"The Scheme", the film we made for the 48 hour film challenge, is being screened at the Curzon Soho in London on Oct. 15 in the 6:30 - 8:30pm session on screen three. The full programme has it listed as "Michaelas Mob Entry" (16th out of 20 films to be shown in the session *gulp*).
Playing at the Moving Sounds Club as part of a Swedish festival on Oct 11th. Göteborg Art Sounds Festival 2003 It's the first time I've been given a stack of new material and asked to do a live mix. I hope this continues. That's where the fun is. Looking forward to my first touch of Scandanavia.
I'm trialling this online business community site Ecademy as a marketing tool. I'm pretty impressed so far. Its the slickest community framework I've seen for a while, totally syndication friendly, rich linking, and I got meetings set up just by doing some browsing - someone writes to say "thanks for looking at my profile" Not sure how they were notified (in my continuing search for a life) but the site is full of real-time updates and alerts of all descriptions.
I'm sure most of you have seen a six-degrees-of-separation web site before but I hadn't seen one focused on business marketing this good before. I'm thinking that this could be a good way of kick-starting a more formal global trust network for US.
How about it? The more people we trust already who are trialling it out at the same time will a) result in a better quality trial for us and b) will skew the focus of the site towards whatever it is that we do. Netstuff innit?
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is in two minds about including open and collaborative development models (including discussion of open source software) in its discussions. According to this Electronic Frontier Foundation email/fax campaign, the US Patent Office is discouraging debate on this issue.
200309120606 William Gibson says he's going to stop blogging and is going back to his novel. Yay! I know what format I prefer his words in.
The Open Money project is an experiment in community currency. The idea is to implement an "open money system" that provides a social mechanism for replacing the negative connotations associated with debt. One of those ideas which sounds interesting, (meritocracy applied to finance?) but how it could work in practice is not so clear. An RSS feed is available.
Today is the last chance to give feedback to the London Cultural capital survey run by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingston.
Internetnews.com poses the question - Is RSS an answer to the global spam crisis?.
"E-mail is dead, period," declares Chris Pirillo, the Internet entrepreneur who distributes about 400,000 e-mail newsletters weekly. "I don't care what kind of legislation goes through, people aren't signing up for newsletters anymore. People are assuming that every e-mail publisher is a spammer."
I agree but it is going to take a few more rounds of chaos before this opinion takes off. I like my information raw but that certainly isn't to everyone's taste. Opposition to XML content feeds comes from publishers worried about how their precious brands are propagated. Why rely on business agreements when you can have a set of technology handcuffs in place. But look where we are. "User friendly" net space is a quagmire of spam, viruses, walled gardens and proprietary coded fiefdoms. There are no XML Schemas for spin, marketspeak and vapourware so how on earth could you conceive of stripping back your jumble to its erm... logical structure. XML is logical to us techies but it's way too easy to publish glossy gunk. If the odd trojan horse slips into the packaging, well... so be it. For now.
Ultimately the audience has to want RSS and its children and understand the benefits. Every new viral outbreak increases the likelihood of that happening.
Services don't have to be infected in order to be labelled as virus carriers. Witness the recent outbreaks of W32.Sobig.f. The virus happily spoofs email addresses it finds on the infected machine. It took me a while to realise what was going on as emails started to come in saying "An email from your address contained a virus". In actual fact, none of my systems were infected. It was someone else's problem technically. It still affects your credibility.
RSS is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to online content syndication. New XML formats are inevitable but the power of RSS isn't the structure, it's the paradigm. Critics who dismiss "Really Simple Syndication", because it was never designed to handle much beyond headline and teaser content feeds, miss the point. The relationship between publisher and audience is far more interesting than the technical specification. Anything that empowers an audience is exciting. Especially when its aligned with the technical architecture of the medium itself. All good stuff. A slow burner.
Don't expect to read much about this on Reuters or Bloomberg. To quote a Reuters spokesperson last year "The Semantic Web is a flawed concept". Why? Reduced marketshare in a world where the average Jo can construct a bespoke information feed from free resources.