Ubiquity, a new Firefox add-on, combines the high-speed access to and manipulation of information of Quicksilver with the user-friendly language interpretation of the Assist button, bolting both onto the browser. Ultimately, it has the potential to be something close to a command line interface for the web.

With the add-on installed, all you have to do is press the command key combination - Alt+Space by default on the Mac - and start typing a command. There are lots of simple ones. Type wikipedia¹ followed by a search term, hit enter, and you’re transported to the relevant results. Type email Don't forget our lunch on Tuesday! to Steve, hit enter, and you’ll be taken to Gmail, with your message all ready to send.

Ubiquity gets really clever when you want to combine its features. What if Steve hasn’t been to the restaurant you’re meeting at? Before sending the mail Ubiquity helped you to create, invoke it again, and type map Stravaign. Yep, a Google Map centred on the best Glasgow pub will appear, along with a link to insert it directly into your mail message.

Like Quicksilver, Ubiquity is a wee bit fiddly to explain, and doesn’t sound quite as thrilling as it does when seen in action. So here’s a video walk-through (skip forward forty-five seconds if you want to avoid the hip marketing-speak intro):

Sure, developer Aza Raskin is showing Ubiquity in the best possible light. In real life, it’s pretty buggy - fair enough, since it’s a prototype. It’s very limited in scope, too - if you don’t use Google’s calendar and mail applications, the best features won’t be much use. And it won’t do some of the things you might expect it to, like lifting microformatted information from web pages and dumping them into your address book or calendar. But it has huge potential to turn disparate web services, which, until now, we’ve had to wrangle together ourselve with unwieldy cutting and pasting, into one great big useful thing.

Also, in the wake of the recent fawning over Aurora - a vision of the coming web in which useful combinations of services were buried under needlessly jazzy 3-D interfaces controlled by daft futuristic peripherals - and similar mock-ups, it’s good to see a project which offers some of the basic utilities imagined by the futurologists on the Aurora team, right now, using a simple, clear interface that takes advantage of one skill all web users share: the ability to type words in a language they understand.

More info:

• Introducing Ubiquity
• Ubiquity 0.1 User Tutorial
• Ubiquity In Depth
• Ubiquity cracks open personal mashup tinkering *Writing a Delicious command for Ubiquity

Thanks to Neil and Matt for pointing me in Ubiquity’s direction!

1. Or just wi. Ubiquity is clever enough to work out what you’re after, or will present a list of possible commands to choose from. It will also work out that, if you’ve selected some text on a web page, that’s what you want to search for.↩

I’ve been following trackbacks from the various articles mentioned here. I found the one for Jack Mottram’s submit response blog. Is the story you get from the email supposed to be about what happened to him at the station?

Then, later, this:

I created a twitter account to follow Jack Mottram…I hope this wouldn’t be considered stalking….this is what his last post said:

Anyone else reading/playing We Tell Stories? http://tinyurl.com/2vckou - http://icanhaz.com/cluez

Wonderful! For a little while, I became a character in a game I’m playing myself!

I resisted the temptation to play along, placing myself inside the ARG as an unofficial hybrid player-character. But only because I’m so easily identified as a real person, and most players would instantly assume that Six To Start, thorough as they are, probably wouldn’t write seven years’ worth of weblog posts or somehow insert a decade of journalism into the press in order to create my backstory.

Though I wonder if this sort of trick been tried before? I’ve never followed any other ARGs, only reading about them after the fact, but it strikes me that recruiting demonstrably real people to play characters would be an interesting move, adding to the level of difficulty and longevity of the game.

As well as being six stories by six Penguin authors, We Tell Stories is an ARG, designed by Six To Start, set to be launched once the six interactive fictions have all been published over the coming weeks. There are, though, already some little ARGish clues peppered through the map text of the first story: the addresses of container companies, prominent mentions of easily-visited places (various rooms in the Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh for example), and a ‘phone number: 020 8133 8141.

I rang, and heard this:

Hello, Alice?

I’ve made a terrible mistake. I need your help.

I have a story to tell you, but it will only make sense in the right place.

If you stand face to face with the statue of John Betjeman in St. Pancras station, ring this number: 020 7193 3154.

Then I’ll be able to explain more.

As luck would have it, I’ll be in St. Pancras Station tomorrow morning…

Hammersly is reporting on the run up to Turkey’s general election in July for the BBC, but rather than just filing copy for the web, audio for the World Service and video for News 24, he’s using a raft of web services to augment the more traditional media.

There are Flickr photographs, links on del.icio.us, status updates on Twitter, routes on Google Maps and, of course, a weblog. You can even add Hammersly as a friend on Facebook.

It’s an interesting experiment in newsgathering and alternative modes of broadcasting, but what’s really grabbed me is that Hammersly is not only providing new ways to follow a news story, but also revealing the processes which usually remain hidden from viewers or listeners, the nuts and bolts of producing a news item:

I probably shouldn’t talk about it in any detail yet, but by the looks of things I’ll soon be involved in a new web project that could learn a lot from the Turkish Journey experiment when it comes to arts reporting and reviewing, rather than news. More on that next month.

Unfortunately, I got caught by the CAPTCHA:

How charming to be considered non-human by a website just because I haven’t the faintest idea what ‘resolving’ some numbers in brackets even means, let alone how to do it.

Admittedly, I add up on my fingers and have to use a calculator for sums involving numbers of more than one digit, but it still seems horribly elitist to expect all users to have an A-level in maths before they’re allowed to use a site.

