Month: July 2007

Redbull air race comes to London

I'm sure everyone else has seen this for weeks but one of the nice things about traveling on the train and tube is the advertising (not that I really like advertising). But the Redbull Air Race comes to South East London on 28th/29th July.

 

I don't know what it is but since Redbull sponsored the Wipeout series on the first playstation, I've always thought Redbull should setup some racing league using something a little special. Anti-gravity crafts which do up and over 200 miles per hour was always going to be a tall order but I got to say this air race isn't that far off in principle. However I tuned in a while ago at my parents house and watched the show from a desert in America somewhere and I got to say it – Wipeout it certainly wasn't.

Don't get me wrong it was exciting but not in the same way and it could be made more exciting if required. Also the time slot of 4pm seems too early for a dare devil fast paced air race. The show needs a shake up, like give the footage to a bunch of skateboard video artist and watch them remix the show into something amazing.

I guess what I'm saying is the pace of the flying is ok but the actual pace of the show is pretty slow and really lets it down. I guess I'll have to pay for a ticket to get a feel for what its like live. But its not cheap at 50 pounds, although I just missed this.

10% of all general tickets are being given free to local residents of affected borough (Greenwich, Newham and Tower Hamlets). For Newham and Tower Hamlets residents, these free tickets have been allocated by online ballot through this website. The ballot opened on Thursday 17th May and closed on Monday 2nd July. Ticket winners have been notified by e-mail.

Greenwich Council will be organising the distribution of their allocation of tickets. If you are a resident of the London Borough of Greenwich please contact Michele Douglas on 0208 921 6405 or by email at michele.douglas@greenwich.gov.uk in order to apply for free tickets.

 

 

Oh well I missed out this time. Oh by the way, they also tucked this rss feed away.

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D.construct tickets now available

Tickets for the popular web deign and development conference, dConstruct 2007, go on sale on Today (10th July) at 11am (about the time I post this hopefully). Tickets usually sell out very fast. So what you waiting for? At less that 100 pounds for a Friday conference in Brighton you can't go wrong.

Don't forget to hang around for social events on Friday night and BarCampBrighton on Saturday and Sunday

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Playstation 3 price cut

So Sony finally start to officially cut the price of the Playstation 3. I've seen so many deals around the web of playstation 3 for about 70 dollars off when you buy at least 3 games but this is much better news. Its still outside of my price range but its put the debate between the Xbox 360 and PS3 back into focus.

I'm hoping Sony take their cuts seriously and drop the European PS3 down by 125 pounds in the next few weeks.

I was asking George today if he knew anyone who had put linux on their PS3. He seemed to have heard about someone who also put MythTV on top of that. He mentioned MythTV front end and back end, which I'm going to check out to see if the front end is anywhere close to xbmc. Who knows maybe I might connect a basic PC to my TV and then later on upgrade that to a PS3? Who knows…

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twitter + delicious + im = Pownce?

I've been avoiding Pownce since hearing about it on Diggnation a while back. A whole heap of invites have been sent to me but I've resisted till I got one from Sheila. I started writing reasons why not to use Pownce but then changed my mind about writing a rant back and decided to actually try it out first before blasting it.

So you can see from the title I think Pownce is basically a combination of twitter/jaiku, delicious and im. This is no bad thing but… what I think is bad is the closed network aspect of it all. This all leads back to a comment I got back from Regular Jen about Facebook.

Also good to hear that Facebook won't become the main 'hangout' for Geek Dinners, as I know I won't be dipping my toes in their shark-infested site again. I still am not clear on why a Facebook Geek Dinners group is necessary, but I hope you find it useful and wish you the best. /images/emoticons/happy.gif

And you know what shes right. I forgotten why I use to hate these non media social networks. Closed networks. I signed up to facebook because they started to open up with a 3rd party API and the sheer pressure from friends. Pownce on the other hand has none of these and yes its early days, I can't get over the simple combination which to me has no benefit except speed and convince over the larger combination. Yes it has a public timeline like twitter so you can tune into someone elses public recommendations but for f-sake delicious has had this ability for years. For example I send links to some delicous friends using the syntax or machine-tag for:username. Once you've done that you can link to anything including binary objects. Some would say the problem is that anything you recommend appears in your own bookmarks. So what? Anything you recommend should be good enough to keep.If not then use email, im, twitter, jaiku, etc, etc. What about privicy? Or like Jen you want to opt out?

