Category: design-and-ideas

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…

Dreamscape introduction for barcampman3

View more presentations from cubicgarden.

.

The new designers are back

So for a long time I use to call myself a designer/developer because I couldn’t quite put myself in one or the other category. This in between category was the best I could come up with at a time when the industry wasn’t very accepting of someone who couldn’t code but didn’t live in photoshop or walk around with a mac attached to there hip (obviously I’m totally joking about the last bit).

The problem started for me when I thought xml was a very cool technology and I started to use it for things in my design class. For example SVG gave me chills, I wouldn’t shut up about it. I mean a way to describe a picture or illustration without resorting to a describe field was amazing. And that was just the start. In previous years I learned about XHTML, XML, XSL, Xpath, SMIL, VRML (now X3d), Xpointer, Xlink, etc. All these technologies seemed to fit together nicely. So after spending some time with startup Edwards Churcher (a design/coding/business outfit based in fashionable Clerkenwell, London) I went back to college during the risk adverse dot bomb era and started doing work with these technologies. Thats also where I learned XSL 1.0, played with Apache Cocoon (the xml pipelining framework) and started messing with a XMLdb (existdb). I was also teaching the students about the technologies I was learning myself. Teaching interaction design students XSL was one of my biggest challenges at the time.

Anyway, before we go too far down memory lane, lets get back to the point.

All the designers were learning Flash and Shockwave (director) and the programmers were learning Java, PHP, Perl. I didn’t fit in either camp and even worst there seemed to be no one else I could spot who was going through the same identity crisis.

However as the industry got more mature, things started to come together and now I can gladly say I’m spotting more new designers (thats what I call them) that ever before. Some of them I’ve known for ages but they have been pigeon holed all this time or chosen work which has let them reflect a certain aspect of there knowledge or personality.

  • Chris Messina or FactoryJoe as he use to be called is a designer who learned to code. I use to think he was just a coder but after many meals and chats with him, I’ve come to learn that no he’s a designer really. If that wasn’t shocking enough, I also learned how old he is *lol*. What a guy!
  • Gavin Bell who now works for nature science magazine and I’ve known him for quite sometime but really well enough it seems. In a recent conversation with Jon Udell on Itconversation’s interview with innovators. Gavin talked about the challenge of having a design focus in a technical job (among other things). Its actually what prompted me to write this blog post.

New designers are popping out of the wood work all over the place and frankly this is no bad thing.

I was a recent barcamp in Manchester and I attended a session which was really a brainstorm for ideas. After the predictable ideas, I chimed in and said "heck I have a idea every few seconds. There ten a penny, here’s a few ideas for you…"

My boss (Adrian Woolard) talks about the continual use of design techniques to problem solve, collaborate and process a idea a lot. And he’s not wrong, I’m seeing it more and more. The thing we learned in the design world are being adopted and modified for creative people generally. For example BarCamp has its roots in something called Unconference which leads back to the design focused Openspace which goes right back to the 70’s I believe? There’s many examples of this and other design process’s being taken up.

Welcome to mydreamscape.org

a inception poster

I love Inception, there’s no doubt about that….

But what really got me going was the idea of dreams.

So here’s the background

Everyone has dreams but up till now dreams have been very personal. People have them and talk about them all the time to there close friends but up till now its not been something you share socially. Well I say that but actually people do share aspects of there dreams. For example

janeygw‎: @MetsThrifty Are you serious? omg I had such horrid dreams last night too

Clodyyyy‎: You wish you can record your dreams and then watch them later. #DamnItsTrue

collinbeballin‎: I have had so many bad dreams tonight that they have left me praying. And thats some real shit.

PatRobeck1ofHis‎: Goodnight, my friends. Dream good dreams!

ohhdarylann‎: if love is a way out, then please let me in. don’t start, darling, don’t you turn my nightmares into dreams once again

stephalicious‎: Just had a dream @natbat had taken up smoking and I threatened to tell @simonw if she didn’t stop 0_o

Natbat‎: Woke at 5am with panicked dreams. can’t sleep. wonder if I should just get up and have breakfast now. hungry

…. lots more on twitter people talking about there dreams on blogs.

So we share aspects of them with friends, family and even total strangers.

The concept

mydreamscape.org to become the flickr of dreams.

Make dreams social with controls so only certain people can see the parts you don’t want to disclose. Use social tagging to add relevance and additional metadata to the dreams.

The concept in more words

Why not have a place where you can share your aspects of your dreams with other people and of course perform analysis on your dreams?

When I say aspects of your dreams, I mean just that. You should be able to add levels of privacy around aspects of your dream. Bit like how flickr.com only shows you certain photos if your a friend or family. I expect this would be quite difficult to do but it should give you the option of defining certain aspects which are public, private and of course who can see that. Hey would you want your girlfriend to find out you have dreams about a ex-girlfriend every night?

