Andy Roberts

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  Facebook event for Jan 25th Andy Roberts night…

  http://distributedresearch.net/status/facebook-event-for-jan-25th-andy-roberts-night/

  Facebook event for Jan 25th Andy Roberts night at Haverfolk http://www.facebook.com/events/297691586949028/

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  January 11 2012, 7:15am | Comments »

• I posted to youtube.com

  Andy Roberts Exhibition - Facebook Connections

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_j5qWFhGJw&feature=youtube_gdata

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  August 7 2011, 2:10pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  When will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/07/when-will-google-allow-rss-feeds

  When if at all, will Google+ allow people to add their own RSS feeds?Friendfeed took off when rooms were added, harnessing the power of the so-called social interest graph, but it started to lose appeal again when they allowed the automated inclusion of rss feeds into those rooms by the room owners, slowly drowning out the interesting and genuine conversations.Facebook allows the automated inclusion of feeds via 3rd party apps, but between the Facebook users and Facebook themselves, they have managed to deprecate content from feeds so that original content and human shares take priority over feeds.Now some Google+ users are clamouring for the ability to be able to add their own streams from elsewhere directly into their own circles, which would amount to the same mistake as Friendfeed made. But Google+ hasn’t even enabled some kind of groups, rooms or interests yet, either because they still don’t understand the dynamics of social networks, or because they are rolling out such features in waves, and this one hasn’t arrived yet.Google’s record with groups isn’t a good one. They bought Dejanews, the web interface for usenet newsgroups, one of the original computer facilitated social networks, and did nothing much with it for nearly a decade. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhen will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?Related posts:Friendfeed for microblogging – a screencast videoReclaim your lifestream feeds with SweetCron softwareFriendfeed and Social Objects

  

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  July 7 2011, 1:21pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Some things I can’t do on the ipad 2 yet.

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/03/some-things-i-cant-do-on-the-ipad-2-yet

  So this is an experimental blog post feeding the output from a mind map directly via email to the blog. The mind map software is ithoughtsHD as recommended by Ed Dale and MacSparky, and it’s an addition to one I made early in order to accumulate some tasks I needed to do when I get back on my iMac again. So the first one was a kind of to do list, which is against the spirit of action logging I know, but sometimes I need the memory aid in special circumstances. 

  I’ve had an intense unplanned two weeks or so learning curve with my new iPad 2, and it’s been enlightening and fun on the whole, but occasionally frustrating as well. In theory there are only about 20-30% of activities which cannot be done easily on the iPad, but in practice they can soon mount up into a bit of a backlog. I’ve tried to avoid getting involved in really complicated workflows which are basically workarounds to make up for the deliberately isolated structure of the IOS apps system. 

  Other things I haven’t mentioned are native OSX apps such as Market Samurai, or Firefox plugins, which haven’t been ported to iPad yet, if at all. 

  The iThoughtsHD output to email process includes a number of different formats and here they are:

  cant do on ipad

  adding autolinks into wordpress blog posts of course this is a bit like thinks to do on the iMac

  the difference being here I might try to find ways to do them on the iPad eventually

  podcasts

  broadcast with livestream edit sound files in audacity

  facebook

  leave groups manage pages on 2nd page

  Google Reader

  add subscriptions unsubscribe

  gmail

  add filters

  WordPress

  edit longer posts add categories after the first few in the list

  reorganise categories?

  cant do on ipad.itm Download this file

  cant do on ipad.itmz Download this file

  cant do on ipad.opml Download this file

  cant do on ipad.pdf Download this file

  Andy Roberts

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog

  via posterous Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSome things I can’t do on the ipad 2 yet.

  Related posts:iPad2 mind maps Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers iPad 2: where can I buy one in the UK?

  

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  May 3 2011, 9:28am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/25/jemima-kiss-how-i-kicked-my-digital-habit

  Twitter, Facebook, emails, and voicemail – we are overwhelmed by digital data, is it time to rebel against information overload? I wondered whe Jemima Kiss had gone too. But of course, managing the information overload IS your job.

  This article titled “Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.05 UTC We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son’s face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for. Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son’s life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live. That weekend, however, our whole family – my partner, my son and I – were offline. Swallowtail Hill Farm, in Rye, East Sussex, is a pretty soft option when it comes to a digital detox; a charming small farm with a diverting collection of animals and four vintage tractors. Camping was an easy option for an offline experiment, but there wasn’t much choice outside that for a UK break. High-end hotels in the US are now promoting their offline credentials, from boutique luxury to remote donkey trekking, but the UK has some catching up to do. Anyway, blessed with two days of good weather and some delicious local food, I barely even noticed I wasn’t online. What I did notice was my partner, Will. If my worst digital habit is incessant tweeting, his is allowing his phone to be the single most disruptive thing in our relationship. Country walks, dinner, bathing our son – no moment is safe from the seemingly irresistible ringing, vibrating, nagging phone that demands – and wins – his attention when he should be enjoying the moment with us. Any objections of mine are swiftly defended by explaining the importance of dealing with that email/text/voicemail now, though it never seems anything that couldn’t wait half an hour. I take equal responsibility for our connectopia – magnetically drawn, as I am, to any screen that can feed my addiction.

  We handed our phones in at the gate. The only interruption during lunch was from two woodpeckers and the entertainment during dinner by the fire was our own conversation. There was a moment when Will was distracted by a buzzing sensation and reached for his phone, before realising it was a bee. Without our phones, we had no idea what the time was. I reached for my phone when I wondered about local property prices and whether it is normal to see a barn owl during the day. And those moments when Artley, my son, was leaning out of the steam train window, having his bath outdoors under a woodburner-powered shower and being read his bedtime story in front of an open fire, I’ve had to try and commit to my own fallible memory. Breaking away from my connected life, I could feel how the compulsion, the divided attention, the multitasking has permeated my way of being. Early adopters, the heavy technology users who throw themselves at every new device and service, will admit to an uncontrollable impulse to check email, tweets or Facebook. Researchers have called this “variable interval reinforcement schedule”; we have in effect been trained into digital message addiction because the most exciting rewards are unpredictable. We’re no better than slot-machine addicts. The hustle we develop as we struggle to keep up with the pace of digital information has produced a restless, anxious way of engaging with the world. Desperate for efficiency, this seeps into our physical lives; I feel compelled to tidy while on the phone, to fold the washing while brushing my teeth. No single task has my undivided attention. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, last week concluded that constant multi-tasking gradually erodes short-term memory. And interruptions are a massive problem, taking anything up to 20 times the length of the interruption to recover. For those of us compelled to check email every few minutes, that revelation explains where the day goes. As consumer web technologies mature, so too does our desire to understand the impact they are having on our lives. Few books on digital dystopia are more resonant than Hamlet’s BlackBerry, an imaginative and thoughtful book that explores philosophical reaction to new technologies throughout time and the lessons we should have learnt from those. The author, former Washington Post journalist William Powers, is, like me, a true believer in the power and potential of digital technologies, but concludes that we need a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives. “The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward,” he writes. “There’s a preoccupation with what’s going on ‘out there’ in the bustling otherworld, rather than ‘in here’ with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible and this carries a sense of obligation or duty.” That feeling that we should be reaching out, or be available to be reached out to, is tied to the self-affirmation the internet provides. “In less-connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth.” Powers offers practical solutions, including advocating the use of paper as a more efficient way of organising our thoughts. The theory of “embodied interaction” asserts that physical objects free our minds to think because our hands and fingers can do much of the work, unlike screens where our brains are constantly in demand. The eponymous technology he describes in his book is an intriguing Elizabethan version of a PDA, pocket-sized notebooks with pages coated in an erasable, plaster-like material. “Writing tables”, as they were known, were used for note-taking and checklists. While we can’t be sure Shakespeare used one, we’re shown that Hamlet was a keen user of the latest screen technology. “Yea, from the table of my memory,” Hamlet reflects, after meeting the ghost of his dead father. I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there Hamlet wants to clear his life of all the superficial detritus so that he can focus exclusively on avenging the death of his father. The development of print culture was adding to the tumult of life in Elizabethan England, just as we are overwhelmed with the explosion of always-on digital information today. Exploring Seneca’s “spa of the mind” as a way of escaping the commotion of a busy city, Powers explains that the constant demands of being overwhelmingly connected need to be balanced out by reintroducing a little disconnectedness. That’s exactly what Powers did at home, banning the internet at weekends. It took six months for the family to adjust. “Because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully … There was an atmospheric change in our minds, a shift to a slower, less restless, more relaxed way of thinking. We could just be in one place, doing one particular thing, and enjoy it.”

