BarCamp Leeds

A full auditorium of people gathered at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds for a day's information sharing at the second BarCamp Leeds.

Dom started the day off with 'SEO = evil ?' and managed to defend SEO practitioners (as opposed to snake oil engineers) in quite a skeptical discussion. Rather than gaming the inevitably gameable system, he advises sticking to the current guidelines that the search engines provide. Good advice for getting the 90% of SEO that site builders can manage for themselves, but no word about what the magic 10% that the SEO specialists do is though ;)

The next session was a demo of Ableton Live, bringing a bit of sonic creativity to the camp. A brave tour of a track in production took us around the software alongside some discussion of the advantages that this particular package offers to both the relative newbie and the touring performer. Given Ableton's accessibility, it would be nice to see some dedicated workshops in the future to encourage more music production.  Cloth Cat provide short courses in music production software, including Ableton, for anyone who fancies a go.

Dean Vipond, a designer from Orange, presented a consideration of design vs usability. Usability can be seen by some designers as an optional extra, or even something to be avoided altogether. As standards become less avoidable, designers are required to pay attention to the balance between marketers wanting to achieve maximum exposure for their product, the technical constraints and what the end user needs. Employing user centred design and user testing can make achieving this balance more manageable.

The HM Revenue & Customs site was discussed as an example of a site that really needs to be user centred - people aren't keen to visit in the first place so the experience has got to feel safe and guided. Other experiences can be less usable - Nintendo's Metroid Prime site encourages the user to explore a very freeform and alien experience which reflects the mechanics of the game that it promotes.

Ultimately, designers and usability practitioners can inform each other and co-operatively build better experiences for users.

After lunch, professional pirate Tom Scott presented lessons learned from making things (especially video) popular online. Even taking Sturgeon's Law into account ("90% of everything is crap") there are a few things that can help before, during and after the creative process.

A good guiding principle is the Effort:Awesome ratio as a guideline. Unless the Awesome > the Effort, spend your time coming up with a new idea. There are a few things you can do to reduce effort : use a tripod, shoot against a static background, get room tone (background audio noise) to paste over audio glitches, film more than you need and remember to get some cut-aways.

Editing three times enables you to make it look good, then better, then get rid of all the extra non-essential stuff that gives viewers time to click their way elsewhere.

Viral propagation depends on you sending your final piece to your friends. It matters not who - what matters is who they send it to and there is nothing you can do to influence that.

Simple ideas win. Just by registering yarr.org.uk, Tom ended up being the UK official point of contact for International Talk Like A Pirate Day, interviewed by Newsround on the deck of a tall ship at Southampton boat show in full pirate regalia. You can spend a million on an idea and on the web it stands about the same chance of success as the one pursued in a spare hour for the giggle.

People from the GeekUp community have been busy recently and each got a 20:20 to give them some air :

Paul Robinson's Kagtum web project is a 'Pandora for news' that addresses the decline in meaningful news coverage by providing an avenue for getting news that you are interested in and that's local to you from around 400 newspapers, 100 blogs & 100 other sources. Stories are geo-coded with the help of OpenCalais, your habits and preferences are filtered with CRM114. Events will become part of the information stream. Northerners, sign up to be an alpha user.

Robert Burrell Donkin was creating an open source release candidate, JSieve, a domain specific language for handling email.

Paul Horsfall has hacked together an Etch-a-sketch emulator in Ruby (with Ruby Shoooes) with an Arduino based hardware controller.

John Leach, ukelele player extraordinare, is taking articles from Wikipedia and singing them. The songs are derivative works of the GNU FreeDocument licensed articles. Performance of them raises some subtle questions about the nuances of copyright law :) Sing your own into ukepedia.com.

Tom Smith has a crawler that finds ukelele songs for analysis to locate those which are easy to play. Adding info in from last.fm, blog and forum rankings allows value to be added and demostrates that a hobby site can be reinterpreted as a commercially valuable engagement engine.

Barry Carlyon is contributing to a bug tracker for the php scripting language as part of the Google Summer Of Code.

A couple of these projects are using Ohloh to track their project's progress.

After the afternoon break, we've got Lee ringing the death knoll for the iPod on the grounds that all the other simple music players have died and that we're all DJs even if we're not yet aware of it.

The Pacemaker from Swedish ex-popstars Tonium allows us to revisit the mixtape era by selecting tunes, create sets and share them. It's got a crossfader, pitchshifts to +-100%, offers filters, effects, looping & EQ and it fits 120Gb of tunes in loads of formats into your pocket. It can sort your tracks in various ways and beat match for you.  Line-out, headphone-out and USB get signals and power in and out.

It's accessible enough for someone who's never seen one before to use to mix with but at £429 it's not cheap and the floor reckon it needs wireless and bluetooth connectivity adding into the mix.

