My parents (of all people) filled me in on this graffiti/street art project which took place in Bristol. Had no idea but good on Bristol Council for making this happen. I’m sure they must have seen the success from the Banksy versus Bristol Museum thing last year, and thought lets embrace it. It must be great for tourism and to be frank that street was pretty dire, so this is going to be a great new face lift.
Author:
Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser.
Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io
Tags vs Circles for Friends
I’m in total limbo when it comes to Google and my friends
Google Plus delivered a new way to classify your friends (although it was first seen in diaspora’s aspects) but I was using Gmail’s Contacts with the tagging previously.
What this boils down to is Taxonomy vs Folksonomy and credit goes to Stowe Boyd, Thomas Wanderwal and others.
I’ve been thinking about the merits of both approaches and concluded that even if Google included the ability to have circles within circles, it wouldn’t be as flexible as a purely tagging/folksonomy based system. The problem seems to center around classifying friends and people full stop. Categories, Circles or rather Taxonomy’s are too ridged and forced. Which to be frank classifying your relationship with people isn’t.
I refer to this table…
| Taxonomy | Folksonomy |
| Brittle | Flexible |
| Accurate (if done well) | Less reliable |
| Compliance must be forced | Rewards but doesn’t force compliance |
| Hard to add to | Easy to add to |
| Centrally controlled | Democratically controlled |
| Predictable | Organic |
The attributes of Folksonomies sound a lot closer to the emergent nature of relationships than Taxonomies.
There is a question which remains however… What happens if Google do adopt Circles within Circles? Or even follow the Twitter lists way of doing things?
Hopefully Google will adopt their own Gmail folksonomy approach in the future, but it does looks very unlikely…?
Some interesting trends…
The ever lasting effect of the Internet on Television, or as I call it the TV post Internet.
See Eric Schmidt’s Edinburgh Festival Keynote which can be read in full on PaidContent.
The concept and idea of a BBC Micro for the 21st Century, which some are saying could be the Raspberry Pi.
Been thinking about this stuff deeply recently for work and what I’ll be doing in the near future… You might be interested in some of the Top10’s I’ve been creating on top10.co
OK Cupid Locals (beta)
It wasn’t long ago that I removed the OKCupid application from my android phone because frankly it wasn’t all that and it was more like an extension of the website. But I was talking to my friend Nicola who I had been telling for a while to stop paying for online dating sites. In the past she has filled me in on the problems Guardian Soulmates was having post there redesign. But today she filled me in on OKCupid’s new beta application feature called Locals.
In actual fact Locals I’d heard about but hadn’t tried till she explained it.
Simply its Grindr for the OKCupid crowd… Sam Yagan (OKC founder) explains why its anti-grindr
So Grindr is obviously the most successful mobile dating app out there. The things that make it so successful—I’m going to terribly stereotype this community—but it’s larger used as a vehicle for short-term, physical relationships. Now it turns out, taking the stereotypical heterosexual case, that the vast majority of women don’t want that. In fact that’s what creeps them out the most about this. They’re worried about stalkers, they’re worried that it’s 10:30 at night on a Friday and you know someone at the bar next to you thinks you want to have sex with them.
How is OkCupid Locals different?
Number one, we’re populating Locals with the OkCupid database. Our entire reputation is built around the fact that we have this data-oriented way to understand people’s personalities. We can actually layer in compatibility. So now, when you make yourself available in Locals, it’s not just, “Oh, who are the people around me who are hot and horny at this moment.” It’s sliced by who are the people around me who are compatible with me. Instead of it being like everyone’s out there in this meat market, it’s more like I can say, “Who wants to go to karaoke.” You can post that not to just everyone in the West Village, but you can say: everyone in the Village who has a compatibility with me over 80 percent.
It sort of cleans the unwashed masses. It’s like, ohhhhh. You’ve been on OkCupid for a couple years, you know that people with high match percentages tend to be people that you could tolerate having a beer with. (Or not—there are creepy people everywhere in every compatibility index.) But in general we’ve got this sort of filter of the users, which I think is super valuable.
And I he’s right, you can just say something like I’m in X place for Y amount of time. Then set who you would like to see there (based on your OKC profile), so for example mine options is Girls who like guys and everybody.
The thing which makes me think this could be a success is the fact I was already doing this on twitter as such. For example I’d say, I’m in central London tonight, anyone fancy joining me for a meal or a drink. Because I have quite a few twitter followers I tend to always catch someone but now I can do the same and hopefully meet some real cool people who, who knows might be rather cute.
Locals really hits the head of what makes OKCupid so cool. One of the secrets of OKC is its social nature. Its more like a place to hangout, do quizes, talk to people, etc, etc. Dating is a massive part but I know people who just use to chat to people in passing, read there journals and fill out the weird and wonderful quizes. If they can get people to do locale too… then there on to a new massive success
I know most people will screw up there face at the notion of Locals but for someone as public as myself, its going to be a whole lot of fun…
Google coming to MCUK?
