Yearly Archives: 2006

09.08.06
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d.Construct – Jeff Barr

I’m at the d.Construct conference today, here to catch up with friends, really, and see what geekery is occurring. No power strips in the auditorium, and the jetlag is making me feel very groggy, so blogging will be light to non-existant, frankly. In fact, this might be the only session I blog, but I do so out of a feeling that Jeff deserves it.

I was critical of Jeff when he spoke at Xtech, not because he had nothing interesting to say but because he managed to say interesting stuff in quite a dull manner. We had a really cool chat about that by email afterwards, so it’s great to see that his talk this time round is snappier, funnier, and far more engaging than Xtech. Obviously this is nothing to do with me, but nonetheless it’s great to see.

Jeff Barr, Amazon
Cool examples of the way that people are using Amazon’s APIs, including one that allows you to visually compare and contrast the specs for computers on sale in Amazon – really neat idea and if I can find the url I’ll link to it.

He also talks a bit about Alexa, which is a web information service which crawls 10 billion web pages and keeps historic data. Does usual link to and links in stuff, does speed data, and web mapping stuff too. You can use Alexa to build a vertical search engine and can specify your own subset of pages you want to search. Basically allows search without needing your own crawlers and server farm.

Simple Storage Service – for storing data on the web. 15 cents per gig per month to store, 20 cent per gig to access. Private and public storage, nothing indexed, nothing processed, just stored. 800 million objects stored already, and is reliable and cost-effective. Simple APIs. Good for things like bit.torrents.

Lots of cool apps: S3 Explorer, filiciou.us, S3 Ajax Wiki (just an Ajax front to S3), Backup Manager, S3 Fox runs inside Firefox and tells you exactly what’s your in your account so gives you your local file system and your S3 account (or multiple accounts).

M-turk – people to do real work, APIs to make requests and do work on your behalf. Work requests are called HITs, and you can control skill sets of the workers using ‘Qualifications’, e.g. you can check to see if someone can translate French into English by seeing if they can read French. So you put up your Human Intelligence Task, someone does it the task, and then you pay them. Puts human into a processing loop. Can have same work done by several people so that if the majority give the same answer you accept that as the correct answer.

Removes the need for AI in applications by simply asking a person. Have the ability to feed high-volume tasks through to a distributed workforce – access to 1000s of people quickly and cost-efficiently.

Examples. One early HIT was asking 10,000 people to draw a sheep. Huge variety of skill levels, but cost only $200. Created a ‘Sheep Market’. Took workers 109 seconds on average to draw a sheep, and harvested them as 11 sheep per hour.

Casting Words transcribe podcasts with very high quality results.

You can create your HITs using the HIT-Builder.

Amazon Powered things in Second Life, Second 411 – can use a HUD (heads up display), which you can use do to Amazon searches.

Life2Life is a search of Amazon inside Second Life.

Virtual kitchen that can be used to interview people based on what you want to purchase and will then guide you to a set of results.

Also a virtual book store.

Also a mixed reality presentation that Jeff gave last week that was attended by about 40 avatars in Second Life.

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09.05.06
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The games people play: Cruel 2 B Kind

Yesterday, myself and Matt Biddulph went down to Dolores park to take part in playtesting Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost‘s new game, Cruel 2 B Kind. It was the first time that the game’s been run, so we and five other teams of two were the guinea pigs.

The game is based on ‘Assassins’, and the idea is that you have a weapon, in this case a random act of kindness such as congratulating someone or blowing kisses at them, and a weakness such as having someone congratulate you or blow kisses at you. So you have to go round the park, using your weapon on anyone you suspect is in the game. If they look at you puzzled, then they’re not in the game. If they say ‘Oh, you’re too kind’, then they are in the game but you haven’t managed to assassinate them because your weapon doesn’t match their weakness. If they surrender, then you assimilate them into your team and get more points.

Matt and I had a bit of a chat about strategy before the game, which went something like:

“We’re British. We’re going to lose.”
“Yup.”
“And it’ll be embarrassing to wander round a park doing… whatever it is we have to do.”
“Yup.”
“We should try to be as conspicuous as possible, so that we can get assassinated as soon as possible, so that we’ll have more fun.”
“Yup.”

