Wednesday, August 4, 2010 (busy day)

Today I 

• discovered I’m a patent holder (named in a patent granted to Quark)
• chatted with a friend about job #1
• spoke on the phone twice about job #2
• worked with Chuck Falzone to Alert Google about a Google Alert bug 
• marked the passing of Google Wave
• was served what looked like a Google Profile pop-up video ad (for Google TV)
• was invited to a LinkedIn Group, on accept noticed real-time updates & other innovations
• discussed videos about mathematics, physics, Feynman, N-dimensions
• continued yesterday’s thread about Iran’s ban on the teaching or playing of music
• spotted a suspicious search result for RDF TV: top result is RFD TV
• sent out a hot tip RE above to media pals, hope Richard Dawkins Foundation may be notified

I’m going to give myself a reward

Google Bike

Scoble's Google Profile Disappears (and quickly re-appears)

UPDATE: Friday April 23 2010 at 14:40

Robert commented here that Google determined his account may have been under attack, so it was deactivated or “locked down” until Robert verified his true identity. This inspires some confidence in Google’s security measures, and is a reminder how important it is to set up your “password recovery” options carefully.

In your Google Account dashboard, under “Personal Settings / Security” you can change password recovery options.

UPDATE:

Clarification: The first screen capture shows Chrome in “incognito” mode. This eliminates the possibility that Scoble’s profile was invisible to me because I had been “blocked.” 

This morning I was going about my business as usual, commenting on the recent Facebook news, when a curious thing happened. I attempted to give a courtesy @ shout-out to Robert Scoble in a thread where a friend recommended his post on the Facebook news, and to my surprise Robert’s Google profile was gone.

The black rectangle over the Anonymous Avatar means the profile has been removed; this is supposed to happen only as a result of a TOS violation such as spamming, phishing, or other serious offense. The profile was restored quickly, but the question remains: what happened?

I’m posting these screen captures as documentation; it was very odd indeed. Note the missing avatars and the missing “feed.” Please speak up if you know what happened, or if you don’t! :)

Personal Settings

Yahoo Pipes - Recent News feed for widget (on the right)

Here is the published Pipe that powers my Recent News widget on Soft Machine: OPML feed items newest 20 with [source] prepended

There are a few details I don't need to go into, at the moment... One thing I will say, however, is that the aggregator pipes I looked at either didn't work or were extremely inefficient. Others weren't suitable, or were fragile, or very specific to a task. This Pipe is general, efficient, and quite good at producing recent items from OPML files. The only ongoing upkeep required is to re-export my subscriptions to the cloud when I make changes I want to see reflected here! In all, I'd say the capabilities of Yahoo Pipes are good, but you may not find what you need easily. [caption id="attachment_152" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Recent News Pipe for Soft Machine"][/caption]

Yahoo Pipes - OPML items

UPDATE: added optional filter on “folder name” for a more selective list of items.

Here is my published OPML items pipe. Here is the Y! message board thread.

This is the first step in solving what I consider to be the distressing state of OPML support in Yahoo Pipes. A very simple fix, it consists of setting up a pipe that parses an OPML file (such as you find when “exporting” subscriptions from Google reader), and outputs the subscription items. I take care to handle both “flat” and “structured” OPML files. Note, I recognize the “flat” items by filtering on “item.type” having “rss” or “atom.” [caption id=”attachment_142” align=”alignnone” width=”550” caption=”First, the flat items”][/caption] [caption id=”attachment_143” align=”alignnone” width=”550” caption=”Then, the children”][/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_156” align=”alignnone” width=”550” caption=”the coup-de-grace”][/caption]

Yahoo Pipes OPML FAIL (Google Reader)

Go to My Yahoo Pipes if you want to verify or play along: “BROKEN Fetch OPML -do aggregate …”

I went to add a simple feature on this site: a list of entries from blogs I like. Also known as a widget showing a magic RSS feed. Enter Yahoo Pipes. Should be simple enough, except I discovered that almost every OPML parser in use is broken with regard to google reader. I have many many subscriptions, so I create a number of folders for organization. Because I use google reader as my "master" feed subscription list, I think it's important to get these basic tools right. I'm going to solve this step by step,  starting with a better  method for parsing the xml, to handle "nested" OPML a la google reader. Folders are empty parent items with a no URL or "type=rss", just "text", "title", and children.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<opml version="1.0">
  ...
 <body>
  <outline title="arts" text="arts">
   <outline text="Civic Center" title="Civic Center" type="rss" xmlUrl= ... 

So, to summarize: FetchData & Yahoo Pipes Help are deficient, and all the OPML aggregation examples I’ve tested are broken. They use FetchData to make an item list out of body.outline, so you get a list of “folders”, instead of the actual feeds.