Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú

Following our launch of , pointed me at from the Twitter API blog.

I see a lot of interest in taking a group of users' tweets and repurposing them as content on another site. For instance, consider a news agency with reporters maintaining active Twitter accounts. This hypothetical agency often wants to display their tweets on the company website.

One thing about corporate entities is they like to pay for services like these because cost communicates longevity, value, and quality. Creating a service that will group tweets, strip out irrelevant content (e.g. @replies), and allow efficient syndication is something worth paying for. You're only limited by the amount of value you can add to the stream and the chosen method of redisplay.

Are you working on this? What niche are you targeting?

Well we like to think we can do a lot more that just repurpose content on the site. There is so much more interesting data that can be used.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?

It wasn't only Philip who presented at Futuresonic 09. Simon Cross and Ben Smith of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Future Media and Technology also gave a talk about the social semantic side of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú. Their presentation is here for us all to enjoy.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Next09 have recently made videos available from the 2009 event. Backstage had the pleasure of talking on a panel alongside Robert Amlung of ZDF (germany's 2nd public broadcaster). The difference in strategy and achievements are quite apparent from the video. Don't forget to check out some of the other excellent videos on the next video site. Here's a list of ones we highly recommend.

• Introduction and Keynote with Jeff Javis
• Digital Vertigo with Andrew Keen
• When money talks and Capitalism 2.0
• Emerging Social Behaviors on the Web, Including Microblogging

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Techbus's first journey happened during Thinking Digital. Backstage had the joy of being on the bus or rather luxury coach. The coach picked me up a little later that expected due to the traffic into Manchester but it was already half full with people from Liverpool. The bus/coach was huge, like something you see superstars or football teams stepping out of rather that geeks with laptops. It turns out that the coach is actually Bolton Wanderers team coach.

Onboard there was everything needed for a unconference including wifi, electrical power and plenty of healthy food and drink. The wifi did drop out while in the middle of the county because the wifi was reliant on a 3g connection, but most of the time it was fine.

The best thing about the techbus was the people onboard, your with them for a few hours and so your talking about the conference and related things. Katie Lips who's idea it was from the start become the host for the bus tour and made sure everyone was moving around and meeting other people.

, and there's already talk of the next tour being from London to Liverpool for B.tween in June. So if you get the chance to join the tour, make sure you get a ticket early, I can certainly see this venture growing. Great work Katie

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Our coverage of Futuresonic is completed with a post from the eyes of 3 Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú R&D engineer's.

Last week the Contact theatre in manchester played host to the as part of 2009, an urban festival of art, music and ideas. Stowe Boyd's radical explored the way the web is changing social interaction, observing a progression from mainstream media to decentralised participative networks and suggesting that a new form a tribalism may arise.

The Digital Economy panel gave a series of short presentations exploring the relationship between user experience and bandwidth, with a particular focus on the rise of gaming technologies. Increasing bandwidth (the 'fat pipe') and accelerating convergence lead to a bright future for creative producers including games companies. As well as the overall convergence of digital platforms, Enda Carey discussed how his organisation is supporting development of creative media industries in England's North West. Funding and support for individuals and small businesses are at the heart of NW V&M's business, including an active involvement in preparing for the arrival of MediaCity.

The Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's own gave an excellent talk on the use of games for good. The power of engagement that games yield makes them an excellent mechanism for delivering factual and educational content as well as entertainment. Philip shared the challenge of creating a shift in the perception of games; it is accepted that television can tackle contentious issues through dramatisation but games are often seen to trivialise their subject matter, despite the fact that some efforts produce more accurate depictions than film could ever achieve. Both Philip and Toby Barnes of made it clear how important games are going forward. They both believe that games are valuable learning tools as well as being a source of entertainment and expression, and provided a wide-ranging list of that demonstrate the current trends in game development as technology progresses. Overall the panel made it clear that the game industry is an important aspect of the future , and provided plenty of food for thought to any traditional media stalwarts in attendance.

The Identity and Trust stream focussed on the responsibility of large social networks to nurture the trust of their users, particularly children, giving them confidence in their identity and relationships. This seems to contrast with the desire to utilise the powerful marketing capabilities made possible by the wealth of personal data generated by users. Rachel O'Connell of is working to ensure that children can use emerging technologies safely, with applications that can educate and empower them. She discussed the challenges they are facing and overcoming using the example of ubiquitous access to support networks such as the Samaritans through social networking sites. The danger seemed to me to be finding the line between these altruistic aims and the marketing power that Bebo offers to commercial clients. There's always a danger of young people's trust being abused, or their ownership of data undermined, and we must tread carefully.

Ewan McIntosh of the gave an inspiring presentation entitled, "The Death of Industrial Education" which was much clearer on the issue of trust. He suggested that in some networks trust should be upheld through , whereas in others, personal data should be gathered transparently and minimally with an incentive to provide information. McIntosh attacked the current state of education, suggesting it is a throwback to the industrial revolution where children were seen as a captive audience to be 'taught at'. He explained how social networks form part of a more suitable environment in which education can flourish.

Tristan Thielmann presented what was billed to be 'a madcap, humourous response' to Drew Hemment's 2006 claim that new thinking in locative media will help resolve the climate change crisis. Perhaps the fact that this is not my field prevented my from entirely grasping his arguments, but his final point that you shouldn't trust data unless you yourself collected it seems like a very romantic ideal that would be impractical for most to follow.

