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
Microsoft announce Popfly, the mashup pipeline application
So only 2 days after my presentation at Xtech 2007 about user generated pipelines and how Microsoft have got something in store in this area. Microsoft release details of Popfly,
Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications.
There is a screencast which shows pretty much everything you can do at a basic level with Popfly. There's also some more focused videos here.
The service is split into two, one a application the other a service.
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Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups.
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Popfly Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.
It looks good and works well. Almost anyone power user will get the hang of it within minutes but there is almost enough to keep more advanced users going for a while. However it falls down in the same places as Yahoo Pipes. No access to the local file system again. Theres even bigger problems when you compare it to my core principles of user generated pipelines.
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Definable
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Graphical
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Standard
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Shareable
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Open
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Non-proprietary
Popfly only manages to get Graphical and Sharable right. This is worrying but its still in Alpha, so who knows what might happen in the next version. Till then, there is a blog for the team and a few screenshots even.
meta-technorati-tags=popfly, pipelines, pipeline, usergeneratedpipelines, flow, xtech, xtech2007, xtech07
My current development setup
I was asked today, what kind of setup I use for developing web applications. I tried to explain but failed because of the lack of common development tools and services. So I thought I'd try and blog it instead.
On my desktop I run,
- XMLSpy 2005 Home Edition (discontinued the free version I think. Might switch to Oxygen XML soon)
- Notepad++
- WinSCP
- Putty
On the server I run,
I tend to do lots of stuff in Cocoon and am slowly starting to use ZK for my front end display. Cocoon is perfect for the plumbing and ZK means I don't need to screw around with Javascript and DOM scripting. If I was deeply into the Ajax stuff, I might not need ZK but frankly I don't have the time.
Yeah its very odd but it works for me.
Plumbing for the next web at Xtech 2007
I have uploaded my presentation, pipelines: plumbing for the next web fresh from the first day of Xtech 2007 today to Slideshare.
The general view is that the presentation went down well and made sense. However I think people really wanted to see something which worked instead of slideware.
My unofficial Out of Office message
Thanks for your email,
I'm actually in a odd part of Paris for the Xtech 2007 conference. So won't be picking up work emails till the weekend because my bloody work laptop can't connect to public wireless! However if you would like to email me on my personal email, I'll be carrying my laptop and phone around everywhere so will be able to reply that way.
For urgent queries twitter me or im me.
Cheers…
Recieved on 10th May, but I missed it…
Hey cubicgarden!
Your slideshow Join us at Hackday 2007 has been featured on SlideShare
Enjoy your day!
the SlideShare team
Flickr finally ends Yahoo photos
Well I guess once Yahoo moved everyone on flickr to the yahoo single sign-on, the nail was in the coffin for Yahoo Photos? Interestingly Yahoo will provide access to other services like photobucket.
Yahoo! has announced that it will shut down its Yahoo! Photos online photo-sharing service in Fall 2007. Members who have photos stored on the site will receive an e-mail during the summer asking them to transfer their images to Flickr, which is also owned by Yahoo!, or to another online gallery site. Other photo-sharing services that are set up to transfer photos automatically from Yahoo! Photos include Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Photobucket.
Yahoo! is also offering to send photo archive CDs to members who previously signed up for the New Yahoo! Photos. The discs will cost $6.95 for each 700MB of photos. Full-resolution images can also be downloaded from Yahoo! Photos albums one at a time.
When Yahoo! Photos shuts down, all images stored by the service will be deleted. Further information on the shut-down is available on the Yahoo! Photos Web site.
meta-technorati-tags=yahoo, flickr, yahoophotos
Takeaway Festival 2: DIY Talks
I was asked to talk at the Takeaway fest yesterday. My talk was after a total of 9 different talks, so I knew I was going to have to keep it super short anyway. But as usual everyone ran over and I had less that 6 mins to explain why Hackday was going to be ever so great for the audience of artists and designers. I even created some slides for the purpose. I felt I did a good job in the short amount of time till I put on the video of Becks puppets and no one laughed. I'm hoping it was just tiredness setting in or something…
Something also struck me about the different stages people were at. For example Briony Greenhill was talking about the new site which encourages people to be a little more greener every month. She demoed it and I was amazed at its lack of (if I had a better word I would use it) Web 2.0ness. First of all it seemed to be built totally in Flash and seemed very unaccessible and somewhat unusable (but I was wrong, its using elements of Flash and lots of images with no alts). Then I looked for other web 2.0 type things like the ability to have friends, take elements away, a feed, an api, openid, microformats, etc. Nope nothing. Maybe I'm being over the top and its not fair to just pick on Briony but it strikes me that there was quite a bit of re-engineering instead of building on whats already there. Another silo to get wrapped up in.
