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Keeping your Quantified Self on the right track

I had the joy of attending the Quantified Self Europe 2014 in Amsterdam. It was amazing and I feel kind of gutted its over so quick.

Its amazing to think it was only a year since we talked about sharing data and the joy of data at the Quantified Self Europe 2013. In the year between the two a lot has happened, especially when Edward Snowdon revealed to the world that we were being hoodwinked into something not even George Orwell could make up.

The big unofficial theme of the conference was about data privacy and security. To be honest I’ve been loosely calling it data ethics, which hopefully will make sense in the near future. During the opening of the conference, Gary and Ernesto made a point of talking about photoblogging/lifeblogging and made reference to last years session about lifeblogging. It was common sense but good to be clear right from the top.

The amount of devices like Google Glass, Autographers and Narrative Clip was interesting in its self. Number-wise, I spotted 5 Google Glasses, 4 Autographers (including myself) and about 30+ Narrative clips. The narrative clip was certainly everywhere and with no status, you have no idea if it was on, off or taking a picture right then. I wore the Autographer and the pictures have been useful to remind myself of things and people I spoke to. I will admit I did leave it on by accident when in the loo but nothing was captured (ooer! lets leave at that)

The QS guys, asked their keynote speakers to talk without slides and the talks were passionate and engaging. Dana Greenfield and Kaiton Williams talks were well worth listening to again. Dana’s talk about grief was personal and really seemed to divide people. I heard someone say it was soooo personal they felt a little uncomfortable. Which I said is a good thing and unique to QSEU. Kaiton talked about self image and posed the question, what happens when being healthy is no longer about not being sick? He’s point was the conflict between business models and self image. What we do now, will effect the future as QS races to the mainstream.

The Conference is structured like a Unconference with filled in slots. At some points there is up to 20 things happening at once. I decided to avoid the eHealth type talks and applications, because they wouldn’t be much use to work and its already quite developed an area.

Here’s my other highlights

Data Futures: Possibilities and Dreams by Alberto Frigo

This discussion was about data reuse beyond the 5-10 years. What happens to our data, where does it just get stored? Does it get deleted? What is the weight of this data? Ethics were in effect again, and interestingly this was right before the EU rule came in about removing links from Google. Kaiton was in the room and said a bunch of interesting things but it was interesting to hear spooky consequences of automated systems. Like someone getting a request to send birthday greetings to someone who had died 5 years previously. This sounds kind of crazy but its going to happen more and more.

Personal data: Attack & Defence by Magnus Kalkuhl and Kley Reynolds.

This two part session started more like a workshop but found its feet in part 2, when Kley ran through a European project (which I’m still trying to get the details for) it turns your quantified state into a finger print securing your devices using a PAN model. This really fascinating for a number of reasons including if it was stolen, only person who could use it would be you or a thief who spend weeks emulating you. At some point Kley mentioned how it could hook into BitCoin but by that point my head was blown already.

Kley also later when talking, said how much he liked the idea of Perceptive Media. He offered up a scenario involving a live view of your house being monitored by an external person like you can do with taskrabbit. You don’t want to necessarily tell that person where your house is, so you change aspects of your home so its not clear where it is or even what time it is. Its very much like Ghost in the Shell’s ghost hacker, the laughing man…

The Laughing Man is an expert hacker, able to hide his physical presence by editing himself out of video feeds and cybernetic eyes, concealing his identity by superimposing an animated logo over his face, and hijacking cybernetic brains altogether, all in real-time

Basically your able to manipulate the video feed in real time. If you want to see basic evidence of this, check out diminished reality. It can be simple things like change the angle of the camera, removing certain objects, changing a dog into a cat for example but these little things all add up to the person watching not quite sure when they decide to come and rob the place. Thanks for that Kley and I certainly look forward to hearing more about the project because damm it could be a disruptive.

It was interesting to hear the term lifejacking in the context of hacking quantified self data. Actually even I was slightly worried…

Is Open Privacy the Next Open Source? by Laurie Frick

Another good conversation resulting in lots of viewpoints including the viewpoint shared with John Wilbanks. Very interesting in the light of the health health caredata upset recently in the UK.

One of the things I never really considered in so much is the linked-data. When I was running BBC Backstage, linked data was a pleasure and joy. The ability to link data to make new and interesting insights was mind blowing. Mashup and create new insight was great but with personal data the insight takes on a much more scary and much more sinister tone.

