Thank you Google for the Android Market Web Store

In my frustrated posts over Okcupid and Match.com, I skipped over the whole Android Honeycomb announcement.

The main thing which strikes me as smart is the Android Market web store.

At long last Google recognises the app store model is broken and they are shattering the model by opening a web store. You can now browse the store using a browser of your choice and when you choice to buy an app, its sent to your phone or tablet. Just the way it should work. Heck you can even using links point to your favourite apps, comments, etc. Genius!

This means finally developers can link to there app and join it up with there own support forums, etc. This thankfully has to be the end of the app store model. And I for one, am thanking Google for killing the model dead!

Like Quora? Try Cwora

I don’t really see the point but even if you do, you got to see the light side of Quora with Cwora

Written by the ever so witty Tom Scott,

A continually spamming collection of unanswered questions created, edited and organized by no-one who uses it.

I specially like the email sign up.

Unless you opt out, we may just blast you with hundreds of messages a day! That’s Web 3.0.

A friend of mine (Tim Dobson) setup a similar "take the piss" site for Facebook called Pokebook. Unfortunately its no where near as witty or clever as Cwora (which is a shame because all the elements are there).

Following the cool kids

Peer Pressure

From Technical Fault two status messages which got me thinking.

Tumblring. Cus it’s what cool kids do. (I prefer Posterous, but the network effect seems stronger on Tumblr atm.) This is like Foursquare vs Gowalla all over again. The better service has a smaller network.

My reply and technical faults reply reposted

Yes > RT @cubicgarden: @technicalfault is that what you do? follow the cool kids instead of making it cool for yourself and others on board?

This is something which is kind of alien to me.

I never like following the cool kids, I’d rather pave my own way and if thats similar to other people around me then great but I won’t be push by social/peer pressure. In actual fact I will admit I tend to be the rebel or (as the cool kids call them now) outlier. Don’t know where it comes from but I get a little fed up of following the established paths which others take.

I understand the whole thing about network effects but then again, I also like the idea that I can bring my own little network effect to a service.

Achieving New Year’s Resolutions

Just discovered Derren Brown is blogging and twittering. One of the things he reblogged was a link to achieve your New Year’s Resolutions.

  1. Make only one resolution – Many people make the mistake of trying to achieve too much
  2. Plan ahead – Don’t wait until New Year’s Eve to think about your resolution
  3. Avoid previous resolutions – Deciding to re-visit a past resolution sets you up for frustration and disappointment
  4. Be specific – Think through exactly what you are going to do, where you are going to do it, and at what time
  5. Set S.M.A.R.T goals – Focus on creating goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time based (SMART).
  6. Carrot not stick – Focus on how much better life will be for you, and those around you, when you achieve your resolution
  7. Go public – Many people keep their New Year’s resolution to themselves.
  8. Be persistent – New habits take time to learn, and once in a while you will slip up and revert to the old you.
  9. Visualise – Visualise yourself doing whatever it takes to achieve you resolution as this will help you believe you can do it and see it through.
  10. Be positive – It is better to think about the good things that will flow from a healthier lifestyle than the bad things that will result from an unhealthy one.

So looking at these recommendations, I’ve pretty much failed on every point except number 7, a bit of 6, 9 and 10.

7. Go Public – Many people keep their New year’s resolution to themselves. Unfortunately, this makes it all too easy to simply forget about them. Instead, go public. For example, write down your resolution on a large sheet of paper, sign it, and place it somewhere prominent in your house. Tell your friends, family and colleagues about your resolution, and ask them to provide you with helpful nudges to assist you in achieving your goal. Either way, do not keep your resolution to yourself.

Discovering lovely workplaces

The old twitter offices

I had message on my flickr mail today. The subject read awesome workplaces. I though it may have been spam at first but I checked it out.

Dear Ian,

I found some great pictures of the Citizen Space workplace here: http://www.officedesigngallery.com/template_permalink.asp?id=154#comments

I would really like to add these pictures to my website: WOVOX.com.

WOVOX is a free and open platform for anyone to show and find workplaces. We want to help people find the workplace of their dreams more easily, but also learn from others and find inspiration for their own workplace.

