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Talking at Thinking Digital 2013

3 years ago I was meant to stand up at Thinking Digital and call an end to BBC Backstage, although I bet my reasoning wouldn’t be so well reasoned back then due to the obvious. A year before that I had the honour of speaking at Thinking Digital the next generation (a one day event aimed at young people of school age to twenties) and just after that hosting the makers workshop/panel. But having been at Thinking Digital right from the start, I had made talking on stage at Thinking Digital one of my aspiration in life.

Now I’m sooooo excited to announce I will be talking at Thinking Digital about one of my favourite subjects right now – Perceptive Media.

I will be sharing the slot with Adrian who will talk about BBC Connected Studio, like a phoenix rising from the end of BBC Backstage and BBC Innovation Labs.

I have been planning a different type of presentation from my usual one I did everywhere last year.

Expect short sharp and pretty intense… On top of that I’ll be showing something which we believe is a worlds first.

Yes your not going to want to miss this years, Thinking Digital conference…

Annotating Thinking Digital my forthoughts and aftermath

My experiments/hacking with the kindle has lead me to this point.

I’m on my way to thinking digital in Gateshead/Newcastle and with the kindle in my jacket pocket and I’m wondering how this whole thing would work. It seems likely that Amazon never really intended for there software to be used in this way and so there will be a massive delay in sharing notes during a conference. But in actual fact, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

When I though about using the kindle for notes, I didn’t want some sudo realtime thing. There’s already plenty of those type of systems. In actual fact just being able to write my own short notes and then share them was good enough. But if I can make some of those notes sharable then even better. Of course if someone else wants to share there notes with me, then cool beans but when I tend to write notes, they tend to only really make sense to the mind of a dyslexic designer/developer (oh thats me).

I guess part of the experiment is working out if;

Is it possible to share notes in a conference setting
How long are the updates between writing it, etc?
How is the kindle going to separate private notes from public notes?
Does it make sense in a conference like thinking digital?

Continue reading “Annotating Thinking Digital my forthoughts and aftermath“

Thinking Digital conference Kindle test1

Thinking Digital Conference Schedule on a Kindle

For those who have been interested in my kindle hacking/project. I’m happy to say the Thinking Digital conference schedule is now up on the Amazon Kindle store.

I might need to do some tweaking and yes it doesn’t look the best but remember it is a hack test and we can clean up the schedule next time for sure.

The first thing you will notice is the schedule actually costs money to download. £0.70 in the UK. The reason for this was down to Amazon. They charge a minimum fee of £0.99 to store and share the book over Amazon’s Whispernet. Although I think this is a bit of a rip off, specially because thinking digital already have a PDF version which they host on there own site, its not bad if this experiment does actually work. And heck, conference organizers could use it to make a little extra too I guess.

The Tweet URLs now seem to resolve to the book ok, which is a promising sign that my conclusions are actually correct.

So next step is to tell Herb Kim about the ebook and add notes next week at Thinking Digital. Hopefully I can pursued a couple of people to add notes too, so we can test the collaborative feature out. If you want to be part of that test, give me a shout… It should work on any device which runs the Kindle software.

A new/different way to collaborate at conferences

Been thinking for a while about the way I take notes…

I tend to write down short lines of text which tend to make sense to myself only, but I’ve been thinking for a while do I really need my laptop to take notes? Specially since my main laptop battery fails after about 5mins of use (my own fault for buying it cheap on ebay I guess) and my backup battery lasts 20mins maximum.

Here’s my options I’ve been thinking…

Use my laptop, bite the bullet and buy yet another laptop, then use Evernote or Tomboynotes
Leave my laptop at home, rely on my Android phone. Maybe even buy a spare battery, so I can run it at full power (wifi, bluetooth, etc) all day
Leave my laptop at home, rely on my Android phone and work out how to use my bluetooth keyboard with Android. Still need to think about battery however
Use my Kindle, which has pretty much endless battery battery and a physical keyboard

Of course I used my Kindle…

Kindle powered

The thought was Amazon added a feature which allows you to add notes to a ebook and share it with other people using the Kindle or Kindle reader. The notes are accessible on the web but theres a problem. The problem is Amazon notes only really work as expected with documents on the Kindle store. This means although I am able to add notes to a PDF of the Future Everything conference. First its a bit crap because its a PDF and secondarily I can’t share the notes publicly very easily (its worth noting Calibre does allow you to pull the notes off the Kindle).

