Whispersync and Kindle

Short but but sweet post this one, a while ago I bought a Kindle for my wife, she loves reading and loves books and always said she wasn't interested in Ebook readers. Well she grudgingly decided to try her new present and now a few months later there is no going back. The Kindle2 was a big big hit.

I don't have a Kindle of my own but have played with one a bit (when I am allowed ;)) and it is an excellent device in my opinion. Something else has impressed me even more though and that is the Whispersync technology. Our Kindle is attached to our Amazon account and I bought a few books for myself and installed the kindle application on my Ipod touch and Android Phone.
I haven't worked out exactly what the syncing does, I don't need to it just works. Very occasionally I pop-up just confirms that I want to jump to the last place I was in a book on another device but that is usually reference books where I am jumping around a lot. Basically it just works, nice one Amazon.

I am not suggesting that reading a book on a phone or Ipod is as good as reading it on the Kindle but it is very nice to be able to pick up reading where you left off if you miss or bus or for some other reason you suddenly have some unexpected free time on your hands and not many options.

Be interesting to see whether Apples new cloud thing works as smoothly, even if it does though Amazon where there first in my humble opinion.

Fractured Identities

I am back again, I think this blog is going to be updated much more frequently, I have a building pressure of thoughts to offload in this private (mostly) space. I re-read some of the material I posted a long time again and it is a very useful review process, so time to start dumping more half-baked thoughts and seeing what happens in my head.

Something that has bothered me for a long time and something I am going to think about in more detail for a while is on-line presence of the individual. A couple of weeks ago I went back to the place where I went to school and met up again with some guys I originally knew from over two decades ago. We meet up approximately once a year or so and have one or two shared interests in common even though we have all lead very different lives. Careers, interests, lifestyles, philosophy, outlook, are all very different. Every time we meet up we have a great time, but between times we communicate very little and know very little about each other. I am sure that the person we present to each other is relevant to the situation and that this is in part what makes it such a pleasure to meet again. We have little connection on-line (apart from the occasional email to make arrangements). The people we are when we meet are in many ways shaped by and relevant to the situation and the history we share.

I have multiple twitter accounts including twitter like accounts in Chinese etc. I struggle with Facebook, the concept that there is a single me that can be represented, distilled and relevant to all the real people I know. How can the various circles in which I move, the various persona's and interests, the professional links converge on one spot in a meaningful way? If I am interested in someone on a language learning basis, I want to read a blog or follow a twitter feed that is mostly relevant to this aspect, not filter through the chuff that is the rest of their lives or get asked if I want to connect with friends of theirs that they go diving with. Perhaps I will meet them and connect more fully (and then be interested in more aspect) but perhaps they will lose interest (even if only online) in languages and the feed will dry up (effectively vanishing from my radar).

I don't want to connect with my teenage sons on Facebook, I should be connecting with them in real life, I am pretty sure that connecting with them on Facebook would dilute the experience on both sides.

Ex-coworkers have largely nothing to do with people I meet to learn foreign languages, my messages to them, links for them, information I share with them (hey I might want to work with them again some time) should not mix. In fact it would seem that in a lot of cases the only reason to mix is to say to one group "hey look how well rounded I am" by exposing them to the edited highlights of the rest of my life. Regardless of tagging etc. I don't have many good ways to separate the life-streams without spending too much time organising (organising something that works better if spontaneous) or expecting people following me to somehow organise theirs. So we are polluting each others lives with spam. No better than inviting someone around in the 1970's to watch the 4 hour sideshow of your holiday (unless there is special interest after the first 10 mins they don't really care).

If I follow the public, social feed of some guy who is known for developing a cool programming platform, anything not related to that platform is spam to me, time wasting spam, we are not related, we are not friends, I don't have a reason to be interested.

Maybe this seems a little harsh, maybe a little extreme, and there are some focused feeds out there, and people who are not afraid to set-up multiple focused on-line presences. Perhaps I could be accused of not being interested in people? Nothing is further from the truth, I enjoy finding out about people, I just find that face to face, with all the feedback mechanisms we have evolved to gauge interest the experience is order of magnitude better.

