Now Web publishers can easily write about local places while growing traffic and ad revenue. Praized is the first free local search platform designed specifically for social media sites like blogs, social networks and other online communities.

I said, back in January, how happy I was about joining the Praized team, and how much potential I was seeing in the company. Suffice to say, I’m just as ecstatic as I was back then, kicked up a notch or two.

Hey, maybe now I can reach inbox zero and start blogging again. ;-)

Edit: we’re getting some pretty good reviews so far. Crossing our fingers. Still work to do.

Now, if you also happen to be on Mac OS X, one annoying thing is that EC2 UI is configured by default to be used on Linux (and GNOME). Looking online, all I could find were questions on how to set EC2 UI on OS X to use the proper terminal and ssh, but no answer.

Fear not! Yours truly spent a few minutes on the case, and ended up finding a solution that is at least viable for myself, and will hopefully be for you as well. The trick is that I have X11 installed on my OS X box anyway, so I just use the binaries intended for this package.

There you have it. Now, I can right click on any instance listed in EC2 UI and select “SSH to Public DNS Name”. X11 and xterm are both seamlessly launched and proceed to log me into the desired instance.

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

Not taking the time to post much these days (too busy), but I couldn’t miss this one, being in the middle of developing stuff for the platform (among other things). :)

The new site at UN Data allows anyone to access the United Nations Data Access System. This online, easy-to-use database was created by the UN in order to provide current, relevant, and reliable statistics to the whole world, for free. Using UN Data, you can access statistical information on populations, demographics, trade, commodities, agriculture, employment, the environment, industry, education, tourism, and much more.

That’s awesome. CIA World Factbook 2.0 anyone?

1. Introduction
2. Noogl: WINNERS: Panel’s Choice
3. A2B
4. SneakSend
5. BlitzDirectory: WINNERS: People’s Choice
6. Reverse Payment system
7. Heron
8. Mandelbrot: 2nd most popular choice; my vote.
9. GoalR
10. Microfinancing for Macrolenders

And a few extra presentations, outside of the competition.

1. TikiWiki 1.10b
2. Digest (in French)
3. Business and Open Source Software

Congratulations to all the teams!

Blitzweekend is an unique experience where designers, developers, and entrepreneurs are challenged to create a working product in 48 hours […] Find a solution to a current problem, meet and innovate with bright creatives, work in an environment built for rapid development, and get feedback from experienced entrepreneurs.

1. Introduction (EN/FR)
   Introduction and last minute match ups.
2. Team Introduction (EN/FR)
   Organizers and Sponsors.
3. Rules and Principles (EN/FR)
   Question and Answers.
4. Presentation - Ben Yoskovitz (EN)
   Starting and raising money for a startup.
5. Presentation - David Fugère (FR)
   Utiliser Ruby on Rails pour programmer des applications Facebook.
6. Presentation - Matthew Harrison (EN)
   Financial and administrative pointers for startups.
7. Presentation - Arach Tchoupani (EN)
   The benefits of Python for rapid web applications development.
8. Presentation - Yann Rousselot-Pailley (FR)
   Aides et subventions gouvernementales pour entrepreneurs Québécois et Canadiens.
9. Presentation - Vincent Guyaux (EN)
   Panelist tips for the contestants.
10. Presentation - Alistair Croll (EN/FR)
    “Making it Viral” (English starts 3 min. in)

Mainly being on the techy side of things, I particularly enjoyed the more business oriented presentations given by Ben, Matthew, Yann and Alistair.

Good luck to all the participants! See you on Sunday, when I come to film the demos and the event’s conclusion.

The company on Thursday announced the first 10 teams of competitors in its $30 million contest to send a spacecraft back to the moon to gain greater insights into the solar system and to find new sources of clean energy.

More info is available on the Google Lunar X Prize web site.

Google. Space. Clean Energy. $30M. What’s not to like?

Via Digg.

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the biggest and most popular in the United States. For the fourth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-less collection of songs that - thanks to Greg Hewgill - can now be downloaded for free via BitTorrent.

A little consolation for not being able to attend this year. :)

In this article I will take a good look at XFN - the microformat for describing relationships between people. I will look briefly at what it is and the basic markup needed to add the information to your sites, before then going into depth, looking at the benefits you can get from that data by extracting it and using it in different ways. Extracting the data is easier than you think - there is probably a library for your favorite language already! If not, there are also some web services that could do the job that I’ll show you below.

Via a Microformat tweet.

There are always seemingly good reasons to continue doing things the way they were done in the past, and transition always presents challenges. As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based infrastructure themselves. They are two basic reasons for this situation: Change of existing operational services is hard. So is changing people behavior.

One of the advantages of working for a startup is that there is no baggage to deal with, leaving you with great freedom of innovation.

On the other hand, vendor and infrastructure lock-in is something that we, as technologists, have all had to deal with in one form or another. The challenge is to develop an ability to spot nascent trends and innovations early on, so as to gage and potentially leverage them as they emerge, rather than miss the boat and be left behind.

