Is the Bay Area the center of the world? If it isn’t, why does the IT world revolve around things happening over there and not anywhere else? I’ve been wondering about this ever since I began to think about building or joining a start-up. Think about it: The conferences are in SF, the new companies are in SF, the hip projects were born there or are moving there soon (think Flickr).

In a time where I believe we should be getting close(r) to establishing the idea of a global network of creative companies and people, it seems like things are focussing down on one point of the map, and that’s probably not healthy. I’ll give you two distinct examples:

• First, Ben Hosken emailed me about his own start-up, started in australia in 1999 but that had to move into the US early on to create a market for it to grow on. He put the situation in a brilliant way: “Its damn hard to be so far away from the “action” as you I’m sure recognize….if only we were in SF”. So very true.
• Second, my own case. Portugal is definitely not the place where you want to have new ideas because you feel powerless to climb the ladder through layers and layers of concepts from the 90s and Web 1.0-centered companies. It could be a lot better because it has a huge market of IT-aware youngsters to explore, but there are no real examples of people taking the time to try and develop new services.

  Naturally any start-up that focusses on what I’ve been working on (social networking, folksonomies and the future of the web itself) will be thinking about dealing with a worldwide market, but it is always good to know that the people in your own city and country know what the hell you’re doing.

Its a weird world, the IT world. And we’re far from being global in terms of economy, even though the internet may get you to believe otherwise.

Its been a long time since I’ve posted something personal, but I believe this may be worth it. I just got the word back from Google that I my proposal was accepted for their Summer of Code program. If you haven’t heard about SOC before, it goes like this: Google funds students into working on an open source project mentored by a 3rd organization (in my case, that will be the Gnome Foundation).

While each student is free to submit their own new application proposals, some proposals were already set up by both Google and the mentoring organizations. Here’s what Gnome proposed as one of the projects they were in need of:

Implement a live web-based wiki-like editor that allows generation of content that can be rolled back into our documentation. Allows users to contribute annotations and additions to documentation (e.g. can add documentation to an undocumented function), save it. Other people visiting the page will see your additions to the documentation, and the maintainer of the module can extract the addition and trivially roll it into the official documentation source.

What I’ll be doing for Gnome and Google is the proposal above with a twist (which may have been what gave my proposal the edge over the 8700 other people in the competition), and is described on this presentation paper.

Considering my infatuation with online content publishing, my proposal was logical, and apparently good enough to be accepted by both Google and the Gnome foundation. You’ll probably see me blog about the development effort quite a lot, mainly because I’ll be implementing the whole system in order to foster participation using web 2.0 methodologies. Stay tuned. I’m gonna go out and celebrate somewhere.

Unfortunately I’m not at Gnomedex 5, but I’ve been keeping an eye and ear out for the news flying from Seattle. I couldn’t help but write about Microsoft’s announcement for RSS. If you haven’t heard about it yet, i’ll give it to you in short, then followed by why I think Microsoft is wrong.

So yesterday at Gnomedex, Microsoft announced:

• They will be implementing a platform for RSS subscriptions in Longhorn, in order to allow different applications to access all the subscriptions of a user, instead of having each application deal with it separately (forcing the user to subscribe in each one)
• Enclosure support from Microsoft applications (like the photo viewer for photo enclosures, windows media player for audio and video enclosures, etc)
• An addition to the RSS standard to allow for listing contents

While the first two measures seem logical to me, and are proof that Microsoft is trying to go the way of the digital life that Apple’s been going on for a while, the third concerns me. This is mainly because it seems Microsoft is trying to break the purpose of RSS. Why?

They’ve announced this extension to RSS because they feel like RSS gives users no way to know what content came at what time, and how it was organized. The problem is, that’s exactly how RSS is supposed to work in the first place.

RSS is about raw content, not about content organization. Just like XHTML/CSS is about code and content separation, RSS/RSS readers are about the exact same thing. RSS feeds alone should carry information, no strings attached, while it is the reader’s function to act upon that information, sort it according to user settings, and present it.

What Microsoft announced breaks this content/code separation methodology, the way I see it (even though this is purely based on their speech, the actual implementation is still to come). I see this as a step back in terms of syndication, and so far, there’s really nothing new to what they propose. We’ll know soon enough if they manage to prove me wrong.

This second part (part 1 is here) of the “5 steps to a better blog” series focusses on letting users find your content. It talks about some measures you can take in order to guarantee that even old posts get the attention they deserve. While the first part was a little more practical and discussed correct typography usage for the web, this one goes into how things should be organized and located in order to actually be found by your blog readers.

The front page dilemma: A huge problem with weblogs and how they work relies on the front page and navigation. Naturally, you are limited to a certain number of articles you can show when people visit your blog, so what it will show is the last few articles you’ve written. This leaves in the dark all the other content you’ve written before if you don’t take proper measures. (more…)