Alexia Blogs

Yesterday’s Photomeet was a lot of fun. Thanks Red Mum for setting this up and getting the word. We ambled about a yard behind the George Bernard Shaw pub in Portobello. After that, we walked up to the Temple Bar farmers market.

It was great to meet so many accomplished photographers. People whose pictures you look at and admire. People whose photos inspire you. Thanks. It was great to meet Red Mum, Gingerpixel, McAWilliams, Catriona, Eoin, Phil, Davy, Nathalie and Eoghan, Darren and Will. And it was fab to meet Deborah too. Great, but all too brief!

Oh and I’m posting a few pics a day from my snap haul. The ones I like. Some of the photos from the meet group are already up on the Toejam Flickr group. More will be uploaded.

Many thanks to everyone who turned out last night. To Darragh, Ben, Anthony, Darren, Davy and Phil. It was nice to catch up and chat. From the Market Bar to O’Neills and Helvetica to Chicagoans, some pearls of wisdom were trawled through. I also have a very fine Rickroll video to upload.

Photo owned by rusvaplauke (cc)
I’m making some this weekend. Kicking raisins out to touch too. Do you have granola dos and don’ts?

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?

Don’t forget - the Dublin Photomeet is kicking off this afternoon at 1pm at the George Bernard Shaw pub (map) in Portobello. And Blogger Beers at 8pm in the Market Bar (map) is still on for tonight too.

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?

Sinéad is starting a digest on Cyberpsychology. Vol 1 is a very interesting collection of stories on Cyberpsychology from around the web. Looking forward to Vol 2.

The Four Nine Pounders are geeky to the power of geekiness.

The Limerick Blogger has that infamous Bulmers messer video.

Ryanair wins the PSO contract to provide air routes between Dublin and Kerry starting in July.

Is this Lost’s big secret?

I always knew it. Tetris makes you smarter.

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.

Don’t forget Bloggers’ Beers this Saturday.

I’m all for recycling, but this is a joke.

MS Touchwall looks sweet. Imagine playing games on it.

Feist hoodies for your iPod. Via Core77.

Google adds houses for sale results in Google Maps. Daft.ie and the like can’t be happy.

Death In Vegas ‘Nuclear’