Author:
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
Ping.fm, the way web services should be done?
So I've finally signed up with Ping.fm thanks to David Owens giving me a update to date code for ping.fm.
So what is Ping.Fm and why do I find it very interesting.
Well according to the website.
Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.
Its a service which will pass on your single message (or ping) to other services. So in practice I can message ping.fm and the message appear on plaxo pulse, twitter, jaiku, plurk, facebook and linked in. Of course it does more than that but those are the ones I'm interested. Whats even better is Ping.fm has im, email and applications of its own. So one of my biggest frustrations is twitters im bot which never bloody works, should be solved.
Its also good to see the setup with other services part is done without revealing your username and password when ever possible. But there are a couple services like twitter and plurk where you must. What would have been ideal is OpenID logins, but few of these services support that right now anyway. Actually on Plaxo, I had to go find the login details because I'm so use to using OpenID.
Once your setup, you can just go to the site and type in your messages which get ping'ed elsewhere. But thats not where it ends, nope you can setup custom and service triggers which allow you to route a message based on a rule you setup or something a service does. So imagine Twitter stopped working (yeah when does that happen?), you could divert messages to another service which you may only use in emergencies. I was trying to work out if you get ping.fm to watch for messages which came through another service and echo those out to the rest of services. So say I SMS twitter, Ping.fm sees the twitter messages, notices its not on my Jaiku and reposts it there.
As mentioned before there is many ways to post to ping.fm but no SMS yet. Right now you can use a facebook application, a load of im bots including xmpp via gtalk, google gadget and even a iphone and wap client! Of course more importantly there's a developer API.
Why do I think Ping.fm is that great? Well its using the web as it should be. There was never a reason why you had to sign into different services to leave messages. Ping.fm is like a layer above all the crazyness going on in the social messaging space. I don't know if I quite trust it yet, currently my hand is forced because I hate the alternative. However these guys are going about the whole thing in the correct way. I love the fact there's from day one im bots and a api. This means once I've setup my services, I don't really ever have to log into ping.fm ever again. This might sound shocking but theres another service which is like this. Dopplr, is trying to be quite transparent in its deliver and use to people. So you can setup Dopplr with your personal calendar, its pulls out places and will inform your friends once you clash. No need to really go back to the site ever really (unless you want reviews and your carbon footprint). There is always a question of how these services will make money without advertising but I don't know maybe a pro version ala Flickr or they could sell the attention data being generated from the messages going through there services?
Who knows, but right now I'm pretty impressed with ping.fm. Once they have SMS gateways its going to be even better.
Korg DS-10 synthesizer in your pocket
Ok I was catching up with the 1up show and they had a segment on the Korg DS-10.
Finally, one of the most powerful new drugs to hit the market is introduced for the very first time outside of Japan by Korg scientists Kazuhito Inoue and Masanao Hayashi. The DS-10 is set to out-perform even its predecessor, the mighty MS-10 thanks in part to its much smaller size, which leading musicology experts Torrey Walker and Ryan O'Donnell have declared to be “almost swallow-able!” Side-effects of the DS-10 include: overwhelming desire to create electronic music on-the-go and to quit one's job in a misguided quest to become a star performer. Oh, and to buy a metallic-pink DS.
Basiclly its a full synthesizer on your DS which can use the wifi feature to link more that one together. Not only that but the touchscreen and multiple screen displays make it very easy to play with. I even believe you can record tracks and play them later. Wow! This awesome, don't get me wrong I still prefer my pacemaker but anything to make the barrier lower and for people to get back into remixing and making music is a good thing in my book. You know stop us from being just consumers. Actually why would you even bother with a ipod now a days, when you have things like this and pacemaker?
I was on the train the other day coming back from London via Shefield and there was this woman sitting next to me. She must have been about 40ish and she asked me what the thing was I kept fiddling with. I explained it was like 2 ipods but I can dj/remix live on them (my usual response for people asking now). She seemed to understand but just ended up saying, she thought it was a new type of mobile phone or games device. I was going to ask if she wanted to have a try but she didn't seem like she was that interested. Maybe next time I'll get some club chick instead.
Technorati Tags: ds, nintendods, korg, synthesizer, pocket, music, remix, make
I am not a werewolf
Next year I'm to make sure I get in there early and get a ticket for Hide+Seek on London's Southbank. I missed the conference part again this year but boy oh boy did everyone have fun playing werewolf afterwards. I believe at one point there were 4 games of about 15-20 people playing at once. Maybe they were a bit too close so you couldn't hear very well what was going on but there were tons of new people to play with and even some of my friends joined in who have never played before. Talking of which, a special award goes out to Hannu for picking two werewolves on his first ever game and in such a important role as the seer. So amazing that a mature player took this as werewolf tactics and almost voted him off. I also took part in a game when we almost got rid of all the werewolves without killing any villagers. Every night the werewolf would try and kill the seer (aka myself) and the healer would heal me. Ok to be fair the werewolves were new to the game but only after 3 rounds of no one dying on the nights did the werewolves start picking off other players. By which time the game was almost wrapped up for the villagers
Technorati Tags: werewolf, werewolves, gaming, play, hide+seek, hideseek, london, southbank
Transparency: the good, bad and ugly
From the Radio Labs blog titled Removing Microformats from bbc.co.uk/programmes
Unfortunately there have been a number of concerns over hCalendar's use of the abbreviation design pattern. Until these issues are resolved the BBC semantic markup standards have been updated to prevent the use of non-human-readable text in abbreviations…
This is has been debated to death in other quarters, but I think its great to see the radio labs guys come out and say in a non judgmental way what problems they've been having and how it conflicts with the BBC standards and guidelines. This is one of those good cluetrain moments which is difficult but so right.
