Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Quick heads up to say Boing Boing is now also podcasting. Like Cory says, its sounds something like the round table conversation of This week in Tech and This week in Media. So far it sounds good except the sound levels need normialising, keep up the great work guys.
This is just great stuff and of the blogs.
Final Score 101-95. It's a shock, but not too big of a shock. The world really has caught up with the USA basketball wise.
Ben Metcalfe writes in response to Brad Templeton's post.
At the blogger panel at Fall VON … Vlogger and blip.tv advocate Dina Kaplan asked bloggers to start vlogging. Its started a minor debate.
My take? Please dont.
Ive written before on what I call the reader-friendly vs. writer-friendly dichotomy. My thesis is that media make choices about where to be on that spectrum, though ideal technology reduces the compromises
Brad actually goes on to advocate podcasting as an acceptable format as it can be listened to whilst jogging, etc. I think hes correct to a degree – podcasting is certainly easier to consume than video/vlogging as it is a multitaskable medium (unlike blogging too). However its still binary – it still requires you to consume at a pace decided by the producer and its far harder to index and search through. Unless it contains a meta-wrapper, there is also no hyperlinking which is arguably one of the greatest keys to the world-wide-webs success.
Its for this reason that Ive been sceptical as to the long-term success of podcasting as an informational medium. And this scepticism certainly extends to vlogging.
My take is that ascii is great but you know what, how bland would the world be if people couldn't express themselves in any form they feel most comfitable? See Ben is taking the reciever (user) point of view and I think thats fine for a lot of people. Even myself, I blog more that I podcast or videocast because I like hyperlinking. But it would be wrong for me to expect everyone to do the same. If podcasting works for you, hey go for it. Yes think about your audience you certainly need to balance that with your own creativity. So in the end I do agree with Ben's final point.
However I think most people would agree that we need to produce work in the format thats right for the content at hand, and for the end consumer whos going to consume it. For the moment at least, I think most people still use the blogosphere more for informational use than they do entertainment and as such that needs to be considered when youre about to produce your next blog/podcast/vlog
Ideally binary searching, scanning, deconstruction would be as easy as acsii but its not at the moment. I think this is mainly a limitation of the tools and services out there. The service and tool creators blame the lack of standards. So the question is where is the microformats of the media? I would have suggested Mpeg4 could have been but its got so screwed up who knows.
So I was listening to a IT Conversations podcast about iCal/CalDav servers. My interest has perked up since Apple announced there own CalDav server will ship as part of the OSX 10.5 package later this year.
At its 2006 Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple Computer announced the iCal Calendar Server, an open-source implementation of a CalDAV server to be provided with the Leopard release of Mac OS X. CalDAV permits greater interoperability between calendars. This brings the number of open-source implementations of CalDAV to four, according to Dave Thewlis
So natrually I thought I'd check out the other 3 CalDav servers. Cal Connect is your standard consortium website, good information but badly architected. However before long I was off checking out the other CalDav servers.
Hula seems to be the most mature but I've had problems getting it running before, so I skipped it and looked at both UW Calendar and Bedework. From what I understand Bedework is based off UW anyway, so I skipped that one and tried out Bedework. So far I'm honestly impressed, its also worth checking out the feature list of this CalDav server or should I say Calendar framework/server. Now if I can only find the right URL for Mozilla Calendar CalDav syncing.
Found via Regular Jen, the GorillapodSLR. Which looks great and almost looks like a little mini spider thing taking over the world. But would be perfect for my Sanyo HD Camera.
The most interesting which came out of the Apple announcements today was the Apple iTV device which fits right into the area currently occupied by Divx DVD players, Media wireless adapters and of course my favorate the xbox. Taken from engadget…
In an unusual turn of events, Apple has pre-announced a wireless video streaming set-top box to be released in Q1 2007 with the tag line “you can take content to your computer or iPod, but now… TV.” Going by the codeword of iTV, the box looks like a flattened Mac mini — apparently it's around half the height — and features a built-in power supply, USB 2.0, Ethernet, 802.11 “wireless component video”, optical audio and HDMI ports, plus regular ol' RCA stereo audio ports. Controllable by the standard Apple remote, the iTV will come with an updated version of the Front Row interface that shares Front Row's smooth 3D graphics, but differs in that it has a menu on the right side of the screen. Apparently it'll work with both iTunes on both PCs and Macs, and will sell for $299.
