MarkItUp

This week Google Reader was given a new look with a significant update, you can read about it here.

This update has addressed many of the usability issues which had previously existed and makes it much simpler to manage feeds and tags, view categories of feeds (now displayed in a tree), and to read.

Well done Mr Google! 

How can you start a mailing list and get over 100 subscriptions in a single week - that's insane.  Grant did it.  Not only that, but OzTFS already has among its subscribers:

• most of the AustralianDPEteam
• the Readify TFS brains trust
• and some guy named Rob Caron :-)

In addition to the mailing list, Grant is planning to have a weekly article which digests the highlights from the week's activity on the list.  Apparently Rob Caron thought that this was a good idea because he blogged about it today!

You've gotta love YouTube - Internet sitcoms now :-)

That was Episode 1 of the new YouTube hosted sitcom called Nobody's Watching.  Here are links to Episode 2 and Episode 3.

A while ago I wrote about the need for a deeper community experience for certain types of people within the community - one which goes well beyond what we get from user groups, forums, and mailing lists.  In that article I wrote that I'd like to consider using a form of geek dinner to encapsulate the experience and I was calling them "Community Dinners".

    http://markitup.com/Posts/Post.aspx?postId=4bf99253-d6aa-434d-b952-0d6beb63e0be

Since writing that article in April, I've been giving the idea more thought because I still wasn't happy with the delivery mechanism.  To recap, I wrote that the group would ideally be between 7 and 10 people and would agree to meet regularly for the next 12 months.

The part that didn't sit well with me is the size of the group.  From my experience, once you go much beyond 3 or 4 people, you start thinning the conversation.  The whole point of the type of group that I'm talking about is that you would really want to avoid this thinning because the people who are involved would really want to dig into the meat and potatoes of the various subjects that they choose to discuss.

So, in wanting to come up with the perfect medium for this community I started thinking about the kind of experiences that I was hoping to emulate.  Some of the experiences that came to mind were things like:

• The conversations that I had when I was travelling home from Code Camp this year
• Conversations that I've had with various people in airport lounges over the past 6-12 months
• Lunch conversations that I've had with various people at various times

Then you look at that list and it's clear what I'm hoping to capture - it's simply real community interaction.  When you put 2 or 3 smart, passionate people together for a short period of time, interesting conversations are sure to happen.  So, in effect, I'm already there - and I can increase the number of experiences that I have simply by meeting more people, and more often. 

This is easy.  It can be a matter of simply ringing somebody and committing to having lunch together.  Maybe it's a coffee after work.  Maybe it's going for a walk with somebody together.  Maybe it's even just sharing a ride in to work with somebody on the train.  It's any and all of these things, and it can be as regular or irregular as you like.  Put simply, it's all about the time that you spend with the people within your network.

Think about the value that is returned by going 25 minutes out of your way for a morning and committing to meet somebody on a train platform and sharing a train ride to work.  That would be a day filled to the brim with new thoughts from which new connections could be made from existing ideas.

Vance Morrison has written a nice article here which discusses some classes that he provides for measuring the performance of code.  He provides a download which contains the source code for two classes - CodeTimer and MultiSampleCodeTimer - that can be used to measure the performance of code.  Using these classes you can do things like:

// Measure 1000 iterations of concatenation
CodeTimer timer = new CodeTimer(1000);
    string myString = "aString";
    string outString;
    timer.Measure("Measurement Name", delegate {
       outString = myString + myString;  // measuring concatination. 
    });

... or, if you want to run more than 1 sample, you could use the MultiSampleCodeTimer and get statistics from multiple sample runs:

// Take 10 samples of measuring 1000 iterations of concatenation
MultiSampleCodeTimer timer = new MultiSampleCodeTimer(10, 1000);
    string myString = "aString";
    string outString;
    timer.Measure("Measurement Name", delegate {
       outString = myString + myString;  // measuring concatination. 
    });

DaveL posts an article about attaining better code through a concept that is familiar to chess players called 'chunking':

    http://blogs.msdn.com/davidlem/archive/2006/09/20/762932.aspx

Mitch and I have talked about this concept a lot when discussing what makes good and great programmers.  The chunking process is really a way to deal with complexity.  To take a bunch of problems and be able to place them in different, higher level buckets or to peek at problems through different abstractions is a very important skill.  Without the ability to "park" a bunch of complexity into some bucket you are left with myriad fine-grained details to manage and the complexity just grows and grows.  This is what ultimately sinks poor developers.