  At home, my concern about our digital addiction is most acute when I catch my son looking at me while I’m checking a screen. It’s reinforcing how much more important the screen is than him, as if I’m teaching him that obeying these machines is what he needs to do. Our fireside conversation that night, against a backdrop of a moonlit wood, was about Hamlet’s BlackBerry and what Powers calls the “vanishing family trick”, when a seemingly sociable family would gradually dissolve away to screens in different corners of the house. It’s a familiar story. “What’s lost in the process is so valuable, it can’t be quantified,” Powers despairs. “Isn’t this what we live for – time spent with other people, those moments that can’t be translated into ones and zeros and replicated on a screen? I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of the heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens.” As we left the farm, the real work began, trying to resolve our new promise of balancing work and home life by introducing phone-free zones and offline days. Best of all, when the farmer handed back our phones, we didn’t have a missed call or message between us.

  Jemima, Will & Artley stayed at Swallowtail Hill Farm, 01275 395447; canopyandstars.co.uk

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

  Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogJemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit

  Related posts:Teaching Assistants Community Now That’s What I Call Music goes digital Digital love: Manuelle Gautrand and the Gaîté Lyrique

  

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  April 25 2011, 10:45am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Spotify to halve free music allowance

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/14/spotify-to-halve-free-music-allowance

  Spotify is notorious amongst musicians for only paying a fraction of the royalties that other online music sites pay to bands. But it’s popular with music fans for allowing them to listen to almost anything on demand. Now they are being forced to bring in new restrictions

  This article titled “Spotify to halve free music allowance” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 14th April 2011 09.31 UTC Spotify is to cut back the amount of free listening available to users from 20 to 10 hours.

  From 1 May, the music streaming service will reduce by half the amount of free music available to its six million users in the UK and Europe.

  Under the new restrictions, non-subscribers will only be allowed to listen to an individual track a maximum of five times. New users will be moved on to the restricted model within six months; it will apply to existing users from 1 May.

  Since its 2008 launch, Spotify’s free offering has proved popular enough to tempt more than 1 million people to become paying customers.

  Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder, announced the changes in a blogpost on the company’s website on Thursday.

  “Making Spotify available to millions across Europe has seen the service become incredibly popular. People are listening to more music and from a wider range of artists than ever before, and are giving up on piracy, which is exactly what we hoped would happen,” he said.

  “So it’s vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you, but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward.”

  Ek said that the changes would mainly affect heavier users of the service, and that users would still be able to listen to around 200 tracks or 20 albums for free each month.

  The move will no doubt rankle with some music fans, who had grown used to Spotify’s free streaming service being “too good to be true“.

  The first commenter on Spotify’s official blogpost lamented: “So long Spotify. It was nice knowing you. Guess I’ll go back to pirating music again then.”

  More details soon…

  • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”. • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

  Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSpotify to halve free music allowance

  Related posts:Music video website Vevo to launch in the UK Pandora shuts out world wide listeners 30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad

  

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  April 14 2011, 6:19am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/12/30-new-music-apps-for-iphone-android-and-ipad

  New iphone iPad and Android apps range from popular artists to social location services aimed at music gig-goers.

