Month: August 2007
NBC Dateline Reporter flees Defcon 15
In the Paper again, this time a city wide one
This was unexpected but Sarah set this up about a week ago and I knew nothing about it till Sarah text me earlier today. Shes been having a hard time recently and I really want to thank her for doing this and holding things together. I know we will end up being long term friends through-out.
So yeah a work paper yesterday, city wide today, national tomorrow? Well funny enough I'm having a interview with a national paper tomorrow about the Edinburgh TV Un-Festival. But seriously you won't see me tomorrow in anything, hopefully
Is Design really seedy?
Blackbelt Jones wrote this great post about Seedcamp and the lack of design involvement.
From the Seedcamp about pages:
“There will be a diverse mentor network of serial entrepreneurs, corporates, venture capitalists, recruiters, marketing specialists, lawyers and accountants that will help the selected teams put together the foundations of a viable business.”
How about designers?
Technology plays alone are starting to lose their distinctiveness in many of the more-crowded areas of the marketplace.
Great service and interaction design are on the rise as strategic differentiators for products as diverse as the iPhone and Facebook.
He's right, The only thing desiresable about the iphone is the interface, the technology is under powered or frankly from 2005. Thankfully its not all bad.
The line between hackers and interaction designers is blurring as they start small businesses that are starting to make waves in the big business press.
As I mentioned, my experience of HackDay Europe was that
“It really does seem that the hacker crowd in London/Europe at least is crossing over more and more with the interaction design crowd, and a new school of developers is coming through who are starting to become excellent interaction designers – who really know their medium and have empathy with users.”
This reminds me of my made up position name while at Ravensbourne, Designer/Developer. At the time I design was far too form based while development was far too programming based. Web designer meant you created HTML pages, Information designer meant you didn't actually touch any data or apis and Interaction designer meant you were too focused on art, hanging out in Hoxton and convince your clients they were always wrong. Things have changed for the better. The grey area between design and development
has been intersected by a 3rd force the hacker. So now you get pursuits like hardware hacking, alternative reality games, product user interface hacking. The fact is that its not about the titles, its about what vision you have in your head and how much effort your willing to put in to it.
Business-wise I think we have yet to see what affect the greying of design, development and hacking will have on startup culture.
To the BBC Ariel and beyond
I'm not the kind of guy to ring my own bell (I bet you liked that one Adam) but finally backstage made the Ariel newspaper. Ariel is the newspaper/magazine which is published every week about whats going on inside the BBC. Its really for internal use only, but you can get it pretty much everywhere now. Anyway the point is that its read by tens of thousands of BBC staff from across the board.
Well finally Backstage made it in, from the work at Hack day to the innovative work we do with the backstage community daily. Its finally made its way into the mainstream. We've become the media darlings of BBC Research and Innovation. But never fear, I'm throwing Cluetrains out when needed and will not be spending time with press unless its necessary (*big smile*).
I hoping when my parents see this, they might understand a little more about what I do at work.
You can zoom in closer on this picture to read what the article actually says. Where's my OCR application gone… No need Leeky worte it out in the comments. So here's the full text.
Not so much a department, more a state of mind. That's how Ian Forrester and Matthew Cashmore describe their innovation award-winning backstage.bbc.co.uk. This self-styled 'comedy duo' may be tucked away on the fifth floor of the Broadcast Centre in W12, but their influence on the corporation's online future surely stretches to infinity and beyond!
“Historically people wanting to develop internet applications independently for the BBC didn't know how to talk to or how to access a server on which they could demonstrate their work”, says Forrester. “So our job has been to break down the old barriers and build up new relationships.”
Backstage.bbc.co.uk is a prime example of the BBC's commitment to the growing open source community.
“Our motto is 'Use our stuff to build your stuff'”, chuckles Cashmore. A genial Welshman with a list of website and podcasting innovations to his credit, he claims his first foray into coding came when he created a Dungeons and Dragons dice throwing programme on a Commodore 64 while still a schoolboy in the late 1980s.
Forrester and Cashmore were also British brains behind the Hack Day event which took place at Alexandra Palace in June. Here the BBC joined forces with US-based service provided Yahoo and invited 500 of EUrope's top 'hackers' to take advantage of existing public data and previously unavailable API (application programming interface) codes to deisgn brand new products to enhance or expand the BBC's existing online offer.
“Some of the things these guys mashed together in just 24 hours, especially regarding the interface between mobile phones and computers, were really thrilling”, says Cashmore. “We hope to bring the best of them forward in the very near future.”
Backstage.bbc.co.uk also used Hack Day to launch the new Wild West rapid development server for which the pair received their innovation award two months ago.
