Watching a train crash

A blog is an intensely personal form of communication. It is, for the writer, an immediate and occasionally quite intimate outlet for the thoughts, feelings and emotions that is coursing through your veins. But writing a blog is also an incredibly public process. I have no control over who reads this or any other post. Furthermore, I have no control over who copies, archives or otherwise keeps a record of what I said, even if I have since deleted the post. Of course, I would like to think that anyone keeping a copy will delete any record they have when I delete my version, but I am not so naive to assume that is so.

Although most bloggers realise this, sometimes emotion overtakes us and we allow ourselves to vent without thought of the consequences. I read several blogs and most of them are well thought out and the author will be able to look back at the post in years to come with no fear or recriminations. But just occasionally, even smart people will forget; one blog I read has been describing what appears to be somewhat of an emotional breakdown of an otherwise perfectly healthy woman.

I know neither the blog author nor her friend and the first posts in the series, whilst slightly uncomfortable reading, were acceptable. The recent posts have made me genuinely fear for the friend- for her mental and even her physical well being. The feeling of impotence as I watch this train crash be described over a number of days is extremely unpleasant. Compounding the problem is that I have neither the skills nor the ability to do anything for these people. I don’t wish to be a ‘white knight’ riding in on a charger (though there are other scenarios in life where that image might be fun) but that doesn’t ease the feeling. I don’t know how that story will end, I fear that the answer is ‘not well’, and I am even afraid to look at the blog again. It feels like watching a train crash-you can’t take your eyes off it, no matter how much you want to.

The other example has less actual danger but highlights the danger of venting without thought of the recriminations. As anyone who knows me will tell I am not particularly politically correct. I tend to say what I think and frequently damn the consequences. However, I do try to care how I say things and I try to always include the requisite amount of etiquette in anything I write, say or do. OK, less on the say, but certainly when it comes to the written word I try to take care. So when I come across professional people who either publish very pointed blogs or send curt, incomplete and brusque e-mails; well I generally cringe inside. And the real problem is that by the time I get to read the words they have already been read by the intended recipient. So there is very little I can do can to prevent the damage- it is already there. In this situation the train has already crashed- all I do is to try some form of clean-up.

So with these examples out there in the blogosphere (or the world of internal e-mails) I hope I don’t ever offend anyone by the contents of this blog. If I do feel I am saying something negative I will endeavour to hide or disguise the person concerned so much that they are unaware of the point I am making. Conversely, if I am complimenting someone I will generally let them know directly (especially if I know the person). I feel I owe this to whoever I am communicating with, whether I know them or not, whatever personal feelings I may have or whatever medium I am using. Perhaps I should remind others of this, but I fear that the advice would not be taken well (but that may be due to the aforementioned lack of political correctness and subtlety in my communcation of the message)

(Re)connecting through social networks

No one can deny the massive impact that social network sites are having on the internet world. Of course there is always the bigger question of what percentage of the real world the internet world really represents, but that is a question for another day.

I have used different social network web sites for the past 2 years (except that at the start I didn’t even know what a social network web site was, I just knew that LinkedIn had huge performance issues) and have found that the ability to reconnect with old mates is one of my favourite features. The question becomes: What do you do once you have connected via the ethernet? Ping an occasional e-mail and catch up or actually meet in real-life again.

I have tried both approaches and found that the impact of actually meeting is far greater than any number of e-mails, instant messages or pings or nudges. These are the same issues that all people who meet through the internet face: Suddenly there is no where to hide, no back space key to remove ill conceived thoughts and, worst of all, no easy way to duck out of the conversation if things are going badly. The pressure of these situations is well known on the first date, but what surprised me was that it is still present when reconnecting.

The net result of this is the that meeting can rapidly head into one of two directions:

1. You realise that you really need to see this person more and can’t believe that you ever fell out of touch
2. You realise that the intervening years have taken you in markedly different directions and you really have nothing in common any more

Of course when #2 occurs it is best to retreat a quick retreat, but when #1 happens…..

A(nother) cool web 2.0 site

OK, this one might go into the ‘cool but pointless’ category or it could be the greatest thing to hit the computing cloud, I can’t decide which and I guess that only time will tell.

