Month: November 2004

BBC finally tries out Podcasting

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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The Amazon theatre

Portrait with minnie driver

Interesting thing amazon seem to be doing on there site. Amazon theatre is basiclly a way of showing off small 5min post-independant films by large names. I heard nothing about it in the blogsphere, but I personally think its just interesting that Amazon is doing this, what is the business model? Maybe it drive traffic to amazon or they can sell extra books off the back of them? who knows, but the short films business is dominated by ifilm and I wonder what they make of the whole thing?

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BBC Scotland at bloggercon 3

Ok so I was listening to a podcast from IT conversations titled Newbies and about 50:20 in [clip with Julie] Julie from BBC Scotland Interactive takes the microphone as a crowd member. Where she talks about Island blogging. This took me by suprised because I was waiting for the 354 Bus and just never thought I would hear any one from BBC at bloggercon. Anyway what else took me by suprise.

She talks about the custom built system for blogging and the frustration with the system. And I'm glad shes very honest about it. It now allows me to vent my pain using and looking at the system for Worldservice. Thats no longer a secret too, because Julie also mentions Worldservice are looking at bring blogging to other parts of the world. Its very interesting Julie thinks other BBC blogs are not blogs because they do not allow for comments, trackbacks, etc. I would agree totally with that point.

I dont feel I am out of line saying that the scottish blogging system is not good. I understand they were under tons of pressure to roll something out for the residents of North Argyll and the experience was more important than the tool. But there moving into stage 2 now, they (we) really need to consider a professional tool. I'm in favoring Blojsom because I can make it work really nicely with our worldservice content management system. But honestly, as long as it can do things like multiple user, multiple blog, external access via xmlrpc, rss/atom. Then were moving in the right direction.
I'm feeling the need to sort out blojsom at work so we can at least get into a decent dialogue going about what we really need…

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Podcasting on BBC2 sometime soon?

Group of trendy people standing around with the culture show brand above

I'm hearing on the Daily Source code from Adam Curry that the BBC are doing a feature on Podcasting with him in his Amsterdam castle. Its meant to appear on a show called the culture show. But I cant see anything about it on the site. Oh well at least theres a real stream for watching if I miss it on the TV. Thinking of writing a email to the person producing the show and asking for more details… The abuse of being of a BBC employee.

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Cubicgarden needs to be fixed

Pink Flower close up

I have recieved emails and im's from people asking why comments are not working? I honestly dont know but I am investigating the issue. Seems only my blog is affected no one elses. Which is good news, but its going to take me sometime to work out whats happening and fix. I'm apologetic for those who lost there comments recently…

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Engadget Podcast with SMIL2.0 enclosures

Been spending more than usual time thinking about podcasting. 1. How do we make podcasts more blog entry like, so you browse through it, search engines can index it, etc? 2. How do we make advance the format without emposing a standard on it?

I was encoraged to listen to the engadget podcast yesterday from Kosso in a debate started by me centering around podcasting. Anyway, I was listening and the first item which centered around the fact, there podcast was actually a photo podcast and they were looking for a better way to do it. At this moment if you want to take part, you need to download this zip file and manually change the pictures when they tell you to in the podcast your listening to. Ok fair enough for now, but I was screaming SMIL while listening. Then they finally mentioned it.
Wicked Cool… before they started to rethink the idea, let me explain…

First up SMIL does not stand for simple markup something! Its Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language.
Getting a smil player on the portable players and everyone agreeing would be a problem? I always thought a MMS client was a SMIL player? Please for the love of all things decent in this world do not use Flash. And please no not powerpoint! For now yes, human interaction maybe one way of doing it but there was a good comment on blog about how to do it using a ipod and itunes.
See the fact your breaking down the mp3 into single objects is a good start. Some would scream blue murder, but joining them up together again could be easily done if you use playlists like pls or m3u for now. Hey why cant the podcast software join up the mp3's? even if using filenames which link them together?

Anyhow I'm thinking about two things, putting smil inside of RSS or changing the enclosure element to support structure. I much prefer the first one using smil with xml namespaces. So I'm going to show you how it could look. Please note, i'm doing alot of things in this example. I'm showing how you can play not only content which is downloaded but also content if your connected. And of course how to play audio with pictures in a large sequence. Check out the Engadget Podcast with SMIL2.0 enclosures

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Tools for the del.icio.us API

I've been spent along time in bed this weekend ill but checking out some of the tools based on different webservice API's. The blojsom author /images/emoticons/laugh.gifavid Czarnecki) created a set of java api but I dont need them now i'm using cocoon.

For a while now I've been considering using http://www.flickr.com or http://del.icio.us for creating a text map. If you dont know what I mean check out flickr Tags and real world del.icio.us tags. Anyway I'm really cosidering messing with svg to the same as extisp.icio.us. You can see the cubicgarden one here. Very nice but not useful enough for me. It all sits nicely with Harrys dissertation which is due today and I'm looking forward to reading sometime soon.

