Gotze.eu

Category: Collective Web

  • Search and suggest

    If you read any news or blogs around, I’m sure that you’ve heard of Google Suggest. Yet another feature in Google. In contrast to the feature offered in our browsers where it remembers our own searches, this is a server-based feature, that sort of captures the zeitgeist, and for example (try it) shows that scaringly many spell egovernment as “egoverment“.

    I’m happy now to introduce a new feature in GotzeLinked: Gotze Suggest. The search form shows previous searches and the number of results. Should work in most browsers. It is not quite a fast as googlesuggest, so have a bit of patience.

    Thanks Yogi.

  • An Inspirational Day

    The Danish eBusiness Association, Foreningen for Dansk Internet Handel, arranges an inspirational day, a blogger seminar on 7 December. I’ve been invited to speak about blogging in organisations. Should be fun.

  • The War on Spam

    While we normally refer to our mailboxes when talking about spam, the blogger community is experiencing the next stage of the war on spam: The spambots, that attacks blogs and their commentary systems, and pollutes them with the usual crap.

    Spambots have forced me to close down for comments in our Danish blog Afkalkeren. Which is really a pity, because there have been some good debates now and then.

    Here in this blog, I ask commenters to use a TypeKey, the proprietary system from SixApart, that comes with MovableType. Some day when I have some time to kill, I’ll probably connect my blog to my community.

  • Wikipediation

    Wikipedia is an interesting experiment. In many ways.

    The Wikipedizer is a web service to which one can pass a URL, and get back a list of related Wikipedia entries in XML. Example. Neat idea.

    In the Danish wikipedia, there is a category about it-arkitektur (IT architecture), but I find very little on this in the English version.

    Another interesting thing with Wikipedia is that the underlying engine, MediaWiki, is open sourced.

  • Being a service provider

    In June, I started offering a Feed2JS-service, which allows webmasters to create a few lines of code to paste into their webpages, that takes a RSS-feed of their choice and transforms it into HTML.

    When I released the service, I noted:

    You are welcome to use the service on my server, but please let me know if you do so.

    A few of my friends out there adopted the service, and told me about their use. Others just started using the service, and have never told me. My service is used a number of places “out there”, and the script is activated more than once a minute, and used ever more as time goes by.

    I have some good news and some bad news. The good news first: I am releasing a new Feed2JS-service, which does exactly the same as the old service, but adds a few new things, for example, the ability to style the output. And, uhm, I think that’s it, actually.

    The bad news is that I will offer this service on some slightly more strict terms.

    First of all, I want people who use it to let me know that they are using it. Just so I know. Second, I request that sites that generate more than 5000 monthly hits to the service (and I’ll tell you if you reach this level), must include a link to either 0, 0 or, if your site is based in the US, that you until the Tuesday after the first Monday in November 2004 provide a visible link to a site that supports John Kerry, or if you have problems doing so, a link to Red Cross.

    The old service will be outphased over the coming weeks. The outphasing will be be disruptive, and until closing down, random links of a political nature might appear in the provided listings.

    If you run a site that draw more than 5000 hits a month, you should consider getting your own Feed2JS. I still use Alan Levine’s code. Installation takes less than five minutes, and is all out-of-the-box, with very little configuration needed. And then you could provide the same service to your own community.

  • Wiki wiki wonders

    As a wikilover, I find it worth mentioning that FlexWiki is now a SourceForge project. FlexWiki is a collaborative web-based authoring environment (wiki) implemented on the Microsoft .NET platform (FlexWikiFeatures).

    FlexWiki is Microsoft code, released by David Ornstein under an open-source license, the Common Public License (CPL).

    News coverage: CNet, Eweek, and Slashdot (twice).

  • Blogging policies?

    Know of any public, corporate blogger policies? I know of the Sun Policy on Public Discourse, but can’t find any other. Anyone?

  • We the Media

    Dan Gillmor‘s new book, We the Media is available online. The book is subtitled Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, and is about how new media and the explosion of conversations that blogs in particular represent, represents a deep shift in how we make and consume the news. Dan, a well-known blogger and professional writer/columnist, is a good storyteller. Buy it (UK/Europe) or buy in US. Or follow the explosion of blog conversations about the book.

    I fully agree with Dan about the profound changes we see. I think we have only seen the beginnings of what will be a long revolution. Which takes place at many levels.

    One of these is in politics, obviously. Poul Nyrup Rasmussen won the European elections in Denmark, and even though I doubt his blog significantly changed the vote, it was a good initiative. Respect. Even more so he deserves for continuing to blog after the elections. Let us see if he can make Bruxelles more “alive” by blogging his time in the parliament.

    There are far too few politicians who blogs. Tom Watson and Richard Allan, over in the UK, are some of the few who does a good job at it too.

    In the US, the politicians – who have significantly larger campaign budgets than we ever see in Europe – don’t seem to “need” to blog. They have people to do so. ConventionBloggers.com is the latest Dave Winer project. The Big Media (CNN) and grassroot-turned-“dotcom” (Technorati) “marriage”, CNN/Technorati Election Watch 2004, is another new project worth checking out.

    I have added a new category for Political blogs in GotzeLinked. Feel free to add blogs of a clearly political nature here. Especially elected officials blogs, but if that rules out US blogs, anything political goes. The list of links in this category will be available in OPML, so you can import the list directly into your feed reader.

  • Open Declaration

    The Open Group has announced the Developer Declaration of Independence. Sign the declaration! I have signed it as an individual.
    [Via Sean McGrath]

  • New newsbot

    Google News competition: The new beta MSNBC Newsbot. Search for news: enterprise architecture, e-government, and Bosnia. Now, Microsoft, what about providing these results as RSS feeds??