Web of Flow

I think Stowe Boyd is a very clever man he's thoughts behind social tools run very deep. And rightly so, while the rest of us were trying to grapple with social anything, he coined the term social tools and understood the power of these tools and the conversation. I kind of liken him to people like Doc Searls and Howard Rheningold but instantly more accessible.

A lot of people don't like his presentation style which is more a jumble of mini-thoughts and pointers. So when someone pointed me at Phil Windley's piece about Stowe's latest thought, I knew what the bulk of the post would be about.

Although Phil may not have enjoyed the talk much, I certainly did. It also got me thinking.

He shows his desktop: Snackr,
Friendfeed flow UI, Flickr, Twitterfox, and so on. These are all
flow apps. There are dozens of streams now and there will be lots
more in the future. These differ on the basis of the social
interactions they enable. There will be 5 or 6 themes, but lots of
implementations.

This leads to a model called “lifestreaming.” People are continually
broadcasting their life to groups of friends and even strangers.
People know where you are and ask you questions about things in your
life because of life streaming.

If you take a look at one of my desktops from yesterday when I was watching the us elections (go obama). You can clearly see some common elements between Stowe's and mine.

In Stowe's talk and screenshot he's got the friends activity stream as a page up on the right but using rss there's no need to have that at all. Actually I noticed my microblogging client Gwibber supports not only microblogging services but also Facebook and Flickr. I think with some hacking around in the Python code I can get it to have a generic RSS input too. Another interesting element is snackr, which is the scrolling rss driven marqaue at the bottom. If we could get Gwibber to spit out rss too, that would be cool for snackr. But I can't help but feel the guys are Faradaymedia have already venutured into this area before with Touchstone/Particls. Unfortuelly having the attention engine on your machine wasn't the best of ideas. Which is where a combination of something new I also heard about at Web 2.0 expo could come in useful in relevency area.

Not one to hide my ideas but this time, I want to try hacking around with some software to see what I build either into Gwibber or Snackr.

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Torrent Freak TV starts slowly

‘TorrentFreak TV’ is a biweekly recap of some of the best, most interesting or remarkable stories from the wonderful world of BitTorrent. Its quite a basic show but what got me blogging was the Torrent ratings vs TV Ratings. Its at the end of each episode and shows whats the most popular TV shows are based on torrents and the other based on Neilson's rating. There not even close, which shows once again the change of behaviour people have once they have access to anything and everything. I mean why would you settle for crap like Dancing with the Stars when you could watch Heroes or catch up on Dexter? I do wonder if any British shows will break into the chart? Subscribe to this feed for updates.

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Don’t say I didn’t tell you so…

Oh lovely another screenshot and example for my presentation about data portability in cloud computing.

Yes Yammer went down yesterday and worst still seemed to be throwing out data all over the place. A work mate of mine reported getting some email from Yammer when he's not even registered with the system. I assume the email address came from when someone else request you join Yammer.

The cloud is great, but examples like this are really worrying!

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Upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10, thumbs up

I upgraded on my laptop with no problem using the network update. Since the upgrade I've noticed a couple of things. One the memory usage is much lower, things seem to be hovering around 1.2gig and I have Firefox 3.03 (28tabs), Evolution, Hamachi, Gossip, Specto, RSSOwl (400+ feeds), Gwibber, dropbox, rescuetime, etc all open and active.

Secondly 3g and phone support is much better. I plugged in the Nokia N80 today on the train and it picked it up and suggested using it as a 3g modem. The windows mobile phone is once again simply plug in and go. No settings needed. I've tried to do both over bluetooth but the Nokia ran out of battery (tipical) and Ubuntu for some reason does not see my Windows mobile phone.

Thridly things seem just faster and smoother. I'm using compiz-fusion and the community have added some nice effects which flow along smoothly using Open GL 2.0. But everything seems more responsive that before.

Its not only the upgrade which has made my laptop happy recently. I found a really good twitter client called Gwibber. It works with almost everything including Twitter, Jaiku, Indent.ca, Pownce, Digg, Flickr, etc. No Plurk, friendfeed or Ping.fm support however. But I was thinking if I look into it, I might be able to alter the flickr or digg option to support RSS feeds generally. Or alter one of the others to match the friendfeed api.

Glyn, sent me a email to finally solve my problem with there being no RSS screensaver. This Ubuntu forum has everything you need to get going, but basiclly you install xscreensaver then configure it for fliptext with the url option enable a rss feed. Its like the Tiger screensaver but with less style.

