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BBC Worldservice win Sony's new multiplatform award

[ Web 2.0 ]

BBC Worldservice won Sony's first Multiplatform award just recently. The project was the Bangladesh Boat Trip which involved a team of people from across the new media space. Ben Sutherland along with many others internally and backstage's own Premasagar & Annesley of Dharmafly created a complete experience across different platforms. From James Cridland's blog.

As Ben Sutherland says on the BBC Editors blog: If predictions about sea level rises come true, much of Bangladesh will simply be erased from the map. Our aim, therefore, was to hire a boat and use it to travel the long, wide rivers of the country to meet the people most at risk. There were amazing stories [...] but not only was the method of getting these stories remarkable, but so was our way of getting it out. We weren’t just using tri-media, and we weren’t just World Service. We were on Radio 5 Live, News 24, Radio Scotland - and on Twitter, iTunes, Google.

In the words of the judges, “it embraced everything from podcasts to GPS and Googlemaps to add value to the listener/user experience and met those listeners where they really lived using third party sites such as Flickr.” They even had the foresight to put those photos under a CC licence, to enable people like me to use them again.

James is right, the foresight to put them under a CC licence but I would also say they went one step further by creating the API for the website. This meant people could look directly at the data underpinning the whole project. How many people did? Who knows, I assume not many. But having the foresight to do this is great and a true testament to the move from Radio to true multiplatform. Excellent work.
I'd better also say I use to work for the Worldservice and have many friends who work there.

Whats the difference between Jaiku, Plaxo Pulse and Friend Feed?

[ Web 2.0 ]

Talking about things which are simlar. Can anyone tell me why I should sign up to Friendfeed when I'm already using jaiku as a sort of life stream and I'm already using Plaxo's Pulse? Don't get me wrong I do see some advantages to friendfeed but not enough to make me want to sign up.

I do find this area of aggregation really interesting but having already signed up to lifestreams (which I never use), Jaiku (which I read on my phone whenever I got 5mins spare) and Plaxo Pulse (which I like but am worried about the closed nature of it). I'm just not seeing anything new and interesting in Friendfeed or any of the other simlar services. Now if one of them was to create APML, I would switch in a snap.

Desktop alerts and more

[ Web 2.0 ]

Ok I know there not exactly a like but I just don't understand why you would want to install something like alert thingy when you can use something a lot more intergrated like Specto. I can just about understand why to use Twitterfic and something like Pownce (although please stop asking to be my friend, I don't use pownce). But alertthingy... nope. Actually with Specto and Gnome-Do you can do everything twitterrific does with equal ease. Just my thoughts, obviously most of you will disagree.

Developing Widgets on GNU/Linux

[ Web 2.0 ]

So I just noticed that Konfabulator/yahoo widgets has the ability at long last to embed HTML and Flash. Not only that there is a full HTML DOM too. If this was in there from day one, I wouldn't have given up on konfabulator widget development all that time ago.

Whats odd is that Konfabulator never made the leap over to the linux world. Actually to be honest, the current state of widgets on linux isn't fanastic (sorry i'm not a fan of gDesklets, but thats due to change with the Compiz Screenlets. Screenlests are SVG widgets written using Python (which is another reason to learn python). Jackfield is also interesting because it can run Apple Dashboard widgets and is adding support for Yahoo & Opera widgets and Vista Gadgets.

I got to say screenlets are great, they work like konfabulator widgets. So you can make widgets sit above, below or on the widget layer. I love Compiz fusion.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, linux, gnulinux, compiz

URL X shutdown again

[ Web 2.0 ]

I like URL X because the shorten URL's it makes are still human readable and there's a very simple API. However its been shutdown again.

Bad news: Dreamhost has shut down url(x)! (Again.) They don't think the service should exist in its current anonymous incarnation. I disagree with their assessment and will be moving the site to a new server. I will be tightening some things up, but the service will return in its current form. Sorry for the inconvenience — we will be back shortly!

