I’ve been reading a lot about the Beyond Space and Time project, which is bringing Beijing’s famous Forbidden City to life. As an eightbar person I’ve been aware of the project for quite some time, but I have to admit that I’ve not really done too much digging into the underlying technology.

According to the reports, the project has been built using the Torque engine, with WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Message Broker on the backend, with dynamic provisioning of servers. This is awesome stuff. I frequently refer to Message Broker as “my pet product”, since it’s the product I’ve specialised in for the past 8 years of my professional life. I’m going to probe further into exactly how the middleware stack is being utilised.

As we’ve been evangelising virtual worlds within IBM (I’m not a full-time Metaverse Evangelist, but Ian and, in the past, Roo have frequently been kind enough to put me forward as a speaker on the topic when they’ve been unavailable), the question has arisen as to “why we’re even bothering with all this game stuff”. Well, as someone whose day job has been in enterprise middleware and transactional systems for the past several years, I’ve always seen some of the key connections here. The 3D Internet environment needs to be supported by a multitude of technologies, and enterprises with well-defined Service Oriented Architectures are well placed to have their systems connected to the next-generation environments. If they are going to be successful, Virtual Worlds need hardware to run on, they need some of the enterprise-quality levels of availability, security and service that we’ve become accustomed to in business, and they need to be able to connect up to existing systems. A product like WebSphere Message Broker is ideal for helping to enable this, as it essentially provides the ability to connect to any “legacy” backend and mediate requests on behalf of the avatar needing the data.

So, check out Beyond Space and Time, enjoy it, and you’ll probably forget all about the middleware that enables it to run - which is exactly how it should be. The whole project really does bear out some of the stuff that we’ve been discussing over on eightbar for the past couple of years, and I’m completely thrilled to see it launch.

I noticed Laura Fitton (aka @pistachio) twittering about Flickr and Creative Commons licensing of photos recently.

You can find the photos which I have CC-licensed here on my Flickr stream. This accounts for less than 20% of my total photostream.

I’m a big fan of CC. I use a lot of CC-licensed materials in presentations, for instance. Let me explain the rationale as to how I decide which of my images to make available under Creative Commons.

1. If they are from a social media event, then generally I guess other people might want to blog them.
2. If they are of gadgets or objects, or are quick snapshots, then the likelihood is that I’m going to blog them, and others might want to as well.
3. If someone specifically asks to use an image, I’ll consider whether or not it could / should be CC-licensed. Generally, it’s nice when people want to use one of my images, so I try to oblige.
4. If I find that an image has been used on a blog without the author checking and it is marked All Rights Reserved, and I subsequently decide that the image is generally shareable, then I’ll open it up.
5. If they are family, portraits or landscape shots – i.e. the bulk of my work – then there’s a chance I might want to do something with them commercially in the future, or else there’s a good reason for me not wanting just anyone to use them (plus there may be rights issues outside of my control anyway). In these cases, I generally will not apply a CC license.

The license I most frequently apply is Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. The annoyance is that I seem to find myself having to “police” the use of the images… I have some web search feeds set up which look for references to my Flickr URL, and when I see them used, I’ll take a look at the site. The most frequently-used image seems to be this one of one of my favourite blogging books… but 90% of the time I have to go and ask for the blogger in question to add an attribution or reference back to the original site. I always add a link to the original Flickr page to the bottom of slides, and details of the images used in the notes for any slide deck. It’s part of playing fair.

I like Creative Commons. I just wish that more people understood how to use CC-licensed content.

Update: I just want to emphasise that 99% of the folks I do correspond with on this issue are very polite, helpful, and made the honest mistake of not necessarily knowing the background on CC licensing. The issue is usually fixed without hesitation. In the example I cited in this post, the author did link back to the Flickr page, and the alt text of the img tag very clearly references me - it’s just that many browsers won’t show that even in a tooltip, as the link URL will be shown in preference. A clear credit is usually a better option, in my own opinion.

My colleague (and following a recent reshuffle, new office inmate) Alexis just took delivery of a hard drive adapter for his Thinkpad.

