Saturday January 08, 2005

Developer Contests Over the last few weeks I've been paying more attention to the API's that blog and taggregator services offer. I've also starting looking more into the API's that blog tools offer.

The Technorati Developer's Contest results are in. I was especially impressed with the visualization effort by Michael Dale'sTechnorati Touchgraph application. While it is a little rough around the edges in places (some of the implementation's PITA'ness is just AWT and crapplets being what they are), these kinds of graphical renderings of the Technorati cosmography are really great. Wondering now if anybody has tried something like this with Macromedia Flash, hmm....

If anybody is entering the Blojsom Developer Contest and wants help with the Technorati API, there's a Java client in the SDK and I'd be happy to lend assistance with it.

( Jan 08 2005, 12:04:12 PM PST ) Permalink


Managing Multi-Timezone Conference Calls I'm ringmastering a project that requires coordination with parties near and far. Most of the coordination for these kinds of things functions well with email, IM, wiki and CVS. But sometimes a plain-old conference call is in order.

Getting all of the parties lined with

• a number to dial into
• invitations and acknowledgements (RSVP's)
• conference call times with the time and timezone contextual to the recipient

It turns out that FreeConference.com offers tools for all of this for, well as the name implies, free. They make money up-selling premium services but I've got my first conference call with parties in three timezones setup through them and haven't paid a dime for it (which BTW, is their cost-per-minute-per-connection to have the dial-in number be an 800 number); I'll find out how it goes next week!

( Jan 08 2005, 10:26:54 AM PST ) Permalink