August 02, 2006
thames sky view
Categories: Examples vServer
The view from the top of the Swisshotel Howard is perhaps not the worst in London… --
January 17, 2006
The Whatness of the vServer
Categories: Background vServer
The vServer is an electronic publishing, blogging and collaboration platform, based around a flexible jigsaw of "best-of-breed" Open Source and Open Architecture components. The various elements of the jigsaw can, at need, be combined, substituted and integrated with existing enterprise infrastructures to provide a flexible architecture for the creation and maintenance of dynamic web sites, online communities, team collaboration and mobile device and service integration.
Continue reading "The Whatness of the vServer"November 09, 2005
Video Moblogging (Windows Media format)
Categories: Examples vServer
The vServer can handle most major open video file formats - here we're submitting a Windows Media (.wmv) file.Quicktime Movie Test
Categories: Examples vServer
This is an example of video moblogging - this time of a quicktime movie, emailed to the server....November 05, 2005
Video Moblogging & Podcasting from 3G Phone
Categories: Examples vServer
OK, here's some new wave content creation for you – I'm creating and sending this and the attached video directly from my Nokia 6680 3G phone, while standing watching my village bonfire on Guy Fawkes night. I'm getting some funny looks, so nothing new there...July 26, 2005
Ubiquity, Gorillas and the vServer
Categories: Background vServer
My field is Ubiquity – helping people and communities to enable themselves with effective and universally available knowledge, collaboration and online presence.
Ubiquity is a broad field, and one that tends to headline on the functionality and geek-chic of the endpoint devices and the ever-expanding notion of "invisible" technologies – from PDAs and mobile phones, through wearable computers and so on, to smart buildings and intelligent shoelaces.
I consider that holy grail of 'invisible' technology to be slightly spurious, finding the concept of 'casual' technology to be rather more useful. Here, people are able to extend the utility of the tools they already have available and are comfortable with using, rather than having to continually adopt new technologies and their infrastructures. My focus however is less on the endpoint technologies than on the knowledge architectures, models and processes which give people a reason to use the their technological tools, new or old, to seamlessly integrate their physical and virtual existences. The enabler for this is access to knowledge and association that is timely, contextualised, personalised and relevant to who they are, where they are and what they're doing.
I'm the architect of a variety of more and less complex collaboration and content delivery systems and applications and regard the whole concept of individual and group empowerment for knowing, for interaction an collaboration as key to the emergence of a truly enabled society – I can bore for England on the subject.
I also work in some rather remote corners of the world. Which is to say that they're remote only to us "Western" technorati – the people who live there find them usefully local. The remoteness is simply that of external perception, local infrastructure and access to the tools that access, create and present the connecting knowledge that breaks the barriers of medium, geography and culture. This is the true digital divide, where the affluent connected find it easier and cheaper to become more affluent and connected and, in being connected, lose contact with those societies that don't form part of the infosphere and thereby tend to fall off the edge of our perceptual world. And so it goes. But what if people had that casual access to communication, presentation and collaborative knowledge? What if their voices, achievements, needs and aspirations could be heard, directly and immediately, across the world?
Continue reading "Ubiquity, Gorillas and the vServer"June 21, 2005
3G Moblogging
Categories: Examples
Now for a first - 3G Moblogging. While it almost seems a shame to merely send text over a 384Kbps link, there will be much more to follow. On second thoughts, it's about right - my link from an Edinburgh-Glasgow train has just reverted to GPRS and 44Kbps (with a following wind): Orange claim 70% UK population coverage for 3G, an utterly weasel measure for a mobile service - the word "mobile" being non-trivial in the context, which probably equates to about 20% geographical cover at (say) 500m resolution. So, 'tis early days yet, although the unreliability of UK GSM networks after a dozen years does not bode well. RichardApril 29, 2005
Mopodcasting and Other Gratuitousness
Categories: Examples vServer
Language evolves. New words arise to meet changing needs, old ones are adapted or discarded along the way, and the faster the change in the area of need, the faster new words arise. And that's before we get into arguments over functionality illiteracy and laziness being used as an excuse to mangle the language. No really, let's not. Of course the technology/media/content industry is about the planet's prime culprit here – if a techie Rip van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1985 and had just come to, he or she would be somewhere twixt boggled and brainfried. But at least ForTran's still around…
This time it started with "blogging", a contracted conflation (contraflation?) of "web logging", itself a verbification of something many of us had been doing for years, quite happily and without feeling the need for the naming of names – the doing of things being more important. In essence though, "blogging" is the creation of dynamically updated web site content through the medium of an automated content management system. It's perception ranges from being the reinvention of journalism in a post-post-literate society to a vanity publishing tool for the geek-at-heart. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive. What it has done is to create a massive and large accessible resource of information and opinion, plus mechanisms for its distribution and connection, which contains essential lessons for organisations in today's emergent and adaptive environments. Polemic over for the moment and back to the -oggness of things:
Continue reading "Mopodcasting and Other Gratuitousness"April 26, 2005
Mopodcasting by GPRS
Categories: Examples vServer
Now here's something slightly more sophisticated: I've made a voice recording from deep in the forest on my PDA (in this case a Palm), combined it in an e-mail with a picture from my camera phone (transferred to the PDA by Bluetooth) and forwarded it as an e-mail by GPRS to the moblogging server. This has posted the picture and the audio file to the web site and created a podcast feed for the audio file only.
April 15, 2005
Podcasting
Categories: Examples vServer
Any media audio files embedded in a Movable Type Entry are formatted by the vServer as podcasts, so that any podcast-aware client can download the content directly to an iPod via iTunes or to any other audio player.
And another
Yet another, this time with the enclosure tag hard-coded
April 08, 2005
Demonstration of Gallery Integration
Categories: Examples vServer
The vServer platform includes the ability to create, manage and display photogalleries. We use the Gallery package from Menalto Software.
This can work as a standalone package or can be used for image management, with the galleries created then being integrated with Movable Type, using the MTPhotoGallery Plugin by Brandon Fuller. This works simply by placing the name of the gallery folder in the keyword field, with [] around it, thusly: [Kenya05].
Continue reading "Demonstration of Gallery Integration"
