Category: design-and-ideas

Thinking Digital Conference 2009 Highlights Film from Herbert Kim on Vimeo.

Tickets for 2010 are available now… So what you waiting for? Honestly the conference is unmissable and I'll be at the next one for sure.

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Stowe Boyd calls it deep structure for twitter, Chris Messina terms it baking in meta into twitter and somewhat jokely picoformats. Call it what ever you like but Microsyntax.org is aiming to deliver structure to our short messages. I say short messages because I think the thing they miss is the fact thats its not just about Twitter. We use short messages in loads of places including Text messages (sms/mms) and other microblogging platforms.

From Microsyntax.org,

Over the last several months, I have written a great deal about new types of ‘microsyntax’ for Twitter at my Message blog. By microsyntax I mean various ways to embed structured information right into the text of Twitter messages. The most well-known sort of microsyntax are the retweet convention (or ‘RT’) and hashtags (or twitter tags). (I have also referred to this as microstructure, but I believe that microsyntax is perhaps more self-explanatory.)

These microsyntax conventions arose from the user community, and are variably and differently supported by Twitter and the many clients that are in use. Many people don’t remember that the use of ‘@’ to indicate that a message was to be sent to a specific user’s attention (a reply or a mention) is a convention that grew up with the service’s earliest days.

We have some relatively mature conventions — like hashtags (‘#twitter’ or ‘#ruby’, for example) — that have spread into wide use but are not directly supported by Twitter itself, and where different applications may support them in very different ways.

At the other extreme, we have new conventions appearing — like CoTweet’s use of ‘^’ preceding initial of authors in group twitter accounts, my recent suggestion for ‘/’ as syntax to precede or enclose locations (as in ‘/Germany’ or ‘/156 South Park, San Francisco CA/’), or my proposal for subtags (like ‘#sxsw.kathysierra’ or ‘#w2e.PR’) — and these could lead to confusion or conflicts between contending approaches to the same purpose.

As a result of all this activity, and the potential for collective action in these efforts, we are launching a new non-profit, Microsyntax.org, with the purpose of investigating the various ways that individuals and tool vendors are trying to innovate around this sort of microsyntax, trying to define reference use cases that illuminate the ways they may be used or interpreted, and to create a forum where alternative approaches can be discussed and evaluated. We may even get involved in the development of proof-of-concept implementations that can act as reference architectures for microsyntactic extensions to the Twitter grammar emerging in the real time stream.

In the upcoming weeks, I and other contributors will be enumerating all the known microsyntax for Twitter, and exploring the interaction of those which each other and with other, external applications.

This is great but Stowe and Chris are under illusion that publishing a pico format is the end of the game. From Chris's blog post,

If I’ve learned anything from the microformats process, it’s that anyone can invent a schema or a format, but getting adoption is the hard part (and also the most valuable). So, in order to promote adoption, you should always try to model behavior that already exists in the wild, and then work to make the intensions of the behavior more clear, repeatable and memorable.

Most microsyntax efforts fail to follow this process, and as a result, fail in the wild. Efforts that employ the scientific method tend to see more success: hashtags modeled the convention started by IRC channels and Jaiku (Joshua Schachter also used the hash to denote tags in the early days of Delicious); the $ticker convention (from StockTwits) follows how many financial trade publications denote stock symbols. And so on.

So when it comes to proposing new behaviors that don’t yet exist in the wild, I think that the Microsyntax.org project will be an excellent place to convene and host conversations and experiments, many of which will admittedly fail. But at minimum, there will be a record of what’s been tried, what the thinking and goals were, and where, hopefully, some modest successes have been achieved.

Good on these guys for trying to focus efforts, I think there is a tall hill in front of them but even if they can convince some of the applications/service makers to use some of the microsyntaxes that would be great. Of course its got to come from both sides. Look at the L: syntax which came and went, even though twittervision.com was using it.

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Lots of people talk and watch TEDtalks but they forget the original pioneer of bringing conference presentations/talks to the people. IT Conversations which is now part of the conversations network.