Anyway this is really about Pownce but social networks for the sake of social networking. Something I've forgotten…

And at that I'm unsubscribing from Pownce now.

updated

Is there no end to this madness?

Pownce Invites For Sale On eBay  —  Proving that everything has a market, invites to Kevin Rose's P2P service Pownce are up for sale on eBay.  —  Bidding on Pownce invites start at 1c with buy it now prices at $5.  —  It wasn't that long ago when Gmail invites were available for sale on eBay

meta-technorati-tags=pownce, delicious, twitter, jaiku, im, email, facebook, ebay

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My Media Consumption Diet

So Improbulus tagged me for this social meme a while back but I didn't actually notice. The meme was started by Jeremiah Owyang who is also in the Media 2.0 group along with myself. Anyway from the man himself…

I’m hoping to start this meme, that others will join in and share their media consumption diet, in hopes, that we’ll start to learn how they get information or be entertained. I’ve sort of mixed up mediums, and media types, but after some thought, that’s the best way to organize it.

 

Improbulus also asks the tricky question about what is media anyway which I may get into later in this post.

Web: I get all my news from the web, mainly I read news via Greatnews my personal RSS reader, anything I miss tends to get come via email links from friends. I am currently subscribed to over 300 feeds you can check them all out here because I sync with Bloglines. Obviously I keep my private RSS feeds to my personal RSS reader. I did consider switching over to Google Reader with its offline ability but what tends to happen is when I'm offline and looking at my RSS feeds I can read through 1000's of items in a couple of hours. Google Reader with Gears only stores about 1000 max and isn't as flexable as GreatNews.

As you can see in my subscriptions I have many different folders.

  • Cubicgarden – feeds related to myself, this includes my personal lifestream.
  • Design – is a mixture of inspirational feeds with design feeds
  • Development – use to be development blogs but this got a little strained with the design and xml development folders
  • Education – feeds related to educational blogging, I use to have lots more in this about 3 years ago
  • Events – this was my way of keeping a track of what was going on socially but this has been replaced with ical feeds in Outlook 2007, soon to be Plaxo 3.0
  • Friends – Feeds from my friends, I'm trying to update this one regularly but I don't add everyone unless I think there blog is useful
  • Fun – Uhhhhh what do you think?
  • Gaming – This isn't just gaming, but ARG and hardware type stuff
  • General News – This is where stuff like Boingboing, Slashdot, Digg, techmem, etc go.
  • Interest – bit of a misc folder, which I hope to move in the future
  • Internet Law – This is where my copyright, DRM, Creative Commons, type feeds go
  • Lifehacks – This is one is useful but I tend to review it once every month
  • Media – This is where all my lost feeds go, in the future I'll start adding Bit Torrent feeds and other media related feeds
  • Podcasts – I'm planning to move all these feeds out of here in the future but the idea was to have all my podcast feeds in one folder. This is simply not practical because many people attach enclosures willy nilly now.
  • SmartComms – This was going to be a mix of mobile phone type stuff and human social networking type feeds.
  • Tracking – This was always going to be a place for temporary feeds like ebay searches and offers, etc
  • Watched projects – These are feeds for projects, startups, etc. This folder is very useful for keeping an eye on projects which I may have forgotten over some time
  • XML development – this is where my xml and semantic web type feeds go, in the future I'll start mixing regular development with this folder

You will notice in my feeds I don't subscribe to feeds from mainstream media including believe it or not the BBC. I tend read BBC news in Twitter right now but don't follow any other except sometimes the Guardian's technology and game blogs.