However, I didn’t expect us to be assassinated quite as quickly as we did. Essentially, we sat around for about 10 mins, scoping the place out and looking for anyone else who was scoping the place out. Then we decided to go for a bit of a wander. Within a matter of seconds, a girl had come up to us and asked Matt what his camera was, and then congratulated him on it.

Of course, being British, Matt said “You’re too kind!”, which I’m pretty sure I’ve heard him say lots before, so the would be assassins started to slope off, knowing we were in the game but that they hadn’t killed us. Took me a second, but eventually I realised that a) they were in the game and that b) being congratulated was our weakness and that c) we’d have to confess to our deaths.

So our game lasted no time at all, but I have to admit, it was much more fun going round in a group blowing kisses at strangers than it was working in a pair wondering if we were going to be insulting people by doing same.

Eventually, we ended up with two marauding packs in a Mexican stand-off. We sat on picnic rugs playing Duck Duck Goose (a new game to me), and they lurked behind some trees trying to look inconspicuous and failing. Eventually, with only 10 mins to go, the other group rushed us – using a non-game playing couple with a dog as a decoy, and running straight out of the sun at us, deploying their final, fatal weapon. We were, essentially, kissed to death.

The game was, without doubt, fun. It was also a bit confusing. Much of the organisation, such as sign-up on the day and the deployment of weapons was done over SMS via email, which is new to us Brits as we don’t have that system in the UK. Phone funkiness (my old Treo doesn’t always announce that an SMS has come in) caused a bit of confusion, as did the rules.

I think you were supposed to all deploy your weapon at once to everyone in the opposing team, but when Matt and I were assassinated, I’m not sure the assassinating team did that. They congratulated him on his camera, but didn’t congratulate me on anything. I don’t know if that’s how it was supposed to work, or if congratulating one person in the team is enough.

It was, in fact, pretty hard to remember your weapons, your weaknesses and to remember that when you assimilated a team then you took on their weapon and kept your weakness, in order to ensure that the game can still be played (after all, you’ve just used up your weapon on their weakness, so theoretically you need their weapon in order to have any effect on anyone else). That was kinda hard to keep in mind in the heat of the moment, especially as we thought we added their weapon to the arsenal, rather than expiring ours and using theirs.

That confusion actually did have a significant effect on the outcome of the game. It turned out that being kissed to death wasn’t our weakness, so in the end, we should have won that final showdown.

It would have seemed churlish to argue these points at the time, though, as everyone was having a good time and no one was really all that bothered about winning. But I would say that the rules need either simplification or lots of clarification. The tech side of things – the text messages – also need to be clearer and more timely because they did get a bit confusing too.

This was, though, a test and we were there to help iron out wrinkles, so I really hope that Jane got enough info out of us to make the next game play more smoothly. I wish I was here next Sunday to take part, but I’ll be back in London, trying to catch up on my email.

Meantime I’ve put my photos up on Flickr, as has Matt.

09.04.06
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The Twelve (or so) Step Program for Conference Speakers and Organisers

There’s been a lot of talk the last few days about Office 2.0, a conference that brought gender inequality in technology to a new low. Fifty three speakers and one woman was the original unpleasant statistic, and a few people got very cross about it. Rightly so.

But who is at fault? The organisers? The women? No one? Everyone? Someone else?

If the women think that it’s the organiser’s fault for not looking for more women, then we risk becoming passive, quietly waiting our turn. If the organisers think it’s women’s fault for not putting themselves forward, then they risk being lazy, and waiting for women to turn up on their doorstep. It becomes a tragedy of the commons, everyone blaming everyone else and no one doing a damn thing about it.

So, what do we do? I personally believe that the answer lies with all of us. We are ultimately responsible for our own lives, and our own experiences. As a woman, I am responsible for my own attendance at conferences, for submitting papers, and for assessing the invitations that I get. No one put me on some secret Speakers List – indeed if you look at all the lists of women speakers that have been drawn up these last few days, you’ll see I’m not on any of them. Instead, I went through a process of figuring out how to get to speak at conferences, and although I’m still learning, I think it might be helpful to share some of that knowledge here.