Floppy disks eh? Didn’t know they still shipped those…

This is not quite live from the FT.com newsroom – I’m writing this a day later, but I did upload some photos during the trip.

Yesterday I attended a “bloggers event” at the The Financial Times, arranged by Ben and Drew from Hotwire PR. My friend and (now former) colleague Roo Reynolds had been to the previous one of these, so I was curious to find out what the FT would have to say to a second group of bloggers. Others in attendance were Alan Patrick, Adam Tinworth, Joanna Geary, Patrick Smith and Dominique Jackson; the FT.com team included James Montgomery (editor), Stacy-Marie Ishmael (Alphaville), Kate Mackenzie (Interactive Web Editor), Tim Bradshaw (Digital Media Editor) and Tom Glover (Deputy Director of Communications).

It does seem as though we covered similar ground to the last set of visitors. I say that without wanting to be unkind to our hosts… in all honesty I’ve not been an FT reader, so it was obviously worthwhile learning about the basics of the FT.com business model; and clearly we hadn’t heard the information before, so it was all useful background. James Montgomery kicked things off by talking a bit about the model that the FT.com is driving – trying to find a balance between subscription and free content. After that, the discussion widened out to cover a variety of topics, from their expansion into video, the reader and commenter demographics, the FT Alphaville site, microblogging and other social media, and some of the future technology plans.

The business model itself is a little different. Rather than an all-or-nothing free vs. subscription approach, anyone can read 5 articles on the FT.com site without any need to sign up. This makes the site search engine and blog link-friendly, and enables casual viewers a degree of access. After that you have to register, and can read up to 30 articles per month; beyond that, you should be subscribing, as the likelihood is that you are more seriously interested in the content. James sees the key plays here as the content, brand, expertise and accuracy of The Financial Times, and also pointed out that this model produced a certain quality of audience too. It would appear to be working – I note that the previous bloggers who visited were given a number of c. 450,000 registrations since October, and yesterday the number quoted was in the region of 600,000, so clearly there is some growth happening.

I’d never visited a newsroom before, so it was interesting to observe the setup. It’s big, and the team is obviously also distributed around the world, which resonated with me given that my employer is also a global organisation with people needing to collaborate across timezones.

Back to the social media stuff. The underlying technology is WordPress, although they are currently using two separate platforms for the main site and for Alphaville. Right now that means that the core search indexes are separate, but this will change in the future.

We talked a little about the expansion into video content, with around 150 items now being generated per month “we don’t want the website to be just an online newspaper”. This has produced some new challenges editorially as new skills are needed. I noted that the video production team in the newsroom somewhat unsurprisingly appeared to be using Macs

The discussion and feedback aspects of the site were covered at some length. I’ve observed that many journalists tend to view blogs as a means to post, but not to converse (the BBC blogs being a frequent example where a journo will post an entry, but not respond to reader comments). The FT are keen to find ways to engage “the wisdom of smart crowds” but there are challenges in their market where readers often have the inside scoop on a story and are therefore unable to comment. It was interesting and pleasing to hear that the journalists are generally aware of the need to respond. It was a surprise that it is not necessary to register to comment on the main FT.com site (although Alphaville does require registration) and the community is generally self-policing, with only very lightweight moderation required.

I’ve been taking a particular interest in microblogging lately. It’s surely a sign of the times that the first thing that we bloggers did was to exchange Twitter IDs… Joanna proceeded to Twitter from the event far more quickly and in more detail than I managed (this is probably a comment on the iPhone too… I just couldn’t type as fast or accurately enough to keep up). A couple of interesting angles came out. Firstly, the FT.com lists a set of Twitter feeds on their website, and I’m not aware of other newspapers doing this – quite progressive, but at the same time somewhat dependent on the success / stability of Twitter itself. We also talked about whether people reply to the feeds or whether anyone monitors the interwebs for references to the FT – obviously this would be a major undertaking, and the view was that people tend to view media feeds on Twitter as a way to consume the news, rather than to communicate with the newspaper. I also wondered whether the team had found microblogging to be a useful way of communicating internally… given the privacy constraints that they might be expected to operate under… several of us opined that a solution like Yammer was “never going to work” for internal communications, and the FT team currently exchange a lot of email and use Skype rather than having an internal social software platform.

