Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: July 2005

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Announcing BlogWalk Seattle

Ok, one more posting before going off-line :)

It is our (Lilia's, Sebastian's and mine) pleasure to announce another BlogWalk in North-America: Seattle. Local hosts will be Nancy White, whom I had the great pleasure to meet in Amsterdam last year, and Lilia Efimova herself.

As always this BlogWalk is by invitation only, but it is usually not very hard to get one. Go see the BlogWalk wiki for more details, and contact Lilia or Nancy if you're interested in taking part.

Date is September 2nd, most likely, and the theme will circle around unconferencing, open space, and how on-line blogging exchanges migrate to face to face meetings.

There are also BlogWalks in the works for Dresden, Germany and Limerick, Eire. More about that when I return to this space, or keep an eye on the wiki.

(Tag: blogwalk)

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at July 16, 2005 07:33 AM)

Going Off-line

In the coming month I will be going cold-turkey from my on-line activities. No blogging, no messaging, no e-mailing even. Time for reading (of the book variety) and writing (using pen and paper!), taking a break from it all, and in between we'll go away for a bit as well.

In the mean time, if you're looking for interesting voices, have a look at the blogroll, or explore the archives for interesting links, but I trust you will have enough exciting stuff coming your way anyhow.

To prevent me from having to log into the webserver at least once a day to kick out the spammers, I will be disabling both comments and trackbacks for my entire site for the period I am off-line as of tomorrow. I will switch them back on somewhere in August, when I return to this blog.

Enjoy the summer!

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at July 15, 2005 04:36 PM)

Coined The Term Weblog, Never Made a Dime

Paul Boutin meets a broke homeless guy wearing a Google cap: Jorn Barger, of the Robot Wisdom Weblog, which he started in 1997. At the moment of that meeting Jorn was ready to start panhandling, using the title of this post as a sign. Meanwhile the domain is up again, with links for us to enjoy.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at July 14, 2005 02:00 PM)

All Quiet on the Western Front?

The White House have an interesting page with archived news entries on Iraq......filled with the 'Lorem ipsum' dummy texts designers use in their visuals. So according to Washington no news on Iraq was worthy to be archived since November 2003? Oh dear, the web is a hard place to navigate isn't it. (Via Michael Froomkin's Discourse.net)

tags: iraq, Whitehouse, George W. Bush

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at July 14, 2005 12:31 PM)

Tag Spamming

During a conversation with Francisco van Jole at Blogwalk 7 in Mechelen we talked about how long it would take before spammers took to using tags.

That was in May. Today I came across this post Many-to-Many: Tags run amok! by Clay dating from last February. It was already there, we just didn't see it ourselves yet.

Three interesting things to note here though.

Google doesn't index delicious: http://del.icio.us/robots.txt

As delicious is at least as much about people as it is about tags and information, you simply hit ignore when you come across a spammer

The user DaFox mentioned in the article of last February apparantly gave up his attempts (urged by Delicious?) as this user's list is now emtpy.

Tags: blogwalk, tagging, blogwalk7

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at July 9, 2005 08:51 PM)

Presence: Online Status Indicators

In the past few weeks I have been playing around with on-line status indicators. Some IM services offer their own indicators, others don't. So for a few that don't I've installed a Onlinestatus server. Also I started using a script made by Peter and Olle, to detect my current status with Plazes which I slightly adapted for my purposes.

Current indicators I've got working are Plazes, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM. The last one to add is Skype, which is an indicator I really need. You don't see them here yet, but at the page where I am playing with a new lay-out.

Jyve seemed to offer the service I need, but I cannot get it to work (it keeps saying Pending as my status, also the plugin frequently crashes), and I really wouldn't like to use a service by somebody else requiring me to store profile data there if I can prevent it. I'd like to be able to determine Skype status myself.

So now I am wondering if there are any other solutions out there that you know of? Does anyone have experience with using the Skype API for this?

Would something like running a Skype bot-account on my webserver permanently enable me to access that account's buddylist (which then would only contain my real account) and show its status on my webpages? And what do these guys use? Stuart? Phil? I saw some talk on a forum by somebody from their group mentioning an indicator but not saying much about it.

Suggestions are appreciated!

(tags: skype, presence, Plazes)

[Update: The Jyve plugin is now working, took a few reboots.]

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at July 9, 2005 04:37 PM)