Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

10.12.06
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Parliament and the Internet

I was at a conference today at Portcullis House, APIG‘s Parliament and the Internet Conference which was examining a whole range of internet-related issues, which I wrote up over on the Open Rights Group blog. Here are links to the four sessions I blogged:

– ISPs in the content driven era
– Plenary discussion round up: internet governance, e-crime, ISPs
– Jon Gisby, Yahoo!: were are people going online and what does it mean?
– William Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute: what are people doing online?

Interesting day.

10.10.06
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The most awesome comment system ever

Jack Slocum has hacked together the most awesome blog commenting system I have ever seen, using a combination of WordPress, Yahoo UI and YAHOO.ext. He’s created a system for paragraph- or sentence-level comments with a slick AJAX user interface which could just revolutionise the way we comment. I saw similar functionality on Traction’s Teampage when I got a demo of it last year, and I can imagine that Jack’s approach would be a very powerful way of facilitating quite granular discussions.

At the Open Rights Group we sometimes do public consultations, such as the one we did for the Gowers Review. To gather public input we use a blog and break down the consultation document into sections. This is quite a clumsy way of doing it, and doesn’t really allow for very fine-grained discussions, but Jack’s solution would be far more elegant and would allow us to tease out the nuances of what can be quite complex calls for evidence.

Question is, how do I get one?

(Thanks to Kevin for pointing this out via IM.)

10.09.06
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How can anyone get a blog this wrong?

Thanks to Geeklawyer for pointing out the truly dreadful ‘blog‘ by Watson Farley & Williams, an international legal firm. As he says, it wouldn’t have taken them long to find someone to help them understand what this blog malarky is all about, but instead they’ve gone the FIUY (fuck it up yourself) route and have ended up with something truly atrocious.

Let’s have a quick look at what they did wrong.

a) The blog entries are PDFs. What on earth do they think they are doing? Why use a PDF? Blog entries are supposed to be easy to read in your browser at the click of a button, they shouldn’t involved downloading anything at all, let alone a PDF.

b) The blog entries are dire. The company has asked the trainees to blog, but obviously hasn’t helped them understand what blogs are, what might be good to write about, or how best to write it. Instead of an insight into life in a law firm, you get trite nonsense: “Oh it’s so great top work here… And look! Free booze!” I’m not going to pick on the trainees individually though – it’s not their fault they’ve been asked to do this and given no proper help or direction.

c) No comments.

d) No trackbacks.

e) No archives.

f) No blogroll.

g) No RSS.

h) No links to other blogs.

i) The blog entries are PDFs. Ok, I know I said that once already, but I really can’t get over it. PDFs. For the blog entries. WTF?

In fact, this ‘blog’ has absolutely none of the technology that makes a blog a blog. This is not a blog. It’s is a collection of poorly written PDF articles. Where’s the openness? The transparency? The honesty? The interest? The passion? If I wrote a blog about watching paint dry it’d have more passion than this one, and it’d be a lot more interesting.

Now I’m not the only blog consultant in town, but frankly you don’t need to be a blog consultant to see just how dreadful this attempt at latching on to a ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ phenomenon is. Ask any blogger what makes a blog a blog and they’ll probably give you a list much the same as above, but obviously Watson Farley & Williams are quite happy spouting bullshit and following trends from a safe distance of several hundred light years.

I wonder if they’ll do a L’Oreal (fix it) or a Juicy Fruit (pull it and pretend it never happened)?

10.02.06
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BlogTalk Reloaded: danah boyd

[This is liable to being the only talk I take notes on – just too braindead to do more.]

The word ‘beta’ used to mean something. Before Friendster, it used to mean that something was in testing, but now it probably means ‘not yet profitable’.

Software dev used to be a hideous process with specs being written, and checked, and coding and lawyers. But developers don’t like this sort of process.

MySpace developers decided to hack something together using Cold Fusion. No spec, no qa, no usability, no legal, no marketing. They just deployed it. From idea to deployment was two months. Can say ‘maybe they got lucky’, but that’s not the full story. But when they shipped, they asked the users for feedback, and built out requested features. But still no designed system, it’s just piecemeal hacks.

The beta is still pretty standard way of doing something. But MySpace still doesn’t have QA, instead they launch 2 or 3 new features a day, and hack on the live servers. An extreme idea but it’s a new way of working that’s pretty consistent to the social software world.

– hack it up, get it out there
– learn from your users, evolve the system with them
– make your presence known, invite feedback
– monetisation? Add a few ads here and there

Pros and Cons to this.

