Thank God, all programming languages have many things is common. So, with the assistance of this brilliant short tutorial by Stavros Korokithakis I managed to get a grasp of the basics quickly.

Then I found a couple of similar plugins, studied them a bit, and,  voila, the offspring of this endeavor: the Biblionet calibre plugin.
(Those not interested in code should  download the plugin from here because the github zip adds an extra folder to the plugin and generates an error when trying to add it).

Installation
To install the plugin, open Calibre, go to Preferences>Change Calibre behavior, scroll down and locate in the Advanced section the Plugins icon. Click it and the following window will appear:

Choose “Load plugin from file”, answer ‘yes’ to the warning that will pop up, and you are done.

Use
The best option for mass entering and mass updating printed books in calibre IMHO is this:

Use a mobile phone barcode scanner app to read the isbn barcodes, or write them down, one per line, in a text file.

Then copy paste them in the relevant calibre dialog box (see picture) and fire the process.

The Future
This plugin is not a complete one. Unlike most of  the other metadata plugins,  it only makes use of the book ISBN (10 or 13 digit) to query the biblionet database.
Normally such a plugin can also make use of the  title and author info. But for adding printed books entried  in calibre (that was my initial motive, remember?)  that would be rather tedious, as one would have to manually type every single one of them.
This (:the isbn only feature) is going to change in the next version and the plugin will be able to query metadata based on title or author too.

There is another difference: the plugin makes use of the bookmeta script that acts like a proxy between the plugin and the biblionet database, so the script had to be hosted somewhere. I hosted it at phpfog.com.
If you have some techinal skills, you can host the script wherever you like. Then just  edit the plugin file __init__.py, locate the following line,

    BASE_URL = 'http://bookmeta.phpfogapp.com/index.php?isbn='

and change the ‘http://bookmeta.phpfogapp.com/‘ to the address of your server.
If not, remain assured that I will host this solution to phpfog for your convenience.

In the next version of the plugin, this need will be eliminated. The plugin will not require this kind of intermediary. But the bookmeta script will stay, as there might be other programs/services that could potentially use it.

If you want to fork the plugin and make your own, head to github and serve yourselves.

Please give some feedback if you decide to use the plugin. It both motivates and helps

In my case, what I wanted was a metadata source for my books in calibre.

I use calibre not only for tracking ebooks (which is what is made for), but also for normal, printed books.

I have no problem with the English and French books of my library since the metadata sources provided by calibre are more than enough.

But I also own a big number of Greek books and, there, the results I get through calibre are quite poor: for very few greek books there are metadata available(provided by Google). And these are transcribed into Latin, which is odd to read.

Now, the most comprehensive source of greek books, especially the last 20 years production, is found in the Biblionet database. But there is no web api and the  semantics of their web pages are poor if existent at all. Which means that in order to get book metadata, one has to scrape their web pages.

The simplest query (and the most reliable) to perform in biblionet is to search by isbn, as this returns only one  record (or none, if the isbn is not found).

So what i did, was to make a simple web app(?) that searches a book by isbn in biblionet, parses the result page and returns a json or html output. I call it bookmeta.

Here is a sample output:

{"biblionetid" : "44201", "cover_url" : "http://biblionet.gr/images/logo_gr.jpg", "title" : "Από το Βυζάντιο στην Αναγέννηση", "authors" : "N. G. Wilson", "translators" : "Φωτεινή Πρεβεδούρου - Γεωργίνη", "publisher" : "Εκδοτικός Οίκος Α. Α. Λιβάνη", "yr_published" : "1994.", "original_language" : " αγγλικά", "original_title" : " From Byzantium to Italy", "categories" : "Ευρώπη - Ιστορία - Αναγέννηση [DDC: 940.21]"}

This script  isn’t meant for end users. It is for people who might want to use this in another product or service. Help yourselves folks!

Next steps?

I am now developing a calibre plugin that does exactly the same thing, and since my python knowledge is close to zero, I am going to use this hack to get book metadata in the plugin almost without  any further parsing in python (for v.1 at least).

Still, IE6 being used more than IE7 is a kind of a perversion.

The End of an Era: Internet Explorer Drops Below 50 Percent of Web Usage | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

And then, in the beginning of the ’80s, came an innovator: Microsoft.

