When you start sueing your fans, you know its all over

A ex-student I taught and good friend of mine, Harry Jones won his WIPO trademark case against Jonathan Ive and Apple inc recently. Yes the Jonathan Ive who now works on a lot of Apple products. For years Harry has owned the domain names JonthanIve.com and jonyive.com. Unlike most Harry bought the domain names because he loved the work of the designer with the same name. Harry was a fan and ran a fan site to honour his work. Unfortunately Apple and Jonthan Ive had other plans and put a lot of pressure on Harry to give up the domain name. I remember last time I saw Harry, he had a recording of Jonathan himself asking for the domain name. He also had many calls from Apple people trying to play good and bad cop with him. It was all very underhand and to be honest makes me even less of a Apple Fan.

Actually I was talking to Tara Hunt the other night about her presentation at thinking digital and her new book. And cited Apple as a company doing everything wrong but still loved by many. Well I fell straight into the trap, it would seem because in her book she talks about Apple and says Apple provide a fantastic customer experience. So much so that they can pass on everything else and still come out smelling of roses. And you know what that's just not right in my book.

Apple and Jonathan Ive put increased pressure on Harry to give over the domain name, and who's reporting on it? Hardly anyone. Will this convince anyone that Apple do bad things like all businesses? Nope. Anyway, I'm sure Harry is much happier now he's not being harassed by Apple people. The Wipo decision document makes for some interesting reading, some of the press can't let go of the money thing, its actually quite simple..

The Respondent has demanded USD400,000 for transfer of the disputed domain names, even though he had previously been offered USD10,000 by Apple Inc. This demonstrates that the disputed domain names were registered primarily for the purpose of selling, renting or otherwise transferring the disputed domain name registrations to the Complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of the Respondent’s out of pocket costs.

What would you do if Apple phoned you up and started bugging you about selling the domain?

  1. Hand over for there first price?
  2. Give it up for free because you love Apple so much
  3. Make up some figure on the spot and see what they say.

Now the answer may seem like number 2 for most of you Apple fans, but actually number 3. Its also silly to suggest that the domain name was primarily for selling when there bugging him about selling it. I'm not selling Cubicgarden.com but if the cubicgarden corp phone me up and start throwing around cash, you bet your dollar I'll be suggesting silly prices just like Harry did.

Good on you Harry for standing up to these bully boy tactics. Matt Mason said sueing your fans means you got no business model. Well Apple and Ive have been very short sighted, they could have given Harry even more material and maybe guided Harry who was in it for the fandom. So Tara, this has got to be a example of where the Apple approach is just bad for business. Shame on you!

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Thinking Digital 2009

Thinking digital 2009 was simply fantastic this year. It was going to be challenge to beat last year but they manage to smash the ball out the park this time around. I turned up a little late for the for the first talk and was directed upstairs in time for Paul Miller from the school of everything to talk about the social media camp and how the education system was slightly broken. Harry Drnec former CEO of Red Bull spelled out a simple message, advertise well and make money. As he talked about Red Bull, the can of Red Bull Cola called me from the late night I had the previous night. Dr James Terkeurst from the institute of digital innovation showed some good projects they had at the college. One of the most interesting was around a musical experience which involved 3 guys playing live on electrical instruments while the visual danced along in time to the music being made in real time (The Sancho Plan). Its hard to describe but we were treated to the live experience later in the day. The last talk of the session was Mike Southon from the FT. I've already written about Mike who gave a updated talk of his talk at Thinking Digital: The Next Generation. This talk must be watched live, but its Mike comparing Startup Culture to the Beatles. Its bold, funny and full of good points. A good end to the section titled Present at the Creation.

