The Flicker Blog and Podcast

Now that he's gone public himself, I’m free to comment on how pleased I am for Ian Forrester, friend and ex-work colleague, who’s just accepted the Senior Producer role at backstage.bbc.co.uk.

I heard the news a couple of days ago, and I am certain that his knowledge, enthusiasm and commitment to the UK Developer ’scene’ will quickly make an impact – and be hugely appreciated by the community of developers out there. Well done Ian!

I read this today, where Tim O’Reilly refers to a correlation (drawn by Ed Kummer of Disney) between solar energy units in homes and the ‘traditional’ understanding of user-generated content. The main point being that ‘users’ can now create their own energy, and sell surplus back to the network – just as users of the web, increasingly share data and content.

I’m very enthused by any technology that liberates and empowers individuals – particularly if individual endevours benefit a community. But, this parallel brought into sharper focus for me, the idea that the term ‘User Generated Content’ is innapropriate, and seems increasingly laboured (even if the parallel drawn here has some merit). Dare I say it, perhaps it’s time we stopped celebrating ‘UGC’ altogether – it’s verging on patronising: ‘Hey,look at what this regular person managed to make!’

People have always made stuff, and generally, improvised means by which they can improve the quality of their existence. Before we had muti-national business, and looked at everything through the lens of globalisation, I’d even speculate that it was considered normal.

Perhaps it is because the Internet was first viewed as a new form of media, and that the media industries have until recently, enjoyed exclusivity? The very term ‘user’ suggests a relationship based around dependence on the provider – or one that’s based on consumption.

Apart from talent, the only thing separating authors, film-makers musicians journalists etc from ‘common folk’ is the sponsorship/backing of a publishing business. The media industries who were the gatekeepers have found that the surrounding walls have come down. People, not users, create content – and the internet dramatically lowers the barriers to distribution.

Sure, none of what I’m saying is any great revelation. I guess that what I’m saying is that drawing a parallel between user-generated electricty and Web 2.0 is looking at it the wrong way round. Web 2.0 is allowing the internet to become more like the real world.

So today I woke up, ready to start my new job, feeling relatively relaxed. After checking my emails, I looked over several changes I’d made yesterday to my site, only to find the message ‘You have been hacked’ in place of both my blog and index page!

My initial response was one of mild irritation, which was quickly followed by concern. Was this due to my installation of WordPress? Was my blog lost forever? Fortunately, the answer to both questions was no – a kernel upgrade and security upgrade on the server was all that was required; and backups restored the site to a fairly recent state. All I then needed to do was upload all of the files I edited yesterday (which weren’t included in the last automated backup).

Still, the whole experience was a bit of an eye-opener and has made me a whole lot less complacent. Not that I feel this blog has huge artistic merit, but if I lost it all, I’d still be pretty upset.

BTW – I have removed the URL from the image below because I’m guessing the site may have some malicious Windows hack on it – even if it hasn’t, the last thing I’d want to do is give the perpetrators any traffic.

Thanks to Graeme for sending me this rather charming video made by Guillaume Reymond (who clearly has a lot of free time!)

67 participants in coloured T-Shirts recreate the Space Invaders game in a movie/lecture theatre via the magic of stop-motion.

Some time ago, Ian pointed me at a video of two new visualisation tools (Stack and Swarm) that have been developed for Digg. Now that they’re both live (on Digg Labs) I wanted to give them a mention.

Stack is a visualisation tool, showing ‘diggs’ as they occur in real-time. Taking the form of a bar chart, vertical bars along the bottom grow, as blocks (representing ‘diggs’) fall from above. Visually, it feels like an early 80’s video game, and the default zoom level tends to yield little in the way of information. Clicking on a bar (which at the lowest zoom level, requires the manual dexterity and speed associated with playing a video game) gives you a more detailed view on the respective story. Interesting stuff!

Swarm is definitely the approach that I find most interesting. As a real-time visualisation tool, it affords far more information at a glance. Individual stories are represented as circles, growing in size as they grow in popularity. Hovering over a circle reveals not only the headline, but connections (or lackof) to other stories – arcs temporarily appear to illustrate relationships between items as the user moves them.

There’s a nice application of physics employed in the visualisation – ‘loner’ stories push adjacent stories away whilst connected items have elastic connections (causing a lag in movement that’s dependent on the speed with which objects are moved). I did initially find myself questioning the value of some of the interactions. Moving items around seemed to have little purpose beyond sheer playfulness, and any attempt to organise items in the constantly fluid state is futile. That said, I have to concede that the interaction does help the user grasp the relationship (or lackof) between objects in a way that visual stimulus alone, would not.

As real-time visualisations of data go, both approaches are very impressive.