Category: design-and-ideas

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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The Digital well being store

Digital well being

I just got back from the Digital Well Being store in Fulham. I saw so many good things, I'm not even going to try and talk about them here. Instead you can see a load of pictures here on Flickr. But the most interesting thing about Digital well being is the whole concept of digital products being out and available to use and play with. Its not sterile like the apple store and certainly nothing like the dodgy pc world setups. The only stores which comes close is Ikea and Habitat. Anyway to only way to experience the store is to get your ass down there before they move somewhere else and change it around. You can also keep a track of whats going on with the blog they have setup, which needs to be updated.

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One Web Day

One web day banner

I should have a really good video for one web day (22nd September). Howard Rheingold talking to the BBC in a talk titled Co-operate or Die! Should have the video online sometime tonight, so keep an eye on a update soon.

I've added a couple of question and answer videos here. But i'm still processing the actual talk video, which will show up under the same url someday soon.

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Visualisation of complex data

Spam architecture

I was catching up with mobuzztv today and caught quite a few things in the links, which I felt like sharing.

First up was a link to a guy who has made quite aggressive objects out of his email spam.

The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.

Nice stuff, but I was thinking it would be great to see a real time view of this thing growing over days or weeks then bits getting lobbed off when he purges his spam folder. And this could easily be done with x3d, hey what ever happend to x3d? Anyway, it also seems Alex has a few projects based on visualising complex data like this one called Brecht, a VJ tool based on SQL queries.

Second through the gates, and on a simlar vein is shape of song

The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see–literally–the shape of any composition available on the Web. The resulting images reflect the full range of musical forms, from the deep structure of Bach to the crystalline beauty of Philip Glass.

I don't what else to say but I would love to see these drawn using multiple colours and animated to the music. Which (with my remix head on) could be done using clever use of SVG. Do check out the Gallery to get a feel for what I mean.

Third but somewhat deserving to be last, Brian Eno and David Byrne offer all there song data from there latest album My life in the bush of ghosts under a creative commons licence. Great, and lots of people have already started remixing but there something I can't let go of so easily. Why wrap the whole damm site up in Flash! Its really fiddley and means I can't permalink to any of my favorate remixes or even copy the text for a blockquote. One word…. suck! Although the general idea is good. Shame its let down by some over the top flash wankery.

Oh quick plug for one my favorate blogs about information visualisation, information aesthetics. Now if only someone could make the link between information visualisation and real world remixing of xml and webservices.

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Videos from the @media Social now online

At the @media Social, there were some talks given by some of the speakers of the @media conference. And I managed to stick slightly smaller versions on my server. There in Mpeg4 format because thats what my new Sanyo shoots in and VLC compresses nicely into. I've tested them with Quicktime and VLC but nothing much else sorry. I may try compressing to Xvid at some point in the future if people ask for it. Enjoy… and I'm sorry the Javascript one is slightly cut, my camera battery died near the end.

CSS get together

Molly quizes Andy about moving on the CSS discussion
With Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke

Have I got Accessbility for you?

Have I got accessbility for you
With Andy Clarke, Patrick Lauke and others

Javascript get together

Javascript get together
With Jeremy Keith, Dean Edwards, PPK and Chris Heilmann

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Gimpshop beta, I love it

Gimpshop in action

For some reason I just can't get on with GIMP (the GPL Photoshop). Its weirdly layed out and if your use to Photoshop its simply a nightmare. Its funny because I've not used Photoshop seriously for maybe 4 years but these habits die hard. I've managed to get on with Illustrators GPL replace Inkscape no problem but GIMP? no even close.

So I remembered I had tagged this project called gimpshop and decided to go try it out. Although its still in Beta, I was highly impressed. I mean although its just (well its never that simple, when working with someone elses code) moving around some of the options and finally adding a backdrop. I've been able to work with it and design things much quicker than before.

I did look around for other opensource and gpl photoshop applications but besides a range of Japanese apps like Canvas 4, I was pretty much stuck with Gimp.

