Category: social-hardware

London Geekdinner with Jyri from Jaiku

I made the mistake once again of not actually taking any stickers for my laptop. Damm it! Its also worth mentioning Guy West has put the video of Jyri's talk up here and Improbulus has a much deeper review of the night that I ever could write. I don't know how she does it but honestly when Improbulus covers something she does it so deep you feel the burn marks on the event or gadget.

So generally the event was boosted when Jason Canacus decided to come along too. Luckly he didn't steal the limelight from our guest Jyri. Actually to be honest Jyri was flipping awesome. He really controlled the room well, I hardly had to step into the conversation and there were some real strong personalities in the room.

We had about 50 people turn up for this geekdinner in our new home for geekdinners the Ye Olde Cock Tavern on Fleet Street. The venue worked well but the heat level in room was pretty high, so thats something to remember for next time. The microphone worked really well but there was a jazz playing upstairs which was strange and somewhat entertaining.

I did get around to seeing almost everyone including Dan Gilmor who I missed earlier that day due to hackday meetings. Jason is one of those people I kind of don't mind. Ok don't take this the wrong way but Ben Metcafe, Jason and a few other out-spoken people I know are quite simlar and I don't mind them while others hate them for there outspokeness. Funny enough the same group of people (not mentioning any names).I don't mind them because Jason seems to be the kind of person who would call bullshit if he saw it. I know this puts people backs up, but generally I think you need people like this otherwise you get people like Mena talking at Le Web 2.0. Enough said really.

Anyway the event went really well and we had quite a different group of people turn up, this was good because even Hugh McCloud seemed to be enjoying the geekdinner. Sucessful geekdinner with some high profile people. Thanks Jyri for agreeing to do the dinner and standing up giving us a free preview of whats was to come at the NMK forum the next day. Oh thanks to Ian from NMK for everything he did.

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Events next week

Quick reminder for everyone, its going to be a busy week.

I hear Molly is in town, so hopefully she can make the Geekdinner with Julie or even the Werewolf night.

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Back from Hackday London and I’m so tired….

So tired I can't write a compete entry… Here's some classic pictures instead.

BBC Iplayer in Facebook

Aral playing with the Nabaztag

Euan with the Diet Coke rockets

Matthew talking about what just happened in the West Hall

Umbrellas up while the West Hall lets the rain in pour in. Hacker spirit

The scene as the West hall starts to slide open

Myself and Matt on stage

So at long last a update to Hackday.

Hackday was great. Very different from BarCampLondon which was a good thing. Highlights of the day included lightning hitting Alexandra Palace twice and the building going into protective mode by opening all the skylights and letting the rain come in.

Wireless was a problem on the first day but got solved after dinner on Saturday. Actually through out the night it was flawless. I personally don't think it was just load because Sunday morning everyone was hacking away trying to get stuff done before the deadline of 2pm. I think Wireless generally is a problem and we try to minimise that problem by creating pools of non conflicting wireless instead of flooding the room with wireless. Obviously something worked so this is good to remember for future events. Talking to the BT engineers was also interesting because they talked alot about 802.11a being the thing to solve all these problems. It will change channels automaticlly to stop conflicts. So yes anyone with the newer intel chipsets would have got a better experience if we had turned some of the wireless points to A only. We didn';t know the percentage of new vs old laptops so we went with the safe 802.11b/g

A negative comment comes in the form of food. There was food and snacks but generally we could really have done with a selection from Ocrdo or something. I generally got sick of eating dry as hell pizza after a while. When I got home on Sunday I ordered a nice curry because it was so dry all weekend. It was good there was a endless supply of coffee and tea but I really really wanted something different that a chocolate bar through-out the night.

The work of the developers was great, lots of hacks and plenty of variety. I won't list the winners because that will be on the backstage site one day soon. but yes good stuff from the 480 developers.

The event went pretty smoothly through-out Sunday and we were wrong about how long it would take to go through the hacks. I did think it was a shame that the time was then wasted playing flickrball on stage while the crowd watched for another 5mins. We should have ended earlier and gave more time for people to walk around not subject them to a un-inspiring game. Hey we could have desplayed the results of the hackday game which was created. Another thing we should have done is used the main screen more for infomration. A dedicated machine with yahoo widgets, 3 windows one for twitters to the hackday bot, one blank for quick messages and another refreshing the backnetwork. We should never have had Matthew's odd collection of music on through out the hacking period. Honestly people kept asking for it to be turned down or turned off. What would I have replaced it with? I don't know maybe nothing. I know it sounded dead but most hackers wanted that.

As always this whole thing sounds a little negative and its not meant to be. It was a great event but we need to learn for next time for sure. This further proves London and Europe is a great place for development and geek events like this. Even Yahoo didn't expect such a grand event

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Yeah I’ve caved in and finally joined Facebook

facebook

Do I have to say anything more?

Every bloody person I know is on Facebook now. And since Facebook started opening up to 3rd party sites like Twitter, Del.icio.us, Upcoming, Flickr, Last.FM, etc there's even more of a reason to use it. The weird thing about facebook for me is how odd a mix it is of web 1.0 and web 2.0. For example its got the community and participation stuff down really well but its interface and experience is franky dirty and feels like it belongs in the internet archive.

