Category: Technology

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Social Software Technology

Social whitelisting with OpenID…

My ex-colleague Simon Willison has recently been doing some profoundly good work out in the wilds of the Internet promoting and explaining OpenID. In fact, the best articulation I’ve seen anywhere on the Internet of the OpenID concept is his screencast which I think neatly sums up the value of the concept as well as how easy they are to use.

You’re going to need to understand OpenID before I go much further, so if it’s an area that’s new to you, this is the point where you need to either go and watch that screencast or follow carefully the simple description of the service that follows…

OpenID—fundamentally—is a solution to the problem of having a million user accounts all over the place. Instead of getting hundreds of user names all over the place you go to a site that provides OpenIDs and choose one username and password. These sites then give you a pretty simple web address which is probably easiest to think about as a profile page for you. Then when you want to sign into any other site on the Internet with an OpenID all you do is type in the address of this profile page. The site you’re on wanders over to that address, the other site asks you for your password, you tell it your password and then you’re bounced back to the original site where you are logged in and can get on with your business unfussed. Sometimes the local site will ask you if you want a different user name. That’s all there is to it.

Having the same ID across a number of sites can also make a number of other things possible. You could hook up all the stuff you do over the internet really easily, and aggregate it and get a handle on it. You wouldn’t have to share your passwords with lots of different people either. All good. From my perspective, given my long term interest in technologies of moderation and social software, Open ID also provides one super-significant thing – relatively stable, repurposable identities across the web as a whole that can develop levels of trust and build personal reputations. But more on that in a moment.

Of course with new solutions come new problems and the most obvious problem associated with OpenID is ‘phishing’, which is to say that a site could ask you for your OpenID and then pretend to be your central provider. You type in your password thinking that you’re safe, but in fact you’re giving out your details to a rogue third party, who now can use it across all of your registered sites and services. This—let us be clear—is a very real problem and one that Simon talks about again in his piece on OpenID phishing. I’ve heard some really interesting ideas around how you might do this stuff effectively, but I’m still not completely sure that I’ve heard one that I think is totally convincing. This isn’t such a problem for the phishing-resistant old dogs like the people who read my site, but could be an enormous problem for real people. In the endif such a project is to take offI suspect this problem is going to be solved by a combination of design and education. People are going to have to get their heads around web addresses a bit more. Or we’re going to have to build something into browsers that handles distributed identities a bit more effectively.

The area that I really wanted to talk about today though was social whitelisting, which Simon and I were discussing the other day and which Simon has already written about on his site. This emerged out of some conversations about a very weblogger-focused problem, ie. comment spam. I’ve written about problems that I’ve been having with trackback and comment spam before, but every single day it seems to get worse. I get dozens of comment spams every single daysometimes hundreds. And this is even though I use extremely powerful and useful MT plugins like Akismet. And the spam is profoundly upsetting and vile stuff, with people shilling for bestiality or incest pornography, or apparently just trying to break comment spam systems by weight of empty posts.

Over the last year or so, it’s stopped being a problem that I’ve been able to deal with by selectively publishing things. Now every single comment that’s posted to my site is kept back until I’ve had a chance to look at it, with the exception of the few people that I’ve marked as trustworthy. It has now very much become a problem of whitelisting for meof determining which scant number of users I can particularly say it’s okay to post. And if this is where I am now, with my long weblog history and middling okay technical abilities, I can only dread where everyone else is going to be in a couple of years time. This is unsustainable and we have to change models.

Which is where the social whitelisting concept comes in. Most whitelisting has been around approving specific individual people, but this doesn’t scale. A large proportion of the people who post to my sites are doing so for the first time and may never post again.

The solution that Simon and I came up with was really simple and sort of the opposite of Akismet. Jason Kottke deals with a hell of a lot of comments every day. So does Techcrunch and GigaOM. Every day they approve things that people have written and say that it’s okay for them to be more regular posters. So each of these people is developing their own personal whitelist of people that they trust. More importantly I trust Jason and Techcrunch and GigaOM along with Matt Biddulph and Paul Hammond and Caterina Fake and about a thousand other people online. So why shouldn’t I trust their decisions? If they think someone is worth trusting then I can trust them too. Someone that Caterina thinks is a real person that she’s prepared to let post to her site, I should also trust to post on mine. This is one of the profound benefits of OpenID – it’s more reliable than an e-mail address that people can just spoof, but it’s just as repurposeable. You can be identified by it (and evaluated and rewarded for it) all across the whole web.