I just heard a fantastic talk from Douglas Rushkoff from the Web 2.0 conference. Here's the details.

A few “bugs” in society from hundreds of years ago have had profound consequences for society today, according to author Douglas Rushkoff. In this presentation from the Web 2.0 Expo he points out two false assumptions about the world, their medieval origins, and how the internet has provided a brief window where we can fix them.

One myth is that corporations promote free market capitalism, but they were originally monopolies granted by royalty to prolong and fund monarchy. The other myth is that currency is money, but national currency has prevented thriving trade among peers that existed in ancient times. The new opportunity the internet provides is to make a living by building and keeping businesses that create value for other people, rather than large corporations.

You can listen online or download the whole thing here. I also noticed there's a video for the talk on Blip.tv. Rushkoff is always a profound speaker who I've always had time for. Yes he waves his hands around a lot and is kind of vague on somethings but he certainly gets you thinking.

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Electric still had the perception of big, clunky and not attractive till Tesla changed all that with there very attractive roadster. Of course people have been building electric motorcycles (and maxi-scooters) but like the Tesla Roadster example, they have been so so till this beast above. Its designed by Yves Béhar who also designed the OLPC XO laptop and can ride up to 150 miles on a 2 hour charge. Forgetting how amazing it looks, it can also do up 150mph and has roughly 100bhp (that's over double my 600cc scooter, but my scooter is very heavy). So its about the speed and power of Kawasaki Ninja I believe. I believe its twist and go (aka no gears) and launches next month. On my full motorcycle licence I could actually ride one of these. So look out, who knows what might happen in the future… Oh by the way I love the tag line on the microsite, its the bike the environment would want you to ride.

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Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so.

A fantastic TED talk which really got me thinking. Seth Godin is highly rated in most circles but I've not really come in contact with anywhere, even in my reading. So in the talk above, Seth gives a presentation about tribes which I gathered he wrote a book on. The core message was about leading a movement, and you know what he's so right. For example, BarCamp is a movement and its growing getting stronger with them popping up and being used for many different things. We have a few pioneers to thank for that. But most of those people have moved on to the next thing. They never stop changing the world which would be a great subtitle to have on your card. These pioneers also fall into the trap of never being able to explain what they actually do.

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Diagrams can be so much more powerful and easier to understand that words. So here's a diagram which explains the jabbering post I wrote a little while ago. Please note I'm not saying this is exclusive to dance music, I'm sure it happens across many other different types of music genres. I'm just using dance music as a example.

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You might have heard how my machine had a meltdown on stage at Next09 but it wasn't that simple. First up I was covering for David Brain of Edelman who was booked to talk about Crowd Surfing, I didn't want to just talk about the same thing as my other talk so I put together a presentation during the first day on my laptop and finally finished it late in the night after the party. Actually some people might remember me working during the after party working on the presentation instead of blogging because the hotel I booked didn't have decent wifi.

The next day I turned up 15mins early and had some problems getting my head mic on because of the size of my head. Anyway the moment came to plug in my laptop and the German Technician looked at my laptop puzzled because it wasn't what he was expecting. He was expecting Windows. So unfortunately in a rush while trying to communicate in sudo english/german he tried to plug my laptop in. I was trying to help because he was getting very confused with my multiple workspaces and the general layout of ubuntu. What made things even worst was there was no local loop display of the 2nd screen, so when it was working I couldn't see what was actually on it till they switched the main display. And thats the thing, it was working. We got extended desktop display working but I couldn't see where to drag the presentation to show it. So we decided to go for mirror or cloned display. We changed the settings and resolution and suddenly the screen refreshed and there was nothing on screen. Of course I couldn't see the other screen to see what was really going on. At this point the the Moderator Patrick de Laive, stopped talking and I was there just in silence.