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Rebooting the BBC home page

Reboot top logo
Reboot bottom logo

Help us discover what bbc.co.uk 2.0 looks like.
We don't just want you to redesign the bbc.co.uk homepage, we want you take it all the way back to the drawing board…
Throw out the existing content, throw out the existing focus, throw out the existing expectations, limitations and assumptions – and help reboot:bbc.co.uk

So here is your chance to reinvent the BBC.co.uk home/portal/aggregator site. There are some great prizes available to the winner and runner-ups. Now I know there's been lots of talk about the rip off issue, which Ben has covered really well here in an entry titled we want to reboot not rip-off!. Here's one of the quotes.

…why not have “redesign the Ten O'Clock News” or “redesign The Archers” competitions. Or you could do all this yourselves, which is what I'm paying you over a hundred quid a year for.

But Ben Metcalfe returns with a fantastic comment which I feel sums it up nicely.

But not only does that not seem right, but that's not a BBC approach. Auntie doesn't always know best.

And thats where things get tricky I guess. Being a BBC employee, you would instantly think I would rush to the help of the BBC. But honestly I think the BBC is trying to really open up. Reboot is a way to encorage not only developers but anyone who has had that thought, why isn't the bbc website like this? Well here's a chance to put that thought in to action. And yes, thats my thought, not the BBC's.

On the plus side Martin Belam has showed his thinking behind the clean Google like BBC home page. I've also confirmed with Ben that reboot is open to everyone living outside the UK. So what you all waiting for? I have some ideas but there maybe a little too radical and niche to win a prize. Something to maybe inspire your thinking? Well how about the newly launched BBC Programme Catalogue prototype?

At only just shy of 1million BBC Radio and TV programmes over 75 years its pretty amazing to browse around. And don't forget every single part has RDF and ATOM data which can be easily used as part of a Mashup or something else. Pretty impressive stuff you must agree? Now back to rebooting…

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The future of everything conference

I may have messed up the dates but for some reason I thought the Carson Workshops Future of webapps was on the same day as the BBC's digital futures conference. It looks like a early email mistake by someone might have been at fault. Either way I ended up going to the BBC's digital futures and not the future of webapps, but Licence to Roam's Racheal Clarke has written up quite a few of her notes which have been really useful. Thanks for that Racheal. Paul Hammond told me I need to check out Tom Coates presentation.

I'm tempted to upload my notes from digital future but one I don't/didn't write many notes and two my dyslexic mind means my notes make a lot of sense to me but not to anyone else. I usually have to tiidy stuff up afterwards if I'm going to give my notes to someone else. By the way I tried using Gobby which is the opensource and cross platform version of subedit on the mac. But not many people were using laptops and of those who were, they were all mac users. Anyhow I believe although it was a BBC staff event I'm sure I can talk about it publicly without a problem.

So who were the guests?

  • Ron Pompei
  • Matt Webb
  • Dan Hon and Adrian Hon
  • Natalie Jeremijenko
  • Jeffrey Veen

Honestly I actually enjoyed every single presentation and they were really varied. Natalie Jeremijenko was great but I quickly realised I had heard her before on IT Conversations. The only thing new I saw was the excellent idea of Howstuffismade.org But it was great to see her live and see the videos of the OOZ robotics and the feral robotics dogs project. It was great to see the Dan and Adrian Hon doing a presentation about Perplex City which is the first major ARG in the UK. And one I was involved in from day one. I was quite suprised by the openness of there presentation, as it seems they have lower the curtain and made the game a… game? Something which the American ARG's are very strict about. For those who have never checked out ARGs check out these links.. The curtain issue is like a line in the sand between the players and the game creators. In some previous ARGs the line has been over stepped and it was not uncommon for puppetmasters (general term used as they pull the strings of the game, I prefer game creators) to go into hiding during a game because people will and have followed them around as part of the game. I talked with Dan and Adrian a lot afterwards about there openness and previous mistakes by other games. I wanted to ask the questions in public at the event but didn't get a chance. But moving on, as I got a feeling I will end up back at ARGs again at some point soon.

