Piers Jones

Very easy widget creation with SpringWidgets

I've just tried setting up the SpringWidgets 'Express Widgets' service and it's incredibly easy to do.

You just go through the wizard and drop in the RSS feed for your site. The rest is very easy.

Here is the express Widget for this blog. I might add it to the sidebar. There are very easy resizing and formatting options, it's flash based.

Get this widget!

Google Reader for the Nintendo Wii

Good to see that Google Reader now support browsing from the Nintendo Wii.

(Though I do wish they would hurry up and allow me to search through my RSS feeds, being Google you would have thought they would put that one together already.)

We are big fans of the Wii where I work, though not all expert players :)   

Where is my RSS?

I have been doing a little reading around GeoRSS.

It is looking increasingly important to tag your RSS feeds with 'Where' information,  or in Web 3 speak use an "RDF vocabulary for representing the latitude and longitude of spatially-located things".

Apparently Yahoo pipes can now use GeoRSS and can output pipes in a yahoo maps format or as a .kml format that can be used by Googlemaps.

So if you want your data mashed-up into more interesting forms on maps  GeoRSS looks the way to go.

 

Having  done the reading I'm going to have to set some time aside to see how I can start GeoTagging the RSS feeds from this blog to see what simple GeoRSS mapping applications I can put on top, like this one or this one.

UPDATE:

You can even read GeoRSS from within SecondLife

Mashup event & digital identity a summary

I tried some live blogging notes from the mashup event over on my vox blog. Here is a summary of what I took away from the discussion;

1. Open ID might not be the answer to all our prayers when it comes to identity theft, but if it means I dont have to remember a million usernames and passwords to log into my favourite sites then I'm all in favour of it. I imagine it will take off fairly fast this year.
2. There is obviously a lot of concern about the security of your online identity and I was surprised to find that fraudsters can make on average £85,000 if they can steal key information like usernames, mothers maiden names etc.
3. We need a wider debate about identity an how to manage it in an online world and I fully support Luke's efforts to get the conversation started. I'll be tracking his blog with interest

Explaining RSS to non techies

I came across this excellent video which explains RSS to non technical users.

Click To Play

                                       

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

A long overdue explanation which I hope gets picked up and worked on even further.

Maybe we could even think of a better name for it?

From common craft (the site went on Digg and seems to be down at the moment!)