All posts by Lloyd

Living about 1000km, a couple of lifetimes, and several cultures from where I grew up.
Podcasts

The podwalker returns

The Great Court

OK, this was recorded on 20th February just after podwalk 6 but it’s been sitting “in the can” since then as I’ve been doing all sorts of other things.

You can hear me walk and talk my way from the Great Court of the British Museum over to Kingsway, down High Holborn, over Holborn viaduct into the City, along Newgate St and down Cheapside to the Bank of England – where I disappear underground. There was more, but it got boring underground (I think I was tired). By the way, this was the first time I used my Sony MZ-NH700 Hi-MD player/recorder and while I wasn’t too thrilled about it at this stage it has really come into it’s own with longer recordings – the tests I talk about in this cast were too short to show the benefit, I’m a happy user now (now if Sony could do something to speed up the transfer and conversion process, I would be a super happy bunny). Oh yeah, and I’m sorry about the intro and the lack of pics (there are 3 on flickr with the tag podwalk007).

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What I've Been Doing

Great wi-fi, cool music, hot coffee in London’s West End

rays

Just a quick plug for the Cafe in Ray’s Jazz Shop within Foyles in the Charing Cross Road.

Excellent coffee, great atmosphere, really cool music and a guy behind the bar who doesn’t really mind having his picture taken, I’m sure.

Plus free wifi for customers – way to go Ray! (contrast with Borders over the road who have a money-grubbing Starbucks wifi place on their first floor)

[Update] Well the guy didn’t say anything, but the woman (in black behind him) wasn’t too keen on me taking her photograph and popping it on my weblog without asking her permission – so I apologised, I forgot that I wasn’t really in a public place – another lesson in online living learned.

What I've Been Doing

Oh yes it is….or is it?

4 Comments

I just posted a comment on one of the threads around the Google Autolink debate, thusly:

“Is there another way of looking at this? It seems to me that the debate has only been framed so far in either…or terms, ie of the web either being read/writeable or read-only whereas actually it’s been both for some time. Some bits are information served up that could be enriched in any number of ways. Some bits need to be kept sacred. Some bits need to keep the original intact while comments and modifications can be added in an explicit way.

Would it be too complicated for those people who are happy for their content to be ripped, mixed and burned to insert some sort of flag or licence (heard this before somewhere?) in their html that allows for that and for those who wish to only have their stuff read and perhaps re-presented in an aggregator to have a different kind of licence?

Then if I get really pissed off with Dave ‘cos his content doesn’t get “enriched” in the way I like it, I can raise it with him, and he can ignore me if he wants to or change if he wants to – isn’t that a more grown up conversation than “This is evil!”, “Oh, no it’s not!”, “Oh yes it is!”…. ”

My gut is with Dave and Scoble on this, but I have this nagging feeling that saying “Autolinks is bad for the web” sounds too much like “P2P is bad for the recording industry”

What I've Seen

Be alert… your country needs lerts

I feel much safer now

I’ve been using these inkernets for more than ten years now, so perhaps I’m a bit jaded and not in the target audience, but I can’t actually see anything of use in the UK Government’s launch of ITsafe.

  • It looks like someone’s GCSE coursework project
  • It has very little information – None of its publications have been launched yet – certainly nothing here to make me say “Wow, I must sign up for their alerts”
  • The information it does have is presented in interlinked mini-chunks which means that you lose interest before you’ve learned anything
  • It has that trippy picture of Hazel Blears (why is her desk outside?)
  • It has no RSS feed – you have to give them information about yourself to get their updates (like that’s so tempting)
  • It has those stupid made up FAQs – did anybody outside of your press office/web team think these up?

    I do think there’s an important point here that Government has still not realised that authority is not its right in this space. Authority comes from having something interesting and useful to say, not from being able to legitimately use a crown as your logo.

    And the presentation is so naff that it undermines the central aim, which is surely to build trust. This site says “We don’t know what we’re doing, but hey you will trust us anyway ‘cos we’re the government” Another pointless bit of public spending.

    F-


    • Podcasts

    Podwalk 006

    Right, no pictures, no music, just more sound of some nutcase, wandering around London on a Sunday afternoon.

    Starting in Piccadilly outside the RA, I walk through Piccadilly Circus, up through Soho, along Oxford Street, across Tottenham Court Road and along to the British Museum.

    Podcasts

    And now….

    2 Comments

    for something completely different. I have some more podwalk material in the can, but it needs chopping up into digestible bits and there aren’t any pictures grrrr….

    So for a Sunday evening chortle see what you think of this.

    What I've Seen

    The Stanford Law Professor and first post suck syndrome

    Lessig is podcasting … in his own way. He reads aloud from his latest published work in Wired – a good piece on public funding of wi-fi – but the fact that he’s “just” reading it gets a lot more comment than the content of what he says.

    He does explain up front, on his blog, that it’s an experiment. I hope the feedback doesn’t put him off trying something more adventurous. I’d love to hear him thinking aloud. Dave has shown (though other examples are rare) that one can still deliver a well-structured thoughtful argument in this medium and I think that this is way more powerful than something that was “finished” before it was started.

    Podcasts

    Podwalk 005

    2 Comments

    A shorter one this week, with not so much walking. Well plenty of walking, but within a small area. Podwalk 005 starts with a busker at Bond St tube station before heading off to Speakers Corner in Hyde Park on Sunday 13th February.

    I didn’t have my camera with me so there are only a couple of crappy shots from my phone on flickr, but the material (when you can hear it over the wind) is so good, that I’m going to try this location again but armed with better equipment.

    Enjoy, leave comments, e-mail me or leave audio comments at lloyd dot davis at gmail dot com.