Characterising Ian Forrester, wheres the APML?

ian forrester
cubicgarden

Interesting data mining site, found via Miss Geeky. Like her I get quite different results depending if I go for cubicgarden or ian forrester.

I stumbled on an interesting website called Personas; it’s part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, that’s currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses natural language processing to create a data portrait of your online identit

Its fun to watch it work you out by the words you use or others use about you but I can't help but feel it would be great to attach the ability to generate Implicit Data/Concepts in APML to the backend of this, so I can remove the parts I think its got wrong or at least balance it with some Explicit Data/Concepts of my own. Actually now more that ever do we need APML 1.0 I think.

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Cheap cloud storage anyone?

I have been changing around my home network storage recently because I don't really want to loose a load of data again and I don't think the home server setup I have is the best. (Although to be fair fair I've only lost data in the last few year because I stupidly formatted the wrong hard drive when switching from Freenas to a plain Ubuntu install. I have never had a disk failure in my storage server yet)

Freenas was good if you just wanted a replacement NAS setup but it lacked any multimedia, backup, services. So I started running Ubuntu on the box and installed everything myself (Samba, SSH, Webmin, etc). The machine physically has 6 drives and I was planning to put them into a RAID formation but didn't see the point when I could use LVM (logical volume management) which has the effect of loads of drives looking like one. Yes I know if one drive goes down i loose stuff but its a risk I take and I tend to run Spinrite on the server and all my machines once a month so I can work out if theres any problems coming up. Oh yeah and I looked into the UnRAID stuff but it seemed to be more trouble thats its worth. For backup I then copy everything important worth keeping to a external drive which I place away from the computers (aka its only powered on when I'm backing up or restoring). But this isn't enough, I need to really look into serious remote cloud storage but I've found them to be expensive in the past.

Looking at Backblaze's solution, I'm certainly amazed and am reconsidering cloud storage again. 5 dollars a month is about 3.50 pounds a month which is good for unlimited data storage. And I can see why its so cheap compared to the others, although I was surprised to find it uses some application and it only works on PC and Mac. The problem I've always had is the word unlimited, when doing some research – unlimited has been restricted to just typical website files, not allowed archive files, backup files, etc, etc. For example check out Dreamhost's upfront unlimited policy. I already have a free dropbox account which is great but its not really a backup service like I need. I did use Jungledisk for a while with Amazon S3 for a bit but the pricing starting adding up. I've heard good things about Spideroak and they support Linux well. The last option which has me thinking is my ISP recently starting offering a online backup service, unlike the rest it uses standard protocals to do the transfering but unlike the rest the pricing model is not clear. Actually so unclear, that I can't even find it.

What do people do for backup? What services do people highly recommend? Should I just try building my own backblaze box instead?

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Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Everything I'd experienced and guessed about motivating people around out of the box problems is sumed up perfectly in this delightful talk by Dan Pink at TED Global. Its stunning to hear how much of no brainer this all is, but how the disconnect still challenges most companies.

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.

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Where RSS Readers went wrong

Friendfeed

Dare Obasanjo wrote quite a critical blog post about where RSS readers went wrong, then followed that up with another post about where Friendfeed went wrong.

Dare's thoughts quite solid too,

  1. Dave Winer was right about River of News style aggregators. A user interface where I see a stream of news and can click on the bits that interest me without doing a lot of management is superior to the using the current dominant RSS reader paradigm where I need to click on multiple folders, manage read/unread state and wade through massive walls of text I don’t want to read to get to the gems.
  2. Today’s RSS readers are a one way tool instead of a two-way tool. One of the things I like about shared links in Twitter & Facebook is that I can start or read a conversation about the story and otherwise give feedback (i.e. “like” or retweet) to the publisher of the news as part of the experience.
  3. As Dave McClure once ranted, it's all about the faces. The user interface of RSS readers is sterile and impersonal compared to social sites like Twitter and Facebook because of the lack of pictures/faces of the people whose words you are reading
  4. No good ways to separate the wheat from the chaff. As if it isn’t bad enough that you are nagged about having thousands of unread blog posts when you don’t visit your RSS reader for a few days, there isn’t a good way to get an overview of what is most interesting/pressing and then move on by marking everything as read. On the other hand, when I go to Techmeme I can always see what the current top stories are and can even go back to see what was popular on the days I didn’t visit the site.
  5. The process of adding feeds still takes too many steps. If I see your Twitter profile and think you’re worth following, I click the “follow” button and I’m done. On the other hand, if I visit your blog there’s a multi-step process involved to adding you to my subscriptions even if I use a web-based RSS aggregator like Google Reader.

