North Atlantic Radio

Episode 14

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5 minutes

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In this episode, I interview Drew Neil about his site all-sorts.org and his collection of collective nouns. In the podcast he explains how you can submit your own and some of the stranger submissions he's gotten.

If you have an extra 6:20 seconds, you can also watch's Drew's Pecha Kucha presentation on the topic and see some of the prints that have been made of the various works.

Episode 13

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5 minutes

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In episode two, Brian talks about a book he recently read entitled, Web Forms Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski. It is all about how to imperially design better forms based on years of research and hard evidence.

Episode 12

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5 minutes

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This is the beginning of a 6 episode North Atlantic Radio mini-series. In this first episode, Brian looks into the history of the first talking computer, the IMB 704 and its relation to 2001's HAL.

Episode 11

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27 minutes

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Here it is, the final episode of our first series. In episode 11 we cover newspaper paywalls, Google and China, TweetCC, software patents, data.gov.uk, and — as always — the books we’ve been reading.

We hope you enjoy this last episode of the series as much as we’ve enjoyed making it. All and any feedback is welcome.

Paywalls

Heroes

Villains

Site of the episode

Books we’ve been reading

Episode 10

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47 minutes

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You lucky lucky people, you have an extra long episode for those long winter evenings over Christmas and New Year. A veritable cornucopia of topics awaits, including Google’s latest software, HTML 5-based games, web site pay walls, the differences between reporting and journalism, and, bizarrely, mid-nineteenth century British politics.

Google’s recent releases

First, SPDY, an upgrade for the HTTP protocol. It looks good, even though we don’t think it’s likely to make an impact. And why would the search giant release Google DNS? To speed up page loading time, or for some as-yet-unknown reason related to Google Chrome OS and Android? Finally, we talk about the new labs feature of Google’s webmaster tools, the site speed checker.

HTML 5 games

HTML 5 is still only a draft but we’re seeing some real innovation here. From only a few months ago when games written in HTML 5 were just a twinkle in our eye, we now have two real-world games, Pie Guy and Some Adventure Guy, you can play right now. We talk about these games along with some of the problems that have yet to be overcome.

Pay walls

Pay walls can only work if just about everyone promises to implement one. How are the companies that want pay walls going to manage to get everyone to agree? What about free options like the BBC News website? Are pay wall advocates just doing what the music industry did ten years ago, and fighting against the inevitable? Should they not be looking into new and sustainable business methods?

Reporting versus journalism

Reporting is something social media can be good at (although there are still problems with trust and authenticity), but journalism is different. Journalism takes time, effort, and more than 140 characters. Can newspapers survive by admitting they’ll never win at the former, but can do the latter better than anyone?

Heroes

Books

Episode nine

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18 minutes

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This episode sees us talking about open government data, including the soon-to-be-released web site from the UK government as headed by Tim Berners-Lee. We also slam Adobe for trying wheedle to wheedle their way in to open data with their distinctly unopen Flash.

Along with that we mention games, NASA, and the books we’re reading.

Open data

Heroes

Villains

Site of the episode

After last episode’s chat about native gaming in browsers we were very impressed to see Gil Megidish implement part of the old classic Another World using Javascript and canvas.

Books

Episode eight

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18 minutes

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Heroes and villains

Matt thinks Flickr are being particularly heroic this time around for their work integrating OpenStreetMap with geo-located photos. But Royal Mail are bad bad boys for their insistence on keeping UK post codes for themselves.

And Brian? He loves Mozilla for standing up to Microsoft and their buggy Firefox plugin. He’s not so impressed with Twitter though, for introducing the cop out that is lists.

For background, see Matt’s ideas on legal deposit and the web. We discuss why web sites aren’t covered by national legal deposit laws, why as a culture we seem so comfortable with losing so much of our contemporary written culture, how this would have affected the US Declaration of Independence, and what we can do solve this.

Site of the episode:

If only because it’s beautiful to look at, out site of the episode is Midtone Design.

Books we’re reading

The picture above, Old books in Valldemossa, courtesy Astrid Walter.

Episode seven

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22 minutes

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Join us for episode seven: native 3D graphics in your web browser, web hooks and APIs for SMS messaging, our heroes and villains, site of the episode, and the books we’re reading.

WebGL

Native 3D graphics are coming to your web browser: the development versions of Webkit and Firefox now include support for WebGL, a Javascript binding for the OpenGL graphics library. It’s early days but very exciting, and we talk about what you might be doing in you browser in a few years time.

Taykt

Taykt is a service that allows you to send SMS messages programatically. There’s an API and you can use web hooks to interact with your users over SMS. We talk about potential uses for the service and how in the future you might use it to make money.

Heroes and villains

Matt says Google Chrome Frame is heroic but Google Sidewiki is villainous. Meanwhile Brian is too pessimistic to come up with a hero but calls Apple as his villain. Listen to find out why.

Site of the episode

Next time you’re making up some slides for a presentation, pause before you use Powerpoint, Keynote, or Google Docs and try 280 Slides instead.

Books we’re reading

Those TED talks Brian mentioned

The picture above, Edison telephone, 1879, Science Museum Collection, Hallway, courtesy Science Museum London.

Episode six

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21 minutes

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It may be late, but it’s perfectly formed. And you get an extra five minutes this time around, so count yourself lucky. Twenty minutes of chat about URL shorteners, the state of RSS, Google’s new static maps API, and more.

URL shorteners

Brian and Matt discuss the problems inherent in using proprietary third-party systems to shorten URLs. Can you trust them to stay around? What happens if and when the go bust and disappear? What are the alternatives?

Is RSS dead?

RSS is a technology nerds can't do without. But the average "man on the street" has yet to find it exciting or useful. These days, Twitter and Facebook are replacing it as a user-facing technology. Has RSS come to the end of its useful days?

Google static maps

Google recently released version 2.0 of its static maps API that allows you to embed maps in your pages as lightweight images rather than heavy javascript functionality. We review it and come out impressed.

Site of the episode

Prezi. Presentation software without boring, linear slides. Let's all use a giant canvas instead!

What we're reading

Photo by Scott Schiller.

Episode five

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15 minutes

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This is episode five of North Atlantic Radio, with Brian Suda and Matt Riggott. In this episode we talk about AP and microformats, Matt takes on the UK government’s swine flu site, and of course we mention our favourite new site and the books we’re reading.

The photo, Barnyard Races, courtesy Larry and Flo.

Episode four

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14 minutes

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In this episode Brian and Matt talk about XHTML2 and HTML5, Twilio, Brian's polyphasic sleep experiment, and the books they've been reading.

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