Incremental Blogger

I think I’ve found my favorite way to browse the Tablet PC/UMPC conversations list: on an iPhone.

My first stab at it was less than satisfying. The page was too small. Turns out there was an easy fix. All we had to do was add the following meta tag to each html page, which tells Safari how to scale the page in relation to size of the screen:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=320″/>

With this simple addition, pages now scale nicely so that by default the text is readable. I just tried taking some pictures of the iPhone showing the conversations list, but I don’t have a good setup yet, so instead I’m using the iPhoneTest.com iPhone emulator here and taking screenshots from it. (Be sure to use the Safari browser for best results.)

Here’s the Tablet PC list as of this evening much like it appears on the actual iPhone:

The Tablet PC conversation list is currently the default page on the server, but it’s also available as: http://www.thredr.com/tabletpc.html.

What’s really cool and convenient is setting up a home-screen icon for the page so you can get to it with a single tap after powering on the iPhone. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the Safari browser from the home screen by tapping on the Safari icon.
2. Tap on the url edit box in the browser and enter:
http://www.thredr.com/tabletpc.html.
3. Then tap on the plus sign at the bottom of the screen and in the pick list that appears select the “Add to Home Screen” option.
4. You will then be asked to give this bookmark a name. I use “Tablet PC,” but any short name will do.

That’s it. Now when you go to the home screen you’ll see an extra icon that looks like a bit of zoomed out text with the bookmark name that you entered in the last step.

Now when you want to check what’s going on in the Tablet/UMPC world, you just pick up your iPhone, wake it up and tap on your custom icon. This brings up Safari with the conversations list ready to scroll through. Did I mention it’s addicting to use your fingers to flick through lists on the iPhone? Well, it is. At least for me.

Now as I’ve mentioned before, we’re working on a couple other custom micro-conversation lists too. There’s one that tracks Apple talk at http://www.thredr.com/apple.html. It looks like this on the iPhone:

As you can see in this screenshot, the conversation threader supports YouTube videos. When one appears you can tap on the link to watch it–although on the iPhone not all videos are available because they have to be re-encoded for the iPhone video format. There’s no Flash as of yet on the iPhone.

Well, here’s one other list that I have added to my iPhone home screen: http://www.thredr.com/msdev.html. It tracks a wide variety of Microsoft-oriented developers. (We still have many more to add to the watch list, but there are some good ones already.) Anyway, what better way to monitor what’s going on with Microsoft developers than on an iPhone :-).

What makes the iPhone so great for checking a list like this? It’s quick and easy to get to it. Waking up the iPhone or powering it up from a cold start is fast and getting to the page is only two or so taps away. The slow part will be downloading the content if on the EVDO network, but for the most part that’s not too bad. Plus it’s easy to flick through the content by sliding a finger up and down the page. And if the content is too small, it scales up nicely in landscape mode. Just flip the phone sideways.

Now wouldn’t it be cool if you could flick the page side to side to switch topics :-). (Probably would be too slow on an EVDO network, but it would be cool.)

We made a slight change to the blog grouping content I posted about today and yesterday. Now it includes ”popular” YouTube videos that have been recently posted which are on topic. Up to this point, the only way to get YouTube videos to show up was for at least one blog to link to them. Now, a popular YouTube video can makes its way to the list even if there’s no referring link. The YouTube RSS feeds/API really help out here.

I do see one thing I have to fix here: The list picked up the non-English video entry “Asus Notebook KickOff 2008 Munchen.” Hmmm. I’ll have to see if I can restrict the content to just English.

What’s going on in the Tabletsphere this morning? Here’s a snapshot courtesy of the converstation grouping service we’ve been working on:

(Click on the image above for a better view.)

I’m enjoying dabbling with on this “conversation tracker” app. Although there’s much more to do to make it robust and compelling across a wide range of domains, it’s interesting enough to see what it generates up to this point.

