After having worked on my own Iquomi project for several years and found no system which really seems to have the same basic ideas as me, I saw a new beta from Google named Google Base. This looks very interesting and seems to have a lot capabilities similar to Iquomi.

Depending on the success of this system it should be possible to use Google Base as one global CMS similar to Microsoft’s “Hailstorm” project from around 2001. From a user perspective this is a great thing - it will allow us to define our information in one location and have several subsystems extract these information for their use - much more than the obvious choices where Google uses it for its own purpose (Google Maps showing location of a profile, Google Froggle to have up-to-date address information, etc) but for other companies as well allowing them to extract information from one global store.

I really like Google’s pragmatic way of defining their systems - notice this small sentence from their web site “We can’t guarantee where your items will appear.”. Basically they tell users they’re able to sell their information to anyone - or at least us it. One major concern about the Hailstorm project was exactly who should be “in charge” of information stored on Microsoft servers.

The format of data may be specified by RSS or Atom format (with extensions) - this is a great idea and might be something I’ll use for my Iquomi project which currently is heavily based on XML Schemas.

I definitely smell some Google Base/Iquomi integration coming up in the future

I’ve updated my newsfeed so it’s being served by Iquomi’s “IqRss” service. This service is merely an implementation of the RSS 2.0 Feed Specification and by using my Iquomi XML-RPC wrapper I’m able to push blog entries from my blogging-system (WordPress) directly into Iquomi.

In Iquomi I’ve defined a custom service method named “FrontPage”. When this method is executed it’ll request my RSS data and do an XSL transformation to provide the final output which will finally be shown on my Theill Web Site frontpage.

Easy and incredible cool

Finally a friend invited me to join GMail and I must say it’s great. It’s still in beta and of course doesn’t contain a lot of ‘nice to have’ features but its overall way to work is incredible and the included spam filter is much better than expected. I’m currently running all my mails through several spam filters one of these being a simple ISP provided ending up with a Spam Assassin one. Now I forward all mails directly to my gmail account and I’m even getting -lesser- spam than before. It’s very cool. I like the way it automatically organizes emails into conversations and of course the search abilities is just plain brilliant.

I have decided I will try to update my projects more often this year. Yeah!

Merry Christmas to all of you from all of me