Aren't we all

Category: Media

The return of the platform game: From Jet Set Willy to LittleBigPlanet

I’m not much of a “gamer”, although I have to admit I am able to reference my life by what computer game I was playing since I was about 10 years old (for the record – Jet Set Willy, on the trusty ZX Spectrum) – maybe before then, if you include the clunky Radio Shack games I played on my Dad’s computers.

Jet Set Willy (1984: ZX Spectrum), Sonic the Hedgehog (1991: Sega Megadrive), Monkey Island (1990: PC), Doom (1993: PC), Worms (1995: PC), Abe’s Oddysee (1997: PS1), Grand Theft Auto (1997: PC), Rainbow Six (1998: PC) and many more; they all chart a certain personal view of the evolution of console and computer gaming. And it’s incredible to think how things have changed.

I can mark eras of my life in the same way you might signpost your autobiographical memory with where you were living. Sad but true. It tends to be just the one game as I don’t devote masses of time to gaming – when I find a game that I like, I stick with it.

Recently, I persuaded my wife that a PS3 would be a great addition to our family because “a PS3 is so much more than just a games console – you can use it to view all those digital photos and videos of our son”. And I’m glad I did as I think I’ve found the game to mark the next era – LittleBigPlanet. This game is incredible. It has brought the traditional platform game into the future with a fun, creative and collaborative online world that is constantly changing and ever evolving. Irrespective of what it represents in terms of amazing media and technological innovation, it also represents a return to pure and simple platform based game-play, with a few twists. And, possibly most importantly, it is impossible not to feel happy playing this game. It looks like we’re going to have some fun with this one…

Open source: utopian-dreams, recession-proofing and socialism…

Those who know me will undoubtedly have at some point had the pleasure of listening to me ranting on about the power of the open source movement – or, more generally, social collaboration online. On the bus yesterday I read an editorial piece – “Collaboration is the new revolution” – in the Guardian newspaper that certainly struck a few chords. Here’s a few extracts, by way of a summary:

1) Open source paves the way for the odd utopian dream:

Sir Thomas More’s description of Utopia as a place where “nobody owns anything, but everyone is rich” is not a bad way to describe the open source movement in which people around the world collaborate with each other to produce services that anyone can use – or improve on – for nothing.

2) Open source is recession proof:

One of the interesting things about the collaborative movement is that it is probably recession-proof, though you won’t see it in economic statistics because it mostly does not involve cash transactions.

3) Open source is robust and well-trusted by large successful organisations:

Big corporations, such as IBM, Google and Amazon, are devourers of open source software because they find it cheap, efficient, low-maintenance and reliable. But UK government departments, including health and the foreign office, have proved risk-averse with hardly any open source in their infrastructure.

4) Open source is socialism (well, social collaboration at least):

…open source combines the cooperative spirit that was at the heart of the Labour party in the past with the entrepreneurial skills needed today.

And with nothing more to add to that summary, I’m off to join the revolution (well, okay, I’m off down the pub to carry on ranting to anyone who’s too polite to stop me).

No more mobile tweets?

Twitter has announced they will cut outbound SMS alerts for users in the UK because it was costing too much!

Whatever you say about Twitter, I was enjoying the ability it gave me to receive updates via SMS. In fact, it was this feature that won me over to using it and helped demonstrate what it was all about to mates. I figured that the initial free SMS alerts that appeared in my Twitter account would run out one day and then I’d have to pay for more credits – easy business model. I’d happily have paid too. So why pull it? Maybe its all part of some ploy by Twitter to gather a crowd reaction – so that when they announce payment plans for SMS alerts, they already have the crowds’ support. Yeah – okay, that may be a tad cynical but I do hope they listen to their UK users (and, in fact, anyone who used the UK based SMS alerts). The reaction is already gathering pace – with comments and tweets a plenty – and now a Facebook group. SMS is huge here and it seems to be a glaringly obvious way to actually turn Twitter into a revenue making business, in the UK at the very least.

SWO: Semantic Web Optimisation?

