Archive
I was recently asked by the good people at Proboscis to undertake a virtual residency, exploring their Bookleteer suite of tools. Bookleteer is described as “a platform for public authoring and cultures of listening—creating and sharing knowledge, stories, ideas and information”, and also as a form of samizdat for the twentieth century. I’ll be further exploring the Bookleteer API in a future post. The code for the experiments can be found on the Bookleteer blog. One of the subjects that came up in my thinking for SXSW, and which I mentioned briefly, was the... Read the rest of this post →
Warning: deeply dull post ahead. But, we’ve had a lot of discussion about bookdata, APIs, and Amazon on this blog, so it would be remiss of me not to post this. From August 15th, Amazon requires all API requests to be signed, which to the layman means that you need to add a timestamp, and a ‘signature’, which is a hash of the entire request, and your private Amazon key. There are a bunch of PHP examples for doing this on the web, but because I had to tweak them all slightly to get them to work, I... Read the rest of this post →
Shared bookmarks are one of the primary drivers of conversation and socialisation on the web. Simple pointers to information are the basic currency of networked communication, and one of the most desirable functions of the future book. But, in the book, they’re pretty hard to achieve. I’ve hit this problem already on bkkeepr, and that’s just with physical books. If two people are reading the same book in two different editions (hardback or paperback, modern or ancient, even in different translations) then the same text doesn’t occur on the same page. (This is one of the main reasons... Read the rest of this post →
The above is a graph of my reading for the last year from bkkeepr, as generated by the first application powered by the bkkeepr API: The Velocity of Reading. TVR calculates statistics and draws graphs based on your reading habits, counting pages read and hence your average reading speed. All you need is a bkkeepr username (and a few weeks reading under your belt). I’m incredibly pleased to see the API in use, and this is exactly the kind of application I had in mind. A big hand to Tristan Ferne for building it. With... Read the rest of this post →
I’m off to India for a couple of weeks: don’t expect too many posts, but I’ll have lots to tell on my return. No time to write up the excellent experience that was Bookcamp last weekend – keep your eye on the Penguin blog for more reports. There will be more to come. Very pleased to see Bookkake and bkkeepr (twice) on the map above that’s doing the rounds. 2008 was a good year, and there are many more plans for 2009. See you in February.
It’s rare that I out-and-out praise a service, particularly here, but if you’re running any kind of customer-facing service on the web I can’t recommend Get Satisfaction highly enough. In fact, if you’re not using it, you’re doing it wrong: it’s up there in a select set of absolutely essential tools like Google Analytics, Feedburner and Campaign Monitor (or equivalents, but they’re my picks) that should be set up and running for your project / website / shop before they launch. Get Satisfaction is “people-powered customer service” that provides a trackable single point of contact,... Read the rest of this post →
I’m pleased to tell you that bkkeepr, my project to create a Last.fm-alike for reading (and more besides) now has an API. An Application Programming Interface (API) is essentially a machine-readable version of an application, and more specifically, the data in contains. bkkeepr is first and foremost an application that does stuff with data, and bkkeepr.com is the human-readable version of that application. What an API does is allow third parties to build small applications, widgets and so on that utilise that data in new and different ways. (This is another post, but I pretty much... Read the rest of this post →
Back in February, I sketched out this idea on the back of an envelope. I’m pleased to say it is now a reality. Bkkeepr allows you to track your reading and make bookmarks via text message and the web. It uses Twitter as it’s source, generating a timeline of everyone’s reading, as well as pages for people, and pages for books. Once added, users can add their books to the LibraryThing account, check library availability, and much more. There are also all the RSS feeds and widgets you’d expect. I particularly like the... Read the rest of this post →
For Hire
Booktwo.org is the blog of James Bridle, a book and technology specialist with specific expertise in planning and producing web and new media projects for clients in publishing and the arts. If you'd like to hire me, have a look at my CV and portfolio, and feel free to get in touch.
I am also a member of the Really Interesting Group.
You can follow me on Twitter.
Speaking Engagements:
I am available for conferences and other events. For examples, see my talks at Interesting, Playful, South by Southwest, dConstruct and Tools of Change Frankfurt.
A complete list of talks, with links, is available.
