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A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database
You will probably never need to know about the Olson database, also known as the Zoneinfo or tz database. And were it not for my elmcity project I never would have looked into it. I knew roughly that...
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Where is the money going?
Over the weekend I was poking around in the recipient-reported data at recovery.gov. I filtered the New Hampshire spreadsheet down to items for my town, Keene, and was a bit surprised to find no...
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Jazz in Madison, Wisconsin: A case study in curation
The elmcity project’s newest hub is called Madison Jazz. The curator, Bob Kerwin, will be aggregating jazz-related events in Madison, Wisconsin. Bob thought about creating a Where hub, which merges...
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Automatic shifting and manual steering on the information superhighway
I’d like to thank the folks at the Berkman Center for listening to my talk yesterday, and for feedback that was skeptical about the very points I know that I need to sharpen. The talk is available...
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How George Bailey can save Delicious
Every Christmas we watch It’s a Wonderful Life. This year I’ll be imagining Jimmy Stewart saying, to a panicked crowd of delicious.com users rushing for the exits, “Now, hold on, it’ll work out, we’ve...
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Syndicating Facebook events
My wife Luann showed her new art work at a local venue last Saturday. Here’s how the event looked in Keene’s elmcity hub: It got there by way of a new technique I just added to elmcity’s repertoire....
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Liberating the Swamp Bats calendar
One of the great pleasures of summer in Keene, NH is our New England Collegiate Baseball League team, the Swamp Bats. I tell people that going to one of the Bats’ home games at the high school’s...
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Garden gates can swing two ways
My latest Radar essay makes the modest proposal that Facebook might, in some cases, syndicate my data from elsewhere rather than requiring me to type it in. Most people think that’ll never happen....
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Can elmcity and Delicious continue their partnership? (2nd try)
Delicious has been part of my life for a long time. I first wrote about it back in August of 2004. I know this because Delicious helped me remember. The link has gone stale because I wrote the article...
View ArticleThe long tail of the iCalendar ecosystem
A couple of months ago I began saving the iCalendar files that are submitted to the iCalendar Validator. Today I extracted a list of unique names of iCalendar producers along with associated counts of...
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X-WR-TIMEZONE considered harmful?
In a pair of recent entries, Semantic web 101: Say what you mean and The long tail of the iCalendar ecosystem, I’ve begun to report on what I’m learning about the state of the iCalendar ecosystem as I...
View ArticleThought leadership at the Ann Arbor District Library
In Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, which is taglined Essays from the bleeding edge of publishing and is co-edited by Brian O’Leary and Hugh McGuire, there’s a refreshingly forward-thinking chapter on...
View ArticleCalendar feeds are a best practice for bookstores
Bookstores, for all the obvious reasons, are hanging on by their fingernails. What brings people into bookstores nowadays? Some of us still buy and read actual printed books. Some of us enjoy browsing...
View ArticleCommunity calendar workshop next week in Newport News
My next community calendar workshop will be at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News, on Tuesday April 23 at 6PM. It’s for groups and organizations in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia,...
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Upcoming is downgoing, Elm City is ongoing
Here’s Andy Baio’s farewell to Upcoming, a service I’ve been involved with for a decade. In a March 2005 blog post I wrote about what I hoped Upcoming would become, in my town and elsewhere, and...
View ArticleStrategic choices for calendar publishers
Although I haven’t been able to confirm this officially yet, it looks like FuseCal, the HTML screen-scraping service that I’ve been using (and recommending) as a way to convert calendar-like web pages...
View ArticleMore fun than herding servers
Until recently, the elmcity calendar aggregator was running as a single instance of an Azure worker role. The idea all along, of course, was to exploit the system’s ability to farm out the work of...
View ArticleWhy we need an XML representation for iCalendar
Translations: Croatian On this week’s Innovators show I got together with two of the authors of a new proposal for representing iCalendar in XML. Mike Douglass is lead developer of the Bedework...
View ArticleTopical event hubs
The elmcity project began with a focus on aggregating events for communities defined by places: cities, towns. But I realized a while ago that it could also be used to aggregate events for communities...
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Curation, meta-curation, and live Net radio
I’ve long been dissatisfied with how we discover and tune into Net radio. This iTunes screenshot illustrates the problem: Start with a genre, pick a station in that genre, then listen to that station....
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Two projects for civic-minded student programmers
One of the key findings of the elmcity project, so far, is that there’s a lot of calendar information online, but very little in machine-readable form. Transforming this implicit data about public...
View Articleelmcity and WordPress MU: Questions and answers
In the spirit of keystroke conservation, I’m relaying some elmcity-related questions and answers from email to here. Hopefully it will attract more questions and more answers. Dear Mr. Udell, I am...
View ArticleFriendFeed for project collaboration
For me, FriendFeed has been a new answer to an old question — namely, how to collaborate in a loosely-coupled way with people who are using, and helping to develop, an online service. The elmcity...
View ArticleAsk and ye may receive, don’t ask and ye surely will not
This fall a small team of University of Toronto and Michigan State undergrads will be working on parts of the elmcity project by way of Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP), organized...
View ArticleFamiliar idioms in Perl, Python, JavaScript, and C#
When I started working on the elmcity project, I planned to use my language of choice in recent years: Python. But early on, IronPython wasn’t fully supported on Azure, so I switched to C#. Later,...
View ArticleQuerying mobile data objects with LINQ
I’m using US census data to look up the estimated populations of the cities and towns running elmcity hubs. The dataset is just plain old CSV (comma-separated variable), a format that’s more popular...
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