The other aspect is the amount of insight you can tell over time. A small subset of data can tell you little but a year or more of location data can tell you loads more than you may really want to consider. This was further backed up in the session, Passive Sensing on Smart Phones with Jan Peter Larsen and Freek van Polen. Passive sensing or as I prefer implicit data is the next battle ground.

It was a pleasure to meet PBS’s Sesame Street innovations team too, further proving the quantified self is grow for the betterment of all plus they seem to be trying to archive a similar goal to our project.

Its aggregation which was the other big trend trend I noticed at QSEU14. Everyone had their own aggregation dashboard to collect your data and make insights. Pryv looked pretty good with a ton of useful clearances and the ability to store exactly which country your data sits. There were even companies offering to make insight of your data for you, bypassing the inputing data part. Even Intel had their own in beta service. I have been a fan of Fluxstream because its the most developed open source dashboard I’ve seen to date. There are many others but I don’t feel confident recommending or using something closed source to store my private data.

I actually had the pleasure of meeting the people behind the fluxstream project and I was very impressed with her ignite talk which highlighted and answered a lot of the issues I had with it. Main one being unambiguous timestamps and a better API. Afterward my talk at the end of the day, we caught up and we discussed how they Flux could work with Trakt.TV, something I’d like to have, as part of a very early Quantified Self project in R&D. Its worth mentioning the project in part but I’d rather do that officially on the R&D blog, although you can get a sniff of the presentation here. Its low on details because its mainly about my own consumption and its auto advancing slides, which I hate so much!

There was touching finish to the proceedings with a public mention about the work of Seth Roberts (who recently died). Its fitting to end with his moto… The Best Way to Learn is to Do. This sums up the Quantified Self movement more than you can imagine. Even when I finished my presentation, Ernesto asked me the question of what I personally got out of the insight into my own media consumption. We might be the edge cases and even deeply curiosity but as Kaiton said, we will define what the rest of the world does in the near future…

It was an exciting event and I’m very glad I could participate in a small way. It didn’t quite have the buzz of the 2013’s QS Europe but I think its because the diversity of the subjects was so wide, while this year it was much more concrete around the subjects mentioned before. I’ll look forward to telling more on the R&D Blog and going into more depth in internal talks and in the QS Manchester meetup on the 6th June.

Thanks to everyone who took part and made it a great event… Look forward to seeing you all in 2015?

Embracing the unquantifiable self?

I’m sat in Manchester terminal 3 airport using the free wifi (for one hour with a sign up to some bothersome news letter) anyway I’m on my way to the Quantified Self Europe Conference in Amsterdam for the 2nd year (reasons why you should be coming too). I gather the popularity of the conference and area has obviously started to rise with a sharp 50% increase in the ticket price. Fair dues but further proves its getting popular and breaking into the mainstream.

But I wanted to reflect on aspects I’ve touched on many times in my blog. The unquantifiable.

Its one of those lunch time chats in R&D. This time I was talking to Matt Brooks and Jasmine about the Quantified Self and some of the smart data wearemoment.us were able to understand from patterns of usage. Matt stopped me and said how much he hated recommendation systems.

“I want a system which doesn’t give you what you want or even the opposite… ”

The perfect example being spotify… Before long we were talking l about something which is dear to me and my blogging.

The unquantifiable! Or as Matt likes to call it the “unquantifiable self” credit to Matt for that one.

There seems to be somethings which are simply unquantifiable. Two come to mind instantly. Dj mixing and Chemistry when dating. Everything can be right on paper but when meeting that person in real life or hearing that mix, something just isn’t right. Not only that it can be a total rejection of something you should in the data, adore?

Although I love the quantified self: knowledge through numbers. I feel like I appreciate the unquantifiable even more now. I know there is those who believe we just need more data or more computational power (they may even be right) but in the meanwhile lets have fun with the unquantifiable self.

See you at the quantified self europe. By the way I’ll be talking on Sunday afternoon about my media consumption and maybe a tiny bit about how this relates to perceptive media.

Tangible playlists

There’s been a research project I have been thinking about quite a bit. It involves something of a passion of mine and maybe many others. It combines a couple of thoughts, I have actually blogged a few times.

Make DJing physical again

I have been calling for the more democracy in the world of Djing for a while. Luckily I’m not the only one thinking this, the pacemaker guys are all over this. But before their latest app, I was inspired by my experience of switching from vinyl to laptop to the pacemakerdevice. But frustrated by the lack of forward thinking by the rest of the Dj world. I called for a hackday for djs, oppose to the already popular music hackday.