The most interesting which came out of the Apple announcements today was the Apple iTV device which fits right into the area currently occupied by Divx DVD players, Media wireless adapters and of course my favorate the xbox. Taken from engadget…
In an unusual turn of events, Apple has pre-announced a wireless video streaming set-top box to be released in Q1 2007 with the tag line “you can take content to your computer or iPod, but now… TV.” Going by the codeword of iTV, the box looks like a flattened Mac mini — apparently it's around half the height — and features a built-in power supply, USB 2.0, Ethernet, 802.11 “wireless component video”, optical audio and HDMI ports, plus regular ol' RCA stereo audio ports. Controllable by the standard Apple remote, the iTV will come with an updated version of the Front Row interface that shares Front Row's smooth 3D graphics, but differs in that it has a menu on the right side of the screen. Apparently it'll work with both iTunes on both PCs and Macs, and will sell for $299.
So moving forward from my last post which I didn't quite finish. I've been keeping a close eye on what people have been saying in blog posts and I've seen hardly any negativity to the event.
Aral Balkan has a nice review of all the presentations he attended. He ends with…
BarCampLondon was a blast! Over the course of a weekend, I got to meet some amazing people, catch up with friends, learn some great stuff (including a new game called Werewolf) and get inspired.
No thank you Aral, I'm still not a fan of Flash, but I agree my view point of Flash exist in the Flash 4 and 5 era. I look forward to seeing if Adobe will take the biggest step and open source the Flash Player. I still think its not going to happen but we shall see.
During my time at BarCampLondon and the geekdinner the night before, I rubbed sholders with quite a few people but Nicole Simon sticks in my mind. She blogged and read a lot too. Her last post on BarCampLondon has a list of things which shes picked up on.
Looking over the reports of the last days of Barcamp, I notice some things popping up more than usual
- the usual topic of lack of women on such events
- the amount of user interface designers and flashers
- I am not a werewolf or I want to jot down a list of things to actually read out at the beginning of such events to have a consistent knowledge of the rules
- and last but not least: marketers are not evil and programmers are not gods
Good points but it doesn't stop there.
Developper focus is something which was – for my taste – a bit too much. For example driven by Ben Metcalfe who “disturbed” the talking crowd to force them to do mash pits – when most of the people just where waiting to play Werewolf.
It may be a good idea to call it DevBarcamp if you really want this to be programmer centric but if you don't say so, people will show up for more than just the programmer centric topics.
In this regard I would like to ask if those flash people actually counted for programming or not? *gd&r*
To be fair, it was on the schedule and yes we did kind of force mashup-pit on everyone but we felt if we didn't people might just hang around and get boarded till the dinner came. Then we might have people asking why we were not doing something about it. I think the point I'm getting at, is that we were not trying to force mashpit upon people, just suggesting things people could do. Werewolf was on the list too.
Nicole moves on the lack of women.
Again, of course, there were only few women although I found there where quite a lot. Until I started counting from memory – naa, not that many. We had a longer discussion about this and especially Ian was very keen how to make this work for women.
Without falling for the “let's get women in here just for the sake of it”. To which I agree totally. We can start passing on those messages to our networks and it may even be a cool idea to add to such a Barcamp description a bit more information for example about the camping part. (This Barcamp started out with having a boys / girls room but ended up with having a snorrer / non snorring separation.)
But in general I think we someday have to draw the line. I refuse to run after women all the time just to get them to such meetings if they dont also at least voice their opinions on why they did not come or where not feeling like coming. You cant complain about the cake but eat it too.
