Elearning07

Live moblogging an award for slidecasting about moblogging - it doesn't get much more information age than that! Or does it...I also twittered the tinyurl to the organisers. I wonder if anyone will notice in time for tomorrow's session....

Headphones

"You can bite my shiny metal iPod"

The doped masses, heads hanging, blank eyes badly hidden behind over-expensive sunglasses sit on the bus together, nodding to the invisible beat of the anaesthetic administered aurally via the white umbilicus.

"Yesterday, I swear I got to work and had no idea how I got there."

Every smart suit and pair of clicking heals living in denial of their symptoms. The brain-surgeon working on itself excising the horror of the daily commute asks only for a little music to cut by.

I was trying to work dammit!

I was actually doing some work on the internet, for a bit of a change, when there was a flash and a KABOOM and the connection fried. A very sudden and extremely powerful thunderstorm wafted through and interupted every transmitter for miles. Not even the phone worked.

The connection is now so erratic I am writing this in short bursts. This occasionally happens here, it's one of the hazards of living right on the Pacific ocean. A year or two before I came to Sydney there was a hailstorm that spat chunks of ice the size of a softball from the sky. It hasn't done that yet but I wouldn't want to be outside in it.

Film festival special

Last night Em & I went to a session supported by the Sydney Film Festival that was specifically devoted to internet distributed short films hosted by two people Emily has worked with/for. This is great for a number of reasons, my favourite being that I can show you the three stand-out ones right here.

The first one is a Will Ferrell film (!) called The Landlord. It speaks for itself but if you are interested in how they got a child to do this then have a look at the Funny or Die site for 'the making of' and outtakes clips too.

The second film is too odd to describe so I shan't. It is distributed by atom films who support independant film makers through advertising. This means that there are some pre-roll adverts on the video but stick with it, it's weird!

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

The last video clip is a piece of machinima. Machinima - machine animation - for the purposes of this film, is taking the output of your computer and dubbing it as film. The artist in this case has built a Vincent Van Gough picture in the very powerful 3D rendering engine of virtual world Second Life, put some effects on and dubbed it then dismantled it in Second Life leaving only the video clip behind. It is a breathtaking piece of work when seen on a big screen, I'm afraid I can only do small on here.

6 degrees of separation

Silly me, I thought social networking meant a trip to the pub (this may be why my boss has described my networking skills as "pretty modest" but he seems to treat networking as a trip to the pub as well so I suspect this is something else). Apparently the web has changed much of this and social networking is now achieved by technological means as well.

To try and get a handle on what I might use these for I have been trying out various "Social Networking" websites. Some over the past couple of months/years some only very recently. I am now on twitter, Linkedin and Facebook as well as MySpace, Flickr and just about anything else with a crap name. I stopped short of Bebo, I don't want to be part of a social network that sounds like a teddy bear (although I am on Orkut, which sounds like a character from terrible Eighties cartoon He-Man).

There are hundreds of these bloody things, they can't all be useful. I can understand when they have a set purpose like Linkedin (business connections) and Flickr (photos), but Facebook, although enourmous fun for the first 5 days of membership, seems too broad in application to be useful, as is MySpace which seems to have become infested with musos as well as aggravating teenagers. MySpace also has the distasteful honour of being owned by Uncle Rupert, it is also poorly designed, hard to use and forces you to put your name and photograph next to adverts. I don't use that much.

The biggest problem for these sites is that each one seems to want to be the master account; it assumes that you will be logged in to that site and that site alone to update your personal details, status, photos, what you had for breakfast etc. I spend a lot of time online but even I draw the line at being logged in to a website pumping adverts at me all day.

One of the main reasons I use Google's services for the majority of my online life is that it is all behind one login all the time and that I can update most things from one place or go to the exact spot I want with a single click and get everything I want to do in my personal online world finished before I finish my morning coffee. This is slowly becoming more and more possible as each site publishes an API and I know for a fact that some online service providers are building software that will aggregate all these things to a single spot. This is a spectacularly difficult endeavour and as a result there aren't any plans to turn this into a product as yet - but you can bet anything you like there will be, because I'd use it.