So the idea is simplicity itself. We switch to a model in which individual sites publish lists of OpenIDs that they have explicitly trusted in the past. Then individually, site owners can choose to trust anyone trusted by other site owners or friends. People who are trusted by you or your friends or peers can post immediately while the rest are held back in moderation queues for you to plough through later. But with any luck the percentage of real comments held back over time would rapidly shrink as real people became trusted and fake people did not.

Another approach to this idea would be to create a central whitelisting service with which you could share your specific trusted OpenIDs and associate them with your weblogs. Through a central interface you could decide to either accept a generic trusted set of whitelists from the top 100 weblogs on the planet to get you going, or add in the specific weblogs of friends, family and colleagues that you know share the same interests or readers. And of course individual weblogs can be rated subsequently for whether they let through people who subsequently turn out to be troublemakers, or rewarded for the number of real people that they mark as trustworthy. I want to make this particularly clear – I’m not talking about one great big web of trust which can be polluted by someone hacking one whitelist somewhere on the internet. I’m not talking about there being one canonical whitelist anywhere either. I’m definitely and specifically talking about you deciding which site owners (or groups of site owners) that you trust and that being the backbone to your personal service. People that your peers trust may be different to the people that my peers trust. And so it should be.

There’s even a business model here. I’d pay (a small amount) for any service that allowed me to have vibrant and enthusiastic conversations on my weblog without having to manually approve every single message. I’m sure other people would too. And of course, much like OpenID itself, there’s no reason that there should only be one such whitelist provider online. There could be a whole ecology here.

So what do people think? Does this have legs? Is it a sufficiently interesting idea to play with further? Where is the OpenID community on this stuff at the moment? Could social whitelisting of OpenIDs be the thing that rescues distributed conversation from death by spam? There’s a discussion over on Simon’s original post on the subject, or feel free to post below (but be warned that it may take me a while to approve your messages…)

Categories
Humour Technology

When iPods take over the Earth…

This is a bit of a frivolous post, but what the hell. It’s better than nothing. Highly entertaining images from the latest episode of the Simpsons. Firstly Ralph being a unitard:

But my particular favourites, which I’m sure I’ll have to find a way to work into some presentation on design practice at some point in the future, concerns MP3 players. As the man in the future says, “If only we’d known that iPods would unite and overthrow the very humans they entertained…”

Made me laugh, anyway…

Categories
Design Mobile Science Technology

On Wattson and Electrisave…

Thanks to a fascinating conversation on haddock the other day, I’m now completely obsessed with a brand new class of personal lifestyle gizmos – a class that is very much in sync with the emergent energy puritanism that I find myself unexpectedly interested in after An Inconvenient Truth. The class of objects is ‘things that help you develop an understanding of your personal energy consumption’, and thus give you a handle by which to control it.

My boss at UpMyStreet had a line he used recurrently about statistics”Everything measured goes up”. Specifically, he meant that the act of measuring itself creates an impetus for change and competitiona pressure to move a figure towards whichever extreme is (sometimes arbitrarily given the absence of context) defined as ‘better’. It’s a comment on the nature of observation, feedback loops and the selection of the criteria by which you measure success.

The energy-tracking gadgets that have come to fascinate me hope that by exposing these figures, a pressure will manifest that drives energy consumption downwards, and that these actions will justify the expense to the earth spent in making and powering the trackers themselves.

This beautiful object is the Wattson available from diykyoto.com. It’s a handmade object that costs a significantly alarming 350 of your Earth Pounds. You attach a sensor near to your elecricity meter and can then place the object itself pretty much anywhere in the home where it will communicate with the sensor wirelessly. It will then display in real time both an ambient and a digital numerical display of the amount of electricity being used in your house, so you can see the benefits of turning off a light or microwaving a meal or having a shower. It can alsoapparentlyconnect to the internet via your computer and broadcast data about your energy consumption to online social environments. But more about that stuff in a minute.

