Alexia Blogs

I’ll be back blogging this week, but not here. I’m moving to a new domain. If you are subscribe to my feed, you should have no problems. If you do see any issues, drop me a mail. See you soon.

Photo owned by The Wu’s Photo Land (cc)

Yesterday was your official fifth birthday, Wordpress. Despite our differences, I still prefer you to the competition. I hope your birthday party had scallops, champers and karaoke.

I’m really enjoying using The Hype Machine to find new music. The site works by indexing music uploaded to music blogs and streaming it to users of the site.

Like a lot of music streaming sites on the web (LastFM comes to mind), there’s a social networking model at work. It’s an optional feature whereby you can set up an account on the site and use it to bookmark your favourite tracks and/or the blogs that host them.

It’s a neat idea that’s very well executed, but I wonder will it be around in two or three years time. Try it out for yourself.

Photo owned by benleto (cc)

IO9 has a very interesting post describing the results of a survey it carried out on the occupations and aspirations of Doctor Who and Star Trek fans. It’s a brainstrobing read that compares and contrasts the paths the fans took in their lives. Doctor Who fans are unapologetic science nerds. Not a shocker, but it’s nice to see evidence, even in a small sample.

Accepting the computing/mathematics bias in the survey, it’s also nice to see that that a significant proportion of respondents aspire to work and do work in Visual & Performing Arts. Less than 10%, granted, but it’s still a healthy figure and something I didn’t expect to read. Nerds are born under the same sun and fantasy entertainment is a great leveler.

Photo owned by axel kramer (cc)
So, Youtube has just set up a new channel called ‘citizennews‘ dedicated to ‘highlighting some of the best news content on YouTube’. At first blush, I love the idea. Imagine standing in the rice riots of Vietnam, bearing witness to happenings world within hours. Isn’t that the what democratising the web is about? People-powered media.

Here’s the ‘citizennews’ editor, Olivia, introducing the service:

Viewers are encouraged to contact the ‘citizennews’ editor, highlighting videos they believe newsworthy, and the editorial process will sift out the videos of the moment. User-generated content and crowdsourcing for popularity, very Web 2.0. Editorial yea and nay, a bit old news don’t you think?

Perhaps ‘citizennews’ is a little like Frankenstein’s monster? Count the number of times ‘citizen journalism’ is inserted in the video. It’s nice, cheap way for Youtube and Google to source on the ground video from people in the thick of breaking news, circumventing the large news conglomerates. Cutting out the middle-man so to speak.

So Paper Nerds Inherit the Earth?

Youtubers aren’t interested in what the school paper nerds deem interesting, they like same kind of content that their friends are into. Let’s face it, slap any cool, ‘awesome’ intro you like onto a crowdsourced channel, the editorial voice is still that paper nerd for the average Youtuber. Going down this route would lead to a disconnect with the yoof viewership. They are the lifeblood of Youtube, the real viewers that Google/Youtube would love to serve ads to.

So, instead of adding editorial layers on videos, wouldn’t it be nice to think of video news laterally? It’s pretty obvious that Youtube’s citizen journalist experiment is going this way, anyway.

Meshing Your Video

Imagine this, I’m out and about town. By chance, I spy someone stencil spray-painting on the side of a building. I’m a big Banksy fan, this looks like something he’d do. I pull out my mobile phone and start videoing the event. I want my friends to see this video, because they’d get a kick out off seeing it live. I could be using an application like Qik (or maybe Android will have something similar) to stream video from my phone up to the Internet. Just to make sure that know what the clip is about, I add a description to my video “Looks like a Banksy”.

As my video is streaming on the web, a message is sent to my friends on different social networks telling them that I’m streaming live, giving them a link to view the video stream and my Banksy description. My video is tagged with the description and keywords I gave it. If they are offline when I stream, the link will redirect to my saved video.

Wouldn’t it also be nice if the video were peer-ranked too. My friends could rate the video and this number combined with the number of independent views outside my circle of friends would yield a popularity ranking. Perhaps they could swap, share and embed my video on their blogs. The more times it’s posted or shared, the more votes it gets.

