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Gwibber the dashboard for streams and flow?

I partly talked about this before but theres been a series of updates which I couldn't help but blog about.

So I was talking to Miles about a client which could support much more that Microblogging and we were suprised that no ones actually built a clever client app which supports Microblogging + RSS + XMPP? Well the closes we can find to that idea is a OSX application called Eventbox. Actually this blog entry does a much better job explaining what it can do, and what a difference it means for advanced users.

If you imagine the dashboard of Facebook (credit to Stowe Boyd) but under your control using the services you prefer. Fan of Flickr, just add them and the RSS feed. Prefer photobucket use that instead. Its a bit like the life streaming services such as Plaxo, Mybloglog and Friendfeed. The application/client should be clever enough to look at the service and work out through maybe some discovery service/xml whats possible with the service. So for example adding Twitter will allow you to post and read, while a flickr feed won't. It would be cool to also finally start adding some of those comment services into the mix, so for example allow backtype comments if you start adding stuff to a RSS feed from a blog. Hell why not add a proper metaweblog/atom Blog editor too maybe?

Anyway, Eventbox is close and seems to be on the right track and I was starting to get worried that once again the linux platform would be left behind in this area. But I was wrong actually deadly wrong because under my own nose was Gwibber.

I've been using it for a while now and its actually fended off competition from Air apps like Twitterdeck (far too twitterfied) and Twirl (crashes a lot) for my ubuntu desktop. But what shocked me today when talking to Miles was the new supported protocals it has. I had done updates and never knew about the new features.

Gwibber 0.72 Screenshot by you.

So now theres support for,

RSS/Atom
Digg
La.conica
Twitter
Pidgin
Ping.fm
Facebook
Jaiku
Pownce
Flickr
Indenti.ca

So most of the Microblogging services including the recently defunked Pownce and open source La.conica. RSS including automatic discovery for Digg and Flickr. Then some of the interesting ones, Facebook with the ability to also send messages into the Facebook paywall. Ping.FM support, means you can send from Gwibber to all those other services such as Brightkite, Rejaw, etc, etc. But the one which is strange and most exciting is Pidgin support. The problem is, there is no documentation for the Pidgin part and the account says you can send only. So after some playing around, I worked out that when you send a message on Gwibber, it will also set the status of Pidgin. This is cool, but I also want the ability to recieve XMPP messages straight into Gwibber.

Gwibber 0.72 Screenshot by you.

Actually Gwibber has the structure to really move forward. I've already seen multiple types of authentication from username/password to a Oauth like facebook auth. Each protocal gets its own colour which you can set and you can enable recieve, send and search on each one (protocal supporting). Search works well, but I'll like to see some kind of watch or a pounce system like you get in Pidgin or Specto. Finally it would be useful to support the Newsgator API (yep I switched from bloglines to newsgator) for RSS, so you can properly manage the RSS and not end up reading the same news over and over again.

Technorati Tags: gwibber, microblogging, linux, client, stream, flow, eventbox, xmpp, twitter

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Security for People and Computers by Neal Puff

creepy guy looking over a application form

I've been reading this fantastic ebook on my ipod called Security for People and Computers by Neal Puff. I had assumed because the cocoa application (what do you call ipod/iphone apps?) was free it would be available somewhere else as a PDF or another free format. However it seems like you can only get it free on iTunes, which really sucks. Because I really want to send all my computer literal friends this book. Its the kind of book I could give to my parents and they might actually make sense of. Its written as a refresher for people like myself and a overview for people who care less about computer security. I have a list ranging from my sister to friends who are still using Windows in a bad way, who NEED to read this very short book.

I noticed you can buy it too but its not cheap at 19 pounds plus shipping. But it might be worth buying a few copies for friends and family next time its there birthday. Its a shame because turning ebooks into ipod/iphone applications is almost like a DRM of its own. I totally get what Tom Peck is doing turning books into apps but I would much prefer he write a app which reads PDFs/RTF/Text files well instead. Anyhow, here's the description of the book…

This book is meant as general knowledge for people who want to live a safer and more secure existence in today's environment, covering both basic Internet safety and general advice for non-technical parts of our life. While this book was previously sold commercially, it is offered here at no charge in the hope that it will be of some benefit to help people in their daily lives.

