More on the Demise of Teletext

Teletext's History on Dipity.

The Cutting Room Experiment

Jon and Ben from Cahoona have made their Social Media Cafe presentation available...

Cutting Room Experiment #smc_mcr

View more presentations from cahoona.

New Adventures in Eye-Fi

@technicalfault and @paulie asked what my experiences with an Eye-Fi card were and I had more than 140 characters on the subject so here goes.

I bought a 2gb Eye-Fi Explore SD Card from eBay a few weeks ago. It arrived in a sealed pack sitting inside its own USB connector. When I plugged it into the PC it was instantly recognised, but when it fired up the browser to connect me to eyefi.com to register and configure the settings it told me that it had a known fault and it was impossible to register, configure or otherwise use. Doh!

However, the site captured my name and address and committed to send a replacement f.o.c. within a few days from the States. This replacement duly arrived and I was able to register it straight away and configure it.

(Config is about telling it your router's WEP key, setting up a directory to dump pictures into when it's near youe network and giving it your Flickr (or similar) login details should you wish it to automatically post stuff there. You can also input your Twitter details so that it sends you a DM to let you know when it's started uploading photos and when it's finished.)

If you don't want it to automatically send all you pictures to Flickr you can configure it only to upload photographs that you have "protected" in your camera's settings.

Once you're configured, you just need to set your camera so that it doesn't automatically switch itself off after a couple of minutes and, provided you're within range of your network it starts uploading your pictures.

In theory, provided your camera is on, it should start uploading pictures whenever you're in range of an open wifi network but I've never experienced this and remain to be convinced.

Anyhow, the Eye-Fi card works fine in my little Fuji Finepix Z20fd. However, I was also hoping to use it in my old trusty Canon EOS 300D, which actually takes Compact Flash cards. So when I bought my Eye-Fi card I also bought a converter so that I could slide an SD (or SDHC) card into a CF shaped adaptor and use it in my Canon. The good news is that the adaptor works, in that I can take photographs and they are saved on the SD card. However, the automatic upload functionality of the Eye-Fi card don't seem to work whilst it's in the Canon even if I set it so that it doesn't switch off automatically and where I opt to 'protect' selected frames.

A point to be aware of is that it does takes a long time to transfer the photographs from my Fuji, so if you take a lot of photographs like me do opt for the 'protect' option and be selective about which ones you want to upload in this way. Either way, it's a real battery drainer. I always carry two spare batteries with me along with the one in the camera and I've sat and watched it drain all three and still not be finished uploading.

Given that I've not really seen it work on an open wifi network, I'm only using it at home and, frankly, it's quicker, cheaper and greener to take the card out of the camera, bang it into the PC and whizz all the pics across in seconds/minutes than go through all of this palaver. It would be useful if I could set it up to recognise networks at friends', family, the office etc, but to configure this I'd need to input all the individual WEP keys and, as the config is done on the laptop, I'd need to trail it round to everywhere to set it up before I ever might want to upload from the camera 'in real life'.

So on balance, I like the Eye-Fi card in principle but they're expensive (£80ish) , faffy and, given that SD cards are pretty cheap, I don't think they currently offer huge convenience or represent value for money (but I'd love other's views - @spooons?).

Furthermore, chatting to @documentally about them, he tells me that a friend of his had some problems with one breaking inside his camera... the plastic does seem a tad more brittle than a conventional SD card... so if you're going to have a dabble... take care.

SMC at the BBC

Last night saw Manchester's Social Media Cafe take another step forward as it tried out another new venue thanks to Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) who'd arranged for the event to take place in the bar of BBC Broadcasting House on Oxford Road.

The venue enabled the parallel sessions from Joelly Black (@thecharmquark), Dan Donald(@hereinthehive), Ben and Jon from Cahoona (@ben_cahoona, @jonthebeef) to take place in clearly defined areas so that attendees could easily settle into the session of their choice or, like me, take a tour around all three.

Each session was well attended and opened up into broad ranging discussions immediately afterwards. This bit is always the best part - it's encouraging for the speakers and it also keeps the subject matter open-ended and free-flowing.

Speaking of free-flowing, the subsidised bar was busy all night and as the sessions wound up, the emphasis reverted to the S of SMC for a little while whilst preparations got under way for the next stage of evening.

Maria (@marialittlestar)from Littlestar had co-ordinated the production of #thejoyofceefax - a short film "crowdsourced" from Twitter-based conversations, through filming by individual contributors right through to its premiere at the Social Media Cafe. Before, the attendees could settle down to watch it though, we made time for a game of Ceefax Bingo as prepared by Dave Mee (@davemee). The crowd were issued with bingo cards each featuring 'random' page numbers selected from the Ceefax, Teletext and FourText archives.

With thousands of numbers to go at, it took a while for anyone to get a line, although Chi-chi Ekweazor ( @realfreshtv) did put in a fraudulent claim at one stage (see the video evidence below). Eventually the highly sought after Ceefax buns, which were put up as prizes, were shared by two eager winners.

So it was onto #thejoyofceefax film at last... a lighthearted look at people's memories of soon-to-be-no-more analogue teletext. @innovationmcr suggested that it would convert easily into an episode of Creature Comforts from Ardman Animations and I know what they mean. As it is, it's a neat little artefact in itself and I'm pleased to have contributed. I hope to share it here when @marialittlestar puts it up onto YouTube later on.

