Category: xml and web 2.0

So finally I have edited and re-encoded my videos for the DataPortabilityAndMe video project. Now before you all moan about the quality or the very strange eye movements. Bear in mind this was shot while in Hamburg at about 2am in a hotel room while I was trying to talk clearly but not loudly, as to not wake my neighbours. I had also just come from a girl geekdinner where I was drinking wine and just finished a espresso before turning the camera towards myself. So yes generally not the best of conditions but I just needed to do it, or the nerves would have gotten hold of me and I would never have done it.

The quality is a little poorer that expected because I had finally run it through 3 different encoders. At the start it was shot on my Sanyo HD1 camera at HighDef 720p resoultion using the lower quality mpeg4 codec (I wish I'd used the higher quality one now). The footage was copied from SD card to hard drive and transcoded into Mpeg4 video and Mpeg1 audio so Kdenlive could edit the footage without the audio error I was getting when importing straight from the Sanyo HD1 footage. So after editing using Kdenlive (which I have to say is one of the best desktop editing tools for gnu/Linux at the moment) I exported the video in a range of video formats for uploading to Blip.tv. In the end I found it easier to just output from Kdenlive using Divx and Mpeg3 audio then once again transcode that using VLC into Mpeg4 which Blip could understand. Yes its a pain but I finally got there. Next time I would convert once to HDV files and encode again before sending to bliptv.

Some of you might have noticed I also shot two videos. DataPortabilityAndMe (Large version) is me talking for less that 5mins and the longer version where I quote “wax lyrical” (yes I wish I had not said that too) is called DataPortabilityAndMe Adhoc Talk (Small version). Enjoy and let me know what you all think.

Technorati Tags: dataportability, dataportabilityandme, portability, data, video, kdenlive, gnulinux, ianforrester, thoughts, mpeg4, mpeg, bliptv

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alt.support.divorce and diet.low-carb, hummm I guess I should be scared. Google couldn't have worked this out from my gmail because I don't tend to use that much for personal emails. My google reader subscriptions and blog might be the source if this isn't just a fluke. Problem is that I can't see the same page without logging in, otherwise I would be able to tell for sure. Now if Google only supported APML then I could know for sure. Yes another reason for APML along with Tristan's thoughts on the radio labs blog.

Technorati Tags: google, googlegroups, apml, fluke, bbc

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I have not written much about APML for a while, partly because I've been focused on Data Portability. But I saw this a while ago and forgot to blog it over December.

Attention data is an emerging concept in web circles that focusses on making people the owners of the data about the websites they visit, or pay attention to. Currently, this kind of information builds up in the individual websites that we visit, but in most cases that information is never shared us. The Attention movement seeks to remedy that by making data about what we pay attention to available in a portable format.

That format is known as APML, or Attention Profile Markup Language. And, with some simple integration with APML providers, Engagd, we’ve now made it possible for Ma.gnolia members to build an attention profile from their bookmarks.

A new setting in your profile controls, found on the newly-renamed Bookmarks tab, allows you to turn on the generation of APML from your bookmarks feed. After the profile has had some time to build up, you can grab a copy of your profile data.

When I first read this, my finger hovered the sign up button. Yes I was that close to converting from delicious to magnolia. And lets be honest Magnolia's openID signup would have made things so simple. I bet it would have taken all of about 5mins to signup and to be using it like how I use delicious right now. Its not too late either… If anything will make me move or join a new service its going to be APML support and OpenID. OAuth support is a nice touch but not essential. RSS/ATOM, a API and Microformats should now be a given. If there not, obvioulsy the service isn't serious about its dataportability policy or you could say really care about the advanced participations.

Great news about Yahoo and OpenID by the way, I look forward to seeing OpenID support on Flickr, Delicious, etc very soon.

Technorati Tags: apml, openid, profile, yahoo, oauth, magnolia, delicious

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Just a quick post to highlight this great talk from O'reilly's Emerging Tech conference which I attended last year. The talk is titled the coming age of magic by Mike Kuniavsky and here's a quick quote.

Yes, 'magic', meaning enchanted objects. “I do not advocate that we pretend that technology is a kind of magic, but that we use our existing cultural understanding of magic objects as an abstraction to describe the behavior of ubiquitous computing devices,

Mike's discussion about Animism is well worth listening to, later in the talk he points at objects such as the Wiimote, Nabaztags and security wand you see at airport security as examples of enchanted objects. I also found these 7 rules very interesting.

I’ve enumerated the properties of enchanted objects that I believe make them particularly good for
designing ubicomp devices:

1. They are everyday objects.
2. We’re familiar with how to use them, at least on a basic level
3. They are physical. You grab them, you swing them, you twist them, you push them.
4. They do not have a screen. There isn’t the assumption that somewhere there’s text output.
5. Behaviorally, magic objects are not humans, and we do not expect them to act human. This is contrast to, say, the implications of something like “ambient intelligence,” another metaphor for ubiquitous computing devices. How smart is that intelligence? Is It like me? It’s not clear.
6. They are not superhuman. They may be hard to control, but ultimately it is we who are in control, not they, by definition.
7. There is a healthy disbelief in magic, so it's likely to be treated as an analogy, rather than as the literal truth.

Technorati Tags: magic, enchanted, objects, etech, animism

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It started at BarCampBerlin2. Brian Suda asked me if I knew much about APML and could I explain why I thought it was of interest to myself and others. And ended up with Brian creating an excellent XSL to generate microformat complete tag clouds and lots more.

Along the way, Brian created some excellent little icons for APML and suggested a load of clever things he felt APML could be used for outside of the use cases the APML group have pulled together already. I did ask Brian at the time if it was ok to record his thoughts for a blog entry later and he agreed so he's some of things he mentioned.

• APML could be useful for recommendations inside of Bloglines and Google reader but even better for something like Google News.
• APML could be useful for checking for new groups when you newly sign up to Flickr, Facebook, etc. So it could be used as a means of discovery
• APML could be used as a personal page rank. So when you search google it would take into account your perferences of APML
• In ways to help gnerate the information for APML, Brian thought some global/desktop widget which you could click when you find something interesting. I was thinking it could be like a thing you drag web pages into. We also thought it could be a simple Firefox extension too. Brian also thought you could use ambient non-user time technology like etherpeek to grab data from unencrypted network traffic. This seemed perfect for the explicit section of APML.

Brian and me also talked about APML lite. Brian seem to think it would be possible to generate APML lite using just Microformats (hCard + hReview). I'm not so sure this would work but Brian promises to create a few examples soon. I'm still keen to do APML lite in RDF/A. Ether way, it APML is getting more accpeted everyday and its role in data protability will be a big one. Look out for more APML use cases soon.

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