Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: October 2005

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Six Apart Supports Videoblogging

Maarten Schenk of Six Apart Europe just alerted me to the fact that Six Apart will start to support videoblogging. A small example is available on Maarten's blog: Blogologie: Videoblog test

This is done in cooperation with VideoEgg. If you have a Typepad account you can go to typepad.videoegg.com to test it out with your Typepad login.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 26, 2005 03:05 PM)

How to Get P2P Social Networking

During BarCamp Amsterdam last Friday I prepared a few sheets that in the end I didn't use. As everybody was busy coding or already in a presentation, and by the end of the afternoon everybody was starting to concentrate on the beer in the fridge more, I didn't see a useful window of opportunity to get a group together for what is basically a conversation around a question I have. It concerns peer to peer social networking, and at this point is much more about concepts than tools I think. So Roland, sorry I didn't grab a room and presented this, but let's see if this conversation can get off the ground here as well.

My starting point is the notion that Information Overload doesn't exist. The perceived stress is the symptom of failing information strategies that work fine in an environment where info is scarce but do not scale to the information abundance the internet offers us.

A good way to build strategies that do work in information abundance, is taking the social context of information into account.

Doing that you then look for patterns without paying much attention to individual information items (the outside-in approach), or focus and those singular items that relate to a specific list of topics that concerns your current goals and actions (inside-out approach). Also, as you look at information within its social context (that basically taking its human source into account) you try to move up information paths and networks of your contacts that are the source of that information.

Moving up those paths, and having a clear notion of the social context of an information item, requires some social networking tools if done on-line. The first generation yasns (linked-in, openbc, tribe, orkut etc) don't cut it for me. Firstly because they have my data somewhere else, in the clubhouse so to speak, and if I am to do anything with it I have to do it in that clubhouse. As if my whole life takes places there, and I am not meeting people in the on-line equivalents of my home, my friends houses, my fav pubs, and public squares etc. Also relations require substance, an object to revolve around. Networking for the sake of networking such as most yasns seem to only offer is useless. Flickr and Plazes on the other hand readily provide object to form and have relations around.

What I really want from social networking tools is:

a) to have my data at home, or at least in one, not service specific, location where I can control it.

b) to finely nuance the levels of trust around information items I share (so that e.g. friends see more in my blog than the general public.But being able to specify that seamlessly per item per context, not as general settings only or merely on/off)

c) to be in the center of my own network, be able to visualize that, spider it, and do that in real time and over time. (Like Anjo Anjewierden in the picture above, or Valdis Krebs does)

How to do that? I don't know.

I would like to have a true peer to peer social networking platform. Also I'd like to have my own spiders and agents.

FOAF isn't ready for this kind of thing I think, but we might look to an existing p2p infrastructure like Skype to be a carrier. Boris Mann pretty much repeatedly said Jabber can do anything during BarCamp, and seemed to be only half joking.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags : socialnetworking, p2p, yasns, spidering, sna, barcampamsterdam, barcamp

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Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 22, 2005 09:12 PM)

Washington Post Incorporates Technorati Links

While reading an article in the Washington Post this morning, at first I ignored the boxes to the right that provided additional sources. But then my eyes fell upon the familiar green Technorati logo.

Turns out, the Washington Post links to the weblogs that refer to their articles by incorporating Technorati data. Cool.

[UPDATE] Ah, and it works too. Because I wrote this entry, I showed up on the Washington Post's website. How long before we see spam blogs trying to exploit this? Ads in the Washington Post for pills etc.

Technorati WashingtonPost

Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 19, 2005 07:51 AM)

Euro OSCON and BarCamp

OSCON comes to Europe. De O'Reilly conference on Open Source software takes place in Amsterdam, this Monday 'till Thursday. Participants from around the world have been flying in in the past days.

EuroOSCON targets the specific needs of European developers, programmers, strategists, entrepreneurs, and technologists, helping them to deliver the benefits of open source technology to their companies and organizations.