The long tail of Torrent sites

[ Web 2.0 ]

I really miss Trance Traffic. It was my primary source for the music discovery and music download. Problem was and I'm sure others have had this problem too. The Torrent site has RSS feeds but doesn't use a passkey system on the torrents so once you have the torrent file you can just download it and I guess share it with others. Unlike other sites where the torrent file is attached to you via a passkey system. Anyway the downside of not using a passkey system is the torrent site does not know when your using it unless you login via the website. Which kind of makes the RSS pretty useless, right? Well I would say so. So thats how I lost my trance traffic login although I was a regular on the site.

I've been looking around for other torrent sites which do trance and dance music but there all closed to the public. Trancetraffic, Puresound, Deepbassnine, etc... (wow UKnova is getting big) If anyone has passes to trancetraffic, please send me a email please.

Whats interesting about the search for a new site is the amount of small torrent sites which do a couple of smaller genres. I bet if you did a graph it would map the long tail perfectly. At one end you have huge sites like thepiratebay, mininova, etc but quickly the curve turns towards sites like uknova, torrentreacter, etc and before long into the smaller sites which include lots of porn, anime, games and music video, trackers. I would draw that out in inkscape tonight, but its bloody 4:30am I shoudl be sleeping.

Things may not be so bad, now the head sites like piratebay have started adding long tail categories and tagging. So for example I found the latest dance music here on mininova and obviously there is RSS too. I can even do a search query for my favorate trance show (a state of trance) with RSS too. Although I will miss the comments and special trance traffic packs that would be uploaded by people in the community.

Technorati Tags: torrent, trancetraffic, music, dance, bittorrent, rss

BBC launches

[ Web 2.0 ]

Rather that write a huge long blog post about the BBC launches recently, I thought I'd keep it short and sweet. James Cridland beat me to the boat on both anyway.

The much imporved BBC Home beta is now publicly available. How out dated does the current one look next to the new one? And thankful we've broken out of that 800 wide frame which drove me insane. Also not to be out done, iPlayer now has flash streaming using the new h.264 flash ability. It does work on Mac and GNU/Linux using the Adobe Flash Player (aka not using Gnash yet). I did try and get XBMC to play back the flash stream but it failed. More investivgation soon

Technorati Tags: bbc, blogs, iplayer, drm, flash, homepage, bbc.co.uk

A trend worth noting : Live Streaming from conferences

[ Web 2.0 ]

The London Bubble or really the Berlinblase crew were at BarCampLondon3 in force this time around. They must have really organised there ticket collection as quite a few of them got tickets. Anyway, something which I noticed at BarCampLondon3 this time around was the use of live streaming services. One of the guys was using this site mogulus while another was using something else. At BarCampLondon3 everything was in place to make this work well, lots of power, laptops with cameras and seamless wifi. This isn't always the case but it seemed to work really well at the Google offices. Maybe in the near future its not worth taking a camcorder, as live streaming from a laptop just works. Specially when you have a webcam like mine which you can face foward or backwards.

Talking about Corporate Communications 2.0, BBC Internet blog launch

[ Web 2.0 ]

So this is great I'm sitting in the front row of a talk about Corporate Communications 2.0. The blurb goes like this.

Today's successful corporate communications and PR efforts are moving faster and faster towards the Web 2.0 channels of the day. Even some of the largest companies are using blogs, podcasts, videos - even Twitter and Jaiku - to reach customers, employees, and shareholders. Many of these efforts have had excellent results, others not so much. How does PR and corporate communications operate today, in a world full of direct communication with customers via web sites, email, blogs, and video?In order to use update your corporate communications plan, you need to consider corporate blogging practices that fit your company and situation, understand the variety of channel and tools available, and learn to blend the old with the new.Through a variety of corporate case studies, find out how businesses can use blogs and other forms of online communication to reach out and inform their customers, connect with their employees and their community, and create conversations and relationships that last.

