Jun 14

Ben Hammersley – reboot

One of the memorable talks of the second day was Ben Hammersley‘s talk on Ettiquette and the Singularity. It was entertaining, not just because of the “men’s unbifurcated garment” that was being worn, but for the enthusiasm of the speech.

There was a lot of comments made about the speech in various places, (take a look at the Technorati beta whilst you’re there). Quite a bit of it has been driven by a intimation that people need to be taught how to behave in virtual environments, as taken up by David Weinberg and picked up by a number of people, including Doc Searls. Co-incidently, the Observer had a small piece about this very issue last week. And it was reflected in a comment from Nicole Simon, in the situation where she had commented on a blog that the appreciated reading, to find the the author had done the same thing back to here.

As well as new technologies driving the needs for new behaviours, I think we also have the situation that new technologies make people completely forget the old behaviours, to ignore the current set of manners because they have something new as an excuse. As the pace of change continues to quicken, we should build on the current social norms to let new ones emerge. We should not just rip everythng up to start again.

Jun 12

Home again

Finally got home after a not too bad trip. It was great to land early, and then spend the 20 minutes we’d gained wiating for somewhere to park the plane. Went along to a good very pleasant breakfast meet this morning, meeting even more new people. The photos of the breakfast, plus my wander around the Botanical Gardens and here. Now to catch up on chores, before spending some time this week tidying up the postings from the last few days and adding more from those I took notes about instead of typing up direct.

Jun 11

Dave Weinberger – reboot7

The Natural Shape of Knowledge

He’s startng off looking at the history of (Western) knowledge, where knowledge was of the real world, when Aristotle was setting out the standard. Classigfication, to order knoweldge started at this point, when orgnaisation was thought about in physical terms.

“principles of organisation mirror the limitations of the physical” ie we organise things based on what we have experiences in the real world, and assume that everyone has the same experience and will sort out the knowledge in the same way.

But now we’re unconstrained by the physical, everything is digital. So the model changes. We can put leaves on multiple branches; messiness has a value (linkage); the order in unowned; – the owner of the information does not own the order of the information; users build the information and the metadata.

We’re pulling the leaves off the trees, making a pile and giving different ways of finding it. So “what is the new shape of knowledge”. It’s not what commercial sites think – it’s not keeping people on the site, but sending people elsewhere – linking is a key to knowledge So the NYT only points to itself or the ads – they are scared…but they are the ultimate echo chamber.

The topics are getting smaller and more niche, driven by people’s interests (wiki). Paper is expensive, digital is cheap – digital allows the expansion of what is interested (the long Tail). We get multiple subjectivities, that are in conversation with each other.

Knowledge is becoming the conversation, not the result of it. We are moving away from gatekeepers. We don’t want the best, we want the ‘it’ll do” – the good enough.

Multi-dispute-ism – facts being used as weapons – but in the digital space both can be right, multi parties can be right – or at least have their say.

Conversation can be global, with conversation across huge areas of commonality and differences.

The questions now are about the difference types of data..so the IRC channel is now looking for the super-sub-micro-meta datasphere. Meanwhile challenges to the gatekeepers of the info – are they going to give up their keys. Summary – not until they are prised out of their hands!

Jun 11

Lee Bryant – Reboot 7

Comments on social tagging

This talk is about some possible future developments for social tagging.

1. User-organised news. Working with user-tagged BBC news stories, linking to external sites, user-driven related stories. This works through Backstage, allowing people to do things with the BBC content. Tagging works in a similar way to Flickr tagging, allowing you to tag stories, and see the stories other people have tagged with same terms.

2. Local Aggregation. Local aggregator pulling news, blogs, links, photos etc. So removes need for an editor to create the page, allows the page to pull things in. text analysis derives common themes. Can monitor local issues and encourage participation.

3.Negotiating Meaning: knowledge sharing extranet, multifaceted classifications; allows users to create own terms to organise content; allows users to build bottom-up classification

4. Negotiating language. learning from unstructured data. Text analysis identified matches with formal taxonomies, build user generated tag clouds from the information to learn users language,

Some really good stuff here to try and get more use out of the stories people say, instead of asking for structure dfeedback, where people can give the information that they think the collectors are after. deriving order from chaos.

Good challenge to companies that want to organsie all data, getting their people to fit into a fixed taxonomy. Use technology to let taxonomy emerge, move “outside the taxonomy deadzone” So dont’t use things like Sharepoint (hooray, please, no more sharepoint) but let the information come to life.

So this is all on Headshift

Jun 11

Skype: Malthe Sigurdsson – reboot

“An application you use to talk through the internet. For free. Forever”

(or at least until the next thing arrives!) It’s about enhacing comms, not just replacing.

They call it a small big company, with around 160 people in 15 countries.

