Published August 21st, 2008
The APML community has been itching for the APML 1.0 Specification for a little while now, and Paul, our resident genius; has spec’d out the initial draft for community discussion. You can find the intial draft, at http://groups.google.com/group/apml-public/web/apml-1-0-draft-1
From the Public Google Group:
This comes with a very large fore note: This is a very early draft only, and nothing is set in stone. Given that the community is obviously itching to start seeing APML 1.0 progress, I felt that it would be an appropriate time to release this and assist in structuring the discussion. I intend to follow this with a few more emails that detail individual sections I believe need substantial addressing.
APML version 1.0 proposes a number of substantial changes over the previous 0.6 version, with some of the changes including, but not limited to;
- The Addition of an ‘Entity’ node to describe (People, Businesses and other non-metaphysical interests.
- The Addition of a ‘Location’ node to outline places of interest.
- The inclusion of an rdf:about node attribute to allow for richer RDF-type ontologies without reducing the “simple” nature of APML.
APML has come a long way since its inital conception a little over 2 years ago. And I am very proud to be involved with a community of people all dedicated to creating an open format to give attention back to the people who own it.
The APML Workgroup is committed to ratifying this standard as soon as public commenting is evalutated, and is tasked to provide a smooth transition to the new version; so please feel free to head over to the public Google Group and put in your 2c.
Tags: APML, Data Portability, standard
Posted in APML | 1 Comment »
Published August 19th, 2008
Over the past two weeks, the Faraday Media development team have been hard at work migrating all our products and initiatives into a new datacenter. The new data center was much more suited to Faraday Media technology - much easier to scale, much faster and more reliable.
As part of our efforts, we’ve finally had the opportunity to give Particls and the Engagd platform their own dedicated servers, effectively quadrupling our processing capability. This will allow us to service our partners and customers with increased reliability and confidence.
We’ve taken the opportunity with the new servers, to finally move our blogs off Blogger and onto a hosted WordPress solution, giving us far more flexibility with our blogs and presentation.
One problem, however, after we upgraded to WordPress 2.6, was that when we changed the permalink settings (to something more tollerable than ‘?p=x’) suddenly, index.php worked fine, but any other page reported as ‘not found’. After serverl long hours Googling for the answer, there was lots of “answers” for WordPress on Apache (specifically about correct access to the .htaccess file and ensuring the correct PHP/Apache modules are installed) - but none about how to solve these issues on IIS. It turns out that there are a number of known issues with 2.6 on IIS, which are now solved with the release of WordPress 2.6.1.
With most of our migration issues now sorted, we can now confidently continue to deliver our attention and data portablity solutions to the masses secure in the knowledge that our services are scalable and our bandwidth is plenty.
Tags: engagd, hosting, IIS, particls, scale, servers, WordPress
Posted in Service Status | No Comments »
Published July 14th, 2008
Are you in Sydney or the Bay Area? If so - come join me, Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur and our host Ross Dawson at the Future of Media Summit 08. A Cross-continental conference.
Otherwise track #fom08 on the various social networks.
Tags: APML, conference, Media 2.0, Silicon Valley, speaking, sydney
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Published June 19th, 2008
Ross Dawson has published a list of the top 60 web apps in Australia in the BRW this week. At number 5, our very own Engagd.com - the engine that powers Attention Profiling for the web at large as well as Particls version 2.
This is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the development team. A huge thanks to Ashley Angell, Paul Jones and Jon Cianciullo who have been working tirelessly to manage, build and polish the Engagd platform.
Particls itself came in at 21. That will change of course once we launch the new version!
Thanks to Ross for his hard work compiling the list and including us.
Ashley went to Sydney to demo Engagd at the celebration party. By all accounts it was a big success. Somehow he made a developer platform interesting for a non-technical audience. Good work my friend!
Tags: announcement, engagd, media, particls
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Published June 12th, 2008
If you think Faraday Media is ‘cool’ don’t forget to nominate us for the Anthill Cool Company Awards.
Does asking for a nomination make us uncool? Hopefully not 
Tags: anthill, cool, nominate
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Published June 4th, 2008
There are only a limited number of start-up founders in the world, even less who sets his or her mind to change the very fabric of the internet. Chris is one of them.
When Chris and I founded Faraday Media, it was of extreme importance that just being another startup was not enough. We had to do something meaningful. Something significant. Not happy with fame or glory, we wanted to grow as people - giving back to a medium which had fed us for long time. To take the internet to a new place, just like Google had done nearly a decade ago. Its been a long road for Faraday, and while it hasn’t always been easy, Chris’ drive and aspiration has bought us to new and extraordinary heights, time after time after time; often at great personal sacrifice. I could never ask for a better CEO, or friend.
It’s no secret that Chris and I are the best of friends and it makes me very happy, to congratulate him on being selected as one of the 30Under30’s for Anthill, the leading entrepreneurial magazine in Australia.
From the website:
At 26, Chris Saad is one of Australia’s most impressive young web entrepreneurs. His theory and practice around web standards - specifically ‘DataPortability’ and ‘Attention Management’ - have gained significant traction and are set to have a profound impact on the evolution of media in the digital age. Saad has co-founded several web-related companies and organisations, most prominently Faraday Media in 2006, of which he is CEO. Faraday Media is developing Particls, a technology that learns user habit and taste and delivers relevant information to them via news crawler, SMS, email, flash visualisations, etc. He also co-founded the Media 2.0 Workgroup with 14 industry ‘commentators, agitators and innovators’. There’s no shortage of ideas or energy in this digitally-minded entrepreneur. One to watch in the years to come.
Make sure you click through to the Article, subscribe to the mag and read the other 29 profiles!
This is recognition to a man whom has dedicated and sacrificed so much for the greater good, a true philanthropist. Well done Chris, you are definitely deserving of this prestigious award and will no doubt be one of many in the years to come.
Tags: 30under30, announcement, chrissaad, media, Media 2.0, web 2.0
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Published June 1st, 2008
I have written on my personal blog about what I am starting to call “Personal Reality“.
As I wrote there:
Personal Media includes your friend’s shared items. It includes the comments you leave on blogs. It includes Social Media. But it also includes private updates. Updates from your Intranet. Updates from your family. Updates from broadcast media. Updates that matter to you - no one else.
Personal Media is about recognizing that people are social and private. They are interested in personal experiences.
Check it out.
Tags: APML, dataportability, Media 2.0, personal reality, personal relevancy, trends
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Published June 1st, 2008
NineMSN Program Manager Paul Keen has written about a new NineMSN site feature that has the potential to dramatically improve the news reading user experience on their site.
They call it the “What’s Happening Now” module. Think Facebook News Feed for a news site. It logs and lists events such as new stories, first comments and other changes to the site in ‘real time’ in a reverse chronological order.
This is another example of how flow based presentation can improve visibility and usability when it comes to consuming large quantities of content/interactions.
Well done to Paul and the NineMSN team for this innovative approach.
Tags: flow, Media 2.0, news feed, ninemsn
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Published March 15th, 2008
Good news - I will be in Amsterdam speaking at the Next Web Conference on the 3rd and 4th of April - are you coming?
Here’s a bit of info about the conference from the website:
The Next Web Conference is THE European conference for industry thought-leaders, leading web-companies, innovative Startups, visionaries and real Web savvies. This third edition will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on April 3rd & 4th, 2008.
Tags: APML, conference, dataportability, Media 2.0, speaking
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
