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

Creative Commons UK goes live!

The founder of the Creative Commons project, Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, will be at UCL on 4 October to launch the UK version of the Creative Commons licenses. Come and hear from him about the problems of the existing copyright system and the future of creativity in the Internet age.

Need I say more?

Well actual I do have a lot more to say. With great fore-sight before summer, I booked a lecture with Paula Le Dieu at Ravensbourne College in October. Paula is a fantastic speaker and the ideal person to talk about the partnership of the BBC creative archive and creative commons licences. I'm sure she will inspire new and old students (hey lets not forget staff too) about the BBC Creative Archive project and make them think about there own work and practices.

If your unsure about what this is all about, check out some of the news about this important project and announcement. But before that, check out this link to a official transcripts from another news agency. Sourced from Weatherall, Thanks!

There was a great piece titled Mr Rights, in the media guardian this week, unfortually you need to register to read it. But just use guardian@dodgeit.com password = Picasso7. Glad to see others have had the same idea. By the way,
Cory Doctorow's Written Testimony to Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, is also excellent work and really shines the light on how important the creative archive really is.

And just incase you ever missed it, Lawrence Lessig on the BBC Creative Archive…

Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford University and cultural commentator thinks that the BBC have got it right with their proposal of making their freely archive available to the public for non-commercial uses.

By making the content available, commercial entities will also be able to identify BBC material and then license it for a fee.

Lessig describes this as a brilliant response to the extra ordinary explosion of creative capacity enabled by digital technologies.

There is less evidence of this sort of thinking in the US: corporations there are opposed to sharing standards and protocols and, as highlighted by the fascinating and ongoing Linux vs. SCO vs. IBM case, suspicious of the open source movement.

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Synergy raises its head again

Synergy logo

Installed Synergy on my dual screen work pc and development mac. Works so well that one of the designers commeted that …Its like god has come down to earth with this software. What more can I say? I do know I will get a slap down at some point for installing software on a work machine. But seriously theres no douht its worth of the slap because its so damm useful. Just from a ergnomic view, having one keyboard and mouse to control 2 machines is a god sent for sure.

A couple of tips I learn along the way. Use the windows machine as the server, as its quicker, more stable and has a simple gui. And on the mac run the command like this ./synergyc -n MacScreen -f PcScreen. If you try it without the name, synergy will use the rendez-vous name not the mac computer name, and dont forget to run the command on a mac you need to add your ./. Very cool, anyway… Cant wait to add redhat box to the synergy configuration.

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Bugmenot

I cant remember where I first heard about this first but I've been meaning to try it out for a while now. Usually I tend to use mailinator.com or now dodgeit.com to create a temporary account which I tend to use again and again as I make the username and password easy to remember. For example today I was trying to get into the guardian.co.uk site and so I tried to setup an account with the email address – guardian@dodgeit.com with the password of password (hehe). But someone had already done it before. So I simply requested the password again, and waited till the guardian sent the email. Easy

But even that can be a hassle, so bugmenot is ideal. Its basicly a huge database of username and passwords which people donate for others to use on registration sites. Good idea, well thought out with plugins and bookmarklets.

The bugmenot official response to the fact there webhost also hosts the neonazi group combat 18.
I've decided that its better to go through the little hassle of using dodgeit or mailinator than to promote the clinical response of freespeech from bugmenot.

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Dont you just love multi language RDF?

The BBC world service has finally commited to delivering RSS 1.0 (RDF) feeds for content syndication. I'm suprised the blogsphere has' not caught on quicker because I wrote automatic discovery into the xsl on Monday / Tuesday and the RSS feeds have been out there for at least 2 weeks now.

I kid you not this is a huge project, to syndicate in over 30 different languages on one site is a worlds first and shows how creative the BBC is as an Corporation. I cant say too much about the future stages of content syndication but other formats are being considered and other options are also being considered. But at this stage all new indexes on the BBC worldservice language sites should be publishing rss. And they should be linked in the html files, using simple feed discovery.
Here's an example of the BBC Indonesia news index in RDF form and the sport section in RDF too. The URL is pretty easy to work out (we adopted a RESTful type URL) http://www.bbc.co.uk/{language service}/{section}/index.rdf. Feel free to check them out, but be warned this is still in beta and may be withdrawn without notice. If yu want to see more check this aggregator example which will be taken down soon.

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Ravensbourne Online learning community

After posting about Dissertation time again… and late night lectures. I have been offered the chance to try something out for the college. So if your one of my ex-students reading this, contact me via my ravensbourne email address and I will add you to the group. As it sounds, its a experimental online learning community which I will use not only for dissertation but for teaching and learning over the next year. Oh by the way this applies to 1st, 2nd and 3rd yrs mainly in interaction or subjects close to interaction.

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IT conversations

Its one of those things I've been meaning to blog for ages but forgot due to the reshuffle of cubicgarden.com (comments and trackbacks should be fine now). IT conversations is how to do streaming audio correct. Not only does it host some of the best talks from some of the best conferences, oh no they host it using streaming mp3 or windows media. Theres an option to just download the mp3 if you like too. Theres full text transcripts and they syndicate new streams with enclosures. I mean things can not get any better, oh did I forget to say you dont even have to register if you want to… Excellent resource and I'm proud to say its what I listen to at work.

