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Xavier Badosa

Web experiments since 1995

RT @dotepub: dotEPUB widget released! Insert a "Save as epub" button in your webpage http://dotepub.com #ebooks #download #conversion #i ... (About 19 hours ago by @badosa)

Personal web projects

Latest bookmarks

My current personal web project is dotepub.com: an automatic conversion service from web page to epub.

Badosa.com has been my main field of experimentation, a website in the Web 1.0 era that kept some editorial control but was made of user-generated content. Soon it offered e-books in the “standard” of those early non-standardized years (RocketeBook). Or dedicated e-books for MS Reader (e-books generated on the fly with a customized dedication). I always thought immersive reading was a handheld matter; that’s why Badosa.com was made available for some mobile devices (pocket.badosa.com).

In 1998 I played with random literature (“human-computer interaction” you might say) in the Poetic Browser, completely remodeled 10 years later with widgets and an API. Widgets weren’t new at Badosa.com. I tried them many years before in what I called our Content Server (this page is still online but it’s not linked and it’s not considered “active”). 2005 was the Ajax year: to try the technology I build Excerpta, a service that was introduced to the public in 2006. And because it’s always fun to play with APIs, in Map of fictions I couldn’t avoid putting my hands in the Google Maps API. Finally, December 2008 was the time to play with the Flickr API and machine tags (“tripletags”) to let people associate photos to texts.

Back in the 90’s I was full of energy. I thought some sort of literary directory was necessary and I build Inlibris.com. I think Inlibris was the first to offer random results. Or results from other user’s queries. Or the possibility to get a copy of the search results in an e-mail (this feature is gone; back then it seemed interesting considering there was no DSL). When Amazon.com introduced its Associates Web Service I couldn’t wait to build my own store. Inlibris Bookstore was made “à la 90’s”, and I haven’t updated since (sorry!). The store was designed PDA-friendly and tried to make sense of the Welcome tab by putting features instead of sections in the tab area (and failed). In the first quarter of 2009, I couldn’t fight the irresistible urge to put my hands on the New York Times API: I used it to add links to reviews of books in the bestseller’s list.

Días tan largos acostumbrados a ser minoría abarrotan su estentórea pesadilla evitando los charcos. (About 10 hours ago by @oniros)

(Besides the aforementioned APIs, as you may have noticed, in the site you are viewing now I’m using the Twitter, Delicious and BackType’ APIs.)

Galeradas.com (galleys, in Spanish) was a platform for digital conversion services. But the e-book market wasn’t ready. I should be remodeling this site soon.

With Critipedia.com I learned how the Wikipedia works. It was meant to be a place for reviewing books and other content powered by MediaWiki. But it never took off (it wasn’t the right tool, actually, and once there was nothing else to learn I lost interest). I developed some tools to convert ISBNs, get related ISBN, find ISBNs... I should try to do something with those... Anyone with an interesting idea for this domain?

Widgets have a bright future, in my humble opinion. And that’s why I acquired the domain Widgetia.com. It sounds like the name of a directory of widgets. But I’m not planning on using this domain in the short term.

I’m the proud owner of more domains: accedo.org (on accessibility?) and leelia.com (on the reading universe?). I should try to find time to build something on them.

Latest photos

Pirate symbol at the Ministry of Justice Sipnosis Twitter error: followers and followees, gone! Google Chrome Irresponsible Acts Google Confesionario The Web Analytics Dance (1) The Web Analytics Dance (2) Gemma Muñoz tweetering Kaushik's presentation The Web Analytics Dance (3) The Web Analytics Dance (7) The Web Analytics Dance (8) The Web Analytics Dance (4) The Web Analytics Dance (5) The Web Analytics Dance (6) Avinash Kaushik in Barcelona 2009

Things that interest me

In no particular order:

Presentations

E-books Are Not the Future of Books: On the concept of e-books. A follow-up to my presentation on "The Future of Books: Digital Literature & Market" (see below). Published in April 2010 but written mainly in the summer of 2009.

