Tag: data

Its all about the Top10?



Been meaning to blog about Harry Jones’s next venture for a while…

I was shown a beta of it a while ago and I got to say upfront I’m a close friend of Harry’s and yes I did teach him in university (Ravensbourne college of design and communication). At the time he was doing lots of Flash stuff and singing from the Adobe/Macromedia song book but I slowly broke that down and I kind of remember one day he turned to me and said he gets it (referring to XHTML) not the actual technology (Harry was very smart and picked it up instantly) but the concept of the web being readable to not just humans but to machines and devices.

Anyway a while he launched Top10.co which is a place for all those crazy top 10’s. Top 10 makes it super easy to create your own list but the magic comes when you remix someone elses. What it does is create an instance of the top 10 someone else did and allows you complete control over the list. So in the video above you can see some artificial but funny disagreement over cheesy 80’s action film between Harry and the other co-founder (don’t give up your day jobs to be actors  guys….). But as its a instance, its still linked to the original, so you can see an aggregated view of everyones top10.

For example I setup a top 10 after my blog post about the films you should have seen in 2010.

Here’s the aggregated view (master list) of everyone who has contributed to the top films in 2010, and of course my top 10.

So interestingly they have catered for both the popular stuff in the actual list but also the long tail in the variety of weird and wonderful lists you can make.

Its all public, so thats great. However there are problems… The first one is the non-ability to embed the top 10 list. I know it supports Facebook and Twitter (in actual fact you sign up using one of them, wheres the openid guys?) but I just want to embed or even copy the information to somewhere which is mine. May seem slightly old fashioned (can’t believe I just said that) but its important. I’d also like to see better use of there blog… When I first saw it I first thought it could be like Okcupid’s OKtrends… You know, “we have 100000 users who picked films of 2010, and we aggregated all the lists together to show the top film choice across all lists is Inception…” type stuff. Right now its just fluff about the company which is a yawn to be frank. Heck even this is the types of films which make it to the top of most film related lists, and here’s the ones which tend to be in the middle ground… Come Harry… Data is the new source code (think I just coined a new saying)

So as a whole I think the concept is good, but it really needs someone to think about uses of the top 10’s. I’d also like to see a format which makes it easily transferable. Like a opml file with top10 extensions… but thats further down the line and I expect most won’t be interested in such a thing. Although when I explain what you can do with such a thing, it gets very interesting… Maybe I harry should pop up one day soon for a chat but he’s one busy son of a gun…

Anyway good luck and good to hear he’s moved on from all that Apple crap which he had to deal with a few years ago. Oh and congrats on getting engaged to the lovely Tiffany…

Beyond the data: making meaning of data

Ian Forrester at Next 09

The Next conference is looking for speakers for 2011 and they have opened a public voting system to seek out the next generation of speakers. Of course I have put a talk based around the Channelography project.

Beyond the data

Data is something we have been working with before it became mainstream a few years ago. We have many projects using data but what are the challenges once you have the data? Using the prototype Channelography (http://channelography.rattlecentral.com/) we will explore the challenges and dangers of collecting data and trying to make meaning of it.

So of course, it would be great if friends could vote for my talk, although there’s some great proposals like this one for OKcupid to talk and Brian Suda’s rally cry to analyse 15 Petabytes of data from the Large Hadron Collider.

The Joy of Data

Via infosthetics,

It was only a matter of time before the mind-changing talk of Hans Rosling would find its way to the television medium. A reincarnation of this talk will be part of "The Joy of Stats", a new television documentary that soon will appear at BBC. This documentary will explore various forms of data gathering and statistical analysis, such as a new application that mashes police department data with the city’s street map to show what crime is being reported street by street, house by house, in near real-time; and Google’s current efforts at the machine translation project

From what I seen of the programme, it should be called the joy of data not stats.

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.

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Data Availablity?

So i read Myspace have joined the Dataportability group, but then I spotted via Techmeme that they were also launching Data availability? There seems to be little detail about the whole thing now, but it looks closely related to the Data Portability effort.

Anyway, here's part of the alleged leaked press release.

Data Availability is about enriching existing Internet destinations with social functionality and valuable pre-existing user generated content and data. By empowering users with the ability to dynamically share, those destinations will create deeper levels of social engagement and new functionality throughout their site. As the online home to 117 million users worldwide, this groundbreaking initiative enables the larger Web to leverage the highly engaged and passionate MySpace global community.

To ease implementation for participating sites, the MySpace Data Availability initiative uses OAUTH and Restful APIs as its core technology underpinnings. MySpace is using open standards in an effort to embrace the open source community and allow the implementation to be as non-proprietary as possible. Today’s announcement is the first step of MySpace’s larger data portability initiatives coming down the pipeline. MySpace is officially joining the Data Portability Project demonstrating our continued commitment to openness and open standards.

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Kevin Rose talks about Data Portability on Diggnation

So it started off about the facebook applications on any site and their global javascript library. But before long Kevin Rose is informing Alex about the advantages of this move for Facebook and some of its users. Kevin then points out that its disadvantage is for the users because its still tied to Facebook. He briefly mentions OpenSocial then starts talking about DataPortability. During the following 3-4 mins Alex challenges Kevin about Digg.com and its Dataportanility stance and to be Kevin admits he's all for dataportability in Digg.com. This is obviously very fitting looking forward to the announcement a while back that Digg joins the Dataportability group.

