• FOAF following -- why aren't Buzznet FOAF results showing up in the social graph?
• sgn://mboxsha1 format inconsistency -- what's the system for these SGN:// things anyhoo?

After attending SGFooCamp (photos), I've been meaning to playwith Google'snew Social Graph API a little more.

The SGAPI is a fairly simple and powerful tool:

• it looks for data captured on the web by the Google crawler, namely:
  • XFN links (normal webpage links with rel="something" markers),
  • FOAF information, which I won't go into
• this data defines a graph, with nodes being webpages (which are URLs, and URLs are people) and edges being relationships
• it's not a proprietary Google data store
• there's one RESTful GET call in the API that returns the graph given a starting URL

That sounds kind of abstract, but it's really quite simple. For example, consider all the web services you use:your blogger.com account, your flickr account, your del.icio.us account, your twitter account, and your home page. They're all"you"and should have additional information to indicate that they belong to the same person. XFN defines this asthe rel="me" relationship.

Let's look at a specific example: Mark Kuznicki'saccount. Usingthe magic of thedemo application, we can see that Mark has a number of accounts that are claiming that they're him:

Why? Because Mark entered the URL of his home page and these applications added a link marked with rel="me" on the appropriate A tag. (If you don't believe, follow thelinks and look at the source).

Now, why does it (currently -- 2008-02-20) call these "possible" connections? Simple: because Mark hasn't linked back to these sites on his home page with A linksmarked rel="me".

Why should Mark do this? Simple:

• because if he does this he can have identity consolidation on all his public social networks, that is, by giving only his home page URL we can definitely know all the social networks that Mark belongs to (and not just claim that Mark is a member of)
• and by knowing this, we can start exploring other (web) relationships that mark is involved in, such as rel="friend"
• and if he starts doing this, pretty soon we have a solution to the YANS problem: when Mark joins a site, he need merely specify his home page and his friends are automatically found -- and without having to screw around with the password anti-pattern or manually re-entering all friends.

Kevin Marks reports:

I made an initial conversion to hAtom by hand in the meantime, but a few weeks back Michał Cierniak and I checked in a change to the underlying Blogger templates to make hAtom the default, which the Blogger team graciously accepted. This should enable much simpler client-side parsing of the blog pages.

Kevin has more details on how to add this to your template if you're using new-style Blogger templates. Here's a note I sent to the Blogger mailing list when someone raised the "what good is it" question:

Just to clarify, hAtom was never intended to be a "syndication format"
nor to compete with Atom or RSS. It's simply designed to describe the
microcontent on webpages, such as blog posts. We used Atom because it
provides a well-defined nomenclature for describing such elements.

What can you do with it? You could provide search results that narrow
into the exact content on a page, rather that keywords that were found
elsewhere on a page. You can write tools, such as entry pretty
printers, or "reblogging" tools for quoting posts that work
universally across hAtom blogs, rather than depending on the author/
publisher to provider this for you. Because it effectively
standardizes CSS elements for blog posts, you can write CSS that works
across all hAtom conforming blogs. You can combine with other
microformats or "POSH" HTML to associate data displayed on a page
(say, the geographic location of where a post was made) with the exact
post it belongs to.

In and off themselves not earth shattering perhaps, but not bad for
standardizing a half-dozen or so tags with minimal effort for
publishers.

All templates in the BlogMatrix Platform are hAtom compliant.

When you search with Google (for example) and there's a site map, Google should automatically give you a "search within this site" option.

Google has launched an API to Picassa, it's photo uploading service. This is something we may want to interface with in the future, since we've already done the hard work interfacing with Google Base.

TechCrunch reports:

The new Blogger beta product, open to a limited number of users in August, is now live for all users.

The key changes include the addition of tags, which Google has always called “labels,” and an option to create a private blog. You can also now sign into your blogger account using your Google credentials, and Google has made editing the template and posts significantly more user friendly.

None of these changes put Blogger ahead of its primary competitors. For example, SixApart’s Comet product allows not only for private blogs, but privacy setting can also be changed for each post. but it is a sign of hope for Blogger users who’ve been stuck with last generation software for years.

Privacy per post is becoming a bigger and bigger deal. I believe the template format for Blogger has also changed? I'll have to go look at this: maybe they're planning to do integration with Google Page creator...

Techcrunch reports:

In an encouraging act of collaboration, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced tonight that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track updates to pages. This should make it easier to get your pages indexed in a simple and standardized way. People who use Google Sitemaps don’t need to change anything, those maps will now be indexed by Yahoo and Microsoft.

