Here’s a video from Rudman Consulting for AmbiTIon Scotland about the Festivals API portion of the project:

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Here she is on Twitter and Facebook. I came to the project late, and I’m not sure how the photos were contributed; there’s a site at whichside.net, but it’s not hugely inspiring. Nonetheless, the song is, and it’s a great start.

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Within this design pattern, there are four main places where innovation can occur:

• How you consume the river.
• How you filter the river.
• Where the river lives.
• How and what you post to the river.

Right now, all the value lies in the first three. Social news apps suddenly declined when Facebook changed how its river works; Technology Review recently moved its content into an RSS feed after users abandoned its apps. Consumers want their content in one place, convenient for them, interconnected with the other services they use.

Facebook, Google and Twitter want your river to live on their services. Facebook and Google want to do the filtering for you; Twitter wants to give you the tools to filter it yourself. But if rivers are truly to be the future of publishing and content – which it looks like they might be – two things are likely to happen:

• Savvy publishers will own their own rivers of content.
• Savvy readers will want to consume content on their terms, with their own filters.

It doesn’t make sense for content producers to be subject to sudden changes like the one Facebook imposed recently. And the smart ones won’t stand for it.

The question is, who will help them regain control of their brands, their property, and their content?

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As TechDirt notes:

Basically this means CISPA can no longer be called a cybersecurity bill at all. The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a “cybersecurity crime”. Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all. Moreover, the government could do whatever it wants with the data as long as it can claim that someone was in danger of bodily harm, or that children were somehow threatened—again, notwithstanding absolutely any other law that would normally limit the government’s power.

This bill must be blocked in the Senate. If you’re a US citizen, you need to call your Senator now. This action list over on Reddit is fantastic, or, once again, Grassroutes makes this easy. Just click a button below:

(If you’re reading the feed, you probably won’t see the Grassroutes widget above. Click here to see the buttons, and to get the code to paste the widget on your own site.

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I want an activity stream for my activity on my local computer, and across my network. When, for example, I make a change to a document, I want my PC to record it on my activity stream as “Ben Werdmuller edited ‘Linux Format wishlist’ in LibreOffice Writer.” By default, those changes are private to me only, but I can set access permissions per file, application, location on disk and type of update (“status update”, “text file”, etc). In a network environment, I can share my activity streams across the network, and see the updates that other network users have allowed me to view. This stream is at an infrastructure data level, so I can choose a number of applications to view it with – although I can easily imagine Ubuntu, for example, shipping a beautiful default app.

Then, I want to be able to program against the activity stream, and the activity streams I can see on my network, using a simple API. This would allow me to sync files, status updates and other things, while not being bound to any one application or utility. It also could provide an interesting underlying basis for social web applications running on Linux servers.

This is a little convoluted, so let me explain: I want my activity on my computer, my activity across my enterprise network, and my activity on the web to be saved to a single activity stream that I control. I want to be able to conditionally share and have access to the entire activity stream – and then do stuff with it, using tools like the excellent ifttt.

Consider the following unified stream:

• Ben Werdmuller saved Technical white paper to Work out tray 3 seconds ago
• Ben’s mom sent you an email: A little family news to ben@benwerd.com 15 minutes ago
• Ben’s cousin sent you a message: I’m engaged! on Facebook 1 hour ago
• Your task: Finish technical white paper is due 3 hours ago
• You were tagged in a photo: ElggCamp San Francisco 2012 on Flickr 4 hours ago

In the example above, the act of saving something to the folder Work out tray could automatically cause it to be uploaded to Basecamp, or emailed to a few people for review. Similarly, my being tagged in a photo on Flickr could cause it to be automatically downloaded into my local Photos folder.

Why should my activity stream just contain stuff that happened on the web? Now that we have apps like Google Drive, these separations are arbitrary at this point. What matters is that I did something, not where I did it.

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Mission:Explore is a game, but not as you know it. There are two aims to the game. One is to collect points and unlock rewards. The other is to experience the world in new ways by doing vitally important random and warped challenges. The more missions you do the more rewards you’ll unlock and the more fun you’ll have during your stay on planet Earth.

