December 2011
1 post
Frictionless and frictionfull sharing and where...
Since F8 I’ve been thinking a lot about frictionless sharing and what it means and in particular how I feel about it. I think it’s best summed up for me by bastardising a Douglas Adams quote - ”I love frictionlessly shared things. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
Frictionlessly shared things feel devoid of meaning to me. They were shared automagically...
November 2011
4 posts
DACS Open. Working with artists to find new ways...
Something I’m very proud of and honoured to be involved in launched yesterday. It’s a project called DACS Open. Its name harks back to events such as the Whitechapel Open which was an annual event which was renowned for supporting the local community of artists, many of who moved to East London because of the low rents for both housing and studio space.
It’s important to...
A Dream Within a Dream and the futility of...
Mark Simpkins and I took a very different approach to the Honda Hackday to the ones that we both take both at hack days and in our working lives. We decided to make some art together. Mark’s talked a bit about it here. We jokingly called the movement the Algorithmicists. Both of us have wanted to explore how you make things to provoke thought and invite inquiry in the observer and have no...
How not to do developer launch events and an...
I just received more details about the launch event for a competition to engage developers to make things for the much hyped Nokia Lumia 800. I love Nokia. I actually like Windows Phone 7. I had a play with a Lumia 800 when buying my iPhone 4S. It’s a lovely device and with the right apps it could possibly do well.
However, the event is on a Saturday, and it’s three hours long. Ten am...
Give Us Your Dream
Mark Simpkins and I are collaborating on a project for Honda Hackday. It’s all about dreams and algorithmically scoring them, in the loosest of senses, and then doing something physical with them where we write them out on paper and then do something with that. I won’t give it all away now.
If you’d like to be involved, and we’d love you to, please just tweet your dream...
October 2011
4 posts
The Later On Today Guardian, iPad apps and news...
A few short days ago Dan Roberts and the rest of The Guardian team did something really rather extraordinary and yet really rather simple - they opened up the news lists as Google Docs. It was extraordinary for two reasons for me. Firstly the news lists are a prized asset; less scrupulous newspapers have bribed people at competitors to see them. One way of viewing the move is that opening them...
The Palace and the Conway Hall. State and "church"...
So last week something quite monumental happened. Many digital people, myself included were invited to Buckingham Palace. I say myself included at the start not from wanting to big myself up, but because last time someone wrote a blogpost like this, the excellent post by Bobbie Johnson, someone said that it was sour grapes about not being part of the in crowd. Knowing Bobbie I can’t think of...
Thinking. Different
Today my 20 month old son delivered the perfect epitaph to Steve Jobs. He closed my laptop. Humanity over technology. You’re right Tom. Steve was right too on that.
When we started the Activate Summit at The Guardian it was designed to be all about the people who do, not the people who talk. The people who do the hard thing and ship, not just talk about it. The summit also had to be about...
September 2011
8 posts
In the open internet very few people see you click
I like many others watched bits of the F8 keynote the other day. Just as with the unveiling of the Like button over a year ago I watched and I worried a little.
To me the Like button is a human powered web crawler. Most crawlers index the known web. When pressed, the Like button indexes the declaratively important web. Some may say that it indexes the visited web because the Like button is an...
Glanceable →
iamdanw:
Barnes has started a tumblr tracking glanceables
Well that got quite recursive quickly.
Toursquare. A little audiotour thing full of...
I’m getting rather fond of the Foursquare API at the moment and more and more with the service. In particular I’m liking the way that both the dataset and the API calls are, as the service is getting more used, becoming a bucket of sentiment and post-hoc intent wrapped around the geopoints, rather than just being the bare geopoints as it felt last year when I first played with the API....
Making meaningful and emotional utility out of...
I’ve been pondering how we can generate digital peripheral vision of late and this utilitarian miserablist sounding title relates to some recent thinking and playing about how to do it. Parish notice boards and signs attached to lamp posts do all sorts of wonderful things, but one major thing they do is they trigger our peripheral vision; that most basal of responses, the response which...
