jaggeree

Frictionless and frictionfull sharing and where the meaning lies.

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:14:03 +0000

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 without human intervention and, as such, all they have is an algorithmic relationship with that person. Normally the only human intervention connected with them is to switch them off.

That’s why I tweeted this this morning:

I’ve been fascinated in declarative vs implicit sharing for a while now, but somehow seeing the very ignorable stream of people’s actions flow by has sharpened the focus. I’ve not glanced and seen one interesting thing within it. It’s like your peripheral vision as you drive fast along a road. It feels like mere fodder for the robots; for other algorithms to try at best to curate something for you out of your friends actions, or quite possibly to try and make better adverts.

It’s aspergic social software. I always think that good social software is where you can picture yourself having that conversation with someone - where they have edited their subconscious in some way before the stream of data emerges.

There are three services around at the moment which are the converse and feel very meaningful to me. Interestingly the sharing within them is declarative and frictionfull. You have to work to do something before sharing it and in doing so, far more of you, the thing your friends and people who follow you care about, emerges.

The first of these is Readmill. At some point I should write more about why I like it in general. It’s beautiful. In this context though, the simple action of highlighting things that you’re interested in has an implied friction. You have to have read the thing first to be able to highlight an element that has meaning for you. There’s no shortcut. The act of opening a page is not enough as it is with the frictionless sharing in some of the newspaper Facebook apps.

The second one is Instagram. For me it seems like a way to curate the world around you. To note down the moments in life where you spot something. It makes you see. It reminds me a lot of Tom Taylor and Tom Armitage’s lovely Noticings and in some of the things we tried to do with our game And I Saw… You’re not live streaming the world around you, you’re plucking visual ephemera and things which touch you and sharing it. As such it has a massive emotional resonance and feels like one of the most visceral ways of being present with distant friends.

The third is a new one and is the perfect antidote to the Facebook Spotify integration which takes more out of the party than it brings for me. This is my Jam allows you to share the one piece of music that is currently full of meaning for you.

“What’s your favorite song right now?

Not any old track, but THAT song; the one that’s on repeat, the one you can’t get out of your head today, the one worth shouting about.”

This comes back to my thoughts about the conversation you’d have with someone and on how you really have to role play social software to imagine how it feels for someone on the other end of it. Personally, I’d tell my friends what music I was obsessing about and I’d hope they’d do the same for me. This morning’s chat with Chris Wild shows me how true that is. The Spotify autoshare functionality is like my friends telling me in person the name of every track they’re playing, even the ones which play when they go off to make the tea. It’s the zenith of anti-social social software - no eye contact is ever made as the stream of non-conversation occurs. All it feels like to me is analytics for a person’s life.

Good things are always hard won and it strikes me that frictionless sharing is merely the easy way out. It’s the outcome of having enough compute units and a deep enough desire to amass data in the hope of understanding a person as a monetizable unit. Let’s make things harder and do better with those compute units and the pieces of life people choose to share. Make it more about curation and make the more complicated services that encourage people think about sharing and through doing that give them a meaningful and emotional connection to their friends.

DACS Open. Working with artists to find new ways for them to engage audiences digitally.

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:40:00 +0000

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 mention money early on. Very few artists make work that command the enormous numbers often associated with the art world. Many artists struggle to be artists. Many have to teach and in the current cuts to education, teaching jobs are harder to find. Many work to public commission, but these are being reduced. Many make work thanks to the support of fellowships, however these are in decline. It’s not just the public sector in a recent essay at the start of their annual booklet Alan Christea talks about the challenging climate for commercial organisations too. The arts and artists are getting squeezed from every direction at the moment. It’s always the first thing to go, but definitely not the first thing to be missed.

DACS, the Design and Artists Copyright Society, has recently been studying artist’s wages. The results are shocking as the statement above shows. With the current financial climate and squeeze on funding for the Arts it’s hard to see it changing any time soon. The DACS Open project hopes to help this problem by working with artists on ways that they can engage audiences online and then hopefully find new funding models such as micro-philanthropy.

The whole process is a set of co-creation exercises where we explore with artists what is possible in terms of stitching together bits of technology and how they want to be in digital spaces. We’re looking with them for the places where they feel they they can be open without changing how they are as artists. We’re looking with them for tools which make their lives easier, places where everyday devices and software can be transformed into things that help them to concentrate on making work while at the same time helping them to take advantage of all of the opportunities that digital holds for engaging audiences. The co-creation is key. We’re two workshops in and I now know so much more about artists and in particular what it is to be one and the process of being one that the prototypes we’re making with them are very different to anything I’ve made before in direction. We’ll be sharing all that we do on the DACS Open blog and Twitter account, with videos on Vimeo and photos on Flickr. Please follow along, I’ve written my first diary entry about the first two weeks of workshops and making.

For me personally there’s a strong reason to do this. It’s about giving back. The visual arts have been one of the greatest passions in my life. Visiting galleries and seeing art is one of my major pleasures in life but for a long while now I’ve wanted to find a way to say thank you for all the joy it brings. This is a small part of that thank you.

A Dream Within a Dream and the futility of algorithmic scoring of influence

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:28:00 +0000

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 utility or purpose apart from that. Mark has for a while talked about an organisation of unknown shape called This is Our Algorithm and this was a chance for us to try it on, to see how it felt and many thanks to Rewired State and Honda for allowing us to.

Mark talks very well about some of the thoughts and principles:

“All three pieces dealt with algorithms, code and control. They were as much about some strange desire we have to codify up our lives into possibly complex but ultimately meaningless algorithms, trying to reduce complexity to a point beyond understandable simplicity to end at a nihilistic pointlessness.

Reality is complex, understanding reality is hard.”

The first piece and physically the largest piece we made was called A Dream Within A Dream. It is an exploration both into influence and algorithmic scoring and also a piece to provoke that thought in the viewer. It’s partly inspired by this fabulous tweet from Chris Sacca.

I have some fairly strong views about Klout. I really don’t like it in so many ways. I can sympathise with people who feel there need to be some form indicator about the reputation of an account on Twitter (real person vs bot) but I feel really rather sad about things like Klout in many ways. They dehumanise networks in my opinion. One use case I often hear is about looking at how companies can avoid very public confrontations with people by understanding who the influencers are and then ensuring that they’re helped/offered special treatment/pacified. This feels like an own goal for a quasi-meritocratic society at best and a re-enactment of the rise of the 1% at worst. Giving free things to influencers feels like giving gift bags to people at Awards Ceremonies.

I also have strong views about black box ranking systems or ones where the walls are so opaque that an everyday user cannot begin to see what is going on in the system. I can imagine which tweet it was that made Klout for a long while think I was influential about Hugh Grant. However it’s really quite an outlier in my stream, although I sent another today. I’m not an expert statistician, but as a former research scientist I find it worrying that a large amount of faith is put into a metric which clearly in some cases amplifies aberrant signal over noise and pretends it’s a relevance. I’d love to know how they run controls in their system. How they test it against randomness. How the look for and guard against false positives. How they compare against standard texts and against nonsense tweets algorithmically created out of common word tables.

