Well it’s been a while since I last posted, but there is good reason, aside from all the freelance work I’ve been doing which I’ll go into in another post soon, I’ve also been busy working on Chatsum. So it is with great pleasure that I can now announce that Chatsum has launched, is live, and open to new users!

In case you don’t already know, Chatsum is a FREE add-on for your web browser that lets you chat with all the other Chatsum users that are looking at the same website as you. But that’s not all, Chatsum also acts as a way of looking more closely at your browsing history, allowing you to see what you’ve looked at the most in the last week and in total since you first joined Chatsum. You can even share this information and make use of it in your own site via the integrated RSS features. For an example take a look at my member page.

We’ve got heaps more features planned both in the immediate future and long-term, including support for Safari in addition to the existing Firefox extension, so why not take a look and sign up for a free account and start Chatsumming today.

Well today George and I went to The Future Of Web Apps Summit in the Kensington Town Hall conference centre. I actually had a really fun day, and some of the talks were really quite interesting, a couple of points might even prove useful.

The speakers included such luminaries of the Web 2.0 world as Joshua Schachter the founder of Delicious, Tom Coates of BBC, Yahoo and Plastic Bag fame, and Shaun Inman. I think the awards for the best talks go to Tom Coates, Joshua Schachter and Ryan Carson. Each of these guys covered some different territory, from Tom’s more esoteric conceptual musings on the direction of the ‘atomic’ web, through helpful technical details from Delicious, to an interesting case study of the economics of starting a web services based business on a budget from Ryan Carson.

Coates also included a slide of the Chatsum homepage in his presentation, and while I’m not totally sure he meant it as a complete compliment, it was still good to get a shout-out and we got some good feedback from people as a result.

The two presentations I enjoyed the least (barring the advert from Adobe) were Shaun Inman and David Heinemeier Hansson. Shauns’s talk was a little on the short side. He was supposed to be talking about APIs, but to be honest the other guys had already covered it, and in more depth. I think it’s a shame he didn’t focus on how visual interface design can contribute to a web 2.0 app as I think that’s his real strength. Hansson’s presentation was a pep-rally for Ruby On Rails, and although I could see a certain elegance in what he was evangelising, it did strike me as the sort of technology only someone with OCD could really love, and he came off a bit prescriptive for my tastes.

All in all it was a very enjoyable day, and our first outing as Team Chatsum! Oh, and check out the photo of Ryan looking a bit like action man. How does he get his skin to be so perfect and shiny?!

In case you’ve been clicking around the site you may of noticed that the portfolio section has seen a few updates today. It’s still not quite finished which you’ll know if you’ve read much of the text, but hopefully I’ll get it sorted over the next few days.

Also I’m having a fun day out tomorrow with the rest of Team Chatsum (a.k.a. George) at Carson Workshops’ “The Future Of Web Apps Summit” in Kensington.

If you’re going along then do seek me out and say hi. In addition to hearing some interesting talks I’ll be whoring myself around in the hopes of being offered millions of pounds to work on earth shatteringly exciting projects. Alternatively I may just wind up talking to the plants and crying into my soulless frappuccino. You decide!

Ok, Apple have just announced their new laptop, the Intel powered MacBook Pro. Overall it looks good, those speed claims are certainly impressive, however there are a few unanswered questions that, well, need answers.

1. How long does the battery last? There is a total absence of any estimates on Apple’s site.
2. Where has the Firewire 800 port gone? Is that it for Firewire 800?
3. Where is the s-video out? I use that! Any adapter gonna be available to take it from the DVI? The graphics chip is capable of doing it supposedly.
4. What the heck is a ExpressCard/34 slot? And what did it do with the body of PCMCIA?
5. It’s a little bigger no?
6. Why isn’t it cheaper!? (OK, that’s just my stupid fantasies)

Any thoughts?

Happy New Year! For my first post of the year I’d like to tell you all about a little project I’ve been working on. It’s called Chatsum, and it’s the brainchild of my old friend George Grinsted. For years now George has wanted to create a way to let people who are visiting the same website communicate with each other, and contribute to the content itself.

Recently users have been given new ways to interact with websites through commenting, trackbacks and wikis. However all of these forms of interaction require that the website itself chooses to implement them. So although the opportunity for the reader to become the author has increased, it’s still pretty limited and is only really ‘the norm’ on blogs like this, or on more technically orientated sites. There are of course many notable exceptions such as Wikipedia, but I think you get the point. Well we’re hoping that Chatsum will change that, let me tell you a little more about it…

Chatsum is a free service that allows you to chat with other users who are looking at the same website as you. There are two interfaces currently in development, the first takes the form of a sidebar extension for Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is the worlds most popular open source web browser and is widely regarded as the best browser available for Windows and Linux users. The Chatsum sidebar lives in the side of your browser (big surprise) and houses a fully-fledged chatroom. The clever bit is that the chatroom is specific to the page you’re looking at, and all the other users in the room are also viewing the same web page. When you navigate to a different page the Chatsum room changes too, automagically! Open a page in a new tab? No problem, Chatsum will keep pace with whatever you’re currently viewing, no matter how many tabs you’ve got open. There is the option to switch between a page level room and a site level room, and you can also see what rooms/pages are popular with other Chatsum users.

