OUseful.Info, the blog…

Several weeks ago, a BBC News video had appeared embedded within a Guardian Media news story on the Guardian website (Microsoft launches UK online TV player).

[Screenshot made with the aid of the OUseful split screen utility]

I had a vague memory from last year that the BBC had been experimenting with embedding video on the Daily Telegraph website (BBC pilots iPlayer content sharing with Telegraph Media Group), and it seems that a wider agreement with other news groups is now in place: BBC to share limited video news content with newspapers.

Not everyone was happy about it though, nor did everyone join the party: Murdoch’s News International, for example, didn’t sign up to the initiative, although there may be good reasons for that – like getting people to pay to enter parts of News International web properties that embed video content from various Sky channels? If, as Andrew Lewin suggests, people will only pay for what they know about, then football highlights and ‘exclusive’ celebrity interviews would seem to fit the bill in an effective way. And this, it seems, may be exactly is what is going happen: England qualifier could be shown pay-per-view on newspaper websites.

Possibly another sign of the times with respect to the increasing use of video content on newspaper websites is the recent Guardian job ad (h/t to @digidickinson for spotting it) for a Video Content Producer:

With responsibility for training and assisting non-video specialists, such as reporters and foreign correspondents, in filming video to accompany news articles and features. You will be the main point of contact for putting into practice ideas of other non-video specialist staff, as well as originating ideas yourself. You should have experience in news video production with an aptitude for scripting, editing and voicing video material.

That said, video clips are not really a ‘new’ news medium… But interactive documentaries may be? A recent post on the Official Google Blog (Google climate change tools for COP15) included a link to:

a series of Google Earth layers and tours to allow you to explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet and the solutions for managing it. Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show on Google Earth the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century. Today we are unveiling our first climate tour on Google Earth: “Confronting Climate Change”, with narration by Al Gore.

Because maybe these do represent a new form of mass market news presentation?

See a recording of the “Confronting Climate Change” Google Earth tour below:

And what does this all mean for education? In the OU, we have been using bespoke video materials and interactive software applications to support our distance education courses for years: you can see several examples on OpenLearn, such as this interactive on The theory of plate tectonics: Destructive plate boundaries, continued: ocean-ocean (island-arc) subduction. (If you manage to find any others, please post a link in the comments below…;-) There also used to be a showcase of LTS interactives on the OU intranet, but I can’t find that any more? Com on, folks, let’s start promoting this stuff…:-)

That said, the animations and video materials used to support OU course materials tend to be produced to high production values (and long time scales…!) using in-house and contracted (often ex-OU…) specialist media producers. But is a time coming when academics might be expected to produce their own video material and interactive animations using tools like Google Earth?

Earlier this week I managed to miss a talk about Erewhon, an Oxford University project that “exists to research and develop methods of accessing University information and services from mobile devices”. The project maintains, amongst other things, oxpoints, a ‘name and location’ server that provides a dictionary of geocoded names relating to Oxford University sites and departments. (Fortunately, @ostephens blogged the talk here: Telstar blog: Erewhon).

It was interesting to see one of the early mashup examples on the Erewhon blog was a Simple Library mashup that allows you to “(f)ind the nearest copy of a book from a reading list” using the oxpoints service.

The whole ‘bringing places to the browser’ took another step forward today as well with the announcement of Place Pages for Google Maps. The idea appears to be to have a (wiki like?) page for every location… but what particularly caught my eye was the structure of the URIs, which are human readable and based on the actual address… So for example:

http://maps.google.com/places/uk/london/downing-street/10

which you’d probably expect to be there… and locations like:

http://maps.google.com/places/uk/ryde/union-st/

which you possibly wouldn’t?

So now you can guess at the human readable, and human hackable, URL of a particular location.

PS each location also seems to have a machine URI, rather than the human readable URIs, containing a cid argument which I’m guessing is some sort of place identifier? For example:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=10463731849571799424

It probably bears no relation to Yahoo’s WOEIDs, though, which are also used by flickr, but it would make sense for someone to start publishing relations between them?