More interesting to me however is the BarCamp that will take place directly after the conference. Starting Thursday after Cory Doctorows closing key note at OSCON, coders, developers, thinkers, creatives and others from different backgrounds will get together until midnight Friday, to discuss, create and present new ideas. I am planning on joining them Friday for at least part of the day at the PostCS building near Amsterdam Central Station. More info on BarCamp Amsterdam in the BarCamp wiki.

Apart from this being a very good opportunity to meet fellow blogger Roland Tanglao from Vancouver face to face again, I look forward to having conversations about how create flow between different social software tools, p2p social networking tools, and bringing together the infoscape that is the internet and the geographical landscape we move around in.

In true unconferencing fashion, organizing this event started mere weeks ago. Mediamatic donated their space, after several community members in the Netherlands scouted out possible locations. More "common" venues fell off, because they expected bookings at least 6 months in advance. Different business models.

Oh and if you're going to OSCON and/or BarCamp: informal get-together over drinks tonight at 9 p.m. in Café de Jaren in Amsterdam. (Can't make it there myself though)

(Ad experiment:)

Technorati Tags : opensource, oscon, barcamp, postcs, mediamatic, amsterdam

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Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 16, 2005 01:12 PM)

Web 2.0: Teenagers using technology

During the Web 2.0 conference last week there was a panel with teenagers, mostly 17. The transcript is here. Now we must be careful to read too much into this as these are 5 kids from the Bay Area and probably are not representative of an entire generation, but these to me are the highlights:

Q: What are your online habits?
Diamond: stays on phone, spends couple hundred dollars a month on ringtones and games

A couple of hundred a month on ringtones? Ouch!

Q: Who has an iPod?
3 of 5 have ipods .

The guy from Nokia at Reboot in Copenhagen would have continued to ask if they kept it in their trouser pockets or in their bags. To see if these were truly treated as mobile devices or not. He said Steve Jobs biggest problem is that iPods are not carried around in peoples pockets like their keys, handkerchiefs and since a couple of years a mobile phone.

And while we are discussing iPods and thus music:

Sasha: I have 10 paid songs out of 1500 on my iPod .

The most revealing comment in the transcript to me was this one:

Q: Let's say you want to buy a CD player, where would you go?
Sean: ummm, a CD player...? (laughter)

Having CDs, and records or tapes or eighttracks is when I think of it a symptom of an age where information was scarce. Thus it was interesting if not vitally important to have the actual information carrier in your posession. We went to classmates homes to listen to records that we didn't have ourselves. Now in the age of information abundance, it becomes futile to want to posess the actual carrier with data, or have the actual file stored. There would be simply to much to have. It is more important to have a (shifting) collection of pointers to stuff that might be of use or interest combined with the certainty that it will be out there when you want to access it. Are children intuitively moving away from owning information, in this case music? I think I can see something like that in my own behaviour as well. I used to buy a CD to try it out, now I only buy CDs when I already know the music from on-line listening. It's an easy way to get a physical info carrier for the car, the stereo etc. It's certainly no longer the journey of discovery that buying a vinyl album was when I was in my teens, when all you really knew of an album were the single releases and the rumors about those who had the album already.

Q: Do you use TiVo or Skype?
TiVo: "it's too much money."
Skype: Silence. [Ed: there goes eBay's investment.]

Another interesting remark, in this case on Skype. In the comments of the transcript it is pointed out however that most Skype users are outside the US anyway. Maybe something is at play here like in the nineties. At a point when it was already common to ask people to switch of their mobiles in meetings here in Europe, American participants were astonished that we all carried such devices when they still carried beepers. The uptake of different technologies in different countries and continents varies.

A last quote on IM-ing:
Q: What more do you want out of instant messenger?
Sean: "Just that: instant messenger."
Q: would you like to see video on IM?
Sean: Ummm, no, i'm trying to talk to my friends...! (applause)

I guess Keep It Simple Stupid still holds true across the generations.

And now a first attempt of including an ad in a blog posting:

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Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 14, 2005 10:43 PM)

Test driving the new Qumana

I have been using Qumana since over a year. Started using it after Jon Husband drew the concept on a napkin for me during a diner here in Enschede, in the spring of 2004.

