Month: November 2004

I first heard about the SVG group here. And decided I should go for sure, as I've not been involved with SVG for a while now but am still a large supporter. The group was a interesting mix, but still mainly acdemia and developers. Theres was one guy called Paul who was a designer/artist who I had a good chat with afterwards. I recomended reading Harry and Dave's Dissertations as there right up his street. I also suggested to Jan-Klaas of vectoreal who was showing encrypted content inside SVG. He should consider looking at XML Encryption standard because a killer application would beable to pass a SVG around to anyone with encrypted content. Then for different groups to beable decrypt different parts of the same SVG. Think of it like the Rubik's Magic Rings where with the correct process you can get a different model/picture that others. I remember it took me hours to work out how to get a 3D construction. Anyway, it was a shame Mark Birbeck from x-port.net did not attend because I was interested in seeing formsplayer 2 working. Pn the plus side, I think SVGOpen 2005 is looking and sounding great. Plus its only in the netherlands so I'm thinking it would make a nice holiday as Sarahs never been to the netherlands and I have not been for 5 years now. The prices also seem very reasonable for a 4 day conference and if I do decide to submit a paper (which I am considering) its even cheaper. Thinking of doing my idea about dynamicly changing content based on external feeds. Think 10×10 and your close.

Some thoughts afterwards. Most of the Vodafone live phones come with SVG as standard now. Just because SVG is XML, doesnt mean you shouldnt forgot the metadata. Adobe Illustrator CS has support for Adobe's XMP metadata, but even putting in rdf dublin core is a good idea. Worth reading – From hypertext to Datument.

At long last there is stable support for native SVG in Mozilla, so its really starting to happen. And talking about Mozilla…
I need to check out XUL and XBL. I remember looking at XUL along time ago when Mozilla was still in point release. Now it seems pretty darn good and easy to write. I see it as a useful way to combine different webservices into an application. For example I could use the del.icio.us api with cocoon server to pass data back and forth into the XUL interface and on to other apps. The example I saw on Friday took content from a xml file processed it and transformed it into a svg all inside the XUL interface. Ok and another thing I learned about. XBL – A way to bind xml languages together. Its like using CSS almost in XHTML but actually does away with complex namespaces issues? But XBL raises many questions. Whats the difference between XBL and namespaces in the practical sense? and whats sXBL?

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At long last I decided to send the email which I had been storing in my draft for the last 2 months. Since we started syndicating RSS 1.0, I had thought about sending out the email to the alpha bloggers and getting the word out to the bloggerosphere that way. Now its starting to happen.

I got a email back from David Weinberger, saying wow! Thanks (I blogged it.).
One from Dave Winer saying,

RSS 2.0 actually does have an item-level pubDate element.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss#ltpubdategtSubelementOfLtitemgt

Anyway, glad to see you getting into syndication in all those languages.

In reply to Dave I wrote.

We were comparing RSS 0.91 against RSS 1.0 because http://www.bbc.co.uk/news are currently syndicating RSS 0.91 and we didn’t want to just follow there lead.

RSS 2.0 was talked about too, but we felt that RSS 1.0 with its RDF base was more suited for us, as we could convert 1.0 to 2.0 without loosing any data. With that in mind, we are able to bring in RSS 2.0 at any point in the future.

I'm honestly just glad we are able to syndicate in so many languages, and hope this encourages others (small and large) to publish multiple language rss. As RSS should not be tied to Latin based languages.

I also recieved a very thought provoking reply from Bob DuCharme.

Very cool, congratulations, and cheers for going with RSS 1.0.

Once enough stories accumulate, would the new entries be bumping the old ones out of the feed files, as most do, or are there any ideas about making archives of the entries available? I've ranted a bit about how archived RSS from anyone would be a tremendous contribution to a semantic web, while I still can't see any use cases for transient RSS in a semantic web. (Useful nevertheless, obviously, but just not in any semantic web contexts.)

Honestly, I replied. I have never really thought about archiving RSS. At the moment we do not archive our indexes for worldservice sites. That may change, but its a very interesting thought none the less.

