Category: design-and-ideas

Everyone is loving Prezi, people are totally raving about it. But I have serious problems with the technology behind Prezi.

As far as I can tell Prezi generates a huge flash file which is bad enough but on top of that is it seems to suck everything into it and nothing much seems to come out. So for example it can injest pdf file, images, text, movies, etc. But can you export to a presentation file which people can take away? Can you export to a printable for format? Can you export to a movie? It doesn't seem very clear from any of the information I have seen. In actual fact you can only export to a format which requires another Prezi player, to play it back! The business model is also worth mentioning, 119 dollars a month for version which includes offline editing but not much else. All the payment grades are tied to there online storage too, which is very expensive for what you get. For example how would you pay for 2gig of storage? Certainly no where up from 30 dollars, which still assumes the offline editor is worth 90 dollars. From a Data Portability angle this is like the spawn of satan surely? And I'm sure from a open source and free software angle, this has got to have Tim Oreilly and Richard Stallman in chills at night? Lastly, what on earth are TED thinking sponsoring this stuff?

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.

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TEDx North has gone live, and if your playing catch up its a combination of 5 different TEDx (x being independently run) events.

• TEDxLiverpool – 7th August 2009
• TEDxLeeds – 10th September 2009
• TEDxSheffield – 16th September 2009
• TEDxNewcastle – 30th September 2009
• TEDxManchester – 2nd October 2009

Each event will have excellent live speakers and previous TEDtalks. They promise to bring you a taste of TED without the huge cost and long waiting list.

I’m happy to say the BBC’s famous Studio 7 will also host TEDxManchester on the 2nd October. We have room for 100’s of people, so it should be one of the biggest events and a great end to the series of collaborative events. We've teamed up with FutureEverything and

There are upcoming TEDx's in the south, midlands, scotland and of course the rest of the world too.

Unlike others I don't have a real relationship with TED, I actually experienced Pop!Tech before TED because they would put there shows on IT Conversations.com for anyone to download and listen to. Then Pop!Tech started streaming there conference to the world. I remember getting it working on my XBMC xbox at one point. Pop!tech never felt as elitist as TED and Thinking Digital was doing great things for the UK but none of them were of them quite moved into the exciting decentralised mode of barcamp. I had noticed a small break away conference called BIL which I had considered putting on in the UK, because it was more fitting with the barcamp philosophy. But Herb Kim asked me if I'd like to run TEDxManchester pretty soon after the recent Thinking Digital. So after a look into TEDx, I agreed and the rest is history as they say.

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I have already given the Windows Mobile App Store the thumbs down and put the boot into the Apple App store. So its clear I believe there a fad and other factors will take over very soon.

What's reassuring is that Google also see the problems with App stores and in this interview with FT.com found via Jyri, they describe the problem. Boiled down to a sentence, the web is the platform.

Apple customers may have downloaded 1.5bn applications from its AppStore in the past year for their iPhones and iPod touches, but the service does not represent the future for the mobile industry, according to Google.

Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist, (pictured centre) told the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco on Thursday that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in future.

“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

Mr Gundotra won some support from the rest of the panel. Michael Abbott, head of application software for Palm, said advances in the browser being introduced through HTML5 standards meant that web applications could tap features of particular phones such as their accelerometers.

Once again I need to give some credit to Chris Messina for waking me up to the fact that the web has won. Google and Palm have also put out products and services which operate on this fact. And today at a presentation from Aza Ruskin, I quized him about Ubiquity and the notion of browser vs the OS. I didn't push hard or even mention Google Chrome OS but he came back to me with a lot of interesting thoughts about barriers around personal content rather that a barrier between online and offline content. Would have liked to have explored but it was clear that Aza Ruskin was also talking like the web had won.

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Matt Mason gave pretty much the same talk at Thinking Digital and I've been wanting to link or post the video ever since. I love that classic quote, Pirates are the most innovate people.

Here's the main takeaway headlines from Matt's talk,

1. If you want to beat pirates, copy them.
2. Good business is the best art.
3. Don't let legal ruin a good remix without talking to marketing first.
4. Abudance is better that advertising
5. Some good experiences will always be scarce.
6. In an economy based on abundance, your business model needs to be a virtuous circle.

And I'd like to add I just paid for a digital download of Matt's book The Pirates Dilemma. I bought it for about 3 pounds which seems fair to me. About the same price as a expensive coffee or decent sandwich at lunch time. As Matt, Cory and Tim Oreilly has put it before, The problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Well hopefully the video and this blog post might have helped Matt become less obscure.

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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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