Tag: meme

Geeks talk sexy….

Geeks talk sexy

Excellent photo by hoyvinmayvin – cc: by-nc-sa

Sex and geeks don’t fit together or compute, most would say. However the truth may be the total opposite.

This quarter we take a brave step into the explicit adult world of sex, lies and alternative lifestyles by following the geek world underground.

Join us on the wild ride in to the unknown, in a series of open talks and discussions. Next stop sexy town.

The event is free to attend, but you MUST BE OVER 18.

Not many people know but every once in a while I do a talk at BarCamps titled “Sex.” I usually do it to be slightly controversial and to bring a certain edge to the talks which can be far too technical for some.

I’ve had mixed success, I think the funniest session was at BarCampLiverpool while the most serious was at BarCampLondon7. (Not sure what that says about the cities)

However while talking one night in the Northern Quarter with Samantha and Joshi about BarCampManchester3 and my plans to do another one. I mentioned the sex talks I’ve done previously and that meme must have stuck in Samantha’s head (I need to get better at doing that). She had a word with Hwa Young Jung over at Madlab (Manchester’s digital laboratory) and bish bosh boof we have a new series of talks and discussions planned for the next few months.

Of course we’re also after knowledgeable and thought provoking guests for the future, so if that interest you, give us a message on twitter.

mydreamscape presentated at social media cafe manchester

Chi-chi Ekweozor (@realfreshtv) has written up my scramble thoughts and presentation about mydreamscape.org up on her blog.

I am amazed at how much detail she got down in the session, its a perfect account of what was said and by who. Her hand must have been going into over drive!

A couple of people ask great questions about privacy and how easy the network will be to spam.

The points raised range from deciding to keep users anonymous to encourage people to share their dreams in detail to wondering how to stop the spammer that ‘keeps dreaming about ‘Coca-cola’ or Justin Bieber(!)

Adrian Slatcher (@adrianslatcher on Twitter) from Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA), added some fine observations about dreams being non-linear.

Some people make associations in dreams based on colour, so called ‘colour dreams’. There are also ‘anxiety’ dreams. There is a very strong metaphysical element to dreams.

Adrian went on to add that this ‘crowd-sourced’ emotional categorisation of dreams: ‘anxiety = red’, ‘peace = green’ etc lends itself to making such a social network a very useful psychoanalysis tool.

She also detailed a great conversation we had afterwards with Josh (@technicalfault) about a killer mobile app for mydreamscape

In a conversation with Ian and Social Media Cafe co-organiser Josh (@technicalfault) after his talk, we discussed what I think is the killer application for such a project: a mobile phone app that combines access with the social network with a dream diary linked to the phone’s alarm clock.

As soon as you wake up, you are prompted to record your dream into a ‘What did you dream today?’ interface rather like Twitter’s early ‘What are you doing?’ question.

Different media types could be introduced later on so people would eventually make voice or video recordings of their dreams. That would rock.

I love the idea of asking the question, “what did you dream today?” or even “what did you dream last night?” Its a very catchy punchline and sums up the project nicely. The Flickr of dreams say one thing but “what did you dream today?” says something very different.

The point keeps coming up, why not make a facebook application? And finally I had a reply

People have suggested Ian should implement the idea as a Facebook app. He’s not particularly keen on this, preferring the Flickr model as “Flickr never exposes private stuff.”

Facebook’s EULA makes mydreamscape unworkable or at least cuts right into the users privicy which would make trusting the system almost impossible. Flickr have a good model as they never expose users private data and never will. Hence “the flickr of dreams” tag line.

I’ve presented at barcampmanchester3 and now at Social Media cafe manchester and each time I’ve had a positive response, but raised many more questions. Some of those question have been useful but none have been no this is a terriable idea. In actually fact I’ve picked up a few people who really want to get involved along the way. Each person has offered some advice and some more passion into the general idea. I think my next step is to do a map for the idea (a masssive A0 sheet of endless paper with information about the idea and details which I currently have in tomboynotes). I can then publish the map and make it even easier for people to develop the idea themsleves. Its also handy to have everything on one sheet, so I can put everything in context. This presentation isn’t really explaining the idea very well and does a bit of deservice to the underlying idea. I really hope to change for something better soon. But for now it explains the concept enough…

Dreamscape introduction for barcampman3

View more presentations from cubicgarden.

.

Welcome to mydreamscape.org

a inception poster

I love Inception, there’s no doubt about that….

