Category: Life online

My four readers

Tom RafteryMy good Irish buddy and fellow conspirator, Tom Raftery, helped me realize that I should be writing my blog to, well, none other than the four people who actually read it.

Sounds simple and somewhat inane, but seeing as I’ve struggled with finding my “blogging voice” for some while, all of a sudden this problem dissipates when I know who I’m writing for!

So though I necessarily have no idea who you four metaphorical readers are, from here on out, I’ve decided to dedicate and direct what I say to exactly to the four a’ ya. Thanks for readerin’ and I’ll try to keep it lively. Ya wankahs (an inside joke the four of you will get).

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San Fransocial

So I’m here in Paris, tonight at a mini Bar Camp meetup — having a cappucino with emincé de tomate et mozzarella, and there’s about 15 of us here. Presumably we’re going to talk about the Bar Camp Paris event coming up in the spring at some point but for now, we’re happily eating, drinking and… geeking out.

And in that, there’s something interesting — something changing. I’m going to call it “San Fransocialing” or “being San Franciscosocial”.

Basically it’s something that a lot of us do already, but seems particularly accepted, or native at least, within the original San Fran crew. So you show up somewhere where there are other people you’re going to “meet” and when you arrive, out come the laptops. What follows has to be something of an evolution in social behavior: instead of the old chat, look at each other in the eye, sip, drink, speak, listen, respond and on and on, you have these myriad verbal, non-verbal and digital communication methods happening simultaneously, spontaneously and asynchronously.

Consider this: here I am in this cafe-slash-bar-slash-restaurant and I’ve got Skype, Adium, Colloquy, Thunderbird, Flock with Gmail, Plazes all running at the same time over the free wifi… all on in order to keep in touch and communicate with the people in my life. Meanwhile, I’m having conversations in real time, in person, with as many as four or five people at a time. This is normal for me. This is … usual. This isn’t even overload. Somehow, I can handle all this simultaneous stimulation. Must be the video games I played when I was younger. Yep, everything bad was good for me!

And one last closing note… while fluttery and not always as deep, the communication and conversations are nevertheless valid, important, real and essential. The quality is not dimished, but it is different. Ah, que sera, sera.

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The Bubble Cometh (now streaming!)

Richard MacManus = Illuminati

There’s been a lot of talk about whether there is another tech or Internet bubble on the inflate. Yes, there have a been a bunch of launch parties as of late. Yes, more companies are getting funded. It’s giving the blogosphere much to ponder,. But one only has to look at the latest issue of Wired magazine to find the answer. It’s fat again! Yes, it’s a heavy ass slab this month. Compare it to say 2 or 3 years ago, during Wired’s anorexic years. I can’t remember it being this obese in years.

Of course, this is fantastic news for the budding young media empire known as Geek Entertainment Televison. There’s endless material to draw from, and draw from is what we must do. The greater the exhuberance, the more irrational we must be. Bring on the bubble! Give us the fuel we need to snark this thing. We’re up to 7 episodes now, with new ones every couple of days. Take a gander if you haven’t yet, and then subscribe to the GETV feed so you don’t have to remember to keep checking back.

jibber jabber: the eddie underworld » As the Bubble Fattens Up

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Flock Postage Stamp Contest

Now that Flickr is offering all kinds of new services (including stamp printing!) I thought it’d be fun to do something about it!

Flickr PhotoSo how about this? You design some kind of way cool Flock-inspired postage stamp and we’ll print it. I can’t say how many we’ll print, but chances are it’ll be a few (since we’ll need stamps to send out the shirt we’ll give you in exchange for your entry!).

Let’s say this little contest goes until Nov 5.

Here’s how to play: create a stamp using this template (borrowed from Postal Shirow). Upload it to your Flickr account and tag it “flockstamp” and add it to the Flock Art pool. Based on interestingness and some good taste, we’ll pick a winner and print the stamps and give you some other cool swag.

Questions? Just drop me a message!

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BradSucks makes open source music

I Don't Know What I'm DoingBrad Sucks, the one man band with no fans, released a set of remixes from people who apparently downloaded his songs and thought they could do better.

While I dig the guy’s tunes, I love his process.

That he’s also part of the PEI collective is cool, but he’s got cred all his own, given that I ran into him way back in 2003 when he made it onto Steven Garrity’s first ever Acts of Volition podcast.

Oh, and it seems that the markup on his track listing could definitely use a microformat. Guys, you hear that? Another example for ya!