Of course you don’t have to go quite this extravagent to get this kind of functionality. The wooden sides and iPod-like white of the display are clearly designed to fit into some hybrid modernist but environmentalist minimal aestheticand I suspect that it’s really the visual or artistic appeal of the object that really floats my boatbut you can get cheaper and less ridiculous devices that do similar jobs.

The Electrisave Meter is a very different-looking beast – it’s all grey plastic and LCD displays and cables. But then again it’s also the rather more manageable ¬£80. But somehow it doesn’t appeal to me in the same way.

There are two particular things that occur to me about these devices and my own (and potentially other people’s) reactions to them. The first is back to the nature of scoring and measuring. I went to see a rather introductory talk by Judith Donath when I was last in the US around signalling theory and she talked a bit about what signalling actually referred to in particular cases. She talked about the man who buys a fast and flashy car, who probably thinks that he’s communicating in some ways that he is virile and manly and exciting, where in fact in pure signalling terms he’s communicating no more and no less than that he can afford to buy a fast car. Still, being able to buy a fast car actually may be a good thing to advertise. She also talked a bit about the controversial Handicap principle which talked about why there might be advantage in reproductive terms to develop completely impractical or ridiculously showy traitslike the tails on peacocks. The proposal of this particular controversial theory was that the generation of these costly attributes might actually be designed to indicate genetic health and vigour, since only particularly strong and healthy candidates could afford to be so wasteful.

Anyway the thing that leapt to my mind when thinking about this stuff was that anything that’s scored can have at least two positive states. Behaviour that is good is often rewarded, but the inability of all people to be the best on these grounds creates a space where bad behaviour can be viewed as revolutionary or cool or subversive. Lowering energy consumption might be viewed in positive ways by many people, but giving people an easy way to display their own patterns may just as easily lead people into showy conspicuous consumption and indications that they can afford to be wasteful. Metrics are always troubling, conflicting and often uniquely vulnerable to any forms of interpretative activity.

The other thing that occurred to me was that I’m noticing an increasing instinct in my own life towards trying to capture and track as much information about what I’m doing or what I have done as possible – and to be able to get it out somewhere on the internet where I might be able to do things with it. From my playcounts in iTunes and my last.fm profile through to my web stats and geotagged Flickr photos all the way to my sudden almost overwhelming fascination with tracking/displaying my energy consumptions and getting programmatic access to my Oyster card data, over and over again I’m finding myself interested in capturing and making sense of the activities of my life in an ambient and backgrounded way. I want to know what I’ve watched on television, how many days of sunshine I’ve experienced this year and how well my mood as correlated with them, how much I’m sleeping, how much I’ve drank, how much bandwidth I use up in a week and how loud my neighbourhood is compared to the average.

Or more specifically I don’t want to know this stuff, I want to be able to capture it invisibly so that it can be knitted together and sense made of it and data made discoverable and searchable at some point in the future, when the urge or need takes me. This is going to be one of the great benefits of ambient/pervasive computing or everyware – not the tracking of objects but the tracking and collating of you yourself through objects. The citizen of the future will have some of their personal fuzziness removed as the sharp data edges of their lives are captured and tracked for personal use. And I’m not sure what I think about it. Except that it’s fascinating.

Do you know about any more products like this? Things that display in interesting ways the energy consumption or patterns of consumption around your home? What do you think of these ones in particular? Should I get one?

Categories
Technology

The unusual flakiness of the MacBook Pro…

I have had four MacBook Pros and even more power supplies for MacBook Pros since the top-of-the-range Apple laptops launched in March. I love the machines, but hot damn has my experience of them been unusual. Let’s start with the pins inside the MagSafe plug deciding not to extrude:

The only solution here was getting the damn thing replaced. I wouldn’t have minded had not the same thing happened to Matt Biddulph less than a week later.

Then the machine started to act really weirdly. It would get extraordinarily hot, had a weird and unresponsive trackpad that drove me insane and a mouse button that had a strange grinding touch to it and the whole thing sounded like a vacuum cleaner when it was running. There was clearly something wrong with it, but they couldn’t fix it without taking it away and I couldn’t be without a machine for a couple of weeks while they fixed it, so I bought myself another one so I could get the first one repaired and then sell it on ebay. Two days after I bought the new one, the battery on the old one just stopped charging completely.

