I came across a quick post from Benjamin Golub in his blog about SUP (no Wikipedia page yet, anyone want to write one?), a protocol developed by FriendFeed and described in their blog. 

Benjamin created a small YouTube video showing how SUP works.

Benjamin Golub demonstrates SUP

So naturally, I now have a bit of SUP-envy, since I run a WordPress blog and not my own home made cloud-based blog platform like Ben.  Which means my next step was to perform a Google search for ‘WordPress’ and ‘SUP’.  To my great surprise, a small SUP plugin has already been written!

Enter WP SUP, a small plugin that does exactly what’s necessary, which is to say add a bit of code to the RSS feed to make it SUP-enabled, and ping FriendFeed when the feed is updated.

Done and done.  Thanks Derek van Vliet!  Everybody go friend him immediately on FriendFeed.  Thanks!

WP SUP home page

Update: Feedburner seems to be stripping the SUP information out of the RSS feed header.  I’m looking in to it, along with Josh Haley and Benjamin Golub

I installed the MediaRSS WordPress plugin today.  Hopefully that will mean that the picture that I included will show up in FriendFeed and other places that support Media RSS extensions.

Media RSS extensions allow one to describe different types of media, such as embedded music and video clips, directly in an RSS stream.  These extensions are technically optional, so traditional RSS parsers can safely ignore them.

I just noticed that yesterday was the 40-year anniversary of Douglas Engelbart’s historic 1968 Human Augmentation demo, affectionately titled “The Mother of All Demos.”

Only slowly has this demo, Douglas, and the Stanford Research Institute team (The Augmentation Research Center, or ARC) gotten the recognition they deserve for the groundbreaking work they did here.  The system they developed was called NLS or “oN-Line System.”  Many of the concept developed for and presented here didn’t even have names back in 1968:

• The computer mouse (only recently named) as a alternative input device.
• Chording keyboard technology, a keyboard where multiple buttons are pressed simultaneously to issue a single command.
• Hypertext, or the concept of endowing a word to be a link to more information *about* that word.
• Electronic collaboration, the ability to share information and meta-information with other people in the same electronic system.
• Multimedia conferencing, sharing both audio, video, and electronic information simultaneously.
• Teleconferencing, being able to conference people in from remote locations.
• Metatext, the ability to endow text or other userland objects with contextual information.
• Email.  Do I even have to say any more here?

In certain ways, a lot of the concepts and technologies we enjoy today with our networked PCs not only were first realized in 1968, but were then immediately stuffed back into the closet because of the explosive and unforeseen growth of “personal computers” in the ’70s an ’80s.  Because they were so popular, funding for large, expensive collaborative systems such as the one in this demo dried up.

Only after years of first standalone PC use, local area networks and finally the internet did these technologies come back to the fore.

So, after 40 years, I’d simply like to say:  Doug, you and the ARC team were right.  You touched the obelisk and the rest of us ran away.  Thank you.

You can find more on Douglas Engelbart, ARC, The NLS demo and more at these links:

• Stanford’s 1968 Demo Page: “The Mouse Site”
• The Bootstrap Institute
• Invisible Revolution – a documentary

Yesterday, I saw a breaking news blog entry relating to Outbrain and Disqus. It’s a very small update in the Outbrain widget that detects if Disqus is being used and asks if the person rating an article would like to leave a Disqus comment as well.

Although the integration isn’t huge, it did catch my attention and I decided to install Outbrain on my blog. Outbrain is a plug-in content rating system that also provides recommendations automatically at the end of each article where it is installed. There is no special logins needed to rate an article, just click on the number of stars you think the article deserves and your rating is recorded.

The install was very quick and easy, with one odd hiccup. The hiccup came when I was instructed to paste in a unique activation code for my blog in to the plugin’s control panel.  After hitting the button to attempt activation, I eventually got a ‘timeout’ error. I tried the same steps several times with no joy. 

Eventually, however, I noticed that my blog management page on the Outbrain web site apparently decided I was activated, and allowed the plugin to operate normally. It was all very mysterious and I never actually got the confirmation through the control panel as I should.  But knock on wood, I am up and running.

As you can see in my screenshot, I rated my own article to see if the Disqus integration was working. However, it didn’t ask me to leave a comment.  (I subsequently figured out the ‘comment’ link only appears on the single post page, after the Disqus module loads.)

There are a number of great blogs that I follow that are now using the Outbrain plugin, such as Louis Gray, CenterNetworks, WinExtra, The Inquisitr, and VentureBeat.

Tonight, I got a SMS message from Disqus on Twitter.  The tweet was pretty succinct:

Disqus for WordPress 2.03 released.: This release includes trackback/pingback and pagination support as we.. http://tinyurl.com/5z98kh

That was enough for me!  Disqus’ lack of PingBack support in WordPress was really something that I missed, as you can probably tell from this article’s title.  So, without wasting another minute, I followed the link to the blog entry, and downloaded the new version of the plugin, 2.03.

And, I’m happy to report that it does indeed support trackback and pingback support!  I’ve included a screenshot below.

Disqus TrackBacks

Thanks for your hard work, Disqus team!

I’d like to make a small announcement that this is Scribkin’s 100th post.  It’s been a long time coming, especially the last 20, but I finally made it.  I am definitely looking forward to writing 100 more!

I’d like to thank Colin Walker (FF), Sarah Perez (FF), Corvida (FF & Twitter), Steven Hodson (FF),  Louis Gray (FF), Shey Smith (FF) and Mike Fruchter (FF) among many many other great people for being enthusiastic about the development and direction of my site. 

Also, I’d like to thank SheGeeks, Google Tutor and LouisGray.com for giving me the opportunity to guest-post on their sites.  I consider it an honor and a responsibility when writing content for another site, I always try to do the best I can.

Finally, I’d like to say that I am receptive to requests for those who would like to try guest-posting here on Scribkin.  I know my site isn’t huge by any stretch, but everyone likes to see their name outside of their own blog, and you may reach a different group of folks than you might otherwise..

Let me know if you are interested!