Yearly Archives: 2006

09.23.06
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EuroFOO: Pirate Party

Sven Riedel gave us an overview of what the Pirate Party’s up to, and we had a great discussion about what ORG does. My rough and ready notes:

Sprouting all over Europe and US, small topic-based party. Swedish Pirate Bay, server confiscation, media attention, more Pirate Parties springing up.

– Goals – copyrights/patents: e.g. no software patents; limit copyright, e.g. disney copyright on Mickey Mouse, so pressure on congress to extend, Sonny-Bono.
– data privacy: who gets access to what dat, show shares the data, how’s it cross-referenced, anti-terorrism rage – thin veil to gather as much data as possible,
– transparent gov’t: what is gov’t doing, why, what contracts are they giving out under what conditions, e.g. toll autobahn system, mfr couldn’t keep to the deadline but didn’t have to pay a fine, was in contract but gov’t wouldn’t tell anyone.
– Open access: particularly in Germany, scientific community has to publish papers in specific journals and not allowed to publish elsewhere, so scientists have to pay for these journals.

[academic papers, digital journals]

Technical reports. Grants were off the back of the papers you’d publish, but people would also publish a significantly “modified technical report” in order to get round it.

Reputation problem.

Change grants system, to get people to publish openly by forcing it as a condition on the grant. Citations – use those to see which are held in esteem even if they are published in lesser known journals.

We agree open access is a good thing, but why is this a party?

Just a few topics that are agreed upon, and are being publicised. For issues like taxation, the party doesn’t currently have any opinions. Is about getting legislation to counter lobbying etc.

In Germany, Pirate Party has status of Greens in the late 70s.

Current opinion in the party is ‘well cross the taxation bridge when we come to it’.

The name is provocative, it’s unusual.

– should publicly support Open GeoData; INSPIRE
– should Open Source be on there? In transparent gov’t but not a major point. Should be able to debug the gov’s tenders to ensure open standards and open source software.

Do deal with DRM. Line is: DRM sucks.

Goal is to be elected to EU Parliament in 2008 elections. Hoping to get one or two people in there.

Belgium
France
US
Italy
Sweden
Russia
Spain
Austria
Germany

Personally, I’m interested to see how this all goes. I think that the Pirate Party needs to think a bit beyond its own goals in order to get anyone elected. I would also imagine that if they do get anyone elected, it’ll be in a country with proportional representation, so no chance here.

09.23.06
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EuroFOO: Building a Tricorder

I was lucky enough to be invited not just to FOOCamp this year, but also its European counterpart, EuroFOO. Just like FOOCamp, which by the end of the two days had become known as ‘FooFoo’, EuroFOO was a fantastic gathering of really smart people who were happy to just chat about whatever it was that came up. I took more notes at EuroFOO than at FooFoo, and whilst I’m not going to blog all of them, I will give you some highlights.

Matt Jones, with help from Matt Webb and Simon Willison, ran a session on how to build a tricorder specifically for finding out more about your immediate environment, which split us up into three teams – one to work on some Python, one to think about the top-level design/functionality spec, and one to go out into the street and ask locals some questions. The questions were from Kevin Kelly’s ‘Big Here’, including:

1) Point north.
2) What time is sunset today?
3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
5) How many feet above sea level are you?
6) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
7) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?
8) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?
9) Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves?
10) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.

I joined the team working out the top-level spec, and the interesting thing to me was how everyone went off in different directions. I’ve seen this happen elsewhere – unless one or two people are holding the torch and saying ‘Follow me!’ the collaboration disintegrates. There was a lot of meta discussion, but not a huge amount of real collaboration.

We thought a bit about potential data sources, where you could get data about the environment and acts of nature. One person made a tangential but interesting point that children waste a lot of brain power on things like Pokemon cards, so why not do a set based on flowers, teaching them to identify native species, invaders, and weeds. Nice idea.

We talked about almanac data, how you map data onto a grid and whether postcode data is useful or GPS better. Talked about layers of data superimposed over the grid, such as a watershed layer which had info about the water table and which direction groundwater flows in.

Then we analysed how the original tricorder had sensors, but ours was not about sensing local conditions but conveying local information gathered asynchronously.

