Petit Bourgeois commentary on web building

Notes from the Self TV congress at the HKU. [This was originally written for the internal blog I maintain at Weathernews. I hope to cover the HKU's next congress, Upload.]

Many of the speakers ignored the topic of TV to focus instead on blogging and user-submitted contents. It seems the technological difficulty is preventing "self TV" from really taking place, and instead we focus on lighter technologies. In fact, the lighter the better: consumers are not willing to submit to difficult processes to publish content.

Left-of-center, quality newspaper de Volkskrant set up a new system, where the web site is part of the operations of the whole newspaper. Both as output (some articles written by journalists are published only online) and as input, with the following pyramid model:

• the public as newsmaker (creating the news)
• experts as moderators (qualifying the news)
• redaction as filter (ensuring quality)

The autonomous publication model (where the redaction is responsible for creating content and does not take into account reactions from readers) remains relevant, even in a thoroughly web-aware context, for example in this attempt at re-inventing the editorial cartoon.

Local TV channel RTV Utrecht launched a citizen blogging platform experiment, with the intention of relying on "an unlimited number of journalists in the province", referring to the capacity of such a platform to potentially turn every citizen into a journalist.

With 15.000 page views a day, the blog aims at involving more of the 1.2 million inhabitants of the province in the agenda of the channel's news services. The ambition is to bridge the gaps between small groups of people who otherwise do not come in contact, even if they share the same geographical space.

In the day's perhaps most insightful moment, a representative from the national public-service TV channel VPRO asked "who will watch self-TV?" He insisted on the really special effect we're all working towards: regular people communicating with each other. The key, for him, is to support and encourage people's capacity to tell nice stories.

The VPRO's various online experiments, although not supported by advertisement money, did benefit dramatically from the channel's support in free advertisement and coverage.

His parting shot: "if everyone becomes an author, then art becomes a commodity."

Self-appointed new-media guru Peter Mechels asked the usual questions about reality and our digital existence. To which extent does digital life blur the boundary with reality? To which extent does digital life replace reality? Welcome to eternity was his slogan, claiming that new media allow people to exist forever.

In a more business-oriented conclusion, he stated that media marketing needed to "replace usual systems of massive broadcast advertising." Showing a Flash-intensive web ad for Opel that actually has a robot call your mobile phone while you're watching the animation, he insisted that cross-media was "intensive marketing, identity marketing."

Weathernews is looking for Web/Mobile developers for our European consumer operations. Join!

April 19, no end in sight, yet.

After working with Chris, Eiko and Paul on L'Institut (フランス語教室), I've been working on various improvements and site launches for the European mobile sites of Weathernews.

Recently, Weathernews Netherlands has re-launched its weather site. Probably a draft and test run for our upcoming European sites, which might take up the interface from our Japanese site.

Some more great reporting about Google from non-emergent Andrew Orlowski got me thinking about Google's business objectives. At first, I wondered how long Mozilla would keep distributing anti-advertisement add-ons to Firefox such as the Greasemonkey, Customize Google or Adblock extensions. On second thought, they probably will, because it's good for them.

Continue reading... (Do no evil: Google's business model)

Once again installed PHP 5, MySQL 5 and Apache 2 on my laptop (running Windows XP), and once again I had problems, MySQL was not available in PHP. I'd solved the problem before, but could not remember how.

The problem should not happen at all, the issue is in fact quite trivial. But a series of small problems occur, and the various layers involved make it difficult to see where and why things go wrong. So I've put together this checklist.

Continue reading... (PHP 5, MySQL 5 install problems)

On Thursday, a renewed Weathernews site for KPN i-mode (Netherlands) was launched, featuring quite a bit of my code and even more of my overtime hours these recent weeks. If you have a KPN i-mode handset, you can access the site here: wap.weathernews.nl/

My colleague Jean also launched the Weathernews site on Bouygues i-mode (France), pretty exciting with a Mobile Flash interface and location-based services (not using GPS, but mast triangulation provided by the operator). Both sites make use of our MobileEngine data abstraction system.

I still consider myself a total beginner, but I'm afraid I will never grow to enjoy coding in Perl ;-)

This timestamp to date bookmarklet converts a Unix-style timestamp (seconds elapsed since Jan 1, 1970) into a human-readable date.

After a discussion with Paul last week, he forwarded me a great link about the fashion of traditional Japanese workclothes (I would like to get one of those wide blue pants, as the toed shoes 30cm long are beyond hope).

The manufacturers' pages (Kaseyama, Toraichi) are a good example of the typical use of text and images for textual representation in Japanese web design. What do you want Google's or Altavista's translation engines to make out of text written in images?

Continue reading... (Accessibility of Japanese worker clothing sites)

Old news, of course, but I agree, the internet is shit.