If your not at Mashed, where are you?
I'm ill but that wasn't going to stop me missing this fantastic event. Highly drugged on a combination of paracetamol, phenylephrine and caffeine but still playing werewolf till 5am in the morning has got be priceless.
Only half way through the event and you can already see the range and depth of the prototypes/hacks are going to be on another level. Talking to people, i've heard and seen everything, from social simulators to rockets with cameras. If your near Alexandra Palace today (Sunday) make sure you drop in for the presentations, because there going to be something else this year.
Spent the last few hours listening to old skool tunes
I can't remember exactly how I found the site but oldskoolanthemz.com is taking me all the way back. In the site is a section where you can listen in full to tracks from as early as 87 to almost the current day which are self-described as old skool. There's roughly over 2000 tunes and there all there ondemand. The only thing which I wish they would support is a Mpeg3 download store. I would be lighter of 100 pounds by now if they supported that. Instead they have a place where you can buy the Vinyl or CDs via Amazon, they've missed the trick. I'm sure its not as simple as that, a lot of old skool stuff came out under multiple labels and people and so tracing the copyright owners back will be a nightmare. Anyway, if your into old skool and never checked out these great resource, take a couple of hours out and do. I can hardly pull myself away from it. For example in the last few moments I just found – Frequency – Kiss The Sky, I mean you can get any more classic than that?
Playing with the pacemaker
There's something very special about letting people play with technology and tools that also enjoy. At the Geekparty Ryan Alexander asked me if I had the pacemaker on me. Of course I did and gladly handed it over for him to play with. I'd forgotten how much Ryan would appreciate it, because he loves dance music and dance music culture. Ryan had already seen part of what was possible on the videos I had posted already but the smile which reacted over his face was like a kid in a sweetshop. I reckon 10mins with the pacemaker and he would have would have be that close to buying one. You could just see the sparkle in his eye as he played with the effects. Fun times!
Although the photo has little to do with the title, I just love the look on our faces. It was a long night at the geekparty and I spent maybe too much money on cocktails but it was all good. Well captured rainycat.
Skipping forward
Improbulus asks…
Surprisingly few people I know have digital video recorders or DVRs (also known as personal video recorders or PVRs), geeks and gadget fans excepted. Why haven't PVRs caught on more in the UK?
Just about the time Euan writes this…
In the last three hours none of my family have watched a television and yet:
The kids watched video of themselves when they were younger using Front Row streamed off my media server to their iBook.
We all watched an EyeTV recording of Dr Who on the big iMac
My wife then watched Casualty on the iMac using the BBC's iPlayer
I watched leo Laporte's twitlive.tv streamed via Stickam from his personal studio in California
And all of this was what is now typical behaviour on a typical day.
And about yesterday night I finished my replacement Xbox media centre box. I picked up a XFX GeForce 6200 256meg card from the computer fair in Manchester on Saturday then offered another stand owner 80p for a cheap DVI card. The DVI card was low profile and lined up perfectly with the GeForce Card's DVI port. The box is almost complete (i'll expand on my soundblaster digital audio output another day)
I guess what I'm getting at is, PVR's and DVR's go back to a time when we didn't have home networks and bandwidth going out to the net. The current future surely has to be a media server type device/computer/service and some kind of simple frontend to it. Be that a Xbox, Macmini, AppleTV, Nereos, etc, etc. The PVR doesn't even fit the equation. Which reminds me, I wonder how Ubuntuhomeserver is now doing?
What is it with Newspapers on a Weekend?
I can't put my finger on it but something about the British (i'm not so convinced its just the British now) and Newspapers which I'm observing, which I find interesting. There's something about going to places like coffee shops, bars, pubs and even parks with a Saturday or Sunday paper in hand. Then (usually in couples) sitting in silence reading the paper to themselves. Sometimes if they find something very witty or interesting, they will attract the attention of there partner and read it out aloud. What kills me is sometimes there reading the same paper! So one of them most of opted to buy the same paper instead of waiting a while to swap papers?
What this type of activity is called or does for relationships I don't know but its the opening scene in a new british movie – scenes of a sexual nature. So it got me thinking would the same effect be true if both persons were on a laptop or some kind of read/write device? For example if both couples were on a crackberry (blackberry) would that be radically different and why? How about if they were reading a ebook type device? What is the effect of this newspaper reading too? I've identified a lot of couples do this activity, so it can't be all that bad, can it? Maybe you can tell people are a couple by them reading silently to themselves in the park? Or maybe there's something extra low level going on like in this picture. In the movie, the guy actually angles his newspaper and body in a way to peer a look at some other woman sitting reading a book.
I was talking to Nicole about this today over dinner and she suggested that maybe that's ME time for most couples? But a strange way to have Me time, I would say. When I have Me time, I usually need to be shut away from everyone or something like that. Maybe its like a less intense version of Me time? I could buy that maybe. Hey, maybe me and Nicole were looking at this the wrong way? Maybe this is actually shared time?
There's a ton of research which I've yet to find about how the digital world effects notions of a modern relationship, but its certainly something I'm finding interesting.