So I expect the gui for that would generate some special but simple xml (I’m thinking about using a subset of XML encryption to hide the information in plain sight) . I imagine it would look something like the modern editors such as Etherpad (colored text to indicate who can see what) but there would be levels of access to tied to the information.

Etherpad

dreams tend to have some sort of structure but its not very defined but there’s no doubt that you can say this is how it started (even if it’s just I’m in a room with no windows) and a middle (a woman talks to me in french which I seem to be able to understand) and a end (she gets up and leaves through a wall, leaving me in the room alone, then I wake up). It may not be clear how you got there or even how it ultimately ends but you could just say I don’t remember to that section.

Obviously there will be the ability to run your dreams through a dictionary of sorts (this may cost) so you can work out what your dream is about. But on top of that there will be tags/keywords will link you to other people’s dreams. So if your dream is about falling off a building, you can see who else has similar dream or even the same dream? Maybe you might find people who are having the same dream but with a unique twist. Heck, you might even find people who are in your dream who happen to be having the same dream! Of course Locations can also be tagged using geo locations, so you can see who else has been having a dream around a certain location. I’d also like to include Times, so you can say if it was night or day. Also people, so you can say I had a dream and he or she was in it. There may be others but that will do for now.

This is really interesting information but when socially put together across many people you got something extra special. Not only can you see trends across dreams but you can also spot how memes start to spread and where they end up.

The other part of this is the ability to write comments or add annotations to your dreams. So certain people (definable list) can add tags or link to other stuff. For example a dream about identity thief might lead back to the new itv tv series “identity” which you might have forgotten about but your friends remember you watched a couple of days ago. A dream about running down endless stairs could be the result of watching inception and thinking/dreaming about the architects role. Basically you can have many people adding analysis to your dream instead of just one so called expert. In actual fact your friends may know you better and where aspects of your dreams come from.

I expect we’ll make the data freely available in the same way Okcupid.com makes stats about its users available.

Hows it going to make money?

  • Pro users – Selling access to the dream dictionary (PRO users) which won’t be a static thing, it will change based on what people say about there dreams. There may also be a limit on how many dreams we hold unless your a pro user which means its endless. Maybe also only pro users can tag other people dreams?
  • Advertising – If your not a pro user, you will get adverts next to the dream your reading. We can also add advertising to the aggregated pages like the one for falling (which I expect will be quite popular)
  • Trending – Although the data will be freely available, there will be different resolutions on the dream data. So if you pay you can get much richer data (obviously depending on the users preferences). I imagine you would be able to work out how many European citizens are dreaming about a certain delegate just before an election. Not only that but if those dreams or positive or negative.
  • Product and locational placements – Maybe a lot of people are dreaming about a certain location or a certain product. If you own that location or product you may want to own that page and make it more like yours? So for example http://www.mydreamscape.org/items/buzzlightyear/ – could be a page about buzzlight year in dreams and have images and links to the item its self. This would also be true of locations too for example http://www.mydreamscape.org/location/europe/london/thamesbarrier – would obviously link to the Thames barrier in London with information taken from Wikipedia.org and other open sources. The information architecture of exactly how this would this work needs to be sorted out.

A Totem

How am I going to build this?

Well I’m not sure. I’ve been looking at things like drupal and existing services such as Facebook to see if I can adapt there system to this purpose. But it looks like it requires some serious development as there some key elements which need work. However I expect once I post this, entry people might think wow nice idea, its got legs I might be interested in either…

  1. Getting involved, so we got a team of people interested
  2. Recommend some software or a service to set it up
  3. Steal the idea and build there own version (fine, but you must give me attribution)
  4. Steal the idea and have me help out on the build process (theres a whole lot more to this idea that what I described above, ask me if you want to know more)
  5. Build a plugin for another service which could supports this

The final word

There are some elements to this idea which may not work such as will people remember there dreams, will be willing to share them, etc but honestly I think its a killer of an idea and deserves to be built. You can just imagine what a resource it could turn out to be… and imagine this scenario…

“you were dreaming about me, but I was also dreaming about you. On the same bloody night? What are the chances of that?”

That would be amazing.

dreams are still very much a unknown or under-tapped process. We all have them even if we don’t always remember them. dream diaries, etc are good but what benefits could come to a dreamers dreams if there crowd-sourced or social? There is a lot of metadata we could add to our dreams, if we had the chance. We could start to really understand our dreams a lot better through the social network of our friends, families or strangers. Heck even if all else fails, it may get people thinking about dreams a lot more and considering what they can do with them. Be it control there dreams or as far as even sharing dreams.

mydreamscape.org and mydreamscape.com could be the start of something massive, remember where you first read about it first…

So who wants to help me make it happen?