“Wild West is somewhere outside existing BBC servers where anybody with an interesting idea can try it out and we can qucikly and cheapily assess whether it's worth supporting”, says Forrester.
meta-technorati-tags=bbc, backstage, bbcbackstage, ariel, article, cluetrain
You can’t stop the beat…
Ok when I first started watching this I was thinking oh no I didn't know it was a musical. But before long the story line had kicked in and it came clear that the whole thing was a comment on segregation in the early 60's. Yes I know its a remake but its a very good remake and dare I say it, prefer it to the 1988 original. Not only that but how amazing is the lead actress Nikki Blonsky…
Anyway this was perfectly timed after a couple of things which have happened recently.
First up the internet discussion about geek women which exploded on the Girl Geekdom blog (also blogged myself). I made the comment at the end that,
if the environment and people are inherently corrupt how do you reverse that? The answer isn't simple and its something most people hate but most people have never faced such corruption.
Some people have asked me what did I mean. Well …. if you switch corruption for racism or sexism you get the general idea.
Back to Hairspray a second, although its classed as watery fun the idea of dancing together really has reminiscing of the early days of hardcore when house music brought people together. Which leads nicely on to yesterday.
I went out yesterday to the make your mark connectors event. First time and I met some very interesting people. But one sticks out more that everyone else. Rebecca a self described Feminist. Yes imagine the kind of discussions we had with me being a self described Geek. (Yes we did talk about the Woman Geek stuff) After most people left there were 3 of us and we decided to go and have a dance. The music was slightly progressive house but was certainly danceable. Well what surprised me was Rebecca's freeness
of movement.
When dancing in normal bars and non dance clubs I can tend to be quite a normal or average dancer because I tend to work up a sweat very quickly and usually don't want to attract too much attention to myself. Rebecca didn't seem to have any of this in mind and to be honest I started to wonder what had happened to me over the last few years which made me adopt this boring average dancing?
I love dancing, watching it on Hairspray (although very different type) and seeing Rebecca dancing really brought it back.
So I'll be hitting the clubs more that monthly again now. I'm also going to check out some of those clubs I've heard about but never been to like the End and the Cross.
CC Salon talk from July
Last week I attended my first CC Salon. Had a great time but the highlight of the night was the discussion started or hosted by Paula LeDieu. I filmed most of the round table discussion which I thought was great. Its quite long and the audio is sometimes quite low but generally its audiable.
Part one is here and Part two follows a couple of minutes afterwards.
The Gender Un-balance of Web 2.0
So Maz really has shaken the gender teapot. First the post Me Tarzan. You Jane, then Geeks can be Chic(K)s.
Some quotes,
Add to this my return from a recent visit to the San Francisco to the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo where I was struck by the uniformity of the male technology enthusiasts – As one of the few females in attendance, I stuck out like a PC at a Mac convention, so much so that another woman with whom I met remarked how few ‘skirts there were amongst all the suits’. Well that’s certainly one way to put it!
It does sadden me to think that amongst my daily little foray into the Web 2.0 world, there is little realisation, nor concern about such a gender imbalance. It seems ironic that where we are very savvy at collectively contributing and sharing information there is a lack of attention about the formation of such user knowledge, shares and application creation.
Maybe the way the world is Tarzan build tools; Jane gets to use them…
Perhaps the Web 3.0 jungle will bring with it a more egalitarian gender balance?
Yep there's certainly no real argument there. Some of the comments are also interesting, including this one which points out that there more women in the less programming led fields. Human computing, interaction and even xml seem to be fields where woman are more common that straight programming.
But whats really interesting is…
It seems that gender is not the only issue here, but also the geek image. You are only allowed into The Club if you possess an in-depth knowledge of coding and more structural aspects of web development. Ok so here my own level of ‘geek ability’ does rather fall short. I do, do HTML (when forced), Javascript, Flash and so on… but hell Web 2.0 fluidity makes this less of an ‘essential’ special power – especially as I am not by ‘trade’ a web developer. However, there are
important assumptions that are being made about the types of knowledge one should (and can) possess and the association of such abilities along gendered lines.Case in note, one of the biggest issues that a (female) friend of mine has come across is that people assume that she is not a web developer. No, not that she is not capable, but simply that she does not fit the ‘image’, that that particular role calls forth. Now where’s the equality in that?
The Geek image is certainly something which I've touched on before but I've never thought about how the poor geek image is affecting women.
I'm going to avoid the current comments about special treatment just to say if the environment and people are inherently corrupt how do you reverse that? The answer isn't simple and its something most people hate but most people have never faced such corruption.