But what really got me going was the idea of dreams.

So here’s the background

Everyone has dreams but up till now dreams have been very personal. People have them and talk about them all the time to there close friends but up till now its not been something you share socially. Well I say that but actually people do share aspects of there dreams. For example

janeygw‎: @MetsThrifty Are you serious? omg I had such horrid dreams last night too

Clodyyyy‎: You wish you can record your dreams and then watch them later. #DamnItsTrue

collinbeballin‎: I have had so many bad dreams tonight that they have left me praying. And thats some real shit.

PatRobeck1ofHis‎: Goodnight, my friends. Dream good dreams!

ohhdarylann‎: if love is a way out, then please let me in. don’t start, darling, don’t you turn my nightmares into dreams once again

stephalicious‎: Just had a dream @natbat had taken up smoking and I threatened to tell @simonw if she didn’t stop 0_o

Natbat‎: Woke at 5am with panicked dreams. can’t sleep. wonder if I should just get up and have breakfast now. hungry

…. lots more on twitter people talking about there dreams on blogs.

So we share aspects of them with friends, family and even total strangers.

The concept

mydreamscape.org to become the flickr of dreams.

Make dreams social with controls so only certain people can see the parts you don’t want to disclose. Use social tagging to add relevance and additional metadata to the dreams.

The concept in more words

Why not have a place where you can share your aspects of your dreams with other people and of course perform analysis on your dreams?

When I say aspects of your dreams, I mean just that. You should be able to add levels of privacy around aspects of your dream. Bit like how flickr.com only shows you certain photos if your a friend or family. I expect this would be quite difficult to do but it should give you the option of defining certain aspects which are public, private and of course who can see that. Hey would you want your girlfriend to find out you have dreams about a ex-girlfriend every night?

So I expect the gui for that would generate some special but simple xml (I’m thinking about using a subset of XML encryption to hide the information in plain sight) . I imagine it would look something like the modern editors such as Etherpad (colored text to indicate who can see what) but there would be levels of access to tied to the information.

Etherpad

dreams tend to have some sort of structure but its not very defined but there’s no doubt that you can say this is how it started (even if it’s just I’m in a room with no windows) and a middle (a woman talks to me in french which I seem to be able to understand) and a end (she gets up and leaves through a wall, leaving me in the room alone, then I wake up). It may not be clear how you got there or even how it ultimately ends but you could just say I don’t remember to that section.

Obviously there will be the ability to run your dreams through a dictionary of sorts (this may cost) so you can work out what your dream is about. But on top of that there will be tags/keywords will link you to other people’s dreams. So if your dream is about falling off a building, you can see who else has similar dream or even the same dream? Maybe you might find people who are having the same dream but with a unique twist. Heck, you might even find people who are in your dream who happen to be having the same dream! Of course Locations can also be tagged using geo locations, so you can see who else has been having a dream around a certain location. I’d also like to include Times, so you can say if it was night or day. Also people, so you can say I had a dream and he or she was in it. There may be others but that will do for now.

This is really interesting information but when socially put together across many people you got something extra special. Not only can you see trends across dreams but you can also spot how memes start to spread and where they end up.

The other part of this is the ability to write comments or add annotations to your dreams. So certain people (definable list) can add tags or link to other stuff. For example a dream about identity thief might lead back to the new itv tv series “identity” which you might have forgotten about but your friends remember you watched a couple of days ago. A dream about running down endless stairs could be the result of watching inception and thinking/dreaming about the architects role. Basically you can have many people adding analysis to your dream instead of just one so called expert. In actual fact your friends may know you better and where aspects of your dreams come from.

I expect we’ll make the data freely available in the same way Okcupid.com makes stats about its users available.

Hows it going to make money?

  • Pro users – Selling access to the dream dictionary (PRO users) which won’t be a static thing, it will change based on what people say about there dreams. There may also be a limit on how many dreams we hold unless your a pro user which means its endless. Maybe also only pro users can tag other people dreams?
  • Advertising – If your not a pro user, you will get adverts next to the dream your reading. We can also add advertising to the aggregated pages like the one for falling (which I expect will be quite popular)
  • Trending – Although the data will be freely available, there will be different resolutions on the dream data. So if you pay you can get much richer data (obviously depending on the users preferences). I imagine you would be able to work out how many European citizens are dreaming about a certain delegate just before an election. Not only that but if those dreams or positive or negative.
  • Product and locational placements – Maybe a lot of people are dreaming about a certain location or a certain product. If you own that location or product you may want to own that page and make it more like yours? So for example http://www.mydreamscape.org/items/buzzlightyear/ – could be a page about buzzlight year in dreams and have images and links to the item its self. This would also be true of locations too for example http://www.mydreamscape.org/location/europe/london/thamesbarrier – would obviously link to the Thames barrier in London with information taken from Wikipedia.org and other open sources. The information architecture of exactly how this would this work needs to be sorted out.

