Episode 11
27 minutes
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
- How the New York Times should construct its paywall
- The Financial Times, the paper that doesn’t want to be free
- New Scientist paywall, an open letter
- Amazon charges for reading blogs on the Kindle
- The Guardian iPhone app
Heroes
Villains
Site of the episode
Books we’ve been reading
- Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett
- Letters from High Latitudes, by Lord Dufferin
- Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Married to a Bedouin, by Marguerite Van Geldermalsen
Episode 10
47 minutes
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
- The Guardian, for their new iPhone app.
- Wikileaks is my hero for standing-up to The Man.
Books
Episode nine
18 minutes
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
- Adobe, for their “open data” ploy
- Verizon, for their Droid fees
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
- The Forgotten Prime Minister: the 14th Earl of Derby, by Angus Hawkins
- Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State, by Steven Heller
Episode eight
18 minutes
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.
Legal deposit and the web
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
- Imprimatur, by Monaldi and Sorti
- The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, by Ian Mortimer
- Index on Censorship
- Blue Ocean Strategy, by W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
- Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with Java Implementations, by Ian Witten
The picture above, Old books in Valldemossa, courtesy Astrid Walter.
Episode seven
22 minutes
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
- The Image of the City, by Kevin Lynch
- Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz
- Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely
- Imprimatur, by Monaldi and Sorti
- European Architecture 1750–1890, by Barry Bergdoll
Those TED talks Brian mentioned
The picture above, Edison telephone, 1879, Science Museum Collection, Hallway, courtesy Science Museum London.
Episode six
21 minutes
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
- Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, by Len Fisher
- How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, by William Poundstone
- The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker
- The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon
- The New British Constitution, by Vernon Bogdanor
- Imprimatur, by Monaldi and Sorti
Photo by Scott Schiller.
Episode five
15 minutes
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.
- AP want DRM for news
- AP’s hNews format
- Microformats
- AP DRM diagram demystified
- National Pandemic Flu Service
- ‘9.3m hits an hour for swine flu website — but we can cope, government insists’
- Baconfile
- The New British Constitution, by Vernon Bogdaor
- The (Mis)behaviour of Markets: a Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward, by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte
The photo, Barnyard Races, courtesy Larry and Flo.
Episode four
14 minutes
In this episode Brian and Matt talk about XHTML2 and HTML5, Twilio, Brian's polyphasic sleep experiment, and the books they've been reading.
Episode three
15 minutes
This time we're talking about the all-new Safari 4 and ACID 3 compliance, web hooks, the trouble with storing Twitter's ids in your own database, and, as always, the books we've been reading.
- Safari 4
- Acid 3 test
- Web hooks
- Watercoolr
- Twitpocalypse
- Will your Twitter client survive the 'twitpocalypse'?
- Simon Willison on external ids
- The Y2K problem — ten years ago!
- 'Premature optimisation is the root of all evil'
- Be liberal in what you accept
- The Drunkard's Walk
- Round Ireland with a Fridge
The picture above, Hooked, courtesy Debbi Long.
Episode two
15 minutes
In this, our second episode, we're talking all about maps and geolocation APIs. We test the new Yahoo Placemarker API live on air and end up very impressed. We also chat about the first impressions of the new Google Maps Data API. For future reference, the maximum length of the data you can send to Placemarker is 50,000 bytes.
Links
- Where 2.0 conference
- Yahoo Placemarker
- Gutenkarte
- North Atlantic Radio about page
- Jack London on Wikipedia
- Google Maps Data API
- Simon Willison's thoughts on the Google Maps Data API
Brian's books
- Fooled by Randomness
- Black Swan
- How to Lie with Statistics
- Information Dashboard Design
- Calendrical Calculations
Matt's books
As you'll be able to tell, we're still tinkering with the audio settings. Bear with us in these first few podcasts as we work out how best to record it all.
The photo above, California Island, was taken by Stuart Haury.
Episode one
16 minutes
Welcome, one and all, to the first episode of North Atlantic Radio. Your hosts are Brian Suda and Matt Riggott, both geeks obsessed with the web as a universal medium.
In this episode we talk about Twitter and the future of journalism, and the XMPP (aka Jabber) protocol and what it means for web developers.
Twitter and journalism
Newspapers are mass journalism, Twitter is a niche — or at least a collection of niches, if that makes sense. Can the latter replace the former completely, or can they co-exist? Is Twitter the future of news distribution? And what will become of the journalism itself?
XMPP (aka Jabber)
- XMPP
- Twitter firehose: details from the Twitter API documentation and the Twitter blog
Books
- Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky
- Mindhacks, by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb
- Hyperspace, by Michio Kaku
- A View from the Foothills, by Chris Mullin
- Scottish Screen Archive (not really a book)
The photo above, Newspaper, was taken by Luc De Leeuw.