I highly reccommend listening to Tim O'Reilly's Watching the Alpha Geeks. Covers a lot but well worth it. It also reminds me to check Dan O'Brien's Intro to life hacks. Which is still not completed. Saying that, I've still not sorted out the copyright vs community audio and video streams!

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Flickr useage

I've got a presentation coming up tomorrow and I'm just adding the finishing touches now. Now this is quite interesting and a lesson to myself. In one of my slides.

Minning against searching

Google and other search engines work on page-scraping technology. Google will for example ignore html metadata.Technorati, Daypop and Feedster work on content syndicated rss feeds only. Minning content like this, better represents BBC content as it keeps content in context.

I've been searching for images using google image search but the results when looking for certain subjects or topics are not good. Gogle relies mainly on the image filename and webpage it sits in. Well thats ok, but Flickr does a much better job because people actual asign metadata to the pictures. Then I've been thinking actually this is better way to get pictures because you can see the copyright licence straight away, for example Perfect morning by Bmann has a creative commons licence. I love flickr so much that I've actual signed up myself, wont be put too many pictures up because I'm not totally sure about storing personal data on a beta service (much my same problem with Gmail and del.icio.us). But I'll put up some photos which I dont mind other people using, glad to see flickr makes it super easy to do this. I picked Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike for obvious reasons, and incase you didnt guess my flickr address is http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubicgarden/ and http://www.flickr.com/people/cubicgarden/. Good to see Flickr is making use of all the backend data (EXIF, XML, RSS) as well as making great web interfaces. Just dont understand why there using Flash 7 to display images?

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Getting free music legally?

Friends with benefits image

Just recently I've not been consuming enough music. I use to follow dance music alot but I've been consuming too much Television and Movies from UKnova and Suprnova. They do have music too but usually popular albums rather than the edgy underground stuff I listen to. Plus they rarely do tracks rather than full albums. So I've been thinking about using a p2p client like Shareaza again to share and trade tracks.

But then again I was reading Xeni Jarden's article about putting the share back into filesharing. I keep meaning to check out the links and see if its any good. However the ripping off live radio is back in fashion and much more accessable than ever before. Streamripper seems to be the application which all others is copying. Streamripper is Opensource (GPL) and runs on Windows and OSX, so there seems to be little reason why you cant compile it for other platforms? For those new to all this, basicly this application will rip what it hears streamed. It will use ID3 tags to create the individual mp3 files with the right meta and filenames. Plus its actually not against the law to record it for personal use. I have yet to try it yet, but I'm going to try it this weekend for sure… I've been tempted to do it at work, except I would have no way to take all the tunes home after work. Maybe this is a good time to get that 160gig drive (55 pounds plus vat is going rate at the moment) for my external harddrive enclosure?

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Blojsom events

Ever since David announced the blojsom event notification and listener API, I've been thinking about 100's of ways to use it. But before I explore the possibilites I need to at least upgrade to 2.18. And alot of you will be glad to hear that I will be sorting out my feed links which are still relative rather than absolute.

I still need to run tests on blojsom, My aim is to get blojsom to output SSI's for use with the BBC blogs. Talking of which, got some really interesting news about the BBC but I cant tell quite yet. Once I can, I will post it here first before anywhere else.

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My top Firefox extensions

Get Firefox

I've now got Firefox on three different machines which I use everyday. But my problem is that each one is slighly different because I dont have the same extensions and themes on them. Of course I still use Opera, but with my GNU/Linux setup at home now, I've decided to not install any Open/Free software on it. Which was a problem at first but I've pretty much made Firefox work like Opera now.

First up the ones which make Firefox like Opera for me
Nuke Anything 0.2 – Adds a Remove this object entry to the right-click context menu, which will remove an object from a webpage temporarily. The effects can be undone by reloading the page.

Paste and Go 0.3.1 – Lets you paste an URL from the clipboard and directly load it.

Mouse Gestures 0.9.20040902 – Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard. You can also use “rocker” gestures.

MiniT (drag+indicator) 0.3 – Adds tab dragging with drop place indicator.

Image-Show-Hide 0.1.3.2 – Adds an icon to toolbar. By clicking this button (Or “Shift+B” shortcut) you can simply turn on|off images on all web-pages and (optional) autoreload current page!

QuickNote 0.5.9.2 – A note taking extension with advanced features.

ReloadEvery 0.3.2 – Reloads webpages every so many seconds or minutes

User Agent Switcher 0.6 – Adds a menu to switch the user agent of the browser.

Sage 1.2.2 – A lightweight RSS and ATOM feed aggregator.

Single Window 1.4 – A simple extension that allows Mozilla to fully utilize the built-in tabbed browsing behavior, compatible with Mozilla, Netscape, and Firefox. Singlewindow has only two options: * Single Window Mode — Traps links that would normally open in a new window

And ones I just love
EditCSS 0.2.2 – Stylesheet modifier in the Sidebar.

BBCode 0.3.2 – Adds BBCode/HTML/XHTML formating to the context menu for forums like Mozillazine. Based on Cussers pastequote extension.

Delicious Delicacies 0.1 – Restores our favorite cookie placeholder text.

Wikalong 0.9.5 – A roaming wiki embeded in the sidebar of your browser, indexed off the URL of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the Internet.

FoxyTunes 0.5 – Control any media player from Firefox and more… [Windows/Linux]

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