  This article titled “30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 12th April 2011 09.15 UTC There’s something of an explosion in music apps happening on iPhone and Android at the moment, from official artist apps that look to go beyond pure news and audio samples, through to social location services aimed at gig-goers. Here’s a list of 30 apps that have launched in the past few months, from big stars and startup developers alike. It offers a glimpse at the trends and technologies that make apps as potentially habit-changing for music fans as they are for gamers and TV viewers. Note, this list is focused on apps that involve listening to or interacting around music, rather than actually creating it. Not because the latter isn’t just as interesting – there is a similar boom in innovative music-making apps – but because, well, those apps will sit better in their own list. Meanwhile, the focus on recently launched apps is why the likes of Spotify, Pandora Radio, Last.fm and others are not included. They’re still innovative and important, but this piece is about new contenders in 2011. The History of Jazz This sits alongside The Elements as one of the iPad apps showing that tablet book-apps can be far more than a scanned-in PDF with a bit of extra video. The History of Jazz offers an interactive timeline tracing the chronological history of jazz, with music samples, videos and curated playlists to dive into featured artists’ catalogues. Discovr This is less of a timeline, and more of a flowchart plotting connections between artists whose music is broadly similar. Discovr gets you to type in an artist, then tap your way through the chart of related bands, double-tapping to bring up biographies, videos and blogposts. MusicDrop and BoxyTunes Two apps that both have the same aim – to turn online storage service DropBox into a fully functioning cloud music service. Both MusicDrop and BoxyTunes stream music from your DropBox account, pulling in cover artwork and other information. They will increasingly face competition from pure cloud music services in 2011, but for existing DropBox users they may be a good stopgap. Decoded by Jay-Z This universal app for iPhone and iPad is based on a physical book collecting together rapper Jay-Z’s lyrics, and adding in video interviews. People paying $4.99 for the app can choose 10 of the 36 featured songs to unlock, or pay another $9.99 to unlock all 36. The actual music is not included – the app focuses on lyrics – but if the songs are already on the user’s device, they can be played in sync with the words. BEP360 will.i.am likes apps so much, he started his own development studio to make them. BEP360 was the first app to emerge. It’s described as a ’360 mobile music video’, which gets fans to hold up their iPhone and spin around for a 360-degree view of the video for the Peas’ The Time (Dirty Bit) single. Augmented reality features and photo-sharing are also included, making this an app worth admiring even if you’re not so keen on the music itself. Mike Scanner Part of the promotional effort around the final album by the Streets, Mike Scanner is one of the first artist apps to use the kind of barcode-scanning technology that’s been seen in numerous mobile shopping apps. The idea here: fans scan household items to unlock exclusive music, videos and ticket offers. Erykah Badu As we reported in February, soul singer Badu is the first artist to use the platform of startup FanTrail to try to connect with her fans – although she’s since been followed by the Roots and Quiet Company. The Erykah Badu app brings gamification to music fandom, with users filling up their ‘LoveMeter’ by sharing news with friends, buying music and checking in at gigs. The more full the meter gets, the more personal the recorded voice messages from Badu accessed through the app will be. Lykke Li Scandinavian pop artist Lykke Li’s app uses another platform, from Steam Republic. Here, the innovation is less about gamified rewards, and more about linking the app with her existing website, so fans can create profiles and share content across both. That includes blogposts and photos, while the app also has the now-obligatory gig check-ins feature too. Pocket Hipster We covered this app in February too: it’s a collaboration between two music technology startups, The Echo Nest and We Are Hunted. Pocket Hipster includes two avatar hipsters, who sneer at your music collection and suggest alternatives to listen to. The hipster aspect is for fun, but the recommendation technology is very serious – it uses The Echo Nest’s API, which is being licensed to a range of app and service companies in 2011. we7 Radio Plus Personalised radio is all the rage in the US thanks to Pandora Radio, but licensing arguments led to the company pulling out of the UK a few years ago. That’s left the way clear for Last.fm, and now we7 to see how the concept flies among British music fans. Released for Android this year, we7 Radio Plus creates radio stations on the fly based on specific artists and genres. SoundTracking Released by developer Schematic Labs in time for SXSW this year, SoundTracking lets people share details of the song they’re listening to there and then, including photos and comments. Other users of the app will be able to listen to 30-second samples courtesy of iTunes, and it integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Roxette Singbox Who knew Roxette would be the subject of an innovative music game in 2011? That said, who knew the Smurfs would be the subject of one of the most lucrative iPhone social games in 2010… Roxette Singbox brings the SingStar karaoke game model to iOS, using in-app purchases to download individual songs, with email and Facebook challenges for a social spin. Spin Play US music magazine Spin launched an iPad app in March this year, but it went beyond simply reproducing the print edition’s articles. Each $1.99 issue includes a playlist of 60 streaming songs and 30 streaming videos, chosen by the Spin team to complement the editorial content for that issue. The aim is for readers to listen to bands while reading about them. Play by AOL Music Launched for Android smartphones in March, Play by AOL Music is another music discovery app, released by the newly-editorial focused US internet giant. It’s a music player app with social features baked in, enabling people to easily tweet or Facebook share the song that’s currently playing. Friends’ posts and comments are pulled into a real-time feed. Tune Drop and Pioneer Air Jam Everyone’s a wannabe DJ at house parties nowadays, but usually whoever controls the device gets to choose the tunes. Apps are emerging to make the process more collaborative, though. Tune Drop is an iPad app that lets party guests cue up requests from your iPod music library, while Pioneer Air Jam handles the process wirelessly – albeit only for Pioneer hi-fis. Kling Klang Machine Techno pioneers Kraftwerk were similarly innovative with their first iOS application this year, billing Kling Klang Machine as an ‘interactive 24-hour music generator’. Fans can browse a music map of the world divided into timezones, and mix Kraftwerk loops and samples together – overseen by wireframe models of the group itself. DJ Rivals US startup Booyah has had success with its Nightclub City Facebook game and MyTown iPhone social location game. DJ Rivals brings the two ideas together, as players build up their virtual DJ through rhythm mini-games and location-based DJ battles. Roqbot Roqbot won this year’s SXSW Music Accelerator contest, and is another collaborative playlist app, except this time designed to be used in bars and restaurants rather than the home. The iPhone and Android app lets users vote for the songs they’d like to hear, making it an app-centric incarnation of the traditional jukebox. Nirvana Classic Album: Nevermind In itself, this app isn’t technically innovative: it’s basically an existing documentary film ported to iPad, with bonus material and social commenting. However, it’s a sign that labels – Universal Music Group in this case – are keen to see how much demand there is for tablet apps focused on their back catalogues, as well as newer bands. McFly Live – Above The Noise Punk-pop band McFly teamed up with UK firm LoveLive recently, to release an app for a specific gig, rather than the band as a whole. It let fans watch a live stream of their concert at Wembley Arena in early April, while entering a contest and chatting to other fans on a forum. Swedish House Mafia – Until One iPad Edition Scandinavian dance supergroup Swedish House Mafia are already exploring multiplatform content, having released their own book and video documentary around latest album Until One. Now there’s an iPad app too, based on the book and videos, but with all nine tracks of the album streamable from within the app. Impressive technically, but also for the ability of label EMI to get the necessary publishing licensing signed off to include the full tracks. Owl City Galaxy While fans await new material from Owl City, they can dive into his US-only Galaxy application, which offers similar gamification to the Erykah Badu app – points for ‘future Owl City bonuses’. Social is the key feature, with fans invited to ‘customise your own planet and connect with other fans’, with an exclusive track dangled as the reward for doing so. Eavesdrop, MyStream and PairShare These three apps all launched around the same time, aiming to provide a modern-day equivalent of the two headphone sockets found on vintage Walkmans. All three allow people to listen to music at the same time, using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth streaming in the case of Eavesdrop and MyStream, and just Bluetooth for PairShare. AudioVroom Originally developed as part of a Music Hack Day event, AudioVroom styles itself as a ‘multi-user internet radio station’, where people earn points for recommending the app to friends, which can then be spent on listening to ad-free personal radio stations. Foursquare-style badges are thrown into the mix, while the sharing happens using the Bump app’s API, requiring people to physically knock their iPhones together to connect. US-only for now. The National Mall This ‘hyperlocal’ app isn’t much use to fans who don’t live in Washington DC, where US duo BlueBrain reside. The National Mall is an interactive album designed to be listened to on a walk around the National Mall in DC, with the rhythms and beats changing as they go. The app is due out imminently. iheartradio for iPad US radio group Clear Channel’s iheartradio apps have racked up millions of downloads on iPhone and other smartphones, but the newly-released iPad app shows what can be added for larger screens. Listeners can see related tweets when listening to one of the 750 US radio stations streaming within the app, while also perusing videos and photo galleries. That’s our selection, so what do you think? Which of these apps has most potential, and which will sink without a trace? And have we missed anything out that’s been released in 2011? Post a comment to let us know your feedback.

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

  Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad

  Related posts:Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble? Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers Justin.tv boss: ‘We want to replace the camera app on the phone’

  

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  April 12 2011, 4:54am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Facebook answers green critics with data centre design disclosure

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/11/facebook-answers-green-critics-with-data-centre-design-disclosure

  Facebook the social network is to make energy efficient design secrets freely available, by open sourcing the information, in answer to green critics.

