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There is so much free knowledge online

[ Web 2.0 ]

Can I just say I love the internet! There is tons of great resources online and most of them are freely available to anyone who wants to invest the time. I can't understand people who say the internet is full of crap. A bit of media literacy about how to search, how to judge sources, friends recommendations, etc, etc and internet is a better that any other resource known to man. Simple!

In that vein, here's a couple of great little resources which have been recommended to me by friends.

How to bridge the distance between business strategy and design - recommended to me by Paul via Del.icio.us. I mean wow, I would love to hear this live, the presentation slides are pretty credible and describing enough that you feel like you could give the presentation
yourself with enough time.

Living digital - recommended to me by Kate via email. I've heard of this guy but yes this is a awesome presentation to google. Would love to get him to the BBC one day. A lot of this for me is shaking head in agreement but its so good to have that sometimes. Even today I hardly ever turn on the TV, its all about Internet content be it licenced, unknown or unlicenced. Its also good to see the technology is ready. My friend bought a Popcorn box a while back and a couple of other friends bought a xbox just for xbmc the other day. And I got to say I'm still having fun downloading what ever highdef content I can find and playing it back on my homemade xbmc box.

Background Patterns - recommended to me by everyone but Lucas was first. Lovely site, well thought out and the fact you can download the pattern is ideal.

Doing all the right things

[ Web 2.0 ]

I mean to include this graph of ping.fm in the last blog entry but must have fell a sleep or much more likely the internet went off again (i've been having so much problems with my home broadband recently its not even funny). The graph shows how Ping.FM has or could be come a trusted message broker. Someone posted a comment about incoming XMPP support which seems to add more fire to this idea of a message broker.

But just when we were getting excited about ping.fm, when someone really does things correctly. identi.ca ticks almost all the data portability and openness tick boxes I can think of. Not only is the service a Opensource Creative Commons framework based on Jabber/XMPP but it supports OpenID and remote subscription via OpenMicroblogging which is OAuth and some established responses and returns. But no thats not all, it finally supports Federation, which means finally people really like owning there own can build and maintain there own and connect to the network when it pleases them. Simple this is awesome and I've already joined it.

Ping.fm, the way web services should be done?

[ Web 2.0 ]

So I've finally signed up with Ping.fm thanks to David Owens giving me a update to date code for ping.fm.

So what is Ping.Fm and why do I find it very interesting.

Well according to the website.

Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.

Its a service which will pass on your single message (or ping) to other services. So in practice I can message ping.fm and the message appear on plaxo pulse, twitter, jaiku, plurk, facebook and linked in. Of course it does more than that but those are the ones I'm interested. Whats even better is Ping.fm has im, email and applications of its own. So one of my biggest frustrations is twitters im bot which never bloody works, should be solved.

Its also good to see the setup with other services part is done without revealing your username and password when ever possible. But there are a couple services like twitter and plurk where you must. What would have been ideal is OpenID logins, but few of these services support that right now anyway. Actually on Plaxo, I had to go find the login details because I'm so use to using OpenID.

Once your setup, you can just go to the site and type in your messages which get ping'ed elsewhere. But thats not where it ends, nope you can setup custom and service triggers which allow you to route a message based on a rule you setup or something a service does. So imagine Twitter stopped working (yeah when does that happen?), you could divert messages to another service which you may only use in emergencies. I was trying to work out if you get ping.fm to watch for messages which came through another service and echo those out to the rest of services. So say I SMS twitter, Ping.fm sees the twitter messages, notices its not on my Jaiku and reposts it there.

As mentioned before there is many ways to post to ping.fm but no SMS yet. Right now you can use a facebook application, a load of im bots including xmpp via gtalk, google gadget and even a iphone and wap client! Of course more importantly there's a developer API.

Why do I think Ping.fm is that great? Well its using the web as it should be. There was never a reason why you had to sign into different services to leave messages. Ping.fm is like a layer above all the crazyness going on in the social messaging space. I don't know if I quite trust it yet, currently my hand is forced because I hate the alternative. However these guys are going about the whole thing in the correct way. I love the fact there's from day one im bots and a api. This means once I've setup my services, I don't really ever have to log into ping.fm ever again. This might sound shocking but theres another service which is like this. Dopplr, is trying to be quite transparent in its deliver and use to people. So you can setup Dopplr with your personal calendar, its pulls out places and will inform your friends once you clash. No need to really go back to the site ever really (unless you want reviews and your carbon footprint). There is always a question of how these services will make money without advertising but I don't know maybe a pro version ala Flickr or they could sell the attention data being generated from the messages going through there services?

Who knows, but right now I'm pretty impressed with ping.fm. Once they have SMS gateways its going to be even better.

Transparency: the good, bad and ugly

[ Web 2.0 ]

From the Radio Labs blog titled Removing Microformats from bbc.co.uk/programmes

Unfortunately there have been a number of concerns over hCalendar's use of the abbreviation design pattern. Until these issues are resolved the BBC semantic markup standards have been updated to prevent the use of non-human-readable text in abbreviations...

This is has been debated to death in other quarters, but I think its great to see the radio labs guys come out and say in a non judgmental way what problems they've been having and how it conflicts with the BBC standards and guidelines. This is one of those good cluetrain moments which is difficult but so right.

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.

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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