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Jon blogs at:
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Upcoming is downgoing, Elm City is ongoing
May 03 2013
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 offered some suggestions to help it along. One was a request for an API… read moreCommunity calendar workshop next week in Newport News
April 19 2013
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, including Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. If you’re someone… read moreMarch 19 2013
My dad died of congestive heart failure in 2009. The last weeks of his life weren’t what they could have been had we known enough to get him into hospice care. But we didn’t know, and I’ve felt ashamed about that. If we had it to do over again things… read moreMarch 18 2013
Last month ago I wrote a column for Wired.com, Rebooting web comments, that attracted some unsavory feedback. Had the flamers read beyond the second paragraph they might have seen that I wasn’t insisting everyone must use verifiable identities online. But they didn’t. So I wrote another column last week, Own… read moreMarch 04 2013
Movie showtimes are easy to find. Just type something like “movies keene nh” into Google or Bing and they pop right up: You might assume that this is open data, available for anyone to use. Not so, as web developers interested in such data periodically discover. For example, from MetaFilter:… read moreLet’s think about what we’re doing right
February 22 2013
In The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker compiles massive amounts of evidence to show that we are becoming a more civilized species. The principal yardstick he uses to measure progress is the steady decline, over millenia, in per-capita rates of homicide. But he also… read moreFlash Fill: Text wrangling for non-programmers
February 18 2013
As Elm City hubs grow, with respect to both raw numbers of events and numbers of categories, unfiltered lists of categories become unwieldy. So I’m noodling on ways to focus initially on a filtered list of “important” categories. The scare quotes indicate that I’m not yet sure how to empower… read moreFebruary 14 2013
In U.N. Maps Show U.S. High in Gun Ownership, Low in Homicides, A.W.R. Hawkins presents the following two maps: From these he concludes: Notice the correlation between high gun ownership and lower homicide rates. … As these maps show, “more guns, less crime” is true internationally as well as domestically.… read moreFebruary 13 2013
It’s said that every social scientist must, at some point, write a sentence that begins: “Man is the only animal that _____.” Some popular completions of the sentence have been: uses tools, uses language, laughs, contemplates death, commits atrocities. In his new book Jonathan Gottschall offers another variation on the… read moreJuly 28 2011
Think about the records that describe the status of your health, finances, insurance policies, vehicles, and computers. If the systems that manage these records could produce timestamped JSON snapshots when indicators change, it would be much easier to find out what changed, and when. read moreWhy Facebook isn't the best home for your public events
June 09 2011
Organizations should strive to own and control their online identities (and associated data) to the extent they can. read moreApril 20 2011
What if blogs had come of age in an era when a uniform kind of API was expected? We could then ask questions of blogs in the same way we could ask questions of event services. read moreHow will the elmcity service scale? Like the web!
December 22 2010
A blog feed is just a special kind of web page. Anybody can create a blog and publish its feed at some URL. Why not calendars too? read moreThe iCalendar chicken-and-egg conundrum
November 12 2010
If you're a school or a business or a band or a club whose website sports an Events tab that doesn't offer a companion iCalendar feed, I hope you'll ask your CMS vendor why not. read moreNovember 04 2010
Headlines matter. They're always visible to a scan or a search, while other information -- like decks and leads -- are active in far fewer contexts. read moreA lesson in civics, public data, and computational principles
October 26 2010
An efficient model of collective information management relies on principles like pub/sub, indirection and syndication. Translating these principles beyond computational thinkers is the tricky part. To pull it off we need to educate the kids we assume to be digital natives. read moreDeveloping intuitions about data
October 07 2010
Some kinds of computer files have different properties than others, and thus serve different purposes. Structured representation of data is one such property. If we are trying to put data onto the web, and if we want others to have the use of that data, and if we hope it… read moreSeptember 30 2010
Networks of people and data are governed by principles as basic as the commutative law of addition and multiplication. Indirection is one of those principles. read morePersonal data stores and pub/sub networks
September 22 2010
Most people and organizations think of the calendar information they push as text for people to read. Few realize it's also data networks can syndicate. When that mindset changes, a river of data will be unleashed. read moreTwitter kills the password anti-pattern, but at what cost?
September 10 2010
It's good to see Twitter driving a stake into the heart of the password anti-pattern. But the Twitter ecosystem wouldn't exist if it hadn't been possible to sketch ideas, and to explore the unanticipated uses that can emerge from the soup of active ingredients that the web has become. read moreThe laws of information chemistry
August 18 2010
Everybody learns that things in the physical world are structured in ways that govern how they can or cannot interact. The right shape will open the door, the wrong one won't. But unless you're on an IT track, you'll likely graduate from college without ever learning this corollary: The right… read moreThe power of informal contracts
August 11 2010
In a world full of services like delicious, FriendFeed, and Twitter -- services that can route feeds of data based on user-defined vocabularies -- you don't have to be a programmer to create useful mashups. You just have to understand, and find ways to apply, something Jon Udell calls the… read moreLessons learned building the elmcity service
August 03 2010
What happens when you mix open source goals, styles, and attitudes with Microsoft tools, languages, and frameworks? You get a cultural mashup. That's what the elmcity project is, and what this series will explore. read moreRecent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
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