Actually just going back to the ebook application as a DRM a second. I also saw, Project Gutenberg will be releasing Mobile eBooks. Great I thought till I found out there going to create *.jar files (java apps) which play the book rather that mobile versions of the books in pdf, text, etc. So once again, this sucks because I'm constrained to one player and the player is attached to the book. This means my ipod can't read it and my older ebook reader on my phone can't be used either. Can someone please just create a Ebook reader for most platforms including Windows Mobile, Symbian, Java, Blackberry and Apple which is open source and reads all types of free/open textual format

Technorati Tags: security, people, computers, nealpuff, ebooks, ebook, pdf, iphone, ipod, apps

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Somewhat seperated at birth?

I've never quite found a total replacement for Particls, but there's something between snackr + gwibber + pidgin + socialmedian + pipes and a bunch of other stuff which could make the experience particls like.

Technorati Tags: aggregation, desktop, rss, particls, feeds, feed

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My Christmas eCard to friends and Family

If you didn't receive one in your mailbox, no worries. Here it is for you to print off, make your festive wallpaper or just throw darts at. Thanks to Cristiano for the excellent photograph, I just tweaked the levels and let Plaxo do the rest. Shame Plaxo eCards couldn't send them out too, but thats another story.

Happy Christmas to everyone…

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And the social stacks fit together like that…

One of the things I really missed out on but have been following is the developments around the open stack. I kind of prefer social stack but I can see a lot of benefit to open over social. Anyway, this work has been pioneered by some really good guys including David Recordon, Chris Messina, Sebastian Küpers, etc, etc (sorry to many names to list). Today I was struck by Jyri's blog post about Chris Messina's talk at some event recently.

In his presentation at Friday's event, Chris Messina demonstrated the use case of subscribing to someone who lives on a foreign Web service.

In what follows I'll expand on Chris' story by discussing another use case, where you add the
foreign friend to your address book without needing to go to their site.

Imagine I want to add a friend, David Recordon to my contacts. I
know his email address, so I click 'add contact' in my client and enter
his email.

My client translates David's email address into his OpenID URL, probably using a method called Email to URL Translation.

Now that my client knows where to find David on the Web, it goes out to David's URL and fetches a little file that contains machine-readable pointers
to David's public profile and the photos, status messages, bookmarks,
blogs, and other feeds he publishes. The enabling standards at work
here are likely to be XRDS-Simple and Portable Contacts.

This loop is simply referred to as 'discovery'.

Once my client is done, it is ready to display its findings to me.
Here's a mock-up to illustrate what I might see (the same mock is in
Chris' slides):

After selecting David's contact information and some of his feeds, I
click 'Save', and a subscription request is sent to these services. They
return a few of David's most recent public updates to me.

The next time David logs into these services, he sees a standard new
subscriber notification. His service can perform discovery on me to
display my name and profile summary to him, and allow him to
reciprocate.

David may also choose to allow me to see some of his private information, such as his contact details. The enabling standard here is of course OAuth.

I have never needed to join any of the services David uses; in fact,
I don't even need to know their names. It is irrelevant to me if he
uses Twitter, Plurk, or Friendfeed to publish his status updates or
prefers Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa for sharing his photos. All I care about is seeing his updates and being able to respond to them using my own client.

Information wants to be free, and social objects want to travel.

The thing this reminds me of, is when Tim Burners-Lee wrote about the Semantic web and how agents talk to services, etc. You can follow how it works without even knowing the different technologies too well. So while these guys figure out the webside of things, these other guys earn a mention for there work on the services stuff and Controlyourself for there work on openmicroblogging.

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Video 3.0 is the future, no really…

Doc Searls is such a great thinker, it would be great to see him on stage at a Thinking Digital, Pop!tech or TED.

Video 3.0 is two way. Or many-way. It’s with, not just to. And its “def” is truly high, and not compromised by current channel-defined bandwidth constraints. This is what will disrupt both telecom and cablecom in a huge way, unless they get on the side of all producers — including the people they now call consumers. The opportunities here are enormous. I think telcos are especially advantaged in this sense: telephony is naturally two-way, and has been ever since the 1880s. Now is the time to think about how we return to that in a big way. Telcos may be getting hammered flat right now, but there’s a groundswell underneath there. Just watch.

I've been asked again and again, so whats the future then Ian? and I always say video online. This usually causes a puzzled look. Maybe I should be saying Video 3.0 or maybe a better word would be Participtory Video or even Networked Video? Don't make the mistake of thinking Podcasting video is Video 3.0. Some of it is simply Video 2.0 (dump video online), some of it is Video 2.5. I've not seen anything which says to me Video 3.0 yet. Even Seesmic, Ustream, etc.