I had my iPhone with me but the lack of free wireless meant that I was mostly taking notes with pen and paper… (tenuous photo tie-in!). I’m curious as to the mobile strategy. On visiting the main FT.com site before going for the event yesterday, I couldn’t see a way of getting a view optimised for my iPhone, although I’m told that there is a mobile version. Alphaville does have some automatic optimisation for mobile, and I’m told that there is a (Java?) mobile application for some phones too… I guess as platforms like Android emerge, there may be more interest in developing this side of things (I note that Bloomberg makes an iPhone app available for free… but would the FT do the same?).  I guess the choice of video technology will become interesting here, too, since not all mobile devices can show Flash, WMV or whatever.

An interesting afternoon, and it was lovely to be invited. Delighted to meet the other bloggers, too. I’ll be following the evolution of FT.com to see where it all goes next.

Coverage from others:

• A day at the FT (Patrick Smith at The Wire): some well-captured quotes from the key FT folks in this piece.
• The Financial Times they are a’Changing (Alan Patrick at Broadstuff): good thoughts about the dynamics of the value chain they apply to media in this space.

Taken whilst in London for the Thames Festival a couple of weeks ago.

I sometimes use my Tumblelog to post the odd photo from my iPhone. Generally I don’t want to post iPhone images to Flickr (typically these are spur-of-the-moment snapshots and low quality). There are actually two very nice free apps for the iPhone that let me post directly to Tumblr (called, imaginatively, Tumble and TheTumbler – I’m still trying to decide which one I prefer).

The problem is that I also feed my blog titles and my del.icio.us links to Tumblr, and my Flickr images, and sometimes I will also post a text note there too. Tumblr does not provide feeds on a per-item-type basis, it only gives an aggregated feed containing all the stuff you’ve uploaded there, or pulled in from other sources. Plus, if you then add that to FriendFeed, you get duplicates, even though FF can now work that out to some extent and roll them up into single entries.

Anyway… I put together a quick Yahoo Pipe which filters just the photos that were uploaded directly to Tumblr (ignoring Flickr images, for example). Feel free to clone and re-use, you can just enter your own Tumblr feed URL in the entry box at the top.

Update: well, shoot. It doesn’t ignore the Flickr images at all, does it? Gah. Apparently they are imported to Tumblr as images… which makes me suspect that even when I remove photos from Flickr they will stay on Tumblr. How annoying. And the more I look at the way that the Tumblr feed is constructed, the more I don’t like it at all.

Although Steve Jobs described the iPhone as the “best iPod [Apple] ever made” back in January 2007, I have to say I’m not sure.

I previously owned a 2nd generation nano, and loved it. Light, easy to use… OK the screen was tiny and the capacity was limited, but it did the job.

The iPhone has that nice big screen with video playback going for it, and now it also has the new (and very, very cool) Genius playlist feature. Just a small number of issues, then…

1. No search? the 2G nano had search! Am I missing something?
2. No ability to read the notes for podcasts. On the nano I could press the button to cycle through time / cover art / lyrics or info display, and on the iPhone I get lyrics or the “back” of the album cover. Nothing useful for podcasts.
3. The time slider is way too difficult to control with a finger. On a longer podcast, say over an hour, skipping over a minute or two of the duration is almost impossible. The click wheel definitely wins there.
4. Finally, and most annoyingly: no external skip / pause control. I have to take the phone out of my pocket, potentially unlock the screen, and then skip to the next track. Really not the best idea when travelling on the London Underground (“that’s right folks, I have a 3G iPhone, please mug me at the next station”).
   OK - time for a confession here. I never unpacked the iPhone headphones until last week. I didn’t realise that they have a mic on the wire with a click switch which gives the forward/back/pause control. Why? Because I’m so used to the poor audio quality of the Apple earbuds that I switched to Shure ones several months ago and I’ve been using them since. So it seems to me that what is needed is some kind of cable which can fit in between third-party headphones and the iPhone’s headphone socket with an external switch on them.

