James has a great write-up of the excellent BarCamp Ireland on Saturday. I'm so pumped with ideas - I've got pages and pages scribbled in my notebook of stuff to do. I've just gotta start Getting Things Done - close all of those open loops, y'know? 
Here's a little corker I missed. David Hasselhoff did a CD signing at HMV in London. I've had a shit day - and the thought of seeing David Hasselhoff in the flesh only makes it worse.
Alan Yentob - TV presenter and former Controller of BBC 1 - wants to know why YouTube matters (via plasticbag). I posted this comment: "YouTube doesn't matter to me. It's a transitory step to something far greater. YouTube and MySpace are the training wheels of the Internet. Eventually other services will improve their offering and the current so-called 'MySpace generation' will grow up and realise that they own their own data - not MySpace or YouTube or anybody else for that matter. And then the fun will really happen."
I love the idea of totally inclusive social networks. Facebook opening up for everybody is a step towards that. Unfortunately, some people disagree. In my Facebook, I've got friends from college and friends from the 'net together - in the same interface. That's how it should be. I'm a non-drinker - but there are two things that could get me on the booze. The extremely slow repairs in Knightsbridge which slowed the bus down enough the other day that I missed my train. And the Web 2.0 drinking game could help.
The FT has a review of Dawkins' God Delusion. I'll read Dawkins when (a) I finish reading Yochai Benkler, (b) I've finished reading the stack of things I need to read for my course and for my dissertation.
Techblog has built a live category-based OPML template for Wordpress 2.0. Believe me, I've got ways to extend that!
Shawn Anthony: "Seminarians are facing a shortage of pulpits! Mainline Protestant churches - including Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian - continue to decline in membership and attendance". My reaction is so obvious that it need not even be printed. 
Perry de Havilland: "The Tory Party stands for continuity with Blair-ism, just with a fresh set of managers".
The Web on Cameron 
So, as I posted yesterday, David Cameron - possible future PM of Britain and current Conservative Party leader - now has a "blog" of sorts. Here are some responses from the blogosphere he purports to be joining:
Politaholic reckons that it's an utter fake: "That doesn't seem quite to fit with their cramped quarters. But then this is a film set. It is no more real than the facade of a western town on a Hollywood studio lot. It's phoney. Of course, before the 1997 Election Blair did the same thing, inviting a film crew into his Islington home where he pretended familiariy with a vacuum cleaner; and there wasn't a nanny in sight, although there was one, later silenced by the lawyers. But when it comes to using his kids as props in party political broadcasts and photo shoots Cameron is in a class of his own."
Here's what is really interesting though. The complete lack of RSS is interesting. That seems to point to it being an agency job who just don't get blogging. The Web 2.0 style is now so established that politicians are doing it.
Dave said a few years ago that the next president would be blogging. Cameron is blogging and - if the pollsters are to be believed - will be the prime minister after the next election by a fairly clear margin. If you want to see what is wrong with blogging, look on at Cameron and ye shall despair.
Browser Hunt
Tara Hunt is following the Steve Gillmor gravy train by saying "x is dead" when they really mean "x ought to be dead". I'm sensitive to this because of G. E. Moore and his naturalistic fallacy. If you want to say ought just say so. It's easy. Come on - Windows ought to be dead - Windows' value proposition for is already dead for anyone who isn't snorting the Outlook or DirectX crack - but the body has yet to catch up.
Anyway, Tara's point is that offline applications aren't all that bad after all.
I agree. One of the things I like about the OPML Editor (and Frontier) is that it's an offline application. What would be really amazing is if someone could make a really powerful, extensible desktop application. The technology that needs to be made much simpler are all the little pieces that everyone has been bitching about for years: synchronisation, offline browsing and so on.
The application would do things like keep your files in sync with all your different web services, provide a neat offline bridge to web services, and do synchronisation with calendar, events, mapping and so on.
I use Flickr and I use blip.tv. Both have offline apps to easily upload content. They are both doing the same thing - taking data from my hard drive and putting it on the web. I have an FTP client (the excellent Interarchy). I have ssh. I have a group of hacked-together shell scripts. Bundle all that crap together, make it look nice and make it all sync nicely with all my devices.
The bridge between online and offline is still far too much hard work. It needs to be like my iPod - I just drop my iPod in to the dock, all the podcasts that are on it that I've listened to gets pulled off and all the new stuff gets dropped on there without me having to do anything. Why can the same not be true for everything else I do on the computer?
I have iCal - but it doesn't update my calendars unless the application is open. This means that if I want to find out what's going on, I have to open iCal, sync all my calendars in there, then open iSync and sync my calendars with my Palm and/or iPod.
I use loads of web applications that use a mixture of SOAP, XML-RPC, REST and other XML-based pieces. Tie them all together and make them look pretty. And make them work when I'm in a tunnel. No amount of AJAX will fix the fact that radio waves don't penetrate railway tunnels.
Bandwidth is currently nicely built up in two places - the home and the workplace. It's easier to access in the former (the latter has firewalls and IT department bullshit to deal with). Bandwidth in the gap is going to be far, far more expensive for a long time. Mobile networks are still too expensive and too slow (it's only affordable for me because I use GPRS instead of 3G) - and wi-fi is £25 a month (the same as a standard cable or satellite subscription). I'm not confident that the geek masturbation fodder of high-speed wireless connectivity everywhere is anything but a fantasy for at least a decade.
There aren't easy answers. I'm hoping to hack little possible solutions in to what I'm doing with my forthcoming online services platform.