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TV killed the Movie

So i'm watching live TV because I'm ill and am really waiting for the IT Crowd to start. Anyway Film 4 have Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet starting and I thought I've not seen that for ages and boy I love the sound track and start of the movie. I mean who doesn't remember the petrol station scene at the very start of the movie? It's a classic and one of the best starts to a film ever.

But Channel4 or Film4 killed it for me. They resize the beautiful 2.35:1 panavision aspect ratio down to 16:9 and cut off he edges! There should be a law against such things. It looked stupid on my large widescreen LCD, and it wouldn't have hurt them to add a small border on the top and bottom to keep the ratio correct and not slice off the left and right of the picture. But they wouldn't let it lie, no. They also soften the dynamic sound track using some kind of dampener or compressor. Its the equivalent of listening to a Dolby Digital track through a pair of ipod headphones (yes I now have a pair and I can tell you my Vodafone 12 pounds headphones are so much better that those white bud things, avoid at all cost). On most AV systems with digital sound, theres this thing called Midnight mode. From the Dolby site, it works like this.

Midnight mode allows low-volume listening with high-volume benefits, reducing the volume on just the loud effects of a program, increasing the volume on quiet sounds, and maintaining dialogue at a consistent level. A Dolby Digital feature applies dynamic range compression that preserves low-level sounds, prevents dramatic passages from getting too loud, and keeps dialogue intelligible during lower-level listening.

The amount of compression is not arbitrary, but is decided in advance by the soundtrack's producers and coded right onto the soundtrack.

Some Dolby Digital decoders let you select various amounts of the available compression (for example, 50, 75, 100 percent), while others provide only 100 percent when the compression mode is selected.

Well they applied this technique to the whole movie but at like 100 percent. It was dull, lifeless and flat (that is me being nice). In the end I turned the bloody thing off and watched something else till a excellent IT Crowd. I was that pissed off…

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Apple’s Netbook?

Imran sent me a link to this readwriteweb entry about the iphone being Apple's netbook. Although I'm totally buying the reason of wifi usage here's what they say…

Steve Jobs once said that the iPhone is Apple's netbook, and this usage data does lend some credence to this. Most of these WiFi requests probably come from people using the iPhone on their couch at home or in a coffee shop, and often, these users might be quickly checking their email or the weather from their phone instead of booting up their netbooks or laptops.

I got to say I'm also selling my Acer Netbook because I now have a ipod touch. The Netbook was too much for what I needed. I just wanted a device to read rss and ebooks. It was cool having the netbook because I could run RSS Owl on it but it was over kill in size and most of the time it sat in my bedroom because there wasn't enough room to carry both my laptop and netbook. Miles expressed a simular thought about his Nokia N800 internet tablet now he owns a iphone.

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Measuring success of evangelism

At the recent speeddating event I went on, people always ask what you do. I always have problems explaining what I do without using up at least 30secs of the 180secs. So I've recently found it easier to say I'm a BBC internet evangelist. Its not ideal but most people I speak to have a better idea of what I do because of the wording.

Christian wrote a excellent blog post about justifying the work we do. Theres some really good parts I would like to quote.

As an evangelist/advocate the hardest job is to tell people exactly what your impact was. A lot of what you do is planting mental seeds and inspiring people to work differently – that can’t be measured in hard figures. Other companies measure the success of an event for example by how many business cards were collected and have a department that follows these up by contacting people. I don’t like this much, first of all because a lot of the people I meet don’t have business cards but follow me on twitter instead and secondly because they gave me the card and not the company.

If you enjoy free information, swag, being able to directly reach internal experts and being able to network with a select group of like-minded people:

please leave comments on the blogs/announcement pages of the events (in our case the YDN blog and upcoming – a lot of people only look there and don’t have time to scrounge the web for all the info.

Use tags we provide at events to tag your photos, blog posts, tweets, videos…

Tell us about cool implementations and changes in your company based on what we talked about – we are happy to feature those and send you link love and there is nothing cooler than telling the world how someone else but us have done something cool with our stuff

If you sign up for an event – show up (or send a colleague). I am getting terribly sick of spending a lot of money to hire locations and have 150 sign up to the event in the first 10 minutes – effectively blocking out people that should be there – and then 20 show up! This is wasted time and money – and in the current climate that is not a clever thing to do.

I love my job and I am doing quite extensive work to make the IT industry understand that tech evangelism is not a waste of money but that there is a massive need for it. Marketing and PR departments just cannot reach geeks and internal geeks have neither the drive or the opportunities to talk to the world about the great things they do. I am very sure that innovation and change in IT is not coming from top down but from people who dare to talk to the right people to initiate change. As I put it in my talk at accessibility 2.0 geeks that care are the drivers of innovation and I don’t want to lose the opportunities we have right now.

