IT Conversations: Dan Gillmor [en]

Some notes on IT Conversations show with Halley Suitt and Dan Gillmor (audio available online).

[fr] Interview audio de Dan Gillmor par Halley Suitt. Quelques notes.

I’m currently listening to Halley’s interview of Dan Gillmor on IT Conversations. I’m not used to listening to stuff through the internet (the whole podcasting hype hasn’t really caught my interest… yet) — so here are a few notes and comments, mainly for myself.

First of all, I’m always slightly shocked to hear people I know from the Internet actually speaking. When chatting, or reading blogs, I forget that people have accents. So, my first reaction upon hearing Halley speaking was “Gosh! She really has an American accent!”.

After a first part on American politics that went completely over my head, the topic turned to “Journalism and blogging” (already more interesting) and finally, more webby stuff. A few random notes:

  • Strive for objectivity in journalism still a valid aim.
  • 9-11, elections, tsunami: made blogs visible as a media, rather than “made more people blog” (I’ve finally managed to name the confusion that irritates me so much.)
  • Camera phones (and digicams in general) have a highly disruptive potential. Towards more transparency. Harder to hide nasty things.
  • Podcasting: most people not trained to produce the kind of audio we enjoy listening to.
  • Blogs with small readership (target audience=family and close friends): very important sociologically.
  • Internet allows to bring readers closer to source material.
  • Probably lots of source material for historians gathering now on the web. Web stuff as potential replacement for the letter, which used to give lots of information on people’s lives and current events. (Biographies, History.)
  • Not holding people accountable (in future) about silly things they wrote on their teenage blogs…
  • About writing the book online: retaining authorship, while having thousands of “eyes” to give feedback and comments. (And the eyes in question will be those interested by the topic.)

Next one I’m listening to is Joi’s.

Article dans La Liberté [fr]

Un article dans La Liberté, pour lequel j’ai été interviewée, parle de la diversité de la blogosphère.

[en] A brief interview of me appeared today in La Liberté, on a page about the diversity of the blogosphere (PDF).

Un article dans La Liberté, Puissance et extension de la blogosphère (PDF), parle de la diversité de la blogosphère. Il y a aussi un petit interview “questions-réponses” de moi en encadré.

Article intéressant, à  mon avis, qui présente bien les différentes tendances existant parmi les blogs. Dommage simplement (pour un article sur les blogs!) qu’il n’indique pas une seule URL!

Simple Technorati Tags Plugin for WordPress [en]

A simple plugin for WordPress which lets you display tags (or keywords) in your posts. Tags are stored in a Custom Field (no database modification required).

[fr] Un plugin simple pour WordPress qui vous permet de garnir vos billets de 'tags' (étiquettes) qui seront compris et interprétés par Technorati. Ce plugin ne modifie pas la base de données, et permet l'affichage de tags stockés dans un Custom Field nommé "tags", sous forme de liste de mots séparés par des espaces. Il est aussi possible d'afficher ainsi des mots-clés se trouvant dans un Custom Field nommé "keywords".

Update 31.01.07: The wp-plugins.org wiki isn’t allowing edits anymore. The plugin has been updated to version 0.6, compatible with WordPress 2.1, by Sudar. Get Bunny Tags.

Update 21.01.05: Please see Bunny’s Technorati Tags on the wp-plugins.org wiki for information about this plugin!

As wp-plugins.org isn’t letting me in yet, here is a little post to announce my first real live plugin for WordPress (one can’t exactly say that Batch Categories is a proper plugin).

Bunny’s Technorati Tags (zip, phps) provides you with a template function that you can use to easily display Technorati tags for your posts. The tags are stored in a Custom Field, so this plugin does not require any modifications of the database structure. The plugin has not been thoroughly tested on different versions, though it works fine on my recent 1.5 nightly. As it is really very basic, I don’t believe you’ll run into any major compatibility issues on other versions (do keep me informed, though).

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin (manually or with the Plugin Manager, enter a space-separated list of tags in a Custom Field named “tags”, and place the following code in your template where you want the list of tags to appear:

<php the_bunny_tags(); ?>

If you’re like me and you’ve been painfully entering comma-separated keywords for your posts using a Custom Field of same name, you can use the following line to use these existing keywords as tags:

<php the_bunny_keyword_tags(); ?>

Update 21.01.05: by setting $bunny_strict to false (see SETTINGS at the top of the plugin code) you will display keywords as tags for posts which do not have tags.

This might not be the greatest idea, as I believe tagging and choosing keywords is a different process, but it makes me happy for the moment, so I thought I’d share this possibility with you too.