I.e. it looks like they all agreed on Google's defacto standard?

Last April, we demoed some of the structured blogging capabilities of BlogMatrix. Part of the demo involved posting an event and having it show up in Google Calendar. We've recently decided to make that code part of the standard "base" installation under a system called continuous export -- whenever you post something, it will show up on other systems as appropiate.

Anyway, I couldn't get it to work so I contacted the Google Calendar Data API support group where a gentleman named Ryan Boyd helped me out. I didn't quite believe his last answer so I decided make a standalone test case that could be safely shared. Of course, after I finished writing it the test case worked perfectly so I ported back that test case code and everything's working just fine.

As a public service, I've included the test case code here. If you're trying to do PUT/POST using Python's urllib2, need to login to Google Calendar, or whatever, this code is well documented internally, is easy to follow, and it works.

This will demo quite nicely -- you can go to upcoming or any other hCalendar supporting tool, import the event and have it published on your Google Calendar. Neat and useful.

Outstanding items:

• making sure when an item is deleted in BlogMatrix, it's deleted on Google Calendar
• implementing Google Account Authentication
• make Google Calendar update (in the user's browser) when the item is added. Currently, one has to press the browser's refresh button which is suboptimal

Writely is no more -- it's now been renamed to "Google Docs" and packaged with "Google Spreadsheets" (just in time for Office 2.0). TechCrunch has the story here, where Arrington notes that Google isn't the only game in town:

Notably absent is the ability to embed spreadsheets directly into writely documents, a feature already offered by Zoho, which has been furiously updating its own office suite (Google says this feature is coming).

Missing from Spreadsheets is the abilitity to post as JSON, which would have been brilliant for controlling mashups.

The PC Advisor reports that Google plans to extend its search results to give Google Base (read more) results also:

Google plans to extend the product search capabilities on its main Google.com search engine in the fourth quarter, in time for the holiday shopping season.

[...] When people search for products on Google.com, the system will present them with another search box so that they can refine their query, according to Bear Stearns & Co analysts.

After people refine their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service.

That is, if your company places information about "widgets for sale" into Google Base (with price, picture and description information), people searching for "widgets" on Google will be given the option of seeing the "for sale" results.

The Read/Write web believes this will pose a problem for microformats; I'm not so sure -- microformats are a way of specifying structured data elements in a web page in a formal and open way. Google Base is a proprietary database run by Google Corp -- if you can create the data to go in the latter, you should have no trouble publishing it for the former.

Forbes has listed its favorite web apps for small business. Quickly summing up:

• Google Calendar
• GMail
• Google Notebook (I'd never even heard of this one!)
  
• Google Spreadsheets
• PageFlakes and YouOS (webtops)
• Zoho (word processor)
  

Well, there certainly was a trend here! Interestingly, no blogging app makes the list. We'll see if this changes next year, as blogging starts to become a key component of Enterprise 2.0.

Google is in the process of revamping the way Blogger.com works. Chris writes:

Hello,

Not sure to whom I should address this request, but I’m very excited about the Blogger Beta and that it represents an open opportunity to add support for microformatted content.

You can read more about microformats at microformats.org, but to summarize, microformats are community-developed standards for identifying certain kinds of information in webpages using your typical HTML tags and classes.

In particular, this is my wishlist of microformats that I would love to see Blogger support:

• rel-tag: okay, you already took care of this one, so kudos!
• XFN: WordPress already supports this, and it’s especially useful for representing lists of friends in blogrolls.
• rel-me: from the XFN family, being able to link to other pages on the web using rel=”me” creates an informal means of “claiming” other places where I publish online. Read about Ma.gnolia’s addition of rel-me.
• hCard: marking up personal profiles in hcard means that if I add personal contact details, people can click a link to add me to their address book without any extra typing. I’ve done this on my main blog. Clicking the “Add me to your address book” link will convert the HTML content in that page into a .vcf file that most address book programs can recognize.
• hCalendar: In order to make it easy for my readers to add events that I’ve blogged about to their calendars (Google Calendar or others, like iCal), I can use hcalendar to mark up this information with a link to add the events to their calendar. Here’s an example.
• hAtom: This one is fairly simple to implement since you’re already classing most of this information already. hAtom uses element names from Atom as class names. This allows people to subscribe to blogs directly, without the need to subscribe to RSS. You can read more about this.