The new one had an exciting feature wherein every so often it would decide that although it was not in num lock mode, keys on the right hand side of the keyboard should only produce numbers no matter what I asked of the machine. Ones on the left continued to produce letters. I took that one back within a week, and got my current MacBook Pro, which I love.

And then today I noticed that the weird MacBook Pro that had been causing me all the trouble with the trackpad and where the battery had completely stopped charging had miraculously gone even more peculiar. I’d not got around to taking it in to be repaired because I’d been travelling so much, but I think spontaneously changing shape counts as a significant flaw:

I’d take it back today, except I tried to book a session at the genius bar at 1am this morning and apparently they’d already run out of appointments for the day. It’s pretty extraordinary to me that I’m still using Apple products after the last six months. All I can say is that when they work, they work very well and make me genuinely happy. It’s just a shame that recently they’ve not been quite as reliable as my previous experiences would have led me to expect…

Categories
Social Software Talks Technology

Slides from my Future of Web Apps (SF06) talk…

Last week I talked at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco as detailed in my euphoric debrief on Saturday. It was not a talk that I looked forward to enormously, but I have to say that the response has been really positive with a decent number of people asking me to post up the slides. So that’s what I’m here to do – providing one (large/75Mb) PDF version: Greater than the sum of its parts and the other a Keynote-produced (and partly self-optimised) small web version.

The talk is about how to generate systems and models wherein large groups of people can publically create something together that’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s about Wikipedia, Flickr, motives for social engagement, how to derive value from innumerable small contributions and what challenges this form of creation may be causing in a world of proprietary data. All fun stuff. Hopefully.

Much as with my last Future of Web Apps talk there’s an extent to which the slides will only make sense if viewed alongside some coherent notes of the talk around them. There are luckily some of those available online. I want to make sure to thank Matt Webb, Simon Willison and Matt Biddulph again (in addition to everyone else who helped me get it together) before I post up the thing in question. Mr Webb in particular deserves a mention since there’s a great chunk of thinking in this piece that – while I’m not sure he’d agree with all of it – was definitely the result of conversations that we had together at the BBC.

Like last time, I will promise right now to properly write up the talk in question, but – again like last time – it’s quite likely to be a while before I can get my act together!

Categories
Film Politics Technology

An Inconvenient Truth…

My politics are pretty well known to people who read this site, I suspect – I’m basically economically centrist, believing in the the necessary efficiencies of a free market curbed from excesses and derailment by regulation at the extremes. I hold a simultaneous belief that vulnerable individuals should be protected from the occasionally inhuman logic of this system through social security and healthcare. I would also argue that this latter support actually helps the functioning of the larger economy by reducing the causes of crime, and maintaining a healthy and educated workforce.

Alongside my economic centrism, I’m basically socially libertarian – quite possibly as a result of being gay and necessarily slightly on the fringes of mainstream acceptability, particularly in some of the more religious parts of the world. I’m a confirmed atheist of long-standing, a rationalist humanist that sees religion as a blot of superstition upon the world, something that confuses and muddies and disguises truths much more than it reveals them. And having spent time working and thinking about ancient cultures and from there moving into the technology industries, I’ve probably gradually moved towards a technologically determinist position on the world – that while changes in technology and changes in politics and belief influence and effect one another, changes in technology are leading that particular dance. If you’re really interested, you can see my positioning on the political compass (and if you want to generate your own, you can do so here).

I say all this to contextualise what I’m to say next – that there is, however, one thing I’ve never really had that much strength of feeling about and that is green politics. It’s probably a clich√©, but at some level I suppose I’ve never really been significantly convinced that the impact that humankind had on the planet was as dramatic as had been claimed. In addition, I’d never really been convinced that any individual could make any kind of realistic difference to the changes that were happening.

It seemed to me that significant change was only likely to happen at the level of hundreds of years and that many of the environmental movement’s particular missions were sort of indulgently anthropocentic. I mean, I care that species go extinct every day. It does matter to me. It’s a terrible thing that humankind has done to that part of the world, but people fight tooth and nail to protect the Panda because they think they’re cute and adorable, because they want to be able to fool themselves that somehow if a few tiny leaves of a once-massive tree remain trapped in some kind of evolutionary terrarium that they’ve somehow saved the world. It’s nature as spectacle, nature as theme-park, where the guilt and prurient interest of humankind has to be assuaged by futile token acts. That’s never appealed to me, because it seems self-deceiving. To an extent I still feel this way.

