My chord

Just discovered there's a Tristan Chord. Four notes with the following intervals; augmented 4th, major third and perfect fourth. Very complicated classical business here.



Must learn it.

XTech 2006

I'm going to be speaking at XTech 2006 in Amsterdam in May. I will be talking about (and hopefully demonstrating) the BBC's annotatable audio project...

Chopping Up Radio - collaboratively annotating radio programmes

16:00 Wednesday May 17

With more and more TV and radio programmes being made and more and more ways of accessing them (e.g. digital broadcasts, PVRs or downloading) one of the major challenges is how to find things and how to describe things. Currently the metadata describing these programmes is often very poor. To start to address this BBC Radio & Music Interactive have developed a prototype wiki-like interface for collaboratively chopping up radio programmes into segments and annotating and tagging each segment.

So we are using our audience to generate additional metadata for our programmes. But why would our audience want to do this? Because they will get a much better described programme, increasing it's findability, and so they get new ways of exploring within programmes. There are potentially all sorts of searches and custom downloads of the marked-up and chopped-up programme that we could provide with this metadata. And the benefit for the BBC is that we get loads of lovely metadata that we don't already have.

The interface for the application uses a seamless combination of Flash for the audio playback and mark-up and HTML/Javascript for the descriptive elements to provide a familiar wiki-like environment. The MySQL/Python back-end incorporates an XML-based REST API to promote further use of the metadata.

This paper describes the application; how it works, how we built it and how people use it.

Also speaking will be my excellent current and former colleagues; Matt Biddulph, Tom Coates, Paul Hammond and Tom Loosemore.

ETech '06

I went to ETech in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, my first time. Loads of people have written about the conference already and there are lots of session slides and other notes around so this is just my filter on the conference - concentrating on connecting things, real applications, how people use technology and, of course, anything to do with radio and music.

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Intelligence Augmentation, not Artifical Intelligence
Using humans to provide intelligence

Amazon's Mechnical Turk (ETech session) - Amazon acting as a broker for services that need human intervention. There's actually a web services API to programmatically make requests to humans and get responses back. One company that are making use of this are www.castingwords.com who provide a podcast transcription service.

Eric Bonabeau's Hunch Engine, which didn't seem particularly new, used genetic algorithms to generate variations on things from which humans could then select their favourites. Working on the premise that humans are not very good at searching for things but are good at evaluating things and detecting patterns. Examples of car design and filters for image manipulation.

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Patterns
Design patterns for, well, design. And social software

Derek Powazek of Technorait on The New Community

• Treat your community well. Because they'll leave if you don't
• Go where your community is. You can't "create community".

Clay Shirky on "Shut Up! No, *You* Shut Up: A Pattern Language for Moderation Strategies"

Peter Morville on Ambient Findability
Bill Scott of Yahoo on The Language of Attention: A Pattern Approach

• immediacy: live suggest, auto complete
• directness: drag'n'drop, inline editing
• invitational: hover/tooltip invitations
• without boundaries: endless scrolling, expand, hover details
• light footprint: rating an object, remembered collections
• cinematic: fades and slides
• rich content: shareable objects, microformats, web objects

Tom on web2.0: Lots of gradient fills and rounded corners

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Ethnography
G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide- Danah Boyd. Your culture affects how you see the world and how you design technology. Cultural and linguistic diversity often appear in popular social software sites. You need to design within the culture. Empower the user to personalise and culture-ise.

How a Small Island Held the Key to Better Collaborative Filtering - Charles Armstrong, an ethnographer, spent 12 months on the Isles of Scilly studying how information was distributed in a small community. And then created some new group software!

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The Internet of Things
Hacking the physical world
New ways of controlling and interacting with the world. Prototyping products or ideas in SecondLife?
Bruce Sterling's talk from ETech - spimes, thinglinks, theory objects...

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microformats
Additional mark-up in HTML that is human- and machine-readable - microformats.org

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Other good stuff
Which didn't fit in above

Native To A Web of Data - Tom Coates

1. Look to add value to the aggregate web of data
2. Build for normal users, developers and machines
3. Start by designing explorable data, not pages
4. Identify your first order objects and make them addressable
5. Correlate with external identifier schemes (or coin a new standard)
6. Use readable, reliable, hackable URLs
7. Build list views and batch manipulation interfaces
8. Create parallel data servicves using standards
9. Make your data as discoverable as possible
10. Give everything an appropriate license

Auditory Interfaces for Small Screen Data Representation - Michael Jefferson and Spencer Kiser
The capabilities of mobile devices have outpaced usability so the speakers studied how the blind use similar applications for clues on interaction design. They built an audible calendar view with different sounds representing different events and stereo panning representing time. It is an important area of study but I don't think we're there yet.

Some of These Things are Just Like the Others - Meredith Patterson
Query by example for PostgreSQL.

SELECT title FROM songs WHERE EXAMPLE KEY title LIKE ("Canon in D", "Sonata") NOT LIKE ("Take On Me", "Closer")

The Digital Avant-garde Paving the Way for New Developments of Technology by Regine Debatty from we-make-money-not-art. Suggested that digital art should make people talk about relevant issues and keep eyes and minds open. I was wondering if there was more - can it act as an inspiration for technology development?

(and some photos from the trip)

delicious spam

At R&Mi we've been discussing how we could increase the "findability" of BBC radio programmes. One of the ideas was to give them a presence on sites like del.icio.us or flickr (OK, so that may work better for TV). Then users of these sites may run across our content serendipitously - rather than when explicitly searching for BBC content. We are, in a way, diverting people's attention to our programmes.

So I spent a bit of time this afternoon writing a bit of code to...

1. take a programme page (e.g. the canonical In Our Time example)
   
2. run its text through the Yahoo Term Extraction API to get a list of tags
3. post to del.icio.us
4. repeat for the next programme

You can see the link here: http://del.icio.us/rmirnd

But I haven't gone any further because I'm a bit worried about the ethics of this. Would we (i.e. the BBC) be spamming the site?

A lot of the value of these community bookmarking/photo/whatever sites is from the behaviour of the users who take care over what they post and how they tag. And is that something that just comes from a dedicated community? Will these sites lose their value if large numbers of links are automatically posted? What if we got our editorial teams to manually post the links - is that different? Actually, what happens when these sites go more mainstream - any studies on the effects?

Matt reminded me that Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us mentioned the issue of spamming at the recent Carson Workshops Summit and commented that when they find someone spamming they just let them keep posting but it all goes into a big black hole. He also suggested that...

...the value in Delicious is in the "attention" - auto-tagging detracts from this

Also note that nobody else on del.icio.us has yet used any of the tags knighterrant, tiltingatwindmills or belies. Why not?

The Internet of Things

I'm slightly obsessed with physical prototyping at the moment - see make. Though I haven't done anything about it yet.

Is hacking the physical world the next frontier for hackers/geeks?

After all, anyone can build a web application now.

And "The Internet of Things"...

• Bruce Sterling's talk from ETech - spimes, thinglinks, theory objects...
• Blogject workshop from LIFT'06
• Shaping Things - Bruce Sterling