Weblog: Archive

So, the controversial Lex Nokia passed today, with 47 members of parliament absent. Here we go:

Microblogging is all about conversations. About interesting ideas, and the opinions and clarifications to those. About discovering things happening around you.

But to be honest, Twitter and its clones like Identi.ca do not do that so well. Ease of posting, and good external tools might be there, but what lacks is the possibility to have real conversations. That is where Jaiku has been shining: the original posts follow the traditional microblogging concept of conversation starters being limited to the SMS-like 140 characters. But responses to those are not limited similarly, allowing thoughtful commentary to be written.

That is something that simply doesn't happen on Twitter: thoughtful discussion. The poor threading model, and lack of differentiation between conversation starters and comments simply means everybody ends up shouting on top of each other.

Brightkite, a location-aware microblogging service almost gets there. It differentiates conversation starters and comments from each other, and adds quite cool location-aware features on top of that. Suddenly I can follow conversations happening in the same neighborhood, or in the same city! But the problem is that they have made posting a little bit too cumbersome, and they make following and finding conversations quite difficult.

Instead of these services, Jaiku has been the place where the interesting stuff has been happening. But lately there has been too little development, and too much the failbird happening for it to remain a viable platform. And so the Finnish web community has been actively looking for an alternative. I think Qaiku, released today, could be it.

So, what is cool about Qaiku?

• Multilingual support: I can microblog in Finnish and English, and my international friends don't need to be bothered with a language they don't understand
• Private channels: our company can have a private channel where to handle actual workstreaming without leaking confidential information
• Favoriting and sharing: You can easily save interesting conversations to be accessed later, or share them in other services like del.icio.us or Facebook
• An evolving platform: Jaiku stagnated after Google bought them. With Qaiku there is a dynamic company, a cool platform and many interesting ideas that will hopefully make the service evolve into interesting directions

Sidenote: if microblogs are all about conversations, why doesn't my blog provide a commenting feature? To quote Alex Payne:

The main reason I don’t allow comments is that I want to inspire debate. I think people do their best writing when they’re forced to defend their ideas on their own turf. It’s one thing to leave a comment on someone else’s blog, but quite another to put your argument in front of your own readers. It forces a level of consideration that, without fail, results in a higher quality exchange of ideas.

With the same idea, instead of the comments happening on my site, I hope you will either react via your own blog, or by communicating using a microblogging service. If you link to me, I'll do my best to read it and respond :-)

So, if you want to discuss this post, you'll find me on Qaiku, Jaiku, Twitter and Brightkite. This post on Qaiku preferred, but I will watch couple of days for replies on the other services too.

Technorati Tags: brightkite, jaiku, microblogging, qaiku, twitter

Yanko Design's You-SB concept:

Jerry's real prosthetic USB finger storage:

The story behind this is that Jerry had a motorcycle accident last May and lost a finger. When the doctor working on the artificial finger heard he is a hacker, the immediate suggestion was to embed a USB "finger drive" to the design. Now he carries a Billix Linux distribution and the Freddy Got Fingered movie as part of his hand.

Yanko Design's concept via Gizmodo.

Technorati Tags: cyborg, usb

Qaiku is the new conversation-oriented microblog that many former Jaiku users are migrating to. While the team is still working on APIs and other features, it is already possible to pipe your qaikus to other social services like Twitter and Facebook. This blog entry will show you how.

The first step is to register to ping.fm, a service that can post your microblogs to a large number of different social web services:

After registering, add the credentials to whatever sites you want ping.fm to post to:

Then go back to Qaiku and get the Atom feed address of your posts:

...and sign up with your OpenID account to Twitterfeed, and add your feed address and ping.fm credentials:

After this, your Qaikus should start appearing in the other microblogs. This way, my friends on Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook can easily follow what I'm up to!

Technorati Tags: jaiku, twitterfeed, qaiku, twitter

I've been beta testing the new conversation-oriented microblogging service Qaiku, and after some negotiations we today signed a cooperation agreement to join in developing the site:

Qaiku is a microblogging service, focusing strongly on discussion. Microblogging differs from ordinary blogging by the length of the posts, more topical content and automatically published micromedia, such as Flickr photo stream, Audioscrobbler stream etc. Allowed lengthier comments to the brief posts make discussion possible.



Technically Qaiku has been built on Midgard 2 platform. Some of the features Nemein will develop for Qaiku will be released in the open source Midgard 2 project.

On my list of priorities is a public API, OpenMicroBlogging support and location import from various services like Fire Eagle and Plazes. I hope to get hacking on these as soon as I return from the Linköping Midgard Gathering. Will be fun!

Technorati Tags: microblogging, midgard, nemein, qaiku

Via Bertrand there is a meme of CMS vendors analyzing how they are doing with CMS Watch's CMS reality checklist. Here's how Midgard 8.09 copes:

1. Our software comes with an installer program.

Yes. First you install Midgard using your distributions's native package management tools, and then let datagard do the rest. It will install all necessary PEAR packages, create a database for you, tune cron and SOLR setup, and finally set up a working Midgard website.

