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July 23, 2005
helsinki flickr meetup
Just a quick note to publicise the Helsinki Flickr meetup, happening tomorrow (Sunday, 24th July) from 1300 in Hesperianpuisto. I'll imagine we'll be pretty obvious - look for the cameras or badges!
(and if it's wet we'll be in Korjaamo)
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July 22, 2005
something afoot at Google
Today I started noticing that Google was adding extra links when I searched for software. It seems to be trying to decipher what are the main sections of the site, and providing direct links.
Here are some examples:
It doesn't always work so well:
It works for:
photoshop
ultraedit
flickr
dreamweaver
transmit
And doesn't work for:
bbedit
microsoft word
Interestingly, it works for Unilever as well, so it may be working from proper nouns or a list of company and product names.
It's not working for most people, so I guess I've been cookied into a trial segment. It worked even after turning off personalised results and logging out of google for all services.
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July 20, 2005
subscription fatigue
I've noticed recently a move towards one-off payments and away from monthly subscriptions. It used to be that services and online things were monthly subscriptions, but hardware was a one-off purchase. However, most hardware these days is in some way networked and connected, and sometimes relies on this for utility and use. The traditional model has been to go for a monthly fee, but I think we're reaching a point where being nickel-and-dimed on our credit card bills each month has gone too far, and people are looking for easy-to-understand (old fashioned) purchases.
Luckily it seems some hardware manufacturers (or is everone a service provider these days?) are listening. The CEO of the company making the Slingbox (a nifty place-shifting TV->Internet->computer device) mentions "subscription fatigue". His model is: you buy the box, plug it in, it works. The same goes for the PhoneGnome VoIP device. Even though there must be servers to run, infrastructure, even customer support, it's absorbed as being a cost of doing business, funded by people purchasing boxes in Best Buy. A simple business model that means it's probably far easier to justify new features and upgrades rather than the extreme nitpicking of cost-benefit analyses.
The same is happening in gaming - consoles are becoming connected (stealth media centres), and again we're seeing a push towards no monthly cost. Nintendo are opening free hotspots in game stores for DS owners, and Xbox 360 will come out of the box with free registration for Live and free network play at weekends.
So what about pure Internet services? I think there will even be a push here to make more one-off purchases rather than continual drains of cash. Compare, say, Flickr to the old-fashioned way of pricing - Typepad and Backpack. Flickr is $24.95. Sure, you are actually buying one year of service, but it's sold as a one-off purchase, a yearly event; far less taxing that a constant auto-renewing drain.
I'm also intrigued about the cost: the cost of infrastructure can't be cheap for Flickr. They're serving and storing an awful lot of pictures, as you can upload up to 2 gigabytes a month. They're backing it up. And yet, Backpack is, at the lowest pricing level, over double the price, for what must be far less data and less bandwidth. Sure, it's perceived value that people will pay for, but with things like Flickr and Google Mail, it seems there's a big sea-change in Internet service pricing coming (and this is where I'd love to know if 37signals policy of not doing user-testing might hurt them).
The final area that seems to be changing is software. The traditional model is to release a new version every year, and make people pay for the upgrades (which means the total cost of the product grows each year, increasing the barrier to purchase tremedously). There have been several applications, notably small homegrown Macintosh software, that have chosen the route of a single one-off payment, with all upgrades free, forever. This gives users reassurance that something newer and spanglier won't come out tommorrow, they get new features as they come out, quicker and faster upgrade of the userbase, lower support costs, and makes sure the price stays low enough to give no-one a good reason not to pay.
Pricing is probably cyclical, and we're hitting a wave of one-off purchase at the moment, but it's very interesting when service providers are considering getting into hardware and vice-versa.
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July 18, 2005
the trouble with tshirts
I buy a lot of tshirts. I've mentioned this before. However, the reality hit me in the supermarket this weekend, when I saw someone else wearing the Take A Hike tshirt. Matt also bought it, meaning there are now three people potentially wearing the same tshirt. In Helsinki.
This will not do.
Threadless will have to be relegated for a bit, whilst new tshirt shops are explored and conquered. Even if they do now have an rss feed, and someone knocked up a submissions feed as well.
So, A little bit more of my business will be going to La Fraise, a French copycat of threadless, also with rss (the quality isn't quite as high, but then again threadless have had a few too many Shoreditch or Urban Outfitters style tees recently), Punk MC, whos tshirts I'm really impressed with, and Stacks.
(but, oh, Threadless' tshirt a month club is so tempting...)
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films about London
Recently two films about London have been made available on DVD, and they're highly recommended.
The first is Patrick Keiller's London (in a double pack with the also-excellent Robinson in Space).
