Another day of interesting behaviour!  Today, (Tues 5^th May) the birds have spent the majority of their time on or around a new (old raven’s!) nest positioned on the east facing clock face.  They have been sitting very close to each other, often both in the nest together, and also have disappeared on hunting trips together.  Such “lovey dovy” behaviour is not the norm for peregrines, except during the pair bonding period, which usually occurs before laying in Feb and March.  The female then spent the afternoon “scraping” the nest.  This is a natural behaviour to create a bowl shaped “scrape” on the nest ledge, which prevents eggs from rolling off the cliff. 

It is unusual, but not unheard of, for peregrines to lay a second clutch of eggs after sitting for the full incubation period.  When it does happen, it tends to occur only in city nesting peregrines, reflecting the greater availability of food in cities later in the year. 

Could Gavin and Stacey be attempting a second clutch??  Watch this space!!

It has been a depressing few days for the PoCT team.  After a completely normal day on Sunday (3^rd May), at about 3.30pm the birds suddenly became very agitated and active around the Clock Tower.  At first we thought their excitement was due to the eggs hatching, which was supported by the fact that the one of the birds appeared to bring food to the nest.  However, no chicks were sighted and the feed didn’t take place.  The birds then left the nest completely unattended for the next hour or so and could be seen perched at the top of the tower.  As I left the site at the end of the day, one of the adults was seen forlornly circling the tower, occasionally landing at the eyrie (but not sitting) and looking generally lost.

Monday (4^th) confirmed our worst fears.  The eggs had failed and the Peregrines had abandoned the nest.  They spent most of the day sitting on the clock tower and ignored the nest that they had been working so hard to incubate.

We had a fabulous event at St Fagans yesterday. The weather wasn't quite with us - damp and overcast - but luckily lots of people were, and very many of them bought copies of the book!

I didn't catch the whole service as I was flitting around with boxes of books, but what I saw was very moving, and it felt intimate and totally natural.

Then a whole load more people arrived for the actual launch. People crowded into the Church and the two main speakers, Garry Owen and Eurwyn Wiliam, both did excellent jobs. Eurwyn spoke about the project from its beginnings, and as he's been involved with the project since its beginning 25 years ago it was a great overview. But, as always, humorous too! Then Garry Owen brought a lovely personal note, as he's a local boy who remembers the Church when it was still by the river Loughour at Pontarddulais. He really emphasised just how iconic the Church was  - and still is - to the local community.

Finally everyone came over to Oakdale, the Workmen's Instititute, for refreshments and we were flooded with people queuing up to buy the book. It was like when you first arrive at a car boot sale! It was also great for me to finally meet some of the book's contributors, people I've only emailed up til now. I guess everybody was enjoying themselves as by 5.30pm some people didn't seem to want to leave!

The rest of the work for me is now to make sure all the relevant bookshops and retail outlets know about it. And making sure it's on the relevant websites. And sending out review copies... In a way, producing the book is only half the job: now we've got to sell it!

It has been a successful week, with the birds showing well for the museum visitors.  The most spectacular moment came on Friday morning when the adult male peregrine (Gavin to his friends!) returned to the Clock Tower with a tasty seagull to eat!  As you can imagine, this didn't go down too well with the local gulls, who attempted to mob Gavin as he arrived home.  Luckily, he made it to a nice comfortable ledge where he was able to enjoy his meal in peace. 

For the lucky people down below watching through scopes, it really was a WOW moment.  And there will be more to come!  Our eggs are due to hatch very soon (last year the first chick appeared on the 1^st of May) which means more action on the nest ledge, more hunting trips for the adults and lots many more gory feeds to watch!

So why not come along and have your own RSPB WOW moment?!  We will be at the Museum Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-4pm.

I am an Intranet & Web Developer working for Amgueddfa Cymru and this blog entry is about The Next Web Conference held in Amsterdam 15th - 17th April.

If you avoid the tourist areas after 9pm, Amsterdam is a calm and laid back city. People are friendly and the only dangers are the thousands of cyclists criss-crossing pavements and over-enthusiastic refuse collection trucks spinning three-sixty at road junctions – I believe the trams are there to provide safe passage over longer distances.