  This article titled “Facebook answers green critics with data centre design disclosure” was written by By Iain Tomson and James Murray, Business Green for the Guardian Sustainable Business Network, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 11th April 2011 17.04 UTC Facebook has launched a major new initiative designed to share its server and data centre designs with rivals, in a move that the company claims could save enough energy to power over 100,000 homes. The Open Compute Project (OCP) will allow the wider IT industry to access the design secrets behind the social network’s new data centre in Prineville, Oregon, which the company says uses 38 per cent less power than existing server farms. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that engineers have been working for the past 18 months on new designs that would fit large-scale computing needs while significantly enhancing energy efficiency. “We want to share that knowledge with the industry and make server and data centre design open,” he said. “We’re trying to foster ecosystems for the development of business startups. It’s really cool. We’re not the only ones who need this hardware and by sharing there will be more demand for the stuff we need, which makes it cost effective.” Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, said that central to its strategy was power usage effectiveness (PUE), which is the ratio of power spent on computing versus that used to run and cool the facility. The ideal PUE is a rating of 1.0 – meaning 100 per cent of power went to computing – but data centres typically operate at a PUE of 1.5. Facebook’s new data centre operates at a PUE of 1.07. “A typical data centre consumes about $1m per MW each year, so this design would cut the annual power budget for an average site from $10m to $6m,” said Graham Weston, chairman at data centre provider Rackspace, which has worked on the OCP initiative. “We had [been] developing our own intellectual property around this issue, but will be flushing that to go with this open source design, because we believe in open source.” Facebook has deployed several customised designs and technologies at the new facility, including stripping out non-essential parts from servers and other systems, such as paint and logos – a move the company says has saved six pounds of materials per server. Switching just one quarter of US data centres to the specifications released by the OCP would save enough power for more than 160,000 homes, according to Facebook. The move follows a campaign orchestrated by Greenpeace called ‘Facebook: Unfriend Coal’ which has protested against the company’s reliance on coal power for its data centres. “If Facebook wants to be a truly green company, it needs to reduce its gas emissions,” Casey Harrell, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace, told the BBC. “The way to do that is decouple its growth from its emissions footprint by using clean, renewable energy to power its business instead of dirty coal and dangerous nuclear power.”

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  April 11 2011, 12:23pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Tapping into online communities can help councils engage with citizens

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/28/tapping-into-online-communities-can-help-councils-engage-with-citizens

  Be it on Twitter, Facebook or Linked In, online communities are dominating the conversation and government just needs to get out of the way.

  This article titled “Tapping into online communities can help councils engage with citizens” was written by Louise Kidney, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 28th March 2011 08.00 UTC Of all the rumours floating around local government this year, my favourite is that the localism bill introduction in the House of Commons was delayed because nobody could agree on the definition of “community”.   A lot of people are interested in defining community at the moment, not just the coalition. The RSA is currently running a project examining the notion of a connected community in real space within the New Cross Gate area – mapping how people interrelate in their everyday lives whether through membership of special interest groups or in gyms. Facebook recently mapped their entire user base and how they interrelate – creating an image that reveals humanity’s need both to connect but also to migrate in all its global glory.   We are fascinated with community. Mapping existing connections within a community might seem pointless, until you consider that this might be where the proof of the pudding is for a multicultural society. The truth is, until you ask the question and map a community, how it exists currently and came to be that way, you cannot find the reason or motivation for the cohesion that exists within it, nor transfer that anywhere else. Until you identify who goes to which mosque but also the gym next to it, and identify that that person who attends both is a hub and an influencer, how can you know who the people are who you should be targeting to attend your local neighbourhood meetings? If you engage with the influencers, your message will be passed by word of mouth – but you must identify them first.   Even Facebook, a community in a digital space – or rather a collision of a series of friendship circles and communities all interacting and merging – has influencers. Most people, according to research, have about 150 people listed as friends on Facebook – but some have more, and they are the people who we assume cross over groups – the people who link groups, the people who work a room with ease at parties who transfer those networking skills across to the digital world. Again, if you want to get a digital community on board, get them behind your message, or, for example, behind your community clean up – identify the digital influencer in the geographical location you are targeting.   Communities can be enormously useful, and these are just a few examples of how. But how do you identify a community that you can’t see – one which exists in a space which allegedly has no borders? And how do you quantify the value of a digital community, surely it’s just a load of people sitting around chatting?   Not quite. Wikipedia defines a virtual community as ‘a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographic and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals.’ Sometimes it’s obvious that these communities exist online – take a look at any Facebook page on a common interest issue, be that a local issue or a band, and you will see there is a community – a collection of individuals with a commonality. But those links are not always so defined – local government has a community but that community sprawls across many digital networks, from the Communities of Practice to Twitter on the #localgov tag.   There is a small article buried as a reference in the Wikipedia article on virtual community. PBS Teachers, an educators’ community over in the US, published a report on understanding the impact of online communities on civic engagement. The figures speak for themselves. 65% of online community members have involvement in civic affairs since becoming members, 44% are more involved in social activism. Instead of frantic typing and little else, it seems that becoming part of a community empowers and motivates people to transfer the feeling of belonging to a community into the real world to effect real, tangible community driven change.   The lesson here, perhaps, is that just because something is digital does not mean it has no value in real world. It appears to act as an enabler, and for the RSA and others as an identifier, not an inhibitor.   Louise Kidney works in the communications team at Blackburn with Darwen borough council and blogs at ashinyworld.blogspot.com   This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the local government network for more like this direct to your inbox.

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  March 28 2011, 4:08pm | Comments »

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  Aggregators: if we can’t beat them, let’s join them

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/28/aggregators-if-we-cant-beat-them-letsjoin-them

  Arianna Huffington’s sale of her website The Huffington Post to AOL shows there’s still money to be made from content aggregators if you know what you’re doing.