I also want to give organisers a heads up, but I’ll do that below. You people are also responsible for your own experience but you also, at the conference at least, help shape ours. You have a responsibility to pull your fingers out of your collective ass and start trying harder.

So… on with the program.

How To Become A Conference Speaker
1. Identify your interests. What subjects are you interested in? What are you passionate about? What do you do at work? What do you want to do at work? Where does your experience lie? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you are going to find it hard to crack the conference problem. You need to be focused – there are a lot of conferences out there, and you need to pick the ones that you will benefit from most.

2. Identify the conferences. This is easier said than done. I’ve yet to see a comprehensive conference calendar, and I’ve missed plenty of good conference action because I missed an announcement. So search Upcoming and the blogs and any other event-based site you can find. List out your conferences, look at when they are, how much they cost, who’s speaking, what the topics are, and then make a shortlist of ones that interest you most. Note: This is an ongoing process, because new conferences get announced all the time.

3. Pick which conferences you really want to go to. If any are work related, ask your boss if she or he will send you. You may think ‘They’ll never go for this’ but you won’t know unless you ask, and you might get a nice surprise.

4. If you can’t persuade your boss to send you, book off some holiday and go yourself. This is career development, and the investment will be worth it. You will learn new stuff, meet new people and have new ideas. How can that not be worth it?

5. Identify and become a part of the conferences communities. Conferences don’t happen in a vacuum, and you will do well to join the mailing lists associated with the subjects you are interested. You should also engage with bloggers writing about your subjects, and any wikis, forums, etc. that are relevant. Some conferences will even have social networking tools associated with the event, so use those too. Also join wikis like The Speaker’s Wiki. Get yourself out there.

6. If you blog, then write about the conferences you are going to, tell the world you are open to meeting up with people, and then follow through on any invitations you get. If you don’t have a blog, get one and do the above.

7. At the conference, participate. Talk to other attendees, the organiser, the speakers, everyone you can. You’re not there to observe, you’re there to take part and you can guarantee that no organiser is going to notice you if you just sit in the corner and watch. Make sure you mingle with everyone – don’t just hang out with your friends or other women. Go talk to strangers!

8. Ask questions. Speaking is a skill you may have to work hard to acquire. For some it comes naturally, for most it does not. But almost everyone is terrified by the thought of potential public humiliation and I know more people whose stomachs get churned up before speaking than who don’t. One way to ease yourself through this pain barrier is to make yourself ask questions from the floor – personally I find it harder to ask questions than to be a speaker, but maybe that’s just me.

9. When you’ve been to a few conferences and are familiar with the way that they work, start looking for ones that you want to speak at. If they have a call for papers then submit one. If not, then contact the organiser and say you’d like to take part as a speaker. Make sure you are clear about what you bring to the conference: What experience do you have? What projects have you been working on? What are you unique successes? Where does your wisdom lie? Don’t give them a huge long biography or CV, just a succinct summary of your experience and some ideas of how you could fit into the conference schedule. The idea is not to drown them in information but to show them how you make their conference better, and make them want to get in touch with you to find out more.

10. Be prepared to be turned down. It happens to everyone all the time. It may bruise your ego but it’s going to happen and you may as well get used to it. Don’t let it stop you from continuing to push yourself forward as a speaker, and don’t get a chip on your shoulder about it.

11. Improve your public speaking skills. If you’re not a natural (and you may not find that out until it’s too late if you do no prep), then you are going to have to work hard to becomes a good speaker. Most people in the tech industry – male and female – do not do this. They make no effort to learn how to present, and consequently they bore the pants off their audience. Yes, some of them keep getting invited back because they did something that everyone’s interested in, but if you didn’t just float your start-up or invent AI, then you’re going to have to make sure you are damn compelling when you get up on that stage. So be prepared!

