GEOLOCATION PANEL _________________ Christian Nold // Biomapping.net He presents a quick introduction to some early photographs of locations, and talks about how empty the photos are, suggesting that there are political reasons for not representing mob culture at that point in history. - find a way of turning biometric technologies away from identifying individuals to something more bottom-up. - he's using GPRS to map his galvanic skin response as they wander around London - trying to build maps that demonstrate stress and excitement. - think it could be useful connecting bodily responses with pollution mapping, note taking and locative mechanisms... Nick West // Urban Tapestries "Building a Space-Based App Without Thinking About Technology (much)" - created a large map and asked them to walk around the map adding whatever notes they wanted to - kind of things: i was here architectural touristic messages and friends fiction really weird misc things - writing a note about every fight she had with her boyfriend - first tests illustrated that people were actually interested - decided whether to do mobibe or web annotation - went towards mobile - separated location and attention (very similar to the way that UMS allowed you to post in places other than where you lived) - Software trials with PDA's Wifi. Moved to Phone and GPRS stuff. - Currently ongoing - uses Cell triangulation to get location (not that precise) Questions: Do people read other people's annotations before they leave their own? (Answer: yes) Earle Martin - Open Guides - project to create collaborative city guides based on a wiki platform - started with UseModWiki, but had issues with extensibility, reliability - wrote CGI::Wiki, aimed at being extensible, then an app atop it - OpenGuides can be used as an ordinary Wiki but has a database for metadata, which is presented to the user seperately - In particular, supports RDF export - Question on copyright. London uses a CC licence - Looking at dealing with "installation complexity issues" Project Z - Dealing With The Top 10 Worst Situations In Urban Exploration - Mostly talking about the thrills of subverting security systems and exploring drains and abandoned buildings. HARDWARE (with Matt Jones!) ________ James Larsson / Telling the time (not very accurately) using a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich and a BBC micro - If you can measure the change in state of something, then you can use that to measure the passage of time - Using a BBC Model B from 1982 - Turned off the clock this morning, and when he reconnects it with the sandwich it should go through to the correct time - The prawns, mayonaisse and the bread all deteriorate at different rates, which is apparently how it works. He has a separate prawn, bread and mayonnaise sensor - The clock on the right is showing how fresh or stale the prawns are is going to be - And now the disconnected clock is trying to get in sync with the non-prawn related one. - Shows graphs of the various decays of the materials Matt Westcott / New hardware/software developments on the Sinclair Spectrum [Not sure that I can really say much about this one - there are some random new software developments on the Sinclair Spectrum] - He has a 90k microdrive tape with a ISO file system on it, read by a sourceforge project (I think) - There still seems to be a thriving Sinclair demo scene. 3d graphics, water effects, audio better than I seem to remember... - Has a compact flash card (on a reduction board interface) which allows connection of an IBM IDE drive, (full of video). He has just shown some streamed video. On a speccy. - Shows Michel Gondry's Chemical Brother's "Let Forever Be" video through the Spectrum. Which is a bit random. Reverand Rat / Something about Bluetooth - The "Reverand Rat" is doing something with Bluetooth. USB BT dongle. Only has 10m range. BT uses same freq. as Wifi, so he thought about connecting BT dongle to large attenna, which gives it massive range (1 watt gives it 35 mile range, apparently). Snooping opportunities? Steven Goodwin / How to Email Your Video (and other things to make your home come alive - literally) - e-mail your video (e-mail / video / glue logic in perl to join the two together) - controlling appliances long-distance via e-mail and then responding by sending responses back - the web as effective interface for doing this kind of thing George Wright / Why Interactive telly isn't the Web, why it never will be, and why that's good - Makes interactive TV for the BBC - Interactive TV has nothing in common with the Web. No upstream connectivity in most cases - Broadcast. - People think they're going to converge Interactive TV and Web / Internet - Everyone was talking abotu convergence, but he doesn't think it's going to happen? - When it started to get interesting - threw away the idea of it being like the web - Good bits - thick bandwidth - Bad bits - code is proprietary - all content has