I agree, the river of news style aggregator works surprisingly well, I don't know what it is but that movement of scanning a load of headlines is quick and effective. I actually liked RSS Owl's aggregator mode, where you can select a load of feeds and just have them all available in one massive long list. This is great for reading on the train for example.
The social nature of the RSS reader has always been a problem. Not only did I want to share bookmarks via delicious but I also wanted almost equal balance with being able to blog parts of
what I was reading. So in RSS Owl there was the concept of newsbins which you could dump news items into. I wanted those bins to be linked to things like tublr blogs but it wasn't to be. I guess Google readers like feature is as close as I could imagine it would work. However it would be good to make for example public and have a rss feed in the future.

I'm not tied to the look of blogs, its nice but not essential for my reading, although I can see others seeing it as important. The wheat and chaff argument for me wasn't as bad when I was using Touchstone/Particls. It was like having your own Techmeme on your desktop, to be fair also Particls had nicer ways to share news that most rss readers. The APML support and concept was ahead of its time and I'm sure will make it into future rss readers. And finally adding feeds is agreed still too painful, what really does my nut in is when someone links a podcast to the itunes store. So you can't actually get the RSS feed its self. Sometimes I have to pull down the source and search for *.rss or *.xml feeds which is shocking. Discovery should work but it doesn't always and very few seem to cope with multiple feeds.

Don't get me wrong, I still use Liferea with Google Reader sync but I don't bother with folders anymore. I tend to use Liferea when I'm offline to catch up with stuff. My more general use of RSS is as plumbing between components and services, there's no doubt thats what its best for.

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On Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators

So I had the pleasure of being on Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators series on IT Conversations. I'm talking about the data and feeds used on BBC Backstage and example of mashups using that data. Its about a hour long and we cover quite a lot of ground in that time. Jon Udell did cut quite a lot of the ramble which was actually a good thing. Anyway you can judge for yourself.

BBC Backstage is the umbrella term for an evolving set of feeds and APIs that the BBC has been offering since 2005. In this conversation, Ian Forrester updates Jon Udell on what progress has been made, and what obstacles remain, as the BBC navigates toward its digital future.

Thanks to Jon Udell for having me on the show.

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Apple being hit from many sides

So after the surprising announcement that Spotify was accepted by Apple on to (into) the App Store. And the recent Google Voice pondering, will Apple also allow Real's Rhapsody too and even more interestingly will Netflix get a on to the App store? What kind of justification could they use against those two but not the others? Will the FCC also add to the pressure of the app store submission process?

This is why being the filter between yes and no is a very bad position to be in. Apple will get it from every single direction, not only the large players but also the smaller players. Anyone considering building a App Store modeled on the Apple Store better take note (microsoft), this is simply not sustainable. One yes to one player such as Skype/Spotify, gives others the grounds to push there application too. I mean really whats the practical difference between Spotify and Rhapsody? Maybe Napster might also want to get in to the game, heck even Microsoft Music might get involved. If Netflix do get on to the app store, why would Apple not allow a specially crafted Boxee for example? Or even better examples Hulu or BBC's iplayer?

I know I bash Apple a lot but what would you say when Netflix come calling?

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TV Show: The Cube

I downloaded the first episode of this new show and to be honest I was surprised how addictive it was to watch. Its a very simple concept, do a task which most people could do then put it in the cube, crank up the pressure with large sums of money with a large drop to zero if your limited number of tries/lives end.