The Future of Books: Digital Literature & Market: I prepared (but didn’t use) this presentation for a round table given at a writers’ meeting on digital literature organized by Octubre CCC on October 2009 in Valencia. About e-books, e-readers and digital literature.

Statitistical Dissemination 2.0?: I prepared this presentation for a speech given at a course organized by Eurostat on Statistical Dissemination and the Internet in Madrid. The actual presentation was enriched with some web demos and had fewer slides: in this version, I have unhidden some slides that were not needed for the core of my speech and I have added some text to help following the line of argumentation.

Latest comments

WWW para editores (y más allá) (1): WWW for publishers (1). Introduction. Hypertext. Books, CD-ROMs and the WWW. User experience. Usability. Accessibility. This is part I of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.

WWW para editores (y más allá) (2): WWW for publishers (2). Hypertext and software. Information arquitecture. Interaction design. Navigation design. Interface design. Categorization, nomenclature, structure. Orientation tools: sitemaps, indexes. Search engine. Conceptual model, metaphors. This is part II of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.

WWW para editores (y más allá) (3): WWW for publishers (3). Addresses: URL (URI). Domains. HTML. XML. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search Engine Marketing (SEM). This is part III of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.

WWW para editores (y más allá) (4): WWW for publishers (4). Text. Writing for the web. Typographical resources for the web. This is part IV of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.

WWW para editores (y más allá) (5): WWW for publishers (5). Web 2.0. This is part V of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.

WWW para editores (y más allá) (6): WWW for publishers (6). Web 2.0. Digitization. XML. RSS/Atom, ONIX, BookDROP, papiNet, XBITS, TEI, ePub, DocBook, DAISY. API. Widgets. Webservices. Mashups. This is part VI of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.

WWW para editores (y más allá) (7): WWW for publishers (7). Creative Commons. This is part VII of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.

WWW para editores (y más allá) (y 8): WWW for publishers (and 8). E-books. This is the last part of the material I prepared for my sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá. Due to the important changes in the electronic book sector between 2009 and 2010, I updated this presentation in 2010.

La difusión estadística en el contexto de la web 2.0: This presentation was the original starting point for my speech at a round table concerning Web 2.0 in a Spanish regional statistical offices’ meeting. Due to time restrictions, the actual presentation I gave was shorter: I was forced to hide many slides. In this version all those slides are visible again.

Proyecto E-book 2001: My 2001 e-book project. Interesting for historical reasons. We might learn something from the past.

TOPLAX, the right approach to Ajax: This presentation was really a test, or a joke, or a neologasm (the pleasurable feeling from having coined a new word). There are more neologisms than ideas these days. I was trying to prove that a new word in the Ajax semantic field even with no promo whatsoever could get a significant number of views.

Background

I have studied Economics and Philosophy. A result of those studies is for example my very old article La metrización y las ciencias sociales: introducción a la teoría de la metrización para investigadores sociales. Not that it matters. For many years I have been teaching online publishing in Masters Courses by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and EdiTrain. I have worked in the software sector (SAS Institute), but that was short: I have been working on statistics for the government for many years. Fruit of those years is for example the old article Estimation of sampling variance of the Spanish Labour Force Survey (with Montserrat Guillén Estany). Currently, I am the manager of Statistical Institute of Catalonia website.

Contact

On the net, I’m known as Xavier Badosa. Other possible variants: Xavier M. Badosa, Xavier Martín Badosa, Xavier Badosa Martín.

You may contact me by sending an e-mail to my first name (Xavier) at my main domain (that happens to be my family name, too). If you are human, I guess you understood. If you didn't, use the form at Badosa.com.

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Last updated (main text): July 16th, 2010 — http://xavierbadosa.com

Personal web projects | Things that interest me | Presentations | Background | Contact | Shortcuts