Open Tech 2005

Going to the Open Tech 2005 event tomorrow (well, today now).

Will be trying out the new cameraphone log (below left) so expect some photos to appear during the day.

Almost back on track…

Almost fully sorted out this blog – it’s back to its good ol’ self.

I also managed to get Flickr linked up to the blog on a less temporary basis. The latest photos from my cameraphone appear here, within about a minute of me taking them (whereever I am in the world – that is a seriously fantastic thought)

Screen recording

If you want to create a video of your screen, for example for walkthrough videos or product demos, check out CamStudio – it’s completely free (GPL licensed) and is a lot easier/better than some commercial equivalents. It also offers AVI to SWF conversion, although I’m having mixed results with this: sometimes random squares appear and the movement is a bit jerky.

 

Content Rating

ICRA have officially announced the release of the new version of their labelling system for content rating in websites, with a move to RDF prompting thoughts that we could have RSS feeds individually labeled with content ratings (and then filtered as the reader sees fit). About a year ago I was involved in some of the development work for this project and it’s been fascinating seeing it develop from drawing-board plans into a full and ready implementation. Now go label your site!

…where’s the response?

30 minutes after the Olympic result is announced (London won, yay) and the ‘most-discussed news story right now’ on Technorati is ‘Boffins create zombie dogs’; the most popular tags on Flickr in the past 24 hours are all about 4th July, and top of Blogdex is a link to a blog called ‘fifthnail’.

There’s something wrong with this. Several times now I’ve gone online, in search of opinions and thoughts about current events and found nothing. The major news organisations updated their pages minutes after the announcement and we can read the sanitised text, but what are blogs if they’re not about alternative views, feelings, experiences. How is this event affecting people? I want pictures, views and first-hand accounts and I can’t believe nobody out there has posted anything yet, either in response to the result or from the build-up or even earlier.

What I’d like to see from Technorati or other blogosphere monitors is ‘London wins bid, now see what people are saying and photographing’. What I actually see is zombie dogs – apparantly that’s the most important story on people’s minds right now!?

The concept of pinging is interesting – blog author tells the Internet they have written something new. The implementation is challenging (Feedmesh sounds quite promising though), but when the infrastructure is sorted out the only bottlenecks to presenting genuinely current results will be the clock ticks of whatever processors sit, download and analyse the data, and the algorithms themselves.

I look forward to the day when a website on the Internet will tell me not only what’s happening right now, but what people think about it, what eyewitnesses have captured about it, and what else the Internet has to say about it. We’re certainly not there yet, but we’re surely getting there.