What makes the cube even more impressive to watch is the use of high definition and high speed footage with 360 degrees of views. So one of the tasks was to drop a ball into a tube and catch it at the other end before it hits the floor. Seeing how close it gets in HD on a super highspeed camera is something else. Its not just close, its nail biting eerily close. Another aspect of the cube is the lateral thinking which goes into beating the cube. So in the task mentioned earlier the guy knocked the ball up in the air with one hand then got into a position to catch it on the way down. In the most recent one, a guy striped down to his pants to complete a task which involved walking over two barriers without being able to see anything.

If this came straight from the production of ITV then I'm sure this format will appear in other countries very soon. Its also got legs for a gameshow, so you can imagine a celeb version at Christmas and New Years then even a doubles version further down the line. There's also a almost unlimited amount of games you can play in the cube. Everything from Basketball with a square box to flicking a ball into a small glass of water. You can even have the same game with different levels. So the flicking the ball into a glass of water means at 2k a bucket of water, while at 100k its a pint glass and at 250k it could be a large test tube. Clever stuff, although I would love for the voice of the cube to be a little more like the computer in Portal. The Body also looks like something out of Ghost in the Shell, nice move.

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P2P users spend more on media

P2P File Stealers Spend A Ton On Media

Ok so I was a little harsh in the last blog post, it seems some people are still catching on. So here's another graph I found which sums up the opportunity I've been spelling out across my blog for years.

Internet file sharers swapping music, movies and TV shows over peer-to-peer networks are killing media and technology companies, right?

Wrong.

According to a study conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates published in AdAge, “the P2P user attends 34% more movies in theaters, purchases 34% more DVDs and rents 24% more movies than the average Internet user.”

In almost every single one of those categories, I personally spend more money that most of my friends who don't use P2P or even on-demand services. I have own a HDTV for 2 years now, yes my screen is well over 20inches (40inch) but I didn't pay anywhere near 2000 dollars for it. Yes I do own a next gen game console (xbox360, and I use to own a Wii). Had a home cinema system for 14+ years now, but just recently upgraded it to 7.1. Wouldn't even consider buying anything but a smartphone since about 2001. No Bluray player, but yes to the Media centre PC (XBMC). Plus I would add that I spend more time in the cinema and buy more films that my non P2P friends. The Ad people should be gunning for people like myself, but instead they lump us in with dvd/cd street/market copiers and demonize us all collectively at the start of films as mass pirates.

Of course it gets worst because now the UK Government wants to choke P2P file sharers (bearing in mind P2P isn't against the law, it just depends on what you share). As pointed out by the open rights group, the market is coming back in to balance (even I end up buying 10+ songs a month from Audiojelly) and the government have overstepped the mark with this latest proposal.

Fact is that you can never stop such things, and calling all out war on piracy is not even funny, its actually childish and headline grabbing. Even Obama has stopped using the word war on terror, because they know how stupid the whole notion of a war on anything is. Britain needs people like myself (early adopters) who do slide in the grey areas of media because we inform whats possible for the masses in the near future. We spend more money, time, attention on media that the average person and we even share our experiences openly for all to learn from. The positive up shot of all this will go away quickly if such regulations come into play.

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Hulu Has More Viewers Than Time Warner Cable, and what?

Graph showing Hulu with more users that Time warner cable

Is anyone really that surprised that Hulu has more viewers that some cable networks in America? Seriously? I mean come on its 2009, have people not been paying attention? Maybe I spent so much time off the broadcast schedule that when theres a line in the sand between the broadcast schedule and on demand viewing, I automatically assume the on demand position. But for good reason. I mean, I'm sure I could draw some graph/chart showing how YouTube has more viewers that almost every single broadcaster out there. How Bit Torrent download is still totally killing pay per downloads stores like itunes. etc, etc. This isn't news, its clarification of what most of already knew wrapped up in a poor infographic.

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