Here’s my Mr Apple Heads so far… from the first accident, to the pathetic attempts to trick myself to eating more fruit, to his subsequent marketing materials.
Thanks to Rick at Gadget Glamour. Shame he got Mr Apple Head’s name wrong. Still it’s the thought isn’t it ?
Last night was Betta Kultcha VII at the Corn Exchange, Leeds. It was a night of Pecha Kucha 20:20 style presentations ( that’s 20 slides, 20 second each) . I won’t go into too much detail about the presentations in case you get to see them at other events. But the evening was made up of ….
The presentations were rounded off with four brave souls who spoke to random slides… there were casualties.
At the time I said “This #bettakultcha thing is like middle class variety acts. It’s bloody brilliant“… and I meant that, in the good way. What an evening of mind-boggling edifying variety. What a venue too… just sitting there, with a beer, looking at the ceiling (aren’t lights ace) was worth the ticket price.
I came away wondering what I’d just been part of. It felt a bit punk rock, in that the performers clambered out of the audience (they were one of us)… it felt educational – in that I learned a lot. It was extremely professional yet had more than a whiff of grassroots about it.
The event was definitely fun but with 150ish people there it also felt like a bit of a phenomenon. Who ARE all these people? Do they all have an arts degree? Can this sizeable turnout be maintained? What if it got bigger?
I had a great time. I’d go on more about it but don’t want to miss getting a ticket for the next one.
When I recently wrote about the Death of RSS Readers, it seemed that there was a wave of similar posts around the web (like this RSS is Dying ). A lot of people reacted to these Death of RSS sentiments with Sure, RSS is dead, just like the web is dead) which, for me, sort of misses the point(s).
I was interested in RSS reading from a teaching perspective. I’m not saying for one minute that RSS is dead as a technology, it’s just that is knowing about RSS really necessary when introducing people to the whole world of Web2.0? Lots of the people I know who use RSS Readers have been using them for at least 5 years, maybe 10. They’ve grown with them, slowly and carefully built up a collection of feeds worth reading. Is this roughly how long it takes to massage and mulch RSS reading into something you like? Given tools like paper.li is learning about Google Reader really worth the effort?
I’m sure part of my, and others’ ennui with RSS, or rather news in general was in part similar to how newspapers are woefully slim at Christmas, when you need them most with some time to kill in the post-Boxing Day lull.
In my swapping OPML experiment with Doug and Andy, I noticed they had about 200ish feeds each. I had 200ish feeds too. Is that a natural limit? Is it point where you start to see the phenomenon I noticed whereby with different feeds you can start to receive roughly the same news. Is 200 the point when the benefits of looking for new feeds stop paying off because the news they report starts to overlap with news you already get … from sources whose names you can remember.
Interestingly, I’ve found that by adding BOTH Doug and Andy’s OPML subscriptions to my subscriptions (now 600ish instead of 200ish) I’ve found that it’s breathed a breath of fresh novelty, of similar but different news into my old favourites. Either that or people who make the news are back at work again.
I’ve also found the Feedly iPhone app has helped too (see below) because if RSS Reading can’t be done on the train then you do begin to lose interest too. (And if you are Google Reader user AND a Firefox/Chrome user and haven’t tried Feedly, go give it a go… Paul! )
Is 200ish just a magic number when it comes to RSS subscriptions? If you use Google Reader, how many subscriptions do you have?
Why is subscribing so binary? Often, you want to hush a feed, rather than unsubscribe forever. Or maybe you only want to hear from a feed if people from your social circle (or network) are into a feed…
Why is there an artificial split between writing and reading? Why is there a separate application, like Delicious, for tagging web pages (that you can also write notes on)?
Imagine if you will a mashup between Delicious, Google Reader and WordPress. It’s a simple enough idea called “Reading & Writing & Organising”.
All three of those tools share tags, content (posts) and URLs… why not work with them in one place rather than three.
The tags you tag random content out there in the wild internet, the tags you tag “subscriptions” with ( the difference between Delicious and Google Reader starts to blur if you imagine that Delicious had have auto-discovered newer items from the ones you’ve tagged) and the tags you tag your own content with, become, or can become, the same tags.
The random notes you add to tags, can become blog posts… or not.
Your subscriptions are like your “best bits” blogroll.
