@media social is still happening today

@media 2006

@Media 06 Conference is supposedly happening
The @Media 06 Conference (second day) is supposedly happening today. But it’s funny, I’ve seen very little mention of it on the blogosphere. If you ignore the Flickr photos that have crept into Technorati, a search for the tag atmedia returns just 3 posts from the last few days.

I have to agree its been pretty quiet in the blogosphere but Flickr does have a good collection of pictures from the days including the social events. I've been collecting a good range of pictures so I can project them around tomorrow at the social. But it would have been nice to have seen some podcasts too, maybe a special boagworld?

To answer some questions ahead of the Social which will happen in less than 12 hours now. Ben is right, I'm not being paid. Like geekdinners, I don't earn any money from the social events I do. I mainly do it for the fun and enjoyment of seeing other people enjoying themselves. Although if you would like to buy me a drink tomorrow, mine would be either a Redbull, Cranberry Juice or Coke. Also not being paid has its advantages, like not taking any risk with my own money, aka @media are paying for the beautiful venue not myself.
Second question is the timing. Yes we have the venue for 10hours plus, that does not mean you need to be there 10 hours with us. You can come along in the afternoon, go shopping and come back if you like. Which leads nicely on to question three.
People keep asking me if its really a free event and do you need to have gone to the @media conference. The answer is yes its free and open to everyone. We have things setup for certain times during the 10hours but generally I will go with the flow and see whos around and what people would prefer to do during the afternoon. But during the night, I'm expecting to stick pretty closely to the geekdinner style of party. Just rememeber to get your food in early because the kitchen closes earlier that usual.

And on that note, I'll hopefully see you all there tomorrow, don't forget to invite your friends and tag your media atmedia, geekdinner or atmediasocial.

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Signs of brand loyality, or sadness?

My Adidas A3's

You know things are turning sad when you end up buying one of every Cushion technology by one brand. I seem to own one of every Adidas a3 cushion technology to date. This is totally by chance, it just seems the last 3 lot of trainers I have bought, have all been Adidas and they have all included A3 cushioning but are each slightly different.

The first type were the A3 Strike type (2005), then the ugly twin strikes followed. End A3 era 1. Then the A3 Torsions were made which one'tt come in twins, end of era 2 but you can still pick these up all over the place. Then era 3, with the megarides and twins named ultraride. Which seems to be nothing more than very strong modled plastic in a round hoola-hoop shaped cylinder with a joiner in the middle to make sure they don't break. I kind of prefer them to the Nike Shox, but not these crazy megaride things. Geez, i must be sad, but its been one of those things in my head for a while now – *grin* Don't worry I never bought any crazy trainers like the one linked. Why did I write this post? Well someone was asking me about my new trainers and it got me thinking about the whole A3 thing compared to the Nike Shox. Ah I remember the days when we use to go around popping peoples air bags on there trainers… No longer possible with these range of trainers.

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Blogosphere is more international than ever before

I've been meaning to blog this for weeks now. Dave Sifry's latest report on the state of the blogosphere. So generally the blogosphere has becaome a lot more international with english taking a step down in the most used language in the blogosphere. Its actually better that you think too, because english now count for less than 35% of the blogosphere. Theres lots of other interesting things in the report like the Chinese blogosphere growing a lot due to MSN Spaces and Chinese and Bokee.com. Dave suggests that Japanese bloggers blog small posts from there phone, hence the huge jump. In the same post but not really realted Dave talks about how Tags and Categories are used by 47% of the blogosphere now.

Talking about languages and blogs, the BBC blogs has new additions to its own blognetwork. Spanish, Arabic and Persian blogs. The Chinese and new Urdu blog are just around the corner too. I guess this is perfectly fitting with the latest report. I have yet to try out Native text (a free web service that translates RSS feeds from blogs and podcasts into foreign languages) but it certainly sounds useful. I hear the Persian Blog already has a large audience visiting it.

Chinese just launched yesterday in simplfied chinese which causes it own problems because its all in UTF-8. It seems a lot of chinese reading people set there browsers to the encoding GB2312 or Traditional BIG5

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ARG’s and Education

I saw this in my aggregator today, Calling All ARG Academia.