Generally the keyboard on the Kindle is ok, nothing compared to my bluetooth keyboard but slightly better that the onscreen keyboard on my phone. The symbols option is a pain but because I’m writing rough notes, it doesn’t matter so much.

I also had a little bit of a panic when it seemed like most of my notes had gone. But it seems to be a way the Kindle shows the notes. In the end I was able to bring them all back (well they hadn’t actually gone anywhere). I was writing one set of notes per speaker but you can do more, making it possible to tweet/share the notes too which I might do more of next time.

In the picture above you can just about see the little numbers which are the different notes. The Kindle software assigns a number but it might do something different

So where from now…?

Well the Thinking Digital Conference is in less that two weeks, so I’m gearing up for doing the same with this wonderful conference but…

I’m going to get the conference schedule in a non-PDF format from Herb Kim
I’m going to try and get the schedule posted on Amazon’s Kindle Store, so when I share the notes. The actual document will be partly available instead of the usual message about it being a personal document.

If this works well, I’ll try collaborate editing with someone else in future but also if this does actually work, it will be a really nice way to collaboratively edit notes at a conference and I can certainly see it taking off in the future. Specially if as I suspect you can annotate and collaborate on notes on many different platforms and devices together.

I’m surprised no one else has thought about doing the same really, or maybe its just not possible?

Thinking Digital Conference

The thinking digital conference was great. At one point I twittered that I felt like I was at TED. And seriously I wasn't joking. some of the speakers like Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurtzwell, Helen Fisher, Jonathan Harris, Tara Hunt, etc, were top notch speakers and worthy of the ticket price alone. But rather that go completely out there, the conference was unpinned by a lot of business type talks like for example Greg Dyke, Doug Richard and Casper Berry. There was also the usual what is the future of mobile, green technologies, the future of media and social networking. All the panels were interesting and included a bit of time for some good crowd questions.

So a quick time out for some of my favorate talks. Helen Fisher's talk was simply amazing. She deconstructed why woman are in the position there in now and what the future spells for woman. As Helen calls it woman are shedding 1000's years of a farming lifestyle in favor of something much natrual like in the stone age. Helen asked the question What is love? and pointed at 3 parts of the brain. 1st one being sex (drive, lust,etc), 2nd being romantic love (passion, obsession, etc) and 3rd being deep feelings of attachment (calm, monogahmy, security). Helen sees the first part as a way of getting out there looking for a partner, the 2nd part to keep you faithful and the 3rd part to able you and your partner sane enough to raise children. Pushing things along Helen asks the question if we know about these chemical reactions in the brain, can we have casual sex? Yes we can but the brain systems are stimulated and there is a 1/3 chance you will fall in love with your casual sex partner. Its also possible to have the brain parts act upon different people. Aka you have the drive to have sex with one person, feel loving to another person and feel safe and calm with another person. There not connected.

Female sexuality is growing – Woman are as sexual as men! Always have been. But on the other hand Men are as romantic as woman, Men always have been. Some world wide trends, Fact! When woman are better educated, or higher income theres more sexuality. People who divorce have more sexuality, people with access to conception are more likely to express there sexuality,

21st centery marriage, a marriage between equals is now commons. Divorce isn't a fail, its a positive things.

A few other things, picked up from Helens talk
1. Bad – Use of Anti-Depressions, the drugs kill the sex drive, performance and Fantasies. Helen believes it also effects your romantic love and attachment brain areas. Helen calls it the numbing of the world
2. We working harder on our relationships that ever before.
3. Divorice rate is flatting out, maybe because we're marrying later
4. Peer marriages / marriages of equals are here to stay, Marriages are also happier maybe for the same reason.
5. Middle age isn't the end, there are drugs which can help you keep the drive. While the romantic love and attachement comes natrually.

I had heard some people moan about the conference being not like your traditional Technology/New Media conference. Well maybe if you had only hear the title you might be mistaken for what the conference was about. But one look at the list of presenters and there would be no doubt what kind of conference this was going to be. I mean can you imagine Ray Kurtzwell at Future of Webapps? Xtech (maybe), Web 2.0 expo, etc. Nope theres always been a need for a high end conference in the UK for a while, yes it will be expensive but you don't get this kind of quality for cheap. It was a risk which did pay off, the codeworks team are already talking about thinking digital 2009 which I'm sure will be even better and even better attended.