So I thought, hummm I wonder if the BBC Internet Blog has launched yet? Yes that thing I've been closed lipped about for ages is now online for all to see. Enjoy!

I see Ashley has wrote a entry about Linux Figures off the back of the Podcast which was done recently. Well 151 comments later its turned a little nasty...

indigenous content

[ Web 2.0 ]

Stowe gave a great talk from the Web 2.0 expo which I'll expand on later but during the talk he used the term Indigenous content which caught my ear. After a quick chat with Stowe, he pointed me to the source. I actually like the term and the background of it By the tribe, for the tribe.

Mozilla Prism (Web Runner)

[ Web 2.0 ]

Yes I know its old but I saw Prism recently working and I was very impressed. Combine this with Google Gears or Offline Dojo and wow. Till then, this is perfect for my parents who really have problems with typing in urls.

Prism isn’t a new platform, it’s simply the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don’t have to target it separately, because any application that can run in a modern standards-compliant web browser can run in Prism. Prism is built on Firefox, so it supports rich internet technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

And while Prism focuses on how web apps can integrate into the desktop experience, we’re also working to increase the capabilities of those apps by adding functionality to the Web itself, such as providing support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware.

Firefox 3.0 user interface changes

[ Web 2.0 ] | Tags: firefox  firefox3  ui  gui  xe  userexperience  mozilla 

Alex Faaborg has a nice round up of the proposed user interface changes which are planned for Firefox 3.0. None of the ideas are complete and Alex is soliciting ideas around a few themes. So what you waiting for? Go check it out and contribute to the next Firefox UI.

A great overview of my talk at Xtech

[ Web 2.0 ]

Its funny to see an overview of my presentation, pipelines: plumbing for the next web in the Guardian. Its is good to confirm my talk did make sense and did make a few people stop and think.

As Ian says, APIs open the silos. APIs are application protocol interfaces and make it easy to pass data between applications and websites. Web services also have revenue models such as Amazon S3. Feeds are everywhere. Widgets and gadgets are starting to become useful. There are the Semantic Desktop projects. The most interesting data is online but it's also on your own computer, bridging the worlds of the internet and one's own computer.

Ian thought someone had to have built this, and then he discussed applications and services that came close to his idea, Touchstone/Particles, Automator and Yahoo Pipelines.

Touchstone/Particls is based on many inputs and outputs. There is only one input type: RSS. It is completely XML driven. It takes all of these RSS feeds, puts it through its own attention engine and then spits out more ordered information including flagging up really important things.

Automator makes it very simple to automate tasks. It has a powerful GUI, levels of abstraction. It plugs into the web, but it's proprietary. It's only on the Mac.

Yahoo! Pipes is the next service Ian reviews. I've used it. As a matter of fact, I used it to create a combined RSS feed of several showbiz and fashion blogs for our Lost in Showbiz blog. It is really, really easy to use, but Ian says that there is no underlying definable language. I find it slightly difficult to understand some of the operators as a non-coder. But that's probably just the limits of my own understanding.

Ian has his own idea for an application: Flow. It allows access to the local file system and anything connected to it. The Flow system has all of these things on the desktop such as applications but also a host of web services such as Twiter, Blip.TV, Technorati and Yahoo. Instead of using a traditional GUI, he suggeted using a widget.

Flow doesn't currently exist. It's not an application. It's not a service. He has partially built it. He uses RSS Bus to pull in XML files and turn it into RSS. It pulls in Jabber, Outlook, output from all kinds of applications. He then uses Apache Cocoon and Widgets. But it's not quite there. It usually crashes.

He wants Flow to be definable, graphical, standard, shareable, open and non-proprietary.

I like Ian's ideas, and I'm not just saying that because he's a friend and former colleague. I am beginning to use the web like this, although Ian is doing this on a more advanced level than I do. But as he says, novices can use other people's widgets or pipelines. This is already happening on Yahoo! Pipe. And people with little idea of programming can actually look and learn at other people's pipelines.