And all it needs is to blur (and remove the replication of concepts ) Delicious, Google Reader and WordPress… and to remove the separation of reading and writing. As ideas go, it’s about taking stuff out rather than adding stuff in…
Imagine…
A blogroll that auto-subscribed to new items, and was shareable (does anyone really bother with blogrolls anymore?)
Bookmarks that were linked to YOUR WORK… and your news.
A Tag Cloud of news subscriptions… tags AND/OR content.
…. just a thought ….
I think what I’m trying to sort out in my mind is what are the main skills that people need when being introduced to all the loveliness of Web2.0.
Looking back the components might have been…
And to be honest, when introducing those three tools to teams, people aren’t half creative with what can be done with crude and simple tools. But with Delicious fading and Google Reader seeming less relevant somehow, is all we’re left with Twitter and Facebook ( or twitter-based tools like Paper.li )? … for both Production and Consumption of information… with nowhere to shape, to hack or Organise our information.
In many ways these three tools never really integrated very well. Maybe that is a good thing, like separation of church and state… Maybe I’m getting old but 2011 feels more about losing choice and control than gaining new features.
Apologies for another “Death of…” post… just getting a few things off my chest.
I was a Delicious user ( theOTHERblog ). I used it for years, often I wasn’t sure why but somehow it felt like I was building up a useful resource somehow. As you can see, my bookmarked stuff is mainly about usability, socialmedia, collaboration and the like. And like my RSS Reader account, most of it is old.
Delicious certainly was useful for retrieving those “where did I see that” items or for rummaging around other people’s bookmarks. But also, like RSS, for me, Delicious never lived up to its potential.
Delicious has the potential to be an RSS news reader for one. It almost was a personal taxonomy that could have helped me organise other items (like RSS subscriptions maybe) … it could have helped me connect with hashtags on Twitter… or SOMETHING! At least it might have checked (and flagged) broken links or shown me a tag cloud over time.
I guess I’m saying the same thing as I said in my last post, that I’m finding it hard to believe in the process of tagging and encourage other people to explore it. Yes, I’ve found it personally useful, but it took YEARS and now Delicious is being closed down I wonder if I’ll really even miss it.
One of the best uses of Delicious I saw was as a shared repository to create a Horizon Report, a methodology developed by NASA ( I think ) to help teams future gaze without the noisy people dominating.
A Horizon Report is a simple enough way of working and basically a group of people share interesting stuff with tags of “short term”, “mid term” and “long term” and everyone then votes on what’s been collected. It’s an interesting way of consensually identifying what an organisation should focus on next. Every organisation should do one.
The best bit about using Delicious for this was how well it integrates into people’s everyday work. With the right bits and bobs in place (bookmarkets, plugins etc) , an individual can easily flag things of interest and collectively build up a genuinely useful ( but disposeable ) archive. It’s a Web2.0 wet dream.
But now it’s time to clear up the mess and move on.
After being a vague fan of the Cloud, I must admit that Delicious closing down does worry me. Not because I’ve lost a service, as I said, I was never sure about WHY I was even tagging things. I’m not overly worried by the loss of the data, most of it was old anyway and I have an XML export file if I really want to breath life into old interests.
I may be mourning the loss of potential that Delicious never quite lived up to.
I think the scariest thing about all of this is that increasingly, as the Cloud becomes more pervasive, there will be no places to jump to… there a big gaps between the Clouds and as yours evaporates you will have simply have created SO MUCH DATA that even if you wanted to, copying it to another Cloud will take years… and the only other Cloud out there will have a Google logo on it.
I’ve been saying for a while now, that in terms of “information revolutions” we’re on the brink of the third wave. The first was about simply accessing information , the second about publishing information and the third is about manipulating or routing information (or data).
For years I’d assumed that RSS would play a part in the arrival of the third wave, but where have all the online RSS readers gone? Is Bloglines still “live”? What happened to Rojo? I remember a number of contenders, including desktop apps like NetNewsWire and the like but it seems now that there is only Google Reader left.
Other newsreaders like Rojo used to let me re-publish or share my news, but Google Reader doesn’t. And to be honest Google Reader is crap. Although using browser plugins like Feedly massively improve the experience of RSS it’s just not as automatic or fun as tools like Paper.li or how I imagine Flipboard (I don’t have an iPad).
And although I have more control over an RSS account than what appears in my Paper.li or Flipboard pages, RSS feels more clunky. Images are often still shown as links, sites that post every few minutes flood your news and in general it just feels like you are too close to the technology.
