01.7001 New York Rising

Its been a while since I updated my blog so I'll begin by recounting my recent trip to New York. I have been working with Gabriel Ortiz of nGrinder to help develop business ideas and trying to drum up clients for a new Flash based content management system that he and his developer in Japan have been working on. With that in mind we set out to New York to continue our networking extravaganza at the Future of Web Design conference. To be honest it was not as memorable as the Future of Web Apps in London however I made some significant links with one or two of the delegates there and learned quite a bit about the development of user interfaces and system design as well as seeing an interesting debate about how designers and developers should deal with each other: The Digg developers seem like an unruly bunch of prima donnas but I guess when you've been on a lead developer company team for over five years you consider youself indispensible and therefore entitled to that sort of ridiculous behaviour.

The after conference party was paid for by Micro$oft this time and took place around the block from Times Square. It was a bit of a farcical affair with representives trying to give a presentation in the club to live audience of drunk designers and developers. I'd like to meet the clever spark who organised that. It might have been more beneficial for Microsoft to leave bits of their kit lying around for everyone to play with we probably would have learned a lot more and actually engaged with the brand, suffice to say it was a lot of money spent for not much return on their part.

After drinking on their purse, eating the fine food on offer and doing bit of a last minute  networking with anyone who looked vaguely finance based, Gabe and I drifted towards Times Square at midnight where, concurrent with the conference the 2008 election campaign was drawing to a close. I have to say although I consider myself engaged I've never been particularly excited about conventional politicing however on this night the excitement about Obama ignited a new hope in me, irrational as that may be. As we arrived at the electronic light show and multitudinous crowds in the streets Obama was being announced as the winner and everyone went wild even the police who have to remain impartial were in good humour. Cue a million jokes from a mutual friend of ours as he said could now do anything he wanted 'coz we got a black president'.

What does Obama's presidency mean for me personally? Well I feel like we're living in a time of great historical significance but then probably everyone who has ever lived thought that unless you live in Milton Keynes where time doesn't pass. I feel like my contribution to the planet really means something it also means I have no excuses for doing whatever I want in life and neither does anybody else. It reinvigorated my faith in Americans or at least some of them and I had a warm fuzzy feeling for a couple of days.

Professionally though his presidency means a lot more. I would like to see his interest in education, history and science really affect the way Americans and indeed all of us go about our lives and business in the future. We as a race need to move forward from this momentous occasion and realise that anything we want to do with the world to be can be achieved. Its a question of what motivates us and though I think that actually Obama will have his hands tied and, personally, will not be able to achieve as much as some people may hope. I feel its not his responsibility to change things, its ours we Americans showed that by electing him in the first place so that he could be a symbol of that change.

As a person involved in using digital technologies I feel its important that I develop myself and my business towards the spreading of information and knowledge to others and make a contribution to that effect - I still haven't worked out the details of this but I have a lot of space here to blog about what that form that effort will take in the future and more importantly the results.

But before my grand master plan to change the world I need to go take out the recycling....

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01.7001 The 4th Dimension in Social Media

As some readers may know I only recently set up this site and between my consulting work, web design and doing my own personal projects I've had barely enough time to really sit down and write about something meaty. I want to open up another dimension in social networking or rather I wish someone else would...

When I was talking with Mario F. Ruckh of My Heritage at the FOWA 2008 I was instantly grabbed by the concept of his site. It was nothing new mind you - yet another site that would facilitate the greater part of the middle classes in finding out whether they were related to nobility...yawn. Geneaology has never really excited or ignited passions in the wider public because it has always been such personal and private past time. The only time you would share your family history with outsiders was if it was somehow exceptional and interesting or if you thought it was exceptional and/or interesting. Most people's families aren't that interesting... or are they?

Leaving aside the grand stories of royal families and great dynasties, historians these days tend to relish getting their hands on primary source accounts of ordinary peoples lives. Social histories as opposed to royal-dynastic or military accounts can be more tedious and at times very difficult to uncover especially from the distant past but the data offered by primary source material about peoples lives, attitudes, socio-economic backgrounds and motivations could be far higher more valuable.

MyHeritage.com is currently in its fourth round of funding and has an international staff. Its website provides comprehensive tools for recreating massive family trees though be careful because you can only go so far with your family before the owners charge to increase the size of your tree. What if we could combine family data to recreate social networks from the past and therefore trace histories of individuals back to perhaps 200-300 hundred years with fairly good accuracy before records really degrade. Some families may be traced up to a 1000 thousand years with a fair degree of accuracy due to the existence of primary souce books and artefacts that may confirm certain connections.

All of this information could also be geo-tagged and then combined with archaeological data or architectural/land ownership data to show a pattern of human interaction and movement that is more accurate than any historical social model yet in existence. Is Google doing this yet? I know that KML data in Google maps has time data associated with it so, for example, one can view Londons Financial District and view buildings from different time periods in multiple locations appearing and disappearing by using a time slider. It's pretty cool.

