The next geekdinner will be with Marc Canter

Marc Canter and his girls at SXSW

I do not even know where to start with Marc Canter. Honestly he's one of the guys whos been around since the early days of the internet and beyond. Good friend of other great personalities such as Doc Searls, David Weinberger and JD Lasica. I'm excited to announce that our next geekdinner will be with one of the most outspoken and genuine guy in the internet industry today. Marc Canter.

Here's a few snippits from the profile on wikipedia.

Marc Canter is a recognized figure in the sphere of open standards, social networks and blogging, and has been interviewed and quoted on the subject matter in numerous publications. Marc is a frequent speaker and panelist at conferences such as Web 2.0, SuperNova, Gnomedex, AlwaysOn Innovation, SXSW and many others. Marc is also a contributer to many open standards efforts and is champion for end-user controlled digital identities and content – being a co-founder of the Identity Gang

He is the founder and CEO of Broadband Mechanics, a digital lifestyle aggregator /images/emoticons/laugh.gifLA) company. Broadband Mechanics builds tools and environments to enable online communities. They target their products at a broad user base with the hope that everyday people can make better use of Internet technologies.

Broadband Mechanics recently released Ourmedia (along with JD Lasica), a community for digital creators to store their work for free. This nonprofit effort provides unlimited storage for grassroots video, audio, music, photos, text and public domain works, and presents a community space to share and discuss personal media.

Broadband Mechanics also recently released StructuredBlogging, a compatability box effort at establishing clear standards for microcontent. This organization has released Perl and Php libraries and plug-ins for WordPress and Moveable Type. StructuredBlogging is a complete superset of microformats.org and has established schemas for events, reviews, lists, media (audio and video), people and group showcases.

You can find his voice on his personal blog

So the details of the event. It will be Monday 1st May downstairs in the Polar Bear's Cellar bar. It will start at 6pm and carry on till late. Yes its a Bank Holiday and I know London's Public Transport isn't the best on Bank Holidays but were starting earlier and bring everything forward so people can get home without too much hassle. The price will be 5 pounds just to cover the range of food as usual. Yes there will be vegatarian food and I have spoke to the polar bear about trying to seperate the food a lot more. I will post a entry on the geekdinner.co.uk website tonight if I can find the login and password. Look out for it on the londongeekdinner Eventful group and the London metro on Upcoming.

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Recent xbox media centre changes

Firefox entension in use

Recently the Xbox media centre team have been working on a stable 2.0 version. This means there is a code freeze while they iron out any outstanding bugs. But this hasn't stopped the innovation around xbmc.

So first up, xbox media centre took both game and multimedia 2006 sourceforge awards. On the side, Azureus won overall winner which like Jon is a permanent fixture in my video viewing. Good to see xbmc winning awards like this. I really believe its one of the best open source projects out there at the moment.

Some innovation which I haven't quite worked out the possiblities of yet. In the recent update to xbox media centre (march betas), is the ability for xbox media centre to connect to FTP servers. This is pretty crazy, because the only limitation is now the pipe, as you will also see in the next innovation. I've connected to my personal cubicgarden FTP server and a couple of annoymous FTP servers. It works really well and you can browse around for any media which is on there. It would be good to connect to Webdav servers but I'm sure thats coming soon. Reminds me to suggest that in the forums.

The next thing is the send media URL to Xbox media centre. Its been in xbmc for quite sometime but the application to get it working has been a windows only application. And there was no way I was going to run some odd application just to quickly post a media url to the xbox. But now someone has wrote a Firefox application which does this. Its really cool too, because all you need to do is set the ip address of the xbox and then right click on the link you want to send. And within seconds the xbox will start streaming the media link. Oh and for you mac fans theres is also a Dashboard widget, i'm sure it won't take long for it to be a Yahoo/Konfabulator widget too. Obviously the pipe/bandwidth is still a issue. But damm its quick and easy. This fits perfectly with Keep Vid.com however you can't get stuff from You Tube because its in FLV format and the xbox won't play back flash video files. Ideally the xbox would play back flash formats or Keep Vid would transcode it to something more playable like avi or mov. Then people could also take it away and play the media on there psp or ipod.

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