I've long worried about population growth - it's something that my mind has never really been able to fully grasp.  For instance, how third world countries see their populations double in a short space of time while not solving existing problems of food shortage and poor health simply amazes me.  Through marvellous planning we have gone to the moon and beyond, yet still it appears - to me that at least - that we have not sat down and done any sort of sensible planning for world population on our own planet.  My own anxious fears force me to ask the question - what will our world look like if populations doubled by 2050?

Tonight I read the following special series on the BBC News site which describes some of what we might be faced with in that timeframe by looking at growing urbanisation trends:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/world/2006/urbanisation/default.stm

A couple of interesting things that I managed to snip from that feature were this world population counter:

And also these pictures of Dubai. The first picture was taken in 1991 while the second one was taken 14 years later in 2005. This scene is being repeated in many places across the world today.

Dubai in 1991

Dubai in 2005

Most people have probably seen this article which was posted on ValleyWag a couple of weeks ago, but I thought that I'd post a link to it here for posterity:

    http://valleywag.com/tech/myspace/myspace-the-business-of-spam-20-exhaustive-edition-199924.php

If you haven't read Trent Lapinski's article, head over and check it out.  It's a good read :-)  I'd especially recommend following the links to help think about the research that went into creating that article.  This is what this morning's AFR had to say about Trent:

Trent Lapinski, a 20-year-old blogger and journalism student, has been investigating the social-networking site MySpace since July 2005, when News Corporation bought it...

As I mentioned in my last post, I've started a new website that I hope may form the beginnings of an Aussie Gadget Community.  The site is hosted at http://OzGadgets.com.au and the plan is to be an aggregator of information about Australian gadgets and also to post some tutorials about creating gadgets while I'm at it.

So far the only Aussie gadget that I know about is my AFL Ladder gadget, so if you know of others, please let me know about them so that I can feature them on the OzGadgets blog.  Likewise, if you have requests for Aussie Gadgets that you'd like to see, then please let me know about those too so that I can add them to the site.

I hope to post a few tutorials up on the site over the next week or so about creating and deploying gadgets.  Over time, the tutorials will include scripts for doing common tasks - such as displaying grids of data, or providing a customization interface for your gadget.

Please let me know if you'd like to get involved with the site - maybe we can make http://OzGadgets.com.au the first multi-user instance of SingleUserBlog :-)

In a comment to a recent post, Matt asks where I'm grabbing the data for the AFL Gadget from.  It's all a dirty trick though, because, as I told Matt in my reply, so far I've just created a static XML file and am hosting it from this site:

    http://www.markitup.com/data/aflladder.xml

My plan is to actually remove that file at some stage and replace it with a web service that other people can access via a subscriber identifier - not that I'm thinking of charging for it, I just want to be able to track who's using it.

I'll probably move the web service over to my new domain:

    http://OzGadgets.com.au

Where I envisage hosting a number of data services for "Aussie" sports data. 

More about http://OzGadgets.com.au to follow :-)

Over on the SUB project, each of us have a different web.config file requirement.  This is because each of us may be using a different:

• Theme
• Master Page
• Personalization Provider
• etc

Having a different config file requirement meant that we were constantly tripping over each other in the rush to make the config file suit our own needs/wants.  Thankfully Matt has come up with a great method that allows us to each have our own config files.  Read about it here:

    http://sticklebackplastic.com/Posts/Post.aspx?postId=3de6b68d-e518-4957-ba76-0603e3b6052f

I was having lunch with Omar, Dan, and Paul on Monday and I mentioned that I'm planning to create a few Live Gadgets that are based on Australian regional information.  As a sample, I've uploaded the most dirt simple gadget that I could think of - the AFL premiership ladder:

You can add the Gadget to your Live.com page by adding the following manifest link:

    http://www.markitup.com/Gadgets/AFLLadderGadget/AFLLadderGadget.xml

Or, by simply clicking on this image :)

This week I changed my Live.com communication preferences in the hope that I might be able to keep control over my Space and better manage the flow of Friends into it:

The rationale behind this change is that I'm much more familiar at dealing with Friend pollition :) in Instant Messenger (now Live Messenger) than I am at dealing with it in my Space.  By allowing anybody to invite me to Messenger, I can deal with Friend requests in the same way that I have done for the past 5 years.  Once on my Messenger list, people can then request to be added to my Friends list on Live.

Finally, I've removed a lot of the "Friends of Friends" stuff.  Not that I think that it's a necessarily bad thing but it definitely increases the "attack surface".

For a while now I've sat and watched as a range of the Live.com team have struggled to explain Live and what it really is all about.  Sure I've seen Ajax in action and have been thrown a bunch of buzzwords but the real story has never really been revealed.  In fact, in desperation I actually made a bit of an idiot of myself at a meeting where I stood up and said, quite bluntly... "I don't get it!".  And I didn't.  And the guy giving the talk couldn't bridge that gap.

