Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I should have blogged this much earlier but I attended and spoke at the UK Geospatial Mash up event at the Ordnance Survey centre in Southampton. I don't remember much now but there's some really good posts about the whole day here and here. I did however record a few of the sessions and put them on Blip.tv for everyone to enjoy.
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.
One of my favorate conferences, Pop Tech! Is going to have live streams again for its event starting tomorrow (October 19th). Yahoo are this time providing the streams so big thanks to Yahoo. The Schedule looks pretty amazing and I can't wait to hear it. This certainly worth staying up for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke
With Andy Clarke, Patrick Lauke and others
With Jeremy Keith, Dean Edwards, PPK and Chris Heilmann
Zach, just showed me the Notmedia site. Very interesting I just wish I had known about it ages ago. Saturday is still free, so I guess theres still a chance to get the at media social on everyones radars. Those going to at media and those not going.
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.
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…