  This article titled “Aggregators: if we can’t beat them, let’s join them” was written by Dan Sabbagh, for The Guardian on Monday 28th March 2011 06.00 UTC Arianna Huffington’s sale of the website that bears her name has not been without controversy; there are plenty who say she made a fortune from the sale to AOL on the back of aggregating other people’s content and exploiting bloggers who contributed for no pay and none of the highly rated equity. It is easy, of course, to argue that it isn’t fair, and, in addition, that life isn’t fair either. But it is also worth bearing in mind that this is the nature of the internet too. Facebook, for example, isn’t offering to share the advertising revenue it generates with the half a billion people who supply profiles (although come to think of it, income from one’s own site might be somewhat disappointing). Why should it? The skill is corralling so many people in one place, not in writing a Facebook profile. Whatever next? ITV paying viewers to watch the final of Dancing on Ice so they can get more advertising revenue? It’s not like there is any skill in watching telly after all. Meanwhile, the open nature of so much web content means that traditional boundaries of authorial ownership – they’re my words not yours – have been pretty much erased. It’s so easy, for example, to scrape a blog’s RSS feed and post the headline and teaser on another site. Newspapers, meanwhile, cheerfully copy tweets wholesale (one of mine on the merits of Rebecca Ferguson once made the Sunday Mirror) – while in the era of the live blog it has become not just possible, but increasingly common for media organisations to cite tweets from reporters employed by rivals. Think about it like that for a second and the scenario looks scary if you are part of an established news organisation – there is nothing to stop two blokes in a bedroom with BBC News and al-Jazeera on, and a fast eye for what else is popping up online, from coming up with their own “Libya live blog”. On this thinking, all that is preventing professional news sites being ripped off is copyright law, which is meant to stop other people copying and pasting sizeable quantities of text. Mind you, there are plenty of celebrity news sites that come perilously close to nicking whatever they see in the morning’s tabloids and running it as their own. Huffington – visiting the Guardian last week – also argued that there is a distinction to be made between professional journalists and bloggers. This isn’t necessarily a distinction of quality (because there are so many good bloggers out there) – rather the difference is between those who are paid to report professionally, and bloggers who are not. A handful of bloggers, of course, generate enough money to make the jump into full-time writing, but most can’t. Which is also the other reason why there aren’t two blokes in every third bedroom running their own Libya live blog – there isn’t enough money for a regular supply of biscuits and whatever else daily life requires. In truth, come to think of it, even those who write for traditional newspapers wouldn’t be able to make a living on the pay-per-click model. As Matt Wells notes in the cover feature, live blogs with no single author account for 9% of traffic to guardian.co.uk in March. The hit-driven nature of internet content means that a handful of stories and subjects dominate rankings, and by implication dominate online revenues. Paying writers on the basis of the traffic they get would turn a newspaper into a record company, where a handful of the artists are rich, and the rest become social workers in three years’ time. Aggregation, in short, is necessary to survive all round. Before the internet, there were generations of newspaper interviewees who were never paid for their contribution. Now the game is different – about providing destinations for people to share and discover news and content. And if Arianna Huffington was good at that, then it is wise not to complain, but probably to try and copy her.

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  March 28 2011, 5:01am | Comments »

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  Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/24/are-social-photo-apps-trapped-in-a-silicon-valley-bubble

  Some social apps are really cool but it’s unlikely your actual friends are using them

  This article titled “Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 11.28 UTC Another day, another innovative smartphone app based around photo-sharing. Color is the work of a team assembled by Bill Nguyen, the entrepreneur who previously sold streaming music service Lala to Apple. Backed by $41m (£25.3m) of venture capital, it lets users post photos tagged with a location, browse the latest pics of people around them, and form ad-hoc groups to bundle together shots from a group of friends in the same place. It brings to mind another hotshot photo-sharing app that launched last year: Path. There, the focus was on sharing pictures with just 50 close friends and family members — a deliberately restricted social network. It provoked similar excitement among the big US tech blogs. Here’s my question: are these kinds of apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble? Not in the financial sense — although that $41m for Color may fuel the debate around that too. More of a cultural bubble, where it may be a little too easy to assume that all your friends and family will be quick to catch on to the same cool new apps as you. Put it another way: if I made a list of my 50 closest friends and family members, none of them are using Path already. They won’t know about Color. And judging by my experience trying to tempt them onto Foursquare in recent months, they won’t be interested for a long time either. For now, all these apps only let me connect with other mobile industry geeks like myself. That’s where the suspicion of a bubble comes in: the assumption that if all your friends and colleagues aren’t using these new apps already, they’ll want to when you talk about them. Color may have an additional focus on strangers sharing pics, but while that’s a perfect storm of virality in Silicon Valley, it’s rather more of a lonely cul-de-sac in, say, Bishop’s Stortford. The answer may simply be to wire in Facebook, as Path does already, to widen the distribution to … well, to your real friends. An app like Instagram has its own social network, but I suspect much more social activity around its filtered photos is happening on Facebook and Twitter. Color is an interesting app with lots of money behind it. Investing in features that break it out of that Silicon Valley cultural bubble will be essential if it’s to amount to more than a geo-restricted social plaything.

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  March 24 2011, 10:57am | Comments »

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  The internet is over

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/15/the-internet-is-over

  Oliver Burkeman went to Texas to the South by Southwest festival of film, music and technology, in search of the next big idea. After three days he found it: the boundary between ‘real life’ and ‘online’ has disappeared.

  This article titled “SXSW 2011: The internet is over” was written by Oliver Burkeman, for The Guardian on Tuesday 15th March 2011 08.00 UTC If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won’t, of course, because they’ll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I’ll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco. It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world’s highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I’d been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is “user experience”, really? What the hell is “the gamification of healthcare”? Or “geofencing”? Or “design thinking”? Or “open source government”? What is “content strategy”? No, I mean, like, specifically? The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured cocktail. He looked slightly exasperated. “Well, from one perspective, I guess,” he said, “it’s kind of everything.” This, for outsiders, is the fundamental obstacle to understanding where technology culture is heading: increasingly, it’s about everything. The vaguely intimidating twentysomethings who prowl the corridors of the Austin Convention Centre, juggling coffee cups, iPad 2s and the festival’s 330-page schedule of events, are no longer content with transforming that part of your life you spend at your computer, or even on your smartphone. This is not just grandiosity on their part. Rather – and this is a technological point, but also a philosophical one – they herald the final disappearance of the boundary between “life online” and “real life”, between the physical and the virtual. It thus requires only a small (and hopefully permissible) amount of journalistic hyperbole to suggest that the days of “the internet” as an identifiably separate thing may be behind us. After a few hours at South by Southwest (SXSW), the 330-page programme in my bag started triggering shoulder aches, but to be honest it was a marvel of brevity: after all, the festival was pretty much about everything. We’ve been hearing about this moment in digital history since at least 1988, when the Xerox technologist Mark Weiser coined the term “ubiquitous computing”, referring to the point at which devices and systems would become so numerous and pervasive that “technology recedes into the background of our lives”. (To be fair, Weiser also called this “the age of calm technology”, implying a serenity that the caffeinated, Twitter-distracted masses in Austin this week didn’t seem yet to have attained.) And it’s almost a decade since annoying tech-marketing types started using “mobile” as an abstract noun, referring to the end of computing as a desktop-only affair. But the arrival of the truly ubiquitous internet is something new, with implications both thrilling and sinister – and it has a way of rendering many of the questions we’ve been asking about technology in recent years almost meaningless. Did social media cause the recent Arab uprisings? Is the web distracting us from living? Are online friendships as rich as those offline? When the lines between reality and virtuality dissolve, both sides of such debates are left looking oddly anachronistic. Here, then, is a short tour of where we might be headed instead: Web 3.0