The biggest benefits of this tool to me are/were the drop pad, allowing me to create a bread crumb trail of my feedreading and browsing, and the fact that I could directly post to all my blogs from the editor.

When the light edition of Qumana came out I kept on using the older version because of the workpad/bread crumb trail. This feature basically allows me to work on multiple postings at once, while storing the different sources and copied bits as seperate items as well. The newer version put all the items in one entry, assuming you would want to post the amalgam. Until today I used a release from early november 2004.

However now the new version supports using the categories of my blogtools, can handle technorati tagging, lets me edit older postings, and has a built in advertising feature I've decided to give it a try. Let's see if I can set up a routine that lets me work with Qumana as I was used to, using the workpad/bread crumb trail. Also I want to experiment with advertising a bit. Not that I think it will bring in shiploads of money. In the end you will decide whether the advertising will stay or not. I am especially curious about what you think about ads showing up in my RSS feeds. Let me know!

Tags : qumana, adgenta, blogvertising

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Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 14, 2005 10:20 AM)

Bye Bye Dark Matter

found via Yotophoto crane.jpg Aether 2.0 seems to be ready for the scrapheap of science. Finally. The concept of Dark Matter always seemed like a 20th century version of Newton's aether to me, and an attempt to make the story fit the observations by employing what Daniel Dennett calls a 'skyhook'. Employing skyhooks means using something fantastic or miraculous, a deus ex machina, to plug a hole in your theory. This as opposed to using 'cranes', meaning using already existing building blocks to create a new layer of insight. Not that I have any deep knowledge of dark matter, or matter for that matter, I am just naturally suspicious of this sort of miracular hypothetical things.

Via Gary L. Murphy of Teledyn I learned that the skyhook explanation that is Dark Matter (which should constitute 90% of the existing mass) may soon become superfluous. University of Victoria astrophysicists Fred Cooperstock and Steven Tieu have come up with a 'crane'-based model of a pressureless gas of gravitational participants to explain a problem that until now needed Dark Matter to explain.

The success of Newtonian mechanics in situations like our solar system can be traced to the fact that in this case the planets are basically "test particles", which do not contribute significantly to the overall field. However, in a galaxy this approximation is not a good one - all the rotating matter is also the source of the gravitational field in which everything rotates.
[astro-ph/0507619] General Relativity Resolves Galactic Rotation Without Exotic Dark Matter

Let's hope that other problems that need the Dark Matter skyhook in their explanation will find themselves fitted out with a brand new crane-based one soon.

darkmatter skyhook Dennett

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 12, 2005 07:53 PM)

BBC goes Slashdot

Ben Metcalfe reports BBC going Slashdot. After already experimenting with tagging (as Lee showed us in Copenhagen, and which you can testdrive at Headshift's BBC mock-up here) the BBC is now opening up their Have Your Say section to a Slashdot-like rating system. This is another step in the BBC's experiments with the opportunities the web gves us in building on the patterns of what we collectively contribute.

The new Have Your Say is not on-line yet, but it will look like this:

Found via Heiko Hebig

BBC Slashdot consumerasproducer ratingsystems Headshift

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 12, 2005 08:42 AM)

Skype 1.4 Release: Steps to Social Networking?

Yesterday saw the release of Skype 1.4.0.78
Apart from some bugfixes, extra language support and improving on the API (important!), Skype makes a small step to adding social networking like features to Skype with this 1.4 release.

The profile page will now show how many people are in your contact list. This can have interesting consequences, as Stuart at SkypeJournal also notes. For those of you who are publicly listed this might be something to opt out of, but I use Skype with a closed list of users, and can only be called by people in my list (though I leave the chat function open). These are people that are part of my social network, and I am happy to share my network with them. Otherwise they would not be in my list in the first place. So for those people I might want to disclose not only the number of contacts (which to me means nothing) but who those contacts are.