You can already chain together little web widgets and pipelines that do simple analysis to sift masses of information online. I wonder how useful it is for most users. Well, it's not even whether it is useful. I guess it's how much people are willing to invest in creating their own little apps.

But we are moving to a web where people aren't just creating content but also creating widgets, simple, small easily developed applications.

Quoted from the Guardian, but there's more worth reading. Also Kevin has a review of some sessions at Xtech including a video of moi on the stranger blog. I also captured some videos which plan to release on the backstage blog very soon.

Ok enough blogging from this great cafe.

Techmeme is pretty good to me

[ Web 2.0 ] | Tags: techmeme  cubicgarden  ianforrester  news 

Been meaning to write about Techmeme for a while now, specially after Tom Morris's thoughts on Techmeme.

See for some reason Techmeme really likes my blog entries. I can't work out why, but I seem to get ranked pretty high along the likes of the mainstream press sometimes. Generally I do use Techmeme for catching up on the latest news, and although Tom is right about the business focus. Its reasonably ok and saves me flicking through tons of blogs about the same story, when I just want the headline stories. I rated it very high in Particls (Touchstone) for this exact reason.

Xtech 2007 finished for this year

[ Web 2.0 ] | Tags: xtech  xtech07  xtech2007  paris  france 

So its Friday and Xtech finished half a day ago. Overall, Xtech 2007 was excellent and I enjoyed every minute of it.

The conference was quite diverse in nature this year. A quick scan of a room revealed people from enterprise, academia, public sector and of smaller startups. The theme for the conference was ubiquity and most presentations were actually loosely connected. And what a range of topics this time around. Everything from debates about XHTML 2.0 and HTML 5 to the abstract nature of ubiquitous technology and products.

Once again choosing the sessions was always going to be very difficult with 4 tracks running side by side. Edd added Personal schedule just before the conference last week which helped a lot but I ended up adding more that one per slot into my personal schedule. In the end I went to these sessions.

• Web-app access to "sensors" on mobile devices (video)
  Michael(tm) Smith (W3C)
  Making Web apps interact with common "sensor" hardware on mobile devices requires scripting APIs to that hardware -- APIs that haven't been standardized yet. This session looks at what's needed.


• Practical ubiquity with mobile phones (video) (video)Claus Dahl (Imity.com) Imity is a live experiment piggybacking mobile identity and a social web on the ubiquitous world of bluetooth cell phones.


• Ceci n'est pas seulement une pipe: semantic meaning of everyday objects in a connected world (video) (video)Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (designswarm) Using examples of applications to illustrate the semantic disturbance that takes place when then web hacks objects of everyday lives and when it makes them disappear.


• Barcamping and Co-working, Parisian styleOri Pekelman (AF83) How much do cultural differences affect the transposition of models born in the US? Join those who have organized and promoting Barcamps in Paris and jumpstarted the first Parisian co-working space.


• Everyware: Expectation, emergence, realityAdam Greenfield (Studies and Observations) As late as 2006, the assertion that ubiquitous computing was in the process of transforming everyday life was controversial. A single year later, it's become inarguable.


• Keynote (video)Gavin Starks (d::gen network)


• Jabber: Social Software for RobotsBlaine Cook (Obvious Corp.), Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Flickr (Yahoo)) Jabber (XMPP) as enabling technology of bots and web services to participate in ubiquitous networks. Now! Made easy! With Ruby!


• Jaiku - rich presence (video)Ralph Meijer (Jaiku) The contacts list on your phone should tell you what your friends are doing, where they are, and what they're planning next. We're working to make this happen.


• RSS RemixingIan Davis (Talis) I'll demonstrate and explain a new ultra-simple protocol for augmenting search results with related content. We send the search results, asking the providers to add what they know about the items.