  “Big ideas are like locomotives,” says Tim O’Reilly, a computer book publisher legendary among geeks, embarking on one of the grand metaphors to which the headline speakers at SXSW seem invariably prone. “They pull a train, and the train’s gotta be going somewhere lots of people want to go.” The big idea O’Reilly is touting is “sensor-driven collective intelligence”, but since he coined the term “Web 2.0″, he seems resigned to people labelling this new phase “Web 3.0″. If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed. You’re still creating the web, but without the conscious need to do so. “Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications,” O’Reilly has written. “Motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we’re looking at, and how fast we’re moving . . . Increasingly, the web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an ‘information shadow’, an aura of data, which when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mindbending implications.” Alarming ones, too, of course, if you don’t know exactly what’s being shared with whom. Walking past a bank of plasma screens in Austin that were sputtering out tweets from the festival, I saw the claim from Marissa Mayer, a Google vice-president, that credit card companies can predict with 98% accuracy, two years in advance, when a couple is going to divorce, based on spending patterns alone. She meant this to be reassuring: Google, she explained, didn’t engage in such covert data-mining. (Deep inside, I admit, I wasn’t reassured. But then Mayer probably already knew that.) The game layer

  Depending on your degree of immersion in the digital world, it’s possible that you’ve never heard the term “gamification” or that you’re already profoundly sick of it. From a linguistic point of view, the word should probably be outlawed – perhaps we could ban “webinar” at the same time? – but as a concept it was everywhere in Austin. Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world’s leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft. So why not apply that expertise to all those areas of life where we could use more engagement, commitment and fun: in education, say, or in civic life, or in hospitals? Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn’t some of that energy be productively harnessed? This sounds plausible until you start to demand details, whereupon it becomes extraordinarily hard to grasp what this might actually mean. The current public face of gamification is Jane McGonigal, author of the new book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World, but many of her prescriptions are cringe-inducing: they seem to involve redefining aid projects in Africa as “superhero missions”, or telling hospital patients to think of their recovery from illness as a “multiplayer game”. Hearing how McGonigal speeded her recovery from a serious head injury by inventing a “superhero-themed game” called SuperBetter, based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which her family and friends were players helping her back to health, I’m apparently supposed to feel inspired. Instead I feel embarrassed and a little sad: if I’m ever in that situation, I hope I won’t need to invent a game to persuade my family to care. A different reaction results from watching a manic presentation by Seth Priebatsch, the 22-year-old Princeton dropout who is this year’s leading victim of what the New York Times has labelled “Next Zuckerberg Syndrome”, the quest to identify and invest in tomorrow’s equivalent of the billionaire Facebook founder. Priebatsch’s declared aim is to “build a game layer on top of the world” – which at first seems simply to mean that we should all use SCVNGR, his location-based gaming platform that allows users to compete to win rewards at restaurants, bars and cinemas on their smartphones. (You can practically hear the marketers in the room start to salivate when he mentions this.) But Priebatsch’s ideas run deeper than that, whatever the impression conveyed by his bright orange polo shirt, his bright orange-framed sunglasses, and his tendency to bounce around the stage like a wind-up children’s toy. His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you’ve failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score? This kind of insight isn’t unique to the world of videogames: these are basic insights into human psychology and the role of incentives, recently repopularised in books such as Freakonomics and Nudge. But that fact, in itself, may be a symptom of the vanishing distinction between online and off – and it certainly doesn’t make it wrong. The dictator’s dilemma

  Not long ago, according to the new-media guru Clay Shirky, the Sudanese government set up a Facebook page calling for a protest against the Sudanese government, naming a specific time and place – then simply arrested those who showed up. It was proof, Shirky argues, that social media can’t be revolutionary on its own. “The reason that worked is that nobody knew anybody else,” he says. “They thought Facebook itself was trustworthy.” This is one of many counterintuitive impacts that the internet has wrought on the politics of protest. But perhaps the most powerful is the one that Shirky – himself a prominent evangelist for the democratic power of services such as Twitter and Facebook – labels “the dictator’s dilemma”. Authoritarian leaders and protesters alike can exploit the power of the internet, Shirky concedes. (At least he notes the risks: in another session at the conference, I watch dumbstruck as a consultant on cyber-crimefighting speaks with undisguised joy about how much information the police could glean from Facebook, in order to infiltrate communities where criminals might lurk. Asked about privacy concerns, she replies: “Yeah – we’ll have to keep an eye on that.”) But there’s a crucial asymmetry, Shirky goes on. The internet is now such a pervasive part of so many people’s lives that blocking certain sites, or simply turning the whole thing off – as leaders in Bahrain, Egypt and elsewhere have recently tried to do – can backfire completely, angering protesters further and, from a dictator’s point of view, making matters worse. “The end state of connectivity,” he argues, “is that it provides citizens with increased power.” The road to that end state won’t be smooth. But the compensatory efforts of the authorities to harness the internet for their own ends will never fully compensate. Either they must allow dissenters to organise online, or – by cutting off a resource that’s crucial to their daily lives – provoke them to greater fury. Biomimicry comes of age

  The search engine AskNature describes itself as “the world’s first digital library of Nature’s solutions”, and to visit it is to experience the curious, rather disorienting sensation of Googling the physical universe. Ask it some basic question – how to keep warm, say, or float in water, or walk on unstable ground – and it will search its library for solutions to the problem that nature has already found. The idea of “biomimicry” is certainly not new: for much of the past decade, the notion of borrowing engineering solutions from the natural world has inspired architects, industrial designers and others. Austin is abuzz with examples. “Nissan, right now, is developing swarming cars based on the movements of schooling fish,” says Chris Allen of the Biomimicry Institute. Fish follow ultra-simple mathematical rules, he explains, to ensure that they never collide with each other when swimming in groups. Borrow that algorithm for navigating cars and a new solution to congestion and road accidents presents itself: what if, in heavy traffic, auto-navigated cars could be programmed to avoid each other while continuing forwards as efficiently as possible? The Bank of England, he adds, is currently consulting biologists to explore ways in which organic immune systems might inspire reforms to the financial system to render it immune to devastating crises. “And what we’re looking for now,” Allen says cryptically, “is an interactive technology inspired by snakes.” ‘We are meant to pulse’

  Until recently, the debate over “digital distraction” has been one of vested interests: authors nostalgic for the days of quiet book-reading have bemoaned it, while technology zealots have dismissed it. But the fusion of the virtual world with the real one exposes both sides of this argument as insufficient, and suggests a simpler answer: the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn’t, it isn’t. Similarly, warnings about “internet addiction” used to sound like grandparental cautions against the evils of rock music; scoffing at the very notion was a point of pride for those who identified themselves with the future. But you can develop a problematic addiction to anything: there’s no reason to exclude the internet, and many real geeks in Austin (as opposed to the new-media gurus who claim to speak for them) readily concede they know sufferers. One of the most popular talks at the conference, touching on these subjects, bore the title Why Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy. A related danger of the merging of online and offline life, says business thinker Tony Schwartz, is that we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But “we were not meant to operate as computers do,” Schwartz says. “We are meant to pulse.” When it comes to managing our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: “We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours.” Schwartz cites research suggesting that we should work in periods of no greater than 90 minutes before seeking rest. Whatever you might have been led to imagine by the seeping of digital culture into every aspect of daily life – and at times this week in Austin it was easy to forget this – you are not, ultimately, a computer.