Innovator in the sense that it pioneered the business of being a software company that sells primarily operating systems. Because, otherwise, neither OS it sold (the MS-DOS)  was really novel, not the company itself. As a matter of fact, Microsoft is a bit older than Apple. But Bill Gates and Co were the right time in the right place to close a deal (with IBM) that would change their fortunes as well as the whole computer industry.

The decoupling of the Operating System from the Hardware and the widespread copying of the IBM personal computer, led to the boom of the PC industry: hundreds of manufacturers produced cheap clones of the original IBM machine, eroding its dominant position and swallowing its market share. This unprecedented expansion was not matched by a relevant expansion of OS offerings though. Microsoft became the king of the game.

The situation remained practically unchanged for 25 years until, in the middle of the ’00s, Apple, aided by the success of its ipod and itunes, started gaining market share again. The one stop shop approach started showing strength again and this trend, as far as personal computers are concerned,  is still unfolding.

In 2007 enters the iPhone, a mobile phone with HW and SW from the same source: Apple. As with the original Apple computers, ipPhone made significant inroads in the Smartphone market. Soon it became its  driving force and certainly the fastest growing, most profitable and most discussed product.

Android, much like MS-DOS compared to Apple, comes later. Much like MS-DOS too,  it’s coming from a vendor (Google) that does not sell hardware. Much like MS-DOS it helps manufactures around the globe to produce better and cheaper smartphones. And much like MS-DOS (or Windows) suffers from bugs and instabilities and lacks in the user experience it offers compared to the iPhone operating system, the iOS.

But it doesn’t matter.

On it’s way to  becoming the main smartphone operating system  (if it’s not already there) it’s becoming better. And it challenges the wisdom of buying hardware and software from the same source afresh.

If we project these parallels into the future, we will expect to see a marginalization of the iPhone and its latter, much latter, shiny come-back with a vengeance.

But Steve Jobs is not around this time. And this makes things less predictable.

So here is a list of a few projects that I was really pleased to discover.

1. CSSLint For those that would like to have some advise and an overlooking tutor in their CSS projects, here is a service that does exactly this: analyzes css files and offers ‘advise’ about usual pitfalls and patterns to be avoided.  CSSLint is a project of  Nicholas C. Zakas and Nicole Sullivan.
2. 960.gs As you can guess by the name, it’s a grid system for 12 or 16 column grids. I have never used a grid system before. I prefer to hack my way to the design from scratch. But the simplicity of the thing is tempting, at least for prototyping work. 906.gr is a project of  Nathan Smith.
3. Handlebars Littering javascript with a lot of html is an anti-pattern. The solution? Use some sort of javascript templating mechanism such as Handlebars.  Simple and elegant. A brain child of Yehuda Katz.
4. Backbone.js A javascript Model View Controller (MVC)  … backbone for web applications. Developed by the guys responsible for DocumentCloud.

Now they have to come together in a future project of mine

#page {
  opacity: 0.5;
}
/* IE7 and less */
#page {
  filter: alpha(opacity=50);
  position: relative;
  zoom: 1;
}
/* IE8 specific */
#page {
  -ms-filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=50);
  position: relative;
  zoom: 1;
}

It is a pain but it works.

But what I found is that if you try to set these properties dynamically, through jQuery for instance, they are less obedient.

For filter and -ms-filter to be set through jQuery, the element has to be positioned through css and NOT by jQuery.

So one would need something like this:

/* IE less than 9 */
#page {
  position: relative;
  zoom: 1;
}

if($.support.opacity){
  $('#page').css('opacity' , ".5")
}else {
  $('#page').css('filter' , 'alpha(opacity=50)');
  $('#page').css('-ms-filter' , 'progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=50)');
}

This is empirical knowledge though. I don’t know why is it like this.

I am really impressed by this feature. And the reason I am writing this post is to explore the capabilities.
Does the twitter character limit apply?
Can I upload pictures and videos?

Update 1: The character limit does not apply as you can testify from this post

But ‘websites’ are not ‘in’. Check the diagrams  from Google trends for websites below.

Website traffic for 5 major IT companies

Website traffic for the 2 major consumer goods companies

While the overall number of people online is increasing, the visits to the web sites keep falling.

At the same time the volume of searches for these brands shows a completely different picture.

