Category: design-and-ideas

Channel4 have launched a competition titled The play's the thing. Its an opportunity to write a play which may be performed in London's West end if its good enough. Now I like theatre but love cinema because I find theatre quite stuffy and out of touch (my thoughts). But I do like the idea of live theatre. So this strikes me as a chance to do something about my thoughts.

Me and Sarah have come up with a cracker of idea for a play which brings it right up to date and sends a message out about the society were in today and tomorrow. Yep you bet your bottom dollar its got something for the net generation but its also got something for people who just read about the internet in papers. Obviously once me and Sarah thrash through ideas and develop something concerete which we will submit. I'll open up the idea and development on my blog. Maybe if its a little too riskque for Channel4 someone else may be interested in the idea. Submission has to be done by 1st July 2005 which is the same deadline for the Microsoft IP video thing, hence I only got time to do one or the other.

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Thought Thieves is about people stealing and profiting from your creation or innovation. Think about it: how would you feel if you saw your hard work being passed off as the property of someone else? What would you do?

As I said to Dave and Miles over email a while ago, I swear, I am so tempted to enter this competition just so I can make a film which expresses the advantages of the opening your ideas to the world. IP is not a black and white issue, I very much douht many of the videos will speak in favour of opening thoughts. I could be wrong though… Honestly if I won, I would get myself a decent DV camera and then give away the rest to my previous college.
Were not the only one who noticed the thought thieves competition, NTK.net are running there own competition off the back off thought police, umm I mean thieves.

The 1400-word terms and conditions for MSN.CO.UK's strong-IP “Thought Thieves” film competition are quite the read, even if you're not the 14-17 year-old they're intended to be read and understood by and complied with in their therein bywhich entirety. Entries must be the “sole work and creation of the person submitting the film” (no sharing your precious intellectual property fluids with your cameraman, Mr Auteur); must not “use third party intellectual property rights” (no furniture, no architecture, only clouds as background); the entry form additionally specifies “Should I be selected as a finalist […] I will formally licence on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so”. But what we made us wonder was: where exactly did Microsoft get this “Thought Thieves” idea from?
The idea that people can “steal your thoughts” is surely not original. We're hoping for a class-action by paranoid schizophrenics, who we think came up with the idea that others are stealing the very THOUGHTS FROM YOUR MIND a good few years before Microsoft started losing theirs.

http://www.msn.co.uk/thoughtthieves/
– send us a copy of your entry. We'll do prizes.
http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/excerpts/index.shtm
– Lessig's book starts at the exact point the T&C gets ridiculous

Are you shitting me? Indeed, I love the category Copyfight put the competition under, yep IP Abuse. P2P weblog suggests the winner will end up on Bit torrent, which would be poetic justice in some odd way. There was or is some discussion on Channel 9 but its not exactly saying much we didnt know. It also seems it was slashdotted along with boingboing'ed (is that the right name for it?) at some point in the past according to Loren.
I'm sure this will not be the end of the thought police thievies.

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Via Ben Metcalfe's blog, I hear Microsoft are opening interaction/deign Competition to design and share a vision for the next Windows. I assume they mean Longhorn? Anyhow I agree this is a good move for Microsoft, even I will enter. This is also a interaction design students dream competition (hint hint). There is a entry kit which is quite a few word files, pdf's and a jpeg. Although, the site's design is a little touchy when it comes to accessability, at least RSS updates is a good move. Maybe Microsoft are really starting to get it? This is quite funny when you read Kevin Rose's entry titled Microsoft, please copy Apple. I douht Microsoft will fully take these ideas submitted on, but would the white castle walls of Apple make such a move? Maybe, maybe not?

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The Dragons' Den was a six part series where entrepreneurs pitched their ideas to secure investment finance from the Dragons… elite business experts.

I missed most of this series and only caught bits here and there on TV. It also seems very few people were interested in seeding a torrent of the Dragons' Den, but I'm slowly getting them down. Anyhow I have to say its one of those programmes that the BBC do so well. Yes its reality TV but actually its got all the elements of ideas and thoughts which I expect from the BBC. Great programming, well shot, well thought-out… I may even considering checking out the Apprentice which starts next week on BBC2.

Some of the ideas for businesses are sometimes laughable like in the pitch when a couple of guys suggested turning old tyres into wheelchair ramps. But there have been some gems like Paul Thomas' Truffles – plantation system. The pitches can make one hell of a difference (as we all know too well) and honestly the winning entrepreneurs tend to have a good pitch and the business figures to back themselves up. Best example has to be Huw Gwyther who pitched for a high quality magazine called Wonderland (shame about the nasty flash website, hardly says quality or good taste in anyway!). I know just the person Huw should speak to about this…

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Its back again, freaky Epic future. Just in case you missed it before, its about the future of news media and is a look back from 2014 where the New York Times has gone offline and Google is the number one news provider. All presented in a Museum kiosk style.

