Minibar London, May 25th

Just had a reminder e-mail from Christian that the next Minibar is coming up, this time with a focus on geolocation and mapping services.

[ upcoming.org entry ]

This fits in with my interest in services like Plazes and Dopplr, geotagging, and cool gadgets. I’ll definitely be making an effort to make it.

Dale should probably come along, too

Technorati tags: minibar, minicamp, barcamp, location awareness, london, events

Travel plans

I’ve been quiet and I’ve been on the road (although like many people, I’m twittering wildly).

• Last week I was in Sheffield.
• This week I am staying in Edinburgh, working with a customer in Scotland. My first time stopping in the city, and it is lovely – I only wish I had a camera with me.
• On Friday night I’ll be at Minibar in London. Hope to meet some of my blog and Twitter contacts there.
• From Saturday I will be in dazzling Las Vegas, attending and speaking at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference[1], an internal IBM event. I’ll be speaking on File Handling Choices in WebSphere Message Broker v6 on Wednesday afternoon, and generally enjoying the huge opportunities to learn from my peers for the rest of the week. I had a great time at the event last year, and this will be a good chance to get together with colleagues again, so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll try to blog the event, and suggest a tag of wstc2007 for other attendees who might want to follow suit.
• On my return, I’ll be back here in Edinburgh for most of May.

Thanks to Roo, I’m now also starting to play with Dopplr. It’s a remarkably simple idea – mark the dates when you’ll be in a particular place and work out when contacts might be in that same location. In true Web 2.0 style it has the usual feeds, tagging, Google Maps mashup, etc.. Looks very useful. The information is limited to you and the group of trusted other travellers, and it is invite-only (and I’m currently out of invites), but I think this “trusted circle” idea is probably a sound one. Looking forward to seeing how the service develops.

[1] aka “webspherepalooza”… that is, if you are Kelly…

Technorati tags: travel, Dopplr, Web 2.0, social software, Twitter, work, Edinburgh, Las Vegas, WebSphere Services Technical Conference, wstc2007, minibar

Your rights online

Flicking through my feeds this morning, I noticed that Suw Charman is pimping next week’s Open Rights Group party in London (here’s the event entry for the upcoming-inclined). The group had a brief slot at the last Minibar. I would have been interested to go along to this meetup, but sadly my work schedule will have me 250 miles away at the time.

Anyway, if you are around London and fancy learning more about ORG, it sounds like a worthwhile gig. Hope it goes off well.

Technorati tags: Open Rights Group, ORG, Suw Charman, London, events

Cats and tin foil

Two observations about my recent blogging habits. Firstly, I’m apparently blogging less than I did this time last year. Secondly, perhaps my twittering has reduced my interest in blogging.

I’m aware of the former, but I dispute the latter. I’ve been busy, attempting to think about what I blog about and when I do so, and yes, I apologise if I’ve been quieter than “normal”. I do want to get more technical again, and I’ll make an effort to do so.

In the meantime, here is a break from the norm. Stop reading now if you came for highbrow discussion of technology trends.

A fascinating and utterly frivolous fact that I learned from a Toffee Crisp wrapper the other day:

Cats will not walk on tin foil

Since making this discovery, my mind has been working overtime:

1. Do cats know something that we don’t?
2. Who discovered this? How did they do so?
3. Does it matter which way up the tin foil is?
4. How can I test the theory? Given a cat’s ability to leap a reasonably large obstacle, how large a piece of foil would I need to lay down and in what configuration would it have to be in order to place the cat in a position where it had no other choice?
5. What else won’t cats walk on? We already know that a hot tin roof is no problem…

Technorati Tags: cats, facts, humor, humour, tin foil, Toffee Crisp

Scrapbook

After watching Ian’s twitterings and Roo’s blog postings, I’ve set myself up a tumblelog on Tumblr.

Over a year ago I tried a new service called Suprglu, which had a similar promise of aggregating feeds from different sources (Flickr, blogs etc.) into a single site. It doesn’t really call for any maintenance at all – it just sits there and pulls together my photos and posts. Unfortunately though, it has a bit of a lag on updates (usually taking a good day or so before new entries appear).

Tumblr is different, both because I can customise the way that the feeds are displayed, and because I can post snippets directly to the tumblelog itself, making it more of a flexible scrapbook. One thing I don’t know is whether I can use my normal blogging clients (ecto and Windows Live Writer) to add content. I’ve no idea how much I will use it… I already Twitter my discoveries, add them to del.icio.us, or write longer pieces on the blog. We’ll see.

Note to my detractors: I’ll get some WebSphere-related posts lined up for you shortly, to avoid further accusations of lack of interest in blogging the day job.

