Month: October 2007

What party?

So someone you don’t know, starts talking to you on Facebook and through a couple of blog comments. Then invites you to an exclusive private party in Central London. Would you go?

Well thats what happened to me. A woman going by the name (redacted) invited me and it would seem quite a few bloggers to a un-official future of webapps after party. I thought well I’ll give it a try, what could go wrong? So on to Drinks & Canapes in St. Martins Lane Hotel. Well thats how it was advertised along with this little blurb…

A perfect opportunity to chill out and relax with drinks and canapes at the luxurious Light Bar, at St. Martins Lane Hotel in the heart of London.

I got there about 9pm expecting not much but someone to tell me it was all a hoax or some suits party. I did have a thought that this could dangerous too but decided I’m big enough to keep myself out of any trouble, plus most people knew where I had gone. Anyway, so got there, asked the doormen, staff, front desk, restaurant manager, etc, etc and no one knew anything about the party, Fowa or (redacted). So I had a look around myself and went home. No harm done I guess. No Facebook friendship for you (redacted)…. There’s a lot more to this that I first thought, so I’ll fill in the rest of the details below…soon

So it turns out that (redacted) had cancelled the event but the message didn’t get out quick enough. (redacted) had some very bad news which required her presence elsewhere. I received a facebook mail from (redacted) about 10 days later saying how upset she was with my post, which was fair enough but bear in mind I wrote it straight after coming back. So hopefully this clears things up a little.

Diggnation Live in London

So thanks to the guys at Carsonified, Revision 3 finally (50+ episodes later) landed in London and did a live version of Diggnation in front of 1000+ people after the first day of the Future of Webapps conference. Honestly the only way to get close to describing how mental the atmosphere was in that arena is through pictures (mine and everyone elses) and videos. I'm really happy it went down this way, if I me and Kathy had got the guys over, we would only have got a venue which would hold about 500 people max. Anyway back to yesterday I have a ton of videos and shot in HD with my shakey hand which I still need to upload but others have already done so. As the guys would say, good times… good times.

The offical video is now out on revision3.com

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bbc.co.uk 2.0: Why it isn’t happening and shouldn’t happen

Jason Cartwright

Jason who now works for Google instead of the BBC had some crushing words to say about the BBC's online future on his blog. I hadn't noticed because my RSS Owl is playing up (yes I'm going to write a bug request for this problem) so I've missed a lot of what my friends have been writing about. Anyway Jason makes the point that the BBC's web efforts are doomed to fail because we are a broadcasting company with broadcasting type funding in a nutshell. So when I first read his blog entry, I was going to respond on the backstage blog but felt the backstage blog wasn't the right place to reply, as some of these points are my own view and not of the BBC. So I may just link to the post on backstage and leave it as that. It won't spend much time on the front page either because there will be posts from the Future of Webapps Expo tomorrow.

Here's some choice quotes.

Moving away from the economic analysis of the situation facing the BBC, we can see the tide already turning. The BBC was an innovator in radio (2LO – in beta 1922, v1.0 when licenced in 1923) then TV (BBC Television Service – beta from 1929, v1.0 release 1946) but not now in the online age. Sky Anytime, 4OD, and ITV.com's video revamp have all launched before the BBC's iPlayer service (iMP beta 2005, iPlayer in beta, v1.0 not released at time of writing) showing commercial efforts in this field have trumped the BBC. One person working on the project called it “worse than boo.com”. With the lead now lost, how can they pull it back?

Frankly and I'm sure I'm breaking some part of my contract here. iPlayer is a mess and I can't / won't defend it on my own blog. Everyone I speak, asks what happened? Why would the BBC put out iplayer and think it was acceptable? Even in Boston the developer of Miro/Democracy player was asking me seriously why would a public broadcaster do such a thing? I don't have an answer, I really don't. In the first BBC Backstage podcast, Dave Crossland answered Tom Loosemore's question if the BBC should have done nothing over releasing iplayer. He answered yes, do nothing because it was morally wrong. Well thats his view but lets be honest would we better off if we didn't do iplayer? I actually think so. Tom Loosemore was right, we do need to deliever to those who don't understand bit torrent or simlar technologies but I wonder how many of us we're eating our own dogfood?

Lets go through the some of the principals of Web 2.0 and the BBC…

  • Rich user experience: archaic BBC tech standards say that you can't rely on javascript/flash to deliver content, and pages need to be below 200kb in size. Buh bye innovative user interfaces, widgets/gadgets, Google or Yahoo Maps style interface, or YouTube for that matter.
  • User as contributor: BBC requires moderation of content before publishing it – see above for 606 example.
  • Participation, not publishing – as above.
  • Enable the long tail – BBC tech has limited ability to cater for large amount of content in the first place. CMSs are disparate and clunky, content distribution network is run off one single, overloaded computer (!).
  • Radical trust – this simply doesn't happen at the BBC, see 606. Not even to employee's, see first point.

Right so, point one. The BBC Standards and guidelines are under consistent review and lots of those archaic are being shifted as our audience become more internet savvy. Backstage also doesn't have to live by those standards and guidlines. Jason is right publishing is cheap and free, we need to reflect that. Yes long tail, we need lightweight cms which don't require a room full of people to understand how it works. Trust I won't talk about right now.

Anyway, there's lots more I want to say, but its late and I got a early start tomorrow at FOWA. So I'll finish off later (maybe Thursday).

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Bloglines officially announce APML and OpenID support

Bloglines announced today that OpenID and APML is in the near pipeline. Cheers Chris for the heads up on this.

Today is our first release devoted to supporting OpenID for Bloglines Classic and Bloglines Beta. In the near future, Bloglines will also support consuming OpenIDs and OpenID 2.0 which was just released this week.

Now our more technical users will know right way what's going on and will be excited. In that case, you can go to id.bloglines.com and get started. Note – OpenID is just the beginning of us working with true open standards. Other formats getting our attention include oAuth (Open Authentication) and APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language).

I had never heard of oAuth before but it looks good and could be a killer solution for use with something like Keepass. I'll be checking it out more in the future. Hummm, imagine using the bloglines sync with oAuth too.

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I’m just glad someone still working on the Xbox 360

A long time ago, a hack was found so you can play copied games and backups on a Xbox 360. So the hacking went dead except for a little blip here and there. Well now it turns out that people have already got Linux on it and have been working on running unsigned code on it. Maybe I wrote the platform off too soon?

From Xbox-scene.com,

Since we have an exploit in the hypervisor (kernel 4532 and 4548) and recently found a way to downgrade to these kernels, some hackers over at the XBH forums are working on a way to boot homebrew code on the Xbox360. Linux was already done via the linux bootloader, but for homebrew we'll need another bootloader obviously that will allow to boot 'unsigned' xbox 360 code.

If this works, then I wonder if someone will convert xbox media centre over to that platform too? Imagine Linux, PC, Xbox, Xbox 360 and PS3 all being choices for XBMC.

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