Our way of probing all of this was to create a fake dreaminess index. To show the futility of algorithmic scoring and how you can create an index about anything against anything. To show through parody that value only exists in creating a truly realistic index if that is what you feel you must do. To show this we set out to make the most pointless one we could.

The first point in our plan was in calling it a dreaminess index as shown in the parody image above from our presentation. What are we referring to as dreaminess? The second point is to think about what a dream is. Like influence, the word dream, has so many meanings and nuances - from the dreams you have at night to short term and long term aspirations, both personal and for the wider world.

The mechanism by which we went about creating the index was a further probe. Indexes need to be compared to things. The only way to measure things algorithmically is against some form of ideal, be it a standard or a derived standard. We decided to create an index of dreaminess based on pure lexicographical similarity to Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Dream Within A Dream”. I could argue, as pointlessly and as vigorously as I liked if I wanted to, about why I think that poem is the very ideal of a piece of writing about a dream. Without statistics, and all of the things we as scientists take for granted such as reproducibility and controls it and any index or scoring table is pointless. We’d like to thank Dom Hodgson who suggested our +D index should be called Doubt. Inspired.

The way we created the index is deliberately meaningless too. The scoring table is based purely on word frequency analysis of the poem. Things you’d normally stopword out are deliberately left in. The poem is our ideal of dreaminess and we’re futilely comparing how similar all the words including “a” and “I” in your tweets are to the poem. It’s deliberately wrong and pointless. The number of times the indefinite article are present in the tweet are doubly amplified, it’s both a high scoring and common word. It has all the wrong forms of bias.

We invited people to send in their dreams to us, we set up an account called GiveUsYourDream. The wording was deliberate - we would become the possessors of your dreams. You gave them freely, we have them now. When not enough people opted in we simply did what all other similar indexes would do, we just hoovered in tweets from a Twitter search for “dream” without asking people to opt in. This again is a deliberate response and provocation, and in addition it ensures that every dream gets at least a score of 5 for having the word “dream” in it.

What we did next is to start making the physical side of the project, the visible part of the art work that people would see and engage with. We started writing down the dreams on blank pieces of paper chain. We wrote the tweet on the inside, so that it would be hidden partially from view. On the outside was the name of the person who had the dream and our +D score of their dream and, by inference, them. The reality, the sentiment, was barely visible when the chain was assembled; it was partially or largely obscured by the nature of the paper chain. The score and the name were dominant, just as it is on Klout. You’re boiled down to a score, the thing which you said is now a second class citizen.

Part way through writing down the scraped tweets I came across this one and it stopped me cold. It made me think that actually anyone who does anything algorithmic should have to, as part of what they do, physically write down some of the data. You get a new emotional connection to it. It becomes real. And personal. It’s clear that someone typed it, just as clearly as you are having to laborioiusly write it. I wanted in a way to share a picture of what we’d done with this person, but then I felt I may spook them out. Instead I’ll look at this from time to time as almost a cautionary tale to anyone who may think about sentiment or influence mining. People write things with hopes, fears, feelings - read and use those things with respect for that.

We then set out to assemble. We’d originally considered going the whole height of the Guardian’s floors at Kings Place but the physicality of writing and making the chain meant that we could only manage the height of one floor in the time allotted, even though it was an inspiring and moving sight. A chain of semi obscured dreams. Independent dreams now interlinked. Dreams inextricably held within other dreams. Dreams within dreams. The whole piece was designed to be utterly self referential, the text selected as the source of the scoring table related to the physicality of how the tweets were displayed and gave the piece its name. It was moving to see it installed, hung on transparent nylon thread, running through the void of the stairwell and gently touching the floor. Rain Ashford took this picture of it, the best I’ve seen, as it disappears up into the illuminated stairwell.

I miss it. It was something Mark and I talked about and schemed and thought about all weekend and it was there for a few hours and then it was gone (possibly to appear again we hope somewhere in Honda’s office in the UK). I do however have a feeling we’ll do more of these things. We spoke to many people afterwards who were really encouraging and said it had made them think about Klout and algorithmic scoring. We hope it makes you think about that to.

Footnote/Full disclosure: After my post bemoaning things on a weekend, yes, the Honda hackday over the weekend. I was paid to be there.

How not to do developer launch events and an alternative suggestion for free.

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:36:00 +0000

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 till One pm. Silly day, silly time. Not just silly, a bit rude. I and many other developers have a life. Some have outside interests, some have girlfriends, some have wives, some have boyfriends, some have husbands, some have children. Three hours on a Saturday morning feels like a weird one. Maybe do a bit of market research rather than just assuming developers are a stereotype which doesn’t have a life at the weekend, as this is how your choice makes me feel.

I can almost predict the format. Some very exuberant marketing person or senior business figure will flounce on stage and list all of the features on the phone in excruciating detail. If you’re unlucky it will be preceded by TV slots, brand presentations and some sort of ghastly faux Jony Ive video about the design language (I’m a massive fan of Jony Ive, people aping him talking about design just annoy me). The details of the device will be excruciating as everyone already knows them. Engadget and everyone else scooped it months before your launch event which we also probably read the coverage for. I almost guarantee it’ll concentrate on consumer not developer features. Then a whole load of people will patronise about what a great opportunity the competition is while everyone in the audience sarcastically tweets about how it’s their applications that make the ecosystem. Then someone will tell you about the competition, the prize fund which is probably a lot less than the venue hire and the stage set cost and will have a small enough spread to make it barely worth entering. They’ll probably have a few presentations from people who had advanced access, but these people will only talk about the good things, it’ll feel fake. Telling the truth would be smarter but not on message. Someone may or may not tell you about the toolsets and the APIs, their presence in the whole thing will be so small as to almost feel apologetic. Expect no chance for Q and A.

Then there will probably be lots of milling around before the big palette of handsets arrives to be handed out. Expect queueing here. Lots of it. While you’re in the queue people may come and demo the phones. The demos will be by marketing people or hired in staff, sometimes inappropriately dressed models, rather than by developers or evangelists. Sometimes the phones will be their personal units with their data on it, often making you feel embarrassed at playing/viewing the device. Sometimes the demo units will be poorly charged. Asking for the developer tools will at best be responded to with a piece of paper with a web link on it. At worst with a suggestion to go and register on the developer site and download the tools.

Sound familiar?

Doesn’t have to be this way. As Dan Williams just said “I am a developer not your cheap marketing tool”. These big glitzy launches serve just one community: the agency or department who report on bums on seats rather than engagement and provide places for the senior people to “get out among the people who make great stuff for us” (but then normally get swooshed off before you can chat to them). It’s a posh bun fight with no analytics about value or return on investment in apps which make the ecosystem great. Some day I’d love to see an analysis of how many competition apps actually end up being top grossing ones.