And I did mention that we also have a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X 10.4 in development…

We’re currently inviting people to join our beta test and hope to release the Firefox sidebar within the next couple of weeks, with the Widget soon after. We have lots of exciting features planned and intend to take a pretty aggressive approach to adding them. I’m particularly excited by all the extra community stuff we’ll be doing on the site and by some new possibilities that are emerging in relation to bringing Chatsum to an even wider audience. If you want to keep up-to-date with the development then check out the development blog, and also please do sign-up to the beta test, we really need your help, and the sooner we can get going with the beta test the sooner we can start implementing all the new stuff!

Chatsum Site
http://www.chatsum.com

Chatsum Development Blog
http://www.chatsum.com/blog

The end of the year approacheth and I thought I’d take that as an opportunity to try and foist some of my own personal taste on to you. This isn’t a definitive list you understand, just a few things that I liked in the world of popular entertainment, well CDs and TV anyway. Some of these things were new in 2005, some just new to me.

Favourite TV of 2005

Favourite Albums of 2005

I’m back! Hooray! No? Okay, I’ll be posting soon about my Christmas experience very soon, as well as letting the world know about my favourite things of the year, but in the mean time I thought I’d share a few of these interesting facts from 2005 that have been posted over at the BBC’s news site.

You can find the full list here, but here are a few of my favourites…

Just a brief post to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I’m about to head off home to deepest darkest rural Oxfordshire for a couple of days and will be without broadband! Maybe I’ll write some posts and get them online via modem, who knows.

Five TV channels and no internet, what on earth will I do?

I just had to draw your attention to this great little photo of what are being called ‘Tomkat’, otherwise known as Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes. Dlisted is running their caption competition which cannot fail to produce results, read some, or make up your own. I wouldn’t normally post such dirt but because I’ve been reading these sort of blogs recently, Tomkat actually popped up in a dream. We were in a limo together, along with miscellaneous other celebrities that I can’t remember, and I don’t know what was being said, but after a while Tomkat started bitching about my house and insulting it. I had to tell them they were being quite rude and impolite. They were very cold.

dlisted.blogspot.com caption contest

Today my flatmates and I did a little pre-emptive Christmas shopping. We still haven’t decorated our house yet and tomorrow we’re going to go and buy a tree and all the trimmings, so today was all about the research. Not quite sure where we’re going to get one from yet, the only ones we could find today were all a bit on the small side. We also popped into our local CrackDonalds for lunch. I haven’t been to the golden arches for years, and today was a reminder why. We knew we wouldn’t really enjoy it, but it was just one of those things that you have to do once in a while. We all felt suitably shamed and dirty.

I finally plucked up the courage to go to the hairdressers the other day. I’m terribly slack when it comes to getting a new-do. I find the whole experience really unpleasant if I’m honest. I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if I did it more regularly, but as I leave it so long between chops (we’re talking 2 or 3 months here) I usually look like crap. I can feel all those fashionable Toni & Guy types sneering at me while I wait, and I know what they’re thinking, it’s something along the lines of… “It’s gonna take more than a haircut sweetie”. Of course it gets even worse once the cut begins.

You have to sit wrapped in this awful black plastic shawl, with your hair sodden and stuck to your face staring into a huge mirror while lights more powerful than the sun highlight every last defect of my sorry potato-headed self. It’s utterly gruelling. And let’s not forget the pathetic small-talk you have to endure. I’m not one of the worlds most natural or gifted conversationalists and I think I probably experienced at least ten stoney silences during the pitiful exchange with my stylist ‘Penny’. I did experience something new this time though, ceramic hair straighteners. Now my hair is pretty straight as it is, but my stylist saw fit to take it to the next level and I can’t say it’s an experience I’m eager to ever repeat. By the time she was finished I looked like a deformed Top Shop mannequin, it was as if someone had painted my hair on. Fortunately though a good shower and blow-dry later and I looked relatively normal once more. I’m still not entirely sure about the wispy mullet I now possess , but I suppose it’ll grow on me, literally.

Look at this idiot, he’s heard the news about the explosion at Hemel Hempstead and despite the police and oil companies saying explicitly that you shouldn’t react by panic buying petrol, he’s decided to pop down to his local petrol station and join the huge queues of other brainless wonders. If anyone knows his name then please do write in!