BlogBridge releases coming fast and furious
BlogBridge is going " Great Guns" as I told my friend David in answer to "What's going on with BlogBridge?" Well I don't really know what the heck that means except that I am pumped to see the progress we've been making. More and more every day. And now there's a way for you to see it too!
We just made a beta release (0.5.6) Betas have been coming about once a month.
Beta releases are tested (to a certain extent) on multiple platforms, include a web site update, emails and so on. We also snapshot the source code to SourceForge for the open source community.
Well, we realized that we have useful running code more often than that, so we've introduced the idea of an Alpha release , which is not really tested but feels pretty stable and consistent. We will issue an update email, do a very minor update to the web site, and again snapshot the source on SourceForge.
See our web site for a more detailed explanation and let us know what you think!
BlogBridge Beta 4: Sept 15, 2004
Ok, guys, we have another beta release with lots of great new goodies! It will be up on the web site tomorrow hopefully. It sports lots of new features, which I will be describing when I have some more time to do it. For now, please go to the BlogBridge web site and look around. Some links of interest:
One of the cool new things in this beta is the BlogStarz feature , illustrated to the left. Notice that each Channel has several new pieces of information. Not all are fully implemented yet. Click on the image to enlarge it.
Now, here's the real story:
The icon on the top left (pointing up or down or not) indicates how 'popular' this Channel is. Today, Popularity is measured by the number of inbound blog links as reported by Technorati.
The Starz in the top center summarize BlogBridge's measure of this Channel's interest to you. One Starz - Not very; 5 Starz - Very Very.
The Icon on the top right (heart or bomb) is clickable. It is where you subjectively tell BlogBridge how you feel about this Channel. Kind of a Tivo Thumbs up/down. By the way, of course this icon will change to a thumb.
Finally there are 3 numbers at the bottom left. These correspond to how many articles there are total in this Channel, how many you have not read, and how many BlogBridge guesses you will consider Good articles. The numbers go in the opposite order: good / unread / total.
Try the new beta. I hope you like it. Let me know!
Patterns from the master
I came across a fascinating article, a transcript of a speech by Christopher Alexander , architect and author of "A Pattern Language."
Alexander is the guy who invented Patterns as they have now been broadly adopted by the Software Design community. In this piece Alexander tells of the thinking and objectives that led to the Pattern approach to architectural design - much more than simply cataloging patterns that were known work. He was hoping that when architects used these patterns they would be led, driven, forced into creating living and livable structures.
In his words:
"However, that is not all that pattern languages are supposed to do. The pattern language that we began creating in the 1970s had other essential features. First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence in the things which are made with it. And third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence, morally sound objects, and encourages and enables this process because of its emphasis on the coherence of the created whole.
I don't know whether these features of pattern language have yet been translated into your discipline. "
Simulation is hot!
Here's an interesting link that continues on the theme from my previous post on Agent Based Modeling. This isn't agent based, but it is kind of the most auspicious use of simulation one could imagine: "Computing the Cosmos. One of the biggest computer simulations ever run is illuminating the deepest mysteries of the universe."
Why Blogs are great, #102
I am often asked what 's so special about blogging. I always answer, technically it's pretty simple, so that's not it. It's that there are people in the world, who for their own reasons have chosen to write down their thoughts and opinion. I learn things that I would never have learned otherwise from blogs.
Here's the latest example. Now I am not a Bushie - by any stretch of the imagination , and I haven't bothered checking the credibility of this post.
I had not heard or seen this before. An interesting perspective. That 's why blogs are great!
Agent Based Modeling
And now for something completely different. I was reading this book: "It's Alive" over the weekend. Particularly of interest to me was all the discussion about so-called "Agent Based Modeling." Agent based modeling is a big word for simulations used generally to research and understand systems involving many independent agents.
They often have very cool visual displays where you can see, variously the agents traversing their space, growing, reproducing, exchanging, consuming, etc. There are lots and lots of cool examples of this.
I thought that there had to be some framework that someone developed to make it 'easier' to create these models, and indeed, I found what looks like a really good one: AScape or Agent Scape. Reading about it reveals that it is open source and that it has been used in many real projects that you might have heard of. It looks very cool and useful.
Anyway, more on this new hobby of mine later 🙂
What’s wrong with Feed Readers?
Here are two very interesting posts on the question of Feed Readers:
This is of more than passing interest to me of course, as it relates to the design of my Blog Reader: BlogBridge. Some of the ideas mentioned here are already planned for BlogBridge, but there are lots of good tidbits to insipre further work!
A new term: Blobjects
A very thought provoking speech by Bruce Sterling at SigGraph 2004. Recommended.
"When you shop for Amazon, you're already adding value to everything you look at on an Amazon screen. You don't get paid for it, but your shopping is unpaid work for them. Imagine this blown to huge proportions and attached to all your physical possessions. Whenever you use a spime, you're rubbing up against everybody else who has that same kind of spime. A spime is a users group first, and a physical object second."
BlogBridge Starz!
Finally. Ever since we started working on BlogBridge, I've been talking about helping a user slice and dice and sort through a ton of blogs and other channels, finding the good from the bad, the interesting from the boring.
Remember the catch phrase "… the ability to follow hundreds of blogs without loosing your mind " which is sprinkled all over our web site. In our next beta you will see the initial instantiation of this idea.
Channels (Blogs and other feeds) in BlogBridge are rated with from one to five stars(unique, isn't it?) These stars will tell you how interesting these Channels are to you.
The secret sauce is in how a certain Blog is rated with one or two or three or four or five starz. This aint AI folks! It's actually pretty simple and flexible.
For each Blog, BlogBridge figures out4 different metrics:
Importance. Using Technorati's API, we figure out how many inbound links there are, and use that as a proxy for importance.
Rating. There's a Thumbs Up/Thumbs down widget where the user can, Tivo-like, indicate subjectively how much they like the Blog
Keyword Hits. The user can, optionally, supply a global list of keywords that are important to them (for me, "Pito", "Salas", "BlogBridge", "eRoom", "Lotus"). This metric is simply counts the hits.
Activity. Using another web based service, we'll try to figure out how actively this Blog is updated.
Given these four metrics (so far, but more can easily be added) we come up with a number of stars to rate the blog. Of course the more advanced user can tweak the mix to get the Starz to reflect their own priorities, using this cool interface.
Given the Starz Rating on each Channel, there are lots of other interesting things we can do for the user. That 's for another time.