What technology is already out there to solve this problem? We already have a mobile phone, GeoDB, sources of information… so just need a model for interaction.

So the interface could be text based, map based, representative image based (e.g. an image of a landcape with the sunset/sunrise in the sun, tree with local flora information, etc.), or a 3D fly through like Second LIfe with a heads-up display.

At the end of the session, the three groups reported back. The most interesting thing came from the people who’d gone out to do interviews. They discovered that people find out that they are actually intrigued by the questions Kevin Kelly sets, and wanted to know the answers and how well they did. Mainly, they knew where North was, knew when sunset was, knew where the rubbish went, but not much else. Yet once their lack of knowledge was illustrated by their inability to answer these questions, they became curious to find out the real answers.

Interesting session, and it made me think a lot about motivation, education and the separation between man and environment.

09.18.06
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Why I blog, and why the MSM should and many times shouldn’t

That’s the title of the talk I gave last week at IBC and that I have given in various forms at other places over the last year. I began the talk by showing off some numbers from Dave Sifry’s most recent State of the Blogosphere reports, the latest one being from early in August. Technorati is now tracking 50 million blogs, and that’s just a self-selecting sample of people who have registered with the site (well self selecting and plenty of splogs, spam blogs, which the Team Technorati is working on trimming from its ranks). That’s a lot of people.

The mainstream media, or MSM for short, can give 16-year-olds trying to lay their hands on the latest fashion a run for their money when it comes to herd-like activity. And newspapers, TV networks and everyone else trying to protect or resurrect an old media business model have jumped enmasse on what Jon Stewart called the ‘Blogwagon‘. But it’s mostly been an unthinking, headlong rush towards the blogosphere, “to get snaps” from the good-as-advertising-gold 18-to-34 demographic.

Is this really about giving a voice to the already voiced, as Jon Stewart says? What value is it to our audiences to serve up ‘news sushi’, content we already produce and publish but just served up in bite-sized blog bits in reverse chronological order? And I can hear the editors out there saying: “But blogs are just snarky comment, and hey we’ve got snarky columnists in spades. We are so going to own the Technorati and iTunes Top 10.” (And I’ve heard them say this.) Sorry, but if you want to sit up on high and keep pushing your content out at the “great unwashed masses”, YouTube, CraigsList and their successors are so gonna own your asses.

This is not about changing your content management system. You’ve already sunk a lot of cash into those. This is about changing your culture. What do blogs allow you to do that you don’t already do?

  1. Blogs can get you closer to your audience
    And that’s exactly where you need to be. I met Robert Scoble at a Geek Dinner here in London last summer, and he talked about having a conversation with his customers on how Microsoft could better serve their needs. I don’t really understand when journalists moved away from their audience, but many people have that impression.
  2. Blogs can bring new voices to your journalism
    Since when did journalism become a game of pick the pundit? It’s lazy, and it’s turned a lot of journalism into a talking shop amongst pundits, politicians and other journalists. Google yourself some new voices. In the last year, blogs have helped me bring serving soldiers in Iraq onto programmes, helped me hear from a Saudi teenager calling for women’s right to vote and let me eavesdrop in on a guy’s thoughts as he left New Orleans to escape Katrina.
  3. Blogs can get you closer to the story
    Blogs and a world of tools that have grown up around them make creating multimedia stories in the field easier than ever. I’m an online journalist because I believe that the internet is a revolutionary medium. I can do better journalism with blogging tools: Real, raw and in the field, while being in constant contact with my audience. What do they want to know? What questions do they have for the people I’m interviewing?
  4. Blogs could just re-invigorate western democracy
    OK, OK, maybe I’m getting a little carried away. But I’m still an idealist at heart. That’s one of the reasons I got into journalism. Steve Yelvington, who really should be in your RSS reader, put it this way recently:

      5. The end of mass media. Here’s what the 20the century gave us: A population of consumers whose economic role was to eat what they’re served and pay up. These “people formerly known as the audience” are alienated, disengaged and angry. Instead of setting our sights on building a nation of shopkeepers, bankers and passive consumers, what if we set our sights on building a nation of participants in cultural and civic life? Perhaps this world where everyone can be a publisher will not be such a bad place.

