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Rory Cellan-Jones

Tech Tools Aid Heathrow Hack

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 18 Jan 08, 21:52 GMT

I鈥檝e been away from my normal beat for a couple of days, getting involved in coverage of the Heathrow crash landing. But reporting on this story has reminded me of how new technology has changed the lives of journalists. Ten years ago, we would not have had three tools that proved essential over recent days 鈥 Google, Youtube, and games software downloaded online.

Even just a decade ago, my first stop in examining the possible causes of this near disaster would have been the 大象传媒 library, home to volumes of Jane鈥檚 Aircraft and to dedicated researchers who would comb through countless dusty folders of little cuttings from newspapers in search of vital scraps of information. Next, I would have called our film library in search of archive pictures, then waited for a stack of tapes, sometimes in old formats which needed converting, to arrive on a van..

But nowadays I turn to Google. A quick look at my web history shows I made around 70 searches over the last two days. The first, an hour or so after the crash landing, was for 鈥渋nstrument landing system鈥 (Wikipedia gave me a useful summary) but soon the theories moved on and I was typing 鈥777 power incidents鈥 into the search box.

My very first search, though, was on Youtube 鈥 and it quickly turned up something very useful. A passenger on a BA 777 flight to Heathrow last year had posted his footage filmed out of the window as it made a safe landing, passing over the exact spot where Thursday鈥檚 flight fell short. We used those pictures on the Six O Clock News 鈥 and other broadcasters had the same idea, finding Youtube footage of bird strikes to illustrate one possible cause of the crash landing.

Graphics artists are invaluable on these occasions and Google Earth provided them with useful images of the approach to Heathrow. But to get a real feel for the view from the cockpit, I despatched a producer to go and buy a Flight Simulator PC game. Then we realised that the small aircraft that comes with the game wouldn鈥檛 do the trick, so we went online to download a Boeing 777 add-on.

When we invited a retired pilot into our edit suite to describe what happens when you find yourself without power at 600 feet, we expected him to be scornful of our game footage. Quite the opposite 鈥 he said it was identical to the experience provided by the simulator where he learned to fly a 777 at Heathrow ten years ago. So a 拢25 piece of software is now performing the same task as a machine that cost a six-figure sum to build 鈥 another example of the advance of computing power.

Mind you, as the grateful passengers of the BA flight will attest, technology has its limitations. When something went terribly wrong with the systems on one of the world鈥檚 most advanced passenger aircraft, it was human qualities 鈥 the skill and nerve of the crew 鈥 which saw them safely onto the ground.

Darren Waters

Seesmic killed the YouTube star?

  • Darren Waters
  • 18 Jan 08, 11:01 GMT

It's not often you are presented with a vision of the future of online video in a pub in London.
Loic LeMeur

But that's exactly what I was shown last night by celebrated French blogger, well-connected entrepreneur and founder

He believes that the future of online video is not YouTube or even live video, he thinks it is video conversations among a community.

His Seesmic project is currently in Alpha - very early release - but already he has built up a strong, and loyal, community of so-called Seesmic-ers.

Here's an example of a video he made while we chatted.

Within minutes of posting the video to Seesmic, he had replies from the community all around the world, including from members sat around the corner in the same bar.

"YouTube is not a conversation," explained LeMeur. "As one Seesmic-er said to me, 'YouTube is about the videos, Seesmic is about the people in the videos'."

Users can record videos via webcams and upload directly to Seesmic, or record using YouTube and post from that site.

The company is also working on a mobile phone version of Seesmic.

He says Seesmic is more intimate because video allows users to see each other for who they are.

Users reply to each others' replies, creating an almost infinite threaded conversation around different topics.

Seesmic has an arrangement with micro-blogging site Twitter so that as soon as a new reply is posted, it is also posted on a user's Twitter page.

It's a great example of how two start-up companies are leveraging each others' success to strengthen their own platform's offering.

The death of Benazir Bhutto and the recent crash-landing of the British Airways plane at Heathrow had provoked much video chattering, says LeMeur.

"People are fed up of seeing the same footage on the mainstream networks. With Seesmic they can go in a different direction," he explains.

For LeMeur, Seesmic is not just a business and a social space, it's also where he has done business.

"Half of my development team I met on Seesmic," he explains.

He has $6m in funding and says he is in no hurry to start monetising the project. His backers include big names such as Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and people like Ron Conway, one of the original investors in Google.

LeMeur hopes that Seesmic will become THE platform for video conversations. There is an API that people can use to build on top of, in much the way Facebook is positioning itself as the lingua franca of social networking.

He admits that the thought of YouTube wading into the video conversation space is a risk.

"That's the challenge. That's the excitement of being small," he says.

LeMeur is due to meet YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley soon after he requested one of the sought-after invites to take part in the Seesmic trial.

But he says if YouTube came knocking, Seesmic would not be for sale.

LeMeur will be in Davos at the next week. He is working with CNN who will use Seesmic-ers replies to questions posed by LeMeur on the channel as an experiment.

It will be a very high-profile public showing of Seesmic.

And something that is bound to keep investors happy.

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