Monthly Archive for March, 2006

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Big Brother and the Pfaffs: the end of reality TV, please

Published on March 27, 2006 in Belgium and TV. 3 Comments

De Pfaffs: Jean-Marie en Carmen
Yesterday, while waiting for the Parelvissers to start on één, my zapping pattern made me stumble upon

  • Big Brother: some ‘grown-ups’ were fishing rubber ducks out of a pool with forced enthusiasm
  • De Pfaffs: 2 ‘grown-up’ men couldn’t work out how to install a game console and resorted to drinking half a dozen beers out of a home tap, in glasses featuring the face of their father-in-law (Jean-Marie Pfaff, Belgium’s best example of ‘brains don’t matter’)

Ironically, the excellent ‘Parelvissers’ show is about the decay of a formerly successful TV production company that falls apart because they produce more and more shitty stuff. I wonder how many of the people in Endemol (Big Brother) or Eyeworks (de Pfaffs) have a déjà-vu feeling when watching the series. “A show that features old people reading their will on TV and explaining why cousin X doesn’t get anything, hey, we had that idea too!“.

Watching Big Brother for 5 minutes was bad enough, but the Pfaffs episode was really embarrassing. Two guys in their late twenties fruitlessly struggling with a game console and a huge flat screen, a pregnant daughter talking to her doctor about her stool inconsistency, a 50-year ex-goalie talking about the importance of friendship while wearing sponsored shirts, … there’s just that much a sensible person can take. This is Reality television when the genre has outstayed its welcome, when they’re just trying to milk a dead cow. Reality TV is dead. Let’s see what’s on the other channels …

Moving up the feed chain

Published on March 24, 2006 in RSS and Web2.0. 3 Comments

While playing with Feed43 recently (an excellent anything-to-RSS converter), I wondered: why doesn’t Feedburner do any of this stuff? It’s just a bit earlier in the RSS food chain (let’s call that the ‘feed chain’). Which of course incentivised me to put that feed chain on paper. This is the result:
RSS feed chain
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Parelvissers aflevering 5 komt er aan

Published on March 23, 2006 in Belgium, NL and TV. 2 Comments

Parelvissers aflevering 5 trailer
De omerta tussen Guido, Dick en Xavier staat op springen, lijkt het. En is Lucas niet met Piet zijn voeten aan het rammelen. Als er maar niks gebeurt met ons Anneke (de promiscue trees). Kijken nu zondag!
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Web-based web development

Published on March 22, 2006 in technology, Web2.0 and webdev. 5 Comments

Writing code in your browser, it’s coming this way, I tell you! Some indications:

my own WikiRAD article (July 2005)
Playing around with PHP and wikis at the same time made me think on how web-based editing and compiling would be a good way to develop and run web applications
Feed43
Create an RSS feed out of any web page by using regular expressions with a nifty Web2.0 user interface. Lots of services are based on URLs and use RSS as input, so this can be the start of a first application. E.g. I just created an RSS feed for the Stubru playlist pages out of a Stubru Javascript file. Imagine I could now tell Feed43:
for each item in feed_that_I_just_created {
parse_the item_url
publish an rss feed for this item_url as feed_url_X
}
and then start working with that content too.
Amazon S3
web-based outsourced storage for any application, which made John Keyes and Peter Van Dijck to ask themselves: “Can you use Amazon S3 to create the new Flickr killer?”, and which made me think: but what if not only the storage, but the whole program was run by a 3rd party?
Iamalpha (via Richard McManus)
AOL’s new initiative for building microformat-based applications. It’s a bit early to grasp the extent what what they’re trying to accomplish, but I think it’s potentially more than just widgets. They don’t have a web-based IDE yet, but they do have a copy/paste code-validator. Most importantly: the applications are run by AOL!
YouOS (via Jeremy Zawodny)
YouOS: web-based IDE
a web-based OS that allows you to develop Javascript-based applications in a web-based IDE, with version control and compiling. It’s one of the products coming out of Paul Graham‘s Y-combinator startup incubator.

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