Student. Geek. Ultimate (frisbee) player. F1 fanatic. Techie
My blog for all the cool stuff I've found and want to share.
So I've been pimping Seesmic Web for the last couple of weeks, and I'd thought I would sum up my thoughts in a blog post and chuck in some tips.
So what is Seesmic Web? A Twitter client that runs entirely in the browser. Written with Google Web Toolkit, a pretty cool set of open source tools that turns Java into Javascript (apologies for the rubbish description - I'm definitely going to try and learn more about GWT). I won't bore you with the feature set, except to say that it's up there with the desktop clients, instead I'll talk about what I like about it and what I'd like in the future.Scrolling Now I know this sounds a little weird, but scrolling for me is very important, especially in a vertical stream where you go up and down quite a lot. On desktop apps I always felt like there was a disconnect between my scroll wheel and the page. In Seesmic Web the scrolling is handled by the browser and so is exactly the same, making it 'feel' a lot better. Yeah I know - I'm fussy about this sort of thing ;) One more cool thing - I can scroll sideways using my mouse, because it's supported by Firefox, but not in any of the desktop apps I've tried. FiltersThis is a really great feature that is often overlooked. Columns can be filtered to only show tweets with specified keywords - I use this to refind tweets that have passed by and I can't find again, often to give someone credit in a retweet. Columns can also be filtered to hide all tweets with specified keywords - this again is something that I find really useful for filtering out F1 tweets after a race that I haven't seen yet and might spoilt it (yep - definitely a geek).
Buzz
Cross-posted from kandersteg.posterous.com where I'll be blogging about my summer in Switzerland from now on:
So I thought I'd write up where I'm going this summer (only taken me a week):
(picture: Jonty Sewell on Flickr) Kandersteg International Scout Centre in Switzerland, opened in 1923 by Robert Baden-Powell (who founded the Scouts) as a 'Permament Mini Jamboree' for Scouts all round the world. Over 10 000 guests visit each year from around 40 different countries. Right in the middle of the Alps it's a great place for hiking, climbing, mountain biking and quite a lot more. KISC has a large Chalet which has rooms for 200 people, a large campsite holding 1200 people, and even a sauna! I've been there twice before as a Scout with my troop, in 2000 and 2005. I have some pretty awesome memories of doing some great stuff out there and I'm excited to being going back.What I'm doing
I'm working there for the three Summer season months doing, well, I don't know! I could be doing anything from cooking breakfast, cleaning the Chalet, helping out campers in the campsite, working in reception, taking Scouts hiking or rock climbing. So pretty varied then? :-) The staff
The people who I'll be working with come from all around the world, just like the guests - I've been sent a list of everybody and I'm sure that I'll meet some pretty cool people. The blog
I'll be keeping this blog updated with my Kandersteg Adventures - pictures, updates on what I'm doing, maybe even some video and audio... If you want to keep updated just click the little Subscribe button on the right hand side or follow me on Twitter: @40_thieves. Thanks!
Data-driven voting is a great idea - the more data or information on politics we have the more wisdom we can glean, and use this to decide our vote. It cuts out the spinning from the PR chiefs and the editorial bullshit that comes out of the press. The problem is that there's not masses of raw data out there - its hidden in data archives or by politicians not saying exactly what they mean.
That's why I really like what Democracy Club is doing - they sent out questionnaires to candidates asking them 15 questions on a variety of subjects. Their answers were collected and made available to voters in the candidate's constituencies. But here's the key - they've now made all of the data available, for free, online - enabling statistical mashups and infographics (I hope Information is Beautiful gets hold of this).
I did write a wholly different blog post on this, with my crack at looking at the data. However my stats skills are poor and subsequently Democracy Club's blog posted the entry below. There's some great analysis here, from Democracy Club themselves and from @tomatosquid, but I'm sure that there's load more that can be done with this - so grab the data from here and get cracking!
Lots of people have told us that our candidate survey tool really helped them decide who to vote for. We’re truly delighted about this. The next step is to learn what we can from the data, partly for fun, and partly to see what we can learn, in order to an even better job next time.
