Month: January 2007

Yahoo are at it again…

I think it was about a year ago when Yahoo tried to sweet talk everyone who used Flickr into upgrading to a Yahoo ID. Old Skool flickr members revolted and staged a large protest. Well its happening again, I wonder if there will be a large protest again? I just received this email from Yahoo.

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we'll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

We're making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at: http://go.yahoo.com.

95% of your fellow Flickrites already use this system and their experience is just the same as yours is now, except they sign in on a different page. It's easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID and about five minutes if you don't.

You can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you'll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page:

http://flickr.com/account/associate/

Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes: you can continue to have your FlickrMail and notifications sent to any email address at any domain and your screenname will remain the same.

Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here: http://flickr.com/help/signin/

Thanks for your patience and understanding – and even bigger thanks for your continued support of Flickr: if you're reading this, you've been around for a while and that means a lot to us!

Warmest regards,

– The Flickreenos

So as Neil and others have pointed out, the Yahoo/Flickr protest is back and this time Yahoo don't seem to be rolling over. So whats my beef with Yahoo? Well let me tell you in a couple of points.

  • I bloody paid for 2 years of Flickr not Yahoo.
  • My Yahoo ID is something completely different and getting ianforrester or anything close is going to impossible (trust me I tried)
  • I don't want my non-commercial licensed photos involved in Yahoo's promotional warez.
  • Sorry but I preferred to have my own ID not linked to Yahoo, simple.
  • Why on earth does Yahoo want to know Birthday and Postcode? Is this needed just to share pictures?

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The Tom and Ian Show?

Recently I've been doing more podcasts, and finally not cringing when I hear my deep voice. Me and Tom Morris have started a podcast in the vain of the pretty dead Gillmor Gang. The MP3 file is on Archive.org and you can subscribe to the feed here.

Between all the outages and bad quality of my voice, there is a pretty good discussion about a whole host of things including RDF/A vs Microformats, XHTML vs HTML5, the semantic web vs The Semantic Web. Tom is working on some clever notes system which I assume uses RDF or OPML to clever effect.

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I’m a founding member of the Media 2.0 work group

media 2.0 workgroup

I'm proud to announce I'm also a member of the Media 2.0 workgroup, along side people like Ben Metcalfe, Suw & Kevin, Steve Boyd, Chris Saad, etc.

The Media 2.0 Workgroup is a group of industry commentators, agitators and innovators who believe that the phenomena of democratic participation will change the face of Media Creation, Distribution and Consumption.

I think you will agree, this is certainly a noble cause. And when Chris outlines in detail the root of the group it just gets better and better. I like to think of this group being something like the mix of people who turned out the forever relevant Cluetrain manifesto

The term “Web 2.0” has become a little warn out lately, but it has had an important and dramatic effect on our industry. It has spurred innovation, driven investment and ignited the imagination of the entrepreneurial community.

The Web (2.0 or otherwise), however, is only part of the Media landscape. An important part of course, however Media includes the superset of people, places and things that can co-existing in and around the web to create participation experiences.

Radio, TV, Traditional Media Outlets, News, Entertainment, Movies, Music, Game Consoles etc all have an opportunity to innovate by 'getting social', and each will be impacted by and contribute to the transformative effects of Media 2.0.

There are underlying issues and opportunities however. Issues with fancy names like Aggregation, Attention, Convergence, DRM, Distribution, Engagement, Identity, Participation. These issues need discussion across the perceived Media boundaries and traditional disciplines so that we can all achieve real, integrated results.

To put it plainly, the visionaries, tool builders, emerging social media participants, 'old media' vanguard, investors and marketers all need to speak to each other to help create this opportunity together.

We call this broader ecosystem Media 2.0.

Like the Web, Media 2.0 is about shifting the power from the few to the many. We, the participants, are (or should be) the most important parts of the emerging Social Media. We each have a story to tell and connections just waiting to be made.

The challenge, however, is to help the unsocial media understand how to be social. To help advertisers understand the value of an engaged, trusting participant over a passive audience demographic. To help content creators understand that sharing and remixing is more profitable than DRM and to shine a light on the best innovations and ideas emerging from that very long tail.

