Tom Morris

I had a brief chat with Yoz Grahame after the Technology 2.0 event today, on the topic of Ning. Here's what's really cool. A few days ago, I wrote a piece called Ruminations on Message Boards, where I described how virtually nobody had done anything new or interesting with message boards and forum technology. Basically, the whole idea of message boards has been stuck virtually in a vacuum since 1996, with many, many recreations of the same, tired old ideas.

During Yoz's talk, I found a discussion board system on Ning at discussion.ning.com. It offers much of the functionality which I want, and because it's 'cloneable' for anyone with a Ning account, anyone can launch a pretty, Web 2.0 message board which uses a tag-based folksonomy rather than an artificial hierarchy.

I explained the point about letting organic organisation flow using tag-based hierarchy structures. There is something very Ning-like in the idea - basically, you are taking an aggregate of user ideas, and letting people 'clone' and customise them.

Talk turned to OPML, Dave's OPML Editor and the suchlike. Yoz has actually installed Les Orchard's PHP server on to Ning. You can find it at opmlserver.ning.com. Neither Les Orchard's server, nor Yoz's Ning implementation support the blogging functionality, which needs to be ported over from the Frontier code.

To be honest, when I first saw Ning, I said "meh". But looking at it again tonight, during Yoz's talk, is all rather exciting.

Evening all, I'm at 01ZeroOne, to liveblog Technology 2.0, the evening technology conference where they take stuff that people have seen at American tech conferences.

Promise TV

First up, Promise TV (the Ludlam family). These guys presented back at OpenTech 2005 in London.

Video recorders were one of the main changes in televisual technology, that let consumers exert control over our entertainment. Time-shifting and alternative content sources (eg. video rental).

DVR & PVR has made things easier, but it's just an extension of taping content. We are still programming a device for a particular event.

Freeview was born from On Digital (later ITV Digital) services in 1998, an exciting change in UK TV. One of Greg Dyke's most stunning achievement.

5 channels in the last month, 3 more due this year, Channel 4 trebled revenue their revenue by moving away from subscription.

Moved from five analogue channels to over 30 digital cahnnels.

There are still problems: in one evening, 81 separate programmes, with scheduling conflicts inevitable.

Demonstration: Watch Live TV, Programme List, Recorder Status. Four viewing boxes hooked up to one recorder.

Four minutes rewind and fast-foreword. "You're in a time machine with video". Two thousand programmes recorded, which you can browse through.

This is very cool. Thin clients, radio, Zeroconf (aka Bonjour, Rendezvous) support!!!!, automatic tuning, faster interaction response time. This isn't a Personal Video Recorder, this is "an Impersonal Video Recorder".

Impacts on viewing habits: you watch less TV, not watching live, quality goes up, the "Last Night's TV" column in the papers is actually useful, you watch less live TV, 'news' comes mainly from radio. Still buy the Radio Times, need an 'editorial' review of TV, because the EPG is impartial.

Producing a limited production run for a beta test, next-gen EPG development, levering social software concepts, freesat and HD tests.

Promise TV is so unbelievably cool.

Tom Armitage: From Paddles to Pads: Is controller design killing creativity in videogames?

Summary of Etech talk - see we make money not art for previous talk and comments.

Google for the Revolution Remote image. What's wrong with gaming now? Gaming is "bigger than Hollywood". A sea of genres, sameyness of games - adding a few new buttons each time.

Console take-up in the US: 8bit 31m, 16-bit 42m, 32-bit 48m, now 52m. 31% of households have a console throughout the last thirty years. Games isn't growing.

Current controllers are aesthetically uninspiring (for the developer)? Donkey Konga, Buzz, Singstar, Guitar Hero, Steel Battalion etc.

Current joypads are aesthetically uninspiring? Convention becomes ingrained. Halo's controls are the basis for FPS. Metroid Prime, Killer7, Micro Machines 2 all break the model.

Handedness - asymmetric, left and right handedness. Uncanny Valley.

Is the PS2 pad the best we can do. Satoru Iwata: "If we cannot expand the market, all we can do is [wait for it to die]".

"Difficult Questions About Videogames" (James Newman and Iain Simons (ed.))

Controllers as serious limiting factor. The Revolution will change things!

Liz Turner: Harpers Magazine News Review

Building an interactive Flash 'thing' to browse the Harmers Magazine News Review. Lots of clever stuff with metadata, iconography and so on.

See Weekly Review and Iconaut.

Charles Armstrong (Trampoline Systems): How a small island held the key to better collaborative filtering

Compressed version of an Etech presentation

Ethnography, Social Political Sciences (Cambridge), consulting, "became fascinated by inefficiency of corporate IT systems at distributing information". Mentoring relationship with Lord Michael Young of Dartington.

Spend 12 months living with 80 people on an island.

Isles of Scilly, St Agnes. Flower farming, no cars, just tractors and electric jeep buggies

Information distribution on St Agnes - like "No boat on Friday evening". Efficient and mysterious mechanism of transmitting information. How does it work?

Observation 1: "Groups have implicit authorisation parameters that govern how information is relayed"

Observation 2: "Groups pool intelligence on who needs to know something and who is best placed to pass it on"

Observation 3 (missed)

Observation 4: "Each person and group is identified with certain semantic "triggers" that activate relaying behaviour" (eg. water regulations and farmers)

Observation 5: "The "further away" two people or groups are in a social network, the higher the threshold for relaying information between them"

34% of business email is completely unnecessary

Technologies: collaborative scoring (eg. Digg) effective inside homogenous expert communities

Semantic sorting of unstructured data (eg. Autonomy) - not responsive to individuals.

Trampoline: document looks interesting, post to Trampoline team module, indexes contents, find trigger matches, authorisation, social network evaluation, recipient preferences, de-duplication process

Trampoline Systems, notes from Etech talk.

Rev Dan Catt: How to Make the Most of Maps

Now works for Flickr, worked on geoRSS. Subscribing to RSS feeds on the basis of location.

geo: tags in Flickr, and on Technorati etc. Flickr machine codes

Zonetag: http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com - uses mobile phone Cell ID, with30% accuracy, plus Cell ID, time, tags and users 50%. 70% imge recognition ("l33t image hax0ring").

Cameltagged: TripleTags have nothing to do with location, but otherstuff.

Semacode, Optical Character Recognition, GPS tracklogs which compare with digital camera, compare times connected with server, server log files.

35 ways to find your location, this blog.

Guessing something interesting happening: adds context to time, relate to other people, doucments events, find keys (maps of your deskotp).

Presentation

Yoz Grahame: The Ning Playground: A Springboard for New Social Software

A "B-side" of ETech talk

Talk from etech06.ning.com, also at technology20.ning.com

"People love cute bunnies... but don't show them while you're trying to speak"

Ning makes it easy for non-developers to create and share web apps, developers can create and share apps to share content, functionality to evolve.

It's got a code sandbox, easy cloning, content store, universal authentication, unversal tagging, useful starter apps, well-furnished apps.

PHP, and Ruby coming soon.

New sample apps: [login to ning first] restaurants.mystatenisland.com (you can assign your own domain names), bloggercomments.ning.com, CCHits (digg for creative commons tunes), Yoz's New York Trip -> clone to Bob's New York Trip.

With cloning, you can see the genealogy of the app.

UK Pollution Map uses Anti-Pollution Groups.

The cloning model - can be set up in seconds, lets you add new content and features.

Bunnies! Nagaztag, YozBaztag - lets you control devices.

That's it, folks.