The Flicker Blog and Podcast

In response to Richard Sambrook’s call for questions for Andrew Keen, author of: The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy:

I will start off by stating that I have not (yet) read this book. However, the the book’s title, summary and multiple online discussions about the book’s central theme (this example is particularly informative) have given me a fair enough idea of the book’s polemic theme.

If (as the book’s title suggests) he feels that giving a voice to the masses is such an assault on our cultural values, does he therefore, feel the same way about the concept of democracy, or the free market for that matter? Isn’t the economy, that he would appear to fear for, largely successful because of the free market, and it’s inherent exchange of ideas?

To the (to me at least) deliberately provocative title: how exactly do you kill a culture, and who exactly, should be entrusted with it’s safekeeping? Isn’t a culture an organic, evolving representation of the individuals that inhabit it? Doesn’t it exist because, not in spite of, those that occupy it?

Regardless of copyright issues (which are more of a legal than a cultural challenge) isn’t the propogation, discussion and resultant filtering of memes and ideas ultimately a good thing for a culture?

What exactly is it about the loss of centralised power and authority that concerns him so, and who does he feel has a rightful claim to it? Can authority derived from expertise not emerge naturally from within a marketplace of ideas and discussion?

…or at least, after a couple of failed attempts, that would currently seem to be the case.

With great thanks to the Matt Hickey at Crunch Gear, and to my great surprise, I appear to have successfully resurrected my 60Gb iPod Photo (that a couple of weeks ago seemed destined for a recycling bin somewhere).

I have to admit to being more than a little sceptical that what appeared to be a dead hard-drive could be coaxed back into life with a little pressure on it’s case (applied via a folded business card). Apparently, with repeated use, the heat generated by the drive causes the case to warp. At a certain point, the lack of tension in the casing that this causes results in failure.

So, armed with a Stanley Knife blade, I (eventually) managed to prise open the stubbornly locked shell of my iPod. It now sports a few battle scars following the procedure – but I’d rather own a functioning, scratched device than an expensive paperweight.
Once inside (being incredibly careful not to damage the fragile ribbon cable connecting the two halves) I folded an old business card in half twice, placed it on the back of the hard drive case, and snapped it back together.

With regards to the repair, I say it was completed ’successfully’ only tentatively, because my first attempt resulted in premature feelings of elation. The sad iPod icon gave way to a fresh-faced, newly booted iPod. But, half way through syncing, iTunes, my Mac and the iPod alll froze, with the iPod’s hard-drive making the most unhealthy of noises.

Still – spurred on by the seemingly miraculous results brought about by a piece of folded paper, I wanted to try at least once more before disposing of the device (or shelling out for a replacement hard-drive.) I figured that if a piece of folded paper could make such a difference, that too much of it would cause problems. So, once again, I struggled to get the device open, ripped away one quarter of the folded business card, and this time, appeared to achieve the desired result.

I have restored the iPod, verified the disk with ‘Disk Utility’ and filled it (to around 95% capacity) without any locks or unfortunate sounds. Certainly, I’m a lot less trusting of the device now, but if I can get a little more life out of it before it finally gives up, I’ll feel that this was quite an accomplishment.

I have to admit to being completely blown away by this video. It presents several very complex interactions in a manner that’s both innovative and intuitive. Seeing synthesis approached like this underscores for me how poorly suited to the task, the interfaces of most virtual instruments are (Check the images of Reason for an example of what I mean). I’m sorry that I cannot link directly to the images – some people still insist on using frames on their sites!

Analogue synths of the 70’s and 80’s were restricted by the physical limitations of the components used to manipulate and program them. User feedback was predominately conducted via your ears, with the legending on knobs and sliders the only visual clue to what was happening inside the box.

I just don’t understand why companies resort to Pixel based renditions of retro analogue gear when designing virtual instruments. The video here shows what could be accomplished if only designers would move away from fetishistic renditions of retro hardware and embrace the possibilites afforfed by the platform they’re creating for.

In the world of hardware, physical limitations mean that you cannot dynamically represent the impact that parameters have upon one another. In the virtual world, these restrictions don’t exist, yet such limitations seem to be eagerly embraced.

Here’s what the Reactable creators have to say about their video:
‘Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.’

You can read more on the reactable website.

An interesting (if not a little cynical and manipulative) method for generating a buzz in the blog space around your product – give bloggers a year’s free trial of your product in exchange for a blog post or trackback linking to your product page.
Terribly phallic logo aside, the product (bandwagon) is an interesting concept – backup your iTunes music library to an online server, simply and painlessly. I’m not 100 percent sure how useful I’ll find it (being relatively organised already with regard to backups). Also, the price (currently $99 per year) seems quite high given the volume of physical storage that you could buy for a similar amount. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a .mac account (at a near identical price) soon offers a similar service covering your entire media collection.