But on the plane over from the UK on Monday I watched An Inconvenient Truth and I have to confess, it actually feels to me like it’s had a significant personal impact and that it’s genuinely changed my opinions on a whole range of things.

It’s extraordinarily rare for me now to find myself genuinely persuaded by a documentary but Al Gore’s personal walk through the statistics and effects of global warming was convincing, clear and the obvious product of a serious and intelligent man who had read and thought widely on the subject. I found it genuinely interesting, moving and significant – and only slightly polluted by the interweaving of some of the maudlin personal political history of a man who emerges more effectively in action than in narrative and is revealed as a charismatic, intelligent, rational and passionate individual.

I genuinely believe that if you have access to a cinema (I believe it’s just come out in the UK) that you should go and see this film and – if nothing else – let it be a corrective to the other media that we’ve all consumed around this issue. Don’t let it convince you out of hand, but let it stimulate your desire to find out more and to interrogate your own prejudices about the green movement. And in the meantime, as half of America slowly starts to wake up to the realisation that they’ve had the wrong head of state for the last six years, I find myself – like many others in the technology community and beyond – wondering what the world might have looked like now had Al Gore won in the year 2000.

Categories
Conference Notes Design Technology

Maps, Invaders, Robots & Throwies… (FOO 06)

So I thought I’d end my series of posts on FOO (which some of you may have determined was originally one grotesquely long post of approaching 5,000 words, roughly chunked to last as long as possible sometime last weekend) by talking about some of the more frivolous things that happened. You need an example? The football-playing robots were pretty extraordinary:

You can see the original by dewitt over on Flickr or – if you’re feeling particularly cheerful and playful, you can watch a tiny bit of crappy phonecam footage of Stewart Butterfield having a play with one of them. There was apparently a large football game between two teams of these monsters. I missed that, but got have a private fiddle which in the end is all that matters.

What else was awesome? There was a great set of films displayed by the Graffiti Research Lab displaying some of their work on Throwies and magnetic / projected graffiti. You can see a whole bunch of videos of their projects on their site – but can I recommend Jesus 2.0, Night Writer and LED Throwies 2.0 if you haven’t seen them already. I think my favourite bit of that particular part of the evening was when Simon started muttering to himself that they were all a bunch of noisy vandals. That particular film also introduced me to new favourite track Bustin’ Loose by Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers. Which rocks.

Oh and then there was the Applied Mindsish rotating map table of wonder and the laser-etching machine which made a lot of people very happy / nerdy. I only wish that I’d figured out that this was going on earlier in the day when I still had time to get something personal carefully-etched with a space invader.

Speaking of space invaders, the most fun out-of-camp project was organised by Chris DiBona and heavily featured space invaders of various kinds. He’d managed to get a plane from Google to fly overhead to take photos to put onto Google Maps and Google Earth. Chris and the lovely Jane McGonigal organised one particular pretty substantial project to take advantage of this opportunity – to build a representation of a crashed Cylon Raider out of bin-liners in the grounds of the O’Reilly offices.

There’s was clearly the most technically proficient of the projects, but I think ours has a chance of being as entertaining. Cal, Simon, Paul, Heathcote, Suw Charman, Biddulph and I – with help from variously lovely people including (again) Jane, decided to assemble two massive space invaders out of large sheets of white cardboard that I’d bought on the way to FOO in the morning for the princely sum of $100. Everything was going really well until about fifteen minutes before the plane flew over when the wind blew everything away (we’d not thought about how to moor the paper down), but we ran around frantically and piled them up with apples and with any luck you’ll be able to see our stunning works of pixel art on your second-favourite maps site sometime in the next month or so. Here are some pictures to whet your appetite:

All photos from Julian Bleecker’s FOO Camp set.