Geotag the video with exact earth coordinates where it was taken and you have a distributed network of crowdsourced videos that editorialised by the public. A mesh of people-powered video. Make the most popular/recent/hot videos just icons on a map like Google Maps or Local Live and you have a simple, intuitive way to browse through those videos.

Agendas, Agendas

Agenda is, and always will be lock, stock and barrel of the news business be it sitting in the noisy presses or in binary. Youtube’s ‘citizennews’ or any other media outlet does this. Soliciting votes in a news channel may not uncover those hidden gem stories, but the most fitting way to sift through crowdsourced videos appears to be crowdsourcing thumbs ups too.

Heard of Wikipedia? How about McCainpedia? Nope? The Democratic National Committee have gone all Web 2.0 and have built a Wikipedia clone stuffed full of anti-McCain spin. At least they’ve grasped the web, the Republicans are probably still sending telegrams.

It’s closed for updating. Pity that. I thought the spirit of Web 2.0 was all about opening up content systems for user submission. Here’s their spiel:

McCainpedia.org is a wiki run by the DNC’s Research, Communications, and Internet teams. The goal is to centralize research material, allowing the general public to use it as they see fit. Unlike some wikis, McCainpedia is read-only and can’t be edited by the public. This allows us to fully validate all of the information that appears, ensuring accuracy and reliability.

A read-only wiki? Love it. Now that’s not very Democratic, is it?

The Democrat love of wikis doesn’t stop there. Obama supporters have jumped on the bandwagon and created Obamapedia. Hey these guys are more democratic that the DNC web team. You can actually update some pages - Undecided Voters and Barak Obama Supporters. Two pages. Let’s jump up and down.Where is Hillarypedia in this ruck?

It seems that the Twitter’s scheduled maintenance for midnight PST has spilled over. Again. Going by reports I’m reading, Twitter devs were trying to clean up bot users that were spiking network activity. Twitter need to estimate downtime accurately, build in at least 20% more time than they expect into the schedule and and fix these issues.  

Photo owned by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com (cc)
Privacy is the last bastion of preserving our identity online. Would you be willing to hand over some of the control of that privacy in return for free broadband? Mark Evans poses the question.

The Consumerist this week reports that Charter Communications, a broadband provider in the US, is offering users an ‘enhanced’ browsing experience where ads are targeted to users following analysis of their online habits. The move screams ‘1984′, but we’re already treading that path, aren’t we? After all, our search experiences are profiled every time we use a search engine. A big, fat profile exists on each and every one of us across search engines and social networks. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but in the wrong hands, it could be.

So would you hand over a dossier of your browsing habits for free broadband, or perhaps in Ireland, for decent broadband to begin with? Do you mind the marketeers looking over your shoulder and sending contextual ads? Consensual online stalking, if you would. I suppose the real question is, how do rate the risk the that your browsing data distributed across different data depots on the web, will get connected up into a mesh that profiles you?

Security at these knowledge bases needs to be top-notch. Look back to Charter, for example. Browsers can opt out of it’s ‘enhanced’ service only by submitting their details using an unencrypted form. Alarms bells should be ringing by now. To protect their privacy, users must download an cookie every time they exit their browser or purge their cache. Arghhhh.

The cynics says that we give away breadcrumbs on our identity each and every day. Those broadcast messages in Twitter and Facebook’s status updates tell the world that we’re going down the shop for a pint of milk and the National Enquirer. We trust the service provider to keep certain parts of our profile secret and others public. What happens then when that trust is broken? Or when the provider uses lax security? Sure we could enact legal action, but hasn’t the horse already bolted?

Photo owned by Marcin Wichary (cc)

In terms of web design, 2008 is definitely the Year of Typography. The run to embracing typography has been a slow, but steady one. Haven’t you noticed the amount of sites that favour simple, clean typographic text grow over graphics-laden portals?

The move from heavy graphics sites to clean type amounts to a schism in web design, a Reformation. Why Reformation? Looking back to the Protestant break with Roman Catholicism (excepting the machinations of Henry VIII, of course), the adoption of evangelical Protestant dogma amounted to a rejection of gaudy iconography and rituals for the Scripture i.e. the Word of God. Is there any more fitting metaphor for 2008’s Typography craze, than describing it as an obsession with Words? Replace iconography and rituals for heavy web technology like Flash and graphics-rich portals like IOL. It’s no wonder that a healthy back-to-basics movement of typography lovers sprung up.