Here’s my suggestion and I’m saying it for free as I’ve had enough of this sort of event and I’d like a better one. Hire one of the many shops which are currently unused in our austerity highstreets, create a pop up developer shop somewhere near to where there are lots of developers and start ups. If you’re stuck, here’s a starting place map for London. Don’t spend a fortune on the decor, spend the money on putting people who know what they’re talking about in there. Possibly spend some of the budget on a good coffee machine or, if you want to pander to stereotypes, a big fridge full of Cuke. Invite people to come into the shop and allow them to book half hour to an hour slots, make sure you’ve got lots of staff at lunchtimes. Write down the things they ask about so you can improve your developer site and FAQs. Write sample code for the commonly found things. Give them a USB stick (hint: they’re very cheap) with the developer tools on it. If you must put all of your marketing videos, put it on the stick. Do not make it mandatory to watch the videos. Do not put the documentation or the tools installer in some form of multimedia presentation thingy which makes you sit through the marketing guff.

If you’re going to do a competition make it one in which there can be lots and lots of winners of smaller prizes where the prize roughly to the loss of earnings in making the thing you’ve made. That way if it’s a paid app and you promote it, then the developer does really well, but everyone feels like they have a good chance.

I’m betting this will cost the same or less as a fomulaic (despite what you think you’re doing with your crazy slightly leftfield idea) big glitzy marketing led launch.

Anyone want to give it a try with a new device? Then I’ll come and play. Until then, keep your free phone. Saturday with my family is worth more, and it’s your opportunity, not mine.

p.s. thank you to @iamtheprawn and @rainycat who made me go cold with embarrassment that my original version didn’t mention developers who have husbands and boyfriends. Hopefully those of you who know me realise this was just a slip up when writing a rant.

Give Us Your Dream

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:24:59 +0000

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 to @GiveUsYourDream.

The Later On Today Guardian, iPad apps and news lists. Bridgeheads between continuous publishing and bundles of news

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:46:56 +0100

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 up is in many ways a tacit admission that the speed of transmission of news has now reached a point where openness outweighs commercial advantage and secrecy. Advertising what you’re working on builds suspense and anticipation. The alternate way of viewing it is that it’s part of inviting the readership in; making them a part of the newspaper - mutualising the relationship and utilising the knowledge out there to improve the story. This is something that I’ve seen friends on the technology team (Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss) do to great effect.

The second extraordinary thing and the beautifully simple thing was how they released it: Google Docs. Simple and democratic at the least, full of data and empowering of experimentation at best. I was very interested. Having worked on Open Platform from the start I was excited to see a new form of data emerging for me to remix and alchemise.

Initially I thought my evening’s play after they released it would be to make a little JSON feed to play with. Isn’t that what every developer does when they see some data in a Google spreadsheet that interests them nowadays? Then I discovered that Dan Catt had done that, which was the most lovely discovery and allowed me to play a bit further into the opportunities that much quicker. (You can read Dan’s excellent discourse about the newslists and JSON and the thing I made, The Later On Today Guardian, and small pieces loosely joined here).

What interested me first about the news lists was that there were two phases to them with the publication of the story being the phase boundary. You could “help” to inform the story before it was published and then you could “read” the story afterwards. This informed part of the design of The Later On Today Guardian which is very much an ugly version 0.1 thing. In the “help” phase, Twitter’s rather excellent Web Intents allow you to tweet the journalists with a prepopulated hashtag. One elegant addition would be to give each story a unique hashtag, akin to a machine tag, right from inception. This would allow for easier collation at a later stage of the process, scooping together the news list, the information from readers that helped to form the story and the story itself in to a capsule of process journalism.

The second thing which interested me was the fact that the newslist was itself a capsule; akin to the bundles of stories in a physical newspaper (well it sort of is the digital manifestation of the promise of a newspaper). I and many others have been long interested in the finishability and serendipitous nature of the curated bundle within newspapers. We’ve even some of us tried to make them anew. This felt like a new way to highlight the curation of news and to give you a chance to finish the news stories that editors felt were important during the day. Something that is now being rather well and rather beautifully and with deft human intervention in the new Guardian iPad app.

The progress bar isn’t there for some crazy gamification thing, it’s more of an ambient readout of how far through the news day they - the journalists - might be (the matching is currently imperfect and misses stories and has the occasional false positive). It also gives you an idea from visit to visit as to whether there is anything new for you to look at. You can remember a percentage complete (roughly) or the position of a bar far easier than you can remember everything you’ve seen on a page.

I’m enjoying looking at it occasionally, I have yet to make the columns work really nicely on a tablet device or on Google TV (and the webfonts break on Google TV), but there is something interesting about something which jogs your peripheral vision about news things. Something like these things below which atomise news and curate temporally in a persistence of vision type way, but that’s a post for another time.

The Palace and the Conway Hall. State and "church" and the new establishment.

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:38:19 +0100

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 anything further from the truth. In the spirit of transparency, here’s the invite. I’ll forgive them for now for one thing, getting my title wrong, there are other things I can’t forgive.

When emailed the invitation I accepted, when the physical invitation arrived I decided not to go. I really felt uncomfortable about the host. My feeling about his burgeoning relationship with London’s startup scene is that he is looking for a new meaning in the fallout from his downgraded role as a special trade representative a result of some dubious dealings while acting as a representative of the country.

It would have been interesting to see my fellow digital people in lounge suits. Amusing but not necessarily comfortable. It’s not really how the sector is. I know it’s politic to dress up for events, such as this picture below, but it just feels like the first step onto a slippery slope.

The slippery slope I refer to is about losing sight about what makes us us. The night before a few people over dinner were talking about us being the new establishment. If in becoming the new establishment we become the old establishment, modelled anew a bit, more digital but not much else, then we’ve done a massive disservice to generations of digital people behind us. We don’t need to change ourselves to become more like the people we often feel are corrupt or doing the wrong or inappropriate thing.

Anyone who hasn’t already read Ben Hammersley’s excellent speech to the IAAC should read it now. Anyone who has read it before should read it again before they jump on a digital duke bandwagon. Ben’s speech and being a mentor at Young Rewired State say three things to me.

1. We’re becoming the new establishment just by being ourselves, through being intelligent and through the simple truth that everything digital touches is being transformed.

2. We’re a transitional generation. Born of an analogue world. As Ben says “ third-digital-native, third-pathfinder. And … also third-establishment”. As such we need to be mindful of the decisions we make, not just for ourselves but for those who come afterwards. We’re stewards.

3. Our role is really to move aside the old establishment were we can, not to replace them wholesale with all of their tendencies and fallibilities. We, the people who rail against the hyperconsumptive business mechanics of the broadcast era and the 21st century, mustn’t become the new dinosaurs.

I wanted to remind people of something written in what, for a now secular humanist building, is the closest thing to a geek church we have in London; Conway Hall. Who has not sat in pews at Conway Hall and listened to and debated the dogma of digital either at Interesting, Playful and The Story.