12a. Knock their socks off, and keep knocking them off. Be interesting. If there’s one thing that will keep getting you invited back, it’s being interesting.

12b. GOTO 1.

Note for Conference Organisers
This doesn’t let you off the hook. If you aren’t more inclusive, you can expect to get the kind of flack that Ismael is getting over Office 2.0. If you don’t want to get hassled, then I suggest that you too follow a few tips.

1. Organise your conferences in advance. Don’t try and throw something together at the last minute, because people have lives and the best speakers aren’t necessarily going to drop everything just for you.

2. Look at the other conferences in your field. Who’s speaking? How many males? How many females? How many people from out of town? Or abroad?

3. Look at who’s blogging about your subject. Use Technorati or Icerocket, and spend significant time finding you who’s saying what to whom.

4. Look at your list of potential speakers. Are they all friends? If so, then you might want to hold a private party instead. Are they all men? If so, then you might want to put a bit more effort into finding some women, unless you want your balls handed to you on a plate. Does the gender balance reflect that of the industry? If so, well done.

5. Ask around. Dig a little. Find people who are new to you. Start to compile a list of subjects and possible speakers, and see how well you can balance new, familiar, male, female.

6. Talk to the community. They know people, y’know. Announce a call for papers, but be specific about what you want. I can promise you that ’email me if you want to speak’ is going to result in a whole world of pain for you – far better to have a formalised submission process asking for things like abstracts to make sure that you collect the necessary data.

7. If you have some names of speakers that you just don’t know, try having a conference call with them to try and get a feel for how they’ll be onstage. It’s very easy to see cross people off your list just because you’ve never heard of them, but try to actually investigate first. After all, you don’t know everybody.

8. For panels, consider mixing up some established speakers and some first-time speakers. Panel discussions are really good places for first-time speakers to cut their teeth, but make sure you have an experienced moderator to make sure everyone gets a say.

9. If you have a newbie who has some really good business experience to share, but no speaking experience, try setting up an onstage interview instead of giving them a keynote. But make sure you find a presenter who is good at interviewing (maybe a journalist?), as the only thing worse than one bad speaker on stage is two bad speakers on stage.

10. Stand up to your sponsors. Yes, we all know big names draw crowds. But not everyone on your schedule has to be famous and if your sponsors are pushing for more big names, you should push back. Some of the people on the conference circuit give new talks every time… some just trot out the same old same old every time. Ditch them, no matter how famous they are.

11. Have an expenses fund. Not all good speakers work for big companies willing to cover their costs. Be prepared to help out those who are self-funded, even if you only pay travel and a cheap hotel.

12a. Never stop putting the effort in. Your job is to put on a good conference with varied voices, and if you stop trying to find new speakers, and stop trying to ensure a healthy gender balance, then you’re failing. There is such a thing as ‘bad publicity’ after all – it’s when people say ‘sod you, I’m not coming to your crappy sexist conference’.

12b. GOTO 1.

Right… those are my thoughts off the top of my head. Any more tips for speakers and organisers?

UPDATE: For the record, I did get an invitation to Office 2.0 from Ross Mayfield (after this, but probably unconnected as I’ve worked with Ross in the past). I can’t go, because I have a prior engagement.

09.03.06
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County fairs, country music and loving your audience

I grew up in the rural Midwest in the US, about 90 miles west of Chicago, and my father loved – still loves – county fairs. Back in the mid 1980s, I was lucky enough to see Johnny Cash with his wife June Carter at a country fair. I still remember the shiver that went down my spine when he took the stage and said: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”

I’m not a huge country music fan, but I love good music. Johnny Cash was a living legend, but he still thanked the audience for coming to the concert, for buying his records. He was humble, but it was a humility and a gratitude for his audience that was common to country singers. When I saw Walk the Line this year, I realised for Johnny Cash it might have been because of all of the letters of support he got, especially when he was struggling with his demons and addictions.

I got that feeling of connection with my audience when I was a cub reporter in western Kansas. It was not just a connection with my sources but also with my audience. That feeling of connection is one of the reasons that I find blogging as a journalist more fulfilling than traditional publishing or broadcasting. I find it odd now to write a story that doesn’t have a space for comments. Yeah, I can see the stats. I know people are clicking on the story, but I find having a conversation with my audience more fulfilling.

