Disruptive Conversations

I'm suddenly experiencing some problems uploading images from Windows Live Writer to TypePad, so I'm just doing a sanity test from a different computer to see if the problem is with a specific computer.  If you are actually reading this post, I'll know that the problem was with that other computer, and I'll probably be in the middle of doing the whole shutdown-and-restart routine...  aren't computers supposed to make our life more productive?

Curious moves by Cisco... they just announced the acquistion of the technology behind the Tribe.net social networking site.  The deal does not include the actual Tribe.net site but includes the technology and the developers responsible for the site.  Given that just last month Cisco announced the acquisition of FiveAcross, it is pretty clear they have visions of some role for social networking within the broader portfolio.  This NetworkWorld update has more analysis (including the comment that Cisco should just buy Second Life developer Linden Labs... methinks the Lindens have probably had all sorts of offers!)

Like any such list, PC World's list out today on "The 50 Most Important People on the Web" is inherently subjective, but still, it's definitely worth a read.  There are many names on there that will be commonly recognized... while a good number of others will probably not be outside their specific domains.  For that alone it is worth reading, because there's a good number of folks out there laboring away in lesser-known corners of our online world.  You will of course disagree with some people who are included and wonder why others aren't... such is the way of these lists.  (The good news is, if you really don't like it, you can always create and publish your own list!)

In its short existence, I've become a great fan of Yahoo!Pipes, but until very recently it did have a fundamental problem... dates.  If you took a bunch of RSS feeds and combined them together and then tried to sort by date... well, you had a problem.    When I was out at ETel last week in San Francisco, I actually met someone from the Yahoo!Pipes team there at ETel, and we had a chat about the challenge of sorting out the dates, when all the data to work with is very different.

Now, it seems that Yahoo!Pipes has fixed the problem!  As I went to write this post today, it now looks like they have figured out how to sort the dates out.  (My contact out at ETel indicated that they were working hard to try to fix this issue.)

So for those interested in the problem and why it existed, take a look at my pipe combining my various RSS feeds. If you dig down into the actual RSS feed, you'll see the fundamental problem faced by Yahoo (or anyone else trying to mash up different RSS feeds).  Here is the date associated with an entry from Disruptive Telephony, a TypePad blog:

pubDate 2007-03-05T14:37:34-05:00

Here's the date from an entry from Voice of VOIPSA, a WordPress blog:

pubDate Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:14:52 +0000

Here's the date from an entry from my LiveJournal account:

pubDate 2007-03-01T00:00:00-06:00

Here's the date from a RSS feed item from Twitter:

pubDate Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:48:48 +0000

Here's the date from a RSS feed entry from Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast, also a TypePad blog:

pubDate Thu, 22 Feb 2007 22:39:48 -0600

Are we seeing the problem yet?  Note that different feeds are using different formats for the date.  Indeed even two of my blogs from the same host, TypePad, appear to be using different date formats!  Also note that some are using GMT/UTC (the ones with +0000) and some are using the timezone (although why some are -5 and some are -6 is a bit confusing).   I had another feed somewhere that used yet another time format as well.  Since RSS is entirely text, Yahoo!Pipes has to parse the text and try to make sense out of it... and then presumably convert it to some neutral format that it can use for the actual sorting.  Not exactly a fun task.

When I first noticed this shortly after the launch of Yahoo!Pipes, there also was a problem that each feed seemed to have a different date field.  In some RSS feeds, it was "pubDate".  In others, it was "dc:date".  I think one was "publication date".  This created a royal headache when you were trying to create a filter or sort in Yahoo!Pipes. 

Again, though, this seems to have gone away or at least been normalized by the Yahoo!Pipes team.  All my feeds now seem to have "pubDate", albeit in differing formats.  So kudos to the Yahoo! team for figuring out how to make it all make sense.

Interestingly, though, this really appears to be a failure in RSS standardization.  Perhaps not in the specification, but in the adherance to the specification.  Near the top of the RSS 2.0 Specification, in talking about channel elements, it states:

All date-times in RSS conform to the Date and Time Specification of RFC 822, with the exception that the year may be expressed with two characters or four characters (four preferred).

This would argue for the "Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:48:48 +0000" format which is also shown in the example for individual item entries in RSS.  So it would appear that some vendors have not exactly implemented RSS feeds per the spec (is anyone surprised?).

I anticipate not blogging here (at "Disruptive Conversations") as much this week because today starts the first day of ETel, a.k.a. O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony conference.  I am out here in full "VoIP blogger/podcaster/speaker" mode with two presentations (a workshop today and a general conference session Thursday) and a bunch of other activities going on.

So I expect that I'll be blogging more over at "Disruptive Telephony" about the goings on here. I'll also be recording a number of the sessions as O'Reilly has given me the permission to do so for Blue Box (assuming the speakers are alright with that).  And I expect to be doing a number of other interviews as well... so it will be a busy week!

Also, in what should be a very fun event,Andy Abramson has organized a "VoIP Bloggers Dinner" that currently shows something on the order of 38 people having signed up!  Should be fun...

