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The views and thoughts of a dyslexic british designer/developer

Archive for category social-hardware

The Data Visualisation Manchester Weekender

Mar 10

Posted by ianforrester in Uncategorized, socialware-offline | View Comments

So as you may have already seen, Data.gov.uk, BBC Backstage and Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA) will be running an ‘unconference’ focussing on data visualisations. The unconference will team up 100 developers and 100 designers to create diverse and imaginative data visualisations from open data. The aim of the event is to facilitate an unusual opportunity allowing the diversity of the two traditional job roles to bring together imaginative use of open data sources.

The website for more information and to sign up is dvwm.weebly.com

Whats the schedule?

April 9th will see a pre-party get together at a central Manchester venue (TBA)

April 10th will be the first day of the event complete with open sessions to help get you inspired

April 11th will be the day when you can show off your visualisation on stage

This may also help answer your questions?

  • It will be a mix of hackday/mashed with a unconference type event, its the same format as we have used for Over the Air 2008
  • There will be lots of coding, designing and general hacking.
  • We have secured a venue in central Manchester which will allow over night stay, so theres no need to worry about hotels on the Saturday night.
  • A small but good amount of food and drink will be available, but if you ever feel hungry for more theres plenty of shops and restaurants in central Manchester.
  • The venue isn’t far from Piccadilly station, so getting to and from the South, East and West should be pretty easy.
  • Anyone coming into Victoria Station should change on to the tram heading to Piccadilly.
  • The event is totally free but requires signup beforehand and confirmation from the organisers.
  • Visualisations don’t have to be just virtual, they can be physical too.
  • You can use the hashtag or tag – DVWM to find related stuff
  • Yes its in Central Manchester not Central London
  • Yes we all love open data

Interested designers and developers can find out more and apply for an invitation via the DVWM website.

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Geeks of London takes over from London Geekdinners

Feb 20

Posted by ianforrester in socialware-offline | View Comments

london geekdinner logo medium

Sad moment to see the London Geekdinners are no more. As the Formerly organized of Geek Dinners its wasn’t really a surprise. Cristiano Betta and Melinda Seckington took over the running of the events back over a year and half ago when I left London for Manchester. And last year spoke to me about the possibility of changing the direction of geekdinners into something else.

Its been amazing over the years, some of the guests we’ve had include, Stowe Boyd, Tim Oreilly, Adrian and Dan Hon, Brady Forrest, Jen Pahlka, Jyri Engeström, Julie Howell, Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, Chris Anderson, Kevin Marks, Dave Winer, Betsy Weber, Molly Holzschlag, Robert Scoble, Jeff Keni Pulver, Mozilia Labs, Ben Metcalfe, Marc Carter, Dr Sophie Kain, Jeremy Zawodny Howard Rheingold, Holmes Wilson, Dean Jansen, Moo.com, Paul Boag, Dave Shea, Eric Meyers, Mike Culver, Dave Crossland, BBC iplayer team, Ryan Carson, Paul Jones, Richard Clayton, Becky Hogge, David Terrar, myself and many many more…. (sorry if I didnt remember your name).

Our biggest geekdinner by its self was with Chris Anderson of Wired magazine, although the joint girl geekdinner with Scoble have been huge in the past too. The biggest so called geekdinner was the backstage p. arty/geekdinner/community party which took place in the Cuban Bar back in Christmas of 2006. Over 200 people attended that event and who could forget the massive trustedplaces.com cake. The most dinners we have done for one single person has got to be for Molly Holzschlag who will remain in our hearts as the Geekdinner queen with 3 geekdinners.

Geekdinner.co.uk had a bumpy time. The domain name is still owned by Nick Swan and the original server which the blog use to sit on has never been recovered. So if you go back in time on geekdinner.co.uk (the current server which Cristiano owns) you get to a point where there is no more blog entries. Archive.org has most of the old stuff thankfully. One of the best things which came out of geekdinners has to be the girl geekdinners which was the idea of Sarah Blow (not of my ex-wife, as I once heard recently). Sarah and the girlygeekdom have done a great job growing the event and looking back done exactly what maybe geekdinners should have done ages ago. I guess by the time we should have got serious, we were already on to running barcamps. Its great what Sarah Blow has done and I wish her good luck into the future.

We certainly moved around in venues for geekdinners. We started off in the cellar of a bar (bonds) just on Derring Street near Bond Street tube, tried a few places including the crown and anchor. Settled on the Polar Bear just behind Leicester Square before it got shut down (as we found out one day after BarCampLondon1). Tried a few more places and settled again at a very quiet place (The Bottlescrue) in the Holborn Viaduct area. It was summertime and we use to take over the whole bar including the outside seating for our geekdinners. This was also the bar we used for the biggest geekdinner with Chris Anderson. But it wasn’t to last, the reason why? Well it was in area of the city where people don’t hang around after 6pm. The bar closed its doors for good after a few months. After a little more bar shuffling including to the bear in trendy clerkenwell, we ended up at the Ye Olde Cock Taven which is still open and sits in Fleet street. We had that for quite a while before the owner drove me nuts and we moved elsewhere. This is about the time I left for Manchester and Cristiano took over. The venue he seemed to use the most was Hummus Bros in Holborn.