There appears to be 2 ways to move into the true on-line world and I think they differ in their point. The approaches are:

1. Integrate your desktop with your on-line world (not a desktop machine, but your compute desktop)
2. Migrate all the functionality on-line

Desktop Integration

The integration approach (taken by Xdrive) allows you to open a Windows Explorer window that looks just like any other- except that the drive you just opened (cunningly called X: ) is nowhere near your local area network. This allows you to run all your local, desktop applications and save documents and files to the on-line storage. The advantage of this approach is that you have pretty damned good integration with your desktop. The disadvantage is that if you use multiple local machines, you have to make sure that they are all set up identically if you wish to duplicate the experience- for example ensuring that all the applications are installed on each machine.

On-line Functionality

On-line functionality takes everything away from the desktop and runs in its own little world. Meebo takes this approach- so all your IM contact details, your chat logs etc are stored remotely. This has the advantage that everything is going to be the same no matter what computer you use to access the functionality. The downside is that (currently) most apps focus on a single piece of functionality e.g. IM or Calendar or file managment

Unfortunately, what all of this means is that many of the apps are simple re-packaging of what you can already do, just not do it on-line. This means that every on-line desktop provider I have tried (Xdrive, GMX, Omnidrive) has a folder for ‘My Music’, ‘My Photos’ etc and I have no way of taking my data from the on-line applications off-line (though you could argue why would I want to- it is just the Generation X insecurity in me)

And then I came across Jooce (www.jooce.com) that gives the whole world a shake upside down: What Jooce does is create a complete desktop, just like your main desktop, but it does it inside a browser. So now you can file your documents away nicely or just leave them on the desktop.

As I said as the start, I have no idea if this is the coolest thing to hit the way we use computers or a total waste of time. In my mind, the key to creating a cool Web 2.0 app is to try to break down what we use a computer for and then either identify something totally cool that you never knew you needed to do or make something that you do already available in a new and interesting way. I don’t see Jooce doing either of these, but I can’t deny that when I saw that I had the ability to rotate a picture on my desktop it made me smile with glee.

Jooce Desktop with a rotated picture

But then small things always did amuse me… and a good job too.

What I use (2)

Six months ago I posted about the various pieces of (mainly web) software that I use. Well, in this world of rapid software development, six months is a long time. Not least of which is because I am slowly catching up with the rest of the world as to what is the latest ‘cool’ app. I am still using the same personal social network (Facebook), professional social network (LinkedIn), photography site (Flickr), bookmarking site (del.icio.us), travel site (Dopplr) and calendar (Google Calendar) but I have now made some decisions, expanded in other directions and discovered some new apps. So, here goes with the new things that I am using:

• Web mail: GMX. You may not have heard about GMX, but they have been dominant in Germany for years and have recently made their service available to the rest of the world. Now I know that there are lots of people who rave about Gmail and Yahoo has fought Hotmail/ LiveMail (or whatever brand Microsoft has given it this week) to be the biggest webmail on the block, but I have tried ‘em all, and so far GMX is knocking them all out the park: IMAP, slick UI, fast response and no adds. Damn this is good. Oh and it can collect all your mail from all your other accounts. Just about the only thing it doesn’t do is a WAP interface, but smart phones are just downloading mail straight to your phone, so that is not as essential
• Instant Messaging: On a desktop I have been using Adium or Pidgin, but I really like the way Meebo works on the web. The thing about IM is that there is no need to have a desktop client, because how can you chat if you don’t have an internet connection? So it would seem a perfect case of a web app. As far as I can make out, the only down side is that you can’t encrypt the conversation (e.g. with OTR)
• Online storage: Originally there was Xdrive, then AOL bought it and it still offering the best deal (5GB for free, as opposed to Yahoo’s 30MB) but Microsoft’s Live Spaces is coming up hard on the rails. I am trying to stick with an alternative: Omnidrive. When it works it is just great: only 1GB storage, but that is OK for what I need. But I keep having issues getting it to work on my Windows machine- it works magnificently on OS X (seriously, the UI is so good it is yet another reason to switch)
• RSS reader: Last time I didn’t know whether to go with Yahoo or Netvibes. Well, Netvibes won, but I still miss some of Yahoo’s functionality. Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all

There may be more, but with those three (GMX, Meebo and Omnidrive) I think that I am starting to see a trend: the big players (Microsoft, Yahoo and Google) all offer the same functionality and all in a one-stop-shop. So why I am using all sorts of odd little players and not just stick with 1 offering? Many, many reasons including truly picking the best of breed, supporting the little guy or just trying to be different. But probably the main one is just trying to stick one to ‘the man’: It is possible to survive in America without sucking up to the blandness of corporate ubiquity- Dave Gorman proved it by driving coast to coast (with a few, OK a lot, of detours on the way) and making a film and book about it; America Unchained is well worth the read. Mind you, Dave also attempted to live exactly according to his horoscope, so maybe holding him up as a role model is not entirely a good idea.