Anyway, I would not expect to see me writing much here this week...   (but of course, I've been known to be wrong before)

Just a quick note to say that I hope all of you folks heading up to the big T.O. for Podcamp Toronto have a great time!  (And I'm sure you will!) I can see via Twitter that Bryper, Chris Brogan, John Wall and Christopher Penn are all on their way up there... (currently in Buffalo).  It looks to be a fantastic event. Since I'm heading out to Emerging Telephony in San Francisco on Monday, I just couldn't also go to Toronto, but it definitely looks to be a great time.  I'll look forward to reading and hearing about it in various blogs and podcasts over the next days and weeks. 

Sometimes the choices you have to make turn out to be a bit bittersweet.  For the past several years, I've routinely attended the Spring VON show in San Jose, CA.  It's a great show for someone in the CTO space to see what's happening on the bleeding edge of telephony/communication... especially with regard to the carrier/service-provider space.  The thing I always like about VON is that there's always these companies off in the little 10x10 booths doing really wacky things.  And there there's the big open source presence as well.

Well, since (VON founder) Jeff Pulver is an avid blogger, there's always been a blogger presence at the show and for the last couple of shows I've been a member of the "blogger panel" where a bunch of us, usually led by Andy or Alec, engage in a conversation about our views on where the industry is going.  It's always been a good bit of fun - and we've often had a "VoIP blogger dinner" that's been equally fun.

This year looked to be no different. I was invited to be part of the blogger panel and had, in fact, accepted.  Then, other events intervened.  Mitel has a conference for our resellers in Cairo, Egypt, the same week and I need to attend for some presentations there as well as some side meetings.  I'm very much looking forward to it because I love doing the type of presentations I'll be doing... and I've interacted with some of our staff and VARs there, but never met them. (A side benefit is admittedly that I should get to see the pyramids, something I've always wanted to do since I was a wee little kid reading National Geographic.)

But then I read Jeff's post this morning... linking over to Robert Scoble's post...  turns out that Robert and Michael Arrington (of TechCrunch) will be doing a joint presentation at the "Video On the Net" conference... and then joining the blogger panel, where Steve Rubel will also be present.  Dang... talk about "social media rock star" line-ups!  Would have been a great amount of fun to be part of that conversation....

Ah, well... perhaps another time...  I'll send virtual greetings from Cairo...  :-)

Meanwhile, if you are thinking at all of going to Spring VON (or live in the Bay area), here's another great reason to go.  Kudos to Jeff for putting the panel together... it should definitely be a great session!  (And I'm sure as moderator, Andy will make it interesting!)

Today Skype launched a new "3.1 beta" release for Windows that does something rather dramatic... it rolls out a new "SkypeFind" service that lets Skype users search a directory for businesses - and then call them, of course. This goes head-to-head with what Google is doing with GoogleMaps (and its "click-to-call" in North America) and what Yahoo!Local and Microsoft's Windows Live Local are all doing.

I've written up a longer review including screenshots over at my VoIP-focused blog, Disruptive Telephony, but I thought I'd mention it here because: a) I know many folks in social media are also Skype users; and b) there's an interesting social networking element to it.

Specifically, the SkypeFind directory started out close to empty and is there for users to add listings and fill up.  For each listing, other Skype users can also add their ratings and reviews, allowing the directory to be searched by highest ranking reviews (as well as, interestingly, by "most called").  You also see recommendations from your contacts - and have an ability to "ask" you contacts about recommendations.

The directory also turns out to be pretty much like a wiki, in that any Skype user can edit the listings that are in the directory.  While there is a way to view the edit history, I have to wonder about the capability for abuse given the fact that Skype accounts are free... we'll see.

Anyway, more info and links can be found over at my other blog and if you are a Windows user (sorry Mac and Linux users), you can download it and check it out yourself.

I was fascinated to see in an email newsletter today that the owners of Odeo are looking to sell it off to focus on Twitter.  My fascination was just with such a blatant and direct pitch offering up a fairly high profile site.  For those not tracking the world of podcasting, Odeo was one of the entrants in the battle for being the premier podcast host, directory, etc.  I never used them myself, but I knew of other podcasters who did.  But if you look at the stats, they do seem to be getting a good bit of traffic... I mean, 1.5 milion plays of MP3s and 76,000 logins in the last 30 days is nothing to sneeze at.  Still, if they are a small company, I can understand their desire to focus, and if Twitter is where their energy is going, it's understandable.  I wish them well with the sale and transition, and have to say kudos to them for being very open about wanting to sell off the property.

Question for anyone reading - do you use calendars from either Upcoming.org or Google Calendar?  And if so, which one do you like better and why?

Here's the situation - over on my Blue Box podcast, you'll note that in any of the show notes we list "Upcoming Shows".  These are primarily conferences or tradeshows relating either to VoIP or security where the topic of "VoIP security" might be discussed.  You will also note that over in a box on the sidebar of the blog there is a list of upcoming shows... that is woefully out-of-date.

I want to automate this.

Nicely, at their latest Hackathon, the Feedburner folks created an "Event Feed" - see the details here.  So my thought is to use one of those services and then create an RSS feed... which then simply gets loaded into the sidebar of the blog.

However, I have to choose a service.  Google Calendar is easy on the one hand because I already use Gmail and some of the other Google services... but some of what I see at Upcoming.org is also quite interesting.

Any opinions?  (Thanks)