Author: Ianforrester

Founder and firestarter of cubicgarden ltd. Emergent technology expert, public service supporter, defender of human scale flourishing, city dweller, European at heart  and social geek event organiser. Captivated by the digital legacy, future of dating, human data interaction, self-hosing, personal data, open-source, house music, neurodiversity thinking, kindness and  collaborative futures for all. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

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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The slow but sure move to Identi.ca

Identi.ca logo

Guys I live twitter, its been amazing. Most of the people I know are on it and in time we may look back at it like the start of email. But thats the problem, its not email its one network email, its like texting way back in 1996, when you and your friends all had to be on the same network to be sure you would get the text message (sms). I'm sure others older that me will tell stories of when email use to be the same, but luckily I've never known that restriction.

Identi,ca is microblogging done correct, its Affero GPL licence, as API friendly as Twitter (same API really) and supports federation remarkable well. Now this isn't the 1st time I've talked about this service, you may have heard me talk about la.conica and identi.ca many times. But whats interesting about identi.ca is I'm starting to see it being put in next to Twitter in clients. So for example I use Twhirl most of the time and now identi.ca support is there and its not just a add on, its all there. I've started noticing that Identi.ca's clients list is also growing. But whats also getting me really excited is seeing la.conica being put into Drupal and other places. So not only can you have your community blog but you can also have communal microblogging.

I'm personally starting to actively use identi.ca more and more. I'm sure at some point i'll start looking up friends on identi.ca and other systems and add them. Hey I may even start saying different things on them. I can certainly see one day when my default is identi.ca and it posts on to twitter via some bot or service like ping.fm. Unless of course Jaiku gets going again.

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Oh yes they did… Lessig sent DMCA Takedown

Found in Ars Technica, Lawrence Lessig was sent one of those DMCA takedown notices by Warner Music recently. And out of all the people you want to send one of those takedown notices, Lessig is the very bottom of the list.


Oh no you didn't: Warner hits Lessig vid with DMCA takedown

Legal scholar and copyright reform advocate Lawrence Lessig was unhappy to discover that one of his presentations on YouTube was hit with a bogus DMCA takedown notice from Warner Music. Lessig intends to fight back and give Warner some schooling on fair use.

When will they learn?

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Tethering on Ubuntu with a Windows Mobile phone

Been meaning to write this one for a while, specially now Sam helped me solve both connection problems I was having in one go without even knowing it. So if you follow this guide and you should be able to do most of what you want with the windows mobile phone.

However there is a problem with some phones like my TouchHD. They have the wrong MTU setting and this sometimes depending on how you got your machine setup can make it unresponsive when trying to access the web. So if you have the problem of being able to ping but not access the web correctly now check the MTU size. I also got everything working with Bluetooth too instead of USB but its a lot more complex and battery life becomes a problem when you got Bluetooth on for 3 hours straight during a train journey.

Tethering on a Windows mobile phone is pretty simple and as far as I know its pretty much the same on Windows and the Mac. I know you can get those USB dongles but do I really want another contract? Not really thanks. Its a shame that Microsoft didn't give this platform much more attention because its actually pretty good in parts. I mean I couldn't imagine buying a phone which can not be tethered for internet access and mass storage.

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Free dj mixes generate more downloads?

I was listening on the train to Marcel Woods at Trance Energy 2009. Popped the title into Google and came up with this excellent site called the Liveset Database with the mix I was listening to and I quickly identified the tune I was banging my head to (Art of Trance – Madagascar (Richard Durand remix)) and went to Audiojelly typed in the song title and found it to download and buy right there. Not only did I find that one but I also found many other remixes.

I made reference to the maybe unique ecosystem of Trance music in a previous blog post. I actually thought I heard Armin Van Buuren give a shout out to a large Torrent site called Trancetraffic the other day but I think after hearing it again, it didn't quite sound like that. But I can't work out if trance has come so far that its done away with the idea of selling mixes or just let the tapers just take over. And why not? I mean, like all music, dance music included, it sounds better and more heart felt in a club, rave or outdoors over a heavy driving sound system. Some of the cynical in you will say it sounds better with the drugs, but I wouldn't know anything about that. So generally Live and loud. There's always been this idea of mixtapes being quite disposable but back in the mid 90's gready promoters started to sell tapes and cds of the mixes. However generally most made copies and no one got sued that I know. There's also something about owning the original tune, be it on vinyl or something else, maybe because somewhere deep down everyone liked dance music had a dj inside of them? Funny enough, i've also never heard anyone call someone else a pirate even when another artist does a bootleg remix.

Is sharing mixes one of the cornerstones of trance music? And through the mix, the meme of the music is widely distributed? Interesting….

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Ubuntu 9.04 release and first impressions

Wow who would thought Geeks could drink so much? So The Ubuntu launch party in Manchester supported by BBC Backstage went very well. We had about 60+ people turn up and enjoy the night. Thanks to Lucy for arranging most of the event. There's quite a few photos around the place including Flickr.

ubuntu cake

I decided not to upgrade my laptop at the party, instead I decided to upgrade it when I got back from the party. Upgrading was very straight forward and within one hour I had new Ubuntu login prompt. Unfortunately thats where the start of the problems started.

I've been having problems with the firewall on my machine for a while now but in 9.04 it broke and thankfully got fixed by flushing all iptables. But then I noticed my Dell's wireless isn't connecting to my wireless point, correctly. So its connected but there's no signal for some reason. Interestingly enough, it gives me a 10.x.x.x address while my actual network is based on the simple 192.x.x.x class of addresses.

Finally Compiz Fusion isn't working at the moment, once again this wasn't actually a upgrade issue. It wasn't work a while ago due to a display driver update. For all the moaning and problems, ubuntu 9.04 is faster. Startup times are quicker, login time is quicker and i've noticed Ubuntu is making more use of my vast amount of laptop memory that 8.10. The growl like notifications are very nice and I look forward to seeing applications like Twirl taking advantage of them soon. I've yet to convert the hard drive to the new Filesystem EXT4 but I've already had some experience with it via my brief time with Fedora 10.

I fixed the Wireless problem, I worked it out from a comment left on the picture. Daemon.log.0 pointed out that the wireless was set in Adhoc mode for some reason. So I switched it and its all good now.

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Redbull now in XL 473ml cans

Found in the supermarket the other day, Redbull in 473ml cans. Its noteworthy in my mind because the original can of 250ml can was superseded by the 355ml can which you now find Redbull Cola in. While the other energy drinks companies have moved to 500ml cans which are easily mistaken for Beer Cans, Redbull has stuck to its guns and kept the tall can to hold the new size Redbull. Interestingly the supermarkets have copied the Redbull cans instead of going for the Beer Can style.

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