Update: for anyone wondering, the answer to min(8,5) is 5 and Joe who runs correlate.us kindly plans to change the CAPTCHA soon. Here’s my page on the site. For a more complete one-page summary of my recent faffing online, see Flow.

Save the following in a text file somewhere (I put it in /bin/ and called it twitterwakeup.sh), replacing the stuff in italics with your email, password and cheery waking up message:

#! /bin/sh

curl --user yourname@yourdomain.com:yourpassword -F status="Your cheery waking up message!" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

(That second bit should all be on one line.)

Make it executable:

sudo chmod u+x /bin/twitter.sh

Install Bernhard Baehr’s handy Sleepwatcher daemon.

Make a file called .wakeup in your home directory, and put the full path to your twitterwakeup.sh script in it.

That’s it.

Last week MyOpenID added a pair of new features to combat ‘phishing’. That’s the trick familiar from those shady emails purporting to be from your bank which ask you to ‘confirm your account details’ on a site that looks just like your usual login page. OpenID is particularly vulnerable to phishing, since it works by taking you away from the site you’re on in order to sign in, which means that folk will get used to quickly entering their details and clicking the ‘Allow’ button without paying close attention to the URL in the address bar.

Now Simon Willison has launched a new service called idproxy.net, which lets you set up an OpenID identity based on your existing Yahoo! account and also includes a fairly strong layer of features to guard against phishermen, on top of Yahoo!’s existing protection.

Nice work. The usefulness of OpenID from a user’s point of view rests on the fact that it potentially frees you from the hassles of mainting squillions¹ of accounts for all the different sites you use, but achieves this by… asking you to set up yet another bloody account.

Sorry to keep banging on about this—I’m just rather taken with the speed at which folk involved with OpenID seem to go from raising concerns to suggesting solutions and implementing them.

1. I just checked in the application I use to store my passwords, and I have 87 different accounts on the web. Skimming the list, I reckon about two thirds of these could safely be replaced by my OpenID.↩

That doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but it has the potential to change the way we all use websites, particularly those that require you to login, or prove in some way that you are who you say you are.

At the moment, maintaining an identity on all the websites you visit is tricky—at each one, you have to go to all the bother of signing up, cross your fingers that someone hasn’t taken your preferred username, and think up a memorable-but-secure password—with OpenID, you maintain a single identity, expressed in the form of a URL, and can use it to log in to any OpenID-enable site you come across. In other words, OpenID turns the concept of having an account at a given website on its head, letting users be themselves all over the web. One URL, one password: simple.

As well as working as a web-wide login, OpenID also makes it possible for people to keep information about themselves in one place, instead of scattered across personal websites, social networking profiles, MySpace pages and all the rest. And if your information changes, it can be changed once, in one place, and the change is instantly reflected across every site where you’ve logged in using OpenID.

If you have a domain of your own, and are happy to do a bit of tinkering you can make that your OpenID identity¹; if you don’t, you can sign up with a number of free services, like MyOpenID (here’s mine).

At the moment, only a limited number of sites are using OpenID—mostly wikis and weblogs—but, with millions of LiveJournal folk able to use their journal URL as an OpenID identity, and popular sites like Zooomr, Ma.gnolia and Technorati adding support every day, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a commonplace, if not standard, way of managing an identity online.

With all that in mind, I’ve added OpenID support to Submit Response—if you have an identity, you can sign your comments here with it, and everyone will know for sure that you are you.

1. I actually find this faintly disturbing—in a sense, now I am submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/. (I plan to change this to the currently unused jackmottram.com soon).↩

• Scratch Orchestra
• Poutine
• Deep Fried Mars Bar
• Peter Pan Copyright Status
• Buster Mottram
• St. Julien de l’Escap

It would appear that my recent interests have been limited to experimental music, fatty food, Great Ormond Street, fascist tennis-playing namesakes and the place I went to on my holidays.

Update: If you’d like to see more Wikipedia contrails, this Technorati search is a good place to start.

Four jobs I’ve had:

1. Freelance music journalist.
2. Freelance art journalist.
3. Freelance technology journalist.
4. Freelance whatever-else-they’ll-pay-me-to-write-about journalist.

Four films I can watch repeatedly:

1. The Red Shoes
2. Grey Gardens
3. Orlando
4. Uncle Buck (Can as in ‘am capable of’. Long story.)

Four places I’ve lived:

1. Noctorum Lane
2. Croft Drive
3. Park Circus
4. University Avenue

Four television programmes I like to watch:

1. Deal Or No Deal
2. Curb Your Enthusiasm
3. Channel 4 News
4. Coronation Street (Though my heart belongs to Brookside.)

Four places I’ve been to on holiday:

1. Budapest
2. Zagreb
3. Stockholm
4. St. Jean D’Angely

Four of my favourite dishes:

1. Confit du canard with potatoes fried in duck fat.
2. A full Scottish breakfast. (Not English, I need potato scone and white pudding in the mix.)
3. Eggy bread.
4. Bone marrow on toast.

Four websites I visit daily:

1. Metafilter
2. Wikipedia
3. Flickr
4. A wonderful site I am not allowed to name, let alone link to.

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Zagreb
2. A city in Eastern Europe, Central Europe or Scandinavia that I haven’t been to before.
3. At a Prince gig. (Before 1989.)
4. The future.

Four bloggers I am tagging (sorry chaps!):

1. General Ape
2. Sister Phonetica
3. Donny Hide
4. Rob Annable

Thanks, Matt, for tagging me.