Anyway, that’s my FOO experience all done and dusted. Thanks for being so patient. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. As of Monday afternoon I’ll be in San Francisco, more than likely crapping myself with fear about the prospect of speaking in front of a thousand people. I’m around for about a week after the conference as well if you’d like to meet up. Otherwise, speak soon – after all, I haven’t said the slightest thing about Dirty Semantics yet – the talk that I gave at FOO and which I think will be occupying the dark moist spaces in the back of my brain for the next six months or so.

Categories
Conference Notes Net Culture Personal Publishing Technology

Terahertz waves vs. Alexaholics… (FOO '06)

Wrapping up my coverage of FOO sessions, I just thought I should probably mention the two last I attended, even though I don’t have so much to directly say about them. I’ve got one more post to come though, so don’t get your hopes up. No one gets out of here without hearing about the Space Invaders.

One session that I found astonishingly awesome, but honestly don’t know if I really understood 1/100th of, was on Terahertz waves and imaging and was presented by a guy who used to grow diamonds for NASA. He has since moved on to trying to build a small super-hi-tech terahertz whatsit that he plans to use for everything from building a tricoder to heating up collagen beneath the skin and smoothing wrinkles. His talk was … hard … for a non-scientist, and it probably says something about it that the things my brain caught upon were the beautiful silver wavers with tiny grooves upon them that clearly fulfil some purpose that I was unable to focus upon. It was a talk useful for putting the rest of the talks in perspective I suppose – and maybe reminding you of your limited place in the world – if nothing else. Humbling.

The final talk I went to of the weekend was presented by Ron Hornbaker of Alexaholic. Alexaholic is a service that uses data from Alexa’s traffic rankings and provides ways of interpreting it. It was an unusually well-attended session, with Stewart Butterfield from Flickr and Joshua Schachter from Del.icio.us both in attendenace. According to Ron, Tim O’Reilly is also an enormous fan of Alexaholic and uses it to observe trends in the market. Stewart and Joshua are clearly both well versed in tracking what’s going on in the market through Alexa as well – all commenting on a recent upsurge in Web 2.0 properties that was apparently more of a consequence of the removal of spammers than an unusual upspike in their respective traffics (which continue to grow quite solidly). They particularly commented upon Seth Godin’s List of Web 2.0 properties and their respective rankings. Tim O’Reilly apparently arguing that the removal of sites like Google from the list missed out on the ‘harnessing collective intelligence’ aspect of the emerging ecosystem. It was a pretty interesting session, and the product will – I think – get more interesting still when you’re able to assemble your own list of sites to track regularly which was mentioned as the next stage in functionality for the site.

Right then. That’s the sessions all done. You’ve got one more post to endure about FOO, and it’s a fun one – it’s about all the extraneous activities and projects and installations around the place that I experienced, and I’ll be putting it up tomorrow. Thanks for bearing with me through this long series of posts. Next week – San Francisco and the Future of Web Apps. But for now, sayonara!

Categories
Conference Notes Health Technology

Brain stimulation for the masses… (FOO '06)

There was one speaker at FOO this year that would literally have blown my brain away if he’d happened to have had his equipment with him. Ed Boyden talked about transcranial magnetic stimulation – basically how to use focused magnetic fields to stimulate sections of the brain and hence change behaviour. He talked about how you could use this kind of stimulation to improve mood and fight depression, to induce visual phenomena or reduce schizophrenic symptoms, hallucinations and dreams, speed up language processing, improve attention, break habits and improve creativity. Frankly, the whole territory sounded extraordinary. Some examples – a depression study found that stimulating parts of the brain for half an hour once a week massively lifted mood and that the effects lasted for around six weeks after the treatment had stopped. Another study found that by stimulating deep reward centres associated with addiction you could ween someone off smoking.

The whole session was sort of terrifyingly awesome and itself rather brain-melting. Apparently complications from this kind of treatment have been reduced to nearly zero after some safety rules were proposed in 1998. There have been over three and a half thousand papers written around the subject in clinical settings as well. It’s pretty much mainstream science. The only reasons – apparently – that it’s not more widespread is because of (1) the disjunction between neurologists and psychiatrists and (2) the cost and size of the units themselves.

