Listening to: BBC Radio 1

Anthony Reed has
created a slick rendering of a cellphone that uses an E-Ink display:

src: Gizmodo.

Listening to: Nothing, but no one bugs me if I have my headphones
on.

Disclaimer: Video iPod is my generic for portable video device in a PodCasting type
environment. And yes they have been around for yonks… but people we’re talking execution,
delivery platform and the ‘arrival’ that plunking the Apple logo on a technology signifies.

Given that Apple seems to be on the verge of
planting it’s Gucci size twelves up the rear-end of the TV industry… I started a
thinking. So the question that I hasked myself today was:

“What would a TV studio production company look like in a Video iPod
world?”

We have:

• Basic PodCasting
• PodCasting with Pictures
• Broadband distribution
• A viewing population that is willing to produce and consume
  (see PodCasting)
• A craving for time shifting

…and we also have this little
gem… It is the “crash this trailer” web app for Wedding
Crashers.

Maybe the answer to my question is that it would be a media house that constructed
a 1/2 hour news segment for me that is a melange of BBC, The Daily Show, Spaceflight
Now, Salon, Orange Girl, polg and BoingBoing… With ads that were generated by Google.

Maybe it’s an animation system that allowed me to mix and match scripts, characters
and contexts… which if I like the end result I could put online, label myself as
producer and take a penny on the dollar (the rest being split among the other IP owners
and the TV studio).

Nah… probably not… but, man it gets you really thinking.

UPDATE: Either way it is going to be driven by a long-tail type application.

UPDATE 2: Another idea of how the content might be created: Mobile films…they played
a large role in providing content for reporting on the London bombing. They now have
their own film festival.

UPDATE 3: So our TV production company might actually be a smart aggregator of some
sort… one that can draw the media threads together and provide a personalised visual
tapestry that I download every morning…. it only needs to be a few hours of video
and narration (because i have a job).

Listening to: Push Upstairs - Underworld

While I was ironing my shirt this morning (hey! looking this
good doesn’t happen by itself!) I pondered the concept of using current blog software
as a database engine. I guess one of the characteristics of traditional databases
is the ability to describe relationships between entities. I figure that if you’re
happy with a combination of unstructured data entities and loose relationships then
it’s currently feasible to use a blog as a database engine.

Let’s take something like the venerable old ‘pubs’ database that ships with SQL Server:

What you would do is set up six blogs:

• Stores

• Sales

• Titles

• Publishers

• Employees

• Authors

Each would have a list of postings, one posting per record. To link each of the entities
together you would simply link the appropriate records using the permalink for each
posting. The permalink is sufficient because it is something unique enough (GUID)
to prevent clashes on a world wide level so it should be pretty good for a small database. 

OK, an example!

If I were an author who had written 3 books there would be 4 postings (3 in the Titles
blog and 1 in the Authors blog). Each of the book postings would have an href
link to my author posting (to speed up queries my author posting might have links
to the book postings… but if I had Trackbacks turned on these linkages would emerge
over time anyway). Super simple.

Note that I didn’t add a TitleAuthor blog? It seems to be redundant in this environment.

Changing, adding and deleting records would be done using a custom interface (not
much more than a RSS posting tool that understood about relationships) that used something
like the Blogger API to write to the appropriate blog.

The benefits as I see them:

• It’s based on the nicely redundant web

• You can access all ‘tables’ using their URL (eg. some-domain.com/pubs/Titles)

• Tables will render themselves in a human readable manner

• It’s simple

• Non-technical users should ‘get it’

• It’s sloppy… but then all killer standards are … it makes it easy for real
  people to use them because the systems are more tolerant

Downside

• Not too sure how it would scale as the number of entries grew… there are blogs will
  1000s of posts, but I don’t know of any with millions

• Complex queries would need to occur in code *retch* (but that’s until there was a
  sufficiently useful query engine built that allowed the separation of data querying
  and data manipulation)

UPDATE: Got a good question from Doogie Howser about referential integrity. That is
one of the other downsides… that would need to be enforced at a code level.

