Dconstruct and Bathcamp

Interesting couple of weeks ahead, this week I am attending the Dconstruct conference in Brighton and the following weekend I will be attending Bathcamp. Attendance of Dconstruct last year provoked lots of thought and posts about Internet related matters but I suspect that this year Bathcamp will generate or refine even more.

I strongly suspect that Bathcamp will generate more this year, primarily because being an unconference I will be making my own small presentation, this requires a lot of thought....

This post will be a small part of the background to my upcoming Bathcamp presentation.

BathCamp

Short post this, but there will be more. I am signed up to attend Bathcamp later in the summer and looking forward to it, it will be my first attendance of a barcamp style un-conference. I am not entirely sure what to expect, but I am sure it will be interesting and well worth the time.

Twine has started opening little bits to the public now, I quite like a few elements of Twine but there are some things that don't seem to work very well still, building a Twine of language learning resources is going OK, I am building a Bathcamp Twine but already it seems more work than it should be (I am going to have to make a logo for it, add lots of links and text by hand etc. etc.).

Now I wondering how to make a presentation for Bathcamp, I guess as much of my internet interaction that is not work related has been to do with learning Chinese via the internet this will be the theme, there are a lot of web technology goodies in there I just have to shake them out and dust them off. Trouble is I always leave these things to the last minute. Emergency plan is to juggle whilst harmonic throat singing (Tuvan style), I hope it doesn't come to that...

More on the Demise of Email

A while ago I posted on my feelings about email, it was a brief post provoked by frustration at the time, I was intending to come back to the topic but this post at ReadWriteWeb entitled Is Email In Danger says it all really for now.

I think the frustration that I am feeling is not so much to do with email still being used but more to do with the fact that other tools that fit communication needs are not being used in so many organisations.

What flavor of Stone Soup is Twine

I have been playing with Twine for a little while now. Some aspects I really like but there are one or two things that puzzle me, and one or two that I am not sure about. I think the twines themselves have potential, I have slowly started building up one that I hope will be a good way to share some resources, particularly when Twine goes public. I am sure that some will think that the aspects that bother me are simply down to not knowing enough about how Twine works, or more likely because I am not using Twine enough yet. This "not using Twine enough" is the thing that bothers me most, the mantra used to answer criticisms of Twine is that "the more you use it, the more you get out of it". Well that seems reasonable but I also think that a cutting edge semantic web app. should do some things almost from the get go.

There is the story of the stone soup, it doesn't really matter if you don't know it and don't wish to read the Wikipedia entry, hopefully my point will still make sense. Is it that the flavor of the Twine soup is mainly derived from all the ingredients that are added to it by the users. A cunning but relatively simple starting framework could attract a critical mass of interaction and this mass then be used to develop a semantic application. Of course you need content to be added and categorized at some level, but once you have content why does it seemingly require a lot of activity to guess what kind of new content a user may be interested in.

My best example so far is a story on Mandarin immersion learning , here are the things that Twine could know.

1. I have created one twine so far, it is tagged with mandarin


2. I have posted a high percentage of items tagged with mandarin


3. I have read a number of other items tagged with mandarin and shared one or two to other twines


4. I have conducted a search for mandarin


5. I have pulled an RSS feed against the mandarin tag search


6. The mandarin tag is relatively rarely used on twine

Yet when a new item is bookmarked on Twine and has a mandarin tag, I am not alerted. Given all the information above and not withstanding any smart programming that may be monitoring my activity across twines or connections I cannot imagine not picking up on at least enough of the low hanging fruit above to alert me somehow on the item. In fact if I had been involved with the programming I would have a red face at this point because Twine is touted to be smart etc. There is a remote possibility that I missed something I suppose but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to discover or tell me of the important fact, also the twine where the article appeared wouldn't normally hold my interest enough to make it worthwhile subscribing to it, so the standard Twinerian approach of subscribing to a huge number of twines wouldn't have helped either

There are a number of other things I am looking into that worry me. There is a "bug" where if you post a bookmark that is already in Twine you get duplicated items, even if you post to the same Twine. Putting on my programmers hat this is more than a bug, unless I am mistaken it seems that the url of a bookmark is its unique identifier, this should be enforced at the back-end and unit-tested, not allowed to bubble through to the user interface. Other opportunities to cut down on information clutter have been missed for example my Twine digest email informs me of items I have posted myself.

What I have at the moment to discover things I may be interested in a marvelous hack-up of RSS feeds, pumped and tweaked and combined through Google Reader, Netvibes and now increasing Yahoo pipes. This chaotic system has the amazing ability to (assuming I apply a little regular maintenance and tweaking) to supply me with a pretty good overall picture of things I may be interested in. Now I am increasingly adding Yahoo pipes to the mix I can see another big step-up in the ability of my ad-hoc distributed tangle to serve this purpose. In fact if you didn't know how it worked you could even be mistaken for thinking the system I am using has some kind of intelligence (Yahoo pipes probably being the major potential contributor here).