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Understanding in the modern world

SkyTV shows Moblog photoI found out about the London attacks this morning when my roommate told me about them on the way into work. Truth be told, I was out with friends last night and didn’t have direct access to any kind of news sources, so I was quite surprised when he explained what’d happened.

So today, when I started exploring what had been posted online, I was struck by how I went about looking for information versus how I ultimate found anything of substance. I started at a major news outlet earlier in the day and was disappointed by not only the detachment in the writing (“objective” journalism, they call it) but by the meager pictures available. I mean, I’m a visual person and I thrive on being able to see things — in order that I might gain a better understanding of what actually happened.

Only this evening when I sought to understand things more completely did I turn, almost accidently, to Flickr. I hadn’t really considered Flickr a citizen journalism site, but as I landed on the tags page, I realized that this community of people, equipped with cameras and living in the open could be my eyes on the scene — and would help me comprehend what happened with their photos. And beyond what Reuters could provide, I could go back before the attacks and learn about the very individual lives of each witness in their photostreams.

In addition to that, I stumbled upon an ad-hoc community of well-wishers setup within Flickr, called the 7/7 Community, whose specific focus is on the bombings.

What’s interesting in all of this and in my discovery process is that these various technologies and tools that are able to bring me so much closer to such a foreign reality are starting to become more widely used and disseminated throughout the general public. People are not only coming to web to share, to communicate and to understand, but there are finally there are tools to help express and capture reality as it unfolds. Even a year ago, this kind of local civic engagement over the web would have been very hard to pull off.

An uncertain result, however, as pointed out in this post on Radio Open Source (discovered in one of the Flickr groups) concerns how a number of Flickr photos are turning up across the world in the mass media. While I am a strong believer in participatory culture and citizen reportage, the mass media seems to be coopting this emerging trend by reappropriating such content without, in my view, being a good contributing citizen itself. Let’s face it: the media doesn’t “do” open source and yet they’re greedily snatching up the contributions of regular folks to sell their papers, magazines and so on… I know that this material needs to get out there and the more people who see it the better, but something about it simply doesn’t sit well with me.

I guess until initiatives like Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere or media “escrow” repositories like morgueFile become more ubitquitous and well known, citizen journalists will have to tough it out on their own, finding a voice that stands out starkly against the lulling hum of the industrial megamedia machine and developing an organic community of readers who are themselves active participants in creating, telling and retelling the stories that matter to them, and to us all.

The cult of the vagabond hacker

With the success of hacker meetups like SuperHappyDevHouse and HackNight, it dawned on me that there need not be a specific, pre-planned event in order for hacker-types to converge in a physical location to hack on problems that are of interest them. This can, and perhaps should, happen in a much more ad-hoc, spur-of-the-moment manner and be just as successful and integrative. Additionally, there is a role for folks (like David Weekly, host of SHDH) who want to encourage this kind of behavior, especially those who understand that they can benefit from it.

I envision cults of traveling hackers, venturing from one city to the next, war driving and shacking up at homes and offices, seeking caffeine, a decent work environment and space for sleeping bags. Such places need not be permanant destinations, but rather convenient, temporary quarters for such hacking gatherings. Stay-overs may last as little as a day or may carry on over a week; indeed, it’s doubtful that more than a fortnight would even work for such a situation (for that, perhaps we would need hacker hostels).

Results from these events would be contributed back to a “code trough” where other intrepid hackers could either pick up the work or could remix it towards other projects, following the open source model. And the hosts would of course get some kind of working product out of the exchange or could continue to offer space in order to encourage the completion of the work should it not be finished in time.

Would hackers actually work on projects that they themselves didn’t come up with? Well, given the free room (and board, potentially), supply of caffeine (or other hacking supplement) and connectivity, the tradeoff seems more than fair for those hackers who want to work but also want to explore the world.

If such a networked, Meetup-like system were developed and I knew that I could plan a trip across Europe just stopping off at such hacker havens and not pay for anything but transportation, I would surely do so! Indeed, by pushing the social component and randomness of this kind of situation, you would be exposed to new and interesting people with diverse ideas, approaches and experiences that, it would seem, would contribute to creating fundamentally more interesting and valid products that solve more than just your own personal peeves. And if you happen to take a project with you on your travels, you get the compound benefit of having a myriad cross-section of the hacker subculture looking at and refining the ideas in your project as well as contributing effort hours towards getting something done!

I’d love to see such a system emerge and if anyone wants to offer up their home, office or… backyard? for this kind of event, let me know. Perhaps we could see something like this off-shoot from OSCON in August?