Cons – produces terribly horrible code that fails frequently. Held together by voodoo. But if you think about how usability been done, has a mentality, lab-driven context. They show people software, ask them to interact with it, and the result is that they fix a few pixels, change working, change page flow. Great for human-computer interaction but not human-human interaction.

But when you have crowds it is different to when you have individuals. Anything that can be fucked with gets fucked with. No good way of testing it per se, but no way to say ‘how to make certain that this can be used. But this is key to what makes social software valuable – it ends up reflecting the crowds.

Because social software spreads friends to friends, this is great from a marketing perspective. Shapes way people use it, the way they think about it. Early days of flicker, Caterina and Stewart said hello to every new users and talked to them about the site and why they did it. That shaped the Flickr culture, and the community because then friends of Caterina and Stewart did the same.

Lots of social software is tech-centred technology.

But an example that went awry. Orkut. Known now as a Brazilian site. WAs originally deployed as an invite-only to tech people, engineers, people associated to Google. But people joined because they knew those people, but weren’t necessarily interested. Too many YSANs.

But then some Brazilians joined, and the list of countries had a list of flags… like a sports event where you want to rise in the rankings. The Brazilians thought this was fascinating because they could beat the Americans. Messages went out and the Brazilians joined en masse, went from 5% to 90% of the people. At this point, the developers weren’t living in the system anymore.

Orkut has now spread to India, and that was deliberate. No problems launching but has taken on a new form recently. The space duplicates the caste system in some detail, and again Orkut does not know what’s going on or how to deal with it.

Culture’s provide meaningful context that tells us how to act. Spaces set norms, e.g. getting on a bus. As kids we don’t abide by norms, until our parents teach us. We learn from people around us and the space itself. Know that a bus is different to an opera house.

So how do you make meaning of context on a social site? Early Usenet groups all looked the same – so how do you make context? Can’t tell the difference between the others except by interaction.

So look at Friendster:
– Gay men
– Bloggers
– Burning Man attendees

Depending on which group people joined Friendster in, they took on that role. So if you were invited by a Burning Man attendee you thought it was a Burning Man site, so you they did their profile as per their own context, and didn’t realise or assume there would be any other contexts but the ones they knew.

Didn’t take long before your boss got online and you realised this was not a place to be half-naked.

Academics often talk about context and what’s appropriate. But it’s very difficult to cross contexts. People change, for example, the way that they speak depending on who they are talking too, but you can’t speak to multiple groups simultaneously without having to make a choice.

When researchers created ARPANET they were interested in sharing information. Interest driven starting point. Even MUDs and MOOs were activity driven.

But inversion with social software, because they started people-first, because you don’t want to know everyone on the web. You may be blogging to reach an audience, but you don’t have billions of readers, you start off with your friends, and if you’re really popular you’ll get beyond that. But your friends build the context. The people you know, connections of relations you have in the system.

Radically different process, but we don’t know how to deal with it. Problem is scale. These contexts collapse. How can you deal with multiple contexts because you’ve scaled.

Monetisation is forcing a lot of sites to scale too fast.

Facebook, for example. Colleges… then… schools… then businesses… now everyone. Tension with marketing – marketing means scale, and scale means multiple contexts.

Delicious, conversations about how awful it was that non-techies were posting.

How far can things scale? Can it work?

Blogs are the only area where its scaled successfully. Because there is no ‘blogosphere’ because it’s not one thing. People are unaware of each other – foodies and knitting bloggers don’t mingle.

Three questions;

Designers: There are costs to chaotic processes behind the design now, and what are the processes that can support users without burning out designers
Researchers: what implications does all this have for society, design, every day life, globalisation
Business folks: Monetisation and growth are seen as desirable, but they destabilise most social software and kill communities. is it possibly to monetise without doing that?

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10.02.06
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Conference burn out

OK, it’s official. I’m burnt out as regards conferences. My flight was over three hours late last night, and our pilot told us just before we took off that had we been another 20 minutes later, we would not had enough fuel to get to Vienna, so he would have had to cancel the flight. Instead of thinking ‘Wow, that was lucky’, I found myself feeling cross, and wishing that Air Traffic Control had held us just a bit longer, or that the weather had worsened, so that I could just get back on the Piccadilly line and go home.

Instead, Lady Luck saw fit to ensure that I didn’t get to Vienna until 2am, and didn’t get to my friend Horst’s place until nearly 3am. I am, as you can imagine, a bit tired.

