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/​2​vckou - http://​ican​haz.​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 cor​re​late.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 sub​mitre​sponse.​co.​uk/​w​eblog/. (I plan to change this to the cur­rently unused jack​mot​tram.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.