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
My Christmas eCard to friends and Family
If you didn't receive one in your mailbox, no worries. Here it is for you to print off, make your festive wallpaper or just throw darts at. Thanks to Cristiano for the excellent photograph, I just tweaked the levels and let Plaxo do the rest. Shame Plaxo eCards couldn't send them out too, but thats another story.
Happy Christmas to everyone…
Have you been thinking green all year?
Well I like to think I have. As you can see I've done a lot of trips every month this year but its Manchester to London and back again, which I'm doing frequently. The most costly on Carbon was my trip to Berlin, even more so that my crazy trip to Paris via Amsterdam. I wonder how this stacks up against other community managers/evangelistsTechnorati Tags: green, carbon, footprint, dopplr, ianforrester:dopplr=2008 from companys like Yahoo and Microsoft? Think of the BBC Backstage as your green friendly developer network.
And the social stacks fit together like that…
One of the things I really missed out on but have been following is the developments around the open stack. I kind of prefer social stack but I can see a lot of benefit to open over social. Anyway, this work has been pioneered by some really good guys including David Recordon, Chris Messina, Sebastian Küpers, etc, etc (sorry to many names to list). Today I was struck by Jyri's blog post about Chris Messina's talk at some event recently.
In his presentation at Friday's event, Chris Messina demonstrated the use case of subscribing to someone who lives on a foreign Web service.
In what follows I'll expand on Chris' story by discussing another use case, where you add the
foreign friend to your address book without needing to go to their site.Imagine I want to add a friend, David Recordon to my contacts. I
know his email address, so I click 'add contact' in my client and enter
his email.My client translates David's email address into his OpenID URL, probably using a method called Email to URL Translation.
Now that my client knows where to find David on the Web, it goes out to David's URL and fetches a little file that contains machine-readable pointers
to David's public profile and the photos, status messages, bookmarks,
blogs, and other feeds he publishes. The enabling standards at work
here are likely to be XRDS-Simple and Portable Contacts.This loop is simply referred to as 'discovery'.
Once my client is done, it is ready to display its findings to me.
Here's a mock-up to illustrate what I might see (the same mock is in
Chris' slides):
After selecting David's contact information and some of his feeds, I
click 'Save', and a subscription request is sent to these services. They
return a few of David's most recent public updates to me.The next time David logs into these services, he sees a standard new
subscriber notification. His service can perform discovery on me to
display my name and profile summary to him, and allow him to
reciprocate.David may also choose to allow me to see some of his private information, such as his contact details. The enabling standard here is of course OAuth.
I have never needed to join any of the services David uses; in fact,
I don't even need to know their names. It is irrelevant to me if he
uses Twitter, Plurk, or Friendfeed to publish his status updates or
prefers Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa for sharing his photos. All I care about is seeing his updates and being able to respond to them using my own client.Information wants to be free, and social objects want to travel.
The thing this reminds me of, is when Tim Burners-Lee wrote about the Semantic web and how agents talk to services, etc. You can follow how it works without even knowing the different technologies too well. So while these guys figure out the webside of things, these other guys earn a mention for there work on the services stuff and Controlyourself for there work on openmicroblogging.
5 Stages Of Twitter Acceptance
Taken from Steve Clayton's blog.
This is for all my friends is who have yet to join Twitter and think Facebook is where its at. You all know who you are…
Video 3.0 is the future, no really…
Doc Searls is such a great thinker, it would be great to see him on stage at a Thinking Digital, Pop!tech or TED.
Video 3.0 is two way. Or many-way. It’s with, not just to. And its “def” is truly high, and not compromised by current channel-defined bandwidth constraints. This is what will disrupt both telecom and cablecom in a huge way, unless they get on the side of all producers — including the people they now call consumers. The opportunities here are enormous. I think telcos are especially advantaged in this sense: telephony is naturally two-way, and has been ever since the 1880s. Now is the time to think about how we return to that in a big way. Telcos may be getting hammered flat right now, but there’s a groundswell underneath there. Just watch.
I've been asked again and again, so whats the future then Ian? and I always say video online. This usually causes a puzzled look. Maybe I should be saying Video 3.0 or maybe a better word would be Participtory Video or even Networked Video? Don't make the mistake of thinking Podcasting video is Video 3.0. Some of it is simply Video 2.0 (dump video online), some of it is Video 2.5. I've not seen anything which says to me Video 3.0 yet. Even Seesmic, Ustream, etc.
TV killed the Movie
So i'm watching live TV because I'm ill and am really waiting for the IT Crowd to start. Anyway Film 4 have Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet starting and I thought I've not seen that for ages and boy I love the sound track and start of the movie. I mean who doesn't remember the petrol station scene at the very start of the movie? It's a classic and one of the best starts to a film ever.
But Channel4 or Film4 killed it for me. They resize the beautiful 2.35:1 panavision aspect ratio down to 16:9 and cut off he edges! There should be a law against such things. It looked stupid on my large widescreen LCD, and it wouldn't have hurt them to add a small border on the top and bottom to keep the ratio correct and not slice off the left and right of the picture. But they wouldn't let it lie, no. They also soften the dynamic sound track using some kind of dampener or compressor. Its the equivalent of listening to a Dolby Digital track through a pair of ipod headphones (yes I now have a pair and I can tell you my Vodafone 12 pounds headphones are so much better that those white bud things, avoid at all cost). On most AV systems with digital sound, theres this thing called Midnight mode. From the Dolby site, it works like this.
