plasticbag.org – Page 17 – by Tom Coates

Less than a week to Hack Day!

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date June 11, 2007
5 Comments on Less than a week to Hack Day!

With only a few days to go now until Hack Day and my free time evaporating like lead on the surface of the sun, I thought I should duck back online briefly and give you guys an update on what we’re up to.

Firstly, we’ve got a Hack Day backnetwork set up and running. A backnetwork is a site where people who are coming to the event get to generate their own impromptu social network, meet each other beforehand, chat and find out information about the event. It’s also a hub for aggregating content around the event, including blog posts and flickr images.

If you’re coming to Hack Day, then you should be on the backnetwork. If you don’t think you’ve received an invitation then check your spam filters today and if you still can’t find anything, then IM me on plasticbagUK (AIM) or tom.coates (Y! messenger) and I’ll resend your invitation out to you. Please remember though, I probably won’t be free enough to chat. Please don’t think I’m rude if I run off screaming after a few minutes. This whole thing is quite time consuming.

Next up, the band! On Sunday night we’ve got an exclusive performance by next big thing The Rumble Strips. They’ve been described as one of the bands to watch for 2007 by the BBC and are currently touring the country as one of NME’s hottest bands of the moment.

If (like me) you’re too old and unhip to know the band particularly well, then you should probably start off by visiting their MySpace page, their last.fm page and maybe buying a couple of their bouncier singles at 7digital.com or on iTunes. With any luck you should be able to tell your friends that you were there when it all started.

On the other hand, maybe your friends should be there too! If you’re coming to the Hack Day, we’ve got a bonus for you. You can invite up to three of your friends to come and see the band with you! From 7pm on Sunday those friends will be able to join you inside the venue at Alexandra Palace and experience the band with you live in concert. I’m quite happy about that. To get them to come, you’ll need to join the Backnetwork. There’s a part of the site called ‘Party Invites’ and that’s where you put the names of your friends!

Now, to the other communities that you should be joining or keeping up with. Alongside the Backnetwork we’ve set up a Flickr group. There’s already an active Facebook group up and running. Obviously the Unofficial wiki still ticks along nicely. And there are presences on Jumpcut and Upcoming. I think we’re trying to get something cool going with Instructables too, but I’m not so sure about that one yet.

What else do I need to tell you? The tags we’re using for the day mostly will be hackdaylondon. If you want to tags stuff on Flickr using machine tags then the correct term is upcoming:event=173371. That’ll do for now.

Links Random

Links for 2007-06-04

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date June 4, 2007

Dan Hon is moving on from Mind Candy, and is looking for a new project to get his teeth into… A lot of people consumed by the entrepreneurial bug at the moment. Dan’s awesome by the way.

Links Random

Links for 2007-06-01

BBC News now appears to have a section called ‘Also in the News’ for ‘surprising stories from around the world’ These stories include people who drive into underground stations and people meeting leopards. And people say editorial standards are slipping…

Hack Day Technology

Who is speaking at Hack Day?

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date May 31, 2007
1 Comment on Who is speaking at Hack Day?

I’ve just posted a really long piece over on the Hack Day blog about the various people from Yahoo and the BBC who are going to be coming to Alexandra Palace in a little over two weeks. Sorting out the speakers has been really surprisingly easy and good fun because everyone’s been so keen to come over and play. Nearly everyone I’ve wanted to come is coming, and will be around not just for their talk on the Saturday morning but for the whole weekend.

Some names and projects really stand out for me. Jonathan Trevor‘s going to be talking about Yahoo! Pipes which is a project that emerged out of the TechDev party of Yahoo that until recently I was working for. I remember Pasha Sadri mentioning this idea he had when Simon and I first joined the place, and it’s been really gratifying to see it come to fruition. Jonathan, who is coming over to speak, has been heavily involved in the whole project from really early on, and did an enormous amount of work on the incredibly stylish engine for manipulating feeds. Having him come over is really cool.

I’m also really excited to have Tristan Ferne and Chris Bowley from BBC Audio & Music Interactive coming. Tristan runs the my old R&D team at the BBC. We overlapped for a while, and one of the results of that time was the Annotatable Audio project which has now become Find Listen Label. He’s going to be talking about ‘Things to make and do’ at those places where media and technology collide. Very excited about that. Looking forward to seeing what they’ve been up to.

