Aehso’s Output

The Web 2.0 bubble continues to expand and with the hype comes the inevitable need for thought leadership. The daily arrival of “new, exciting and and revolutionary mashups/services” against the background noise of the perpetual “but what the hell IS Web 2.0?” questions from newbies is prompting the thought leaders in the arena to throw in their tuppence.

However, I got a bit worried when I read Thinking in Web 2.0: Sixteen Ways by Dion Hinchcliffe. Aside from having a real problem with #3 on Dion’s list (which is a fantasy) I couldn’t quite put my finger on why this list seemed valueless until I read Russell Beattie’s wtf 2.0? followup (great post title!). Dion’s list not only never touches on the business side of things, it never even mentions the whole reason why someone would want to provide a service - to make money. Update: There is some too-ing and fro-ing between the two in updates to their original posts but wtf 2.0 is still the more important post to read.

Besides, I’m not sure you can teach people how to formulate a good idea from a list of 16 rules for a technology domain that at worst defies definition and at best can only be defined using diagrams that contain 30-40 components.

Last year, podcasting was all the rage, destined to destroy big media. I don’t know about you but back in the real world, I still get most of my content from big media.

Carson Worshops have put up free podcasts of the main talks given by Joshua Schachter (Delicious), Cal Henderson (Flickr), Shaun Inman (Mint), Tom Coates (Yahoo!) et al. at the The Future Of Web Apps Summit in London a few weeks ago. Joshua Schachter in particular gave a fantastic talk on “things he learned while building del.icio.us”. Lots of practical infrastructure advice and some great interface design advice too. I’ve always considered del.icio.us to have a “nice-but-dim” interface - this talk verifies that this simple interface is the very reason why it suceeded when many others failed.

Anyone who is looking to produce software services (yes, even SOAs) could do worse than soak some of this stuff in. (hint: associated summit notes, wiki, roundup)

From the OSGi blog, this is just too true:

However, sometimes I wonder if our skills are not blinding us from the
complexity we put on the rest of the world. And this is not because we
are so clever and our users are not, it is actually often the other way
around. Users are often too clever to learn unnecessary details and
complexities, they just refuse to bring up the patience.

Too true, most of the time they just will not bother.  This isn’t a new phenomenon either - JVC invent VHS and thirty years later the vast majority of users still cannot program the damn video recorders with any degree of confidence.  Then they do it again with DVD players and recorders that are built for geeks. 

Apple fuelled a revolution in the audio industry with the iPod and it will take a similiar revolution (possibly driven by Intel/Viiv this time) to bring time shifted video to the masses.  No matter how good the content is, the interface needs to be seriously dumbed down.

Sky are providing some downloadable videos that illustrate the picture quality of their soon-to-be-released HD channels. Go to the Sky HD homepage and then navigate to “Explore Sky HD”, then “More to Explore”, then “HD Video Clips”. Check out the “Rugby in the Rain” video on a big monitor first - yikes!

Windows Media Player on my laptop (a 2Ghz Tecra M2 w Nvidia GeForce Go 128Mb graphics chipset) can barely decode these clips smoothly and I’ve never noticed this machine to be CPU bound before (apart from when I’m doing builds) I must go read the math but HD streams must be _huge_. Fancy that, my next TV will probably have that much (or more) raw processing power.

Not very energy efficient I guess, perhaps it will heat my living room? And I see this when I recently spotted my next TV - I think I’ll wait until it drops in price though, just a little.

One of the more popular spoof software development websites doing the rounds these days is Waterfall 2006 and it is quite funny in that viral kind of way.

What makes the site even funnier is actually watching real sofware engineers and managers nervously laugh about it’s content. It reminds me of The Office for some reason…

Salon have obtained more documents on the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal.  I am at a loss for words at this stage.  How can anyone defend this?  What happened to the chain or command (and responsibility)?  How can these people sleep at night?  So many questions…

Some of Tom Farrell’s excellent contributions to Old RottenHat have been nominated for “Best Blog Post” in the upcoming the Irish Blog Awards.   I’m sure this is the moment he has always been waiting for…

If I am honest I’ll admit that his older but simpler “Mr Men in Bed” and “More Mr Men observations” still haunt me whenever I wander into a kids bookstore.  Thanks for that Tom.

I like it when theses new terms appear out of nowhere.  “Meatspace” is a recent favourite:

Meatspace is synonymous with the physical world and conceived as the opposite of cyberspace or virtual reality….The term may be used in a derogatory manner as a conscious rejection of the connotations of the term “real life” and the implication that interactions in cyberspace are less real or important than physical interactions.

[above from Wikipedia,  read this Wired article on Second Life for some real world context]

It is always only a matter of time before perspectives started getting inverted and new terminology is required.  Remember the arrival of “snail-mail” back in the 90’s? Now it’s part of common speech.  I wonder how long it will take for ‘meatspace’ to enter the general vocabulary?

“If that’s the best they can do after five months, then they should give up filming. Channel 4 can shove this programme up its jacksie,” said O’Leary. “There’s nothing in it.”

Micahel O’Leary’s view of tonite’s Dispatches exposé on Channel 4. He must be the only CEO in the world who speaks freely like this, credit where it is due. The show should be worth watching but if the sum total of their revelations is that Ryanair treat customers like crap, then they won’t be telling us anything we don’t already know.

I got an EyeTV 200 yesterday and have it hooked up to my NTL connection as I type (me, an impulse shopper, no!) The picture quality is as good as you’d expect with an analog feed.  A hint to NTL Dublin customers - tell the EyeTV tuner software that you are in Germany in order to get it to scan the full frequency range used by NTL’s analogue service.  I’m especially impressed with my newfound ability to record TV programs (via the mobile tvtv EPG) while out in pub on a Friday night - I’ll never miss MOTD again!
I had also blogged about EyeConnect in the past but CyTV caught my attention this evening.  How about that, I can turn my EyeTV into a live streaming video server just like that.

It would be good if NTL would allow us to use a CAM with their digital service though…