[UPDATE]

Hmmm – that Downing Street link just goes to a placeholder page…

But this more detailed page also exists:
http://maps.google.com/places/gb/london/downing-st/10/-10-downing-street

That is, after the address give the ‘business name’, in this case:
http://maps.google.com/places/gb/london/downing-st/10/-10-downing-street.

So if you have an address – e.g.
http://maps.google.com/places/gb/london/brompton-rd/
and you add “-BUSINESSNAME”, you get a business page?

e.g. http://maps.google.com/places/gb/london/brompton-rd/-harrods

What seems to be happening is that the first part of the URI provides a geographical context for a business search term.

So for example:

• http://maps.google.com/places/gb/london/-starbucks
• http://maps.google.com/places/gb/london/regent-st/-starbucks
• http://maps.google.com/places/gb/london/west-end/-starbucks

That is, the URI seems to be implementing a 2D search: a location part (eg gb/london/mayfair) and a business name part (harrods, identified by the leading -)?

(For more 2D search thoughts, see: Mashlib Pipes Tutorial: 2D Journal Search or searchfeedr.)

Some people like to keep their Twitter follower network under control, whilst others are happy to accept all-comers (ahem), but using the default Twitter web page to track of who amongst your new followers may be a spammer is not all that convenient…

So here’s the simplest of gardening tools for helping keep those unwanted followers under control: simple Twitter gardening tool; to see your own friends and followers, you’ll need to edit the URL. Click through the link, then in the browser address/location bar look for psychemedia, and change it to your twitter name….

The tool is very simple (I’ll post the how to later) and simply pulls in details about the most recent of a named person’s followers, along with a count of their number of followers, friends and updates.

The tabular view lets you explore the ‘quality’ of your Twitter friends and followers based on 3 metrics:

• the number of their friends;
• the number of their followers;
• the number of their updates;

A form based interface may be incorporated one day – for now, you have to go via the URI, which looks something like this:

e.g. http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/dataTableDemo2.php?
u=YOUR_TWITTER_ID&p=1&min_fr=200&min_fo=600&sp=5

The URI arguments as follows:

• u: Twitter username
• p: results page (0 gives 100 most recent friends/followers, 1 gives the 101st to 200th most recent friends/followers, etc; if less than 100 people are displayed in any view, it’s because Twitter has blocked them…)
• min_fr: min no. of friends for ‘Min Network Size’ view
• min_fo: min no. of followers for ‘Min Network Size’ view
• sp: min fr/fo ratio for ‘Spammers?’ view

To order the rows by column, simply click on the column heading (once for an ascending view, a second time for the descending view).

By default, the app will only pull in the 100 or so most recent friends/followers (actually – it may be less than that; each 100 is based on following accession (I think) so there will be gaps corresponding to personally or automatically blocked followers).

If you click on ‘Get Next 100 friends/followers’, the next page of followers will be pulled in and added to the table.

A couple of spam follower detecting heuristics are included. The “Spam?” view will display followers whose friend/follower ratio is greater than the specified number (you can set that value via the URI). Another view shows people with a network size above a minimum number of friends and followers (again, those values can be set via the URI). Simply viewing the whole table ordered by decreasing numbers of followers can also detect spammers.

To block a follower, clicking on the name link will take you to their Twitter page. If you’re logged in to Twitter, you should be able to block the follower.

Note that if you’ve loaded lots of pages of followers in, click out to Twitter personal page, and back to the Twitter Gardening page, you’ll lose all but the first 100 or so followers from the table. So a tip: right click on the link and open the Twitter personal pages in a new tab ;-) Work through the table, opening potential spammer pages in a new tab if required, then review the tabs one at a time…

Here’s the link again: simple Twitter gardening tool. Remenber, all you need to do is click through the link, change psychemedia in the URL to your Twitter ID, and refresh the page to analyse your friends and followers.

See also: Brand Association and Your Twitter Followers and associated comments for a discussion about personal Twitter network management.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been messing around more than I should with Twitter, and in particular trying to get a feel for how we might use hashtag communities as a well of identifying and growing community structures in a particular topic area (see posts all over OUseful.info for more details).