With the Alternate Reality Gaming Special Interest Group whitepaper still in development, we have a request from our friend Christy Dena who writes extensively about ARG at her blog Cross-Media Entertainment.Needed: Academics who have investigated Alternate Reality Games
I'm writing a section on ARGs and Academia for the upcoming International Game Developers Association Alternate Reality Game Special Interest Group Whitepaper (IGDA ARG SIG). I'm after approaches from all fields using all sorts of methodologies, and by researchers at different levels of candidacy and postdoctoral status. Since there are many investigations in development around the world I'm including unpublished insights and findings along with published ones.

Well how very interesting, this is exactly what I was thinking quite sometime ago. Using ARG's in education seemed like a logical solution for teaching and meta teaching (teaching about how to teach someone else).

The post goes on…

Alternate Reality Games have captured the imagination of players and academics from its beginning. Academics have analysed the form through comparative analysis with other arts types both contemporary and historical; have employed the aesthetics of ARGs as illustrations of cultural phenomena; have utilised ARGs to interrogate the nature of reality and fiction; utilised ARGs design for pedagogical applications and have also proposed reframings of methodologies in light of the unconventional form. Consistently, however, they have tried to understand the emergence of thisform. Some of these academics are players, some are not. Some are independent scholars, some have made ARGs a subject of a PhD, the PhD or a post-doctoral investigation. Papers have been given at conferences, in journals and articles offered online. Their investigations into what an ARGis, the implications of the form on entertainment, the design of ARGs and the creative heritage of this form provide well researched and measured considerations that offer unique contributions for the benefit of players, designers, researchers, industry and media.

I'm going to subscribe to the Cross media blog for sure, its one of those areas I would like to keep my eyes on in the near future. Maybe a trend for the near future? Talking about ARGs for a moment, I've also been emailing a guy who commented on the runaway success of Perplex City (a ARG from a couple of great and clever english guys). He was talking about the need for Grassroots ARG's. So we've emailed back and forth a couple of times so far. TJ is his name and he's wrote a couple of interesting things.

Many of the staples of immersion have been done before, but just aren't commonly done, such as the pay phone calls, dead drop of items, having characters in the game contacting players directly instead of vice-versa.

I would like to see a greater emphasis on roleplayers acting as the characters, responding to emails, noticing players in the community and reaching out to them.

However, the step I am going farther is to branch out with factions. A couple games have promised an open-end to the game that players can change. We want to do the same, but go farther. Instead of a simple, direct puzzle hunt, what if the players are asked to step inside, investigate and then choose sides?

This is a real neat idea, kind of build the landscape and let people choose which sides they would like to be on in the landscape. The push and pull of each side would work to build up the narriative of the ARG.

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Why is there no EDGE coverage in London

When I was in America. I was suprised when my little data service icon on my SPV M500, changed from G (gprs) to E (edge). Generally GPRS delivers ISDN type speeds while EDGE delivers closer to slow Cable Speeds. In actual life, I was getting about analogue modem speeds (33.6k) on GPRS and single channel ISDN speeds (64k) on EDGE. Which isn't bad, because that's about the same as I got on 3G with my Sanyo S750. But what I don't get is why there is no EDGE coverage in London? I've been around and never noticed the icon change ever. While on Cingular in America I was always on EDGE and even out here in Bristol, EDGE is available once you get closer to central Bristol. Maybe it is the 3G networks pushing out inbetween technologies like EDGE? I do kind of miss having 3G (UMTS) on my phone but having Wifi is a huge plus and I'm honestly finding more use for Wifi than 3G recently.

Talking about EDGE and America, I'm a little worried about my next Orange bill. See I didn't use the phone much for phoning but I did use the data services a lot. I was trying to arrange the @media Social venue from outside the country and needed to email back and forth. When I looked at the Cingular roaming call charges on the Orange site, it seemed to be about 10 for a meg which is a super con but I'm hoping that I never touched that 1meg limit. I mean the phone was on EDGE a lot but wasn't actually transfering any data, so it should be ok. Anyway, I'll find out within the next 2 weeks exactly how much it all come up to. I'm expecting a large one but mainly because of calls from here to the America, ironically.

