Boxee is a platform that is really going places. At one point it was a mainly for enthusiasts willing to spend the time on installing it and setting it up on their own hardware. Now it is moving towards mass appeal with the recent announcement of a Boxee Box, which users will just be able to plug in and go, and Boxee payments, which may make the platform more appealing to content providers. A great starting point before getting stuck into full scale Boxee application development is creating a simple RSS application that will just make a feed of a podcast available and give it presence in the world of Boxee.

Our relationship with the mobile phone is changing, and it is not just the high end phones that show evidence of this. The Sony Ericsson T715 is a new mid range phone available on 3 that comes preloaded with lots of features that will enable you to enjoy the web on the move, including built in Twitter and Facebook clients. You can also make calls and write texts on the phone, but that isn't very interesting; what is more interesting is that this is a great phone if you are into the "constant checking culture" now thought by 3 to be driving mobile broadband usage. Thanks to the kind folk at 3MobileBuzz I was able to try this phone out and see what it has to offer.

One of the joys of using an open source operating system like Ubuntu is that you can experiment with all sorts of ideas and not worry about constantly purchasing software or coming up against artificial limitations. By chaining some open source packages together we can do some quite interesting things, so it is fun sometimes to try a challenge. In this post I will show you how to take a text RSS feed and make it into an Internet radio broadcast that can be received on a dedicated device, so instead of being stuck in front of a screen you can catch up with your RSS feeds while sunbathing in the garden! The solution here is not intended to be production ready, and might be tough going for beginners, but the idea is it will give a basic overview which you can then go and experiment with. I'll be using Icecast2 to stream the broadcast, Ices to feed Icecast2 with files to broadcast, Espeak to generate text to speech audio files and a small custom PHP script to convert the text feed into a format suitable for ESpeak.

Back in January I wrote about a piece of software that I think has a very bright future in Boxee makes your TV social. One of the great features of Boxee is that it will take standard podcast feeds and then allow you to enjoy these podcasts through the software and potentially on your TV. At the Open University, where I work, we publish a wide variety of podcasts on all sorts of subjects and these are made available through a wide variety of platforms including standard RSS feeds, iTunesU and Miro. However it hasn't been possible until now to just drop a link into Boxee to let it discover all of the podcasts on offer. This is because the site structure of the podcasts website is described using an OPML format file which holds the information on the navigation required to get to the various podcasts. Boxee does not understand OPML, but today a new facility has been added to provide a Boxee compatible feed that will let you use one link that enables Boxee to discover everything the OU Podcasts website has to offer.

Back in December 2008 I wrote a small perl script to enable you to enjoy podcasts from the Open University in MythStream, an add on for MythTV that enables you to watch streaming video content through MythTV. The OU's podcasts site has a number of RSS feeds that relate to the varioud subject areas that the podcasts covered and to a number of containing sections like OU Life and OU Research. At the time the script was written there was no easy overall way to autodiscover all of these feeds and tie them together, so I wrote a bit of code that would work this out from the menu rendered on the right hand side. This sort of screen scraping technique is great as a short term way to get the data we need, but the problem is that it is using output that was intended for a human to read rather than a machine to process. This sort of process can easily break if the layout of the page changes. To solve this problem I've been working with Chris Valentine of the Knowledge Media Institite at the OU who has kindly provided a better way to extract this information (many thanks Chris!).

There is no doubt that the mobile is starting to make more of an impact on the Internet. Not long ago many people thought a mobile was really just for making calls and texting. It is difficult to miss the amount of publicity that the Apple iPhone and Google Android projects have generated recently. Many mobile phones come with a browser built in that is capable of rendering regular web pages and the price of Internet access from a mobile is dropping, and is often it is bundled with contracts. Ten years ago Nokia set this process in motion by releasing the Nokia 7110, the first mobile phone to have Internet access, it couldn't render regular web pages, only ones specifically written for mobiles but brought to the public the idea of Internet access in your pocket, available quickly wherever and whenever you need it. It has been a slow process for the mobile web, but it looks set to grow, and one social networking site in Japan has found that mobile traffic has overtaken non-mobile web traffic. A problem remains though, while mobiles are now capable of rendering regular HTML web pages, they still have very small screens meaning that web sites have to be redesigned to look their best. This, depending on how far you want to go, can be a time consuming process (and one I'm determined to do properly later this year!), fortunately there is a service available that promises not only to re-render your web content in a mobile friendly way, but also to render it in different ways for different devices, and to do all of this in the time it takes to have a coffee.

In many houses the TV and broadband line can be found only inches apart and in most cases no connection is yet made. The Internet had the power to bring about a revolution in the choice of programming available, instead of scheduled streams of programming that we have no control over we will be able to pick and chose what we want to watch from thousands of producers. Media centre software such as MythTV is a great option for this, with the capability to deliver a full TV friendly experience, but up to now media centre software has primarily focused on TV tuners and media available locally, such as your collection of videos and MP3s. Now a new entrant onto the media centre scene is offering a different focus, putting web services at the heart of the TV experience, but this goes beyond just consuming web content, they are also adding a social, Web 2.0 dimension by integrating with popular sites such as Twitter, Last.fm and FriendFeed. Boxee is not just software, but also a social networking site where you can form communities and rate content. It makes TV a social activity.

Christmas is upon us once again and inevitably many people will be thinking about what to enjoy on television as they recover from all of that food and drink! So in my last blog post for this year I thought I would experiment with MythStream, a plugin for MythTV which is a multimedia home entertainment system designed for PCs that are connected to your TV and you operate with a remote control rather than the traditional laptop and desktop experience of computing. In my last post the Open University's new podcast website was brought inside Miro, but in this example, information will be extracted from it to integrate it with MythStream and MythTV so you can enjoy the content of the site from your armchair. The OU's podcast site uses a hierarchical navigational structure that made it a bit difficult to import the whole thing into MythStream straight away. Fortunately, MythStream enables you to write your own parsers for external websites, so you can import the same navigational logic, even if it is not supported out of the box.

The Open University here in the UK regularly coproduces educational programming in partnership with the BBC. Some of these programmes are for a wide audience such as Coast, and other programmes are for more specialist audiences such as The Story of Maths. To catch these programmes you don't have to necessarily stay in and make sure that you are sat on your sofa in front of the TV at a scheduled time, instead you can catch the repeats on BBC iPlayer (sorry - UK, IoM & Channel Islands only). My colleague Tony Hirst recently created a mash up to find the OU programmes from the last seven days posted to iPlayer using feeds from Twitter, iPlayer and a Yahoo Pipe, he then presented the results in a web page. When looking at his blog post on this it struck me that it would be really nice if this could be presented in a way more suitable for a media centre PC connected to a TV, so this would mean nice big fonts, an attractive interactive-TV type interface and ease of use from a remote control, and then I thought it would be even better to feed this into MythTV, integrating seven days of OU programming alongside the rest of your entertainment.

The world of Web 2.0 consists of many sites that you might use for different purposes, you might use Flickr store your photos, Twitter to microblog, last.fm to find new music, your bookmarks on del.icio.us, maybe a blog of your own, the list could go on for quite some time. In each of these sites you might have a profile that tells part of the story about who you are, but these websites usually keep themselves to themselves, the profile will only reflect your interaction with that site. So different aspects of your Web 2.0 personality can be found scattered all over the Internet, but now it is possible to tie these strands together to enhance your website or blog and give a better impression of the things you find interesting.