Every community needs some help to grow. The long tail has a head, and every conversation needs a topic. So in this spirit, we have gathered a group of people who are passionate about the issues of Media 2.0 to help propel and focus the conversation.

These participants are from a cross-section of disciplines and agendas. Some merely comment, criticize and consult, some develop tools, some live the dream and have started their own Media 2.0 empires and some are fighting from the inside of established media to change the face of ‘business as usual’.

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Geek and Geekhag podcasts

Sarah and Ian

Finally I got around to setting up another blog for Geek and Geekhag podcast.

http://www.cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/geekandgeekhag/ or http://www.geekandgeekhag.com/

There is also a RSS 2.0 feed which you can stick in your Podcatcher clients such as Jucie, iPodderX, and yuck iTunes.

At the moment we only have the 2007 episodes posts up, but we'll add the other older ones soon. Me and Sarah will be posting all future ones there and maybe only once in a while pointing to them from our own blogs. Subscribe and enjoy the weekly podcasts.

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Some interesting videos I’ve seen recently

So here's a couple of interesting videos I've seen recently,

Rocketboom (yep I still watch it) has a interesting short analysing the different video production used in the democrats announcements videos for the 2008 elections (can't think of a better way to explain them). They also have a good piece about paper or plastic bags and some interesting facts about the internet
and china.

On10 has a long piece about the Pioneer DVJ 1000 which is a Digital CD/DVD turntable. The reason why its DVD is so you can mix video along side music. Now I've seen this a while ago but never actually seen it been used live before. Dj Ronnie G does a good job showing off whats possible. Now to be fair I wasn't blown away but made me rethink playing with Virtual
Dj 4's ability to mix video at the same time as mixing music.

Large multi touch displays with Jeff Han and Phil Davidson. And I want to archive the other interface stuff which people might have missed over time. Light tracer and Afterglow use laser pens to interesting effect, MIT have something where they use a brush called I/O
brush and Multitouch research.

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Tom Reynolds at the Citizen Journalism conference



Click To Play

So after my nightmare trip to Birmingham. I did get the conference about 1 hour late, but in time for Tom Reynolds good presentation which cause a nice stir. The room was full of journalism academics and they asked a lot of tricky questions of Tom. Anyway as usual, I recorded the presentation and the questions which
followed (i did do it at the lowest quality sorry). Tom has also added a post about his presentation.

So the talk went pretty well (I think so anyway). The audience mainly consisted of a load of journalism lecturers with one or two from the blooging community. So obviously I felt incredibly qualified to be there…

Thankfully I think I entertained them a bit and gave them a few things to think about. After the talk there was a workshop session and a panel discussion which I also think went well.

The rest of the conference was good too but raised more questions that it answered. I recorded the end panel which is not the best quality because I was so far away and Vicky Taylor from BBC News. Good work Paul

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Rights will make you rich or how to Boag?

I went to Rights will make you rich at one dot zero. Without going into details, it was a interesting debate once the presentations (1) (2) were out of the way although I have no idea what on earth the PSP document is. And one of the highlights of the night was a guy called Saw who was trying to make a point about something and decided
to storm out in frustration. I didn't quite get the point he was making but it was something to do with freesoftware and opensource. I'm sure it was well thought-out but he left before we got a chance to talk. The rest of the evening wasn't very note worthy and I was too tired to contribute anything to the conversation after the BBC Innovation Forum.

Luckly the Boagworld meetup was far better.

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Having a nightmare day and its only 9:20am

It started at 6:20am when I woke up in a panic. I had not actually received the confirmation number for my train tickets to Birmingham today. Why was I going to Birmingham? Well back tracking a bit, I had heard about the citizen journalism conference a while ago but couldn't really justify paying for it and taking the time off. However, on Tuesday 23rd I got a email in my spam box from Paul Bradshaw. The start went exactly like this…

I am writing to invite you to the 'Citizen Journalism' conference this Friday, 26th January 2007. This one day event in Birmingham's Custard Factory will provide an important opportunity for those who work in the news industry, academics and citizen journalists to create a network of those working within the field, and discuss the issues involved. As one of the country's foremost bloggers we would be honoured if you would like to attend this event as a non-paying guest.