Search volume for the 2 major consumer goods companies

Search volume for 5 big IT companies

In the last 12 months CG companies see a volume increase or remain steady (amidst the crisis) while, for IT, a longer perspective reveals a mixed picture that has to do with what these companies are and technologies they offer:

• oracle and ibm are gradually decreasing,
• apple is increasing,
• dell  increases too  although less quickly,
• and hp seems to hold its ground or slightly decreasing.

But there is an equally important movement undergoing: people shift their reliance from search to peers for news,  recommendations and answers.

I don’t remember how many times and about how many things I  have asked my twitter friends’ advise. And it always comes. And most of the time  it’s good too. Not so  abundant as  search results, but who reads search results past the first page anyway?

Enter social seach. Google injects results in search from our social graphs (opt in). I don’t have to reason the usefulness of this.

What should we expect? What else than  these two inversely related trends accelerating?  Less reliance on search, more reliance on peer recommendations.

There are some interesting implications here: SEO consulting and search advertising have profited from our reliance on search. Search won’t go away anytime soon, especially with the social element in it. But what would be the need for SEO? And what would be the need for adword advertising, if the important factor in search results turns out to be our peers?

Is Google shooting its own foot?  So it seems. But I am sure they have figured it out already and they are thinking of alternatives.

• Publisher  publishes a blogpost
• A regular reader of the Publisher comments on the blogpost
• Someone else reads the post in  Google Reader and shares it
• Another comments and reshares the Google Reader item
• Another decides to share it on Facebook
• Another comments on above  the Facebook link
• Another submits the link on Digg
• Another comments on the Digg link
• Publisher  has a Friendfeed account and the post appears in his FF stream
• Another user comments on the FF stream item
• etc

Obviously the post has stirred some interest and generated a conversation. But the conversation is dispersed in many different places. Publisher looses track of many aspects of the conversation around the post. Commenters also mostly ignore what happens outside their area of interaction with the content: Facebook users ignore the FF commenters etc.

This situation has fired some intense debates. Many publishers think this situation is not  in their best interest as potential traffic to their sites is deflected to an ‘aggregator’. Especially publishers that have a financial interest in their site traffic and do not just want their opinions spread, find this particularly not appealing.

To mend this situation, a group in Google is working on a new protocol that will allow comments to ‘return’ back on the original publisher site. The protocol is called Salmon

Salmon protocol logo

and you can get a basic idea of its workings  from this  presentation.

Salmon does bring back the comments to the publisher site but it does not solve the publishers’ problem.  As you can see from slide 4, once a comment is back to the publisher’s site, it  is republished back to all its subscribers (including the aggregators). What this would mean is that each aggregator has a full picture of the comments around the post, regardless of origin. From the user’s standpoint there is no need to move to the publisher’s site or to another aggregator for any reason, as the  full picture will be available in  whatever site the user prefers to frequent. The publishers may object it, but in what right? The publishers’ protests imply  they OWN the comments which is hardly the case. The user owns his comments.

But let’s leave aside the publisher’s concern for  a moment. Is slamon a good thing for the user? I would argue it is. He can have access to a discussion in its entirety  without much hassle. And therefore he might be tempted to engage or engage more.

But there is something still missing: the user does not have easy access to his own comments for ALL pieces of content he has interacted with. And he has no control either. They can disappear with a site that closes down. Or in the simplest case, the can be deleted by the site moderators. This is the problem that systems like disqus, intense debate and JS-Kit are aiming to solve. But they won’t. Because it is very unlike that one of them will become ubiquitus.

I think the problem should be approached from another angle. A comment is a piece of content. There is no distinction in form from any other piece of content. They are both text (or audio or video in some cases). What subordinates a comment-content to the original post-content is notional and semantic: the post-content preceded the comment-content and actually the post-content was what aroused the commenters interest in the issue. But the same applies to a post that pingbacks to another post. So a comment is a piece of content and should have independence.

The question is how?

The issue is related to our digital identities: if in the web -to-come we can  have a unique independent central point for our digital identities, this central point could be the originator and hoster of our comments.

A modification of the salmon protocol could easily let this happen: whenever a user comments on a publisher site, the site will send the comment back to the users digital identity home. Likewise, whenever an aggregator receives a user comment, the aggregator sends the comment back to the user home, as well as to the publisher.

I do not think this is difficult to implement although I can predict the frictions about who controls the user’s  digital ‘home’. But that’s another issue.

Read also Louis Gray’s post on Salmon