Session 2 was disturbing the universe and included talks from Simone Brunozzi of Amazon, Alex Hunter of Virgin, Tara Shears of Liverpool Uni/Cern LHC and Curtis Wong. Simone gave a good introduction to cloud computing while Alex Hunter gave a talk which I felt could have been covered by Tara Hunt later. So although it was bad, it just felt like duplication and that slot could have gone to something else. Tara Shears on the Large Hardon Collider was really interesting, although I heard certain people grumbling that it was long. I think it felt longer because Alex had over run? By the time we got to Curtis Wong of Microsoft he had to cut half his talk which then felt like a product demo of the worldwide telescope. Reading his profile it seems like there was lots more he wanted to say but didn't get the chance.

After a lovely social Dinner, came session 3: thinking digital. Straight after the Sancho Plan which is the interactive experience I talked about before came Johnny Chung Lee who recently joined Microsoft. Johnny did the same talk as he did at Mix09 where he talked about what really interested him in the HCI research field. Although Johnny's fame is from the stuff he did with the wiimote, you certainly get the feeling he's moved on, which is great. Talking about moved on, Adrian Hon from Six to Start talked about the work they had done for Penguin and you really got the feeling that they had finally dropped the notion thoughts idea that they were just about Alternative Reality Gaming. It was never once mentioned in his presentation. Adrian did have some problems with his laptop at the start and I was worried for him that what had happened to me at Next09 would happen to him but it was sorted after about 5mins. For the record he had a Mac, but I also want to say I've used my laptop for many presentations after Next09 and never had a problem doing dual screen. Anyway, we ended with Dan Lyons of Newsweek Magazine who was the Fake Steve Jobs. Dan started off the talk by talking about how his comments in the Thinking Digital University the day before had been twittered and posted in the Guardian via Kevin Anderson. He claimed he had been sudo-miss-quoted. I expected Kevin to ask a question at the end but he wasn't in the room, instead he was doing a interview somewhere else, but later came to find me to find out exactly what Dan had said. Anyhow back the talk, Dan talked about how Newsweek was accepting the fact they need to be more niche. There plan of action was to become much more relevant to a certain demographic but also charge more for the magazine. It started out that way and by the questions he was ad-libbing about all types of stuff. Dan's entertaining to say the least.

The last session of the long day titled: stop making sense started slowly with Michael Shermer of Scientific America and Skeptic magazine. A good talk but very similar to the talk in 2008. Talking about last year, the surprise hit for me was the Chemistry of Love and this year Chandler Burr of the New York Times with his insight into the perfume business and process was just something else. So this might not seem like anything new to anyone else but being a typical heterosexual man I tend to use little in the way of perfume, we learned that perfume was a multiple billion pound business where billions of individual scents are stored and mixed in labs to enhance the perfumes we use. Some of those scents are natural and some synthetic, some are blends of others but the whole thing is art. Amazing! And even better the night before at the speakers dinner, Chandler had prepared a menu of smells for the dinner. Before the food came out, he would give us a talk about the smells which make up the dinner. So you would get the smell of the next course on smeller sticks before it would come out. That was a seriously cool night. Another seriously from left field talk from Caleb Chung the toymaker and creator of Furby and Pleo. We were running very late by the time this talk started but no one moved from there seat it was still very full in the Sage2 room. Caleb explained where he had come from and what inspired him at every stage. Then got to Furby and Pleo. By the time he put on the video of the Pleo in action the crowd was in his hands. Then he pulled out Pleo and wow you could feel the excitement in the air. Great talk.
The dinner for Thinking Digital was so large they had to split it across 2 venues. It was a excellent end to a long but rewarding day.

