to it.
An add-on: a for instance. . .
Everyday on the site I build, mepath.com I have a primitive framework working (I refer to it as a stage before the creation of a whuffie currency), here is what it does:
Lets say, I (James) authored a blog post / twitter e.g. I pulled a muscle swimming tonight at the pool. And the quest for information I have is to recover as best I can. Now my twitter/ blog commentators may provide info. but what I really want is to ‘correlate’ myself to all life that has the best information. What happens is the ’software/machine’ ‘understands’ the context of what I have authored (and in the context of all my previous authored info. on my life), it also understands the context of all other swimmers that have pulled a muscle swimming, the ‘machine’ then bring to my attention the best bits of information for me. No hyperlinks are counted into a PageRank (by the way PageRank is the current best way to link to information) but the context does have numerical score attached to it. I will be open sourcing the documentation on the scoring context dynamics, for the nitty gritty on that. Whuffie scoring will be the stage after ‘context’ scoring.
Attention : Whuffie
August 31st, 2009I was down in Edinburgh the other week where Mike Coulter was showing me a set of presentation slides he had presented to a SME (small business) audience. On one slide on measuring social media he listed Attention as being currency of measurement. Got me thinking, how long before the world Attention will be replaced by the word Whuffie?
Whuffie, the new bark
July 8th, 2009Capitalism is often described as a dog eat dog world. Well, capitalism there is a new bark in town, Whuffie. One of the earliest blogs I read is titled, HorsePigCow. It is the blog of Tara Hunt and this year she has published a book titled, The Whuffie Factor. I’ve not read it yet but I will. Why? If I were to name one person in the world to explain why web2.0 and social networks are not just mere buzz words but a state of natural evolution in society’s ability to communicate and share, then Tara would be that person. As for the word Whuffie, it comes from a book called, Down and out in the magic kingdom, by Cory Doctorow. In this novel Whuffie is the currency used by humans to make decisions on how trustworthy other people are and how to give our attention. Tara has a set of slides that explain Whuffie much better. . . .
Why Whuffie is My SEO Jetpack
View more presentations from Tara Hunt.
Open source as a service
June 30th, 2009I think I am all set to opensource the code I have been writing for 2 year now. But I have discovered a snag, two major ones, the code base including supporting api libraries takes over 4 hours to ftp upload and the second is the time it takes to prepare is just about a full time job, or was becoming so. Plus I listened to Stephen Wolfram talk about his open sourcing experiences, the time and complexity required and his shocking conclusion, in the end just about no one looked at the code. Why? It was simply too complex. I feel I am heading in that direction. Time for a rethink?
Not on open sourcing but on how to do it. Opensource as a service is my thinking, giving access to a test site that exposes the ‘new’ code amongst the api libraries. Opendata is the trump card and not only that but links back to the supporting ‘meaning’ behind the data, e.g. semantic lifestyle object word list, averages, statistics, language rules, lifestyle rules etc. I don’t have this ready to open up but I now know where to direct my opensourcing efforts. Create this opensource environment them hopefully the wider openstack developer community will start to engage with the code, and ultimately, open data flow available to all users freeing them to use their data as they choose.
function coder to a class coder
March 18th, 2009The first lines of code I wrote we all sequentially written, you read about functions and after functions you come to OOP, Object Orientated Programming ie. Classes. Each step along the way it seems so hard to evolve but when you get the hang of functions and their properties, you can not imagine how you managed to code with out them. Most of my code is grouped into functions and have files that group many functions together. I guess instead of files I could be using classes now? I read that class are a good way of spawning multiple occasions of the same bit of code but for different data inputs. Again like moving to functions, there are a whole new set of properties to understand about writing Classes. Each class instant is called an Object (straight for the text book speak). The code quickly looses that familiar look but with that we get many new benefits, technical and maintenance and I expect with time this will all look ‘normal’ again.
It is not that I do not use many classes right now but these are mainly opensource files I have imported. Creating my classes is the new frontier.
open sourcing code for a beginner
March 18th, 2009I am preparing to open source the code I have been writing for mepath.com . The hardest work has been figuring out a logic that allow a machine to ‘understand’ context of the text that has been authored. However, preparing the code for release is proving real hard too. Completely new, you soon pick up on words like SVN or GIT but I never read you need a local client and a hosting service. Well, the sites do say that but say it clearly in geek speak. I contrast that wth the current ease of ftp - ing the files up to hosting account. OK, no version control except human and backups done well, occationally but the opportunity to share is missing. The opportunity to share is the goal, if others do not have a chance to see and read about the goals you want to achieve, then it is highly unlikely they will get involved. I have been pointed to this book . I am doing my best to learn from it. Hopefully I will write soon about where the code is hosted, that is if you are interested in the lifestyle linking vision code we are figuring out.
jumped into the deepend of coding
March 9th, 2009I entitled my last post along the lines of my Rookies year as a coder. That was not exactly true, I wrote my first html lines of code back in 1996 after reading a Internet Magazine, yes they existed back then. I was a trainee Accountant and some made remarks, why are you reading that? The intervening time gives the best answer, the Internet is everywhere.
I am first and foremost a user of the Internet and most of my entrepeneurial life has been about having ideas and finding others to development them, that is write the code. mepath.com started that way but about 18 months ago I wanted to take the lead in writing the code. The team was experimenting with datamining techniques to understand context. Us humans can read a blog post and say, this is about swimming and that is a sport etc. Getting a machine to ’understand’ such a straight forward interpretation of context is very hard. I was naive to how hard. I have come to learn it is one of the biggest problems out there in computer science looking to be solved.
That is not the problem I have set out to solve. My vision is about sharing information to allow individuals to live ‘positive prevention‘ in other words, discover the lifestyle cause and effect on health and to create a personalized future that ensure I can live a lifestyle I want to. Solving ‘machine intelligence’ is just a problem along that path that needs addressed. And there are many teams working on it, that illustrates the magnitude of the problem. I am always happy to reuse the best ideas out there. I can state quite categorically that mepath would be not be where it is today without the re-use of opensource code and re-use of ideas I have encountered in my education and entrepreneurship. To contribute in that same spirit I am currently working on releasing the logic behind mepath as an opensource project.
Until recently, the code written has failed. Failed to solve the big problem but achieved in the discovery of ideas that seem to be working and working to some degree reliably. More over, working on a small scale and designed to work better with more scaling of information. We will see as time progresses.
The liberating thing about writing software is that you can take an idea, that intangible linkages of thoughts in your head, sometimes distilled into words or diagrams and you can make them real. That is the buzz I get from writing code. First I am an early adopter user of information technology but I have always listened to the brightest technologist too. You were just as likely to see me at a SV technology SIG (special interest group) as a web2.0 unconference. Free from a formal computer science education has given me the opportunity to go with my ideas as I see them.
I cannot say, that mepath uses datamining techniques of this school of thought or this semantic web technique or computation method. I sure it does fit in with them but I describe the code combining the use of ‘wisdom of the crowd’ data aggregation and sematic web techniques. Both are required and the concepts are use many times in the logic processing that has been discovered. My future blog post will start the process of sharing those as best I can.