Midnight mode allows low-volume listening with high-volume benefits, reducing the volume on just the loud effects of a program, increasing the volume on quiet sounds, and maintaining dialogue at a consistent level. A Dolby Digital feature applies dynamic range compression that preserves low-level sounds, prevents dramatic passages from getting too loud, and keeps dialogue intelligible during lower-level listening.
The amount of compression is not arbitrary, but is decided in advance by the soundtrack's producers and coded right onto the soundtrack.
Some Dolby Digital decoders let you select various amounts of the available compression (for example, 50, 75, 100 percent), while others provide only 100 percent when the compression mode is selected.
Well they applied this technique to the whole movie but at like 100 percent. It was dull, lifeless and flat (that is me being nice). In the end I turned the bloody thing off and watched something else till a excellent IT Crowd. I was that pissed off…
Apple’s Netbook?
Imran sent me a link to this readwriteweb entry about the iphone being Apple's netbook. Although I'm totally buying the reason of wifi usage here's what they say…
Steve Jobs once said that the iPhone is Apple's netbook, and this usage data does lend some credence to this. Most of these WiFi requests probably come from people using the iPhone on their couch at home or in a coffee shop, and often, these users might be quickly checking their email or the weather from their phone instead of booting up their netbooks or laptops.
I got to say I'm also selling my Acer Netbook because I now have a ipod touch. The Netbook was too much for what I needed. I just wanted a device to read rss and ebooks. It was cool having the netbook because I could run RSS Owl on it but it was over kill in size and most of the time it sat in my bedroom because there wasn't enough room to carry both my laptop and netbook. Miles expressed a simular thought about his Nokia N800 internet tablet now he owns a iphone.
In other related news Windows Mobile falls behind iPhone in latest mobile-market numbers
Measuring success of evangelism
At the recent speeddating event I went on, people always ask what you do. I always have problems explaining what I do without using up at least 30secs of the 180secs. So I've recently found it easier to say I'm a BBC internet evangelist. Its not ideal but most people I speak to have a better idea of what I do because of the wording.
Christian wrote a excellent blog post about justifying the work we do. Theres some really good parts I would like to quote.
As an evangelist/advocate the hardest job is to tell people exactly what your impact was. A lot of what you do is planting mental seeds and inspiring people to work differently – that can’t be measured in hard figures. Other companies measure the success of an event for example by how many business cards were collected and have a department that follows these up by contacting people. I don’t like this much, first of all because a lot of the people I meet don’t have business cards but follow me on twitter instead and secondly because they gave me the card and not the company.
If you enjoy free information, swag, being able to directly reach internal experts and being able to network with a select group of like-minded people:
- please leave comments on the blogs/announcement pages of the events (in our case the YDN blog and upcoming – a lot of people only look there and don’t have time to scrounge the web for all the info.
- Use tags we provide at events to tag your photos, blog posts, tweets, videos…
- Tell us about cool implementations and changes in your company based on what we talked about – we are happy to feature those and send you link love and there is nothing cooler than telling the world how someone else but us have done something cool with our stuff
- If you sign up for an event – show up (or send a colleague). I am getting terribly sick of spending a lot of money to hire locations and have 150 sign up to the event in the first 10 minutes – effectively blocking out people that should be there – and then 20 show up! This is wasted time and money – and in the current climate that is not a clever thing to do.
I love my job and I am doing quite extensive work to make the IT industry understand that tech evangelism is not a waste of money but that there is a massive need for it. Marketing and PR departments just cannot reach geeks and internal geeks have neither the drive or the opportunities to talk to the world about the great things they do. I am very sure that innovation and change in IT is not coming from top down but from people who dare to talk to the right people to initiate change. As I put it in my talk at accessibility 2.0 geeks that care are the drivers of innovation and I don’t want to lose the opportunities we have right now.
Yes exactly this why I have had such a hard time with the PR and Marketing departments of the BBC. Luckily most of the time they have ignored Backstage but with the events we attracted a lot of attention. As most people know, I tried to educate our lovely PR lady Sarah by forcing her to read the Cluetrain Manifesto. That only works so far though, Christian is right the evangelist create opportunities at a grass roots level. I like to think PR and marketing is all about control while being an tech evangelist isn't, actually the opposite. We tend to tell it as it is and answer the tricky questions. But this is all about measuring success and yes its all about the stories. The stories when things grow from a small seed to something large and interesting. I guess being humans, we like stories. Stories put things in perspective for ourselves. Maybe this translates into a slide on a managers powerpoint between the hard figures of other projects. Or even a example for how successful a project or division is doing but at a much lower level, the links are tighter, stronger and true that ever before. Theres no way to measure these more human like attributes such as trust yet, but the day there is, I bet ever company will come around to the fact that evangelist are good long-term business sense.
Interested in buying a Netbook?
Well I'm selling mine on ebay over the next few days. Starting price of 150 pounds for my upgraded Netbook. I did record me doing the memory upgrade but it was 45mins long and the netbook wouldn't start properly afterwards because I hadn't pluged in the Solid state drive, But trust me its all working fine now, I just don't need it now I got a ipod touch.