I’ll be curious to see after using it for awhile how “sticky” the application is. Will I naturally go to it each day? Or more than once a day? Or will it slowly become more and more idle, gathering dust in the bit bin?

No matter. At least I’m learning something along the way. Here are just a few of the things I’ve noticed so far:

1. RSS feeds are all over the place in terms of how closely they follow the standard. And it’s not just small developers that don’t adhere to the format correctly. Some of the big name news sites fall victim to format errors. It takes a lot of trial and error to get things working well. It really shouldn’t be this way.

2. Feeds that redirect links are getting more and more popular. It gives an RSS tracking service a chance to see if a link has been clicked on. The tracking service then redirects the link as needed. It means that you have to be careful to get the correct link when trying to build a system that analyzes links though. The original link is what you really want–not the tracking link. Currently there appear to be two sites that are the most common in providing this kind of “service:” feedburner (most popular) and pheedo. What if there become more and more of these services? It means more and more special cases.

3. Some feeds are overly complicated–that’s just my opinion. MSDN blog feeds are a case in point here. What’s going on? Is formatting that much of a problem?

4. After working on a system that reads RSS feeds I appreciate even more all the work that the browsers do to properly handly mal-formed HTML or XHTML, even when the content has significant errors. You have to be able to intelligently handle all forms of bad syntax. What do you do when an anchor tag contains jibberish for an href (url) attribute? Well, that’s simple enough–ignore the link. But, what do you do when CDATA sections are missing? For now, the code tries to fix things up, but if the challenge is too great, that article in the feed is skipped.

5. I would have thought by this time that everyone understands how useful full feeds are. Many of the major publications are culprits here–providing partial feeds. Some go further. Apple’s PR feed, for instance, is just a list of headlines. Why not have a full feed? I don’t get it.

6. A system like we’re building here is based in part on the number of links–so links are important. Too few links and the generated list gets less interesting. The workaround is to leverage other metrics, but in some ways

7. Links are a sign of conversations. However, for some topics there don’t appear to be all that many conversations going on–even when there are lots of bloggers. Take digital photography, for example. There are many great sites and blogs, however, the bloggers don’t seem to link all that much. Instead, other metrics, such as number of comments, become more and more important.

Bob and I have been working on a tool for keeping track of the various conversations going on in the Tablet/UMPC/MID/ultra-mobile space. Although each of us has our favorite feeds that we check multiple times every day, we know we’re missing some great threads. Ultimately we know we need to read more content in order to find those conversation gems. The tool we’re building tries to make this a bit easier.

The idea is to collect the various RSS feeds from Tablet/ultra-mobile sites/blogs and group their content based on things such as who’s linking to whom, how many comments there are, the time of the post, and so on. Here’s a snapshot of what today’s Tablet talk is about:

(Click on the image above for a full-sized view)

This is just a partial screen capture of the items listed, but it gives an idea how the sites are shown. Actually, since this screenshot is a bit small, here’s a better look at the top of the page:

Here you can see that two Digitimes articles made it to the top of the list and various sites are linking to the articles.

As you can see, this is more than an RSS reader. We’re trying to organize the RSS articles so that we can quickly and easily get to the most compelling and “active” stories. It’s like TechMeme in that respect, however, this conversation viewer is tuned to conversations of the scale that go on in markets such as the Tablet PC/UMPC space. In fact, the tool is architected so that other sets of links covering other domains can be used instead.

The ordering of the list and links is still evolving. In fact, I imagine that the algorithm will be tweeked for as long as the tool is being used. That’ll be the nature of this kind of tool. It’ll “never be done.”

Anyway, there’s still lots to do: bugs to fix, feeds to add, server to set up, and so on, but so far so good. Step by step.

Yes Scott Rosenberg, the database part of Google Base appears to be a closed system. However, there is no reason that the bulk RSS feeds have to be.

One piece of a solution is for someone to build a public, master index of RSS feeds (OPML I assume) supplied to Google Base. That way anyone could consume the data too.

Again, this would make a good Dave project.