I’m also not impressed one little bit with the programme at BlogTalk Reloaded. There are lots of great speakers… in fact, there are too many. With no slot longer than half an hour, and a distinct lack of breaks, I am wondering how I am going to last. In fact, I know I am not going to last at all. I haven’t had a proper meal since lunchtime yesterday, I didn’t get dinner last night, no breakfast this morning because we had to rush to get here in time, we have a 15 minute break at 12:30, and lunch is not until 1.45. My talk is just before lunch. If I can string a sentence together at that point, I will be lucky.

I have to ask, for exactly whose benefit was this programme put together? As a speaker, I feel a bit miffed at only getting half an hour, because it’s not really long enough to get into the interesting detail of what I have to speak about. I will either have to talk fast or cut stuff out, and either way I’ll feel like I’m short-changing everyone. (And no, I’m not going to come over all falsely modest to say that I’m not interesting enough for a full hour. I’m bloody interesting, actually, and I believe that I’m not the only one here who’s bloody interesting.)

Half an hour also doesn’t give time for questions. Half the fun of talking is having a chat with the audience for the last 15 mins… oh, wait. Now I’m really pissed off. I don’t get half an hour, I get 10 minutes. I spent all that money, and went through all that pain for 10 minutes? I work for myself, so I have to pay for my own flights, there’s no nice business slush fund to pay for me. The whole point of coming to these conferences is to raise one’s profile in order to get more work. Networking is a big part of that, but so is having the opportunity to prove one’s experience and express one’s opinions from the stage, thus giving people an understanding of what you do and who you are.

10 mins gives no more than a snapshot, and frankly, had I known I would never have bothered.

Their format is this – two 10 minute presentations and then a 40 minute chat afterwards in small groups. Now, I’m all for chats, but would rather do that with everyone here (there are not many people here so it would be more than doable).

I thought last night that I need to put a moratorium on conferences for the next few months, and this experience just emphasises that I need to not book in any more conferences for a good long time.

UPDATE: I complained to the organisers, and they have changed the format so that myself and the other person talking this hour get half an hour each, with no ‘open space’. I do appreciate this, and I hope it will make for a better experience not just for me but for the audience. All I have to do now is not pass out or fall asleep.

09.29.06
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SHiFT: Dannie Jost – Patents and software

Legislation was invented in the 18th century, and it’s not able to cope with the 21st century. Worked for the patent office so has a background.

Software should not be patented at all, it should be exempted at all times.

No one in the audience has a patent.
Lots of people have coded.
No one has ever applied for a patent.

Code is language, like literature, mathematic, and belongs to the domain of culture. Code is not a machine, it’s abstract, an intellectual endeavour. Usually code get packaged and is called software. It’s not physical yet it’s made physical.

Intellectual property:

copyright
– literature
– scientific
– art
– music

design 5 x 5
Patents 20 + 5
trademarks 10 yrs x X
trade secret – only good way to protect code

Why do you need to know about software patents?

Facts
1. Software is patentable in the US
2. Software is not patentable in ‘EP-land’, i.e. ‘European Patent’-land, Swiss are part of the European Patent Convention, also includes Moldavia. (Community patent does not exist yet, but it is a project.)

What is a patent?
“a title issued by a governmental entity that entitles the owner to a geographically and time limited monopoly.”

It’s a deal you do with the government. They let you have a monopoly for a limited time for a specific geographical area and your part of the deal is to disclose your invention, you publish the details.

Different types of knowledge: public domain and proprietary knowledge.

Wipo tells you what you can patent. Picks words very, very carefully – very legal domain. Have to be as exact as possible, terminology is important.

What are patentable inventions?
– new
– industrial application
– involve and inventive step, which must not be obvious to the people who know the field concerned.

Exclusions to the European Patent Convention
i.e. stuff you can’t patent
– discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods
– aesthetic creations
– schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers

This is just for European patents.

Patent paths. How do you get a patent?
– apply
– examination
– grant
– admin

Can file for a patent locally, or in WIPO in Geneva.

Three different groups that regulated. World patents done by PCT, in Geneva, can pick which countries you want to patent in, e.g. China, Portugal, US.

So there are software patents in Europe although they are not allowed, because through the PCT route you can get American specifications turned into European patents. This is why even if you are fully open source, fully free software, and if you are a developer or programmer and are serious about writing an application or starting a business which your intellectual capital is code, you better be aware of what is out there in terms of software patents. This is not about just filing a patent, but being aware of what is out there.

Very expensive. Not friendly to individuals, freelancers or even SMEs. Cost of the EP patent that is one of the driving forces pushing the Community Patent.