Yesterday some of that changed when I watched this awesome Channel 9 video with Danny Thorpe:

    http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=232926

In this awesome video, Danny shows some new techniques that they have for allowing our own apps to host gadgets.  I'll say that again... this video shows how we could host gadgets in our own applications. 

In the video, Danny shows the Windows Live Contacts Gadget hosted within a web page and showing the technique that they are looking at for allowing gadgets to share their data with the hosting page - sharing data across domains!  To get your mind spinning, just consider that the Live contact database that sits behind this gadget is home to between 12 and 14 billion records.

For me this - and more of the monetization story - had previously been significant missing parts in the Live story and now it's all getting good for me.

I was checking my feeds this afternoon and came across this post by Scott Hanselman.  The post is a great tribute to his father and offers a wonderful insight into some of the magic of fatherhood and family.  Just think, some day Zenzo may write a blog entry with an image of himself standing alongside of Scott, captioned with "*The Grandpa of ..." :-)

Reading Scott's post actually prompted reminded me to blog about an experience that I had this very week.

Over the past few weeks things have been hectic and, added to the already high amount of business travel that I had clocked up in the past month, meant that I had spent a lot of time in airports and away from my little family lately.  Something happens when you travel.  First it doesn't matter, then you just kinda stop noticing it.  Anyways this time must've been different because apparently something inside of me noticed it.

On Monday morning I arrived at the airport, checked in my baggage, and headed up to the airline club that I'm a member of for a bite to eat before my flight.  As I was sitting in the club lounge drinking my coffee things started feeling strange.  I started thinking about my family.  I thought about all of the extra work that Anne has coped with lately.  I thought about Harrison and how I hadn't read him a bedtime story for a while.  And I thought about Charles and wondered what was becoming of the father/son relationship that I share with that little 3 year old guy.

Before I knew it something really strange happened.  With about 30 minutes on the clock until my flight was due to board I headed off to the service counter and explained that I couldn't make the flight.  To my surprise, the lady at the desk just looked at me and smiled and then explained that they would retrieve my luggage immediately.

With my luggage in hand I headed back up to the club to have a coffee and to make sense of what had just happened.  I briefly considered what work I needed to do and contemplated whether there was still sufficient reason for me to catch a later flight that day and continue as planned. 

Once I had made the decision to stay home this week, I rang my wife to come and pick me up.

I made the right decision :-)

While reading my morning feeds I see that Frank has given Dave the thumbs up to get a new community up and running. 

I'm sure that I can think of a few people who would be keen to collaborate on ideas in and around team based development - perhaps I should give them a gentle nudge in the right direction :-)

I've been an MVP now for 3 years and it's that time of the year where my MVP status comes up for renewal and so I thought that I'd blog some thoughts about the program and revisit this old post from Dave Lemphers:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/davidlem/archive/2006/01/20/515165.aspx.

First, the MVP program is many things to many people.  To some it's just a bad form of Kool Aid, while to others it's a set of rules.  Heck, according to this guy, it's now actually being run by Kofi Anan!  So whatever your take on the MVP program, it's clearly an emotive discussion point.

For my part I'm in agreeance with Dave Lemphers thoughts about it and would really like to see a greater churn in the program for a couple of reasons.  First, by having greater churn I think that you could keep the size of the program down and, in turn, reduce the administration effort that is required to maintain it.  Secondly, greater churn would provide an opportunity for some people who may not otherwise get the opportunity - because of timing or bad luck - to be an MVP; and that would be a shame.

Aside from the obvious benefit of the free MSDN Subscription the MVP program is great because of what it allows you to do.  The MVP program is really a set of tools that allow you to plug in to Microsoft at a pretty low level and to use those tools and your own energy to do things that might otherwise have been unachievable. 

I'd like to see that the MVP's that are awarded are those people who are most likely to benefit from the use of these tools and the doors that they can open.  For example, take some of the guys that I've worked with in the community of late: Joseph Cooney (WPF), Paul Stovell (Languages), Keyvan Nayyeri (.NET Developer Community) and Tatham Oddie (Web 2.0).  Nice guys, great attitude, 1000% more energy than me - not MVP's.  So here is me, with this terrific network that I've built, sitting at the top, licking cream.  While they are stuck with having to work two or three times as hard as me just to get the same level of information.  It's an exaggerated example used for effect.

If those guys were MVP's they'd get the invites to the right meetings; they'd get access to the right newsgroups, and they'd have the opportunity to mix their current levels of energy with the product teams to create unique and interesting things with the product.  And just as important... they'd get the recognition that they deserve for the effort that they've put into the Microsoft developer community.

