Category Archives: General

Near Futurism

Blessed with the gift-curse of seeing ~24h into the future, I spend it on bad TV. Monday Nov 17th 2014 (IRC): 10:06 danbri: I’ve figured out what the world needs – a new modern WestWorld sequel. 10:06 libby: why does the world need that? 10:06 danbri: just that it was a great film and it […]

OpenStreetMap for disaster response – raw notes from Harry Wood talk

Very raw, sometimes verbatim but doubtless flawed notes from Harry Wood‘s excellent talk at Open Data Institute in London. #odifridays Many thanks to Harry for a great talk and to ODI for putting together these lunchtime lectures. The ODI have also published slides and audio from the talk. “An introduction to OpenStreetMap, the UK born […]

XMPP untethered – serverless messaging in the core?

In the XMPP session at last february’s FOSDEM I gave a brief demo of some NoTube work on how TV-style remote controls might look with XMPP providing their communication link. For the TV part, I showed Boxee, with a tiny Python script exposing some of its localhost HTTP API to the wider network via XMPP. […]

‘Republic of Letters’ in R / Custom Widgets for Second Screen TV navigation trails

As ever, I write one post that perhaps should’ve been two. This is about the use and linking of datasets that aid ‘second screen’ (smartphone, tablet) TV remotes, and it takes as a quick example a navigation widget and underlying dataset that show us how we might expect to navigate TV archives, in some future […]

Lonclass and RDF

Lonclass is one of the BBC’s in-house classification systems – the “London classification”. I’ve had the privilege of investigating lonclass within the NoTube project. It’s not currently public, but much of what I say here is also applicable to the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system upon which it was based. UDC is also not fully […]

Archive.org TV metadata howto

The  following is composed from answers kindly supplied by Hank Bromley, Karen Coyle, George Oates, and Alexis Rossi from the archive.org team. I have mixed together various helpful replies and retro-fitted them to a howto/faq style summary. I asked about APIs and data access for descriptions of the many and varied videos in Archive.org. This guide should […]

Local Video for Local People

OK it’s all Google stuff, but still good to see. Go to Google Maps, My Maps, to find ‘Videos from YouTube’ listed. Here’s where I used to live (Bristol UK) and where I live now (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Here’s a promo film of some nearby art installations from ArtZuid, who even have a page in […]

NoTube scenario: Facebooks groups and TV recommendation

Short version: If the Web knows I like a TV show, why can’t my TV be more useful? So I have just joined a Facebook group, “Spaced Appreciation Society“: Basic Info Type: Common Interest – Pets & Animals Description: If you’ve ever watched (and therefore loved) the TV series Spaced, then come and pay homage […]

YouTube/Viacom privacy followup (and what Google should do)

A brief update on the YouTube/Viacom privacy disaster. From Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post: Yesterday, lawyers for Google said they would not appeal the ruling. They sent Viacom a letter requesting that the company allow YouTube to redact user names and IP addresses from the data. “We are pleased the court put some limits […]