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  March 15 2011, 4:07am | Comments »

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  SXSW 2011: Can Facebook photos be used commercially?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/14/sxsw-2011-can-facebook-photos-be-used-commercially

  Facebook is asked whether businesses and advertisers could make use of the equivalent to one Flickr‘s worth of photos being uploaded each month. SXSW report

  This article titled “SXSW 2011: Can Facebook photos be used commercially?” was written by Jemima Kiss, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 16.41 UTC Much of the focus of this discussion was inevitably focused on Facebook’s photos product manager, Sam Odio, who disappointingly played the “not my remit’ card when asked the most interested and pertinent questions about Facebook’s use of users’ photos, including facial recognition and how images might be co-opted by advertisers. • Facebook sees “a Flickr’s worth of photos uploaded every month”, said Odio. But it’s worth considering the different values of those two services: Flickr includes some high-quality, well edited photography, while Facebook focuses on storytelling over quality. It doesn’t matter, said Odio, if that first photo of your newborn nephew is blurry: it’s the social context behind the photo. • Odio fielded a question by one delegate about how businesses and advertisers might start appropriating photos for commercial use. “We’re not in the business of selling ads through people’s photos and we want to prevent businesses having free rein over users,” he said. “But businesses are users,” pushed the delegate. Odio said Facebook would want the people in the photos to be telling the story – which means advertising would be there but more subtly, and directed by users. • As for ownership of photos, Odio said that comes down to the need to build the API in such a way that it can access your friends’ photos. If each of those users retained ownership, that would become very complicated. “There are worries we are going to use photos in advertising but it doesn’t really benefit us that much given how sensitive the subject is.” • Yan-David Erlick, a serial entrepreneur who founded Mophot.to, predicted that social photos will become even more integrated with our lives through different sorts of tagging. “Timelines between items will mean that over time, these entities are not viewed as individual pieces of media but will have contextual attributes tying them to other pieces.” • Odio explained how after struggling to keep his startup photo site Divvyshot going in 2009, ploughing in all his own savings, he got a random email one Sunday night. It was from Blake Ross, who later turned out to be co-creator of Firefox, at an address at Facebook. “He said ‘Sam – your site looks interesting. You should come here.’ I was living with six developers at the time and they were all looking over my shoulder to figure out if the email was fake or not.” It was, and Facebook acquired Divvyshot in April 2010. • Feature requests aren’t always the best way to develop a product. Odio said nobody asked for Instagram, which just raised $7m in funding, but now it is taking off. Facebook’s engineers also have a monthly hackathon where they can work on whatever they like; that doesn’t determine product direction but features such as drag-and-drop organisation have come out of that. • On facial recognition, all Odio would say is that Facebook “hasn’t been able to move quickly on it given how sensitive it is”, which does seem to imply it would have liked to do plenty if it could have got away with it. • Odio said a startup should make the product extremely simple; he had got distracted when trying to add too many features and functions. “Focus on one thing and do it extremely well. In early days the product needs to be explained to users in 10 seconds or less.” • One delegate said he was concerned that Facebook is becoming such an important repository for his life, and that photos are the most easily accessible part of that archive compared to status updates or messages. Erlich described the web being used as an external memory for us all, from photos to phone numbers; this ties in with Clay Shirky’s idea of cognitive surplus – if machines can take over the mechanical parts of our brain function, what can we do with the space and energy that frees up?

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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  March 14 2011, 6:33am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Why would councils want to exclude bloggers and tweeters?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/11/why-would-councils-want-to-exclude-bloggers-and-tweeters

  Can you be a blogger and respectable at the same time? I hope not.

  This article titled “Why would councils want to exclude bloggers and tweeters?” was written by Dave Hill, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 11th March 2011 15.00 UTC Local government minister Bob Neill MP (Con) recently wrote to local authorities as follows: “Bloggers, tweeters, residents with their own websites and users of Facebook and YouTube are increasingly a part of the modern world, blurring the lines between professional journalists and the public. There are recent stories about people being ejected from council meetings for blogging, tweeting or filming. This potentially is at odds with the fundamentals of democracy, and I want to encourage all councils to take a welcoming approach to those who want to bring local news stories to a wider audience.” Excellent advice. But some councils have been slow to get the message. These notably include the famous Tory “easyCouncil” of Barnet in north London, whose leader Lynne Hillan told the Barnet Times:   “The current advice according to the constitution does not allow filming in the council chamber … The only thing we will do is consider responsible media requests, and they are the only thing we would allow at this stage … I do not think we would consider a request from bloggers. Only respectable media would be considered.”  The statement raises an array of questions. What defines some parts of the media as “respectable” and “responsible” and others not? Who does the category “blogger” include? Can you be a blogger and respectable at the same time? I’ve a hunch that Councillor Hillan had a certain person in mind. His name is Roger Tichborne, publisher of a blog called Barnet Eye. The Eye campaigns tirelessly against her administration. Its author’s greatest triumph was successfully complaining that a Tory colleague – the quite astounding Brian Coleman – had breached the council’s code of conduct by sending him an abusive email. Tichborne networks with fellow local online citizen journalists – some of theme dissident Barnet Tories – in one of London’s best-blogged boroughs. Following Hillan’s remarks he attended a council committee meeting as a member of the public and filmed it until another Tory councillor ticked him off, unimpressed by the unrespectable blogger’s protesting that he had legal opinion on his side. But the law shouldn’t need to be dragged into this. Neither should those increasingly meaningless distinctions between citizen journalists and the professional media, not least because plenty of the latter are far less “respectable” or “responsible” than plenty of the former. Little love may be lost between Tichborne and the Tories responsible for emptying his bins, but Barnet town hall should still welcome him. It should welcome anyone prepared to sit through deliberations in its democratic chambers and convey these to a wider public either live or later and whether by blogging, tweeting, audio recording, filming or standing on a street corner waving semaphore flags. So should every town hall in the land. In recent weeks public galleries in London and elsewhere have been filled with hecklers ritually denouncing Labour councils in particular for passing on “Tory cuts” in their budgets. Many of the outraged were ignorant, boring and stuffed with cost-free piety, but at least they were there. Mostly, those galleries are close to empty. The same often goes for the press seats. Councils slammed for publishing their own freesheets often plead that their local papers take little notice of what they do. Often, they have a point. Citizen journalists can help to fill the void. Councils wary of licensing the amateur hordes should look to the top tier of local government in the capital. At London’s City Hall, the Thames-side glass bauble that contains London’s mayors, the main debating chamber enshrines in its very seating plan the non-recognition of any amateur-professional distinction. There is no special section for the press. Instead, anyone at all – the Guardian, Mayorwatch, Adam Beinkov, CyberBoris a school student on an educational trip – can liveblog or tweet, and lots of people do. Still photography is discouraged after the first 20 minutes of each session and the use of flash banned, but in both cases the restraints are simply to prevent noise and other distractions. All proceedings are webcast, but if I wanted to point my digicam at Boris Johnson or the assembly members I’d be as free to do so as BBC London’s camera crews so long as I created no disturbance. I’m told a simple principle applies: “It’s a public meeting. It should be public.” Town halls should take Bob Neill’s advice, and do the same. Who knows, the more open their policies, the more numerous, civil, varied and well-informed those in their public galleries might become, to the benefit of the voters they serve. How could they lose?