A Totem

How am I going to build this?

Well I’m not sure. I’ve been looking at things like drupal and existing services such as Facebook to see if I can adapt there system to this purpose. But it looks like it requires some serious development as there some key elements which need work. However I expect once I post this, entry people might think wow nice idea, its got legs I might be interested in either…

  1. Getting involved, so we got a team of people interested
  2. Recommend some software or a service to set it up
  3. Steal the idea and build there own version (fine, but you must give me attribution)
  4. Steal the idea and have me help out on the build process (theres a whole lot more to this idea that what I described above, ask me if you want to know more)
  5. Build a plugin for another service which could supports this

The final word

There are some elements to this idea which may not work such as will people remember there dreams, will be willing to share them, etc but honestly I think its a killer of an idea and deserves to be built. You can just imagine what a resource it could turn out to be… and imagine this scenario…

“you were dreaming about me, but I was also dreaming about you. On the same bloody night? What are the chances of that?”

That would be amazing.

dreams are still very much a unknown or under-tapped process. We all have them even if we don’t always remember them. dream diaries, etc are good but what benefits could come to a dreamers dreams if there crowd-sourced or social? There is a lot of metadata we could add to our dreams, if we had the chance. We could start to really understand our dreams a lot better through the social network of our friends, families or strangers. Heck even if all else fails, it may get people thinking about dreams a lot more and considering what they can do with them. Be it control there dreams or as far as even sharing dreams.

mydreamscape.org and mydreamscape.com could be the start of something massive, remember where you first read about it first…

So who wants to help me make it happen?

8 Random Facts About Me (tagging meme)

Somethinkodd Diabolo

James Cridland tagged me in the blogging meme by the same name. Yes its been a while but I've been pretty busy with lots of other stuff. Unlike James I know what a meme is and I like the idea of memetics, which I first heard via Susan Blackmore. Anyway I'm sure James actually does know what a meme is and its on with the rules.

Here are the rules:

  1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
  2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
  3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
  4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
  1. My first computer was a Commodore 16
    Not a Commodore 64 or 128, 16 as in 16k of total memory. My father bought the C16 for me when I was about 7 and I loved it. I use to play games then started to get into basic programming. I still remember the weird rounded tape cassette recorder thing and the blocky as hell graphics.
  2. I have worked in some odd places including… Equinox Discotheque in Leicester Square
    I was between jobs and I only lasted 3 weeks before quiting. I learned how to pour drinks correctly and how to make a lot of cocktails. I was only paid 3.70 a hour because you were expected to make a ton of money in tips. This only worked well if you were a attractive woman. The best tips I got in one night was 20 pounds while my female equivilents were getting upwards of 100 pounds a night!
  3. I use to have hypersomnolence and now sleep Apnea
    This is a sleep disorder where I pause snoring and breathing during the night. This makes sleeping difficult and a couple of the side-effects are loud sleeping, morning headaches (like being hangover), trouble concentrating, decreased sex drive forgetfulness, nocturia, etc, etc. Now you can see why working later in the day works better for me. I have also had surgery to try and correct it but its had little to no effect. Most people think its down to weight but actually I've had this since I was really young and thin. I even know people who are very fit who have this same problem, you can imagine its a problem for the partner who thinks your dying while you sleep.
  4. I'm a Diabolist
    Whats a diabolo? Well it actually means the devil with two sticks but really its a Chinese Yo-Yo. It looks like a egg cup with a string and sticks. Anyway, I learned how to do the Yo-Yo during the coke-cola yo-yo days and got fed up because everyone had them and everyone knew how to do most of the limited tricks. So I picked up on this thing called a wow ball. It turns out the wow ball was a cheap version of a diabolo and before long I was doing most of the same tricks with a full size diabolo. When I was younger, I use to enter competitions at holiday camps and have won a couple of times including a few holidays. I'm going to start putting up videos of me doing the diabolo on to videojug or more likely sclipo, so look out for it. Although thediabolo.com might have beaten me to it (I love that light path idea).
  5. I can skateboard and rollerblade
    Yes believe it or not. I can skateboard and I use to skateboard to work and college everyday. Roughly 5+ miles a day. Could I do any tricks? Well basic jumps and thats about it. By the way I can also rollerblade ok.
  6. I think I can ski but have never tried it on snow
    Yes its odd eh? I can actually ski but I've only ski'ed on dry slopes and grass. Grass skiing is pretty cool but those boots are damm heavy.
  7. I don't know popular music
    I don't know my led zepplin from my rolling stones. Seriously I don't know much about rock or pop music. When I was young I use to listen to dance music and hiphop. I was deep in to my dance music too, I stopped listening to radio when GWR changed there policy to no rap, less chat (thanks Miles for the correction). This meant the end of Sandy Martin's disco tracking and no more dance music on local radio. Radio 1 was interesting to me but I only listen to pete tong when I was older. I was never into the MTV actually I turned my back on it and The Box because it had no rave music. I did for a while check out that show after the Fresh Prince on BBC 2, the one with Normski (good on the BBC for taking a risk with such a show, maybe this lead the way towards 1xtra?) and I was a avid watcher of the Hitman and Her (check out the episode where pete and michaela go to Eclipse in Covertry!) and after it BPM (which I can't find anywhere). I went to clubs and raves alot, the magazines I read were eternity and knowledge, the music I listened to was rave. I just didn't have the time for other music because rave culture was so involving.
  8. I have never taken any drugs stronger that caffeine and I don't like Beer
    As you can see above, I was well into the rave and dance culture, but never ever took any class A, B or C drugs. Hell I didn't even drink beer. So although I was surrounded by drug taking I never got involved. It was strange because I educated myself about drugs at a early age and while the press was having a field day about evil ravers and dealers following the Leah Betts death I was seeing strange through the bull. Although I could see ecstasy wasn't this evil drug, I just wasn't interested in taking it because for me life was wild and weird enough, plus I just loved the music. About Beer. I bought them for friends when I was younger simply because I looked old enough to pass for 18 when I was 13 (yes I was bad). So I always got a taste of their beers. I never liked it and trust me I've tried loads of beers. I even last week tried white or wheat beer, which I thought was nasty. Once when I was at a holiday camp, I bought a tray full of drinks for a group of new friends and the security guard tapped me on the back and asked if I was buying drinks for underage teenagers? I being a little shocked that he had not guessed I was also underage answered no its all for me. So he stood there for about 10mins while I slowly drank most of the drink! That was the first time I had tasted Bitter and boy oh boy was I almost sick. Beer tastes like crap to me, I don't get why people like it? The only beer I like is Ginger Beer.

I'm nominating…. (without checking to see if they have done this already)

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

APML as a lightweight Microformat?

My Ubuntu install is working again thanks to Jon Callas from PGP. So I can finally bring you this entry from the Airplane trip 2 days ago.

I've not blogged much of BarCampBrighton, but sitting on this flight to Boston with 2.5 hours of battery life left (54%) I'm now reflecting on a couple of my sessions

The first one was titled as Facebook is Dead, which I later changed to social network killer – reclaim your attention. The whole thing presentation went through reasons and technologies which mean the dead end, locked in social networks no needed to exist. However Jeremy Keith and Tantek had covered most of my points about Microformats and OpenID in a previous session so I skipped most of that stuff and got on to the juicy part about lifestreams and attention profiles. In a quick look, I showed off APML and suggested ways you could do FOAF+APML together to build up everything you needed for open social networking (as aposed to locked in like Linkedin and Facebook style). Oh also while on the differences I made it clear that social media sites like Flickr, Delicious, Bliptv, etc were not included in the locked in category and then started to rip the living piss out of Quechup.com (no link for this nasty social network). I think I put the slide up and asked How dumb do you have to be?. Anyway I'm going off topic here.

So many people are throwing APML around but as Jeremy Keith would say, it looks like a technology looking for a solution. So I came up with some perfect examples of APML including my killer which I thought would also attract the bigger audience who don't care about the technology of it.