Mission: Explore’s web application is an inventive take on the geo-gamification meme we’ve seen for years with the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla. Rather than checking in with brands and getting offers, participants are encouraged to travel 100 metres without being seen or put on a show for a security camera controller. And of course, they get rewards and an endorphin rush for doing so.

Because the site’s mostly aimed at kids, there’s less community or real-time interaction than there could be – what if one of the missions was to join up with six other people and solve a puzzle or make a shape? – but I love the humanity of the intention behind it. And the execution is great, although I find myself wondering what it could be with Geoloqi‘s geofencing.

Mission: Explore offers bespoke challenges for private groups, as well as a dead tree version. It’s all been done with a lot of love, and is great fun – to the extent that I wish more adult geo-apps would take a leaf from its book. If I had kids I’d be all over it.

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Spain’s new political party, the Partido de Internet, is a policy-agnostic political party that makes its decisions based on the will of a community based on Agora, a virtual parliament platform.

PDI is a policy-agnostic political party that does not have, nor will ever have, a political ideology. It has a single and radical proposal: PDI elected representatives will vote in congress according to what the people have previously voted through the internet using Agora.

[...] Agora is a software project with a clear aim to improve our democratic system. The project is well underway but still not complete, and is driven by voluntary work donated generously by members of our team. We welcome anyone, developers, researchers, security enthusiasts, designers, or anyone else who shares our vision, to collaborate and help bring this vision closer to reality.

Representative democracy as we know it today emerged because it was unfeasible for each citizen to participate directly. The Internet fundamentally changes that, and reveals political parties to be gatekeepers: unnecessary levels of organizational abstraction that are unduly influenced by capital rather than the will of the people they declare themselves to represent.

This is a sea change in how government works, and incumbents can see it coming. It’s worth examining the UK’s Internet surveillance plans in this light. David Cameron said that monitoring emails, web use and phone calls would protect against “terrorist threats that [...] that we still face in this country”. Could that include citizens peacefully organizing to push for greater democracy?

I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to also look at policies regarding anonymity and privacy online in this light. Tracking doesn’t just relate to advertising; it’s also always been used to monitor political dissent (alongside agent provocateurs). This is a subject that relates to how we are governed and – though it sounds almost insanely melodramatic to say it – the balance of world power. Owning and controlling your own data needs to be a democratic right.

I’ll be watching the PDI with interest; together with the Pirate Party, they represent a very interesting new phase in how technology and society interact. And just as news, publishing, entertainment and retail have been disrupted, the incumbent political parties had better take notice.

Photo of the Armenian Parliament by PanARMENIAN Photo, released under a Creative Commons license.

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So, here’s what happened.

On Saturday morning, I woke up at 5am, brushed my hair and dressed up (from the waist up). Celia, who was able to attend the wedding in person, brought her MacBook Pro. And as friends and family gathered to watch the ceremony, she FaceTimed me.

In fact, it almost didn’t happen. Mark and Sana had checked with the venue beforehand, and it looked like they had wifi – but on the day, it wasn’t working. So Sven switched his HTC Desire into hotspot mode, and I attended the wedding via FaceTime over a 4G cellphone connection. Not a planned backup – he just happened to have a broadband connection in his pocket (as many of the guests probably did). Thank you Android; thank you Apple.

Now, granted, it was a little fuzzy – that’s a picture of the happy couple after signing the registry book to the right there – but it was more than enough to see and hear what was going on.

Let’s step back for a moment and think about what this might have required ten years ago. Two sets of ISDN lines, a webcam and specialist software? Some kind of satellite connection? Yet today, it was possible with commodity hardware. It didn’t even use much of Sven’s cellphone data allowance.

People talk about the Internet as being information at your fingertips, anywhere; I like to think of it as being a way to connect anyone to anyone in deeper and deeper ways. Here’s some footage from the wedding reception, a little later on, which I recorded using the screen capture software Screeny (that’s Mark playing drums):

Forget flying cars, or scaremongering tales of social networking making us more emotionally isolated: the future we’re living in is more human, more democratic and more personal than ever before. Sitting in Berkeley, getting choked up over a wedding 8 timezones away, I felt more grateful than ever before for all the ways that technology brings us together.