Day 2 and session 5: Unconventional Wisdom. Rob Colling the musican started off the session which I missed most of due to a very long taxi ride from my hotel the marriot, which I got mixed up with the hilton in gateshead. So everyday I had to get a 10 pound taxi to the hotel next to ikea. Yes I got mixed up and its partly my fault for booking so late but the Copthorne, Jurys, Thistle and others were full and booking the Travel lodge or Premier Inn would involve paying for it myself then trying to claim it back while explaining why I had choose not to use a prefered hotel. Anyway, Matt Ridley the author of Genome, did a excellent job explaining genes and the genome. It was short and sweet but packed full of information which was easy to follow. Bob Baskin of Spotlight Analysis followed and his talk although interesting was slow and wondering. Weak I'm sorry to say. Hans Rosling follow via video link and go to meeting for his screencast. Hans is famous for the Trendalyzer which has been seen on TED talks many times over. He sold to Google but his whole talk was about the importance of good visualisations for data and statistics. He praised Google for there recent public data search and urged governments and public agencies to pull there finger out and release their data. Fantastic talk and well presented over a video link. Tom Scott had the hard task of following Hans and stopping people before going to break. Luckily Tom had a great time on stage, it started slowly but by the end people were cheering and laughing out loud to the good graph gags. It was certainly one of the best performances by Tom and I heard people afterwards saying good things about it.

Session 6: Content and it's Discontent. Started off with more music, this time by the singing/playing talent of Oonagh Cassidy. Kerstin Mogull of BBC Future Media & Technology stood in for Erik Huggers and covered the BBC's move to Manchester. Matt Mason, author of The Pirates Dilemma followed and struck a cord, outlined the need for the media businesses to take piracy seriously and do the smart thing. Copy and learn from them. I got a great quote – “don't let your legal department ruin a good remix before they talk to your marketing department.” I really wanted to catch Matt but he was surrounded at the end and I had to go to a networking lunch. I think he would have got a real good kick out of R&D TV. Oh well hope he sees the tweet I sent today. Following Matt was Russell Davies and Ben Terrett, I was intrigued to see who Russell Davies was because I keep missing the interesting conference and he's generally a bit of celeb in certain circles. There presentation was quite varied but in the end they got around to the main point and actually they have created something which I find fascinating. A way of creating short run newspapers or things previous thought of as newspapers, there example was a newspaper made of all the thinking digital online coverage including all the tweets from day one. Delivered to the conference that morning for everyone to read. I didn't grab one, because of the lunch but I was dying to see the quality of the print. I'm thinking this will make a fantastic way of finally reading more. I can control the line lengths and have the type exactly how I want it. It will be cool to finally get back into XSL-FO too. So I'm looking forward to the project, although I can't find anything about it.

At Lunch there was a special invite only lunch with Kerstin Mogull to discuss more about the BBC's move to Manchester. Nothing secret, just a continuation of the conversation over a lunch. Because of this I was late back to Session 7: Thinking Post-Digital. Ben Hammersley of Wired UK, is one of those names once again that fits that uk internet celeb category. Celeb or not Ben waxlyrical about the need to stop talking about things like a episode of top gear. Catering to the niche and not the mass, do it for yourself and don't water it down for everyone else. These are some of the things Ben talked about. It was a good talk but would have liked to asked some questions. Darius Pocha of Enable Interactive talked about how some experiences can't be emulated digitally by throwing things at the crowd, non-demand is more memorial. risk heightens experience, yadda yadda, yeah we get it. Generally it was a little lame and could have been redone in 5mins flat instead of 20mins. Andy Redfern of the Ethical Superstore worked the crowd and gave 10 practical tips to think about in business. Nice presentation but it was somewhat eclipsed by Tara Hunt author of The Whuffie Factor, who gave a great presentation which I really want to show to certain people I know. Actually I really want to buy her book for some people and throw it at them.

Thinking Digital was excellent and the production and location top notch. During the conference there was talk about 2010, TED-X Leeds and a digital festival for gateshead in 2010. So there's plenty being planned for 2010 and later in the year. I expect I'll be at the next one for sure, specially with the amount of inspiration I got from this year. I also spoke to a ton of people, I expect some of those conversations will turn into something very positive in the future. Great work Herb, Codeworks and the Thinking Digital team, can't wait for the videos so I can share them around.

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Rocketboom? Rocketwho?