A couple of days ago, @clarileia raised the question of how you find new hashtags, so I had a little tinker today putting together a couple of hacks (Twitter hashtag search pipe and Twitter my network hashtags) that let you identify recently used Twitter hashtags associated with a particular search term, or with a specified user’s recent friends or followers.

[Note: at the time of writing, Pipes appears to be running a little slow... if the Pipe appears to stall, it does work, honest... try it again later ;-)]

At the core of all the hacks is a clunky hashtag tokeniser pipe that takes a Twitter status update and pulls out the hashtags:

This utility pipe works by taking the status update, extracting the hashtags using a hacked together regular expression, splits the separate hashtags into separate feed items, and then filters them to emit only legitimate hashtags.

The utility pipe is then used in a search powered pipe, which searches twitter for the 100 most recent tweets containing the search terms and then scans those for hashtags; and a ‘personal network hashtags’ pipe that takes a Twitter username, pulls back the tweets from their one hundred most recent friends, and their one hundred most recently followers, and then scans those tweets for hashtags.

For example, here’s the search pipe:

Both pipes have a common output routine – the list of hashtags is filtered through the Unique block, which also returns a count of how many times each hashtag has appeared. The hashtags are then ordered and filtered according to the minimum number of required occurrences in the sample. A regular expression adds the number of occurrences of each hashtag.

The pipes could be extended to pull in more search results, or more followers/friends (maybe the first hundred friends/followers as well as the most recent hundred?) but that’s left as an exercise for the reader. As for the use case – I dunno? Maybe integration with the OUseful TwitterMyHashtag apps? Or perhaps @clarileia had a use case in mind?!;-)

PS thanks to PJ on the Yahoo Pipes team for getting back to me earlier today when I was struggling with a slow running pipes editor… I’m now totally reliant on Pipes for many apps, and especially for rapid the majority of my prototyping, so when Pipes is slow, I feel as happy as if I’ve lost an unbacked up server… Brian Kelly would probably tell me I need to do a risk assessment… I’ve already done one: What Happens If Yahoo! Pipes Dies? – but I haven’t made a start on the contingency stuff that was considered there…

Reading lists hit the news last week with Read/Write Web picking up a post from the venerable Dave Winer about Google get[ting] a patent on reading lists. The patent was filed in 2005, a year or so after Dave Winer blogged:

One of the innovations flowing out the Share Your OPML site is the idea of reading lists. An expert in a given area puts together a set of feeds that you would subscribe to if you want a balanced flow of information on his or her topic of expertise. You let the expert subscribe to feeds on your behalf. I’ve gotten the first taste of what this is like by reading the aggregator page on the Share Your OPML site. As new sites come on the Top-100, as the aggregated interests of the community shift, I automatically start reading sites I wasn’t reading before. I don’t have to do anything. I like this. So at last Thursday’s Berkman meeting I asked two of our regulars, Rick Heller and Jay McCarthy, to start doing these reading lists, and Rick is ready with what he calls a list of “political blogs that provide a balanced diet of liberal and conservative views.”

So what are dynamic reading lists? Take one or more RSS feeds, and declare their URIs as items in a reading list feed. Subscribe to that reading list feed. Now whenever there is a change made to the items contained in either of the RSS feeds, the person who subscribed to the reading list feed sees those changes. So a reading list (which could be maintained by anyone) is something I can subscribe to with a single click. And that reading list can be managed, can contain RSS feeds or other reading lists that are curated by other people.

As a student, my degree could have a reading list that contains links to reading lists for each of my courses. Those course reading lists could be maintained by course instructors, and might contain feeds from other students taking the course. I subscribe to single reading list. My instructor on a particular course can change the contents of one of the feeds that is identified in my reading list. I see those changes via my degree reading list.

So it may have occurred to you that reading lists are a great way of sharing a curatorial load… and you’d be right :-)

Another example of the reading list/shared curation pattern is exemplified by Jon Udell’s elmcity project, which allows for separately maintained calendar feeds to be managed and aggregated using the Delicious social bookmarking tool (e.g. Collaborative curation as a service or elmcity project FAQ.