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Next geekdinner is the @media Social

@media 2006: Europe's Premier Web Design Conference. London, 15th - 16th June.

Something I've been working on for the last few months now, has now finally become reality. The next geekdinner will be part of the post @media social event. And the whole event is FREE for anyone to enter enjoy. Unlike most geekdinners, we are going to be open for 10 hours. Right off the bat, between 1pm – 2pm will be the @media lunch. Which will be a chance to have lunch with some fine designers while discussing the previous nights at the conference or webdesign generally. Then we dive into some key webdesign issues like CSS, Accessibility, Javascript and Design generally. These get togther sessions will quite adhoc and may contain a small panel of people if we get enough people interested. This is also a good time to relax with some beers or wines with likeminded people in the different areas of the Livery. Just before 6pm its a good idea to put your order in for dinner, because from 6pm we will be having a tradional sit down geekdinner with maybe some entertainment or discussion before the party at the end of the night.

So the date for your diary is Saturday 17th June from 1pm onwards at the Livery. Which is 130 Wood Street, just off Cheapside or a short walk from St Pauls Station which is on the central line. I hope to see you all there.

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Back from my Holiday in the midwest

Me and Birch geeking out

So I'm finally back from my holidays. You can tell your holiday is over when your back on the train going to work again. My Jetlag is pretty bad because I've been having really problems getting to sleep and staying a sleep. In my usual way, if I'm not able to sleep for a while, I will get up and do something. Do something last night was sorting out my Holiday photos on Flickr and locally on my network. Believe it or not I actually took over 800 photos and about 20 movies.

On the technology side, lots of the shots were done with my SPV M600 Cameraphone which actually kicks out some quite amazing quality pictures during the daytime. At night its not so good. My old Digital Camera the Nikon 3400 did a great job but I found it painful to pull it out of the case and select the right mode. My new purchase the Sanyo VPC-C6 starts up in a matter of seconds and delivered even better quality shots.

Yes I did finally buy the Sanyo VPC-C6 Camcorder/Camera. Its got a great 6meg pixel sensor but I've not quite worked out all the settings yet because i'm getting tons of blurry shots in low light. I also did buy the High Defination version of the camera but it doesn't quite work as expected. Its a long story…keeping it short. I bidded for the high def version on ebay.com and thought I was getting a great deal when I won an auction by circuit city returns (trading circuit) but 12 hours later found out it didn't actually record anything through this forum which linked to the one I won. Yeah you can imagine, I couldn't sleep without thinking about the nightmare which I had bought. I'm currently going through the process of getting my money back in return for the camera minus a restocking fee. This is my only ebay bad story to date however.

Some more highlights of my holiday include going clubbing in Minneapolis again. That place gets more and more european everytime I see it. The Trams are now working and people walk a lot when out and about. The No guns past this point signs are now gone from all the doors which is a good thing, and its honestly very green and beautiful during the summer. I also saw a different side of Milwaukee that I've seen before but I still don't like it as much as Minneapolis. Madison was also cool but I'm still not a big fan althought the people are super friendly compared to elsewhere. Being in De Forrest just outside of Madison was suprisingly nice and relaxing but I missed the inner city living which I'm use to very quickly. Chicago was cool and we hooked up with Sarahs Friend like most of the cities and towns we went to around the midwest. But I'm still not feeling Chicago compared to other cities. At first I thought it was its size and urban spawl but actually its something else because London is bigger. I think this picture maybe sums it up nicely. Another highlight was having icecream freshly made from Cold stone icecream in north Chicago. It was, I kid you not the best icecream I've ever had!

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Geek and Geekhag podcast number ten – America

Here's a rough podcast me and Sarah did while driving to Minneapolis on the highway. I've cleaned it up as much as I can using Audacity but theres little we can do about the car noise and the laptop internal microphone. For now, its best not to link directly to the mpeg3 file because I will move it to archive.org when I get back online.

The subject for the podcast is that old chestnut, America or the states. We talk about oil prices, cars and the people. Enjoy…

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Which kind of Camcorder should I go for?

So I've now got the chance to get a camcorder of my own. The exchange rate for British pounds is great compared to the American dollar. So its natrual to go out get everything here, including some stuff which I wouldn't normally consider. Hence the Camcorder.

