Category: socialware-online

The endless hassle of the Sanyo HD1 Camcorder

Sanyo Xacti HD1

This long and complex tale starts when I was in America and looking for a camcorder. I wrote a blog entry from America talking about the differences in Camcorders and asking for which one I should go for. I was actually not looking at the High Defination (HD) cameras at the time because of the sheer price but did like the look of the Sanyo Xacti HD1. So after the blog post I got a couple of emails and comments. One suggested looking at Ebay.com because they seem to have lots of them on sale there. So I did while me and Sarah were staying with Birch in Minneapolis. I also looked at a few other places like ebay.co.uk, amazon.com, bensbargins, froogle, pcmag.com, etc etc. And of course Ebay was the best price by a long way. So I thought hummm, maybe this would be a good time to use ebay. Specially being in America and able to get things delivered to my in-laws address, plus of course the great conversion rate of the pound at the time (1.85 dollars to the pound). This is where the tale goes sour….

So me and Sarah decided to look at Ebay for the Sanyo HD1 Camera, we find a seller called Trading Circuit. It turns out that Trading Circuit is actually the online ebay arm of Circuit City (Like Comet in the UK). So basiclly if they can't shift something which has been returned in store, they will sell it on ebay instead. Makes sense and I'm not against this at all. Actually it would be great if Curry's Digital and Comet did the same thing in the UK. Anyway, so me and Sarah are thinking hey there feedback is pretty good and there not going to rip us off, so were looking through the closing auctions. We find one very close to this one (which ends in 2hours), but it only had 23mins remaining on it. I read very carefully thought the information and start bidding. Find out that I can't bid because my ebay account is based in the UK and trading circuit will only sell to the states. Which is stupid because I'm going to use an American credit card (Sarahs) and it will be sent to an America address. So in the end I rope Sarah into buying it because her ebay account is American. We finally finish and look at the bidding, well we lost out on that camera by about 2mins. So we look at the promo box at the bottom which reads See more great items from this seller. And come across this auction for a Sanyo HD1. Scanning quickly across the text, everything looks pretty much the same. Well I was just about to make a huge mistake.

If you look at the Item Specifics. It has 3 ticks, but if you read carefully (which I didn't) it says on the 2nd one AS-IS (Primary function does not work – see description). Then if you look down a little more you will also see this…

Unit will not capture/save pictures or video onto memory card (primary function) – LCD and viewfinder are black during recording.

Well obviously I didn't full read this and you can't really blame me when you look at the other Sanyo HD1 auctions which look exactly the same. Anyhow, me and Sarah did bid on the broken Camera and won the auction at just over a 100 pounds. I was thinking wow were really got a great deal. Then we went off explorering Minneapolis with Birch.

That night, I was up really late and decided to look around at some of the forums about the Sanyo HD1 camera. See I had looked around before, when deciding which camera to get, hence the Samsung and Panasonics didn't stand a chance really. So I found this one called Dvinfo.net and they had a forum just for the Sanyo HD1. It was very useful because it had shots and videos from a HD1, hence I know what the quality is like of the HD camera, etc. So I came across this sticky topic titled Black Screen on my brand new HD1 Help!!!!!!!!! I start reading and guess what…

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sanyo-Xacti-HD-5…QQcmdZViewItem

I found two HD1 items of ebay with the blackscreen problem. Being sold as a spare parts. I guess it's not completely uncommon.

one of the links points almost directly to the auction I had just won that morning. How do I know without clicking? Because the link was Purple not default blue. I honestly couldn't click it for a minute. In the darkness of Minneapolis at 4am, I could feel the blood just chilling all over me. Then I started to sweat, as my head got really hot thinking about the morning and how we had one the 2nd auction not the first one. The first one I had read really hard while the 2nd one I just scanned quickly. Then I finally clicked the link and bang there it was, except this time I could see all the flaws like unit will not capture. Trust me, I couldn't sleep that night and the fear of telling Sarah the next morning that we had just lost over 100 pounds on a camera which is used for spare bits. In the moment of disbelief, I wrote a email to trading circuit saying it was all a mistake and please don't send the package.

