MySpace has a good post explaining why you can’t use relative links within OpenSocial applications. If you’re building for the OpenSocial container and trying to make valid HTML apps, watch out for this one. I’ve written the following in a lot of applications and suspect that others have as well. The #na below will cause problems, despite being valid markup.

<a href="#na" onClick="doJavascriptCall();">Click Me</a>

Consider the following ways to invoke functionality instead:

<a href="javascript:;" onClick="doJavascriptCall();">Click Me</a>
<div onClick="doJavascriptCall();">Click Me</div>

I’m noticing an increasing number of blogs are no longer providing links with a commenters name. While in itself a downside for folks trying to make themselves known through commenting, it does seem a good way to cut down on spam. A tip for folks looking to self promote through commenting, be sure to add a brand to your username and have good content to link to.

Looking at sites and tools like Earth, FreeBase, MediaWiki and DBpedia for inspiration, clarity and vision. Would love to hear about any other sites people have played with that provide wiki like front ends to structured data.

This last year I’ve become increasingly aware of smallish media companies, one or two employees, that seem to be trying to eek out a living by simply commenting on social media trends, this blog occasionally included. I’m not sure how much of this is due to new companies sprouting up or just my own awareness and understanding of the marketspace. The question for me becomes how many sources can cover the same news? Main stream media often takes a bias slant on stories, covering politics or other topics from a conservative, liberal, centrist, libertarian or whatever slant. The coverage of the social media space is far to narrow and doesn’t often lead to differentiation based on ideologies.

Regardless, I think we’re reaching gluttonous proportions and are in danger of becoming an echo chamber, described by Shel Isreal and Robert Scoble in Naked Conversations. Social media is definitely a huge portion of the future technology scene right now and it deserves coverage - but I think we’re covering it too much. I’m watching multiple blogs cover the same news within a few minutes of each other and that’s the part that scares me.

Consider the following post from Facebook about birthday notifications. It was picked up by Inside Facebook with commentary on how it may impact applications providing similar services as did TechCrunch and allfacebook. The saddest part is that none of them are adding additional value. None of the coverage is ground breaking or adds any real value to the experience.

Want more proof? When the fbFund winners were announced it was picked up by nearly every site covering Facebook news. This is actually news worthy, thousands of dollars are being given away! However, with coverage like FaceReviews near regurgitation of Facebook’s announcement and list of winners, I’d say we’re in danger of becoming spam sites. Thankfully some sites are actually reporting on the apps and adding value to the conversation.

I suspect we’ll be seeing consolidation of these blogs soon as those sites that add value stay afloat in troubling times and the others either switch focus to their real strengths or wither and die.

Last week I was traveling on the east coast and staying with a friend while working from the road. About 4 days into my trip, my Blackberry went haywire. If someone called me, the call history would immediately delete the entry. When I received an email, if I didn’t do something about it within 6 hours, the message would disappear - and horrifically end up in the trash folder, ready for deletion, on the IMAP server. The last and most tragic piece was appointments I added to the calendar just vanished when I sync’d back up with my laptop.

As panic set in about lost appointments, messages and calls - I discovered the culprit - applications. As a social media junkie, I’ve installed a number of applications, many I use almost daily, but some far less often. Applications like Yahoo! Go have been replaced with a native Flickr app which better provides the functionality I was using. A test run of tinyTwitter to replace TwitterBerry that failed and a host of other applications left the system with very little available memory. On top of that, I’d been using the native BlackBerry version of Google Maps extensively to figure out where I was and where I was going throughout the trip building a huge cache of local map data that I could review while in subways. What finally tipped me off that the system was out of memory, was when I attempted to install the MySpace application and was told there was insufficient space. I deleted a few applications and all was well with the world.

Two come to mind after this experience. First, I wish I could install apps on the 2Gb media card I have in the phone, like I do with photos. Second, some sort of notice about low main memory would have been a nice! I’m chalking this one up to a learning experience and if I’ve missed a call or appointment - you might want to call me again.

Without context, answers, facts and datum are meaningless. “The ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything” is undeniably 42, however, without the question, lost in an unfortunate galactic construction project, it’s useless.

Wikipedia is an awesome collection of facts, some even with context but, there are many areas, despite the best efforts of the contributors, that lack context. For example, Vincent Van Gogh has a wonderful entry detailing much of his life and explaining the inspirations of much of his works. However, a single link to the post-impressionism article and a few brief mentions of his contemporaries praise and admonitions provide context to his work. This is not a fault with the user driven model, but instead of the toolset. The unstructured nature of a Wiki doesn’t lend itself to comparative analysis - which is of course just one way to provide context to information.

Quantitative information alone is of course insufficient. What if we were to measure the sum of all works by Van Gogh. What measure would we use mass, dimension, net worth - a convoluted formula of all of the above? I am sure the answer would be 42. It’s absurd to compare everything using quantity alone. Qualitative analysis is a critical component in all evaluations. In this area Wikipedia’s model excels. Because the work is living, it can reflect the current thinking on a topic and through the edit history give us context of how perceptions have changed. Unfortunately, it still requires human beings to understand the changes and to provide the perspective - perhaps some graduate student is working on an automated system to solve this problem as their final thesis.

But if we leave the world of art and move back towards less abstract concepts that are easier to quantify, wikipedia fails. The inability to compare and contrast two articles of similar types, such as corporations leaves Wikipedia lacking. Consider Dell and HP. Both are publicly traded companies, both have Wikipedia entries and both have massive amounts of qualitative and quantitative data available about them. To look at the two companies side by side, we have to look beyond the Wiki walls and move to a more data oriented set of information. Google for example does a great job of comparing the corporate stock prices and a whole host of other providers give different toolsets for interacting with the publicly available financial data.

I think there should be a world where these two universes collide, empowering the public to contribute to the qualitative components of data sets in a wiki model, and also have comparative tools that act on the quantitative data.

Taming the Beast has a nice primer on HTTP 301 redirects. I spent some time this morning cleaning up AF-Design’s internal issues after reading over the HubSpot Website Grader report. If you manage a website and haven’t already done so - consider running the free report. It takes only a few minutes to generate and read and most problems can be fixed in only a few additional minutes. You can get a handy dynamic badge too, which you can put on your internal monitoring tools to keep tabs on things.

Website Grader Score Badge Screenshot

The real takeaway on this article for me was swapping all references of www.af-design.com to just af-design.com. WordPress was already handling this for all blog entries, but the remaining sections of the site were still being referenced with the “www.” prefix. The additional lines for the .htaccess file are provided below for reference.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.af-design.com [NC]            
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://af-design.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Two widgets, both provided by major companies have some discrepancies in their data and the election hasn’t even started yet! I’m not sure who’s wrong here, Google or Microsoft, but either way someone’s data isn’t accurate. When it comes to something like an election - accuracy is very important. As best I can tell, Hawaii is the last poll to close and from the even hour discrepancy, it seems to me someone didn’t account for daylight savings or a timezone somewhere.

Screen grabs taken at the same time

The live widgets for both companies are below. (more…)

NewsGang posted this tonight, it’s been picked up on CrunchGear as well - the long awaited Silverlight Watch Instantly, available to PC’s for a long time, is now in beta!

Thanks Netflix!

– Update: 9:10pm

Apparently Netflix has been harder at work than I had realized! Netflix will be offering TiVo subscribers access in December - W00t! Amazon may have gotten there first, but the UnBox - Video on Demand offering hasn’t impressed me.