It looks like the semantic web is about to gain traction with the Yahoo! Search open platform that was announced last month. In summary, Yahoo! is hoping to spread the use of semantic web standards by supporting microformats and RDF – promising enhanced search results for content adhering to such standards.

And with this promise of an enhanced search presence will come the marketing need for publishers to create content that capitalises on this. Just as SEO emerged as an industry all of its own, I expect Semantic Web Optimisation to emerge as an industry all of its own in the very near future.

[Before submitting this post, I quickly searched on the topic (yes – I appreciate the irony of having used Google!) and came across this article – essentially saying the same thing as me above. But please can we not fall into the trap of applying version numbers after “Web” for every evolution in web technology that occurs!]

The rise and rise of websites

Another graph. This time showing how the number of websites has grown since 1990. Actually, things only really started to grow about ten years ago in 1998, a year or two after I first played about on the Internet at university. It took six years (1990-1996) for the number to reach 100,000. In 2008, it is now 162 million! While the numbers have risen and risen, what is also interesting to note is the dip in numbers during 2002. Post dot-com bubble slump? Anything to do with 9/11? Or was it simply that a lot of domain names, bought during the dot-com boom years – with little more than a holding page to show, expired at this time? This little blip aside – it seems the upwards curve is un-stoppable. Will it ever reach saturation point?

Websites (1990 - 2008)

(day) streaming our lives away

I’ve just taken a quick look at friendfeed.com – it’s basically a lifestream service, where people can aggregate and publish their web-lives. It’s done rather nicely – enabling you to quickly create your own lifestream from various feeds (here’s mine) and not too different in look to the lifestream I quickly hacked together with pipes – but done way better and on a grand scale! You can also track friends’ feeds easily too, making it a much more two-way tool than others out there – say Tumblr, for example, which publishes your combined feeds. There’s definitely a need for this – with the whole micro-blogging/twitter/lifestream thing, it is useful to show this data in one place and provides an excellent way for potential stalkers to gather all their up-to-the-minute information on a particular target in one easily digestible feed 😉

Facebook fatigue

I’ll admit I’m quite a fan of Tom Hodgkinson’s work (being an avid reader of the Idler and having read both his recent books – “How To Be Free” and “How To Be Idle”), so I might be more inclined to understand where his rants and raves are coming from. But his latest outburst in the Guardian concerning Facebook certainly seems to have generated a bit of a maelstrom in the murky waters of the social media world (more than 500 del.icio.us bookmarks after one day and counting). While a little conspiratorial, there’s a certain weight to what he’s saying.

Lately there’s been a spate of negative blog entries and articles slating Facebook – and the furore surrounding Mr Scoble’s recent quarrel with Facebook pushed things even further. [Although some may argue that this simply served as an excellent PR pre-cursor to last week’s announcement that Facebook (along with Google) were to join the Data Portability initiative.]

Is this the beginning of Facebook fatigue? In 2008, will Facebook go the way that Second Life went in 2007? Or is this simply the natural media/ public reaction to “hype”, as described in Gartner’s Hype Cycle, and we’re now in the “Trough of Disillusionment“? I have to admit that the tedious slew of unanswered invites in my inbox from zombies, pirates and vampires has sent me sliding down my own trough of Facebook disillusionment. Although, rather lazily, I do find it handy to have friends’ details in one place on the web – I use Facebook to arrange meeting after work or even to message someone, for example, as it is easier than digging around for their contact details. Will I still be doing this in 12 months? I certainly wasn’t a year ago, so who knows? Maybe Gartner does.

Social Graphs and Portable Social Networks

The “social graph” is a global mapping of everybody and how they’re related. I had a play with a visualisation tool for Facebook relationships last night and it was great. Slightly scary but fun nonetheless. However, our weblives are not just about Facebook (although Facebook does provide a platform to bring them all together). Google’s OpenSocial is promising to provide another way to pull them together but, as Brad Fitzpatrick points out, a centralized “owner” of the social graph is a dangerous thing. Social networks need to be made open and portable. And they can be.