First example : Tape it off the internet.com. If you join tape it off the internet.com or tioti it will ask you again and again and again… what shows you like and do you also like these shows? Now this is fine but its tiresome although you can type in your shows and hope it finds them. But what you can't do very well is give shows a certain weighting. So for example I love lost and heroes but have also started watching the new prision break 3rd season although yes its jumped the shark years ago. Now I would like to indicate that although I watch it, I'm not really that much into it. Then I also want to be able to show my friends and maybe get less matches based on this preference. Whats evern better is if I can say I really dislike something. Right now you can give it one star or not add it but what incase I want to say, I watched that show and I bloody hate it? In APML you can set a negative value to things as you'll see later. In actual fact Tioti is going to support APML in the future so that battle is done already.

Second example : Dating sites. This I thought was my killer one but maybe not? So if you join a dating site you build this profile of you and sometimes that involves answering questions and filling in a profile of who yougr looking for as such. This is usually quite detailed stuff and time sucking stuff. So imagine what happens when your friend invites you to a new dating site where he or she have previously had a positive experience. Yep fill in the forms again and indicate your preferences again. Now with APML its robust enough to maybe describe a lot of what your saying in your description and profile. You should be able to log in with your Open ID which could link to your FOAF and APML too. And because you have the concept of personas in Open ID, you could select different FOAF and APML files for those who like to have different profile. Tantek who was in the room when this was announced pretty much slammed APML but liked my example and so suggested I check out some of things people have been doing with tagging their preferences. So I did and although quite robust I had that problem of setting amounts.

So for example if I tagged this quote below you will see I've choosen to tag certain words. But there's no indication of first, if there just tags (yes some class could be added to make it clear that these tags apply to me but in what way?) and secondly what in case I tag flying and writing? How would you know I much prefer the later?

Facebook hopes to expand on the service, one person says, using algorithms to learn how receptive a person might be to an ad based on readily available information about activities and interests of not just a user but also his friends.

In APML you can add values and that makes a huge difference. But maybe there is a way to have a lighter version of APML which is a microformat, so people can play with it right now.

third example : Targeted advertising So as you read before, Facebook are using your data to advertise at you. Here's the full thing.

Next year, Facebook hopes to expand on the service, one person says, using algorithms to learn how receptive a person might be to an ad based on readily available information about activities and interests of not just a user but also his friends — even if the user hasn't explicitly expressed interest in a given topic. Facebook could then target ads accordingly.

While Facebook plans to protect its users' privacy and possibly give them an option to keep certain information completely private, some Facebook users might rebel against the use of their personal information for the company's gain.

And the perceptions that targeted ads create can be as much of a problem as the reality. “Most people don't realize how targeting works; it becomes so good that even though it's anonymous, you feel like they know you,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Publicis Groupe-owned consulting firm Denuo Group. However, he says Facebook needs to be careful in implementing any targeted ad system, lest loyal users “find it creepy.”

Chris Saad, is right to ask the question if users will put up with it. Also just making things private isn't the answer. What in case I had kids but didn't want to see adverts for nappies and babyware? I could hide that stuff but actually don't mind telling the world that I had kids, I just don't want the adverts. In APML i could specify my distaste and give it a nasty negative value which would indicate that I never want to see Nappies or Babyware ever. Of course Facebook or Google could over ride my APML but I wouldn't be happy, and they should be looking at my positive APML stuff anyway. I mean there's more chance I'll click a link saying latest Orange SPV phone here that latest Babyware or even in reality Latest iPhone offer for O2. And this is the killer thing, anyone who knows me will know that, even a browse of my blog will tell you this but to have it in machine readable form in APML has got be final straw. On my blog my APML is linked and its public. I'm saying advertise to me if your high on my interest list. Orange should be banging my door down every time I say I'm looking for a new phone but there not wise to all this yet. Google and Facebook are.

Forth and Fifth examples : LastFM and Preferences. By now you should have got the main points and can see how having a APML output of your favorate tunes in Lastfm could be useful. One example I didn't think about at the time was moving between media players. I moved from iTunes to Winamp to Madman to Amarok. There was no way to take the ratings I had build up for my music collection but now I should be able to look at lastfm and pull out decent enough scores. On the preference front, APML could be used for more that just internet applications. So yes if Amarok supported APML that would be amazing. I'm actually looking into this because Amarok keeps a rating of all music based on how many times you heard it and how much you scored it. It also keeps this information is a SQLlite DB and the rating range is between 0 and 100 which makes it easy to put into APML. Yep I might need some help from some Perl or Python people soon. Although I've learned Gnome has its own scripting language like how Applescript works for OSX. So I might be able to pull something off that way.