I talk to a lot of people in the media who view their audience as an annoyance. In the past, the only time they ever heard from members of their audience was to complain. Here in the UK, they jokingly refer to agitated callers or writers with the blanket phrase, ‘Angry in Milton Keynes’.

When I started this post, I was going to point out some of the many incidents when the media turns on their audience. It’s a pointless exercise really. It gets pretty ugly pretty quickly, like when Richard Cohen of the Washington Post this spring called e-mail correspondents a ‘Digital Lynch Mob‘. (For more background, Kos called it the ‘Substance of a Blogswarm‘. Tailrank has a nice roundup of this particular spat.)

I’m not going to pick on Mr Cohen or any publication. Even I have found myself in a middle of a blogswarm or two, such as when the brothers at Iraq the Model banned the BBC from their blog last year. A poor colleague, Sarah, who actually had little to do with the misunderstanding, got some pretty abusive e-mail. She asked me to help out. I hopped into the comments and explained what we were doing. Two comments later, the tide turned, and a commenter named Thomas was even talking about linking back to us.

As I’ve said before, if we in the traditional media blog, we have to play by the rules of blogging, not our own rules. You don’t issue a press release. You get out ahead of the blog storm. You get into the comments. You give your side of the story.

But you don’t always have to be on the defensive. Real blogging – getting out there and actually engaging in a conversation with your audience – has real benefits, both in terms of the business bottom line and just in terms of personal satisfaction.

What do I get back from it? A lot. As I blogged a few weeks ago, I’m changing jobs. Friday was my last day in the office at the BBC, and my colleagues blogged about it. I had plenty of well wishers. Abdelilah Boukili in Morocco has become a loyal member of our audience. He’s been quick to let us know when something is wrong with the blog, usually technical glitches. But it’s helped us fine tune our blog setup. He has also set up his own blog to chronicle his comments on BBC websites. But his comments on the World Have Your Say blog and here on Strange Attractor show how blogging opens new ways to relate to your audience. He said in a comment to me:

It was your interaction with the contributors to the BBC blog that encouraged me to be one of the frequent contributors. I am not a journalist like you equipped with means to get information. All I can do is give my comments which can be good or bad.

In case, you leave BBC blog I will be “following” you in the Guardian blog.

And there are several bloggers who have become frequent visitors to my blogs, Steve in Utah, Ipanema, Anbika in Nepal and Roberto in Miami, who have wished me well.

It takes time to build a community with a blog. Media companies are rushing to blog, rushing to use social networking tools. But as Suw and I always say, the technical tools are just the start. First off, learn to love your audience. We need to learn from the country music crowd. They remember who pay the bills.

08.29.06
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FooCamp: What I Did On My Holidays

Wow.

So, FooCamp. It’s a bit like being at a conference where only the speakers have turned up, with no formal schedule and more foyer space than seating for sessions. In other words, it’s just exactly what you want it to be: a chance for a damn good conversation. Or several.

And I did have several damn good conversations. Michael Sparks ran a session, which was far too sparsely attended in my opinion, on how to use scifi to do brainstorming. He explained the basic principle, which is that you name a bunch of authors, ask what thing they have invented in their fiction, and then assume that it’s actually real (so long as it doesn’t require breaking the laws of physics). You then ask how things would be different if you had this thing, and what aspects of it you could actually make within a year.

We ended up taking Terry Pratchett‘s Luggage (which has legs and follows its owner round), and working out how to make one… basically you take a Roomba, add a suitcase to it and include additional sensors to follow a beacon implanted in your shoes. You could also add GPS, and Google Maps so that it can find out where you are (you must also transmit your geolocation to it), and then figure out an optimal route to get to you. You could also add a webcam so you could see where your luggage was, and with a bit of AI you pretty much have the Soomba. Or is that a Luggoomba?