Facebook of course is a harder place to fracture, or even linkedin (which is admittedly more focused on fabricating an image for yourself that may make you more employable). Maybe I am over reacting, a lot of the information requires some action to pull it out, but it seems to me that there is still too much I have to actively ignore or too many distractions.

Why Blog?

Introduction

I have been writing posts on various blogs since 2006, most of the more popular ones were related to language learning. Blogging sucks up quite a lot of time and in many cases I am talking to noone in particular. This does beg the question why blog? There isn't a single answer to that question there are many reasons for blogging. I have consistently blogged over a number of subjects and accounts for many years now, there are a variety of reasons for each one and some fall by the wayside (some get picked up again) but why do I do it?

Not for profit

I don't blog for profit (yet, maybe one day). Quite some time ago I experimented with Google ads and found that with little effort I could make maybe £20 per month. I work in internet technologies sometimes helping drive traffic to sites. With some effort there was potential there I guess and a bit more thought should come up with better ways to make money off of the back of blog posts. Just thinking about these things changed the nature of what I posted, made me start thinking about sensational blog titles that may drive traffic, reciprocal links with other sites (just for the sake of links). Two things made me remove the ads, one was that I didn't want to write just to drive traffic, the other simply that making significant amounts of money would be hard work doing things that I didn't want to do in my spare time. I also have a problem in that I am not driven by money, I am rubbish at making money, once I have enough to get by (+ for anybody dependent on me, I find it hard to care too much about money) these days that is considered a character flaw.

Not for the sake of literature

I have said it before and I will doubtless write it again, most of my blog-posts in any area are wrote fast, spare time is precious, I speed-type, I think something and at some point I may write it. Spelling and grammar, checking, I leave for other areas where I have to apply fingers to keyboard. I understand the motivation for more literary blogs but that is not what I am about so far. Each post is a reference to a thought to come back to, somewhere I have a little traffic is an invite to discuss and learn from other opinions.

On occaision I will go back to recent posts and edit them, especially if I think that there is the remote possibility that someone else may read one

Not for the sake of fame

Whilst there is often an element of "look at me" in many things that people do publicly that is not a strong driver for me. I wrote many posts on this blog even after finding out that virtually nobody but me ever reads them. There are useful to me though, putting the thoughts down sometimes crystallizes them. Some rough posts become the basis of more formal writing for work etc.

For conversation

Sometimes (with my language learning blogs for example) I just want to attract a few comments, start a small conversation. Generally in more crowded spaces like technology I don't have the talent, dedication or time to attract a significant audience.

For reflection

Writing things down helps the thought process, making them public acts as a bit of a focus. Sometimes stating something in public provides enough of an impetus to actually do it.

For career

In places it may just help a little for employment, increasingly some kind of online presence is expected.

Summary

So I guess that there is some reflection, some "look at me" and sometimes need for conversation. Up until now that is why I blog.

Against the Spam Argument

I have been thinking about Intranets and Web2.0 a lot over the last few months. One thing that really bugs me is that I can do some much learning, networking and collaborating over the Internet, the benefits are so apparent and so obvious, why can I not do the same at work? I will soon be moving to small company where these problems are not likely to apply, but how is it that so many medium to large companies completely resist new ways to use technology amongst their employees? The larger the company, the more likely there is to be someone who can help me, unfortunately without the right technology the less like I will be able to find them.

I will be posting a series of thoughts tagged with "why_not_at_work" for a while to vent my frustration and suggest ways in which social technologies could help.

One common argument against things like micro blogging/social networking etc. at work is that when managers (of the traditional Corporate nature) are introduced to it they quickly come to the conclusion that it is largely spam and irrelevance, not serious enough for real work etc. this is usually after only gaining a trivial understanding of what is going on.

Of course this is the case but this does not invalidate the new method of communication because maybe every communication medium has been the same, it is the nature of communication between people. Who would argue against the importance of snail mail in its time, yet consider the junk mail problem, consider the huge resource spent to deliver greeting cards with pointless messages, holiday postcards that don't really say anything etc. Spoken language itself is largely phatic communication that doesn't really mean anything of significance. Telephone lines are saturated with meaningless twaddle ......