I heard a interview a while back talking about how facebook was going to replace the operating system on your machine. Although I laughed, I can see what they mean now. I imagine its the starting destination for a lot of people, and with its mixture of chat, photos, groups, etc all blended together. I guess this what Yahoo tried to do with Yahoo 360 somewhat failed?

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London geekdinner with Becky Hogge

The last geekdinner with Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group was another good success. It was a much smaller affair that ever before but we certainly had a lot of fun. The new venue was good but I didn't know we were going to be at the very top of the pub. Some people after wards also told me they went to the Bear venue.

Anyway this time we had over 50% new people and a quite heated debate about digital rights. I really wished I'd recorded it video camera or at least Tom could have recorded it for the new podcast show.

Becky was great and I got a feeling we will have to have her back again.

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London Google Girl Geekdinner

I went a fine girl geekdinner tonight. This time hosted by Google at their UK headquarters in Victoria. Took some time to get there but arrived in time for some Google style dinner. Can I just say how great a idea it is having free dinner between the hours of 6pm-8pm, if the BBC did that I'd be there till 10pm every night I wasn't going out. Anyway, the dinner was good and treats even better. I also enjoyed the speeches from Google and Foundem (A Search Platform). It was a great venue and great to see Google once again getting more involved in the local community. Kudos to Sarah Blow and Nicola for once again another great girl geekdinner.

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Flickr finally ends Yahoo photos

Well I guess once Yahoo moved everyone on flickr to the yahoo single sign-on, the nail was in the coffin for Yahoo Photos? Interestingly Yahoo will provide access to other services like photobucket.

Yahoo! has announced that it will shut down its Yahoo! Photos online photo-sharing service in Fall 2007. Members who have photos stored on the site will receive an e-mail during the summer asking them to transfer their images to Flickr, which is also owned by Yahoo!, or to another online gallery site. Other photo-sharing services that are set up to transfer photos automatically from Yahoo! Photos include Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Photobucket.

Yahoo! is also offering to send photo archive CDs to members who previously signed up for the New Yahoo! Photos. The discs will cost $6.95 for each 700MB of photos. Full-resolution images can also be downloaded from Yahoo! Photos albums one at a time.

When Yahoo! Photos shuts down, all images stored by the service will be deleted. Further information on the shut-down is available on the Yahoo! Photos Web site.

meta-technorati-tags=yahoo, flickr, yahoophotos

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Takeaway Festival 2: DIY Talks

Dana Centre talks

I was asked to talk at the Takeaway fest yesterday. My talk was after a total of 9 different talks, so I knew I was going to have to keep it super short anyway. But as usual everyone ran over and I had less that 6 mins to explain why Hackday was going to be ever so great for the audience of artists and designers. I even created some slides for the purpose. I felt I did a good job in the short amount of time till I put on the video of Becks puppets and no one laughed. I'm hoping it was just tiredness setting in or something…

Something also struck me about the different stages people were at. For example Briony Greenhill was talking about the new site which encourages people to be a little more greener every month. She demoed it and I was amazed at its lack of (if I had a better word I would use it) Web 2.0ness. First of all it seemed to be built totally in Flash and seemed very unaccessible and somewhat unusable (but I was wrong, its using elements of Flash and lots of images with no alts). Then I looked for other web 2.0 type things like the ability to have friends, take elements away, a feed, an api, openid, microformats, etc. Nope nothing. Maybe I'm being over the top and its not fair to just pick on Briony but it strikes me that there was quite a bit of re-engineering instead of building on whats already there. Another silo to get wrapped up in.

Generally there were some very good speakers and good presentations. I specially loved the OScar project, which I've heard of before. I have to be honest and say Swarm of Angels is becoming less and less interesting to me everytime I read about it.

Anyway, I filmed a good selection of talks

and they should be up on Blip.tv in the next few hours, I'll replace the links once they appear.

meta-technorati-tags=takeaway2, festival, diy, talks, conference, design, interaction, art, time, danacentre

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A different type of conference?

Werewolf

From Tom Morris

I've got this great idea for a conference

First, it'd have a session called “Pop Culture and Democracy” which would discuss whether the Internet culture's of remixing popular culture helps in democratic participation and related areas. Just over an hour long. Then I'd have a panel of tech people talking about microformats, spam, Creative Commons and anything else that seems interesting or relevant. After that a short discussion from a researcher talking about the Semantic Web. Next, a half hour session or so on Python programming. Then just under fifty minutes of Cory Doctorow doing all the usual Cory things – copyright, DRM, evil Microsoft etc. A discussion of the role of developers, then an hour on the One Laptop Per Child project. Sound like a cool conference? That's good. It's a list of the podcasts I'm going to listen to. Podcasts are what conferences have become.

Point taken about the podcasts but I would say a BarCamp (unconference) is pretty close to what your getting at. However there is certainly something between a unconference and conference which could be reached. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with d.construct and barcampbrighton in September. Conference+UnConference in one weekend, should be great.

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