So as they say in the Matrix Revolutions, everything that has a beginning has an end. Geekdinners have been an amazing part of my life and I kept considering doing something like Geekdinners in Manchester. But its time to move on. I met some amazing geeks over the time of running the dinners. Some of them I’m still good friends with even now. Flicking through some of the photos, has had me thinking wow so many people, such good times. Geeks of London could be a interesting framework for other smaller events which fell in the shadow of geekdinners. Things like Bowling, Karaoke, heck even Roller Coaster riding might be your thing and there’s always usually another 4-10 people (at least) who also would go if theres interest shown. Who knows maybe there will be a geeks of Manchester one day…

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One social web

Feb 15

Posted by ianforrester in socialware-online | View Comments

Its so odd, the guys behind storytlr were at FOSDEM and I actually watched there presentation but didn’t put two and two together. So I marked down One social web as a project to watch for myself and the BBC but I didn’t twig it was the same guys. If I had known, I would have tracked them down at FOSDEM for some serious conversation about what I want to do with Storytlr and what I thought of the One social web project.

alardw or Alard Weisscher left a comment on my blog post about FOSDEM and then the Lifestreaming blog post talking about One social web, finally made me slap my forehead, oh yeah those two guys were Storytlr.

Anyway, what there aiming to do is impressive and is much more interesting that whats happening with Google Buzz or even Facebook’s XMPP opening.

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What should the character limit be on microblogging?

Feb 14

Posted by ianforrester in socialware-online | View Comments

Evan Prodromou who I finally met at FOSDEM recently, has been running a poll to find out whats the best character limit for microblogging.

For our flagship site, Identi.ca, which runs on the status.net cloud service and uses the 0.9.0 beta, we’d like to open up the discussion of what an appropriate character limit should be. Setting a site-wide limit is a community decision we’d like to leave in the community’s hands. In a conversation on Identi.ca we’ve solicited some candidate character limits that we’d like people to decide on.

  • 140 is compatible with Twitter; in many languages a notice with 140 characters fits into a single SMS message*
  • 280 can fit into two Twitter or SMS messages
  • 300 is a fan favorite
  • 420 is Facebook’s status limit and 3 Twitter tweets or SMS messages
  • 500 is a little bigger
  • 1000 is bigger than that
  • Unlimited
  • Other

So personally I think 300 is enough. 300 will hold a very long URI with room for query string values. Also having it about the size of two text messages seems about right. If you stick to ANSI only characters you usually get about 306 characters to text with (160+160 with overhead) on most phones. Unicode drops it down to 280 characters which still seems fairly close to 300. I’m also thinking 300 characters keeps things micro readable still.

The idea of a more structured microblogging with URIs as metadata in interesting but I think metadata should be inline and in plain view. Its one of the neat things about Microblogging, which would be a shame to remove. Also got to say anything more complex than the current microblogging setup would maybe cause too many problems with backwards compatible. Literate results are good, if you want metadata use blogging instead.

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Its Ladies night

Jan 30

Posted by ianforrester in socialware-offline | View Comments

The Big Bang Theory

Always interesting to read Miss Geeky’s thoughts on woman in technology. She’s been thinking about a Ladies night at a Comic Store in Nova Scotia. Generally she says in the post, I wish we didn’t need things like Ladies Night to make it *not* intimidating for woman. But its the examples which I find really interesting…

Since moving to London, I’ve visited the Forbidden Planet tons of times. I love the place, it’s filled with wonderful geeky delights, and if I could I’d buy everything that caught my eye. And yet… almost every single time I go there by myself I get hit on. Okay, I kind of get that (geek store, geeky girl, chances of possible perfect match increases). But half of the time they open with something along the lines of whether I ”needed help in finding a present” or something else that completely neglects the fact that I might be there for myself. The thing is it almost always happens when I’m browsing the comics. If I’m at any other part of the store (like the fantasy/scifi books section or the manga section) that type of stuff doesn’t happen. It’s as if most geeks have accepted that girls are into geeky things, like fantasy and manga, but comics… then it’s suddenly “you don’t belong here”.

