From YouTube blog, the first time they're sharing their "Most Watched" stats - here are the 5 most watched videos of 2009 across the world, most popular one first. If you've not seen any of them yet, enjoy!
Showing posts with label video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video. Show all posts
Friday, 18 December 2009
Friday, 15 May 2009
Convert videos to audio files / other video formats online, free
To convert your movie or audio etc files, a free online media file converter may be the easiest way as it works whether you have a Mac or Linux or indeed Windows - including if you just want to extract the audio sound file from a video on YouTube or another online video service - though if you don't have broadband then obviously it may be a bit slow.
(I've posted before on how to extract MP3 or other sound from video files but that involved only Windows-centric software, and the process can be a bit involved.)
Here are two free online media file conversion services I've tried and suggested to other people who've tried them too, so I know they work.
With both of them, you can enter a YouTube or other video service link to convert the video direct into MP3 or other file formats over the internet; or alternatively you can upload a file from your own computer for conversion and download the converted video, audio or other file.
Media Converter
Media Converter say they support audio formats like mp3, ogg, wav, wma (only decoding supported), and video file formats like 3g2, 3gp, avi, flv, m4v, mkv, mov, mp4, mpg, mpeg, psp (only encoding supported), rm, and wmv, though I've only tried the flv to MP3 conversion myself. (They also say they convert Office document files i.e. text / wordprocessing and presentation documents, spreadsheets etc: doc to odt or pdf, xls to ods or pdf, ppt to odp or pdf, odt to doc or pdf, ods to xls or pdf, odp to ppt or pdf).It's free only for file sizes up to 100MB, and you pay for the premium service for bigger files.
Media-Convert
Media Convert are more mobile orientated e.g. their "Send File to Mobile" tab enables upload of a file for download on a cellphone, and they have a dedicated mobile host for video or music files.
Supports a wider range of audio files (I won't list them all, see their list of supported file formats, but they include ringtones and .amr and 3gp files as used on mobile phones) and office file conversions (including html, Open Office files, Star Writer etc) - and also compressed or archived file formats like zip, rar, lzh, tar.
Will convert image files i.e. pictures, photos of different formats including gif, jpeg, png, with the ability to resize and compress them, and produce a screenshot of a webpage in your chosen file format (yes you could use your Print Screen key; but it just saves time with converting the resulting file). It even converts pdf to Flash swf.
It will also create a free webpage (with ads, not surprisingly) with a streaming version of the converted file, which you can link to - though I've found it a bit variable as to how well that works. If you want to download the converted file, do that before you try the webpage option, or else it'll vanish and you'll have to convert it all over again.
Up to 150MB size of files converted. Ad-funded. (600MB for their mobile video or music files.)
Personally, I generally prefer the latter as it provides more options (see pic above) in terms of both file conversions (e.g. it will convert PDF source files whereas the former only converts certain formats to PDFs) and ways of presenting the converted files. But as mentioned the webpage streaming option seems not always to work. They're free, so try them both and see which suits you better.Tags:
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
YouTube: deeplink to exact time in video, & other improvements
You can now link direct to a particular spot in a YouTube video, so that someone clicking the link will be taken to the video at that exact spot.
I think this deeplinking is the best of the many enhancements which Google-owned video sharing site YouTube have been rolling out recently.
How to deep link to YouTube video
To deep link to the exact spot you want in a YouTube video, while watching the video just note down the desired time position, and then include the time position at the end of the standard YouTube URL using the format:
#t=XmYs
where X is minutes and Y is seconds - e.g. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OzLeVGUDkvQ#t=0m21s will take you to the video linked to, but directly to the spot that's 0 minutes and 21 seconds in.
(Cleverly, it in fact seems to take you to the video at a second or two before your indicated time, so that you don't miss the start of the spot.)
How to deeplink to YouTube video in a video comment
This works in a comment to a YouTube video too, in fact it's easier - if when posting a comment on a YouTube video you mention a time location in your comment (in format m:s e.g. 0:21 for 0 minutes & 21 seconds in), then the "0:21" becomes a direct deep link to that time location in the video concerned.
So, the syntax for a clickable time position link in a video comment is just:
X:Y
See for example my test comment to the same video.
One gotcha to watch: do not include any punctuation or anything except a space right after the Y, or else it won't work; e.g. "0:21." won't be made into a deep link but "0:21" (without the quotes, of course) will.
Other YouTube improvements / enhancements
Some other interesting features on YouTube over the last few months (as well as a personalised customisable homepage) are:
- Video annotations - the ability to, as YouTube put it, "add background information on-screen, create branching ("choose your own adventure" style) stories or add links to any YouTube upload, channel, or search results page -- at any point in your video... adding speech bubbles, notes and highlight boxes anywhere you want". Including, now, even for embedded videos.