In the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I can do be independent.

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Community, Faith and Religion

I stumbled across a discussion on social networks that concerned itself with the nature of social networks and whether or not the Web 2.0 features of Facebook, MySpace etc constitute a real community. I thought that the discussion had closed, but as with all the best things, you never know when inspiration will strike and from whence it will come (Sorry about that, I just wanted to use ‘whence’).

I have a wonderful bedside radio that also serves as an alarm clock. The beauty of a Tivoli Model 3 is that it is completely analogue in clock, radio and speaker, but that is also its downside: the functionality that you get with modern radios, such as the ability to have different wake up times on different days or listen to different stations, is singularly lacking. All of which meant that on Sunday morning I found myself listening to Good Morning Sunday on BBC Radio 2. Anyone familiar with my taste in music and my opinions on religion will know that this is about as far from my normal listening taste as it is possible to get. But that is also what makes us complete people, and is the beauty of broadcasters like the BBC, CBC and many others around the world; we need to hear, see, read and learn from people with different and opposing viewpoints to our own. It is my considered opinion that the fragmentation of media in the world today is partly to blame for the narrow minded, ill informed society that we are forming around us. A mark of the well rounded mind is the ability to hear opposing views and reject them if they have no merit, or agree with them (and therefore change your own opinion) if these opposing views have sensible, coherent and well made arguments. But that rant is for another day- this post is about something far more positive.

One of the guests on Good Morning Sunday was Tobias Jones to talk about his latest book, Utopian Dreams (isn’t it always an excuse to talk about something that we need to sell). The book is a report on Tobias’ year long odyssey in which he visited 5 communities that had rejected traditional religion, such as christianity. Some of the communities attempted to create their own faiths and some rejected all faith based systems completely.

But what became apparent as the journey progressed was that although we may reject traditional religions most, if not all people substitute a new form of worship. These people may have rejected traditional religion, but they they are not able to exist without any faith. It is a sublte difference- this difference between no traditional faith and no faith at all, but it appears that even people who are willing to adopt life outside of regular society are not able to exist without any faith. At the most simple and obvious level; it may not be a traditional church, but if one considers the parallels between football (either kind) and religion then similarities spring up all over the place: gathering together every week, holding up heroes, be they saints or sportsmen etc etc. I wonder if this also explains the ever increasing rise in celebrity culture; for people not interested in sport perhaps their idols are Paris Hilton, Jordan or whoever is the latest fodder for Heat, Hello and all the rest of the celebrity press.

Whether or not the communities were successful or not in creating their faith is discussed in the book, but the point that I picked up on in the interview was possibly not the obvious one. Where the communities worked it was because of the collective spirit with which the people lived: There is more to inhabiting this world than simply existing as an individual- we as a species have developed through social interaction with each other. Technology means that we can now create the interaction without physically being present, but I wonder if this is yet another case of us not respecting the past. I believe we need real physical interaction- living connected by wires (or wireless) is not really living- but Tobias Jones takes it further than that. His experience of observing these communities is that the late 20th Century notion of the nuclear family is a one fraught with challenges. Now it may not be the most academic of sources, but even The Nanny Diaries appears to back this up: Traditional i.e. non-western cultures believe that it takes an entire village to raise a child, but we perhaps naively believe we know better: We cocoon ourselves in our houses with our toys and technology, we move to find work but that takes us away from family, support structures and the community that we are familiar with. We live as small units and are so frightened by the society we have created that it is rare to see children playing on the street or neighbours just stopping to talk.

