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

My BBC talk at Ravensbourne College

Ravensbourne

So on Tuesday afternoon, I gave a lecture at Ravensbourne College to a mix of interaction design, broadcast and graphic design students. John told me, it just needed to be inspiring. So I was torn between my day job at BBC Backstage and things I think about daily. So I started with my presentation about what is backstage. I got to the 3rd slide before the whole lecture turned into a dynamic conversation about the BBC. It was fantastic, the students and staff wanted to know where the BBC was going in the future. Along that path we explorered the questions of advertising on the BBC's international facing website and the Microsoft BBC agreement. Miles did say this

I did find myself reminded of John Battelle's description of AltaVista as it was fucked over by DEC (just prior to the sale to Compaq): “a mammal chained to a dinosaur more likely than not will get trampled.

While I don't know the details of the agreement, there were lots of thoughts and worries about the future of non-DRM content coming out of the BBC. Someone mentioned Dirac and asked whats happened to that? There was also a serious debate about why we didn't write our own DRM? The suggestion was that DRM in understandable if we can't make up our mind between DRM and NoDRM at this point. And you know what thats actually a good question, even if we internally couldn't build it. Maybe someone else could have from a netrual position. I've heard good things about Open Source DRM but not seen any marjor adopters. This would be an ideal project for the BBC to trial. Hey maybe even a Backstage Project? Someone (i think miles) did ask what would happen if someone today created a videoplayer which looks and feels like the BBC player which is being worked on? I said we would certainly be interested in it from a prototype point of view and if it was that good, who knows what might happen.

Although most of this could sound like BBC bashing, it was far from that. It was concerned people wanting to understand why certain choices were being made without them and wondering what they could do to make sure the BBC values lives on in some form into the future.

For any students who might be reading, I uploaded the raw html from the cache of my desktop RSS reader. I hope to clean it up a little more in the near future.

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What is google up to?

Googlemail mobile

What is google up to? That seems to be the question on a lot of peoples lips. A while ago they did a deal with Sony, then bought YouTube with stock (this is the intimate details link). Not long ago Jotspot was bought by Google and now Google have launched there mobile gmail service. Its not that amazing, Plaxo has offered the same kind of service for quite some time but alas only for there paying users. However its going to be secure and free for anyone who has a Gmail account. Its a bit of a bum deal if you live outside north america and don't have a all you can reasonably eat data plan. But as the taoofmac describes, this could be the email for the masses. Once they start pushing calendar, contacts, etc through that same gateway, it will be even more useful. I hate to say it but this is what Plaxo do right now.

Generally Google is doing the loosey joined pieces pretty well. You can certainly see how everything will fit together in the future but right now, there very keen to just develop the pieces. There pieces are not always cutting edge and best of breed but there getting traction and gaining users.

Cheers Miles for a lot of the links.

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Call for Participation: XTech 2007

Xtech 2005

Looks like my proposal for Etech 2007 was rejected. Which is fine, because that means I could present the idea and proposal at Xtech 2007 instead, which happens to be in Paris this time round. Yep its that time of the year again. Call for Participation…

Proposals for presentations and tutorials are invited for XTech 2007,Europe's premier web technologies conference. The deadline for submitting proposals is December 15th, 2006. Read the CFPs and submit proposals online at http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/cfp

The theme for this year's conference is The Ubiquitous Web. As the web reaches further into our lives, we will consider the increasing ubiquity of connectivity, what it means for real world objects to connect with the web, and the increasing blurring of the lines between virtual worlds and our own.

The technologies underpinning these developments include mobile devices, RFID, Second Life, location-aware services, Google Earth and more. The issues surrounding them include privacy, intellectual property, activism, politics, regulation and standards.

XTech is comprised of four thematic tracks:

  • Applications: web applications, vocabularies, publishing, content management, case studies
  • Browser Technologies: browsers, mobile, user interface, related issues and standards.
  • Core Technology: the heart of web technology, markup, protocols, semantics and more.
  • Open Data: technology, experiences and policy behind open access to data.

More detail on the content for each track can be found at http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/content/tracks

Keynotes for XTech 2007 include Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing”, Gavin Starks of Global Cool and designers of the future Matt Webb and Jack Schulze.

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What is going on at YouTube?

I got two of these today…

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Comedy Central Property claiming that this material is infringing:

Future Shock with Samantha Bee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJrTlUv6EaA
Lewis Black on Advertising: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhSQxPH-YxM

Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to avoid future strikes against your account, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube's copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.

If you elect to send us a counter notice, to be effective it must be a written communication provided to our designated agent that includes substantially the following (please consult your legal counsel or see 17 U.S.C. Section 512(g)(3) to confirm these requirements):

A) A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber.

B) Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled.

C) A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.

D) The subscriber's name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriberis address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.

Such written notice should be sent to our designated agent as follows:

DMCA Complaints
YouTube, Inc.
1000 Cherry Ave.
Second Floor
San Bruno, CA 94066
Email: copyright@youtube.com

Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be subject to liability.

Sincerely,
YouTube, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 YouTube, Inc.

Yes YouTube got told to take down all the Daily Show, South Park and Colbert Report by Viacom representing Comedy Central. But now I'm hearing Viacom have changed there minds and has allowed the material to go back up. Crazy!

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Werewolf night yesterday

Sheila vs Sheila, but are they both werewolves really?

So yesterday I setup the first Werewolf only night in London. It started badly, with me running late. I should have factored in 40mins from White City to Moorgate not 20mins. Plus work demands meant I was running late full stop. Turned up and the bar had set a-side a area, but it was right next to the main bar and it simply wouldn't have worked. However what had happened was a mixup on the bar's part. They had booked the wrong area. So after 15mins of drinks and talking, we moved to the private suite which held about 25 people. There was a large table which made things tricky, so our circle looked more like a squashed triangle. Anyway once a few of us had explained the rules and run through a few tatics, we were off into the 1st game.

I don't remember all the games (think we ended up playing up to 6?)but I certainly remember the one when I was a werewolf with Tiff and Frances. Sheila (australian sheila) pointed the finger at me early on because I had pointed the camera at the victim of the first night attack. I think it was a guess but she was right, so I came out as the seer. Then someone else did and after a while Sheila (aus) did too. But it started to work, I got off and started to pretend to check people every round. People started to believe after a while. And my thoughts about killing myself off to keep the werewolves winning, didn't need to happen. We won and I believe the other werewolves never got fingered once. It was certainly an adrenalin rush and couldn't help but stand up and put my arms up in the air at the end. Harry was gutted because he never believed me as the seer then slowly started to believe and so got taken in by my lies. Oh well thats the way it goes… Deception is such a great thing.

So without going into more detail about the games played, we had roughtly at one point 17 or 18 people enough for 3 werewolves, a seer and a healer. The smallest game was 14 people with 2 werewolves and a seer. Everyone enjoyed the night and would happily go to another one. So I'm going to speak to the venue about removing the table next time and maybe getting a large food order at the start of the game instead. Maybe it might also be worth spending money on getting all our drinks delivered to the room, so the breaks between won't be so long? As usual there's my pictures here and public pictures here.

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Adams Geoblogging Blojsom mashup

My new Geo update for Blojsom

Adam has pimped out his blojsom blog with a Googlemap as a selectable flavor. I got to say this is awesome stuff and I look forward to what he does next. This also shows how powerful Blojsom is as a platform for advance blogging (geoblogging, semantic blogging, etc). I just don't understand why more people don't use it. I think Adam has also pushed me into finally buying Ecto after trying out Live Writer again. I really need to make putting in Microformats and other metadata into blog entries a lot easier for myself. That also reminds me I need to get my Blojsom 3.0 blog up and going.

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Firefox 2.0 out now, go get it now

Firefox 2.0 start page

Just updated my Firefox from RC2 to the full 2.0 version. I'm very impressed so far… Everything seems to work as expected and most of my extensions have updated without a problem. Now's a good time to point to the fact that the Mozilla team are asking for ideas on what they should do with version 3.0 and beyond of Firefox. I personally would like to see more Microformat support and real offline reading. Identity, web feed handling, security and privicy occupy the next few slots for me. How about you?

Oh did I forget to mention IE 7 also came out a few days ago? Well don't forget you can download that from ie7.com.

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London Backstage Christmas Party, Saturday 9th Dec

Smooth water

So its now no real secret. I'm planning a big christmas party for BBC Backstage. The difference is that rather than going it alone and creating a whole lot of havoc with everyone elses plans. I decided that Backstage should actually talk to the rest of the community groups in London and encourage one big party. This is core to the BBC Backstage values, rather than go it alone we're going to see whats already out there and see if we can help out, encourage more take up or parcipitation. Anyway, so after the emails went out, I started getting into conversations with different groups and got a line up to rival all line ups. And on Friday night at the geekdinner I revealed the party plans.

To make things clearer, I posted up the details on the Backstage blog and then with the advice of Rob, hit Upcoming and Eventful

Yes the rumours are true…

There is a BBC Backstage Christmas Party being planned for Saturday 9th December in London.

