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  • It’s like a photo, but it moves!

    Here’s my first Flickr video – from a visit to Boston in 2002 🙂

    There’s been a lotta whining and grousing about the launch of video for Flickr Pro users today, with criticism largely polarising around the 90-second limit or elitist fears of a YouTube-style pollution of the pristine Flickr community. I  these concerns will be largely unfounded…

    • I suspect most users will be recording video ‘before and after’ a photo is taken. Perhaps such a contextualising video to accompanying a Flickr photo will be seen in time as no different than geotagging an image…it’s just extra contexty 🙂
    • Brevity in video is maybe not a bad thing. 140 character limits on Twitter have only enhanced the creativity of that community…
    • Flickr’s full of good and bad photographers. There’s no reason to assume they’ll be any more or less skilled at ‘videography’. The Flickr community is actually very good at collectively surfacing the best contributions and with video only available to Pro users, that’ll act as an additional filter.
    • Flickr’s a little more personal than YouTube- it’s largely photos for friends and family, rather than a wider broadcast. You’re more likely to see cute clips of a friend’s niece – like this – than a trailer for Iron Man.

    I tend to shoot a handful of videos with my point & shoot or phone when I’m taking a whole lotta photos. When I’m looking at the photos of my nephew’s first visit, it makes sense to me that all the related media is contextualised in the same place, by the same application. I don’t wanna create a mashup, I just want to post.

    I think Flickr made the right choices…now I’m just hoping I’ll be able to MMS video from my phone to Flickr real soon 🙂

  • Exposing the APIs of invisible things


    Kati London     was one of my favourite speakers at the ETel Fair in February 2007. Along with other ITP students, Kati saved our asses when a bunch of speakers fell ill and they were able to put together a replacement session showcasing projects such as Kati’s Botanicalls to those who’d missed the Fair.

    I was super-excited when I learned that Kati was part of O’Reilly’s programme committee for ETech 2008 as well as a keynote speaker and exhibitor at the Emerging Arts Fest.

    Kati’s talk – delivered along with Regine Debatty – was oriented around the interesections between art and technology, highlighting a number of ecological, spatial, social, political, networked and even inter-species pieces; there are some great notes from Regine at We Make Money Not Art, to ride along with the slides below…

    Incidentally, Kati and I swapped stories her friend and my Uncle’s respective experiences with the Libyan secret police…no happy outcomes 🙁

  • Dotnorth Snippets…

    A quick roundup of techly-geek things happening across the North…

    • The results of the Leeds Flickr Group’s Photoshop CS3 course are online…
    • Look out for Andy Mitchell’s GTDInbox, a Firefox addon that mods Gmail to reflect the Getting Things Done philosophy.
    • Don’t forget April’s GeekUp Leeds, back at The Lounge after a couple month’s away at OBH and The Living Room…
    • Early May also sees the <yawn> Yorkshire Digital Awards </yawn>…needless to say, the vibrant grassroots communities of Leeds and  Sheffield will be ignored in favour of old media dinosaurs and telcos.
    • Registration has opened for b.TWEEN08, also in mid-June.
    • Sensoria, Sheffield’s week-long festival of film and music, Sensoria, is coming up in mid-April.

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {April} + Coworking Day

    CakecrowdLast month’s
    OpenCoffee {March}     could have been a bit of a downer, with only a handful of people attending. I’m still wondering if I shoulda canceled it while I was in the US for ETech and eComm, but sounds like 10-15 people did make it out to Loftart so it was worth keeping the doors open 🙂

    This month, inspired by Paul Robinson’s mashup of coworking and OpenCoffee in Manchester, we relocated to Leeds Met’s Old Broadcasting House, spiritual home to the city’s geek communities; from coworkers and Flickr groups, to BarCamp and a recent Geekup!

    Though OpenCoffee started slow, albeit wih a handful of new faces, about thirty minutes later the cafe area of OBH was buzzing with around 25-26 attendees, so the venue change didn’t affect the numbers – phew! So this month…

    • Telco 2.0’s Keith McMahon made an appearance, sounds like he’s helping the NetStart guys with some telco-nomics for their platform project. Keith’s in great company at Telco 2.0 with luminaries such as Martin Geddes and my old boss Dr. Norman Lewis; incidentally, they published a great post on digital music business models just the day before.
    • I had a long chat with Leo Fowler, Technical Director of Kensei and one of OBH’s newest coworkers. It sounds as though Kensei will shortly be providing media hosting, management and delivery technology as a white-label service, but are looking for venture funding to grow quickly. I’m not quite sure what they do yet, but they seem to have big ideas and ambition…a startup to keep an eye on for sure.
    • My friend Ross Brown made it over for a too-short half hour, but long enough for us to talk through some editorial ideas for Dotnorth and the timeline for spinning things up.
    • Though Leeds Met student, Stuart Childs had been along to a previous OpenCoffee, this time he brought along his friend Chris, so we, um, doubled the student uptake? Seriously, where are all the students at Leeds various geek+tech meetups?