- Hot spots - the ability to get a graph showing at which points in your video readers are leaving (if at all), and which spots in the video are the most popular with your viewers.
- Captions / subtitles for videos - the ability to add captions and subtitles, now with real time automatic machine translation of captions too, into several languages.
- YouTube for free film distribution - with the ongoing "From Here to Awesome Festival".
- Click to buy feature - some may bemoan this commercialisation (or e-commerce-ialisation!) but let's face it, YouTube aren't a charity, they need to make money at some point somehow.
I actually like the idea of embedding Amazon / iTunes links to songs etc in some YouTube videos, as often I hear a good song in a movie or video soundtrack but have no idea what it's called or how to get it.
I can imagine "product placement" increasing in YouTube videos, with "click to buy" links for products shown in videos too, but as long as the product placement isn't too overt and isn't subliminal conditioning, again I'm quite happy to have the opportunity to buy something I like from a video - I sometimes covet certain jackets I see actresses wear on TV, for instance!
This sort of thing looks set to be a growth area, in my view - for TV, video and film generally, i.e. all things "celluloid", not just Web-based video. - Earn ad money from YouTube videos - the ability via Google's AdSense to get a cut of advertising revenue if you embed certain YouTube videos (some examples)/
Of course, the increasing efforts to monetize YouTube will inevitably bring up issues such as a copyright owner demanding all the ad revenue if you include their song in your YouTube video - but in my view, given the attitude of the music industry, that's progress compared with the record companies' former fave strategy of simply suing you or getting your video taken down!
(Note on YouTube blog links: but there's something weird about their site - if you're in the UK, the US link won't work, and doesn't forward properly to the equivalent UK site page. So I've included both links where possible; hopefully if one doesn't work for you t'other will!)
Video / audio wishlist
It would be great if YouTube enabled the deeplinking feature when you embed a video in a blog post or webpage too. I tried it, and adding (e.g.) #t=0m21s to the end of the URL in the embed code just didn't work, the video started from the very beginning. Maybe in the future?
While I'm on it, while YouTube now allow the upload of higher quality videos, I do which they'd let all users upload videos of more than 10 minutes long. They introduced that limit, they said, for copyright reasons (they seem to think most videos more than 10 minutes long are likely to be copyright infringing clips, I'm not sure I'd agree) - but as many of my videos are of (non-copyright breaching!) geek talks, I have to use Blip instead.
If Blip were to introduce the features YouTube have, particularly deeplinking, I'd use them even more!
Speech to text technologies for video and audio
Finally, my biggest wishlist item: automatic speech to text transcription. Google Research's speech team introduced an Elections Video Search gadget a few months ago, using their speech recognition technologies to enable searching of politicians' spoken content and jumping straight to the relevant part of the speech.
Google Labs then launched Google Audio Indexing (GAudi) (that page can take a while to come up), and recently Google rolled it out for their Google News Election page so that you could search Presidential candidates' YouTube channels for particular words.
I've always thought that one of the biggest issues with the increasing proliferation of video on the Internet, yes and audio too, from MP3 podcasts to YouTube and other videos, is the difficulty of indexing that information so that it can be searched and found. This problem is why including metadata helps both publishers and readers / viewers / listeners, from the viewpoint of searching etc (see 6 Sayings for Search Engine Success (Top Tips to Boost Blog Ranking), though arguably from an economics viewpoint adding metadata benefits the audience more than the publisher.
Given Google's avowed corporate mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", I really hope that working on speech to text for audio as well as video is a priority for them.
I'd love to be able to feed Google the URL of a sound file or a video file (any file, not just one on YouTube, and not just politicians' speeches), and have it automatically transcribe the audio or video into lovely, readable, skimmable, searchable text. And I really don't mind if they want to include contextual ads on the resulting webpage too.
I couldn't agree more with what one of my favourite columnists, Jonathan Guthrie of the Financial Times, said (in an article on corporate webcasts) about the big disadvantage of the video medium:
"It is slow. A webclip lasting a couple of minutes may contain just 200 spoken words. You can read 1,000 words of text in the same time... In the beginning of mass communications was the printed word. It will remain crucial until the end, too."
In my view, the audio and video media are both excellent for entertainment. But they are serial, sequential forms by their very nature. If your aim is to extract /analyse any useful information, it's too painfully slow to go through the audio or video of speeches etc, even with fast forward and rewind. Whereas a single page of text gives me lots of words, lots of information, at the same time. It's denser, but much quicker to scan, from an information retrieval viewpoint. And I'm too impatient to listen or watch through an "educational" podcast or video, most of the time - so give me text (with or without pictures) any day!