So it looks like I got 4 main choices. I've rulied out HDV cams because there still out of my price range and Hi8 is far too large and on its way out.

  1. DV Cam
  2. DVD Cam
  3. HDD Cam
  4. Mpeg4 Cam

I like DV Cam because I know the quality will always be there, plus they all have Firewire for quick capturing to the computer but I hate those tiny DV tapes. DVD cam looks great but I'm unsure its easy to get the footage off this disc for re-editing on a normal desktop computer. I'm also not sure about the price of these 8cm DVD discs and how much they store. I believe 1.3gig discs will hold about 30mins? HDD Cam looks great, no tapes, firewire support and no worries about storage. They seem to be between 20-30gig and that seems to store about 4-5 hours of standard DV 25 footage. There usually a little more expensive but maybe worth it in the end. Then last of the bunch is Mpeg4 camera which store there footage to SD or Memory Stick using Mpeg4 instead of Mpeg2. This means the quality won't quite be there but you can fit a couple of hours on a 1gig SD card (which costs 40 dollars here at the moment). The thing I'm unsure about is how easy it is to edit mpeg4? To be honest the lure of using SD/MMC is very strong because everything including my phone, laptop and ipaq supports SD and MMC.

So although I may seem to be ruling out the others, I'm not but I do like these Mpeg4 camcorders. I've had my eye on the Sanyo Xacti range for about a year and bit now. But the only one which seems to be available at Circuit City at the moment is the 6megapixal monster VPC-C6 which weights in at 549 dollars, its almost as expensive as the 20gig HDD Camcorders. If I could find the 5megapixal version I would be more happy. However whats even more tempting is the HDTV version, which I've not seen anywhere yet.

So if you were in my poistion what would you seek and buy?

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Holiday time in the midwest

Minneapolis Skyline

Yes its that time again, time for me and Sarah to visit the in-laws, see old friends, sample mexican food and stock up on gadgets. I'll be spinning around Chicago, Madison, Racine, Minneapolis/St Paul, etc for the next few weeks. So my blogging will be low due to the cost of roaming GPRS/EDGE in America. But fear not, there will be lots of pictures on my Flickr stream when I get a Wireless connection. One of the best things about going to the midwest is going clubbing in Minneapolis, seriously its like clubbing in a more european city. Can't wait to try it out during a less cold season.

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Diggnation in London?

Diggnation 45 at E3

So me and Sarah were watching Diggnation episode 44 and at the end there was a email from a guy called Martin in York (england) who asked if the guys were coming to England any time soon? At this point Alex and Kevin start talking about coming to London… Now its no real secret that me and Katy have been talking to the guys about coming to London for a geekdinner but this was a suprise for even me. I've got the whole 1min (3meg) clip on my server in Xvid and Divx formats.

So if you would like to show your support for the Diggnation guys to come to London, do email them on diggnationfans@gmail.com.

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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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The scene finished for now

End of the scene

So the scene just ended on episode 20. Looking back its got slowly worst and worst. Don't get me wrong, its ok but the time between episodes and the general lack of speed though out the whole thing made it difficult to follow and enjoy. I stuck with it and felt very let down by the lack of direction once the main event (the group almost getting busted) happened. There were some slight cliff hangers afterwards but not enough to make you go back.

Anyhow there working on the scene 2.0 which should be out in 6 weeks now. Its the same format but different characters and plot. Hopefully they can think a little more about how the whole thing hangs together rather than throwing more complexty in. The scene should also really be shot in a higher resoultion video, so they can fit more on the screen. At the moment the chat windows use up a quarter of the screen and when talking to more than 2 people things get very clutered.

I'm being pretty harsh on this pretty niche tech soap, mainly because theres little to compare it to, except what you see on standard broadcast TV. I mean don't get me wrong, its actually not that bad otherwise I won't watch it at all. I quite like the real style of looking at mainly a computer screen, its a welcome change from the crazy graphics you get in movies and some dramas. End of the day, I'll check out the new series and if its not a big step forward from the old series, I'll spend my time doing something else. I've already dropped other internet soaps for there lack of direction and quality.

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Gimpshop beta, I love it

Gimpshop in action

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.

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