The Venue for Thinking Digital was the Sage2 in Gateshead. I've never been inside of it before but it was a excellent venue for such a event except one thing. Power for the audience. I know there were quite a few people blogging and once they had run out of battery power they looked for anywhere to plug in and charge up. If the team had just spread some 6ways across the bottom and top of the seating, then chained them along a few meters then used black tape to keep them stuck down, it would have covered the problem. It was sad to hear too, because the speed of the network was blazing. I was uploading videos of about 100meg to blip.tv in less that 5mins flat. Flickr photos were painless too, I sometimes reduce the resolution on photos to flickr, so uploading is quicker. But there was no need. During uploading to Blip, I saw a peak of 891kbps. So total kudos to the best internet conference experience I've ever had next to Over the Air.

All the videos I shot are online already, but the quality is low, if I had knew what uploading would be like, I might have opted for VGA quality. There were other cameras shooting the whole thing, so I assume, one was for archiving and the other for the live screens inside the venue. I asked permission before and I think you'll agree, although the records are complete the quality of the sound and vision wasn't the best. Fear not there is a set of audio only podcasts which need to be edited by myself and uploaded to Blip.TV and IT Conversations.

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The Thinking Digital Conference – 21st – 23rd May

I've been meaning to blog about this conference for bloody ages, everytime I go to do it. I remember I'm still offline most of the time. Anyway hopefully this blog post will attract a few last minute choosers and attract more people to the several days of events.

So when I first heard about the thinking digital conference I was in a innovation lab in the north west. Herb Kim of codeworks was saying a bit about codeworks supporting BBC innovation labs and then at the end he did a sneaky pitch about the singularity and it all ended on a slide for a conference he was planning. When I spoke to Herb afterwards, he explained how he had gone to TED in the states last year and wanted to run something like TED in the UK. Those words I have heard else where but when he talked about some of the speakers he had at the time, I was much more convinced this could be closer that anything else I've been to before (i've never been to TED and I've only watched Pop!Tech streamed). So anyway I wanted to help make this a reality and part of that was telling people about the conference, recording it and sponsoring a couple of the events surrounding the event. So we came to conclusion which fit both parties.

So not only is there the conference which may seem quite high cost but actually isn't for the amazing array of speakers from across the world and ideaophere (yeah I just made that up) but its in Newcastle/Gateshead so the hotel prices are not stupidly priced and hell its good to get out of London sometimes people. Lets be honest, its only 3 hours on the train from Kings Cross and that train has plugs in every seat and free wireless unlike the bloody Virgin train which has 2 power sockets per table and no wireless at all. But another reason to go up to the conference is that on the Friday is there will be a geekdinner sponsored by Backstage.bbc.co.uk and then BarCampNorthEast on the Saturday and Sunday. The very first 2 day overnight stay barcamp in the North of England so far. This is a great chance to experience barcamp as it could/should be. I know quite a few Londonerners are traveling up for the whole thing, conference, geekdinner and barcamp, so thats great. But why haven't you signed up? Do you really have something better to do? Didn't think so.

There are still some tickets left over for the conference. Look at these great names.

Greg Dyke , former Director General of the BBC.
I came in when Greg decided to leave. It was a shame because I heard so much about him afterwards and I would have liked to have worked under him.
Doug Richard , formerly of The Dragons' Den on BBC2 and founder of Library House
I've spoken Doug before but not at length and I've not heard speak for a while now. So it would be good to see wheres he at now
Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist & author of The Singularity is Near
Do I need to say anything about Ray?
The Fake Steve Jobs aka Dan Lyons, senior editor of Forbes Magazine & author of Options.
I'm interested why a journalist would do this and whats been the outcome of this since. I also think this will be a session I would like Sarah over at reading the cluetrain to maybe hear.
Steve Clayton, Microsoft Partner Group, UK CTO
Self confessed geek in disguise, this guy is a good guy making waves in Microsoft.
Tara Hunt, founder of Citizen Agency, San Francisco.
Tara is simply awesome, every time I hear her talk she fill my mind with so many things that I had only briefly thought about. I also like to think of Tara as a friend so it will be good to catch up. I also know she'll be at the barcamp, which is great news.