That to me would be a better way of sharing my network than with for instance LinkedIn. Not in terms of the information that is shared, but because of where that information resides. With LinkedIn OpenBC and all other YASN's I hand over my information to a third party. What I'd really want is a peer to peer social networking application, as it allows people to control the information at the source (themselves) and share what they like in situations they like. FOAF builds on that, but is only a machine readable format at this stage. Maybe piggybacking on existing peer to peer infrastructure such as Skype is a way to gain traction for a distributed social networking functionality?

skype yasn foaf socialnetworking

Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 11, 2005 01:09 PM)

Passion and Profession

Anjo Anjewierden comes with three postings aptly titled Passion and Profession

Passion and Profession I
Passion and Profession II
Passion and Profession III (which is a nice encore about language being a barrier or not.)

He and Lilia and Stephanie have been working on using linking data and especially words and cocnepts used in postings to try and figure out whether or not blogger communities emerge and exist. To me Passion and Profession have a strong connection, so I am not really surprised by pretty pictures like the one in this posting. It states more or less what I felt were my blogosphere-surroundings. Intriguing nonetheless, especially if you start dreaming about the applications you could build on this if communities are traceable by spidering this way! So Anjo, don't worry about sending spiders to my door to gather your data! I also certainly like the way your work has been evolving in this area since you first showed us gathered data at Blogwalk back in March 2004, and later at BlogTalk 2.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 11, 2005 11:48 AM)

Technorati Having Data Trouble?

In recent days I saw two sudden drops in the number of sites which Technorati says link to me: from 157 to 111. The number of linking sites disappearing seems roughly in-line with new links (not necessarily new linking sites) being added at the front. The total number of links has dropped slightly, not much, and certainly not as dramatically as the number of linking sites.

This morning I took some time looking into it: Technorati seems to only take into account the first 199 links of the 267 links they report. Those 199 links indeed come from 111 sites. But older stuff is unreachable, and results in the already all too familiar Sorry, we couldn't complete your search because we're experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation. So I cannot reach stuff in Technorati that is older than 866 days or 29 months at the moment.

Every time a new page with new links appears at the front, a page of 20 old links is dumped so it seems. Those are mostly links from blog rolls from when I started blogging 3 years ago and that are still in place, so they hit my stats on how many sites are linking more than they hit the total number of links.

Now the number of links is not very relevant by itself, but that to me it looks as if Technorati is loosing data at the back door sucks.

Anybody else experiencing this?

[UPDATE] David Sifry is quick in pointing out in the comments that Technorati is NOT loosing data at the back door, and are working hard on improving their service. Certainly David's respons time to my posting (90 minutes) is fast!

[UPDATE 2] The drop in sites linking to me as reported by Technorati is caused by a new way of evaluation. Instead of counting the total of all linking sites in the now almost 3 years of Technorati's existence, they now look at the figures of the past 6 months. That favors dynamics in blogs more than seniority, which figures given the nature of blogs, doesn't it?

Technorati

Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 11, 2005 09:07 AM)

Information Strategy: My Routine, Inputs

In previous posts I showed how I filter information, and which tools I use. This posting is about the actual routine I have. I will start with the inputs, and keep the processing and output parts for later postings.

RSS
Most important input is my RSS reader.
I follow a bit over 300 RSS feeds at the moment, which are separated into different groups:

general subscriptions on people's blogs, and a number of del.icio.us feeds of those same people, and subscriptions to a few mainstream media sources for headline news,
a 'keeping track' section, with feeds from blogs, fora, wiki's, and bookmark collections of communities I directly participate in, so I know what is going on in those specific groups. Also a feed with most recent Flickr uploads from my contacts is in this group,
a 'tracking tags' section, to which I add feeds for different topics (at the moment web2.0, long tail, personal knowledge management, innovation and the like) from Technorati, Flickr, and del.icio.us. This brings a general picture (also through the number of daily results) of what is happening around a specific theme,
a 'clients' section which contains RSS feeds of clients I work with, so I know what is happening, and stay in touch with their context also when we are not directly in touch all the time.
a 'local environment' section which contain feeds from people and sources that are interesting to me because they are in my geographic 'vicinity', and maybe not directly interesting regarding context. So I know what is being talked about locally. Feeds like the local chamber of commerce, anything tagged with the name of the region I live in, 'local' bloggers not in my usual area of interest, (possible) competitors. By local I mean the Netherlands in general, with my region Overijssel/Twente specifically, and Germany in general, with nearby Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphal specifically.