On another side, nutr.itio.us, makes posting to del.icio.us more a treat. Sid.vicio.us interface is an interesting take on making an web ontologies. The backup del.icio.us is simple and effective but I could easily do the same using cocoon by download the whole lot into a xml file on the server. Hell I could even trigger it on demand from anywhere in the connected world or set it up so it will do a backup after 100 (or whatever) requests through cubicgarden.com/blog.This guy (Joshua Schachter) has everything you need for more information on other tools.

By the way, i've not tested RSS Calendar yet, but it sounds interesting non the less.

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Belonephobia

Yes I am fucking terrified of needles. But once again, maybe like 3 times in the last month I have been ill with Flu like symptoms. Sarah assures me that I should have a flu vaccine jab. But she will never ever understand what its like to have such a fear run your life.

I remember I could never watch Trainspotting all the way through because I was so terrified that they would show a needle in someones arm. To that effect the pulp fiction scene where they jam the needle into Mia Wallance (Uma thurman) reduced me to hiding behind the sofa for the rest of the movie. And you know what is odd, I can take anything else but not if it involves a needle.
I choose not to go into past doctor and hospital appointments regarding injections because the stories actually bring back the terror I've come across. Lets say one thing, have you ever been stabbed in the finger with a needle when you were not looking by a doctor? didn't think so…

So what am I going to do about it all? I know I'm going to have to take a shot at some point soon, I'm going to recommend they knock me out first. You know sleeping gas, hit over the head, what ever as long as I dont see or feel the needle going into my arm. I've also been considering the fact of being drunk when I get my next injection, as I wouldn't feel it so much and would be powerless to do anything about it. Next up, brut force. I need like 3 guys to hold my arm down and stop me from moving while the doctor or nurse quickly gives me an injection.

Things I dont understand, why oh why do they have to give you a shot in your arm or your bottom? whats wrong with the leg? Is this the only way to give flu vaccine and other types of vaccines? couldn't I take pills over the course of a month or something else. Seriously I would rather take a pill up my arse that take a shot in my arm. OK and what ever happened to those air vacuum sprays which spray through your skin? I would pay for the privilege of using one of those if it meant I didn't need to have an injection.
I really hate it when people just write off off my fear, there are many people with this fear and you cant just get over it!

Obviously none of this covers giving blood for a blood test, but seriously I can not imagine anything worst than giving blood. Even taking a shot in the arm for a vaccine. For everyone who knows me and may think its funny to show me a needle in real life, let me tell you now its not funny and its not clever. If you threaten me with it you may be suprised when you see rage in my eyes and I will put you down for doing so.

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The love of REST webservices

You may have noticed that my bookmarks blog is now not used for storing my bookmarks. Instead I'm using del.icio.us which is a social bookmarking service. Anyway, until recently the section in cubicgarden titled my latest bookmarks was still pointing at the old bookmark blog but through the del.icio.us REST API. I was able to extract my latest bookmarks using http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent. Pull that into Apache Cocoon then do a XSL transformation to create the simple HTML include which Blojsom then called in using its Import tool plugin. Why do i need to use cocoon? Well the results from a REST interface are usually in xml and you need to transform it into html if you want to display it on a webpage. I could have found some way of doing it using Velocity, but why bother when cocoon does such a good job. It also cache's the request and supports http authentication. Making the two step process easy as pie. You can play with the cocoon pipeline which generates the reults by changing the number of entries on the end. http://adrenalin-online.demon.co.uk/cocoon/delicious/5 – will only get 5 of the latest entries. I also thought about doing the same using a RSS to html xsl transform, but why bother when the REST API is already there for you to use. Honestly I've only scratched the surface and theres lots more to play with. But for now this is good…

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Flickr API based desktop application

This is why company's needs to open there API's. I mean seriously would ludicorp build a desktop application for flickr this good? Maybe but they didnt need to because they simply opened there API's up over REST and Soap and someone built a application for them. This has to be a dream for companys, someone else building applications based on there services for free! I mean theres nothing stopping Ludicorp buying or bringing out there own version. But come on, why bother when someone else has? They just have to sit there improving there service and seeing more people converting to Flickr Pro. This is why google, ebay, amazon, etc are happy to expose there API's and let people build away. The web is indeed the platform… whens the windows version?

On the same vein, how to do a decent development weblog. Yahoo! Search blog, Flickr blog, Bitflux blog and of course Blojsom blog. Google your blog sucks, sorry to say. I've actually found myself liking Yahoo more, specially after there recent efforts with RSS. Its actually got me thinking about the rss feeds i generate. Maybe theres somethings I could do to make them more user friendly. Even if it includes putting a damm my yahoo button on my blog. Oh you can listen to the presentation here and the notes are here. Respect Y!

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