R&D TV : Episode 2

We've launched R&D TV episode 2. You can download it directly from the BBC in many different flavours of codecs and formats. We got everything from Flash to Ogg Theora. There's even RSS feeds now which is good. Like the last one, were using a Creative commons non-commercial attribution v2 licence and we have made the assets available for anyone in the world to remix. I want to say thanks to everyone who was involved in the project. R&DTV is a collaboration between BBC Backstage and RAD teams, who are: Producers Rain Ashford and Hemmy Cho, as well as Exec Producers: Ian Forrester, George Wright and Adrian Woolard. This months video is maybe a lot closer to what people were expecting, so enjoy it.

I gave a talk at Social Media Cafe yesterday which included a preview of R&DTV and received a lot of feedback, some of it was quite harsh but only harsh because people could see r&dtv was a good project. The lovely Sarah Hartley live blogged the whole thing using Friendfeed. Chi Chi wrote a little bit and talked about her project, which I missed due to a interesting discussion about the history of emoticons. But if you really want to get a full feeling of what people thought of the project, check out the tweets afterwards and this audioboo which was recorded a few minutes after it ended.

Listen!

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The business of hacking us, H*Commerce

I checked out the online documentary H*Commerce, after hearing about it on Hak.5 . Its in pieces, so you can only see part one and trailers for parts 1 and 2. Its all flash which is painful because I really wanted to watch it on my TV and didn't want to go through the trouble of extracting flash files. The content its self is pretty engaging although very short and punchy. I enjoyed the subject matter and look forward to the next lot of parts. Shame updates are only via email and not via rss or even twitter.

I certainly feel strongly about this area, education about protecting yourself is low in this area. People are being scammed left, right and centre with all types of attacks and the awareness is low. Hopefully things like this will help, even if its sponsored almost to death by McAfee.

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Puting stuff on a IMAX screen doesn’t make it better

So the story is about a guy who books a cinema seat expecting a IMAX experience but finds out that its actually a slightly bigger screen that usual and better a/v. However its not IMAX,

Fine if your expecting IMAX and get something sub-IMAX then you have the right to get your money back. But what equally bugs me is people who said have you seen insert name of big film here on IMAX. I'm sorry but just because its on a huge screen doesn't make it better. If its shot for IMAX like parts of the Dark Knight was, then great IMAX makes sense but when its not, I'd rather be in a decent standard cinema. I talked a while back about my choice to watch the Watchman film on the DLP projector using digital transfer instead of IMAX. I'm not the only one either.

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The next mass collaborative platform for the world? Google Wave

Google Wave, yes I want it to have my first born. So I'm sure you've all read or heard about it but I only just watched the whole video over my HSDPA/3G connection due to being away from home in London. I did actually have the chance (thanks Google) to watch the whole Google IO event live from Google Headquarters in London but didn't come out of a meeting till late and decided that by the time I would get to Victoria, it would have been in full swing. And there is nothing worst that coming into packed room late and having to step over everyone to get a seat.

So as you'd imagined, I'm pretty excited by Google Wave and I've not even used it yet. Why? Well for me it stands for almost everything I've been trying to do elsewhere outside of email, but not only that they are right its about time email moved over and it got upgraded to a world where the internet is ubiquitous. I've had James Cridland's blog open for a while because I've been meaning to reply to his post about the email culture of the BBC and how to deal with email. But I don't think I will now because Google Wave has lead me to true realisation that Email is broken. Its not progressed and although its served us well in the past its time to look elsewhere. Elsewhere, seemed to be heading towards the silo groupware products. Even the non silo ones were some what centralised. Google Wave is much closer to the way email works that the project based systems I even use to date. What makes me smile is that Google could have locked this down a lot but instead they allowed you to create plugins and extensions. Then totally threw it to the community by opening the wave protocal. So you can make a Wave client for anything and deploy the server code on anything you like. Just like email. In practice just like email only a few people do run the server but other enterprising types will happily run a server for you and charge you for the uses of it.

I don't want to talk too much about individual parts of Wave because it is early and theres a lot which is covered by the video but there was a couple of bits where I was thinking oh they've really thought about this stuff. The client of Wave working on a command line, the bit where they showed wave via a plugin watching a blog comments (this is going to be so useful for certain people in the BBC) and when they showed the secret option. There's no doubt that Microsoft and others need to quickly jump on Wave and build there own clients and servers. I can't see much which will hold back wave from being adopted once Google get the developers on board. And why wouldn't you? If Wave could be as big as IMAP? There's going be a lot tension as this service opens to the public, I mean if you work on a groupware system like Lotus Notes, this is a total threat, I had thought maybe the likes of Basecamp would also be in trouble, but the thing they need to do is build plugins for wave as soon as possible. I mean imagine having a Doodle plugin which allows you to do planning of meetings in a simple non-intrusive way. Google really have out innovated everything else in this area and made it very hard to not jump on board. A++ to Google….