But in addition to my post last time. This weeks show web talk show has a detailed discussion around the ideas in the flash movie, as well as the audio of the movie. Well worth the 43mins of listening. Links to the Windows and Real Streams as well as Mp3 download.

Even though the movie is a work of fiction, its actually very freaky and not that far fetched. I mean a place where every participates is something the internet community has been pushing for quite a while. However the devil is in the detail, participating should always be something you choose to do, not just automaticly pushed into. Some interesting points in the movie, which I wanted to talk about more.

Googlezon finally checkmates Microsoft with features the software giant cannot match. Using a new algorithm, Googlezon�s computers construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a news story for every user.

Even though this is very hard to imagine in practice, I can see how this is possible if were expecting even more structure news content. The set of technologies which help make this ver possible is XPointer, Xlink and Xbase. With Xpointer for example, it would be easy to pull paragraphs of a certain criteria out of a xml stream and recombine them into something more interesting, with a different slant or even out of context. Talk about disruptive technology?

2006 � Google combines all of its services – TiVo, Blogger, GMail, GoogleNews and all of its searches into the Google Grid, a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Always online, accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google Grid, or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for anyone, everyone to create as well as consume media.

Dont even need to go into depth with this one, just look at what Gmail has done to webmail. There were lots of concerns for privicy but it seems google have got away with it. Blogger is another stratagic placeholder for the googlegrid. Microsoft are really playing catchup just launching msnspaces recently.

The �Evolving Personalized Information Construct� is the system by which our sprawling, chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered and delivered. Everyone contributes now � from blog entries, to phone-cam images, to video reports, to full investigations. Many people get paid too � a tiny cut of Googlezon�s immense advertising revenue, proportional to the popularity of their contributions.

Amazon and Google have been in the micro advertising game for so long now, people actually make a ok amount of money off google and amazon advertising. Honestly they may have saved the online advertising world back in 2001 with there simple and effective adsense and amazon associates thing.

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Just incase your one of the 50% who read cubicgarden.com through RSS only, you might have missed the style and layout change of cubicgarden.com. I've adopted the popular Asual theme and tweaked it into something more tasty for myself. As I write this, I am not finished yet. I need change the fonts and the sizes to fit with the cheq background. I'm also planning print and presentation stylesheets for myself, so I can easily do a presentation of an idea from my own blog entries. I'm hoping to push out a stylesheet switcher for those who do not use Firefox or Opera browser. So at least you can change the background to something more readable (sorry I have excellent 20/20 vision and can read off the cheq without a problem). This also gives me a chance to get much more creative with CSS and maybe play with Aural stylesheets which should work in Opera 8? Talking of which, its interesting Opera is following Apple by trying to win over the education market first.

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A couple of manifestos which I've been reading recently…

From the gaping void blog

[The ChangeThis blurb:] “You've read the Cluetrain, now Hugh MacLeod brings you The Hughtrain. A manifesto on brands, blogs, and the now of advertising and marketing.”

P2P manifesto Via Howard Rheingold's Smartmobs.com

P2P is unstoppable
P2P is positive for companies
P2P is positive for the market
P2P is good for users

All the readers can create their own P2P Manifesto, free to edit this original P2P manifesto.

The idea is to then collect on the blog all the different P2P Manifesto's releases, to create a good knowledge base point about P2P issues.

Howard Rheingold's own Mobile and Open: A Manifesto

Only a cockeyed optimist would forecast an open, user-driven, entrepreneurial future for the mobile Internet. This should not prevent us from trying, however. Sometimes, envisioning the way things ought to be can inspire people to work at making it that way. That's what manifestos are for.

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Just recently I've been thinking of changing the design of cubicgarden.com. The design your use to has gone throught many tweaks but the main thrust was at a time when blojsom's default template had tables still. Looking Asual for example the default template actually looks and feels better than mine. So I'm going to use it as a base and tweak on top of that. So if you notice things changing each time you refresh, you now know why…

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I'm hearing on the Daily Source code from Adam Curry that the BBC are doing a feature on Podcasting with him in his Amsterdam castle. Its meant to appear on a show called the culture show. But I cant see anything about it on the site. Oh well at least theres a real stream for watching if I miss it on the TV. Thinking of writing a email to the person producing the show and asking for more details… The abuse of being of a BBC employee.

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S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It's totally simple, and it's totally standards-driven.

At long last a way to do presentations without using powerpoint, keynote or openoffice formats. Meyers work is great and well thought out specially for a opera user like me. Its not that I dont like using open office (what i prefer out of the three), its just I usually have to outline it some application like Java outline editor then convert it into something open office will read. Then I end up creating a powerpoint version, pdf version and open office version. i never use the html convert because its usually really nasty and non standard based.