I think the iPhone is an awesome device, but for me, it just isn’t the best iPod I’ve ever had.

My friend Michael Rowe dropped me a line last week to ask if I’d be able to help with a spot of website maintenance around the Dogear Nation website. It has been a while since I’ve had to do much in the way of fiddling with website backends - WordPress.com does all of that for me, really - so I flexed my fingers and thought I’d give it a shot. Here are some notes on what I had to go through.

I needed to update the blog from an older version of WordPress to the latest 2.6.x release. The first stumbling block I encountered was a lack of shell access to the hosting service… instead they offer a web console based on cPanel. This system is actually OK, once you get use to how it all works, although everything would have been far faster at the command line. The web interface offers a level of “automated” application installation through something called Fantastico, which showed me that an upgrade to a newer (but not the newest) version of WordPress could be done automatically… but that I’d potentially lose any customisations and plugins.

Being a podcast, Dogear Nation does use some plugins to extend the basic WordPress experience. In particular it uses podPress. I thought I’d research whether this would cause me any issues if I upgraded, and sure enough it turns out that podPress doesn’t currently work with WordPress 2.6.x and that the plugin author hasn’t been able to release a fixed version yet. Luckily there’s a workaround which involves disabling the new feature in WP 2.6 which clashes with it - a simple switch in the wp-config.php file.

I wanted to check that the workaround plus the upgrade wouldn’t hurt the site, and fortunately there was another instance of WordPress available on the box… but I didn’t have an admin ID. I did have access to the WP MySQL database for that instance though, so I was able to hack myself an administrator ID through a couple of SQL INSERTs into the appropriate tables. Once I’d done that, I disabled the plugins, switched off the revisions stuff in wp-config.php, deleted the older 2.x.x files and replaced them with those from WP 2.6.2 - and things seemed to work, once I’d re-enabled plugins. Since that was a success, I then went ahead and applied the change across the site.

The only thing was that Fantastico continued to think that an older version was installed, so I had to modify an additional file in the install (fantversion.php) to reflect the updated WordPress level… which has now resulted in the system informing me that any further upgrades must be manual. WordPress makes upgrades so easy, I’m really not too scared by that.

While I was at it, I thought I’d make a few more cosmetic changes:

Dogear Nation iPhone screenshot

• the site now has a favicon
• the site now has a Web Clip icon, so if you add a link to the home screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch, a nice Dogear Nation logo shows up. This is a simple case of putting a file called apple-touch-icon.png in the top-level directory.
• talking of iPhones… I’ve installed the very excellent iWPhone plugin, which means that the content is now optimised for Mobile Safari, whilst still working as before in desktop browsers.
• the links in the sidebar now point to various other places where tags can be created (as well as the traditional del.icio.us)
• I’ve locked off a few files that shouldn’t have been accessible, tweaked robots.txt, fixed some typos, updated the podcast description in iTunes, set the home page to show the last 10 posts … basically I’ve done a bit of tidying

An interesting exercise, and hopefully the results are good. As an occasional contributor to the show, and a regular listener, do let me know if you have ideas that might be useful - happy to have a look at implementing additional improvements if the audience demands it!

I’ve known for a while now that my Hursley-based friends had coined the name “Pipr” for me, presumably describing my manic enthusiasm for social networking. Chris Dalby mentioned it in a blog post yesterday, and it prompted me to check whether the pipr.com domain was available.

Sadly, the .com is already being squatted on, and none of the other “obvious” top level domains were available either. But hey, we live in a world of liberalised TLD allocation anyway. I did notice that pipr.me.uk was available and highly affordable, so I picked that one up instead.

Thanks to the magic of WordPress.com Domain mapping, right now it just redirects to the blog. I’ve also created a free Google Apps account so I can get email too.

So I just need a logo, and to work out what Pipr is really going to mean, and I’m all set. Ideas? logo designs? Comment below, or send them here

Update: I generated a silly logo for myself… using the magic of the Web 2.0 Logo Creator, tipped off by Benjamin in the comments below. I’m sure there are better ones that people could come up with.

