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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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
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July 7 2011, 1:21pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Google+ for Mobile
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/01/google-for-mobile
I’m liking what I’ve seen so far of Google+ or Google plus, particularly the mobile version which seems like a good place to quickly catch up on a lot of stuff all in one place. roll on the iPad app for it. The “nearby” feature should be really interesting on occasion, but not until a few more people are on there in my local area, which ought to be teeming really.The big questions are who what and whyWho is going to settle in at Google+ not just to take a look around but to make it a home page that is checked often? Just the early adopter drive-by users or a more stable community of normal people?What are we going to do or talk about on Google+ that’s innovative and original?Why would anybody try to migrate all of their friends over to Google+ if they are already ensconced at other social networks?The thing is, it’s all going to change anyway.Add me as aroberts@gmail.com or possibly “+Andy Roberts”Photos - Google+Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogGoogle+ for MobileRelated posts:I Declare Google Reader BankruptcyOpen Social Objects?SearchWiki from Google is LIVE
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July 1 2011, 4:47am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
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.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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March 15 2011, 4:07am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
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?
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March 14 2011, 6:33am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Yahoo! MyBlogLog Closing 24th May 2011
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/24/yahoo-mybloglog-closing-24th-may-2011
It’s a shame, I found the stats facility in MyBlogLog a nice and quick alternative to Google Analytics. We will officially discontinue Yahoo! MyBlogLog effective May 24, 2011. We recommend Yahoo! Pulse as a service for you to see all your social updates from your favorite networks in one place.
Andy Roberts - MyBlogLog Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogYahoo! MyBlogLog Closing 24th May 2011
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February 24 2011, 10:12am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Information overload? Time to relax then
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/22/information-overload-time-to-relax-then
Yes, it’s all about filters, recommendations and information management, but are there any new tips on offer here? Probabilism may have something to offer. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to wait for someone to email you again because you’ve simply deleted their email without reading it though.
This article titled “Information overload? Time to relax then” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 22nd February 2011 08.37 UTC The title of a fascinating Clay Shirky presentation has it that “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”, and though I rely extensively on filters to make my online life manageable, I find myself wanting to quibble with Shirky. After years of discovering a new information resource, being consumed by it, finding it too much to bear, then getting on top of it, only to find myself being sucked under by another, faster information resource, I’ve concluded that the real secret to beating information overload isn’t better filters: it’s cultivating a “probabilistic” frame of mind. The first online resources I used were dial-up bulletin board systems in the 1980s. At one point, I created accounts on every single BBS that I could connect to with a local phone call (in Canada, where I grew up, local calls weren’t metered, but long distance calls were charged by the minute). That was because most of my local bulletin board systems were hobbyist systems with one or two phone lines, and most of the time, a connection attempt would be foiled by a busy signal. In order to get my fill of online time, I’d have to create logins on dozens of systems and try to call them all until I found one that was free. Then the number of bulletin board systems increased, as did the number of lines the average BBS sported, and the number of users on bulletin board systems. Many of them joined up with syndication systems such as FIDONet, which imported the online discussions from distant bulletin board systems all over the world. I went from reading every word posted on every BBS to reading just a few choice forums. Then I had to winnow down the list of bulletin board systems I used, and then further winnow the list of groups I read. Finally, I had to content myself with skimming most of these groups and actively participating in a small number of groups that were right up my street. This was a real struggle at first. There is a world of difference between reading every word uttered in a community and reading just a few choice ones. But soon the anxiety gave way to contentment and even delight: it turned out that “overload” has a wonderful corollary: redundancy. Anything really worth seeing wouldn’t just appear once and vanish. The really interesting stuff would find its way into other discussions, and early conferencing systems made it easy enough to back my way through the forums I was ignoring or skimming to find the important thing I’d missed. This pattern went on to repeat itself again and again. Once, I could read all the Usenet discussion groups my ISP carried, then only a selection, and then only one or two plus a longer list of groups I’d dip into now and again when time allowed. Once I could read every new website that went online and was posted to Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web (now called Yahoo). Then I could only visit the interesting ones; then I could only visit the last three or four interesting ones, then I had to abandon the project altogether and just discover new sites piecemeal. Again and again, this pattern re-emerges: once I could read all the tweets emitted by everyone I followed on Twitter; now I just skim the last 20 or 30 a few times a day and rely on retweets to bubble the good stuff to the top (I do my bit by retweeting things when I think they deserve it). Once I could read every item in my list of RSS feeds; now I periodically mark them all as read without looking at any of them, just to clear the decks: if there’s something good in the missed material, someone will repost it and I’ll see it then. This is even true for my email, the most “deterministic” of media for me. Now I’ve got a mailbox for people I’ve corresponded with in the past and another that collects mails from previously unseen addresses – the latter gets a lot less attention than the former, but if I miss something and accidentally delete it, the sender often figures it out and resends the message (I keep a list of the people from whom I’m awaiting email replies and give them a nudge every so often, on the assumption that other people probably have similar probabilistic approaches to their mail). There are fascinating implications for a world of probabalistic resource use: for one thing, it points up the importance of “signal amplification” through retweets, reposts, and other recycling of interesting tit-bits – these are critical to the successful use of a medium that can’t be consumed by any one person from tip to tail. It also suggests that the most important strategy for coping with information overload is to simply relax and not worry about missing the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity lurking somewhere in one of your inboxes – it’ll be around again shortly.
