We’re looking to start a development open-access mailing list. Can anyone recommend / offer reliable hosting? We’re open to commercial services, university-affiliated servers, as long as it’s going to stick around for a while.

The Playstation Portable is now a fully capable podcasting client. A host of big players seem to be getting into podcasting at the ground level – right now it’s basically a hack that sits on top of weblog technology, but where will it be in five years? This is beginning to look like it’ll be bigger than weblogging itself.

Via Educational Weblogs.

I think, before too long, RSS feeds aggregated like this will be common practice. Users are all familiar with email, and placing the aggregator in a message-based context actually provides new functionality for content providers too – they can save bandwidth by letting people pull in the new content they’re interested in reading, and better yet, correct mistakes. When you send out a mailing list to subscribers, there’s no going back – with an RSS feed you simply change the content and wait for the clients to reload.

Within an educational context, this means that central information – like course notes, perhaps a lecturer’s blog – can be stored in one place but broadcast to their students. No worries about incorrect email addresses; just a single point of failure. I’d be interested to hear about anyone’s experiences doing this, with Elgg or any other software.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is out – I upgraded this morning and haven’t found any problems. The thing is, I haven’t found any exciting new features either; there’s an easy-to-find “delete all private data” button that would be useful were I to use public computers, and a handy drag-tabs-to-reorder-them widget, but beyond that there’s precious little to sing about. Oh, and it’s incompatible with my web developer’s toolbar, at least for now.

Under the hood, of course, there’ll be all kinds of little fixes and compatibility nudges that make it a better piece of software, which is why I downloaded it. But considering that 81% of people are still using Microsoft Internet Explorer, I think they’re going to have a very difficult job indeed convincing people to move on reliability alone. I would go so far as to say that I think it’ll be a bit of a flop, at least compared to previous releases. The new Mozilla.com website is very nice though; I’ve always thought their graphic designers were very good. Does anyone know who does their art?

An aside: since they removed advertising a month or two ago, I’m becoming more and more impressed with Opera, even though my open-source-friendly instincts tell me to support Firefox to the end. It’s not my default browser – yet – but some of its unique features are both innovative and clever. It also runs faster than any other browser I’ve ever used.

In other news, English alcohol licensing laws change today, which means pubs and clubs can open much later (morbidly enough, on the same day George Best is going to die from alcohol abuse).

I happen to live three houses down from a drinking establishment of less than shining repute; I’ll be interested to see how much trouble we get in the neighbourhood. It’s distinctly unfortunate that this coordinated with disco and karaoke night; the biggest fallout will be people singing Hey Baby at the tops of their voices at 1am, and my consequent inability to get it out of my head the next day at work. Bah.

All this said, I’m not against the change in the law: I expect everything will settle down in a couple of weeks and we’ll all go on as when pubs shut at 11. No big deal.

Lately – every since the ePlugfest in Cambridge last month, in fact – I’ve been thinking about standards and interoperability between web applications. The ideal is that Elgg, Moodle, Gmail, 43things, Upcoming, Match, your university’s intranet portal, LUSID and Microsoft Outlook can all interact with each other, sharing data and resources as if they’ve known each other all their lives. Crucially, any new application that comes along should be able to play along too, without any modifications to any software.

Standards have been written. For eportfolios we have reams of XML; for CVs we’ve got a little more; for weblogs and social networking we’ve got small XML standards used everywhere. But that’s where it ends – developers have a schema to work to, but they’ve got to do the hard work themselves each time. Programmers don’t like hard work. Ideally they want to glue someone else’s code together while they watch a movie in the background. Preferably, although I might just be speaking for myself here, they want to do this with chocolate.

I’m beginning to digress.

Wouldn’t it be splendid if when a committee spewed out a massive schema and usage document based on a standard they’ve spent months hashing out, it also spat out a handful of libraries for the major programming platforms? Some basic implementations for .NET, PHP, Java, C and Perl?