Each morning I load the RSS reader once, usually around 5:15 when I get up on most days. When I have time I look through all new items as one page in the train to work. This mostly takes about 30 to 45 minutes, but I may cut it short when I have less time. I do all my reading off-line.

During the browsing I drag parts that draw my interest into Qumana via the drop pad. (for later publishing, writing) and into my wiki (for filing or further processing) on a page called BlogsDailyRoundUp. Observations or sudden ideas that come to me through browsing end up in that wiki-page as well. Entries in the BlogsDailyRoundUp page usually have formats like:

put in delicious [account] [url] (account being my own, my company's delicious account or that of a community I partake in)
comment at [name]'s about [topic] [url]
follow up reading [entry] at [url] (meaning go check out the links in that posting: I read off-line remember)
file [quote] from [url]
mail [name] about [topic] [url]

Basically I am building a To Do list based on what I read in my RSS reader. The things I want to blog or write about go into Qumana, where they basically form a list "Things to Possibly Write About"

If I am short for time, or don't feel like going through all of it, I *always* look at the 'keeping track' and 'clients' section. Those are most relevant to my day to day activities. If I missed anything important from other people, I count on it to show up again in my reader later through other channels. I never worry about postings that I leave unread.

In case I have some extra time but not enough to browse everything I look through the new items from a few feeds in the 'general subscriptions'. Usually spurred on by things like "I wonder what Martin Roell has been up to" or "I bet Michael Froomkin has an opinion about what happened in the US yesterday". So selection then is based on social context and spur of the moment. Much like how I would be talking to people at a party or a reception when I can only stay for a short while. Relationships are more important than the actual information being shared.

As I wrote before when I have time to look at everything in the reader, I only look at the patterns: what is being talked about and might it have relevance to me? Postings that deal with things that I already have on my radar as relevant to things I am doing now I read entirely.

All downloaded RSS items are stored on my laptop, and accessible to my desktop search tool. This allows me to search back through time for different themes or topics.

E-mail
E-mail I read througout the day, and may result in tasks in which case they end up in the calendar or in the wiki. I hardly have any e-mail list services I use left. Less than 5. One for my old fraternity, one for a local community, and one or two for professional discussions. In those last two I do not actively participate any longer.

Other Conversations
Conversations, face to face, phone, or IM, likewise result in notes for the wiki, or tasks for the calendar or the To Do list in the wiki. I routinely log IM chats, and keep them indexed in Copernic, the desk top search tool. Notes of face to face conversations often are taken on paper, and I transfer them to the wiki as soon as possible afterwards. Either directly at the end of a meeting, or on the way back home in the train, or at the first opportunity that shows itself.

Main stream media
Main stream media have become a very marginal factor in my direct information in-take. I have cancelled both subscriptions to newspapers I held, as I have cancelled all magazine subscriptions except one (a Dutch magazine about philosophy). I may glance at a newspaper I find in the train, but nothing else. I hardly watch the news on tv, only if there is a breaking story like the July 7th bombings in London. I do check the Dutch national text services a couple of times a day, but only through the web (and I hope they will provide RSS real soon). The headlines of three news services are in my RSS subscriptions. I do encounter a lot of what MSM produces however when it is referenced in other (blog) sources I follow through RSS. This is a big change for me, as I used to be a real news junkie with several papers and magazines subscribed to, always watching news editions on the tv, and looking at the discussion and in-depth programmes. Of course I still am a news junkie, but I look to other sources now. MSM has almost completely become an indirect source for me. Meanwhile I find myself often being better informed than those following MSM. I regularly come across items I have seen days earlier on the web, being presented as news in a newspaper or on tv. Documentaries and in-depth programmes I watch as archived streams on the web, not when they are aired on tv, and much more selective than before.