Future development of the plugin includes adding a text input to the “Create New Post” form for easy tagging. (Coming as soon as I can figure out how to do it.)Done!

Plugin available on wp-plugins.net and wp-plugins.org.

Update 21:40 Who’dathunkit? Version 0.2 is out already, with a nice little “Tags” field in the post editing form. the_bunny_keyword_tags() has been revised to display keywords only when no tags are present. All the tagging pleasure is yours to take!

Update 21.01.05 Version 0.3 is out. Upgrade strongly recommended, or your tags won’t be indexed correctly by Technorati.

Thinking About Tags [en]

What if taggy applications like Technorati, Flickr and Del.icio.us started allowing us to query multiple tags with “and” and “or” operators?

[fr] Une proposition pour pouvoir combiner les tags (comme "blogosphere ET blogosphère", "livres OU films") dans des services comme Flickr, Del.icio.us, et maintenant Technorati.

Some quick thoughts about tags, following Technorati Tagified.

So, there is “blog“. And “weblog“. And “blogs“. And “weblogs“.

How about a way to get the posts/photos/links tagged with any of these tags? Maybe something like .../blog,blogs,weblog,weblogs/.

That would also solve some multilingual problems: get “blogosphere” and “blogosphère” together on the same page with .../blogosphère,blogosphere/.

At del.icio.us, I tag the books I’ve read with “books/read“, and films I’ve seen with either “films/seen/cinema” or “films/seen” (if I saw them on DVD). This used to work fine, because a del.icio.us bug (poor me thought it was a feature) would include links tagged as “films/seen/cinema” when one asked for “films/seen“. That doesn’t work anymore.

Say I avoid messing with tags-with-slashes, and tag films I saw at the cinema with “films seen cinema” and others with “films seen dvd”. I’ll probably also have links tagged “films” or “cinema” but which are not tagged “seen”. How could I pull out a list of links tagged “films” AND “seen”? Perhaps something like .../films+seen/.

Update, 10:00: Kevin tells me “+” signifies a space in a URL. Maybe “&” could do the job instead, then? And if “&” can’t because it’s supposed to separate parameters, any other suggestions?

Update, 11:40: holy cow, Del.icio.us does this already! I’ve updated my tags and lists. See “books+read” for books I’ve read, and “films+seen” for films I’ve seen. I’m a happy bunny!

Let’s get wild, shall we? .../books-read/ could list things tagged as “books” but not “read”.

Now we only need a way to assign operation priority, to be able to start retrieving lists like “books I’ve read or films I’ve seen which are also tagged as india” — wouldn’t that be cool?

Taggy application developers, hear the call!

Thanks to rvr and GabeW for the little discussion on #joiito which prompted me to write this post.

P.S.: has anybody written that WordPress plugin yet? (You know the one I’m talking about: the one that lets you painlessly technorati-tag your posts.)

Technorati Tagified [en]

Technorati collects links, photos and posts with tags/categories and displays them all on a nice page. Start tagging!

[fr] Technorati s'intéresse aux "tags". Les "tags", ce sont des étiquettes que l'on colle aux photos chez Flickr ou aux liens chez del.icio.us.

Technorati collecte le tout sur une jolie page, avec les billets de weblogs, bien entendu -- classés soit par leurs catégories, soit par des tags ajoutés manuellement. C'est facile! Voyez la page pour le tag technorati, par exemple.

Qu'est-ce que vous attendez? Lâchez vos tags!

Lo and behold, Technorati goes tags!

Technorati collects weblog posts, Flickr images, and del.icio.us links and organises them by tag on a pretty page.

Tags on weblog posts? Easy. If you have categories, and your RSS/Atom feed is formatted correctly, Technorati will treat your categories as tags. In addition to that (or instead of that), you can also add tags manually to any blog post. Learn how to do it, and get tagging!

Some tag pages I’ve looked at: India, Switzerland, tools, StephanieBooth…

I wonder. What are the implications for TopicExchange? Will Technorati tags make ITE obsolete?

Sans le savoir [fr]

Jolie citation. On devient adulte sans le savoir.

[en] A citation I like. We become adults without being aware of it.

Comment les élèves voient-ils le futur ? Ils imaginent un autre monde, là -bas, derrière le mois de septembre prochain. Derrière cette porte fermée à  clef. Un autre univers, radicalement différent de celui-ci. Un monde peuplé d’adultes. On devient adulte, Amélie, sans le savoir. Parfois, parce que l’on devient parents. Parfois, au moment où l’on perd ses parents. Parfois, jamais.