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February 22 2011, 2:46am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
I Declare Google Reader Bankruptcy
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/08/20/i-declare-google-reader-bankruptcy
I’ve just gone and done it, I’ve declared Google Reader bankruptcy. That means not only that I’ve marked hundreds of unread items as read (I do that regularly anyway) but that I’ve unsubscribed from everything and deleted all tags and folders as well. Here’s the screenshot to prove it: Google Reader I’m sure it’s not difficult to guess why I did this, because of the technological pseudo-complaint they call “information overload”. It’s simple to subscribe to newly discovered feeds, all too easy to accumulate hundreds of unread items, and satisfyingly tempting to hit the big “Mark As Read” button, thus rendering the whole exercise pointless. By having so many feeds in my feed reader that I could only scan through the headlines in “List View” I had become victim to the copywriters’ ploy of adding stand-out, shocking, intriguing or provocative titles – only to be disappointed so often by the substance of the article. Now I want to go back to the old method of choosing top quality feeds that I wish to follow properly, bringing up the full text of the article in front of me before deciding whether I need to read it fully, take action as a result, or skip to the next post. So here I am at day one, with an empty feed reader open to suggestions from my own readers here. Are there any RSS feeds you would like to recommend to me for the purpose of subscribing, reading regularly and inwardly digesting?
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August 20 2010, 2:45am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Location Independent Working
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/05/16/location-independent-working
This year I shall be conducting at least two experiments in location indepndent working and this post is about the first episode, so far. Location independent working has been a long term goal of mine for many years. I’d like to be able to enjoy an optimum climate by migrating in tune with the seasons, do a lot of continuous touring, and be able to take advantage of property letting opportunities. I’m in the middle of my first week long experiment working from a location independent from my usual home and workplace. It’s supposed to be a gentle introduction to the practice, but has turned out to be considerably harder than I anticipated. I’m actually at my mother’s house in a small village with no facilities, and with only intermittent and slow internet access. I don’t have my main workstation computer either, but I do have a fairly recent second computer and an EeePC notebook.
The lack of internet is a temporary obstacle, but not the only one. It should be possible to get a USB dongle that supplies some kind of dialup/3G access in most places, albeit much slower than landline broadband in London. At present there are two of us sharing one dongle that only works when the weather is perfect and even then seems to drop back from so called 3G broadband to an ordinary mobile phone 2G connection which is barely usable. We’ve tried different rooms, orientations, and using the dongle with and without an extension cable. Upstairs and downstairs reception seem to be about the same. But like I say, that’s only one aspect of struggling with getting stuff done from another location. It took the first few days just to get used to not being able to work online constantly. I’ve developed some alternative tasks I can get one with, but it’s surprising how when one is writing something, creating rich media content, that in theory sounds like it could be done offline, how frequently you do need to access online services. It’s been a habit built up over many years. Tired of ISP based pop3 email accounts, I shifted to gmail almost as soon as the beta service became available. I maintain working information on private wikis and online documents. My Flickr photostream is more extensive than the iphoto library on any single machine. Reacting to interruptions has been a major stimulus to tackle the tasklist. But the first thing I learned really, was that the physical workspace is so important. I’m not much of a laptop worker so I got set up at a desk with a borrowed monitor which ought to provide a workstation similar to what I have at home. But of course the room just doesn’t feel the same. Things like relative postion to the window and door, and the height of the desk and chair are obvious factors that need to be set up as close as optimum as possible, but things like acoustics, lighting and proximity to whatever else may be going on in the house can become determining issues as to whether it’s possible to get on with productive work or not. I found it better for any kind of writing task that needs a bit of flow, for example, to venture up into the back garden and sit in the shed – sorry. ’summer house’. I used to laugh at the ’shed workers’ who built themselves a cubicle in their own grounds but now I think I can see what makes the idea seem tempting. On the plus side, without the usual online distractions this has provided an