Twine is a useful social repository to drop information into, they have convinced me of that, also it is supposed to automatically tag things (well sometimes), why haven't the simple quick wins to link people with interesting information been picked up on, especially when I can get so much mileage from tweaking and manipulating RSS feeds from disparate sources all over the Internet? The recommendations that are supposed to kick in once Twine has learned enough about me haven't show me anything yet. My experiment is going to be to see if I can get more interesting and relevant content to read from Twine simply by the manipulation of its many RSS feeds (and become a Yahoo pipes power-user at the same time ;)). At the moment I am betting on my system to win, to be fair I am interacting with Twine in a manner that should help their recommendation system, but not as fast as some (anyway a system that only works for power-users is not a mainstream system at all).

As it happens a helpful Twine user called Twain (thank you twain) told me about the Mandarin post in a reply to a comment on an unrelated thread, which was nice, even though I was already aware of it. This however does not count as Twine informing me of it.

Ultimately the stone soup story can be interpreted in a number of different ways, with both a positive and negative slant, lets hope the Twine story has a happy ending.

BBC go full fat RSS

Just a quick YAAAYY. Due to pressure from some of their users, more BBC RSS is full feed. As I have said before I much, much prefer full feeds.

It is supposed to be a conversation (part1)

A chain of thoughts that started a little while ago and ended up in me resolving some personal thoughts about what a semantic web actually means (to me at least). Bear with me because in part 1 the semantic bit is not really obvious.

It all started when I came across a forum that had a "correct this grammar" link next to each post. I am not sure if this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen or just a very, very clever way to divert the time and energy of pedants whilst quietly direct all their corrective output to /dev/null/ (a place where the sun don't shine). If it was a diversion it was very authentic looking as it even had instructions telling you to retain the original meaning, your corrections were supposed to be approved by a moderator.

I came across this whilst I still had the "well intentioned??" efforts of some grammar/spelling actionists fresh in my mind. They hadn't been directed at me but they easily could have been and we had crossed swords. Often the grammar pedant will start with something like "I hate to be a pedant but it irks me when..." so we have to assume that in this case irk > hate.

There are places where writing as correctly as possible is important, however consider that people do not speak grammatically, when having conversations they do not use correct grammar (amazingly some people haven't even realized this). I view comments, some types of blog posts etc. etc. as conversations and the word conversation is often used to describe many interactions on the web. We are pulling in more and more information, and engaging in more and more online conversations, usually testing/refining ideas, for many people now this is not a place to worry too much about the technicalities of language so long as the meanings and concepts are exercised. I consider many of these conversations are supposed to be quick and snappy, and people adapt to this environment. We don't have same pressure to use l8r for later as we would when texting but there is a pressure there

English is often not the first language of the conversationalists but is the default language of many places where they have to interact (not so smart or sensitive to pick holes in what they have written). This was the case when I lost my rag a little and had to intervene (it irked me to intervene but I hated what was going on).

By all means strive for correct grammar and spelling in a CV or presentation or highbrow blog etc. but apart from that I think those that are upset by non-perfect English should deal with the irksomeness out of the public eye.

How do I think this relates to the semantic web, well that is coming soon.

Languages are made by ordinary human beings not by God or the pundits who stand in for him.
Anthony Burgess loved language and was a linguist. He enjoyed the play of words and the technicalities of grammar and pronounciation. However in his books on language he was consistent in objecting against those that were overly sensitive to its usage, ending on one occasion with
When we think we are making such a judgment we are often merely making a statement about our prejudices.

Facebook not for the Intranet

At one point there was a lot of hype, regarding the possible use of Facebook for all or part of an intranet. From my point of view that quickly became a very bad idea. Maybe a new, small internet company, with internet savy executives could pull it off (maybe) but I wouldn't dream of trying to implement that approach where I work.

Aside from the questions of who owns your data? what happens if Facebook is down or slow? there is the considerable problem of bleed between work and personal life and bleed between the few useful things you can do on Facebook and the vast array of useless trash. The following youtube sums up my feelings exactly. I would suspect that most employees would not welcome this bleed either.

Not that Facebook is a complete waste of time, there are one or two people I can communicate most reliably with via a Facebook message, I have played a couple of very entertaining chess games via Facebook, but I have also ignored far too many hot potatoes and their like.

More on fullness of RSS

A while ago I posted in a very general way about some advantages of full RSS feeds. Since that time I have continued to use RSS extensively and thought about it a little more, there are of course various degrees of fullness.

One of the most useless feeds I have comes from a Chinese site, translated into English the title of the page the feed comes from is "Everyday English". Each time a new article is published it appears in my feed-readers with the title "Everyday English" and the text "Everyday English" that links through to the article. I have no way of knowing whether it is worth my while going to the article, each RSS item in my reader is identical.

At the other end of the spectrum would be the blog feeds where I can read the entire article in a feed-reader, inclusive of any included media files, the only reason to actually go to the site in question would be to read or leave comments.