The silence was only broken with people getting up and leaving. I rebooted my machine and tried plan B which was to get the presentation off on to another machine. Usually I have a copy on a thumb drive/my phone and email/internet but because I had finished the presentation so late I had not done either. When rebooted, the screen was still blank, so I switch to the commend line and tried to copy it that way but the usb devices didn't seem to mount in there usual way. By now its already 10mins into the time and so I give up and they provide another PC laptop. This laptop takes time to setup and has no internet access so I call to the crowd for someone to lend me there laptop which is online. After a while someone did come forward but by then over 15mins had gone and you know what conference wifi is like, so it was difficult to show any of the videos or even sites.

They always say this happens at the worst of times, and it certainly did. Luckily the talk on Open Media later went smooth and without any technical hitches.

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So I've finally read through most of Wired UK's launch issue and as you can see its sitting on my coffee table along with some other bits and pieces. Rather that going into a detailed review about the magazine I thought I'd pull up a couple of other blogs which sum up my thoughts.

Maz Hardey of the girlygeekdom blog makes a really good point that Wired UK is made for men. What is up with that? The adverts are all very much like you'd see in GQ magazine and there's little to no input from woman writers.

Skip to the front of Wired (P.15) and the 05.09 Contributors Page, of the six main contributors, one, Susan Greeenfield (Baroness no less), is the pioneer of content contributed by women. I am not suggesting that Wired is all male-to-male content. Far from it. UK Wired is, in my opinion, far better than its US counterpart in the publication of balanced, interesting and satisfyingly technology divulgent coverage. But then I flick back again through the magazine and the if the masculine led written word doesn't hit you, the masculine emphasis of marketing and advertisement will. TagHeur watch here, Sony Bravia with football coverage there, Jaguar where 'the thrill lasts much longer' and Tom Ford 'for men' set the tone for the First Edition.

A lot of wired UK is republished american articles with some bits and pieces from its UK editors. And you can tell, for example the review of folding backs without the most popular folding bike in the UK? Whoops!? Simon Waldman's lid lifting is points out mistakes like this one is generally a very interesting and worthy read, even if its slightly bias being from the guardian and all that. Simons's point about iplayer is well…. interesting. Obviously it would be foolish for me to comment.

The front cover carries the strapline “How the iPlayer saved the BBC”. Sounds interesting. The headline to what is flagged a “Wired investigation” is “The man who saved the BBC” (that's a big difference) with a picture of Anthony Rose “the renegade South African licensed to upgrade the BBC”. Now, I happen to know that Rose is the BBC's head of digital media technology (because I looked it up on Google), but I've read the piece three times now, and asked someone sitting next to me to read it, and I'm 99% certain they don't actually mention his job title in the piece.

I realise details such as job titles can probably be filed under “Tired” – but it matters, if you are telling a story about how something happened in a business. It's one thing if the chief executive makes it happen, another if it's the marketing director and another if it's the security guard.

And anyway, at least half of the piece is about Ashley Highfield. Why not chuck in Erik Huggers and call it the men who saved the BBC. And while we're at it – please could you specify exactly how it has saved the BBC? Like, it would have had to shut down without it?

So with all my moaning about the magazine, will I be buying the next one? Well yes, its a neat coffee table magazine. Full of super styled graphics, overblown photos and enough substance to pick up and read for 5mins.or so. Everyone whos come over so far has picked it up off the coffee table and had a flick through it. So between buying some gadget mag like T3/Stuff, a men's fashion mag like GQ or a lads mag like Nuts, Zoo or whatever else. I do pick Wired UK. But there is a question of do I really need to buy a magazine at all?

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When someone told me the new ipod shuffle only works with its original headphones I thought they meant in the same way most phones have some proprietary adapter. Not that the device is totally useless without the headphones due to all the controls being on the headphones. Yes its small and has 4gig but how long will the headphones last? If your anything like me headphones last from a weekend to 6 months. I actually bought a pair of headphones in Dixons while heading out to Las Vegas and they were broken the day I came back. I did get some super-glue and fix them but trust me there not very attractive. And its not only that. I also find myself switching headphones, so when I'm playing with my pacemaker device, I will use the in the ear if I got nothing else, but much prefer a couple of over the ear dj headphones. When riding on the scooter, obviously over the ear headphones won't work. When doing something like running I use my bluetooth over the ears and back headphones. So the concept or even reality of only being able to use one set of headphones is insane. Even Sony and other make controlers for there devices but still allow you to plugin your own headphones after the controler. I hate to say it and I'm sure some apple fanboy will comment that i'm wrong, How can anyone buy into Steve Jobs vision of the world where you only use one pair of headphones with your music player? I'm not typical user sure, but still what incase you want to plug this device into a car stereo or friends system for a party? I'm sorry but this just shows that Apple are more interested in making devices which are made of puppets that people.