Ten years ago and today
It’s rare you get to look at an exact decade of your life. We all know what happened ten years ago. We can discuss deeply and from a vast collection of perspectives if and how it has changed the world on a macroscopic level. Today felt moving and poignant though as a result of seeing what changes ten years has wrought.
Ten years ago today I had lunch with my boss, Theo Bloom. My then...
Pondering the Kindle Android tablet vs iPad and...
Yesterday something really clicked for me. On my way to Shropshire Geek Fest Revolution I had some, ahem, issues with my rather beloved MacBook Air. It refused to read the memory stick with my as yet unfinished presentation on it. Since I had to change at Birmingham New Street I went into the Apple Store in the Bullring to do some file transfer things and to see if I could get someone to look at...
Big Bang Blues (Restaurants and communities of...
I currently have a bit of a sad face. It’s nothing really bad, it’s about a restaurant. My favourite restaurant in Oxford, my new home town, closed just under a week ago. It’s not because it’s economically unviable, it’s due to property development that will lead to a greater creep of that great homogoniser, chain supermarkets, into an area which is largely about...
August 2011
3 posts
Sheddable identities and why banning people from...
If anyone wants to think deeply about the structure of social networks they should gaze deeply at this image created by Isaac Hepworth of Twitter. It’s a universe of mentions, but it, like all things in social network land, is more organic than shallow thoughts on something digital would belie.
The trouble is that lots of people who don’t spend their life involved in digital things...
Thoughts on my week at Young Rewired State 2011.
I spent lots of last week in the company of younger people. They were inspiring and wonderful and we must do all we can as a group to help them to shine. Not really that they need much help in that. I was proud and privileged to be a mentor for Young Rewired State.
When all around are seeing “youth” and young people in a slightly negative and derogatory way, as a result of the...
Things to be proud of: Young Rewired State (post 1...
These last few days and weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the last year and things I’ve meant to write about, but for many reasons just failed to. So let’s start here. Young Rewired State. It’s just awesome. The idea of getting young people to show off their talents, their creativity, their energy and drive and their pure chutzpah is wonderful. It also is part of the...
July 2011
1 post
March 2011
4 posts
Day three of the many phones challenge.
Well the BlackBerry
So the BlackBerry is now back in the cupboard. The battery life is great, it makes calls just fine, but then so does my ancient Ericsson T29 which may get an airing. The battery life may be great as I never really used the internet on it. The browser is an abomination and very hard to use without a touch screen. Couldn’t get BlackBerry App World installed (dear phone...
The little festival that could.
Two years ago, some amazing things happened. It snowed for one, and we all stood out in the snow, queuing to go into an East End warehousey type building. We did it because one of us had organised something amazing, partly without organising (although there was a lot of that going on behind the scenes). Amanda Rose, she’s the one on the right of this picture which is one of my favourite...
The few weeks of the many phones
So, this post starts with a cautionary tale. iPhones are not good coffee stirrers. I didn’t find this out, our one year old did. Actually I believe the coffee was successfully stirred, it’s simply that the iPhone didn’t enjoy the experience. I’m all for children learning through experimentation and play, just not with my phone, and certainly not with my phone about 2 months...
Get excited and have a haircut
Not quite sure that’s what Matt Jones said by the way. Ah. That’s better, that’s it.
Haircuts have been on my mind of late though. I haven’t had one for a while and clearly it shows. I started thinking a tiny bit more about them this week when I read some posts from the ever thought provoking Dave McClure and my eyes rested on this very lovely picture of a list of...
February 2011
2 posts
From Dusk till Dawn - an ambient "art radio" for...
As I said at the start of my lightning talk at the Guardian SxSW hackday today “hello, I’m Chris and I’m an insomniac”. Often when I travel, I suffer really badly from insomnia. The best things I’ve found to switch my brain off so I can sleep are either old episodes of the IT Crowd, Father Ted or Black Books, or even better where I can find it, the Discovery...
What if you could see through the walls of every...
Recently I was lucky to be invited to speak at Culture Hackday. It was a truly wonderful two days and I’ll write up soon the thing that we made there.
There’s a video of my talk I’ve embedded below and a slight reworking of the slide deck with some notes. It outlines some of the aims and aspirations I have in working for the startup formerly known as #newstartup but now...
