Category Archives: Ubiquity

Ubiquity History

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I updated the code of the pre­vi­ous exper­i­ment (Shar­ing Ubi­quity Com­mands) such that when you open an URL that con­tains a shared Ubi­quity action, it won’t open Ubi­quity in pre­view mode, but dis­play a small icon.

This also allows to dis­play mul­tiple com­mands on one page, and by using Ubi­quity annota­tion data­base I could cre­ate this com­mand his­tory; such that when you revisit a page where you had already applied some ubi­quity com­mands you will see the icons for each, await­ing re-​applying. Con­tinue reading →

Sharing Ubiquity Commands

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I recently spoke with Aza Raskin at FOWA on Ubi­quity commands/​annotations shar­ing. I prom­ised I’ll pro­to­type some­thing, here it is…


(If the video is clipped, try it here)

When someone applies an Ubi­quity com­mand to a piece of con­tent that tells us what’s the type of that con­tent. The user is mak­ing an annota­tion which is not made for the annota­tion sake, but made for solv­ing a real need. That annota­tion if shared could be use­ful in vari­ous ways.

But first let’s look at all the data involved, con­sider that Alice is select­ing some text on a web page, invokes Ubi­quity and types ‘trans­late to japan­ese’. We have the folow­ing elements:

  1. user: anonym­ous or with an iden­tity (URI)
  2. web page address (URI)
  3. selec­ted content
  4. Ubi­quity com­mand (URI) with arguments

Con­tinue reading →

Ubiquity and “The Semantic Web” (part 2)

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I’ll assume that who reads this knows what Ubi­quity is, if not check it out, it’s awesome.

Since Ubi­quity can remem­ber edits you do to a page (via edit and save com­mands), it may also be able to remem­ber what other com­mands you applied to a piece of con­tent, such that when you revisit that page you’ll see a small visual hint (could be sim­ilar to Alex Faaborg micro­formats exper­i­ments, or Aza Raskin’s mouse Ubi­quity exper­i­ments) that would let you re-​apply the command.

Ima­gine that you visit a blog post about a party, and the map com­mand is just one click away just because you did it before.

Con­tinue reading →