Just finishing up at my first hackday aka mashed08 I am proud to say the hack was actually completely and ready to be presented. Everyone who knows me knows this is just an achievement in it’s self.

Tim Nash and I following his idea developed an accessible and indexable media service.

Following a talk by BBC R & D we were enlighted about embedded ID3 tags within audio and video files and how the BBC are starting to use version two of these tags (id3v2) to put information about the programs directly within the file . These tags hold meta data and can hold rich information about the file and are directly extractable.  However there are few tools for doing this and the example we were shown used Flash™ and had we felt a number of limitations.

• You had to read the whole file before you got the data
• The current method of extraction did not expose this data in a way that search engines could find it (Tim is a SEO specialist)
• The data in all the example we were given was not presented in a format that was portable
• The data was not accessible.

So in a mear 24hrs we looked to address these issues, hacking away through the night at Alexandra Palace. We put together a service that extracted the data before all the file was loaded and exposed that data as html on the page and as a ATOM RSS feed  and then cached it so people could easily get data out of files. OK it is still a bit of a protoype and the amount of files around with enhanced data like the BBC provided  (Chis Moyles podcasts) I give you We Do ID3 So zip over and have a look below I have embedded our slides (unfortunatly no embedded data in them though and not very accessible unless you use  a hack done this year by Christian Heilmann (EasyslideShare) - I have a hosted version of accessible slides from mashed here ) and we even made a small mention in the Guardian News blogs

The crew at the BBC were great and I had a brilliant weekend with some very cool and clever things being created.  I am definately going to go back next year. Well done Matthew Cashmore for organising it.

Just look for tagged info (mashed08) on flickr,mashed08.backnetwork.com and twitter to hear how good it was. Oh and yes I got a free bean bag, that was interesting getting back on our mammoth 5hr journey for a location that is only 2ish hours normally, gotta love Sunday trains.

A friend of mine introduced me to qr codes and blogged about it in his post about qrcodes and said they were going to be a big thing of the future. Being jealous of his Nokia n95 (before I got my Iphone) I dismissed this a bit. Yes they were cool but I did not see them as a great marketing thing until the other day. When I bumped across this article about how the bbc are looking at incorporating qrcodes and they are even branding them. So I will have to look into them more now I think.

Just stumbled across this great find. Those guys at nGen works have released some great nerdy desktop and iphone backgrounds. So why not grab yourself a happy webby.

Good to see the launch of Northpack, it’s great to see the Northern web community rallying.  and thriving.  I attended Barcamp Sheffield 2007 which I hope is to return this year, and thought it was great. I cannot always get up North (OK I know it is not that far away for a Lincolnshire lad)  and never get the time to get to Geekup Leeds but am really chuffed to see this initiative well done those involved. I look forward to spreading my wings a little this year and trying to attempt to catch some meets.

I certainly support the stance by Opera, filing a complaint with the European Commission to ensure users get the opportunity to appreciate web standards based built sites in multiple devices.

Hunting around know to see if anyone has yet developed a badge, to show our support with HÃ¥kon Wium Lie as requested in his open letter to the web community

I was also wondering if a petition could be set up to support this.

Technorati Tags: opera, We Standards, Web Community, Microsoft Internet Explorer, EU

At last I have published my review of dConstruct in Brighton (been in draft for a while now)

If you are expecting insight into the talks this is purely opinion but there are some trails to follow or of course the dConstruct podcasts will be available

My Review

Sep 12, 2007 by

Shaun Hare

event

dConstruct 2007

★★★★★ Well another year another clearleft hosted dConstruct web conference.

This year centered around user experience design.
I felt this was a topic that I was really interested in but maybe something for the larger developer. How wrong I was !

The speaker line up was great and extremely though provoking (see notes below), the conference facilities were much better than last year (although the foyer/congregation area often felt a bit cramped).
The schwag was good, and the sponsers thought of some good promotional ideas.
I particularly liked the Nixon McInnes your status is… T-shirt and the Flickr books (didn’t get one thought dooh!!) .

The speakers were

Jarad Spool of UIE

who gave a good presentation very enthused, funny at times and on topic. A good start to the day, although I am a little unsure about his theory on the art of chicken sexing (having done it) and knowing how hard feather sexing is. For those interested there are a number of methods of sexing a day old chick (probability does come into it, but that is the be all and end all) but good use of external material to demonstrate the point. And he did magic and everything wow!!.

Peter Merholz of of Adaptive Path

For me this started of very similar to Jesse James Garrett’s talk at @media Europe 2007 but it did move on a bit.

Leisa Reichelt of disambiguity.com

Waterfall bad washing machine good was a really good talk. As I am trying to start implementing a methodologies based approach it gave me some ideas on what is best practice and how that can be implemented.

Cameron Moll of Authentic Boredom

Gave a great insight into turning good design into great design. Though provoking stuff like machine efficiency vs User efficiency and simple tips like stripping away the gloss to basic typography in black and white to see how the heirachy works fantastic. First time I had heard him talk.

George Oates and Denise Wilton (Flickr and Moo, B3ta etc etc..

They sat on the sofa and had a chat, somewhat scripting but refreshing, I learnt about the history of flickr and this site called B3ta which I never knew about but enjoyed ever since. They inspired some ideas I could, should put together using the flickr API . I enjoyed it.

Matt Webb of Shulze & Webb

Got to admit I was a bit confused about this and I know Matt has beat himself up about it, but the more I reflect I think the presence was justified and the blog post provides source material that more than makes up for it. Matt needs to take some tips from Other speaking experiences especially the point about live demos but using a wii remote - geekily great.