October 2010
2 posts
Tablet sizes and interfaces and pixels per...
Part of what I’m thinking about at “newsecretthingTM” (the startup I’ve joined) is about tablet interfaces and production processes and cross-platform/cross-device-ness. On Monday Steve Jobs made a few pronouncements on tablets which were less than the size and aspect ratio of the iPad. Part of this can straight away be ignored as a competitive statement, a dismissal of...
5 tags
Glanceable user interfaces - Music Hackday and...
I’ve finally got round to jotting down some thoughts about the thing I made at Music Hackday. It’s taken a while partly as I’ve been busy and partly as I wanted to spend a bit more time thinking about what and why I made the thing I made.
Mixcloud has been one of the sites I’ve been interested in for a while. For starters it’s run by some friends and secondly I love...
August 2010
2 posts
7 tags
FirstPlaces. A prototype thing for digital...
If you want to see FirstPlaces in action, go to http://demo.firstplaces.org/
A while ago I had the privilege of being invited by the lovely Tiina Carr and Joanne Mateer of The Workshop to visit Sheffield and their lovely offices for the day and help come up with ideas around Digital Inclusion. It produced some really interesting ideas, some more immediately useful for them and some less so. Of...
9 tags
A tale of four Rewired States. Making quick APIs.
As I was reflecting on the awesomeness of Young Rewired State, in particular, and Rewired State UK Online, I started to see a pattern emerging in my involvement in these fantastic events. Unsurprisingly it involves APIs. The four Rewired States I’ve been thinking about relating to APIs are the first National Hack the Government Day, Rewired Culture, Young Rewired State 2010 and the Rewired...
July 2010
4 posts
A little thing to help UK Online/Rewired State...
One thing that always strikes me at hackdays is how much more productive they are if there are already APIs available. It’s totally blindingly obvious. The less time you have to spend scraping, parsing, cleaning, finding out where the layout of what you’re scraping breaks etc, the better. That gives you more time to actually make things that’ll make a difference.
As I mentioned...
Developing more thoughtfully for digital inclusion
There was something which Vic Gundotora said at the first Google I/O in 2008 really struck me. He talking how Google wanted to move the internet forward and why they were doing it. The “why they were doing it” was blunt and quite startling, I’ll paraphrase: the more people there are having a good experience on the internet, the more people there will be who would have a need to...
Keep stereotypes of software developers out of...
I read something today which I had such a knee jerk reaction to that I felt the only thing to do out of deference to the author was to not post a comment on it, but to share it, write about it and read the thoughts of others I respect. That thing is Andrea Di Maio’s Keep Developers Out of Politics, Please. There are so many places I disagree with it that I didn’t know where to start,...
The misdirections of NHS Direct
The first things I’d like to say before I get going on this is that the NHS is an amazing thing. We’d be lost without it and I for one have experienced some of the very good sides of it in the last few days. The absence of blog posts for a while have been due to working fairly ridiculously hard of late both at work and at family. So hard in fact that I ignored a chest infection for a...
May 2010
3 posts
All good things... Time to bow out at The...
The last two weeks have been both amazing and bittersweet, but mainly amazing, exhilaratingly amazing. I’ve been to Toronto, San Francisco and Washington talking about the Open Platform and the launch that’s just happened. The bittersweet part is that I’ve been carrying with me the secret that I’m leaving The Guardian. You might think it’d be hard to talk...
Gov 2.0 The British panel.
I was really honoured when invited to be on the “Four Perspectives in data.gov.uk” panel at Gov2.0 expo. The chance to be on a panel talking about a subject dear to my heart, like UK public data and what The Guardian has been doing in this space, with three people I respect deeply was too good an opportunity to miss. As you can see from the photo above we all took our responsibility...
Electioneering should be more tightly regulated.
One thing that open data initiatives like the Guardian Datastore, data.gov.uk, OpenlyLocal, They Work for You and the GLA Datastore have done is to the world is they’ve made transparent the need for raw, verified referencable data. If ever there was a reason for this to be more the case in politics and electioneering, then this leaflet that landed on my doormat this morning is it. Something...
April 2010
4 posts
So long, and thanks for all of this...