Though the benefits may not seem immediately obvious to supporting microformats, the amount of effort required to add support is fairly minimal compared with other, more substantial features that you’re probably already working on. Furthermore, our community would be happy to help with the process of adding support to Blogger, validating your work and providing guidance along the way. This initiative is also not a commercial effort; rather, it represents the work of a large, distributed, worldwide community that wants to build out the value of the “lowercase semantic web” and to make data storage in web pages a reality.

In some respects, we are at a chicken-and-egg crossroads but the more support that we see for microformats in the wild, the more tool makers, publishers, browsers and other applications will reap the benefits of this effort to essentially modernize the web, incrementally building upon the existing infrastructure.

Thanks for your consideration and please let me know if there is any way that I can be of service.

Chris

We fully endorse this letter and in particular would like to make the case for getting hAtom into the template process ASAP:

• hAtom identifies almost all the commonly used elements in blog posts.
  
• standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easier for designers to modify and understand templates. Actions, such as "print this post" can use a shared printing CSS file, as it will inherently understand how all posts are structured.
• standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easier for search companies -- such as Google! -- to understand that a page contains blog posts, what part of the page conatains the blog posts and what isn't part of the blog post. This will make search results within blogs more accurate by giving the ability to ignore "incidental matches" where one blog posts matches but (for example) some other non-important term in the sidebar matches also
• standardizing around hAtom class names will make it easy to do "reblogging" -- that is, quote part of the content of one blog post into another post -- thus making it easier to create blogging communities and blogging conversarions
• as new templates tend to be created from existing templates, the greatest benefit for adding hAtom to Blogger templates would be to do this as early as possible in the development/roll-out cycle

Updated (2006.09.05):

• machine-readable weblog archives (tip: Danny Ayers); this would be especially powerful if combined with a directory of posts (OPML/XOXO) or a microformat for marking weblog archive structure
• Winer-style "river of news" pages can be made with a simple one-stop XSLT transformation

Michael Fagan has spotted that Google Base (which we have written extensively about) is now accessable by the GData API.

We'll have a longer post about this soon. Quick notes:

• this means Google Base is now readable in a structured fashion -- this is good, very good
• missed by most coverage so far, but almost as important: AuthSub let's third party applications access Google Base on your behalf. BlogMatrix will be all over this!

I was going to say I love Writely, but perhaps that's a little strong: I really like Writely though. Writely's an Web 2.0-style full text editor, available through a browser near you. The appeal to use this is very strong: I have MS Office on one computer at home that's gone on the fritz and I can't find anyway to transfer the license over. Writely, well, I can just use that anywhere. Another plus is that you can collaborate with others on the same document.

Unfortunately until a couple of days ago the beta-try-it program was closed. Not any longer -- you can go get your account now:

Google has finally cleared the backlog of applications to join the beta programme for the Writely online word processor and has now reopened the application to new users. There has been no formal announcement on Google although there is a mention in Writely's own blog, presumably to prevent a rush of sign ups.

[...] Writely, along with the Google Spreadsheet launched earlier this year, is one of the core applications around which Google hopes to create an online office suite - although the current version does not integrate with Spreadsheet. Last week rival Microsoft launched its own Writer online word processor as part of its own suite of Live web-based services.

I'm not sure what Google's business model here is, besides perhaps "p-ss off Microsoft". Perhaps they're going to wrap Writely into dedicated boxes that can be dropped into an enterprise, not unlike the search services they sell. 

I'm now doing almost everything except spreadsheets "Office 2.0" style: I use Google Calender, Google Mail, Writely and BlogMatrix for blogging and information sharing.

Joey DeVilla has written a two part article on how to make money from your blog using Google AdSense.

• Blogging for Dollars, Part 1
• Blogging for Dollars, Part 2

Some of the data Joey uses comes from Darren Rowse's article How Much Money Can a Blog Earn? (The answers are "it depends", "maybe not a lot", "some people are making sh*tload of money").

Bill Burnham has a post about what Google is doing these days:

With the launch of these Google Base front-ends, Google is clearly putting into place the major pieces required to support its vertical search platform.  Broadly speaking, such a platform requires 4 major pieces:

1. A big, highly scalable database that can handle lots of queries.  This, of course, is what Google Base was all about.
2. Consumer friendly front ends to access these databases.  The auto and real estate front ends are obviously the first of such front ends.
3. A large, robust, crawling farm.  This is obviously Google’s crown jewel.
4. A set of intelligent algorithms to find, classify, and flag listings.  We have yet to see this from Google.