• Open Data in HTML: GRDDL, eRDF and RDFaElias Torres (IBM), Lee Feigenbaum (IBM) We will present technical approaches addressing the explosion of online information hidden in HTML pages today. This example-filled presentation will focus on the latest examples and implementations.


• Nabaztag and the Emergence of the Internet of Things (video)Rafi Haladjian (Violet) In the coming years, computers, phones and game consoles will no longer be the only devices in our environment deemed worthy to be intelligent and connected.


• Pipelines: Plumbing for the next webIan Forrester (BBC) The next web will be about flow, this flow will be user generated pipelines through applications and services. Unlike before these Pipelines will be definable, non-proprietary and shareable by anyone


• XForms, REST, XQuery...and skimmingMark Birbeck (x-port.net Ltd., W3C Invited Expert) 'skimming' is an approach to building loosely-coupled applications that can run on any server. Combining XForms, REST and XQuery, application development and deployment becomes extremely fast.


• Google Base, a mashups database for the REST of usJeffrey Scudder (Google) Google Base, a public data warehouse, is free to use and it has an API based on GData. I'll cover querying and inserting new items and discuss how Base can serve as a back end for mashups.


• Making Massive Datasets Universally Accessible and UsefulJon Trowbridge (Google, Inc.) A project is underway at Google to collect and distribute large scientific datasets using a 21st century "Sneakernet": multi-terabyte disk arrays shipped via FedEx and other common carriers.


• Putting SVG and CDF to Use in an Internet Desktop ApplicationAntoine Quint (Joost) A look at how various client-side XML technologies, such as SVG and Compound Documents, are being put to use to build The Venice Project internet television application.


• Opening the Silos: sustainable models for open dataPaul Miller (Talis) Open Data is more than a religious debate. Increasingly, it makes good business sense. Come along to hear how.


• A proposal for a real revolution in 'user-generated content' and newsKevin Anderson (Guardian Unlimited) The media is fascinated with 'user-generated content', but the revolution starts if you use geo-tagging & tools like Twitter to allow 'citizen-journalists' to network for real-time reporting


• Security and REST Web Services Richard Mooney (Vordel) This session answers two questions: Are REST Web Services inherently insecure? How can a security model apply to both SOAP and REST Web Services?


• The Web EverywhereCharles McCathieNevile (Opera), Geir Pedersen (Opera), Håkon Wium Lie (Opera) This talk will look at innovations in making the Web available everywhere, and some of the changes that this can bring.
• 20:20 Lightning TalksMichael(tm) Smith (W3C), Deb Bassett (Urbanwide), Rob Lee (Kodefoo) A fast and fun session of talks of 20 slides, each presented for 20 seconds.


• Closing keynoteMatt Webb (Schulze and Webb) Closing keynote address.

I missed a few slots because of the late night drinking and talking with Molly, Gavin and others more that once. Most of the sessions I went to, I did video but its taking forever to upload all 2+ gigs of videos up to Blip.tv via FTP. I got a feeling the hotel might actually be crippling all ports except 80 and 443 because skype sounds like crap and my VPN to the house feels slower that it should be.

The hotel is a pretty nice hotel, a little pricey but its right on the river and just within walking distance from the Eiffel Tower. The conference felt a lot more tighter that the previous one I had been at (2005). Rooms all had plenty of power but wireless was a problem. It wasn't free which seems to be a theme for most conferences now, For the presenters a special code was given out.so they could get online without too much problem

Great work Edd and the other people who  were involved. I look forward to Xtech  next yeaar. I'm already thinking about a couple of new proposals.

My Pictures | Group pictures
My Videos

Pilot for the next series of the office?

[ Web 2.0 ]

Mike Arrington asked what happened to the next series of the Office? Well maybe its closer that I first thought.

Also blogged by Matt Cashmore

Just discovered Xbox Media Centre has a Webish API

[ Web 2.0 ]

I was searching for the new Ajaxy Xbox media centre web interface, but came across documentation for the Xbox media centre's HTTPAPI. Which means I can completely control my xbox via a pipeline interface. However there are issues.