Ok so I'm thinking they must have the wrong guy. Cubicgarden.com doesn't even make the top 10000 in Technorati (but to be fair I've had problems with Technorati for a while now). Although I did make it into the Top 500 feedster bloggers in late 2005. But honestly I don't see how the thoughts and ideas of dyslexic, designer/developer can be of that much interest. Saying all
that, I got to say its quite good to think of myself as a Z level celeb in the blogosphere. Anyway you look at it, I'm still glowing after reading that email and thought I'd better make a effort go along.

And this is where things started to go wrong. On Wednesday I booked the tickets for the train on the BBC's internal train service (supplied by the trainline for business) and I waited a bit for the confirmation email but was so busy I forgot about it and ended up going home without checking again. But I noticed there were a couple of unread items on my phone which is automatically synced with Outlook. So I just assumed those emails could have been the conformation number. Boy was I wrong. It turned out to be
two emails about the future of webapps which is now sold out (whole different story).

On Thursday I was out of the office and busy during the night at the Rights will make you rich and Boagworld meetup, so didn't get a chance to do anything due to having to get up really early the next day. Anyway, so today I logged on to my email remotely from home and checked my email for anything from the trainline. Of course there was nothing. So I attempted to book another ticket from London Euston to Birmingham and back again. The system was having none of it. I tried for like 20mins, even tried booking
single tickets but it just wasn't going to be. Tried phoning our BBC Trainiline helpdesk and the trainline directly but all I got was call back at 8am. Well I would if I didn't have to catch a train at 8:10am. So in the end I logged out and had to signup with the plain consumer facing Trainline website myself and fork it all out on my own credit card. Luckly it worked but I couldn't book tickets for the morning because you can't buy tickets 2hrs before the train leaves. So by the time all this happened and I
quickly jumped in the shower, it was 7:30am and I still had to unlock the scooter and go to euston.

I was already up against it and the traffic along commercial road was stupid and not going anywhere soon. But I did manage to get to Kings Cross at 8:10am which meant I missed the train but could get the next one ok. By the time I found where I could park my scooter (right out side the station actually) it was 8:30 and after getting my ticket (38 pounds for a single to Birmingham) I thought I'd quickly grab some food from Marks and Spencers because I hadn't eaten well yesterday and didn't have any breakfast.
Well you can guess what happened when I got to the platform. Yep wave goodbye to the train. They had cancelled the train at 8:43 and told everyone going that way to get on the earlier 8:40. I think its at that point I thought things couldn't get much worst and I thought well I got to at least write a blog entry about this day I'm having.

Well in the last sting of the tail, my ticket I bought was a super saver which is not valid for travel before 9:45am. The next train (which I'm currently sitting on) was at 9:10am but I didn't know about the super saver till 9:05am. So I ended up having to pay extra money to make up the fair difference (a extra 25 pounds). And to finally to top off everything my power socket is dodgy so it sometimes cuts out plus there is zero wireless! Not even a costly one. I haven't hooked up phones for dial up access yet
with my new laptop and I can't remember the long modem query string for Orange let alone O2.

Anyway, I'm sure the conference will be good and I got molly's birthday bender tonight so i'm sure this morning won't set the tone for the rest of the day.

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Westminster Council, what a bunch of greedy f…

Matthew lead me on to the scheme where Westminster Council will charge motorcyclist a price for parking. It seems to have moved from a joke into something real with legs. I think this so crap and we need to do something about this before it happens and worst still Camden and others start following suite. How dare they claim the cost of securing bikes parking will cost up to 1 pound a day. This is simply wrong and smacks in the face of the congestion charge which is meant to stop congestion in London. Bikes are a good way to get across london and cause very little congestion. Charging for bike parking sends a message that were not welcome. Anyway From London Bikers

Thanks to the efforts of our LB Reporter Mr Toby Stokes – we secured an interview with Westminster Council about the parking scheme. We also asked you what you thought – and here's the video.

Sign the petition here http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/FreeBikeParking/ and visit the campain website here http://www.free4bikers.org.uk/

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