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  March 11 2011, 9:25am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  The Cooperative movement was born out a mixture of radical socialism and paternalist philanthropy

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/09/the-co-operative-revolution

  The Cooperative movement was born out a mixture of radical socialism and paternalist philanthropy during a period of upheavals and change. It was a group called The Rochdale Pioneers who established the first successful co-operative in 1844, starting a revolution which is still going strong.In theory the cooperative movement provides an alternative to capitalism by changing the relationship between the workers and the owners of business. In a workers coop the business is owned by the workers collectively, although it still has to operate in a capitalist marketplace. Not all coops are workers coops though. The coop retail service was a form which claimed to share the ownership of the enterprise with the customers rather than just the workers. Customers were paid a dividend, terminology deliberately derived from shareholders dividends, which was paid out periodically according the amount spent in the coop supermarket. This system degenerated into a stamps scheme, which ended up almost like green shield stamps and is mirrored today by the loyalty card schemes operated by distinctly non cooperative retail giants Sainsbury and Tesco. There is much more to the Cooperative movement than the visible shops trying to compete on our high streets and retail parks though. Today in the UK, as well as The Co-operative Group with its six million members and 5,000 outlets across its family of businesses including food, financial services, travel, pharmacy and funerals, there are thousands of other co-operators who share the same heritage. The cooperative model is often the best way for rural communities to organise services such as broadband into areas where the big telecoms companies can’t be bothered to deliver. Alternative energy is another good example:

  The UK’s first community owned wind farm, Baywind Energy Co-operative was established in 1996. The project has always favoured local investors, that way the economic benefits of the wind farm are kept within the community it serves. In 1998 Baywind secured a loan from The Co-operative Bank to purchase two turbines for their Harlock Hill site. It has also received several grants from The Co-operative Enterprise Hub to develop new, co-operatively owned wind farms across the UK. Baywind now typically generates around 10,000MWh of electricity each year – enough to power around 30,000 homes. And along with educational visits throughout the year, it funds environmental books for local schools. There’s even a Coop Facebook page now,which you can ‘Like’ to get updates. The Co-operative Join the revolution Get involved Sponsored Post

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  March 9 2011, 7:06am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/06/forget-google-%E2%80%93-its-apple-that-is-turning-into-the-evil-empire

  If Google is the new Microsoft, is Apple the new Google or is it Facebook? Well no, not exactly. Google Apple facebook

  This article titled “Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Sunday 6th March 2011 00.18 UTC Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry’s mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. “Very nice, Steve,” growled Tramiel. “I guess you’ll sell it in boutiques.” That was a long time ago. Now, with a market capitalisation of just over $331bn, Apple is the second most valuable company in the world – bigger than Microsoft ($220bn), Oracle ($167bn) or Google ($196bn). The quirky little computer company has grown into a giant. But not necessarily a giant of the Big Friendly variety, as the world’s magazine publishers have recently discovered and as the music and software industries have known for some time. For Apple now controls the commanding heights of the online content business and it looks like doing the same to the mobile phone business. At the moment, it looks as though nobody has a good idea of how to stop it. Every year, Fortune magazine polls a sample of US CEOs asking for their opinions of their competitors. The results for 2011 have just been released and they show that Apple is the “most admired” company in America. This is the sixth year in a row that it has held that title. The reasons are obvious. On the product side, Apple creates beautifully designed, highly functional and user-friendly devices that delight customers and provide fat profit margins; it has a corporate culture that reliably delivers these products by specified dates; it’s much more innovative than any of its competitors; and it has a unique mastery of both hardware and software. On the strategic side, the company has displayed a deep understanding of technology and a shrewd appreciation of potential devices and services for which people will pay over the odds. Most CEOs would kill to run a company that possessed a quarter of these competencies. Apple appears to have them all. Its current dominance is built on three big ideas. The first is that design really matters. It’s not something you can outsource to a design consultancy – which is what most companies do – and design is as much about ease of use as it is about aesthetics. The second insight was that the maelstrom of illicit music downloading triggered by Napster couldn’t last and that the first company to offer a simple way of legally purchasing music (and, later, other kinds of content) online would clean up. And third – and most important – there was the insight that mobile phones are really just hand-held computers that happen to make voice calls and that it’s the computing bit that really matters. Most of the media commentary about Apple attributes all of these insights to Steve Jobs, the company’s charismatic co-founder, on the grounds that Apple’s renaissance began when he returned to the company in 1996. This may well be true, though it seems unlikely that such a comprehensive corporate recovery could be the work of a single individual, no matter how charismatic. What’s more plausible is that Apple’s corporate culture took on some of the characteristics of its CEO’s personality, much as Microsoft was once a corporate extension of Bill Gates, with all that implied in terms of aggression and drive. Whatever the explanation, the fact is that Apple now has a dominant position in several key businesses (content distribution and mobile computing) and is having a seriously disruptive impact on the mobile phone industry. In particular, its iTunes Store gives it control of the tollgate through which billions of paid-for music tracks and albums, videos and apps cascade down to millions of customers worldwide. It levies a commission on everything that passes through that gate. And every Apple mobile device sold can only be activated by hooking up to the gate.   This gives Apple unparalleled power. Lots of other organisations offer paid-for downloads, but none has the credit card details of so many internet users who are accustomed to paying for stuff online. This was one reason why proprietors of print magazines began to slaver when the iPad appeared. Here at last was a way of getting people to pay for online content: just make it available on iTunes and let Apple collect the money. Sure, it rankled that Apple took 30%, but – hey – at least it would bring to an end the parasitic free riding that was endemic on the web. Henceforth, the web was dead: publishing magazines as iPad apps was the future. Then Apple abruptly changed the rules, stipulating that any publisher selling a digital subscription on a website must also make the same subscription offer within the app, from which Apple would take a 30% cut. Publishers have been furious about this, but there’s nothing they can do about it. If they want to do business on the iTunes store, then they have to do it Apple’s way. In itself, this was just an example of the Big Unfriendly Giant flexing its muscles, but it could be a harbinger of things to come. Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven. Eco’s metaphor applies with a vengeance to the new generations of Apple iDevices, which are rigidly controlled appliances. You may think you own your lovely, shiny new iPhone or iPad, but in reality an invisible virtual string links it back to Apple HQ at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino. You can’t install anything on it that hasn’t had the prior approval of Mr Jobs and his subordinates. And if you are foolish enough to break the rules and seek your own route to salvation, then you may find when you next try to sync it with iTunes that it has turned into an expensive, beautifully designed paperweight. If that isn’t power, then I don’t know what is.

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  March 5 2011, 6:28pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Yusuf Islam on ‘My People’

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/25/yusuf-islam-on-my-people

  Yusuf Islam talks about the production and crowd sourcing of his new song ‘My People’ inspired by the revolution in Egypt and the Arab world.

  Yusuf used facebook to gather peoples voices and mixed them into the production. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogYusuf Islam on ‘My People’

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  February 25 2011, 10:49am | Comments »

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