I've also just discovered Pidgin has tons of plugins including a Skype and Facebook one. The skype one only works if skype is also running and the facebook one does odd things to your contact list. For example if you have requests to be a friend it will throw up a alert for each one for you to accept or deny. This is painful when you  Its a nice idea but very buggy in practice.

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A Complete History of My Sexual Failures

No of course not mine… You think I'd just put that out on my blog one day. Not a chance.

Instead a complete history of my sexual failures is a candid and slightly humorous look at a guy (Chris Waitt's) past and present attempts at a relationship. Some of it is cringe worth and some of it laugh out loud bad but overall its a film worth watching at some point in the future. He's a review I got from IMDB.

Meet Chris Waitt. He's a thirty-something auteur and amateur, who
embarks on a project to catalog his past girlfriends following in the
footsteps of Jim Jarmusch and “Broken Flowers” featuring the
middle-aged Bill Murray. The end result is funnier and different in
other aspects, too. Waitt comes off as a Kurt Cobain lookalike, whose
toilet floor is carpeted in pubic hair w/ used toilet paper rolls in
the corner unlike a furniture catalog by IKEA. He walks around carrying
his furry microphone and baggy-saggy pants like a leftover grunge-wars
survivor. His “Swedish” face is, however, only the surface, because
things are boiling beneath it. As the events that unfold testify, he's
got enough balls to visit a dominatrix, test his street-credibility vs.
women, serenade a psychotherapist citing “crack-whores” and “religious
virgins” and trip on Viagra like we've never seen it happen. The movie
suggests that in the lives of most/many GenXers, there are four
recurring factors apart from differences in personal hygiene and CV: a)
A lost loved one is a mental skeleton in the closet b) (S)he is
targeted at least once for reclamation c) Inevitable failure on this
front may lead to creation of wicked senses of humor (as a defense
mechanism) and d) other people and one's own projects claim the (wo)man
in the end. Lived life and history can not be changed. If our
relationships are like bridges, we almost always burn them after saying
cogently goodbye. Because of these strengths, I was mildly indignant
that the audience seemed to revel only in Waitt's failures and
shortcomings on the sexual front. I could think of many girls who
wouldn't be his match or worthy of him as a date

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Email is broken

I'm so close to giving up on Email all together.

I have many email accounts and they all do different things. Everything was cool till Evolution (my mail client) started being selective about what email it would download from the server. Before that I started noticing a load of email on my personal email address, so I was having to add spam control to that account.

Don't get me started on my work email. My BBC email is like the remains of a atom bomb. I blame Outlook 2003 for a start, add limited spam control and the fact my email address is everywhere online. You have a recipe for another atom bomb. Ideally I would use another mail client like Thunderbird but thats only half of the story. The out office no longer works, mail rules like automaticly forward messages are disabled and usually when I got time to reply to emails like at home while watching tv is made very difficult using a windows only VPN solution or hourly webmail option.

Yes its bloody frustrating and I can't help but think I'm much more productive when using social software. Hell even instant messenger is better for me that email.

Suw's talk from Fowa and Web2.0 Expo about the problems people have with email was only the start. I was seriously shaking my head up and down like a nodding dog when I heard Luis Suarez from IBM talk at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe. The talk was about his battle with giving up on email. People said he would be fired but 37 weeks on, he's still working for IBM.

I think theres something about this and the slow movement which fit really well. Its not simply junking your email, its about applying the right amount of effort at the right point. I looked at my stats for working in Rescue time and seriously the amount of time I spend in Outlook or Evolution is just wrong. My Efficiency is very high but its all happening within email.



Its time to sort all these things out once and for all.

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A professional camera setup using one Sanyo Xacti?

Sanyo HD1000 being used

When I first saw the Sanyo Xacti HD1 I thought wow you could film a movie on this easily. Some people totally disagree but I felt the quality was good enough to pass for most things online and even offline. But to be fair the mpeg4 codec wasn't quite good enough and the lens wasn't big enough to get lots of light down it. So when I first saw the Sanyo Xacti HD1000, I started thinking hey this is the revision which could be the break through camcorder.

Well it seems I'm not the only one, thinking this way. I met a startup company doing interviews with people all over the place using simply a Sanyo Xacti HD1000 with a radio mic and large light. It was perfect, the presenter would move the medium hand mic back and forth between himself and the person being interviewed. While the camera man would hold the camera generally quite still and check the levels on his in the ear headphones.

I grabbed a few minutes with the camera man and asked him about his setup. He said he use to walk around with a Canon DV camera but its too big and heavy plus the “downtime” of encoding footage was costly. He said the camera is great but the light makes all the difference to the footage. He also said he'd considered the HD1010 but he's waiting for the 3CCD version before upgrading.