Matt Webb was good but owning his book Mind Hacks meant I had heard and seen quite a lot of the presentation already. I think Matt gave a good presentation on a very difficult subject to present. He may have lost a few people on the way but made everything easily understandable by the end. I didn't get much time to talk to him afterwards but I'm sure our paths will cross at somepoint again. Talking of which. Matt Blackbelt Jones was the event afterwards and said he was subscriber to my blog and to keep up the good work. I was kind of blown away, like when I heard Doc Searls also reads this blog at one point. I wanted to ask Matt why he reads and how he deals with all the rants and grammer mistakes but he was on his way out, so maybe next time. Ron Pompei started ok and got much better towards the end. He talked about the different sides of people and our own ideniity. I think my notes on this one presentation will make more sense than any other. One thing to note was the progression graph which struck me as very cluetrainish.

Co author instead of consumer. dialogue instead of message, journey instead of the desitination, cooperation over corporation and status activities instead of status objects.

Jeffery Veen was fantastic and really rattled through his presentation which was about the buzz of Web 2.0 and why he felt it could be Bubble 2.0. After looking at what others thought of Web 2.0 including the audience and Tim O'reilly. He went on to prove that although Web 2.0 may be buzz word it does have some elements which do show a certain progression forward. Even out of the boom and bust cycle which has been going on for decades The whole presentation is here and worth looking at.

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Inkscape is simply great software

Inkscape logo

I would just love to say, I upgraded my inkscape the other day because I needed to do something using vectors. In my younger days I would instantly use Adobe Illustrator but I really don't feel the need to any more. Inkscape 4.3 is as stable as a brick house (honestly never crashed ever, like previous versions) and although not quite working quite like illustrator. I'm really getting into the way it works now. I also felt so happy about Inkscape, that I decided to add my core but simple illustration to the openclipart project. You can see the whole thing here, till they move it. I provided the object under a public domain licence, so anyone can do what they like to it. I was tempted to do a whole range for XML, XSD, CSS, etc. But thought I'd leave it for now. But maybe one day soon I'll do it. It feel so good to beable to do this with opensource software.

You can't help but feel the tables are turning and there will be enough openclipart and applications like Inkscape to do everything in a opensource environment. Oh whoops, of course there already is. But these new crop like Inkscape, Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, Koffice, Scribus, Openoffice, Gimp, etc really are getting the basics right and win market and mindshare. The google code thing has got me thinking that actually its time I started working with SVG a lot more like I use to. I mean there are people who can see it now and its growing as more browsers come out supporting SVG. Expect to see more inline SVG on this blog as time goes on. I dropped a SVG in this page just for testing purposes. Hey and what a great name for software? Inkscape. What more can I say, oh did I say how great the connector tool is? OMNIGrapple? Don't need it, I got Inkscape thank you very much.

The new Connector tool was used for a preliminary design of these flowcharts, when it was critical to keep items connected all the time while looking for the best layout. The flowchart lines were then edited with the Node tool.Diagrammers everywhere will find this tool invaluable. Connectors stay attached and automatically route to avoid marked objects as the drawing is updated. After the layout work is finished, connectors can be adjusted with the node tool.

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The next geekdinner will be with Paul Boag

Paul Boag

The next geekdinner will be next month on Thursday 23rd Feb and our guest for the night will be Paul Boag of the popular podcast Boagworld. The Boagworld podcast is aimed at those who are responsible for an organisation's website and would like practial advice on what they should or could be doing to improve the current site. Paul himself is a well established web designer usability/accessibility specialist and is a founder partner of Headscape which practice Webstandards when ever possible.

