Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
After my huge mind dump for Pipelines, I've now decided to start a new blog called Flow *. It will be about everything to do with pipelines. I'll sometimes cross post some gems here but generally the flow blog will form part of my research and development into pipelines.
Me and Sarah did a podcast last night, number 14 (really 13 but lets not go there). This time we discuss Second Life, Myspace and Youtube, Feast of Fools and Sarah's new (non-hand me down) phone. The other good news is that Sarah has agreed to do the podcast every week now. So expect more geek and geekhag next week.
Me and Sarah did a podcast last night about some comments on her blog recently.The post was about race and interracial stereotypes and centres around a piece in the guardian over a year ago (march 2005). Now someones called werdz has decided to write a comment and get back at Sarahs comments on the original guardian article. Sarah felt it best to reply by a podcast.
Ben Metcalfe writes in response to Brad Templeton's post.
At the blogger panel at Fall VON … Vlogger and blip.tv advocate Dina Kaplan asked bloggers to start vlogging. Its started a minor debate.
My take? Please dont.
Ive written before on what I call the reader-friendly vs. writer-friendly dichotomy. My thesis is that media make choices about where to be on that spectrum, though ideal technology reduces the compromises
Brad actually goes on to advocate podcasting as an acceptable format as it can be listened to whilst jogging, etc. I think hes correct to a degree – podcasting is certainly easier to consume than video/vlogging as it is a multitaskable medium (unlike blogging too). However its still binary – it still requires you to consume at a pace decided by the producer and its far harder to index and search through. Unless it contains a meta-wrapper, there is also no hyperlinking which is arguably one of the greatest keys to the world-wide-webs success.
Its for this reason that Ive been sceptical as to the long-term success of podcasting as an informational medium. And this scepticism certainly extends to vlogging.
My take is that ascii is great but you know what, how bland would the world be if people couldn't express themselves in any form they feel most comfitable? See Ben is taking the reciever (user) point of view and I think thats fine for a lot of people. Even myself, I blog more that I podcast or videocast because I like hyperlinking. But it would be wrong for me to expect everyone to do the same. If podcasting works for you, hey go for it. Yes think about your audience you certainly need to balance that with your own creativity. So in the end I do agree with Ben's final point.
However I think most people would agree that we need to produce work in the format thats right for the content at hand, and for the end consumer whos going to consume it. For the moment at least, I think most people still use the blogosphere more for informational use than they do entertainment and as such that needs to be considered when youre about to produce your next blog/podcast/vlog
Ideally binary searching, scanning, deconstruction would be as easy as acsii but its not at the moment. I think this is mainly a limitation of the tools and services out there. The service and tool creators blame the lack of standards. So the question is where is the microformats of the media? I would have suggested Mpeg4 could have been but its got so screwed up who knows.
At long last, I can blog that Kevin Anderson our very forward thinking Worldservice journalist is leaving for a brand new position that he helped create.
This is probably the worst kept secret, which is why I'm a journalist and not a member of the intelligence services, but I can finally announce that I'm under new ownership. After almost eight years with the BBC, I'm joining the Guardian as their Head of Blogging and Interaction.
Head of Blogging and Interaction for the Guardian, is certainly a step on from the BBC World have your say programme. Its going to be a shame, Kevin worked so hard to get the BBC blogging and became a very good voice for genuine and authentic conversation with our audience. Anyway, I really wish him so much luck with his new position. I'm expecting big things from Kevin, and I might actually start reading the Guardian more in the future.
I forgot I haven't publicly said anything about Ben Metcalfe highlighting the direct urls of the weather feeds. My take on the whole thing is simple – Security through obscurity.
A system relying on security through obscurity may have theoretical or actual security vulnerabilities, but its owners or designers believe that the flaws are not known, and that attackers are unlikely to find them.
Security through or by obscurity, is generally a bad idea. By the BBC developer putting the urls inside a plain text javascript file, he or she was relying on Security through obscurity. Ben simply disclosed this information to the world. You could say well he should have let the BBC know, but like software vulnerabilities company's will sit on this information for years because its not important enough. Nope theres no douht in my mind that Ben did the right thing, and maybe taking down the blog post was a good idea for the BBC. We should be thankful and hell this might have spurred some movement on the backstage front? I do wonder if the javascript file in question still has the urls inside of it?
Michah Dubirko wrote this entry titled del.icio.us, blogging a while ago. I would take it slightly differently, and compare it to email. Since Del.icio.us applied the feature to send friends bookmarks to their bookmark inbox I've been really tempted to stop sending email too but I don't know if friends are getting them or not?
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
Mario dropped me a skype just a moment ago, the skype was this gem of a blog post titled China blocks Technorati.
I received an email this morning from Ken Carroll of ChinesePod telling me that China has blocked Technorati at the great firewall – it would appear that Technorati will no longer be available to anyone to use in China.
And its starting to kick up a stink over at Technorati and Mad about Shanghai. To be honest I'm not suprised. Technorati is one of the biggest blog search engines and was a gateway to all types of views and opinons from around the world. This simply won't do if your a chinese authority attepting to censor what your citizens are viewing online. Obviously I think this censorship is not a good idea and there simply causing there citizens to look a little deeper for the content they actually want to read just like the iran censorship of bbc.co.uk.
I do not even know where to start with Marc Canter. Honestly he's one of the guys whos been around since the early days of the internet and beyond. Good friend of other great personalities such as Doc Searls, David Weinberger and JD Lasica. I'm excited to announce that our next geekdinner will be with one of the most outspoken and genuine guy in the internet industry today. Marc Canter.
Here's a few snippits from the profile on wikipedia.
Marc Canter is a recognized figure in the sphere of open standards, social networks and blogging, and has been interviewed and quoted on the subject matter in numerous publications. Marc is a frequent speaker and panelist at conferences such as Web 2.0, SuperNova, Gnomedex, AlwaysOn Innovation, SXSW and many others. Marc is also a contributer to many open standards efforts and is champion for end-user controlled digital identities and content – being a co-founder of the Identity Gang
He is the founder and CEO of Broadband Mechanics, a digital lifestyle aggregator
LA) company. Broadband Mechanics builds tools and environments to enable online communities. They target their products at a broad user base with the hope that everyday people can make better use of Internet technologies.
Broadband Mechanics recently released Ourmedia (along with JD Lasica), a community for digital creators to store their work for free. This nonprofit effort provides unlimited storage for grassroots video, audio, music, photos, text and public domain works, and presents a community space to share and discuss personal media.
Broadband Mechanics also recently released StructuredBlogging, a compatability box effort at establishing clear standards for microcontent. This organization has released Perl and Php libraries and plug-ins for WordPress and Moveable Type. StructuredBlogging is a complete superset of microformats.org and has established schemas for events, reviews, lists, media (audio and video), people and group showcases.
You can find his voice on his personal blog
So the details of the event. It will be Monday 1st May downstairs in the Polar Bear's Cellar bar. It will start at 6pm and carry on till late. Yes its a Bank Holiday and I know London's Public Transport isn't the best on Bank Holidays but were starting earlier and bring everything forward so people can get home without too much hassle. The price will be 5 pounds just to cover the range of food as usual. Yes there will be vegatarian food and I have spoke to the polar bear about trying to seperate the food a lot more. I will post a entry on the geekdinner.co.uk website tonight if I can find the login and password. Look out for it on the londongeekdinner Eventful group and the London metro on Upcoming.