How does this change things? Well, in the context of TV programmes, (Michael works at the Beeb), you could have Holiday, shown from the luggage’s point of view. Or LOST, where the luggage lands on the other side of the island and has to fight its way through the jungle until it’s reunited with its owner. Or Airport, all about how the luggage coped with being routed via Minsk. The opportunities are endless!

And also very funny. In fact, we thought it was so funny that we got told off by the participants of the session next door who said we were being too loud. Oops.

Another set of great conversations were with the guys from Second Life, Cory Ondrejka and Philip Rosedale whom I spoke to a few times about what they were up to in their virtual world. I went to a couple of Second Life-related sessions, including the one Philip ran, and was really fascinated by the way SL is developing.

It seems to me that it’s going to be increasingly important for me as a social software consultant to be in SL, and to come to fully understand its ecosystem and the economics. Organisations and businesses are already using SL for mixed reality events, and other commercial purposes, and I have already have conversations with various clients regarding how they could interact with the people within SL. Of course, it being a community-owned world, any business wanted to enter into it has to do so carefully, and has to understand the community before it tries anything, lest it screw up.

Additionally, I can see SL becoming a really useful tool for running virtual meetings an a way richer and more real than IM or voice chat. Or, in fact, even videochat in some ways. It’s hard to stand up and pace about in videochat right now, and sometimes avatars are a more real representation of ourselves than a photo or video is. (But that’s a whole nother post.)

So I foresee a lot more work with SL in my immediate future, not to mention hopefully a lot of ongoing discussions with Philip and Cory.

I had a lot more fascinating conversations with fascinating people, but it’s impossible to record every one of them here. I also had a great time playing Werewolf (link doesn’t include the role Healer, which we were using, but it’s close enough that you’ll get the gist). I only got to play one round, and I did fairly well at not getting lynched (I was a villager), or eaten by the werewolves, but the Seer didn’t figure out I was a villager so that immediately threw suspicion onto me. However, it was a real laugh and I can see why everyone is addicted to it. Really am looking forward to another game some time.

Overall, I have to say that Foo was a fantastic experience. I know it’s not cool in some quarters to rave about how bloody great Foo is, because it’s invitation only and therefore there’s a risk of cliques, but as someone who doesn’t really feel that she’s all that well known or doing the sort of groundbreaking cool shit that a lot of people there were, I must say I felt very much accepted by everyone. There was a great gender balance too. In fact, Quinn tells me it was 17% female, which is far higher than your average tech conference, so props to the O’Reilly crew for that. And there was a lot of diversity in the type of people there: it wasn’t just cool dudes with robots (although there were some cool dudes with robots in attendance).
I did, of course, try to pitch a book idea, and fluffed it really badly. I’m no good at this pitching thing. Witness my attempt to pitch my talk via a single sentence on the schedule boards. Just one person, the very nice Nic Werner, turned up and I have to say that we had a great conversation about social software. One day I will actually write up the talk I was going to give, but maybe next year, if they invite me back, I’ll have something more Fooey to talk about.

08.26.06
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Fooooooo!

FooCamp, for those of you who don’t know, is a small invitation-only camping ubergeek event at O’Reilly Media‘s campus at Sebastopol in California. The whole thing was set up purely so that the O’Reilly lot could then set up a free bar, called the FooBar. It’s a pun, you see, and one worth gathering a few hundred people together to realise.

I was really surprised to get an invitation this year, and really very chuffed, so I’m really excited to be here. There are a lot of people here – most of whom I don’t know, but lots of whom I do. It’s a nice mix of catching up with old friends such as David Weinberger and making new ones like Philip Rosedale from Second Life.

Only got here yesterday afternoon, which was spent putting up the tent, helping David put his up, and generally chatting with people. During the evening, there was a general introduction session where we all (all 326** of us) had to stand up and say who we are, our affiliation and three words to describe ourselves. Mine was ‘Suw Charman, social software consultant. Scaring businesses. Kittens.’ You have to nominate yourself for a talk, so I’ve done that. ‘Social Software: Happy Stories from the Real World’, which will be about how people are really using social software in business… or it will be if anyone actually turns up.