In the meantime, enjoy some photographs and video of last night's event.

[By the way, I bumped into that Rufus Wainwright on the steps of Broadcasting House. He asked me where everyone was heading, so I told him #smc_mcr. He was keen, but I informed him that his name wasn't on the list. Next time, eh? Use the wiki like everyone else mate. ;) ]

Integrating Agile

Met some great people at yesterday's Integrating Agile conference at Hoofddorp in the Netherlands. Organised by the Agile Consortium Benelux, the event featured a number of high-profile speakers and attracted Agile afficionados and those keen to learn from across Europe.

I encouraged the conference team to promote the use of the #iagile hashtag to enable delegates to discuss the event in real time using Twitter, and to share their thoughts with colleagues back in the office and around the world and beyond the Claus Conference Center (great venue btw!).

I can't beat Sander Nagtegaal's (Twitter @centrical) excellent summary of the event so please go to his blog to read it. Many others were tweeting so search #iagile to pick up some useful comments and links.

In the meantime, I managed to grab some photographs, audio and video from the event, so please enjoy and share as appropriate.

Here's the Flickr stream:




Here's an interesting Audioboo interview with Keynote speaker Rob Thomsett (btw within minutes of tweeting the link to this AudioBoo, Mark Rock (Twitter @markrock) - AudioBoo big cheese - commented that their own funky iPhone mini-podcasting software is the product of an Agile house - w00t!:




Here's a mix of videos from attendees and speakers. Look out for Rob Thomsett's take on Integrating Agile, plus Pete Measey on the event's introduction of CHANGE - the International Association for Business Agility. This exciting new venture is aimed at reinforcing a genuine understanding is what Agile is about in the business world... taking it way beyond its software development roots.

Integrating Agile

Just getting under way is the Integrating Agile conference. I'm here to participate, listen, learn, understand and interpret, but also to introduce an element of social media to the proceedings. No Qiking, but participants will be encouraged to tweet about the proceeeding using the #iagile hashtag. I'll also be using my trusty Kodak Zi6 for capturing quick interviews with some of the attendees and speakers. They'll be tagged in the same way.

Here goes looking forward to it.

Fear Of A Green Planet

434 comments and counting for Bjorn Lomborg's Guardian piece from Monday on the downside of instilling eco-fear in children.

How Organisations Must Adapt to Social Computing

I picked this up from a tweet posted by @leebryant... a useful slidepack created by @oamprimo and worth a read:

The Adaptation of Organisations to a Knowledge Economy and the Contribution of Social Computing

PhoneBoo... It's For You...

Those of you without iPhones may have yet to discover the joy of AudioBoo - essentially they are mini-podcasts, recordable and quickly uploadable in great quality via the iPhone. Like an audio version of Twitter, these mini-recordings are ideal for observations or even mini-interviews and are increasingly being used by bloggers, journalists and regular-social-media-joes.

Now, anyone with a phone can join in using PhoneBoo. This service enables you to quickly register your phone number with the service and, if you already have an account, link it to your existing AudioBoo stream (Here's mine). From there on in recording AudioBoos is simply a case of a quick phone call and, within seconds it's live on the AudioBoo site and you've Tweeted a link to it to all of your Twitter followers.

This is me attempting to use PhoneBoo and, in this case, stuffing it up by forgetting to Press 1 after pressing the # key to put it live. Doh! (Eventually, I did get it right... audio quality not bad in the end... have a listen.)

People who follow you on AudioBoo can also pick this up via iTunes by subscribing to your stream as a podcast. Sweet. I'm already looking forward to VideoBoo on the new iPhone... it's already available for the Mac...see a useful heads-up on the Mac version from David Wilcox's Social Reporter blog from last year and actually made using Qik:

Bing arrives, Google Waves.

In the same week that Microsoft has beta-launched its own Google rival, known as 'Bing' - officially described as a 'decision engine' as opposed to a 'search engine' - Google has nudged ahead again with the announcment of two new innovative products.



Grabbing most of the column inches has been Google Wave, a new social media platform which will sit somewhere between Twitter and email as a messaging and collaboration platform. It's not available to play with yet and no-one's really sure what it is and what it will do... but they're pretty sure that it will have a major impact on the way we connect with friends, family, customers and colleagues.



Adopting a slightly lower profile, sneaking out of the back door via Google Labs but available to try right now is Google Squared. Always keen to share new ideas with the world, the Google Labs team release products relatively early on in their development in order to capture input from real-life users across the globe. Google Squared sounds a little lumpy, but comes to life when you try to use it. It is basically a tool to enable you to carry out and collate research very quickly, presented in a spreadsheet-style format, on any given subject. For example, a search on UK Banks, quickly presents you with a neat summary of all of the major players including logos, description, locations, employee numbers, revenue. Missing banks are easily added and more obscure overseas subsidiaries just as quickly removed. Hover over any cell and it will reveal the source of the data and allow you to click through for more.

Results are not perfect, several fields tend to be blank and findings can be inconsistent, but to get you mobilised at the start of a new research project it could save hours of trawling around separate stand-alone corporate websites trying to piece together the basics. It's always easier to fill in the gaps than to start from scratch.

It's not all work, work, work though. I tried searching for 'Smith's lyrics', 'UK Birds' & 'Booker Prize' all with fascinating results.