Great stuff as always.

Remember the  Accord – Cog ad?

Unfortunately I found out about the  event too late to register but I went there anyway, hoping they might let me in if I asked politely. The nice ladies at the door responded the way I hoped and I got a pass for one lecture.

Lucky for me it was the one I was most interested in by  Matt Locke of  BBC Innovation Labs and  BBC Backstage project.

His message…Open up! Open access, open assets. Let the users do whatever they want with your content and find out where that takes you. His primary examples were Flickr, Google Maps and of course – the BBC, where users created all kinds of ingenius products on top of the APIs provided.

One interesting result of the Backstage project was  Mightyv which immediately reminded me of  TVvSPOREDnik by [url:www.vidmar.net/weblog/David Vidmar[/url]. Although I much prefer the approach in TVvSPOREDnik there are some things to be learned from Mightyv. Perhaps David decides to make some modifications along those lines someday.

The  tag cloud approach used is supposedly becoming more valuable to the BBC and others than the classic set-top box, small sample, viewer analisys. According to Matt there are something like 1000 famillies around the UK involved in the programme from which they determine what viewers are watching on TV. Compare that to many thousands who are (could) be using the tagging sistem and you end up with a pretty accurate idea what your audience really wants to see or listen to. I can definitely see this becoming very valuable to TV and radio stations, even newspaper industry. It could be huge…

The problem I see with all this, let’s call it the open up inniciative (and I asked him about it), is that it’s all good for the users but the corporate world doesn’t really see it that way. People running a business are eventually expecting something in return, a profit, and most of them just don’t see how it could happen with open access. They don’t see the benefit and I can imagine it would be really hard to convince corporate types that it’s worth the risk and investment.

His response was oversimplified in my opinion. Obviously the BBC or  RTV SLO and other similar institutions don’t have to worry about such things so experiments are actually very welcome but how does the same apply to folks like  HBO or  CNN and every other commercial media outlet??
He said something along the lines of: Open up (it doesn’t cost that much), see where that takes you and worry about making a profit later on.

I don’t know… maybe that is the answer.

It was definitely worth getting up in the morning, one of the best and most useful lectures I’ve been to in a while. I’m just sorry I was late for application and didn’t get the opportunity to listen to what others had to say. Can anyone sum up what Erika Repovž (of Delo.si Blogs) had to say?? Hopefully she was faced with a lot of criticism. But since I wasn’t there she probably got away easy.

Today a bunch of us retired swimmers (19 years and older) gathered for a competition that serves mainly for some ego boosting (woohooo, I still got it man!!) or ego destruction (I’m in worse shape than I thought!?). I guess I can count myself among those that went home in better mood than they arrived.

I did the 400m free in 4.51, which is 32s slower than my personal best. Yeah, I know it looks awful but it’s not as bad as it seems. I actually thought I was being rather optimistic when I said I’m aiming for a round 5.00:00, especially considering the fact I’ve been out of the water since the  mini marathon back in September.

The same thing happened on 100m free. I was aiming for 1.01 but did it in 59.80 or 4.4s slower than my personal best. Not that great but better than I expected.

Swimming is not as easy as it used to be I’ll tell you that. That’s why most people just stick to short courses like 50 and 100m. You can pull off a decent result even without training. It’s a completely different story beyond that though. The 400m almost felt like torture and I began to question my sanity somewhere around the 200m point.

Good fun though, it’s nice to know what I’m capable of after all this time.