They use a wiki for company knowledge

They want to maintain diversity, avoiding white boys form northern europe – need ot keep knowledge of the BRIC markets.

Driven from a feeling of being ripped off from telco compnaies (both founders were ex-telco)

Currently there are45 million registered users, between 2-3 million users on line, with 10 billion minutes server.. No money on getting customers. They get lots of passionate customers.

“the brand is the product is the brand” so the product has to be good; little focusing on “marketing” means the product tells the story.

“do simple things really well”.similar to yesterdays talk about breaking things down, focusing on getting results, short term aims that you can see things happening. Get the simple things right first, then you can build on it. Keep releasing.

Skype is viral – there’s no point in being on it unless you have someone to talk to. And they use viral methods, videos and banners etc – encouraging people to talk via Skype and ask questions

Not much more than yesterdays on Basecamp, but with a less charismatic speaker. Least there’s only a few slides. And a cool little viral video. Not too much beyond an ad for rhe compnay. SO what’s next?/

Jun 11

Cory Doctorow – reboot7

Most of this is direct notes.

Cory is talking about the European Broadcast Flag. A comnparison of CD with DVDs. CD have driven value creation, with the music being taken and being used in multiple ways; DVDs – all you can do is watch them, there is no new things that can be done with the content. It’s all locked in by the small number of industries that control the rights.

Next a comparison of EU and UK database companies. European databases are subject to copyright so the first person to put together a database owns it. This does not happen in the US. SO all work and innovation has taken place in the US, where the data and ideas are available.

The entertainment industry always want to get involved and control the technology that plays and copies their content. They do not want things that can share the content, they do not want to change. But everytime a change has happened, this has opened the market for more opportunities. But for a long time there has been opposition to the entertainment companies controlling the tech.

But this is changing. The phone companies are huge, far bigger than the entertainment industry. But the phone companies are getting into bed with the entertainers – they want to control what can be done, providing content that can only be used on single platforms, that can’t be shared.

The functionality of the devices and the software is being restricted. The tech companies want the content to drive sales, to provide services but once one step is taken, the risk is you’ll never be able to get step back.

The Braodcast flag movement tries to ensure that all technology is licensed by the entertainment inductry; it also puts things in place to stop users changing the content, altering and playing with it. It’s been killed in the US; but in EU, the project is still ongoing. Even though it’s dead in US, the studios are still pushing in EU (so they can go back to the US and say ‘they have it, we need it’???). The EU tag is planning to restrict content to one household only – but whats a household? How can technology restriction set social standards? It plans to lock down all tech, to prevent mods. And allow permissions to be revoked, to remove functionality that worked before.

So keep asking for products that cost less and do more, instead of cost more and do less.

Jun 10

Jason Fried – reboot7

Notes on “How to do great things with small teams”

So you appear to need people passionate and happy, well rounded, quick learner, trustworthy and a good writer, so he’ll take someone who is average and happy instead of brilliant and disgruntled.

Small has big advantages: customner is closer, so less formal, less mass, less fear, more flexibility, more change and more freedom. So what does this do – allows people (if they are passionate and happy) can do more things, cna speak up, can all contribute to all things and are not constrained by the ‘roles’ a big company puts on then. But a big company has money, hardware, software etc (is he sure??? In a big company we still have issues getting things), so a small company has to be creative in getting things done.

“when spending a dollar no longer hurts, then you have too much money”

An interesting take of ‘customer suggestions”. they respond, they listen, but only act id the suggestion comes up again and again.

Remember – “decisions are temporary” – so you can change things.

“Build less software, build half a product, not a half-assed product”

Less software means less features, lower cost of change, less work to maintain things – all of which can make people happy. Support is tiresome, timeconsuming and a pain. So ensure you build stuff that won’t need much work…and drives people to get their own solutions. Give aids to someone coming up with their own solutuons, don’t try and fix everything.

So I can see the above working with small products that can go onto be big. This is about emergent stuff, stuff that can evolve.

Now he’s putting down fucntional specs – I agree, they constrain evolving design “there’s nothing functional about functional specs” But in the area I work in, they’re compulsary as the designers and the builders are different parties. It’s the agreement – and it does definitely lead to argument.

Design, prototype, experience and change. Repeat until something works and you can live with it. Yes please, I’d love to do this. Iterative design is good.

“things aren’t problems till it’s a problem,” When Basecamp was launched the company did not have any billing software – because it was launched with 30 days free….so they did not have to build it til 30 days were up. Just in Time – only do things when you need to.

He’s talking about something like the SCRUM method, breaking things down into smaller projects, each of which has a cycle.