And as Steve says a few days later in his blog, there isn’t a silver bullet, and I’m not going to try to sell blogs as one. But Steve told me in Florida a year ago that blogs represent a complex set of social behaviours that we’re just understanding. Blogs are just the tip of the ice berg in this fast moving world of participatory media. Blogging and the mainstream media has to be more than ‘me-too-ism’, and it can be. With a little thought to understand these new behaviours and a willingness to actually accept and adapt to these changes instead of wishing they weren’t happening, we might just have a chance.

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09.18.06
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The future of TV?

After talking at IBC last Sunday, I’ve been thinking about TV, which isn’t something that I do much. My information diet is a lot like my friend Ian at CubicGarden: I watch a lot of video, just not a lot of TV. Suw and I didn’t even have a TV until recently when we bought EyeTV from Elgato, great little USB gizmo that not only allows us to watch Freeview over-the-air digital television but it also has some great scheduling and PVR features And like Ian, I use a lot of tools to shift through all the information out there: RSS readers, online aggregators and as Ian puts it “an offline social network”. Here’s a little walk through his day:

My home workstation automatically downloads, podcasts, video, everything.It then syncs the latest content with my laptop and I manually copystuff to my mobile phone’s flash card.

The video content is a real mix of mainstream content like Lost, DailyShow, Simpsons, etc, and content from the net (such as Hak.5, CommandN,etc) mixed in. We tend to just pick and choose depending on our moods.

The problem that I have with TV, as it stands, is that it adds content without providing me with tools to sort through it. There just hasn’t been that much intelligence in TV. My computer helps me filter through all the information I need to know. TV doesn’t. Or maybe doesn’t right now. It doesn’t have to be that way. Tom Coates wrote in a brilliant post: Social software to set-top boxes:

Imagine a buddy-list on your television that you could bring onto yourscreen with the merest tap of a ‘friends’ key on your remote control.The buddy list would be the first stage of an interface that would letyou add and remove friends, and see what your friends are watching inreal-time – whether they be watching live television or somethingstored on their PVRs.

Recommendation of information and entertainment from friends and professional contacts is increasingly important to my media habits. The television industry understands this. I saw a demo of what is now only a mockup of possible future features in set top boxes by one of the companies that makes middleware for them, OpenTV. For one, the interface was a lot more intelligent. It reminded me of some of the animation effects of the new Core animation effects in Mac OS 10.5. The visual animation showed other content that was related to what you were watching either on other channels or on the hard drive of you set top box. But what really caught my eye was that you could also see related content from friends or from video sharing sites on the internet, like YouTube.

Also, things the Tom envisioned such as webcams to chat with your friends while watching TV are already a reality. Philips was demoing set-top boxes with USB inputs for webcams.

More intelligence is coming to television. Set-top boxes are going to rival computers running media centre software for capabilities. Real interactivity might be coming to television. For too long, both the television industry and online content providers have abused the term interactivity. I don’t want to press buttons and interact with a box. I want to interact with my friends.

But so far this was just a demo. I asked how they planned to bridge social networks and cable networks. Right now, they don’t know. Electronic programmer’s guides have a lot of text data. But what about pulling in data from RSS feeds for video blogs or even from mainstream video sources? What about pulling in tags from the internet and other metadata? Right now, there isn’t any way to bridge those worlds.

Maybe it will happen when IPTV becomes a reality. That was another theme at IBC, and all you have to do is look a the headlines this week to realise that TV networks are coming back to the internet. NBC launches the National Broadband Company, and ABC and CBS are both offering more programming online). And computer companies are coming into your living room. Apple previews iTV. (Hey, it’s news that Apple actually previews anything!) More intelligence is coming to TV. Well, at least the technology.

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09.13.06
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Wikipedia vs Britannica: Yawn

So Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia and Dale Hoiberg from Britannica slug it out in the Wall Street Journal. Both miss the point.

Wikipedia will remain the canonical reference source for the internet for as long as Britannica remains a paid-for service. When Britannica makes its content freely accessible to the public, and is one of the sites that can be directly searched from your browser, the way that Wikipedia is from Firefox, then we may see a shift. But until then, we the public cannot compare and contrast the content of the two services, and we cannot make up our own minds as to whether we prefer Wikipedia over Britannica or not.

