B. Mann Consulting

I'm happy to announce that I'll be speaking at Dave Shea and co's Web Directions North conference this coming January, taking place January 29th through 31st here in Vancouver (with apres conference Whistler trip, of course).

I'll be talking about the 3 Stages of Content Management. I'm tagging stuff in delicious with WDN08 -- please send me your links if you have something relevant to add. Yes, I'll be mentioning Drupal, but I'll mainly go through why/when/how you'll be diving into an actual content management "system" vs. straight up HTML pages (people still do that?!?) and some of the different tools and techniques, as well as the reason why you might want to go to a dynamic system.

WDN is still looking for sponsorship, and of course you should definitely attend if building websites is at all in your future. Dave's presence here in Vancouver is finally starting to be felt (which Dave? oh, you mean the CSS Zen Garden guy? He lives in Vancouver?!?) and the conference last year was excellent.

Since I've been rambling on about Facebook recently, Mark Shropshire pinged me to let me know that Facebook is blocking / taking legal action against apps that attempt to remotely "automate" Facebook. Said like that, it sounds kind of bad, but in reality, it's MoodBlast trying to update your status across all systems -- FB, Twitter, Jaiku, etc.

TechCrunch has a longer write up on this trend. What does this mean? Well, it's probably not a good idea to treat a large, commercial system as a coral reef (hat tip to Dave Winer).

Aside: coral reefs and other ecosystems flourish around the rusting hulks of sunken ships. Should we extend the analogy to businesses as well? Didn't all these other social networks spring up because of the dead carcass of Friendster?

Brad Neuberg left a comment on where to find the proxy...or rather, that left me an email address so I could email him that there was no download link :P I've got it now, so now I can transclude the introduction from the purple-include page here directly (note: probably Firefox only at this point -- you should some purple text below after this rolling symbol: ):

And that was just one more line in the Drupal module to set the meta tag:

Now I just have to hope that bad, terrible things won't happen from this proxy.

On Thursday night I was invited to the Microsoft Expression launch event. I was soubly glad to attend because David Crow, who is now with Microsoft Canada, came through town for the event (a post from David about the upcoming BarCamp Vancouver ... which looks to be at capacity already!).

Check out the Vancouver PHP Users Group Summer Workshop Series. It's specifically targeted at beginners, here's the description:

The purpose of this workshop is to introduce beginners to PHP and associated technologies. There is no charge, and these workshops are intended to be an introduction to further courses, that you could pursue at a college or university.

As well, Audrey is going to be one of the main instructors, and she's looking specifically to get a core of women interested in these courses. Check the VanPHP website for full details and session descriptions. This is

What's the catch? Well, Free Geek Vancouver is providing both the venue and a computer lab setup, and there is no charge for these courses. But, just having moved into their new space, they need more power. If you know of an electrician that can help, please contact Free Geek Vancouver.

No, it's not a drug, it's the Semantic Web :P

Freebase is sort of like a structured wiki. In that, anyone can add content to the system. What's different, is that you can also add and define your own "Type" which are a collection of metadata. User generated content is quite common, and Freebase actually sucks in a ton of information from Wikipedia which gives it a huge base of content to start with, but this concept of being able to add/edit/organize higher level structures and metadata is new (tagging aside...).

I had great fun fleshing out entries for Drupal and the Drupal Association, figuring out Company, Software, and People types in the process.

OK, OK, I admit -- filling in the Beer entries for Hacker-Pschorr Weisse and the Hacker-Pschorr Brewery were actually more fun :P

I did a much longer recap/announcement over on my Bryght blog, but wanted to point to some people specifically. I had a great time and it was good to see so many people out.

Scott Hadfield wins the prize for actually OpenID-enabling his blog in real time (and for his bizarro domain name :P).

My site here does have delegation headers for my home.bryght.com account (Simon Willison has good instructions for the OpenID 1.1 format here), but it won't work most places until we get our code updated with the OpenID 1.1 backwards compatability. 

I think Rob of jayandsilentrob.com wins the prize for most errors/frustration encountered in trying to get his site delegating. I realized as we were all clustered around trying to test delegation with various systems....that there are still very few "large" sites that you can just do login with...besides random blog comments. Definitely more work needed here. Oh, and Rob has an event coming up here in Vancouver for tech types (Rob, looked for it in upcoming and couldn't find it...post/email and I'll update this).

I'm trying to find some time to setup a development environment locally again, and I want to invest in learning an IDE. Most of the folks I know use something like emacs or TextMate to code, but I'd love a little more of an environment. Also, I'm still trying to find more bits and pieces that together form a set of best practices for developing, deploying, and maintaining Drupal.

Initially I was thinking about learning Eclipse, except I've heard that it's PHP support isn't the greatest. Looks like the PHP IDE isn't going to be 1.0 until June 2007. But then again, IBM's Drupal tutorial also explained using Eclipse.

Xcode is Apple's own tool, and there are some guides on using it for PHP.

Then there's Komodo, made by Vancouver's very own ActiveState. 

I want to learn an IDE that has support for multiple languages, so editors purely focused on PHP are out. 

Integration directly with CVS / SVN is a nice to have. svnX works for me as a GUI.

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at video online. Part of it has been technical, and part of it has been thinking about what is needed and where it is headed. I was involved with IPTV / video over IP back at Nortel, and a lot of things actually haven't changed.

As if video on the Internet wasn't hot enough already, the whole Google buys YouTube has upped the fever pitch to...well, something hotter than fever :P

So, for starters, go and read (and link to!) Kevin Marks' five point plan to save use from Flash video. He included "crappy" in the title, and he's right, but...well, it's what works today.

And that's what will stop us from getting any further. Getting stuck in the "works today" mindset is a bad thing. When you sit down to build something new, you're really never building it for today...you're building it for today AND for the next little while. Somebody has to take a chance on figuring out the future. 

In any case, I very much agree with all of Kevin's points. The phrase "detection script" makes me shiver a bit, and Flash is still the only platform solution if you want one integrated application that has interactivity built into it as well, but for straight up video, we can do better, and should be trying to.

I just landed in San Francisco and took the BART directly to BarCamp San Francisco. I grabbed some coffee, some beer, and some North Beach pizza from the common areas, and then landed straight in an intense session about microformats.

Tantek and Chris Messina are trying to herd us cats in the room as we think about what "actions" we can do if there is lots of data that is microformat-enabled online.

I'm hearing lots of actions that at their base sound like publish and subscribe actions. But we're trying to stick at the UI layer -- one of Messina's stated goals was actions that are the same across sites for the same type of data. e.g. a Greasemonkey plugin that could do "add as contact" when given an hCard, no matter which site you are on.