Ben Metcalfe's dashboard

Yes, sadly James was incorrect. I was able to receive BBC World News briefly via LiveStation a few months ago but I think it was a mistake in their IP detection system.

I watch BBC News 24 stream and also use iPlayer and the similar services on ITV and C4 by proxying into my server in a datacenter in London - which makes it look like I am accessing the various sites from inside the UK.

If you are confident with some command line stuff on your computer (or have a friend who is) and either a friend in the UK with a fast internet connection or can rent an account on a UK server, then you can make this work.

There are also commercial services such as http://www.uktelly.tv/ which provide the same functionality but in a slightly more user-friendly way (but cost more).

Of course it's worth pointing out the legality of this is questionable, although if you're proxying into your own equipment in UK then it becomes a particularly interesting legal scenario. UKTelly.TV is probably on very dodgy legal grounds as they are providing a circumvention and re-broadcast for profit.

Yes, it comes down to Adobe AIR letting us do this -- but if lots of people vote and show interest then we can pass it along to Adobe :)

That's because Twhirl always gets the last 10-20 tweets, directs, etc from Twitter API so that you have some tweets already in the panel. They will always be the most recent ones, however. – Ben Metcalfe, on January 23, 2009 19:00

That's because Twitter has a feed of your last 10 or so DM's - when you open twhirl it automatically asks twitter for the last 10 DM's to make sure that the list it has is fresh (maybe you've not used Twhirls for a while, so it would be a different 10 to the 10 you had when you closed). – Ben Metcalfe, on January 23, 2009 18:58

Which other client are you using for your Facebook/MySpace updates? What else do you like/dislike about it? Let us know!! :P

Hey Sean! (are you in SF at the moment, btw? I'd love to meet up)

I do agree with your wider point. Yes, I can see a day when the entertainment system suddenly becomes $$ (doesn't JetBlue charge to watch live TV, which is currently free on VA?).

And it goes without saying that most of the old skool airlines now charge you to check baggage, unless you have status. (I rarely check baggage and I have status on United so I don't know when this started).

What I would say is that it's important that the airlines make a profit - and I'm not normally the type of person to go around making sure companies are doing ok out of my hard earned money.

But airlines are an exception because there are only a limited number of them that can exist and we need competition. Scarcity is factored into the industry because there are only so many take off and landing spots, number of passengers per route, etc. If one dies out that doesn't mean another will take it's place - it might mean the ecosystem just got scarcer.

In a nut shell, I don't want VA to go out of business because it's what's keeping the other carriers honest. They can only put their prices up so much - esp as Southwest controls the market for pricing because they locked in their fuel price a few years ago. 40% of your ticket is fuel costs, and so SW are able to control the market in terms of costs based on better operating conditions than the other carriers.

Hmmm, maybe I've not made my point as clearly as I should here - I'm pressed to go out but wanted to respond. As you may know, I travel most weeks on planes and so I follow this area closely and VA is actually an important player in keeping these routes out of SFO competitive - I would rather see things like baggage check and entertainment becomes for-pay than to see ticket prices rise or them go out of business.

There's prob a blog post in here in airline micro-economics, because its fascinating to watch the different airlines change their prices each day to match each other.

You can delete messages that you posted by logging into twitter.com and clicking on the archive tab. Then each message you have made is displayed, along with a trash can next to it. You have to do one-by-one, there is no 'mass mode'

However, the concept of deleting twitter messages is flawed because when you made the message it was distributed to all of your followers, and the messages are never deleted from their client, sms inbox, etc.

Oh, and it's also an example of a product with a playful use case. There is no specific problem it solves, but it is a fun and engaging proposition (er, when it works).

If you're not the type of person who likes to experiment with new things, but instead uses new things only when they solve a particular problem (and nothing wrong with that - people are different) then maybe twitter isn't for you.

It enables and facilitates you to deliver status messages and brief thoughts (+ replies to other people's twitter thoughts) to a large group of people.

The two particular facets here are:

1) that the messages are delivered to people in the way most appropriate to them (some receive SMS, some check their RSS, some have clients). You don't have to worry whether sending everyone an email or an SMS is going to not be the way they like to receive updates

2) you can broadcast your updates to a group of people far wider than your usual circle of influence - this is particularly the case if you become notorious in somewhere, including through the messages you tweet. Over 1500 people receive each of my updates - I don't think I know 1500 people in real life.

Sadly you can't.

But also, it doesn't make sense to delineate between "open for anyone but not indexable by Google" -- your profile page is indexed by loads of other search engines and your RSS feed may be aggregated by loads more services.

If there's something written on a page or in and RSS feed then it's out there for public consumption. I'd suggest reconsidering the projected updates route, but even that is not 100% - people retweet, etc

If it's really private, don't say it at all would be my advice! :P

I thinking about this (yeah, I have much going on) and I think this is a positive move.

99% of people have earphones on them when they get on a flight so for most people it's redundant to be given a second pair.

It cuts down on waste, and expense -- and in these times its in our interest that airlines cut down on expenses that we customers don't want because otherwise we're going to see it in our ticket fares. (water no longer free on US Airways, anyone? urh).

Also, the virgin entertainment system is great, and it's worth listening to with good headphones.

Finally, most earphones - esp the over-the-head ones - are recycled, sorry, reused and thus a little on the unhygienic side too.

I wouldn't remove the blog (someone might want to take it back on) but yeah, I would do a final post putting it on hiatus. Perhaps add links to Technorati and Google Blog searches for "BarCamp" where people can find out what's being talked about in the wider blogosphere – Ben Metcalfe, on September 07, 2008 17:47

Actually, I think BCL5 is being organized by eBay UK peeps. The main man you want to contact is Jonathan Gabbai - jgabbai at ebay dot com.

(or ask Chris directly, as he's definitely one of the 'leaders' and founders of the idea) :)

I'm not involved in this forthcoming BarCampLondon5 but I organized the first in London and familiar with a number of issues that probably relate to this...

The reason why many BarCamps in the UK use tickets is because the demand is always high and the companies that offer their space to be used for the events generally put a restriction on the number of people that can be in there.

That's because offices, esp in London, tend to be small and also because fire regulations are stiffly maintained.

I now live in San Francisco and the events out here (where BarCamp begun) don't have similar constraints because space is more plentiful and there is a more relaxed attitude to issues like fire regs, etc.

Do contact the organizers, as I know they sometimes make tickets available in batches so that everyone can get a fairer chance at getting one - rather than giving them all away to the first group of people to find out about them.