DeliTV also uses a similar pattern to allow users to define video playlists (that may contain other video playlists) on delicious, and then watch them in Boxee or via an appropriate mobile device (e.g. Deli TV – Personally Programmed Social Television Channels on Boxee: Prototype and An Unintended Consequence: DeliTV Goes Mobile on iPhone and Android).

It’s been some time since I properly tinkered with OPML, one of the most convenient formats for describing reading lists, so here’s a note to self about some the services that might be worth playing with:

• Scott Wilson’s JOPML, an OPML bundler for TicTocs RSS feeds (see e.g. Mashlib Pipes Tutorial: 2D Journal Search);
• Scott Wilson’s Ensemble generator, that cobbles together an OPML feed of OERs based on a specified search term;
• a couple of my own, very old, experiments: Social Bookmarking OPML Feed Roller, or Persistent News Search OPML Feed Roller; and not forgetting the OPML Dashboard Display and Disaggregating an MIT OpenCourseware Course into Separate RSS Feeds of course;-)
• @cogdog – you got any OPML/reading lists demos/hacks?;-)

On my to do list is also a way of putting together ‘highlights’ collections of notable paragraphs contained with in an atomised JISCPress/WriteToReply/Digress.it document…

As a design pattern, reading lists provide a very powerful way of leveraging the power of a community of individuals to collaboratively, yet independently, curate sets of resources. As with RSS, it may be that reading lists won’t achieve much explicit consumer success. But as wiring/plumbing – don’t underestimate them…

PS Remember, many resource centric sites allow you to create playlist feeds – e.g. Youtube Playlists, or, more recently, flickr playlists/galleries

Wouldn’t it be handy if, as well as viewing DeliTV feeds in Boxee, you could also consume them on your phone? Well it just so happens that you can… :-)

Whilst messing around with Recent BBC/OU TV Programmes on Boxee, I noticed that my “OU on the BBC 7 Day CatchUp” code used in Recent OU Programmes on the BBC, via iPlayer (also available on iPhone: iPhone 7 Day OU Programme CatchUp, via BBC iPlayer) had broken. Whilst testing the fix on the iPhone/iPod Touch version, (which also works on a wifi link at least with my HTC Magic Android phone) it occurred to m that I should also be able to pipe DeliTV feeds to my phone, and then display them using the the iUI interface libraries too…

So a little bit of tweaking of my OU 7 day catchup code, and couple of extra handlers to wrap the DeliTV (for Boxee) pipe, and what do we get? (Images grabbed from iPhoney on a Mac.)

You can play along here: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php (for a QR code of the URL, see here.)

A clunky homepage…

Leads to the default DeliTV multiplex (psychemedia/boxeetest5):

[You can configure the app to run with your own DeliTV mutliplex:
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php?q=YOURMUTLIPLEX
So e.g. http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php?q=psychemedia/delitv_f1 ; or http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php?q=psychemedia for my default "delitv" multiplex.]

http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php

Here’s the UK Politics suite of channels:

(Note that the page may take some time to load; when I get a chance, I’ll add a loading indicator in…)

If we go into the Political Parties list, and click through on the Liberal Democrats link, we get a list of actual videos:

Clicking through on those takes you to the video page:

And clicking the Watch this video link will play the video for you using whatever your mobile device allows.

Whilst the Youtube content is workingm the iPlayer content is not working – yet. I think the original 7 day catchup had to use a helper for BBC URLs (I seem to remember that iUI doesn’t like BBC mobile URLs), and I haven’t had chance to work it in yet…

Anyway – what does this all tell us? That feeds are a Good Thing, of course…! ;-)

It also means that if you create a hierarchical playlist of Youtube content, at least, that maybe includes curated lists managed by other people, you can watch the content either in Boxee, or on your mobile device.

So that’s the proof of concept done… but as is the way of these things, it needs proper apps building to make it shiny and robust enough, and with a friendly and intuitive UI, to be used on a casual basis by anyone not me… ;-)

One of the easiest ways to get started with DeliTV is to use it to watch video feed subscription from YouTube.

With DeliTV, you can bookmark the following sorts of Youtube content and then view it in a DeliTV Channel:

Here is the example channel bookmarked to a demo DeliTV channel guide: delitv_ytdemo:

(You can of course grab a copy of any of these bookmarks into your own delicious account.)