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We’re proud of what we’ve built. Yesterday, someone sent a 2gb HD video file from Myanmar over satellite phone in nine minutes. At TechCrunch Disrupt last September, a visitor to our stand remarked that what we’re doing is mathematically impossible! Talk about gratifying. [...] In this blog, we’ll be talking a lot about the technology that makes latakoo possible.

You can read the first post here.

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In my opinion, search needs to be at the center of social software. It’s how you find new people, resources and shared conversations. As I argued on a panel at SXSW 2011, it’s far more natural to visit someone’s profile by typing “Ben Werdmuller” (for example) into a box than typing “http://benwerd.com/” or “http://facebook.com/ben.werdmuller”.

Google has over 66% of the US search market, so it’s in a great place to be where that happens, which is presumably what was on their minds when they decided to build a social platform. They also have traditionally had a problem with the “deep web” – the non-public bits of information that its spiders can’t get to. More and more, that’s because these web resources are subject to user-centric access permissions within web applications. Because the Google search spider isn’t a user, it doesn’t have access to these resources, and they never get listed.

Which is why I’m so surprised that Google+ has remained a monolithic social dashboard, akin to Twitter or Facebook. (In fact, it’s more so than Facebook, which has done a great job at turning itself into a very impressive social platform.) You share stuff using +1 buttons or the interface on the Google+ site itself, and are limited to the small number of data types that Google have provided on their own site. You can post links, photos, videos and text updates.

But Google is great at making platforms. Because of its openness, Google Maps is still the go-to standard for displaying cartographic information on the web. (It’s significant that its creator now works at Facebook.) Google Analytics is just about everywhere. And Google APIs are typically easy to use, fast to integrate and powerful.

So why isn’t Google+ a platform? The Circles functionality is brilliant: nuanced access control made simple. If Google integrated those access controls throughout the whole web, allowing anyone to integrate them into their sites and applications with search and universal sharing across all of them, they would effectively become a social application operating system. It would be a new kind of platform altogether, and would cement their search portal – and thus, their advertising – as the default place to look for connected resources. To keep privately-shared resources secure, social objects could be stored in the Google cloud, presenting themselves to a requesting application only if the authenticated user had access. At Elgg, we wanted to do this with a feed format called the Open Data Definition half a decade ago, but didn’t have the resource to execute to our satisfaction; Google has those resources. Universally shareable social objects with privacy controls, searchable via a unified Google interface, would transform the web.

Maybe this is what Google is warming up to. But right now, and probably for the foreseeable future, Facebook is a more interesting social platform.

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Beautiful, right? It’s a virtual assistant that sticks with you wherever you go.

Exciting features debuted in the video include:

• Automatic geo-tracking of both you and your friends.
• Seamless photo-taking and live video broadcasting from anywhere you can put your head.
• A head-up display that occupies some of the visual channel.
• Everything you see – your visual reality – is augmented through a single company.
• You are continuously recording information about the people around you as well as yourself.

Okay, I confess: by beautiful, I meant scary. Leaving aside the implications of having our ambient information spoon-fed to us rather than discerned through inference and discovery, this project opens an ethical can of worms, and asks important questions about Silicon Valley’s attitude towards other peoples’ privacy.

Indeed, traditionally, this isn’t a can of worms that Silicon Valley has been very good at dealing with. Android phones encourage you to link your friends’ accounts together, joining their Facebook details to their Google details, for example. There hasn’t been a strong line between information that is yours, information about you that you’re happy to share, and information that you’re gathering about other people. It seems clear to me that people should know what they’re sharing about themselves, should have to opt in to do so, and should not be able to share personal information about other people without those people opting in. That doesn’t seem to be an opinion that Silicon Valley shares with me. Most free services are a Katamari-like information-gathering free-for-all.

I’m a fan of many, many things that Google does, and kudos to the product team that’s putting Google Glass together. It’s a very significant achievement. But from a social perspective, there’s a lot of work still to be done.

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We’re a part of the Knight News Challenge:

1. What do you propose to do?

Speed up, simplify, economical sending and sharing of large video files from anywhere to aid journalists and others.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different?