Seriously, guys? Why assume straightaway that a girl doesn’t belong there? I thought that by now it should be obvious for guy geeks that the geek girl does exist, but it’s moments like I’ve described above that some guys are completely oblivious to that fact. And it’s those guys that are making it difficult for new geeky girls to feel comfortable with being a geek and going to places like comic stores. I know there are tons of guys out there who do understand and don’t make stupid remarks like those above to girls, but it’s that small oblivious group that do that mess it up for everyone.

Its always the subtle stuff which does the damage I find. I’m not pointing fingers but I wonder if media like the Big Bang Theory and IT Crowd are doing much to counter this problem?

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Apple, you can’t stop the signal

Jan 29

Posted by ianforrester in socialware-online | View Comments

There’s are two winners from yesterday’s coverage of the ipad.

live.twit.tv and live.gdgt.com. Between the two of them, you could hear and see what was going on live on stage but also get a real feel for the presentation details with the whole host of screenshots from live.gdgt.com. Credit is due to these guys for making this all happen, shame on Apple for not just streaming the whole event. You can’t stop the signal…

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Going to Fosdem 2010

Jan 25

Posted by ianforrester in socialware-offline | View Comments

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

I’m booked to go to my first Fosdem. Got the train from Manchester to Brussels return for 140 pounds but the hotel (Hotel Centrale) was quite a bit more but right next to the main station and Parc de Bruxelles. Never been to Brussels before, so on either side of Fosdem, I’ve decided to take some time off and have a wonder around the city.

The Fosdem conference seems to be shaping up into a good event too. Here’s a few of the talks I’ll be checking out.

I do wish there was some guys from XBMC and the Apache Cocoon project coming along, but hey I’m sure between the Mozilia, XMPP, OpenOffice and Ubuntu guys there will be lots of fun.

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Converting posts from Blojsom/Wordpress to Moveabletype

Jan 19

Posted by ianforrester in socialware-online | View Comments

I had to write this because for weeks now I’ve been trying to convert blog entries between different blogging services.

The first one was converting Blojsom to Wordpress, but this wasn’t too bad because both work around the RSS 2.0 format. Getting the comments, tags, metadata out and into the rss 2.0 feed was a real pain and I’m convinced I dropped a load of trackbacks and pingbacks in the process. This is another reason why I started using Disqus for all my comments.

The harder task was moving blog entries from Wordpress to MoveableType. Yes I expect most of you are wondering why I would move from a far superior system to something which most people left in the dirt ages ago. Well unfortunately we still use MT on the bbc.co.uk/blogs platform and that means as backstage moves to the official blog platform, some mug had to find a way to down convert to MT 4.1 which only imports/exports in this crazy text only format.

So after lots of looking around, I finally found a XSL which I modified to do the job from a stripped down Wordpress WXR file (RSS2.0 with lots of WP namespaces stuff). Its important that you strip down the WXR file as it might not be valid XML, so no XSL transform is going to work. I also took a bit of time to write a XSL to remove most of the namespaces elements or convert them into a more valid RSS 2.0 element. You can do the same with lots of finds and replaces, so I won’t post the simple XSL.

Hopefully this will save others a lot of time in the future, if your faced with the same problem.

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Social media in the company

Jan 2

Posted by ianforrester in socialware-online | View Comments

Not perfect but I like the general idea. Been trying to get HR involved in using Linked-In.com for quite a while. Not so good to think the cluetrain has been watered down to this however…

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Nows a good time to signup to a la.conica?

Dec 6

Posted by admin in socialware-online | View Comments

Fail Whale

Twitter is down and people are somewhat freaking out. This is a really good time to install a microblogging application which supports not only twitter an maybe facebook like the popular tweetdeck. But instead go for one which supports one of the la.conica servers. Identi.ca is the most popular of the lot but support for the open microblogging service is a good idea. If Twitter does go down for long periods, its maybe time to consider switching over.

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Novell Pulse catches the Wave

Nov 16

Posted by admin in socialware-online | View Comments

You got to hand it to Novell, they are quick off the mark. Rather that trying to fight Wave they have embraced it (something I suggested big collaboration corps should do). Novell have a nice clean enterprise product/service called Pulse, which looks and feels like a very cleaned up Wave system. But here's the kicker, it interoperates with the Wave protocol. smooth move Novell and I'll certainly keep an eye on Pulse for our future plans.

Novell Pulse Demo from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

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BarCampManchester2 is less that 2 days away

Nov 5

Posted by admin in socialware-offline | View Comments

And believe it or not there are a few tickets left over still….

We are all working flat out to get everything not only ready for BarCampManchester2 but to make it special for everyone involved. Not only do we have 2 days and 1 night of unconference enjoyment but there's also going to be some evening entertainment which will blow your socks off. This year having the host being Contact, we're also going to have a lot of new people and new ideas injected into the event, if you think you know BarCamp think again. I hope to see you there…bright and sharp on Saturday morning 9am.

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