Meantime, Google Earth are sending a plane over to photograph the campus to a resolution of two inches, so up the road people are building a crashed Cylon raider, and Tom Coates, Cal Henderson, Simon Willison, Michael Sparks and I have built a giant space invaders game on some land just behind O’Reilly. Should be fun to see how it comes out in a few weeks when they’ve uploaded the images.

The only hiccup is that I really didn’t do enough research as to the weather here. I was expecting it to be warm, and during the day yesterday, in the sunshine, it was. But by evening, it was freezing cold, and I froze my ass off in my tent overnight despite a nice down sleeping bag. Today, I shall be demonstrating how to wear all the clothes at once.

Having built the space invaders, it’s now time for the first of the sessions that I’m here to see. No notes, because this is more about listening and taking part than it is about taking notes, although I may summarise later if I don’t get caught up in a long, late-night game of Werewolf.

Later…

So the plane came over at just about the same time that the sun came out and the wind picked up. There was much running about and picking up of white cardboard pixels that had blown about, putting them back in the right place and weighing them down with windfall apples and stones. We can only hope that the Google plane managed to get a shot of the space invaders when they were looking their best.

Also went to my first session, which was about a cool brainstorming technique using scifi as it’s starting point that Michael Sparks gave. Was hysterically funny, to the point where we got told off by one of the other sessions for being too noisy. Oops. Sorry. Currently in a session about Second Life which I came late to because I was having a great conversation with Rael Dornfest, whom I last met via a web cam carried about by Kevin Marks at Etech (I was on the webcam, Rael and Kevin were having lunch).

I have to say, though, that FooCamp is possibly one of a very small number of places where one could find oneself staring up at a flock of birds saying ‘Are they birds… or something Philip Torrone built?’.

* For a very flexible definition of ‘ubergeek’, I think.
** Roughly

08.20.06
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Desk diary update

Back in June, I started using a new tactic to combat procrastination – using a desk diary to note down what I was doing and when. My aim was to help me understand how I was using my time and I have to say it has worked pretty well. I’ve tweaked my method in recent weeks though – my A5 week-to-view diary didn’t give me enough room to note everything down clearly. So I’ve bought an A4 day-to-view diary instead and, whilst it’s big enough to be a viable weapon should I ever need to defend myself from burglars, it’s now much easier to note down how my day is split up. And instead of just noting how long I spend on work-related stuff, I’m also noting down how long I spend in the shower, how long I spend doing reading blogs, how long I spend faffing about doing nothing.

It’s an enlightening look at my day. It seems that no matter what time I wake up, it takes me about two to three hours to be ready and able to work. I also have a tendency to work quite late, mainly because Kevin often does a 12 – 8 shift, so I figure I may as well do a 12 – 8 shift myself. It just seems easier that way.

Interestingly, my assumption about how much time I waste each day is totally over-exaggerated. When I actually add up how much time I spend actually working, it is indeed equivalent to (or more than) a normal working week. I admit, I do faff a bit during the day, spending half an hour here or there putting laundry on or washing up or whatever. Yet because I have no commute, it means that the total length of my day is about the same as someone who works in an office, but the ‘commute’ time is spread out through my day and used for chores, rather than reading books and magazines or listening to music, as I used to when I had an office.

The other adaptation that having a bigger sized desk diary has allowed is that I am now more disciplined about my to-do list. I have another book for my master list – which now runs to 10 solid pages of A4 – and instead of using post-it notes or a small notebook to distil off the most important bits, I’m using my diary. Each day I write a short list of the most urgent items for the day, and I find that it gives me a much better sense of continuity through my week because at a glance I can see what I completed yesterday or the day before, and how much stuff I have still to do.

I have learnt, though, not to have too many things on the list at once, otherwise it all feels a bit too daunting. I can always add things later on, if I get through it quicker than expected (although how often does that happen? Usually it’s the other way round…).

