Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Sharing critical documentaries

Saw this on Rocketboom today (yes I still watch it). Its a guy who gives away copies of documentaries like Sicko on DVD in a Subway station in New York. It seems like all the films he's copying and giving away are rights cleared (except maybe Sicko). Anyway I thought it was a great way to educate and enlighten people. Also get people talking and debating. He describes at the end how people will stand around and start talking to each other about the films and there meaning.

Without going into much detail, one of the elements for the ARG a few of us are still working on, includes the mass distribution of information in a public area. This might be a really good solution.

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Even more spam dating emails…

So following from my post about spammers affected dating sites. Here's even more for your viewing pleasure.

From rosewood88 (member since 2008-09-05) – Hello sweet love one

Hello
pls u can get back to my box with my email here angel_mary444@yahoo.com thanks wait
to meet u soon becos i will only hv the chance to check my box ok.
I am angela mary wood, and i am 25 yrs old live in ELTHAM LONDON. seeking for a sexy
and caring partner who has a like minds like i do,simple mature lady,honest, family
oriented,God-fearing. submissive to her man. love gardening, camping and fishing
…like to spend most of her time in working and doing all housechores. my hobbies
include love making,going to the beach side,having fun,fishig,tv,traveling,listening
to music and making love with my husband alone.my Eye Color..black,Hair Color…black,
Height..5'10-(178cm),Body Type.average,Race..white cau,
all kinds of romantic songs,i can also describe myself as
kind/volunteer,sincere,loving,caring,i am ready to meet a man to love and a man who is
ready to care for me …..i just wanna meet a man thats why i decided to show my
beaty up in this site and this is my first time of doing something like this…i
just..wish to meet the right man to marry and settle down with for life.

I

hello ,

i am named as Grace Ansah. i am 30 years of age and very lonely

. i am a lady who is fair and pretty . i am respectful, truthful,

honest , patience, humble, lovely and also nice to all peoples. i

am a lady who is in ghana now . my mum was from the canada and my

dad from ghana. i am in ghana now but for the mean time , i lost

my parents when i was at the age of 28 in a car accident. i lost

them very bad and since from then i stoped schooling .. life

became very bad for me . i have stopped schooling and now living

alone. for the mean time i am alone and now looking for a man to

marry . a man who will love me only and care for me . a man who

will never hurt my feelings . a man who is going to be truthful

and honest with me . a man who will be caring , a man who will

marry and make up a sweet happy family with . i wish and hope to

hear from you to know each otehr aas well. i will be very nice to

hear u so pls reply me back.. this my email adress:

grace_ansah80@yahoo.com . or u can txt or call this number”

00233245483378.

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Social radio listening with Radio Pop

radiopop graph

If you've not checked out Radiopops yet, go sign up now. Its a beta/prototype by the BBC radio labs team. It also shows the type of thing we are thinking and building inside the BBC but can't really make public easily. This is mainly a technical issue about platforms and scaling but I think its better that its made clear this is a prototype that have it hanging around the BBC for years because its not build with the house technologies not the most handy for the job.

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What would your next phone be???

Its getting around to that time of the year again, when I start thinking about which phone I should be getting next. The other good news is that Google Android is confirmed for HTC phones, so there's some serious changes in this space. But generally the hardware is

HTC Dream


HTC Dream which is meant to be the launch phone of the Google Android operating system. Although I don't really like the block on the right and the keyboard looks quite small.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1

Now this is a shock, Dark horse SonyEricsson creates a windows mobile phone which some interesting tweaks to the Windows mobile Gui. It also supports a 3inch touch screen with a resolution of 800×480 which is insane. Everything else is there including HSDPA, Bluetooth 2.0, Wifi but no GPS. Its also got a slight tilt which is useful plus the keyboard looks like a dream to type on. I've also heard on forums that it might have up to 16gig of memory which is great.

HTC Touch Pro

This is the natrual upgrade choice from my HTC Kaiser/Tilt. Its smaller, lighter and has a VGA screen. HTC have also included the new TouchFLO 3D interface (hopefully they turned on the ATI hardware drivers for this phone). Everything else is pretty much the same, HSDPA, Bluetooth 2.0, Wifi and GPS. The Keyboard is improved and the whole device just looks sharp and beautiful. It also seems like Orange will have this soon because they already have the HTC Touch Diamond.

Samsung Omnia i900

This is the other dark horse in the room. Samsung have made some news with the Blackjack windows mobile device but I've never really consider it because I don't like those blackberry type devices. Anyway, this is a looker and has the specs to go with the looks. 3.2 inch touchscreen supporting 400×240 resolution. Like everyone else, they've tweaked Windows mobile to include a couple of new features but once again HSDPA, Bluetoooth 2.0, Wifi and GPS. Its also got 16gig of memory in the box and unlike the rest a 5mpx auto focus camera which also supports VGA camcorder recording, the rest are 3mpx auto focus and QVGA recording. Samsung have gone one better by including FM radio, Geotagging ability, accelerometer and even TV out for playing back video. The only thing missing is the keyboard and its not quadband, so no 3g in north america. Suprisingly Orange have this phone already and its priced like a HTC phone, so actually affordable if you like WinMo phones.

Its amazing, things like USB, SD slot, Speakerphone, 3g, full spectrum HSDPA (up to 7.2meg down), Mp3 ringtones, replaceable batteries, etc, etc are just standard now. Shame the Samsung doesn't support Quadband like everyone else but to be honest, I'm unlikely to use 3G heavly when roaming in america, because I don't like big mobile phone bills. The keyboard will be missed a little and I'm not super keen that it has no stylus at all. But these are small issues really. I think I will get a Omnia in the end. I wonder if anyone will port Android over to it?

