Category: social-hardware

New social software i’m using

Simac : Semantic Interaction with Music Audio Contents

I've been checking out the huge range of Web API's available recently for a project I have in mind. But I've been sidetracked by two new social software/networks.

The first one is upcoming.org which is a place to publish events. It support RSS syndication through-out and ical for events which are easily synced with modern Calendar applications like Sunbird and Apple iCal. Like most social software my events and stuff is public. I'm now checking out eventful which someone recommended to me over upcoming.

The second one is SIMAC: Semantic Interaction with Music Audio Contents. Its self described as “foafing the music.” I call it Audioscrobbler with extra semantic meaning. Interestingly, it actually uses Audioscrobbler, webjay and your live journal or home made foaf profile (Its about bloody time!) to build up a profile of you. I'm sure someday it will be possible to enter your blog url and it will work out the rest – maybe? But back to audioscrobbler a second. Simac, actually uses your standard audioscrobbler plugin to collect your music information. Which for me is great because I can now update last.fm and simac at the same time but also still use the audioscrobbler webservices.

The transision from Audioscrobbler to Last.fm has been a odd one, and honestly the recommendation and tagging in Last.fm is ever so backwards. On the other side, Simac is much more logical and is doing a much better job recommending new music to me. However the interface for Simac really needs some greasemonkeying around. Unlike other social software, there seems to be no rss, webapi or public profile, but then again Audioscrobbler has all this. Now if only pandora was built on top of simac and acted like a plugin in iTunes we would have something very interesting.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Blogs? whats that then?

The revolution has begun

So just recently the British mainstream media have been touted a survey where they have discovered less of the British public know about blogging than dogging. In Blogging vs Dogging (yeah the title says it all really) the facts of the survey are teased out and require a subscription…

More than 1,000 people were surveyed, which included taxi drivers, hairdressers and pub workers for the advertising agency DDB.

Seven out of 10 people don't know what a blog is. While 40 percent say they understood the expression dogging. 10 percent said they knew about podcasting. 56 percent said they were aware of happy slapping. Less than 10 percent of people surveyed were aware of Flashmobbing.

My thoughts on the survey…

First up, its a survey of over a 1000 people. I'm not a big fan of these survey's and wonder about where they get the people from, I mean how many people do you know who were involved in these surveys? So I take these things with a huge chunk of salt. That a-side, blogging the word and movement is still in its early years. Paul explained it best the other day, “10 years ago, people never heard of the internet, now look where we are today.” And you know what Paul is so right, who gives a crap what people say right now. Its going to be huge and there is nothing which the mainstream media can do about it. Surveys, jokes, off the cuff remarks are all part of a dying beast turning in its grave.

A couple of related Cluetrain's

#20 – Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them. In the same way, I'm now laughing at this survey.

#57 – Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner. Luckly working for the BBC, I'm seeing this happen more and more.

#72 – We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it. Self explaining I would say.

Blogs may just be "inarticulate ramblings of wannabe journos" to some, but to a growing audience of socialable internet read/writers its a revolution. In actual fact, we like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Geek Dinner is back with a bang

So yeah I hear Robert Scoble is back for another Geek Dinner on the 10th December via Ben's Blog. But I've got an announcement to say that I'm currently arranging with Tim O'reilly a geekdinner for thursday 13th October. I'm sure Tim will say yes and hopefully by the time I blog this, he would have agreed already. Lee Wilkins is fully aware of this and is stand by waiting for the final go from myself (just sent him the email).

Obviously he will also be doing some presentations and interviews around the BBC before. So if your a BBC member of staff working on the 13th October, try and keep your calendar clear on that day, so you can either attend a session in White City or Bush House with Tim. If your interested but have never heard Tim talk before, please check out this recommended podcast by Paul

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Tagging up facts with tagfacts?

Just when you thought it had all been done. Dima Kuchin builds TagFacts, a tag based tip, tricks and hints service. I honestly do not know what to make of the service. Its a lot to get your head around. But I can instantly imagine some uses.

For example, I'm always looking for little snippets of XSL, JS or Cocoon code to do certain little tasks. Once I use them, I dont formally store them anywhere. So i'm always looking at my previous xsl to work out how to do something. If its something big, I may put it on my blog. But the small pices are usually lost till I need them again. With TagFacts, I can now store them and retrive them quickly. This is pretty what Dima is doing himself.