Anyway, i'm going to use it for a presentation to BBC Learning English about RSS and Enclosures. And at the same time write a xsl to convert opml to this xhtml S5. I thought about other transformations but I dont have the time no more, plus it would be alot easier to just do a opml to pdf rather than xhtml S5 to pdf or open office (wouldnt even attept to do keynote). If all goes well i will adopt it for all my presentations. As someone mentioned it would be great if this was the default option in open office or keynote.

More resources. The slashdot discussion, Opera's thoughts from a while ago, Opera's slideshow generator, Information about Citydesk software

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Sarahs a regular at http://hollyoaks.com and noticed during the show today that the stylesheet was missing for a couple of minutes. Then the new style came into effect. I had to natrually check it out. There using Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0. Theres a bit of Javascript mainly to control the multiple stylesheets which is pretty nice as the default yellow is not great on top of white and the open and close elements which work on all the browsers I've tested it on (opera, firefox, ie and mozilla). Two other things which impressed me. Decent print stylesheet and RSS versions 1.0 and 2.0. Shame the RSS feeds dont contain more than a single paragraph, but its pretty much what everyone else is doing anyway. What I find also really interesting is the link to Mezzoblue about what is RSS and the Accessability statement which is pretty good. On the bad side, its a really shame there not using more semantic elements instead of divs with multiple ids and classes but its all a huge change from the old website.

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Been talking to Yoojin about the possibilies of setting up lectures at Ravensbourne again. Then I started thinking, why not use the internet to broadcast the lectures? I mean, I've been meaning to do something interesting with jabber and the icecast streaming server.

So what I'm thinking is, I do a live lecture as such via my connection over audio while in a chat space of somekind? (maybe using the rave jabber conference rooms?). Or shall i forget the audio aspect and just go for a conference room style chat through out? I think I would prefer that as I could do it from anywhere – allowing me to keep a regular timeline, while not affectig anything at home.

I've also been thinking about using meetup more. My previous experiences have been pretty bad, but maybe there will be a chance to hijack one or create my own which consists of lectures and idea throwing around a pub/cafe environment? I mean do people still go to the london meetups?

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I don’t think the site http://browsehappy.com is the best or most original idea in the world but it does once again highlight issues with IE and maybe why we should warn/advise the public about other IE. And empower there browsing experience with better browsers.
I for one never use IE unless I have to in work (Legacy systems, I hate them too). I mainly use Opera and Mozilla if there are issues with cookies. But I've installed Firefox on my linux box and may start using it more and more in replacement for Mozilla. Specially because I love Thunderbird and Mozilla calendar. Yet to try sunbird yet…

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I'm making some long awaited changes to the garden this week. You should start to notice more images creaping into my design at long last. If you reading this now, you should see the sky or grass backdrop on the cubicgarden banner. I'm getting rid of all the tables except the one which makes up the calendar for now, so the blog will be run using pure css. Going to sort out the VM templates so they churn out XHTML 1.1 or at least XHTML 1.0 strict.

I have hopefully fixed the comment feeds. RSS 0.92 Comments and RSS 2.0 Comments. Some of the changes to structure may take a little longer, as I'm going to use blojsom alot more and maybe use some kind of Wiki for other sections of my garden. The first to change will be the mixes, which will have a simular blojsom style interface and this my main blog will pull in parts from my bookmarks (already a blog) and the mixes. My feeds is also up for a change and sort out but maybe in about 2 or 3 weeks.

So if you notice something odd, dont worry it could be me just messing with stuff. But be warned, I'm working to the W3c standards, if your browser does not support XHTML + CSS2 then it might be time to change it… I recommend Opera 7.5, Mozilla or Firefox.

I'm also on the search for a good quality wiki which has these features.
Editing with preview (live preview would be a bonus)
Editing input options (the topcat type buttons)
Real categories
Hierarchy view
GPL or BSD licence (opensource)
XHTML and CSS support
Multiuser
Search (jakarta lucene would be cool)
Recently changed
CSS themes
Metadata and Diff support
Bookmarking
Calendar
Snipsnap support (Textism would be ideal too)
Rss output (input would be awesome)
XMLRPC or Soap interface
Blog support
Comments

Choices so far.
XWiki – http://www.xwiki.org | Forrest – http://forrest.apache.org | JSPWiki – http://www.jspwiki.org | SnipSnap – http://snipsnap.org | Confluence – http://www.atlassian.com. Confluence is the best wiki i've ever seen shame its not open source. Snipsnap is cool but the blog and wiki combined together makes things confusing, dumping Blojsom is simply not a option. I find JSPWiki too plain and too simplex for what I want. I'm really warming to Xwiki as the author is pretty honest about it and where it sits in the sea of wikis. Shame its only alpha and I think it requires a SQL database. Useful page highlighting alot of the Java Wikis also very useful and upto date.

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