opportunity to create some different kinds of content that I might not normallly get around to. I thought I’d do some Screencasts because this is a good way to create video content but then realised that most screencast require an active internet connection, because they are usually demonstrating online tools and techniques. I did manage to think of some functions that are better done by installed offline applications, and image editing is one. Video editing and music production would be others, so there are plenty of tutorial ‘how to’ screencasts that can be created in these circumstances. The other thing is to write lengthy pieces of narrative that depend mainly on previous experience and life history – autobiographical storytelling. I don’t seem to have done much of that yet though. So the internet connection, such as it is, can be used just to keep reassured that there is nothing untoward going on out there with my websites that might need urgent attention. Once I’ve got used to that, the compulsion to keep checking stuff should subside and I’ll be able to concentrate for longer periods on the offline tasks that can be progressed in between real world distractions. Location Independent living is a promise that has been enabled through new technologies but is a practice that requires a lot more than technical skills to get right.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog Location Independent Working
Related posts:UK Online Communities
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May 16 2009, 12:38pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Best UK Web Hosting
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/03/04/best-uk-web-hosting
I seem to be constantly looking for the best UK web hosting service, either to try out new projects or else when an existing host becomes insufferably bad. I’ve had various recommendations over the months and compiled most of them onto a wiki page: Web Hosting but it’s hard to do any kind of comparison so I usually have several in a state of trial at any one time. Moving stuff over from one web host to another is not exactly trivial so it’s a bit like the home utilities companies, you get stuck with a service you know isn’t necessarily the best value - inertia I think they call it. Then there’s the whole question of whether ti use UK web hosting at all or take advantage of some very cheap US hosting deals. Overselling is another thorny topic.
Maybe someone out there knows better, what’s the best web hosting you’ve used so far?Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog Best UK Web Hosting
Technorati Tags: Best UK Web Hosting, best web, Overselling, UK, uk web hosting service, web host, web hosting, web hosting service
Related posts:New wiki pagesDivshare - Free file hosting for mp3s and blog picturesBest broadband deals
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March 4 2009, 10:09am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
South of Pigalle Paris Breaks Competition
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/02/05/south-of-pigalle-paris-breaks-competition
Twitter Paris Breaks I won a prize for decrypting the acronym SoPi as South of Pigalle for someone called @benjilanyado who is currently conducting an unusual Paris break by following directions from twitter users. The prize is “a big bloke on a house, rue Biot, 18th” so I suppose that means I can blog it here:
Pigalle Pigalle is the name of a metro station, a main street and an area of Paris famous mostly for the Moulin Rouge nightclub and other entertainments connected to a greater or lesser extent with the sex industry. It’s also a popular area for reasonably prices hotels popular with tourists on Paris breaks from London, being not very far from the Gare du Nord. The little quiet area just south of Pigalle has been undergoing a process of gentrification in recent years, with an influx of affluent and artsy foreigners. The nickname SoPi you will notice is not French. It was coined by an American as an act of cultural imperialism trying to make the whole world a bit more like New York (SoHo and NoHo)
TwiTrip to Paris
Follow Benji Lanyado as he live blogs his way around Paris using tips gleaned from Twitter: Paris twitter trip #twitrip
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog South of Pigalle Paris Breaks Competition
Related posts:Why is Samaritaine in Paris still closed?Paris breaksTwitter writing competition - a story in 140 chars
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February 5 2009, 5:41am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Reclaim your lifestream feeds with SweetCron software
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2008/12/02/reclaim-your-lifestream-feeds-with-sweetcron-software
How significant is SweetCron for lifestreaming and Web2.0 Every now and then some new idea or process or thing pops up that isn’t a slow burn, it jumps out and says “Hey, this is the way to GO”. Friendfeed was one such, and further back WordPress, Flickr, MediaWiki, Furl etc etc. Today I was introduced to the latest and have to blog about right away, it’s called sweetcron. Bee Tweets about Sweetcron lifestream software So this tweet from my friend Bee on Twitter caught my eye earlier this evening.
