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Zo'C

The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

Spotify, Music in the cloud in a timely serviceOctober 21

Moving further towards the life in the cloud, I’ve been beta testing Spotify, a new music service, and I’m loving it.

Cloud computing is a term referring to the web as an abstract cloud providing you the services you need without having to rely on a local system for more than connecting to the internet and the services you require.

Spotify is just like that!

They have signed up with several major record labels to create a huge music repository you can browse and play instantly, categorize and share with friends. The simplest explanation I can give you goes like this: “Is just like your iTunes, but with a much bigger library.

Spotify – the story from Spotify on Vimeo.

Why is timely?

First, let me rant a bit about the music industry.

For many, many years, people bought LPs, then CDs and, while tapes have been available for a long time, they were never preferred. Most of us (all?) did record a tape for a friend when asked and moral consequences of that were minimal, if at all. The means to copy and the final quality were rudimentary enough not to cause a deep impact on the music industry.

Since the advent of the CD recorder and m

Fight Poverty: Action + AttitudeOctober 15

Today is blog action day and the theme is poverty, and I’ve been struggling for weeks to find a subject to write on and following discussions today, I realized many other people are in the same boat.

I did wrote yesterday a post saying that poverty isn’t off-topic in any blog niche, and I certainly believe that’s true. Why is, then, so hard to write about it?

Maybe my good friend Jen said it best when she says that any post that comes to mind seems to carry a bit of hypocrisy, and certainly Chris Garret has a point when he says “good intentions are not good without actions”.

According to blog action day stats, Today 12,044 sites have blogged about poverty and hopefully, risen awareness about poverty, but, I’ll join Sue Clark on saying: Just blogging about poverty is not enough.

Awareness about poverty is high enough, what is lacking is attitude and not information. If 12,044 posts have today lead to 12,044 actual actions to fight poverty, then I’ll call it success, but if a good part of these posts are just transferring the responsibility to the reader, then is time wasted.

What can you do?

Actions fall in two categories: long time strategies, and short time sol

Blog Action day 2008: why is not off topic on your blogOctober 14

If you believe in blogging at all, then you have to believe that bloggers united for a cause can be a strong driving force to change. The motivation behind Blog action day is that bloggers around the world gather one day a year to discuss subjects that concern all of us as individuals.

On October 15 last year, thousands of bloggers wrote about the environment and targeted an audience of millions. The environment has become a frequent and recurrent subject but the need for a change of conscience and attitude on that field is still huge and what has been done is not yet enough.

This year, Blog Action Day’s subject is poverty, and so far 8,634 Sites already engaged on the cause and will reach an audience of 9,201,889 subscribers.

Why is your post important?

Now, with all the media coverage on the subject, why is your blog post important?

As a blogger, you probably know that relationship between writers and readers in blogs are much more personal than in traditional media and when you write a post on your blog you might be targeting only a few hundred people (or even less) but these few people are listening to you and if there are bloggers among your readers, they’ll be talking to some people who are actually listening to them.

Why is not off-topic on your blog

Poverty, just like environment, is a subject that concerns every single human bein

Videos of FOWA LondonOctober 13

Last week I’ve attended to the 2008 London Edition of FOWA which was quite interesting.

Being the geek I am, I mostly preferred to watch the keynotes on the developer track, rather than the business track, but the good news is that the organizers are publishing the videos of all keynotes for free, so I’m catching up the ones I missed and so can you.

Some of my favourite are

How to build a desktop app from your web app

Jeremy Baines will explain how to take advantage of the knowledge you already have as a web developer to build desktop applications.

How oAuth and portable data can revolutionise your web app

I think it becomes more and more obvious on a daily basis that every site can provide a better service to users if it can identify them, but at this point, this means having an account on every site you get in. Not only this is boring, but is also dangerous. Most people won’t be able to keep one password for each site and, chances are not every site you will register to is completely honest.

What about mashups then? A mashup will only work if it can have access to a few of your web accounts on your behalf.

Enter oAuth! Chris messina will cover the subject of openids and keeping a consistent identity through differen

3, 2, 1… you are back in the room!October 13

Is the Zo’C blog dead? I hear you asking.

No. Not at all! But in the last four months or so a series of serious changes in my life have drained most of my energy and I had little choice but to stop writing for a while.

The good news are that the serious changes are mostly (if not all) positive and were actually the realisation of projects I was actually investing in. Some of the major changes are to be living in London now (a longtime project of mine) and working for Yahoo! which is a source of so much web goodness that I can’t but be proud of working on a daily basis with some of the guys and girls who shape the web as we know it and write some of the best web literature around.

It is also (hopefully ;) good news that I’m into blogging as much as I used to be and now, with recharged batteries, I’ll try to share the best bits of what’s going on the piece of the web that surrounds me.

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