SO when you have a small product (or half a product) how do you get the word out? Have features that can be shared and gossiped about – find something people want to talk about; promote through education – blogging, conferences; upgrade often, so people see you’re still working on it, still passionate. And finally, be transparent, be honest, keep people informed, don’t hide things. (and that is definitely one of the days’s recurring topics)

Jun 10

Science Commons – reboot7

Paula Le Dieu is talking about Science Commons, a new area from the people behind the Creative Commmons licences. This is starting to look at getting scientific data out in the open.

Using the example of p53, a gene theat is associated with cancer and other diseases. But cancer research and cures is lucrative to the drugs companies, so much of their research is patented. So research into other diseases associated with the gene that is not as lucative can be compromised. Of the 33000 articles in PubMed search, only about 6000 are open with full text. Others are hidden, you can’t access the full text, the knowledge is owned and will not be shared. So scientific knowledge is constrained by copyright and patents. DRM is being applied to the environments which hold the information. Users can only rent, not buy, and access stops if you stop paying.

One way forward is based on CCMixter, which tracks where stuff came form and where it is used going forward, so history and impact is tracked. From the scientists’ view, it’s easier to see how a piece of work is used.

Jun 10

Wikipedia – Reboot7

More notes and interpretations. For more stuff, try Technorati, which is pulling up lots of stuff from people here.

The afternoon keynote is from Jimbo Wales, from Wikipedia “feeely licensed encyclopedia”. The system is expanding to more than jus thte encyclopedia, covering dictionares, books, news etc. 500 million page views monthly. Wikipedia is almost all done by volunteers, only 1 full time employee. Growth has been ompressive, now comparable with about.com, which got sold recently for lots.

I’ve just been introducing the idea of a wiki to brand teams at work, and they just loved it. From starting to think about a centralised route of information, they grasped very quickly the strength of a shared system – and now want to try it.

Comparison of models – emergent model – needs reputation, and users are tinly. A community model has reputation being an outgrowth of human interactions and users are powerful and respected.

In the english wikipedia, the are 0.7% of the people doing >50% edits, 2% >75%. On the Danish version, 3 people are responsible for 33% of edits. So we do get a driving force , but you can still do it anomously – allows people to say things they may not want everyone to know.

“But what about quality control”. The history helps, the cmparisons help – allows user to make more of an objective PoV onthe changes, you can see what people think and argue about. “the community determines how it wants to interact” – the discussion based process for deletions allows judgements to be made, more than democracy where it works on stright votes – there’s a moderator who can take judgement calls based on trust.

Another key concept is about shared ownership – the articles are owned by the community so are looked after by the ownership. So this is group pride? This is tied into the social concept of “Neutral Point of View” – no stands, present both sides. Allows people to work together in a way that allows some recognition of differences. And a final foundation is the fact that is all shared software and done under GPL licences – so the content and the code can be taken easily – the suggestion is that this drives good stewardship.

A mix of “consensus, democracy, aristocracy and monarchy”. The monarch is Jimbo. And he is trying to become more of a constitutional monarch, letting power move to the community. The community values the results over the process – they want to create the info.

“how can such a large community scale” – software features (automating some management); policy of mediation and arbitration (ban the troublemakers?) and an “atmosphere of love and respect”…mmmm to don’t here that often in the software inductry.

This talk is far more like a lecture than many of the previous ones, seems more like a sales talk despite the anecdotes and the good info.

Onto the questions.

“is there opposition from governments” A = no, China has blocked them twice, but is back OK. Otherwise no issues, and fear is more that govs will take credit.

“will it ever become fixed” = no, but they will take snapshots of articles when it is ‘good enough’, to be shared through the non technical route (not everyone has web access)

“what about metadata and more structured content” = there’s category tagging, but tags are reviewed and things can be moved to a different structure.. Making the data be more easily used – they are looking to explore this.

“whats the reaction to the WikiNews from papers/content owners” = it appears they have not really understood the size. questions are about trust etc, but no real scathing attacks -that may be because of their “humanitarian” agenda.

“does wikipedias interface limit the users to those that are more technically minded” Jimbo thinks it does, Ithinnk its because they are the first people to discover it. Show it to people who have never seen it – they get it. Quickly. It’s more about the visibility.

Jun 10

questions – reboot7

Here at my first conference, I can see why having a lineup at microphones so annoys people. The enrgy in the speakinbg sessions is down and interaction is constrained – how many people want to get up and line up at a mike. In the open sessions, conversations and questions flow a lot more.

Jun 10

Designing for Play – reboot7

Ben Cerverny is now up talking about designing for play. Here’s my interpretation of what he is saying.

In many species, play is being used to drive the ‘grammar’ of interactions, to set boundaries for interactions, put some order around the chaos that is out there. We use play to make sense of the world when growing up.