    We had a few mixed reports on the success of Paul’s coworking day over in Manchester, so we weren’t sure what to expect. Most OpenCoffee attendees just wanted a peek at the facilities. Other’s stuck around to chat, share ideas and get a little work done…

    • Neil Wilson who’d travelled over from Halifax’s Elsie Whiteley Innovation Centre stuck around to get his email – we spoke for a while about the region’s digital industries. The EWIC is oddly named (and located!) but it appears to be providing some usefully priced not-quite-working facilities over on the tops of the Pennines 🙂
    • NTI’s Linda Broughton and I met to discuss our shared plans for 2008 regarding the coworking community and the city’s startup/innovation community.
    • My former colleague Mark Sailes was progressively irritated by me trying to convince him to buy a Mac…Ihe spent the rest of the day coding up some proof-of-concept work for Vlume.com. I had more success convincing Gavin Sweet to go Mac, once he saw Windows XP running under Parallels – yay!
    • NetStart‘s Gavin Sweet, Lee Strafford and Marco Potesta convened the NetStart board along with Keith McMahon.

    The coworking afternoon had no agenda – only to give OpenCoffee attendees a taster of the facilities and also give an opportunity to work, meet or just hang out…I think it worked out in that regard.

    However, I’m unsure whether to bundle both events together going forward…OBH is a little tricker to get to, for parking and distance from the core of the City. There’s perhaps a place for separate monthly ‘OpenCoffee’ and ‘Open Coworking’ days a couple of weeks apart…or maybe we do run a single day as a sorta BarCamp-lite each month. No food, just coffee and cakes. No sessions, unless you want to convene one. We need to think a little more…

    In the meantime, here’s a peek at Broadcasting Place, the area that’s taking shape around Old Broadcasting House.

    See y’all next month!

  • TagTunes: Personal Discovery

    TagtunesEight years of friction-free access to digital media mean I have so much music that it’s becoming easy to forget what I do and don’t own.

    I know I have all four Bethany Curve albums, but after recently watching couple of the Indiana Jones movies I was surprised to find I also had one of the soundtracks!

    Technologies such as Spotlight make it easy for us to locate items we know we have and social discovery services such as Last.FM help us surface music we know we don’t have.

    However, there’s perhaps an opportunity for personal rather than discovery services; those that perform analytics on our existing media, recommending items we already own, but have neglected or simply forgotten about…tools that help us poke around in the unexplored corners of our music or photo collections for example.

    It’s not too difficult to envisage…

    • extensions to iTunes that visualises your listening and creates recommended playlists of music you’ve not listened to yet, but that matches your other tastes; even unwatched episodes of TV shows you’ve already downloaded
    • an adaptation of Flickr that reminds you of photos from a year ago today.
    • an address book, IM network or email service that reminds you of close friends and family you haven’t spoken to in some time.

  • ETech Day Two… (*very* rough notes)

    Nat strolled though some of the rationale for this year’s ETech before handing off to Stanford’s John McCarthy – the inventor of lisp!

    Steve cousins, an open source platform for personal robotics…willow garage is an R&D lab for non-miltary robotics
    . impact before capital. components include navigation, object recognition, object map, manipulation. domesticon bot poses an existential threat to my mum!

    kathy sierra asked the audience to tell the person next to them what they really really wanted to be good at! how can we surpass dabbling and get a high-res of experience in a new field. neurogenesis and neuroplasticity implies it’s not about natural talent but ability to put in the time to practice, focus and concentrate. real experitiuse is less about what they know but what they do; chess masters can recall the patterns on a board. 9 expertise hacks… mirror neurons allow us to visualise or run simulations of another person’s brain (direct observation) reduce the interference or mental chatter. time between interruptions is too short…we can;t lose the ability for intense concentration and putting in the hours.

