Talk, Clone, Talk
Posted: July 30th, 2006 | 2 Comments »UPDATE: Link to screencast fixed. Sorry about that.
After much frustrating baby-triggered cancellation, circumstances have at last permitted me to deliver a proper talk – even if it was only seven minutes long. Tom Carden & Steve Coast’s Techa Kucha Ask Later gathering was lots of fun: a kind of open-mic night for tech talks, with people running onto stage with 400 seconds to present the card stacks they’d mailed to Steve the night before. Lots of really good bite-size presentations, my favourites coming from Toms Carden and Armitage, though the strongest reaction was to a talk about Sudoku-solving in Ruby that included a web-crawler and home-built OCR engine.
Since I’m pretty happy with it, I’ve recorded the talk and slides (now with added demos) as a seven-minute Flash screencast: “Get Your Own!” The Build-To-Clone Design Pattern. The talk discusses the concept of software cloning and how it opens up new kinds of web applications. (I had been hoping to cover this as part of my tragically-cancelled Reboot talk, which – taking a cue from the latest trends in the games industry – I’m now hoping to deliver episodically.) I discuss the talk and the Timeliner app I created for it in more depth in this entry on the Ning Blog.
The whole thing’s particularly timely as, the day after I presented, Tim O’Reilly mentioned Ning’s cloning features during his keynote at OSCON. Speaking of which, that’s where Ning PHP Deity David Sklar delivered his deliciously-titled I’m 200, You’re 200: Codependency in the Age of the Mashup (PDF). It provides some excellent answers to questions I’ve had about the use of web services since they first arrived, so I strongly recommend it. Also you may note that we both, with no pre-agreement, used what is rapidly becoming the Ning standard sign-off. I wonder where we got that idea…
Glad you enjoyed the talk, Yoz. I didn’t realise you were around for it – thought you’d headed off before. If you’re interested, the fuller version of it I did in Denmark is at http://infovore.org/talks .
I’ve been back, and I’m ready for gaston! Erm.. Nothing Else!
Well that was fun even if this post is late, I do have more actually. I have a fellow blogger I keep track of which had a talk about the cloning model for web applications on social hosting services like Ning. I thought it was very interesting for those w