I know that it is impossible to take society back to a simpler time in the past- not least of which is because that rose tinted place we hold up in our mind’s eye has just as many downsides as today, they are just different drawbacks. But I do think that the inability of traditional religion to connect with people today has led to a vacuum forming. People don’t want to believe in nothing- but the somethings that are on offer are not enough. Maybe I dream of Nirvana, but then they certainly wouldn’t be played on a Sunday morning on Radio 2.

How the internet changes content

I love the stories, jokes and amusing articles that get circulated around the internet and the fact that the same jokes resurface time after time. But what I hate even more than that is the way that the content of these stories gets changed, the authorship gets modified and we lose sight of the provenance of the thoughts. The net result of content circulating on the internet is that the author often loses control over what happens to their carefully crafted words, loses all rights to their intellectual property and never gets any compensation for the repeated use of their ideas. But I guess that is just the price we have to pay in return for the ability for all of us to transmit vast quantities of information that we are entitled to distribute.

OK, so getting off the high horse of content theft, here are some of the best examples of the way distribution of things over the internet has changed the content. I am sure that there are more- in fact there are probably entire web sites devoted to the subject, just as there are to cataloguing acts of stupidity (Darwin Awards), urban legends www.snopes.com), virus hoaxes etc etc. I simply present some that I have come across.

The most famous example of the misappropriation of authorship is probably the article ‘Sunscreen’. It originally circulated on the internet in 1997 as the graduation speech given by Kurt Vonnegut to a high school. It extolled the virtues of living life to the full and reminded us of the imprtance of using sunscreen to protect our skin. The words were so effective that they were used as the lyrics to a song, cunningly titled ‘Sunscreen’. All of which is fine, except for the fact that Kurt Vonnegut was not the author of this particular article. Presumably the orginator of the e-mail chain, or someone involved in it, thought that the actual author was not famous enough for people to forward the message to all their friends. Or maybe there was another reason, but whatever the reason Mary Schmich must have been pretty miffed that the piece that she wrote for the Chicago Tribune was now circulating the world many times over, with someones elses name attached to it. At least the lyrics to the song were correctly attributed, so not all was lost. I am not the first person to note this- we are all treading in dangerous ground by perpetuating the myth, but here is someone with a fairly complete history of the story.

The next example is one that I liked so much that I even posted it to my collection of jokes: Called ‘A revocation of independence‘ it is a list of what will happen because the US appears to have considerable difficulty electing a President (think ‘hanging chads’ in 2000). There was a canadian equivalent of this, when the result of the election in 2001 was announced (correctly announced too) within hours of the polling booths closing, but the british one is IMHO funnier. The premise of the joke is simply that the former ‘troublesome colony’ like an unruly teenager doesn’t really know how to govern itself, so the Mother Country is going to reclaim what was lost, and reimpose her rules. The same joke, with a few subtle changes, reappeared after the 2004 US election when the rest of the world was quite simply dumbfounded that a population could re-elect someone who, in terms of foreign policy, appears to be a complete buffoon. There is a politician in England called Boris Johnson, who held in the same regard as George W Bush, the only difference being that Boris is probably not destined for higher office, rather he provides huge amounts of amusement when he attempts to host comedy quiz shows such as ‘Have I Got News for You‘ or the Official HIGNFY site. I have no idea if the respective career paths of these politicians is a reflection of the relative intelligence of the two populations (but I rather think not) but back to the two versions of the same joke: Being someone with a background and history of living in the UK (though not so much since I have had a choice in the matter, but that is another story) I could fully see the merits of some of the points raised by the Revocation of Independence, I just couldn’t see the same joke being quite so funny 4 years later.

The final example is also something that I liked so much that I posted it to my web site; it is called ‘A Canadian Apology‘. When I received the text it was attributed to Rick Mercer who is a comedian in Canada most famous for the comedy special ‘Talking to Americans‘. For several years I thought that this was correct, but now, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can see the original video from the CBC show ‘This Hour has 22 Minutes‘. And what becomes immediately apparent is that the presenter is not Rick Mercer, rather it is Colin Mochrie. I have no idea why the original distributor thought it necessary to change the author, because in America and the UK Colin Mochrie is more famous than Rick Mercer, on account of the fact that he appeared on the improv comedy show ‘Who’s Line is it Anyway?’ There is a possibility that Rick Mercer was the writer and Colin Mochrie the presenter, but it is not possible to work that out, and why would the writer give up such fantastic material to someone else? I just don’t know but the mis-attribution persists.