Another different thing about my media consumption when it comes to news is Particls. Particls is a personal desktop attention engine. Its seriously amazing and changed the way I read my news. I tend to use it at work a lot just to keep an eye on whats going on during the day. Its alerted me to many things which were related. Its also been useful for sending people upto the minute information.Its a couple of steps beyond a RSS reader and I'm honestly very impressed with it. I would like to see it on Linux but I'm going to try virtualising it with VMware or Xen in the near future.

Right backing out of news. I use Firefox for everything except really really dodgy sites. Opera is reserved for those sites because of the ability to turn off Java, Javascript, etc in a second. However I do tend to browse the web with Javascript and Flash turned off using a combination of Flashblock and No-Script extensions. I use Tabs a lot and once in a while will del.icio.us my spare tabs. I don't use startpages because I use load previous tabs. I use a Dell PC laptop for most of my browsing. I never use IE7 unless its for Automatic updates and will unlikely install any other browser except Opera (yeah forget about it Safari).

Communication – I own a cracking little phone, Orange SPV M700. It has everything including Wifi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS and 3G. I use it a lot for mapping now I have GPS and iGo. I wish I could mount the phone to my scooter so I could use it even more but generally I do walk around new cities with my phone in my hand. Yes its a Windows Mobile 5 phone but honestly I like it. I choose the phone with no keyboard because I own a Bluetooth keyboard and I can type very fast on the on-screen keyboard.

I hate using my phone for making calls but I do mainly using my new Stereo Bluetooth headphones from itech. I don't own a Mpeg3 player, I did in the past but saw earlier on that I could use my phone for music and more often podcasts.

I email a lot and use Thunderbird 2.0 as my main mail client of choice. I have to use Outlook 2003 at work because the BBC uses exchange mail servers. I hate outlook 2003 for email, specially when I've got Outlook 2007 on my laptop. I own a ton of email accounts which I've setup on cubicgarden.com as my way of dealing with spam. I also own about 3 gmail accounts as backup and one hotpop account for unsecure mails. Yes I've setup the others with SSL and TLS using Thunderbird, so no one can snoop on my mail while on a shared wireless point.

To combat spam, like mentioned before I use multiple accounts with different levels of use. I do have a spam system on the mail server and did have a greylisting system a while ago thanks to Miles and Mark. But generally I find the multiple accounts work well and Thunderbird''s spam filter works enough for me to work on email without too many problems,

I do use instant messenging a lot and use Twitter via IM a lot. I use Pigeon (previously called Gaim) and then connect to 4 different networks (Jabber, AIM, Yahoo, MSN). More and more I'm dropping MSN and would like to drop the others except Jabber. This is becoming easier thanks to Google. I also love the idea of im on the phone but recently its been hard to find a im client for the windows mobile platform which doesn't charge a stupid a mount of money. So in the mid term I'm using tinytwitter a java application with twitter as my substute for mobile im.

I do have email on my phone too but just plain old IMAP and POP. No Push email for me. I do however have a work phone (nokia N80) which really sucks and makes for a bad 3G modem for my laptop.

Music and Podcasts : My phone currently syncs with Winamp and I have 2gig of space to fill up every day. I tend to fill up my phone with new podcasts once a week. I do listen to music, but generally its mixed together already. I simply don't buy music because the music I listen to is so expensive and tends to be hard to find. So instead I use a bit torrent site called Trancetraffic.com to get mixes from the likes of Tiesto, Armin Van Buuren, etc. I do download singles too for my own remixes but if I was to take up djing a little more seriously would start buying the tunes from somewhere. What Trancetraffic does which all the online stores miss is have a community of active users who you can see what they have downloaded. So I can see how many people have downloaded a tune or through the seeds, etc how  Also if your in any douht the trancetraffic community upload trance packs and uses the forums. So you can really get a clue about which tunes are hot and which

ones are not.

I do have a Last.FM account which was adopted from audioscobbler before it. I tend to only use it to track what I'm listening to and maybe sometimes for a couple of recommendations but generally Trancetraffic does a better job. I don't use Pandora and only listen to streaming radio statio

ns ckground music. I love soma.fm and di.fm for streaming radio.