Friday afternoon looked to be better than the morning, with the semantic web up for discussion. Although this is something that people have been talking about for a quite some time, the theatre there did seem to have quite a palpable buzz around what Tom Ilube described as a tide-like phenomenon; slow, but unstoppable. The explanation of the semantic web as the transition from documents to data seemed clear enough, but following the twitter feed of the event showed that there was a fair bit of uncertainty of what the semantic web actually means on a practical level. Later, the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's own Simon Cross and Ben Smith gave an interesting insight into what bbc.co.uk might want to do with data rather than documents. The development of areas such as /music and the /programmes ontology highlights the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's increasing commitment to opnenness and collaboration, just one example being the use of identifiers for /music rather than our own proprietary IDs. As Simon and Ben put it, when you link your data to other open data sources, amazing things happen.

One of the most enjoyable sessions was talk on data visualisation. He proves that great swathes of seemingly trivial data can not only be made understandable, but also beautiful. From his well-known work on visualising flight paths to some fantastic work on the SMS traffic on Dutch mobile networks, his work is well worth a look. He has also produced some interesting art - both visual and musical - based around soliciting the contributions of thousands of individuals via Amazon's . Very social indeed.

Overall a great few days. Next year, Futuresonic returns as , and the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú will doubtless be there too.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Last week, Backstage was really pleased to have over for a presentation to developers at the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú. If you don't know Rasmus, he's credited with creating and has been at Yahoo! for 7 years, he gave us an introduction to PHP and how it's used at Yahoo!

It was a very interesting talk, whatever your views on PHP. I was especially interested in the questions people asked, so have posted a few below.

Q: What's the deploy process at Yahoo!?

A: We have a central package database to ask what package versions are available. What ever you pick it makes sure it picks out the files automatically so they're not half written in the cache.

Q: In terms of source control how do you organize that?

A: We started with CVS but we're mostly Subversion with Git, we build Wine packages and people work in small groups. We have a central control team called 'the paranoids' and we have a code ferret that looks for things. We look for patterns and then red flag things. My goal recently has been to push things developed towards an open source form.

Q: Staging servers?

A: People make their own processes - Yahoo! is a company of 35 companies so you will get different processes in different areas. Some of the code will be horrible and you'll have the desire to pull it apart - it's tricky as you don't want to rock the boat - i.e. it's weird, but it works for them. There are no central services.

Do we use different languages for different parts of Yahoo!?

PHP is the default and so is C++ Fireagle was built in Ruby on Rails, but it's now in Ruby - Delicious was in Perl for years but is now in PHP. Seven years ago we decided to write everything in PHP, we needed to do this as we had 4 different code bases in Singapore and we had all sorts of coders writing different code. We had to make some hard decisions - even where other code would have been better than PHP - we had to do it to standardize everything.

Q: Any drawbacks to using PHP?

A: We may have to revisit it, but not in the next 3-5 years - maybe if I leave!

Q: Will PHP be used more for unit testing in the future?

A: Yes, there's simple test written by a guy in London, but problems are a separate thing. I keep things very simple - there are some very strong opinions but I don't want to get into any battles - PHP is a part of a larger system but you get to decide what you test.

Q: Do you have any recommendations on serving personalized content whilst making the service more dynamic?

A: We don't serve a single static page at Yahoo! - from ads to personalized data we use good code, it has good latency - we work backwards - you build it so you hit the numbers, it's not impossible if you throw effort at it. It's all customizable with news, comics, content, mail etc - not doing it to save money doesn't make

Last week, Backstage was really pleased to have Rasmus Lerdorf over for a presentation to developers at the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú. If you don't know Rasmus, he's credited with creating PHP and has been at Yahoo for 7 years, he gave us an introduction to PHP and how it's used at Yahoo.

It was a very interesting talk, whatever your views on PHP. I was especially interested in the questions people asked, so have posted a few below.

sense.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?

This coming weekend BarCampNortEast2 will be held in the heart of Newcastle upon Tyne, right after Thinking Digital. For a lot of people, this will be their first BarCamp. We spoke to Alistair MacDonald the main organiser behind this Barcamp, about what was planned and why anyone thinking about it should come along.

A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of people to share and learn in an open environment. The event is participation driven that means that you make it happen. It is not so much a conference as it is an "unconferance". There is a wikipedia article with more information at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp .

In the past there have been presentations, workshops and discussions on the latest bleeding edge technology, software and web development, using the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú APIs, hardware hacking, social interaction, wine tasting, show and tell, how to make the perfect cup of tea, and most things in between.

This year BarCampNorthEast2 is being hosted in the heart of Newcastle in part of the grade one listed station buildings. The cost of attendance is free and food and refreshments are supplied. Please reserve your place online at https://www.barcampnortheast.com/get-a-ticket/ .

If you are not certain if the event is for you then please come along and see what it is about. You are free to leave at ant time, but we are certain you will not want to. Even if you can not attend on Saturday or Sunday day you are welcome as a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Backstager to join us for a few drinks on Saturday evening from 8pm. You can meet other like-minded people and possibly partake in an evening session or two.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Backstage has been asked to give two talks at the . The best way to keep a breast of what's happening is to follow , but expect a full post later in the week.

Next09 is a strange mix of business people and geeky bloggers. The layout, size and tone is closer to a future of webapps that anything else. This year the audience was as high as 1300 for some of the keynotes. The event kicked off in fine style with a couple of keynotes. The Great Restructuring by Jeff Jarvis and Capitalism 2.0 by Umair Haque. Both very well given presentations worthy of there keynote statuses. After a coffee break Andrew Keen on Digital Vertigo - Inequality, Anxiety and Isolation in the Social Media Age. Andrew Keen very well known for his views on social media put most people on the back foot as he called out the Wired magazine reading, web 2.0 blogging crowd for being too evangelical. And that debate ran through the rest of the keynotes and twitters till the very end.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?