A Feed Reader Plugin for Pidgin

Pidgin is my favourite instant messaging client. I have been using it when it was still called gaim, mostly for Yahoo and XMPP messaging (like Twitter).

I recently discovered the Skype API Plugin which makes pidgin even more useful as we use skype chat a lot at my current work.

Now the only thing missing is a feed reader!

I am using SharpReader for my daily RSS fix, but having two different UIs pop up every now and again is beginning to be too disruptive.

Wouldn't it be great if my feed updates could be displayed in a pidgin chat window?

And no, I do not want to switch to Miranda. I am used to pidgin, and I am too old to change habits :-)

An Operating System that understands one thing: I do not want it to ever delete my data!

When it comes to the data on my machine, there is one rule that I follow: Never delete content that I have created myself!

I am trying to follow that rule by putting files that I made into a separate folder structure, onto a separate hard drive, or by copying it to gmail.

The latter sounds a bit silly, but to be honest: they all are! Why would I have to worry about not deleting content I created when there is one entity that knows for sure and should be able to take care of this on its own: the operating system.

After all, I am typing this text and the OS does know that. So why doesn't Windows go "uh, he's typing something. I'll see where he puts that and make sure it'll never get deleted. He'll like that."?

Now, will I ever write an OS? Probably not. All I can do is ask Paul or Steve to include this as a feature. Or I could get involved with Linux and develop something myself, maybe as part of gnome... I have to think about this...

A "mix tape" site for MP3 play lists

So you have 5000+ songs on your iPod. But which one do you want to listen to next?

Remember the days when we would make tapes?

In those days, everybody had at least one friend who made really good tapes. For me, it was my friend Arne. Somehow, he knew the good music. And somehow, he knew what I wanted to listen to. I still have a couple of his tapes. Never mind that I don't actually own a cassette player anymore.

I would bet that he has more than one play list these days. While I usually listen to my music using "Shuffle Songs", he is probably creating play lists for different occasions or moods. For different genres or artists. For different times of the day or seasons of the year. And most likely for different people.

So where is the site that brings his play lists to me?

The way I see it, a plugin would scan my music library, then go out and search for play lists that match my songs. I would select some of them, probably based on their name and a short description provided by the creator. I would have my favourite creators in a short list, and I would probably automatically download new lists they made.

(Marketers: the site would of course have a "buy missing tracks" button)

What's in it for play list makers? Well, they would really be DJs. Create good lists, and you'll create yourself some fans...

Somehow I think there must be something like this out there already. No?

A "Social Meta Network" Site

Data portability is a good thing, I guess, but it does not immediately solve my issue: I'm sick of entering and maintaining my personal data on about a dozen sites.

The solution: A site that reads my information from any one site (or from my openid) and maintains it on all the others. That way I would only need to maintain one profile, say the one on Linkedin, and the software would update all the others. Or, I could edit my profile on my meta site directly.

My meta site would also show me news and information about all the contacts I have across all social networks (a bit like spokeo.com), and it has to be able to understand that some people have multiple accounts (e.g. via a merge feature like the one in pidgin).

Wouldn't that be a pip?

A "CSS Consolidator" or Tree-based CSS Editor

I was trying some new layout on a couple of my web pages the other day.

Whenever I do that I always end up with a bunch of different CSS files all over the place, and it becomes increasingly different over time to keep them clean.

Being a programmer, I'd like to follow the DRY directive: don't repeat yourself. In order to do so, my CSS files would ideally be organised in a hierarchy: some CSS directives apply to all my pages, so they should end up in global.css, while others apply only to the astronomy section of my pages and should therefore be in astro.css.

Also, I like to seperate CSS files according to function (layout.css vs. typo.css).

In the end, I always have enough of those files to lose overview.

What I would need is a tool that displays all of my CSS directives along with where they come from. That way, I could move them easily from one file to another, or up/down the hierarchy if needed.

The tool must have an automatic consolidation feature that would move directives up the tree as far as possible.

I would not want to be able to graphically browse through my (X)HTML and apply CSS rules using the mouse. I would really want this tool to be able to work on existing or create a hierarchy of CSS files.

Does that make sense?

A Digital Rights Management (DRM) Infrastructure for my Personal Data

The UK has seen a couple of odd cases of "data loss" lately. Government organisations have on at least 4 occasions lost data about UK citizens: names, birth dates, addresses, bank account details and even some hospital records. Some data was lost by subcontractors and one of those subcontractors was even in the US!

Things like this have not happened in other countries, yet, or maybe they were not made public. But they make me wonder: can I trust my country or my government know what they do with the data they collect from me?

As Jan Schallaböck of the German ULD suggested in a talk at 23C3: DRM might be the solution.

If whenever I hand personal data over to anybody, I could at the same time specify who should be able to use that data, and for how long, I would not be affected by data losses at all.

Of course, it is not that simple.

For this to work, there has to be some standard for "DRM-protected personal data". The different government branches who need my data would have to use software that can handle this standard format-to-be. And I would need some software on my end that would enable me to apply DRM to my data before I send it off.

Maybe it's another "egg or hen" situation as no government will buy software as long as nobody sends them DRM-protected data. And as long as they cannot read it, I am forced to send my data in plain format.

I would love to have a tool that enables me to send my data off with DRM enabled. I guess I would need to parts: one tool that does the "signing" of my content, and a second one that acts as a server and "watches" how my data is used, or enables some people or organisms to actually use the data. The latter one would also render the data unreadable whenever I want.

Of all the software I won't write, this is by far the most important. If anyone knows of a project - preferrably open source - then let me know! I'd absolutely participate.

A "Social Search Engine"

A social search engine would work like this: enter the name of someone you know and press enter. The engine then goes through all the hip web 2.0 social networks and looks for a person with that name. In the end, you will get a list of blogs, accounts on Facebook, MySpace and the like, twitter feeds, and so on.

Why would I want that?

I am sure a lot of my friends are using social sites in ways that I don't know about. And I would potentially like to know what they are up to.

So whenever I find someone on Linkedin, I would also use the social search engine to see whether she is active in any other place as well.

Of course, the next step would be a tool that searches all my address books every now and again in order to find friends automatically.

Update: Just found something on Guy Kawasaki's twitter feed: Spokeo seems to do some of the above...

Update: data portability is now the next big buzzword, and all the big social sites have jumped on the bandwaggon. We'll see how far it all goes... check dataportability.org for more information.