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Sony’s EyePet

I meant to blog
eyepet a while ago when they first showed this. But never got around to it. It got sent around the BBC internal lists for a while and some of the comments said it was everything from fake to amazing. When I first saw it, I had a slight feel of deja'vu. I swear I saw this exact same thing 6 years ago.

The ICA had a event to do with gaming, Sony showed off the eyetoy and some of the more interesting things they were doing. One of those things was a little animal thing which you knock about with your hands and physical objects. It would also do things like balance on small objects, be aware of depth and speed. I can't be the only one to have seen this right? I know we were not able to take pictures or videos but people must have spoke about it. Each group was about 20 people and they had about 4 sessions that day. Obviously it wasn't that smooth or polished as it is now but you can certainly see where eyepet came from. I guess the Playstation2 couldn't handle the processing while the cell processor in the Playstation3 can.

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What happened when I tried to get the lost ring first time

The 3rd Ring by you.

So if you cast your memories back a while ago, I tried to help out some friends by getting the lost ring from a gallery in Manchester's trendy northern quarter. The woman wasn't happy with the fact that I was on the phone and didn't look the part when picking up the ring. So she emailed and phoned someone to find out if it was ok. It wasn't, so we had to send someone else in the next day to do the deeds. That was all caught on camera later but here's the transcript of the discussion between PMs (Puppetmasters) James Tinsley and Jan McGonigal, after I had gone into the gallery and was waiting next door for the final word.

Maybe if there was no glass box, maybe I should have done what other groups did, snatch and run. Then again, we wanted the box it came in too. Plus I did say the passphase correctly!

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Maybe Jaiku left it too late? Its now all about Laconi.ca

The good news is that there is activity showing at Jaiku after months and months of it just ticking over. There are now unlimited invites, so if your after one, ping me a email or pm on twitter with your email address. Oh the same goes for Boxee which has recently been updated (more about that another day).

I can't help but wonder if jaiku left it too late to be a dominate player in the microblogging world? I mean there is no douht that being based on jabber/xmpp/messaging, makes it stronger, scalable, more robust, cleverer and mobile/im happy. But with the jaiku team split up and googlified it was just ticking over while others started to get there platforms together.

I've mentioned before indenti.ca and the software which drives it laconi.ca. As Leo Lapour pointed out in a interview, the ability to have both local and remote communities is a killer feature. Local as in the twit army server and remote as in you can pull your profile from any other laconi.ca install and messages can flow across servers in a federated fashion. I mean thats powerful and honestly think companies must be crazy to use something like twitter or even jaiku over something they can host themselves and still be part of a much wider community. For example, BBC Switch (BBC teens) could now host there own microblogging service which has strict guidelines over language and subject matter but take advantage of the ability to use your profile from another community site running laconi.ca. Maybe this might not be right for teens but someone could also switch a config setting and not allow outside messaging inwards or the other way. The option is in the hoster's hands.

Maybe i'm wrong, but if I was Orange or another mobile phone operator. I would have laconi.ca hosted and be actively throwing them support, money, anything to get it up to speed. I would also be developing software for my latest phones which use our install of laconi.ca from default. I mean the only off putting thing for mobile operators is this could eat right into there Sms/texting cashcows. But if they expect to build a future on sms/text, there sadly mistaken. Imagine if they came up with some killer software too, what would that do at Jaiku? Once the xmpp work is done to laconi.ca there will be little difference between the two (only the rss lifestreaming stuff really). I guess the smart move would be for Jaiku to open up and allow interactions between the two platforms? Jyri care to comment???

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A glimmer of what a semantic web could be like


Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

I love the idea of Freebase, even Tim O'reilly was upbeat about the project when it first launched over a year ago. But this video of a project called Parallax by freebase is simply amazing. It looks closer to the semantic web than almost anything else I've seen. Theres so much going on in this area now, you have things like DBpedia, Freebase, Musicbrainz, last.fm, etc, etc… Then lots of Linking data projects using foaf, atom, rdfa, etc, etc. W3C and other standard bodies working on things like RulesML, APML, etc, etc. And there's even stuff you can run yourself like the many Semantic Wikis and Blogs which are starting to popup. There's some real progress being made, the semantic web is closer that we think…

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Random pictures taken on my phone

Over the last few months I've been taking pictures of interesting things on my camera phone (HTC Kaiser). The camera is actually pretty good but lacks a flash for all round use. Anyway, he's the selection…

Only found in Blackpool now... Ridge Racer 2 arcade by you.

I love seaside towns like Blackpool. They always have the best arcades and they never get rid of the old ones. So I found Ridge Racer full scale (good but slow) then Ridge Racer 2 (faster graphics and remixed sound track, much more techno)

POV in Euston (gate 14) by you.

Going back and forth between London and Manchester late night I see some interesting sights in Euston and Piccadilly stations. Usually drunk people doing stupid things. But this time I was passing the screenis in Euston and I noticed the Hamachi windows gui running. Closer shots show there using a secured hamachi network to control the advertising across a 3g link. This shows two things, Hamachi is good enough for commercial setups and can operate on adhoc low speed connections.

Getting my beanbag back home from Mashed08 by you.

This is how I got my beanbag back from Mashed 08. Yes it does look like my scooter has a huge ass on the top of it. I was getting lots of people waving and honking there horns as I rode from Piccadilly to my flat.

Remembering why we gave up on tape decades ago by you.

Oh have I forgotten the joy of tapes…

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