Reading Roars!

For all those geekily inclined (and there’s a fair number of us), you may be interested to know that a Twestival (Twitter + festival) is planned for Reading on 12 February.

Reading will be joining some 100 cities worldwide in staging a Twestival on this day.  The purpose of the event is to raise money and awareness for charity: water.

The location is to be confirmed (I suggested the Global Cafe, as it is itself a charity, has great coffee/beer, world music and free wifi).  So far 24 Twitter users have pledge to attend, including my humble self, with 13 “maybes”.

For more information, and to register, go here: http://twtvite.com/5hhven

It has taken me a long time – a little more than two months, to be exact – to update this blog.

I can’t explain my absence.  It’s just one of those things.  You stop doing something, and it sticks.  Only that this has a stuck a while longer. 

I’ve actually enjoyed this blogging break.  It’s nice, healthy even, to stop doing something for a while (I’ve been tweeting more regularly instead).  When eventually you do return to whatever activity you did, you see it differently at first before you settle into the usual routine (I find work and travel like that, such as when you return to the UK after a trip overseas).

I’ve also thought about the purpose of this blog and where to take it (if at all).  I’d like to continue producing Roarcasts (=podcasts), beginning with the third I promised in my last post, but I’m also mindful of the fact that 2009 is likely to bring pain to a number of local business owners.  Would it be wrong not to mention the downturn in any recorded conversation?

Without further ado, here is a run-down of things that I should have highlighted in the last couple of months:

• Tutu Melaku of Tutu’s Ethiopian Table won a Pride of Reading award last month in the Restaurant of the Year category (sponsored by The Oracle) for Tutu’s Ethiopian Table.  This is well-deserved, in my opinion.  The food, pleasingly different (Reading restaurants, in the main, offer too familiar food) and service are great.  Tutu’s coffee ceremonies are crowd-pleasing.  Tutu was also my first Roarcast subject recently.  Well done to all other award winners, too, as well as runners up.
   
• Young people and the Youth Engagement Service behind ReadingYouth.com demonstrated the new site to the general public at Broad St. Mall in November.  Like The Vibe, a new radio station aimed at the town’s young people, it’s a cracking initiative.  I hope they achieve success.  
   
• A reader named Charlotte Coad wrote in October to ask whether a creative writing club/group exists in Reading.  I have no idea.  Would anyone know?
   
• Reading Comedy Festival came and went (3 – 19 October).  I didn’t go (I’m not that into comedy gigs, though I was at the FymFyg fairly recently).   How did it go?  It’s exciting to have this sort of thing in Reading. 
   
• The University of Reading is once more placed in The Times Higher Education – QS World University Rankings top 200 institutions worldwide (or top 2.5%).  Not bad!  It was also good to see progress made in climate research (e.g. Oceans may provide clues to future rainfall) and in artificial intelligence (e.g. Machines edge closer to imitating human communication).
   
• Channel 4′s “Eight Minutes to Disaster”, aired in mid-September, followed Reading ambulance 212 around the town.  It was gripping.  212′s crew members did well, I thought, especially when having to deal with drunken idiots.  They really do have tough jobs.

A new radio station is planned for Reading: The Vibe.  The station will be launched to provide young people in the town an opportunity to discuss issues that affect them (anti-social behaviour, knife crime etc.), help local voluntary groups to advertise themselves and encourage the development of new talent.

The individual responsible for this exciting project is Gavin Harris, who is seeking funding from local businesses and organisations.  

If you are interested in taking part in the project (a trial will go live during the October half term), more information can be found on The Vibe website.

Feeling the squeeze?  You’re not alone.  We are now Europe’s most crowded country (and third worldwide in population density, after Bangladesh and South Korea).

Of course, if you are a user of public transport, you may have suspected this already.  The economy may be faltering, but the passenger numbers certainly aren’t.  If anything, the already heaving First Great Western trains and Tube seem to be getting busier and busier. 

It’s apparent to me that smarter transport solutions for the Thames Valley must be found (since our population is predicted to continue growing and even eclipse all other countries in Europe). 

