DiPot: Ice Tea tech » News

3rd Media Camp Athens 2010: The Program so far #mca2010

ageor — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:23:39 +0000

The program below is hot-linked to the “Presentations” box of the “Events” tab of the 3rd Media Camp Athens 2010 site. If you want to host some of its pages or the event widget to the right yourself, please ask for the javascript code.

This page requires frame support. Please use a frame compatible browser to see the amiando ticket sales widget.

Try out the online event registration system from amiando.

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Apologies for last days’ posts flood

ageor — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:17:04 +0000

I apologize for the flood of links of the past few days.

I have been trying to implement Yet Another Autoblogger to bring my Delicious and StumbleUpon bookmarks in WordPress-based Ice Tea tech. It seems that, while everything finally worked fine with Delicious, StumbleUpon kept returning the same posts over and over to Autoblogger causing a flood in the blog itself and to its RSS feed, FriendFeed & Twitter by extension.

I stopped using StumbleUpon a while ago, because it didn’t support greek-encoded titles. It seems there is also an issue between its feed and Autoblogger. So, at least for the time being, I removed it, which is not that much of a problem, as I don’t post there any more.

Sorry about that, I’ll try to contain such incidents in the future. Thank you all for your patience and especially @Sotomi, @Cybereddie, @Chriiiiis, @Botchagalupe, @Alexnewbee, @Skoroneos, @Jimeh, @Vtripolitakis, @Spdd and those I may have missed for taking the time to notify me about it.

In an attempt to minimize the impact, I erased all the Ice Tea tech feed (with posts) from FriendFeed (I don’t know how to bulk-erase the relevant twits, any ideas?). The sideffect is that, as I am about to recreate the feed in FriendFeed, multiple blog and bookmark posts will appear at once, possibly in Twitter as well. Please forgive me, hopefully it will be the end of this annoyance.

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News Reading Thoughts

ageor — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:46:27 +0000

I never have enough of a good thing. The first time I read the online edition of a magazine I immediately wished for a filtered edition which would only contain the articles of my choice. When Greek Naftemporiki newspaper’s online-edition provided filtered, personalized content, I immediately wished for a method to push the content to me, instead of going around the sites and soon after that RSS appeared (what I like about technology; it always catches up).

Now RSS is commonplace. Filters increase, but the implementations are still early and immature. For example, except for Google and similar sites, filters usually apply to a single site; that of the content source (like http://naftemporiki.gr -only in greek). RSS makes it easy to gather information from multiple sources to the feed reader of choice, but by itself provides no filtering in the source, except in the form of multiple feeds. So, where should filtering apply?

The tools have been expanding and improving. From the days of raw content we now have search, filtering, RSS and a multitude of clients to put them to good use. I tried the very good BlogBridge for a while for its keyword-based virtual feeds (thanks, karagos, for suggesting it). It being offline and other problems I had (bad greek support and hitting the 600 feeds limit of the free edition while not convinced to buy yet) made me return to Google Reader. Regardless of reader, my everyday struggle to get and keep informed about the news and my interests has been getting very time-consuming, mainly due to increasing volume (never have enough of a good thing, remember?).

How many sources and how many pieces of news and info am I talking about? A quick count showed around 2800 items from my (ever expanding collection of) ~750 subscriptions in Google Reader in the last 12 hours. This includes my ~450 FriendFeed subcriptions feed, but not my ~900 people Twitter feed (strangely, only a small count of the tweets I follow make it to the RSS feed). Thankfully, a good portion of the tweets make it to FFd as well (although I fear not all FFd posts make it to the RSS feed, either). At this rate of incomings, it takes me 10-20′/h to browse everything, read and microblog about whatever catches my eye.

This is way too much time. In practice, I browse some of the titles when there’s time and only read the interesting items among them. I do use the Google Reader Filter GreaseMonkey script to highlight items containing an increasing number (~100, so far) of keywords and it is helpfull. But the real problem is with the multiple sharing of the same (great) URLs in FriendFeed, which in turn produce multiple different (as they come from different users) items in Google Reader. Those are not caught by the script’s “hide duplicates” option.

So, for the time being, I consider avoiding duplication my #1 goal for increasing my news-reading productivity. I hope Friendfeed will listen and convert duplicate link posts to likes or comments of the first such post. This would also result in a major added benefit: aggregating all the relevant discussions in one thread, as discussed here. I find it so important, I even requested Robert Scoble to lobby for this here (I guess it’s impossible to read everything, even for him)!

#2 goal is to reduce sources that produce similar content, like press releases etc. Google News does well about it but doesn’t track all the sites I do. Mechanisms of bookmarking sites like Delicious might also help, as they keep URL scoring. While I work on a plan, I’ll stick to goal #1. Please join!

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Which Service should a Post go to?

ageor — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:21:55 +0000

I have been trying to organize/visualize the way I post, be it blogging, a comment on FriendFeed, an interesting link a came across etc. During the time it took me to complete the flowchart, more services were added as sources or carriers of my posts. As a result, the chart got more complex than originally anticipated. Interestingly enough, there is a pattern and the flowchart works for me most of the time.

Also get the Posting Flowchart as built in Dia (hence the crudeness), for your own use. So, there it is:

Posting Flowchart

Please do comment. Is posting a one-way street for you? Are there any general rules or do you post on a case by case basis?

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Athens Startup Weekend 2008

ageor — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 07:53:30 +0000

First things first. I told them all in person and I’m saying it here as well. Special thanks go to Andrew Hyde, the mind behind Startup Weekends, Alexandros Pagidas, the person who brought it in Athens, Patrick Malone, our host in Microsoft Innovation Center venue (Patrick and Lydia, you definitely improved Microsoft’s image for all of us), the sponsors of the event (Domino’s, Loumidis, Coca Cola-3E, Wind; hopefully I am not forgetting anyone) and all the professionals who dropped in to give us a hand. I won’t go into the event itself. Others have already done that; follow the event’s site and the links all over this post for that.

In danger of giving the feeling of repetition to readers of other relevant posts, I’ll say it: Athens Startup Weekend was a successful event and proved several points (Greeks can actually work together without shouting or arguing all the time, previous acquaintance is not important, teams can form without guidance or many introductions etc.). Plus, it produced and set off a number of ideas that can eventually work.

Andrew mentioned that Startup Weekends are not meant to create viable startups over the weekend but, rather, form a community among the participants. In a private conversation he said only 4 such startups were created in Startup Weekend history so far (unfortunately I didn’t get the names). The event is meant to prove that people who didn’t know each other before can sit around the same table, share and expand on an idea and make the most out of it in a very short time-frame. The important thing is not the idea, but that these people can work together, add their talents to a cause and produce a combined result that’s greater than the sum of their individual strengths. At the end of the day, these people become potential partners/collaborators in these very same or other promising projects.

The event put the best out of us all. We expressed our opinions and discussed difficult matters (we sometimes knew nothing about) in a civil, productive manner. We all got out of there with some fresh ideas, some new potential friends and partners, the knowledge that talented, cooperative people are there waiting to be found and great accomplishments are so much closer than expected. Indeed, 10 great projects were born.

I consider myself privileged to have been a part of it and hope the event does go annual so we can experience it again.

Here are a few additional relative links (no particular order; I’ll be happy to add links I’ve missed):

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Welcome to the Ice Tea tech blog

ageor — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:17:54 +0000

Ice Tea tech’s ambition is to provide its readers with yet another perspective to technology, including thoughts and how-tos. Stay tuned!