Right so what happens next? First up, I'm going to standardise some way of linking FOAF, OPML, OpenID and APML together. I expect I'll keep this very simple using the link element in (x)HTML or somehow combine this into a Hcard profile. Next up a APML microformat or APML lite for sure. I'll try it as I've been studying the others and the general methology of Microformats and I think it could be done. So I'll suggest it and draw up how it works and submit it for lots of review. I'm now exploring how to get APML out of Amarok and RSS Owl. If anyone wants to help with these, give me a shout. APML is awesome and I know everyones waiting for a 1.0 release (including Tioti, Google, Bloglines) but honestly give it a try now you won't regret it.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

My Media Consumption Diet

So Improbulus tagged me for this social meme a while back but I didn't actually notice. The meme was started by Jeremiah Owyang who is also in the Media 2.0 group along with myself. Anyway from the man himself…

I’m hoping to start this meme, that others will join in and share their media consumption diet, in hopes, that we’ll start to learn how they get information or be entertained. I’ve sort of mixed up mediums, and media types, but after some thought, that’s the best way to organize it.

 

Improbulus also asks the tricky question about what is media anyway which I may get into later in this post.

Web: I get all my news from the web, mainly I read news via Greatnews my personal RSS reader, anything I miss tends to get come via email links from friends. I am currently subscribed to over 300 feeds you can check them all out here because I sync with Bloglines. Obviously I keep my private RSS feeds to my personal RSS reader. I did consider switching over to Google Reader with its offline ability but what tends to happen is when I'm offline and looking at my RSS feeds I can read through 1000's of items in a couple of hours. Google Reader with Gears only stores about 1000 max and isn't as flexable as GreatNews.

As you can see in my subscriptions I have many different folders.

  • Cubicgarden – feeds related to myself, this includes my personal lifestream.
  • Design – is a mixture of inspirational feeds with design feeds
  • Development – use to be development blogs but this got a little strained with the design and xml development folders
  • Education – feeds related to educational blogging, I use to have lots more in this about 3 years ago
  • Events – this was my way of keeping a track of what was going on socially but this has been replaced with ical feeds in Outlook 2007, soon to be Plaxo 3.0
  • Friends – Feeds from my friends, I'm trying to update this one regularly but I don't add everyone unless I think there blog is useful
  • Fun – Uhhhhh what do you think?
  • Gaming – This isn't just gaming, but ARG and hardware type stuff
  • General News – This is where stuff like Boingboing, Slashdot, Digg, techmem, etc go.
  • Interest – bit of a misc folder, which I hope to move in the future
  • Internet Law – This is where my copyright, DRM, Creative Commons, type feeds go
  • Lifehacks – This is one is useful but I tend to review it once every month
  • Media – This is where all my lost feeds go, in the future I'll start adding Bit Torrent feeds and other media related feeds
  • Podcasts – I'm planning to move all these feeds out of here in the future but the idea was to have all my podcast feeds in one folder. This is simply not practical because many people attach enclosures willy nilly now.
  • SmartComms – This was going to be a mix of mobile phone type stuff and human social networking type feeds.
  • Tracking – This was always going to be a place for temporary feeds like ebay searches and offers, etc
  • Watched projects – These are feeds for projects, startups, etc. This folder is very useful for keeping an eye on projects which I may have forgotten over some time
  • XML development – this is where my xml and semantic web type feeds go, in the future I'll start mixing regular development with this folder

You will notice in my feeds I don't subscribe to feeds from mainstream media including believe it or not the BBC. I tend read BBC news in Twitter right now but don't follow any other except sometimes the Guardian's technology and game blogs.

Another different thing about my media consumption when it comes to news is Particls. Particls is a personal desktop attention engine. Its seriously amazing and changed the way I read my news. I tend to use it at work a lot just to keep an eye on whats going on during the day. Its alerted me to many things which were related. Its also been useful for sending people upto the minute information.Its a couple of steps beyond a RSS reader and I'm honestly very impressed with it. I would like to see it on Linux but I'm going to try virtualising it with VMware or Xen in the near future.

Right backing out of news. I use Firefox for everything except really really dodgy sites. Opera is reserved for those sites because of the ability to turn off Java, Javascript, etc in a second. However I do tend to browse the web with Javascript and Flash turned off using a combination of Flashblock and No-Script extensions. I use Tabs a lot and once in a while will del.icio.us my spare tabs. I don't use startpages because I use load previous tabs. I use a Dell PC laptop for most of my browsing. I never use IE7 unless its for Automatic updates and will unlikely install any other browser except Opera (yeah forget about it Safari).

