cooking shows in the participation age

It has become exceedingly easy for anyone to post any pointless pile of bytes for any bored soul out there to download. That's what smart people call the participation age.

In any case, the other night, being one of these bored and sleepless souls, I wandered to youtube to see what was hot. This is how I found Mr Cook.

Mr Cook is a guy who makes videos of himself cooking in his kitchen and talking the whole time like the TV chefs. Like for most TV cooking shows, the culinary value of his recipes is at best questionable, however the delivery is - I am almost ashamed to admit it - simply impeccable. It is packed silly with the sort of teenage humour I somehow never grew out of. I never thought I could become cooking show fanatic...

There are a dozen or so show (at the time of this writing) you can get on youtube and learn how to make Nachos, Sushis, Pizza, and more.

Ok, enough talking. If you don't know Mr Cook, you can start out by watching Mr Cook make a baby, which I suppose is a famous Scottish recipe.

Warning: if you are an actual cooking show fanatic, you may be offended by this video.

Personal Pubsub

The Jabber community just came up with a very elegant way to give IM users their own multi content news (aka publish/subscribe) service: JEP-0163 Traditional IM use of a personal pubsub service include avatar distribution, music or mood sharing. Yet the possibilities are limitless: one could use this mechanism to share all kinds of domain-specific information. XMPP-enabled Call Center systems could allow agents to selectively share with others information about current calls, questions they are not able to answer, etc... XMPP-enabled blog sites can notify your buddies of your new posts.

This mechanism is also really good for bots. Without it, the only client-independent ways a bot has to communicate with you is the presence status (show and status), or vanilla messages (natural language in subject and body) to individual folks. You can still make extensions for controlled environments, but this does not solve the issue of overloading presence and having the bot keep track of who to send what to.

The protocol is based on the rich (but complex) XMPP publish/subscribe protocol, with some simplifications taking into account the fact that we are talking specifically about persons. But what is really interesting about the proposal is how it leverages presence subscriptions and entity capabilities to become really simple in the very common case where events are shared with your buddies. It's like this: By virtue of subscribing to someone's presence, and advertizing the capability to handle a specific type of content, you are implicitely subscribed to content of this type published by this person. In other words, just by sharing one capability (one xml element in a previously shared presence stanza), you are automatically subscribed to all of your buddy's content corresponding to this capability. Can this get easier or more efficient? I doubt it. A very nice way to build on existing protocols.