So this is why I agree with Dave when he talks about being a nominator.  It's not just about sharing the love, it's about being a leader and growing the community.  It's a mentor mindset as opposed to a me mindset.

And "Yes", while the satisfaction of giving someone else a go will be great, letting go of that MSDN Subscription will be hard :-)

I opened Live Messenger just a moment ago and Frank was gleaming so I clicked on his contact card and read this.  I didn't know what ASCCA was so I quickly Googled it and the third entry was this which explained things a bit better.

Anyways, if you're still there Frank, I hope it's all going well :-)

It is with great delight that I announce the release of BlogML 2.0:

    http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=BlogML&ReleaseId=171

This is the first release of BlogML since it was added to CodePlex and made into an Open Source project.  As I look down that list of features that were added I would like to express my most sincere thanks to Keyvan Nayyeri who has put in an enormous effort in working on BlogML for this release.  It's because of Keyvan's significant contribution to BlogML that we've been able to release this significant version.

I'd also like to thank Phil Haack who has volunteered a good deal of time to help us work through some feature ideas while at the same time adding new ideas of his own. 

This blog post from Keyvan describes the new features as well as the intention behind their inclusion:

     http://nayyeri.net/archive/2006/07/23/BlogML-new-features.aspx

Timed with this release we will also be releasing testing providers for SingleUserBlog, CommunityServer, and Subtext which have been developed alongside of the BlogML codebase and which are now incorporated as a part of this project.

OK, I've held off asking this for a while but cannot keep it back any longer.  Put your hand up if you like, or even use MySpace.

[An excerpt from a recent dream]

Makind is moving to an interesting point in its history.  Imagine a species that could never be wiped out.  Not through famine, nor disease, nor nuclear winter, not even through an ice-age.  How could this happen?  How could the human race exist beyond an ice-age?  The answer lies in our relationships with machines and the internet.

The year is 10006 and the weather is superb.  Beyond the fields and giant poplar trees are clear blue skies.  The temperature is 27C and there is a gentle breeze blowing in from the east.  What a lovely day to get out of the house thought Brad.

While packing his blades in his travel bag, Brad's AV unit shrieked out and Clint's face appeared on the display surface.  "Hey Brad", he said.  Brad had known Clint for as long as he could remember and even though they had never actually met, they had collaborated on many exciting projects together and made good money in doing so.  This had been achieved mostly by building customer experiences and trading them on the global market.

Many of the friends in Brad's digital community shared a similar relationship with Brad as Clint did.  These friends were varied in their interests - which reflected Brad's own diverse personality.  There was Raymond who shared Brad's interest of football.  Oftentimes Brad and Raymond would just sit back in their respective pods for hours watching and reminiscing over football matches from across the eons.

There was Nina who shared Brad's love of photography and also Pete who was renown for knowing where to find the best music spots to hang out on the internet.

After a short discussion with Clint about some ideas that Clint had for a new customer experience, it was time to head out into the day...

Now that SUB is uploaded to the CodePlex repository and a team has been assembled, I'm starting to make plans for what I think the future of SUB might look like.  One of the things that I'd like to see is what I'm going to call "Live immersion". 

Because of way that Live integrates so well with all manner of client applications, it is going to be such an important member of the virtual toolbox that we carry around.  In fact, Live immersion means that Live is not merely a tool but an entire virtual body suit that we slip into.  Once inside the suit, Live will become part of your environment and your social network will be at your finger tips.

One of the ways that this is already happening is with the little Gleams that show up in Live Messenger when a contact has unread changes on their Live Space.  By quickly scanning down my list of Live contacts I can quickly see which of my friends has new photos, or links, or which of them has read a new book recently and their blog posts too.  This is great.  One of the two tools that I have permanently on and I can see all of my changes from right there within it.  One click shows me the little card which summarizes what type of change has occured, another click and I'm right there reading it or viewing it in your Live Space.  No longer to I have to jump off to another website or open another application to read my blog feed - it's all right there.

Applications that can learn to hang inside of the Live environment will do well while applications that exist outside of it will compete with the rest of the internet for your views.  While this is fine for some kinds of applications, it's not fine for an application such as a blog which you want to be at the fingertips of your friends at an instant. 

In its next incarnation, I envisage that SUB will be able to seamlessly integrate with your Live Messenger and all of the other parts of your Live environment too.  The real challenge for me now is to sit back and envisage what content I would put on my domain versus what I would locate on my Live Space - and what content would be co-located (and how).