That said – free trials like this are an incredible way of refining a product and evaluating usefulness and I’ll be keen to give it a go.
Privacy concerns aside, the off-site backup for consumers data appears to be an increasingly viable market and I wish bandwagon every success. More and more, I’m alarmed at the amount of personally important data that I’m accumulating and a product such as this may ease my concerns.

My initial impressions of iTunes 7 were very positive (read to the bottom for the very big BUT).

Top of the list of welcome new ‘features’ for me is that (finally) recordings that contain without pauses between tracks are now played back without (amazingly enough) pauses between tracks. This means that my collection of Fabric Mix CDs can now be enjoyed as intended, without the need to separately rip the whole CD as a single track. If only my iPod would exhibit similar behaviour!

Cover Flow – the ability to browse the contents of your library by the flipping through the album art, did initially seem like rather gratuitous (but nicely executed) eye candy. Nonetheless, I have to confess I’ve become rather seduced by it. The interplay between the visual display and the library text view is very useful. Click the genre column in the text view to sort your library by genre. Scroll to the desired genre, and you can then use Cover Flow to navigate visually through your collection by genre.

This turns out to be rather helpful – recognition of images is far easier than scanning (very) long lists of text for the desired item. Surely, this feature will soon appear in Front Row? The ability to navigate your collection with a remote from across the room in this way would be a useful, and visually seductive method of interaction.

Of course, any mention of the benefits of Cover Flow also requires mention of the fact that iTunes can now gather cover art automatically for you (assuming the images exist in the iTunes music store). There’s clearly the potential for privacy issues here – I can imagine Apple being subpoenaed for records of who’s been encoding what, by record companies. Still, for the time being, Apple states that they do not keep any information regarding the contents of your music library, and the CDDB functionality (present from day one) could theoretically, be used for similarly nefarious purposes. I’d conclude that we have to give up a little information if we want our applications to be more useful.

The administration of your iPod is now better implemented too. A mounted device now has a whole series of pages, directly accessible from within the application (as opposed to a preferences pane). This addition further improves the relationship between the device and the application.

Now… on to the negative. I bought 4 CDs yesterday. Arriving home late last night, I was hoping to quickly import them for inclusion on my iPod. What on earth has happened to CD Importing? It has become unbelievably slow! I actually thought that my Superdrive was broken, or that CD manufacturers have started encoding deliberate errors in manufactured CDs to cause ripping problems. I believe that the ripping of each CD was slower than playing the thing for real! At the very least, I ended up only encoding two of the four CDs before giving up and going to bed. I’m doing the remaining two this morning.

This is a huge step backwards for me, and compromises one of the core functions of the app very heavily. Conspiracy theorists will no doubt suggest that Apple are slowly trying to move users towards buying all music rather than encoding it (at the behest of the record companies) but I’d like to hope that is just a bug, and will be remedied in due course. Nonetheless, I’ve considered finding a way to downgrade to version 6 in the meantime. The new features are nice, but I need to import CDs in a time frame that’s measured in minutes, not hours.

Predicting the demise of the iPod and iTunes is clearly a popular sport, and a pretty safe bet given Apple could hardly become more dominant in this space. The only real uncertainty is the scale of the demise. I have begun to wonder this week however, if the change is beginning to occur.

The new iPod nano is the first new iPod whose design has underwhelmed me. I’ve only seen images, but the original Nano remains a far more attractive object to me – the new coloured cases leave the nano looking more like the original iPod mini, and consequently, as if Apple are running out of ideas. Of course, there are limits to how far the form factor can be changed, and why fix something that’s not broken? But on a purely subjective level, this is the first evolution of the iPod that hasn’t had me secretly wanting to go out and buy one, despite already owning a fully functioning 60Gb iPod Photo. Of course – the new Shuffle design does redeem them considerably!

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.

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.

Whilst listening to the presentation mentioned in my last post, a brief mention of the development of software for the new Airbus A380 plane caused me to wonder:
Whilst travelling on a plane, which scenario would make you feel most secure?
1. The software on the plane was developed entirely by the Open Source Community.
2. The software on the plane was developed by a private company.
Discuss…

My first thought – open source software ends up being safer and more secure because those who discover/experience flaws get to fix them. Obviously, a software failure on a plane has far more devastating consequences. That said, opening up the software to the community for scrutiny may be a very effective model for eliminating or discovering bugs.

Actually… pondering the importance of software on a plane is in itself, not terribly reassuring.