And of course, I got some nice emails back from BBC staff who saw David Weinberger's blog saying great work. I'm hoping to send another one out to boingboing, ntk, slashdot, theregister, etc once we get our help pages up and running. But before that I will keep a track of what happens in the bloggerosphere using my uncrafted rss feeds from Daypop and Feedster. At the moment its a bit of echo chamber.

I wont talk about why we choose RSS 1.0 over RSS 2.0 right now, but this is a interesting view on the debate. By the way, please check out the RSS feeds which are, lets say full of metadata. For example here is the caribbean feed.

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At long last its ok to write my feelings about what is going on in the bbc recently. Well first up the context. The BBC is commited to public support, innovation and driving the need for digital takeup in the areas of Broadband (online), Digital Radio and Digital TV. Great, but what does that actually mean?

Well I wont explorer too deeply into the BBC response to the Graf report, but one of the many projects is one called BBC Backstage.

The BBC will support social innovation by encouraging users’ efforts to build sitesand projects that meet their needs and those of their communities. Where market impact considerations allow, BBC management will provide access to core infrastructure applications, like the postcoder database at the heart of iCan, which can in turn become the core of new social applications created by our users, for our users. This is exemplified through plans for Backstage, a public site for the BBC’s in-house development teams to share development plans with their peers and audiences. In a similar way to Google’s Labs test-site, this will be a place to demonstrate work in progress, share expertise and invite contributions and collaboration with expert users. The BBC will also be committed to using open standards that will enable users to find and repurpose BBC content in more flexible ways.

Yes think about it like Google labs and your almost on the right track. Unlike google labs, we may expose data which will relate to the people more than google. Things like Search, Postcodes, Weather, News, Listener data, Geography data, TV listings, etc, etc. The applications, services, etc which are built upon our data from the public will not be hosted on our servers. Not to say that BBC employee's wont try things out internally and expose them externally. But the emphases is on explosing the underline data through webservices or simple API's. Or we are asking in return is to keep it non-commercial, tell us about the service, application, etc and add some kind of attribution to the BBC and BBC backstage. Simple!

This goes deeper into the BBC that you may at first think. For example since I've been working for the BBC it has been very cagey about releasing information about planned projects. And of course understandably, no companys wants to see the latest plans taken and modified by others in the same industry. But you have to ask who are BBC's rivials? Specially in the online space, who? Any how google, flickr, yahoo, microsoft, etc all seem to manage to deliver enough content to know whats going on pass the press release but not critical plans. This almost transparency is what the BBC is starting to adopt now instead of just talking about it.

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It started with a in our time email on a internal discussion board.

We're now offering you the chance to download each edition of In Our
Time, on a trial basis, for 7 days after broadcast. Each edition will
be available soon after broadcast.

The mp3 file can be used on portable players, such as iPods, or you
can just listen to it on your computer.

To download on a PC – right click below, and 'Save Target As' and to
download on a Mac – control button and click.
Follow this link to give us your reactions to this trial

Download in our time

After my email a discussion broke out about podcasting in the BBC.

Do Radio 4 have a RSS feed? This would be the perfect chance to try podcasting with BBC content. I could imagine pushing the audio with the best comments from the debate page in a RSS feed.

(Just in case you do not know what podcasting is, please refer to this piece from the New York times – New Food for IPods: Audio by Subscription – http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/technology/28podd.html?ex=1100149200&en=47e7584f94c0e918&ei=5070&oref=regi)

Broadcasting is what we the BBC, do best…

Ian Forrester | BBC World Service [New Media Software Engineer]

And it all ended with the Radio and Music interactive team doing the clearing work and creating a Podcast for the series. I'm not claiming credit for the podcast, as its a general idea most of the BBC employee's are looking at. But I'm so happy to see something like podcasting happening (or at least being tested), and at such speed for a large company like the BBC. Matt Webb has the same kind of information on his weblog, damm you matt for being able to weblog what you work on… If only I could do the same. Anyway please give your reactions and feedback on this page. By the way, heres a test RSS 1.0 file using RDF enclosures. Please comment if your podcasting app works with it.

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