Where did it all go, they must be wondering? After Amanda left over 2 years ago, Joanna has also now left. Now they got some very strange lady/girl doing the presenting. Rocketboom for me has seriously sunk to new a low. I wonder if people even watch it much any more? Its still part of my podcast download but that may change pretty soon. I don't know what it is but it really needs a good shake, do something different. Right now it still feels old and tired. Well someone needs to say it…

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Getting out of the inbox

Stowe Boyd's talk from Next09 has inspired me again to rethink about my email usage. There's something very stressful about email and actually now can put it into words. Secrets. Its all about secrets or the practice of secrecy. Its a pain in the ass to remember all these secrets and to be honest only about 2% of them should actually be secrets. I've been trying to use other communication methods when possible, say a email thread which goes on too long can be quickly ended with a 5min telephone call. Or a blog entry instead of mass email out. I don't utilise our internal BBC stream (yammer) much yet because most of the things I have to say are ok for public consumption, so I end up using Twitter. I would use IM more if there wasn't this internal/external split. Don't get me wrong some things are secret and thats what email should be used for but right now theres so much going on in my inboxes that I miss stuff which shouldn't even be in there.

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Pulseaudio networked audio

PulseAudio is a sound server for POSIX and Win32 systems. A sound server is basically a proxy for your sound applications. It allows you to do advanced operations on your sound data as it passes between your application and your hardware. Things like transferring the audio to a different machine, changing the sample format or channel count and mixing several sounds into one are easily achieved using a sound server.

So I've recently been playing with Pulseaudio to send audio back and forth between the different ubuntu machines I have in my house. If you look at the Frequently asked questions section there's solutions for the most complex setups. There's even one to push audio from multiple machines into one surround mix. It doesn't create AC3 or DTS signals instead multichannel PCM which some surround receiver can decode. Looking at the instructions you can get slightly scared of the commands you need to feed it. But I've found using Pulse Audio Device Chooser which is in the Ubuntu Universe repository you can do most of the simple tasks without touching the command line.

My only problem at the moment is that I don't boot into Ubuntu when using xbmc or Boxee so I don't get a chance to play with the gui device chooser. Plus xbmc doesn't work well with pulseaudio currently. So the main machine plugged into my largest sound source is currently not setup to receive network audio right now. Expect that to change very soon.

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What happened to me on stage at Next09

You might have heard how my machine had a meltdown on stage at Next09 but it wasn't that simple. First up I was covering for David Brain of Edelman who was booked to talk about Crowd Surfing, I didn't want to just talk about the same thing as my other talk so I put together a presentation during the first day on my laptop and finally finished it late in the night after the party. Actually some people might remember me working during the after party working on the presentation instead of blogging because the hotel I booked didn't have decent wifi.

The next day I turned up 15mins early and had some problems getting my head mic on because of the size of my head. Anyway the moment came to plug in my laptop and the German Technician looked at my laptop puzzled because it wasn't what he was expecting. He was expecting Windows. So unfortunately in a rush while trying to communicate in sudo english/german he tried to plug my laptop in. I was trying to help because he was getting very confused with my multiple workspaces and the general layout of ubuntu. What made things even worst was there was no local loop display of the 2nd screen, so when it was working I couldn't see what was actually on it till they switched the main display. And thats the thing, it was working. We got extended desktop display working but I couldn't see where to drag the presentation to show it. So we decided to go for mirror or cloned display. We changed the settings and resolution and suddenly the screen refreshed and there was nothing on screen. Of course I couldn't see the other screen to see what was really going on. At this point the the Moderator Patrick de Laive, stopped talking and I was there just in silence.