This is how information comes to me on a daily basis. I will discuss processing and sharing information in other postings.

informationstrategies informationoverload

Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (3) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 10, 2005 09:27 PM)

IFCCC founded

In a recent post I talked about a business development network that I build a so-called Patchwork Portal for. Yesterday afternoon we officially established the network as a foundation called the Institute for Collaboration, Creativity and Culture. We're a diverse bunch, hailing from different countries and continents, and with an extremely wide spectrum of experience and expertise.

With the Foundation, for which we went to see a notary, late yesterday afternoon, we have created an important milestone. The IFCCC is the legal framework in which we can now start working together more intensively.

We celebrated with a bottle of champagne, which led to this picture of Champagne Management.
More impressions of the signing in Flickr, including a group picture.

ifccc

Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 5, 2005 07:08 AM)

Information strategy: tools

In my earlier posting on information strategy I discussed how I look at the way I filter information. This posting I will talk about the tools I use to filter incoming information, select, process and share it.

Let's have a look at the basic picture I drew last time.

Filtering information

Of course this picture doesn't show only the filtering. The arrows for Actions and Sharing imply that some processing and output is taking place as well.

In terms of functionality it looks more like this:

On the left hand side you see the different input channels. I read and select from that for both processing and filing. The output of the processing results in taking actions (decisions, taking stuff into client projects etc.), or in sharing through the different channels mentioned.

Let's have a look at the tools I use.

Input
For blogs I use the RSS reader Lektora
E-mail I read with Thunderbird and Gmail (private), and Outlook Exchange (business)
Podcasts come to me through iPodder and I listen to them with my iRiver H10 MP3 player.
Bookmarks I collect from Del.icio.us and Furl, through my RSS reader Lektora
Photo media come from Flickr, through RSS again.
I also routinely take photo's of workshop sheets and sticky notes, which I load into my personal wiki (on which more later)
Conversations take place via Skype and GoogleTalk, and through IM in Trillian (I use IRC, Yahoo, Icq, MSN, AIM through Trillian). The reason I use all of these applications together is to increase reach. I also use a webcam for some of these applications.
Other conversations take place face to face, or via regular (cell) phone. Of all these conversations I take notes, either in my personal wiki, or pen and paper, to be transferred to the wiki later.

Processing
What I select from all my reading, listening and talking (which as I said in my previous post I do based on pattern detection, and current relevant questions I have) gets processed, for which I use three tools I am extremely fond of:

Wikka Wiki, which runs locally on my laptop on a local webserver. The wiki is the one place I use for working out ideas, filing, keeping notes, and the like.

For writing blogpostings and other items to be published on-line I use Qumana (the original full version, not the current Qumana Light Edition which is very good in it's own right, but lacks the library and work pad function I need badly for my writing in progress. I am not an 'in the moment' blogger). Qumana has a very easy drop pad to select morsels of information, and allows me to post to any or all of the 8+ blogs I write in.

For searching outside Wikka I use the Copernic desktop search tool (which indexes the archived RSS as well).

Next to these three great tools I use Picasa and Irfanview for managing photo's.

Output
For sharing I use Movable Type and Wordpress (both on my own server, as well as elsewhere), sometimes Blogger, for blog posting. Different Wikka Wiki installations, Media Wiki, and proprietary platforms for different CoPs. Del.icio.us for sharing bookmarks, and Flickr for uploading photo's. E-mail of course (same as inputs)
Work related things end up, apart from company blog and company del.icio.us account, in a Sharepoint Portal which forms the back-office of our company.

All this next to conversations (again through the same tools as the inputs), presentations (PowerPoint) and documents (Office, OpenOffice)

Now we have seen my view on information filtering, and the tools I use, I will spend one or more coming postings on my daily routine.

In the mean time I am curious to hear more about your way of working. Differences with what I've described thusfar, similarities etc: I'd like to hear more about it.
To me understanding how we are reshaping our information strategies from what they were before blogging/social software/web2.0 is key in explaining others what they might do about what is perceived as information overload.

informationstrategies informationoverload tools web2.0

Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (2) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at October 1, 2005 06:01 PM)