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?

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.

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.

A dry and lengthy (but no less interesting) presentation by Verna Allee from the 2006 Mesh Forum on how the language of traditional economics is often innapropriate for understanding or explaining contemporary online business. We often hear of intangible assets; this presentation explains the need to quantify and measure them.

Economies are usually measured, valued or understood on the basis of trading finite resources. The information/attention/knowledge/etc. economy is hugely different. Put simply, knowledge multiplies when distributed – unlike a tangible product, it does not become scarcer.

Talking about traditional accounting practices, she highlights one of the major institutional and ideological conflicts that arise – to paraphrase:
The typical HR mantra: ‘People are our greatest asset.’
A typical accounting statement: ‘People are our biggest expense.’
If a business can’t agree on where it has value, how can it grow it?

A couple of links that have been doing the rounds at work - some Qualitive and Quantitive studies into the most commonly used web fonts:
A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which is Best and When?
and
Determining the Best Online Font for Older Adults

It’s interesting to read about the methods used, and the information may help inform (or at least defend) certain design decisions that are made, but it all unravelled for me when I read that Comic Sans, was one of the most favoured fonts by the participants!

As promised in my last post I’m posting the response I received from Speed Touch about using their modem on an Intel based Mac:

“We don’t have a date for supporting Intel Macs – hence the recommendation to get a router.”

Given that this is the modem suppied by Talk Talk with their free broadband offer, it’s worth being aware that as an Intel Mac user, you’ll either have to obtain another modem, or play the waiting game with the drivers.

When my father went in to discuss the matter with Talk Talk, they did give him another modem from Sagem. As he’s a hundred miles away, I haven’t yet had a chance to see if this new modem fares any better. Unfortunately, the Sagem website isn’t much help either – it only states that Mac OSX is supported, and gives no further details.

If you’re tempted by the free broadband forever offer in the UK from Talk Talk and have an Intel based Mac, I’d urge you to read on.

My Dad said that the offer appeared to be too good to be true, and unfortunately in this case, this would appear to be true (for the moment at least).

I recently spent several hours trying to set up the Talk Talk provided broadband modem with his Intel iMac.

Despite Talk Talk’s claims that Macs are supported, and after a couple of lengthy (and utterly pointless) support calls to them, I gave up and decided to contact the modem makers directly. It was obvious to me that the problem was with the modem drivers (even though I’d downloaded the latest OSX10.4 ones that day). Nobody at Talk Talk appeared to have any idea what to suggest, and given they charge for support by the minute, their sole purpose seemed to be keeping me on the line as long as possible without offering any assistance.

The official response from Speedtouch was: “The SpeedTouch 330 does not support Intel based MACs.” So – there you have it. I’ve responded to the email to ask if the drivers will be updated to support (what will be) all new macs. As soon as I get a response, I’ll post it here.

First the dramatic statement – this will be my last post on this blog.

Then, the far less exciting disclaimer – I’m simply moving over to to a new tool, the excellent and open-source blogging tool – WordPress.

All of the contents from this blog have been imported, and all future posts will now appear here. I haven’t yet had time to configure my template (so the appearance is the default provided by WordPress). I do promise to remedy that soon however – I just need to find some time!

Anyone interested in the RSS feed, can now get that here.

Came across this simple, yet rather nice idea today from Tiggdo. Create an account, point your phone at their WAP site and add your account details.

After you’ve been through the initial set-up process once, you’re prompted to save your homepage as bookmark on your phone. And that’s it! You use the website to add, edit or remove RSS feeds as you see fit. Given how clunky that the navigation is on mobile devices, this seems like a rather nice way of pulling all the stuff you care about into one, easy to access place.

I attended a talk by the inventor of Hypertext and the web-browser Tim Berners-Lee (Sir) today at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Rather helpfully he put his presentation online (note the Web 2.0 and semantic web friendly URL – looks like finding all presentations by TBL should be relatively trivial!): http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0314-ox-tbl/

Unsurprisingly, Tim evangelised about ‘The Semantic Web’ – his vision of a web of data, rather than a web of hypertext. Whilst his ideas are inspirational, I do find the desire for most citizens of the web to play by the proposed rules and agreed ontologies rather optimistic. The success of the web could be attributed to many things, but for me, ease of use (largely) and access is core to it’s impact. Tim himself alluded to ’serendipitous re-use’ being key to the real value of the web, and what he hopes will begin to happen with data. Several in the audience argued that Web 2.0 is already doing this quite successfully – but it was clear that Tim felt that the Web as we know it is far too ‘dumb’ for him.

With legions of bloggers contributing data, and cross-referencing one another, the web has become a vital medium for the dissemination of ideas and discussion. Where the vision of the Semantic Web did not ring true for me, was the hope that a majority of the web’s citizens would start playing by new rules in order to ‘bring alive’ his vision :

“Make Useful Links” – Easy, we already do this

“Share Ontologies” – Not too difficult, I can see this working with small, focused communities.

“Agree on Ontologies” – Hmmmm. This one, I think will be difficult. Isn’t the web about de-centralisation of everything, including ideas? Can we ever expect a majority to agree on anything? He seemed to be suggesting that everything for which there is data or meaning should have a singular, definitive URI, to which all documents point when referencing. A very engaging idea, kinda reminds me (in a very trivial way) of using VoodooPad on a mac. As you type, any word for which a page exists immediately becomes a link. The problem is, as a sole user, it’s often difficult to avoid multiple pages on the same discreet object. What happens when the whole world is let loose? Who decides on the definitive URI? Who ensures that every other referencing document points to the correct place. This whole concept is very interesting, and rather too expansive to go into in a (relatively) short post.

Unlike Ian (whom we travelled with) Louise and I had to rush back to London straight after the event (a very, very sick cat worrying us to distraction).

Hanging around and networking, Ian got quoted in a New Statesman article about the event. See also, Ian’s post on the event.