Both the blogosphere and that den of iniquity and wrongdoing known as Freenode have been buzzing about Kevin Marks' move to teh Google. Congrats, Kevin! Good to see a fellow Brit storming the big G. A question to ponder: what will this mean for microformats, both generally and within Google? 
If you are crazy enough to want to do XML parsing in AppleScript, then XML Tools is what you need. It's an Expat-based parser written as an OS X (and OS 9!) Scripting Addition. It looks like there is pretty good documentation, and there is an extension to let you do XML-RPC. Personally, I'd write a Python script. 
Ajax2007, the conference Ian and I been taking the piss out of for the last few weeks, may have been cancelled. At least, the website is down and danwrong says so on upcoming. Good riddance. £2,695 conferences that teach the same as can be gotten from a £25 book really shouldn't take place, and they make the technology industry look ridiculous (or, at least, more ridiculous than usual). I hope that the speakers are compensated - I know that Jeremy Keith was saying he didn't particularly want to go and wanted to go to The Future of Web Design instead. When we've got events like Pub Standards, who needs these super-expensive conferences?
There's a great YouTube video of Bill Gates v. Steve Jobs. That Finder sure is zany.
Wow. One of the most utterly useless functions of Firefox (the way that it pops up a tool tip which gets in the way of you actually dragging and dropping a shortcut on to your bookmarks bar) can be disabled quite easily by going to about:config and switching browser.chrome.toolbar_tips to false. Done!
I got an accidental sneak peek of the new Grazr the other day. I'm not going to spill the beans about what I saw, but Mike has just made the announcement of the new Grazr on his blog. In short: rounded corners! New CSS themes and ability to make your own! Simplified toolbar and a new drop-down menu! The footer is on the way out! The announcements should be either later this week or early next week - and I will, of course, be linking to them.
Apple are opening another shop in Britain - this time inside the Bentall Centre in Kingston-upon-Thames. It still looks like the closest one for me will still be Regents Street. Steve Jobs, please note: the London to Hastings line has lots of interesting and exciting places like Tonbridge and Sevenoaks.
MySpace Parser updated 
My MySpace parser has been updated. It had fallen in to disrepair, mostly due to my laziness and the fact that I'm still learning Python. I find the try...except loop a bit of a pain compared to PHP's error handling using @function().
It's a perpetual beta, and all that. I can't promise I've ironed out all the bugs, so please try and look for your profile and send me a comment if there's a problem.
Anyway, the great news is I've added an RDF output as well. I'm using SIOC as the best way of representing data. foaf:Person has to actually represent a person, and foaf:Agent didn't seem to do much for me. MySpace has this really insanely stupid idea of allowing corporate acounts - bands, websites, radio stations, comedy clubs, movies and all sorts of other collaborative enterprises have accounts. So, sioc:User seems to be the best representation of that - even if that makes it so that we can't use FOAF tools.
The URL is as follows:
xml.opiumfield.com/myspace/username/format
username takes both the numerical 'FriendID' and the alphanumeric name used to go direct to a person's page (eg. myspace.com/whatever).
format takes one of the following: 'xml', 'json', 'opml', 'rdf' or 'rss'
XML and JSON both provide data about the user (sorry, the JSON isn't very good - it's just the XML2JSON script - if you want the data, the XML is highly recommended). The OPML version uses inclusion and is designed to be used with Grazr. The RSS version is the latest comments from the page in an RSS 2.0 feed.
The RDF is an RDF/XML file containing SIOC data. It's pretty early at the moment - although I will be adding much more to it as we go on. I have a nasty feeling that I'll have to make a namespace too. D'oh.
Suggestions for improvement of the RDF output are absolutely welcome.
Tags: myspace, rdf, semweb, mashup, xml, opml, grazr, rss, json, sioc
When will the Web do a Sun?
Anyone want to take bets on how long it'll take before a tech journalist uses the phrase "Web 4.0"? Well, don't bother. Dan Farber penned an article today trying to solemnly point the way to Web 3.0 and 4.0.
It's such a shame that the Gillmor Gang is no longer being produced - it gave otherwise sensible technology journalists the chance to go in to wild speculation mode over a crappy phone line for about nine hours a week (split up handily in to inconvenient 28 minute chunks). Now that this outlet for crazy speculation is no more, people like Dan are bringing their speculation back to the blogs.
I'm waiting for us to quit the Web 2.0 thing and do what Sun did - just jump a few versions from Java 1.5 through to Java 5.0 without the intervening version numbers getting in the way.
And what is all this madness in aid of? Well, actually, it's Nova Spivack giving lots of hints about his new company, and doing a lot of explaining about the SemWeb in the process. Spivack's post is well worth reading, but I'm not totally sure it's worth coming up with new version numbers of the Web for.
Anyone want to take a bet on when a professional tech journalist tries to use the phrase "Web 5.0"?
Tags: dan farber, nova spivack, semantic web, semweb, gillmor gang, web 3.0, web 4.0
