I heard a new — to me — piece of music the other evening, It was on ClassicFM’s rather lovely ‘The Full Works‘, the late evening show which plays whole pieces, rather than the shorter snippets featured during the day. The piece was clearly (to my admittedly untutored ears) Beethoven, and symphonic, but, familiar as I am with Beethoven’s symphonies, I’d never heard it before, and couldn’t place it. The use of horns was typically Beethovian, the woodwind was very Beethovian, the strings were quite Beethovian, and the structure of the piece itself was absolutely Beethovian. No doubt about it, it was a Beethovian piece. But what was it?

As soon as I could, I pulled the car over and parked at the side of the road, whipped out my trusty Nokia N95, and used ClassicFM’s useful, if appallingly inaccessible and not really mobile- friendly, on-line playlist to check what it was. And it wasn’t Beethoven at all. To my surprise, it was Georges Bizet’s Symphony In C Major. Remarkably, it was written as a student exercise in 1855, when he was just 16, and lay forgotten and unperformed until it was rediscovered in 1935. You’d never tell, if you heard this impressive work.

Well worth seeking out, I reckon. Especially if you like Beethoven.

Here’s my review of the Daughters of Albion at Birmingham Town Hall.

You can see more of my reviews, on the same site, ‘Birmingham Alive!’.

Here’s a screen-shot of a search of the e-mail archives on my PC at work: never let it be said that I or my colleagues are change-averse!

It’s one year today since Bruce Lawson and James Craig published “hAccessibility“, about the misuse of the ‘abbr’ element in microformats (an issue I first raised on 20 September 2006 in Accessify Forums).

As recent events show, the microformats cabal still has its collective head up its own^W^W^W in the sand.

Despite suggestions for a workaround, a solution seems no nearer, thanks to their apparent indifference. Shame on them.

Here’s another screenshot (linked to a larger version; thank you Flickr).

This one shows some of the RSS feeds I follow, in Google Reader. I only started using that service recently, and I’m finding very compelling (and time consuming!) both on my desktop PC, as shown here, and on my mobile device, using the stripped down and rather splendid mobile interface. However, I think the desktop interface — if I can call it that — could be improved and made more usable.

Firstly, I’d like a “mark as read” (or “ignore”, with the same effect) button, so that I can skip over posts which look uninteresting, without having to open and then close them to do so. It could go to the right of the “star” icon (highlighted yellow — and what’s that for? I can find no explanation, other than references to apparent side-effects of using it, in the help pages).

Also, if I select the title of a feed , such as “BBC News | News front” (a truncation of …News Front Page”; marked in orange), surely I can reasonably expect the view of that feed to open, instead of the specific post? That would be the same action as when I select the feed’s title in the left-hand column. The post’s title, to the right of the feed title, is a large-enough target to work in its own right.

Lastly, there are two “refresh” buttons (each highlighted in red). These, stupidly, have different functions. The one in the left-hand column refreshes all the feeds, while the one at the top refreshes the feed I’m viewing. If I use the latter, it clears read items from the current feed view, but annoyingly that doesn’t happen if I use the former — what’s that about? Either the two buttons should have the same effect, or they should be labelled differently.

I’d like to let Google know what I think, but — in typical Google fashion — they don’t seem to provide a mechanism for me to do so.

Postscript: The URL provided by Google for my “publicly shared items” in Google Reader, which anyone can visit, is the mind-bogglingly unmemorable, untypeable and generally unfriendly http://www.google.com/reader/shared/03499548569546420688. Why can’t I have http://www.google.com/reader/shared/pigsonthewing ?

I’ve just had a look on Facebook, for a group for people concerned about the nasty Phorm cyber-spying system. I found these:

• Save UK internet privacy - reject ISPs that use Phorm (1,347 members)
• Deny Phorm (48 members)
• Arrest Ben Verwaayen for criminal offences under RIPA with regards to Phorm (26 members)
• Fight back against PHORM (19 members)
• Bad Phorm! (9 members)
• Got Phorm? (7 members)
• Stop ISP’s from breaching customers privacy!!!! (174 members)
• Stop BT, TalkTalk, VirginMedia From Selling Your Web Browsing Information! (38 members)
• Things you need to know about your Virgin Media/Blueyonder/NTL Broadband (21 members)

The situation is the same, or worse, for other subjects, too.