Another session that I’m personally really thrilled about is Aaron Straup Cope and Dan Catt—both of whom work with Cal Henderson at Flickr—doing a session on Machine tags. I don’t know that Machine tags have really got the press they deserve, and I was particularly excited to get them coming to talk about them because they’re (as far as I know) totally non-proprietary. It’s really just a concept that Flickr have pushed further than most other organisations. I’m particularly fascinated by it because it’s all about taking the machine-readability of tags and extending it massively, with lightweight and community-generated schemata allowing any object to have an almost infinitely extensible pseudo-database of information attached to it. I’m not explaining it very well. If you want to know more, you should read up on Flickr’s implementation of Machine tags.

Speaking of old-friend and fellow (ex) UK Blogger Cal Henderson, he’s coming to Hack Day as well. He’ll be doing his barn-raising rendition of ‘Why Flickr’s Web Services Rule’ (or something suitably kitten filled). So that can’t help but be awesome. I’m hoping for a few rousing games of Faceball too.

Er. Who else have we got? Obviously backstage.bbc.co.uk‘s main culprits Matt Cashmore and Ian Forrester are going to be performing. We’ve got Christian Heilmann and Nate Koechley talking about YUI, Kent Brewster doing a Yahoo/BBC mash-up in an hour and Bradley Wright talking about Yahoo! Answers APIs. And if that’s not enough for you, if you’re into Geo stuff we’ve got Mirek Grymuza talking about Yahoo! Maps APIs and Mor Naaman from Yahoo! Research Berkeley, who are responsible for such projects as Zonetag and TagMaps.

Oh! Which reminds me. There’s a project that Paul Hammond and Simon Willison and I started working on late last year with Mor and the YRB crew that I’m also hoping we’ll be able to show off at the event. I’m not yet clear on whether we’ll be doing a session on that yet. I guess I’ll see how the next couple of weeks goes.

There’s more news to come about some of the other people coming to the event, but some of that’s in the air at the moment. Hopefully we’ll have more to talk about on Monday or Tuesday next week. Keep watching the Hack Day blog and backstage.bbc.co.uk in the meantime…

Links Random

Links for 2007-05-31

The rumour is that last.fm has been bought by CBS for $280 Million I find myself surprisingly depressed by this revelation, although it does sort of rather explain some of the conversations I had with them a while back about what it’s like inside large organisations and how acquirees fare…
Apple have finally launched the DRM-free higher quality version of songs on iTunes – it’s called iTunes Plus Obviously it’s EMI only at the moment, but it’s sufficiently interesting for me to go and see if there’s anything I’ve bought over the last few years that I could upgrade.

Links Random

Links for 2007-05-30

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date May 30, 2007

Weird idea of the moment: Sell the movie rights to The Sims… I suppose when you think about it, there’s a bunch you could do with this if you treat it as a sort of meta-fiction about the world outside the game and its inter-relationships with the characters within it. Still. Odd.

Links Random

Links for 2007-05-29

A gay pub in Australia has won a court-case that would allow it to ban heterosexuals “The tribunal’s president said groups of straight women found homosexual men entertaining but that such attention was dehumanising.” I have much experience of being treated like this by unpleasant and arrogant women looking for a pet.

Links Random

Links for 2007-05-28

John Battelle has posted his “Data Bill of Rights” and I’m finding it pretty fascinating… I’m not totally sure it’s all workable, but there’s a lot here of significant value. I’m spending a bunch of time trying to work out how to operate honourably in the technology ecosystem and how to encourage honourable business practice. This helps.
Time Magazine’s extract from Al Gore’s book on defending reason is pretty decent… Really interesting in terms of how politics has gone and how evaluation and reason is massively under attack from rhetoric and the visual image. Quite approve. Like Al Gore.
Awesome web cartoon about the current wifi = death absurdities… “Good night, stay safe, and live in constant, irrational, fear.”
I’ve currently got these four pictures entered in the Flickr/Tate “How We Are Now” pool / competition… The photos are displayed in the Tate Britain on screens and then the very best will be published in the Observer or whatever. Good fun. Not sure these are my best photos. Any thoughts out there?
Techcrunch reports on the Facebook platform. This is a very very good idea indeed. I also agree with the description of the move as an anti-MySpace move. It’s weird this stuff. Now of course there will be a whole bunch of imitators. But I wonder how many of them could have got any movement inside their organisations before this…
The Pansy Project finds places where homophobic violence or abuse has occurred and plants a pansy on the site… I can’t helping thinking that schools would be bursting with pansies, all over the place. There wouldn’t be room enough to sit down.
Meg Pickard on the natural heirarchy of seats on the tube… I don’t agree with some of what she says – the idea of being trapped by the end door with the window open in a train would appall me. Hard to escape. Otherwise though, desperately and depressingly insightful.