“have just downloaded Sweetcron and installed it on my server to create my lifestream http://barbaradieu.com/lifestream/ …” Intrigued I took a quick look and instantly understood that this was something important. A piece of opensource software called sweetcron that allows you to run your own lifestreaming site is exactly the missing piece to all of this blogging, microblogging, web-2.0-ing and friendfeeding messy business. No longer is it necessary to leave all your own writing and other content scattered about on websites owned by other organisations large and small, where at the drop of a hat they might suddenly introduce lots of adverts, go selfishly no-follow like Wikipedia (and now Friendfeed too), start charging a membership fee or get taken over by google, yahoo or whoever. Sweetcron is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) I was delighted to see that the sweetcron software Bee installed to make the lifestream site is Free and Open Source, just like WordPress, so I determined to have a go myself straight away. Google brings up the site http://sweetcron.com/ which could have been guessed. Its by a developer called Yongfook who self proclaims to be an internet Z-list celebrity. I put in my email address to join the public beta and received an email confirmation request. On reply I got the link to download the software, view documentation and join a googlegroup support list. Great, I like that.
Andy Roberts blog is born Meanwhile I registered a new domain - andyrobertsblog.co.uk I can’t believe that’s the first Andy Roberts domain I’ve ever bought, but the whole story about why it’s been problematic was documented 8 years ago on the Andy Roberts FAQ Anyway, I pointed the new domain at my Hostgator account and within minutes the DNS had resolved and I was up and running. All that was left was to set up a mySQL database, upload the sweetcron software and edit a couple of config files to put the database and domain details in. Literally 5 minutes work if that.
I’ve reclaimed some of my own feeds already, and I can now add any others just as easily to my own site as to Friendfeed, Lifestream.fm, SecondBrain or SuperGlu etc. What’s still missing in Sweetcron Sweetcron is not yet a mature product, and there are some holes that need filling. One is perhaps to allow comments to be hosted alongside the items in the stream. At present it is suggested to use Discus for that. Another is that the title tags in each permalink are duplicates for each element from a single feed. That’s not very clever but can probably be fixed in third party themes and plugins which will no doubt start to appear once the enormous advance that this sweetcron way of hosting lifestreams represents is more widely appreciated. Should you set up a sweetcron lifestream blog? Personal brands are often overlooked but have a habit of becoming important to whatever it is that you do, eventually. Things are only going to get tougher for all of these Web2.0 applications companies, and in my opinion, whether you already have a self hosted personal blog or not, the sooner you get started and set up your own sweetcron lifestreaming blog on your own domain the better. Reclaim the feeds!
Posted by Andy Roberts Reclaim your lifestream feeds with SweetCron software
December 1 2008, 5:32pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Twitter lists gathered on a wiki blog or forum
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2008/08/02/twitter-lists-gathered-on-a-wiki-blog-or-forum
As the use of twitter continues to spread despite the restricted service and downtime, a commonplace event for communities is to start compiling lists of links to each other’s twitter accounts. These are handy for anybody who hasn’t already built up their network because you can quickly add a bunch of people who are all involved in the same interest or practice. Acting as a kind of jump start into twitter for groups, it feels like a community indicator of some sort. If the community is based mainly on a web forum or email list then it can start with a message from one member who is a twitter enthusiast, that turns into a long thread with the same message re-quoted and a new line added at the bottom. That’s not ideal, but it works for a while and builds up a volume of attention to the activity. Over on one bloggers’ forum we tried compiling the list of member’s twitter links and putting it into a new service called “dropio” where anybody could upload new files and links, but that service proved problematic. When the same process broke out at E-mint, a community for online facilitators, ‘community managers’ and moderators it wasn’t long before somebody - Ed Mitchell - said “Definitely a wiki job, this one” and so here we have the …. E-mint twitter list on DARwiki The advantage of having the twitter list on a wiki is that you can link to what will be always the latest version and that members can easily add themselves or make corrections. If it’s a person-centric or blog-centric community such as Darren Rowse’s pro-blogger readers, the twitter list is gathered from the comments left on an invitation post and then published on the blog. If the community is forming in a friendfeed room then there’s probably no need to compile a twitter list at all because the aggregator sort of does that automatically in that each member’s tweets are in their own streams and twitter links in their services page - which stands in as a profile page on friendfeed. What other formats and processes have you seen out there for gathering twitter lists?
Posted by Andy Roberts Twitter lists gathered on a wiki blog or forum
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August 2 2008, 5:56am | Comments »
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