Love for typography is not necessarily a new phenomenon. Anyone with an iota of graphics design in their past would have had to spend many long hours tracing and draughting type for posters and flyers. Learning to kern letters (space them relative to each other) and centre text is an absolute pain. While digital typography has eliminated this time-intensive task, a true appreciation for typography cannot be gained until one manually renders text.

Have you seen Helvetica? Do you obsess over the Holy War of Calibri vs Helvetica? Does typography matter to you?

HP Garage, Addison Ave, Palo Alto, CA

The way we interact with technology changes dramatically from generation to generation. If, during the heyday of punch card computing in the 1950’s, a programmer was presented with a mouse and graphical operating system, I’m sure they’d balk. Imagine explaining that punch cards are redundant and that the programs they wrote were stored in magnetic signatures on a disc.

Changing the hooks of how we interact with technology is where consumer-facing product innovation nowadays. Look at the way the iPhone changed how people think and interact with mobile phones. The web browsing experience is one of the best in the market and, possibly, the truest experience that end users have to laptop or desktop browsing. The iPhone does it very well. It’s an opportunity for other providers including Windows Mobile to push past previous conventions and truly, think innovative.

Pat originally asked the question, “Has technology set over-innovated?” I have to say yes and no. It depends on what angle you take when looking at the question.

Why yes? Well, look at the amount of research material that is produced year over year in academic institutions. Only a tiny percentage of this research makes into commercial products within a generation. A classic example of this is Boolean algebra. George Boole published his formal treatise on systematic logical reasoning in 1854 with his seminal paper, ‘An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities’ It sat in dusty tomes recognised only by mathematicians of an obscure offshoot of logic until Claude Shannon came across it in an undergrad class and saw potential in ones and zeros. Shannon used these ideas for his Masters in 1937 (that was used to produce a 1940 paper), ‘A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits’ demonstrating a practical application of Boolean logic in electromechanical relays. Look at the time gap - eighty-three years. It took eighty-three years for the founding principle of digital electronics to be uncovered. 

I’m sure there’s thousands, if not tens of thousands of rude gems just like Boolean algebra waiting to be uncovered, polished and scientifically applied to solve the challenges of today. But are we looking for them? And as the research churn increases from third-level institutions and defunct dot-com bombed companies, are we losing some of the best ideas in the ruck? I’m not saying that research and innovation budgets need to be cut, in fact, they need to be strengthened. By introducing a separate stream of interdisciplinary research in connecting the dots and promoting collaboration between third-level institutions and private brain tanks, researched ideas could be mangled and used to advance the frontier of science and consumer products. 

The truth is, that at bleeding edge of research innovators are pushing past into the undiscovered regions of science or applied science in technology. Compared to being at the coal-face of advanced research, looking at the adoption levels of that research in Consumerland must be disheartening. Consumer offerings must look like they have reached a plateau, in terms of advancement. After all, what more could consumers want with new technology? Who would ever have dreamt that we’d be watching video over the Internet back in dark days of 14.4K modems.

But there’s a need for innovation. Where real innovation must continue to come into play, is to find more connected scenarios for the documented research and for the ideas yet to come. Innovation comes by asking “What If?”, not just what. And sometimes the freshest thinking comes from brains from outside a research stream, that can question norms and convention. Plenty of Irish institutions have research colleges dedicated to streams of science, mathematics and materials technology, but how many have an entire initiative composed of interdisciplinary researchers dedicated to seeing potential in research and cross-pollinating their experience into it? And by interdisciplinary, I mean artists, writers, mathematicians, biologists, physicians, economists and the list goes on. I’m not aware of any. Are you? 

So, yes we are over-innovating as the ideas need to be churned and digested enough to realise their full potential. However, innovation needs to continue to ensure that we are examining research with open minds and connected human scenarios in mind. 

Robin and Damien chipped in with their thoughts. Go read them if you haven’t already.