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Cocoon 2.2 + Google App Engine for Java?

At last Google App Engine is available in a Java flavour. This might not seem like a big deal for most of you guys out there but (I think) for me this means I can carry on doing my development in cocoon and hopefully be able to scale up my code if needed.

The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache.

Some of you maybe saying, but hold on Ian. I didn't know you were a Java developer. No I'm not, but the key thing here is the Java Servlet interface, which if I'm reading the documentation correct, means I can deploy servlets/webapps to Google App Engine? I can create these in Cocoon 2.2 which now uses Apache Maven instead of Apache Ant. If this is all true, then excellent, another reason to get back into writing stuff in Cocoon. If I'm wrong, I'll be very disappointed.

I guess the only way to find out for sure is to just build something very small in Cocoon and spend some time playing with Google App Engine.

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Remix the apprentice

Thanks Tim for this link, I was in tears watching this remix of the apprentice. I've seen remixes but this shows such amazing creativity. Its all parody so I assume it should/might be safe from being taken down. (although I 'm not trained to offer any legal advice)

So some content producers will look at this and either go red with anger or white with fear. Because CassetteBoy has done many remixes which totally take the original subject matter out of its original context. This strikes fear into many, and I can already hear the arguments for even tighter control over content. But the thing to remember is a expression of a artist. Enjoy…

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Redbull Cola or is it actually Redbull Coke?

Found via 7Deacons, German food scientist have found traces of Cocaine in Redbull Cola.

About a year ago, the makers of Red Bull, the famous caffeine-loaded energy drink, decided to come out with a soda, unsurprisingly named Red Bull Cola. The shared name implied the same big kick. But could the cola's boost — supposedly “100% natural” — come from something else? Officials in Germany worry that they've found the answer — cocaine. And now they have prohibited the soda's sale in six states across the country and may recommend a nation-wide ban.

Now to be honest I'm a bit shocked and I don't think I can really buy another one till I know for sure what's going on. Don't get me wrong I know its only a trace amount (0.13 micrograms) and you would need to drink liters to feel any effect but I'm going to let this one play out a little more. It would be a shame if it gets banned or they can't redo the formula. Redbull Cola was lovely to drink and strangely moreish (i'm kidding). Tell the honest truth, I've been drinking Pepsi Raw the last few weeks instead of Redbull Cola.

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The Tesla of Motorcycles?

Electric still had the perception of big, clunky and not attractive till Tesla changed all that with there very attractive roadster. Of course people have been building electric motorcycles (and maxi-scooters) but like the Tesla Roadster example, they have been so so till this beast above. Its designed by Yves Béhar who also designed the OLPC XO laptop and can ride up to 150 miles on a 2 hour charge. Forgetting how amazing it looks, it can also do up 150mph and has roughly 100bhp (that's over double my 600cc scooter, but my scooter is very heavy). So its about the speed and power of Kawasaki Ninja I believe. I believe its twist and go (aka no gears) and launches next month. On my full motorcycle licence I could actually ride one of these. So look out, who knows what might happen in the future… Oh by the way I love the tag line on the microsite, its the bike the environment would want you to ride.

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Seth Godin on the tribes we lead

Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so.

A fantastic TED talk which really got me thinking. Seth Godin is highly rated in most circles but I've not really come in contact with anywhere, even in my reading. So in the talk above, Seth gives a presentation about tribes which I gathered he wrote a book on. The core message was about leading a movement, and you know what he's so right. For example, BarCamp is a movement and its growing getting stronger with them popping up and being used for many different things. We have a few pioneers to thank for that. But most of those people have moved on to the next thing. They never stop changing the world which would be a great subtitle to have on your card. These pioneers also fall into the trap of never being able to explain what they actually do.

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Who am I? cubicgarden or ianforrester?

Been thinking about changing my identity a lot recently and even got talking with FactoryJoe I mean Chris Messina about this at Next09. The video sums up the debate pretty well, but I still can't decide if I should use ianforrester instead of cubicgarden.

As Facebook continues dragging the world online using their real names and photos, Chris Messina, David Recordon and John McCrea grab a few minutes to chat with Josh Elman (Facebook) and Kaliya Hamlin (Identity Woman) out on Lake Austin about their philosophical differences when it comes to using your real name versus a pseudonym on the social web.

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