Tim Berners-Lee stated in a post yesterday that

…we have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology…

In other words, the connections and relationships made possible by the semantic web (or social graph – use interchangeably from hereon). He goes on:

Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, “It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important”. Obvious, really.

and on opening up this data:

It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.

So, yes – I am excited but how are we going to do this? Think data feeds, microformats and openID – things that would tend to be met with blank stares if I were to suggest them to clients. But show a client how you could remove barriers (such as log-in/ sign-up) to that all important “conversion” (with openID or microformats – here’s an excellent microformat implementation doing just that) and show how this person would be able to instantly tell all their friends about it (via their social graph) and then they’ll be interested.

joost beta

Some of you will have already heard about Joost (formerly known as The Venice Project) – an IPTV thingy from the folks who brought us Kazaa and Skype. There has been much speculation about its implications for the media, advertising and marketing industries – bringing together the wonders of the internet and TV in one glorious multimedia dream (well – that’s what the hype will have us believe anyway). Find out more over at Wired and MIT.

Anyway – I’ve have been having a bit of a play and it looks rather nice indeed. Not that I’ll be watching TV all day – it’s all purely in the name of research, of course!

I’ve also got a bunch of beta invites for anyone who wants to check it out for themselves – just let me know your email that you want to use for your Joost account…

Red Lion this afternoon

Amongst all this Second Life hype, I’d like to add a little prediction – on the back of trends in buzzwords in the media – that 2007 will see the rise of “web3.d” applications. Where the 3d web (i.e. apps like second life) and web2.0 (i.e. social apps like myspace and del.icio.us) collide in a mash-uptastic frenzy. Oh yes.

If anyone has any “web3.d” ideas, you can catch me down the Red Lion this afternoon to discuss further. That’s the Red Lion in Second Life, of course.

Using del.icio.us as a marketing channel

I’ve just spotted Adobe as a “user” on del.icio.us. It’s interesting to see that organisations like this are using del.icio.us as an online marketing channel to increase brand awareness, page rank and general online visibility.

I’m sure we’ll see many other organisations doing the same thing in the near future as people turn to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us as their first port of call for search – where “page rank” is effectively determined by the users themselves and you can be guaranteed better results. I can even see a niche emerging for optimisation services for these sites, just like SEO became a niche industry around Google page ranks.

Some thoughts about “convergence” and IPTV

I feel the need to air some thoughts after recent goings on in the “convergence” realm. It’s a term that has been bashed about for years now – with every new development being heralded as the harbinger of a new dawn of convergence in digital media and the like. And this last year has been no different. We have the other weekend’s Homechoice (aka Video Networks) and Tiscali merger. There’s that BSkyB and Easynet deal last October. There’s a peer to peer IPTV service about to surface. And finally, there’s something a sales guy said to me this afternoon. In fact, something that got me thinking about all this in the first place. Something about “convergence”, “entertainment hubs” and how we’ll all “obviously be browsing the internet on our TVs in the next couple of years”. Well, sorry, but I beg to differ. Will digital media delivery really converge on a single device as many people seem to think? Surely, as more electronic media devices become IP enabled, media delivery will start to diverge not converge? Okay – so I’m getting bogged down with semantics – I guess that the term “convergence” really refers to overlapping realms of different media with new technologies. But I’m not sure that this single device view is the right direction for IPTV. Particularly whe you consider the most successful interactive TV programmes I have worked on have been those that encourage interaction using a completely different device and media – such as mobile and SMS – rather than relying on a remote control or a keyboard.

The advent of broadband has made delivery of video and other digital media possible via the internet but viewing via your desktop or laptop computer screen is not always practical. Equally, browsing and searching the web from your sofa via the TV is not exactly an easy or sociable thing to do. Surely the best solution is one where you would search on your PC then sit back and view on your TV? I know this is exactly what many people are already doing but it often means situating the PC near the TV so that you can run a cable from the PC’s AV output into the TV. What I want to do, and I’m sure a solution must exist (please tell me if it does – otherwise I hereby patent this idea!), is utilise my Wi-Fi network to stream content to the TV. Maybe via a SCART device that doubles as a Wi-Fi antennae, receiving data streams via the local network? Surely such a simple single device must exist? It’s all I need – not some “media hub” or “home entertainment centre”. It seems to completely bridge that gap between the different tasks of searching/ interacting (i.e. “lean forward” tasks) and watching (i.e. “sit back” tasks). Please – somebody help!