We can now bookmark this channel guide so that it appears in a DeliTV multiplex. In the following example, I’m bookmarking it to my main delitv feed, and also to the boxeetest5 multiplex.

Here’s the result in my boxeetest5 feed:

And here’s a view of the delitv_ytdemo channel guide:

This is what the bookmarked user/channel produces – the recent uploads listing for that user/channel:

And here’s the playlist guide:

Remember, with DeliTV you don’t need to bookmark the actual Youtbe feed – just bookmark the user/channel, playlist or video page to Delicious, and DeliTV will do the rest for you…

To learn how to subscribe to your own DeliTV channel, see Deli TV – Personally Programmed Social Television Channels on Boxee: Prototype

PS a new feature, currently in testing, lets you bookmark a search results page. Whilst it is possible to generate searches for playlist or users/channels as well as videos, DeliTV currently returns just the 20 most relevant Youtube videos when a Youtube search results page is bookamarked.

One of the nice things about iPlayer is that there are plenty of RSS feeds available for different sorts of content that is currently on iPlayer.

So for example, there are feeds available by channel, by genre, by genre and channel, feeds that contain the most popular programmes, and so on.

To a certain extent, you can also configure your own feeds:

Feeds… hmmm :-)

Trying to subscribe to one of these feeds as is in Boxee gives…. nothing – no video items found:-( But if you tidy up the programme URIs that are contained in the feed up a little (for example, by using Boxee/BBC Feed helper pipe that just strips everything off the end of the programme URI after the programme ID. So for example http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mq4r3/sign/Land_Girls_Destinies/ becomes http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mq4r3) then you can subscribe to and that the programmes in Boxee…

Simply(?!) grab the BBC iPlayer programmes feed URI, paste it into the pipe, grab the RSS feed URI for that pipe containing that BBC iPlayer feed URI, and then subscribe to that feed in Boxee, and you can watch a thematic BBC iPlayer channel…

But that’s way too difficult, right? It’s much easier to just bookmark the feed to your DeliTV channel, and the DeliTV pipework will handle it for you. So for example, if you bookmark this Signed BBC TV programmes feed with your DeliTV tag on delicious, you’ll have that channel added to your DeliTV schedule :-)

PS remember, you can also bookmark BBC category pages, such as this one for BBC Thrillers (or on iPlayer: BBC TV Comedy (Sitcoms) with your DeliTV tag, and the programme feed should work correctly in your Boxee DeliTV channel:-)

Now I just need a day or two to put a proper DeliTV homepage togther, with some simple instructions and a screencast or two… Unless someone would like to volunteer to do that?! ;-)

PPS for howtos regarding the creation of other ‘canned’ DeliTV channels, see Recent BBC/OU TV Programmes on Boxee or UK Soaps on BBC and ITV/STV.

Many of you will know that the OU co-produces several BBC television programmes, including Coast and The Money Programme, as well as a wide range of one off series.

If you want to keep up-to-date with OU/BBC programmes, you can now watch BBC/OU programmes on their own dedicated DeliTV channel: just bookmark http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/bbcouiplayer to your DeliTV collection:-)

For details of getting started with DeliTV, see Deli TV – Personally Programmed Social Television Channels on Boxee: Prototype

If you interested in the technical details of how this channel was put together, read on…

What I originally hoped to do was make use of an earlier hack that underpinned Recent OU Programmes on the BBC, via iPlayer (also available on iPhone: iPhone 7 Day OU Programme CatchUp, via BBC iPlayer). Unfortunately the pipework behind those applications has broken (note to self: repair them… – DONE:-) becuase they relied on using a search of the BBC website, a search that now appears to be broken in Yahoo pipes (something to do with a robots.txt exclusion:-(

So it was time for a rethink…

My source of recent OU/BBC programmes is the @open2 twitter feed, which gives the title of the programme and the channel:

So what I needed was to find a way of getting the iPlayer programme IDs for these programmes. My first thought was to take each programme title from the @open2 feed, and search twitter with the name using the from:iplayer_bbcone search limit. But the @player_bbcone feed doesn’t seem to be complete, so I ruled that out…