to be checked and approved before it goes up by the test script people. Can't do good stuff quickly. Removes spontanaity. - How we work with this at the BBC? - There are no books for this stuff either, so you can't really learn it very easily. People have to be recruited from other realms. - BBC leads the world in it, but still no one else is doing it. Anil Madhavapeddy / Camera-Phones: the only remote control you'll ever need Talk overview - mobile phones have cameras / keypad input. Bluetooth / GPRS for network access So, create robust visual tags that decode in real-time using the camera? This is really nice Making buttons with visual recognisable tags and then interacting with them using the phone You can print out hte tags and it's cheap to deploy Phone identifies itself so it can do easy billing [INTERLUDE - weird chunks of stuff about wireless during which the dog whimpered al the way through. Poor dog.] MP3 MIXING AND MASHING-UP _________________________ Panel discussion: - Lionel Vinyl (elektrobank.net) - Soundhog (soundhog.org.uk) - Wendy Seltzer, Chilling Effects (chillingeffects.org) - Will Head (dontellyourfriends.com (or maybe org) /hush) Shows a video in which the various bootlegs and mash-ups start underground and suddenly get turned into commercial hits as a result. ie. Christina vs. Strokes turns into a mash-up. The mash-up then gets covered by Speedway. The Sugababes equivalent is also played. Point made, young men and women! And made well! People getting cease and desist notices that push them to quit, sometimes without knowing whether or not they have the slightest leg to stand on. Sometimes the record industry sends out cease and desist notices and then use the exact same ideas to create new songs. It's pretty easy for an organisation to send out another Cease and Desist letter. Easy for the big company, but not so easy for the little guys not doing it for profit on the other end. Copyright hasn't reacted well to the internet putting the tools to make derivative works into the public domain and being creative. Copyright holders are trying to expand into these territories but maybe they shouldn't be able to. Madonna and the Sex Pistols have had a song mashed up together. They both want to release it, but their respective labels couldn't get it together. In order to get it released, they had to let a third party do it and just promising not to sue. Interesting conversation about whether or not you could abstract out the rule-sets for making these tracks and turning that into something copywritable and distributable (to be reconstructed at the other end by digital appliances or software). Followed up by discussion about the way that the studios and directors in the states sued about changing their films etc. Richard Jones - Why we built Audioscrobbler ___________________________________________ Builds up a profile of the music that you like and shows you recommendations based upone what you like. Ways of getting tof irgure out what people like upload lists surveys rate genres tracks what people are listening to, without bugging you with questions and surveys collaborative filtering all the user pages are public, social networking element. Matches people with people who like similar music 7000 active plugins - every sunday generate a chart from the previous week - only show the number of PEOPLE who have played it, so they can't easily game it. This is an interesting approach that I LIKE WHAT THEY'RE GOING TO BE WORKING ON THIS SUMMER - ways to promote new music from non-mainstream artists. Creative commons artists and the like System has reached critical mass - it can now actually recommend roughly the right kind of artists to people. "People were getting recommended stuff and treating it like a slap in the face." People will tolerate a lot, but there's always a core of music that they hate with a vengeance and they just don't want to be shown it. They want to take some of the effort out of finding new music. Idea mooted: (Touchgraph mapping algorithm of content navigation) - Indie Cluster - Rock / Metal Cluster - Hip-Hop - Nu Metal "Tumour" Straddling genres, serve as a hub for two clusters of music - Radiohead. [TEC - don't know if I buy that - the opposite is also true, if you just looked at the most listened to things, it would make sense for it to be cross-genre interesting or at least woudl appear so in a clustering diagram. Don't know that it means much.] Use as navigation tool. Organic genre creation - rather than the genres set by record companies. "Mainstream of minorities" - charts that would be based on the type of licencing - free, minorities. POTENTIAL QUESTIONS FOR RJ ETC: 1) Neilsen ratings - are record companies interested already? 2) SOCIAL SOFTWARE / WENDY GROSSMAN HANDLING THE PANEL ___________________________________________________ {Wendy Grossman's incredibly ungracious introduction notwithstanding...