In fact, the only thing that didn’t work from my last post about anti-procrastination techniques was the idea of giving myself an hour a day to do stuff for me. My intention was to spend time working on suw.org.uk or getting to grips with Second Life or other R&D things. But the trouble with giving myself an hour a day is that it’s very easy to put it off, and then you get to 8pm and think ‘Ok, time to quit’ and find you haven’t actually taken your hour.

After a long chat with Lloyd Davis last week, I decided to do what he does and mess about on Friday afternoons instead. I mean, who wants to work on a Friday afternoon? Really? I only started this week, and I must admit that after an hour, I did get distracted by something totally non-R&D-y, but whilst I can’t say what it was, if you knew you’d know it was inevitable that it would take over my brain for a while.

Of course, over the next month and a half, I have an insane amounts of travel and the nice rhythm that I had started to slip into this week will be totally disrupted, so I guess we’ll see just how robust my working habits really are!

08.16.06
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Under new ownership…

Guardian UnlimitedThis is probably the worst kept secret, which is why I’m a journalist and not a member of the intelligence services, but I can finally announce that I’m under new ownership. After almost eight years with the BBC, I’m joining the Guardian as their Head of Blogging and Interaction.

During my eight years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some great people on some great projects. The correspondents, videographers, radio producers and business managers at the Washington bureau, which I called home for six years, are the best in the business. I can’t thank them enough for their support. And Andrew Roy and Martin Turner, the two bureau chiefs I worked for, were instrumental in the success of the BBC News website’s Washington operations. John Angeli, Nic Newman, Cathy Grieve and Steve Herrmann at the News website gave me the support and the freedom to innovate.

Nic’s idea for our first US Election road trip put our audience in the driver’s seat. The US Election Challenge in 2000 pushed the edges of technology and the limits of endurance as Tom Carver and I raced across the US. More than 6,500 miles in six days.

Before Strange Attractor, I used to joke that “I’m not a blogger, but I play one on TV”. It was an accident of professional prodding really, but I was excited when Steve suggested that I blog during the political conventions in 2004. But it was such a success that Richard Greene and I reprised the 2000 road trip and I blogged across America. As I will be the first to admit, technically, it wasn’t much of a blog. No RSS. No trackbacks. The comments were put on the bottom of one of our standard web pages. But I tried to behave like a blogger.

I’ve been an online journalist for 10 years now. The reason why I am an online journalist is because every morning I get to wake up, go to work and create a new medium. And there is a lot more work to do. Here’s just a taster of what my new job is about:

[To act as] a role model for the new, participative form of journalism emerging from the best blogs. The role won’t just be about encouraging more journalists and commentators to blog. It should also be about experimenting with different forms of community interaction, spotting opportunities to launch new blogs and develop existing ones, and helping us form a strategy.

Watch this space. Now it gets interesting.

08.11.06
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Lebanese-Israeli conflict via mobile phones

Suw and I have been meaning to do a podcast, maybe a podcast over crepes in the morning. The Strange Attractor Crepe-cast. At any rate, fresh off our two-week European road trip, I decided to take the podcast plunge and have a chat with Eric Sundelof, who is just finishing a fellowship with the Reuters Digital Vision programme.

As he says on his site:

Cell phones today transmit audio, video, photographs and text. When combined with the proper web application, cell phones enable any citizen in any country of any background to publish information and share it with the world.

I talked to him about how he put this idea into practice to hear voices in Lebanon and Israel.

powered by ODEO

Download podcast here

Technical Notes: As Kevin Marks noted before, I originally didn’t enclose the audio download in the RSS feed. It was easily solved by linking to the file on Odeo and using Kevin’s rel=enclosure microformat. The directions are here.

For those of you who are interested, I used a very versatile Skype add-on called Pamela to record the interview with Erik. Pamela is like a Swiss Army knife add-on for Skype, allowing you to record both audio and video, upload it to remote servers and even generate RSS feeds from the uploads. I’m not using half of the functionality, but I have found it well worth the cost and use it often for work.

One note with Odeo’s upload service. I originally had saved my file as 64kbps at 22Khz. Odeo didn’t like that, nor did it seem terribly happy using. But when I resaved the file at 44Khz and uploaded it using Internet Explorer, it worked.