Digging around the iPlayer site, I found a list of feeds containing content by channel currently on iPlayer (I think? God only knows how this’ll scale if they start to do much longer than 7 day catch-up….?!) – BBC iPlayer feeds

[DOH! Something just jumped out at me there... have you seen it yet...? Important post to follow after this one...:-)]

So I created a pipe (BBC TV – Current Programmes on iPlayer) that pulled together the BBC TV feeds, and allowed you to “search” them by title (i.e. search by filtering…;-):

One thing I noticed in one of the @open2 tweets was a capitalisation error, which would fail to match in titles in the filter, so I used a regular expression to remove the effects of capitalisation from the filter stage. (I found the trick from a quick search of the Pipes forums,in a reply by @hapdaniel: replace the grabbed text with the \L prefix (i.e. I used \L$1 as the replacement text to convert everyhting in the $1 string to lower case. \U works for upper (\l replaces applies to the first char, as does \u).)

I could then run the titles from the @open2 feed through the BBC programmes pipe to grab the progamme URIs on iPlayer.

So here’s the pipe. We start by getting the last 50 items from the @open2 updates feed (using ?count=50 to get more than the default number of items from the feed), use a regular expression to parse the tweets to identify the programme titles, remove the duplicate programme title items from the feed using the Unique block, put the time that tweet was sent into a universal/canonical form and then filter by date so we only get tweets from the last 7 days.

We then run each item through the BBC programmes filter described above and return the recent programmes feed:

A couple of tweaks to the DeliTV pipe handle, you know, stuff ;-) and you can now bookmark this pipe – BBC/OU 7 Day TV Catchup (or it’s RSS feed output) to delicious, tagged so that it appears in your DeliTV feed, and you have a channel dedicated to recent BBC/OU TV programmes that have been broadcast on BBC One to Four and that are currently available on iPlayer :-)

Okay, call me paranoid, but with Google buying recaptcha (e.g. Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA, By Acquiring ReCaptcha, Google Acquired a Crowd Computer Along the Way ), the Goog got another way of seeing how much traffic a particular web page is getting, and potentially yet another way of tracking how identifiable people move across websites…

Now I don’t know if the various Google properties and services share traffic information, or reconcile user cookie IDs to piece to together as much as they can about where you’re visiting on the web, but if I was to have a paranoid moment, I’d start to think about how many websites don’t have one of the following associated with them:

• Google Analytics
• Google Adsense
• Doubleclick ads (because We’ve officially acquired DoubleClick)
• content delivered through a Feedburner feed (Adding More Flare)
• an embedded Google map; (embedding charts via the Google visualisation API will also give page impression traffic stats back to Google, as will AJAX libraries downloaded from Google servers; and if a website is running on the Google App Engine, I guess they have those traffic stats too?);
• [added] an embedded YouTube movie;
• and now, recaptcha.

There are other ways for Google to find out what you’re up to of course…

• Google Reader – so the Goog can see what fed powered content you’ve been looking at – and clicking through on
• Google search (and all the other Google search properties) – you think Google doesn’t pay attention to which links you click through to? (see Google Web History for what Google might have learned about you from that source if you you have a Google account.)
• Google Toolbar – this can track you wherever you go…
• Google Chrome – and presumably, so can this… ( this is a paranoid fantasy, right?!;-)
• Google Latitude, and ‘My Location’ services on mobile phones: it’s not just your web locations the Goog is tracking; and you have all seen The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data , right?;-)
• not strictly tracking, but it still helps Google build up a picture of you: Google social graph API (See also: Time to Get Scared, People?);
• [added] Google Calendar – so the Goog gets clues as to where you are in time and space in one fell swoop… (Doesn’t Gmail also scan emails for calendar info that it can helpfully add to Google Calendar? Which means it can glean some of this info from your email, too..?)

But then again, I suppose my ISP could record the URL of every page I visit if it wanted to…?

PS here’s another thought – ReCaptchas are often used on sign up pages… so if there’s a ReCaptcha cookie with a user identifier in it, you can see keep track of what services a particular individual is signing up to… maybe…?! (paranoiiiiaaaaaa… heh heh ;-)