Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

Oooh! I’ve been tagged for the first time. All those hours deciding who I’d invite to dinner and what my last words would be and what animal I’d be … wasted!

And the tagger in question is Paul, who is bringing up the dirty “V” word in The Vision Thing. The poor love sounds a bit jaded doesn’t he? How anyone could possibly be jaded with all these shiny web2.0 baubles to play with is beyond me (and the pale) but here’s my response…

I Feel Your Vision Pain Brother. At times, probably more often that I’d like to admit, everything to do with computers just makes me sigh so deeply that the shelves rattle. I wonder “Is it me or is all of this just complete crap?” and feel very alone and lonely. At times I am astonished at what other people find any good, but then I’m still working out if Delicious and Twitter have any real value at all. And this internet thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either.

What is Vision anyway? Most of the stuff peddled as vision nowadays is no such thing. Most of Web2.0 vision is actually about assumptions, the assumption that we can create a scalable video hosting site easily, the assumption that users generate content, the assumption that Google will buy our last techno-whim.

What’s My Vision Thing? Well, you did ask, kinda. I’m very fortunate cursed with a butterfly mind. I can be easily distracted or if you were being generous you might say I am very inquiring and experimental. What this means is that whilst traveling through times in which Vision is scarce, I can busy myself with The Next Best Thing knowing that, when I least expect it, something so new and fab it hurts will blow my socks off. It’s a waiting game in which you might as well spend the boring bits at least trying to make it interesting. You never know.
On the subject of experimentation and research, I’ve got to tell you that yesterday was a break-through day for me. One of those days when three or four tinkering strands came together in a spume of code. It’s early days but its a mashup of data-mining, natural language processing, visualisation and crispy bacon (it’s still in alpha). I was so excited about this thing I’d made that I gibbered. And here’s the rub, I stumbled across this whilst doing real work, you know, the dull stuff.

In the past I’ve done the Vision thing so many times and I’ve never created a meme… and worse than that, I’ve found myself banging on about something for years and then someone else creates the term that defines it and I then waste my time wearing my best “I told you so hat”.

So my Vision for next few years is, as ever, that there will be more of the same (only slightly better) and loads of crap that becomes a success despite my disregard. Mark my words, this one will come true!

Do Something Else… Quick!

So, in true bloke style, rather than simply listening I’m going to try and find a solution to your current Vision predicament with some handy hints for beating the ennui..

• Take a break. You sound like you need a holiday. People need holidays. I need a holiday. The internet will still be there when you get back, only slower.
• Do something very different on your computer, something meaty. For me it was playing with natural language processing and visualisation that opened the doors of excitement again. What were you tinkering with five years ago that you never quite finished? You are older and wiser now. Now you might crack it.
• Do a very boring job. There’s nothing like drudgery to set the mind a-wandering.
• Dig out your old heroes. Go watch the Doug Englebart videos and imagine how he must feel having created software in 1960 that is still unparelled in today’s Web2.0 loveliness. And then Tommy Cooper.
• Learn the ukulele
• Get out more. I find that other people never fail to inspire me. Let’s have a pint soon! I’ll do the best I can on the inspiration front.

You’ve given me an idea there. Us geeks, especially the self-employed ones really should have supervisors/mentors. Someone to talk to about work. Sure GeekUp is great but I mean something more, well, selfish and less social. A bit like professional technological therapy to stop us all going mad or strange.

Your first session is free.

I got very intrigued about the Intel Mash Maker because it has a Firefox plug-in and a great logo. I tried it. It didn’t work. But the best bit was that the screencast video doesn’t have audio. I’d restarted a few times thinking it was crappy WMV files before I noticed the note.

The author confirmed that it’s not a bug — these videos actually have no audio.

Thanks guys… really web2.0! They need a mac and a copy of this… (via Twitterwhere finding Edd round the corner).

This lets you add a few URLs and instantly create a search engine. Brought to by an ex-Google employee who I think must have left with Google’s databases on a USB stick. How else can you explain “instant indexing”?

I made a  Ukulele Songs  search engine, but then I would, wouldn’t I?

I warm to the idea of this site just because it is so needed, giving geeky busy-bodies like me a much welcome sense of achievement.
FixMyStreet.

I’ve was quite excited when I saw this… Templatemaker, because the idea in it is that rather than tell a web crawler what to do, you basically let the dog smell the rabbit, let it off the lead and then ask it what’s in it’s mouth when it comes back.