Firstly, I wonder what it is about people, that they set up a new group, rather than searching for, and joining, an existing one?

But, more importantly, Facebook needs some sort of mechanism to encourage, and then facilitate (with the agreement of their members) such groups to merge.

This screenshot (linked to a larger version) shows a TechCrunch article in Google Reader, as it appears “out of the box” (apart from cropping, blurring irrelevant content and the addition of orange highlighting). Note the position of the logo, described as being “shown at right”.

In this era of mobile devices, freed readers and other such proxies — not to mention aural browsers and assistive devices with no spatial component — referring to the location of an element on the screen is stupid. Harmful, even.

Images on Flickr (and other sites?) can be tagged with “machine tags“. For living things, these can convey taxonomic information. For example:

taxonomy:binomial=Larus melanocephalus

taxonomy:genus=Larus

Flickr collapses these to:

“larusmelanocephalus” and “larus“, but note that subtracting one from the other gives the specific epithet, “melanocephalus“.

For subspecies, use:

taxonomy:binomial=Larus glaucoides
taxonomy:genus=Larus
taxonomy:subspecies=Larus glaucoides kumlieni

and for other ranks:

taxonomy:class=Aves

Here’s an example: http://flickr.com/photos/pigsonthewing/2238938901/

Well, what are you waiting for? Tag away!

Twitter posts like this one:

We’re still deep in the Sundarbans, near Tambulbunia, meeting experts on dolphins and tigers. l:Tambulbunia, Bangladesh=22.27722,89.71905

have a place- name and corresponding coordinates (indicated by the prefix “l:”). This has allowed them to be plotted on a map.

It should be possible for the poster to send, say:

We’re still deep in the Sundarbans, near Tambulbunia, meeting experts on dolphins and tigers. #hcard: fn+locality:Tambulbunia: country-name:Bangladesh: geo:22.27722,89.71905

using colons as delimiters and have Twitter render that comment marked up as an hCard.

In the short term, this could be achieved by a third-party site, like #hashtags .

UPDATE:  being more mindful of the 140 character limit than I have in the above example, perhaps class names might be abbreviated (”loc” for “locality”, “ctry” for “country-name”, and so on).

Recently, I chanced upon another “social networking” site, BigSight, which claims to be ”the world’s largest people directory”. Although it’s “invitation only” at present, I found a page inviting me to join. So I did.

I was requested to create a profile, and provide an image, so uploaded the “avatar” you see on this blog’s profile, and which I use in most places where I have an on-line presence. I was also asked for my date of birth, and entered the day and month, but not the year. This caused an error message (and not a very meaningful or helpful one) when I saved the profile, so I entered a clearly-bogus dummy value, 1900.

Soon afterwards, I received an e-mail from BigSight, asking if I would “like to” upload a real picture and my real date of birth. I wrote back saying that, frankly, I would not. I then received an e-mail, almost by return, saying “Sorry, then, Andy, I’ve got to zap your page. The whole idea of bigsight is based around actual data.” Sure enough, my profile was already “404″.

Not only do I find such an apology insincere, but I don’t see how this model is workable.

Since they don’t know anything about me, much less what I look like, how would they know whether a “real” photograph was of me? If I’d given my birth date as, say, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, or 1990, how would they know that it was not my real one? How do they verify all the images and birth-dates (and everything else) that they carry at present?

And how would they do such manual checking, if they ever did manage to get six-or seven figures of members?

I predict that BigSight will either fail (through lack of uptake, or, worse, because the “actual” data they profess to have will eventually turn out to be bogus), or will have to modify its polices so that the revealing of such personal data becomes optional.

As it is, BigSight has wiped the autobiography I wrote at their request, and now carry less (i.e. zero) information about me, than they did before they did so. “Way to go”, as I believe our transpondian cousins say.