Yes exactly this why I have had such a hard time with the PR and Marketing departments of the BBC. Luckily most of the time they have ignored Backstage but with the events we attracted a lot of attention. As most people know, I tried to educate our lovely PR lady Sarah by forcing her to read the Cluetrain Manifesto. That only works so far though, Christian is right the evangelist create opportunities at a grass roots level. I like to think PR and marketing is all about control while being an tech evangelist isn't, actually the opposite. We tend to tell it as it is and answer the tricky questions. But this is all about measuring success and yes its all about the stories. The stories when things grow from a small seed to something large and interesting. I guess being humans, we like stories. Stories put things in perspective for ourselves. Maybe this translates into a slide on a managers powerpoint between the hard figures of other projects. Or even a example for how successful a project or division is doing but at a much lower level, the links are tighter, stronger and true that ever before. Theres no way to measure these more human like attributes such as trust yet, but the day there is, I bet ever company will come around to the fact that evangelist are good long-term business sense.

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Interested in buying a Netbook?

Well I'm selling mine on ebay over the next few days. Starting price of 150 pounds for my upgraded Netbook. I did record me doing the memory upgrade but it was 45mins long and the netbook wouldn't start properly afterwards because I hadn't pluged in the Solid state drive, But trust me its all working fine now, I just don't need it now I got a ipod touch.

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BBC Backstage NW Communities Networking Bash

Huge thanks to everyone who came to BBC Backstage first's North West Networking Bash. We partied right through from 7pm to 3am, and loved every moment of it. I spent most of the night socialising and making sure everything was swinging in the right direction. We did start a little later that expected due to a BBC Taxi which took longer that it should have to get everything moved across. Thankfully I had help from Leanne, so before long the wii was in place (thanks the hodge, which I learned was also Dominic) and there was a crowd of people watching Mario Kart 4 player. While downstairs was filling up quickly, I setup the Skype link on the mezzannie level. As usual I had problems with Ubuntu's multiple display support but it was solved with a restart. Actually the biggest problem of the night was the plasma screens. They were old and only supported Svideo and VGA in, which meant we played Mario Kart in black and white too.

The food paid for by BBC Backstage was top notch and there was plenty to go around, The drink which was sponsored by Adaptivitist and although a small amount, it lasted right through to after midnight. Everyone was being very sensible only drinking singles and bottles, no crazy necking of drinks, just everyone having a good time. Talking about having a good time, the live link up with London via Skype was perfectly placed next to the bar, meaning people could play while waiting for drinks at our own private bar. I seen everything from messages back and forth to Hangman. All good fun, unfortually the London end seemed to cut off about 12:30am and so the fun only lasted so long. According to some people I had some stalker in London who kept asking for me, oh well.

All in all, we had just over 200 people attend the bash which is fantastic, it was a real cross section of the communities across the North too. Thanks to Adrian for stepping in for Kevin at the last minute to speak to everyone about the BBC's role in the north now and in future. Thanks to Dan from adaptivist for drinks again, thanks to Leanne and Micheal sparks for helping and thanks to everyone who came along and enjoyed the night.

There's pictures of not only the Manchester event but also the London one on Flickr. I expect to put the videos up a bit later and it will be linked to from backstage directly. So look out for those.

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Embrace your inner geek?

I love working for the BBC but there is certainly a divides which do come up and lets say make the work more challenging. Rain my partner in crime on Backstage brought to attention a letter/email in Ariel.

The keyword ‘respect’ is noted as a BBC value on the back of your BBC pass. ‘We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best. “Software enginneers and computing professionals in the BBC are frequently labelled with demeaning and insulting terms, like ‘techies’ and ‘geeks’, by members of staff in other professional discaplines’. “I find it upsetting to hear these disparaging terms in the office and feel it sad that there is a growing acceptance of the use of these labels among staff – even among the profession itself in an attempt to ameliorate the terms. They are even used in BBC output, such as the Click programme. “The terms are typically used by staff in non-technical roles who, I feel, are getting away with blantent office bullying and professional one-upmanship which is damagine to the moral and self-esteem of staff in crucial technical roles

Andrew Ellis, software engineer FM&T

Unlike Rain who almost takes offence to Andrew's email, I get what he means. Yes I am a geek but I'm selective with the word. Yes alot of us have reclaimed the word but not everyone has and as we know people will use words to gently put people down.

