This how-to isn’t in the usual remit of this blog, but it solves a problem I’ve had for a while – I can’t use the iPhone’s built-in calendar functionality with Google Calendar – so I thought I’d share.

The iPhone 3.0 software update supports CalDAV, an open standard for sharing and updating calendar information. Luckily, so does Google Calendar.

It should really be easier than this; one of the important aspects of integration through open standards isn’t just its possibility, but also its accessibility. This feels more like a hack than real functionality – but at least it works.

1. On your iPhone, press Settings, and then Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
2. Press Add Account… and then Other.
3. Press Add CalDAV account.
4. Follow the instructions for enabling Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal. Specifically, this means using your Google account details for the username and password, and setting the CalDAV server name to be https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/YOUREMAIL@DOMAIN.COM/user.
5. I found that the iPhone didn’t pick up the authentication first time round – you may need to go into Advanced settings and re-enter them. The www in the server name seems to be important.

You can also do it using Google Calendar’s Exchange emulation, but that never worked for me. As with this, your mileage may vary.

North Oxford is the wealthiest part of a wealthy city, where BMWs sit in gravel driveways and wine bars nestle amongst delicatessens and stylish cafes; a part of the city I always yearned to belong to as a kid, but never quite did. It was where I went to school, and where we had our first offices when we were building Elgg.

In keeping with the rest of Oxford, it’s suddenly begun changing dramatically over the last couple of years (I’ve joked a couple of times that someone at the City Council planning office must have died, but this may not be too far from the truth; despite a glut of brilliant minds and genuine creativity, the city itself has always been stiflingly conservative). One of the newcomers is The North Wall, an arts centre that actually sits a few doors down from that first Curverider office on South Parade, and is in some ways more exciting than any other arts space in Oxford. From hip hop comedy dance to puppetry, its events seem to bring new blood.

Ben’s Big Gig was probably the first gig of its kind. Ben Walker is Internet famous for his Twitter Song, an in-joke that, appropriately enough, has been bookmarked, re-tweeted and blogged all over the web, and attracted praise from the likes of Demi Moore. He’s also a genuinely talented songwriter and musician who has been playing around Oxford for years at various events, including a regular stint at the now-defunct QI Club (which was associated with the TV show of the same name). Together that was enough to sell out the arts centre, as well as attract hundreds of visitors who watched live over the web – Nick Gill’s gorgeous lo-fi poster, pasted up all over town, couldn’t have hurt either. A Twitter wall on the back of the stage read out feedback as it happened, forming a back-channel to the music and allowing the audience to heckle the comedy warm-ups with relative safety. All of this felt not like a technological gimmick, but an organic part of the experience.

Live web gigs happen all the time, but they’ve usually got major backing. Sandi Thom was famously discovered through webcasts, but it was a PR stunt: she already had a major publishing deal, and at the time the streaming technology would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Times have changed: although it’s probably not free, technological improvements have brought live streaming within reach of independent artists. Ben’s the real deal, a performer with old-school talent who just happens to be using contemporary tools to reach his audience. We’re going to be seeing much more of this.

However, the first-mover advantage definitely holds water. At the end, as I was leaving, I told Ben that he needed to do it again. He confirmed that he will; I suspect the audience will be even bigger next time.

In the meantime, here’s the video feed from the gig:

The delightful picture of Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall was released under a CC attribution license by Ben Walker.

I have a major announcement to make:

I co-founded Elgg with Dave Tosh five years ago, and it’s been a heck of a ride. I’ve been immensely proud of what we’ve been able to achieve, not least establishing the most popular open source social networking platform, helping establish the first social network to run campus-wide at a university, and developing a commercial business with a first-class team of brilliantly intelligent, creative people. Each major milestone has been both a thrill and an honour.

However, I have decided that the time has come to move onto other projects. As of Wednesday, April 15th, I’ll no longer be part of Curverider or the core Elgg team. I’m immensely excited about my next projects, and announcements will be made about these later in the year – it’s too early to talk about them now, but I intend to continue pushing the envelope of what’s possible on the Web. I’ll also be providing expert advice to organizations who want to create excellent Web-based services.

I’m also very excited about Elgg’s future plans. I’m very proud of the team we’ve created, and the platform is about to enter its own new era. Keep an eye on Elgg.com.

I took some time out this afternoon to hang out in Oxford University Parks with Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which I’d been given for Christmas but hadn’t a chance to read yet. It’s a children’s book, and one whose 526 pages were whizzed through in a couple of hours, leaving a kind of screen burn on the way I look at the world. It’s probably the most beautiful hardback I’ve ever owned, but more than that, it pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with a traditionally printed and bound story. Prose gives way to graphic novel, and then to cinema stills, all becoming part of a visceral patchwork that adds texture to its plot and subtexts. It overtly promotes thinking outside predetermined structures, which is an important lesson for any kid (even a big one in his thirties), and dares the reader to imagine what they could achieve, even going so far as to equate creativity with magic. I loved it.