I had hoped that by looking on each of these sites I would discover which was more used by people I know and could stick with that. Having uploaded my contacts into each one and searched the databases I have discovered that everyone is hedging their bets; everyone uses a few of them infrequently. This tells me that the whole thing is either a waste of time or that this is a space that needs not just consolidation but a good idea of what it aiming to do and a better idea of how people do it. Might I suggest some offline time to facilitate this process? There's nothing like actually socialising to teach you how people network socially, or trying to find a new job to teach you just how much easier this could be made.

Despite myself I quite enjoy the online social networking thing. The sites use the '6 degrees' principle to great effect. Once you have made a connection with someone you can see all their connections and send 'friend requests' to them. It's slightly nauseating in a primary school 'will you be my friend?' kind of way but it can serve to put you back in touch with people you haven't seen in quite some time and has the addictive collecting and slightly competitive feeling to it that football stickers used to have before I grew up (had Watford not lost that FA Cup final to Everton in such a terrible way I might still be collecting them).

These sites also allow you to make a very public tit of yourself and give other people enormous scope to do the same. Posting photos of yourself and others wide eyed and legless allows everyone in your network to see them unless you are very familiar with each site's privacy settings and use them carefully. I am not the kind of person who thinks their social life should need tight administrative protocols and I react badly to having to use them. Also the confluence of professional and social is a tricky area for me, it can make me uneasy and it takes me a while to shake the feeling that I should be behaving in a manner that 'isn't me'. Social networking sites are starting to blur the boundaries between a social networks and professional ones and that makes me uneasy for the same reason.

Dear Microsoft...

Let the fun begin!

Being just an ignorant end-user I was under the impression that the updates that my computer periodically downloads from you were meant to make my computer more secure and work more effectively. In this first regard your most recent set have most certainly succeeded. If I can’t do anything with it how could it ever get malicious software on it?! It is a stroke of genius, a triumph of lateral thinking on which you are to be congratulated. Little was I to know that the update process was also a game of deduction and reasoning to educate users and keep us on our toes. Again I congratulate you on going well beyond what would normally be considered customer service to provide education and entertainment, as well as just a reliable and thoroughly useable product.

At the outset, I must admit, I had some small concerns about the second point above. The effectiveness of my computer post installation was initially somewhat reduced, in as much as it would give the appearance of working as normal and indeed for the first twenty seconds to a minute of use would operate much as before. Unfortunately, after this time it would pop up a warning window with an incomprehensible message on it referencing some abstract section of code that it was attempting to use and that it could not locate. Distressed, I attempted to come to its’ aid, alas to no avail. I found that my computer, plucky little thing that it is, had struggled to its eventual demise.

I will confess to being a little disheartened at this point. I began to wonder how I was to reinstate my poor PC without being able to access the internet, or run any of the restore functions or check the hard-disk for errors. So began the game! Feverishly I hunted for information, I consulted with friends and colleagues, I scoured the internet for information at work, I read countless articles detailing where I might find the error - many of them saying that no further updates or support would be available for my machine. That was a cunning move, and one I hadn’t seen coming! Surely, I thought, they can’t want everyone to upgrade to Vista already. Therein lay the solution to my problem! Self evidently this could not be a cynical ploy to force people to install a new operating system, that would be marketing suicide. Why would any company cripple its’ most widely used and compatible product to try and make people buy a new version of it, a ridiculous notion!

More fantastic updates!

I set about finding an answer, keeping my wits about me. If, as was seemingly the case, the crippling update was, as it could not be, a fiendish scheme to make me upgrade my software, then perhaps these articles telling me there were no further updates to be found were a double bluff and there were in fact additional updates to download. It hit me, a cry of elation escaped my lips and my colleagues cast wary glances in my direction, but I cared not for I had my answer! I had merely to wait and the solution would come to me. There were updates, useful ones, still to come and all I had to do was make sure that the computer had space for all the temporary files it needed. The instant I got home I deleted all the useless bloatware that I had installed – you know the type of thing, photo management software, the suite of software that makes my mobile telephone work with the computer (how could I have installed that hopeless frippery? After all it wasn’t a Microsoft product how could I have expected efficacy?). This cleared space for my poor computer to download its necessary updates and attempt to install them, something it achieved at only the fifth crashed attempt! Remarkable.

