iKOZ

Well, to be honest, there really wasn’t that much to write home about! Seriously, over the last two years since I last went to Vegas for CES, there really weren’t many new innovations at all (in my field). My connectivity in the hotel was restricting the secure access I needed to complete the moblog system (though, now I am in Boston I have nearly finished it).

There were a couple a devices which caught my eye, which I’ll post about shortly. Also a few ‘crippled’ devices which really could have been alot better thought through.

And don’t get me started about the iPhone/ApplePhone. First glance was ‘MMMMMMMMmmm!!’. Now after deeper research, I think they are making a whole load of mistakes with it. God knows what they’re going to do when it hits Europe re: carrier lockin etc. Not to mention all the other crippling I have since learned of.

It looks sexy for sure. But Apple really have no idea about mobile smart phones. Nokia still lead the pack, in my opinion. And they have more MP3/MP4/3GP players in people’s pockets than any other manufacturer out there.

When I get an N95 in my hand, expect to see a real world multimedia, moblogging, mapping version of the blogHUD system to appear very soon after! oooh yes!

I’m going to be in Boston for the next10 days, with a possible short trip out to Vermont to see the snow with the podcast.com gang. One of my legs is totally knackered from all the walking around – ThromVegas?

Another highlight of being around CES, next to ‘the other show’ was that I got to see Ron Jeremy and Larry Flynt up close, near the entrance to the ‘other show’, where the silicon wasn’t in people’s pockets, but slap bang, front and center on the chests of the slew of plastic girls wondering around the place! heh.

Also saw Jenna Jameson walk past with full entourage – she’s so short!! Never seen her ‘movies’ though, but I expect she looks taller lying down!

Lock up your gadgets!!!! Kosso is coming to Las Vegas!!!

I should be leaving home here in about 9 hours then off over the Atlantic andf the USA to Las Vegas for CES 2007! Hurrah! Last time I went there is was 2005. We had different gadgets and new ones which had promise which held truee till now. Here’s pic of my packing last time, when I went on behalf of the BBC Here’s the moblog I did from there last time!

I have been working on an upgrade to the camoby concept for stuff to do with podcast.com and bloghud.com  – It’s working nicely so far and I plan to use it to create a feed of text, images, aufio or video while at the show and around about.

This year, CES will be all about the CONTENT which can get on the gadget I saw a couple of years ago – as well as the new ones.  I cant wait to see everyone again! And I do like a bit of BlackJack!
I’ll let you know the feed when I have it all set up finally. I’m still building it!

I am taking a little less with me, as now I have a better system written I’ll tell you all about it when I get there

This, tied with the other stuff I have been cooking on the podcast.com upgrade will be very nice indeed, if I do say so myself. Different. Useful (hopefully), fun and informative.

See you on the other side!!

Before Christmas, I had heard about the griefing attack which happened on Ansche Chung, Second Life’s first ‘real’ millionaire, during an interview with CNET.

Some residents present took photos and video footage of the attacks, which included self-replicated flying penises floating at Ansche. Another attack during another interview saw a swarm of photoshopped photos of her holding a large copy-pasted penis.

It appears now that she is trying to enforce a takedown of all media showing her avatar or places her organisation has built. She has succeeding in using the DCMA to take down the video of the attack from YouTube.

Reuters have a full article on the events, which also included the mistake of also trying to get BoingBoing to step into line too. D’oh!

The video is still available on Google Video (and downloadable in .mp4 format which SL/Quicktime can play if you want to show it on your land) – all nicely edited to music too

I host pictures people take in Second Life over on blogHUD and if she asked me to take down someone’s photo, I would be hard pushed to do so, as she’s a celebrity, who was effectively ‘papped’ in a public place. She cant stop that. The photographers should be rewarded! Community-style!

And if she wants to try and stop photos of her ‘places’ and builds being posted online, then I think she’s totally off her rocker object. Sure she could try, but she’ll cause herself more harm than good if she does do that. People in communities don’t react well to that kind of control.

We have politicians who have eggs and stuff thrown at them in real life – do you see the footage of this being censored by the victim? No. It gets out there as ‘news’ content. Public domain. No holds barred. (Possibly there are occasions when it does happen though, depending on the image and circumstance and situation)

Ansche needs to deal with this PR in a different way. Laughing usually works. It’s not the emotion the attacker wanted or expected. Stamping your feet like a little girl is not the right way to go.

I think she’ ll learn – the hard way. Like most ‘celebrities’.

The Reuters bureau in Second Life has now released a new version of their RSS reading NewsHUD. Packed with loads of cool features for discussing current stories and the ability to customise your RSS feeds. NOt on that, but they have now added a ‘BLOGHUD’ tab. You can set it to load up all posts from BlogHUD, or only posts from the region you are in. It looks great – quite a few prims though Link to full story
posted by Koz Farina on Nooribeom using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Wooo – cosmic! And not as hot as you’d think
posted by Koz Farina on Nooribeom using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Over on the Web2.0 Show blog, Darren Stuart asks ‘Are Blogs The New Forums?’

“Lets look at the function of a forum.

Users post messages for discussion. Users post messages discussing other messages. These discussions are normally in categorised in to sub forums.

Now lets look at the function of a Blog

A Blogger posts something interesting. Visitors post comments on the Blogger’s post. The Blogger’s posts are normally categorised and tagged.

As you can see the core functions of both Blogs and forums are almost identical.”

I totally agree! I too love forums. From usenet groups to phpBB. IMHO, the thread structure of forums are perfect for almost all communication and publication online.

Now pause for a moment to think and have a look at an OPML file

I often say that the only web software we (almost) ever needed was the remarkably influential ‘WWWBoard’ perl script, from a place called ‘Matt’s Script Archive‘. (I’m amazed it’s still there! – looking different though )I cut my coding teeth on that lot, years ago. Even hacked it make a flat-file content management system too WWWBoard was one of the earliest examples of an ‘open-source’ script that I ever encountered. Matt had other scripts too, for voting and the like. All very useful stuff. Until I found PHP

Any post of anything online has certain basic attributes – a title, body text, author and date.

Having a post exist within the structure of a ‘thread’ – ‘a reply to reply’ or ‘a sub category of a sub category’ – the content immediately has context, reference, ‘a place’ – based on the details of its ‘parent’. It could be a comment to a post, a post on a forum, a reply to that post, a new user submitted script in code documenation, a comment on a comment on an area of a photo, a threaded discussion of experiences at a geographic location. Anything!

I’m actually working on something interesting in this area (I think!) – based around the upgrade to podcast.com which I am (still!) working on.

Let me say it again : It’s “OPML PLUS RSS TO THE POWER OF USERS!”

Do you catch my drift? Look up the tree!

Update: It looks like Dave Winer gets it too! !