Today is my last day in IBM Software Services for WebSphere. I’ve already written about moving to a new role as a customer champion at IBM Hursley. Strange feeling to be moving on… but I’ve just spent part of the last week starting to look at some of the aspects of my new job, and I’m really excited to be making a proper start on Monday!

Well Twitter and the interwebs sparked up with discussion of Google’s new browser, Chrome, late last night (UK time) and I thought I’d add some ill-formed thoughts of my own. Don’t expect reasoned, complete analysis at this point: the morning coffee is sitting beside me unsipped…

First thing to say is that I enjoyed the web comic that leaked out a day before the formal announcement, although I did wonder at some of the logic at the time.

• Chrome installed very smoothly on Vista. For a beta, it’s remarkably stable and well-featured. It has been no real secret that Google have been at least tinkering with browser technology for a while, but they’ve made a very credible entry to the space by coming along with something so (relatively) complete and solid as a first release.
• I didn’t quite get the reasoning behind the inversion of current UI paradigms with the tabs along the top of the window. I’ll be interested to see how this looks across the major OS platforms. Phil mentions that it’s probably easier when each tab represents a separate process, and Phani points out that it lets them associate the address bar and tools with a tab rather than the window. I guess I’m more used to a platform-native look-and-feel now.
• Some of the touches in the UI are quite nice - sites with insecure SSL certificates appear with a crossed-out line through the https, and in common with Firefox 3 it initially warns with a big red page when the site is not trusted.
• It seems fast, but I typically browse with a lot of tabs open in Firefox so I could just be “used” to a slower browsing experience brought on by bad habits.
• On that note, the concept that a “bad tab” won’t kill my browser really, really appeals to me. The design of this feature leaves me wondering whether we are going in another technology loop (processes good, threads bad) but I’m willing to be convinced.
• I like the idea of the start page with thumbnails of favourite pages. I’ll be the other browsers adopt that soon.
• I like the idea of “application shortcuts” which can go straight onto the desktop. It makes sense. Lots of applications are webapps now.
• Flash “just works”. Java does not.
• On the subject of plugins… I’ve come to depend on a lot of the plugins that I can get for Firefox. Given the heritage of the Chrome development team, and the model that the comic describes for isolating plugins / scoping them to a tab, I assume that it will be possible to extend Chrome… but the user-visible extension points are currently limited (no menu bar, no status bar) so it will be interesting to see how they approach this and what the take-up is likely to be.
• The developer tools that are built-in are very impressive… nice source viewer, element inspector, and the “task manager” with “stats for nerds” gives an interesting glimpse into the way the browser and task isolation is working.
• RSS feeds don’t appear to display. I half-expected an RSS link to whisk me off to Google Reader - I have no doubt that all my base WILL belong to Google here. Maybe that’s a “todo” feature.
• Another technical thought - are images in Chrome rendered with colour profiles? I assume so since it uses WebKit, but I’m not sure.

I’ve been saying to people for a while now that Apple has been worth watching… using WebKit as the basis of Safari, Dashboard widgets for OS X, and the iPhone. With this (re)use of the same techology by Google, I’m intrigued to see where all of this will take the browser. With Google’s brand recognition and reach, this has the potential to be a very disruptive move.

Update: WOAH, major licensing issues. And Mark Cathcart brings some interesting perspectives, too. For now, I’m removing Chrome.

Update: as Mark and Justin note below, the EULA has been fixed. Chrome gets a reprieve and can come back to my system, for experimentation purposes at least.

Although the new job officially starts next week, I now have a place to sit and I’m starting to get involved with activities for my new team. Kinda cool since I’ve not had a “regular” office for a while…

(taken with iPhone, edited with Photogene - thus the border which would be cooler if it had transparent edges, posted with WordPress app)

It turns out that Kelly spent some of the Labor Day weekend puttering, doodling and painting… and one of her works of art was inspired by one of my photos (from a recent trip to the White Horse at Uffington, which you can see more of on Flickr)! Very cool. Thanks, Kelly.