Imagine, if you will, my delight today to find that my work computer is now asking me download and install fresh updates. I can hardly wait! What delights of research, what twists and turns of analysis and logic am I to experience now, what intricate subtleties of compatibility am I to learn now? I could not be more pleased, though I wonder if my employer shares my glee. I suspect he may wish the process was perhaps a little less entertaining, the spoilsport!

Keep up the good work!

Shotcode

dataphage:shotcode

Sometimes technology moves more quickly than you really like to think about. The picture to the left is a shotcode. With the aid of a download to your phone from the shotcode website you can then take a picture of these graphics and the phone will automatically direct its browser to the site that it represents. The one to the left is for here.

Personally I find that a little creepy but I'm going to have fun leaving these all over the place, though I might not go this far.

Dodo, dodo, internet that dies!

If you were a brand consultant what might you tell a client that came to you with the idea of naming their service after an extinct flightless bird?

"You got here just in time! Sit down and we'll think of something better in even just the first five minutes of the meeting."

genius

But no your client is in a dizzying frenzy of marketing fervour believing themselves an absolute genius.

"No, no," they might say, "we've had so many good ideas around this. We've got an ad campaign with a REALLY annoying jingle and a brand mascot that looks nothing like a Dodo. We're going to hire people to wear a fuzzy suit that makes them look a bit like a very misshapen version of the mascot and harass people about broadband connections on their way to work, where they have a fast connection all day! It's going to be brilliant!"

I know what I would say at that point:

"Get out of my office you cretin! People will think you hired me and my name will be forever besmirched with your idiocy!

Why are you here anyway exactly...?"

I don't know what Dodo Internet are thinking with that as a strategy. I can't speak as to the quality or consistency of their service as I was so thoroughly put off by their brand identity that I wont be going within 15 feet of their mascot and wouldn't be caught dead using them as an ISP.

Apple announces iCandy

Steve jobs today unveiled the latest in Apple's suite of digital technology, a sweet, or rather a sweet dispenser. Apple is bravely stepping into a market arena long dominated by PEZ and seen by many as one that is ripe for a serious hardware manufacturer to bring high-end functionality into. The announcement brings to a denouement months of speculation in the confectionary press that Apple were about to make inroads into their market – famously there were even mock-ups of what iCandy might have looked like published in Chocolatier Today.

According to Mr Jobs this won't just be any sweet dispenser but the one sweet dispenser anyone will need or want. “iCandy is a total confectionary solution in a single, desirable and easy to use device for grown-ups that does away with ugly and cumbersome front-end,” said Jobs. “iCandy combines the functionality of other sweet dispensers with the ability to pre-select the flavour and texture of the item dispensed as well as order new sweets online through the iSweets software that comes with it.”

It seems that whilst iCandy will dispense many other forms of previously available sweets, sweets that are purchased via iSweets will come in a sealed container that can only be opened by placing it in the iCandy device. Speculation has started that this will mean that the previously much vaunted business model of partnering with manufacturers such as Haribo to produce a significant new channel will not gain the market share predicted. “People won’t really bother with the iSweets store outside of the occasional curiosity purchase,” says Richard Laybrook of Toffee and Butterscotch News, “probably preferring to put sweets from packets they already have into the device”.

The unveiling of the actual iCandy device received astonished gasps from the audience who despite their journalistic objectivity couldn't get enough of the rounded corners and shiny effect on the interface. One of the questions from the audience focussed on the design culture at the company and whether this device had reinvigorated what had been seen as a stale and stagnant process at Apple. The criticism has been that new devices and new versions of devices are simply given more rounded corners, a shiny effect on the interface and released to market in a new colour. The iCandy with its shiny effect and rounded corners was clearly a huge departure for Apple available as it is in black, white and silver on the same device and will soon be available in nearly 4 colours but remained true