Software patents, therefore
– exist
– are enforceable
– part of the public domain

How do you find this stuff?
– open source
– publications
– expired patent applications

Sates of the art
– all publications in any language available up to the filing date.

So if you wrote your algorithm on a napkin and left it in a restaurant, that’s in the public domain. So patent then not valid as ‘novelty’ is destroyed. (Novelty can only be destroyed, it can’t be proven.)

Lots of patent databases.
Several prior art wikis.
Can also use search or metasearch like Clusty.

09.29.06
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SHiFT: Stowe Boyd – We make our tools and they shape us

What sort of web doe we want? What sort of world? And how do our tools shape that?

The web is becoming a third place, replacing the third places we had before.

Oldenberg:
1. home
2. work
3. a place that is neither home nor work, but something else: a library, bar, cafe, park, wherever. Not necessarily with your family or work colleagues.

Movement away from the third place due to the rise of TV. People spend less time in social involvement in the third place. Americans average 4 hours of TV per day… Italians and British also average 4 hours too, so no smugness form the Europeans. Macedonians go for 286 minutes a day.

Television is a disease, because it leads people to sitting passively on a couch having info pushed at them, and are not engaging with people.

But the light at the end of the tunnel is internet. 56% of broadband users watch less tv. People aren’t going back to the pub or cafe or park, but moving on to the net. Using increasingly social tools. Consistent patterns of people’s social interaction within the real world and the virtual world. does not mean that all sociall systems online are equal, or equally good.

So we know this transition is happening. So how do the tools stack up.

Email sucks. Has had a big impact on culture, but it’s terrible. Extremely easy to spam, to treat people homogeneously. People are using less email – proportionately we are using other social tools more. Email changed communications channels in business, and the need for middle-managers went away .

Younger people use email less than older people. People from 13 -19 see email as a corporate evil, a propaganda machine. We’ll see significantly less email in the future.

Instant messaging. The buddy list is the centre of the universe. Average AIM user has the client open for 5 hours a day. Strong advocate of the social cues of IM, status messages etc.

Blogging. All these things came along at once. Biggest impact of blogging is in the US with the dissolution of the traditional media in the US. NYT laid off 400 people this year. Profound impact on journalism, but this isn’t what this talk is about. But blogs are changing what’s happening in the US and it will trickle through to everywhere else too.

Also has impact at individual person level, people communicating with their friends, to make new friends, to participate in the third space online.

Tags. A way for people to create shared meaning.

Explicit social networks, such as Last.fm. Discovered have the musical taste of a 27 year old British woman – she has the most similar taste to me on Last.fm.

Geolocation. Plazes. Where people, and geolocated photos. Bridge from virtual, web world to the real world. Leads to Glocalisation, global products and technology used by a small local network.

Techmeme. Tracks tech memes, and people play the game of jumping on the hottest stories to try to build traffic. Dangerous feedback cycle? Have a piling-on phenomenon, so have a clustering effect. So instead of having 500 stories of interest, it gets narrowed down to 50. Thinks that’s a bad thing because we’re talking about less things, starting to echo each other, talking within the group not to the rest of the world. Bad kind of social model.

If we look at these sorts of social technologies as a group there are certain characteristics that emerge.

Shape of web culture to come, and the potential impact on world culture to come:

– participatory, not passive; people are involved, not just accepting what they’re given or shown.
– open, not closed: anyone can get involved
– inclusive, not exclusive: that’s another reason not to like Techmeme, because it’s an elite group or authors
– edge, not centre: power is moving from the central elite to the edge, to the long tail of millions of people; centralised media organisations are losing control; once you put power in the hands of the people at the edge, it’s unlikely they’ll allow it to go back to the centre.

Our tools have an impact on us, but we can impact them by choosing which tools we use. If you see a tool going in the wrong direction, either complain and say you don’t think it’s going in the right direction, or simply don’t use it.

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09.29.06
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SHiFT: Martin Röll – Time for a SHIFT

How we need to change our thinking and acting to use information technology sensibly.

At these sorts of conferences, there seems to be quest for identity, to find out who we are, and how we shape the word, and how the world shapes us. Thomas talked about hacking language. Stowe will talk about tools, how we shape them and how they shape us. I’m talking about hacking the human operating system, how we live and how we interact.

Two assumptions in the title: we need to change, and that we aren’t using IT sensibly. Lilia thinks we are using IT sensibly, but what I mean is that we are not using the possibilities we have from the things we’ve invented, there’s a lot more we could do, and there’s a lot of tech that’s not useful at all.