In between there is a sliding scale, descriptive titles, snippets or abstracts included etc. etc. The bottom line seems to be I don't care how it works so long as I minimize time spent wasted going via links and finding I am not interested in what is at the other end. If I don't find my-self wasting time this way it is surprising how much information I can sift through and select from,  every time I have to follow a duff lead though feels like a huge drag (probably way out of proportion to the time wasted but that is human nature). A feed that commits the double crime of not having a high enough density of compelling content and wasting too much time gets deleted.

Sometimes the outcome can be surprising, I had a number of feeds that produced very little of interest but sometimes the odd gem. Usually there was enough information in the title or link to spot something of interest. I decided that they were not worth close monitoring but occasionally I have time I might look to see what is floating on top there. A bunch of these types of feeds can be seen on my Netvibes potluck page.

Sometimes I use Google Reader on my phone via the Opera mini browser, it is very efficient so long as I don't waste time following links to destinations that have nothing of interest.

I guess content providers often want me on their sites but, what kind of mood do they want me to be in when I get there. The challenge would seem to be in giving me other compelling reasons to visit.

My final observation is that the usefulness of an RSS feed depends on the type of content and how I interact with/use it, I can only determine this over time and by having some interest in the content. So I suppose if you produce RSS it would be a good idea to get feed-back from people that meet these same criteria.

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Using Google to buffer and/or archive RSS

I have ended up using both Google Reader and Netvibes to monitor RSS feeds. Google Reader is great for long-term stuff whereas Netvibes is great for monitoring what has changed recently. Netvibes also offers other functionality that I find more useful than iGoogle for generating an online desktop.

Whilst learning Chinese I have found a number of things I can monitor by RSS that yield a high number of results, many of which are of no interest but there are the occasional gems. I tend to call these type of feeds "potluck" If I have time I can always trawl through them quickly and see if there is anything that interests me. One type of feed that can yield the occasional gem via online link tagging services, just monitoring the del.icio.us tag for "chinese" for example can sometimes give me useful new resources. Recently I started experimenting with the public universes offered by Netvibes. I also thought it would be useful to carry out the same sort of monitoring at simpy.com and ma.gnolia.com sadly I discovered that like many other online services, simply and ma.gnolia just do not provide good reliable real-time RSS feeds. The result was that many times my Netvibes boxes were empty. The easiest and most elegant solution to this kind of problem was simply to ensure that those kinds of feed were collected by Google Reader and then I made the RSS public from Google Reader. Now when I look at those feeds in Netvibes they are coming from Google Reader and whilst they may not be completely up to date they are never empty (Google Reader caches the information). Of course I can also combines feed and publish them as one from Google Reader.

Thanks to the new public Netvibes service I can make some of my "pot luck" feeds public, which acts as a nice way to demonstrate how this kind of RSS usage

As an aside I have often noticed that many of the less mainstream services are not consistent with the performance of RSS feeds (and searching). At the moment I wouldn't switch from del.icio.us to an alternative simply because nothing else I have looked at is anywhere near so reliable.

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Email is not dead, it just smells like it.

Sometimes I think to myself there is little difference between Email and RSS (or I imagine ways in which I could manage my email in a way that might still make it marginally useful), I always come back to my senses though. Email is always going to be there and there is going to be a long tail of declining useage but I really try to interact with it as little as possible.

The real problem is seen in the use of email for communication in projects, both inside and outside of work. It really takes a lot of effort to manage email in a useful way, when discussions get multi-threaded and emails are copied, replied to, forwarded etc. etc. communication breaks down. Then of course there is the disaster that occurs when someone forgets to "copy in" someone else.

I was recently involved in a non-work project that involved communication by email and has now switched to use Basecamp already it is like a breath of fresh air.

Of course you need more than RSS to replace everything people do with Email, and elements of email can only look anything like RSS if you squint at it from a distance when very tired and forget to use one hemisphere of your brain.

Here is a tip, if someone at work sends you an urgent email, then try to ignore it for at least a day, If someone comes and actually talks to you help them as fast as you can, you can train them if you are persistent enough.

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Blog post in a Chinesepod bottle

A short post this one but with a specific objective. The purpose of this this blog is primarily to act as a brain dump and thinking space, I am not aiming at attracting a readership (and on that measure I am succeeding admirably ;).

That being said It was interesting to note that some comments previous observations I made regarding problems with Chinesepod RSS feeds seem to have resulted in some action. I also noted a few hits from Shanghai in Google analytics. I was kind of expecting and hoping that this may be the case.

I would think that these days, if your online presence is important, then you should be spending some time peering into the dark corners of the web getting indirect feedback from discussions about you. It appears that the folks at Chinesepod have this covered.

I am curious to see if this post in an obscure corner gets read, it has some words and tags about Chinesepod, cpod and Ken Carroll that should do the trick. If somebody (anbody) from Chinesepod or Praxis reads this then please leave a comment, I will be very impressed and it will complete my experiment. The web version of the "message in a bottle" should in theory be much more discoverable than the traditional one.

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