1. Its all HTML
2. Its not valid HTML
3. It seems a little temperamental on Action commands

For example here's how to get what the Xbox is playing right now.

http://xbox/xbmcCmds/xbmcHttp?command=getcurrentlyplaying

But it comes back like this.

<html>
<li>Filename:smb://stratrix/downloads/podcasts/The 1UP Show/041307.m4v
<li>SongNo:0
<li>Type:Video
<li>Title:041307.m4v
<li>Thumb:defaultVideoCover.png
<li>PlayStatuslaying
<li>Time:00:02:40
<li>Duration:00:43:56
<li>Percentage:6
<li>File size:475954023
</html>

Although this is nasty, its still useful. How many media devices under your TV have some kind of API? How many devices around our house support some addressable API?

Its all about the Metadata?

[ Web 2.0 ]

I like what this is saying, however I'd like to see some more examples...From those good people at NewTeeVee.

“What’s metadata?,” you might ask. Think of it as a layer of data describing content. In Joost’s example this could be anything from a simple timeline to tags to a full-grown programing guide.

The notion of using this type of data for some creative mashups first came up on the Ironic Sans blog, where a Joost fan by the name of David Friedman brainstormed about a feature that he would like to see in the client: The ability to share comments on the programming based on each show’s timeline. Says Friedman:

“Imagine watching a show like Heroes once, and then watching it again with comments turned on to see what other people caught that you missed.”

The concept of annotated television is definitely intriguing – especially if you package it into an easy-to-use application. But it wasn’t just the idea itself that made Friedman’s post interesting. Notable was also the first comment, made by someone who identified himself as Matt Hall:

“We’re already working on it. So far we have a rough passive version — a few bits of content have “trivia” that pops up at specified timestamps — but we plan eventually to allow timestamped tagging, commenting, annotation, etc.”

To be fair, we can’t know for sure if this is the same Matt Hall who works as a software engineer at Joost’s offices in Leiden. We do however know that Joost also hired Dan Brickley, who is one of the inventors of FOAF – a RDF-based metadata framework that makes it possible to transform simple web pages into machine-readable social networking nodes.

We also know that Joost makes extensive use of such metadata frameworks to build the programming and community features of its service. To quote Joost developer Leo Simons: “Not a day goes by without some of our developers swearing about ‘RDF’ or ‘metadata.’”

So what can these metadata frameworks be used for? Timestamped comments and tags are certainly one interesting possibility. Combine this with FOAF-like social networking structures, and you got yourself a whole new way to explore TV programming.

Oh by the way, we're planning a little festival in Edinburgh around the end of August . More details to come but if your interested in video, moving image and storytelling in the web space and the state of TV on line, brings you out in rants and raves. Drop me a email or look out for posts soon about the Edinburgh Fringe TV festival.

Future of Webapps London 2007

[ Web 2.0 ] | Tags: fowa07  fowa2007  fowalondon  upcoming:event=117839 

So here's my live blogging during FOWA London 2007.

I'm late for the first session but I find a space near the back and listen to Mike Arrington. Geez I feel like asking a question about TechCrunch UK. Specially with him going on about the fact he was born here or something. Mike Arrington also talks a lot about Adobe Apollo and mentions his own conference. Suggests that there big differences in culture between UK and America . Considers the fact that Asia might be the place to go for in the future. On removing friction, he considers the difference between Yahoo! and Gmail. Someone hits Mike about his love for Apollo, thank goodness I was about to puke.

Edwin Aoki brings it back to communities, starting off with Tim Berners Lee's vision for the internet. Considers the community features in the leading applications like ebay, amazon, etc. Are Webring and Dmoz the mashups of Web 1.0? Edwin certainly thinks so. Proposes some of the trends to be Disaggreagation and Syndication. Mentions community going mobile through helio phone for example. Secondlife blur the virtual and online worlds. Thinks about our responsibility as technologies not only with security/privicy, spam, social effects but also decentralisation and trust models. AOL now supports OpenID. Applications need to be accessible otherwise we won't ever bridge the digital divide. Then talks about Balance.Power but ease of use, social benefits and commercial interests, Offline and online interactions.