The silence was only broken with people getting up and leaving. I rebooted my machine and tried plan B which was to get the presentation off on to another machine. Usually I have a copy on a thumb drive/my phone and email/internet but because I had finished the presentation so late I had not done either. When rebooted, the screen was still blank, so I switch to the commend line and tried to copy it that way but the usb devices didn't seem to mount in there usual way. By now its already 10mins into the time and so I give up and they provide another PC laptop. This laptop takes time to setup and has no internet access so I call to the crowd for someone to lend me there laptop which is online. After a while someone did come forward but by then over 15mins had gone and you know what conference wifi is like, so it was difficult to show any of the videos or even sites.

They always say this happens at the worst of times, and it certainly did. Luckily the talk on Open Media later went smooth and without any technical hitches.

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JaikuEngine vs Laconica

In addition to the post I wrote about slowly moving to Identi.ca. I found this very nice forum thread about Jaiku and Laconi.ca in Jyri's bookmarks. Some take aways….

However the code runs on Google AppEngine. This means setting up your own instance takes less than 5 minutes. You don't need your own hosting. You don't have to pay any money for hosting unless you get enough traffic that you go over AppEngine's free quota: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html

In general my advice is that you sign up to both Identi.ca and Jaiku.com (as they're the single biggest instances of both Laconica and JaikuEngine) to get a feel for how the two systems work. Not only will this give you an understanding of how they compare to each other but you'll see how they differ from Twitter and be able to interact with the respective development teams.

Generally Laconica is a little further down the path but both are mature enough for large scale use. Jaiku has a advantage of running on Google App Engine, which means it can be setup fast and scale super large. Laconica has better support in clients because of the Twitter like API it uses. Federation support is also unique to Laconica at the moment but Jaikuengine does have plans for that and the Twitter like API support. The only other thing which separates them is one is Laconica is PHP based and is AGPL while Jaiku is Python and Apache licensed. So as Evan says in the comments So, wouldn't it be awesome if this were the main question people were deciding right now?

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I should be a Apple fan but I’m so not

People keep getting at me about my Apple hating. “Why is it I'm not a Mac fan?” On paper I should be a fan and should own some of its hardware. So what happened? Here's some history which you may find interesting, even from the point of pure nostalgia.

So with a background in design and running a ST computer back in the early 90's I really wanted to get a Mac. I mean the mac as symbolised in that famous 1984 advert was about breaking the mold, not being a boring grey suit, yadda, yadda. Well at that young age, I was amazed and wanted one. In school they only had boring RM PCs running Windows 3.1 and trust me that added to the myth that PC's were so boring. After leaving school, I had pushed my ST to its limit and I landed a job working for a local newspaper working with Adobe Photoshop 2.x and Quark Express 3.1 while at college. The work place had macs for most of its output and the college had macs for the design school, and pcs on the other side of the campus to this thing called the internet. So there was this dilemma, should I want to do any work, I'd have to use the macs if I wanted to download or check out the web I had to go across the road to the business school and use there pcs. After about a year or so they finally hooked up a sub-powermac (think it was a quadra) with a 28.8k modem and you use the internet on that one machine, but only a few months later they also put in a load of 486's in the room next to mac design suite. They were unlocked and we were able to find software like paintshop pro to put on the pcs. So although the macs could do some amazing things like video editing (we had a couple of powermacs 132's with miro dc030 cards in them, they were no match for the lure of the open internet.

About this time I was big into POV Ray and being able to run this on the pcs was great. I was even able to run it on the PC's really easily, plus late at night I could run super complex scenes over many machines in parallel. It was really liberating. I also discovered with other friends that the UWE (University of the west of england) had a 24hour computer lab with 486's and super fast (at the time) internet over 2 rooms and 40 machines in each one. And security was really lax, so lax that after a while we got to know the security guards and we would just pop in and out without being asked for ID ever. Anyway, this is about the time I also got into PC networked gaming with Quake and learned how to build myself a PC with the help of a guy from the Newspaper called Mike. I need a new computer as the ST really wasn't cutting it any more, and I did crazily consider getting a Silicon Graphics 02 with all the money I could scrap together but thankfully couldn't afford it with everything I had, So the next best thing was a mac but it didn't happen because it was so much cheaper to buy and make a PC. But the Mac had a lot going for it. Quicktime for example was untapped features in it which I'd wished I had more time with at the time. I remember being so amazed with QTVR, that I ended up buying a book on it, which I still own today. At one point I borrowed a Mac from my friend Carl while he was on holiday somewhere and although I did enjoy it and never felt like quite like my own. But I digress,