Like Instapaper, love ReaditLater

I was enjoying instapaper because it just works but then I checked out Readitlater which someone wrote a nice script in Calibre (if you have a ebook readder and are not using this, you should be) for. And I’m converted. Its not as casual but with things like the firefox plugin, its certainly a much richer experience and works how I tend to work. There API could also be very useful for my plans to do with semantic desktop logging or even to move things into a archive space like delicious.

Ada Lovelace Day: Why Do You Share?

Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt is passing around a survey which I believe is ok to share. It takes 5mins and the results are already up and worth looking through.

I also didn’t get around to posting it due to a error on my blog, Tara Hunt is my finding ada. Shes a pretty amazing lady and know not everyones favorite but you have to agree, shes always got something good to say. She’s also been a massive supporter of encouraging more ladies into the tech scene and putting her nose into areas where its not welcomed. She truly breaks down barriers and is a leading expert in her field of social media and marketing. For someone with such a massive cv and impressive background, she can certainly kick back and enjoy a drink after a long day. I was actually shocked the other day to find out Tara Hunt’s real age, she always seemed so mature that I had assumed older. There’s no edge to Tara at all, she is exactly what you see. I would love to see her talking to the next generation more often, as she as so much more to give.

This is why Tara Hunt is my Finding Ada for 2010.

11th May: Malcolm Gladwell Live in Manchester

Malcolm Gladwell

The author of What The Dog Saw, Outliers, The Tipping Point and Blink.

Described by The Observer as ‘The most influential thinker of the iPod generation’, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell returns to the UK with a new live show to mark the publication of his new book What The Dog Saw. This is a rare live opportunity to see Malcolm’s brilliantly entertaining amalgam of storytelling and intuitive thinking, which has captivated UK audiences both in the West End and on tour.

I’m chopping at the bit to get my ticket, this is one I certainly can not miss, neither should you.

Pleo Autopsy video from Makerfaire

Pleo is one of those super hightech toys which people seem to love or hate. It draws a lot of attention because its beautifully life like. But how would you feel if you saw Pleo taken a part by a maker? There’s a manifesto which makers always quote,

If you can’t open it, you don’t own it

That might be the case, but its a little freaky watching the poor Pleo stripped of its skin. Now to be fair the Pleo was half working anyway but to see it lying there with its eyes looking out across the camera, is almost too much to bear.

I remember a long time ago when I was at an event in London and some jurk comes on stage and flying kicks a Aibo off the stage. He shouted, its not real as the crowd all held there mouths gasping. It was certainly one way to start a debate about humans putting there feelings onto objects. A very interesting debate which I can’t help remember after seeing this video. Thanks Elin Roberts for posting it.

Windows phone 7 interface

Windows phone 7

I actually like the new interface of Windows phone 7. The Zune type interface works well on a small device and to be fair it all makes a lot of sense. I’ll be honest and say its fresh and somewhat exciting to see Microsoft’s Mobile team take a total step back and attempt to redesign the whole experience of the mobile again. No icons, no chrome, no backgrounds, just a sliding scope which logically makes sense. Impressive! I can’t believe this is the same company who worked hard on version 6.5!

I’ll have to reconsider writing off Microsoft in the mobile world.

Hello 2010, welcome to the new blog

2010

So I finally decided to switch my blog to wordpress and on top of that I was able to install storytlr open source.

I’m still in the process of doing all the redirects and general cleaning up but its coming together quite nicely. Once its all stable I’m hoping to spend some time sorting out the styles and themes.

Getting the entries out of Blojsom was easy as pie but then converting them into a format which WordPress wouldn’t barf on was a big problem. In the end I wrote a throw away XSL to do it, because it WordPress didn’t like namespaced elements or generally anything over the standard RSS 2.0 elements. I did manage to push over the Categories and Tags but had to split them apart in WordPress later.

My whole thing is hosted with GoDaddy on their new European Servers and will be quite slow while it caches all requests.

I love Blojsom but I never upgraded to version 3.x which required a database to work. With the need for a database, it meant the ground between WordPress and blojsom was a less so. Then add cheap hosting, amazing plugins, themes and community. And its pretty much a no brainer. I also found that less and less blog editors are supporting Blojsom (some kind of metaweblog xmlrpc category issue). So now I’m able to use Bilbo which is a KDE editor with support for pretty much everything WordPress allows. I’m also able to use Google Gears which is useful when offline.

This was also a chance to get a little more serious about my blogging and footprint online. Hence I’m really hoping to stretch what storytlr can do for me and some of the projects I have for it.

In the meantime, let me know if you see anything very weird which I may have missed….