Technorati tags: Tumblr, tumblelog, scrapbook, suprglu, twitter

Friday night’s Minibar meetup

As heavily trailed beforehand, Roo and I popped along to the Minibar unconference in London on Friday.

Interesting. An opportunity to meet some new people, hear a few presentations, and use the free wireless. We were both a bit confused at the fact that they didn’t have name badges for us despite having registered, but it seems that we missed out a part of the process somehow (one site doesn’t pass names to another site / email address which needs to receive them).

On reflection, our decision to turn left at the entrance and make for the comfy sofas had a mixed result – we got nice seating, but we were probably a little too far back from the screen and stage to get the most from the presentations.

The main talk was by the creators of Sellaband, a site that allows “artists and fans [to] make money together”. Basically, 5,000 fans or “believers” can invest $10 a time in a band (or 500 can invest $100, or whatever combination) until a fund of $50k exists, at which point the band gets to record an album, and the fans get a copy of the CD. Crowdsourcing. Interesting concept.

There was a talk by Spikesource, who “minimise the risk of using open source software”, making software like Drupal “business-ready” by providing support.

(at some point there was some rowdy individual in the crowd who shouted “boo” when certain competitors were mentioned – but generally this was all in good humour…)

One slightly off-the-wall talk was by a company called Flirtnik, who run a personals site based on tagging… I was slightly dubious of this one, mainly because as soon as you’ve been out with someone you don’t like, you’d tag them “boring” and that would be that for them… hmm… well to be honest I don’t need to look into the site, and maybe it doesn’t work like that.

My note-taking was a bit patchy since we were so far back, and the acoustics in Corbert Place were not fantastic… but I believe Metaweather was spoken about, as was a new search engine with site thumbnails called rouq. The latter I was also a bit unsure about, since it seems to tread all over Alexa’s patch, and I already use the Google Preview extension for Firefox… but worth a look[1]. I think the final talk was the Open Rights Group.

In the crowd, amongst others I met the exceptionally cool Mario Menti, spent some time learning about thingamy from Sig Rinde (who had virtually participated in another recent London meetup), and Jason King, who lives on a boat and has started a new search engine for boat users in the UK (I know nothing about boats, but it seemed like a cool thing to do!). I also observed Roo’s remarkable network, mostly at a distance…

I’ll definitely be interested in going to the next one.

[1] I just tried rouq, and it did both get my blog as first hit, and generate an up-to-date thumbnail, so maybe my initial skepticism is unfounded… although, saying that, the chances of my choosing a link based on a tiny thumbnail are small, I think text is probably better.

Technorati tags: Minibar, Minicamp, BarCamp, London, Corbet Place, Mario Menti, thingamy, Sellaband, web 2.0, Roo Reynolds, Sig Rinde, Jason King, Flirtnik, Metaweather, rouq, Spikesource, Open Rights Group, Boatr

Minibar

I was disappointed not to be able to attend BarCamp London a few weekends ago, so I was interested when another event appeared on my Upcoming radar – Minibar (homepage, signup).

I’ll be heading along to Corbet Place in London this Friday night, probably with MacBook and DSLR in tow. My ability to live blog the event will depend on the availability of wifi. Look out for a report later in the week

… I really ought to order more Moo cards, I suppose!

Technorati tags: Web 2.0, meetup, events, Minicamp, BarCamp, London, Upcoming

Starbucks cards, the proof

You may remember the discussion a few months ago about the introduction of Starbucks cards here in the UK. Mark Cathcart was good enough to send me a card from the US, loaded with a small sum in dollars, and I can now declare that the system does work internationally. I used the card to purchase a coffee and a muffin on my way to work in Shepherds Bush. I have no idea how they calculated the exchange rate.

I’m still not likely to use a card much, but I’m considering charging one up and using it when I’m in Las Vegas in April (21st-27th). If I remember from last year, there’s a Starbucks kiosk by the lifts, and another on the way from the reception to the conference suite in the Rio hotel…

So, thanks Mark. That was an interesting little experiment

Technorati tags: Starbucks, coffee, economics

Localized tornado

I first read about this on the train on the way to work yesterday… it appears that a tornado ripped the roofs off houses in Farnborough on Saturday afternoon.

This is less than a mile away from where we are – in fact it is only about 500m away. We were in all day and didn’t notice a thing. Amazing.

Technorati tags: Farnborough, weather, mad stuff

Ways to seem "happening"

Sugar Puffs Kellykins Our Kelly suggests adding as many events as possible to your Upcoming.org list, as a way of showing the world how trendy you are.

Mark them as “watching”, or if you think there is the slightest chance in hell you might attend (i.e. if someone lures you out of the house with the promise of chocolate-covered gin & tonics), mark it as “attending”.