The other assumption is that we need to change, and I’m not going to argue that point. But I do think it’s time for a shift and we do need to change, because I see things that we are doing on this planet that I don’t like, but I’m not going to labour the point about when we need to change.

But these points I am going to make are going to work for you no matter if you think the world is going to change or disintegrate.

Wishes don’t work, no point wishing for change. Need to act ourselves. That’s why he used ‘we’. Also, pointless blaming others for our misfortunes, we have to own that ourselves.

Idea of this talk is that when we look at the tech we’ve invented we can see it helps us get more things done. Can access more information, can find things faster, can communicate with more people, can work more effectively. Question is, what are we going to do with all that now? What work are we going to do? Are we going to use it to fight faster and more dynamically, or are we going to come up with some better ideas?

Two things are important:

– the way we interact with each other when we use IT.
– the way we work, the things we work on, and the type of work we do when working for other companies and the way we earn our money.

There are things we get wrong, specially when we access the web for accessing information. We tend to believe that what is in the browser is the world, don’t take into account that it’s a snapshot of the world, and we don’t think about the state of mind we are in when we access information.

So you’ve just got up and haven’t had coffee and are feeling groggy, then a comment on your blog may read as a stupid comment, but later on when you read it you may realise it’s constructive criticism.

Often we mis-interpret things online because we don’t take into account our own state of mind, we no longer see things the way they are, we see our own emotions in the email we get and the information we process. We react to this information badly when you are in a ‘fight’ mode, or a ‘protect’ mode. But have to think about why you are reacting the way you react.

Our information systems are created in such a way as it’s easy to get drowned in information. When we try to absorb too much information we become ineffective.

Once we’ve found out what we want to do, once we have our thinking clear, we have to go on to the acting part. One of the most important things here is what do we focus on. We tend to multitask, think about email, or what we have to do… when we don’t focus on what we need to do, when we are procrastinating we don’t get anything done. But we are the ones that decide where to put our focus, our attention.

There are lots of tools there to help us find what is interesting… but that’s frequently defined as what’s being linked to a lot. But when we do that we get into mob behaviour. We find something on the net, but we don’t know anything more than what we’ve seen. So we amplify what is happening without really it being important or relevant to us.

We should stop doing that. People will not stop reading a blog because I haven’t linked to popular things. In fact, if I stop for 2 weeks, it doesn’t matter. RSS feeds mean that people will stay, they can see when you start writing again. We should blog less about things that suck. What I get mad about when I see what’s happening in my part of the blogosphere – so many people spend so much time commenting on things that we don’t like, or things that suck.

There is so much stuff that sucks, everyone could easily write a list of 100 things that suck, but a blog entry is not going to change it. We should focus on what’s really important to us, what’s positive, what can make a difference. Don’t waste time on criticising politics or business or user-interfacces on a new gadget. We shouldn’t talk about he things that are irrelevant to our own actions.

Also need to be aware of the consequences of what we do, particularly the economic consequences. At this conference, you’ll meet a lot of people who are inventing new tools or processes. We are innovating. This is important for companies because they are hiring us and paying us. But we need to be aware of the repercussions of what we do. We need to think carefully about where we are going to put our new inventions. In the end it will all be freely available, but we are the ones who decide who gets it first, we shape the first behaviour, we help the first users make use of the tools. And by making this decision of how we use the tools, if we are not giving it to some people we can stop development, and by giving it to others we can speed development, so we need to think about where we apply these tools.

We have a duty too to share what we know and what we are developing. Not enough to just talk amongst ourselves, to show the demo to other geeks, but they can find it themselves anyway. If we really believe in what we do and we think that it’s important we need to go out and show it to people who don’t know yet. Most people don’t care about what we do because they don’t know about what we do.

You won’t find them on Google or Skype or IM, but our duty is to go out there and find people to share with. But we are developing stuff for us, not for people who are not at our conferences. We can work effectively but other people don’t, and some people are getting left behind and we should show what we do to other people and let them participate in this new world that we are creating.

I believe we are not using the tools we have developed effectively today. Much of the time we use our computers we are recreating other tools we already have, or engaging in the same behaviours. We need to think more about why we are doing what we do. We shouldn’t confuse the browser with reality. We should be mindful when we communicate with others through the electronic medium. Too often we misunderstand others because we’re not aware of our own state of mind when we are interfacing with the system. We need to co-exist with everyone.

Also need to be careful who we work for, whose money we take. If we aren’t more careful, we’ll just be the generation that made things faster. But if we do, not only can we get more things done, have better communication, but we can also shape a world in which more people can live together peacefully.

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