 

I use Azureus for downloading all bit torrent stuff, which will make sense when you check out the TV section.

On the podcast front I use Juice to download all my podcasts. Thankfully juice supports remote opml files, so I point it at the same opml file as my bloglines account. Juice then downloads any enclosures from any of my 300+ feeds. This might sound over kill but it means I never miss any enclosures ever.Both Azureus and Juice are running on a ubuntu desktop machine under my desk, whcih I treat like a home server. I then use Synctoy on my laptop to sync my music and podcasts across to my laptop everyday.

TV : I don't watch tradional tv but I watch lots of TV shows. What does this mean? Well I don't actually turn on the TV and watch whatever is on. I also don't own a PVR or DVR device so don't actually record anything. I don't watch live TV because I have no reason to do so. Yes I download every single TV show I watch.

I use TV RSS in Azureus to do all my bit torrent downloading. Currently I use a combination of  ShareTV.org, NewTorrents, UKNova and Mininova for all my TV downloading. Some would say my TV viewing is strange at best and are quick to point out the off the schedule nature my activities. Personally being off the schedule is a good thing and this is really on demand. I tend to watch a combination of UK stuff like Doctor Who, Jekyll, etc with American stuff like Lost, Heroes, etc.

The way I actually watch most of the shows is via a 32 inch wide screen TV set and a hacked xbox. The Xbox is running unsigned code by a community project called Xbox Media Centre. The purpose of the hacked xbox running xbox media centre means I can play anything I download on my large screen. In the past I have hooked up my computer to the TV but generally having a computer in the same room as the TV kinda sucks unless you live in a small apartment of course. The xbox isn't exactly beautiful but its small and quiet. It means I can access all the media on my network including podcasts, music, pictures, etc.

I do own a Freeview box (free to air digital tv) and a Ondigital box (same but much older) but they rarely get turned on. And they certainly get no action since the ariel fell down off our roof.

Pictures : So we currently own 2 cameras, not including our mobile phones. One is a Canon 6 megapixal point and shoot (like DLR style) and the other is the Sanyo HD1. Me and Sarah over time have built up quite a few gigabytes of pictures. Every trip or event adds a little more. I tend to store everything and only upload the best ones to Flickr.com.

Recently I've been very slack with Flickr because I'm not naming or adding lots of meta-data to my pictures. This also applied to the files on the server. I hope one day to sort out my collections, sets and geodata. Getting that data back on to the server is another question.

Movies : I sometimes watch films in the cinema, sometimes I download the film and watch it while working away doing something else. It really depends on what film and what mood i'm in. For example just recently I watched Sicko in a cinema after deciding to help micheal moore in his efforts to wake up america to the joys of universial health care. I'll maybe go home (i'm on a plane flying between Exeter and London right now) and download it for my friends who maybe won't watch it otherwise. Being July 4th now too, I did promise to go watch Die Hard 4.0 tonight with a friend but we shall see how jet lagged I am. Generally Die Hard would be a film I would normally download.

DVD rentals I use to do via Amazon a long time ago and before that Blockbusters. I've not rented a DVD in about 2-3 years now.

Gaming : My only contract with gaming right now is the 1up Show podcast which is excellent because it focuses on gaming culture instead of doing long boring reviews. I always feel energized after watching it but I can't afford a next generation console, plus. I'm also not interested in the Xbox 360 because it can't play unsigned code – aka no xbmc! The playstation 3 looks good but at 480 pounds much for me plus I don't see where a Blu-Ray or even HD DVD player would fit into my media consumption diet? The Wii is my next choice but I'm not going to order one quite yet, although I have a wiimote for something else already.