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Thursday, 29 May 2008
Extract MP3 or other sound from video files
How to extract just the sound track from a digital video file ("convert" a video file to MP3 etc?)?
There are two easy ways I know of for Windows users, involving free downloadable software:
AoA Audio Extractor
AoA say their extractor turns AVI, MPEG, MPG, FLV (Flash Video), DAT, WMV, ASF, MOV, MP4 and 3GP video files into MP3, WAV and AC3 audio file formats. I've only tried WMV to MP3 so far.
Clearly it's a demo for their paid-for software - they have an arsenal of programs to do stuff with videos and audio files, even DVDs.
It's self-explanatory. Click Add Files, navigate to the movie files you want to add, and select a batch, or just one file if you prefer. Click Browse at the bottom to choose where on your hard drive you want the converted audio to be saved. When you're ready, click Start and go have a cuppa.
Super
Super promises to extract the sound from the above video file formats plus a whole bunch more like FLI, FLC, M2T, MKV, NSV, OGG, QT, RAM, RM(VB), STR, SWF, TS, TRP, VIV and VOB.It claims to produce not just MP3, WAV and AC3 sound files but also AAC, AMR_NB (for ring tones), AMR_WB, MMF (for ring tones), MP2, MPC (MusePack), OGG and WMA, but I again haven't tried all the variations yet!
The software is free but you have to go through several pages of ads to get to the download link. I don't begrudge them that, and I do check out the ads there. I think it's only fair as the software is free. (I've blogged about Super before in my post on how to convert 3gp video from mobile phones and rotate the video 90 degrees - see that post for screenshot.)
Comparison
Both programs let you convert a whole batch of digital films at one go, rather than having to extract the soundtrack from each one laboriously one at a time. AoA even lets you select and convert to audio just an extract or clip from a video, rather than the full soundtrack.I tested the software when I converted the videos I shot at the London Girl Geek Dinner about search engine optimisation on 25 March 2008. I converted them to MP3 (hear the extracted audio on the same post), and both Super and AoA Audio Extractor did the job fine. I found that AoA was a little faster, and definitely more user friendly, while Super offers more choice of file formats it can convert to and from (see my tips on using Super - although written in a slightly different context, they should help as they still deal with file conversion).
You pays your money... or rather not, in this case, so why not try both out and see which suits you better.
Tip: before uploading the MP3s, I used the open source multi-platform audio editing tool Audacity to compress and normalise the audio files, which makes the speeches sound much clearer to the listener (I was recording with a digital video camera in quite a noisy pub environment).
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Thursday, 28 February 2008
DataPortability discussion video, London Geek Dinner 27 February 2008
Here's a video of the lively discussion on data portability at the London Geek Dinner of 27 February 2008, the main speakers being DataPortability WorkGroup members Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage and Paul Jones of Faraday Media, the company behind Particls - with lots of views on privacy, data protection, etc as well as technology. The event was organised by Cristiano Betta, thanks Cristiano! (UPDATE: embedded Flash version instead, much better, thanks again Cristiano)
Anyone who wants to can join the public DataPortability Action Groups - just sign up for those Google Groups and add yourself to the list.
Personally I think it's necessary to work on both policy and technology issues at the same time, as they have to inform each other. It's early days yet but lots of people seem to be coming on board, so let's hope the momentum is kept up and that there will be positive, concrete results soon from all this.
For those interested there's a previous video of Ian talking about data portability at BarCampLondon3 in November 2007 (more videos from BarCampLondon3) and this popular short video on dataportability.
For your diaries: the next London Geek Dinner will be on Thursday 13 March 2008, and will feature a speaker from the Participatory Culture Foundation, who will talk about internet TV/video application Miro.
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Friday, 22 February 2008
BarCampLondon3 video: the future of BarCamp?
My final video from BarCampLondon3 in November 2007... a thought-provoking discussion on how the organisation of BarCamps might evolve or develop, to ensure the longevity of the concept in the future.
Led by Ryan Alexander, Ian Forrester and others.
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Tuesday, 19 February 2008
BarCampLondon3 video: technology & our rights, aka "You did WHAT with my bits??"
The video below from BarCampLondon3 back in November 2007 is, at its broadest, about technology and your rights, with e.g. a fascinating story (on e-voting) which brings home just how scarily little government and others in power appear to understand technology or the internet, and yet they're making laws affecting our digital rights, they're trying to use technology in ways it shouldn't be used - despite the serious implications for security, privacy and democracy.
