People’s Network

http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/enquire.html

The idea is that you submit a question to ‘the system’ and somebody from the UK or international library system will try and answer your question in real-time. Jolly neat idea, but I’d love to see a log of previous questions to see exactly what people have been asking (I’m nosey like that…)

Blogging in the mainstream

Last night at the cinema, a trailer was played for a movie called The Perfect Man. Remarkably, the trailer started with lead Hillary Duff writing an entry into her blog (the voiceover/narrative of the post began ‘Dear fellow bloggers…’). Yet another confirmation that the word blog has entered mainstream media.

I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by the way… quite good. Better than I thought it could be, but still basically a kid’s movie 🙂

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.

The Storm’s a’brewin’

http://www.isleofwightweather.co.uk/live_storm_data.htm

If you want to see the storms and lightning strikes across Britain right now this is almost certainly the best place to see it. Live data is overlaid on a decent quality picture of the British Isles.

Somehow, even though I’m in South Central England, I’ve managed to completely avoid anything more than a few rumbles and a brief shower. Almost certainly living in the shadow of the Isle of Wight has something to do with it.