As Martin Salter MP said at a Thames Valley transport workshop on 17 September (I’m grabbing this from the TVEP website): 

The infrastructure is absolutely antiquated. We should be talking of six tracking the Great Westerm main line, we should be talking of electrification, certainly to Reading, and probably to Bristol. For business men, if infrastructure inhibits the growth of your business, you are not going to hang around in the Thames Valley…….it is an indictment of governments that 86 per cent of all delays on the road network are due to capacity issues, but that is because we have not planned.. .parish pump politicians in West Berkshire blocked an absolutely crucial park and ride scheme in Reading because a cabbage field on the edge of the M4  was designated an area of outstanding natural beauty. The people who object to M4 widening, to more rail tracks and to park and ride schemes would be the very first to complain if their jobs were not here and they  did not have the ability to sustain the very prosperous lifestyle we have here.

That’s fine, but there is another solution that  I think we ought to consider, however, and that is to encourage flexible working.  It’s barmy that many of us are expected to begin and finish work at the same time in the 21st century.  Technology allows us to do all sorts of wonderful things without the need to travel very far.  It’s worth a thought.

A 12-month Reading University study has revealed that expanding icons, links and other elements on a computer interface as a cursor moves towards them could benefit older people.  In particular, the benefits are shown to be:

• a 50% drop in ‘point and click’ mistakes
• a 13% drop in the time required by older people to pick a target

More white space would help as well, I’d argue.  Too many popular pages are cluttered with largely meaningless icons, links and widgets, in my opinion. 

I’m trying making improvements in this area myself on this blog by scrapping the pointless ClustrMaps and Technorati tag cloud.  They may look “cool”, but that isn’t good enough.

Local online dating site Datereading.com will be relaunching on 21 July.  New features will include, we’re told:

• Video chat
• SMS messages to members
• Advanced search facilities
• Weekly events
• A Polish language option

Good luck to Faarhad and team (and to all those looking for a relationship, of course)

I am experiencing Facebook fatigue at the moment (all those walls <sigh>), so have focused my attention on the microblogging service Twitter (think Facebook status updates).  

I’d signed up a while back after reading social media expert and Reading resident Drew Benvie’s blog, but didn’t see the appeal.  Well, I see the appeal now, a late entrant as always.

You can follow my 140 character nonsense at www.twitter.com/mattbrady.  One of these days I will do something smarter with it.  But not today.

I have been checking out veevow (don’t you just love these Web 2.0 names?), an online video playlist site that launched just 10 days ago. 

Veevow, founded by former Reading PhD student Dr Matthew Ryan (I’m told that the veewow team is very fond of The Oracle), allows you to build YouTube video playlists.  I gave it a go 5 minutes ago and it really is very simple:

1. Sign up.  This is short and sweet (how it should be)
2. Create a playlist, in this instance “Reading FC” – got there first! 
3. Add videos to your playlist, taking the “embed” code from YouTube.  The playlist is automatically generated
4. Save or play your selection.  See my Reading FC playlist for yourselves.

You can share the playlist with your mates and add other videos found on veewow to your playlist. 

Further features are planned (it would be good to see enhancements such as video rating, a Facebook application, WordPress plugin and tagging, for example).  One new feature was added yesterday – a WordPress blog (nice one!).

One to watch, I think

The Reading Evening Post has a new website. It looks very similar to the Reading Chronicle effort, unveiled weeks earlier (see images below). The new site has all the usual Web 2.0 features.  By signing up for an “S&B Media Passport” (not another passport – groan), you will be able to post comments on articles, receive newsletters (but which and when?) and enter competitions.

I was looking very hard for my blog feed, previously located under Community Blogs, and… I’m still looking. All other local blogs written by everyday folk (not Evening Post journos) have similarly disappeared from the Blogs channel. It’s an odd decision and no one warned me about it. I do hope that these feeds are brought back.

Fancy participating in a scientific study for cash?  Jan Luff at the University of Reading is looking for healthy volunteers to help “evaluate the effects of different breakfast cereals on beneficial faecal bacteria”.  Here’s the digest:

It has long been known that the bacteria in the human gut can infuluence health; in particular eating fermented foods such as yoghurt can be beneficial. One of the problems with this approach is that the beneficial components of food must survive most of the digestive processes of the gut and reach the large intestine intact.

We would like to determine the effect of whole grain breakfast cereals on human gut bacteria, and to evaluate the diversity of the microbial community and any changes in major bacterial groups. We will also measure the metabolic and immunological consequences of changing our gut bacteria in this way using a range of high resolution analytical techniques.

If you’re interested in finding out more about this study, call Jan Luff on 0118 378 7771.