Don't blame the communication medium for human nature that makes us blather away, we need that, it maintains and creates connections, we will still need it right up to the point that we can make direct data connections between the lumps of jelly that sit in our skulls. Think instead that a traditional letter that had worth would have to be sent to a newspaper (or other medium) deliberately and published to be made available to to a wide audience, yet a single tweet can be plucked from the maelstrom and instantly made available on a Newspaper website. A single undirected micro-blog post about a piece of software can elicit an immediate response from the author of the software. a carefully selected RSS search in my feed reader can alert me when two people I don't know comment on something I said in a presentation months ago. How easy would it be for me stop listening to a source of traditional snail mail? It is the searching, categorization, scalability, and personal control that give the Web2.0 technologies their power.

If all you see is spam and a trivial waste of time then maybe you just don't know how to look yet.

Gaming and the Web

Been very busy recently but finally getting around to re-thinking about dconstruct 2008, yes that is some lag but I fully expect to have completed writing up my thoughts by September of 2009 ;). Actually lots of people complain about information over-load etc. etc. my favorite way of coping with that is simply to put aside quite long periods of time for just reviewing and going over things I have squirreled away. Making connections between old and new is also hugely useful.

The first talk at dconstruct2008 that came to mind is actually the second, it was presented by Aleks Krotoski, at the time it was probably the talk that made the least impact on me although looking back I find it much more interesting. Reviewing material from Dconstruct is easy now since eventually both podcasts and transcripts have appeared for all the presentations.  

The main gist of the presentation was that web developers and game developers do not mix although they have a lot to learn from each other, maybe the web has borrowed some ideas from the games industry but the flow of information in the other direction has not been so great. The thing that sparked my mind into reviewing this presentation was simply watching my children playing (and starting to play myself) Little Big Planet for the PS3. I was struck by the community aspects of the game and by the very web like use (and very useful implementation imho) of tagging and commenting  for content developed by other players.Once I found out that there was a huge amount of community content out there I immediately got my sons to show me how you could search (and re-find) that from within the game interface, as soon as I saw the tagging it made perfect sense that it should be there.


Actually I find it hard to pull out juicy points from the presentation although there was much I agree with and that sparked more thinging, Joshua March gives a good summary and Aleks wrote about it herself. A minor highlight for me after the fact is simply that Little Big Planet made me think of the talk and that when I got around to reading the transcript Little Big planet was raised in the brief question and answer session, it is certainly a game that was worth mentioning in this context so well done to man1. 

Watching the development of games and community aspects on a games console via the PS3 is certainly an elightening and highly useful experiance.  

Why I wouldn't like to design an Asian Website

Actually I wouldn't like to design any kind of website, that is not where my strengths lie. I would be particularly careful of making any design decisions on a website that was aimed at a culture I didn't fully appreciate though.

Taking Chinese as an example, a number of times I have directed Chinese users to an Internet site I like and then been surprised when they are completely underwhelmed by it. One reason has been that they feel there is not enough content. This screen shot above is from web-page of the Chinese television station CCTV, it is typical of many I have seen and to my eyes appears very text dense with lots and lots (too many links). It wasn't until a Chinese web friend told me that many Chinese Internet users had yet to get used to using search functionality that the penny dropped, navigating through and discovering new content via links felt most natural to them.

Also consider that a Chinese designer can typically choose a lot of two character words for links (or three / four character words/phrases) this makes it an awful lot easier to layout blocks of links that can be scanned much better than if they were written in English.

I am not advocating the CCTV site as a good example of any kind of web design, simply attempting to highlight the kind of issues that may need to be taken into account when looking at websites from different cultures. It has to be said that in my experience many Asian websites do a better job of catering for Western users (with language options and search support) than their Western counterparts.

Naturally nothing is that clear, many young Chinese will be familiar and used to Western style websites, many of them have gone through the language/culture mind-hack.