Hack Day Technology

On Alexandra Palace and Hack Day…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date May 27, 2007
2 Comments on On Alexandra Palace and Hack Day…

The first time I went inside Alexandra Palace was a couple of months ago, while we were still trying to work out if we were going to be able to carry off this whole Hack Day concept in the UK. It was snowing insanely hard and I got completely lost between the tube and the venue. I was wearing canvassy trainers. They got pretty much immediately soaked through leaving me with numb lumps of uncooked meat at the end of my legs. I kept slipping all over the place and falling over as I tried to get my way up the hill. In the end I got a cab. There were kids everywhere throwing snowballs at passing cars and sledging down the hill. Matt Cashmore—who had thought of the whole Alexandra Palace venue in the first place—couldn’t even make it to the venue because the roads were so slushy and clogged. I took a couple of pictures that day and posted them to Flickr: The view from Alexandra Palace, International Woodworking Convention. But even then walking into the venue I remember getting entirely over-excited by the whole thing.

Last week, I went back for the first time since February. The weather was completely different – beautiful, clear skies. Beating sun. Everything was green. But the effect was pretty much the same. This is going to be great. I’ve put some pictures below to whet your appetite, but if you really want to get the whole feel for it in these last few weeks, I’d recommend checking out the Flickr set I’ve put together: Site visit to Alexandra Palace. And if you’ve not applied to come yet, then there’s still time.

Links Random

Links for 2007-05-26

The Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards is about celebrating the best in European weblogs… It’s a pretty good way to see what people are writing about and to discover some new sites, and if you want to vote for me in the ‘Past his best’ category, that would be fine too…
Charlie Brooker on lying just for the hell of it… You see, I sort of get this, but I’m afraid I’m a bit old fashioned. I don’t think that smiling to people you’re not so keen on counts as lying, and I think people who play tricks on other people are sort of self-inflated arseholes, really. Sorry. No fun,
Grindhouse has been chopped in half for UK release. Kurt Russell’s not thrilled, and neither am I… Nice to know me and Russelly have something in common. You know what would be ace? NFT doing the original film as it was supposed to be shown. Or maybe showing both at the same time at some exclusive large venues?
The rumour a month or so ago was that Amazon were about to launch an MP3 only music-selling un-DRM’d service Anyone heard any more about this? Also when the crap are iTunes going to start their DRM free service. Why does everyone insist on keeping me waiting for cool things. Very aggravating.
Derek Powazek on “The Real Story of JPG Magazine” Derek provides his side of the story about how he left the company that he co-founded, and the reasons behind it.
Heather gives her perspective on the whole JPG experience… It makes me sad that such a lovely idea got soured, however it came about. Very depressing. I only wish I’d been able to write about this earlier. Got distracted. Sorry.
Where in London would I be able to see a bearskin-wearing wearing footguard of the Household Cavalry? I asked Metafilter (although I also said foodguard which is a bit dumb) cos I’m trying to get some good pictures. Can anyone out there help? Also they’re not the Household Cavalry. I feel stupid.
How to meet other hackers! I wrote this post over on the Hack Day blog listing some of the ways that people are self-organising around Hack Day. Really fun bunch of stuff. If you know of anything else let me know. Otherwise #hackday on freenode might be a good place to hang…
I’m sort of fascinated by ‘I Want Sandy’, the personal e-mail based life organising service from Rael Dornfest… It’s not live yet. I think I’m interested in it because my mum’s name is Sandy and she’s totally over-organised. Therefore it has a nice feel to it. That’s a dumb reason, isn’t it.