The session was led by Glyn Wintle of the (mainly UK) organisation Openrightsgroup.org (given my views e.g. my Copyfighter posts, it won't surprise you to know that I'm an ORG member, and indeed I joined when it was first formed).
More on the electronic voting example, where the ORG were e-voting election observers last year. It seemed the SNP had won no seats. On challenging the result, fortunately just before it was officially declared, it was found that votes for the SNP hadn't been counted - probably because the results had been entered onto an Excel spreadsheet, and the person responsible hadn't scrolled across horizontally enough to see all the parties' votes! See page 51-52 of the ORG's May 2007 Election Report (executive summary), which I'm surprised hasn't received more publicity.
Incidentally, on e-voting, it's interesting that as Bob Wyman reported German hacker group, the Chaos Computer Club, in January 2008 went to the courts to try to stop the use of electronic voting machines. They'd previously submitted an expert opinion to the German courts reporting serious defects in the voting computers. Why governments insist on ignoring technology experts, I don't know. Maybe because they don't really understand technology themselves, but won't believe that they don't. Which is where this post began...
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Sunday, 17 February 2008
Urban fox in London, in daylight!
So foxes are bold these days, but to pose for a video, in broad daylight, in a garden in the middle of London?
Why, they're getting as bad as dem Texas possums...
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Saturday, 9 February 2008
BarCampLondon3 video: open social networks & Noserub
This video from BarCampLondon3 in November 2007 is of a talk by Dirk Olbertz of noserub.com, an open source decentralised social networking protocol.
Have a look at the video below to find out more about Noserub.
There's been a lot of buzz about Google's OpenSocial (which MySpace are participating in), which was announced in November 2007, and about data portability - which all need to be considered together, in my view. It's too early perhaps to say how Noserub will fit into all this.
OpenSocial has certainly been developing apace (e.g. social gadgets) which isn't surprising with Google behind it. For those interested, the Open Social announcement video is below (more OpenSocial videos etc).
Open Social was announced at Google's CampFire One:
Although Open Social lets developers write an application once which can then be used on all supporting social networking sites, so it saves coders and programmers time and increases the potential marketability and adoption of their service, it does depend on sites to support it. That's why I'm much more excited about the possibilities of broader, more general open standards with data portability, which Google, Facebook and Plaxo have recently signed up to in joining the DataPortability workgroup.
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Sunday, 20 January 2008
BarCampLondon3 video: use Yahoo! Pipes to build your lifestream
As you'd expect from the title, this video from BarCampLondon3 in November 2007 is a quick practical run through by Cristiano Betta of how to use Yahoo! Pipes to build your "lifestream" - no, that's not "lifestream" in the sense of a cult religion, before you run away! (In fact Cristiano beat me to it in finding the video I'd uploaded before I'd had a chance to blog it).
Yahoo! Pipes lets non-programmers build mashups relatively easy, by drag & drop etc, of content from different web sources, as long as the source has a feed whether Atom, RSS or other XML (see my introduction to feeds - Pipes are obviously another great way of making use of feeds).
The official description of Pipes: "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant."
In this case, Cristiano grabbed feeds from blogs where he's a contributor, then filtered out the other posts to leave only his posts, then combined his posts with his feeds from other web services like Flickr, Delicious, Twitter and Upcoming - so he could display a single combo webpage with all his sources: his "lifestream".
Cristiano's blog also has his guide in step by step text format. It does need a few extra steps but I shall leave the Javascripting to experts like Kirk! I've been meaning to have a play with Pipes since it first came out, but it's one of my get a round tuit things...
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BarCampLondon3 video: self-publishing via Lyx & Lulu
This video of a BarCampLondon3 presentation in November 2007 may be of interest to writers, journalists and aspiring writers.
It's a guide to the art of self-publishing - how to publish and distribute your own (hard copy) book, or indeed thesis or dissertation, DIY, using various tools and services such as the open source Lyx word processor, GIMP for cover / illustrations, and self-publishing website Lulu. It's by Victoria Lamburn, who's published quite a few fiction books of her own.
There's a detailed overview of Lyx and its advantages - it's LaTex-based WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) and, in her view, produces better typography, control of fonts etc than Word or Writer - in terms of kerning, ligatures etc - basically how to get your book to look professional, presentationally, even if you're not a typesetting expert.
There are tips e.g. on the image you want to use for your cover, the benefits of submitting to Lulu in PDF format, and a short overview of Lulu and its options (such as privacy settings you control, with limited access only to your work; size of the book, etc), tips on submitting to Lulu including the importance of keywords (tags), and the potential of much better profit margins for the author than with conventional publishers. Different distributions are available e.g. through well known online booksellers like Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or you can choose to exclusively distribute and market it yourself, etc.
