Earlier today I was playing with the new Life with PlayStation which is available as a free upgrade to the older “Folding @ Home” application that originally shipped with the PS3.
The new application looks like it is a step towards generalizing the existing interface, which is a “Google Earth-lite” style zoomable, pannable, 3D globe albeit with much less detail than its desktop equivalent. The main new feature is integrated weather reports and news feeds from the capital cities of 60 countries. You can read more about it on the website and watch a video demo.
What intrigued me was the possibility that Sony may decide to open this up further. They’re clearing expecting there to be more “channels”, which is their term for overlays that can be displayed on the globe. At present only the news, plus the older Folding@Home channels are available, but it’d be fantastic if this was opened up to web hackers to allow geo apps to be delivered directly to the Playstation. I’ve done some googling around but there’s doesn’t seem to be any discussion about how they intend to add new services, or whether there may be a developer kit.
There is a huge amount of creative work going on in the world of geo-hackery that could be re-targetted for delivery to the PS3 if Sony decide to embrace open-ness. Indeed, other than the currently fairly limited resolution of the map and the need for Sony to provide a way to feed content into their system, there seems to be little in the way of further obstacles.
I also noticed that the software license page explains that the application ships with a “simple cross-platform XML parser” and LiteSQL. An even more exciting leap would be to see a sandboxed Javascript engine in there too, but lets not run before we can walk!
September, 2008
21
Sep 08
Life With Playstation
14
Sep 08
How about a DJ rather than a Genius?
There’s been plenty of commentary about the new Genius feature in iTunes. A recommendation engine is a nice new feature, but personally there’s a couple of other features I’d like to see on my iPod, or in iTunes. These are more in the “reacquaint yourself with the music you already own” category rather than recommending new purchases.
For example, I use the shuffle feature quite a bit, usually when I just want some background music to blot out noise when commutting. But there’s no context navigation available from the “now playing” view. If you’re on shuffle, then you can only proceed to the next random track. But quite often I hear something and want to listen to the rest of the album, or more by the same artist. It’d be nice to be able to quickly switch from a random order to album order with a couple of clicks, rather than having to navigate back through all of the menus again. Similarly it’d be useful to be able to jump directly into that artist’s music in my collection from the same screen.
And rather than having a “genius” in the software, why not a DJ? (And I don’t mean in a cheesy voice over style!)
If listening to your collection on random is listening to your own personal radio station, then where are the other “feature programming” playlsits that you get from real radio stations? For example how about randomly programming a “Blue’s Hour”, a Second Summer of Love special, a Radiohead retrospective, or a Mercury Prize Nominee playlist?
There’s plenty of metadata in iTunes and plenty more available from an increasingly wide array of sources, so why doesn’t the software provide us with a better interface onto it? Supported by slightly more sophisticated software agents to help navigate or use it?
Implementing some of this might be possible through iTunes plugins, but some of the features it’d be nice to have on the device. The hackability of the iPhone suggests that this might be a better platform for exploration that the iPod.
12
Sep 08
The Web’s Rich Tapestry
This week I co-chaired a plenary session at the ALPSP International Conference.
The goal of the session, titled “The Web’s Rich Tapestry” (abstract), was to discuss the continuing evolution of the web from a document-centric view of the world to one that was more data and link centric.
The first half of the session was presented by my friend and former colleague Geoff Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef. Geoff focussed on discussion the nature of the link and its implementation both on the web and in early hypertext systems. Geoff discussed some of the power that was evident in these hypertext environments and the growing need and awareness for features like stable, persistent links and multi-directional links not just in scholarly communication (where they’re already very common) but more widely on the web.
I’ve explored this theme myself. It seems to me that what we’re doing is slowly rebuilding many of the features of early hypertext environments but in a more distributed, open and scalable fashion.
In my half of the talk I focused on the evolution towards the Semantic Web. I’ve included my notes below. I don’t normally write up talks in this way, but it proved a useful way to organize my thoughts on this occasion. They’re reproduced below without much editing. The accompanying slides are on Slideshare.
(Note: this was a presentation for a non-technical audience, so may not be much new content here for Planet RDF readers)