Photo:

Watercolour:

Remember MySpace? I guess it was one of the first really mainstream social networking sites… remember, it was all big and fluffy and exciting a couple of years back, everyone who was anyone was flocking there. And then along came Facebook, and Twitter, and a whole range of other sites, and suddenly MySpace was “like, so last year”, and lots of people stopped caring.

“Myspace” by moyix.

The benefits

I’m still on MySpace, but I can’t say that I’m an active participant. My page essentially acts as a placeholder, provides a link over here to my primary blog, and acts as a way of keeping in touch with a small group of folks who I know over there. If someone searches for me on MySpace, they’ll find at least one way to contact me, and hopefully find my “main” web presences.

I also find that MySpace, along with Last.FM, is one of my key “music networks”. I have discovered a number of new artists through MySpace - particularly Alex Cornish who is increasingly beginning to break through into the mainstream in the UK (looking forward to his London gig in a couple of weeks’ time). I’ve also connected with smaller bands and found more obscure (to the UK) artists I’ve been following for a while. I believe that MySpace is an interesting way for artists to release music, get themselves known, and interact with fans.

The way the music thing has generally worked is that I’ve found and “friended” an artist, and then explored their connections and sampled their music on the site. In a couple of cases other musicians have introduced themselves to me as “friends of xxx” artist that I like, and again I’ve usually at least visited their page to check them out. I’ve bought at least 2 albums by unsigned or minor artists that way, but conversely in other cases I’ve also decided that no, I still really don’t like hip-hop and not bothered with the musician that has tried to friend me.

There’s an iPhone application now, and I guess that has helped me to keep up with the status of folks on there and what they are doing, too. It has rekindled my interest a little.

The annoyances

A couple of things really are not great, though.

First, there’s a the perennial make-your-eyes-bleed-its-so-horrible design of MySpace pages. They really are awful, and although the refreshed header and button design introduced this year makes it a little cleaner, the majority of MySpace pages still look as though a 5 year old has plastered the most gaudy advert they can find onto a computer screen and then scribbled on it with crayon. There’s also the language and slang used by the majority of regular users WHO FINK THAT SHOUTING MAKES U KULER LOL (you get the point).

Today I received 3 emails from a guy who was trying to promote his MySpace profile and music. There were a few annoyances here… firstly he was using some automated mailing list thing to spam me, not using MySpace at all… secondly he sent me THREE of the darned emails, one of which contained the HTML code for a Flash player of his music, which I assume he thought would play directly in my mail… and again, there was that lack of grammar or spelling that characterises certain MySpace users.

Reader, on receipt of the third email, I took a look at the guy’s site.

Not my kind of music, to be perfectly honest. So I sent him a mail on MySpace asking him not to spam, and explaining that although I’m sure he’s a great guy, sending me repeated messages about himself was not going to encourage me to either listen, or tell others to listen - quite the opposite in fact.

The response?

not spam if ya aint sellin nothing, Sry Your pissed off over email, try Being born in poverty and haveing to become somthing with no help, if you got that many that just means im doing my job

*sigh* Well that’s another MySpace user blocked, then…

This was one of those comments you start to write on someone else’s blog entry, which morphed into a post all of its own.

As an IBMer who Twitters, I’m pretty astonished that the company hit this list of “brands that suck on Twitter”… in common with Adam, Ed and Ryan’s comments on the post (which Ed follows up in a post of his own).

I’ve spoken about the organisation’s engagement with social media of all kinds before. Looking at my own Twitter usage, I would guess that of my current ~500 followers/followees, a fair percentage of them are folks from across the company I want to keep in touch with, or people that share common technology interests that I want to learn from or that are watching and listening to me. I have search feeds set up for topics of interest (products, brand names, etc.) in my feedreader and make an effort to check what people are saying about our stuff - where necessary I highlight those comments to people internally, or try to talk to the original commenter. I’ve observed IBMers using Twitter to build communities and connections across the company, and with both customers and others outside it too.

I guess that the original post bases the assessment on the @IBM account alone, and reaches the conclusions it does… but look at all the ways in which we use social media and you might arrive at a different endpoint. I’d say we’re listening, engaging, talking,