There is room for credits and a link back to your website or social media profile. Your pictures will be available under an attribute & share alike creative commons license.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Thank you,

Arjen Hoekstra

I totally forgot about the pictures I took of the CitizenSpace, the old twitter offices (see the photo above – yes that how twitter use to look back in 2006ish) and the creative commons office, all in San Francisco. I’ve lot loads more which I forgot about. Good thing about flickr keeping all these photos and of course the creative commons license which is a sign that I’m willing to share.

Wovox.com actually looks pretty sweet. The ethos seems pretty well thought out too. For example heres a bit from the user guideline page.

Authenticity! Better show a few things with spirit than a lot of stuff without depth. A mobile phone pic in the heat of the moment is worth much more than a non-descript €1000 pose shot.

Plus its really good seeing Creative Commons licenses being baked in from day one rather that being an after thought (i’m looking at you mixcloud.com crew).

Seeing all these work places in one place, has somewhat inspired me. I hope to add the BBC media city office to the mix in the near future, it will be interesting to see how it grows as we get more people too.

Forgetting history

Xerox Parc Mouse

One of the things I’m hoping to do a lot more of in the future is working with the hackers of our generation and understand how what there doing now to scratch there own itches will expand to the mainstream. Anyway interestingly I was having a discussion with a guy from my circus workshop class (yeah another day I’ll explain) and he was saying why he liked Apple. One of his reasons was that Apple created the Mouse and that Apple create the best Keyboards and Mice.

I was totally shocked!

Now to be fair he was only 19 but still… one look at the Xerox Parc page on wikipedia page.

Most of these developments were included in the Alto, which added the now familiar SRI-developed mouse unifying into a single model most aspects of now-standard personal computer use.

Shock horror, apple did not develop the mouse. They may have borrowed/stolen the idea once Steve Jobs saw it but it wasn’t developed by them.

Anyway the point is theres a lot of this going around. We cover this on the latest Techgrumps, people ignoring or dismissing the rich history which sits behind most of the things we take for granted.

My good friend Miles use to talk a lot about the fact most blogs would only go surface deep however the blog does make a great place to dispense information. Don’t get me wrong there are some really great blogs with well thought out posts but maybe there isn’t enough?

Sleeping on the weekends

I’ve been doing lots of research into dreams and sleeping and I just wanted to share this nugget of information.

Why is it So Hard to Wake Up in the Morning?

Your clock is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a part of the brain that controls the body’s biological rhythms. But, says Jean Matheson, a sleep-disorders specialist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, these preset natural rhythms often don’t align with daily realities—work or school start times cannot be adjusted to fit a person’s sleep schedule. People who have trouble crawling out of bed probably have an inner clock set to late wake-up and sleep times, a condition known as phase delay.

It is possible to adjust your phase-delayed body clock, Matheson says, but at a price: No sleeping in on the weekends. “When people sleep late on weekends, they revert to their natural phase-delayed rhythm,” she explains. This makes it harder to wake up early on weekdays. You can train yourself to wake up earlier, Matheson says, by setting your alarm 15 minutes earlier each day (and heeding its call).

When I was younger, I use to be able to cycle my body clock on the weekend. So I would sleep in late on the weekends but wake up early on weekdays. Now I’m older, I’ve finally come to the realisation that I can’t do it no longer.

More dream recording news

My lovely hypnotherapist, sent me a clipping from the Metro the other day. Its was a clipping about the ability to record your own dreams.

Although I saw this general thought in a post my boss sent me a while ago, it was good to read something similar in the mainstream press.

I’ve included the text for those who can’t be bothered to read the image.

A real hope of recording our dreams

A real hope of recording our dreams

Dreams could one day be recorded electronically, allowing them to be interpreted, scientists say. Experiments in which volunteers had electrodes surgically implanted deep inside their brains had already allowed researchers to ‘read’ people’s minds, said Dr Moran Cerf. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the development of a dream recorder, he added. ‘We would like to read people’s dreams,’ Dr Cerf said. ‘It would be wonderful to read people’s minds when they cannot communicate, such as people in comas.’

In tests on 12 epilepsy patients, electrodes recorded the activity of neurones in a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe, which plays a major role in human memory and retention. The volunteers were shown more than 100 familiar images, such as Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson, on a screen. From these, pictures that had triggered responsive neurons in different parts of the subjects’ MTLs were selected.

The patients were then shown two of these images superimposed and told to think about one of them, while the scientists ran the neuron patterns through a decoder. When the decoded information was fed back on to the superimposed images, the one whose neuron was firing more quickly was enhanced, while the other faded.