Although the appeal is not as great as reader2, it could have some long term appeal and become a place where people look before hitting the newsgroups and forums?

It could become a resource like wikipedia, but in actual fact its the total opposite of wikipedia. See rather then collabative working on the same fact, the collaboration comes from the choice of tags. Tagfacts will work best when you have trusted friends on it, so I could check out how Mr M Kay reverses a XML tree.

There is however something which I cant quite get my headaround. Each fact is so different and could actually be wrong. How is it possible to work whats poplar? There is also no commonality between facts except the tags (in reader2 the isbn is used while in del.icio.us the link is used), this strikes me as quite a difficult thing to keep a track of in the backend. Anyhow, I'm sure Dima has it covered.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Shared ownership house buying update

So in case you didnt know, me and Sarah are going through the final stages of buying our first house via shared ownership. Its going but not quite quick enough in our view but hopefully we will have a moving date really soon.
We've already started boxing stuff we dont really need in the next month, and planning out how were going to paint and carpet areas of the house. As you can expect, Sarahs in charge of that stuff while I'm charged with getting our internet, internal and av networks up and running. So I've been charting it out, because I've always had the computers and cinema systems together in the same room from a early age. It use to make sense because I would have TV capture (PVR) and TV output options. But now we have decided to move the computers out of the living room and into the spare bedroom. The only machines downstairs now will be laptops and the xbox. This is difficult because the xbox runs really nice on a 100baseT cabled network, I really dont want to push it on to a shared wireless node.
So it looks like were going to have a combination of wireless and cables. We thought about putting wireless access points on each level of the house and hoping one in the loft, spare bedroom and living room will be enough to cover the house. But with no power up in the loft thats not going to happen quite yet. I'm also planning on setting up switches upstairs and downstairs, so the laptops can be plugged into a solid connection for large transfers or when firends come around with there laptops with no wifi. The connection between the switches will be a good quality 100baseT ethernet connection, otherwise seperate bridging wireless points will be needed.

So generally, the house buying is going, but just not anywhere fast. We hope to be moved out by mid Novemeber the latest.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

I love rollercoasters

Are you ready to scream?

I've ridden some of the best but I had forgot how fun it was to ride a new one till today. A friend of ours was going to Thorpe Park for her birthday and asked if me and Sarah would like to come along as her husband did not really enjoy rollercoasters. I guess Coasters is one of those subjects we just never got around to talking about. So it was a bit of a shock when we explain how much we adored coasters.

Nemesis Inferno really brough back my desire to ride more exotic coasters, and from the picture it looks like one I heard about a while ago is coming to England next year. From a little browsing around it seems the unknown coaster's development name is stealth but looks like a carbon copy of Cedar Point's Top Thrill Dragster. Going on estimates it seems Dragster is 2 times the height but 60+ meters in the UK is pretty good going and I'm wondering how they got the planning permission for such a tall structure, so close to Heathrow airport? To get a feel for how this amazing roller coaster will look check out this shot from the top of dragster, this one from the ground and this one from the side. Thorpe Park isnt the only one doing this type of ride, Warner Bros are building Superman: Escape which is seems to be the same height, same designers and looks like this. So even at half the height its going to be one hell of a Hydraulic launch ride.

On another note, Oakwood is also building a secret rollercoaster which seems to have a few people interested. Plus its good to finally see Drayton Manor build another decent coaster to go with the slightly aging but still only english stand up coaster – Shockwave

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

update – Socially sharing everything?

Ok I keep adding more to the previous blog entry, so heres an update.

I've been playing with Listal and BlinkList after the recent comments. There both pretty good, BlinkList is certainly a whole lot futher down the line than Listal or even Reader2 and Myprogs. But seems to be a straight replacement to del.icio.us, de.liri.ous, furl, etc. It lets you easily import thses too. I'm currently quite happy with del.icio.us and am thinking waiting till Yahoo's My Web 2 and other bookmarking services show something different they can do.

Listal is a little scatty because it can do so (maybe too) much? Flickr works because its all about photos, del.icio.us works because its about bookmarking resources online. Listal does Bookmarking, movies, books, music, etc. Its useful to have the ability to create a list about anything but you loose the fundmental social aspect of a social tool. Reader2 works because every resource must have a ISBN and del.icio.us because every resource has a URL. Listal has so many different types of resources to work around I cant see how it would be possible to keep track of them all. Its easier to match people together based on one common resource. I also dont get the artificial barriers it throws in. Talk about driving the complexity up! Why is there a difference between Region 1 and Region 2 DVDs? I assume because the database pull is different, but why display that to the user? Anyhow, I dont want to seem too harsh in my comments, as I've only played with it for a few hours.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Socially sharing everything?