Slow or expensive methods of video delivery exist, but latakoo is fast and inexpensive. We speedily send, share, download, and transcode large video files and provide public and private distribution.

Check out our full Knight News Challenge profile and – if you like our idea – click the “heart”.

Every visit and show of support helps. Thank you!

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[...] But there’s a stronger undertone from speaker after speaker talking about their projects. It’s about how the community wants and needs to own and control their social network (instead of just merely having a little section inside a worldwide social network). And how the community wouldn’t be as strong if they couldn’t. About the community needing to evolve the communication tools in parallel to how the community evolves. About how it is almost impossible to “work together” with others on a general-purpose site like Facebook, and how even high school students automatically switch to their school social network when attempting to get something done.

You can read the whole post here.

I spoke a little about ensuring the longevity of communities, which is something I’ve begun to think about in a general context: if you’ve established a community site and attracted a solid social network of people, how do you ensure that the community remains vibrant in six months, or three years, or a decade from now? How do you make sure, to put it bluntly, that maintaining a community remains worth your time?

In the same way that a community site augments the social experience for a network of people, I’m interested in explicit market features that augment the online social experience. For example, open source communities like the Elgg community itself: what if the Elgg ecosystem could crowdfund features and plugins?

This also speaks to community ownership. Why monetize a community using AdSense – content piped in from third parties outside the community, which may or may not be relevant but certainly are less passionate about the community’s topic – when you could empower the community to do this for itself? Why not allow online communities to be truly self-sustainable?

It’s been an interesting day, and I’m looking forward to talking to people afterwards. I’ve set up a collaborative latakoo How I Fly site here, for participants to collaboratively share video footage of the event.

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On the official Box blog, Box and latakoo make video uploads faster than ever:

What does scale is anything that improves your productivity by saving time, especially when it comes to uploading videos. That’s why we’re excited to announce a new integration with video management provider latakoo. latakoo employs a one-click utility to shrink and convey large HD and SD video files in minutes instead of hours. Available today, latakoo subscribers can push their videos to Box faster than ever.

Then, CBS Radio News featured us in this week’s Reporters Notebook (MP3 link).

Steve Kline had an HD camera on our stand at SXSW, so we recorded lots of video of passers-by and uploaded it to our SXSW How I Fly video portal. How I Fly is a beta service that allows anyone to run their own collaborative video portal. (Like running your own YouTube or Vimeo.)

Speaking of which, here’s one of my SXSW contributions, sent using latakoo’s integration with YouTube (uploading to YouTube with latakoo is up to 37 times faster than uploading straight from YouTube’s own website):

The lesson I’m trying to drive home? latakoo makes video simple, no matter what you’re trying to do with it. And people are taking notice.

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What’s even cooler is that the interface is based on Bootstrap 2, a UI framework for Twitter. We’re using it as a bedrock so that the page adapts to the form factor of the user’s device: if you’re on a desktop, you’ll get the full two-column experience, while a mobile device will see things in a compact single column with menu options hidden behind a dropdown.

It’s been very fast, and the framework is extremely robust. I know there have been complaints about it being overused, but to be honest, that’s because it’s excellent. (We’re not keeping the default colors or styles, mind you, which I know a lot of people are.)

Interested in the video portals? Stay tuned.

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When Brett let me know about ElggCamp San Francisco, I was delighted. It looks great: the attendee list is already impressive, and tickets are cheap – possibly the best-value event about online communities you’ll attend in the vicinity of Silicon Valley, both in terms of price and the professional experience that’ll be under one roof. I’m looking forward to both the talks and the networking afterwards, and if Brett and co are half as professional as they have been with managing Elgg itself, it will be a great day. Buy tickets here.

Meanwhile, latakoo, my current company, is making video management dramatically easier. We’ll be at SXSW Interactive. Find us on Stand 308 at the trade show next week, or book some office hours to talk to me one-on-one.

Elgg logo credits: the top two were by me, the learning landscape logo was by Sonia Virdi, and the bottom was by Pete Harris. You can tell when we brought real designers in.