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Is Learning Chinese a Mind-Hack?

Mind Hack image from psd.

It has been said that learning a language is a type of mind hack, it is good for the brain and gives you a different perspective on many things. Written Chinese however has a peculiar feature compared to English and that is simply that it takes rather less characters to write something. Many Chinese words are just one or two characters and there is no space between words. Some of the space gain is lost because each Chinese character takes the same space and English fonts can take advantage of proportional spacing but on the whole a block of Chinese text takes up less space. On Twitter and other micro-blogging sites you are typically given 140 characters, a fairly short message in English but a Chinese writer can potentially pack in a lot more information. As a couple of examples (美女) and (帅哥) map to (beautiful women) and (handsome guy). I also believe from my own early experience and observation that the Chinese reader can read noticeably faster than English readers (could be useful if you have a lot of information to scan).

Sometimes it is unfortunate that so much emphasis is given to ease of use and quick learning/understanding, often the thing that is initially easiest to learn, understand and use falls short in the long run when compared to something that initially takes more effort. Douglas Engelbert is credited with developing the computer mouse which was widely adopted, he also developed a special one hand keypad that in conjunction with the mouse was proven to significantly improve typing speed. This keypad was not adopted though simply because the learning curve was considered too high (taking into account all the typing I do though it makes me wonder).

I feel that an often overlooked mind expanding element of language learning occurs when you are prepared to open your mind to a new culture however. It is possible and sometimes illuminating to see something from two points of view simultaneously. A recent Newscientist article How to keep your head in scary situations (unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to view full text) stated "find a knowledgeable person who shares your general cultural but who disagrees with you. You are likely to give this person's arguments a sympathetic hearing, which will help offset the natural disposition we all have to dismiss as unreliable and biased the arguments of persons whose basic outlooks are different from our own." The cultural element is important because you are not likely to believe or entertain an argument coming from a culture that differs from your own. I found that being prepared to start adsorbing another culture suddenly hugely expands the number of people that you can learn from. As Steve Kaufmann puts it History is a good example. Students should be obliged to read history books from different countries, in order to see how different these perspectives can be.

A final thought, many people who have learned English as an additional language (and or adsorbed Western culture) have undergone a mind-hack of some sort, doesn't this leave many mono-lingual English speakers at a disadvantage?

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Learning Via a Muse

This is what learning Mandarin means to me in respect to learning about the Internet, no Wait! let me explain ;)

Like the artist's muse my language learning gives me a focus, a filter, a point of reference and a reason to learn more about Web(n.0) and to judge whether a new technology is really helping me. Perhaps because I often spend more time working on the back-end of websites I used to find it difficult to learn about using web-technologies via learning about web-technologies. I often felt I was in a kind of "echo chamber". Although this work that sold for so much money probably doesn't fully represent a muse.

At Dconstruct08 Aleks Krotoski explains how Web developers can learn from game developers, this is her own summary on at the Guardian. I think learners can learn from game players also, make it fun, get passionate and the learning happens before your realize.

What is your muse, or if you don't have one, how do you avoid the echo chamber?

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Learning Potential of the Internet

The Rue Sophie Germain named for the French mathematician (1776 - 1831).

I believe that the Internet has boosted learning potential in a way that most of us have not caught up with yet. The full impact has yet to be realized but I think many subjects, or the foundation of many subjects can be easily acquired and practiced by an individual with no need for teachers, classes, university etc.

Of course to learn successfully requires dedication and interest but this is almost always the case, no matter what the method. The internet gives us unprecedented access to information, unprecedented access to fellow learners and experts and supports more media and approaches than most traditional methods.

A big hint lies in the IT sector, of there are many that are formally educated, but due to the ever changing nature of IT and due to fact that the barrier to playing with and building real things with real technology is so low, many people in successful IT careers have no formal qualifications at all, many have learned everything that supports their career via the very same devices and infrastructure they use in their daily work.