At the time Intel and AMD were neck and neck but Intel was seen as the enemy, so I made a 200mhz AMD K6 because only the Microsoft fans would pick the expensive and slower Pentium chip. (I also remember this was not long before the whole CPU benchmark thing where Apple compared the G3 to a Pentium 3 but never a AMD. This further fuelled my dislike for Apple, I mean the AMD's were beating the Intel chips on everything non MMX or SSE based. Once I learned how to build my own, that was pretty much it. I customised my PC, by pained the case black replaced the leds with blue ones and played with stardocks object desktop to create insane hacker (the film) type startup screens etc. Software was easily available and sharing it was currency. Life was all good.

So running Windows was my prefered choice but it gave me more alleged freedom that a mac. I did try switching over to linux at some point but decided it was too command like, and I wanted something more visual like the mac desktop. So I choose BeOS which was around at the time and was still a viable alternative. Obviously that all went down the pan, and I only ever installed it on a spare machine thankfully.

I can't remember exact times or dates, but here's a few things which put me off Apple even more over the last ten years. I remember the imac, it was loved by everyone in the community but when I tried to actually use it, it was shockingly slow and troublesome. The round pluck like USB mouse really got to me, I think it was about then I become aware of the Steve Jobs approach to design and products. Maybe it was also the software OS8 and 9 but I saw people on there knees over the look of the imac and general use was anything but good. Apple sold this and all other mac since as aspirational machines, when frankly there anything but. The religion of the Apple Mac really rubbed me up the wrong way, even with the serious mistakes of OSX/Classic. It wasn't till OSX.3 when things starting getting good enough again. But back to the cult of the mac, remember those Mac vs PC adverts. Apple totally shot themselves in the foot with me. And to double back Microsoft's advertising campaign, I'm a PC is pure genius.

Funny enough this Guardian Article sums up my thoughts till OSX.3, adding FreeBSD is the only saving grace.

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis /images/emoticons/laugh.gifoctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, “I hate Macs”, and then I think, “Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?” Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

The Mac and Apple always stood for creativity and thinking differently, even now there are some amazing software created by its insanely dedicated community which can't be found on other platforms. I've never even looked at development in Cocoa but there's certainly heard good things about it. I also think OSX is actually not bad with its BSD backbone but I'm not keen on the Gui. The whole iPod and iPhone thing drives me totally insane. Most companies create different versions of consumer electronic products to capture the market, but Apple don't do that. Fair enough but to argue that Apple products are better that anything else and thats why there's only one type or two types is simply arrogant. A while back I looked into getting a new laptop and did consider a Mac book but for me the size was a little too big, general ports very low and actual spec not as efficient as the many models by Dell, HP, IBM, etc. I'm not saying there better but I am saying my requirements are different to Steve Jobs. For example the iphone still has not got stereo bluetooth support, for most people this is a who cares? But when you already have 2 sets of headphones and a set of speakers at home with Bluetooth support, this is a deal breaker.

To finish, I already touched on the snobbery of most Mac users. But there's something equally strange about this snobbery. Maybe in the same way there's iphone socks and macbook screen protectors. Most PC users have a love/hate relationship with there machine. Well this seems to be less so with Mac users. Is this because the fisher price machine does exactly what its told to do or maybe because the Mac users have self brainwashed themselves into believing the hype? I think I know which one it is but thats for another post. I'll leave you thinking with this.