Over on Live QnA, Jana asks the following interesting question:

    What should be tracked when it comes to online reputation

As I proposed in my answer, I'm not sure that there's a definitive answer to that question because it really all just comes down what activities an issuer deems are worthy.  For example, Microsoft might count your MVP status as points towards your reputation whereas Amazon clearly couldn't right?

From the very first moment when you utter the words: “All I need is a RichTextBox on a page and a Save button” you are on your way to writing your very own blog application.  That’s almost how SingleUserBlog (SUB) came about.  In the first version which was written using ASP.NET V1.1, the main goal of SUB was to be the simplest thing that would work.  Grab a bunch of files, copy them into a folder somewhere, create an IIS application which points to the folder, press Browse and you’re away.  Then along came ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts and my book and suddenly SUB started to gain legs of its own.  Now it was a showcase of how to work with and customize the portal framework to build an architecture which is highly extensible.  Luckily, thanks to things like MasterPages and Themes, not too much was sacrificed in the way of simplicity.

Now I can happily announce the latest incarnation of SUB – open source!  As of today, SUB has been accepted as an open source project on CodePlex.

   http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=SUB

Initially I was somewhat skeptical about the idea because I’m not keen at all to see SUB head down the predictable path of high quality, solid web portal applications such as CommunityServer, Subtext, and DotNetNuke.  I mean what would be the point of that?  Build another application which was essentially a “RichTextBox on a page and a Save button”?  No.  I’d like to see SUB head down a different path.  A path that allows SUB to stand on its own and where it remains as a unique showcase of web technology.  Where exactly that is will be up to the members of the team to decide but I’m thinking something a little Web-Two-Oh’ish or even better: Live, might make things interesting :-)

Anyways, go SingleUserBlog, go away and come not back.  Go to the world and do good!

The Virtual Worker Manifesto

Working from home presents some significant challenges beyond those that exist when working from a traditional workplace.  Many of those challenges relate to how we communicate effectively with our co-workers and more importantly how we address the notion of living in our offices.  In this article I’m presenting a number of things that should be taken into account when making the shift to becoming a virtual worker so that you can enjoy the best that it has to offer.

1) Email work items to colleagues anytime, just don't expect an immediate response.  There's no guarantee that they are on the same cycle as you anyway. ;-)

2) Don’t phone your work colleagues about work related matters after hours.  Family time is precious.

3) Zero your Inbox daily.  Or put better… stay on top of things.

4) Subscribe to the alerts – blogs, IM status changes, shared calendars, etc – of your co-workers to keep abreast of what they are up to. This will reduce the amount of time that you need to spend writing emails and engaging in phone conversations and will reserve those activities for only special occasions.

5) Delegate anything that you can delegate before starting your own work – this is no different to the bricks and mortar rule.

6) Don't spend your entire day processing email.  Go for extended periods where you are physically disconnected from your email client.  You don’t need be the author of each alternate message in an email thread :-)

7) Take advantage of the best of what virtual has to offer.  Have lunch with your family.  Work from the beach.  Grow a beard.  Chill out!

8) Shower daily.  Yes… DAILY - and while you are at it get out of the house too!

9) Invest in creating a pleasant working environment.  Don’t skimp on your virtual habitat.  Buy a water cooler, a nice painting, and invest in having a pleasant view.

10) Re-think how you communicate with your co-workers and choose your communication medium wisely.  No need to choose a synchronous medium when an asynchronous one will do.

11) Switch off, and I mean off.  Switch off the phone, email, IM or all of them, any time, day or night.  We are all virtual professionals and as such do spend extended hours on line, but at the same time if we get bumped to voicemail, or have to wait for a reply to an email, nobody is going to think that you are slacking off, or unresponsive.  We all need to switch off whether to focus on a particular task or just have time out.  I do.  (Added by Graeme Armstrong 6-Sep-2006)

In my recent post about the virtual office I mentioned that there are several ways to connect with your digital co-workers - one of which is to view their online presence message on Instant Messenger.  In the comments of that post, fellow Readify guy Andrew Parsons touches upon what is potentially the greatest challenge of the virtual office when he writes this:

I agree completely Darren and putting this blog entry together with your other one you can definitely see the upside of running a virtualised office full of night programmers. We're always available at pretty much any time 24x7, we have Live Messenger, phones, email contact, etc.

24x7 eh?  Are you up for that?  Always at your desk or digitally strolling the corridors of your virtual establishment.  Able to be pulled up at an instant to chat about progress on a piece of work or just to simply chat about the football.  Available: On Demand.

When your office is your living room you are never far away from email and the opportunity to "process" it.  How do you step back?  Relax?  Enjoy?

Go on, answer it... you know you want to.  It's only 11PM right... just a quick response.