danger smells like clean socks

roy

This Tabulas is like a sandwich. The boring parts are the bread and consist of most of the "real" content, while the stupid entries filled with narcissism and self-deprecation are like the delicious inner burger. Sometimes you just want to RIP out the burger and eat it with your hands, even if your hands would them be covered with ketchup and mustard and your sister looks over at you in disbelief and covers her eyes with her hands and tries to tell everybody that her brother is just a bit hungry and not really that crazy and just starts crying and then the little kids get sad and start crying and ... wait. what?

Oh yeah. So I've been knocked out of commission this past week due to an illness... I could only spend what little waking hours I had for my job, so I had ot wait until I got better (yesterday) before I could tackle some of my personal projects. Right now on the plate is swarmf ...

Tonight I wrapped up work on inline editing (so all clippings and page edits are done from inline dialogs, although the actual saves trigger reloads, I can change that later too) and a HUGE feature: dynamic columns. You can specify in the new version how many columns you want and you can DRAG them to specific widths. This doesn't sound important, but it's HUGE in being able to control the layout of your swarmf topic pages. The more I work on this, the more I realize I'm simply building a layout editor for clippings. It's a lot of fun, in any case.

I had a cool idea: if in the future the layout editor gets pretty stable, it'd be cool if suggested clippings appeared in a horizontal scrollable strip; an "editor" (swarmf topic owner) could simply drag and drop these items into the existing layout ... how SWEET would that be? You could even automate the horizontal strip so it pulled from an existing RSS feed or something.

In any case, I'm going to make a quick listfoo of items left to do with swarmf before I hit the sack. It feels good to not be sick.

First off, let me say that Matt rules for creating the first current events swarm: UNC Replaces Football Coach. He's aggregated a bunch of links regarding John Buntings getting fired from UNC... sweet.

Here's a list of changes that have been updated to swarmf this weekend:

• Style changes - this site was developed on a Mac, and the big fonts didn't look so big. When I loaded it on a PC, everything looked superhuge. Things should look a lot better now. Brian was gracious enough to scan and send me the way NYTimes does news summaries; that's been a huge inspiration for possible ways of styling things for swarmf. I'm still mulling over the exact styling of swarmf topics (especially how to handle columns), but I'm starting to get an idea of where to go...
• Missing titles - spaceinthewho was curious why images didn't display titles - my original reasoning was that titles were human-readable representations of urls; since images would embed directly into the page, there was no need to display a title - descriptions would work to describe the image if you needed text to accompany the image. However, in the future, I want to start caching images locally (thumbnail them) for layout reasons - if this is the case, then titles would need to be displayed again (since what would be displayed on swarmf would just be a thumbnail and not the actual image). Hence, images will also display titles/urls just like every other item. I also fixed up that annoying bug where descriptions would show up above videos (but below for images).
• Email this topic to a friend - along the bottom of every page, youll see a new section called "Topic Options." You now have the option of Emailing a topic to multiple friends (I emailed the Bunting swarmf to nasty nate and chris; we actually had a convo this week about the need for Bunting to be fired); you also have the option of Forking a page ...
• Forking a page - credit goes to Yush for inspiring this feature. Basically it allows you to take any swarmf and copy it to your account. It lets you remix a remix ... right now the feature may seem sorta stand-alone, but I have some ideas on creating similar topic clouds (based on item overlaps) which will allow me to generate a list of similar topics
• Add bookmarklet - when you use the bookmarklet to add an item to any swarmf, you'll now see a checkbox that will redirect you back to the item after it's saved to swarmf - this hopefully will make less of an interruption on your normal surfing habits
• Editing topic names - you can edit your topic names, but the URL won't update. I need to write the functionality for storing and saving redirects before I can allow topic name edits to correspond to urls
• Contacting page author - Across from the title of a swarmf topic, you'll now see a link to the page author - you can now use a HTML form to send a message to that user. Suggestions and privacy blocks (e.g. not allowing people to contact you) haven't been implemented, but they're on the to-do list.
• Permalinks! - your public swarmf pages are now at subdomains - for example: http://hunter-s-thompsons-death.swarmf.com/
• Current to-do list: You can see what's on the todo list at http://roy.listfoo.com/swarmf/

. . .

I've started working on listfoo 1.1 this past weekend: check out the semi-functional mockup. Goals for listfoo 1.1

• Standardize all the JS to the scriptaculous/prototype libraries
• Implement a better UI to replace the placeholder UI
• Actually write some content for the home page that makes it clear what listfoo does
• Add internationalization support
• Change the way checked-off items are handled
• Add browser/platform specific keyboard commands to expedite using listfoo (cause really, who likes using the mouse?