Cue 10 years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not because they are fashionable, but because “they are just better”. Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so, you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul – that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn't really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow “define themselves” with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that “says something” about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe – but not a personality. Of course, that hasn't stopped me slagging off Mac owners, with a series of sweeping generalisations, for the past 900 words, but that is what the ads do to PCs. Besides, that's what we PC owners are like – unreliable, idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you'll excuse me now, I feel an unexpected crash coming.

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Profiles – Plaxo, Linkedin and now Google

Google Profiles

Its all over the tech press recently, Google giving users the ability to slightly influence search results on themselves with Google Profiles. Here is mine. But I'm not totally sure this is the best way to solve this problem. For example, my plaxo profile has all the same information and better controls, surely it would be better if Google just picked up on the information and the structure of the plaxo profile page? Further more, what about Linkedin, Facebook, etc? It strikes me there's no need to duplicate everything again. What would be very cool would be if they could copied ping.fm and become a sort of super aggregator or broker.

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Interview with Boxee founder

Found this good interview with Avner Ronen, one of the founders of Boxee. Interesting to hear about Avner's previous work on XBMC and helping out the project. So far there's been two forks for XBMC, Plex and Boxee. Boxee is certainly the more interesting. I would use it more but I find XBMC does everything I need and I love the Mediastream Skin, which looks amazing on my 40inch LCD screen.

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Asserting equivalence between tags

Stowe Boyd's come up with a interesting and simple solution to the problem of multiple tags for events and things.

Today, on Twitter, I introduced a simple mechanism for asserting equivalence between tags — making them explicitly synonyms — using the equal sign '='. For example:

#web2expo = #w2e

This has the immediate impact of informing people following one tag that there is another they might want to follow too. And it shows up in searchs for any of the tags. Here's the first post in which I used tag equivalence:

[from http://twitter.com/stoweboyd/status/1649219359]

#aporkalypse = #snoutbreak = #hamdemic = #h1n1 = #swineflu = #parmageddon = #epigdemic = #pigpox

Obviously, tools that track or do anything interesting with tags could benefit from taking advantage of these synonyms. And those involved with creating 'beacons' — predefined tags, often associated with conferences or events — would be smart to start publishing the synonyms, too.

This is just another interesting example of microstructure cropping up in the Twittosphere, to help us make sense of the torrent of information flowing through the microstream.

,,,,,,,,,

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Next09: The sharing economy

Some of you might already know I've been invited to talk at the Next Conference in Hamburg. This conference is one of the major web conferences in Germany and is attended by lots of different nationalities in Europe and further a field. One of the best parts is its all filmed and put on the web for anyone to follow (its a real shame they don't supply a licence too).

Originally I was also meant to talk last year too, but it all fell through due to Over the Air and Mashed events. Anyway this year I'll be there and I was asked by Anna of the Next09 team to write a short 2 or 3 paragraph abstract explaining my view on the sharing economy. So last night on the train back I wrote this…

The Sharing Economy is something a lot people talk about but rarely
actually jump into. Almost every company is having their innovators
dilemma, they refuse to give it up and just jump at the new
opportunities which await them. However its not simply the companies
fault. The whole way business is done does not reflect a sharing
economy. In actual fact sharing is done at the very end when something
has served its purpose or no other value which can be extracted. This is
usually because we are using short-term and costing metrics.

The smart companies are balancing the short-term money needs with the
long-term needs participators. Their content is a participatory mix
spread all over the net and they are good citizens by releasing
creditable amounts of rich data to create a ecosystem around themselves
and their business. Being a smart business isn't easy work, the
challenges juggling needs isn't a parlour trick, it can only be done
with a strong level of transparency.

Now reading it back, there's quite a few things I want to change and you can tell I wrote the first part with another second part then changed it later without changing the first part again. There's also quite a lot of buzz words in it but its not too bad? The general point is put across and of course I think the BBC with its public remit is a ideal example of a smart company, in some part.

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