I think I’m not too bad at what I do, but then again, there are people like Sylvain, Joe and Chris (to only name a few) who always help keeping me modest on this front.

I am in fact very happy to announce that I have now officially joined the ranks of the Praized Media team.

Praized Media is a startup company working on a web-based application that will enable you to find and discover local places and merchants with help from people you can trust. It’s also a tool that will structure local conversations within blogs and a new platform for local search providers to generate leads from the untapped social media market.

I’ve been following Praized since mid-2007, when they really started to show up on my radar as a serious[ly fun] and innovative venture, oozing with potential, and backed by a winning trio of entrepreneurs: Sebastien Provencher, Sylvain Carle and Harry Wakefield. A fact which was only reinforced when Garage Technology Ventures decided to fund the company last September.

I’ve been given the opportunity to increasingly involve myself in the company as a consultant since last December. The way things were evolving, I could not longer deny the clear fact that this is a project I want to be an integral part of. Something I can unequivocally see myself focusing on, even providing segues into some of involvements in the web and open source communities.

Luckily for me, the feeling seemed to be mutual and today marked my first day on staff. Suffice to say, I’m sporting a mile long smile about it all.

Praized is currently in stealth-mode, so although I can’t say much more, I can definitely hint that great things are coming! And with the people already on board, I’m in for a fun ride, striving to keep up with and help them in their efforts.

Thanks for the opportunity, team! But shame on you though. Now I’ll have to can that site I worked on for my consulting biz’… ;-p

Compressed-graphite field plotter:
This example of inscriptive technology is a dactylically manipulated lignin/cellulose-encased crystalline carbon allotrope allowing shear force deposition for semiotic and representational modification of planar compressed-cellulose substrates.

I dare you to think of what the device might be before checking the answer out.

Note: The whole video is great, but the amazing stuff starts about half-way into it (~2 min.).

I’ve been stopping myself from buying another BMX for years, thinking “bald dude + trick bike = not so cool”, but seeing stuff like this just makes me think “Hey, I’ve got kids, don’t I?”.

Gotta show them how to not get hurt, right? Right? Riiiight!

Worked for skateboarding and snowboarding, after all. :p

… we have a quick way for applications to integrate with users in new locales. We are now sending a param “fb_sig_locale” to all canvas pages that signals the locale set for the visiting user. Feel free to use this to begin localizing.

Good thing to know, since Facebook is now available in Spanish, with French and German to come shortly.

One of the most important improvement in this release is the fact that the distribution is now built upon CentOS, with select Fedora 7 components, making it a much more robust enterprise solution. YDL6 has support for the PS3, Apple G4/G5 and IBM System p.

Don’t know why you would want to run Linux on your PS3? Just check Terra Soft’s projects/clients showcase to get an idea of how powerful the Cell-based console truly is. From driving a car to solving celestial mysteries, this sure is one versatile little black box.

The wheels of progress turn slowly, but turn they do. The crystal ball might be a little hazy, but the outline of XML’s future is becoming clear. The exact time line is a tad uncertain, but where XML is going isn’t. XML’s future lies with the Web, and more specifically with Web publishing. […] Word processors, spreadsheets, games, diagramming tools, and more are all migrating into the browser. This trend will only accelerate in the coming year as local storage in Web browsers makes it increasingly possible to work offline. But XML is still firmly grounded in Web 1.0 publishing, and that’s still very important.

Passthru from Slashdot. Great read from IBM.

I only recently activated the phone features though, then found out that it took special (though widly published) credentials to be able to use Rogers’ EDGE network from the device.

So I tried the latter a few days ago, and got somewhat of a nasty surprise after trying to load one (yes, only one) Facebook page through Mobile Safari: it ended up costing me around $8.00… Ooops, I guess I won’t be doing that under my pay-as-you-go account…

I did find this a bit dishonest puzzling, since the same account (and SIM) allowed me to browse the mobile web for $0.05 per page from my older Motorola phone. Of course, there’s a difference between quasi-text-only pages vs. a standard page and all the attached media elements, but still…

The obvious conclusion was that I’d wait to use EDGE until I could score a decent data plan, since gaining the voice and SMS features was really what I was looking for when unlocking my device.

Looking for signs of such a plan, I found out that Rogers in fact recently released an unlimited data plan, without much fanfare, now matching Bell Canada’s $7.00/month offering. Details are very scarce and I’m not entirely sure this truly applies to my needs or if some types of weird partnership-based limitations are involved, but it’s definitely worth looking into. Unfortunately, the plan excludes anything but what Rogers wants to peddle, which still makes Bell’s offer a much better choice, but is unfortunately incompatible with the iPhone GSM capabilities (vs. CDMA)…

Now to top it all off, here is what happened to me this morning and what every iPhone-totting Canadian must be aware of: I was waiting for the bus, browsing the web from my iPhone while connected to a public hotspot (hence why I’m not really in a rush to get EDGE browsing activated). Reception wasn’t great though, being a bit far from the source, and what ensued led me to find out that Rogers has indeed tweaked/opened their network for increased and simplified data access: even though I had cleared out the credentials previously required to access the web through EDGE, it turns out that my iPhone did switch from wifi to EDGE in the middle of my session.