Lulu can also be used for distributing music via CDs and videos via DVDs. It does seem to really empower the creative in relation to controlling and setting your terms for distribution, pricing, etc - and seems a relatively economical way to get your work out there, too. To me, services like Lulu are one of the great developments have come out of the rise of the Internet.
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Thursday, 17 January 2008
Dataportability explained: short snazzy video
Coincidentally, soon after my last post with the video of Ian Forrester's presentation at BarCampLondon3 on data portability and Dataportability.org, I came across this brief "plain English" video by Michael Pick of SmashCut Media, which explains the benefits of data portability for non-techies: a PR promo video for Dataportability.org, if you like - though there's no writhing lithe ladeez or gentz, sorry to disappoint you, it doesn't try to take promo that far!
It's called "DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix" and you can view it below:
DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
Via Common Craft (whose own excellent explanatory video for non-geeks on RSS feeds I've previously recommended).
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Monday, 14 January 2008
BarCampLondon3 video: data portability
This video from BarCampLondon3 in November 2007 is of BarCampLondon organiser extraodinaire Ian Forrester, talking about the the dream and goal of data portability - standardisation of identity and other personal data and its exchange (and controlling its sharing and privacy), notably the laudable Dataportability.org initiative which seems to be increasingly gaining momentum, with lots of the great & the good of the Net already involved, such as Ian himself. To quote from their site:
"Philosophy As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.
Mission Mission To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community."
Of course, cautious paranoid that I am, a major point to my mind is total user control of privacy settings - it's my personal data, I'll only want to use a system that lets me control, easily but quite precisely, exactly which people or groups will be able to access exactly which information about me. Which is the opposite of Facebook -I'm now on it but I admit I don't like it and rarely visit, as Facebook make too much of your data too public by default, which is scary, and opting out is too hard. Both are deliberate, I'm convinced. They also they claim to be able to re-use, as much as they like, for whatever they like, it seems to me, all YOUR data that YOU put on their site. Although to be fair Google seem to claim much the same thing and there's a lot less fuss about that.
Anyway, back on track, I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about data portability in future, particularly with increasing convergence of Internet and mobile.
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Sunday, 13 January 2008
BarCampLondon3 video: from Web 2.0 to Mobile 2.0 - the transition
Another video from BarCampLondon3 held in November 2007, of a lively discussion whose title is self-explanatory, on how the mobile web might develop. Unfortunately I didn't get the name of the main speaker (I think he was German but there was a big contingent from Germany so that won't help narrow it down much!) - if anyone can tell me I'll update this post to add it. No slides were uploaded.
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Sunday, 7 October 2007
MobileCampLondon 2007 videos & a Girl Geek perspective on BarCamp
(photo by Futurescape)
Where could you find a Brad Pitt-lookalike and a 6'6" tall (here's why he's lucky) Latino guy who's into kinky women? Why, at mobileCampLondon 2007 last weekend, of course. Who says BarCamp isn't for girl geeks?
You'll have to view the presentation videos or photos to figure out who I might possibly have meant. I'll even offer a prize to the non-attendee who works it out by 23.59 on Sunday 21 October 2007 - attendees are disqualified, I'll pick duplicate winners out of a hat. Entries on a postcard (or SMS text!) please, or preferably via a comment on this blog entry...
But lest you think girl geeks are only interested in just one thing - the weekend wasn't just about hacking mobile apps, nope. The wide range of presentations included the open mobile comms platform OpenMoko, mobile text to speech via Otodio, social mobile networks, and even wearable technology where you can hug yourself to give a friend a hug (if you're both wearing "hug shirts" and carrying Bluetooth phones), and I got a few ideas about what Psion 5mx replacement with usable keyboard I might get, or should avoid.
Overview of Barcamp
So, what was BarCamp like? Barcamp involves the concept of "user-generated conferences" run according to certain loose "rules". It was my first BarCamp ever, fun and fascinating but exhausting. I volunteered to wield my newish camcorder, bought especially for geek events - partly because I thought I'd be less likely to be caught in front of a camera if I was behind it, as I blog anonymously, and partly because I was a scaredycat about presenting (see rule 8 of the rules of BarCamp), plus again I thought presenters were more likely to get photographed or videoed.As it turned out, no one went round saying "Aha! Newbie!" and forcing us to present at mousepoint (or even Powerpoint), so I needn't have worried on that score. Shame no one told me that people don't in fact stalk around BarCamp tying newbies to a chair in the middle of circling laptops and prodding them with laser pointers to make 'em talk.