    Tom Coates’ talk on ‘Ride the Fire Eagle: Open Location for All’ driven by the need for a back end for ubiquitous computing, decoupling the creation and usage of location data. Fire Eagle enables location to be broadcast to a platform which brokers this data to other applications for permission control. dopplr is one of the first partners, supplying data that can broker location to other apps via fire eagle. spimes and sensors indicate some of the vectors that location can be drawn from.

    peter semmelhack of buglabs (also an eComm speaker) speaking about the long taol of gadgets, what they refer to as ‘community electronics’. LEGO mindstorms represents an OS for innovation in hardware…LEGO factory is one of the models for BUG. Most interestingly Peter demonstrated the BUG development environment. Pluggin in the base baord shows visually which modules are available as well as their scriptable properties. Each module produces a web service, abstracting a lot of the functionality, making for example the camera addressable by a URL (to retreieve the image)

    talked to mehrshad and peter about european activities

    bumped into gina, talked about oscon’s mobile track and how well ecomm’s doing – gnat manhugged me and i said hi to evan from brickhouse while picking his brain on eComm and  microhoo! 🙂

    project sunspot – basic three layer device with a battert, processor board with radio and a sensor board that’s application specific (accelerometer, light, temperature, push buttons, LEDs, analig inputs, speakers etc) demos include autonomous light air vehicles. automated helicopter piloted by sunspot drops another sunspot at a programmed location! also using sunspots to track ccondiions of sun’s blackbox in transit!

    came across scott varland of ITP and socialbomb.net between sessions 🙂

    visualisation, beyond the RSS lava lamp (J.C.Herz) moving beyond beauty of visualisation to looking at utility of visualisation – what’s the purpose? some principles…don’t show everything right now – what’s actionable and what matters – tracicalt precision and strategic sloppiness. what’s a useful question? how do yo ask new questions? avoid being decor!

    narrative vs hypothesis generation and testing – surfacing consequnces of the data (legislators and relationships to various parties). what’re the impictions of scale and resolution, situating urself in data, broad/deep, trend analysis, statis or dynamic alerts, speed of data pipette/firehose, highly dimensional data demands choices

    demo of tripledex ‘necklace’ no more than 100 dots on screen, visualising relationships between rael and other entities – number of connections and affinity (number between 2 entities). high affinity, low connectivity reveals clustering (e.g. pattern of coinvesments between silicon alley VCs)

  • ETech Day One… (rough notes)

    Saul Griffith – Energy Literacy, IoV!

    Your Cellphone Is Your Controller – megaphone, making digital signage interactice http://www.playmegaphone.com/

    Eric Rodenback onstage from Stamen Design walking through various visualisations from Stamen’s portfolio – oakland crime maps, london olympics travel times and property/cummuting vectors

    Sun’s chief gaming officer – gamers are raising gamers…it’s not a new market, 40 years old!
    server tech is designer ‘per game’ not built for scale or sustainability. Darkstar, game and client agnostic. Is sun the marlgest MMO operator through their work on Wall Street? project wonderland, virtual worlds for collaboration, help the video game industry grow, leverage standards – remove barriers for new content and experience to emerge, since people play games on their consoles and cellphones, and even ifyou have problems with your cellphone, you can get Cell Phone Repair Hamilton to help you with this.

    multitouch displays in the real world, elizabeth f. churchill from yahoo research; how do you provode serendipity, encoutering and peripheral participation..window shopping in physical and virtual spaces, browsing and reading, talking, showing, responding to camera – similar to iCom project from MIT. is there something in a mashup between matt webb’s glancing and a closed bonjour-like network?

    coffee with matt biddulph and brianbehldehoff – travel ppl?

    http://www.connotea.org/tag/etechbrain

    bumped into raffi!

    tap is the new click – dan saffer – wii, iphone, MBA, PS3 – generally touchscreen or freeform, do u need a gest UI (not for heavy data input), reliance on physical and visual feedback http://www.designinggesturalinterfaces.com/samples/interactivegestures_ch1.pdf

    lunch with nokia guy, mckinsey and also brian the airline software guy

    green nano and the holy grail R. Stanley Williams, HP Senior Fellow. climate modellers need a zetaflop computer, that’s be the size of paris and the world’s biggest polluter! maybe exaflop by 2018 (using all current tricks)? but zettaflop will require a diff way to compute. the human brain is 100m gigaflops at 10W – computing can be more efficient! photonics and nanoswitches will hybridise with silocon to increase performance without volume and power.  multiple nanowire layers could create dense synaptic computers

    sufficiently uable platform will attract porn – then activism

    rise of user generated swiftboating, planespotting the tunisian president on google earth, raise the social cost of censorship (blocking removes cute cats too!) http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/ – Censor the web by keywords, URLs, DNS and IPs http://map.opennet.net/

    http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/

    bahrain-y land distribution by emailed PDF – understanding who owns what land

    twittering – put up my free alla website’ if im not out from the cops within 6 hours http://twitter.com/alaa

    100m sub-saharan phones – cant overstate importance of phones as a light platform for activism and blogging

    china can’t afford to block gmail, skype and MMOGs – how will OLPC impact?