So all this debate over open and closed models is no more than blowing hot air. Wikipedia wins not because it is more accurate or more inclusive or written by more people or has expert contributors. All that is irrelevant. It wins because it’s free.

(Link via Euan.)

09.10.06
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Blogging IBC in Amsterdam

I’m in Amstedam at the massive IBC broadcast conference to give a talk about blogging and breaking news. While I’m waiting to give my talk, I’m of course blogging about the conference over at 5Live’s Pods and Blogs blog. I’ve found a WiFi video phone that I want for Christmas, and I’m on the hunt for the Swiss Army knife of moblogging gear. When I get back to London, I’ve got a few posts to write here on Strange Attractor including: TV as a social media? Discuss.

09.10.06
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Second Life (FOO and beyond)

I saw Second Life being demoed at Supernova last year, although I stood and watched a bunch of avatars dancing to Chumbawumba, I didn’t immediately pay much attention. Oh yes, that’s me, on the cutting edge right there… no, back a bit…

I have this really annoying practical streak. Whenever I see something new, I think to myself, “Yes, but what can I do with it?” and if I can’t immediately answer that question, I tend to move on. A few months ago, I started to hear stories of what people were doing with Second Life, and my ears pricked right up. Mixed reality events. In-game stores created by real-world businesses. In-game stores created by in-game people. Commerce. Oh yes. Now you’re floating my boat. (Oh dear… am I really that much of a capitalist?)

So I signed up for an account (I’m TiddlesMcNubbin Goodnight) and logged in to find out what all the fuss was about. What I actually found out was that my iBook really couldn’t handle the client. I’d press the arrow key three times, then have to wait whilst the client caught up – totally sub-optimal user experience, that. But now I have a spiffy new MacBook and I’m away. In just the last week, I’ve learnt how to move around, I’ve left the Help Island and gone to the mainland, bought my first plot of land, and been given a terminal velocity-triggered parachute, a house and a four poster bed, and been treated to a fight between two Daleks.

Two Daleks having a fight

(Really, no user experience is complete without Daleks.)

And you know, that’s just the start of it. American Apparel have a store there, apparently a replica of a store they have in Tokyo, where you can go and buy t-shirts. Creative Commons have an auditorium where they hold events. Nissan have a presence (not quite sure what to call the big tower-y thing they have, and not sure if it’s official or not). Developers from the Amazon community are building things in-game like virtual bookstores in which you can actually buy books from Amazon. And I’ve heard that a chain of hotels, W I think, are creating a replica of one of their hotels there so you can go check out the rooms.

The possibilities really are endless and the above is just a tiny selection. It doesn’t really matter what you do or how you do it, you can do something in Second Life. You can stream audio and video into an in-game theatre, as BBC Radio 1 did from their One Big Weekend gig in Dundee. Actually, there’s a ton of music events in Second Life, as this Wired article shows, with a Duran Duran gig coming up. You can give away goodies – the BBC gave away headphones with their logo on. You can create and sell, for Linden Dollars, any object you like, from clothing to houses to jetskis.

So, whilst I was at FooCamp, I went to a couple of talks about Second Life. The first from Matt Biddulph about bringing web apps into the game, and the second from Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab, who talked about what is happening with the game and how its community is developing and behaving. Both were fascinating.

Matt’s talk was pretty techy, and I missed the beginning so I didn’t really fully grok it until I read Tom’s summary, but in short, it’s about taking stuff from the web, such as a Flickr photo stream, and bringing it into Second Life – in the case of the Flickr stream it is projected up on a big screen that anyone can go and look at.

Think for a second… you can take anything that’s out there and bring it in-game. And then people can see it in-game and follow the link out to the web. Does this make anyone else as excited as it makes me? Think of all the really cool shit that you can’t afford to do in real life, but which you can do in Second Life!

Philip was talking about what people do in-game. One of the things that interested me was that there is an in-game building industry, with skilled builders creating objects and selling them, either in-game for Linden Dollars, or on eBay for US Dollars. Bear in mind that both currencies are ‘real’, no matter how you define ‘money’. I’ll spare you the detailed argument right now, but if you doubt me go and read Play Money by Julian Dibbell and that should convince you.