This is one of my favourite films, a 90 minute psychogeographical psychohistorical narration of 3 trips by Robinson and the unnamed narrator around London. It's filmed over the 1992 election period; Robinson is a staunch Labour supporter who realises the inevitability of a defeat. To the pictures of John Major's acceptance speech, Robinson weighs up his future:
Has all of that come to pass? Well, no, but some was fulfilled after the Tories left power.
What is interesting is seeing London 13 years ago, and way that Londoners lived their lives, especially given the recent London atrocities. Terrorism was a daily mentality; posters everywhere keeping people alert, 8 bombs in a week. Everyone used to it, if not accepting it. As the pressure from Ireland thankfully eased, due to work from both Major's and Blair's governments, London might have become a bit complacent. The protections - the ring of steel - befitting a very British kind of terrorism, and no other.
This may give the impression that London is a sour film, but it isn't. It's really quite funny, and fantastical, and the characterisation of the two protagonists is quite amazing given the constraints of fixed ethnographic camerawork and one unseen narrator.
There's more on Keiller here, three film clips and stills from London, and one of the essays from the DVD booklet. If anyone knows about screenings of his newer films, The Dilapidated Dwelling and The City of the Future, please let me know.
The second DVD is Finisterre, filmed by Paul Kelly, Kieran Evans with music by Saint Etienne. Paul's review is better than anything I could write. It's a more romanticised view of London, obviously drawing inspiration from Keiller's work (a bit hamfistedly), but still a wonderful addition to the filmography of London.
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July 12, 2005
nearly nearly
After hacking didn't work, I was glad to see today that Apple released iSync 2.1, with support for far more Nokia phones. So, I eagerly installed it, it saw my phone, threw the Symbian app to the phone, installed it, had a dinky little 6630 in iSync, synched, and.... it died halfway through.
Argh!
So far, the rollcall is:
Nokia 6600 - works
Nokia 6630 - doesn't work for everyone, works, works (v2.39.129)
Nokia 6682 - works
If you have any other newly supported phone, leave a comment and I'll add it. Likewise if you have a 6630 and it works.
Update: doesn't seem to be a firmware issue, people with older and newer firmware can sync fine.
I have isolated it to the calendar - just synching contacts seems to work. Time for more hunting...
Update 2: It works! I deleted my iCal calendars, to no avail. So then I deleted all my calendar entries from the phone, restored them from a PC using PC Suite, rebooted the phone, and it now works. Added a new iCal calendar, and it still works.
I don't know what was wrong in the calendar - I will have to check it continues to work as new events are added.
Finally, after two and a half years of Mac ownership, phone synchronisation...
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July 11, 2005
Antarctic Archigram
Wow. There's been a competition to design the next Halley Antarctic base (see this entry on the very fantastic 75° South weblog). There are three finalists, all with pretty similar designs. One of the big problems with the base, it seems, is that it moves 1km a year due to ice flows, edging closer and closer to the sea, wit a danger of the ice cracking and Halley floating off on an iceberg.
So, all designs are on stilts. Two are draggable, but one of them walks!
So exciting! It's the Archigram future! Watch the video here.
I suspect the Buro Happold design will win - the inside looks the nicest and most practically laid out. But for sheer bring-me-my-futureness, the Hopkins design deserves to be built - in London if not Antartica.
The Ideal Walking Archigram Home Exhibition.
More details here, with images and videos here.
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July 09, 2005
bleep
I have to give a quick shout out to bleep. It's the digital distribution arm of Warp Records, which in itself would be a wonderful thing - Warp have consistently bled me of money since their start - LFO, Sweet Exorcist, Nightmares on Wax and the monumental Artificial Intelligence compilation. They've been through a few moments of less interest (I'm not completely into faceless microglitch music that you can't dance to, and there's some Shoreditch nerdrock recently), but I still regularly buy Warp records, and because of bleep, I buy even more.
bleep has become a behemoth of alternative music, with over 100 labels distributing some or all of their catalogue. You can get all of Warp (obviously), Ninja Tune, Skint, Wall of Sound, Accidental, plus Bjork's entire back catalogue, Franz Ferdinand, Roots Manuva, Röyksopp...
And it's all in MP3, with no DRM. Good quality, sometimes created by the artist themselves. Well, there's also a most of Autechre's output as FLAC, too, for those fan-nerds that have to hear every single digital glitch.
Not only that, but bleep really understands the web. There's an RSS feed of new releases, plus individual ones for each label, and every recording has a 'web tools' link, letting you get direct links and Flash players, previewing the whole album, to embed in your website.