So Ed Boyden’s proposal (along with some colleagues) is to create an open source community that could develop and apply safe brain stimulator technology. They’re currently using Sourceforge, following in the tracks of the Open EEG project. Apparently to construct a brain stimulator is surprisingly easy – you only need a reinforced coil, a high-capacity capacitor, a power supply, control circuitry for discharging the capacitors, hardware for holding and positioning the coil on the head, safety circuitry, optional measurement devices and some form of software and hardware combination to act as an interface. Absolutely fascinating. I shall expect to see pictures of Schulze and Webb experimenting with one shortly.

He ended by telling the story of one prominent thinker in this field who developed a wand that she could touch against a part of your head and stop you being able to talk. Apparently she used to roam around the laboratories doing this to people. She also apparently had her head shaved and tattooed with all the various areas of the brain and what direct stimulation to them (with a wand) could do to her. She has, apparently, since grown her hair. I’d love to meet her.

Categories
Conference Notes Technology

On a global AIBO consciousness… (FOO '06)

My third FOO post in a row, and I’m only just getting onto the talks themselves. This time I learned from my experience last year and made sure that I tried to steer myself towards talks that were outside my natural territories. I think I only really screwed up twice – once by going to a session on the democratisation of media hosted by the guys from Digg, Kevin Kelly and Dan Gillmor and once by going to Steven Levy‘s session on the future of the music industry. Steven’s always good value and it was great to see Dan again (however briefly), but realistically I knew these territories too well and wasn’t likely to get my mind very satisfactorily blown. It’s possible of course that my presence was useful for other people, but to be honest I kind of doubt it. Two things however do stick in my head – firstly when I told Kevin Kelly that most magazines were just regurgitated press releases (having completely erased from my head for a moment that he was the founding editor of Wired). Not the right context to go about making massive generalisations, really. The other thing that really made an impact was how nice the guys from Digg are. Simon, Paul and I did some exploring around Digg a while back for work and my impression of the site completely changed from it being a trivially easy proposition to a highly polished and carefully crafted piece of work – both things that seemed to be reflected in the people who had worked on it. Smart, decent, honourable people. Very interesting.

Anyway, the talk that I really wanted to start with was one by an old colleague – Matt Biddulph. He was talking about some of the things he’s been doing (during his year of slacking off) that hybridise Second Life with the rest of the web-based internet. I’d seen his Flickr screen in-game, but the thinking he’s been doing around it was really fascinating to me. In particular he’s been thinking about Second Life as a useful prototyping environment for ubicomp stuff of the Adam Greenfield Everyware variety and his thinking pushed me off in all kinds of interesting directions. A few of the key concepts he described that stirred me up:

  • The Invisible Tail – being the sheer number of real-world objects or products that are currently not represented in data at all (with the result that you can’t yet leverage any of the long-tail benefits supplied by the Interweb). Lots of Age of Point at Things stuff in there, but more interestingly framed;
  • The relationship between the above and concepts like thinglinks.org, which allow individuals to give individual items identifiers that will make them annotatable over time;
  • Ubicomp Middleware – specifically, “what’s the outboard brain for an object in second life” and what could you do with it – lovely concepts there;
  • Each AIBO becoming not an individual object but an endpoint for a global AIBO consciousness – and if that didn’t get you salivating then you’re dead inside;

Lots of things occurred to me during the talk, including the possibilities of using in-game architectures as structures to layer visualisations of extra-game information. So for example, could you have a huge structure that was designed to reflect the spacial territories in the Google NewsMap? That is to say, could each room in the structure represent a story and could its size be influenced by the current significance of the news story in which people could discuss the story in question. Could you basically create a virtual building that actively guided the discussions within it – literal forums for short-term topics of interest that grew or shrank depending on various metrics.

Another thing I started wondering about was to what extent you could use collaborative filtering mechanisms (or mechanisms like the old BBC Homepage patina) to alter objects in-game in real-time to reflect the usage patterns of the people who used them – and what implications this could have to automatically reconfiguring objects in the real-world. When I mentioned this to Matt he said it was like your Powerbook automatically getting smaller when you got onto a plane because it had discovered that people who used the smaller ones tended to bring them out more often on planes. I started wondering about evolutionary algorithms and slowly evolving functionality spreading virally across mobile phones. I don’t really have a sense about whether this is all one great conceptual dead-end but something tells me that objects that can learn from how all other objects like them are being used is an idea that will have a time.

Anyway, that’s enough to be getting on with. More later.