Services like delicious, twitter and friendfeed mean nothing if you don’t give them context. Recently I came to the conclusion that my links page was dead. So I replaced it with a delicious link-stream, following dextro’s advice.

But then it hit me, you can’t post comments to delicious. A click later I went from that thought to the friendfeed api page.

A quick search came up with 2 wordpress plugins, both already installed and none of which singles out the delicious stream from friendfeed. Back to square one.

So I took a look at my server and noticed that one of the plugins already came with the friendfeep api library. About an hour later I had coded a new page template that I called lifestream beta.

With it, I now have a delicious link stream that links to friendfeed so you can comment. Ideally, I was aiming for a lifestream page that allowed filtering the stream by service.

I think there’s a gap between friendfeed and wordpress. One that we could easily fill by providing a more customized friendfeed page in wordpress, along with the friendfeed comments plugin. In a perfect world, we could even seamelessly merge friendfeed and wordpress comments.

So please, go ahead and steal this idea. I would love to have a lifestream with filter and comment features.

Here’s the code if you’re interested in showing a link-stream:
<?php
$username = 'brunoamaral';
$service = "delicious";
$date_format = 'l G:i';
$feed = new FriendFeed($username, $api);
$session = new FriendFeed();
$feed = $session->fetch_user_feed($username, $service);?>

<div id="ff-activity">

<?php foreach ($feed->entries as $entry) { ?>
<div class="ff-event ff-<?php echo $entry->service->id; ?>" style="background-image: url('<?php echo $entry->service->iconUrl; ?>');">

<p class="title"><a href="<?php echo $entry->link;?>"><?php echo $entry->title;?></a></p>

<p class="ff-meta"><small><a href="http://del.icio.us/bruno.amaral" class="external"><?php echo date($date_format, $entry->published); ?></a></small> >>> <a href="http://friendfeed.com/e/<?php echo $entry->id; ?>">Friendfeed entry</a> </div>
<?php } ?>
</div></div>

Obercom is the Portuguese Observatory for the Media. And altough they have produced some great studies on the subject, their most recent flashreport leaves a lot to be desired.

The problem is not just the way the terms “Blogger-producer” and “Blogger-consumer” are used, leaving an immense grey area. It’s mostly having a report published in 2008 with data from 2006.

Obercom left this report in the dark for two years. A lot changed since then of course. Enough to make this report useless by now, unless you are mapping the evolution of the web over a long period.

But allow me to broaden the scope and ask: How ethical is it for a research organization to keep information inaccessible?

Enter Open Information

If there are API (Application Programming Interface) built for services like twitter, why not build an interface for researchers to access raw data and publish their conclusions?

This would just mean having extra care not to divulge private information of people who participate in the research. And the questionnaires already reflect that concern by not asking for a name or any information that might lead to a possible identification.

Still, there is ethical ground to uncover here, but I think that it’s something worth considering.