The next morning I did tell Sarah and we contacted Trading Circuit again but through Sarahs ebay account and offical means. Hoping they wouldn't ship the package and understand its all a big mistake. They did write back saying many people say this after an auction they won. We wrote back saying its honestly the truth and that we had bought the model below (Sanyo VPC-C6) at a Circuit City in Madison because we really did want the camera, but one which worked. Would they like to see the recept? We had left Minneapolis and ended up in Madison, so the email back and forth took about 3-4 days. Finally they asked us to fill out some form to claim back some of the money excluding a restocking fee of 10% (I believe). I hope to have all the emails available soon.

After we sent back the form, nothing. We did get the goods, and yes the Camera did turn on, but did not record of show anything on screen (which was not mentioned in the Auction only the forum). We decided to leave the camera and its almost useless accessories in the states, just in case Trading Circuit say yes, ok we'll have it back. I did buy the Sanyo C6 like I said in this blog post. And am happy with it except I had my heart set on the HD version with Widescreen video and external microphone port. So when I got back, I did bid on a few cameras which were just the cameras and no accessories, hoping to make up the complete package. But in the end got sick of the idea of buying another thing from Trading Circuit and decided to bid on this Refurbished one which includes the Manufacturer Warranty. So I shouldn't have the grey import problem which others have described in the same forum. The auction didn't have all the package of a new HD1, so those accessories will be useful after all. I'm still down on Trading Circuit and am choosing what to stick in there ebay feedback but at least I should have everything. Its cost me and Sarah over 700 dollars which is the same price as I could have got it for on Amazon or BestBuy but hopefully we will sell the Sanyo C6 in the UK and maybe beable to get the broken HD1 fixed or sold for parts.

I would love to say this will be the end, but I don't think it is. First it I'm not counting any chickens till both boxes are in my hands in the UK and it does work correctly. Second, I've been reading this blank screen of death or black screen disease is maybe common across all Sanyo HD1's! Which means at some point in the future everyone will have this problem? Geez, maybe the C6 was the best idea after all.

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London geekdinner’s the most popular geekdinners?

London geekdinner top of flickr clusters

I spent a lot of time on Flickr this week, something to do with our BBC awayday presentation. Anyway I was amazed at the quality and quantity of photos. The longtail effect can easily be witnessed on Flickr. But something struck me while looking for pictures of geeks. First if you do search for the tag geek in the cluster format, you will notice Londongeekdinner is 3rd on the right and theres a selection of pictures from the last few dinners. But also if you search for geekdinner, London is 1st. So if you do the maths, according to Flickr's engine. London has the most popular geekdinners in the world?

Looking at Google, the same is also the case. Amsterdam gets a mention at 3rd spot and Denmark gets 5th place. Although Google still thinks I'm searching for gardiner. Google's blog search for geekdinner echo's pretty much what the regular search has. Theres actually quite a few pointers to this blog in the top 10 list. What I find funny at the moment is the lack of American geekdinners, so I thought I'd try searching in Technorati. And believe it or not, only a single geekdinner from north america came up in the top 20 results. The Sussex geekdinner came up first with talk about Amsterdam and other European countries not far behind that. Singapore was also mentioned a few times, which is great to see.

So it looks like London is the popular geekdinner destination right now. I'm expecting this will contuine with some of the great events being aranged in June by myself and July/August by Sarah Blow of Girlgeekdinners. Oh on a side point if you try searching for girl geekdinner in anything, you always find links back to the London Girl geekdinners. There doesn't seem to be any other part of the world doing girl geekdinners.

Talking about Geekdinners the interviews from the last geekdinner are now up on Archive.org. There all in Xvid format for now, but licenced under a share-a-like licence so your welcome to re-encode them.

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BA site compromised, again?

British Airways

From Slashdot yesterday, Identity Theft from Tossed Airline Boarding pass?

The Guardian newspaper has a great story about how the gathering of information for anti-terrorist passenger screening databases allowed a reporter and security guru Adam Laurie to lay the groundwork for stealing the identity of a business traveller by using his discarded boarding-pass stub. From the article: We logged on to the BA website, bought a ticket in Broers name and then, using the frequent flyer number on his boarding pass stub, without typing in a password, were given full access to all his personal details – including his passport number, the date it expired, his nationality (he is Dutch, living in the UK) and his date of birth. The system even allowed us to change the information.