It’s also a good reminder that people, particularly in crunch times like that one we’re now in, will always try and constrain things to the categories that make sense to them. The people who are really successful, and who changed the world for the better, all managed to take the skills they’d learned and built up over their lifetimes and turn them to breaking through the barriers other people had put in their way. They weren’t afraid to be themselves, think the way they think, and push the boat out that little bit further.

What can you imagine? Why aren’t you doing it?

Flying by Francisco-PortoNortePortugal, released under an Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license.

Vero nails what I’ve thought for a long time:

Since I moved from Canada, I have seen too many Brits or Europeans be very sheepish about self-promotion. American sales people are reputed to be bubbly, brash and bigger than life, speaking louder than anyone else in the room and gesticulating endlessly to illustrate what they’re saying. Quite at the other extreme, British marketing folks are often seen to be more reserved and self-deprecating.

It’s worth reading the whole post; particularly her tips for breaking the habit. I’ve been to some Toastmasters meetings, but I just might give karaoke a go.

This lecture by Obama transition team member Greg Simon is worth a watch (click the Flash icon in the top right). While ostensibly about advocacy strategies for lobbyists, the fundamentals of what he talks about are applicable to marketing of ideas much more generally – commercial marketing, creative writing, and so on. The first 40 minutes or so are particularly worth paying attention to.

Essentially, marketing your ideas – what Greg euphemistically calls “getting someone to listen to your iPod” – comes down to providing an emotional reason for them to listen to you and buy into what you’re saying. This lecture is a great starting point for thinking about how to do that, and provides lots of food for thought.

A very happy new year to everyone reading this (assuming you follow the Gregorian calendar, obviously).

One of my new year’s resolutions, alongside the annual stalwarts like “lose weight”, “eat better” and “go to bed before midnight once in a while”, is “update your blog more often”. I’m also going to turn this site into much more of a personal space for reflection and splurging jotting down what I’m thinking, which might not always be technology related, or even very sensible. When I have time, the design will change accordingly. As ever, I welcome your comments with open arms and the offer of a beer if you’re ever in my neck of the woods.

In the meantime, I hope 2009 brings peace and prosperity to you as individuals, but also to your families and the communities around you. Have a good one.

If these products existed, they’d make it onto my Christmas list for me and my loved ones:

The open ebook reader

• Electronic paper screen
• A DRM-free format (in a perfect world) or at the very least a format that allows borrowing (from libraries and friends), lending and passing on of ownership, like a real book
• Not necessarily much memory (2Gb would easily do) but lots of battery life
• RSS subscriptions
• The ability to subscribe to the paper versions of magazines like the New Yorker and Wired (but get them electronically rather than on paper)
• An optional waterproof case to cater for the people in my life who like reading books in the bath with candles lit and a glass of wine
• Optionally, a screen reader

Bespoke television

• Streaming TV through the Internet, with an optional set-top box for a standard TV
• Subscribe to any TV channel anywhere, both free and pay, without having to commit to a package of multiple channels (although you might have to pay a TV license to get British channels, for example)
• Digital Video Recorder capabilities
• Subtitles (new media technologies shouldn’t be allowed to step backwards on support for the hearing impaired)
• Movies and TV shows on demand (paid)
• Pushing the boat out: the ability to pay more to excuse yourself from watching commercials

All-in-one health kit

• Blood pressure and unobtrusive heart rate monitors
• Pedometer
• USB connectors for all of the above
• Software that reads from the above and also prompts you to enter your age, weight, daily food, any additional exercise and health issues
• Produces fitness plan to meet goals, whether they’re improved cardiovascular health, weight loss, etc

In the meantime, happy holidays to all of you, and best wishes for an excellent new year.

I just finished watching Pirate Radio USA, a great little independent documentary about pirate radio and free speech over the airwaves. It makes one major, fundamental point: although freedom of expression is guaranteed by the US constitution (and by similar laws in many countries worldwide), because the medium of that expression has changed over time, there are often tight controls on how that medium is used. The film concerned itself with radio broadcasting; low-range, local radio stations can play vital roles in communities, but larger broadcasters have succeeded (using disinformation about things like the potential for signal interference) in making them largely illegal. The same media companies are visibly attempting similar things with the Internet as a medium, and the principle is the same: free speech is protected, and that involves not just the right to think and talk, but also to disseminate.

Although I don’t have much time for the commercial, national stations like BBC Radio One, in general I like radio a lot. Blogs, videos and podcasts are all well and good, but there’s definitely a place for live, local information; although I spent a lot of my late teens and early twenties reading websites and newsgroups, the local Oxford and Edinburgh stations were my soundtrack. There’s also a potentially much larger audience with radio: a cheap radio can cost $5, whereas a laptop and Internet connection are still not within everybody’s reach. I’ve spent some time this evening thinking about networked solutions for free speech radio, but they involve peer to peer networks, special software and broadband connections. A transmitter and an AM receiver are still much more realistic in many places.

I recommend Pirate Radio USA, by the way. I saw it on public access TV, but you can buy a DRM-free video at bside.com. (I couldn’t find anywhere that would stream it online legally; if you can, please leave a link in the comments.)

The following post is a fleshed-out version of my notes for my talk at the Elgg International Conference on Monday, December 1st, wherein I discussed my attitude to social networks and how they should be built.