The venue was a huge concrete-floored room provided by Fjord, in one of those tucked-away streets you'd never know existed till you had to find your way there, just off Carnaby Street in the heart of London. The room was huge in the floorspace rather than high-ceilinged sense, with a fun 3-walled bean bags area, but otherwise just partitions between different presenting and hacking spaces. Someone had come over all the way from Amsterdam to set up free wi-fi for the weekend.
The mobileCamp London event, organised by Victor Szilagyi, was sponsored by: and hosted by Fjord.
The idea with BarCamp is that, having signed up in advance on the Barcamp wiki, you turn up and sign in (and get your freebies from the sponsors!). There's a whiteboard with timeslots, and whoever wants to present just writes their topic and name against a slot (see pic above).
But hardly anyone had turned up at the scheduled registration time of 9 am except the poor volunteers who'd offered to help with registrations (hats off to Feren Calderwood and Nick Middleton!). The day was meant too kick off at 9.30 and I squeaked in at about 9.40 am, but in fact the first session didn't start till 10.30 am, no surprise there - sensibly no presenter had put their name down for any earlier slots. On day 2 I arrived at 10.30. I figured with free beer the previous evening I'd be one of the earlier ones. Amazingly, some had arrived for 10.
At the risk of making Tantek Çelik tsk tsk or even tut-tut, I have to report that, as you can guess, they didn't stick strictly to the rules of BarCamp - topics and names weren't written in presentation slots (a rule I really wish people had stuck to, and more), intro lengths were totally variable and definitely more than 3 words long, and presentation lengths didn't stop when they ran into another slot - the other slots just got moved to start later.
Cafetière coffee and small bottles of water were available all day, and even scones, thanks to the host and volunteers. But though coffee is a major food group for geeks, it did make for some hyperness especially as the room got quite cold, so if you wanted a hot drink you had to have a coffee. One of the presentations incidentally included a slide showing pics of webs woven by spiders who'd been fed marijuana, LSD, caffeine etc. Guess which webs were the worst? That's right - spiders on caffeine wove the most incoherent webs, they couldn't even manage more than a few random threads. Luckily, on the second day there was hot water and teabags, but I think my brain has only just about recovered from all that caffeine!
As a result of concentrating on videoing, I didn't get to chat with as many people as I'd have liked to, or (sob, wail, tearing of hair) play with as many prototypes - there was a 8GB Nokia N95 there, I heard. But still I managed to swap cards with some people, and even got a few LinkedIn invites after the event, which has prompted me to make a note to send out a few myself too.
What about the girls?
I was chatting with Sarah Blow (founder of the London Girl Geek Dinners and related blog), and we were both surprised and pleased that there were more geek girls there than we'd expected. But when "Ooooh, sooooooo many women!" means fewer than 10 out of the nearly 100 who signed up, that's still very telling about the IT industry. And at least 4 or 5 of the women there were from Fjord, the host, or from sponsors or speakers like Orange Partner and Cute Circuit. Hmmm, maybe girl geek attendance wasn't that good after all.At the 2nd anniversary Geek Girl dinner (see also Maz's Girlygeekdom post and videos), one issue discussed was how at tech conventions often men wouldn't talk to the women until they had proved their technology credentials. Ironically, this story from last weekend proves the point (names withheld to protect the guilty and innocent!). A geek girl was talking to a guy at MobileCamp about precisely this subject, i.e. the way that the guys at that event were totally ignoring the girls, when 2 guys sat down opposite her, right next to the man she was chatting with. She said "Hi" to them, but they totally blanked her. She had to prove herself to be worthy of their time before they would even say a word to her: they listened in to about 20 minutes of her conversation with the guy she was talking to, before saying anything to either of them.
It is very disappointing that in this day and age that kind of attitude towards women still exists in such abundance in the technology industry. May I point out the following women who made great advances in technology that fundamentally affected computing/communications - and I'm just naming one per century, there are more:
- 19th century - Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron) - who documented Charles Babbage's analytical engine, widely thought of as the first computer, and added notes which Babbage himself acknowledged corrected his mistake, with a specification recognised by historians as being the first computer program
- 20th century - Hedy Lamarr - who co-invented a system of frequency hopping on which modern spread spectrum broadcast communications technologies are based, including wifi wireless networking and CDMA mobile telephony, and who was honoured by the EFF
- 21st century - Wang Xiaoyun (home page) - who, with her team (including Yiqun Lisa Yin, another female scientist) cracked the two hash functions most widely used: at the end of 2004 SHA-1, an algorithm invent by the US National Security Agency and described by New Scientist as "the gold standard security algorithm that underpins online transactions" - it's used in digital signatures and other internet encryption protocols such as SSL, SSH and also PGP - and before that, she broke MD5. While it will still take a lot of computing power and a lot of time for this attack to succeed in practice, the fact is that she cracked it, and the search for a more secure successor is on.