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Xtech 2008 proposals

I have put in a couple of proposals for Xtech 2008 which is this year in Dublin. The theme for the year is the web on the go which actually fits in nicely with our thoughts about for over the air (more details about that really soon). So the way I see it is data portability is a type of movement like data on the go, in actual fact you can't have data on the go without some dataportability. Roll on the brief descriptions… .

The truth behind Data Portability
Data portability is in a way one of the greatest freedoms users and developers can have. Portability of data underpins the web of data, apis and the ability to move data to other services, platforms and devices. It is silo busting and is deeply weaved into the debate over social platforms, identity and mobile data. In this talk, I will explore the problems, solutions and gamut of policy decisions

The attention economy is only just around the corner
The attention economy was talked about at the end of 06 to death. Through all the hype, a couple of guys from down-under started to make sense of attention and proposed APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language).Unfortunately little is known about APML and there is a lot of mis-information on APML. As one of the working group members I will run through what it is, its purpose and why its important

Technorati Tags: xtech, conference, proposals, papers

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Two conferences in one hour and one presentation

I gave a presentation at work yesterday summing up the two conferences I went to recently. There's nothing secret in the presentation so I posted it to slideshare for sharing. Hopfully it will be useful to others.

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Full write up on the wealth of netwoks conference

I wrote my notes up here on Backstage.

The TTI Vanguard is one of those groups who run conferences you hear about but never get the chance to attend. In actually fact it might be membership or invite only like the Churchill Club. The people who attend and speak at the conferences are simply leaders in their fields and make a special effort to make such conferences. Boston plays host to the wealth of networks conference which includes great speakers such as Dr. Eric Miller (Zepheira), Clay Shirky, Dr. Henry Tirri (Nokia), Nicholas Carr, David Prior (general dynamics uk), Andrew McAfee (Havard) and Yochai Benkler who actually recently wrote a book which influenced the whole conference.

Read the rest here

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The Wealth of Networks, Boston – Day Two

The Tubeless Internet – Not bad, maybe too complex
David Reed, TTI/Vanguard Advisory Board

Starts with a quote from Ted Stevenson, which is complete wrong and is so the wrong way of thinking about the network.
Jon Steward effect = when he goes from channel to channel to get the same words from all the channels. Saying the same thing over and over again.
ARPANET was a packet net, the internet emerged at PARC, MIT, etc. At the time there was only the message switch model and phone company model. At the start no one knew what the internet was for so the creators kept their options open. Putting functions at the edge creates value in the form of options. Pervasive computing, now theres computers everywhere. Failed Pervasive computing – Universal Plug and Play, Bluetooth.
Eggtimer model, Intelligence was at the very edges. Reed talks about Phase. Traffic patterns – Rural and suburban traffic (gas), rush hour (liquid), traffic jam (solid), London (semi-conductor). Non-hierarchical, collective behaviours can and do work. Didn't understand the talk anymore, very complex. But David Reed and David Weinburger have been thinking about Beyond Net Netruality

Customized Mobile Virtual Networks – Good
Juha Christensen, CEO, Sonopia

Virtual Mobile operators. The network as a operating system. Its about the individuals not about the collective. Points out that there are credit cards which are interest and brand based. You can build price plans and do things like send out mass market messages to all subscribers. Affinity mobile gives you a revenue share of 5%. Could be used to provide cheaper or free phone calls. Ant and Heilo are other Affinity in America, while in the UK and Europe. Sonopia enterprise is around the corner.

Web 2.0 Architecture: Offline, Freedom, Open and Participation – Good
John Robb, Vice President, Technology Leadership, Zimbra/Yahoo

Things which are changing. Offline browsing, Software as a service, Freedom of Access and the web as a platform.
Offline browsing – why? Experience, lower tco, local backups, sharing, mashups. Offline solutions include Mozilla's Firefox 3.0, Google gears, Sun Java or Adobe Air. John make it clear that Zimbra will interop with many of the Yahoo services.

Mashup on the Fly – Excellent
David Prior, Chief Technologist, Research & Development, General Dynamics

Demystifying Mashups. There is nothing which the marketing department will understand. http://twickrpedia.com. Demostrated a couple of Mashups in less that 5mins.