Anyhow, the first “unConference” day was a little loose in how it was arranged, but intentionally so. I ventured to the Mobile DevCamp and Music & Bits sessions:

Steve Jang, CMO of social music service iMeem gave away one of his insights: despite Apple’s current dominance in the market, Google’s Android shouldn’t be underestimated and would provide decent mobile development/financial opportunities - I should clarify that this conference had money iconography and business models roaming all over it. 

Continuing with the music theme, Lucas Gonze presented one of the infrequent talks of the three days that tried to avoid direct business model chatter. His main reference point was Fresh Hot Radio, which allows people to propagate musical playlists and tracks in a sympathetic manor. Most of his selections appeared to be demos, third drafts found on web forums and such (all good); but his point was that the original author information was not lost through web propagation (embeds and share links). The website pages were simple, but they always tried to use the sometimes-scarce sources of artwork from the actual musician - it’s about the music after all. Jolly good.

Other sessions discussed and demonstrated musical ideas using mobile phones to aid interaction between the user and music. One example used an accelerometer as part of a university project, Mustick (PDF) - interesting because the development time was short.

There were Sun Microsystem start-up presentations intermittently throughout the next couple of days. The Mendeley pitch was engaging in that it approached the research world: organise your research papers across multiple computers and help find trends within your particular research field (museum's are full of curators and researchers). It is built on Adobe Air, I believe - the proliferation continues.

Andrew Keen conceptualised the state/ideal state of the web using both flamboyant and succinct language. I enjoyed his enthusiastic approach, even if certain conclusions appeared to be driven by the need for a good sound bite, rather than firm logic - "web 2.0 is dead, long live Twitter".

A Dave sidetrack: Andrew Keen used a Johannes Vermeer painting to demonstrate a particular intensity of human interaction: Woman reading a letter. I couldn’t recall the artist Jonathan Janson at the time, a fact that you wouldn't have known, but he created a humorous painting influenced by Vermeer: A young girl writing an email.

Turn on the radio, read a web article, visit the next web conference, Twitter is doing the rounds - that is fine and dandy. It can be used for good (twestival.com), it has an open API  - aggregate this source into your website/application. A conference recommendation to help control your Twitter action appeared to be: Tweet Deck, another Adobe Air application.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress guy, had a similar vibe to the Jonathon Harris’ chat at the FOTB ’08, which I didn’t object to at all. The word “why” was mentioned. Fair enough I say.

Eric A. Meyer shared his love of JavaScript and how it allows developers to control browser standards: for instance, using JavaScript and CSS to enable keyboard control of flash media players. Cleaning up Microsoft Internet Explorer to make it a standards-compliant browser, from IE5 - IE8 – see Dean Edwards work. Meyer's conclusion: web standards can be forced on the web browsers without the need for plug-ins, and backward compatibly could be maintained.

Another Dave sidetrack: since leaving the conference I have wandered through the saveIE6 website. My web developer love of IE6 has been restored, I have seen the light - I shouldn’t fight it.

Michael J. Brown, an architectural theorist and practitioner (nice), completed the conference. He pointed out that current 3D environments have a little too much benzoic sulfinide (artificial sweetener) [Mr. Brown didn't use this kind of language] -  they fail because they are merely trying to replicate the real world. Who needs hardware? He finished with the cocoon concept, a learning pod.

Exhibition ideas:

A scaled back research project of the cocoon: It would involve three back-projected screens, a touch screen and/or blue-toothed mobile phone with an accelerometer (you’re missing the point Dave - my head is in my hands) - Minority Report on a shoe-string.

Based on the MiNiBar in Amsterdam, where you have a key to your own fridge, create an installation where you have key to a locked cabinet and people are only allowed to explore the particular contents of their chosen cabinet.

Yes, I think I’ve been affected.

Conference take-aways:

• JavaScript is still great
• The world of APIs and data aggregation wont stop tomorrow - disparate sources are being published somewhere as one
• You can’t create communities, they already exist
• The world wide web is the social network