Most people remain unimpressed by Google Base because it doesn’t seem to contain a lot data.  That’s because what you are seeing is a work in progress that is being purposely hobbled to reduce load during the testing phase.   Google has now built beta versions of pieces #1 and #2.  We will un doubtedly soon see pieces #3 and #4.  Only when those pieces are in place will Google Base fulfill its potential.

The second half of the post is called "Losers and Bigger Losers":

There will be two sets of losers in all of this.  The first and most immediate set of losers will be the start-up vertical search players (indeed one can only imagine the long faces at Trulia (and their VC backers) when they got their first look at Google Real Estate).

...

The second set of losers in this are the well established listings-focused Walled Gardens of the Internet.  As I have outlined before in detail, these Walled Galled face a fundamental threat from search.  A fully functioning Google Base will make that threat more real than ever.

What Bill hasn't mentioned is who can be the winners in this situation (besides Google!). I'll answer the question: us. The structured data component of this blogging platform is designed to populate Google Base. We've already demoed populating events into Google Calendar (not live, because of password issues). We're going to expand this idea (and do it correctly) using Google Account Authenication and then uses the GData APIs to populate pretty well anything you see in Google Base.

Read more here, including code samples:

Until yesterday I'd only tire-kicked Google Calendar. I couldn't use it for real until I loaded it with real data. Last night I finally got around to doing that. In my case, the export/import path led from Mozilla Calendar to an XML representation of iCalendar format to Atom and then into Google Calendar. The hero of the piece is Joe Gregorio, whose wonderful Sparkline service I highlighted a while back. Joe is also, and rather more notably, the author of both the Atom Publishing Protocol and Python's httplib2 library, two projects that came together to facilitate my transfer of calendar data (see script below).

Google's Patrick Chanezon had alerted me to the fact that Joe has added a new authentication scheme to httplib2. Along with HTTP Basic, Digest, and a couple of others, this Python HTTP library will now handle Google-style authentication. That's really the only tricky thing about using Google Calendar's API. Everything else is URLs and Atom entries. There are Java and C# wrappers for this stuff, but I'm having a ball just using Python's interactive mode to explore the Calendar API. Among the things I can easily do: search for entries matching dentist, search for entries after June 10, receive the results of any query as an Atom or RSS feed.

My TorDemoCamp demonstration (here and here) of what you're looking at here also had Google Calendar integration, using Microformats to read the calender information. Alas, not only was it a little flaky, it has the sample problem Udell's demo does: you cannot create a service to put data into Google Calendar without giving up your Google password. There may be a way to create a secondary Google account, but I haven't delved deeper into this yet. It'd hardly be fair to ask people to put their super secure Google password into our app and you'd be a fool if you were the one doing it.

An interesting story in the New York Times today about how Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all building giant data centers in Washington state to take advantage of cheap power, and to a lesser degree, proximity to customers:

Even before the Oregon center comes online, Google has lashed together a global network of computers — known in the industry as the Googleplex — that is a singular achievement. "Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden asset," said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and a founder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex.

The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles east of Portland has been a closely guarded corporate secret. "Companies are historically sensitive about where their operational infrastructure is," acknowledged Urs Holzle, Google's senior vice president for operations.

Behind the curtain of secrecy, the two buildings here — and a third that Google has a permit to build — will probably house tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks, held together with Velcro tape in a Google practice that makes for easy swapping of components. The cooling plants are essential because of the searing heat produced by so much computing power.

The complex will tap into the region's large surplus of fiber optic networking, a legacy of the dot-com boom.

If it's cheap power you're looking for, I have just the place for you -- Labrador. Consider the benefits:

• the Lower Churchill Falls project (yet to be built) is expected to generate 4,000 MV
• Churchill Falls is cool to cold, reaching an average daily maximum of 18 degrees in July and in fact, for much of the year, the daily average temperature is below 0
• It's less than 1500 km to NYC, the New England States and central Canada
• labour is available
• the government would be willing to make consessions

Issues uncovered while making this post:

• it would be nice to be able to dynamically update your Google Key OR at least post a message but not display it.
  
• the map extension is flaking out in "show" if there is no key
• it would be nice to be able to place multiple markers on the map AND to reference those markers from within the message body
• we need a cool way to add a degrees symbol (and other special characters)