Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

Imran has posted some Feedback from BarcampLeeds… He says the bar had a £500 bar bill, but I reckon at least 50% of that was Dom. Tom Sharp needs to know that once you have managed to remove your finger-prints that when you get caught, it just means that they’ll keep you inside until they grow back.

Here’s my notes from what was, for me, a wonderful day that seemed to just naturally unfold but undoubtedly had lots and lots of hard work behind the scenes… Thank you everyone behind the scenes.

TV3.0

Mark kicked off with a peek into an idea he’s been playing with for the last few years in which characters or scenes in Star Wars, for example could be tagged by users, with “luke” or “light saber”. It kicked off a great discussion about interface, scene selection, meta data and of course DRM.

Open Street Map.

Tim, the mapping guy, gave us a look at the work of Open Street Map.  The video of a courier companies GPS tracks was strangely beautiful, alive almost, and was used to work out where roads are. Although how do you know they aren’t cycling through a park or on a walkway? When TomTom licence some of Open Street Map data there’s going to be a few news stories. Interestingly, the project actually uses out of copyright OS maps (to trace over) to help in the mapping effort.

Mobile. Is that a computer in your pocket?

Ian from Orange, gave a look at what’s happening in the mobile sector. I learned loads… about text input, GEOVector, Magitti, OpenKODE, Open platforms,  Bug labs (design your own phone) carbon nano tube paper. Great talk and after the discussion on DRM, and then copyright and Ordandance Survery, guess what, it’s copyright, proprietary-ism and lack of co-operation that’s knackering up the mobile world.

I then bumped into Victor between sessions. I’d just missed his, but he was kind enough to share his slides with me in the kitchen. He’s doing wonderful location-based gestural interface things at Samsung. You have to see it… he’s working on ways to deal with too many ads, what I call, peripheralizing information.

Wikis or Document Sharing

Manoj gave us a look at his document-sharing site, edocr, highlighting some of the problems of collaboration with wikis. The things that make wikis good also make wikis bad, such as a equity in editing, ease of editing. Thank you to the person that mentioned Blurb (the blog-to-book tool).

Wordpress as CMS
Simon gave an intro to using Wordpress as a lightweight CMS. He started very basic, poor sod… the screen didn’t work for him…. but then got down to the PHP functions you need to start doing useful things with the admin screen etc. As much as I feel uncomfortable digging around in PHP, it gave me the confidence to maybe have a bash at something more ambitious, usually when hacking Wordpress I simply add a few well-chosen plugins and change the theme.
HCI from Reinhold

Reinhold has talked at conferences before… he rattled through some of the fantastic projects they’re doing at Leeds met, including vision recognition good enough to drive a car. In fact they drove across Europe with the system being in control 95% of the time… which compared to me and my driving is pretty impressive.

He went on to promote the idea of prize-driven development, an approach used in a “Robot Driving” competition in the US in which a million dollars is put up to the best entry that manages to drive around a course.

He spoke so animatedly that the poor old deaf signers had to work a tag team system, where one would collapse on the floor in a pool of sweat and hand over the baton.

SEO clinic

I enjoyed the SEO clinic in which sites were SEO-ed live. Dom (and the other guy, sorry) argued about the ins and outs, which was great and only goes to maintain the black art aspect of most SEO work. I came away with a to-do list for a heap of my sites.

I’d put a link to Dom’s site, but I’m sure he wouldn’t like yet another link

How To Build a Business

Guy from Adaptavist gave a wonderful talk on how to not build a business. It was hilarious. They basically broke all the rules, no fancy office, no business plan, no products even. I say they broke all the rules, they broke them all except one. They focussed TOTALLY on what people needed (and then simply did that). This strategy has seen them grow to a company with thousands of international fancy clients.

They make extensions to the Confluence wiki tool from Atlassian.

They found that if they refused to play the 99.999 up-time game, it would piss off those sorts of people who care about that and that those sorts of people, generally are really shitty customers. Genius.

In between-times I was grateful to discover Miro TV (like Joost only free-er) and Shiftspace (a tool for commenting on other sites, very useful for usability work)… and so much more…

What a great day.