Its not news that our industrial societies are entering the information age. However, beyond industrialised media industries serving us more and more CNN, the implications are only just starting to be understood. After all its only recently that significant proportions of the population have had access to an always-on connection to the internet.
Geo SMS s /Posters / Post-its
February 14, 2005Leave an SMS note outside the pub to say you just went for chips but you’ll be back in 10 mins?
Or public type advertisments hitting your phone as you walk past shops. That would be really annoying.
Plenty of social engineering problems to be sorted out here. But its a step towards the Ghost in the machine that I posted about in January.
Digital Media Europe: News – Siemens developing invisible ‘post-its’
As simple as possible, but no simpler: Mapping Google
February 12, 2005I was looking at the new google map beta with Franklin, and we were wondering how they did it. Judging by the conversation that went on in the comments, this post must be a good analyisis. I’m not a great javascript programmer so most of it went over my head, however I’m getting more interested in geo-location.
I find it difficult to find local information on the web. Searching on words often means that the information I want for Sheffield UK is hidden behind US sources – afterall our namespaces have shared history. So we need better local contexts (post codes?, geo coordinates?) as well as the maps. Wonder how long it will take to get this kind of service for the UK?
Subscribing to people or to search feeds?
February 11, 2005I’ve been blogging off and on for 2 years, but it took me until recently to really understand how big this thing is going to be. In my experience you mentally have to jump through an number of hoops before you can comprehend why blogs, or more accurately the blogoshpere is going to be vital both to individuals and business.
Now that I’ve been turned into an evangelist – takes me back 10 years to when no one in the UK had heard of the Internet – the interesting question is: How can I illustrate the value proposition?
My theory is to RSS enable the person/company which involves pre-populating some feeds, or otherwise they will never open the reader. But as this post points out, Tag/search feeds can become even more important.
This is new to me, but I can see it makes complete sense. I find that although reading peoples feeds is facinating I find that I get pulled off on too many tangents which makes me anxious about the job in hand.
In my own personal blog reading evolution I’m obviously not yet using Technorati feeds enough. I only have 2 feeds set up. So I know what I gotta do then!
NapsterizationThere are Feeds and Then There are Feeds
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POMO Knowledge Management
February 8, 2005Post Modern Knowledge management. JOHO quoting Kevin Werbach (in 2001):
Postmodern KM operates within and on the basis of existing behavior patterns, mining conversation streams and relationships automatically to incorporate structure and context into the information human users already manipulate. It fosters human intelligence and interaction rather than trying to replace them.
Nicely said. And don’t worry about the PM moniker they are only half serious 
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The web brain stirs
February 7, 2005An Aha! Moment
Last night just before I went to sleep, I had an aha moment. I was thinking about something bloggy but quite different and my mind wandered off and thought the following (and I just watched it think):
I saw the individual links that we make between different pieces of information as small discrete lines but as more and more people made similar lines the footsteps formed pathways and a digital skeleton became sineuwy and organic. It grew in front of my eyes like ascii art.
Last week I saw a post from Dave Winer (Courtesy of Scoble) about categorisation of their blog posts. (can’t find link). Categorising is painful, to paraphrase Dave You do 95% of the job and get punished for the 5% that you slipped up on. Wouldn’t it be better to have a system that rewarded you for doing 5% of the work?
I guess my mind took some time to digest this post properly. Its seeing a hard genetic code of words and and a simple link of A->B forming the basis of an organic structure – a web brain that is dependent of us all and all the connections that we make.
Creating taxonomy is an arduous task, I know I’ve spent months doing it. You never stop moving things around, adding layers taking layers away. You worry about making that binary desicion then fight the person who alters your changes. Let everyone contribute – problem solved.
Services like del.icio.us has been on my radar but I haven’t digested what it does yet. Will it create these nueral pathways. Will it blur the distinction between what is a Text Search and what is a Directory Search approach? I’m off there now to have a play;-)
What Does a Blog Consulting Company Do?
February 7, 2005Good question. Check out what the Inside Blogging thinks the answers are. A worthwhile read, still I found the second user comment more interesting: What happens when the client DOESN’T understand the value proposition. How do you sell the value proposition?
I’ll no doubt post more on this later
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Wired : Ancient Macs Make Modern Art
February 4, 2005A Wired Magazine article mentioning Sheffield!
Wired News: Ancient Macs Make Modern Art
Its rare to find interesting Net things related to Sheffield. The only Sheffield blog I’ve found that is regularly updated was one by a Sheffield United fan which took the piss out of Sheffield Wednesday (Football club) and their recent misfortunes. Hardly constructive.
Seems like we just don’t get this interconnectedness. Either that or we are too busy doing physically still in this compact and very liveable city.
Live SkypeRadio Podcast (#011)
February 3, 2005I think I might just have done the first “Live SkypeRadio Podcast”, although you could call it any number of things: Narrowcast and Podcast ; The SkypeRadioCast Podcast ; Podcast Partly Live ; Share my Shuffle – Transcontinental.
I wanted to try a SkypeRadio session with 2 guinea pigs – uhh I mean friends. So I Skyped Adriana & La Nena in Venezuela, i’m in Sheffield, UK… they were wanting some music to work to. So then I decided to try recording it for my regular weekly podcast. To further confuse the issue I set iTunes to shuffle to bring an element of fun (name that tune!) into the mix. But it turned out simply proving that the iTunes shuffle function is not very random – the show turned into an indie feeds promo – but hey thats fine.
As I didn’t get around to turning off the IM sounds you can hear messages arriving during the early songs. I had constant feedback with questions and requests as the show progressed; so despite fighting with a reluctant iTunes, and try to work out why the audio config was working, I was actually having a blast.
A result was that I actually played some latin music this week which was a first for RichardRadio. Thought quite a lot of good tunes came out. This is definatly how we are going to be sharing our music in the future. If someone could just make the audio setup easier.
PLAYLIST
Beth Quist – Monsters (Magnatunes)
Sythian – Danny Boy
?? – Broken
?? – On a wire
Lemon Jelly – 95 aka Make Things Right
People in Planes – Talking Head
Now is Now – Days of Summer
Benny More – Que Bueno Baila Usted
Chemical Brothers – Hold Tight
Nimitznequi – Te Quiero (Magnatunes)
Gilberto Santa Rosa – Perdoname
Oscar de Leon – Lloraras
Download (right click the headphones to ‘save as’)
UK Indymedia Sheffield
February 2, 2005I’m always looking out for Sheffield bloggers or rss feeds with local info. Here’ one. Indymedia has national coverage but there is a separate sheffield feed.
Don’t know who writes this stuff but it left me in the UN-usual predicament of feeling like a right winger. I was in favour of Hallam University turning the bankrupt White Elephant “National Centre for Popular Music” into a Night club because thats about all you could use it for.
I’m also in favour of improving road links between Sheffield and Manchester. Why should the 3rd and 4th cities of England, only 40 miles apart not have a decent road between them. The bit through the beautiful Peaks isn’t the bottle neck, its getting through the towns of Glossop and Mottram that is the problem.