And then comes the second piece of internet corruption: The text that circulated the internet is not the same as the original video. Someone, somewhere decided that they knew better than a professional writer and they would edit the content to make the joke ‘better’. There are two possibilities that I can see here:

1. The editor was watching the show and tried to transcribe the words and got it wrong. Look I am trying to be generous here, no I don’t believe it either, but we have to include it as a possibility
2. The editor genuinely thought that they were smarter than the original writer

Given the arrogance (and anonymity) of the average internet publisher, I am going to go with #2. And this is a real shame, because there are, IMHO, a couple of cracking jokes that were missed out from the text and it would have been great to read the original as it was intended to be. But then I like seeing Shakespeare done with the original words, rather than someone trying to adapt it. So maybe I am still out there on the ledge.

I guess that the final action that I should take after making all these points is to take down the various articles that I make available via my web site, on account of the fact that now that I know the copyright of the material I am actually breaking it. In my defence I am trying to provide the correct history and provenance of the jokes, articles and text; I am pretty sure that won’t stand up as a defence in court, but I’ll cross that bridge when the lawyers come.

Data Portability

… coming to a Web 2.0 near you.

I haven’t had time to dig into the details behind the announcement, but it looks like some of the big players in web 2.0 (Facebook, Google and Plaxo) have joined the data portability workgroup.

The initial aim is simply to allow users to export contacts from one social network to another, but this is hopefully the first step on the path web 2.0 conforming to sound data architecture principles. I have no idea if this was all part of the plan, but I can’t help but think that comments about how OpenSocial missed the point by ignoring the data from people like Tim O’Reilly and echoed by myself may have spurred on the process.

Whatever, congratulations to them for joining up and let’s hope that they are able to commit resources to Data Portability to improve the resources available

Microblog sites and the Creation of a new Community

I spent a short time recently getting Twitter (a ‘micro blogging’ site) to talk to Facebook. Obviously the desire to spend time integrating two Web 2.0 applications places me firmly in the category of ‘geek’, but let’s ignore that for now. What I began to think about is:

Who cares?

I mean, really, who cares what I am doing?

15 years ago I worked in remote parts of the world: The only contact we had was via the BBC World Service or Voice Of America (both on Short Wave radio) or if there was a real emergency via Single Side Band Radio to the country office. I was out of touch with the world for 2 months at a time.

And the world seemed to keep turning.

Now, we are being encouraged to post to the world in every minute detail. I just wonder what it is that gives us the arrogance to think that anyone else is remotely interested in what we are doing right now Or maybe I am just officially a Grumpy Old Man

I can understand the concept of creating a new online community of your friends, knowing what each of us is doing all the time. Maybe that is what neighbourhood communities were like 40, 50 or more years ago. Or maybe my vision of the world has so changed as a result of working away for long periods of time that I can’t actually work out how much “normal” people know about each other every day.

Facebook Application Overload

Hard to believe amongst all the frisbee throwing, vampire chasing and general waste of time and space… but there are some cool applications running on Facebook.

The problem is that is not clear what Facebook is… but maybe that is the point. Different people use it in different ways- but what happens when “friends” are using it differently? Does the added stress of one person conspicuously ignoring another’s request to be a pirate or whatever indicate a deeper incompatibility?

Or maybe I just got ground down by the number of invites to install a new app.

What I use

Here is what I use (for what it is worth) in the general Web 2.0 sphere. Hey this is as much for me to remember as anyone else (so expect the odd edit to occur)

• Personal Social Network: Facebook
  (though I do have a MySpace page it does little more than redirect to my home page)
• Professional Network: LinkedIn
• Photography: Flickr
• Bookmarks: del.icio.us
• “Real” Home Page: BatWeb
• Travel and Location: Dopplr
• Calendar: Google Calendar (redirected and hosted on my’professionl’ site: Maguffyn Calendar)
• Aggregator: My Yahoo and Netvibes

And I’ll add more as I remember them. So far, I haven’t signed up with YouTube as I a) don’t like the quality of their videos b) can host videos quite happily on BatWeb.

I am sure that there are more apps that I use, but I can’t remember them for now.