Rather than host it ourselves and clash with everyone else's parties. We decided that it would be very fitting to backstage if we collaborated together some of the best groups and communities in London. Then got them under one roof to share in the Christmas Party…

Seemed like a crazy idea, but I would like to introduce our fantastic partners for the Christmas Bash,

Swedish Beers
London Girl Geekdinners
Geekdinners
London Perlmongers
London Webstandards Group
London Ruby user group
Open rights group
London 2.0
Momo Monday

We have an excellent Cuban venue (TBC) all to ourselves deep in the area of Moorgate and Citypoint.

So please keep a note in your calendar, as Saturday 9th December looks to be a fantastic night to be in London.

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Why do I use Blip.tv? and what is their business model?

I use to upload all my audio and video to the Internet Archive, but the uploading tools and general tools once the file was there, were very poor. So Tom recommended Blip.tv one night at BarCampLondon. I did check it out and really give it a squeeze. But it came out clean, so since then I've been pretty much using that and enjoying it. I think the feature set and general openness to download the actual high quality videos makes a hugh difference

This was pretty much confirmed in my mind today when Miles sent this entry from Joi Ito which links to the entry by Lawerence Lessig where he compares a whole host of video sites to a web 2.0 ethic.

In this context, YouTube is a “cool” poster-child of the Web 2.0 trend, but doesn't meet the basic requirement of allowing the user to download videos from the site. While it is “sharing”, it is what Larry is calling a “fake sharing site”.

Harsh but the truth, its painful to get content out of Youtube, even Google Video is a pain. And all I wanted to do was play it on my big widescreen tv via xbox media centre.

Funny enough, I was talking to Cary Marsh, CEO and Co-founder of a site called Mydeo (meant to be in Tech Crunch this week). Her take on things is that people want to be able to upload video and only show it to a small group of friends and family. They also may not want there wedding videos next to kids racing each other in supermarket trolleys. I see what she means. But what got her was when I started listing off the reasons why I use Blip.tv. She honestly was dumb-founded and wanted to know what there business model was/is. I pointed out that there may be pro version in the future but right now you can.

  • Upload video of any length
  • Download the archived orginal
  • Use there non branded flash player anywhere you like
  • Add a creative commons licence
  • Automaticlly add content to Internet Archive
  • Add advertising to your video (start or end)
  • Add alternative formats of the same clip

And thats just for starters… So to the question of is Youtube really web 2.0? Well I agree with Larry and say nope, its more a 1.75ish type site. Maybe Google will change this in the long run, but my money is certainly at Blip.tv for now. But I do worry that unless they do setup pro accounts soon or start running serious advertising, they won't be substanable and a great video service will go under.

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Last night’s Geekdinner with Molly was great

Geek Rampage

So once again, another highly successful geekdinner, this time with Molly. Believe it or not, but I was late for the party and as host, this is very bad form. I thought to myself, as I ran from waterloo up and down stairs till I reached City Thameslink. If I get there before Molly at least that would be a good thing. When I arrived, I was met with about 40 people drinking and enjoying themselves and Molly's great smile. Oh well I failed. But by the time I had got a drink and cooled off a little, everything was in full swing.

Its great that geekdinner's has got to such a point that people can just gather and enjoy the evening. I just wondered around looking for people who I've never met. Give them a nice introduction to others and geekdinners. In total I counted 60 people which was a great achivement. I do worry about geekdinners getting too big, but to date its still not happened quite yet. I feel the day I can't have a word with everyone, then geekdinners will have lost something. Not to say I won't do large events in the future, they just won't be geekdinners.

At the speaking part of the Geekdinner, Chris Helimann gave Molly some Lush goodies (chris i owe you one), Molly announced that she's going to live in London for a month trial in January and I announced the BBC Backstage London Christmas bash. So there is quite alot to talk about, but I may seperate my news out into another blog post.

The only down side to the night was the venue. See I had a deal with the old management that we could stay till 11pm, which is normal pub drink up time. But the bottlescrew have this thing about closing at 10pm, So last orders got called about 9:50pm and they started kicking us out by about 10:20pm. People gathered outside saying what the hell was that about and that we should find somewhere to drink. So in the hour between 10:30pm and 11:30pm we (about 20+ people) kind of slowly walked up the road towards Holborn station. It was wicked fun and there was great fun had outside some building as we tried to get everyone in for a group photo. By the time we actually got Holborn, most of the pubs were shut and people didn't want to walk all the way to Soho for one more drink. I think, me, sheila and a guy from Norway were the last to leave from the geekdinner. And that must have been just before midnight.

So seriously that was a great geekdinner, I really enjoyed it and totally forgot I was shattered and had not slept well the whole week.

Molly, when your over here for the month, we either need to do a geekdinner or have a welcome to London party for you. And for all those interested, I'm going to look into using another venue for the next geekdinner. The venue has lots of advantages when it was summer

You can find pictures here and here. Oh my god there's a crazy picture of me.

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