I call this a diary rather than a blog. It's the page where I add or link to new
stuff with content arranged in date order, rather than where I regularly write short
pieces on what I'm doing… although some of this does read rather like a blog.
Remembering Radio Orwell 257
Long long ago, before the Web, before I did anything else, but just after I left school, I
worked in local radio. The first station I spent time at was Stoke-on-Trent's
Signal Radio. When I was there getting my foot
in the industry door by volunteering in 1983-84, the Managing Director was one Donald Brooks who had been MD at
a station on the other side of the country in Ipswich. One thing lead to another and I ended up moving
to join the Radio Orwell team in November '85.
The advent of social networking means that a lot of radio stations like Orwell (now part
of the amorphous mass of mediocrity that is Heart FM) live on as "I remember when…" Facebook pages. The
one for Radio Orwell is very active just now but I'm keen to capture some of the messages and the links to
the audio that people are posting before they become hard to find in facebook's rolling system.
The first big event of my working year is the UKGovcamp 2012. I was able to attend last year and,
like everyone else who did so, came away inspired by the energy, enthusiasm and expertise of the event.
UKGovcamp folows the now familiar unconference format. There's a framework and a bunch of rooms but the
actual topics discussed are based entirely on what people suggest and sign up for on the day. It sounds
like a recipe for disaster but it works incredibly well.
I have lots of reasons for wanting to go this year - mostly around making more contact
with people who may benefit from the work I'm doing with the ISA programme on Core Vocabularies -
but also because I want to see just how these events come together and what can be done to
replicate them in other countries. They do happen elsewhere, there's a whole Govcamp movement,
but the London one does seem to stand out as an example of how to do it.
Digital Gifts - What's Missing?
Get anything nice for Christmas? I certainly did and am very grateful.
Anything missing from your stocking?
Well, maybe. And the problem seems to be that
in the very welcome and generally positive move to digital delivery of books, music and
films, we've lost something important - the sense of occasion, the sense of giving or receiving
a thing of value and beauty. So I have some ideas on the subject.
Yesterday I went to Brussels for a meeting which once again saw me heading to St Pancras Station to
board the Eurostar. An eye catching feature of the station at the moment is the enormous Lego Christmas
tree. That got me thinking about Christmas and it's so called 'true meaning.'
I felt compelled to write a few of those thoughts…
It was Gerald Oskoboiny, one of the W3C's systeam, who noticed that
today is the twentieth anniversary of an e-mail. Not a particularly special e-mail — it's just a test — but
it has the distinction of being the oldest e-mail in the W3C archives. The fact that it was sent by TimBL
from an address ending in cern.ch gives you some idea of its age.
Gerald is going to be carrying out a little activity next week around the topic of the W3C mailing list archives
but they're such a fundamental part of what the W3C does and the way it does it that I wanted to mark
the anniversary itself today.
In June 2005, the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group
had its kick off meeting at Vodafone's then London office in the Strand and I am proud to say I was there.
I remained a member of the Working Group throughout most of the rest of its life and did my best to
contribute to several documents.
In February 2009 I began teaching the W3C Introduction to Mobile Web Best Practices
online course. At the time of writing, working with others, I've run that course 6 times and am heading for run 7, thus helping many hundreds
of people learn more about developing Web content for mobile.
Guess what I've never done until now?
Made this site mobile-friendly.
OK, I have now. There's still more to do but as of now this site uses a variety of techniques to try to present content
in a way that can be read on desktop, tablet or mobile. Doing so has made me think long and hard about some of the things
I've been teaching over the last three years and putting them into practice has been very instructive.
I plan at least one more article about this site but here are the first three to be getting on with.
Still to come: Optimisation and Caching and I should probably say something about mobileOK having been so involved in its definition. As of
today, I only score 59% which is far from good!
Europeana Tech 2011
One of my colleagues on the Paths Project,
Runar Bergheim of Avinet,
is chairing a session at Europeana Tech in early October and kindly asked me to take part. Although Runar and
fellow pannelist Kate Fernie are both 'Paths people', and I take part in Paths for i-sieve, I'm going to this
conference wearing my W3C hat to talk about different metadata standards. schema.org has certainly provoked
a lot of discussion and W3C has just launched a couple of new Task Forces,
one on Web Schemas
and another on HTML Data, at least in part as a response to the establishment
of schema.org. Europeana itself is something of a flagship project for the Semantic Web (it brings together collections from
many differnet European cultutural heritage institutions) so there should be a lot ot talk about.
Last night I spent an hour grinning from ear to ear listening to a terrific documentary by
Tim Rice
about Pick of the Pops.
First broadcast on it's the quintessential chart show. It's forever associated with the incomparable
Alan Freeman
although I was surprised to learn that even before the recent outings with
Dale Winton and
Tony Blackburn,
not the only one. I remember not that many years ago hearing
Andy Kershaw presenting
Radio 4's Pick of the Week
in which he, rightly, pointed out that local and hospital radio DJs up and down the country did their utmost to copy the slick style of Alan Freeman
which he illustrated with a truly incredible clip from that week's Pick of the Pops. Kershaw was right — no one could touch him.
He was brilliant, the ultimate radio DJs' DJ.
If you love music radio from the 60s-80s, it's a fantastic programme full of jingles, back story, memories, and the
history of its iconic theme tune At The Sign Of Swinging Cymbal from its original by Brian Fahey
(freely available on YouTube) to the one arranged by
Barbara Moore, performed by Brass Incorporated, that you can't get your hands on but always wish you
could. Sadly copyright forbids me from being kind enough to include the MP3 I made of it so as I write,
you have 4 days to head over to the BBC iPlayer.
It's often hard for me to describe what I actually do for a living. I'll throw around acronmys
like W3C and EU Projects
but day to day, how do I earn a living when I barely leave the house? Well, a big part of my return to
the W3C Team recently is to work on EU projects around Open Government Metadata. And since the project officer,
Vassilios Peristeras, has just published a short and very readable summary of the subject, it seems only
right that I highlight it.
The particular bit of the Commission responsible for this work is the Interoperability Solutions for European
Public Administrations programme (ISA) and it's through them, and PwC, that I'm contributing W3C
expertise to work on developing Core Vocabularies. Dublin Core provides the basic terms for describing publications, but there
are other areas less well served. FOAF was designed to describe people and relationships — which is not quite the same as
describing a person for uses in eGovernment so there may be some work to do there, for example. Time will tell.