Anyway, back to mobileCamp, I will say that the girl geek in that story wasn't me. But then if I really want to talk to someone I usually just go up and corner them where they can't get away, as I'm used to most people not coming up to talk to me - and that includes women, so I think it's more than just my gender which puts them off approaching me. Maybe it's the 666 tattooed on my forehead. Go figure.
Moving on, here's a different story, which might show how males and females approach tech quite differently - or might not! Being a keyboard fan, my fave gadget is my Psion 5mx for productivity and play on the move, and I'm still looking for my dream gadget to replace it, oh arrrr, nothing can beat the good ol' gadgets we had in my time, arrrr. I bugged the Nokia boys and others about why phone handset manufacturers don't build a phone with an "in between" form factor - bigger than the teeny-keyed Blackberry or Nokia N95 (or even E90 - just a tad bigger than an E90, please!), but smaller and lighter than a UMPC - i.e. exactly like the Psion 5mx, especially the patented sliding keyboard which you can touch type on, combined with mobile phone and updated with colour screen, wi fi, etc.
The guys all thought there was no market for it, perhaps being in beefy bloke "Yeah me macho me can lug heavy laptop round a-l-l day, real men laugh at lower back trouble, hahahahaha! owww" mode. However the women, who presumably have smaller fingers which can touch type on a Psion-sized keyboard, and who generally are less keen on bulky heavy laptops, all liked the idea. So there's a gap in the market there to flog small laptops-cum-mobiles to business women (and teenagers, and the like) who care about their backs, which some canny mobile handset manufacturer could exploit - just as there's a gap for credit card companies to exploit for online sales if just one company only bothered to.
Aside on public conveniences (there is a geek and a girl angle, honest!)
The loos were unisex, which was very egalitarian. No open urinals, thankfully for all concerned, I think that would have been taking the concept of "open" too far! - but one set of toilet cubicles for all, each with doors (again, thankfully).I have to say that while I'm all for equal rights and equal treatment, personally I'm not in favour of unisex loos, for practical reasons of hygiene shall we discreetly say (tactful translation: many men make more mess), rather than because guys are always forgetting to put the toilet seat down, never mind game theory or modelling or statistical analyses!
While I'm on this digression: yes, I prefer segregated WCs or at least segregated designated cubicles, but there are never enough loos for women, in the sense of absolute numbers of them. For true equality in terms of usage time and throughput of the same numbers of people, there should in fact be more cubicles for women than men, and it's even an architectural / building design point that there should be twice as many toilets for women than men - but that rarely seems to be the case, in the UK at least. But then we're probably architecturally behind anyway, pun intended.
Now, finally, to the geek point. The Fjord loos marked my first encounter ever with the Dyson Airblade hand dryer, and believe it or not people were talking about them (of course you'd believe it, this is a gaggle of geeks we're talking about here!). Here's proof, and it's probably telling about me that the only photo I took at the whole event was of this gizmo:
As you can tell, the gadget freak in me really liked the Airblade. (I hate Dyson's customer service though. They let their generally well-designed hi tech products down by having a crappy customer service department - see, there's still a vague toilet connection here. After the only time I've been forced to deal with Dyson's customer disservice team, I've refused to buy any Dyson products ever again. I'll use 'em elsewhere, e.g. the Airblade at Fjord, but I won't let Dyson have any more of my own hard-earned money. As regular readers will know, I have a big bugbear about bad customer service. I've boycotted other companies before but relented when they apologised and made up for it - Dyson were so awful, even worse than BT and that's saying something, that I don't feel like ever giving them another chance. /digression.)
The videos
Right, back on topic. I managed to video quite a few of the presentations, and for one I missed I nabbed the presenter for a video interview/demo.For reasons of download speed and targeting I've published a separate post per video, except for the introduction. Where I've had thoughts to add on a particular presentation, I've done so in the post for the video. Here's the list:
- Welcome and intro to mobileCamp London 2007 (8:20):
- Nokia Series 60 - how to develop web widgets for Nokia s60 cellphones - very handy for developers
- Nokia Series 60 geo-location technologies - again mainly for hackers, a bit less so than the previous session
- Mobile social networks - how should or might they progress?
- OpenMoko video interview / presentation and demo of Neo1973 handset - very interesting presentation and demos of the world's first open source handset, based on Linux
- State, and why sync is dumb - mobiles and other portable electronic devices should remember "state", e.g. the point in the song you were playing, but don't...