Take the mathematician who inspired the French street name above, she taught herself mathematics from books in her fathers library despite all the efforts of her family to stop her (not the done thing for a middle class girl at the time), she had to pretend to be a man initially to correspond with famous mathematicians of the time and develop her theories. Think how much lower is the barrier to entry for a modern day Sophie Germain, the vital inputs and opportunities to communicate are so much more now. The interesting questions is will the availability of information create many more autodidacts like Sophie?

In language learning we have access to media, learning resources, foreign speakers, fellow learners, free tools (Audacity for audio for example, your own personal language lab), I firmly believe that any reasonably motivated learner can learn a language to a significantly better level than most university students in less time as a hobby (it really seems that farcical).

I hear people moaning about informational overload but this is a personal problem we just have to learn to adjust the way we view learning and knowledge, nowadays the possession of information is less important than the understanding of it and the ability to do things with it. The memory tricks of savants like Kim Peek seem much less impressive today, although Kim has show an increasing ability to work with his facts and develop his social skills due to his fame allowing him to practice and use what he knows. Many of us today can retrieve information as reliably Kim does and almost as fast, it is up to us to understand and use it.

I understand that some areas will always need professional qualifications, and some will need access to special equipment (particle physics springs to mind at the moment). But the basis of knowledge acquisition in these areas can still be acquired outside of special institutions.

How many times have I heard someone say "I really want to learn XXXX, I haven't started yet though I am waiting to see if there is going to be a course at the college next year...." how much do you want to learn???

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Social Network Portability

Attended the Dconstruct conference last week and as last time I'll try to process the information I got from it over the next few weeks. As I am also attending BathCamp next week I will start with the talks that have any kind of potential connection with my BathCamp presentation.

Tantek Çelik gave an interesting talk on Social Network Portability a brief summary of which is provided by Tom Hume.

The point Tom makes that there may be instances where we don't want to share aspects of ourselves between different social sites is one that immediately came to my mind also. In my case an excellent example is when using some social sites for language learning. I don't see this a significant barrier though, unless I am mistaken in the application side of things, a profile page that you create on a social site is not going to be able to make those connections or allow others to make them unless you provide the initial link into your social network, it will still be easy to create completly separate identities. Also the connection to your identities on other social sites will be limited to public information.

The basic aims that Tantek initially expressed certainly need to be addressed, my own AHA moment recently came whilst using the microblogging service at identi.ca, thanks to the openmicroblogging specification I was able to follow a user on http://openmicroblogger.com/ simply by adding the url of his profile page. The exchange of avatar icons and who is following, being followed by who happened automatically (try doing that on Twitter).

I guess at that moment the microblogging AHA moment sums up my interest in this area (although I have not looked under the hood I don't thing it uses the same technology Tantek was discussing), unless I am doing something at work that is impacted by Social Network Portability then I will leave the implementation and specifications to others and wait to see how it affects me. I have installed the Operator Firefox extension for microformats and so far it doesn't appear that much if anything I am using online is using them (or if it is, then it doesn't impact what I am doing).

Information on the technologies that Tantek discussed can be found here on the microformat wiki.

BathCamp Presentation

For the last two and a half years I have been learning Chinese, for the last two and a half years I have also been learning about learning especially how the learning landscape is changing thanks to the web technologies.

Learning Chinese has become my muse for learning about new web technologies. My job has involved me in many different aspects of developing web applications (possibly too many) and a while ago I had totally lost touch with the front end and more importantly how to "use" the emergent technologies. Because I don't feel you can really understand something until you can use it and because I was interested in learning a language I decided to learn a language as much as possible via the internet.

I like to write down my thoughts sometimes especially to refine ideas, when I came to think about a presentation for Bathcamp the obvious thing to do was to write down anything I feel I have learned so far and then pull out the more interesting points(in my opinion) for a short spoken presentation. Whatever happens the writings will be useful to me in the future, I have found it very useful to review what I wrote about Dconstruct last year.

I tend to write in more than one place and may have some other resources to add so I am going to try to pull all the background material to the presentation in a twine. By the time I make the short spoken presentation (or at least shortly afterwards); hopefully everything underpinning it will be available on the twine.