Now imaging taking a city like Split where the Emperor Diocletian built a palace which becaom a provincial capital and over 1500 years later still has people living within its ancient walls, some of whom can trace their family lines back 500 years or more due to the existence of some very musty books. Now lets imagine we can re-create the different phases of the architectural elements of the city and overlay that with the social data, familial connections and ownership patterns of the town.

As a historian I get so excited about these possibilities and yet as so often is the case the people working at my heritage never quite saw just how valuable their data wasfor social research and modelling. This because they are so desperately trying to monetise it and conventional internet business models (none of which are a guarenteed money earner in the long term) are capable of taking into account the intrinsic value of much of the metadata. Most business know that their data is valuable but even the hi-tech ones don't always see how they can leverage all aspects of it.

I'll be posting more on this topic as its my pet project to work on an interactive museum exhibit that will take advantage of these technologies...

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01.7001 Future of Web Apps

Just woke up after an intensive evening of networking at the Future of Web Apps and much free booze. It was an eye opener for sure.

The highlights:

Dave Morian announced

Facebook's Connect service allowing integration of your users' social data onto your website. It allows activity on other websites to be published in you news feed and well that was the most interesting part... It wasn't the announcement we we waiting for - everyone wants integration with OpenSocial and an opening up of the API... No such luck Zuck

Diggnation filmed a live show on the last night

and Google decided to give

away free beer while everyone was queuing. My business partner, Gabriel Ortiz and I decided that the party was not for us so we swiped twenty beers and the deck chairs kindly provided by BT and proceeded to drink with Linda Wolters of MyHeritage.com, Sam Collins of Yadster generally show our righteous inDiggnation.

I sat through some rather interesting if hurried talks by developers on the Friday. Tim Bray gave a doom and gloom prediction for those developers and designers that don't do multi-role and complained about the ones that say "I don't code in xyz"... But in the end

he talked about opportunities for people who are willing to go back to companies with legacy code and sort out a new front end for the aging critical systems.

Sam Collins and I were struck by the number of people who have a good idea or company but are still stuck in antiquated ways of implementation or down right ignorance of the value of some the data they possess or will possess in the future.

Meanwhile Gabriel was vox popping the crowds, stall holders and speakers and making it be known that he was Gabriel Ortiz - nothingGrinder.

And me I was slowly formulating plans for world domination..... Muhahahaaaaa coughoouegh.

Will report more once the event has sunk in. Wanna watch the talks for free go to here

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01.7001 Playing with technology

I should be in bed cuddling up to my missus but I'm such a geek that I had to test whether the wordpress app for my shiny new iPhone works. It's bloody amazing this thing. I simply can't believe how easy it is to type. I have never been fast at texting but I'm bashing this post at almost the speed that I type on full size keyboard but somehow I think my thumbs will never be the right fit for the Apple recommended two thumb typing position! If your thinking of buying a blackberry your insane...nuff said.

And my plan for this lovely gadget? Well me thinks I shall promote it to secretarial status, without a wage, and then jailbreak it an experiment to install better apps than those which available through the fluff sorry I meant App Store. Finally when the contract runs out and I'm eligible for an upgrade I think I shall try installing Google's Android OS on a second partition if that's at all possible. Or another Linux distro. Signing off now I here the missus beckoning good night....

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01.7001 The End

With a title like that you'd think i was finishing my blog though actually I'm referring to my documentary. I began filming Capoeira groups in Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Bali, Jakarta and a quick stop in Singapore though I wish I had more time as I'm missing a massive capoeira festival in Singapore. Due to a massive cock up by the airline I bought my ticket from I was sold the wrong type of ticket - an inflexible one so changing dates was impossible. Perhaps its just as well as I have a number clients at home wondering when I shall be returning to work for them.
The journey was epic hopefully the footage is good I hope ... all 40 hours of it! I recorded some amazing sounds for use in the film including of course the usual capoeira songs and instruments but also random people like a guy next door to me in the hotel who played me some Brazilian Shoras on his mandolin and a girl singing Charles Tenet's 'La Mer'. Some of the stuff I caught on the beach in Bali was beautiful and some of the games are great but I have realised that documentary is not going to be game heavy and yet I'm not going to have two much of a talking heads approach.
Now comes the hard part organising all the footage and then doing a conceptual paper edit. As the story and characters emerged during filming I'll have to change my original plans and cut two versions of the film together - one 40-45 minute version for an hour slot on TV and one full length 1h30min version for the groups who all want to see themselves.
Fingers crossed my friend Ben Strebel will be able o help me out with the edit. He's a really talented editor and visualist check out the new Stereo MCs video which he had a hand in producing...

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