Tag Archives: news

Why have information in one place, when it can be duplicated a 10000 times in many places? The web demonstrates very effectively how easily information can become corrupted by indirect communication. Take any news story, then (if you can be bothered), read the same story on different websites. Mostly, they are the same, but some cannot resist adding their own additions to the story.

Semantic Media Cloud

mediacloudMedia Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data.

Media Cloud

Positive News – Reports on People, Events & Influences


A nice change for those of us sick of tabloid sensationalism of doom and gloom.  I know as a nation we are a tad on the pessimistic side, but if all we had to go by was British media, we would all be queuing at suicide booths.

Its a good reminder, amongst all the grime of constant wars and greedy bankers, that there is actually good things going on too!

Windows Media Player Video Demo

Browser Support:

  • Internet Explorer 6+/7
  • Firefox 2+ – (Some features, such as “Autostart”, will not work)  

There is currently no support for embedded Windows Media Player for MAC browsers, but other players are supported for MAC (such as Flash or Real Player).  It is normal practice to supply at least two different format choices, to increase the range of browser support.  Flash is the most popular choice, as it has the most extensive browser support.

Embedded Windows Media Player Video

Video Formats Supported : mpeg1, mpeg2, avi, asx, wmv, asf

(Video Source – BBC News)

There are many parameters to cusotmise the players look and funtionality, amongst others: autostart, customisable controls and demensions.   The demo is the default setup.

Semantic-butchering corporations

During recent consultancy assignment, I have seen a dangerous misconception of a semantic web technology with taxonomy. Tags are a set of words that can be associated, in single or multiple assignments, to content. Although you can specify a set of tags before you even start generating content, generally tags ressult from evolution of a website, rather than be designed. It is not mandatory to organise tags in a hierarchial structure – that is more for ease for the human brain, which finds it easy to process procedural information. But in order to follow the semantic/microformat principles (data stored for ease of human and machine), it is better general practice to organise tags in groups and sub groups. These can be changed/repositioned at any time, with no impact on exisiting data. Unless ….

OK, so we have our nice taxonomy, and feel confident we are following new web development methodologies. Then we have the site application. One ridiculous peice of content management I have seen recently, is when content tagged with multiple tags, ends up published numerous times. Why? Because the way the site has been designed at folder level, was based on old-fashioned hierarchy. Each tag had it’s own folder, and as a tag could also be duplicated in many sub-folder names, the CMS created duplicates in all the same-named folders.

This is a problem when a CMS simply nod towards semantic web principles. The danger being, there is a part-implementation, and the classic mistake of trying to fit a square peg (outdated CMS) into round hole (semantic web). So we now have a massive inefficiency on the website itself – the web application portal on the www. All he careful tagging work done at content level is now effectively useless. Add a breadcrumb navigation, and be assured it will look nonsensical to the user. They will instinctively recognice the classic hierarchial menu, then get confused why when they click on “Fashion” -> “News”, then click on an article link to end up in “Retail” -> “News”. Modern CMS’s do (to varying degrees) seperate out the data from the design, but this is no good if they do not also understand why that is important.

There are very few corporate level CMS’s that are future-proofed, as they rely on constant support and upgrade contracts. But maybe now is the time to realise that maybe that is not what is needed – with a flexible, content could be provided in all sorts of way. Aggregation is increasing more and more, rss/opml have become standards for feeding news/articles, and other microformats have evolved to cater for other types of information. These can be managed very simply internally, as the UI’s for data entry are simple and structured. This is just the start – once these standards become more and more adopted, the semantic web will come ever closer. If you want to be seen, you have to do the work to get the user’s attention.

Business & the Semantic Web

The semantic web could potentially make a lot of web business models redundant. This is good news, and business needed a kick in the seat of the pants, and business has had to re-evaluate how to generate revenue after the intial successes, and increasing general acceptance of web 2.0 (and beyond).  On the back of the obvious youtube/myspace/de.licio.us successes, it appears logically these ventures will components of future ventures.  It feels like business and technology is finally in a proper “marriage” – the question I have is now, will it be business that drives the www advancement, and/or vice versa?