To Thine Own Self Be True

I pondered this a lot at Playful. The sun hit it in almost a road to Damascus style way. I’d felt sad the night before as I saw friends heading to the palace, delivered through the media of Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare - the new broadcasters - that I wasn’t going there with my friends. As I stared at those words in Conway Hall surrounded by those same friends I knew I’d made the right choice for me. I’m not judging them at all, part of me wishes still that I’d gone. This is my personal view.

On my way from Conway Hall to see another friend after Playful I passed by the Occupy London Stock Exchange camp. Agree with them, disagree with them, it’s up to you. When The Telegraph writes an article with this title you know that something is amiss and the old establishment is despised.

As I walked away from the camp I walked past many stereotypical city workers, in suits, smoking cigars, the epitome of excessive consumption. I felt deeply that I’d hate the world in which my friends had not displaced them but replaced them in every way. I’d like to think we have a strong enough moral compass to not go that way, but I fear that the system is grasping out at a time of crisis. It realises the power is shifting in some ways, not yet in the companies that broker power and wealth, but in the companies that have relevance in the near future.

I’d swap any number of evenings at the palace to spend a day in the company of my friends at Conway Hall and see wonderful things like the fabulous self-effacing Swede Emil Ovemar nervously giggling among the balloons while Toby Barnes haphazardly sorts out the next very clever presentation.

Call me naive or sentimental if you like. I just think we can do better and I hope to fuck we don’t become a new “old establishment”. Our kids will hate us and they and we deserve us to make a better world and system. We need to fight for it and not to settle for the path well trodden or take short cuts that will lead us astray.

I’ll leave you to think over Matt Locke’s wise words below. I’m not trying to appropriate his sentiment on this matter. I personally don’t know how he feels about the palace. I just know how I feel reading this: empowered.

Sharable social content for presence, not distance.

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:39:00 +0100

Sharable social content for presence, not distance.

Thinking. Different

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:51:10 +0100

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 the magical place where the technology disappears and you’re just left with what it brings to the user. This is how I’ve thought about Apple devices for a long while now. They’re different.

I first encountered a Mac half way through my Chemistry degree. I was on my industrial placement at SmithKline and French, lucky enough to work with some of the people who’d pioneered Computer Aided Drug Design and had made Tagamet, the anti-ulcer drug. They were people who thought differently. I was hooked. Everywhere around were VT220s, VT420s and the occasional IBM PS1/PS2. It was a VAX world. This was a Mac Classic. Small, tiny screen, perfectly formed. Brilliant. Sadly I was a student, I couldn’t afford one. But I got to play with a Silicon Graphics and a beautiful Evans and Sutherland Picture System so that was cool.

The machine for some reason I always wanted was a Color Classic. They were the real icons for me. Still would love one.

I owned my first Mac part way through my PhD. It was a PowerBook 100. It revolutionised how I wrote and what I did and helped me to think more graphically. It inspired me so much in my research and writing. As I came closer to submitting my thesis I took it everywhere; I clung onto it. It held my world. I was even holding it while in a queue to have Michael Nyman sign a CD. He signed my PowerBook and talked about having one himself and how he couldn’t be without it. After several years (3) the PowerBook 100 had a bad experience falling onto the floor as I tripped and fell off a train. It still boots up behind a cracked screen. I bought a PowerBook 190 and on the commute between Chichester and London I finished writing the first website for the Cass Sculpture Foundation in 1996 that I’d started on the 100 while I was working on the Which Online project for Webmedia. Again the 190 still boots up. Different.

Then there were the Sculley years, the years of beige. Not the best, but the machines were still the best to use from a software perspective. I never stopped buying them though, they were somehow better. They got better after Jobs returned and focussed the line up. I had tricked out G3 machine on which I did the video montages that were used as part of the proposal to get planning permission to put sculpture on the FourthPlinth in Trafalgar Square. Videos that made it onto Channel4 and BBC Breakfast news. I’d never really done much video stuff or photomontages before, but somehow the Mac made it easy to do these things.

I remember where I was when the iMac appeared. I was sitting in NoHo Digital on Regent Street. It was amazing. Not just in the way that Steve often said amazing, but truly amazing. It was a computer that looked like it could be part of a home, part of the family. The post-PC era started there in that teardrop shaped blue and white thing for me. I still have my iMacDV SE, the see through smokey grey one where you can see deep into the workings. It still works just fine. I occasionally still play with it. The slight curvature of the screen now seems so strange, so fascinating, so retro.

Then came the G5. I was lucky enough to be sitting in the audience at WWDC for the keynote when it was announced. I was working on PeoplesArchive, we were building a video on demand archive for the life stories of great scientists. I’d been working closely with some of the QuickTime team at Apple. We were doing some interesting stuff around how you made subscriptions to video services. We also built a production system out of iMovie and using AppleScript to break up videos using chapter markers automatically. It was a large scale edit system for humans who’d never used computers much before. I was hugely touched when they wrote a Pro story about Peoples Archive, more touched when I was flown out to Paris for the MacWorld and my second Stevenote of the year. In between the two events the new G5 had revolutionised our production of an enormous amount of video. The sheer horespower was amazing.

It was in Paris that I was the closest physically to Steve Jobs in my life. I got to meet Phil Schiller and talk to him about what we were doing. While standing outside one of the bars at the Musee D’Orsay where the party was Steve walked up to the door of the bar. This is where I saw the lovely humility I’ve heard about him in action. The doorman told him that bar was over capacity, but there was another one a floor down. He thanked them very politely, smiled and walked to go there, carrying on his conversation with the person he was with. No drama, no fuss, no diva like behaviour. Everyone has a Steve story about his attention to detail and his passion and dictatorial nature. From my perspective that evening he was an inspiration in being humble.

And now we’re in the post-PC era. I have some of the best computers I’ve ever had in terms of design and usability. I can’t see how they can build a better screen than the 27” iMac and how they can make a better laptop than the 11” MacBook Air. Either ends of the spectrum. I also have an iPhone and iPads. I’ve made software for them too, something I’ve never done for a PC apart from in the days of CD-ROM. It never appealed that much before, but the iPad made me want to make something other than a website. They’re inclusive devices. Computers for people who don’t want a computer. They’ve enabled some amazing applications to come into being and they’ve altered the world of interaction forever. My boys swipe things now, not peck them.

I remembered very clearly him saying these words. It was at the iPad2 launch. I was finishing off the coding on Artfinder’s iPad framework. It felt so right. The first time I saw the iPad it made me think of coffee table art books. Now we could make them. There are now over 20 Artfinder iPad apps in the App Store. Most of the time the thinking was about getting the interface out of the way of the art and out of the way of the device.

As I’ve thought more and more about these words they’ve become a mantra. I’ve pondered them more and more since then, often every day. They became more poignant when he stepped down from Apple. They became a lot more poignant today. I wrote the words below into my script for my talk at Shropshire Geek Night to accompany the slide above. I wanted to make sure I said what I really wanted to say when I was likely to be emotional; he’d just stepped down from Apple and we all sadly knew why.