Of course, the reason I realized the latter fact was that my account quickly went from $7.00 left to $0.00… So unless you do have a ([un]limited) data plan, be very careful if you run an unlocked iPhone in Canada: the usual trick to disable EDGE (ie: not entering the special credentials) will not work anymore, and you might end up with a pretty bad surprise on your bill. Turning off Data Roaming (Settings -> General -> Network -> Data Roaming = off) won’t help either, since Rogers is my carrier. Just be sure that Mail.app doesn’t automatically checks for new messages (Settings -> Mail -> Auto-Check = manual), and avoid using network-based apps unless you have a good wifi connection.

We’re getting We’ll hopefully get there… At a somewhat totally depressing rate, given countries like Iran and Estonia have better data rates and networks than we do…

Cybertec is a PostgreSQL replication solution which makes sure that the database cluster is consistent at every point in time. We rely on a shared-nothing architecture which is perfectly suitable for synchronous multimaster replication.

I had somehow missed this newly open sourced (BSD license) solution from the list of accessories in the PostgreSQL 8.3 press release… That sounds like a great multimaster solution. Woohoo, one more tool!

Edit: Actually, that’s two more tools, since Mr. Icon also recommended me first hand to look into the wonders of using pgpool-II for persistent connections today, a product which also has a few replication and load balancing tricks of its own.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of version 8.3 of the high-performance object-relational database management system. This release includes a record number of new and improved features which will greatly enhance PostgreSQL for application designers, database administrators, and users, with more than 280 patches by dozens of PostgreSQL contributors from 18 countries.

Please forgive me as I bathe in my own drool after reading the detailed features list and feature matrix.

Still have to rely on Slony-I for master-to-slave replication though…I also have to check into Postgres-R as a multimaster replication engine.

Blitzweekend is an unique experience where designers, developers, and entrepreneurs are challenged to create a working product in 48 hours. Find a solution to a current problem, meet and innovate with bright creatives, work in an environment built for rapid development, and get feedback from experienced entrepreneurs.

There are a lot of good people putting a lot of effort into organizing this great event. Just check out their blog and wiki, and you’ll get ample proof of this fact. I predict a total success and I know I’ll be happy to join in the fun.

Steve O’Hear (who edits our digital lifestyle blog last100) has an interesting post on his ZDNet blog that questions whether Google’s OpenSocial initiative is at all about data portability, or if in fact it really just about widget standardization. O’Hear quotes heavily from a recent article by Marc Canter, who is a strong advocate for open standards and data portability, that ran on CNet.

I see the same issue with Facebook’s JS Client Library.

I love client-side technologies, but I’m increasingly thinking that the propagation of such libraries is calculated by the providers more in terms of securing data and activity custodianship, as an alternative to truly opening one’s data APIs, rather than with scalability and processing decentralization in mind, like some argue.

It’s not a bad thing by any stretch, but I’m not sure associating them with true openness and data portability is entirely appropriate.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive is a browser-based digital archive created by the Warumungu community in Tennant Creek, N.T. Australia in collaboration with researchers Kimberly Christen, Craig Dietrich, Chris Cooney, and Tim Dietrich.

Doesn’t that sound like a perfect site to be accessed from an XO?

But obvious references aside, what is so special about this effort beyond the niche community it revolves around?

As the Beeb duly reports, it’s all about the social approach to accessing the knowledge made available through the archives.

It asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing within their community.

This information then restricts what they can search for in the archive, offering a new take on DRM.

Or what I would have labeled as SRM: social rights management. Using socially defined standards and volunteered information to filter the data, rather than credentials provided by a central authority to restrict access to it.

Puts a whole new twist on Praized Media’s “Trust your tribes” motto!

Via Slashdot.

I’m quite pleased to have played a part in helping SPARQL become a W3C Recommendation. As we were putting together the press release that accompanied the publication of the SPARQL recommendations, Ian Jacobs, Ivan Herman, Tim Berners-Lee, and myself put together some comments (in bullet point form) explaining some of the benefits of SPARQL.

One step closer to semantic heaven.

This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML.

Now let’s compare this to the Open Social API description:

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

Is it just me or are others also thinking this is a missed opportunity for FB to take part in Open Social?

On the other hand, it could also lead to just that with what could be a simple wrapper to interconnect both ecosystems. That’s if FB decides not to go that way on their own and doesn’t expressly block such development through technical or legal means.

Calais which is a metadata generation web service that is powered by Reuters is offering up a $5,000.00 bounty to anyone who can develop a plugin that meets the following criteria: tag auto suggestion, semantic cloud, GUID incorporation.

I can’t go for this one, having other immediate priorities and commitments, but it sounds like a neat and challenging project to tackle.