Looking the evolution of use of markdown in sites like github, I feel that markdown is becoming a way to platformize your service.
travis-ci.org is an example of that: by embedding an icon in the home page of the repository whose content displays dynamically the build status of the repository you end up getting a truly dynamic repository home page.
Playing on this theme I was talking with folks at work yesterday.. I saw a friend awesome picture - he has just had a baby and made his desktop background a picture of his baby and his dog. It was truly an awesome picture. My first immediate reaction was to take a photo of it. Why? because I felt that what I and his physically collocated colleagues could see and enjoy and share-feelings with him, was not possible for all our remote, not-physically collocated colleagues. And given that this a thorn in my eye every time I see it, I took a picture to send it around.
My friend laughed at me explaining that all his friends have already seen the photo - only me the non-facebooking guy hasn't. I wasn't satisfied. What I cared was not photo sharing with friends.
The desktop background/screensaver plays a different role.
It is always there today tomorrow and makes the people that more closely work with a person getting a continuous (and often changing) vibe about their colleague personality, face in life, mood etc.
The desktop background is one more thing that makes face to face work relationships work better/differently than remore ones.
Ok, then I can fix it. Creating a mydesktopbackground.com site with a desktopclient that pushes the current desktop when it changes to a site making that same picture available to become my web background/homepage photo in my github pages, in my blog, in my homepage background image.... all that are possible, easy make sense. And then you can actually not only see that picture but also the history of the backgrounds... to see how you have changed. and maybe do that for all your desktops. And maybe do that for yourandroid/iphone background as well. etc..
One thing that is at the back of my mind that makes some of the connections with the first paragraph is that the wealth of tools like phantomjs that allow one to easily/freely with an API convert a complex html layout of an image/dashboard/report rendered as a .png or jpg allows any page to be "sourced" inside a markdown page. Let me repeat, before you had to rely on more open systems that allow one to include full html as part of an html widget (think disquss etc..) . But today even in the most restricted systems - as long as they allow the embedding of a picture, then you still have the option of including a the static rendering of that page. It's not click sensitive (note to self - I wondered what has happened to the original html image-map and whether I could generate using phantomjs not just a picture rendering of a page but also an imagemap that would capture the different click targets that every subregion of the page has... that would be cool) but it can make a diff in how connected / integrated diff services feel.
travis-ci.org is an example of that: by embedding an icon in the home page of the repository whose content displays dynamically the build status of the repository you end up getting a truly dynamic repository home page.
Playing on this theme I was talking with folks at work yesterday.. I saw a friend awesome picture - he has just had a baby and made his desktop background a picture of his baby and his dog. It was truly an awesome picture. My first immediate reaction was to take a photo of it. Why? because I felt that what I and his physically collocated colleagues could see and enjoy and share-feelings with him, was not possible for all our remote, not-physically collocated colleagues. And given that this a thorn in my eye every time I see it, I took a picture to send it around.
My friend laughed at me explaining that all his friends have already seen the photo - only me the non-facebooking guy hasn't. I wasn't satisfied. What I cared was not photo sharing with friends.
The desktop background/screensaver plays a different role.
It is always there today tomorrow and makes the people that more closely work with a person getting a continuous (and often changing) vibe about their colleague personality, face in life, mood etc.
The desktop background is one more thing that makes face to face work relationships work better/differently than remore ones.
Ok, then I can fix it. Creating a mydesktopbackground.com site with a desktopclient that pushes the current desktop when it changes to a site making that same picture available to become my web background/homepage photo in my github pages, in my blog, in my homepage background image.... all that are possible, easy make sense. And then you can actually not only see that picture but also the history of the backgrounds... to see how you have changed. and maybe do that for all your desktops. And maybe do that for yourandroid/iphone background as well. etc..
One thing that is at the back of my mind that makes some of the connections with the first paragraph is that the wealth of tools like phantomjs that allow one to easily/freely with an API convert a complex html layout of an image/dashboard/report rendered as a .png or jpg allows any page to be "sourced" inside a markdown page. Let me repeat, before you had to rely on more open systems that allow one to include full html as part of an html widget (think disquss etc..) . But today even in the most restricted systems - as long as they allow the embedding of a picture, then you still have the option of including a the static rendering of that page. It's not click sensitive (note to self - I wondered what has happened to the original html image-map and whether I could generate using phantomjs not just a picture rendering of a page but also an imagemap that would capture the different click targets that every subregion of the page has... that would be cool) but it can make a diff in how connected / integrated diff services feel.