So my take on it is, maybe this story is not quite what its cracked up to be. According to many Slashdotters there calling bullshit. But in the past I've also seen how easy it is to exploit BA's online system. I'm actually sure I've emailed BA over 2 years ago and maybe blogged it a while ago. See the problem I had was that my password timed out and I needed to get a eticket for the return journey. So I logged in as Sarah who had a different account then changed a few things in the URL and bingo I was able to see my account details including address, passport number, etc. Now from what I remember I couldn't get the password, but I could change it (which I did). I do remember the membership number, firstname, lastname and email address was all I needed to change the account.

I remember being so shocked at the lack of security and privicy that I tried to delete my account once I got back to the UK. I know for sure I told quite a few people about this flaw but can't quite remember exactly who. Honestly the problem seems to be when your already logged in accessing someone elses account other than your own. Anyway, I guess I should go and see if I can get my old details without a password… Hopefully some mainstream attention like this will force BA to recheck there site and maybe solve the flaw I identified all that time ago.

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Your network now available in Del.icio.us

Your network in delicious

Just spotted the your network option in del.icio.us. Nice idea, would like to do the same in Flickr. So heading over to the del.icio.us blog, I found a recent entry.

To make sharing easier, weve just released a new feature called your network. You can add other del.icio.us users to your network either by visiting their del.icio.us pages or from the your network page itself. Once someone is in your network, you can keep track of their latest saved public bookmarks. And when you save new bookmarks you can easily share them with people in your network just by clicking on their username.

In Flickr there is the ability to send pictures to a set of pictures but not to a group or person. Once you've uploaded it you can then send it to a group. But the nice thing about the delicious way, is that its using Tags instead of some other thing.

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One of the meetup features I miss

Meetup

I will be first to admit that Meetup.com has some good features, but since they started charging the group origaniser it seems like there has been a move away from its system. The problem is where do you move to? Eventful and Upcoming are my prefered services but there are things like Zevents also. However all of them don't quite have all the features of meetup.

One of the features which I miss from Meetup is the ability to print out signs to attract people to the event when your at the actual venue. Last nights London Blogger's meetup was a small affair but attracted some regulars to geekdinner but I also finally met Jo. Jo printed out the meetup sign and placed it on the long table in all bar one, soho. I certainly miss this.

So I've decide to build a XSL transform to generate one of these for Eventful events. My first thought was to transform the XHTML page which already has microformat data for the event.. But quickly realised that the page isn't XHTML at all, for example my next geekdinner event. So unless I cleaned up the HTML first using something like Jtidy first it seemed pointless. So I started looking at the RSS and ATOM feeds. And there is where I struck gold. In the ATOM feed there is everything you need and more. Unlike the RSS feed which is simple RSS 2.0 with A9 Opensearch and Yahoo Media RSS extentions, the ATOM feed has some google data extention. The schema links no where but contains the event dates, location and more. All defined in nice namespaced elements which means its easy to pull out the data needed for the XSL transformation. I was hoping to adapt the XSL to transform not only Eventful ATOM feeds but also upcoming events. But there syndication is either ical or some odd combined html/javascript yahoo or google export. Which really sucks because its not valid XHTML. I'll post my XSL one I'm done. But I'm also considering a XSL-FO transform instead of CSS and XSL. Although its tempting to use XSL 2.0, I 'm going to resist so people can download it and apply the XSL locally. Humm maybe a simple Greasemonkey script will make this even easier to apply to any eventful event.

So using Cocoon and a simple XSL, you can now see any event from Eventful in a design which can be printed out on a black and white printer and pinned up at the event or before the event. Its not quite the table things I was thinking about before, Instead its a useful A4 poster. To use the service? simply enter the eventful unique code into the url after http://cubicgarden.com/cocoon/eventful/poster/{eventful code}. So here's a list of test events.