Enterprise Knowledge Infrastructures, enabling collective knowledge – bad
Ross Button, Vice President, Technology Leadership, CGI

Connecting people and people to knowledge.

PlanetLab: Catalyzing Network Innovation – Good
Larry Peterson, Director, PlanetLab Consortium

Innovation can come from anywhere.
Most of the internet success is due to its support for at the edge development
There is a high barrier to entry for innovating through-out the net.
Planet Lab allows you to define what happens through-out the net, its all distributed virtualsation. So each project could use a slice of a bunch of servers (up to 600). 2500 users.

Therapy Development in a Networked World – Great
Sean Scott, President, ALS Therapy Development Institute

Build a project out of filemaker database to hunt down the correct drugs for his dying mother, simply an amazing story

Layer 8 Is More Interesting Than You Think – Great
Clay Shirky, Writer and Consultant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8 – Layer 8, where the users are.
Users will do what you'd never thought someone could do
Individual vs community
Powerlaw signature can be found in many social systems – Links per weblog, tag pairs on digg, edits per user on wikipedia.
Commons based peer production – pluto on wikipedia. adverage of 2.5 edits per user.
80/20 would kill wikipedia, you need the organic division of labor/cooperation without collaboration. If you want good quality work, you need limited collaboration. Jane Jacobs problem – many eyes on one problem, keeps people straight.
the Problem Wikipedia has is down to idenity, but if you make the wiki strict for secuirty you will lock out those who bring good stuff too.

Networks and Social Identity – Excellent
John Clippinger, Senior Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School

The state of identity in social networks
Facebook, email address was your context (.edu), now its open and they've lost the context. In secondlife, people wanted to look like yourself with some slighly changes. Persistence is important. In linked in what does the numbers really mean when you can game the system easily? To build effective social networks you need to solve the identity. Identity is more that security, privacy, compliance, unfeathered rights, decisions. Social signaling is happening all the time, look at myspace. Implicit vs Explicit signals in profiles is a interesting idea. User control is centricity. Higgins = manages identity across multiple applications. If people can build relationships together based on trust and express what they want, you could have reverse auctions. Someone suggests that Facebook causes could be used to indicate your identity. Someone suggests that Facebook causes could be used to indicate your identity. Causes clouds which sits out side the closed networks are interesting. Some interesting URLs. http://eclipse.org/higgins and http://www.cloudtripper.com.

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What do you do when Gnome Display Manager dies? Fixed!

My Ubuntu install is working again thanks to Jon Callas from PGP. So I can finally bring you this entry from the Airplane trip 2 days ago. The mount command using the remount flag really made a huge difference. Otherwise I would still be running Windows!

Right so I'm in Boston after a nice but late flight. Get through customs, jump in the first cab which takes me to my Hotel (Westin Seaport) where I open my laptop to find that Gnome Display Bloody Manager fails. Now I can't get into my gnu/linux setup. Luckly I still have Windows on dual boot, so I can use the laptop and get on with stuff. But it seems a little setting in /etc/fstab which was recommended by Linux Format magazine which I bought for the portions of the flight when your not allowed to use electorinic equipment, has caused the root drive to be read only and hence why Gnome won't start. The problem is that I have no way to change this without (in my mind) booting into Linux with a live CD and then making the changes? If someone else knows a way to change /etc/fstab from windows or the recovery command line, drop me a email or comment. Damm you linux format and your No more disk thrashing which recommended adding this to /etc/fstab – defaults,noatime,data=writeback.

Right its 6:45am and I want to upload some pictures of Boston from yesterday and then head out for a day packed solid for the conference I'm at. Oh can I say I download the live Ubuntu CD already, I just need to find somewhere to buy blank CD-Rs, came down at 724.3kB/s from MIT over the hotels non-free (10 dollars per day) ethernet connection. So yes any tips on where I can quickly nip out and get a blank CD would be useful too. I'll quickly blog my post from the airplane too. Oh but I can't because its in my /home/ian directory! Damm it

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The Wealth of Networks, Boston – Day One

So I'm going to attempt to Live blog the conference but mainly for myself

Leanord Kleinrock, TTI/Vanguard Advisory Board
The conference isn't about plumbing, its about the services and ecosystem which sits on top of it.