My slides are available in Powerpoint or OpenDocument Presentation format.

Let’s take this to first principles. Stating the obvious, what is a social network? Is it a collection of profiles, friends lists and so on, or is it something more fundamental? What does the term even mean?

Social is an adjective that means relating to human society and its members.

A network is an interconnected system of things or people.

Therefore, I’d suggest that we can define a social network as just being an interconnected system of people.

When defined like this, everyone has a social network, regardless of Internet or technology use, and they’re as old as human society. Your friendships, colleagues, professional contacts, fellow students and book group members are all social networks. They’re not necessarily communities – a “community” tends to imply a common geography or set of interests, which isn’t always true to a social network. But while a social network is not always a community, a community is always a social network.

Clearly, social networks are made of people, who are joined through something in common – perhaps something as community-like as an interest or a shared geography, or something fuzzier, like a mutual friend, a chance encounter, etc. People are complicated; they have individual personalities, quirks and foibles, which make it hard to interact with them in a cookie-cutter way.

Because people are complicated, networks of people are exponentially more complicated. To get the most out of your social networks, you need to be able to embrace everyone’s individuality. Furthermore, they’re not discrete; they may overlap in all kinds of ways. My friends may also be my coworkers, or someone at work may also be a part of my knitting circle. (If I had a knitting circle. Cough.) They have all kinds of different contexts, which may impose requirements on how the members of the network interact with each other. Work colleagues generally need to communicate within an office space, or via methods imposed by management, for example. More formal networks have more restrictions. Personalities may also impose restrictions: some people are bad at talking on the phone, for example.

Of all the tools and methods social networks can talk to each other, the Web is just one. Face to face conversations, telephone calls, SMS messages, faxes, emails, letters and telegrams are all perfectly valid types of communication.

So in short, let’s reclaim a piece of language: a social network is an interconnected system of people, as I’ve suggested above. The websites that foster social networks are simply social networking tools. A social network doesn’t live on the Web, but a website can help its members communicate and share with each other.

With this in mind, what’s the best way to foster a social network using a Web tool?

Joshua Schachter, the creator of Delicious, has this to say:

“If you need scale in order to create value, it’s hard to get scale, because there’s little incentive for the first people to use the product. [...] The system should be useful for user number one.” 

In other words, people need to be able to visit your site and see something immediately useful, even when a network has not developed around it. Flickr, first and foremost, is a site for uploading photographs. Delicious is a flexible bookmarking utility. Facebook is the exception to this rule, because it’s a utlity that helps you keep in touch with your existing friends – but because it was initially limited to Harvard students, Mark Zuckerburg et al were able to carefully grow it from a handful of people. The Harvard community was an existing social network, and Zuckerburg simply gave them a tool.

To summarise: you cannot install a social networking tool and assume that a network will grow around it. You must either have another purpose, or an existing network of people to plug into it. Either way, it’s also going to take a lot of work: you need to lead by example, and participate heavily every day.

As each tool should focus on one particular network, or at least type of network, I’d argue that the exact feature set should be dictated by the needs of that network. Educational social networks might need some coursework delivery tools; a network for bakers might need a way to share bread recipes. The one common feature in any social network is people; even profiles may not be entirely necessary. (Look at Twitter.)

What they should do, however, is amplify the network effect. The idea of a social networking tool is to make that network communicate more efficiently, so anything that the tool does should make it easier for that network to talk to each other and share information. The tool itself shouldn’t attempt to create the network – although that being said, new network connections may arise through a purpose. Most of us have made new contacts on Flickr or Twitter, for example, because we enjoyed someone’s content.

The final lesson is that, once again, people are individuals, and social networks are complicated. Therefore, the featureset in any tool needs to embrace as much of the full range of personalities and ways of communicating as possible. Tagging was a great invention, because it didn’t try and dictate the terms with which people sorted their content. As Schachter said about Delicious in the above linked article:

“If I went in there and said, Hey, you’re using that tag wrong, people would just tell me [where to go].” 

In other words, he was smart enough to leave people to sort their bookmarks however best suited them. There will be inevitable variations in the tags different people use to describe the same resource, but because the network’s personalities are catered for, they’re more likely to continue to use the tool.

This attitude is what led us to develop Elgg, initially for the educational market: a user-centred social networking tool to support educational communities rather than the top-down, rigidly specified software that was common at the time. The features we built into it – extremely granular access controls, cross-site tagging, personalisation and customisation for site admins – drew a lot of attention, and it quickly became apparent that they would be useful in scenarios well beyond education. We spent the next four years developing Elgg into a flexible tool for facilitating social networks.

The latest version – rewritten from the ground up to be even more flexible, while learning from all the feedback and Elgg usage to date – addresses all the aspects of social networks I’ve discussed above, except for one: overlapping networks. That’s what the Open Data Definition is trying to solve – and something we’re coming very close to being able to support. Marc Canter is trying to solve something similar with his Open Mesh, and he’s not alone.

The Web has become a great tool for supporting networks of people, and with the kind of innovation we’ve seen over the last eight years, can only become better. The only remaining question is: what kind of network do you want to build?