By watching this online feedback, more than two-thirds of subjects were able to make their targeted image completely visible and entirely eliminate the other picture. By observing which brain cells lit up and when, Dr Cerf and his US colleagues, Christof Koch and Itzhak Fried, said they were in effect able ‘read the subjects’ minds’. The study is published in the journal Nature.

Once again, I really need to get mydreamscape up and running…

Dataportability between supermarkets…

Tesco Metro

Yeah right… Like thats going to happen (just like dating data portability)

I just switched from Tesco.com to Sainsburys because for some reason Tesco’s site fails to show on my internet connection. (I tried multiple browsers on multiple machines and it just times out. But doing the same on my phone connection works no problem). There seems to be a problem with the MTU or something

Anyway, I found Sainsbury’s delivery service actually really good, dare I say better than Tesco’s. But what I can’t get over (yet) is the lack of favorites. Sainsburys does have favorites but I had to manually copy over the data from Tesco.com on my phone to Sainsburys on my laptop. Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t that painful because I generally don’t have that much on my favorities but boy oh boy could I have done with some portability in this space.

Heck even allowing openid would be a start, I looked at Ocado but it couldn’t find my postcode. It gave me a phone number to ring but calling it went no where. I was hoping to use them because I’ve used them for barcamps in the past, plus they have a android phone app but it wasn’t to be.

BarCampManchesterX, are you in?

barcampmanchesterx

(This non-descriptive entrance might just be the entrance to a very special barcamp)

So following my last blog post about BarCamp, I’ve been thinking about BarCampManchester (I also mentioned it at Social Media Cafe Manchester) and how I did say I wasn’t going to get involved in BarCamp for a while. But I’ve found a venue which is excellent and perfect for a barcampmanchester.

The venue is a ex-estate agents and show home on the outskirts of my new flat. It may not look like much but in that small single level venue, theres 5 distinct rooms which can be used as barcamp rooms. 3 bathrooms, 2 kitchens and a large open room which use to be used as the estate agent office. There’s also a private garden which would be perfect for a bbq or after party.

Theres a car park right out front and plenty of room for about 150-200 people. The venue is also only 10mins from Piccadilly Station, just a leisurely walk up Piccadilly Basin (besides the Ashton canal). And its clearly noticeable from any train coming into Piccadilly. The venue use to be a showroom for one of the flats, so there’s a high standard of build across the whole venue. Of course the office isn’t still in use, they moved the estate office to the front of the building and now do tours of the actual building instead of the showroom.

BarCampManchesterX

Ideally the developer ISIS would like someone to find a good use for the venue but so far its just sitting mainly empty. Of course they have other locations they have for commercial use. But this great venue is pretty much set up for a barcamp. There’s just a few things which need sorting before everything is a go…

  • Security for the venue – Its meters from the Ashton canal and you sometimes get drunks and kiddies hanging out around there. So if we had a party, some security would be good.
  • Connectivity for the venue – There use to be a office there, so I expect there is a couple of phone lines or we could look into WiMax again, like BarCampManchester2
  • Overnight insurance – This is tricky at the best of times, but if worst comes to worst we could open till really late (say 4am, then open again at 8am)

So far I have convinced ISIS to give me permission to do the barcamp at the venue from Saturday daytime till Sunday afternoon and if we can sort out the overnight insurance, we have a overnight venue.

If you are interested in being part of the organising committee for this challenging but potentially fantastic barcamp.

Please drop me a message or email. Theres a lot left to do including what date we actually hold the barcamp on. I’m expecting to get everyone together for a meeting soon…

Magnetic Resonance Stimulation or MRS the lecture

MRS 2000

So my hypo-therapist Shannon douglas on the first day talked to me about MRS (Magnetic Resonance Stimulation) and this guy called Wolfgang Jaksch, When she (Shannon) first explained about it, I honestly did think, hummmm I’m not so sure about this. Skepticism certainly did set in, specially when she explained how much the device (the matt) cost. £2000+!!!

Anyway I decided since the hypnotherapy did work for me, I thought I’d give the MRS lecture a try. Heck it was free anyway and I could voice my skepticism if needed. The worst that would happen is they would tell me to get lost. So the day comes around and I turn up at the Novatel hotel and find the room where the lecture is due to happen. Theres a few people sitting down in a school layout of a room and I take a seat at the very back.