Added to the clunk, is the fact that once you have a few hundred subscriptions in an RSS reader exactly where your news is coming from becomes mystifying. Especially if you’ve subscribed to a few aggregated feeds. It doesn’t feel like you are routing or even in control anymore. RSS starts to feel like an albatross.
As an experiment, I recently swapped my subscriptions (by exporting our subscriptions as OPML) with Andy over at Offmessage to see if someone with similar but different interests would enliven RSS for me. What I found was that amazingly, with almost a completely different set of news sources, the news felt the same. Or to put it another way, even with all of Andy’s lolcats, I didn’t feel I was missing out on any news, it was just coming to me via a different route.
What all of this is saying to me, given the fact that one of my roles is about sharing “best practice”, is that after years of being an ardent fan of the possibilities of RSS, I’m now doubting if it is worth the effort. RSS hasn’t delivered, RSS Readers (and by that I mean Google Reader) doesn’t do what I wanted, it isn’t putting me in control of anything, it isn’t delivering any magic and I can pretty much get “good enough” news in plenty of other ways.
A large part of this ennui with RSS has to be that, my interests are always shifting and I feel weighed down with usability or information architecture stuff, things I was interested in pre 2000. I’ve moved on but my RSS Reader hasn’t and it’s become too big to prune…. AND it doesn’t do anything to help me, it just sits there, spewing crap at me. You’d really think that Google Reader would do helpful things, like categorising news feeds, or noticing the ones you focus in on, or SOMETHING helpful.
Part of the “craft” of creating an enjoyable RSS experience is that feeds have to complement each other, there’s no point having information fire-hoses obscuring the infrequent writer. It takes time to create your own personal newspaper… and it’s almost impossible to create a collection of feeds for someone else, I’ve tried many times.
So there. You might still find RSS useful for you, well done, but given my current disappointment with it, especially from an evangelising perspective, I’m looking for a whole new way of being kept up to date. It probably will be Twitter-based, either that or paper. The walk to the newsagent will do me good.
Actually, maybe it’s just, for me, a death of news per se. If I see another “10 ways to XYZ” article again I think I might lose it. Rather than blaming Google Reader for being rubbish and slowly suffocating all the (better) competition there was, I need to look to myself and realise most news IS CRAP… and spend less time worrying about it.
But if you want to send me your exported OPML file, I’ll give it a whirl for a week and see if I feel news inspired by your picks of the internet. It can’t be worse than Andy’s pictures of cats…. can it? I’ll let you know how I get on.
It’s the time of year when I moan about the overall rubbishness that is Illuminating York ( see my 2009 review here.. missing images though) and I’m going to say the same things all over again, so I’ll keep it brief.
1. Projecting something onto the minster doesn’t make it art. The candy coloured installation that was projected onto the minster (was that last year?) was brilliant because it was both sensitive to architecture in some way and because it made you think about the minster differently, it made you look again. This years projection onto the Rose window was a nice piece in itself (about 10 minutes of radio 4 poetry and pentacle-like roses growing up and down the side of the minster) but it really felt like a Powerpoint presentation.
Next year, if Illuminating York has another “something projected onto the one building we can think of” then heads should roll. From the top of the minster hopefully.
2. Why can’t these pieces be made at least semi permanent, so that the Illuminating York event could get bigger and better each year? This would also prevent lazy artists from “projecting something onto the minster” because that would already be covered. It would take more collaboration and organising than turning up with a van and some scaffolding and a projector.
3. Will someone tell the Tag Tool people that it’s crap, please? That’s maybe too harsh (except it’s not), but the hostage walk around the Treasurer’s Garden was painful. With only one way round everyone was gagging to leave the lack of spectacle. I’m surprised there wasn’t a stampede with people trampled underfoot.
4. The colour experience caravan sounded interesting but they closed the queue realising that they couldn’t get people through quick enough. Sigh.
5. There was a big ball with some random film projected onto it. Again, this felt like it had arrived on a van, been set up and left to underwhelm. The film clips had no cohesion or story and bizarrely it seemed that no effort was made to adapt what was presented onto a sphere… except maybe the eyeball blinking – I quite liked that.