Look, here's one for Jamie Lidell's most excellent new album, Multiply:
Btw, this is a really cracking album. I've seen Jamie Lidell live several times, and always been impressed, even if his last album was a bit random for my taste. This album is completely different from the live shows - it's the very very best of Motown, performed on a Sunday morning just for you. The title track is really wonderful, and I hope it gets airplay on Radio 2 (a first for Warp?), even if it gets a bit frenetic in the middle.
bleep also tell you how big a download it's going to be, how long it's going to take, and lets you download a zip file of your order, or individual tracks. They even let you choose how the files should be named, for the obsessive music librarians.
It's crazy to download anything on bleep from anywhere else, really.
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July 08, 2005
holiday booked
I've finally got around to booking some time off:
At the end of July I'm going up to Finnmark for a week, to see the midnight sun. Or the midnight fog and rain, knowing my luck.
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July 07, 2005
London
Little that can be said that hasn't already - it's still the city I love, and one containing many of the people I love. Had checkins, or flashes of existence from most so far, of which I am glad.
Felt disconnected - no TV here in the office, and the BBC streams firewalled off from my computer. Been compulsively checking the Guardian, BBC, and Flickr. Talking to friends on IRC has helped immensely. Going to go and sit in the park and try to clear my head. My thoughts are with everyone, friends and strangers, affected by this.
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July 03, 2005
london. flickr. city.
(update: the Flickr API is up and down all the time at the moment - if you hit flickrcity at a bad time, you'll get a nasty 500 error. And having caching problems with new code. Will fix this asap.)
The need to program comes around every 6 months or so for me, and, probably due to the Where 2.0 conference (which I sort-of attended by sitting in the IRC channel and heckling), I decided to get one of my mapping ideas out of my head.
It also fortuitously coincided with the google maps api launch, which has made it both easier and harder to created google maps hacks.
So, here it is : flickrcity.
The basic idea is to provide a nice output mechanism for geotagging photos, much like the excellent work of Trevor, Mikel and many others. However, this uses Flickr as its data source and google maps as its presentation.
So what? I mean, Flickr + Google Maps is an idea everyone's had. Well, I think I've got a few nice features now, with the promise of more. Basically, the code is based around a city - it at a base level filters through tags of the city name, and 'geotagged'. You can then specify extra tags, and either take contributions from all users, or just one.
So, an example:
This is the base New York map, with photos tagged with 'newyork' and 'geotagged':
http://anti-mega.com/flickrcity/newyork.city
This is New York filtered through the tag 'bridge':
http://anti-mega.com/flickrcity/newyork.city?tags=bridge
or what about 'thegates':
http://anti-mega.com/flickrcity/newyork.city?tags=thegates
Filtering on a user (I choose you, charmingman):
http://anti-mega.com/flickrcity/newyork.city?user=charmingman
And finally tags and user:
http://anti-mega.com/flickrcity/newyork.city?user=charmingman&tags=eastriver
Through a combination of user and tags, you can basically define your own custom map.
There's a limit of 50 photos on the map at the moment (I'll implement pages soon). To test the limits of the APIs, there's also this. Which indicates not that many people have geotagged the way I thought they had (or at all) - if there are other ways of indicating position, let me know.
This is not a worldwide service, though the code is suitable for anywhere in the world. I'll run the code for a few cities, but what I really want is for others to take this and run it (and run with it). By being situated, the code gives a more immediate response to users, and it's easier to understand cause and effect. The map itself may be the visualisation, or the pictures themselves tell the story. I hope it's open-ended enough to have a variety of uses.
So, I'm currently running:
New York
San Francisco
Want to add photos? You need to tag your pictures on Flickr. This currently isn't completely easy - the best way is using Firefox, Greasemonkey and Steeev's wonderful hacks. It's a lot easier than it used to be, but not easy enough for most people. I'm hoping this output spurs the input community to get hacking.
v0.2 to do - a list so far - any suggestions, holler:
* add pagination (the code handles it already, just isn't presented - e.g.
http://anti-mega.com/flickrcity/newyork.city?pageno=2
* check lat longs to be within bounds
* multiple city names - especially for non-English speaking countries, this is important
* when Google sort their key situation out, the URLs will be the nicer (Rails-ier) http://example.com/flickrcity/newyork.city/bridges/chrisdodo/2 .
* a nice entry page for people who don't understand urls
* fix the popup bubble height issue
* error checking!
WARNINGS, BUGS
The first time you hit a combination of city, tags and users, it takes a while to generate the page. A minute or so. It's making a lot of hits on the APIs, particularly Flickr's, to get all the information out. Sit tight. After the initial creation, it should be a lot quicker, with updates happening in the background. I'd like to find ways to do less api calls though.
The source code (in Perl) is here(link now fixed) - it should be fairly self explanatory.
My code is crufty. Really bad. Professionals, look away, it will cause nightmares. I'm not a programmer. Please, take it, improve it, rewrite it. Send me a copy when you do!
