Month: June 2009

The Twitter Book reviewed

the twitter book

So upfront, I'm reviewing this book after it was sent to me from O'reilly. However this is my honest opinion of the book.

The book has been talked about elsewhere quite a bit, so I came with a but of scepticism when reading the book. However I'm pleasantly surprised. The first part of the quite thick book is all about twitter as a idea and service. Even before you sign up you can get a feel for what its all about and what the etiquettes are. Actually the book does a very good job laying out the ground work of the culture around microblogging.

It could get very hippy or meta and how great this all is, but the book doesn't it actually goes into how to track trends, topics and generally use twitter as a service like google. For example theres a page called “Figure out who's influential on Twitter.” I actually decided to add myself to We Follow after reading it. Just when you had enough about whos top of the list we're back into the more meta stuff about how to have a great conversation. Lots of tips taken from places like the Cluetrain but served up in the notion of twitter. There's lot of useful stuff even for tweeters like myself who have been at it for years. For example I had no idea about the spam twitter user Lots of this stuff has come in over the last few years and totally bypass us old skool users. Again there's a few section for those wanting to use twitter for marketing and publishing. And again there's a more human section with advice about reveling yourself and how to retweet.

The pages of information are chunked up nicely and you can quickly skim read the pages you know and get a bit more depth out of the ones you don't. Every other page is a related large picture, which adds to the enjoyment of reading through this book. The only real negative thing I can see about this book is the price. It really quite high at about 14-16 pounds. Amazon actually have it for about 10 pounds. which is much more reasonable.

This book has everything in it and certainly earns the title of the twitter book, but the best thing about the book is the balance between those who want to use twitter to communicate and particpate, and those who want to leverage it for there own means. Excellent work O'reilly.

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Two new mixes, inspired by London

While in London last week I had the opportunity of spending the time on tube doing mixes to myself in the headphones. I did quite a few mixes but these are certainly the best of the bunch. I tried to upload them to pacemaker.net but I kept getting errors when uploading. I can't quite work out if its because I'm running the software under a virtual machine or not. Eitherway, Soundcloud seems like a great place to put mixes. Just noticed my mixes have been downloaded a total of 909 times to date. Which can't be bad for just the occasional tweet and live mix. I should do more mixing, but I guess my walk to work is too short.

The warm breeze sweeps through London mix, was the recent heatwave the UK has been getting. I remember I was in the hotel and deciding if I should bother with a coat or not. Decided against it in the morning and enjoyed the sunshine right through till beyond dusk. I was coming back from dinner somewhere (think it was China Town) and although it was close to 10pm it was still warm enough to not need a coat. When I got back to the hotel, I stood outside and mixed till it was too cold to be outside. So imagine, me on the tube mixing away, then slowly walking from the station still mixing, then outside the hotel mixing away, alongside all the smokers and waiting taxi drivers.

  1. Dido (Armin Universal Mix) – Aria
  2. Shadow World – Thomas Bronzwaer
  3. Grooveline (Matt Darey's mix) – Blockster
  4. Peace – Yves Deruyter
  5. Embrace (Ferry Fix) – Embrace
  6. Intuition – Marninx Presents Ecco
  7. Gouryella (extended version) – Gouryella
  8. Into the Danger (M.I.K.E remix) – M.I.K.E vs Andrew Bennett
  9. Resound – Thomas Bronzwaer
  10. Turn out the lights (Transa mix) – M.I.K.E
  11. Heal – Electrique Boutique
  12. Walk the Edge (Alex M.O.R.P.H b2b Wiidy van Eyedn mix) – Alex M.O.R.P.H
  13. 1999 (Gouryella mix) – Binary Finary
  14. In the Dark (Tiesto trance mix) – Dj Tiesto
  15. Barber's Adagio for strings (Ferry Corsten mix) – William Orbit

The Force of night is done while going home again from a dinner, this time I opted for the bus but a major accident on Oxford Street just down from Oxford Circus stops all traffic and after a while of sitting on the bus I decide to walk it. Because I'm mixing away, I decide to only rejoin public transport at Lancaster Gate. Nice walk and headphones on mixing away through the whole journey back to the hotel.

  1. Running Two – Run Lola Run
  2. A New Dawn (extended version) – Steve Forte Rio
  3. Troy (Push Remix) – Sinead O'Connor
  4. Attention – John OO Fleming vs Christopher Lawrence
  5. First Strike (signum signal 2004 remake) – Signum
  6. Such is Life (Marco V Remix) – Rank1 feat Shanokee
  7. Into the Danger (M.I.K.E Remix) – M.I.K.E vs Andrew Bennett
  8. Summer Melodies (Frequence remix) – Frequence
  9. Please Save me (Push Remix) – Sunscreem vs Push
  10. Beauty hides in the deep (John O'Callaghan remix) – The Dopplr Effect
  11. Gouryella (Extended mix) – Gouryella
  12. Eventuality – 8 Wonders

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R&D TV : Episode 2

We've launched R&D TV episode 2. You can download it directly from the BBC in many different flavours of codecs and formats. We got everything from Flash to Ogg Theora. There's even RSS feeds now which is good. Like the last one, were using a Creative commons non-commercial attribution v2 licence and we have made the assets available for anyone in the world to remix. I want to say thanks to everyone who was involved in the project. R&DTV is a collaboration between BBC Backstage and RAD teams, who are: Producers Rain Ashford and Hemmy Cho, as well as Exec Producers: Ian Forrester, George Wright and Adrian Woolard. This months video is maybe a lot closer to what people were expecting, so enjoy it.

I gave a talk at Social Media Cafe yesterday which included a preview of R&DTV and received a lot of feedback, some of it was quite harsh but only harsh because people could see r&dtv was a good project. The lovely Sarah Hartley live blogged the whole thing using Friendfeed. Chi Chi wrote a little bit and talked about her project, which I missed due to a interesting discussion about the history of emoticons. But if you really want to get a full feeling of what people thought of the project, check out the tweets afterwards and this audioboo which was recorded a few minutes after it ended.

Listen!

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The business of hacking us, H*Commerce

I checked out the online documentary H*Commerce, after hearing about it on Hak.5 . Its in pieces, so you can only see part one and trailers for parts 1 and 2. Its all flash which is painful because I really wanted to watch it on my TV and didn't want to go through the trouble of extracting flash files. The content its self is pretty engaging although very short and punchy. I enjoyed the subject matter and look forward to the next lot of parts. Shame updates are only via email and not via rss or even twitter.

I certainly feel strongly about this area, education about protecting yourself is low in this area. People are being scammed left, right and centre with all types of attacks and the awareness is low. Hopefully things like this will help, even if its sponsored almost to death by McAfee.

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Puting stuff on a IMAX screen doesn’t make it better

So the story is about a guy who books a cinema seat expecting a IMAX experience but finds out that its actually a slightly bigger screen that usual and better a/v. However its not IMAX,

Fine if your expecting IMAX and get something sub-IMAX then you have the right to get your money back. But what equally bugs me is people who said have you seen insert name of big film here on IMAX. I'm sorry but just because its on a huge screen doesn't make it better. If its shot for IMAX like parts of the Dark Knight was, then great IMAX makes sense but when its not, I'd rather be in a decent standard cinema. I talked a while back about my choice to watch the Watchman film on the DLP projector using digital transfer instead of IMAX. I'm not the only one either.

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