For someone whose one of the founders of the Dataportability group, I've been quite quiet about it. Don't get me wrong I'm lurking a lot and I already have my fingers in certain dataportability pies. You may have seen some data portability videos around, well I'm glad to say I have completed mine and I'm just trying to edit mine with Kdenlive and Pitivi but not having much luck. It seems Kdenlive doesn't like my Sanyo's Mpeg4 audio format. So I need to convert them first into something else using VLC. Pitivi is strange and does weird things to the video, which means it won't play in much including the great VLC.

Big thanks to Kevin Rose for allowing me the permission to clip this video and put it up on Blip.TV. Originally not only was I having problems with encoding but Blip kept removing my video because I was breaching Revision3's Copyright. So after a brief email to Kevin directly, he replied yes but he would have liked to have seen the video first. I told him if he doesn't like it I will take it down.

There is also now a Geekdinner about Data Portability in London. If your interested in this subject and in the area of London on Wednesday 27th Feb, come along for a good debate about the whole project and subject.

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Data Portability Video


DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.


CREDITS:
Written, designed and edited by Michael Pick, smashcut-media.com

Music – “Bongo Avenger” – Eric & Ryan Kilkenny: CC Attrib. Non Commercial

Hands photo: Scol22 – Stock.xchng

Additional images: istockphoto

Animated Flourishes: Andrew Kramer

So I was impressed with the production value of the video but felt it needed more snap. Chris asked what I meant by “snap?” But I think you will know what I mean and agree, it certainly needs more snappyness. Not that I'm slagging it off, actually its really good and well worth sending around to people who don't know or understand the whole data portability movement.

I've also finally put in a Xtech 2008 proposal for Data Portability at long last. Here is my short description.

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

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Facebook, Google And Plaxo Join The DataPortability Workgroup

Dataportability

Forget Open social, this is huge! This a huge win for interoperability, portability and fair use. Chris told me a while ago but promised to say nothing till now. It also shows how much influence characters like scoble have, but I'm sure these companies were looking at Data portability long before scobles account got suspended.

After publishing an invitation to Facebook to join the DataPortability Working Group January 4, we never thought that Facebook would accept it. Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before, because today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.

Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have previously joined together for platforms such as OpenSocial it’s not that significant, but Facebook is another matter. On January 4 Michael sort of defended Facebook’s stance against Plaxo pulling data from Facebook on the grounds that “Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses – user privacy.” Today, by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards.

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Scoble calls for dataportability

Thanks Tom for the heads up… Straight from Scoble. A very good reason for dataportability. You should be able to export your data even when your account is disabled.

Facebook disabled my account

If you are trying to contact me on Facebook, please don’t. My account has been “disabled” for breaking Facebook’s Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account. I’m appealing. I’ll tell you what I was doing as soon as I talk with the developers who built what I was using and as soon as I talk with Facebook’s support (I sent an email in reply to the one below, but haven’t heard back yet).

I run this stuff so you don’t have to. 🙂

UPDATE: Rodney Rumford, who runs the FaceReviews Blog about Facebook says that all traces of me have been already removed from Facebook too.

UPDATE2: Tonight I learned about DataPortability.org and signed my name to that effort.

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I bricked my windows mobile phone

Mobile data?

Mobile laptop data has always been a pain, in my mind it started when the phone companies started making those PCMCIA adapters where you could stick in a GSM/GPRS card. Before that you use to have to dialup via the infrared port or a serial cable. The GSM/GPRS cards would allow you to put in a sim card into the PC card and dialup on your laptop from anywhere. Then Vodafone came out with a 3G data card, others followed suit adding Wireless and even HSDPA (3.5g) to the mix.

But there was a few problems. Each card came with some propitery software, the card themselves were expensive and the data plans attached only suitable for business users. In America on the otherhand all you could get all you can eat data plans based on that weird standard called EVDO for a reasonable rate. Because of this Laptop makers started adding EVDO and other Mobile data options, which made the PC cards a little less important. But the huge break through (in the UK) came when Tmobile (to there credit) dropped there data plan to a all you can eat model. Vodafone and Orange followed soon afterwards. 3 the mobile operator in the UK started offering a cheap usb dongle to there users of mobile data. 10 pounds buys you the dongle and the data for a month. Well I thought this was a good idea and I know a few people are tempted with the offer but I think I found better.

Ok enough history – I bricked my new phone, no not actually killed it so it no long works but more like bricked it so it operates as a wireless modem. I was doing this over bluetooth at the start but for some reason while using the windows mobile internet sharing option the phone wants to be in bluetooth discovery mode too. This quickly kills the battery, so I started plugging it in over USB. Because the phone also charges over USB too, it might as well be like the USB dongle. My Data plan currently is 5 pounds for weekend and evening unlimited data (unlimited meaning 1gig fair use data a month). Orange offer for another 3 pounds a all day everyday option but limited to 30meg a month. This doesn't work for me, as I'm usually around a wireless or wired connection during the daytime. Anyway the point is that mobile laptop data is become cheap and easy. If I can get a windows mobile phone to talk to a linux laptop, then anyone running windows or mac must be able to get theres up and running in minutes. But like before the data rates are better that ever. HSDPA (3.5g) is also pretty impressive, I was getting 400k down and 200k up in a starbucks in central Bristol. I expect in London I might get even more. This makes it a serious contender to the rip off wireless hotspots you find in some hotels and cafes up and down the country. Now if only the mobile operators would sort out international roaming data charges!

Ah I forgot to mention one thing.The bricked nature also comes from WMstorage, which basiclly turns your phone into a mass storage device or usb memory stick. Because I can't use activesync on linux this has been perfect for dragging files back and forth. However its never been reliable till now. So my phone sits there as a mini flashdrive and bluetooth modem but can still receive calls and texts if needed. Next step really is to pass some of that functionality on to my laptop instead.

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