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I saw this film documentary at mix09 one night. After the showing the director Gary Hustwit opened questions and answers from a developer focused crowd. I did express my opitions to the crowd and Gary. The film left me a little feeling uneasy at the notion of hero worshipping the designers behind some of the products and services. In essence the film feel like two halves. First half is about the process and aesthetics of design, so obvious examples like Apple come up. But much more interestingly is part 2 which is more about the affect of design on culture and society. I think Miles once described designers as the whore of capitalism, and after watching a good part of the first half you can see how that kind of fits in place. Ben Darlow (kapowaz) thinks I'm full of crap and I need to check my baggage at the door. Yes I did cringe when Jonathan Ive was talking about the process of making the new mac book but to be fair its been talked about to death and its like me jabbering on about the beauty of XSLT. Sometimes you just don't really want to hear it. Actually its that kind of inward looking, which I struggle to get and be part of when I was studying design at university.

Anyway, its not all bad, actually later in the film it gets really good. Some of the oldskool designers admit they didn't have the environmental impact as a thought in there mind when designing, now thats simply not possible and although that makes things very difficult its a creative constraint. There was also a small part about customisation and personalisation. Its one of those things which I think is the most interesting part of design. Designing to enable others to hack and customise. I wasn't the only one who picked up this point. During further questioning, the point was made that the person buying the product should have ownership of the product, and that means if they choose to paint it a different colour or customise it, they should be able to, or at least not feel like they ruined someone's design. The site which was mentioned was ikeahacker, which although Ikea suggest you use something a certain way in a certain context in the showrooms and catalogue. Gets completely turned on its head.

So generally the film is a good one, its easy to get wrapped up in design and think about the pure aesthetics but design is so much more that just pretty shapes and paint jobs. And later in the film, this is explored in more detail. Garry says this is a 2nd of trilogy, so I'm looking forward to hearing what subject he will cover for the third and final one.

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The Cluetrain Manifesto has a great rule about advertising.

74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

But afterwards theres the rule which follows.

75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

Well be this a Samsung advert or not, its certainly taken number 75 and run with it. If only all products were this good and the advertising was this clever.

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I tried to run Twirl (a microblogging client) and I get this error. I attempt to run snackr and I get the same error. I try and force a update using the latest version of the Air framework and I get the same dialog, and I remember exactly why I switched from Windows to Ubuntu.

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in fusion rollercoaster from the ground from Ian Forrester on Vimeo.

I resized the Blip.TV version down from 1280 x 720 to 640 x 360 to match the Flickr version, but otherwise I've done nothing to the quality or videos. Vimeo also won't let you embed the HD version, so your looking at the lower quality version stretched

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When I first saw the Beetham Tower or the Deansgate tower I quickly liked Manchester. It says a lot about where Manchester is and where its going. It was great to see Vertical City cover it, a shock because I never really thought of it as anything special compared to the rest of the worlds skyscrapers. Lovely looking and almost affordable to live in but nothing like 1 Canada Square or 375 Park Avenue. I think you can catch up with the whole thing on 4OD if you missed it.

As the tallest residential skyscraper in the UK, Manchester's distinctive Beetham Tower is turning heads and dividing opinion.

Heading up a new generation of skyscrapers that are regenerating Britain's post-industrial cities, Beetham is at the heart of a battle between traditionalists and modernists.

Despite producing some of the world's leading architects such as Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, Britain isn't exactly enamoured with skyscrapers.

And this reluctance to embrace the high-rise even extends to the country's future king, Prince Charles.

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