Wolfgangs lecture

The lecture starts and well Wolfgang seemed nice enough. He went through his background and how he found about the MRS machine due to his cancer (he had stage 4 cancer at 26) which he had surgery on. Now to be clear he never said he used it to replace modern medicine, instead he talked about how it was a great comfort for afterwards when he went through the chemotherapy. He then explained how it works. So generally he said theres a lot changed in our environment over the last 150 years and electronic interference has greatly increased. While we haven’t changed enough to cope with these major changes in our environment. He used the term Electro-smog to explain it.

Then he pulled out some device to demonstrate the electronic activity of his laptop, a watch and other things around the room. As you can imagine, they all made a nasty noise while putting above the MRS matt when it was switched on, gave a much more gentle pulsing sound.

The claim is that using the matt/machine stimulates cells in the body to grow more quickly that before through its pulsed electro magnetic field. And off the back of that it can aid (He always said its a aid and not a replacement for traditional medicine) with recover of many things. This obviously is in part with a positive lifestyle, a well balanced diet and positive thinking.

There were people in the room who swear by the Matt, as you’d expect. But also there was Alex Worsley who is a alternative health adviser. I had met her earlier last week in BoConcept while getting the Todem. She sat next to me when she came in late and kept passing her broken iphone 3 over with messages to me while the lecture finished up. She came with a brilliant question in the end. Wolfgang had said how lying in the park helps rebalance our electrochemistry, and Alex asked the question "if that is true how come she always feels worst afterward spending time on the matt?" The obvious answer which I did say but Wolfgang rejected, was that Alex and everyone has slightly different body rhythm/tone/whatever and she would need to set the machine to match her’s. However Wolfgang just said there was something wrong with her and the machine was indicating that some how. Now looking at Alex (shes a homeopath and reading about her) I think Wolfgang was dead wrong. Anyway later he seemed to indicate that, as I thought people might have slightly different frequences/tone/rhythm, so you would need to set the machine to match that.

What I think

So I do think there is more to the radio interference that we really understand but I’m not so sure simply using this matt everyday will increase cell division and therefore improve the body’s natural deference. Its helped a lot of people but I’m not convinced.

Wolfgang did make a point that Animals find the matt attractive because of the natural low pulsing frequency it gives off.

I asked Wolfgang, why don’t you open source the matt and the electronics which make the matt? So it benefits society and not just a privileged few who can afford it. He came back with a surprising answer, beyond lending the matt to people for a trial, the matt and the electronics which surround it are not patented and someone could make a copy. In actual fact there are others but there not exactly the same concept, instead they do something slightly different/wrong. He welcomed me to copy the contents of the machine.

Later after dinner, he said to me his comment about google being the global search engine was much more about a company owning it that the concept of global knowledge being very accessible to almost anyone. He also admitted that he was a wealthy man and he loved traveling place to place talking about the MRS machine. If he could create a cheaper version he would love to be a part of that. Ideally he would like to see more using it, even if that means he wouldn’t get a penny from the profits. All very noble but there is a massive question mark over does it actually work (in my mind). I guess we’ll never really know unless its cheap enough for us all to use and evaluate.

Shannon, Wolfgang Jaksch and the rest of the crew are actually really nice people, I don’t think there charlatans in actual fact they base a lot in science and reason. A lot of what they talk about may turn out to have some legs, they are waiting for science and reason to catch up. But on the MRS matt, I stand somewhat on the non-believer side. I think its somewhat amazing that Wolfgang has dedicated his life to educating the world about this but it also most of the hallmarks of something unsettlingly scammy. Occam’s razer says

all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one

If playing a ultra low pulsed signal really does increase cell reproduction then I can see how the rest of the claims are somewhat valid. But as a message in Alex’s broken iPhone 3gs said, we didnt really hear enough how that part works. Even Wolfgangs diagram of how frequencies all effect each other didn’t sound quite right to me. The radio spectrum is large/wide enough that lots of the radiospace never touch each other for example the FM space is crowded with frequencies but only runs between 87 megaherz and 108 megahertz, so a 50hz frequency will never interfere with a 1hz frequency for example, let alone a 48hz frequency.

So again, I’m thankful that I got the chance to hear and evaluate MRS, and the meal afterwards was very yummy. I wish them luck in the future, hopefully they will prove it to be helpful and it will end up just being a regular part of our traditional medical knowledge in the future.