Part of the thinking was around making the DJ experience physical again, as pressing buttons behind a laptop screen makes you look like your doing your email, not banging out a epic set. Physical without needing tons of controllers and moving away from 2 decks and a mixer.

There are parallels with Djing/Mixing and making a playlist. A lot of thinking goes into the tune selection. But like mixes, the platform allows you to be more creative than simply play one tune after another. You may choose to play part of a tune, start a tune after the introduction. You may choose to speed up or slow down a tune. The mixtape is a narrative, a narrative your giving to another person. To think about a pls, m3u or xspif is almost an insult.

Physically sharing things

I have spoken at length about the way we are physical beings and tend to prefer physical things. Whats interesting about physical things is the emotional attachment which comes with them. I even said it myself before…

Physical artifacts are much easier to lend to people and much more likely to be taken seriously by friends currently.

My examples include my book collection and the best example is the creativity which went into mixtapes.

Like it or not, there is something about sharing which is instantly more engaging. I think it might have something to do with the way our brains are wired. Something some people take advantage of (wish I could find the exact effect/scam, where someone gives you a small token gift and you in exchange tend to open your pocket to bigger amounts)…

There have been many attempts to give digital things a physical footprint but its always felt forced. What if you could take the best parts of digital and give them a physical footprint?

What would that look like, what would it be able to do which you can’t do right now in both mediums?

Tangible Playlists

This project I nicked named Tangible Playlists… Although its actually called physical playlists. Its a join project between BBC R&D and Lancaster University.

‘Mix tapes’ were a thing of love, a physical object which people would share with significant others and friends around them. They were naturally a social object and highly representative of a person’s identity. The knowledge of effort involved by the giver in selecting the songs and having to sit through each one was also part of the symbolism for the receiver. Objects can be generated and shaped from and by the media you “teach” them or existing objects you play (embed) media into. Thus the modern mix tape could become a linked series of small objects like lucky charms which are physically shareable in a form representing the tracks they contain.
This is based on the idea that physical items often mean more to us as physical beings and adds a level of exclusivity and personalisation to the sharing process. Considering transplatform engagement and the ability to engage users and viewers in co-creating media it is suggested that this may present as a new modality for user co-creation and curation.

You can read more about the project including a real nice piece about slow digital by Lancaster Uni. It will be great once the project is finished.

Other playlists

Interestingly Nathan Langley is working with others on a startup idea called Desert.fm.

Our industry is full of stories and there is many outlets for them. Blogs, publications, podcasts all giving interviews giving designers and developers a platform to share their sources of inspiration and to tell their story. We found music was usually an afterthought or a sideline, for our idea Desert fm we want to bring music to the fore, in view to create the ultimate inspiring playlist that everyone can access to discover new music and be enthralled by.

Ultimately Nathan would like a playlist from me with a few lines on why each track means something to me in an autobiographical sense.

This could be anything. For example, one track was around when you were you at school, sketching and doodling ideas for a new transformer! Or when you first learning code in the dead of night you had a special artist you would go to to get in the zone. Or just a song you are digging at the moment. This can be as long or as short as you want it.

This reminds me of Top10.com and ultimately Listgeeks.

So here is my clubbing days gone by list

Seven Days And One Week – BBE – Clubbing in Ibiza in 1998, it was heavily played everywhere and although I got bored of it at the time, it still reminds me of the early days of Trance.
Please Save Me (Push Remix) – Push vs Sunscreem – This was known as the Monster track by friends and the girlfriend I was dating at the time. It was killer track and made for some great nights out at the Bristol, Ritzy
Oblivion (Head In The Clouds) – Manix – One of the tunes I danced to in the early days of clubbing in a underground rave.
It’s My Turn (Extended Mix) – Angelic – Driving home from Bristol on the A4 road with my old Aprilla SR125 scooter listening to Judge Jules on the Essential mix. It was perfectly timed for hitting west London.
Time to get ill – 4 Hero – I spent some time in Cheltenham once during school at a special event to do with the rotary club. There was a small funfair and I spent a lot of time on a ride which played Time to get ill again and again. Great time!
Music Reach (1,2,3,4) – Prodigy – This song blew my mind when I first heard it on the Prodigy Experience album, which I borrowed from friend/best man Ross. I wanted more music like it.
Passion (Do You Want it Right Now) – Get Decor – This song sums up clubbing in the old Bristol Mecca discotheque. Its the song which comes to mind when thinking about that period of time.
Rhythm is a Dancer – Snap! – Remember listening to my next door neighbor playing this on 12inch vinyl and being blown away by the introduction. It sounded so alive, then hearing it in a club the week afterwards
The Legacy (Club Mix) – Push – When I heard this tune at the Bristol Ritzy, it blew my mind. I seeked out this tune for a good few months, as I had to own it.
Let me show you – Camisra – When I first heard this in a club, it brought me out chills all over. Love it and its a classic.