Please note you need to view the print preview to actually see the correct poster, because I'm using two stylesheets one for print and another for the screen. Oh and the current XSL is here. Please modify it if you feel the need, its released under a creative commons licence.

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Finally a reason to dump user generated content

From Derek Powazek, the guy who wrote Design for Community (the book which got me and Sarah together.

Death to User-Generated Content
Can I make a suggestion? Let's all stop using the phrase “user-generated content.” I'm serious. It's a despicable, terrible term. Let's deconstruct it.
User: One who uses. Like, you know, a junkie.
Generated: Like a generator, engine. Like, you know, a robot.
Content: Something that fills a box. Like, you know, packing peanuts.

So what's user-generated content? Junkies robotically filling boxes with packing peanuts. Lovely.

Calling the beautiful, amazing, brilliant things people create online “user-generated content” is like sliding up to your lady, putting your arm around her and whispering, “Hey baby, let's have intercourse.”

UCG or user generated content has always got my back up. But now I know exactly why now. This is perfect Derek, couldn't have said it better and to be honest the phrase Authentic Media isn't bad at all.

Authentic media comes to you unfiltered by the global brands and conglomerates that have taken over the mainstream media. Authentic media is the raw, first-person narrative you can find on blogs and homepages. Authentic media is what happens when the mediators get out of the way and give the mic over to the people who actually have something to say.
The best part about this phrase? It paints the rest of the mediascape as inauthentic. I can live with that.

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BBC’s World have your say, hearts blogs

World have your say

Although this is work stuff, I can't help but say at long last the World Have Your Say team have got there blog and its now live. Yes I did have a hand in its path out of the BBC firewall and on to the internet. Now some of you may say well the BBC has had blogs for a long time now, so whats the big deal? And I somewhat agree, but except for a few good examples like Island blogging and the Urdu blog. IMHO, Our part in the blogosphere has been kind of hap-hazard. (my own words not the BBC). Without going into details or pointing fingers, its quite true that we've not really jumped into the pool. Or rather we have rarely engaged with what blogging is truely about. Yes we've done blogs but not really let it take us away. Some would say this is a good thing but I personally think there are some places where we could be doing this. Which leads me on to World Have Your Say. See Mark Sandell almost says it all in this one entry. But what Mark does not say Kevin _strange attractor_ Anderson says in his entry about the blog. A couple of quotes from Cluetrain comes to mind.

73: You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

This team gets it, they not only have decided to get rid of there traditonal BBC pages and presence. But there shoes are off and there starting to paddle in the pool, ready to jump right in.

I don't think its a bad thing to say that somethings had to be held back for the launch. These would include a blogroll, categories (was working on this today) and even trackbacks. But trust me keep an eye on the blog, because there's going to be some suprises which I simply can not mention here. Honestly I'm really excited about World have your say. Much more so that the Nick Robinson's blog, which launched in Dec 2005 to a lot of praise and cheers. Oh by the way Paul Mason's official BBC blog is worth checking out if your a Newsnight fan. I don't believe he's blogging anywhere else now?But I could be wrong.

Obviously this isn't the end of the blogs in the BBC, there is more to come. Its no secret that I'm working on the World Update blog which is written by Dan Damon. Dan is very fired up about his blog too and has also in the past been known to use Typepad to host his own personal or unoffical BBC blog. I feel he will also take a deep dive in the pool of the blogosphere and will be frankly honest about his experiences. I'm also looking forward to being able to subscribe to his blog and not have to read a stupidly long page.

So generally its a good day for the BBC and the Blogosphere. I'll be interested to hear what others think.

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Blogs will not save old media alone

Blogburst

Since being alerted to Blogburst by Ben Metcalfe, I've had a RSS search filter running through-out the day. I've seen some really interesting posts filter through.

Well first what is blogburst? The tech crunch guys have pretty much got this covered, but there post has sparked a lot of coversations about there covering of Blogburst. For example Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0.

Michael Arrington declares that BlogBurst Can Save Big (print) Media. To suggest that the lack of blog content is all that ails Old Media is deeply naive. Old Media needs to follow bloggers into the new content creation frontier, but that in itself will NOT solve the problem of business models.