Yep I decided it was best to have the snorrers like myself in the main room away from everyone else. Nicole is right, I'm very keen to have more women involved in BarCampLondon, and maybe next time I will work a lot harder on making the event a lot more accessable to women, but not at the expense of others. BarCamp requires a certain amount of get up and go, a certain amount of passion. I know there are a lot of women with this passion but might have been put off by the over geekness of the event in past? And I think thats the point which Nicole quotes from Sarah Blow. Women don't want to be treated as special cases, just show them what there missing. Which is why flickr pictures really help in this case.
James Aylett covers a quite a few sessions including the missing presentation which I recorded but gave up to Paul Hammond.
Paul Hammond's half-presentation, half-discussion called Foo, Bar, Baz, on where future London unconferences and similar events might go, based in part on the strengths of FOOcamp that BarCamp might not be able to mimic easily. I didn't come away with a clear idea of what the future might hold, but I'm convinced that the UK has more than enough smart people to be exciting, even if most of us aren't going to make millions out of start-ups; we'll leave that to Silicon Valley. (And hey, their million is smaller than ours, so we'd have to try harder.)
Well put and I'm looking forward to putting that footage up online so others like Sarah Blow can get an insight into what was said and talked about in that 30mins. James also goes into depth on Sofia Kallin's (Ben Metcalfe's wife) rant about the differences between geek culture and mentality. This is a session I recorded and put up on Blip.tv, but I can't seem to find it right now.
Then Sofia Kallin challenged a bunch of people to persuade her that social networking software is a good thing.
The main thought that I came away from this session with was that there's a huge (and probably growing gap) between the top technologists, who are inventing and building all the sites which (to us) seem really cool; and the people who make up 99% of the world, and really don't care that we've used microformats, or that we have a table-free design, and who just want it to work.
There's a element of truth to this but catering to the masses is not always the best idea if you want to think outside the box. I won't go into the alpha geeks, cool merchants, early adopters stuff but there's got to be somewhere for the niche markets.
Other good blogs worth mentioning include the ones here and…
Like I've said many times now, thanks to everyone who helped out in little and big ways. Good luck to my partner in crime Ben Metcalfe whos now state side. Thanks to Murray, whos a true party animal, has world domination plans and a awesome team to back him up. And finally Sarah (my wife) for backing me up and letting me go off for a whole weekend to camp out with my peers and friends. Not many wives would give up there husband for a weekend.
I wish I had gone last year, but to be honest it was great to attend this year. I only wished I wasn't still feeling tired after BarCampLondon, which was a week ago now (I got the last train to London with Chris, Murray please tell me you didn't sleep on the beach). I happened to have filmed and photograph most of the sessions from d.construct and finally uploaded them to blip.tv. Please be warned there filmed at the lowest quality so I could get the battery life out my camera, plus my camera battery died in the middle of Jeffery Veen and Derek Featherstone's talks. I was also able to get a couple of interviews with Paul Boag, Gary Broadbent and Yahoo's dynamic duo Paul and Simon. My favorate session was of course Jeffery Veen, but a there was draw for 2nd place between the Yahoo's dynamic duo and Jeremy Keith. Thomas Vander Wal on tagging, Aral Balkan on Flex and Derek Featherstone on Web 2.0 accessability are also worth watching. Jeff Barr, well to be honest I wasn't that impressed by the presentation but the work Amazon are doing in this area is very cool.
Jeremy Keith really went to town on Microformats and everyone noticed. This is a good thing because as Ms Jen pointed out, the UK is in need of a Tantek type person. Jeremy then took to the outside park to lead the Microformats lunch. I wanted to get Jeremy for a interview, but by the time we got to the bar it was too late. Anyway, Kudos to Andy Budd and everyone else who helped him out, it all seemed to go really well and smoothly. I'll be back next year for sure.
Tomorrow I get to sit back and relax while someone else arranges a conference. Yep d.construct is upon us and this time around, I have a ticket. So I'll see some of you there. In the usual way, I'll hopefully take tons of photos and some videos if my batteries last long enough. After the day of conference speaking comes the social events and it looks like the beach side location is going to be a great ending to the day.
