The weather was somewhat bracing and provided a good excuse to stop off at numerous bars, cafés (for hot chocolate mit schlag) and even the oddly-floored Kunst Haus Wien, the latter of which had a fantastic Annie Leibovitz exhibition on. And on the subject of photography, Dan took some amazing photos of the trip which he put up on his blog.

Novelties of the trip included the musical Wiesel trains, the Opera Toilet, a plate of spare ribs twice the size of my head, and the regular recital of a particular Ultravox song. And of course, the company. Roll on the next trip!

Whilst it has an API, it’s still difficult to get recent data out of the service in a format that isn’t one of the badges they provide. However, a little bit of Javascript and RegEx magic later, and I’ve written a quick PHP wrapper that gets the latest data for a particular user and spits it out. You can see it in action on the right hand side.

I’ve started a project on Google Code where you can see the code and download it. You’re more than welcome to use and/or modify it, and it’d be great to hear from you if you do. Download it here. Hopefully putting the figures here for all to see might persuade me to run a bit more…

So the news I got this morning was, on a personal level, quite disappointing. The slideshows we had prepared for a few radio stations didn’t work on the demo models of the rather lovely Pure Sensia that was released today. It eventually came down to connectivity issues that only seemed to happen inside the venue where the event took place — and the detail of that certainly isn’t what this blog post is for.

From what I’ve seen and heard over the past 24 hours, the Sensia is a great little bit of kit whose touch-sensitive glass screen I am very much looking forward to grubbying with my fingers. It’s pretty much the first device that takes advantage of the fact that there’s a web connection in most of the places in which it’ll be used, and then uses that to provide more than just additional web-only stations. The important bit is the support for RadioVIS, which I’ve written a bit about before. As my boss Matt points out, it’s something we expect to have on our devices.

It opens up a whole new range of ways for stations to interact with listeners, and provide additional content to supplement what’s on air and engage listeners. For instance, if you’ve got a radio on your desk and you know that Capital FM broadcasts the status of tube lines (which it does), then you might just wait a little bit to see that come around. Who knows, if you’re not a regular listener then you may well hear something to convince you otherwise. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, with many of us (including the firm I work for, Folder Media) coming up with all sorts of interesting things to serve up to the masses.

As someone who is very much a newcomer to the entire industry, Ben sums up the atmosphere surrounding the whole project very well in his comment on Matt’s post. It’s fantastic to be able co-operate with teams who are essentially competitors, and in a friendly and constructive way. My thanks go out especially to Andy, Ben and the Global team, as well as Matt and David who I work with directly, and Colin and Matt at Pure – here’s to more of the same in the future.

Photo courtesy of James Cridland. Thanks to him too.

Myself and my two good friends Dan Pilkington and Rick Sellars all took part in the Great Yorkshire Run on Sunday. Perfect day for running – a bit cloudy and just the right side of being warm. I think Sheffield must have some kind of protective bubble around it, as the weather is almost too perfect every time I go… Managed to shave 5 minutes off my existing personal best to come in at 1:08:38, despite the lack of the promised run-through shower at the 7km mark. Nice. The next goal is to get under an hour.

Fantastic work from Rick and Dan though. Rick (who I did the Great Manchester Run with earlier this year) also got around 5 minutes off his best time with 42 minutes, and Dan got 47 minutes – and it was only his first proper run. We all ran for the Alzheimer’s Society, and it’s not to late to donate. For details of our times, you can search for us here.

Photo courtesy of the Alzheimer’s Society.

The RadioVIS part of things is where it gets interesting as it allows for a station to broadcast images in a slideshow-esque fashion, as well as text (just like the existing DLS text on DAB). Global and the BBC are already signed up as supporters of the project, and are starting to broadcast data to go along with their services. At the time of writing, Global’s Capital FM were the only station to be running a public RadioVIS service as it’s the one used in their iPhone app.

There are a huge number of possibilities here, and Capital have quite a few nice ideas up and running — including updates on the status of Tube lines, the latest news and chart recaps. Mind you, it’s no surprise that they lead the way, as the Creative Technology team at Global in Bristol are the ones behind the bulk of existing development.

I’m in the middle of getting to grips with the framework and it’s underlying technologies at the moment, and intend to write up a ‘dummies’ guide to getting started and writing some simple Python applications around it within the next week or so. It should be very interesting to see what content people decide to deliver using RadioVIS as the project gains momentum, so I’ll be keeping my eyes (and ears) peeled.

A beautiful day in Crouch End today, so went out for a run around Priory Park and then Alexandra Park. Ended up at about 6.6km for the whole thing, coming in at about 50 minutes or so. I’ll put that down to the Farmer’s Market crowds hampering me on the way in to Alexandra Park, and the long slog of a hill you get as you run up to the Palace. Anyway, after a poke around Google Maps it looks like there’s a relatively gentle uphill run from the office to my flat that’s around 7.5km and skirts around Shoreditch Park and Finsbury Park. I’ll see how my pace fares there and report back!