“We should hang onto this phrase as closely and as tangibly as we physically hang onto our shiny Apple gadgets. It’s the touchstone for why we should always try harder to make better things. This is the greatest legacy and the greatest inspiration. We have to make technology human, and to ensure that the things we make fix real needs and problems and have a soul. Most importantly we need to make things so good that we love using them and the technology melts away and the impact is all that’s left.”

We’re in the post-PC era now. It’s all about user centricity, the technology being subservient to the user, the things we make being about their needs, even before thy can articulate them. That is the most incredible legacy for him. We can’t squander that. Ship more things that are bent around the needs and desires of the people who use them. If you don’t, you’re doing it wrong, and you’re doing his memory a disservice.

In the open internet very few people see you click

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:21:00 +0100

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 IFRAME and even if logged out some of the data in Facebook’s cookies are available for tracking purposes. At best it has a shaped graph of how often a page is visited, something which could be used for filtering or ranking search. At worst from a privacy perspective it has propensities of liking, both for the content and for the user.

The new move into bringing media into apps and a walled garden takes this a stage further. Leaving aside whether walled gardens are a smart or dim move for now there’s one bit of user interaction/integration I’ve never seen before which is real time scrobbling of text content. Last.fm’s scrobbler at least waits until you’re part the way through a track before recording your play of it. This gives you time to discard it, to try new bits of music on privately before declaring your interest in them.

Text is harder. Sure you could see if people scroll down the page as a measure of engagement. Simply at the moment they click it to say they’ve read it implies a meaning that isn’t there. Everything in the graph is based on verbs. To me the right verb is “opened” or “clicked”, maybe “viewed”; “reading” is a very different action more purposeful, more intentional, more emotional.

I think it’ll shape user behaviour and engagement with content more than it will alter people’s knowledge of how to change privacy settings. You may see something which you don’t necessarily agree with or know would be uncomfortable for your friends, and rather than go amend privacy settings to see it privately you’ll just not look at it.

All this real time scrobbling content will do, in my opinion, is to channel some people further into apparently safe monocultures and reduce the impact of content which could diversify their views. Or they’ll hopefully just walk out of the gates of the walled garden and read it elsewhere. It’s the beginning of the end for one or other thing. Time will tell.

Glanceable

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:52:45 +0100

Glanceable:

iamdanw:

Barnes has started a tumblr tracking glanceables

Well that got quite recursive quickly.

An operating manual for digital companies. Saw this a while ago...

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:03:53 +0100

An operating manual for digital companies. Saw this a while ago and have been meaning to post for ages. Was finally inspired to do so by this lovely tweet by Paul Bennun.

Toursquare. A little audiotour thing full of Foursquare Lists.

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:31:03 +0100

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. I’ve been spending bits of time over the summer thinking about how you build things on top of the Foursquare API in the way that the clever folks at Lanyrd have used Twitter as a backbone. I don’t think for a moment that this is it. It’s just a playful thing.

Moving to Oxford makes you even more aware of walking tours than living in London did. It’s all about density of history and tourists. Oxford seems to have critical mass of both. The good tour guides have interesting things to say and are clearly very well researched. I’d love to go on one, but I really don’t like crowds and I certainly don’t like route marches. If something is interesting, I’d want to ponder a while and maybe branch off to other things it inspired.

These two things intertwined at the weekend. I’d originally thought of going out to New York for the official Foursquare hackday. When at Artfinder it was lovely to get to know the guys there a bit better. Things conspired and I decided to stay at home. And have a hackday at home. I even went to the steps of starting when the New York one did. This was actually a good plan as I immediately got stuck and was very happily helped out by IRC from the people in New York. I set up a couple of lists and then started thinking about UI and editorial assets. What I made was a little app which let you add images and audio snippets to the items of a Foursquare List and turn it into an audiotour.

Navigation is simple it’s a list of tours. Obviously with a little more time you could search for tours by someone, see tours from friends, see tours near to you or ones which contained predominantly museums or cafes or which contained search terms.

Picking a tour gives you a list of places in the tour. This is in the order of the list in Foursquare, obviously it would be nice to cluster them in some form of sensible geographical order.

Picking a place gives you a nice picture. A map so you know you’re there and a big play/pause button. It’s all MVP with the quality being in the images and audio.

Clearly there could be refinements like walking directions, more maps etc and some form of in app purchase for people to buy and sell tours if that’s their thing. But for now it was just one of the three fun things I did at Foursquare hackday. I really love what Dennis and co are doing at the moment, I look forward to the next set of APIs and tools eagerly and will definitely make it to New York for the next hackday.

Oh and I made a video. As you do.

Making meaningful and emotional utility out of sentiment and intent

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:38:00 +0100

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 helps to protect us and our environment and has done for millions of years. Nowadays our peripheral vision is more useful for dealing with the impending arrival of bulldozers and changes of services we care about and rely on than lions and tigers, but nevertheless it’s useful. It’s a peripheral vision around meaning and emotion rather than survival.

One thing that digital has done is to assemble information into central stores and repositories that can be queried, the downside is you don’t always know what question to ask of them. To replace the peripheral vision relating to planning notices on lampposts as you walk through your neighbourhood, or the arrival of a new notice disturbing the pattern and patina of existing ones on a noticeboard, we need to ask rather complex questions and sometimes it’s hard or impossible to phrase those as a set of structured queries. Asking of ourselves what we’d be sad if we lost is hard enough without having to try and fill out a form with all of the parameters required to discover it. The remotest of possibilities possibility and the non-immediate timeframe further complicate. Automating is often right out.

Much of my time of late relates to thinking about two things which are in some ways inexorably linked. One is making digital public services that serve. The other is about what this wealth of sentiment, intent and life scrobbling data can be used for. We have to think of a further future than simply floating a layer of adverts over it. That’s the short termist thinking bubbling to the top and smothering services with a layer of tar; services which could have a long term future as infrastructure if it were not for people leaving as they feel like a commodity. This says it all.

But what can we do? The peripheral vision bit may come from seeing how you see the world compared to your peers. Comparing the things you’ve scrobbled to the level of interaction from others. Approximating comparative interaction for sentiment and attachment. Once this set of things you care about can be mapped then the relevant sources queried and the information relayed more automatically. As I said in my recent Shropgeek talk we need to stop making lots of things but use technology to bring together meaningful things. To make empathic utilities that know of the things that mean the most to us and tell us more about them. Emotive filters rather the blunt filters and browse options we currently have.

Here’s a first stab at thinking a bit about the human geography of places we love. It’s my new neighbourhood and the places I’ve been to as I’m learning it and exploring it. The opacity of the circle relates to how often I’ve been there. The radius to the average number of checkins for a venue and the colour to how your visits relate to the average, how much you like/visit it compared to the norm.

I talked a bit about this idea and it’s logical conclusion at Shropgeek; take Foursquare data, find the places which are important and then try and associate planning applications to those places. You always think that the things that affect your quality of life the most are those right by your house, then you find they’re not, often when the system is perturbed and it is too late to affect change.