Flickr group

It's all go in Leeds

One of the nice things about the Northern summer is the hive of activity that the place becomes, in that little slice of time after the weather gets bearable, before autumn crash lands in a pile of sodden leaves.

I'm looking forward to trashing a few N95 batteries this weekend and spending very little time at home.

Barcamp 2008 promises to be marvellous and is simultaneous with Hyde Park Unity Day (I'd link but you probably don't need a full-fat MySpace splurge at the moment). An Open Street Map mapping party will fill in some of the blanks around Leeds.

There's also been an influx of people back from Australia for the summer festy circuit landing in Leeds, bless 'em, so I imagine that Sunday dinner's going to be loud, epic and still going at around midnight.

Should be good Flickring and Twittering exercise at least :)

Leeds first web festival

North by North West ?

Is this really Leeds first web festival ?

I'm tempted to think that we've hit a critical mass of technology oriented group think, and there are sufficient events in close temporal proximity for an enterprising festival label to be attached.

Nonetheless, there _are_ sufficient events happening in Leeds and it's worth pushing word of this progress out into the wider community. If it takes a festival label to do that, so be it.

Ten years from now

"Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form." -- Steve Ballmer in a Washington Post interview

We've seen premises like this before and they seem to be a combination of wishful thinking and fail. E-tailers expect spamming people who "haven't opted out" to generate word-of-mouth sales. We'll read screens instead of books. Video killed the radio star. Grey is the new black.

Usually, we're hearing it from some entrepreneur determined for their latest venture to succeed but in this case we're hearing it from Miscrosoft's new helmsman.

The belief that The New will utterly replace The Old is wrong on at least two counts :

First, The Old came to be that way because it actually offered something to someone and presumably still does. The New may not be required. A dead-trees book is my preference for sitting by a river with, no matter what delightful features Adobe have build into Reader.

Also, there are inevitably tools and techniques around the corner that we cannot envisage at the moment. Email was going to be a global communication panacea until SMS came along. The New that we end up confronting or adopting rarely turns out to be the one that we thought we glimpsed up ahead.

While Microsoft deliver their IP future to whoever is still using their product ten years from now, I'll probably still be visiting the library, picking up fanzines and flyers from record shops, browsing posters and papers with my coffee, throwing coins to buskers and generally being thankful that art and communication extend beyond the screen into The Big Room.

We're in the The Register

And for all the right reasons. We didn't lose any unencrypted CDs of customer data or anything.

The Register have noticed what we've been up to with landline numbers.

We took a demo to the Unified Communications tradeshow at Olympia last week which allowed people to put a message on our big monitor by sending an SMS to us.

It doesn't seem like an innovation until you realise that you can can get your message onscreen by sending it to any one of ten thousand landline numbers.

No doubt we'll have something online about it soon.

If you're going to the Internet World show between the 29th April and 1st May you'll be able to try it out for yourself.

It's not agile, but it did help

I was asked to build 'a quick page of links to articles' and suspected that what I was being asked for wasn't really what was required. The Agile folk at the last GeekUp meeting convinced me that their iterative way of doing things was worth considering so I decided to give a slightly different approach a try.

The end product was surprisingly different to what was first requested. It also worked far better than we had hoped it might.

The original request was centred around the interface and went something along the lines of "I want a page that links to these articles, the section headings need to go here and here and remember to put a logo here," accompanied by the traditional scribbling on the back of a fax.

I grabbed a skeletal php/Smarty system and started considering the unspecified back end. The choice seemed to be between a static system (a pile of HTML files) and a dynamic system (one big Smarty template containing all the articles with a php script to switch on the appropriate bit).

The articles were all tiny, just a couple of paragraphs, and not numerous (about a dozen or so to begin with), so a database looked unhelpful. It seems sensible to store HTML in HTML files. I built one big Smarty template containing all the articles and went back to the customer.

At this point we have a system which completely fulfils their requirements. In the process of testing it they learnt something about what they needed rather than wanted, and realised that someone was going to have to maintain this thing - and that was going to be them. Their focus moved immediately from the end user interface to the maintenance back end.

Our solution stored each article in it's own file. Conventionally, we started each file with a H2 tag containing the article title which was parsed to use as link text when dynamically creating the index page.

- separated content from presentation
- separated presentation from processing
- zero training for maintainers
- zero training for users
- the development cycle happened rapidly (<20 hours to delivery)
- we solved problems that we didn't even know we had

A nice mod would be giving the maintainer something like the TinyMCE HTML editor to use to edit the articles and a little control panel to add and delete them.

This blog should be called Lazarus

I started it in 2006, and this is my fourth post.

Mind you, I have been posting plenty to my links page.