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Of course, there’s far more to SXSW than the trade show and the talks, and I’ll be attending as many events as I can. If you’re in the area, I’d love to meet. If you’d like to talk latakoo, online video, the open, social web or open source, I’m using Ohours to meet up with people on Sunday the 11th.

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This year, I’m writing it. It’s called Profiled, and I’ll be releasing it in installments later this year, alongside a blog about taking a lean startup approach to writing a novel. You can sign up for free here. (And yes, these posts and the signup form are my minimum viable product.)

I can’t tell you too much about my actual writing thought process, because I don’t know what to say. I’m getting into the story, which is probably a good sign, but there’s no getting away from the fact that I’ve never done this before. I need professional advice and editing. More on that another time.

Nor can I talk authoritatively about how to write in terms of the structure of language or narrative. Instead, I thought I’d tell you a little about my setup:

Sitting down to write

Years of Internet work (and obsessive Twitter checking) have left me with a very short attention span. I’m shockingly easy to distract.

For a while I was using Dr Evil’s Write Or Die, a little Adobe Air app that forces you to write a certain number of words in a pre-defined timeframe. Plug in 500 words and 25 minutes, and you’re off, racing against the timer. The app punishes you if you pause significantly. If you’re feeling particularly masochistic, it’ll even start to delete your work, word by word.

I wrote my first published short story this way, but this is a very stressful way to write a longer piece. Also, Adobe Air is unholy. So for Profiled, I’ve been experimenting with the same methodology I use in my day job: the Pomodoro Technique.

I give my Pomodoro session a brief title based on what I intend to write about (although I don’t hold myself to it), hit “OK”, and write until the timer goes off. Pomodoro gives me five minutes’ break, and then I start again. It’s a great way to write regularly and sustainably.

Keeping track of my writing

I’ve got both LibreOffice and Microsoft Office on my computer, as well as TextWrangler, OmmWriter and a number of other editors. But what really works for me is Scrivener.

I’ve got to admit that I was skeptical about all the hype around Scrivener, but it just works. It’s got a distraction-free text editor, it allows me to rearrange portions of my story as I see fit, and is unrepentantly geeky in the way that it stores my writing. It’s like dealing with a well-designed Git client for creative writing. If you’ve been hesitating over the “buy” button, I can confirm that it’s worth every penny.

(Side note: I did once start a poetry anthology as an open source Github repository. It turns out, though, that I’m not a poet. I’d be very interested in collaborating with poets on something similar though.)

The whole thing – like virtually all of my documents – is backed up on Dropbox (I’m a paying user), which allows me to keep track of versions and sync across any of my devices. Cloud services have changed the way I use my computers, and that’s no different here.

Research

Inevitably, almost all my research has been on the web. I’ve never been someone who keeps bookmarks, or leaves a bunch of tabs open overnight. My browser windows never stay open for more than a few hours. So when I do want to keep something, I need another approach.

Obviously, I use Evernote. It’s magic: notes, bookmarks, images and audio notes are all synced across my devices, available to me offline and easily searchable. The Chrome plugin is seamless. I wouldn’t use anything else.

Not-promotion

This has been my biggest struggle. I’m used to the instant gratification of social media, and there’s nothing instantly gratifying about writing long-form pieces. I previously shared a taster, but this was from my first draft – it’s likely to change significantly before I’m done. Should I have shared it at all? Probably not. In fact, I’m not convinced that my extended social media use is good for me at all – but that’s a subject for another post.

For now, my plan is to hold back and write, while gauging interest in the project. I’d love your input, both on the software I’m using above, and the themes that I’m incorporating into the story. But it won’t be ready til it’s ready.

In the meantime, you should definitely subscribe to updates here.

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Too many apps and services treat bandwidth as an unconstrained, ubiquitous resource. We think that’s wrong, for a number of reasons.

So early on in latakoo’s development, we decided to compress video before sending it to the cloud. We harnessed the fact that computers are faster and more powerful than they’ve ever been, and decided to trade a more difficult development process for a much easier user experience. It’s possible to make video sizes much smaller while protecting quality, and as a result, that 2Gb uncompressed HD file could be sent in minutes over a 3G connection, without significantly affecting your bandwidth bill.

You can read the whole post over here.

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