L’avenir, Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu d’enseignement

Call to WordPress Plugin Developers [en]

Call for help to WordPress plugin developers. I have a bunch of hacks and modifications I’d like to turn into plugins, but I am unfortunately as plugin-challenged as ever.

[fr] Un descriptif des plugins que j'écrirais pour WordPress si je ne faisais pas un vilain blocage sur le sujet. Ne vous gênez pas si vous voulez contribuer!

If I was fluent in WordPress plugin coding, here are the plugins I’d write. If you feel like coding one of them yourself, or helping me get it done, you’re most welcome. Carthik has already pointed me to Plunge into Plugins, which I will have a close look at once I’ve finished writing this post.

Of course, if you know of a plugin which does precisely what I’m describing here, leave a link to it in the comments!

Keywords plugin

This would be a pretty straightforward one:

  • add a “keywords” text input to post.php
  • save the value of that text input to a custom field called “keywords”
  • add those keywords as an HTML meta tag on the individual post pages.
Excerpt plugin

This one would also be pretty straightforward, as all it would do is add the “excerpt” field to the “simple” post.php layout.

Customize post.php plugin

This would be more complex, but allow for more flexibility than the previous plugin. I don’t yet have a clear idea of how to make it work, but the basic principle would be to allow the user to select which fields should appear on the post.php page. Instead of having “simple” and “advanced” controls, this would add the option to have “custom” controls and define them.

TopicExchange plugin

As far as functionality is concerned, this plugin would do what my TopicExchange hack did:

  • add a “trackback TopicExchange channels” text input to post.php
  • store the space-separated list of keywords in a meta value named (e.g.) ite_topic (one record for each value)
  • for each value, trackback the appropriate TopicExchange channel
  • display the trackbacked channels (with link) on each post.
Bilingual plugin

This would be a clean version of my language hacks:

  • add a small “language” text input to post.php (with a default value)
  • add an “other language excerpt” textarea, which posts to the corresponding custom value
  • display the “other language excerpt” at the top of each post
  • provide a function to return the post language, and the other-excerpt language (so it can be declared in a lang attribute, allowing the use of language-dependant CSS formatting, in addition to being semantically correct)
  • if this is not already possible with the date function in the WordPress core, provide an alternative date function which will format the date correctly corresponding on the language of the post
  • optional: figure out a way to adapt text like “comments”, “categories” etc. to the post language; make the plugin usable with more than two languages.
Smart Linkroll plugin

I love the way ViaBloga manages blogrolls and would love to see a plugin for WordPress that does the same thing. In ViaBloga, you simply enter the URL of the site you want to add to your links. ViaBloga then retrieves the title, description, RSS feed address, and even (yes!) a screenshot for the site. No need to fill in fields manually anymore…

Wiki-Keywords plugin

I haven’t through this through yet completely, but it seems to me that a plugin which would add wiki-like capability to WordPress, like ViaBloga does with keywords, could be an interesting idea to explore.

Technorati plugin

This is really a simple one: add a function which will allow easy display of the Technorati cosmos of each post, like I have done manually for this weblog.

On the subject of multilingual blogging, Kevin Marks has some interesting markup suggestions I need to look at more closely.

Reighikan Dojo Lausanne [fr]

Une page de pub pour le site du Reighikan Dojo, dont je m’occupe (bien mal, pour le moment).

[en] Mainly for the benefit of Google, here is a little advertising for the website of my judo school. What do you expect to find on the website of a school of martial arts?

Une fois n’est pas coutume, je profite un peu de la visibilité de ce site pour faire une page de publicité. Pas n’importe laquelle, pourtant: le Reighikan Dojo à  Lausanne est l’endroit où je pratique le judo depuis une dizaine d’années.

Cela fait un moment que je tente de mettre en place le site du Dojo, et un peu de visibilité dans Google ne gênera certainement pas.

Pour le moment, vous y trouverez horaires et adresse de contact. Qu’est-ce que vous vous attendriez à  trouver sur le site d’une école d’arts martiaux? (On y pratique le judo, l’aikido, et les armes — jo (bâton), iaido, nunchaku…)

Friday Cat Blogging [fr]

Une photo de chat pour Laurent.

[en] Laurent launched the blogs without cats operation in reaction to Friday Cat Blogging. Here is a kitty for him. (Don't take this too seriously, it's an insider's joke!)

Pour Laurent, comme promis. Bagha te fait des namours.

Bagha le chat en train de faire sa sieste.

Encore des photos de Bagha. Laurent et les chats.