Next to look at velocity of the perceived emotional connection to see if you can start to find the sort of shapes that relate to the areas that matter to you and then start to generate the noticeboard around it which decay when they’re old a burst to the front when they’re new. Foursquare hackday ahoy.

Ten years ago and today

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:53:58 +0100

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 girlfriend and now wife and business partner was on a business trip on the East Coast for the publisher we all worked for. Becky had just moved in to the flat I owned in Whitechapel. When Theo and I came back from lunch my thoughts were constantly on whether Becky was in the air and if she wasn’t persuading her not to be. We got two brief phone calls in and then all of the cellphone networks in New York understandably fell over, physically and literally. The first phone call was lots of discussion of not flying, the second was about trying to be the calm voice that anyone in a situation like that needed.

I remember clearly watching the second plane hit on our chairman’s Samsung monitor that doubled as a TV. Something that felt totally amazing back then: a flat screen 17” monitor that was also a TV. I remember clearly watching the BBC website fall over and be turned into something that resembled Web 0.1. No stylesheets and no images. Scale was everything. I ended up looking at the New York Times site, they were still updating it and no one in New York was able to see it or looking at it in any numbers.

I had what now seems an archaic Siemens phone. I lost it years ago but can picture it clearly today as if on that day. It had a brilliant feature. You could tell it how often to try and reconnect to a number. After 24 hours of an unavailable line, dialling every quarter of an hour it finally got through.

I came up to Oxford to spend the evening with my now mother-in-law, both her children were in New York, Becky’s brother lives there, and it felt only right that she had company. We now live minutes away from her house and the restaurant where we ate that night. I now look on that evening as somewhat of a blessing. How often do you actually get to spend quality time with your in-laws and really get to know them well?

I remember getting the late night Oxford Tube bus back to London and doing that thing which felt so metropolitan, so cool, picking up the next day’s papers at Victoria station at about 3am. I read them in a cab back to Whitechapel. The papers were important to read, the news in them was still pretty new. Also Whitechapel was still only on dial up, BT didn’t see it as economically viable to provide ADSL. This feels crazy now considering it’s closeness to Hoxton, or Tech City as the government would have us call it. The main reason why I moved to Whitechapel was the vibrancy of the digital scene in Hoxton, even back then.

I spent the night watching news, hoping my phone would connect to Becky’s and also hoping that my dear friend Tom Guida was fine as I knew he worked near the World Trade Center.

Over the next week the world seemed odd and yet seemed to be slowly righting itself, but not. Virgin Atlantic called and asked me if I’d give up my flight to the US, I’d been planning on meeting up with Becky and going on vacation with her and her brother. I said yes straight away when I knew why they wanted it. They flew relatives of Cantor Fitzgerald back and forth across the Atlantic free. Richard Branson’s office emailed me from his account to thank me for giving up the flight. I’ve never been more proud or in awe of a company in my life than of them and the honourable way they acted.

Over the next week I saw a reaction against the lovely Muslim community I lived among in the East End. I had a spectacular argument with an amazingly insensitive, and zealous to the point of madness, evangelical Christian who was preaching outside Whitechapel tube, calling people heathens. My parents and I went to the mosque open day which they had nearly cancelled… it felt so important both for us and for the local muslims that we should all be together to disprove the ridiculousness that was going on.

Then there was the war on terror.

And what of today. Well, lots of thinking, lots of thanking and lots of being with family. It’s hard to say how the world has changed. It’s hard to write about it without trivialising it. What fascinates me in particular is how things like Twitter and Facebook and pervasive internet have reshaped our news delivery and moreover our world. I remember hearing Ben Hammersley and others liken Al Qaeda to a social network with an arms budget. I like to think of Twitter as a social network with a worldwide comforter, the #riotwombles being a classic example. We now have a collection of networks and technologies we can use to remake the world and respond to things in real time. If enough of us care we can be a force for good, we now have the tools, let’s use them.

My overriding feeling as I ate dinner with family this evening was of being lucky. So many family dinners have been missed as a result of things that happened ten years ago and in between. Men, women and children of every faith, denomination lost. It’s time to do what the Norwegian president suggested and to fight violence with democracy and tolerance for the next ten years and beyond.

Pondering the Kindle Android tablet vs iPad and design for bricks and mortar shops vs sale online

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 13:18:16 +0100

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 the machine. Genius Bar was predictably full, the store, surprisingly to me was full almost to bursting; mid-afternoon on a Friday. I dread to think what peak time is like.

Whatever clever calculated thing they’re doing about making the Post PC era work it’s clearly successful. I’ve never seen so many people in a technology store on a mid afternoon on a Friday. And lots of normals too. I was convinced that I had the day wrong for a few moments. Then this morning there was an interesting little exchange on Twitter with Paul Bennun and Matt Jones about Apple’s way of long termism and relentless focus on building sustainable markets out of quality and good fiscal/tactical control of supply chain and clever techniques. Yes, so that’s it.

I think they’ve done something extraordinarily clever. They’ve really focussed so hard on holdability and touchability and ergonomics that through having bricks and mortar stores containing all that they make or approve they have essentially created a physical museum of the present for their aesthetic. The store and the display systems only add to enhance this… the iPads perfectly angled on lucite acting as both an information display and yet more temptation for the unconverted.

Then there are their front of house displays which are quite extraordinary both in quality of construction and the systems they integrate in. It’s a machine for an overarching vision and conveying it perfectly and in a very measured and controlled way.

It’s no wonder the other tablet makers are finding it hard to find their feet. I’m sad that the TouchPad is no more. I thoroughly enjoyed my weekend with one and still think my Pre2 has a lovely UI. The PlayBook is powerful but let down by software and that leaves us with Android and the many devices. Market fragmentation is not for the win.

I’m “lucky” enough to have played with a few. Original GalaxyTab is an ungainly 7” brick, the Motorola Xoom has some severe problems in physical design and the GalaxyTab 10.1 feels to me that it’s designed for online sales. From a distance and on a website it has awesome specs and design. For starters it looks like the iPad’s taller thinner brother. It’s slim which is an improvement too. Pick it up and play with it and you realise the gulf between it and an iPad is huge in terms of OS, UI, tactile feel, materials and of course the apps you can get for it. It’s a throw the kitchen sink at it design with a nod ot a successful piece of aesthetic rather than a reductionist and holistic product and experience.

The Android device that feels the best and feels properly designed so far is the Nook. Surprise surprise it’s available primarily in physical bricks and mortar stores. It’s designed to be handled and the industrial and interface design shows clearly in this. It’s priced well and it’s selling well. It also has excellent store presence with a store within a store, often at the front of a Barnes and Noble

So this brings me back to Amazon and the chatter about two blog posts on Techcrunch. If the mockup in one of the blog posts is the physical device then a big sigh and a Jones style “Good Luck Buddy” award to it. Hopefully the mockup is just about the user interface design. I know Amazon has a huge distribution network. I know the Kindle is a strong brand and I know they have deep pockets and a very big reason to want a share of Apple’s hardware revenues, but poor un-differentiated industrial design and a highly subsidised and substandard device feels like the wrong way to win a market that everyone is losing in.