Gay is one of those words which has been turned around by the community but, you know what I'm not going to start throwing it around willy nilly. Some people still find it offensive a type slur which is painful. So before calling people Geek, I tend to wait and see if there comfitable with the word when I call myself a geek.

Back to Andrew Ellis's email, there is something about the way the mainstream portrays geeks which does bug me. The problem is geek is wide and differental. Some of my regular readers will remember the geek stereotypes piece wired magazine did a while ago.

Rain says,

My current favourite TV programme is ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and follows a bunch of guys who could be described as ‘geeks’ and pokes fun at their everyday social, um dilemmas as high functioning chaps who might be on the edges of the social spectrum and have issues with everyday stuff such as socialising, girls or sarcasm. It’s light hearted and pokes fun at things we all see in ourselves sometimes, especially geeks.

For me I find it sometimes too close to offensive to be watchable. What bugs me about it is the stereotypes again. Geeks can't talk in public, geeks can't talk to woman, geeks are men, geeks are techie, geeks wear odd non-matching clothes. Well sorry this doesn't fly and to be fair no wonder people like Andrew get teased about being a geek. The IT Crowd is another show which maintains the geek stereotype, and to be fair I do watch it but sometimes cringe. One of the best episode recently was actually today when the geeks convince there manager (Jen) who knows nothing about what they do, that the internet exists in a black box complete with flashing red light. So the Joke is less about how geeky the two IT works are but more about how little knowledge the rest of the workforce has about technology. This strikes me as a more positive light of geek that the usual studdering bumbling idiot which pass for a geek.

This is much more fitting with my experience of people who are geeks too. Actually this is another reason why I think the Girl Geekdinners are so important. Its breaking down the stereotypes that geeks are men, geeks dress a certain way and geek woman are somewhat strange. All this in the end should in the future mean people will be more open about the fact there a geek and be actually proud to be a geek. One day…eh?

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iPlayer has changed little for me

Its BBC iPlayer's first birthday today and the BBC has a range of things planned around the event. Good stuff, its been something to be proud of and the alterations keep coming thick and fast. But although there is all this lovely innovation going on with iplayer and all those iphone, nokia nseries users and console owners are feeling the benefits, I got to be frank and say its done little for myself.

This will seem quite negative and maybe not best timed some would say, but I've been thinking about it and where I would like to see iplayer this time next year. Actually last year about this time, I remember watching Ashley Highfield take the stage of a central London venue and show BBC FM&T (future media and technology) the iplayer adverts which would go out on TV during Christmas. Yes remember making the missable unmissable or something tag line like that? Anyway, even then, I knew it was going to change very little of my media consumption.

I can't put my finger on it, I like watching stuff on my 40inch LCD screen and I like the idea of accessing files when I choose to watch them. iplayer's 7 day window means I still can't watch whole series in one go or catch up with old episodes of a series I may have missed the start of. So for example, I caught the 3rd episode of the BBC high budget post super-flu drama Survivors. Within a few days, I was able to find parts one and two in high def to watch back to back. This type of behavour is common when leaving the broadcast stream but iplayer doesn't quite support that. iPlayer doesn't support playlists, this might sound kind crazy but think about it, when I watch media at home I add them to a mixed playlist of not only TV content but also films and Podcasts. To me its all just media. Formats are reduced to nothing because XBMC plays everything and anything. This is also why I've not bought a CD since 1997. Any CDs I've borrowed have been converted to Mpeg3s and most of my film collection exists on HD now. Streaming content can fit into the routine, for example I do sometimes watch youtube, vimeo, bliptv conehttp://farm3.static.flickr.com/2133/2451266469_653d85446d.jpg?v=0tnt but with iplayer the 7 day window makes links harder to engage with. Every once in a while I will cut or edit media for the blog or something else, so the ability to do so in iplayer is not possible. Even the ability to include a start and end position like Hulu and even Youtube now, would be useful.

So what would I like to see in the next year? 31 day window would be great and finally allow for more long tail use and the effort of getting the streaming links would be worth it. I would like to see all of the BBC's content on iPlayer including HD content. Yep some HD like Vimeo/Blip streaming flash would be lovely, those extra lines are useful on such a large screen. It would be good to see other types of streaming like Pure Mpeg4 (non h.264), Theora, Windows Media streaming would cover older windows mobile phones and slightly older smartphones. Download and Bit torrent distrubution would be great but I understand thats still sometime away due to the copyright owners and not the BBC.

Happy Birthday iPlayer, time to grow up and revisit some of those more touchy issues. If you don't the community will do it for you.

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