AttentionTrust.org is a non-profit organization and serves a firefox extension to keep track of your browsing history. It is based on Steve Gillmors idea of attention.xml (technorati developer wiki). As I can see the social component is still missing, it is only your attention and not the attention brought to you by your social network. Read more about social search.

Seth Godin and his start-up Squidoo are building something similar. They try to focus on certain topics creating “lenses” (Seth’s lense). There is a free e-book about it here.

With rollyo you can set up your own searchengine. Just create a searchroll with a certain kind of urls (e.g. music blogs or linux sites). For instance if you create a searchroll from your blogroll you can actually search through your blogs.

Read Citizen428 on the Developers Notebook - Mono

I also have a copy of this book. It’s definitly one of the best ways to get into mono. By the way I recently got a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails, which is kind of similar in fastly diving into the topic. Speaking of diving, Dive into Python is also very great and it’s for free.
So enough to read for the next months? No, just read a few pages and start coding!

By the way, my mono - plazes project is still on ice. Currently I’m using a ruby script on my server to get information about my plazes and on my desktop I’m still running the old launcher. Anyone working on a GTK GUI?

See the funny theandyface pictures at the barcamp…

Also read the wired article about barcamp and the posts on technorati if you wanna know what happened.

via actioncontents.com (this is really honorably )

Update: Hehe, have a look at the flickrTagFight.

Speaking of RSS as a pull service. Kevin Burton did a little math on RSS network overhead. Also read Bob Wymans (PubSub) post about feed instance-manipulation.

via slashdot (thx to david)

CakePHP is a rapid web development framework similar to Ruby on Rails.

“The Cake is a lightweight framework written in PHP, based on the concepts used in Rails. It’s primary goal is to rapidly create and maintain web applications of any kind and level of complexity.”

There is also a tutorial how to build a blogging application in their wiki like this great facinating Rails Video.

I just saw waldar’s post about the audioscrobbler relaunch. They switched over to last.fm, consequently moving to a web2.0 application, this includes tagging, ajax and a typical design2.0.

What does last.fm?

• There are plugins for your media player to send information about the music you are listening to last.fm
• They create a music profile of you and suggest new bands and people with a similar taste in music
• You can discover new music very easily and listen to a personalized radio

It’s really a great service. While sometimes performance and uptime is really bad, the redesign looks really good and promising. You can start guessing who will buy this service.

Flickr now has clusters of related tags. So if you look at a tag (e.g. http://flickr.com/photos/tags/girl) with lots of pictures it is easier to find what you are looking for in narrowing your search to one of the clusters (http://flickr.com/photos/tags/girl/clusters). The first cluster is full of women portraits, the second full of kid photos and so on.

Other examples:

• Animals
• Art
• Cameraphone
• City
• Computer
• Dog
• Europe
• Nature

Sorry, that I didn’t write close on time. Wifi really sucked on WTH, I couldn’t get a connection anywhere. So there was no way to connect my computer while attending lectures. The schedule was tight and after 10-12 hours of lectures I kept my focus on socializing. There were interesting people all around. We had a lot of fun with the 4 austrian guys right next to our tent. Michael is gentoo ruby maintainer and takes care of the liferea ebuilds, my favorite rss reader.

So lets just dump some links and short stories about the interesting lectures.

Pentabarf by Tim Pritlove and Sven Klemm was very interesting. For me it wasn’t only presenting their conference planning software, it was more a ‘how to create a web2.0 application’. They have a really nice concept and improved GUI. We had a little talking after their presentation about their upcoming decision to refactor the whole system in Ruby.

Openstreetmap - a free wiki world map. There were a lot of great ideas and the project got me very interested. They are looking for developers and volunteers with GPS devices. You can modify the maps on their website using a java applet, but they are also planning to rewrite it in Ruby.

Future Shock - one of the best lectures on the congress. Get the video here.

Search engines internals by Greg Newby was very interesting. He also talked about his work on project gutenberg and why literature has to be free especially now. Literature is kept away from the public domain for 90 years in US, 70 in germany, by default even after the death of the author. This is nonsense, only 1% of the books written 70 years ago are still published. Turn it around, make public domain default after the death of the author and if there are still relatives who would like it to be under copyright they can do so.

There were a lot of security lectures all of them with the same message. Get rid of C’s buffer overflows, integer overflows and string vulnerabilities. There was also some websecurity stuff, let’s get rid of PHP anyway.

Phasing out Unix before 2038-01-19 - became a dylan commercial after complaining about c and unix. Sure, you are right with going on and phasing out ‘c’, but is dylan the right solution? Got the prize for the catchiest phrase on the conference.

C64 - lots of stuff for the old ‘brotkasten’ held by Stephan Humer, one of the authors of go64 the only german c64 print magazine.

On the second day Molly found out that there are cbs DJs from Den Haag on the camping site. They played really good minimal, eighties, video console, synthie electronics the whole weekend.

There is a new business networking tool by O’Reilly called connection. Looks kind of neat. If you register get me connected.

via O’Reilly Radar

After a heavy thunderstorm in the early morning we survived in our tent without drowning. A great cold shower got us ready to start with the lectures today.

The keynote was held by Rop Gonggrijp and Eric Corley aka Emmanuel Goldstein. They gave us an overview about the camps which started 1989 and were held every 4 years. There was a lot of hacker spirit stuff and how everything became what it is today. By the way there is actually one cop on every 100 hackers here on the campside. But there is no criminal energy here. There was even a lecture about how to improve collaboration of the police in european countries.

Kevin Warwick talked about Cyborgs: Practical experimentation which was quite interesting. Best thing were the wires in his arm with which he can control another metal arm.

Fabienne Serriere is an expert in multichannel audio hacking. She does a lot of projects hacking and enhancing her techie toys for artistic live performances. She is even writing a new codec with a friend for multichannel audio over wifi.

There was also a freaky lecture about ubuntu’s derivative development model and how it is related to debian by Benjamin Mako Hill. Don’t use forks on that.