If they create something that feels amazing as you unbox it, they have a chance because people will enjoy their first interaction with it, the one which Apple is winning so well with in the physical stores. If they don’t I think it’ll just be another casualty with a high return rate. Yes it’s way cheaper than the iPad, but it’s also a lot more expensive than a Kindle and if you tune a cheaper device to that audience and use case and don’t do great industrial design I’m not sure you’re ever going to win in the bigger tablet market. The opportunity to provide the healthy dose of competition will go lost for another round, more people will be heading to iPad and if at some point they do a cheaper iPad as a partner for the expensive one as is rumoured it’s hard to see how anyone can catch up in the medium term. I think now you need a great device and a good price, a vibrant app ecosystem, to tune it to be a tablet that is also an e-reader and some high quality bricks and mortar placement which isn’t in the middle of also ran and poor devices in a Best Buy or other tech emporium.

As Charles Arthur sagely pointed out the other week to me, Apple had the iPad before they had the iPhone… they’ve been working on the tech for a long while, ensuring they have the right supplier relationships in place. In fact it’s probably hard for others to get the volume of parts. They’ve been working on this particular future for years now. Dropping prices can work as the sell out of the TouchPad have shown, but true innovation and designing an experience not just playing a catchup game feels like the only way to make sure your device has longevity.

Big Bang Blues (Restaurants and communities of purpose and residence)

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 08:21:46 +0100

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 diverse privately held businesses. It is a continuation of a pernicious 20th century disease, but that particular rant is not for here or now.

I love local restaurants. They to me are the heart of places I live. The focal point. The connecting hubs and nodes, both spatially and socially, people are the edges. They bring people together, you see people there who may become friends. They are a community of purpose and they convene residential communities well at a time when it’s needed and there are less places that do it. Everyone talks of shopping malls as the new church and shopping the new religion, in my view it’s local restaurants, be it a southern fried chicken joint, a kebab shop or a diner.

When we left East London I consoled myself about the loss of my beloved open plan flat by falling in love with our local Greek restaurant in Crouch End, Arocaria. Wonderfully scruffy and beautifully friendly with excellent food. We past it every day on the way too and from work, said hello to the people who ran it, ate there as often as we could and occasionally got the takeaway Moussaka. We even helped pick up their plants that blew over in a big storm. When we decided to move, I knew it would be the place I’d missed the most. We took Sam for his first meal out there. The restauranteurs knew us and our family; if my parents went in there they’d get the same welcome we did.

I had to spend a year going back and forth to Philadelphia. Every time I went I’d go to my local deli run by an amazing old Polish couple. They served the best Reuben sandwiches and would laugh at the Englishman with the small appetite who’d take half of his sandwich back home with him for later. I went back to Philly recently and was delighted to see that the place was still there, albeit remodelled, but with the same enormous sandwiches. The old couple had retired, someone had taken it on and not done so well with it and one of the old customers had then taken it on and tried to replicate what he remembered, but with some new twists, they did specials on Foursquare and cured their own Pastrami.

When we moved to Tooting we knew we’d miss Arocaria, but when we were house hunting we discovered an amazing Italian deli. On the other side of the road is a Fish and Chip shop. They’ve been friends at the end of the road where we eventually bought our house. The people in the Fish and Chip shop give Sam a lolly when we go there and the guys in the deli are now our friends. We’ve seen the boys grow up there and walk past there every day on the way to the boys nursery. Sam initially learnt to say Bon Journo and is learning lots of Italian from them, Tom aged one and a half now says Ciao when he sees one of the owners. They are a hub of the local community, the community police officers go and sit and eat lunch there to be part of the area and because the food is great. Working from home days normally involve a wander there and then a bit of pasta coma later because of the great lunches they do. The excellent cappuccinos wake me up in turn. Now we’re moving to Oxford, and I’ll miss the place and most importantly Aldo and Giovvani.

We’re part way through moving to Oxford, and the day we saw the house we’re moving into we had lunch at the Big Bang. Just 3 short months ago. The whimsy of the menu being contained in an old book is fabulous and the tables being covered in dictionary pages makes a fun game for the eye and a great game with kids. The food is excellent and Max the proprietor is very gregarious and has a great attitude towards the food. He knows where the food comes from, he’s enthusiastic. He is keen on making sure the quality is the best and the producers do right by their livestock. I have always loved sausages, my two boys do too. Sam loves the place and it was hard breaking it to him that it’s going to close.

These places have been the fulcrum of the areas we live in for me. The individuality of all of these places is the key. They’re run by humans for humans. They understand and clearly love their customers. They may be scruffy, but they’re not bland. They have everything that cookie cutter shops and restaurants from chains don’t have, a soul. I can’t imagine falling in love with or falling in love in a Starbucks or any of the chains. You can’t tell them apart enough for one to really remind you of itself. It’s hard to delight when weighed down with a style guideline, a very tightly controlled budget and a standardised set of fittings and fixtures. The visual elements are the same everywhere, regardless of country or the architecture of the shell they’re in.

I’m sad about the Big Bang closing for many reasons, I’m sad as I love going there and love the ever changing menu. I’m sad as it’s individuality is the perfect foil for the blandness of a consumerist corporate society. I’m sad as Max can’t find another property with the right rates to make it work elsewhere in Oxford. I’m sad for the suppliers and I’m sad because all we’ll get in the redeveloped buildings will be the Tesco we know is going to be there and probably other chains that can afford the higher rents and can make the economy of scale work for them. The irony of it; an ethical restaurant that cares about producers being replaced by a Tesco whose attitude towards customers and suppliers is the antithesis.

The thing that makes me most sad though is that it was a part of my dreams of our future tied up in our move. I still love the area we’re in, it’s not all dependent on a single restaurant. I just imagined us going there over the years with the two boys as they grow up. Hearing their tales, maybe consoling them over a plate of sausages when things don’t go their way. That’ll still happen, we’ll just have to find another place to be our local for family meals out. Good luck Max. So long, and thanks for all the sausages.

Sheddable identities and why banning people from social networks is just a dumb idea.

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 21:19:19 +0100

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 believe that the online world is either like their experience of it, like what they see in films or is their preconception of it. It’s digital. It’s ones and zeroes. It’s on and off. It’s like The Matrix.

Non digital people think the world conforms to their preconceptions and it just doesn’t. Isaach’s beautiful universe of mentions illustrates this. It’s an organic view, like a network of neurons, like a field of swaying plants from a hedgerow that have gone to seed. It’s not the predictable shape of a collection of nodes that a non-digital person will believe is the shape of a social network. It moves. It flows. It has life and it reflects that people will create close circles of conversation for a while and they’ll die away, either because you don’t talk to those people anymore, or at one extreme you or they die, or more likely that some day you or they leave the service. And that’s where some interesting stuff lies. Relationships are springy. Our relationships with people are springy, they flex in and out, and our relationships with services are too.