Listening to: Franz Ferdinand on Radio 1

Warning: This is a bit of a fragile demo (and it’s not terribly elegant
either)… and due to the very hacked nature it only appears to work on IE 6 and Firefox
(I haven’t constructed my RSS correctly so it will die in IE 7 and Safari). I will
tidy up in the next day or so.

I have been talking to a lot of people about RSS over the past few days. All these
conversations prompted me to realise (and it’s pretty obvious) that we’re sitting
on top of a world wide database already (via the RSS generated by blogs and other
applications)… All that was needed was a tiny bit of code to open the items to dynamic
queries (ok a tiny bit of code to demo the concept… probably a bit more than that
for a good query parser ). The key to it is tho think of blog as a set of tables
that look a little like:

Adam
Bosworth described this in some detail a few months ago… and that’s where the
most of the inspiration came from.

The direction that i have taken is that an RSS feed is a table of items that can have
“select” queries made against them. You already see this with categories and calendar
views, but these are pre-canned queries… my thinking was more along the lines of
being able to execute a:

select * from items where URL = www.dave5.com/blog and
category in (’eink’, ‘business’)

Like this for instance: http://www.dave5.com/rsswhere/RSSWhere.aspx?select=item&where=eink,business

Or:

select * from category

Like this for instance: http://www.dave5.com/rsswhere/RSSWhere.aspx?select=category

They are pretty meaningless queries because they are over my drivel and they are very
simple. But their importance is that I have been able to make my blog perform like
a database.

In reality these are just selects over a sub select because the source RSS is scoped
by what ever count limit I place on the items in my RSS feed. If you remove that limit
and treat a blog as a generic data store it becomes very exciting (say a product list).

UPDATE: The C# - RSSWhere.txt
(4.21 KB)

UPDATE 2: Numerous spelling corrections (*sigh*).

See also More
Blog As A Database Thoughts

Listening to: November Has Come - Gorillaz

There seems to be a bit of a baby boom in my circle of friends… this means the missus
is buying baby stuff. While pondering the rather alien world of baby toys and, simultaneously,
the recent success of the Polymer Vision team
I came across the idea of Story Blinds.

Imagine if you scaled the Readius up
to the size of the roller blind and you hung them in a child’s room. The blind could
then be an imaging surface upon which you could display views of a fantastical world.
The blind would cease to simply close out the outside world and would start to be
a window on whole set of new worlds. All the blinds in the room could be networked
together so they all displayed a set of consistent images.

Listening to: Superstition - Stevie Wonder

I came across a couple of very cool augmented reality links yesterday:

• Pacman comes
  to life virtually
• SmartRunner:
  your GPS path while jogging

An application I have always wanted to create is a “virtual racer”.

On some racing computer games you can race a ghost competitor. The ghost competitor
is often the ideal race line and it is represented on screen as a “ghost”.
If you’re slower than the “ghost” it appears ahead of you on the track,
if you’re faster it is in your review mirror.

Imagine you’re running or cycling around a course you do regularly (say you cycle
to work). Each time you walk to work the time and path is captured as a series of
GPS coordinates. When you decide you want to race you don a pair of goggles and choose
a recent recording of your run/cycle/walk to work. As you start to walk you
see the recorded version of yourself projected onto the reality around you. The projection
is related to your progress, if you’re slower this time it is ahead of you, if you’re
faster it is some where behind you.

One of the most compelling characteristics of the idea are the community aspects.
A club, say mountain biking, sail boarding or yachting could build up a database of
racers and their races. A club member could then choose from that extended database.
They would then be able to race against other members in a sort of “time-shifting”
manner (obviously time-shifting a sail board race or a yacht race doesn’t make too
much sense when it comes to having an accurate competition (given the environmental
dependancy), but there are many racing sports where it might… motor racing for instance.).

UPDATE: Not the only one thinking these thoughts