Saturday, January 11, 2003

Going Underground. Anyone who has ever travelled on the London Underground should feel at home on the website of Annie Mole (a.k.a. The Mole), Going Underground. Her site is organised somewhat chaotically (just like the Underground itself, you might say), but once you've found your way, you'll surely appreciate it as it deals with the wackier side of The Tube: among other things, it features the basics of Underground etiquette, ghost sightings, notes on tube food, 50 obscure facts and funny train drivers' announcements such as this one: "I apologise for the delay leaving the station ladies and gentlemen, this is due to a passenger masturbating on the train at Edgware Road. Someone has activated the alarm and he is being removed from the train." Here's more. [I corresponded with Annie a while back over my own underground website. This is me finally keeping my promise to link to her site.] By the way, the London Underground is celebrating its 140th birthday today, the first line of the Metropolitan Railway having been opened in 1863 between Farringdon Street and Paddington using trains hauled with steam engines. Here's more. [The Aardvark Speaks] 6:00:02 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Proposal for Open Media Management servers. Here's a followup to my initial proposal for us to create open source, media management servers - (probably) utilizing Apache Cocoon. By creating what amounts to intelligent proxy and registry servers for media, on-line tools and communities can share media (within the spirit of the Creative Commons) or AT LEAST  just not have to duplicate the code that EVERYONE is gonna need for managing media.  Whether you're moblogging from your photo camera, streaming media from some service, storing files on a virtual hard drive, subscribing to on-line services, cow-towing to whatever Microsoft shoves down your throat, stealing MP3 files, buying media legally or even creating media yourself - every modern on-line system today has to: - keep track of where the media it, and what device it's on - enable it to be easily integrated into the blog, community, page, webapp or service, etc. - keep meta-data around about the media; who owns it, created it, what the 'deal' is, it's size, shape, depth, etc. - scale itself to the available bandwidth - follow it's owner around through their digital lifestyle (home, school, office, on the road) [Marc's Voice] 4:16:36 PM    trackback []     Articulate []