A view I will be missing…
The last week has been a strange one, separated from family and at times unsure of how long I’ve been away, I’ve been in San Francisco. Initially a sort of flying visit for Chirp it turned into a two week stay. It’s been difficult at times but wonderful on the whole and that is largely thanks to the people and organisations below who I feel I...
Week #103
I like many others like the idea of week notes. The sort of thing that makes you retrospect a bit and see progress where otherwise it may not be apparent. I’m obviously coming very late to the party, but was very keen to start doing it before week 104 where I’d have been freelance for two years.
So how was week 103? Week 103 was spent in a strange mixture of thinking, walking, riding...
Are there "barely game" like things in physical...
I really like Russel Davies’ term barely game. In particular I like that he includes collection in his description of barely game. It feels right. Although these barely games are almost, or in some cases mildly, competitive externally, collecting is always something which can be competitive internally. You can play collecting games by yourself. Wanting to complete the set of something. Maybe...
I want the science bit on the flying through the...
Hello from a sunny San Francisco. I came out here for Chirp and was due to be flying back on Sunday to see my wife and children. I’m missing them. I clearly have a vested interest in returning home soon to see them, but you know, what I have a greater vested interest in is returning home safely. It’s a long game really that I don’t need to explain fully here but if you asked any...
March 2010
6 posts
Newspapers as serendipity bundles and chatroulette...
Back in the days when the web was young, and I was younger (as were Steve and Ivan as this front cover of Wired will attest), and I had the rather excellent email address christ@webmedia.com, I got rather het up about something Nicholas Negroponte wrote in Wired. Unbelievably they published my rather precocious and slightly wanky letter (I had just left academia at the time and was using my...
My Ada Lovelace Day Heroines for 2010
This year for me it’s all about three women, who I’ve had the pleasure of seeing working in transforming different bits of government service provision; Emma Mulqueeny, Martha Lane Fox and Emer Coleman. All three of them are doing amazing things and doing it with a combination of sincerity, tact, sensitivity, sheer bloody-mindedness, where need be, and above all humility.
...
Making pregnancy information playable.
Early this morning something capped a surreal few days. The Prime Minister mentioned the game that a few of us made at Rewired State dotgovlabs. I guess now Gordon Brown has mentioned it, we probably have to really do it as a proper product, but for now let’s just think about the why and what of The Bump Game.
It all started off with dotgovlabs and Rewired State organising a 2 day...
PlaceHoldr : On what we read where...
So the thing I should probably have focussed on a little bit more at Bonnier Hackday was this. It could have been so much more and hopefully, with a little bit of thinking and a bit of effort, it can be. By half-way through the hackday everything was working and instead of polishing and honing an idea, I made other things. Mea culpa, and I won’t be doing that again (although I think...
Collating and exploring a hashtag
For a while now with bits of technology I’ve written for The Guardian both in curating conversations and collating and whitelisting people talking about a subject, I’ve been interested in sentiment and identity and who talks about what and in finding ways of seeing the data and letting people search it.
As a small illustration for my talk at the start of Bonnier Hackday I rewrote...
Bonnier Hackday
I’ve spent the last 2 days in sunny Stockholm (still with some snow around) at one of the most wonderful hackdays I’ve been to. Partly it was wonderful through not having to do any of the organising (compared to events we have at The Guardian), that job was wonderfully done by the lovely Paulina Söderlund Modlitba.
It was also wonderful through the beautiful surroundings of the...
January 2010
3 posts
Why the iPad may be just what we need for Digital...
I seem to have a bit of a problem sometimes with Apple keynotes. Apart from the high end pro kit I have a bit of a “meh” response at first and then a blinding epiphany which leads at some point to understanding why I’ll be buying and then often making things that work/run on them. The original iPod was a case in point. At some Apple shindig after the announcement there were Apple...
Supporting Haiti, some links
I don’t really have a spot for banner ads so this will have to do.
If you do have a spot on your site, you can get adverts from here to help link people to the appropriate donation page which in the UK is here. Here’s hoping no evil people will set up fake “donation sites”. Donate safely people. Make sure it’s somewhere you trust.
Well done to Sam for doing this, to...