Generally there were some very good speakers and good presentations. I specially loved the OScar project, which I've heard of before. I have to be honest and say Swarm of Angels is becoming less and less interesting to me everytime I read about it.
Anyway, I filmed a good selection of talks
and they should be up on Blip.tv in the next few hours, I'll replace the links once they appear.
- Swarm of Angels – Matt Hanson – Video
- Change through lifestyle: the Anti-Apathy way – Cyndi Rhoades and Briony Greenhill – Video
- TheOScarproject – Markus Merz – Video
- When a long tail swings towards politics – Alexandre Nako – Video
- OpenTheFuture – Jamais Cascio – Video
meta-technorati-tags=takeaway2, festival, diy, talks, conference, design, interaction, art, time, danacentre
The best and worst of Hotel Wifi
Hotelchatter posted up a list of its best and worst wifi enabled hotels. Its mainly American centric but there is a international version here.
Number one in the international version is the Lloydhotel.
Amsterdam: Lloyd Hotel. Free WiFi. Worked so fast in this large hotel. So fast we downloaded an entire season of The Office on iTunes within two hours.
Even 2 years ago it was flipping fast and effect-less. Every 4 rooms shared a wireless point and there was more that enough through-out the rest of the hotel to get wireless outside, the lobby and beyond. I think the only place you don't get wireless is in the lifts. I also got upgraded to the D level penthouse on the weekend, so I'm a little bias generally towards a simply awesome hotel.
Since joining Backstage, I've spent a lot of time in hotels and always try to pick hotels with Free Wireless. Usually the problem I get is that the wireless is in the lobby not the rooms or its not actually free its pay wireless by someone like Tmobile, BT or much worst Eurospot. The other issue is that most hotels don't care or have no one who actually knows the difference. When trying to book a hotel in Newcastle I phoned up about 12 hotels and at one point had to describe the BT open zone, Tmobile logos over the phone because the reception couldn't tell the difference between free and pay wifi. No lie!
So yes the situation in the UK is pretty dire once you get out there. I'm certainly thinking about submitting some of the hotels I've been to on the international hotelchatter site. I remember a hotel I stayed in during my last trip to Manchester, it costs equivalent to 10p a minute for internet access through a wired connection (there were no bundles or offers available) I believe it was operated by swissport or europort. And thats the biggest problem, you can read the website and find it does have internet access but what kind is unknown by even the staff or management.
On the upside, GNER trains have wireless through-out the trains and although it costs about 10 pounds for 24hours, its certainly worth it for a 6 hour journey to Scotland. Recently I heard the Cloud have covered the City of London (business square mile) in rich wifi. I don't think its free but at 11.99 per month for unlimited (yes what does unlimited really mean) data its not a bad deal if your wanting wireless in the UK. The cloud has also been pretty good about inter-operating with BT and I think you can even interop with Tmobile hotspots. There's no douht where ever you go now in London at least, there is some kind of wireless and its usually operated by one of the big 3. Sometimes I do see Orange hotspots, but I can't seem to get Orange to just add it to my existing mobile bill.
Generally its all a big mess but soon I'm sure like the Marriot adverts I keep seeing, hotels will wise up and start highlighting the fact they have free wireless (although I'm sure it will just get added into the room bill).
A different type of conference?
From Tom Morris
I've got this great idea for a conference
First, it'd have a session called “Pop Culture and Democracy” which would discuss whether the Internet culture's of remixing popular culture helps in democratic participation and related areas. Just over an hour long. Then I'd have a panel of tech people talking about microformats, spam, Creative Commons and anything else that seems interesting or relevant. After that a short discussion from a researcher talking about the Semantic Web. Next, a half hour session or so on Python programming. Then just under fifty minutes of Cory Doctorow doing all the usual Cory things – copyright, DRM, evil Microsoft etc. A discussion of the role of developers, then an hour on the One Laptop Per Child project. Sound like a cool conference? That's good. It's a list of the podcasts I'm going to listen to. Podcasts are what conferences have become.
Point taken about the podcasts but I would say a BarCamp (unconference) is pretty close to what your getting at. However there is certainly something between a unconference and conference which could be reached. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with d.construct and barcampbrighton in September. Conference+UnConference in one weekend, should be great.