It’s a fine plan. Roo introduced me to Upcoming last year. Over the past few months, I did pretty much exactly what Kelly suggests in her post. In fact, I’d really intended to attend as many of the events as I could, but I ran into a snag…

The problem is that events in Upcoming either have to be single-occurence, or span a period – and once you hit the start date, they slip from your Upcoming list. So, if I decide I want to remember to go to an exhibition or play, I have to choose the specific date, or create the event as covering a period of days/weeks/months, and keep remembering that it is still running by looking in my past events list. Doesn’t work for me. Generally speaking, I want to have an event that spans a timeframe, and just keep it in my list as a reminder to “go along at some point”. It shouldn’t expire from the list until the end date.

Ultimately, I only attended a couple of the ones I’d marked, as I didn’t go on the first day of the exhibition / play / whatever and they disappeared from the list.

Nevertheless, I’m going to keep trying to make use of it. I’ve just spotted a very useful list of photography exhibitions that are going to be on in London over the next month. Must add some of them to my Upcoming list, so that people think I’m hip…

Technorati tags: events, Upcoming, exhibition, photography, plays, theatre

Do not buy this product

Londonist says it all. Madness.

Publishing my Mugshot

My friend Tim Waugh^[1] pinged me yesterday, to invite me to something called Mugshot.

I had a vague recollection of reading something about this last year, but I never looked into it. These days, of course, if it is even vaguely “Web 2.0″-related I just have to play – witness my addiction to Flickr, Plazes, and blogs; and my passing interest in MySpace and Vox (which I’ll talk more about, soon).

Here’s a summary of Mugshot, from the Red Hat magazine last June:

The focus of Mugshot is to foster the creation of live social experiences around entertainment, all in the context of an open project.

This is how it works. You add information about your website, blog, and other networks (Flickr, LinkedIn, Last.fm etc.) to your profile. You build a network. Once you’ve done that, you can install a small application which sits in the system tray. When updates are detected in your network, you get alerted to them via a little pop-up list called the Stacker. The desktop app is currently available for Linux and Windows, and a Mac version is being worked on. Mugshot integrates with your music player (well… some music players) and enables you to share your current playlists on your blog. There’s also something called the Web Swarm – a way of sharing web pages and feeds with friends and groups on Mugshot, via a Firefox bookmarklet.

So what?

I’m not sure, really. I’ve barely started to look at it, so my opinion is very flexible. It is easy to use, and pretty cool to see the Stacker pop up new items from time to time. The thing that keeps looping in my mind is that my RSS reader already lets me follow blogs that I’m interested in; if I was a Last.fm user I could share playlists; and if I had a del.icio.us profile, I could share my web links. Mugshot appears to let me integrate all of those interests together. With the proliferation of social networks, integration is certainly helpful… but so far I’ve yet to get really excited about it. Maybe once I start seeing my network grow and things starting to appear in my Stacker more often, I’ll get addicted like my dealer wants me to.

One thing I’m slightly confused by is the concept of Groups. There are groups in Mugshot, based on activities like, say, cooking (!), or being a Firefox user. The idea is that you can share links with interested communities. When I went browsing, though, I found that I was only able to sign-up to a group as a “follower”, rather than as a member, and as a result I can’t share links – I can only do that with people in my network (which is still rather small). I’m sure I’ll figure it all out eventually.

As I said earlier, I was sure that I’d heard of Mugshot before, but I couldn’t remember where. I wondered what kind of interest it had attracted so far, so I did a bit of hunting and pulled up a few articles from when it first surfaced, in the middle of last year. The Guardian’s Technology section spotted it, as did internetnews. Interestingly they both comment on the fact that del.icio.us and Last.fm have been in this space for a while, but the focus is clearly slightly different here. The entertainment angle is something that I see mentioned in most of the articles. From internetnews:

Red Hat doesn’t consider Mugshot a replacement for social networking sites, but rather as a tool that will work with them to add what Red Hat calls “live social experiences” to the mix.

So, I’m going to give this a try. If you’re as much of a magpie for new, cool things as I am… let me know, and I’ll invite you  

And I can hardly finish this post without pointing you at my own Mugshot page.

[1] Tim is a Red Hat engineer; Linux printing maestro; hacker extraordinaire; one-time elk; and without Tim, to be honest, I would probably have never gotten a decent mark in AO Level Maths… spent so much time with Acorn computers… or become temporarily addicted to south coast radio station Power FM during my mid-teens. The man has a lot to answer for.

Technorati tags: Mugshot, Red Hat, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, del.icio.us, Last.fm, social networking, entertainment, stacker, web swarm, playlist