1.1 won't be adding any big functionality; it's mostly a polish on the 1.0 release if anything. But the polish, it's oh-so-pretty.

I'm also working on something with Matt, but I won't talk about that yet. It's looking to be a busy few months ahead...

So I've been working on a new project - I finalized the 0.8 release (which most would call "beta" or "alpha" releases, except those phrases are dumb) last weekend and I've just been playing with it and talking to other people about it. There's this feeling for me that this is something original, so I'm a bit excited about it. (Credit goes to discussions I've held with Neeraj, Matt, Brian, Yush for solidifying my arguments on what I'm attempting to accomplish).

The current trend in websites is "user-generated content." All blogging, vlogging, podcasting, video-sharing sites remain the same: it's all about creating content. What's interesting is that blogging (and podcasting since it piggybacked off of blogging) started off in a distributed fashion and trended towards centralized services. Early bloggers learned tricky installation processes (remember CGI blogging tools, pre-Movable Type? Good god, they were atrocious), bought their own domains, and sat in virtual fiefdoms. Sites like TypePad and Wordpress attempt to lower the barrier to entry in creating content by simplfying the installation process (and to a certain degree, providing a simpler UI). This allowed a broader range of users to create and share content. (An aside: Due to compability and storage issues, videoblogging (or user-generated video sharing) went the other way: we're starting with a centralized location (YouTube) and vbloggers are starting to set up their own sites, BUT these sites are usually piggybacking off of a popular blogger/podcaster).

Creating sites that allow for user-generated content are so passe now. The next generation of important sites will be those that can effectively aggregate this content and create nodes of information that are of relevance to casual readers.

Lowering the barriers to content creation has created a virtual overload of information. When the web was smaller, sites like MeFi and Slashdot were able to aggregate and redistribute content; I remember when I could visit Slashdot and get nearly *all* relevant tech news for a given day. But as the web grew, these sites were largely relegated to focusing on a few articles a day; the information fiends like me transitioned to RSS aggregators to read sites and consume information. Sites like Digg and delicious, which relied on reader-editors have become the new way to discover and share information.

Not everybody in the world is a content creator; many people don't have the time to create a full website to aggregate information about a particular topic or contribute to a Wikipedia article on a topic, because it just takes too much time. And most of the time, a lot of these topics are so ephemeral that it's not worth capturing cause of the time required to blog/wikipedia it.

What I'm trying to do with Project Swarm is to allow for microaggregation by presenting information as something that is more easy for people to understand: the newspaper front page. Adding an item to your virtual front page takes about 20 seconds with a bookmarklet and doesn't interrupt your reading flow. You can drag items around and (soon) can style items differently - it's like bringing the power of creating Drudge Report to everybody. There is no barrier to creating the content or getting it approved. One of my metrics for success will be judging the actual time and amount of typing/clicking you have to do to add an item to a swarm and manage it.

So basically, low time commitment to participate and contribute in creating infonodes = the goal for Project Swarm.

P.S. I've un-privat-ized the swarmf category that has a bunch of posts I wrote while developing the site and idea.

The site's functionality is complete. Now I've got a lot of work cleaning up the UI (creating an ajax endpoint so I can generate some forms dynamically), as well as localization work and general code cleanup.

Unfortunately yesterday was a busy social day (a rare one), and today I had to catch up on work, so not much work could be done on swarmf. However, I did get one key thing done: the clippings sorting on each swarm topic. This allows you to organize items wherever you want them.

This is an image of my test swarm topic a few days ago:

You can see that although each column has the same number of items, the height distribution isn't the same - I was struggling for a while on how to handle this technically. Then I realized I should just let users sort them visually!

Today's screenshot:

The beauty of scriptaculous made the whole process so easy! You can even drag items from one column to one another. Right now each page defaults to 2 columns - I want to let users pick up either 1 column or 3 columns in the future. It'd be nice to allow users to set the width of the columns as well, but I've set a minimum width for 800x600 resolutions and a maximum width on the content to 1024 (I hate content that stretches too wide); the 1024pixel max will probably render 4 column designs useless.

Right now you can only speciy columns to go vertically, but it'd be really nice in the future to allow for horizontal columns as well. And maybe even let users style each block in their own way - people could really create a nice looking magazine-esque front pages!