Using Inkscape for presentations

For ages now I have been seeking a better way to do certain presentations. I tend to spend a lot of time in Inkscape mapping out ideas but I don’t really want to put slides on different layers.

I bought a copy of dan roam’s the back of a napkin a while ago and I’ve been influenced by the idea of using white boards, mood boards, etc to explain ideas. The problem is that once you put the effort in to putting down the idea on to the canvas, you then have to re-adapt it to a presentation with Open Office. Its why I kind of like the idea of the unlimited canvas.

Prezi was talked about and overused to death a while ago, now you hardly see it. I blogged about it a while ago and decided that there must be a better more open way to do the same.

I have been thinking maybe some enterprising group of people could take the SVG specification and build a tool which generates these exact same presentations. So first up you can use scripts on every element including the viewpoint attribute. There seems to be a load of things you can do with the Canvas coordinate system. SVG 1.1 has the ability to embed certain multimedia but SVG Foreign Object could be used to place a browser or a complete video within a SVG.

You could imagine a specially made tool which worked like Prezi but wouldn’t need to be propitery and locked in. They could even create and sell a player and editor backed with its online space, so the business model isn’t totally shattered. Even if a rival tried to create the same, OpenPrezi as I’m coining it would be first to the market and have a wealth of knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. Even a track record might go down well. So in my mind, there’s no way I will be using Prezi till its a lot more open. I’m sure even I could with a bit of time construct something using the SVG methods I mentioned. I’m not questioning the method or even the concept, it actually reminds me of mood boards. Its the implementation which winds me up.

Well my questions have been answered by some enterprising group of people.

Jessyink is the answer…

JessyInk, an open-source extension to the open-source SVG editor InkScape.

Perfect, so once I’ve created my master piece, its hopefully going to take a few more moments to turn it into something presentable. I’m not the only person to realise the power of this setup. Prezi vs JessyInk

The first time I heard about Prezi, I started looking for a possible equivalent in SVG, and I discovered that JessyInk was a pretty good candidate: it combines a Javascript library that deals with enabling simple navigation through a SVG document according to some conventions, with an extension to the fantastic InkScape SVG editor to make it possible to integrate effects, transitions and views from the editor itself.

But it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I got confirmation that JessyInk now provides the tools needed to build Prezi-like effects, and so, when I was invited to talk on “W3C and the Social Web” at the 10th anniversary of the W3C Italian office I decided to give it a try to build my presentation.

The resulting “slides” were OK, but they clearly remain much more “slide-based” than what I would have done with Prezi.

A big reason for that is that JessyInk still uses slide as the basic unit for its operations – slides are based on Inkscape layers across which you can have transitions. This doesn’t encourage working on a completely 2D-based presentation, even though it allows fairly easily to zoom in and out in a particular slide.

So it looks like JessyInk might have a bright future in front of it. The presentations are not quite as free flowing as Prezi, but to be fair its a good compromise. Open source comes up with the goods, and what a true test of the power of Open source! Fantastic, where do I start!

Evernote is back with Nevernote

I use to love evernote but when I moved to Ubuntu for my main operating system, I found out that Evernote was not going to be supporting Ubuntu or more generally Linux. (instead you have to use wine and the Windows version)

[[I can’t seem to find the quote in the forums, where the Evernote team diss linux saying just use Wine.]]

This wound me up big time. So I got use to using TomboyNotes and was very pleased when I hear about Snowy (now also Ubuntu One sync). I even suggested this could rival Evernote. I seeked other alternatives before, but having Tomboynotes (which runs on every operating system) built in is useful. I also tried getting on with Tomdroid but having to sync my phone every time over usb is a pain in the ass (to be frank). Someone did compile a version out of the repository which does have websync with Ubuntu One but it fails to work on my HTC desire.

So up till a few days ago I was using Tomboynotes and Tomdroid. I even considered writing a XSL to transform Sony E-ink notes to Tomboy Notes and back (although my next blog post will explain why this won’t be nee e.

However yesterday dale l, left me a note on my blog…

There is a LINUX version of Evernote – it’s called Nevernote and you can find it here:

http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/

There’s just a few requirements to get it running… follow the instructions and visit their forum!

You can choose between 32 bit or 64.

I got it working fine and it runs well…!