I have more photos of course…

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Microsoft embraces the cloud and its technologies

cloud office

So I did say in a few presentations recently, that I'm dying to replace my slide of Microsoft Livemesh and Ray Ozzie's thoughts about cloud computing with something more cloud like. Well yesterday Microsoft unveiled Azure, a operating system for the cloud. From my understanding, its like Google App engine but using .net instead of python. They do say Python, PHP, Ruby, etc are coming soon.

I did sit and watch the Channel9 video where he explains the whole thing over 40mins and it does sound good but not ground breaking in my own mind. Could be useful for the backstage wild west server but I expect the community would litch me before I got close to suggesting it.

So after the cloud computing announcement of Azure, Microsoft went on to surprise us all with a consumer facing announcement that Windows live ID will OpenID 2.0.

Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider. You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!

I wonder if they ever plan to support access to there own services via openID?

But the biggest announcement was of course a demo of microsoft office live which is like google docs but microsoft office. Unsuprisingly Microsoft will still be selling copies of Microsoft Office 14 in shops.

So Microsoft have certainly put a foot in cloud computing but between livemesh, azure and officelive I'm not exactly wow'ed. More me too that trailblazing.

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Web 2.0 Expo Europe, a review

Tim Oreilly

Yes! The O'reilly team have finally got it going on in Europe. Last year's Web 2.0 Expo somewhat sucked, but for the wrong reasons. The venue was terrible , I mean worst that anywhere else I've been. They placed the expo in the middle of this huge lifeless exhibition centre and the staff made everyone feel like a alien. Some people say the Excel Centre can feel like that sometimes but honestly you have no idea how lifeless thing really can get till you see this place.

Anyway those days are forgotten now, the BCC is right in the middle of town and a short walk from Alexandplatz which meant more Sbahn riding for me that last time but it was worth it. 3 Levels, lots of space and helpful staff made already good conference really very good. So to get all the moans out of the way first and to be fair to the barcampberlin post I just wrote.

The programme for the conference was a little scatty, so yes there were interesting talks but it seemed like sometimes you had to choose between 3 really good sessions and sometimes settle for one. The quality of the speakers were variable sometimes too, but I think thats mainly down to language that anything. For example I was in the OAuth talk and by the time the presenter had explained a typical Oauth transaction as such, I was getting bored and started falling a sleep. It was about 15mins too long. The transaction could have been explained in less that 5mins I felt, specially because most people in room already knew how permissions and OpenID worked. That certainly reminds me that next time I should put a presentation in about something.

Food wasn't bad, a little basic but filling enough. I found the Wifi actually not bad but they seemed to be blocking ports, so Jabber didn't work which meant no Jaiku, Yammer, etc access while at the conference without going to the webpages. The web access was very slow but twitter perfectly usable. I wouldn't have wanted to upload any pictures while there because that was very slow.

Tim Oreilly came out and gave a keynote pretty much about what he had said in New York a while back. It was all about the downturn and what this means for web 2.0. Tim's been talking about it for a while anyway. This was also picked up by many other speakers so there was a sense of doom and gloom surround the conference but people were also telling us to do something meaningful. Great stuff but then again, there was 2 fireside chats with one Yossi Vardi and second Martin Varsavsky

Both talked about how they started and sold there startups. Which seemed very strange when you got all this doom and gloom happening. I guess it was all planned that way to break up the doom and gloom? Maybe? Anyway, I attended a lot of sessions and although being pretty tired from overdoing it on the night. What I found interesting was the amount of value you got for the 13 euro expo only pass. The obvious stuff like the talks, parties and food/drink were not included but most other things were fine (even the keynotes were included) On the Startup Ignite front, I liked aka-aki, Amazee and Soundcloud. But really didn't see the point of the others, specially iDesktopTV in the face of things like Boxee. The Berlin Girl Geekdinner was a blast and really started off the web 2.0 expo in the best of ways. I believe that night I stayed out with a small group of people including Nicole till 4am. I also did get into a conversation with Stephennie Booth about the subject of quotas or as I wanted to call it affirmative action. She had some really interesting things to say about it which I'd hoped to catch at the session Suw and Steph ran later but it didn't quite happen. Actually I have the recording of that session which need to upload I've uploaded to Blip.tv (mp3) (ogg). Rather that turn this entry into a massive long one, I'll end it by saying it was a really good conference. Everyone knew it and felt a lot happier about it that last year. I think next year, there should be a attempt to bring back web 2.0 open again (that worked well from last year) but in the same space of the berlin congress centre. Good Work Oreilly and Techweb, see you next year.

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