David Emery Online

Thoughts on BarCamp

Due to the lack of a decent internet connection at Future of Web Apps my round up of BarCampLondon2 is going to end up being a bit briefer than I originally anticipated; I was going to try and write it during the day but it just never quite happened…

One of the first big themes of the weekend was of RDF Vs Microformats, and the semantic web – my conclusion is, quite frankly, RDF sounds interesting from a technical point of view but is never, ever going to take off. There is just no compelling reason for using it, other than because it’s interesting – that’s just not enough for most people.

Even Microformats, which most people at the conference seem to have taken for granted as a “success”, still don’t have a huge uptake – for exactly the same reason: as yet, there’s no really compelling reason for the end user to care about Microformats.

For crying out loud, most people still don’t get RSS…

The two most common demos for Microformats are converting an event listing into an ics file, and converting some contact information into a vcard. Both are nice, but generating vcards and ics files isn’t hard in the...

BarCamp in Pictures

I’m hopefully going to post a full roundup of the weekends activities at BarCampLondon2 tomorrow – safe to say it was a very good event, and I’ve got lots of things to talk about. For the time being, you’re going to have to make do with some pictures – lots of pictures. I took almost 500 over the weekend, but here’s some choice highlights:

Friday Links I

Welcome, welcome one and all to the inaugural Friday Links! As mentioned earlier this week, the whole point of just posting links on Friday is because I’m not really coherent enough by this point in the week to write anything “proper”, so I’m going to stop writtering and start linking:

NetNewsWire 3 Beta – NetNewsWire is pretty much the most popular desktop RSS reader, and version 3 has all sorts of new goodies coming in it, including a whole new UI (which I’m not sure if I like yet).

Monocle launches their first issue – I have to admit, from a content point of view I’m finding it kind to get though, but the design and layout is wonderful.

Ben Metcalfe: Do we really want to aggregate all our social networks? – Insightful points from Ben; their are a lot of tech people that really don’t seem to understand what attracts people to social networks, and how they actually use them.

Microsoft Launches another form of DRM – seriously. They’re not joking. Amusing timing considering the recent Steve Jobs DRM debate.

BarCampLondon 2 – this weekends plans. I’m thinking of chairing a discussion of digital music formats and...

Effort

Sick days.

I, since leaving school, have never had a sick day.

Not one unplanned day off work.

So why do some people take them all the time? Am I unusually healthy; extremely lucky that I don’t have to take 1-2 days off ill every month? I really don’t think so.

The corollary of this is people that work late.

In my current job I’ve stayed working late twice in the year and a half I’ve been there – both times because I was stuck in meetings that overran. I get my work done during the day – during the time I get paid for. I’ve never come across a time where I’ve had to stay late due to something needing to be done now, even though we frequently have very tight deadlines.

This contrasts with the large amount of people that both stay late, and seem to be perpetually busy; rushed off their feet. Do they really have that much more work to do, or is it just a state of mind?

I think so many things – almost everything, in fact – come down to your state of mind. If you decide that you are “busy”, then you will be busy. If you decide you...

Views of London

Alternate Reality Gaming

Dan Dickinson points out that to promote the new Nine Inch Nails album – which I’m very much looking forward to – they running an Alternate Reality Game (ARG for short).

Alternate Reality Games – if you haven’t come across them before – normally take the form of one clue, placed fairly obviously in some publicly released material, which then takes the player to a web site. Then, by coming through the clues planted in that site you get moved on to more sites, each traditionally telling a part of a story. These clues aren’t your normal riddle type affairs either – ARGs are aimed at a community of players to solve, so are incredibly fiendish and use things like embedding text in the binary file of an image, or using morse code in an audio file.

The NIN game seems to be playing out in a very similar way to the ILoveBees game which promoted Halo 2, which is no surprise considering it’s being done by the same people. For iLoveBees the original clue was planted as a one frame url to the site in a trailer for the game, and for NIN they’ve rather nicely highlighted certain letters...

Fridays

Ok.

I admit it.

I have a problem.

Fridays.

You might have noticed recently that I’ve become pretty lax at posting on Fridays. Admittedly, it’s not really something that matters in the slightest to anybody other then me; my self-imposed one-post-per-week-day rule is there purely so that I don’t end up not posting at all, which is what would inevitably happen.

The whole plan only works though by telling you, the reader, that I post every week day. For some reason it clicks something inside – an obligation, I guess – that means that I end up posting; so I don’t let you folks down.

My schedule is pretty hectic at the moment – let alone next week with the double whammy of BarCamp and Future Of Web Apps – and hence by Friday I’m pretty burnt out, and don’t quite make it to posting. I’ve even started posting on Saturday or Sunday, and dating it as a post on Friday, which is pretty weird now I come to think about it.

I do, however, have a plan to combat my inherent slacker attitude.

Posts on Friday are now going to be a quick roundup of links, gathered during the week. I’ve noticed that I don’t...

Don't forget Amazon

Lost in the noise surrounding Steve Jobs’ music DRM essay was the announcement by Amazon and Tivo that you’re going to be able to play movies and TV shows downloaded with Amazon’s Unbox service on a Tivo.

I’ve talked before about the importance of being able to play video content you’ve paid for on your TV, and this is a very smart move on Amazon’s part. The Tivo is a very successful product from a user experience point of view, and has what is widely regarded as the best UI of any set top box. Amazon couldn’t have found a better partner to hook up with.

I mentioned briefly yesterday that it is widely rumoured that Amazon is not only going to bring out a music download store, but that when they do it’ll be based on mp3s. A lot of people I think take Amazon almost for granted, but they are quietly turning into one of the most interesting tech companies to watch, with things like their S3 online storage system, Mechanical Turk the system that allows people to complete simple tasks and get paid for them and more.

With their continuing moves into digital content...

Steve

By now I imagine most people have heard about Steve Jobs’ Thoughts On Music – I mean it was on the Radio 1 news this morning, for crying out loud. I’m not sure if any other CEO could post an essay on a web site and it make it on the radio news, but that’s a question for another day…

Taken at face value, this is a very bold move by Jobs but in many ways an unsurprising one. For a start, the industry is quite obviously moving away from DRM. Rumour has it that Amazon is going to start an MP3-based online store later this year, which will probably be the first serious competition to the iTunes store if they get the pricing right; this is just the first strike by Apple to try and be in a competitive place when they launch.

Secondly, with the concept of DRM obviously having a limited shelf life, and iTunes’ current dominant market position Apple has little to lose by stating they want to get rid of DRM. One of the key points in Apple’s self image is its slightly hippie, anti-establishment undertone – they like to be seen as “sticking it to...

The Future of HTML

After standing around doing relatively little; resting on their laurels content in the knowledge that finally Microsoft have released a browser with decent (ish) standards support, and most web developers have figured out that HTML and CSS is the way to go, the assorted standards bodies are awakening from their slumber and starting to think about what’s next for HTML.

What’s next is, of course, two competing standards.

One obviously wouldn’t be enough.

However, I can completely see why there are two competing standards – XHTML 2 and HTML 5; neither of them are very good! Both the two standards seem content with adding cruft and useless additions to the current standards, without really addressing any major problems .

XHTML 2, as you can see from the linked article, adds some new elements like nl, take away a few like b and i, messes around with headings and makes every element be a link by adding a href attribute.

HTML 5 adds a whole load of pre-defined elements like “article” and “nav”, which would commonly be created using divs with ids or classes. It also, like XHTML 2, adds some fairly useless new elements like dialog and figure, and for some...