So there’s a bunch of cool – and sometimes physically impossible – things you can do in Second Life and an ecosystem of skilled artisans in-game who can help you realise your ideas.

Of course, it’s never that easy. Like blogging, if you’re a business and you wanna get into Second Life, then you have to be really careful what you do and how you do it. Talking to Jeff Barr from Amazon, he told me about how people will turn up and protest – with placards and everything – when a business turns up in Second Life without been a part of the community before, or without giving something back to the community they are ‘invading’. People don’t want to be sold to. They don’t want the creep of commercialism to take over their play environments as well as their work and home environments.

So what is successful? Well it’s early days for me in Second Life, so I’m still figuring that out. Like my friend and fellow social software consultant, Stephanie Booth says, it takes a while to learn what’s happening in-world and how it all works:

What makes Second Life exciting is also what makes it really difficult to get into: it’s complex. I’m spending a lot of time learning stuff which isn’t really that interesting in itself for me (I have no ambition to become a digital hairstylist) but which is needed for what’s coming next. Feeling comfortable with your inventory, moving the camera about, doing things with objects… there are all basic skills and I’m not comfortable with them yet. But if you want a world where people can be digital artists, build businesses, organise live music performances or conferences, you need that level of complexity to allow users to be creative.

But I think the rules for businesses in Second Life are going to be similar to those for blogging:

– be a part of the community, and empower them to do stuff with your stuff
– be respectful, truthful, honest, genuine
– don’t sell at people
– give people something valuable in return for their attention
– do cool shit

And the capacity for doing cool shit in Second Life is huge.

09.09.06
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d.Construct: Highlights

A bit of a jetlagged and groggy day for me, so not really the best time to be sitting in a darkened room listening to people speak, but over all I enjoyed the day. The lack of power outlets in the auditorium was maddening, and meant I ended up missing two sessions so that I could go and power my MacBook.

Highlights certainly were the two Jeffs, Barr and Veen, whose talks were engaging and insightful. I managed to snag Jeff Barr at a break and have a bit of a chat about the way that people from the Amazon developer community (i.e. not from Amazon) are using their APIs to create things like virtual bookstores in Second Life. As will become apparent over the coming weeks, I am obsessed by Second Life at the moment, so a surefire way to get my attention is to mention words like ‘metaverse’, ‘avatar’, or ‘Linden Lab‘. Jeff is going to ping me some locations when he’s next online, so I’ll blog about them then.

The other Jeff, Mr Veen, gave possibly the most entertaining talk of the conference about user centred design. It was great – hysterically funny and very informative, just like I wish my talks were. More to the point, it made me think about how I work as a social software consultant, and particularly how I evaluate clients’ needs and how I assess project ideas. I shall have to investigate a little further, as I have some half-formed thoughts that need fleshing out.

Also a special mention must be given to Jeremy Keith‘s Joy of API talk, which was also very funny. As soon as he showed the photo of a ZX81, half the room sighed with giddy reminiscence of childhood/youth. My first computer was actually a ZX80, then we went to the ZX81 and then the ZX Spectrum. Ahh, those were the days. Remember those little silver paper printers, the ones that burnt the text onto the paper and smelt like the pit of Hell had opened up at the bottom of the garden?

Anyway, Jeremy’s talk was entertaining and I wish I’d been a bit more alert because I’m very interested in how APIs work, but it takes extra special attention for me to decode programmer speak into non-programmer speak. He was talking about how APIs are really only used by the alpha geeks at the moment and how it would be cool if we could make it easier for non-programmers to play with this stuff. I would certainly be one of those people who would love to play with APIs, but who lack the specific skill-set required to do so.

Someone from the audience asked why non-alpha geeks would care, but I think it’s really vital that some of this stuff gets translated across, because the people who try to help businesses grok APIs aren’t necessarily the same people who create APIs. (The point that you don’t need to spend six months creating an API if you use microformats and RSS was well made, but doesn’t entirely solve the problem.)

Jeremy also mentioned Overplot, a great mash-up of conversations overhead in NY plotted on a Google Maps. The other links he used are on his site.

