A little late on my public service announcement since August is almost over, but August is National Breastfeeding Month. World Breastfeeding Week was August 1st-7th, but i guess here in the states we have extended it to the whole month (good because we need more awareness of the benefits of breastfeeding!) . Hey what the hell, let's celebrate it all year around- knockers that's what they are for!

Saturday afternoon. Ramona is asleep taking her afternoon nap. Me? I got tons to do but am sitting on the sofa playing with my iPad so I thought I would give Blogger (the platform my blog is hosted on) a try.

I unwrapped my iPad on wednesday taking the day off to enjoy my new toy and spend the day with the kid. I proceeded to do more YouTube watching of Elmo's song then anything else as my 8 month old is already asserting her control of the iPad as a toy that I will have to share with her. So be it, on my list of why I should get one was that she could play baby games on it.

I didn't rush out to buy the iPad - I actually did not buy it, my husband sick of hearing me talk about the pros and cons, if I should wait for the next version (primarily because of the camera) came home with it on Monday - there was no reason to return it once it was in the house. I am a lucky girl. I do like Apple products, our home computer is a Mac, I have an iTouch (which I won but probably would have bought) but work revolves around windows and blackberry and those are big parts of my digital life.

I am going to love my iPad for personal use, consuming content from browsing the web, reading books, playing games, watching videos, etc. But straight away i feel that this is a great tool for work as well. I have only had my iPad for 4 days, but I have already used it at two client meetings and sketched an outline of a solution I am putting together for a client (using sketchbook pro app). One of the meetings i had to be on the 3G network in downtown San Francisco, which was slow as a turtle which was disappointing but expected. The other i displayed a presentation in PDF format that i had emailed myself and it worked fine. Keynote is one of my next Apps that i need to download.

Aside from being a good tool for client meetings it is important for me to know and understand consuming media on a device such as this because it will go beyond the iPad to other devices and this will happen quickly. Our customers are already starting to aggressively ask about iPad solutions (especially for the executive set who tend to be early adopters and important consumers of our content delivery solutions). Lucky for me, because of our alignment with the digital content side of our consumer business (the folks that brought us the WSJ iPad app) we already are a few steps ahead of the game in delivering.

A recent Wall Street Journal article 'Businesses Add iPads to Their Briefcases' on how
"Some Companies, Which Barred the iPhone, Build Apps for Tablet Computer and Give Apple Gadget to Employees" points into the direction this will be going, hopefully i didn't jump the gun too early and miss the handing out of iPads by corporate? (ok ok i would just have two :-)

Note: I had to jump on my computer to do some of the links, Blogger works but it could either be my inexperience with the iPad (e.g. copy and paste), or it is just not not optimized which i reckon will be the case with many sites and services on the web that do not have native Apps. i am ok with that.

Although Summer ends closer to the end of September, traditionally the last friday of August is the last day of "summer" as the mind-shift shifts to Fall. Work on friday however is just as important in the summer as any other day of the week according to our leader here at Dow Jones (which i honestly agree with) so today a little Friday learning for all of us.

I used to have a small .txt file that had all the HTML tags that i thought people should know regardless if they ever had a chance to code a web page. Things like how to bold and italic text, add images, links etc. Useful tips for adding rich text to web forms, text inputs etc.

This blog post on HTML5 for journalists reminded me of my well distributed .txt file and perhaps the need to update it once again. If you have heard about HTML5 it is probably because of the HTML5 Video element for playing videos and movies that directly competes with Flash. The Spec being worked on by the W3C goes way beyond video and its a great opportunity to create mark-up that will moves us towards the semantic web by adding valuable semantic meaning to your pages in non-structural ways which is typical of HTML

Martin Belam's post is targeted to journalists (he is an Information Architect at the Guardian) but relevant to everyone that is producing content for online distribution and outlines some key markup that HTML5 is making standard. Here are some of the elements he highlights that are interesting:

• aside, is used to mark-up something tangentially related to the main body of text. In a news context, that might represent a factbox, some links to related stories, or a sidebar detailing the key points of a story's timeline.
• details is intended to provide a way of including extra content or information that can be optionally expanded or collapsed by the user. That might be something like additional information about an album release, or the opening times of an exhibition.
• replicate the print feature of having an image, chart or diagram that sits in the main flow of content, but that is not actually part of the main article. These elements will be marked-up as a figure, with figcaption specifying, as it suggests, a caption to go with the image.
• mark tag provides a way to highlight or signify text. Visually you can style it however you want, although a yellow highlighter pen effect seems to be the favourite so far, but the point is to allow you to distinguish portions of text.

At the bottom of his post he also points out some other articles on the subject that are good reads if you want to dig deeper. There are over 100 elements in the HTML5 specs that the W3C that is working on and the HTML5 draft is also a good reference point. Of course RDFa specifications are also being recommended as an add-in to HTML5.

HTML5 is early in its use in the wild but with the W3C making progress (and yes of course there is always some controversy that they have to work through) to finalizing the spec hopefully web developers who understand the value will start making more use of it- so get yourself ready....


Image|Flickr|justinsomnia

As many of you know i have been involved with the DataPortability Project from the start being one of the co-founders and the first chairperson of the board/steering committee. Having Ramona last December pulled me back from a lot of my DataPortability duties and since i have gone back to work my time continues to be limited- but one thing that has not changed is my belief that Data Portability is a topic that both users and service providers should not only be aware of but have standards to implement.

In June of this year we launched the DataPortability Policy after many months of work .The heart of the Portability Policy is a set of plain language questions that should become a common vocabulary between software users and providers. Through these questions, a provider can disclose what they do or do not, to enable data portability and the users can have a clear understanding of what they are about to 'sign-up' for as they select new services to share their data.

Elias Bizannes, the current chairperson just posted an article on Mashable titled "What You Need To Know About Data Portability" that is a good read as it gives an overview of why it should matter for both users and companies. As Elias writes, the technology to enable data portability exists but what we lack, is a cultural acceptance that a company opening up your data to competing services is beneficial. Coverage of the topic on well read sites like Mashable will help this discussion proceed even further!