I really do think that Illuminating York both could and should be something special. But it really isn’t the reason to visit York that the tourist office claim it is. It is always a disappointment ( see a comment from last year). What is the cause of the complete lack of spectacle? Is it just lack of budget… Maybe it’s Health n Safety ( gone mad ) and doing anything interesting would probably be a health hazard? Is it lack of imagination? York has more than just a minster, there are hundreds of better, or at least different, sites to host unusual installations.
What I did find interesting is that some people started to play with their shadows accidentally cast on the minster… It’s worrying when the audience are more creative than the artists – don’t you think?
I went to a public lecture at the University of York on Neanderthals last night, it was about using archeological evidence for signs of caring and even love in earlier times. It seems that a large part of the research has to be about understanding both the similarities and differences between the Neanderthals and us.
Neanderthals were shorter, stockier and stronger than us. They also travelled less far and had smaller, more compact social groups.
Interestingly, they were less attached to objects – you might call us in comparison materialistic, treasuring beads, shells and small sculptures. It becomes easy for me to imagine them as being more spiritual or arty and finding us frivolous, and perhaps composing a complex song to sing around the fire with their big hairy lungs.
The most striking difference to me was that their technology didn’t develop for hundreds and hundreds of thousand years. Neanderthals flint tools stayed the same. I guess you could call them very traditional … inward-looking on a bad day.
With the arrival of homo sapiens however, our tools changed in a comparative whirlwind, developing new approaches and refinements.
So, we don’t know if the Neanderthals were thicker than us. They might not have been, and the fact there’s 5% of their DNA in ours, they maybe weren’t as distant a cousin as we’d like to think. We don’t know if they were any less dextrous than us either. But what we do know is that man travelled more, probably met more people and had a richer social network. It seems we were more curious and happy to explore and meet people.
So, the rise of man and the disappearance of the Neanderthal might not be because we were more intelligent (we might not have been) or more skilled (again we might not have been), we definitely weren’t stronger either … but because when we had a good (or bad ) idea twenty other people got to see it rather than three. So, human ideas themselves might not even have been better than Neanderthal ideas, but more people were exposed to them, able to use or adapt them or refine them.
I find that idea stunning, that it’s potentially not how good the idea is, but how far it can travel easily that creates innovation and development, don’t you? Say it again… it’s not the quality of an idea that counts – it’s how many people it can touch that determines if it’s a good idea.
Less than four days to go until Killing Joke’s new album, Absolute Dissent, is available for download and I already love it.
Someone on Twitter said that it was all a bit meta, listening to Killing Joke sound as if they’ve been influenced by the bands they’ve influenced. Whoever they were, I know what they mean… The Great Cull reminds me of the Queens of the Stone Age somehow, This World Hell sounds like a Norwegian metal band covering a Black Sabbath song. It even has a single bended guitar note and a bluesy-like riff towards the end, which is dangerously close to ROCK for Geordie if you ask me.
And if you listen very carefully you can just about hear Kylie Minogue doing her breathy backing vocals on European Super State in the opening disco sequence. I reckon.
But then again, Killing Joke always manage to sound like more like themselves than anyone else, Depth Charge is a riff-driven punk anthem with old skool coughing up flegm and worrying vocal ticks. It sounds like he’s blowing raspberries in the opening few bars. I hope he is. There can’t be (m)any songs out there with a deliberate fart sound included. I love the synth drifting in and out (which should be higher in the mix) and Jaz’s distorted lyrics which are almost like a new Wardance.
The thing that strikes me most about this album is the thing that I like about all the best Killing Joke albums. It is the meeting of four distinct characters, Jaz, Geordie, Paul and Youth. For me, when that balance was altered it all started going a shade Duran Duran, until Pandemonium even. Youth’s bass is brilliant throughout, and just like when I was trying to work out how to play the bass lines on What’s This For? a lot of the time you can’t work out what the hell he’s doing, but you can feel it, it’s the perfect foil for Geordie’s uniquely thinned discordant sound.
And in Endgame, at the beginning are they singing “meow… meow!” … Go listen. I can imagine them in battered and burned Sylvester the Cat outfits with Jaz dressed at Tweetie Pie staggering out of a mushroom cloud of dust … for some reason.
Like all of Joke’s albums, I tend to be agnostic about half of the songs on each… this is no different and a like that. To me it means they’re trying, experimenting, getting it wrong sometimes.