Overall, a good day, however I’ll reiterate the point for any future conference organisers: fish need water; geeks need power outlets. I know venues like the Corn Exchange are too old to have been wired up with geeks in mind, but electricity is very important, as is wifi. Actually, regarding the wifi I’m not sure what was up with it, but we had to manually specify a DCHP address in order to get a connection. Not ideal, although once we knew that it became easy to get it working.

09.09.06
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d.Construct: Jeff Veen – Designing the complete user experience

People who were on the web in the mid-90s were producing the web and so understood it. Now, most people who use the web don’t create websites so they don’t understand the technical issues and have very little interest in decoding interfaces that don’t meet their expectations.

When people can’t find information, they blame themselves and don’t think that it might not be their fault. Lots of companies have data that they are willing to tell customers, but which customers can’t actually access via the web. Yet customers assume that if they can’t find something, that they must be looking in the wrong place.

Venn diagram:
1. Viability: is there a business case for having this website?
2. Feasibility: is it even possible to build it?
3. Desirability: do people want it?

Napster was example of site with tremendous desirability; had the technology; but financially was a nightmare. These three things not in balance with Napster.

But the iPod is. Tech is right, business is right, desirability is right.

How can we use this on the web?

Usability is a balance between following the rules and ignoring the rules. Some sites break all the usability rules (such as those created by Jacob Nilsen), but are still successful. But simply following rules without understanding them just gives the illusion of competence.

We have many best practices, but too early to have a solid rule set for web design. There is no ‘One True Way’ or ‘Four Step Process’. Twelve years is a drop in the bucket and we should avoid the arrogance of ‘we know all this now’.

User centred design is about experience, not about making pages pretty. Doesn’t matter what it is that you’re trying to achieve.

Experience is based on users trying to accomplish goals and our stuff (whatever it is) getting in the way. So we need to enable that cycle of people getting stuff done. Solve that by looking for the patterns in our stuff that enable people to get stuff done.

Get a pile of stuff, look for the patterns which turn stuff into an experience, which through labelling turns into navigation that is intuitive to users.

But not all users have the same goal. A good designer lets all users access all stuff in any way that makes sense to them. But this is not easy.

Classifications differ, the way people classify the world is different.

Globalisation – needs to be in several languages, hard if you have no budget. And it’s not just internationalisation but localisation, so content specific to the region.

Accessibility issues are big.

Design suffers from jargon. Marketing often come up with weird jargon, and whilst there is no reasons for people to use identical nomenclature, unnecessary jargon gets in the way.

Politics get in the way, when the site reflects the internal org chart. Companies end up with silos, with no communication between, but that makes it into the website so that the sections have no cross-fertilisation, and a different user experience in each section. Does a disservice to the users.

Extensible. Amazon added a tab at the top of the page every time they added a new business area, but that is not scalable. They had to find another way to do navigation in order for their site to remain usable.

We don’t know what else is going on in the user’s life. We make assumptions about their experience which are usually wrong. People multitask and get distracted. So you have to have a sense of overall context, so have to do user research.

There is the top-down, understanding what people are trying to do;
– interview or observer users
– develop mental models
– match goals to features

And bottom-up:
– inventory what you have
– evaluate content and features
– organise with librarianship
– let users participate

Hard to figure out what people want unless we talk to them.

At Google Analytics, what do people do to figure out how successful their website is? Interviewed some people, had it transcribed, and then tried to figure out what people would do. Would write each bit on a post-it and try to group it, and tried to match stuff that people were saying with the stuff that Google had. Derived an architecture from that, and hopefully provide users with an intuitive experience.

Mental model. Try to work out what was going on in people’s minds when they do their work, (tasks), and then what the software does, (features).

Mind the gaps. Where isn’t there stuff? Look for tasks that don’t map to features you have, or tasks with no features. Good prioritisation plan.

Why? Helps you eliminate a lot of possibilities for your design early. Helps you narrow down the design so that it is what people want. Early on, easy to change your mind, later on the cost of changing your mind rises dramatically. This helps to convince people that, up front, they need to spend money to talk to people.

Jeff‘s presentation is up online.