BT TV pacing in the aisles

As BT prepares to step up onto the IPTV stage – to take on the likes of Homechoice, NTL and sky – it is starting to gather together content providers like Warner Music, Paramount, the Beeb and National Geographic. All the sort of content providers that are likely to produce decent TV that people will sign up to “BT TV” to watch but please tell me that there’ll be more than Big Brother re-runs coming from Endemol.

On a similar note, I wonder what BT will use to deliver their video streams? It would be quite fitting if they used BitTorrent (BT – geddit?) really. Although, it looks like NTL are one step ahead on that one.

future of web apps summit

The future of the Web?

why buck a trend at a geek fest?
everyone else is blogging here, so here’s my quick notes to self:

C4 ditches interactive TV service

Channel 4 have ditched their clunky red button interactive TV service that supports some broadcasts like Big Brother. Some might be shocked by this but, if the truth be told, it makes sense. It’s a bold move that apparently flies in the face of interactive TV “progress” but look at the underlying factors and you’ll see it’s actually a very wise decision. The red button service that Channel 4 offered was only ever delivered over the sky platform, where the initial data associated with the interactive TV service had to be transmitted as part of the broadcast stream via satellite. Over satellite, this broadcast stream bandwidth is very limited and, as you’ve probably seen, results in a very slow interactive experience. Once the base interactive TV application had been loaded, additional data could be retrieved via a sluggish 28k modem. All in all a rather painful user experience. And, believe me, unless you are following a “template” like the i-Ad format (the red button feature for interactive TV adverts, which C4 are keeping) developing for the platform was an even more tedious process! In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the driving force behind Channel 4’s decision were their programme producers. When I left Endemol they were struggling to develop interactive TV applications – it simply did not fit into the way TV is produced. These applications require defining and rigorous testing, whereas TV production is a much more fluid process – with concepts potentially changing completely at the 11th hour. Besides, SMS voting is much easier to shoe-horn into a TV concept as a viable revenue stream.

So, step aside clunky satellite interactive TV and make room for TV delivered via a fast broadband connection. The real interactive TV experience is when you don’t even notice you are “interacting” – where viewing is no longer passive but your involvement (like choosing what to watch, whether live or achived) is very much part of the TV experience. Whether you call it internet TV, broadband TV, IPTV or Video On Demand, the underlying concepts are essentially the same. And Homechoice is already there.

As mentioned before I’m keen to see how the areas of TV content, broadband and search technologies eventually come together. I’m sure it won’t be a clean race.

ITV and BT rumours

Now then, I don’t like it when blogs just re-hash speculation but this one is just too big not to comment on. I’ve just heard on the grapevine that BT *might* be considering making a bid for ITV. Buying such an established UK content provider would certainly realign BT against competition from Homechoice, BSkyB and ntl in this emerging market.

With last week’s news that Sky will be using Microsoft’s Windows Media Center to deliver its forthcoming Sky By Broadband service and Google announcing a new video store, some interesting areas in technology and media are finally starting to come together. It looks like the big players are jostling for starting positions in the race to realise the much heralded interplay of TV content, broadband and search technologies in the UK.

So – who’s next?

Microsoft stumbles across Web 2.0

In the wake of Bill Gate’s media spin last week, Microsoft announces a “strategic shift”. The new services will be called Windows Live and Office Live, and Mr Gates said they were “a revolution in how we think about software”.

Hmm. Forgive me but haven’t we all been using applications “online and on demand” for a while now? To unashamedly use a meme that’s been bashed about for the last year or so – it’s all about this “Web 2.0” stuff, innit?

