Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

With an social activity index hitting a new all-time low, after weeks of failing to find time for blogging, I would like to give a short status update. I have been invited by Peter Svensson to speak about Apache Sling at the second Web Monday in Stockholm. As Peter is the sole organizer of Web Monday in Stockholm, he took the freedom of letting it happen tuesdays, but still it should not be confused with Web Tuesday (of Zurich). In preparation of Web Monday Stockholm I am spending every free minute with coding a Dojo+µsling integration that I want to showcase in two days, and that will eventually be a part of Peter's Bunkai project.

Now that I have the attention (uppmärksamhet) of my 15 readers from Stockholm - I would like to inform you that Peter Svensson is organizing a Web Monday in Stockholm. Web Monday is a tradition of the german Web 2.0 community, a

Web Monday is a decentrally organized, informal meetup focused on Web 2.0 in the broadest of all definitions, that wants to connect users, developers, founders, entrepreneurs, scientists, web-pioneers, blogger, podcaster, designer and anyone else interested. Goal of Web Monday is one the one hand a better connection of the Web 2.0 crowd in Germany and on the other hand a deeping of the cross-atlantic exchange of ideas

(from the Web Montag Wiki) If you are interested in taking part in the first Web Monday in Stockholm, browse to the Wiki page, add your name to the list of participants and perhaps your presentation to the list of presentations and demos. In a regular Web Monday there are up to four presentations, everything that does not fit in this schedule will be covered on the next event.

Interestingly, the organization of the Web Montag is a good example of Web 2.0 communication. Peter picked up the idea from my twitter feed - and I got his announcement via twitter as well. I think this is an awesome idea and if you happen to be in Stockholm at Feb 05, 2008 (yes, it is a tuesday), you should consider being at the first Web Monday in Stockholm.

My presentation went well, we had a lively discussion at Web Montag about the benefits of JCR, why µjax is browser-only (remember, Sling comes with ESP, which is the server-side scripting equivalent to the JST client-side templates demonstrated yesterday), additional topics were Mindquarry and Georg Jähnig presented serchilo, a meta-search engine with a command line for the web approach. In serchilo you can define your own query aliases (or web commands) by editing a wiki page. We discussed possible improvements and one idea was to introduce a bash-like pipe-syntax that would allow extraction of Atom feeds or Microformats from a website and using this data set as the argument for another website. Think of it as a combination of Yahoo Pipes and Bash.

After a long time without posting any Sling-related content, here is a short entry:

I am going to present µjax, the micro AJAX framework that comes with Sling at the Web Montag in Berlin. Today. This means I am right now in the midst of preparing the demo, preparing slides and getting ready for getting to Berlin. I will post the slide here and on slideshare afterwards.

I will present Mindquarry at Web Montag in Berlin. Just in case you want to meet me or get a live demonstration of Mindquarry. This evening there will be an opportunity.

I've attended yesterday's Webmontag in Berlin. It was quite interesting, but the interesting parts were not the ones I expected:

Ting and Gobby

Mattis Manzel talked about Ting. A ting is a collaborative editing session that is supported by three tools: A collaborative editor like Gobby, a Voice-over-IP client like Skype or Teamspeak (Mattis said Teamspeak's push-to-talk-feature makes it the best program for tings because it does not distract from writing and disciplines the users) and an extension of MediaWiki that will save the exported document (The extension seems to be Mutante/MoonEdit and was originally designed for the proprietary MoonEdit).

The main idea is that a bunch of people meets at a specified time at a certain server and launces their collaborative editors. The appointment for time and server will be made using a wiki page. People start writing and discussing what they are writing by embedding comments into the document and using the VoIP tool. After completion of the ting, which might take from 30 minutes to five hours, the created document is copied into the talk page of the wiki.

From my point of view, collaborative editing is an extremely intesting topic and I see many connections to Wiki software, but I am not sure how the Ting concept could be used for more than geek entertainment.

Structured Blogging

The part was the unexpectedly interesting part. Baju Bitter introduced Structured Blogging, which I head about before, but have seen it as just another way to make blogging even more complicated. After hearing Baju's talk, I've changed my opinion. The basic idea of structured blogging is to define data types for blog entries. For example an weblog entry can be a review of a book or a movie, it can be the announcement of an event and many more. The structured blogging initiative provides a definition of blog entry types and relies on the popular microformats concept which embeds machine-readable data into HTML by using CSS class definitions. Furthermore it provides plugins for two weblog tools that make creating structured weblog entries easier by providing editors that are suited at certain blog entry data types.

Most interesting part of this concept is that there are already aggregators that are utilizing these structured blogging contents.

• edgeio finds listings of things you would like to sell in blog entries, think of it as a decentralized ebay (which would need Rapleaf integration, of course)
• incredibooks is a list of book reviews by children and teenagers.

If you are capable of reading german, you should further check out Baju's collection of links, his weblog entry on this Webmontag and the german structured blogging website and forum he maintains.

Readers Edition

Finally Peter Schink of Die Netzzeitung showcased a new Cititzen's Journalism project: Readers Edition which will go live soon. Nothing new, but nice webdesign.