April 26th, 2006 |
Published in
metadata
While I’m talking BBC, here’s a story from a little while ago. I’m a big fan of last.fm, and I’ve been using it for a few years. Because I used to play my MP3s on a headless linux box in my flat, I wrote a commandline python mp3 player that could ping last.fm. My profile is a pretty good picture of my listening habits.
At BBC Radio, the radio stations are moving steadily from traditional analogue studios to fully digital systems that play nearly all their music from hard disk. As a member of the Architecture Team there, I had access to experimental data feeds from these systems. One day at work I asked myself a question: what happens when you plug behavioural data generated by an automatic process into social software designed for humans?
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April 26th, 2006 |
Published in
rails | 1 Comment
I’ve returned to the working world from sabbatical and now it’s a big day. I’ve been looking forward to this all year.
This afternoon I flipped the switch on the BBC Programme Catalogue and let everyone in. Stop reading this now and get in there.
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March 31st, 2006 |
Published in
events
No sooner have I returned from my USA trip than I have to think about the next steps. I now have two exciting speaking engagements and a couple of fun side-trips planned. I’ve decided not to return to living in London once the snowboarding season is over; I’m going to go wherever work and speaking takes me, and take a month or two living in each place along the way. I’m very much looking forward to taking on freelance work and getting back to making things on the internet again.
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March 8th, 2006 |
Published in
talks
My esteemed former colleague Tom Coates has been giving a talk recently entitled Native to a Web of Data: Designing a Part of the Aggregate Web. It’s a tour de force journey through key issues and implications of the renaissance in web thinking that’s happening right now.
In his talk, Tom very kindly references a talk I gave at last year’s XTech conference. It’s based on a great deal of work he and I did together at the BBC, and endless conversations that we’ve had on the nature of the web. It’s called The Application of Weblike Design to Data: Designing Data for Reuse and hopefully those slides are some use to those seeking background for Tom’s narrative.
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February 27th, 2006 |
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events
Time has flown, and I’ve only got two months left before the winter season is over and the snowboarding is done. It’s time to get on a plane again and reconnect a little with the tech world.
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January 9th, 2006 |
Published in
events
The XTech 2006 proposal submissions close at the end of the day today. Watching my private RSS feed of the submissions is a lot of fun, but I reckon it can get better.
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December 28th, 2005 |
Published in
events
I’m on sabbatical, but when an interesting conference like LIFT06 is being organised a bus-ride away from my chalet, I think I have to make an exception. I’ve made my booking – are you going too? Let me know.
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December 8th, 2005 |
Published in
misc
The coding’s done on version 1.0 of the BBC Programme Catalogue and I’ve handed it over to the BBC for testing and deployment. Now I’m going snowboarding. I’ll be living in Morzine in the French Alps until the end of the winter.
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November 18th, 2005 |
Published in
events
The XTech 2006 Call For Participation has just been published, and you should be submitting something. You have until January 9th 2006.
XTech is a superb European tech conference covering internet, XML, browser and open data technologies. This year’s conference has a Web 2.0 flavour – think AJAX, tagging, identity, digital rights, owning your own data and opening up information for reuse. Don’t think business models, think really great demos.
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November 18th, 2005 |
Published in
rails
I had a great time presenting yesterday evening at the London Web Frameworks night. Huge round of applause to Dean Wilson for putting it together. I learnt interesting things about Catalyst and Django from the other speakers, and did my first public demo of the BBC Programme Catalogue. I’m immensely proud of the site, and I think it came across.
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