Communication – I own a cracking little phone, Orange SPV M700. It has everything including Wifi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS and 3G. I use it a lot for mapping now I have GPS and iGo. I wish I could mount the phone to my scooter so I could use it even more but generally I do walk around new cities with my phone in my hand. Yes its a Windows Mobile 5 phone but honestly I like it. I choose the phone with no keyboard because I own a Bluetooth keyboard and I can type very fast on the on-screen keyboard.

I hate using my phone for making calls but I do mainly using my new Stereo Bluetooth headphones from itech. I don't own a Mpeg3 player, I did in the past but saw earlier on that I could use my phone for music and more often podcasts.

I email a lot and use Thunderbird 2.0 as my main mail client of choice. I have to use Outlook 2003 at work because the BBC uses exchange mail servers. I hate outlook 2003 for email, specially when I've got Outlook 2007 on my laptop. I own a ton of email accounts which I've setup on cubicgarden.com as my way of dealing with spam. I also own about 3 gmail accounts as backup and one hotpop account for unsecure mails. Yes I've setup the others with SSL and TLS using Thunderbird, so no one can snoop on my mail while on a shared wireless point.

To combat spam, like mentioned before I use multiple accounts with different levels of use. I do have a spam system on the mail server and did have a greylisting system a while ago thanks to Miles and Mark. But generally I find the multiple accounts work well and Thunderbird''s spam filter works enough for me to work on email without too many problems,

I do use instant messenging a lot and use Twitter via IM a lot. I use Pigeon (previously called Gaim) and then connect to 4 different networks (Jabber, AIM, Yahoo, MSN). More and more I'm dropping MSN and would like to drop the others except Jabber. This is becoming easier thanks to Google. I also love the idea of im on the phone but recently its been hard to find a im client for the windows mobile platform which doesn't charge a stupid a mount of money. So in the mid term I'm using tinytwitter a java application with twitter as my substute for mobile im.

I do have email on my phone too but just plain old IMAP and POP. No Push email for me. I do however have a work phone (nokia N80) which really sucks and makes for a bad 3G modem for my laptop.

Music and Podcasts : My phone currently syncs with Winamp and I have 2gig of space to fill up every day. I tend to fill up my phone with new podcasts once a week. I do listen to music, but generally its mixed together already. I simply don't buy music because the music I listen to is so expensive and tends to be hard to find. So instead I use a bit torrent site called Trancetraffic.com to get mixes from the likes of Tiesto, Armin Van Buuren, etc. I do download singles too for my own remixes but if I was to take up djing a little more seriously would start buying the tunes from somewhere. What Trancetraffic does which all the online stores miss is have a community of active users who you can see what they have downloaded. So I can see how many people have downloaded a tune or through the seeds, etc how  Also if your in any douht the trancetraffic community upload trance packs and uses the forums. So you can really get a clue about which tunes are hot and which

ones are not.

I do have a Last.FM account which was adopted from audioscobbler before it. I tend to only use it to track what I'm listening to and maybe sometimes for a couple of recommendations but generally Trancetraffic does a better job. I don't use Pandora and only listen to streaming radio statio

ns ckground music. I love soma.fm and di.fm for streaming radio.

 

I use Azureus for downloading all bit torrent stuff, which will make sense when you check out the TV section.

On the podcast front I use Juice to download all my podcasts. Thankfully juice supports remote opml files, so I point it at the same opml file as my bloglines account. Juice then downloads any enclosures from any of my 300+ feeds. This might sound over kill but it means I never miss any enclosures ever.Both Azureus and Juice are running on a ubuntu desktop machine under my desk, whcih I treat like a home server. I then use Synctoy on my laptop to sync my music and podcasts across to my laptop everyday.

TV : I don't watch tradional tv but I watch lots of TV shows. What does this mean? Well I don't actually turn on the TV and watch whatever is on. I also don't own a PVR or DVR device so don't actually record anything. I don't watch live TV because I have no reason to do so. Yes I download every single TV show I watch.