Books : I tend to buy quite a few books because I like to lend them to people who maybe don't like to read on screen. For example I bought the Cluetrain Manifesto in book form so I could lend it to my friend Carl. He still has it but hey it was worth it becuase he wouldn't have read it online. I tried to read at night but it doesn't work for me because I fall a sleep quickly and am usually near a machine I can read the RSS off. I also have a hard time reading a book because of the line lengths and size of the text. It just doesn't quite gel with me. So I could easily sit down and read a PDF on my phone quicker that a actual book. I would love to have a real ebook reader but I can't afford such luxuaries, although I was considering using my old tabletpc as one. I'm a odd guy, I don't really read fiction that much any more, I tend to prefer the visual feedback of TV and Film.

Magazines : I only buy magazines .net and wired when I'm getting on a plane where I can't open my laptop till I'm all the way up in the air.

More to come….

Right my turn to tag some people.

Tom Morris, Miles Metcalfe, Duncan Barnes, Black belt jones and Phil Windley

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London Geekdinner Facebook group

Geekdinner london logo

After some minor issues with Facebook networks, I have finally sorted out a global geekdinner group on facebook. You can sign up here or search for geek dinner to find the girl geekdinner group along side the geekdinner group.

As you may have noticed in some of the blog comments else where (Regular Jen) not everyone could sign up to the previous group because I left the default network of London instead of setting it to Global. This was stupid because I even after I knew the problem I couldn't change it. So please makes ure you're signed up to the correct group (the one with the geekdinner logo not the red x).

I do make the joke that everyone is on Facebook but I won't be using Facebook as the official way to tell people about events and news. As Regular Jen points out.

The catch, as I see it, is that you still have to be a member of Facebook to view it. That is not what I would call open… it is open to members of Facebook only. That’s fine and fair and there is no reason to hold back from creating such a group, however, it absolutely divides the followers of London Geek Dinners (and London Girl Geek Dinners). You now have a group within Facebook and ‘the rest of us’

Total agreement and I expect to be using some sort of aggregation to allow good communication between the different spaces. This isn't the first time I've had this problem. It would be very easy for me to stop using our tradional geekdinner blog and setup some group on upcoming and urge people to use that instead but I don't. Instead I prefer the older comment system on the geekdinner blog and then allow sign up on upcoming.org. Ideally I would aggregate the upcoming results via there API back on the geekdinner site but this will all make sense hopefully in the near future.

I want to address something Jen talked about in the same post.

Making something very clear: this isn’t about London Geek Dinners, but the recent LGD Facebook group creation solidified a feeling I already had forming in my subconscious about Facebook dividing people. I posted about Facebook last week. I caved to social pressures and joined the service. I wish I hadn’t. I have only me to blame for that (well, and Facebook. Bastards. /images/emoticons/happy.gif.
What I hope I’ve brought forward more than anything is that every time a link is posted to a page within Facebook to the world outside of Facebook, that link (and its poster) excludes people. The ‘welcome’ page non-members get is a stark, uninviting login screen with no other content— it’s the equivalent of a giant, muscly body guard outside an exclusive club’s door. You aren’t welcome to the content within the Facebook walls unless you give up something in return, and in this case, it’s your data. Forever. I have never felt so unwelcome on a site. Even without the information brought to light by the video I linked to in another post, I felt this way.

This is not the way to start or nurture relationships. It’s high-level data mining wearing a social network cloak and at the same time subtly creates social outcasts out of the ones who want nothing to do with it.

I joined it and now I can never truly leave. Sounds dramatic, but Rachel called Facebook a new Hotel California. She’s right you know

 

 

 

I hate social networks for the sake of social networking, this includes Facebook. Facebook is the new roach motel as one of the gilmor gang use to say. I like Jen resisted till the bitter end but once they included a developer API and I started to see some applications being built I signed up.

I heard rumors that the facebook guys didn't sell to Yahoo because they are working on a operating system or something. Well currently you can certainly see how once your in facebook it would be easy to ignore most of the net if your thinking that way already. Its like the portals of the late 90's but with social networking layed through-out it. This may be all good for most people and at this very moment just about bearable for me too. I still can't find a way to put my blog rss into my facebook profile for example and I'm a sucker for owning my own data.