It didn’t work.  This function says it all…

num_holes( )

… but then, looking more closely at it, it can’t work. Because if you were to teach it two pages with songs on, such as “Frank Black” and “Hank Williams”, it will return…

 Fr{{hole}} Wi{{hole}}liams

… which is not what I (or anyone) wants.

Ironically, this post begins having been locked out of my Flickr account since Yahoo took it over, so I’ve not been dumping my phone photos like I used to. I’ve found that my phone camera is a sort of visual memory. I often look back at it, amazed at the sights I’ve seen, taken a picture of, and then completely forgotten I’ve been there.

Double ironically, I tried Twitxr for a while, but the forgotten password routine doesn’t work…

I was astonished to find a hand-dryer in Kennedy’s bar in York that actually worked! It fires a thin jet of air and you lift your hands up and down through it.

Note: Kennedy’s has crap beer btw. Why can’t pubs do good beer (for me) AND good wine (for Sophie)? Is it so impossible a combination to manage?

It’s amazing that a hand-drier that works has taken so long to be invented. I can’t imagine what the first demo of the very first hand-driers must have been like, with people nodding their heads and putting in orders for something that warmed your hands slightly but made enough noise to reassure the girls in accounts that you’d actually washed your hands. And then dried them on the arse of your trousers.
This joy at finding something that worked for once was tempered by the fact that a few minutes earlier I’d been subjected to one of my biggest usability hates of all time, modern taps.

Why oh why do people like taps that are so difficult to use and need de-coding and experimenting with before you spray a huge jet of water all over your groin? Something the lovely hand-drier above won’t be able to sort out unless you take your trousers off and lift them up and down through the fine jets of air.

So, then on to the station, where there used to be an independent coffee shop (that did delicious toasted bacon rolls…and not in a bloody microwave) which has now been replaced with a Costa Coffee (the one on the bridge with the big clock).

They’ve tarted the place up a bit, replaced bacon rolls with sellaphane and cardboarded breakfast solutions but worst of all, off-center saucers that make a cup almost uncarryable! I await the injury claim court cases eagerly.

And finally… Every little helps…. You know that the saying, “Every little helps…” comes from a victorian cartoon in which an old lady was taking a leak into the sea, uttering the now immortal Hoskins/Wogan words.

And knowing that somehow makes everything make some sort of ironic sense.

p.s There is also another footnote about the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress, which seems to have got to the pinnacle of Mount Good Enough To Use But Bad Enough To Drive You Bloody Loopy….

 I met Jonathan to swap hints and tips last week in Covent Garden (downstairs) whilst he took a few photographs for The Market Quarter, his new gourmet ecommerce site growing out of his (and my) work with Bedales in Borough Market. Interestingly, he used his camera to grab the incredients (quickly) from the labels for use on the site later.

I wonder if that would be a good web2.0 service? Email a picture, receive the text back. I’m sure its been done hasn’t it?

Rory Motion is riffing on James Street and Morrisons, he’s also playing at the Winning Post this Saturday.

Another Rich Application coming atcha… this time it’s page-turning cover-flow for PDFs….via Issuu - nowhereware. I’d really like a few collaboration tools thrown in here, even just the ability to add a Post-It note would be nice.

Cover flow is fast becoming what Lists used to be. Shopping will never be the same.

… You came to the right place, Searchme. Cover flow for search results. Rich interfaces are coming to get you, I wonder if Google have realised yet… or care.

I’ve just had a run with FriendFeed and it’s quite good at pulling all these web services (Flickr, Twitter, Blogs etc) together into a single page, a little like the Facebook “home” page without, well, the Facebook. I really couldn’t bring myself to invite all my contacts though, which is the point at which I could see this service becoming interesting, because adding my stuff does little more than any common or garden RSS reader. If friends and contacts add their stuff, then they are effectively helping me keep up with their stuff for me. There is real value there because with the best will in the world, I can’t keep up with the umpteen sites and services other people are trying… it’s not just blogs n flickr anymore kids!

On the train last week, I started work on what I think is a cool tool, that is a bit like FriendFeed but takes a very different approach. It assumes you/we can’t keep up with stuff. This for me is the only tenable starting point for creating web software nowadays. For example, how well-kept is your RSS reader? How many great information sources do you find yourself back at realising you haven’t subscribed yet? How often do you feel that you won’t bother subscribing to something because “you’ve got enough” feeds to last you till Thursday afternoon?

