Dopplr’s still invite only, but there’s a good chance you know someone with an account by now. We’ll be issuing new invite tokens from time to time, so keep an eye out. There are some screenshots on Flickr, and alpha travellers Stowe Boyd and Roo Reynolds have written some illuminating reviews. I’ll be at XTech in Paris in May (don’t forget, online registration closes soon) so track me down and I’ll give you a demo.
I’ve just got back from another big trip. I’ve spent most of the last two weeks in New Zealand, thanks to Nat Torkington and the kind sponsorship of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. Not only did I get to attend NZ Foo Camp, but NZTE’s John Houlker arranged for me to meet with representives of Auckland and Wellington’s media, software and archiving interests.
Here’s a video demonstration (people reading the feed, start your web browsers). On the left you’ll see an Arduino reading analogue values from a potentiometer and feeding the results in via the USB-serial interface to my Mac. On the right, you’ll see a modified version of Second Life that is feeding those values in via my avatar’s chat channel. An object in the Second Life world is reacting, with perhaps a half-second lag.
The call for proposals for XTech 2007 is closing this weekend. Last year’s conference was superb, and if you’ve got anything to say about making the web then you’ll definitely want to be part of next year’s lineup.
The theme for this year’s conference is “The Ubiquitous Web”. As the web reaches further into our lives, we will consider the increasing ubiquity of connectivity, what it means for real world objects to connect to the web, and the increasing blurring of the lines between virtual worlds and our own.
The technologies underpinning these developments include mobile devices, RFID, ultra-wideband, Second Life, location-aware services, Google Earth and more. The issues surrounding them include privacy, intellectual property, activism, politics, regulation and standards.
Nearly two years ago, I wrote a utility to check your del.icio.us tags for duplication using Porter stemming. Until today, the application had stopped working completely due to the fragility of the screenscraping code it was using. For fun, I’ve done a rewrite using Ruby and Hpricot, with all-new fragile screenscraping code based on the del.icio.us JSON feeds (thanks to Lenny Domnitser for pointer those out to me). I web-enabled it using Camping, a nice mini-framework for when webapps don’t need all the bells and whistles of Rails.
This month my freelance work takes me to Nature Publishing Group to work on a new scientific project in Second Life. We’re not quite ready to talk about what we’re doing yet, but I’m so pleased with a bit of work in progress that I thought I’d put a teaser up here.
It’s nearly time to return to London for a pause and a stretch. Since I quit my job at the BBC almost exactly a year ago, I’ve spent 4 months snowboarding, attended 6 conferences and spoken at 3 (LIFT06, ETech, SXSW, XTech, Railsconf and Foocamp), worked on at least 5 freelance contracts, lived in 3 different countries (France, Holland and the USA) and spent time in at least 5 others (Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Finland). I’ve travelled more than 40,000 miles by air, taken a flight every 2 weeks on average, and probably met more people in one year than in all the previous years of my life put together.
I’m heading to Helsinki in a few days for the next Thinglink workshop. My lovely hosts Ulla-Maaria and Jyri have organised a chance for me to give an Aula talk on “the Open Data Movement”. I’m honoured to be part of a series that has included Ben Cerveny, Henry Jenkins, Joi Ito and Lawrence Lessig.