I think Facebook is almost unstoppable without some radical game changing from someone else. I'm hoping that other thing is open and decentralised (the first person to make the concept of FOAF work or the concept of FOAF work will bite a huge chunk out of Facebook) and puts a end to facebook but till then i'm forced to use it because thats where the attention and people are right now. Sad but true.

Please note I haven't mentioned Plaxo 3.0 or Plaxo Pulse which I'm sure will come up when I decide to do a post about lifestreams.

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Ok I’ll give the iPhone this one

From Ben Metcalfe on the unified mobile platform or why the iPhone is really important,

The reason why the iPhone is an important phone is not because of its shiny gadgetness or its touch interface. It’s not even important because it’s the first serious media player to be combined with a phone.

It’s important because of its web-based approach to application development. I believe this approach will spawn other manufactures to follow suit and in turn we will find ourselves with a truly unified development platform not owned by any single vendor or manufacturer.

Right now developing applications for mobile phones is a pain with no single way of rolling out an application to every phone (or even the majority of phones) on the market. Sun’s J2ME was supposed to solve all this but instead we still have a chaotic environment of different MIDP profiles, screensizes, capabilities and even carriers who prevent unsigned (read: approved) java applets from running on some of their phones.

This is kind of what the world of computing was like before the Internet – when Macs wouldn’t read files created on PC’s and vice-versa. The internet came along and a common set of standards were created that allowed documents to be interchanged between any computer. Later on we managed to coerce those standards into lightweight applications that more often than not provide all the functionality we needed.

I believe we are finally going to see this happen on the mobile phone. Apple is leading the way by promoting the iPhone’s Safari browser as the development environment for the iPhone – but there is no reason why this can’t be emulated on other phones too.

He's right but I'm sorry this doesn't go far enough for me. I would like to see much more in the browser API. Access to the GPS and Camera, Offline storage like Google Gadgets, Widgets? Opera are best placed to do this but they cover so many phones. The Mozilla builds of the Mobile Firefox (Minimo) could be the perfect platform to do this, as its open source and could be adapted by every single manufactor to boost the sales and power of there own mobile device. Safari sucks and we all know it. Yes its built on webkit but geez what the hell did they do to it?

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Sicko – the Universial Heath care question

Micheal moore in a waiting room

So I just returned from watching Sicko in a Canadian Cinema (don't you know).

The experience was quite different. Although watching from the outside looking in on this massive problem the united states has with its self was the same, you certainly got the feeling that Canadians were shocked at how bad the problem really was.

Spoilers ahead

Micheal Moore this time around does a fantastic job not getting too muddled in the politics and conspiracy areas. Instead uses peoples stories to tell how bad things have got. Even if the stories stretch the truth, they were powerful enough to cast a couple of tears from peoples eyes. Micheal looks at the Canadian, British, French systems, but what really hammer the point home is the visit to Cuba with some 911 helpers. Micheal Moore is a genius for that one which looked to be a stunt too far turned into something very meaningful. The Cheque for the Anti Micheal Moore site owner was clever but could been seen as another stunt or a act of humanity. I thought humanity but I could see how others would think the opposite.

The movie is well worth watching even if you can't stand Micheal Moore. I went to the cinema because I want to support Micheal Moore's efforts in this one but you can also get the film online if you don't like the guy.

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ShareTV just needs a social network and a client

ShareTV.org is my hot tip for the future of TV online.

For a long time I've been wishing that Tioti.com (Tape it off the internet) would get its act together, but it never so I gave up on it about 6 months ago. Since then I've noticed ShareTV and TV nanny move closer into the area which Tioti occupied. TV Nanny I don't kow enough about because I don't really like installing clients on my desktop machine and its only windows based.