Tom Coates of Plastic Bag and of course Yahoo but I guess you know that url

FANTASTIC- Really made me think I have been thinking along the right lines. with my dallies into machine tags,bluetooth, location data, feeds, api’s, microformats etc I just see the web as a big data source ready for mining. Can’t wait to see fire eagle . I am also sure one of my clients will be happy when I unveil the results of more thoughts on their data distribution .

So all round a great day .. I am bookmarking/watching/marking next year on the calendar already

Well done Clearleft

0.3

This
hReview brought to you by the
power of Microformats

Technorati Tags: dconstruct2007, dConstruct, dconstruct07, web design conferences

Having first come across the concept on Richard Rutter’s site and later Jeremy Keith’s blog. I have been really interested in machinetags and have followed other information via Rev Dan Catt and Aaron Straup
and the emegence of flickr machinetags Revish use of machinetagsand through the mailinglist and wiki at http://www.machinetags.org
,
I just think they offer a little more precision to tagging and am testing quite a few parsing methods at present in any I can find in the wild. So I am pleased to see the emergence of new tags. I have always though and discussed with some that the namespaces and predicates should be as generic as possible. e.g event:

So it is great to see blog: be proposed as a namespace and the predicate via

So I am now finally going to start machine tagging posts wordpress custom fields have been included for blog:blog=porkandpaws, blog:postid=53

Technorati Tags: machinetags, blog:blog=porkandpaws, semantic web, tagging

Just returned from atMedia in London, this was my first time of going but of course I had heard of it and had it reccommended.

Was not dissappointed

This was the track I followed

Jesse James Garrett Beyond Ajax (no other alternative )
Jason Santa Maria - Diabolical Design
Drew McLellan and Simon Collinson -Hign Noon Shoot Out
Dan Cederholm - Interface Design Juggling
Tantek Celik - Microformats
Jon Hicks - Creative Spongery (of course )
Jeremy Keith -Bulletproof Ajax
Hakon Wium Lie - 1 web Acid 2 Css 3
Andy Clarke - Royale with Cheese
Hot topics

In review

Good all round

event

@Media London

★★★★☆ I find myself writing another good review, maybe this is biased by my love of the interweb. But at media was just great.

I have come away having learnt some great gems, Jason Santa Maria gave me, and the rest of the audience, a great insight into design, nearly as good as that delivered by my design hero Jon Hicks.

Drew McLellan and Simon Collinson made me laugh and showed how passionate they can be about the industry.

Tantek Celik did not dissapoint but he was preaching to the converted, it did make me think though ( I will explain more in my upcoming blog post - What is a Microformat?)

Joe Clark, well what can I say he says it like it is!!

Mr Jon Hicks so good he gets mentioned twice

Jeremy Keith was right on message and thought provoking too, although I have heard some of it before (through his workshops,books and dconstruct) I still enjoyed it (Got another post brewing for that one title a secret at present)

Hakon Wium Lie, I got to say sorry bit dissappointing, good to be in the presence of such a guy but I felt I need to know a little less about Opera and more about the CSS.

Andy Clarke - all of the above entertaining, though provoking and excellent at promoting johnny foreigner makes me proud to be British.

The hot topics panel was good

Location OK
Food excellent for a conference !
The paper based feedback form -just felt right- online doesn’t always work

Jun 8, 2007 by

Shaun Hare

Technorati Tags: atmedia, atmedia07, atmedia2007, atmedialondon

Today is the start of Barcamp Sheffield Hurray for those (Plus.net Dean Sadler and Kelly Dorset ) bringing it up north

On my way… drive ahead

update: pretty cool so far
see pictures http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/barcampsheffield

update:

May 27, 2007

Barcamp Sheffield

★★★★☆ Went to the first day of Barcamp Sheffield.

Was very pleased to know that someone had bothered to organise it, and organise it well (well done plus net guys) even if Dean Sadler made out he did not know what to do.

Day 1 was presentations
Some interesting stuff, Ruby shone through as it always appears to with presentatiosn from George Palmer and Adam Bardsley.

Sue Jamison-Powell did a talk on her upcoming research into online psychology which sounds interesting although I was half listing to Dominic Hodgson who did a quick and dirty SEO for wordpress (I learn’t one thing at least - to see if it boosts my traffic)

All in all a good time and it also opened my eyes to bigger corporations and the way they work.

Barcamp Sheffield

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcamp sheffield, barcampsheffield

I have been following the debate to rejuvenate semantic markup by using the acronymn POSH
Jeremy Keith has commented on POSH and it looks like Molly has been persuaded by POSH. I try to ensure I do it but being honest it doesn’t always happen I am getting better So I advocate this 100%. Getting an acronym to help persuade people can only be good.

I must say in this last year I have refined loads semantically (but there is still work) , microformats and other nuggets have changed the way I code and accessibility and sites have definately improved

However when you read around there are a lot of instances where people are defining your coding(Markup/CSS whatever) through class name insistence, tagging preferences etc to the finite detail and I wonder if this could have a negative effect!

Are some people going to be turned of by the fact there are these standards?

With all the technologies we have to learn as professionals (HTML,CSS,JAVASCRIPT,PHP_ASP_CF or whatever,XML,XLST etc ) are some of us just going to forget?
Remembering everything is not practical and the lack of support within editors is weak.

So maybe it should be incorporated in the standard markup language (Stand up HTML 5) but as discussed within the working group this can mean problems with backwards compatibility, incorrect interpretation etc
However I worry because they(I am also a member so I should say we) are also spending time debating about whether to
re-introduce the font tag

I believe we need a semantically correct human and machine readable web and maybe this is a point to start

What about a series of standard prefixes as proposed by others but on a more basic level ?