} Simon Cozens // Flox: An Open Source Social Network - Here to talk about web applications programming... - Mapping the relationships between people: nothing special. Concepts: - User profile: view, edit etc. - Connection: Accept or Reject - Invitation: Accept or Reject connection - from_user, to_user, status (offered, accepted) user - first_name, last_name, email, profile, password, status (real, invited) invitation - ... Maypole: MVC application framework in Perl. Extensible front end to database. Secure, controlled mapping between URIs and methods. [TMM: This is, okay, moderately cool for kickstarting little projects.] [TEC: Not that relevant to social software though...] Gavin Starks // Open Webcasting and Collaborative Scheduling - on exequo - an open broadcast network - live 'channels' == broadcast portals - collaborative filtering? for content - skinning with logos - better than Tivo? Alex McLean // Editing text for live gabba techno performance - Wicked live hardcore - http://nosignal.slab.org for gig tonight - Similar to ChucK - http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/ Scott Matthews // 4rthur.com: organically grown social software - No show, poor guy got trashed last night - http://hypothetical.co.uk better anyway BLOGGING WITH A POINT (PANEL) _____________________________ Introduction: Dave Green drones on about Snackspot as usual! Tim Ireland / How to Stalk Your Local MP (In Less Than 10 Minutes a Day) - Why Stalk an MP - if they dont' have a website - if their website isn't updated frequently enough to be useful - Why a Local MP? - You will have better knowledge of local issues - You will have easier access to local newspapers (many of which do not publish/ archive any / all of their articles online). - It's cheaper to meet/chase them and/or call their constitutency office for 'clarification' when necessary. they won ttake you too seriously at first, then they'll be much more polite after that - Why a weblog? FOR THE CONSTITUENTS - To better enable transparency/access via search engines. - To make recent / hidden information more readily available Bring an end to the fish-wrapper mentality FOR THE MP: - To encourage them to get their own damn weblog Two words: Public. Servant. HOW TO GET STARTED - 1 - www.blogger.com - open a free account you CAN'T impoersonate your MP - more to follow.. - Use a nickname for your display name if you wish to remain anonymous (Skip this step if you already have an account with Blogger. Duh.) HOW TO GET STARTED - 2 - Include the name of your MP in the Blog title - Make it clear that it is not the official website of this MP. - Include the name of your MP in the URL. HOW TO GET STARTED - 3 - Choose a design template. - Post! WHAT TO INCLUDE IN YOUR DESIGN TEMPLATE - Contact details for your good self - Contact details for your local MP (not always readily available) - Links to official relevant profiles websites. EXTRAS YOU WILL NEED - IMAGE HOSTING - Blogger.com does not allow for the hosting of images. - To host pictures, scans of newspaper articles, etc. you will need your own (anonymous?) webspace or an image host. - Free image hosting links: http://communities.msn.com http://tinyurl.com/2k7vn EXTRAS YOU WILL NEED - TRACKING - Blogger.com does not offer tracking - You will need tracking to know that your weblog is reaching readers - You will need tracking to know where they are coming from - Free tracking link http://my.statcounter.com Getting listed: - check the Open directory project (ODP) - make valid contributions and comments on other blogs - every time Tim Yeo says things in the media, this page shows up and everyone sees the full glory. Hansard - publishes online the edited transcript of the proceedings of the House of Commons. But it's not easy to access (Hmm... what's the MySociety announcement this afternoon?) WHAT TO PUT ON YOUR WEBLOG - 1 - Extracts from (and commentary on) news articles - local or otherwise - Scan local newspapers - Use Google News Alerts to keep track of latest news and information published online (alerts sent direct to your Inbox): http://www.google.com/newsalerts Intermediary: Weblogs vs. webcams Richard Holmes / A controlled study on the impacts of blogging within a defined geographical location - Inner Hebrides, very remote in terms of journey time (Tiree, four hours) - Started by raising internet access to 100% in the islands (free computer, free net access) - Comparison project run in central Glasgow - 'didn't go so well - as soon as people had their computers, they sold them' (general laughter, unsurprisingly). - Broadly an attempt to collect content for Auntie and introduce web literacy - 70 blogs THE DARKER SIDE OF BITTORRENT - Mu ha ha haha! - Publishing without recrimination - PEPA, stochastic modelling of performance of BitTorrent - Darkness as in anonymity - Using steganography to hide things inside legit data - Problem: bandwidth capping, hiding requires much larger downloads per useful bit - http://logicwand.com/darktorrent/