And he's very right, its not about simply adding blog content to a already ageing medium. Anyone who does is seriously mistaken if they think thats the end of the deal. Its about a conversation not simply publishing. Scott moves on.

But why do publishers need BlogBurst as a middleman? Why can’t publishers hire an editor whose job it is to go out into the blogosphere and pull in the best and most relevant content, which is already easily and freely available through RSS feeds?

Agreed, but for some reason this does not happen. I can't work out why, theres already enough tools to keep a track of whats going on in a given subject and RSS can make these things more automated. But back to the point it simply does not happen. Like Scott says I will give BlogBurst credit for the understanding that the blogosphere needs a human filter to extract value. and thats where I totally agree too. Blogburst is a human filter on the blogosphere and this is a welcomed new model.

The rest of Scott's post is about Tech Crunch which I'm not that interested in, but yes this could reflect badly on Blogburst if taken out of context. Mark Evans talks about the sign up issue for bloggers.

nother question is why would a blogger sign up unless they really, really want exposure and/or traffic. Blogburst takes a blogger's content and provides the following: “visibility and exposure”, “new readers”, “authority and credibility” and “the opportunity to take your blog to the next level” (whatever that means). The downside is there's no economic incentive for the blogger and little guarantee readers are going to visit your blog unless they click on your byline. For anyone really trying to build a brand, they should want and encourage people to visit their blogs.

Point taken, its a interesting question which I personally don't have a complete answer for yet. Blackfriars' Marketing talks about the scale issue and how effective human filtering is at the million plus mark.

This is a system that works great with 100 or 1,000 blogs, but collapses under its own weight with 100,000 or a million blogs. No editor or reporter is going to wade through a reading list of 1,000 entries, but that could easily happen with big categories like News and Opinion or Technology. If that happens, editors will go back to reading Memeorandum.com or TailRank.com.

One second, who said they were using Memo or tailrank? I certainly don't see any signs that this is true. Anyway moving on…

My suggestion to BlogBurst: take a page out of Web 2.0 and allow members of the newspaper community to vote feeds and stories up and down in the rankings. Otherwise, a successful BlogBurst could do just that — burst.

And I'm in total agreement, its about collabrative filtering.

What I find most interesting is BlogBurst's powerful Publisher Workbench. Its a API between there system and the internal content management of the mainstream publishers. How effective it is, we shall see but its a good move and being SOAP and XML (rest) means any internal development team could work with there service. I'm hoping this will cause Bloglines to release a API for there Citations service. I'm also wondering when Feedster and Blogdigger will consider collabrative filtering as another option with there machine filtering? Back saving old media for the closing. Old media needs to engage in the conversation if they would like to be saved as such. Its no good just dipping in and out of these conversations. The smart ones are already moving out of the slow decending circles. Hint hint.

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Some thoughts on the Wikipedia changes

I like many people have not said much about the recent stuff with Wikipedia but this post by Danah Boyd pretty much sums my thoughts and position on this subject. A few choice quotes.

Welcome to being a public figure – people will say mean things about you on the web. None of it is guaranteed to be true – its the web. (Of course, my view probably stems from being a native web kid – no one likes the meannies but weve gotten used to it.) Wikipedia is better than most of the web because YOU CAN CHANGE IT

I watched Internet Researchers take up the same anti-Wikipedia argument. I was floored. These arent just academics, theyre the academics who study the web. The academics who should know better. But they felt as though it was a problem that Wikipedia would allow for a man to be defamed

Its searchable and in the hands of everyone with digital access (a much larger population than those with encyclopedias in their homes). It also exists in hundreds of languages and is available to populations who cant even imagine what a library looks like. Yes, it is open. This means that people can contribute what they do know and that others who know something about that area will try to improve it. Over time, articles with a lot of attention begin to be inclusive and approximating neutral. The more people who contribute, the stronger and more valuable the resource. Boycotting Wikipedia doesnt make it go away, but it doesnt make it any better either

It will be truly sad if academics dont support the project, dont contribute knowledge. I will be outraged if academics continue to talk about having Wikipedia eliminated as a tool for information dispersal.

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