    lolcats are a strange problem – limited mostly to the US and europe – how can u use this kinda virality. dont build tools for activistm, theywont use them. ethanzuckerman.com/blog

    http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/2008/03/cute_cat_theory_of_web_activis.html

    is there a dimension for innovation that amateurs can apply in robotics – the minimum UAV project! sticking with a 2d problem (stabilisation done) made with lego windows mobile GPS, camera, WAN for navigation, imaging and text commands for MMS! diydrones.com

    temporal resolution rather than high rsolution – ‘ground truth’ – plane crashed in federal lab at berkely national lab. now have a homeland security record!

    using ms flightsim to program GPS paths into the flight computer! use it to find parking spots in SD! shaed UAV missions? good for dull, dirty and dangerous jobs – like traffic copters, agriculture, ground truth in disaster areas

    my daughter’s DNA – clinical data, literature, knowledge bases, experts, dna sequences, primers, services, software!

    software tools usable bymany more, an interpretive engine for individual patient findings, integrative diagnostics, cholesterol plus sequence data? engage the patient or parent as partners – educate, enable and emply!

    Ed and Jimmy at Exhibit Hall reception

    After Hours Disney Party – ABC and Disney executives, Lost HD, interactive lounge, demos. Looking up primaries on public displays. Bumped into EFF Danny and Eric Rodenback, Olympic project and London office.

    EFF fundraiser honoring Mitchell Baker – turned and dumped flyer on table she was standing at!

    http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/03/etech-tuesday-morning-keynotes.html

  • Westward…

    Spring08
    Wow – flying from Manchester to JFK and onto San Diego with no delays or interrogations? I almost don’t believe it…maybe America’s loosening up in anticipation of a new President, maybe it’s no longer realistic to put Husseins on the Do Not Fly list or perhaps I just got lucky 🙂

    During the next few days I’ll be hopping around California and Washington for…

    • O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology 2008 conference. I’ve been to three prior ETechs between 2004 and 2008 – the first two did nothing less than change my world-view on technology and the third helped me to find the confidence to strike out on my own. 2007 was a bif of an O’Reilly bust for me with the cancellation of ETel, being unable to travel and deliver my talk for Web 2.0 Expo and having to cancel plans for Foo Camp. San Diego holds a lotta good memories for me, so it’s lovely to be back in the City and also a programme that returning ETech to its roots, away from the noise of Web 2.0 and back to the cutting edge of knowledge – this time including personal genomics, hacking UAVs, emerging tech in emerging markets, policy development and data visualisation. Holy crap I think I’m going to pass out from the anticipation!
    • Next up, I’ll be spending the coming weekend with my great friends Aaron and Chrissey in Seattle. hanging out, discussing world changing ideas, shopping for a Time Capsule and maybe – just maybe – a trip to the Evil Campus. If I had more time, I’d love to return to Vancouver or visit Surj and Rael over in Portland.
    • Finally I’ll be back in the Bay Area for Emerging Communications 2008. I’ve been part of the advisory board since late last year and throughly looking forward to meeting many of the people we’ve got scheduled…I’m pretty sure we can keep the ETel movement alive through eComm.

    My usual group isn’t around – but I’m hoping to see some familiar faces this evening… 🙂

  • (Dot)Northern Snippets

    More goodies…

    • Ray Kurzwell – yes Ray Kurzwell – has been added to the roster of speakers for Newcastle’s Thinking Digital in May. I don’t think the Singularity will emerge from the North East, but it’s possible to argue that Newcastle United players are transhuman 😉 Oh yeah, <coughs> Greg Dyke too.
    • Media Lab Europe lives! MLE alumni, Stefan Agamanolis – and leader of its Human Connectedness group –  relaunched much of MLE’s philosophy in the ‘Highlands & Islands‘ as the Distance Lab.
      OK, it’s waaaaay North, but it still counts 🙂

      Distance Lab has apparently been
      around a couple years, but I’m ashamed to admit I only discovered it today – thanks to Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. Stefan oversaw some of my favourite projects at MLE, including Desktop Subversibles, iCom and tunA and I’m sure the new lab will be doing equally great things. I always thought Negroponte picked the wrong country for MLE – the UK was a better home…though I woulda argued for Leeds or Manchester 😉

  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

    He’s back! I couldn’t help but grin when the first few bars of the Indy theme play over the classically Spielberg-ian shot of a silhouetted Indy pulling on his fedora…

    ‘Damn, I thought that was closer’. Cute, but funny enough without the dialogue George.

    Check out the HD versions at Yahoo…