Where it comes to social spaces non digital native’s preconceptions are all about their experience or their friend’s experiences: “people use their real identities like I do on Facebook”. It’s a continuum: “I’d never do anything to harm my online identity or reputation”. In my time at MySpace I remember one specific moment when I started to have a revelation about how people younger than me used the site. How they shed their identities, how it was about trying things on for size to see how they fitted. You could see it happen in the stats and in the analysis of the useage of the site and in surveys of users.

We need to look back into our own youthfullness to see this in context. We liked the bands people we wanted to in order to be liked by peers. We wore uniforms, clothes to fit in. We read specific books or magazines. We wanted to be part of something, and then sometimes another thing came along or we didn’t fit into that group any more and we left and became something else. We shed a persona, shed a skin and grew a new one. David used to be a member of the Bullingdon Club, then he wasn’t. He was probably other even more embarrassing things as a teenager, but he shed those identities too, there were just no digital traces.

And so it is here and this is why the idea of banning someone from a social network is crazy. The people they’re thinking about banning are probably very adept at having multiple identities and personas and shedding the ones they no longer want, or need, or that may be dangerous to them. Anyone who thinks along the lines that people build up and protect identities need to look outside of their own life and life stage and also to think if there is anything about these young people’s lives and futures that is so important to them that they want to protect their online persona, rather than just create a new one.

To create a new persona all you need is a new email address. Gmail or Hotmail or others will provide one of those. You may need a new mobile phone number. A new PAYG SIM is free or cheap. A BBM account is created in seconds. A new phone or a second phone or a third phone can be bought cheaply legitimately or even cheaper on the black market. Another identity, another untraceable you can be created in seconds. You can add your friends that matter in seconds (ask any Google+ user how quickly they set up a new social graph and you’ll see instantly how foolish the concept of the difficulty of migrating to a new service is).

We, as older professionals, care about our reputation and our online identity. The people they wish to ban won’t. They’ll see an account, an identity as a disposable thing, something you use and then discard. In the same way that some neurological damage is tolerable and the nervous system can route around it, so it is with people excising social profile from their life, letting it lay behind them like a discarded husk, telling their social circle about their new one, reforming the network it as they go.

At some point those in power have to start realising this, or they sound foolish and irrelevant. They’ll damage the good things about freedom of speech online while failing to stop the very things they wish to. It’s time for them to stop being relics of the broadcast age, making statements that are merely spin and PR and to go and engage. To ask and to listen and then to go away and really think and learn about what motivates people.

Once they’ve done that, these out of touch politicians can, if they choose, then cast a new digital version of themselves. A new identity to replace the out of touch one they’ve shed, and they’ll make some new friends and join a new gang who will respect them all the more.

Thoughts on my week at Young Rewired State 2011.

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 09:36:37 +0100

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 rioting, I’d like to put a totally different spin on it. They’re energising, wise beyond their years, kind, funny, hardworking and hellishly bright, or at least the ones I met are and I’d like to think personally, being an optimist, that in many ways they’re more the norm.

What I felt overwhelmingly from being among them was about how differently they think. Not due totally to the generation and environment they’ve grown up in. They have the enthusiasm and proactivity of youth. Everything is a possibility, and with their talent and skills, all I feel my generation can do is to break down the barriers that we and they see so that they can cast a better society in their image.

I’ve long been frustrated by the tendency of the Open Data movement towards transparency data. It’s important, but let’s make stuff that matters. Things which will change society, better tools for people, better ways for users to engage with the state and with its services. Not one of the groups I was mentoring was really that interested in transparency, it was about using technology to make life easier for people.

The things they ones I helped and mentored made were amazing phone apps which told you about the neighbourhood you were in, a rethinking of how a council website should be and a way of interacting personally with the NHS. None of these things are either small in intent or scope, or trivial, or frivolous. It was incredibly moving to watch the show and tell, brilliant ideas one after another, well executed and well presented. Just like last year I questioned what I’d be doing in life when these young people are in the job marketplace. They’re good, scarily good.

So this, after a good bit of thinking, is what I think people like me of my generation need to do. We need to spend the rest of our careers pushing barriers out of the way, removing ridiculous bits of 20th century broadcast era thinking and when we’ve done that and if we become the barrier, we need to be proactive at getting out of the way and letting this incredible group of people at it. They’ve grown up digital and social and their thinking is so advanced about service design compared to the systems integrators and the gatekeepers. The words me and my to my generation are about selfishness. To them they’re about access to your own things and about bending the world of services around you. Better, brighter, more inclusive.

All I hope is they’ll let me mentor them where I can and that they’ll be kind enough to teach me. They’re wonderful. They’re not young people, they’re not kids, they’re just younger, please don’t patronise them or demonise them. They’re our future and we’ll live in their world in our twilight years and from what I saw last week, I quite like that idea.

Things to be proud of: Young Rewired State (post 1 of many)

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:20:12 +0100

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 entire revolution we’re in around government digital services. At the first National Hack the Government Day, Richard Pope, along with James Darling, exhorted us to Code a Better Country. He along with many other people who gave up their weekend those two seemingly short years ago now are, being part of Alphagov and now the Government DIgital Service. I digress and as Tom Watson would say, I will come back to them.

Last year, due to pressure of work, I sadly couldn’t mentor and I had to watch enviously as I saw Ben Griffiths helping and inspiring people. This year I cleared as much of my calendar so I could do some mentoring this week. To give back to where I grew up, I’m on a train to Brighton to be with the lovely folks at NixonMcInnes where a Young Rewired State centre is being run. All I could do last year was help build a few scrapers and APIs and that felt good.

What is marvellous about Young Rewired State is the sheer brilliance and yet sheer humility of these people. Take Mr Daniel May for example. He was keen on building a phone app for the recently released Boris Bikes. He needed data, and I’ve been interested in transport data for a while, and it’s proper release so we can make businesses off of it, so I created an API off of some data which was being scraped. What Daniel did was quite amazing. He built a Windows Phone 7 app. They weren’t even released in the UK then, but there it was a beautiful Windows Phone 7 app. Full of Metro UI (he’d clearly studied hard on this) and really nicely made. There’s a picture of it below.

What pleased me, more than anything else that day, was a moment no one else would have seen. Someone from Microsoft bought a phone for him to demo the app on, which was amazing, and then there was the moment, the best bit. When Daniel and the person from Microsoft did the deploy the app onto the pre-release phone I was sent away as I hadn’t been included on the confidentiality agreement. I couldn’t have been more proud at that moment. I’ve been lucky enough to play with pre-release kit for a long while now, but that for me was a huge thing. He’d organised it, Microsoft trusted him.

These young people are our future. Our very near future. They’re incredibly talented and all we can do is to help where we can, pass on experience we have, and hope that we’ll all work together for many years to come. They will push boundaries constantly and we’ll have to run to keep up, and I so look forward to it. Thank you.