The Wealth of Networks – Excellent

Yochai Benkler, Co-director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
Critical change is decentralisation of inputs and processes. Cites Participatory culture. Talks about the incumbents who want to fight over copyright, there last breath of air. Talks about the battle for Teraflops, SeTI@home beats IBM and NEC, radically decentralised capitalisation beats the centralised. This makes us all involved.Yochai cites the encyclopedia ecosystem, from books to cheap cds to free and wikipedia .Our authority models have been challenged. Brititannica and Nature are challenged. There
are new Opportunities. IBM's revenue jumped when they moved from old patents to there open linux stratrergy. Commons based production = production without exclusion, decentralises authority. Some guy, cuts Yochai mid flow and asks the question, what does this mean for big business? Yochai makes it clear that business needs to count all this into there business models, if they don't they will simply die. Someone else kicks in another question about how deep should people should be allowed in to collaborate. Someone
else asks a question about boundreys and hints at the trust. Whats to stop businesses to be open at the start then close everything up once they have an advantage? Yochai points out that GPL keeps people and businesses in check for the Free software world. Although Yochai isn't say everything should be Free and Open. But the legal framework keeps everyone on the right side of the line. Fear is the enemy of collaboration, fear wants you to know all the pieces and non open and collabroative. Fear puts up walls
and limits your scope. Yochai is hoping to write a book about fear soon as he has tons to say about it.
Someone asks the question if there is such as thing as too much collaboration, says Firefox stopped becoming creative and innovative due to the amount of people collaborating. However Yochai, points out that the plugin framework allows for creativity and innovation. You wouldn't see plugins like operator and seatbelt if you had a team tasked with building a browser.
Yochai says its not all about the money. If you go to dinner with friends and leave a tip for 100 pounds, you wouldn't improve your status with your friends. Not everyone is motovated by money all the time. People change their priorities a depending on many things, the system and markets need to reflect this. We need to learn how to manage and work with distributed social

Application Design, trust and the End-to-End arguments – Good
David Clark, Senior Research Scientist, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
E2EA (the end to end arguement) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
Is Email end to end? Answer 1. No because its not wrapped around the outside. Answer 2. Yes End to end doesn't apply to apps. All of the servers are part of the rest. Answer 3. Yes we have used reliable application-aware parts to compensate for unreliable ones – we trust the servers, we trust mine and you trust yours. Answer 4. No we trust more that we need to. Question we should be asking is Email reliable? Reframing End to end in Trust instead of end of the transport mechanisms. Trust to Trust – Tim Moors.
This all fits in with net netrailty. In the Email example, the protocals allow functions to be assigned to different servers, can re-arraged to match trust assumption. So if your ISP blocks SMTP servers you have a broken trust model. Users trusts IM servers whether or not they trust it. We don't trust each other, hence in the real world we have deeds and escrow, registries. We can't really trust our own computer/servers no more due to bots, virus, etc. Trust to trust, third party servers and services are not
intrinsically in violation of End to end. How can people trust Google to look at your email along delivering your mail? What levels of trust will people put up with? Someone ask the question about a motorway of drivers and do people trust each other or is it something else?

Emerging Global Networks – Very good
Henry Tirri, Research Fellow, Nokia Research Center
Sensor planet. Wireless Grid, the worlds largest grid but how will people interact and work with the grid? A goal to have 50% access for the world by 2015. 500 Trillion text messages sent in 2004 alone. 1 in 5 are illterate.
Nokia have a app which can read a menu and translate it into english or other languages but what if your illterate? Concerns. Privacy and incentives, licences and non-licenced,centralised vs viral distributed, green vs survival, literacy (interaction methods), multi-lingual environoment, native innovation (home land innovation) vs innovation by others and transactions. America and Canada have the disadvantage of having minute based charging and charging both ends of the connections. Were still in the voice
to data transaction and that seems to be true for the rest of the world.