ShareTV features

Anyway, back to ShareTV. This bit torrent site focuses on yes you guessed it Television programmes. Its clean cut and lacks a style. This makes it super easy to navigate around its pages and discover new areas without feeling lost. Right from the start they included RSS feeds with direct links to the torrent files. Not only a global one but per programme and the last 30 shows feed. Both of these make it really simple to setup a TVRSS setup using Azureus, UTorrent Democracy or something else. Another key feature of ShareTV is it only selects one torrent of each episode of the programme. Aka you don't have to choose which version of the programme you want to download. This might sound like a disadvantage for those who really like downloading those 1gig 720p HD versions of Heroes but for the rest of us its fine. I'm sure in the near future they will build feeds with all HD episodes which can be used.

ShareTV also indexes currently about 100+ shows including UK shows like Jekyll and Doctor Who (which I'm currently missing due to be in Toronto). They rip the details for each show from TV.com so you can get the full details about a show before downloading it. Recently they have included previews so you can get a idea about a show using a streaming flash player in the page. This is being extended by it would seem them watching links in del.icio.us and Youtube pointing to episodes, so you can actually watch the whole show there in your browser if you choose to. I don't know how successful this will be but thats not the most interesting part.

Recently if you log into ShareTV you can do a whole bunch of new stuff. Voting for a show is new and interesting because you are able to gage per show what people thought of the show. You can vote either a thumbs up or thumbs down. Less interesting is the fact you can add comments to each episode. Tv.com has the same thing, so the duplication isn't  that welcomed. Now its possible to add your favorite shows to a personal list and keep a track of just those. I didn't notice a RSS feed for them yet but I'm sure thats coming soon. Another nice thing ShareTV does is a calendar view of TV shows like a 9 day TV listings, But it looks possible that this can be applied the shows you favorite too. Meaning you get a personalised TV listing guide.

Getting Social

So most of this is exactly what Tioti does but Tioti was a mess.for things like picking torrents. Whats missing from ShareTV is the social aspect. Now I have my personal schedule or TV listing of my shows. I want to share this with other ShareTV friends or buddies. I also want to share my schedule with the world. You know stick it in my blog or even in my facebook profile. Once you ShareTV allows RSS, this will be easier but I still want some simple to share widget too.

Something which bugged me about Tioti was the show tracker, it required you to say I've seen this episode, I've seen that episode. But it was a pain. I suggest ShareTV use that voting feature to assume people have also seen that episode at the same time. Ideally ShareTV would have a public API behind it but personalised RSS would be a start, so the feed would have up to date metadata about if you watched the episode or not. I was at one point thinking about using a iCal feed with the free/busy status switched if you've seen it or not but it seems over kill.

Points system

I forgot to add this to my first post. ShareTV now have a points system for your account. This level of participation is both playful and community building. Some of the core elements I would say for making the site more social.

You get points by participating in the site. The more points you have the higher priority you get when downloading off our tracker or streaming videos.

Action Points Given
Create Account +10 points
Rate Show +1 point per
Place Comment +2 point per
Upload new Torrent +3 points per**
Submit new video clip +4 points per**

** You also get plus/minus points for each vote on the torrent or video you submit, so make sure you submit stuff other members would like

Ideally it would still be great if your bit torrent client or mediaplayer device could say if you've seen the episode – You could imagine something like Last.FM for TV (last broadcast) with plugins for the Xbox Media Centre, Windows Media Centre, Apple TV, Democracy, BBC iPlayer etc. But thats a long way off and seems the demand won't be there till we get over the whole downloading TV shows thing. I actually think shareTV would be a great place to try such a service but even if ShareTV could consume someone elses service that would be great.

I mean it would only take ShareTV a while to add some kind of distributed Digg like system through peoples personal desktop widget engines. Or they could create some simple application using Xul or Air (formally known as Adobe Apollo). Geez if there was a API again, I would try writing the other part myself.

These are the things Tioti promised but never quite delivered (or at least got over complex on). I don't want to be harsh to Tioti and Paul Pod (who I hope to meet in Edinburgh)  but the illustrations of the features of Tioti were amazing and the result has been a big let down. ShareTV is closer to the vision of Tioti that it may actually know and it would be a shame if it went in a different direction now.

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