For one thing, this would dramatically increase uptake. For another, it would increase compatibility across applications that had taken it up – no issues due to incorrect implementations, because the applications would be dependent on more or less the same implementation. If programmers still wanted to roll their own versions, they’d at least have something to work from, as well as data produced by many more applications in the wild.

Better than that would be a sort of standard library framework for social networking and broad “web 2.0″ functions – something that handles connections between people and objects for you. I don’t say this as a lazy programmer; I say this as someone who sees the value of some basic (simple) standards underlying more than one application. Imagine if Moodle and Elgg really did use the same underlying glue, and imagine if another programmer could pick up a toolkit and both quickly and easily create another tool that interacted seamlessly with them.

Small pieces, loosely joined. Without toolkits enabling other programmers to easily create other applications that play along – generic toolkits, not application-specific “interoperate with Elgg”-style libraries – we’re going to be waiting a long time for the ideal.

I think it was Misja who pointed me towards Microsoft’s Simple Sharing Extensions draft. SSE provides a minimal XML data structure to allow better collaboration using RSS and OPML feeds – e.g. using RSS to synchronise events between two calendar systems.

This possibly represents a bit of a sea change for Microsoft; not only is it a great idea that’s genuinely useful and doesn’t require any proprietary technology from them, but there’s a little note at the bottom of the page:

Microsoft’s copyrights in this specification are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License …

It’s a different world – one in which they’ve also just opened up their Office file formats and sent them off to be registered as standards. Presumably they’re facing up to the open source movement and realising slowly that they have to let people use Windows as a useful coding platform if they’re going to retain their userbase.

I’m finding myself trapped by a problem that’s often been expressed to me in the past – who can you legitimately call a ‘contact’? On a system like Elgg I’m happy to add anyone I’m interested in, but LinkedIn’s contacts are people you actually know and have interacted with. It always feels a bit pushy to send a “connect with me!” email; so much so that I’ve only just now sent the first one, while I’m wondering exactly how presumptious it would be to send out more.

I think it’s time to hold my breath and jump …

As Dave will confirm, before we embarked upon Elgg I had an idea for a book called The Internet is People about running a web business. The thesis was that the only web businesses that would ever succeed were ones that looked at the Internet as a collection of people who wanted to communicate with each other, and would facilitate that to some degree.

I’ve lately been kicking myself for not writing it, because my hypothesis has been proven correct. Since then we’ve been introduced to the concept of Web 2.0, which was defined by Reid Hoffman yesterday at the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford conference as follows:

Web 1.0 is read-only and sorted by flat directories.

Think AltaVista, a search engine that ranked pages purely according to the words on each page in a vaccum, or Yahoo, which employed teams of people to fit submitted pages into a giant taxonomy.

Web 2.0 is read-write and sorted by networks.

I was lucky enough today to meet Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Odeo, the podcasting creation service and directory. Podcasting is much more than downloadable radio over the Internet, although it does that very well; Evan has a vision that encompasses personal reflection, collaboration, voicemail-like services and more.

Of course, you can create podcasts in Elgg, simply by uploading MP3 files and setting their access permissions to ‘public’. Or, if you’d prefer, you can create a podcast using Odeo’s tools and import it into Elgg. It’s actually quite exciting, and because we have a shared belief in open standards it’s incredibly easy to add an Elgg podcast to Odeo:

1. Create an Odeo account
2. Click ‘create’ and then ‘import an external feed’
3. Copy the address of your RSS feed (you’ll find a link next to your user icon, usually in the top right of your Elgg profile pages)
4. Paste them into Odeo

Equally, to import an Odeo feed into Elgg:

1. Visit the Odeo channel’s page
2. Copy the address of the RSS feed where it says ‘audio in this channel’
3. Click on ‘manage your subscriptions’ in ‘Your Resources’
4. Enter the RSS feed address into the ‘new feed’ box

With autodiscovery – a planned development that will mean you can just type in a website’s address or click a button in your browser and Elgg will automatically find the feed – this will become even easier.