There is something quite special about Playlists and its amazing the stories which come out of the wood work when picking music. Imagine what would happen if you could pick any media. This is what we’ll be exploring/researching in Tangible playlists.

Can’t wait to share more details on the project soon…

Funf + Perceptive Radio, imagine the possibilities

Video streaming by UstreamEver since I saw Funf at Quantified Self 2013, I have wondered about what things we could do with it.

Highlights of FutureEverything 2014

Another year another good Future Everything festival. It seemed to fly by so quickly and partly because I was roped into the Radio 4 Character invasion day and Vision 2022,thanks for the tweet Julius. So although I was back and forth between different conferences, I did get to soak up some of the good events at Future Everything.

Adrian Hon

Adrian was also involved in the character invasion day and his book History of the Future in 100 Objects made up part of the festival. I have to admit everytime I hear Adrian talk, he spurs a number of ideas and thought. Such a smart guy and plenty of interesting thoughts. My evernote was overflowing from the conversation with him.

Anab Jain

I had not really come across Superflux but Anab delivered a stellar keynote in place of Anthony Dunne. Not only did she talk about the serious disconnect between what Snowden uncovered. But she also touched heavily on privacy, social compliance and the invisible war over autonomy. Not only a great keynote (which I can’t believe was all last minute) but she also delivered a good fireside chat just like Adrian Hon did.

New shape of things panel

I just got back from Future 2022 and caught the tail end of the new shapes panel. Its always impressive to see people you know very well talking on a panel. Dan W, Tom Armitage, Alexandra DS and Claire Red moderating. Wish I could have heard the whole thing but it was full of interesting discussion about the nature of the maker scene to the unnecessary maker projects going through kickstarter recently. It was certainly one of the better panels I’ve heard in a while.

Liam Young

Liam’s talk was certainly interesting but the sync from the laptop caused the output to fail a lot and sometimes go out of sync.

Future everything had a lot of potential but for me didn’t quite pull through mainly because of my own hectic schedule. Must remember to give it more time in the future. Well worth attending and still very reasonably priced.

Dating, Lies and Algorithms the conference talk?

Thayer is a wonderful woman and when she emailed me asking if I would talk at her conference, The Best of British. I thought for about 2mins before agreeing.

I’m going to do something to connect some of the thinking I’ve had about algorithms and dating. Into a unique one time talk. Never to be repeated I can say… Exclusive! So go support.

“Support you say?”

What makes this conference special is its going to be funded by kickstarter…. I know how crazy is that? Confirm speakers include…

Alice Taylor, MakieLab, London
Chris Thorpe, I Can Make, Oxford
Matthew Somerville, mySociety (& many other great things), Birmingham
Mazz Mosley, freelance technologist, previously a tech lead @ GDS, Leighton Buzzard
Ian Forrester, BBC R&D, Manchester
Dan Fairs, SecondSync, Bristol
Dr Tom Crick, Senior Lecturer in Computing Science, Cardiff Metropolitan University
Priya Prakash, Founder, Design for Social Change, London

Well Thayer is the Prime, so trust in her we do.

Geek history worth keeping

While talking to Martin, Sam, Chris and others over the last few weeks. I have been thinking how things have been forgotten.

The history of geek culture seems to get forgotten too often. Recently a discussion about the tech community in Manchester with Martin raised a bunch of questions in my mind.

How much of geek history is still available now? What do I mean?

Great people have said….

“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

And to be honest I’m seeing the same thing over and over again in the limited time I’ve been around the geek scene. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing necessarily wrong with this… But no one seems to be documenting the past… Which seems crazy with the amount of social media or in the past user generated content created. But the issue seems to be putting it all together. For example if you search geekdinners on my blog, theres quite a few posts. But its a mishmash of stuff. Look for the same on Flickr (assuming you knew flickr was where most geeks uploaded stuff in the past and flickr had not gone dark) and you get a mishmash again. If your smart you might try the clusters and find the London geekdinners.

Geekdinners.com is actual up for sale at $2.5k. But this isn’t so much my point. In the past we would write blog posts about events (don’t get me started on the blogging) but this is a bit like throwing a pound in a tip jar. Whats need is something to aggregate the blogs, tweets, photos, videos, etc together. Tell the whole story in long form. This is what me and Martin were discussing, and the natural place seems to be wikipedia and archive.org.