I have a theory… and it was fully baked in my mind but now I got it
Google is launching Google TV to the UK and Europe in 2012 and it needs content from companies such as the BBC.
The logical place to have a presence is (of course I would argue is) MediaCityUK.
Doesn’t seem that baked now…
Steve Jobs steps down
People have been asking me, what do I feel about Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO of Apple.
The markets have already spoken… But to be honest, I do wish him well although I talk smack about him and Apple all the time. For Apple, I do think the real test will be 2-4 years down the line when the current crop of products and services are a little old or long in the tooth.
The problem with having a leader dishing out his wisdom from on high, means when their gone (in what ever way) the single vision is lost or not communicated in the same way. And frankly I don’t think anyone will be able to follow Steve Jobs into the void.
Of course I don’t want to speak too ill of the sick but I’m really hoping Tim Cook can bring a little more openness to Apples future. Under Steve Jobs it was just never going to happen.
They say when you get older you become more conservative than before, maybe this sums up Apple’s recent moves to control and conquer?
Feed your Kindle for free
Still loving my Kindle specially now I can use my phone as a Wifi hotspot/Mifi. I’m usually tweeting something I’ve read on the way to work. I’ve described my kindle ecosystem but recently I’m starting to notice more services supporting the Kindle, here’s the better one…
Cold Climate tweeted me this… Kindle It lets you send articles you find on the web to your Kindle or other e-reader for easy reading. It is being developed as part of the Five Filters project to promote independent, non-corporate media.
Its pretty nice, specially the Android App which is handy for on the go sending. I’ve used send to Kindle in the past but to be honest I hardly need to send from my HTC Desire to the Kindle. Maybe when I get a Tablet, it might be different.
But I’ve started using NewstoEbook which is great perfect for myself because I use Google Reader for quite a bit of my news. The problem I had was that the subscriptions were quite large and calibre would do its thing and collect them all up to a certain point and then time out. Meaning I would only get the first lot of subscriptions. Even if it did, the file size of the final ebook would be too big to send via email to the Kindle.
News to Ebook is great but I’m trying to find a way to automate the whole process… It seems tricky because of the need to automate the Oauth part and select the subscription to make the ebook from.
My only negative comment is when it creates the ebooks, it doesn’t generate index correctly, so you can’t browse the ebook like most other ebooks. Hopefully the author can solve this problem by updating the script, engine, etc which generates the ebooks.
I love MCR, jumping on the bandwagon?
Since the English Riots there’s been a campaign which I believe started on Twitter and Facebook by Manchester City Council, to kick start Manchester day. But recently big business has jumped on board.
I’m not saying its all bad. For example Co-operative put up a massive poster recently with a few delays.
But I’m not certain everything I’ve seen is a good idea… Most businesses are simply hanging up posters but without calling out certain company’s, there’s some who are simply cashing in on this… Then again what’s new?
Portal: No Escape
Portal: No Escape is a live action short film by Dan Trachtenberg
If there was ever a single doubt about the quality, talent and creativity of fan made media, this is the time drop the crap and get a clue. Awesome and might even kick start a race to create Portal the movie?
How I work…
A survey went around R&D today and after answering all the questions there was a blank area for other comments…
I’m sure I haven’t thought of all the weird software/network combinations that are in use. Please use this box to add any info you think I need to know.
To which I wrote
I have machines on multiple networks…
One on the R&D network,
One on the BBC internal network
One on the plain Internet.I tend to keep the BBC internal one (running Windows 7 – which I have Admin rights) at work because its useless outside the BBC due to the constraints placed on it.
The R&D one has two profiles on it. One profile is setup for the R&D network and the other is setup to use the plain internet wifi. This means I don’t need to carry around multiple machines just one and user switch profile on Ubuntu 11.04.The software I use is Thunderbird for email mainly on the R&D network because Evolution (my usual mail client) doesn’t support Socks5 proxies. I tried to get Evolution working because I really wanted to get the BBC network/Exchange calendar working in Evolution but it wouldn’t work without root access!
Its important to have a plain internet connection because I tend to work at home and from different places. The Webmail without the SecureID pass has made life a lot easier but I really would like to have some kind of 2 step authentication. I’ve enabled it for my Google Mail account for example.
I tend to send emails for calendar requests to my gmail, just so I can sync my Google Calendar with my BBC calendar. Google Calendar Sync seems to fail maybe because I have too many items or it might be the two step authentication? End of the day its not as reliable as send it to my gmail.
Its interesting because things are really starting to change and it starts with the change of outlook on the systems people use and work with everyday. Gone are the days of strict control of the employees machines… This surely has to be a good thing?