After that, you can add the evernote webclipper to your browser…

So without a further a do I installed Nevernote on my 64bit Ubuntu laptop and tried it out. It took a little while to setup but I finally got it syncing all my old notes which I had in my old Evernote account. I’m currently moving all my old notes over from Tomboy Notes. Of course there is a Android client already, so I’m also doing the sync thing with that too. (oh there is also a command line version – clevernote for you hardcore.)

I’m going to miss Tomboy Notes but to be honest without the mobile syncing I’m a little unhappy. Maybe once Snowy and Tomdroid is more mature, I’ll consider going back. don’t get me wrong Nevernote looks and feels like a dog but it does work and even better, I get all the goodness of evernote. So automatic text analysis, syncing, picture and rich data support. I’m also interested in the new feature – Evernote Trunk.

The Trunk is a showcase of great apps and products that makes your Evernote experience more awesome.

To access it, click on the new “Trunk” icon in today’s update to Evernote for Windows and Evernote for Mac (Evernote Web later today, iPad next week). Clicking it opens a window full of amazing intergrations. Today, there are nearly 100 items listed across five categories: Mobile, Desktop & Web, Hardware, Gear, and Notebooks (this one is really cool, more on that later).

Obviously Nevernote does not support the Trunk directly, but I guess if you set it up online, it will just work. So for example the speech to text will just work if you make a note with audio in it?

mydreamscape presentated at social media cafe manchester

Chi-chi Ekweozor (@realfreshtv) has written up my scramble thoughts and presentation about mydreamscape.org up on her blog.

I am amazed at how much detail she got down in the session, its a perfect account of what was said and by who. Her hand must have been going into over drive!

A couple of people ask great questions about privacy and how easy the network will be to spam.

The points raised range from deciding to keep users anonymous to encourage people to share their dreams in detail to wondering how to stop the spammer that ‘keeps dreaming about ‘Coca-cola’ or Justin Bieber(!)

Adrian Slatcher (@adrianslatcher on Twitter) from Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA), added some fine observations about dreams being non-linear.

Some people make associations in dreams based on colour, so called ‘colour dreams’. There are also ‘anxiety’ dreams. There is a very strong metaphysical element to dreams.

Adrian went on to add that this ‘crowd-sourced’ emotional categorisation of dreams: ‘anxiety = red’, ‘peace = green’ etc lends itself to making such a social network a very useful psychoanalysis tool.

She also detailed a great conversation we had afterwards with Josh (@technicalfault) about a killer mobile app for mydreamscape

In a conversation with Ian and Social Media Cafe co-organiser Josh (@technicalfault) after his talk, we discussed what I think is the killer application for such a project: a mobile phone app that combines access with the social network with a dream diary linked to the phone’s alarm clock.

As soon as you wake up, you are prompted to record your dream into a ‘What did you dream today?’ interface rather like Twitter’s early ‘What are you doing?’ question.

Different media types could be introduced later on so people would eventually make voice or video recordings of their dreams. That would rock.

I love the idea of asking the question, “what did you dream today?” or even “what did you dream last night?” Its a very catchy punchline and sums up the project nicely. The Flickr of dreams say one thing but “what did you dream today?” says something very different.

The point keeps coming up, why not make a facebook application? And finally I had a reply

People have suggested Ian should implement the idea as a Facebook app. He’s not particularly keen on this, preferring the Flickr model as “Flickr never exposes private stuff.”

Facebook’s EULA makes mydreamscape unworkable or at least cuts right into the users privicy which would make trusting the system almost impossible. Flickr have a good model as they never expose users private data and never will. Hence “the flickr of dreams” tag line.

I’ve presented at barcampmanchester3 and now at Social Media cafe manchester and each time I’ve had a positive response, but raised many more questions. Some of those question have been useful but none have been no this is a terriable idea. In actually fact I’ve picked up a few people who really want to get involved along the way. Each person has offered some advice and some more passion into the general idea. I think my next step is to do a map for the idea (a masssive A0 sheet of endless paper with information about the idea and details which I currently have in tomboynotes). I can then publish the map and make it even easier for people to develop the idea themsleves. Its also handy to have everything on one sheet, so I can put everything in context. This presentation isn’t really explaining the idea very well and does a bit of deservice to the underlying idea. I really hope to change for something better soon. But for now it explains the concept enough…

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