2. Installing or uninstalling our software does not require a reboot of your machine.

Yep. Apache needs to be restarted, though when you install Midgard or new MgdSchemas.

3. You can choose your locale and language at install time, and never have to see English again after that.

Language isn't asked at install time. Instead, we use browser content negotiation to figure out the appropriate UI language.

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website.

Midgard is free software, so you can always get the full version.

5. Our WCM software comes with a fully templated "sample web site" and sample workflows, which work out-of-the-box.

Yes, there is a default template datagard will set your initial website with. We could do more to make the sample site "do more" out-of-the-box though.

6. We ship a tutorial.

The stuff is online. There are plans to start shipping it with Midgard, though.

7. You can raise a support issue via a button, link, or menu command in our administrative interface.

Nope, but you can do it on our Trac install. A good idea to add it to the UI, and so it will be there in next release.

8. All help files and documentation for the product are laid down as part of the install.

Currently documentation is online, but more and more of it is being included to the install packages.

9. We run our entire company website using the latest version of our own WCM products.

Yes.

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work.

Yep, seems so :-)

11. Our software does what we say it does.

Yes, though the list from 1.8 would have new items in 8.09.

12. We don't charge extra for our SDK.
13. Our licensing model is simple enough for a 5-year-old to understand.
14. We have one price sheet for all customers.

Free software. Need I say more? Services pricing is relatively straightforward too.

15. Our top executives are on Skype, Twitter, or some similar channel, and: Feel free to contact them directly at any time.

Yep. And Qaiku too :-)

To help people find pages related to this meme around the web, I suggest adding the string 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf to such pages, so that a Google query can find them all.

Technorati Tags: midgard, cms

As is customary, Midgardians are again meeting in Linköping, Sweden. This time most of the focus is on Midgard 9.03 "Vinland" familiarization, and discussing what shall be done for 9.09.

So far discussed:

• New XML-based element inclusion syntax <mgd:include />
• Moving MidCOM3 administrative tools behind a mgd: URL namespace
• Implementing database views in MgdSchema API
• Initializing Midgard database in stand-alone Python applications
• Using git and SVN repositories for Midgard package management
• Generating POT files from i18n calls in MidCOM's controllers and TAL templates
• Moving MidCOM toolbar generation to use Neutron-like introspection API
• Renaming MidCOM to "Midgard MVC framework"
• Naming Midgard 9.09 ("Vinland+1") Mjolnir, the hammer of Thor

Good stuff. Some discussions are happening in #midgard on Qaiku. Solt has posted some pictures.

See also Linköping Gatherings from 2008, 2007, 2005 and 2004.

Technorati Tags: cms, midcom, midgard

Week and half ago I posted a story on Jerry's USB finger. While obviously we all thought the idea of replacing a lost finger with USB storage was cool in a cyberpunk way, we still felt it was old news as all had happened around last summer. And so, the worldwide interest around it took us by quite a surprise. The story was an all major news websites, and even on radio morning shows.

The wave of attention, as shown by Google Analytics fits Morgan Stanley's media coverage graph reasonably well:

First the story was picked up by Digg, then gadget sites Gizmodo and Engadget. Second attention peak came from Slashdot and Boing Boing, and after that there was the long tail of mainstream media followed by smaller local newspapers and websites:

A week after the post Jerry was visiting our office to do integration testing for a project and the media circus was running at its hottest. His phone, and even mine were ringing quite often, with interview requests ranging from Indian radio stations to Channel 4 News and Reuters. Will be interesting to see how much longer the attention stays on when the story hits the TV networks next week.

Never underestimate what a single blog post can initiate!

May 8th 1999:

The Midgard Project has finally released the first public version of Midgard Application Server Suite. The new release contains Midgard core libraries, a PHP3-based web application server for the Apache platform and the needed web-based administration tools.

May 8th 2009:

It's time for celebration - Midgard CMS turns ten in May! The decade of Midgard will be celebrated with a guest gala that is to be held at restaurant Ostrobotnia in Helsinki, Finland.

Looking forward to seeing as many of you in the party as possible! Please register ASAP as we need to tell the restaurant how many tables are needed.

From USB fingers and flying cars to Chinese death vans, I think we need to agree that the future is now. It is just not (thankfully) evenly distributed.

Inside each 'death van' there is a dedicated team of doctors to 'harvest' the organs of the deceased. The injections leave the body intact and in pristine condition for such lucrative work.

What next, Soylent Green?

The tale of Jerry's prosthetic USB finger continues. Helsingin Sanomat has posted the recent Reuters interview video with him:

While the hs.fi site is in Finnish, the interview video is in English.

Technorati Tags: video, usb