All our raw data is now online. Based on this, we’ve done a preliminary analysis of the survey responses, showing average answers broken down by party. Some patterns immediately emerge; one that jumped out at us straight away was the extraordinary distance that Labour party candidates are from everyone else when it comes to the statement “there are too many CCTV cameras in Britain”:
party agreement % Labour Party 35 Independent 67 Conservative Party 68 Liberal Democrats 75 Green Party 78 UK Independence Party – UKIP 78 British National Party 82 We’ve got a basic grasp of stats, but we’re not statisticians. So we’re really hoping other people can do interesting things with our data. @tomatosquid has already made a multidimensional map of the average figures linked to above, which seems to show the closest pairings of parties are Ind/Con, Lib/Lab, Green/Lib, and UKIP/BNP. (Remember this is based only on our questions; if we’d included a question about “voluntary repatriation” then no doubt UKIP and BNP would have been further apart, and if we’d included a question about ID cards, then Lib Dems might well have been closer to the Conservatives than Labour).
It’s also possible to cross reference our data with the biographical data available at YourNextMP; in particular, I’d like to crowdsource a complete gender dataset soon, so we can do interesting things with that. I’d also like to add 2005 poll figures, so we can see if there’s a correlation between seat marginality and likelihood of a candidate answering our survey (about 50% of candidates we contacted by email answered in the end, but the distribution of answering rates varied enormously by party; if we can understand what correlates with survey answer rate, we can focus our attempts to get that figure higher next time).
What else can be done with our data? How about comparing how gender or age compares with party membership as a predictor for survey answers; running a spell checker across the free-text part of the answers and finding out the best spellers; identifying which questions divide candidates the best, or which parties have the widest range of answers. It’s also been suggested that a Principal Components Analysis might show us unexpected cross-party groupings. Please show us what can be done, and drop a comment here!
(via democracyclub.org,uk)
I couldn't resist posting this (hat-tip to @billt)
From NASA's Flickr page:
This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian day, or sol, of its mission. (March 8, 2004)
The image is a mosaic of images taken by the rover's navigation camera showing a broad view of the sky, and an image taken by the rover's panoramic camera of Earth. The contrast in the panoramic camera image was increased two times to make Earth easier to see.The inset shows a combination of four panoramic camera images zoomed in on Earth. The arrow points to Earth. Earth was too faint to be detected in images taken with the panoramic camera's color filters.
India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy is poised to mandate that telecom operators power their cellphone towers with solar panels instead of the diesel generators that are currently used. This may not seem like such a big deal until you think about the numbers – India has approximately 500 million mobile phone subscribers (more than the population of any country except China) and still continues to be one of the two fastest growing telecom markets. That means that even more cellphone towers are going to be set up in the near future. According to Cleantechnica, the switch over to solar power translates to a reduction of 5 million tons of CO2 emissions as well as a savings of $1.4 billion!
Why can't we (in Britain and the West in general) do this? Seems like such a stupid move *not* to! Or is it simply the the huge companies that control our world are so short sighted they can't invest in the future - its a *saving* of $1.4 BILLION.
Or this for that matter:
Korea famously invested in its national broadband infrastructure and was able to vault itself into a position as a world leader for mobile, Internet and consumer electronics innovation. Can the country do the same for the smart grid? It will certainly be spending the money to try — according to Pike Research the Korean government and private industry expect to spend $15.8 billion on building out smart grid infrastructure in the country between 2009 and 2016.
This is a pretty neat example of where I think AR can go until we start getting AR glasses or contact lenses. The use of AR on phones seems, to me, to be clunky and not very useful. AR's real potential is only really released when its always on, proving that extra data - not when we load up an app and then hold it up to see the overlays (and then get your phone nicked). This is where a car windscreen comes in - you're always looking through it to drive.
There are some great opportunities to improve safety here - I can imagine blind spot indicators, or cameras that could replace mirrors entirely. But equally important are the safety risks to acknowledge - distractions or computer errors are the obvious ones. However as talked about on the last TWiT it might not be that long until cars can drive themselves automagically, but public opinion against would stop that (unsurprisingly).
This great drawing (of me) was knocked up in about an hour while I was watching TV. As you can tell, I have no drawing talent at all so this is amazing for me!
Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis are two of the most public people on the internet. For those of you not familiar with their disclosures, Leo tweets his weight and Jeff gives regular updates on his experience with prostate cancer and that is just the start of it. This week on TWIT, as they were extolling the virtues of living in public, Jeff asked Leo where he would draw the line on privacy. The question went unanswered at the time, it was a great show recorded at SXSW with a lot going on and I think Leo may have just missed it. Either way it is an interesting question that we all should consider. What is your comfort level with privacy? I searched for privacy and found several articles about how to keep your data private, the dust up over Buzz and Facebook, but did not see a privacy hierarchy list, or what I have called here the Privacy Stack. So here is my shot at building a it. I have started with the stuff that most people would agree to open to the public -- so I guess the stack is up side down -- but you get the idea:
- Job Details (things on your business card)
- Job or Educational History (things on your BIO or Resume)
- Past Performance (Grades, job reviews, details of professional separations)
- Identification (Name, address, phone number, email, social security number, birth date)
- Transaction (What did you buy, how much did you pay)
- Location (Where are you now, where have you been, where are you going to be)
- Relationship (Friends, family members, business associates, group affiliations -- past and current)
- Interaction (Who did you talk to and what did you say)
- Intellectual Property (Writings, images, thoughts, plans)
- Contractual (Anything professional or personal covered by a legal document including legal instruments for contracts, divorces, payment plans, agreements of exclusivity)
- Financial (Income level, net worth, credit rating, assets, liabilities)
- Health (Records of doctor visits and lab tests)
Clearly this idea needs expanding -- including turning it into a matrix because there are degrees to each item.
My though with this privacy stack is that people would be more willing to share the things at the top and less willing to do so with the things at the bottom. My question to guys like Leo and Jeff is -- where do you draw the line?
All of this gets much more complicated when you start to think about what information could be made public as a result of your interacting with a person or system that has not drawn the line across the privacy stack in the same place you did. This is fundamental to the current Facebook / Buzz debate. If a person thought their email inbox was private, and then found out that it was not, it presents a big problem.
Item number eight: Interaction, is where this was already an issue in the pre-social media world. One person (a third grader even) tells another person something with the idea that it would be kept between them and the other person has a different idea about privacy and... well you know the rest.
Google got in trouble because they beta tested Buzz inside the company. Privacy in a work email environment is much different than otherwise. If you have an email with a business contract attached that is going back and forth between people at the office, it is much different than the email going back and forth between a client and an attorney with a divorce settlement attached. Everybody is on the same "friend list" inside a company -- it is called the company directory. So any issues associated with sharing lists of work friends does not translate to the real world because at work everyone has access to everyone else's work friend list (the same company directory for everyone).
So how much of the stack would you share? I have to say I start to get out of my comfort zone when I hit number 4-Identification, can't see doing 5-Transaction or 6-Location, and am dabbling in 7-Relationship with Linked In and Facebook, but I am clearly not all in like Leo and Jeff.
Hat-tip for this article goes to @JeffJarvis
A really great post sparked off by a great coversation that needs to be discussed more.
Privacy is becoming a much more important issue lately - with problems arising around Google Buzz and Facebook. As I see the problem, people are thinking too binary about privacy - it's either off or on, something that never really applies in "real life". Privacy is granular - there are different levels of privacy - something that is post hits perfectly. I don't totally agree with the order of the privacy stack - for me name is right at the top, grades are lower down and interaction should be given a privacy stack of it's own. However we should be incorporating this idea of levels of privacy into new services - with greater controls over what gets published. The challenge then becomes how to make setting privacy levels as painless as possible - the recent Facebook scandal relied on the ignorance and laziness of most people to ring advertising dollars out of them.
IBM's Smarter Planet team has created a great 5 minute video explaining the emerging trend of Internet of Things, an exciting topic ReadWriteWeb has and will continue to cover frequently and in depth. Internet of Things is about, as the video explains, the coming future when there are more "things" on the Internet (sensors especially) than there are people.
The result of that will be "a kind of global data field" the video says. "If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. That's where societies become more efficient, that's where more innovation is sparked." Check out this artistic, succinct, optimistic and inspiring video explaining what could well become a big factor in how the future unfolds.
This is heavy stuff, clearly aimed to fostering positive and substantial cultural change through technology - by opening up a new plane of options for humanity. Of course there's little critique of this movement in videos like this; that's something we're still exploring but we imagine surveillance is one down side. There's also some risk of paying so much attention to our machines that we lose track of the joy of engaging directly with the world around us.
The upside as described in the video is big, though.
"When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we werent. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us."To track this trend across multiple vendors, check out ReadWriteWeb's Internet of Things archive.
Ever since I heard about the "Internet of Things" concept I liked it - the ability to connect everyday objects, to network them, and ultimately to data mine them is pretty exciting to me. My post recently about linking your house to Twitter is a example of something that I'd like to do in the future.
After watching this video it seems obvious but I never thought of IBM as a big player in this. One of their slogans is "A Smarter Planet" - something that the Internet of Things is aiming to do. So a big hats off to IBM :-)
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