Pipes: Birmingham local blog aggregator

http://pipes.yahoo.com/bounder/birminghamlocalblogs

and a description of how it was done

http://www.jonbounds.co.uk/blog/645/hyperlocal-news-wire/

Nice work

***Imported from old blog***

Digital Britain Report - Underwhelmed

Wordle from Guardian

Underwhelmed by the Digital Britain report, but still a pity I won't be able to make the regional launch at the ICC today. The Wordle above nicely summarises the issues:

- dominance of Government
- Radio far stronger than TV or Internet (talk about aiming low)
- Ditto spectrum
- No mention of web 2.0 brands, technologies or principles

Overall it looks more like an "old media" report than a "new media" report, failing to grasp the possibly seismic change in communications that high speed broadband and mobile broadband could bring, and the changes in consumption (and production) patterns already happening.

Perhaps a better approach would have been a 3 part one:
- tidying up the old guard (radio, spectrum, BBC, Channel 4)
- rapid build-out of a next-gen infrastructure
- exploiting that infrastructure

***Imported from old blog***

Yahoo! Query Language - YDN

Yahoo Query Language - Pipes on steriods (or sunk in SQL?)>

***Imported from old blog***

OptimalSort - online and easy cardsorting - neat app

http://www.optimalsort.com/pages/default.html

***Imported from old blog***

We Feel Fine

www.wefeelfine.org - looks a fun site mining emotion on the Internet.

***Imported from old blog***

Tabbloid - Personalised PDF newspaper from RSS

http://www.tabbloid.com/

Love it. Been meaning to do something like this myself in C# so I could wake up to my own newspaper. Must give it a try.

***Imported from old blog***

Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

Mmm. This was hailed as being on a par with the Machine is Us video, and EPIC 2015 but its a bit more portmanteau than that. In this interesting but not earth shattering ramble he talks about Kurzweil's "Internet is as big as the brain" idea, Negroponte's Bit/Atom worlds, Internet 0 (the Internet of things), Berners-Lee's Semantic Web, Kevin Kelly is Exec Editor at Wired.

***Imported from old blog***

MAGIC Interactive Map

http://www.magic.gov.uk/website/magic/

UK Government public GIS system, some interesting data sets and good resolution rural mapping

***Imported from old blog***

Skitch.com + Skitch = fast and fun screen capture and image sharing.

http://skitch.com/

Looks fun

***Imported from old blog***

MapTube

http://www.maptube.org/

Like my old Newsglobe but on steriods. Done by CASA who did the 3D London, and who like our Google Maps in SL.

***Imported from old blog***

Get Satisfaction - People-Powered Customer Service

http://getsatisfaction.com/ - the Web 2.0 support application for Web 2.0 services?

***Imported from old blog***

OpenLearn - The Open University

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/


Open Learn - the Open University's CC licenced content

which ends up at....

***Imported from old blog***

Show Us a Better Way - UK Govt Mash-up Competition

http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk/


The start of a quick surf trail. Similar concept to BBC Backstage and what we've also been suggesting to Digital Birmingham.

Which leads to....

***Imported from old blog***

Digital Urban: Google Earth Thematic Mapping Engine

Thanks to Digital Urban for the heads up on this great data visualisation tool using Google Earth. More at http://thematicmapping.org/.

***Imported from old blog***

Intel® Mash Maker

http://mashmaker.intel.com/web/index.php

Not quite sure about this - putting your own widgets on top of existing pages to "mash" up data - although each bit of data appears to stay in its own widget.

***Imported from old blog***

Being Digital

A day spent at Mashup*Events' Being Digital conference at BAFTA in London.

Panel Comments

Very sterile Advertising debate (but me.jpg) and haphazard Identity panel (must start using OpenID). Will Mclnnes' Content panel was much better but took a while to get to the nub of the matter finally caught by Ivan Pope (but spotted earlier by the texters) that the debate is not about content but the role of channels vs. aggregation and recommendation services - last.tv as someone said.

On the location panel Tim Warr fm Microsoft had some good stuff about the need for better and radical new interfaces for location data (augmented reality?). Richard Wahrman's Locomatrix company sounds fun - outdoor games over GSM/GPS - be good to get them to Brum - or into SL for a mixed reality game. 'Location is ubiquitous' had to be the phrase of the day!

Retail - Brent Hobermann talked through mydeco - neat affiliate model for furniture sales through your room designs. IKEA - multi-channel customer has x2.5 LTV

Search - Jeff Kelisky talked about 3D search and Mirror Worlds (2 MS employees almost talking sense!).

Pitch Comments

putplace = youtube, not web-cen
fav.or.it = del.ic.ous
mapness=GE mash-up
mippin=bango/wapgata
kiwork=getafreelancer
phreadz=yet another cross-poster

Site Recommendations

headmap/scribed/hivemindfireeagle - location brokerrummble - couple of mentionswoe-yahoo-semantic locationfredcavazza.net - social apps maptaptu - mobile search

Overall

Lost count of the comments on Twitter outages. The need for proper semantic markup was highlighted again and again - but never discussed.
Mobile phone camera based AR driven by barcodes came up a couple of times.

Micropayments came up several times cf yesterdays Big Debate. Good SMS comment system from eventspace, again cf Big Debate - next a live wifi message board and then we can almost reproduce the SL experience in RL. Good food and venue.

In summary the whole event felt a bit like the dot-com boom re-visited. Less geeks than I expected, lots of marketing types, a few VCs, few corporate end users.

***Imported from old blog***

IT posters to cover your empty walls

http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=304

Some great tech related charts

***Imported from old blog***

Many Eyes

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home

This is IBM's "Flickr" for data visualisations site

***Imported from old blog***

Wikipedia API - still not there?

» Wikipedia API?

Like this blog muses, why isn't there a nice neat API to wikipedia. Will have to get one written.

***Imported from old blog***

Everyscape

EveryScape is a neat Google StreetView lookalike allowing to walk through a city.

***Imported from old blog***