Cubicgarden.com changes

I was meant to be learning Python while on my holidays but that plan got slightly disrupted with crazy nights out on the town in Manchester and long sleeps to recover. No worries, I guess its what I should be doing on holiday anyway. However in between all the crazy nights, I did manage to start to jiggle things around on a couple of domains I own.

I recently switched over the commenting system within my blog to Disqus. The main reason is because lots of people comment elsewhere on my blog entries and I wanted to find a way to aggregate them and reply to them sensibly. Disqus also has a import and export ability which will be useful for when I do finally move my blog to wordpress.

As many of you might have seen, a while back I made a static summary page about myself on cubicgarden.com. After a while it refreshes and send you to the blog url. Some people have asked me how to avoid the landing page (as such). Simple just type cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/ or even cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog. Most modern browsers will autotype in previous locations you've been to, so you don't need to type the lot. However this is a temporary solution. I originally wanted to install Sweetcron at cubicgarden.com, so people could see what else I get up to elsewhere online. But then I found Storytlr which allows you to semi-host a lifestream under your own url. Friend feed and tublr get a mentioned a lot in this space but to be honest storytlr was ideal. So you can get to that stream by now going to www.ianforrester.org. Enjoy…

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Give it to the children

I went to this thing yesterday with Dave and SarahK. It was better than I expected and hosted at the design council, Convert Garden. The title was – Understanding the future of mobile devices, which instantly rings alarm bells in my head.

It was my first time to this event, so I was a little uneasy about the format of the meeting (as such), not enough questions from the floor for my liking and no real debate. But I was attracted to the event my friend dmarks and by the listings of previous meetings, also on the website.

The key points for me were Joe Odukoya's talk, which was a round up of different technologies and when were expecting to see them become common place. I did question the lack of discovery in his chart but mainly to start a debate, which didnt work. But yeah over all good simple and entertaining presentation. Just the kinda person I would invite to talk in college. Maybe just maybe?
One of the suprising things for me was the fact eastern markets prefer cables, hence why bluetooth, wifi and even infra red were not common place. Scarey! Also he pointed out the America market is run by the corps while the european market is run by consumers, hence why wireless instant messaging will be more popular here than wireless email or push to talk.

Ok till then I was ok with everything, then this guy Dr Simon Roberts does his presentation.
He presented the idea of bottom up content rather than top down – yes because we havent heard that before. But then he went off on how the early adopters are to blame for a lot the issues with mobile technology. I was like what the fcuk! Anyway, it didnt take long for people to challenge him and a guy from IDEO said the most sensible thing of the night. Give the technology to the kids and they will do something different. The point he was putting across was the fact technology when it first comes out is expensive, yes of course the early adopters will be a certain group. Make it cheap and afforable and give it away and you will see a new group of early adopters doing different things.
Early adoption isnt bad, just in its current state only a few can be the adopters.
However Simon did bring up some good points and a subject I've never heard of before. Kinship? – I tapped down, The study of linkage, Relationship of people and content.
And i was wondering how sematics and otologies fits into this?
Also he had some good quotes including this one. We use people to find content, we use conent to find people
and this European have a fear of falling. Eastern Asians have a playful nature.

Remind myself to get there early next time and get a seat in the crowd rather than the edge. Will be going to the next event for sure…

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Designer rooms

Smartmobs found another good link. And brings back the issue of collabration spaces. Well for me it has.
Great stuff from Carnegie Mellon University all the same

But as usual a few things,
The Barn records TWI and allows people to jump to those points like chapters of a meeting. But someone has to hit a button? Why? Wouldnt it be a better idea if the system realised this was a TWI or at least a chapter point rather than someone out of character hitting a button?

Why does a person have to login if there wearing RFID tags? Surely the rfid tags would be part of larger system in the business? Simular to the way most employees have swipe cards.

The all important question is then, what is the meeting stored in? That is crutical to the whole system. Can I extract bits out of it, can I only watch one person or a group of people, can I get a highlight of the TWI's, etc, etc.

I wrote a schema for meeting minutes in my college and its going to be put into use very soon. But it was made for conversion afterwards, so I never interfere with the note taker. I did think about a app which could be built which would guide or assist the note taker though the process of writing structured meeting notes. The notes would then be added to the background information like who attened, the time and date, etc to make structured meeting minutes.
Even thought something like a tablet pc would be the perfect tool for such a thing. But I know how much people love to write on paper – maybe that OCR plugin would be useful david after all.

Anyway, i'm going off topic here.
I do think CMU are doing a good job, but I'm more interesting in keeping it real and would like to see more work done in the area of assisting current methods of recording meetings and collabration sessions.

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