Tara Hunt just gave a fantastic presentation with tons of information which shes going to stick on Slideshare.net soon. The best part was her analysis of Flickr, Threadless, Twitter, BarCamp and another. Well worth looking through.

Simon Wardley gave a good fun presentation about ducks and Zimki which is going open source soon. I love Last.fm, but their presentation certainly sound a little dull for my liking. Next time guys, a little spark would be cool.

Werner Vogels, although very hard to understand because of his accent but made a fantatstic case for Amazon S3 storage. Showing pictures of a datacentre failure and the percentage of hard drive failures after a few years was scary enough. However he made solid points about scaling and uptime. Then they showed off a few figures pre-S3 and post-S3. Elastic compute cloud also recieved simular treatment with Powerset.com and a couple others. Mechanical Turk also came up but only at the end. And Steve from Openstreetmap.org, rightly pointed out that the Turk doesn't work in the UK. Vogels points out that its down to labor laws here. Which I think speaks volumes about the States.

Brandley Horowitz brought the afternoon back into reality with a talk about users. He showed the good and bad sides of user-generated content and then talked about the organic process of interestingness - or turning users into editors. He pointed out it was retroactive and less susceptible to gaming or agendas. Turning users into taggers, highlighted the fact that its quick and brings the level of entry right down. He also pointed out the machine tags (or RDF triples) then quickly moved on to zone tagging which came from yahoo? In the same vein about lower the barrier to entry, he pointed at flickr clustering. Turning his head to the concept of neighboring he also mentioned mybloglog.com. At long last he talks about Yahoo Pipes. RSS is mashup for the masses? Horowitz, makes a good comparison about pipelines as sampling vs synthesizing.

Then we were into the sponsored talks which included QuotationsBook.com, Soocial.com and BT. Soocial.com, left me thinking whats the difference between it and Plaxo.com (bar the cool style). BT showed off BTconnect.com, which I assume was also showed off at BarCampLondon2 but I missed it. BTconnect.com I have to say looks pretty interested although its not live yet (see screenshot).

The last session of the day was by Kevin Rose of Digg.com. He ran through a lot of digg's past and announced that OpenID was coming soon and that a Flashtoolkit will be also be available soon. The toolkit would allow people to take a subset of digg and show it somewhere else. For example allow a bunch of friends to show others their own number ones, etc. He also talked about exporting attention, I suggested that the digg team should consider apml.org (should have mentioned attention rdf too).

The first day had its ups and downs. The biggest down was certainly the wireless which didn't work because of some broadband connection problems. This wouldn't be so bad but the speakers were also on the same connection, so some of the demos couldn't be shown live. Ryan Carson was rightly so, pissed off about it all and made his feelings known. On the upside, Tara Hunt, Werner Vogels, Bradley Horowitz and Kevin Rose were very good and gave me lots to think about. I'm sure Day 2 will be good too. Hey and free parking underground for Scooters was a huge bonus for myself.

Its Adobe on board talking about Flex and Apollo. He's revealing the code behind Flex aka mxml. I'm still having a hard time understanding what the real difference between flex and xaml. In places they could have used SVG like syntax, they didn't, where they could have used xpaths they didn't. Thankfully they used CSS at least. Now he's showing off picnic.com which I've seen before. It seems Flashplayer 9 has been redone and now supports ECMAscript for XML (E4X). A guy from Scrybe shows how much faster Actionscript 3 is compared to actionscript 2, it looks like 12x faster across the board. AVM2 source was donated to Mozilla (Tamarin), it looks like it will make its way into Firefox 4.0. Now finally with only 3mins left, Apollo. Maptastic and a ebay application on the desktop, oh wow - i'm so impressed. Not!