So I put it to you, that a site/service that you need to explicitly maintain is doomed to failure (in terms of subscriptions). It will simply not work, or become too much work… take your pick.

And the tool is aiming to do this… Work out what the components of identity are, such as…

• A blog
• A Flickr account
• A Twitter account
• A Facebook account
• A Delicious account
• A YouTube account
• An Upcoming account
• A LastFM account
• An email address

…and many more. Now the interesting thing is, is that everyone is different. Wouldn’t it be great if you could assume a blog was someone’s identity and from there crawl to find what their Flickr username was etc… but many people don’t blog, but do Twitter or both Delicious and StumbleUpon.

And isn’t it funny that Twitter and LastFM let you have profile pictures which would should/might we use when trying to piece together a Frankenstein’s version of someone’s online identity.

One thing is for sure, when someone lists their online identities we can get a very good picture of who they are online. Take a look at Andy’s blog ( OFFMESSAGE ), you can see what he’s reading (Delicious) and hear what he’s listening to (LastFM) and even to some degree, see what he’s seeing (Flickr).

You find yourself making snap judgements about someone’s online appearance based on what services they use. For example, the fact that there’s no Dopplr link says something (to me). Dopplr users all seem a bit crass and flashy to me, saying, “Oh look at how important I am because I’m in a foreign city”. That of course is thinly veiled jealously and I’ll be signing up for Dopplr as soon as I can afford air tickets to anywhere.

So, here’s the plan and premise…

• Peoples’ identities are made up of content created on an ever-expanding collection of sites and services. Expect this list to be at over 100 within the year for geeks like us. There will be attempts to consolidate systems (like Facebook did) but new facets and tools will keep emerging. Having a “Add service A/B/C” feature is not the way to go, because people will have created their own service “X/Y/Z” by tea-time.
• The people/information I would like to track is not a constant, it changes depending on context. So subscribing per se is a complete nonsense. I’m not suggesting that one can “discover” how certain peoples’ sites are connected, that way lies madness, but I would like to be able to both broaden and narrow my feed-space based on connections and usage.

I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that all of this is simpler than I just made it sound. Read between the lines.

Since my NorthPack post, they’ve Been Busy On NorthCrew Farm and have started adding a number of features.

Just in case the Linkbait-y title meant you perhaps didn’t get the real gist of the post, I’d like to re-iterate what I meant.

The post was not meant as moaning for moaning’s sake, it wasn’t having a go, and it definitely wasn’t a “What’s in it for me?” - all get thrown at you moment as 3HV suggests.

My point was this. I think NorthPack is a great initiative, but wanted to strongly point out how, despite its charm it was setting out on the wrong foot in terms of building a community. All communities are built, to some degree on a “what’s in for me” factor. Even if that factor is, “I get a warm feeling because I haven’t brutally killed anyone today”.

It all comes down to focus. I felt that NorthPack, wrongly, was focusing on NorthPack when, if it wants to be successful, I reckon it should really focus on interactions between members, enabling me (and everyone else to do/find/read things that my RSS reader doesn’t). Added value!

The difference is subtle. For example, there is a huge difference between being able to browse profiles, and being able to browse profiles near me. The first is a “feature” (yawn!) the second enables ME to do something with regards to other NorthPack members (membershiptastic!)

So…

• In the world of NorthPack, we are the “Social Objects”
• I really like the idea of a NorthPack Twitter channel. It is a “we” thing, well done!
• The stats are fun but can you now we-ify them? Let’s have a “Top of the Posts” chart
• Why not add a Post-code field to the profiles. Let’s worry about what we do with it later.
• Why not have a “NorthPack Stalk Suggestion Box”. This would allow people to recommend cool Northern bloggers. Their feed would get picked up, with their news shown in a sidebar. This would encourage them to sign-up and prevent NorthPack from becoming clique-y.

So… hope that’s clearer. All I wanted to say was that, if NorthPack want to really engage me and not be blown away by the next NorthPack, then you really do have to think about the “What’s in it for me” factor. And by me, I really don’t me… I mean all of us…. we.

So please, don’t go “feature mad”, keep up with the good work and keep focussing on the “we” factor.

Oh, finally… Uniting the North under the banner of a Flat Cap, is what my next post will be about.

(Newsflash, you have to change a Doncaster on the way to London from York today)