I use TV RSS in Azureus to do all my bit torrent downloading. Currently I use a combination of  ShareTV.org, NewTorrents, UKNova and Mininova for all my TV downloading. Some would say my TV viewing is strange at best and are quick to point out the off the schedule nature my activities. Personally being off the schedule is a good thing and this is really on demand. I tend to watch a combination of UK stuff like Doctor Who, Jekyll, etc with American stuff like Lost, Heroes, etc.

The way I actually watch most of the shows is via a 32 inch wide screen TV set and a hacked xbox. The Xbox is running unsigned code by a community project called Xbox Media Centre. The purpose of the hacked xbox running xbox media centre means I can play anything I download on my large screen. In the past I have hooked up my computer to the TV but generally having a computer in the same room as the TV kinda sucks unless you live in a small apartment of course. The xbox isn't exactly beautiful but its small and quiet. It means I can access all the media on my network including podcasts, music, pictures, etc.

I do own a Freeview box (free to air digital tv) and a Ondigital box (same but much older) but they rarely get turned on. And they certainly get no action since the ariel fell down off our roof.

Pictures : So we currently own 2 cameras, not including our mobile phones. One is a Canon 6 megapixal point and shoot (like DLR style) and the other is the Sanyo HD1. Me and Sarah over time have built up quite a few gigabytes of pictures. Every trip or event adds a little more. I tend to store everything and only upload the best ones to Flickr.com.

Recently I've been very slack with Flickr because I'm not naming or adding lots of meta-data to my pictures. This also applied to the files on the server. I hope one day to sort out my collections, sets and geodata. Getting that data back on to the server is another question.

Movies : I sometimes watch films in the cinema, sometimes I download the film and watch it while working away doing something else. It really depends on what film and what mood i'm in. For example just recently I watched Sicko in a cinema after deciding to help micheal moore in his efforts to wake up america to the joys of universial health care. I'll maybe go home (i'm on a plane flying between Exeter and London right now) and download it for my friends who maybe won't watch it otherwise. Being July 4th now too, I did promise to go watch Die Hard 4.0 tonight with a friend but we shall see how jet lagged I am. Generally Die Hard would be a film I would normally download.

DVD rentals I use to do via Amazon a long time ago and before that Blockbusters. I've not rented a DVD in about 2-3 years now.

Gaming : My only contract with gaming right now is the 1up Show podcast which is excellent because it focuses on gaming culture instead of doing long boring reviews. I always feel energized after watching it but I can't afford a next generation console, plus. I'm also not interested in the Xbox 360 because it can't play unsigned code – aka no xbmc! The playstation 3 looks good but at 480 pounds much for me plus I don't see where a Blu-Ray or even HD DVD player would fit into my media consumption diet? The Wii is my next choice but I'm not going to order one quite yet, although I have a wiimote for something else already.

Books : I tend to buy quite a few books because I like to lend them to people who maybe don't like to read on screen. For example I bought the Cluetrain Manifesto in book form so I could lend it to my friend Carl. He still has it but hey it was worth it becuase he wouldn't have read it online. I tried to read at night but it doesn't work for me because I fall a sleep quickly and am usually near a machine I can read the RSS off. I also have a hard time reading a book because of the line lengths and size of the text. It just doesn't quite gel with me. So I could easily sit down and read a PDF on my phone quicker that a actual book. I would love to have a real ebook reader but I can't afford such luxuaries, although I was considering using my old tabletpc as one. I'm a odd guy, I don't really read fiction that much any more, I tend to prefer the visual feedback of TV and Film.

Magazines : I only buy magazines .net and wired when I'm getting on a plane where I can't open my laptop till I'm all the way up in the air.

More to come….

Right my turn to tag some people.

Tom Morris, Miles Metcalfe, Duncan Barnes, Black belt jones and Phil Windley

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

The end of screensavers?

Widgets everywhere

Something I picked up somewhere today. The concept of a screensaver is quite simple.

A screensaver is a computer program originally designed to conserve the image quality of computer displays by blanking the screen or filling them with moving images or patterns when the computers are not in use. Today, screensavers are primarily used for entertainment or security purposes.

So with all the best screensavers now being RSS or internet connected and widget engines being common on desktops now. Doesn't it make sense to do away with screensavers and go for a special widget mode. For example it would be really cool if instead of going to a screensaver, the computer simply moved all the windows and applications back and showed the desktop and an array of widgets. Like most widget engines, it could dull the background so you avoid the burn-in effect. I'm also thinking the widgets in that mode would be either be locked or ones which are informational only. So you can't bypass security through a widget. Anyway it was just a thought….

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]