I had a discussion recently with Tom Morris who is very knowledgeable about wikipedia. I was discussing the recent addition of a page about myself. But it got me thinking Wikipedia is a great place for the type of thing I was hinting at before.

So I’m going to start filling in pages on Geekdinner, LondonGeekdinners, BarCampLondon, BarCampManchester, Geekup and Over the Air. Hopefully people who go on to write pages about Technights, Social Media Cafe, Tuttleclub, etc will link and reference. Then we can start to trace back events and community efforts. Give attribution where its well deserved and encourage more people to get more involved in shaping the future of geek culture.

Where Storytelling and Internet of Things cross over

If you know anything about the kind of work I’ve been researching for R&D. You may know Perceptive Media is big deal in my world and as my motto seems to be, my world is not mainstream yet. However this world crosses over with a couple other areas. Internet of Things, Quantified Self and Object media are a few of the obvious ones, which come to mind.

Tomorrow I’m fortunate enough to take part in another one of the Future of Storytelling weekly hangouts. I took part in one a while ago but I regularly watch on Wednesdays (1730 GMT) before heading to Volleyball. Make sure you tune into the hangout…

join us this Wednesday, March 12, as we explore “the story of things” with Alexis Lloyd, the Creative Director of the New York Times’s Research and Development Lab. The “Internet of Things,” has ushered us into an age where physical objects have the potential to talk to us – and each other – in a way that rapidly transforms our most basic understanding of what gadgets are. Llloyd, informed in part by her background designing immersive and exploratory experiences, believes these “enchanted objects” have within them a world of narrative and poetic potential: The R+D lab exists as a laboratory for the staff of the “Grey Lady” to study the implications of these emerging technologies and behaviors on news-media and print. In the hangout she, alongside an audience of industry experts, will explore the storytelling potential of tools and devices as unassuming as a simple bathroom mirror.

The video sums it up well and gets right into the depths of storytelling and the Internet of things. It begs the question, what would objects around you say if they could talk?

Love what Alexis is doing and who knows what might happen in the future? Sure Perceptive Publishing would be right up their avenue? And some of the guys from the NYtimes office came to Hackday and Mashed back in the day… I wonder what they would make of some more of the object things were up to?

Your list and my list

I recently discovered Listgeeks via a friend who may want to stay anonymous. I have been looking for something which did what Top10 did. However the guys behind top10 made the decision that a generic top10 site was maybe not ideal for growing a business on. So instead they focused on hotels.

This left my idea of using top10’s for floating emerging tech and designs in the grass.

I found something fascinating happened when I printed out my top10 and stuck it on the wall near me. Conversations would start and develop around the list. After top10 moved towards hotels, I tried to recreate it with a spreadsheet. What a colleague added to her top10 was fascinating again. We spent about 20mins talking about the top10s and questioning what each item was.

This shared knowledge was great and my thoughts is if we can scale it up within a small group of smart people. It can be a great tool for surfacing new ideas and trends.

I do wish there was the ability to track historic changes, so you can see things rise and fall, imagine if you could see it over a few years. On top of that I don’t understand why no one has implemented either OPML or even XOXO? You could have a nice simple exporter and importer?

BBC Radio 4 Character Invasion day with Perceptive Futures

BBC Radio 4 are putting on a number of events on Saturday 29th March under the banner of Character Invasion day

Character Invasion is a celebration of character taking place over the course of one day – Saturday 29 March 2014. The day will have character at its heart combining an on-air exploration of the importance of character on BBC Radio 4, with a day of public events at all BBC sites which produce Radio Drama.

BBC R&D are involved and focusing on the idea of characters in the future. What are the possibilities for characters in a future which looks more perceptive? Of course we’re not alone, there will be some other key people from across the industry debating the question too.

At this session, you’ll hear from a panel of fantastic guests including Adrian Hon (CEO, Six to Start and Technology writer for the Telegraph), Julius Amedume (film director, writer and producer), Sarah Glenister (author of Perceptive Media’s Breaking Out), Henry Swindell (Development Producer for BBC Writersroom) and Anna Frew (PhD student studying the book and narrative in the new era of the internet).

With a line up like that, you know your going to get some great debate, plus there might be a chance to see/hear the Perceptive Radio in action.

The sign up process is a little weird, so you need to register by Thursday 13th March and then you will be notified later if you got a ticket or not. The event takes place in Media City, Salford Quays.

Hope to see you there… its going to be a blast