If I had any criticisms of the album it would be that I wish, every now again Paul would up the tribal style he made his own for a few bars ( if only for old times sake ) and that Jaz’s “mouth of hell” synth sounds, the sort you get on the Pandys or Unspeakable is missing or just too low in the mix.
I also think European Super State could have been much, much cheesier, with a huge arms in the air intro (say at least 5 minutes)… and it needs disco hand claps… and probably hot pants.
So, here they are roughly in my order of preference…
European Super State
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naUAuptzUb4&feature=related
End Game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4ompm4PQk4&feature=related
Depth Charge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a95Npoa6aCo
The Great Cull
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPN7EvbrCp0
Fresh Fever
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x3UiDR1jUY&feature=related
Here Comes The Singularity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc-YDG7GG0s
The Ghost of Ladbroke Grove
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZOOYFO5ee0
Honour the Fire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LemzpnB-HWc
In Excelsis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T869Obl03oE
The Raven King
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VQwX9h6kWo
Today someone wrote to me asking if I’d be up for writing a detailed usability review of a site and that they’d need it by Monday… for free.
Someone else wrote asking (very nicely) for advice in selling photographic prints. I haven’t a clue as it happens, so go buy one… his site only gets a few hits a day…
I learned to play Democracy by Killing Joke on the guitar as I watched swifts (I think) reel above me in sky, eating flies I imagine.
Someone else wore socks that were designed to look like bowling shoes.
For most of the day I felt guilty.
Anyone that knows me knows that this year I have been completely obsessed with listening to Killing Joke. I’ve listened to an album a day for almost every day for six months on my walk to work. I’ve even been studying Killing Joke albums that I loathe, the ones between 1983 and 1993 when Jaz Coleman had a bit of a breakdown of sorts, had his hair permed, grew a moustache, thought the world was about to end and Killing Joke the band went all Simple Minds on me. Bad times, bad albums… still.
I don’t consider myself the OCD type at all but I have to admit that it has to be slightly obsessed, to listen to stuff you don’t like in the hope that somehow you learn to love it. It’s like torture. You can browse both the good and the bad Joke stuff on the Dipity timeline I made of Killing Joke’s career here… or in my You Tube Killing Joke playlist here (which also has relevant bands in too)… ahem… Not obsessed at all.
I don’t really know why I like Killing Joke that much. Of course, everyone has the band, which for them just seemed to have meant so much, you know, when you were 14 or 15… don’t they? For most people I guess they grow out of it, or the band turns crap, like Adam & the Ants and Death Cult did or they break up or music simply starts to matter less.
All of these happened with Killing Joke, but in 1994 whilst I was stripping wallpaper, they got back together again and started making that strange discordant noise that only they can do … listen to Whiteout (spotify link) or Exorcism (spotify link) from the Pandemonium album and tell me it’s not the most noisiest fantastic din ever created). The latter was recorded in a Great Pyramid and has coughs in (like a lot of Killing Joke songs) dontchaknow.
I mean, try to these two live songs below on YouTube (only 87 views btw), Requiem (one of their first) and Total Invasion (one of the most recent) and they’re pure punk… with a hint of disco. Guitars you can dance to. If you wanted.
I relax to this (The Hum from Revelations). Killing Joke are my whales singing… my birds tweeting in a forest… by a sea with crashing waves…
And so, on the longest day (yesterday), Killing Joke have release an EP called In Excelsis (go listen for free) which I’m not so sure about. It has a dub track which is fun and Endgame sounds to me like Lemmy from Motorhead (no bad thing) but it’s not quite Killing Joke, or rather the Killing Joke I love which falls between 1980 – 1984 and 1994 and now ( please don’t listen to Love Like Blood or Sanity or America which are so bad I still get embarrassed for them). I’ve give it another few thousand listens before I pass judgement but at the moment… I’m slightly disappointed…
Anyway, I have been both worrying about my ever increasing Killing Joke obsession and at the same time writing a TV script (a bit like those wonderful Rock Family Trees show) to explain “Why Killing Joke Are Ace” to my mate Dave because I’ve got tickets to see them in October and he needs a little persuasion that they, and not Pink Floyd are the best bend that ever walked the earth – even if they did go a little potty in the 80s… I mean, who didn’t?
Spheres of Collaboration, CTP Report and Use Cases
All about the Collaborative Tools Project… as a PDF.
Tom Smith is now helping improve collaboration at the University of York.
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