Web services like Flickr, Writely, inetWord and even MSExchange all offer feature rich applications as “online and on demand” software. And with broadband use becoming increasingly prolific, the thin-client model is now a feasible direction for certain applications. I can see that embedded advertising within these applications is a way to make money – particularly for the likes of Microsoft. But I guarantee the developer community will quickly find a way to outrun the displaying of these embedded adverts.

Either way – is this the beginning of the end for CD installed software? Maybe one day even our operating systems will be online…

Looking to the sky for the future of TV

Sky have apparently seen the light and are considering making a bid for Video Networks – the owners of Homechoice. They say they are not for sale and, of course, it is all rumours but I’d say it was inevitable that a big player such as Sky makes a move on these guys at some point. And what with Sky going on a bit of a spending spree right now, you know it makes sense. Sky certainly appear to be angling towards IPTV – having bought broadband provider EasyNet and a few specialist content providers in recent weeks. I’ve been ranting about Homechoice for a while now and think their technology is second to none. To me it’s true interactive TV – you don’t even notice it happening – the interactivity just happens as part of the viewing experience. Not like Sky’s slow and rather hotch-potch combo of a piddly modem and satellite data feed. Does this mean the technology might finally reach further than the 15,000 Londoners currently subscribing to Homechoice? At the moment the cost of installing digital exchanges required to provide the kind of IPTV you see with Homechoice is preventing its growth but perhaps Sky’s credibility and massive subscriber base will help prolificate the reach of this technology beyond the M25. And it might just keep BT’s move into IPTV at bay too. However, one of the reasons I like Homechoice (technology aside) is the simple fact it’s not Sky. I guess Homechoice is hardly a little guy either – with some heavyweight shareholders such as Microsoft’s Chris Larson, Time Warner, Sony and Disney – but it did feel as if Homechoice was one of the last great hopes in the fight against the Murdoch media empire.

chomsky – knowledge is power

i went to see noam chomsky talk on “Simple Truths, Hard Choices: Some Thoughts on Terror, Justice and Self-Defence” the other evening. hmm. not sure what i was expecting to hear. these sorts of issues seem to be at the forefront of peoples minds these days – with everybody bringing the subject up, whether over a beer in the pub or a picnic in the park. it’s all good and well to rant about how imbalanced power and wealth is in the world but it strikes me that a point is being missed when it becomes a “philosophical topic”. especially when that philosophising is held in the lecture halls of western universities, predominantly in the english language.

noam chomsky wouldn’t be there talking to the masses if it wasn’t for this power imbalance. we wouldn’t have been able to visit the lecture in such comfort if it wasn’t for this power imbalance. knowledge is power – and universities do well to share it with those who will recipricate the power favour by choosing english to communicate. oh look – i’m doing it myself 🙂

anyway – i left the lecture thinking that we can talk all we like saying “something must be done” but surely the consequences of such action would have to mean the west loses its grip on power and wealth in the world? maybe that would be a good thing but it would mean a very different daily reality for the people that are currently going about telling others how bad it all is.

Kill Bill verdict

just been to see kill bill and i have to say i liked it! with all the anticipation there has been surrounding the fruits of tarantino’s six year absence, it’s difficult to not become caught up in the preamble. i’ve being i’ve been hearing mixed reports and didn’t know what to expect – apart from lots of violence. yes – there’s violence – but it doesn’t quite hit you in the same way as that mr orange scene does in reservoir dogs. i was expecting to be scared and, to be honest, i’m not very good with scary movies – especially on a delicate sunday evening. but i was laughing all the way through! don’t expect any ground-breaking cinematics – just classic kung-fu hilarity, with ott blood and not a scary moment in sight (apart from the first scene, maybe). i loved the mixing of film styles – with live action blending into anime. the music went well with the mood of the scenes (was that ironside?), though i can’t see the soundtrack becoming a pulp fiction-esque classic. all in all – a stylish, bloody and trashy yet entertaining tribute to bruce lee/samurai movies and spaghetti westerns.