Jeremy Keith, that famous podcaster has tons of details about some pre-event happening right now and some open street mapping happening Saturday. I'll only be down for the Friday, but might be convinced to getting the first train to London if people are up for a all-nighter. There is also a Microformats picnic which looks to be good. I'm also thinking about doing some little interviews with some of the guys I met at BarCamp. Hey and lets not forget to get a game of Werewolf going at some point. Maybe Werewolf on the beach around a small camp fire with a full moon? You know really get into the mood.
Andy did ask me if I wanted to run a geekdinner after d.construct on the Saturday, but finding a venue in a city I don't know well on a Saturday night was a very tall order. Specially with all my time taken up on BarCampLondon at the time. Next year, for sure…
I have been reading tons of blogs talking about BarCampLondon. I don't know what else to say about BarCampLondon which hasn't been said. So I'll do my best to comment back on everyones blogs and round up the best parts in this blog post. So onwards and upwards…
So first up, Sarah Blow from the Girl geekdinners, decided to have an exclusive girl geekdinner in the middle of BarCampLondon. It was great stuff and I think we had a really good conversation about women and technology. Sarah with her brand new Toshiba Tablet PC (2 generations ahead of mine) recorded the whole session and we would have carried on if not for the Pizza delivery (thanks Yahoo for that). I didn't attend the mystery session but thats also up and online. Good work Sarah, I look forward to listening to both of them.
Simon Wilson introduced everyone to Werewolf while the Mashpit started in the main room. Mashpit started off with a range of topics but slowly filtered down to a very small amount of people. Rob, Sheila, Tom and myself were around one switch talking interchangable about XSL, Ruby on Rails, pipelines, etc. I think while me and Rob argued about frameworks, Sheila and Tom had settled into a session on learning XSL. Now Tom's well into XSL.
Sheila also taught me how to use XSLT. It's so unbelievably cool!
Me and Ben had not planned to be attending many of the sessions because we thought we'd be too busy cleaning up and directing people to the right place (or something). This was certainly not true, specially on Sunday. But to be honest, it was all to do with the helpers we had. People just helped out and for example at 4:45pm on Sunday the place was pretty much cleaned in 15mins flat. Yep 5 meeting rooms and a reception just needed a hover and a polish here and there. It was truely awesome and ended the conference perfectly. Unfortually I made the mistake of recommending a pub which was actually closed down, so people did carry on but it was over for me. It was a shame because I should have phoned Sarah Blow or someone. Damm it! *smile* Don't worry guys I'll make up for it all at d.construct this Friday.
Nicole and others make a really good point about the lack of post-conference support. I hoped that the wiki would be used more but we're still having the lock problem with PB wiki so now people are using Ben's Wiki. Ideally we would have something like the Backnetwork, but you have to remember its a unconference so nothing can be planned beforehand. However it would have been great to have all the presentations online so I could revisit the ones I missed.
Don't worry folks there's lots more to come…. once I finish writing up the rest.
While I delay my rather large post rounding up BarCampLondon, I've been thinking about Werewolf the game. I'm thinking about doing a game at the next geekdinner, as I think it could go down really well. Check out the Videos I posted from BarCampLondon and one from FooCamp by Tara Hunt 5 days earlier. Honestly the game is as adictive as Poker but can be played with more people and has that key thing I love about poker. Reading people…
So who's up for it after d.construct on Friday?
I'm almost in tears writing this, why? I don't know its really stupid but while driving back from BarCampLondon a few minutes ago and it hit me, we just had a near perfect BarCamp. Its hit me hard and I'm just overjoyed and tears are slowly running down my face now. Sheila asked me afterwards if I had a good time? And I answered with a kind yes but now I'm thinking fuck me, we just pulled off the first British BarCamp, it was an amazing event and everyone loved it. I don't know one person who complained about anything this weekend. Everyone was glowing with praise about the event and now I'm getting it.
Thanks to everyone who attended and made this one of the best weekends I've ever had. So much was learned but I'll get around to the sessions in another blog post. Till then please do check out Blog posts on Technorati, Pictures on Flickr, Bookmarks on Delicious and Videos on Blip.TV
And everyones having fun. Plus were playing this great social game called Werewolf
