• RSS Feeds
  The News feed on the main page, as well as other sections should all be available in a subscribable syndication format. I don’t neccsarily want to check the city’s website everyday, but if its streamed in with my other feeds, I might see something I would not have otherwise noticed.
  
  
• iCal Syndication
  Provide iCal or XML data for any calendars or events such as waste disposal schedules, Council meeting schedules, Arts and recreational events (Swimming schedules, etc). People can then subscribe to these calendars directly from within their Calendar software, or to enable third parties to build interesting tools on top of them.
• Raw XML Data
  Provide raw XML data for things like Outdoor Skating rink locations, municipal offices, transit schedules, and recreational facilities. Geotag it. Allow people to consume the data and build things on top of this data. Scraping and cleansing the data from the website is painful and unnceesary when all the underlying data already exists.
• Podcasts
  Not everyone has time to watch City Council webcasts at their computer, but if you’re taking the bus in from Orléans, you might throw it on your iPod and watch on the way to work. Assuming the City (not Rogers) maintains the rights to these meetings, syndicate it to iTunes and let people watch it where and when they want.

As an example, and mostly because I wanted to find the closest outdoor skating rink to my house without going through a list of 230 locations and trying to figure out which ones sounded like they might be close – I scraped, geo-tagged, and mapped all of the City’s outdoor skating rink locations. I also tried to make the legend of what is on-site at each rink little easier to understand. At first glance, I had no clue what W, L,S,B was and thought I couldn’t be alone in this.  All told, it probably took me about an hour and a half to clean and geotag the data, and a couple more hours to drop it into Google Maps and determine the layout. The most paunful part though, was cleaning the data. If we had clean data like this from the City, they’d have a ton of great mashups.

Features I thought about adding might be the ability to upload photos of each rink, comments on the latest conditions,  etc. But for now, I wanted to get it out there so that other people don’t have to suffer through the pain of guessing which rink might be closest.

While the City seems to be moving in the right direction with their online consultation process, allowing people to comment directly on whitepapers is hardly revolutionary, it is a small step in the right direction.

Old: New:

I like the old one better, but I guess its not as close to the standard RSS icons.

Would it be so difficult to tag each book with an RFID tag and then place a mesh network of RFID transmitters on each shelf so as to keep track of every book within the store passively. A Book Search would display exactly where each book was located within the store, and avoid the ridiculousness that was today’s bookstore experience. I’ve slowly stopped going into Chapters/Indigo as much as I used to as they either tend not to carry the book I’m looking for, or its simply too hard to find a title.

Update: As you may have noticed from the comments, both the Rideau Store Manager, and Heather Reisman have been in contact offering to right the situation.

1. I used to swim competitively and went to the OFSAA finals for men’s 800 free-style and I think I did about 200m in the men’s relay.
2. I co-wrote a 1-hour play back in high school entitled “Home Honey I’m Hi” created a site (RIP script-source.com) to host it and about 250 other independantly written/amateur scripts, screenplays, and it was subsequently performed by two high schools: one in Guam, the other I believe was in Saskatchewan. I’ve not been able to find a copy of the script since a hard drive crash in 2001. I know there were backup copies somewhere, it could be floating on the internet somewhere.
3. I played the clarinet in high school band. I couldn’t read sheet music fast enough, so I just played by ear/memory.
4. I love to cook….less a fan of the clean-up.
5. I took piano lessons until I was 9 or 10. I want to learn how to play again.

Owen, Chris Erwin, Spencer Callaghan, Dave Bobak, and foo, you’re up!

If you’re looking to launch your own multi-blog platform, make sure to take a look at WordPress MU.

By exposing a simple XML web service on their site a customer would be able to gain access to realtime pricing via their LDC. I imagine this is in the works for realtime online billing, but not having to login to the LDC’s site to determine current rates and exposing the rates via a simple XML or HTTP POST would allow for integration into other systems and appliances. If rates vary a great deal from customer to customer, then all that’s needed is a private key implementation to ensure that only that customer has access to their live pricing. Pipe this over SSL, and you’re set.

At the very least, this would allow customers to view live electricity pricing from their desktop via a Yahoo Desktop Widget or an Apple Dashboard Widget, or have SMS alerts delivered to their Blackberry and act accordingly. In other cases WiFi-enabled thermostats could be programmed to poll for the latest pricing and only come on below a certain price threshold, or comapies that do a lot of printing could have their large print runs automatically run at off-peak hours to save money and reduce costs.

I’m sure there’s a number of other usage cases I could come up with, but the real advantage (as realized by Google, YouTube, and every other web service API provider) is that the LDC only has to provide the electricity usage API and perhaps a few code samples. As the prices for electricity continue, the developer community at large will be the ones to put that data to use in innovative and mutually beneficial ways.

My first impressions are that these makes facebook a lot more useful in the real world. Can’t remember a friend’s cell #? No problem, text "cell john smith" to FBOOK and if they have their cell # in their profile, you’ll get it back. Sweet! Just meet someone and want to add them to your facebook, text "add john smith" and they’ll be added. You can even get a little more info on someone by just entering their name.

 Even if you don’t have a mobile phone you can test out the system with their mobile emulator at http://www.facebook.com/mobile.php

Overall, I think the new mobile accessibility via SMS is pretty smart and has the potential to take the facebook addicts to another level; at least now they’ll be able to leave their dorm rooms.

Reputations are relative.

Reputations are contextual.

You shouldn’t have to visit a separate site or use a special username to modify your reputation – you don’t do this in real life, it should be part of the experience.

Any site that wants to integrate reputation management/inclusion into their site should be able to do so via an easy to use, open API.

Going through the available newcomers – iKarma and Opinity, I see things they’re doing right, and things that are just off.. likely to allow for their business model to work.

I wasn’t a fan of iKarma when I ran through their tour and created an account, and the fact that a score was a simple percentage and star rating was almost too simple. When you think of your friends and if you’d want to do business with them or play a game with them, those ‘reputations’ aren’t the same and really don’t have a lot to do with each other, rather, their reputation is contextual. Someone could be great to play online games with, but terrible when it comes to shipping out a product, or trading something. This is where I think Opinity has the solution partly right – they’ve defined categories (contexts) where reputations can differ without affecting each other to any large degree – Community, Dating, Gaming, Commerce are the big ones there. They also allow for tagging which gives people another level on which to define the context of the reputation above and beyond their rigidly defined contexts. The integration of existing sites with Opinity is also another of its strengths, I’d love to know how they’re obtaining the Ebay reputation metrics.

But back to the relativity of reputations. On top of individual users having reputations relative to each other, the sources of those reputations might also be scored in some fashion as to the reputation of the site itself. ie. Would you weigh incoming reputation from Ebay the same as you would from someone’s random blog? Probably not, so there needs to be some mechanism for sources to be integrated into that contextual reputation calculation. Given that each user of the API

We’re working on an Open API to fill this niche at Voxxia, and hope to have an alpha release out within the next month or so. We’re thinking of offering code samples in PHP, .NET and possibly Java to start. Developer API tokens will also be used to manage bandwidth and the potential for spamming (this is where source reputation will be very valuable).