- Mobile data & the networks: the good, the bad & the ugly - essential viewing for mobile developers, in my view, on how the UK mobile networks handle mobile data, charging etc
- Personal audio information - Otodio's text to speech technology for mobile
- Wearable technologies and CuteCircuit products, imminent & not so imminent, including the "hug shirt" that you pair with your Bluetooth mobile!
- Mobile hack challenge presentations, demos and results - congrats to the winners, some fab ideas there.
- One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO-1 demo - someone from OpenedHand had brought one along. Cute, most people wanted to run away with it including the guys!
Imp's Laws of BarCamp
Finally, here's Improbulus's 8 laws of mobileCamp - partly a tongue in cheek variation on the 8 rules of BarCamp, maybe, but I do mean these seriously for organisers and presenters!:- Start time - be kind to geeks. Never, ever expect geeks to turn up to anything for earlier than 10 or 11 am! Especially at the weekend.
- Name tags or badges. Yeah name badges are a bit corporate, but given that BarCamp often has corporate sponsors that's not a reason not to have them. They really help, to track down people you want to stalk talk to (or avoid). However, as a minority request, I'd like one that also says "No photos" so that people know who there doesn't want to be photographed or videoed - I know BarCamp is meant to be open, but I have my limits!
- Clear info about your presentation on the whiteboard (Imp's mod to rule 3 of the Rules of BarCamp, BY-NC-SA of course) - please don't just put down the name of your company, product or service and expect everyone to instantly recognise it or have the time to search for info about it before your presentation starts (you notice I dutifully avoided the G-word as a verb, I think it's a losing battle for Google, m'self). Please also add a clearly-written summary on the whiteboard of what that product or service is about. That's why I didn't go to some presentations I'd otherwise have been interested in, because I had no clue from the name what it was about - e.g. "Blinks and Buttons" meant nothing to me, and the title of the 6-key keyboard session (which I'd have wanted to see) looked like "Tiki 6 days" and I swear the "6 days" wasn't even there when I first looked at the board! Whereas I went to Mobile data & the networks because there was a clear description on the whiteboard of what it was about.
- To presenters - be kind to the audience. Even if you're using slides and you're talking about a particular slide, please remember to direct your mouth towards the audience, not at the screen. They'd quite like to see both the screen and your face, not the back of your head. Having mics is good, thank you host/sponsors, but dear speakers, please use the microphone properly - it's received mike geekery wisdom that, although most people don't realise this, you have to hold it very close to your mouth for it to pick up your voice: half an inch can make all the difference (as the actress said to the bishop). And please give your name & affiliation clearly at the start, and, if you wish, contact details at the end. And during the discussion phase, please repeat the question clearly into the mic for the benefit of those of us who weren't sitting near enough mumbled questions to hear them.
- Facilities. Of course, free wi fi is de rigeur. And not only lots of projectors for presenters' slides, and mikes for presenters with speakers, but also tons of power points and extension leads for people to plug their laptops into, please. There were quite a few, but still not enough mains adaptors for everyone. It was interesting that Sarah and I had both thought to bring extra adaptors (that's girl geeks for you - foresight, logic and preparation!), and others (mostly guys, ahem) predictably duly inserted their plugs into our spare sockets. Another wishlist item - roving mics for questions, sometimes you couldn't hear the discussion properly. And heating for cold rooms...
- Nutrients. Not just lots of water and coffee on tap, but also tea please (preferably Earl Grey, but of course). And soft drinks too. Even for the free beer at the end of the day, don't forget there may be some people who can't take alcohol for health, driving or religious reasons, a major bugbear of mine e.g. at the Minibars. Last weekend scored high on this front, especially on the 2nd day when there was tea.
- Freebies. Not essential, but nice, thanks you sponsors! However, should you decide to hand out free gifts, please don't forget that if you're providing T-shirts or sweatshirts there may be female geeks there too. Last weekend there were (miracle of miracles!) a few T-shirts in size "S", but supplies of those ran out far too soon. I've moaned about this (with photos!) before.
- To participants. It seems a good idea always to bring business cards or cards with personal contact details, for networking. I generally remember people better if they've given me one, maybe the card helps act as a mnemonic. Interestingly for a geek event, the only person who offered to Bluetooth me a business card was Feren Calderwood - female! Maybe other geeks (ahem) think it's too time-consuming to whip up a Bluetooth e-card..? Finally, do make the effort to talk to at least one girl geek, if only to see whether you might be able to get your widgets into her honeypot. Wail, no one's tried to get into my honeypot for months now, I think I may as well give up...
For lots more, see the official mobileCampLondon blog, and photos tagged mobileCampLondon on Flickr.
And remember, if you want to enter my compo (very cheap prize promised as I'm very cheap!), the deadline is 23.59 London time on 21 October 2007.
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