The Sociology of Networks
– Very Good

Duncan Watts, Professor, Department of Sociology, Columbia University
Interactions between individuals is paramount, how they collect and aggregate (emergence) is the problem. Hence why Sociology is difficult. The Web has brought together a suite of interactions viable and measurable – email, online communities, mmorpgs, etc. Individual and group behavior can be observed over any period of time. Now there is tons of data when previously there was little. A science of networks is coming. Most data is being mined by corporations, not collected by research and the design
of sites have been largely evolutionary (mashing new features in). Recent experiments. Small-World Experiment, verified Milgram's Six Degrees result. Music-Lab Experiment, dumbness of crowds, markets don't necessarily. There is no evidence that there are leaders in a social network. Dominators, leaders, influences don't exist and if they did they would be replaced a few weeks later. After the fact, that person looks influencial. Before that they were just a person. Duncan talks about how the influencers
are just people who figure out where the crowd is going and jump in front at the right time. So in actual fact they spend most of their time working out what the crowd whats to hear.

Leveraging Networks
Michael Furdyk, Co-founder and Director of Technology, TakingITGlobal.org
Social network for young people who give them skills and resources to set themselves up for new challenges and opptunities. It acts as a platform for action. Inspire > inform > involved. Does Facebook and other social networks encorage you to meet people in other countries other cultures? A lot of social networks are banned in schools. Should do some work with geekdinners and girlgeekdinners?

The Emergence of Enterprise 2.0
Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor, Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Intranet need a kick up the ass. Enterprises 2.0 is about how its used not how its built or deployed. Andrew says IT is a differentiator. Underlying trends are social and network effects. Andrew adds Free platforms, lack of structure and tools that emerge.

Email = Channels which are point to point, invisible to others and be consulted.

Website = Platform which is universal, visible, consultable.

Blog = Free and Easy Platform

New apps have been getting out of the way of the user. Uses Wikipedia vs Newpedia as example. Then Delicious.

Tools should let structure emerge. Uses Google and tags clouds as example a example. Taking snapshots of tag clouds is interesting. Mentions how Flickr uses Clusters to apply structure.

Someone asks about complience. Transparancy helps.

Networks and the Semantic Web (Weaving a web of Data) – Very Good
Eric Miller, President, Zepheira

The art of data.

The web is unique objects (pages and links) data is hidden.

How did people work before the web? Next generation just can't imagine anything before.

Eric talks about how the cuting and pasting needs to stop and points at the TTI Vanguard site as example of rich data.

The web is evolving, its not versions

Talks about community driven ontologies using it the way they want it to be.

Shows off Piggy Bank to pull together his own list of hotels which made sense via a google map.

Talks about dbpedia.org – mines for details out of wikipedia

freebase.com and mashmaker.intel.com (intel's new pipes type system)

Shows a bunch of javascript tools to build new views on data

note to myself – BBC.co.uk as timeline

Web framework for resource description, talks about wrapping data sources like excel spreadsheets so they appear on the web.

Lego is interopable from 50 years ago, if Lego can do it, why can't we?

Eric answered my question about Microformats and he talked about GRDDL as a way to make use of microformats beyond their basic use.

Generally the questions surrounded the concept of a semantic web

Peer-Production of Rich Media (or What Happens when YouTube Meets Wikipedia) – Bad
Shay David, CTO Kaltura.com

Shows a porno on the wikipedia page for Pornography.

Rich media collaboration is harder that text based collaboration. Been little peer production of rich media / instead lots of aggregation.

Thinks we will see real time feeds of networked video and audio. Quotes Reed's law.

Shows off Kaltura.com

Shows off Kaltura.com in facebook

The Big Switch – Good

Nicholas Carr, Author, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage

Radical centralist

Nicholas thinks we're moving to a world of centralisation/control

Preview of the next book – The Big Switch

Uses the Westinghouse engine station (AC electricity) as a example of centralisation with a service over a network. Local power went out of fashion and out of business.

Someone challenges Nick about the black outs on the electricity grids. Nick says utilitys always get treated badly. And now there cueing up to take a bite out of nick. Nick points out that the mainframes use to run at 90% of capitacy while the move to the server client model has given rise to high costs and higher wastes of processes. Someone suggests Virtualisation is fixing this problem and Nick actually agrees. Someone points out that work productivity went up due to IT investment along with the server client
model. Shows off the new Google server station in Columbia and says its the new Westinghouse engine station. Someone suggests some regulation doesn't allow there data be placed outside of their firewall, nick comes back and says regulation will catch up. Plus sharing data between companies and people will be lighting quick because they will be on highspeed inner network, instead of a companies T1 connection.
Nick certainly lived up to his rep and caused a stir. But now its time to fix my machine and go to dinner.

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