Just recently I've been checking out the social bookmarking/media web. The first major addition is YouTube.com which is everything Flickr is but based around video clips. It supports a set of Web APIs, RSS feeds and many social possiblities. Uploading video is a pain and enter metadata for clips is somewhat a pain compared to Flickr, you must fill in at least 3 pieces of meta (title, description and a set of tags). I got a feeling that Youtube wont be popular till video capturing is popular on mobile phones and digital cameras. Flickr was well timed for this expansion. As usual you can check out my public page here.

The other 2 Social networks I've been dabling with is myprogs, del.icio.us for software and reader2, del.icio.us for books. Both written by Dima Kuchin from Israel and coming to the UK really soon it would seem.
Like Youtube, they falls into the trap of entering metadata. Reader2 does have a google and amazon lookup, but its not great. I would expect once you have the ISBN of the book, all I would need to do is enter my tags. However, the copy item feature is good if a little fussy to use. It would be really great if Reader2 supported Amazon Wishlist and Myprogs could read your start menu or something via a downloadable application?
I'm kinda of looking forward to a movie version of these social bookmarking, which will save me building a personal store using cocoon or some other open source tool. I thought about using imdb to do this, but I still do not see any web api or even rss feeds for getting my data in and out. Unlike Youtube none of these services have public web apis but theres enough RSS feeds and I'm sure it will come over time. Just like how I hope Digg gets its act together, I'm not going to visit the website everytime I want to digg a story forever.

While I'm talking about social software. Has anyone noticed how Clusters or Bundles are starting to emerge out of the collaborative tagging. So for a good example, here is a search for social on Flickr. On the left hand side you will see a link to the Social clusters. Heres a Nature cluster, City, Phone and even the xbox. Interesting and popular is also becoming well used cluster types.

Following on from the comment by Tim at LibraryThing.com
I have started looking at LibraryThing and comparing it with reader2. My first thoughts, is that its not as sweet looking but thats not a big problem because it actually has lots of ability to customise it. I just wish they would adopt a tableless design like reader2.
On the plus side, theres already the ability to import data from del.icio.us and export data as csv. I expect XML output wouldnt be out of the question but worst comes to worst, I could get Cocoon to transform it to some xml format. I also have to give Tim a thumbs up for pluging into the Library of Congress and building a much better book adding system. It also supports tags with commas instead of spaces which seems to be consistent with where every other tagging system are heading. Reader2 doesnt but has much more fluid interface (Ajaxy) for entering tags and other metadata.
Like Reader2, there is no WebAPI but worst still there no RSS feeds which I can find. This is deeply off putting and has stopped me adding more content for now. So generally I think LibraryThing is good if your a serious book collector (the revenue model seems to match this too) but for myself the lack of basic RSS feeds is off putting simply because I cant extract my own content out easily.
If your interested in checking it out, heres my profile and heres my books.

My mistake Reader2 does support a slight export via javascript as well as RSS. I swear this was not available yesterday. Quite amazing to see the other language versions poping up now.

If you want support for your language, mail me and I'll arrange it.
Russian, French, Spanish, Dutch and Chinese languages are already supported.

I would like to ask Dima Kuchin why he choose to do this. Wikipedia takes this approch too, but Flickr, del.icio.us and other just let people from all countries get on with it. Maybe with time there will be a way to aggregate tags from other languages together but I expect this will some time…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Skype opens up

Skype

Just as google talk hits the news, Skype unleashes a response which answers a few of the questions about Skype and its openness.

Skype has a present to give back to the internet for all of the amazing support we have received from the internet community. We are announcing two new initiatives that make Skype and the Web a little more interesting and open up new possibilities for the developer and partner community. After all � sharing is good

The full text is here. Theres also a developers area and a official skype blog. Which is weird because I kinda of assumed Skype Journal was almost it. Skype is also tipping its hat to the community efforts through there extras gallery, which is really a large directory of links.

For those wondering about Google Talk vs Skype, check out this good summary of the difference from a normal user point of view.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]