Chris Wilison from Microsoft is now on stage, expressing why he felt thing went wrong in 2001. Hacking also became lucrative is one of his slides, but generally he talks about lack of vision of web developers trying to build everything in a their own silo. 2005 saw the rebirth of the lower s semantic web. RSS, Microformats, tagging and other browsers arise. Now the IE7 pitch, but some details on the integrated RSS platform. And back to security... and back to IE7. Wasn't this talk meant to be about the future of the browser? Talk about quirks vs strict mode and running multiple IE's side by side. Microsoft are releasing a virual PC image which has IE6 and IE6 sp2 for free every few months. Now a section about Microsoft Expression designer, ASP.net Ajax and WPF/E. WPF/E is like WPF but is a subset of XAML and works like a Mozilla plugin at 1.1meg.

I'm left wondering if the new york times get it at all after hearing Khoi Vinh talking? There still building lots of stuff internally and not reaching out to the rest of the web - silo building?

Simon Willison did a great job outlining the problem with a non-single sign on eco-system. The slide for Microsoft and Six a Part did get a laugh when asked if you trust these people. The rest of the presentation was pretty fluid (as is Simon when usually talking). Intellengence on the edge is actually a very good model for why OpenID makes sense. Simon then outlined a load of scenarios which could be done now we're using OpenID. Simple examples using OpenID and XFN and hCard microformats. Plus more complex examples using Social Whitelists using OpenIDs. On the whats wrong with OpenID, he mentions phishing, privicy and what happens if your openID provider goes down? He mentions Microsofts cardspace as possible solution, but generally thats a browser issue which openID can not solve. The others can be solved by using adding multiple OpenIDs to a ID and using multiple providers.

I attended the Panel Debate in the Council Chamber. The debate was what could be learned from the Americans when it comes to startups in Europe. It wasn't a very good debate at all (too many panel members I think) and the setting was kind of odd, Anyway some of the highlights or lowlights depending on where you sit included, Mike Arrington deciding it would be best for the UK market if the BBC was shutdown (I caught the whole rant on camera). Another BBC employee jumped in and made the point about the public service test but Mike Arrington was having none of it. His point about the Office was simply stupid. The reason why there is no more seasons of the office is because we know when to stop (Mike should take a note out of that book) and it looks like we may have sold the rights to the American version. Distoration in the market my ass arrington.Later in the debate Chris Messina made the point about define goals and success. Mike being the one sided guy which I now think he might be, said to Chris, what do you mean? Thats pretty simple - How much money does the startup make. Chris I believe didn't say anything but shruge his sholders, knowing this was simply a arguement which couldn't be won with such a one sided guy. Maybe I was wrong but its certainly what I felt. The rest of the debate was pretty un-eventful except Arrington grinning everytime Mike Bucher avoided my question (which wasn't going to be about the BBC actually). I can't help but wonder if Mike is more upset because he didn't get the full details of CBBC world?

I took a few sessions off to catch up with Ben Metcalfe and others after the panel debate.

Rasmus, compared opensource projects to the current crop of web 2.0 sites. System that harness network effects and get better the more people use them in a way that to there own self-interest. He wonders what PHP, any Sourceforge project, Wikipedia and Flickr would be like without partcipitation from its users

Tariq from Netvibes just quickly announced a universal widget API (UWA) for Netvibes and then came back on and announced OpenID support coming soon. Mike Arrington blogged it 30mins before the annoucement.

Moo cards guys talk about the differences between them and there rivals Qoop who launched there cards 2 weeks before Moo.com. Made a good point about marketing. They think about and pay for marketing before the product which is very cool. Moo is very much the company I think of when saying the word boutique. They hand check every single pack and send it all via Royal Mail in the morning.

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Great Video, I found via Backstage forum and Delicious. Well worth watching and sharing with others. Maybe the best display of what makes the next generation of the web.