The venue has changed once again, this time were at the Polar Bear which is just a stone throw away from Leicester Square. The venue is larger than the one in Covent Garden, and a nicer cleaner deco. I'm also expecting the food will not run out like last time and at only 5 pound per head expect a more rounded buffet with food for vegetarians as well as meat eaters. There will also at long last be a PA system with Microphone for the guest and the Question and Answers session which follows. I'm also able to play what ever music I like at what ever level I like. So if anyones interested I can maybe put there ipod on shuffle mode and play it during the night at a low level.

As always expect a post on Geekdinner.co.uk soon and its been listed on Eventful and Upcoming.

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The challenges of validating cubicgarden

Validation

Its one of the dirty little secrets of my blog, I’ve never been able to get it to validate to xhtml because of a combination of things. So first up lets have a look at how many errors I currently receive. 127 validation errors to be exact at the moment without this post. But its honestly not that bad, well it is but let me show you the better side first. If I just validate just one post with my current theme/style you will see there is only 4 errors and they all point towards my search box which actually links to Blogdigger.com.

form method=”get” action=”http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?search=1″
input type=”text” size=”31″ name=”q”
input type=”hidden” name=”id” value=”1065″
input type=”hidden” name=”sortby” value=”date”
/form

So to solve this problem I need to wrap the input elements in another element first. This is simple as I just added a div with a id around the input elements.

Ok so moving on, lets try another single post entry. The errors are varied, but the first one is Error Line 125, column 167: there is no attribute “border”. Yeah easy to fix, but why would I make some a school boy error? Well I dont its actually my blogging application which automaticly adds it when I make a image element. I just keep forgetting to remove it. So the easy thing to do would be to change blogging client, specially seeing how i’ve been meaning to change to something more powerful for quite some time. I tried to notify the author but had no reply and theres no forum or bug tracking. Worst still I cant actually change the element properties in wbloggar. So I’m going to try Performancing for Firefox and maybe even pay for Ecto. Till then I’m having to edit my posts to remove that border=0. Oh by the way Error Line 125, column 172: required attribute “alt” not specified is also because wbloggar puts the alt attribute as a title attribute instead. Another reason to move away from wbloggar.

My next error is my own fault. I’ve forgotten the fact that the Blockquote element should not contain text content only another block level element like a paragraph. So once again I need to go back through my entries and change that. I’ve also changed my wbloggar custom tag to add a paragraph element inside the blockquote element. When I change to ecto or something else, I hope it does this out of the box.

Ok so were almost there now. But wait here’s the big problem. Lets take my last 5 entries including this one which I was typing at the same time as validating.

3. Warning Line 125, column 438: reference not terminated by REFC delimiter
…ojsom%2Fblog%2Fcubicgarden%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=XHTM
If you meant to include an entity that starts with “&”, then you should terminate it with “;”. Another reason for this error message is that you inadvertently created an entity by failing to escape an “&” character just before this text.

4. Warning Line 125, column 438: reference to external entity in attribute value .
…ojsom%2Fblog%2Fcubicgarden%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=XHTM
This is generally the sign of an ampersand that was not properly escaped for inclusion in an attribute, in a href for example. You will need to escape all instances of ‘&’ into ‘&’.

5. Error Line 125, column 438: reference to entity “charset” for which no system identifier could be generated .
…ojsom%2Fblog%2Fcubicgarden%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=XHTM
This is usually a cascading error caused by a an undefined entity reference or use of an unencoded ampersand (&) in an URL or body text. See the previous message for further details.

So basicly all the URLs need to be converted to include ampersands otherwise I will never be able to get a validating weblog. So I’m looking into my Velocity templates if there is anything which can be done. I thought I’d have a look around at other popular blojsom based blogs, see if the problem is the same. First up David Czarnecki, same problem. Ravensbourne’s Mobile learning blog, same problem. IRIS at VeriSign, yep you guessed it same problem. A quick look across the web and the problem seems to be hit and miss. Ben Metcalfe, Robert Scoble, Jeremy Zawodny, Consuming Experience, etc. Geez, theres got to be a way to solve this without actually recrafting urls when blogging?