But humans carry on playing after the time other species would stop and get on with surviving. We take games develop them for their own sake. We continue to use games as metaphors for life, continue to explore the world – back to Doc Searls reference to language and despcription is all about something else – we rarely create a brand new language, but look for metaphors and usages from things we’ve used or experienced before.

So games can potentially allow us to explore a new way of thinking by driving out different metaphors.

“There are multiple states of play” – there can be many modes and many stages in the game. there are challenges in learning the game, learning the metaphors, so designers can put in a learning space, where you can set the parameters, set up characters, and think before you enter the game. you move between composition and performance.

Interactive games reflect the need for ‘state machines’, where humans run through a series of rules, usually subconcious, that are developed to allow sense to be made of the world. In games, the state machines are designed, controlling the rules of the game. And players get immersed in the rules, internalise them, and then recognise the rules of the world they are playing in. Increasing metadata, increasing sources of date mean that more rules need to be recognised. Playing with the inputs increases the speed of creating the rules, creating new world views, allows the player and the viewers to quicker grasp the complexity.

Simlutions, like the Sims, are different from many games; they don’t have a winner at the end. The game is in the playing, not the winning. The state machine here can be the result of thousands of interactions and we can;t predict the result. Humans need occasional chaos to drive the thought (back to Open Sauce marketing, the previous talk). Chaos can surprise you and produce something new.

Jun 10

The new cult

Blogging is a faith that drives a cult. A cult that may lead to the truth. So says Jason Calacanis talking about colaborative consumer journalism, where a small pebble can gather enough momentum to cause an avalanche. A journalist may never have the time and the resources to follow the small stories, they are in a business. They have to make money for the media owners. But bloggers aren’t always in it for the money. they like the truth and don’t necessarily want to prostitute themselves. A quick survey of the audience seemed to say that most people are not making money from the blog (but more make money from something that happened because of their blog.)

Do blogs have a better history of the truth – they may have a better process to get tothe truth, if corrections are open (instead of buried in a small paragraph in the back of the paper when the original story was on the front page. A well read blog will get corrections from its readers in a very real-time manner. And updates and rewrites can be made in the same timeframe.

A further point being made about RSS feeds and how they can be used to steal content. This could drive to people to turning off the full feeds – especially if other people are making money by putting ads on the blogs that contains stolen content.

A final comment was about getting ‘ratings’ for commenters and bloggers, so you can build up the trust system. Over longer term, assessment can be made about contributors value.

Jun 10

reboot7.0 day 1

First day of the conference and listening tothe first 2 speeches –
from Doc Searls and Robert Scoble, followed by a short (very short) Q&A session. Very different styles of presentation. The first was from a slideslow, the second from some written otes and very much winging it. But both valuable. Both about conversations, the language that is used and the barriers that can be bent or broken. Now we start to break up into different conversations.

Jun 10

Breakfast

I’ve seen some funny things on the breakfast table but at the hotel this morning they were offering sliced carrots. I could face them later in the day for a healthy snack…but not at breakfast. Apparently they are quite common on buffets here.

Posted in fun
Jun 09

Copenhagen

Thought about putting wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen as a title but as it’s so much of a cliche that it’s even the theme of the official welcome notice at the airport, I decided not to. I finally got here after a slightly delayed flight to find a city that really reminds me of Amsterdam, enough so that I want to answer with questions with the small amount of Dutch that I know.

First port of call (after the hotel) was thePre-conference Meetup for drinks (following a wee bite to eat). I caught up with some people from Tuesday nights Geek Dinner and met some more, inckuding Nicole Simon, who I recognised from her voice, having listened to her podcasts. There was free wireless at the venue which was used by many, including this lot in the picture below. Nicole, Maryam and I decided on the appropriate caption “Bloggers finally discover European late night TV broadcasts over the web”

Focusing.jpg

Take a look at this use of dynamic mapping in Switzerland, which was actually the item being blogged at the time

Meanwhile, I’ve found me another use for Flickr. I’ve not yet loaded any graphical/imaging software on the new laptop, so had no way to reduce the size of the image above. So, upload to Flickr and then download a smaller size gives me an image that won’t kill the load times. Not that amazing discovery, but it’s the small things that help.

Jun 08

Logos

Bloglines has added an Ask Jeeves logo in the top right corner. Unfortunately, everytime I glimpse it out of the corner of my eye, it looks like a snail

Jun 08

Testing

Nick Swann last night gave me his elevator pitch for a site he has just launched – www.connectviabooks.com. He did a great job against my constant heckling. He suggested I take a look at it and feed back any comments. Considering I’m in test mode at the moment and seem to spend a fair few hours picking holes in website design, content and functionality his suggestion was probably a bad idea. Feedback has been sent on the first set of pages, now into the site to try it out.