Tech Related

Chris Brogan recently wrote a list of one hundred things he would like people to blog about and I would like to make my way through the list. It may take 100 days but it may take fewer. It depends on how busy I get and what interesting things are there to sidetrack me. The first question is about Facebook and how we use it as individuals. In order to answer that question i must describe the four groups of friends I have on the website. The first group is made up of many friends I have met over the last three years. This includes university friends for the most part. Within this group of friends are many complex friendships with many overlaps between networks of friends and there is a true sense of community in the real world sense. We share photographs, videos, events and more. There is a communal history which makes for some insider jokes. Groups such as “The curse of the N18” reflect how this network of friends has grown use to catching a nightbus home after a long night of fun in the centre of London. If you’ve ever taken the bus you’ll understand why the group gets such a name. The second network of friends is made up of friends I’ve known for more than three year but may not have seen for a decade. These are the highschool friends from life in Switzerland. Almost every single one of these friends has been to study at University and completed that phase of life and is now moving into the professional life. They are spread globally although there are the occasional communal group meetings that occur where we all meetup. This group is part of the International community and they are not too hard to identify. The third group of friends are those I know through other social networking websites. This group is about people whom I got to know through websites such as the Flipside back in the days when the Internet and World Wide Web were the realm of anonimity. Everyone had a nickname but through facebook that nickname has disappeared. The last group is that of people I have met only briefly and know relatively little about. This is due to two reasons in particular. The first of these is that “we randomly facebooked each other” or simply that we met and chatted for a few minutes in real life without taking it any further so far. What this means is that Facebook, for the most part, is a network of close friends that I have known for a number of hours in the real world. They are people I have shared adventures and travel with, good nights out and many boring/interesting lectures with. As a result of this keeping up to date with what they are doing allows me to see what we have achieved  as a group of friends. In brief I use Facebook almost exclusively to keep up to date with what real life friends are doing thus the reason for which I avoid adding “randoms”.

Content creation and distribution has become far cheaper than it was in the past. Whereas in the past you’d have tons of equipment to create television programs today the barriers to entry are lower as a result of which the cult of the amateur is allowed to flourish. As the technology is adopted by more people those who have never studied the theorie point and shoot. What this means is that there is a huge amount of mediocrity on the web. Some like to say that it’s ninety nine percent crap and they’d be right. Why else use a search engine? The cult of the amateur is a great thing because it encourages those who have no training to produce content for others to enjoy. The problem is that they’ve had no training. As a result they’re sloppy. They don’t shoot b-roll. They don’t edit anything and then they put it on the web. What’s worse is that it’s long. Andrew Keen concentrated on audio and really wanted it to promote the sharing of great works and high culture. Instead there has been a steady rise in low culture. This is a debate that goes back to the days of Adorno when public literacy for all became a hot topic. Over time the general level of knowledge increased and so the natural balance returned. Professional journalists are investigative, going out and doing their own research before digesting this information out and writing their pieces. They have an in-depth knowledge of their topic and rather than go off on tangents they are going to backup everything they say with facts. I listened to a woman present her theories about one topic a few days ago and she always said “I did this” and “I did that”, a few days letter I listened to journalists, ambassadors and other professionals speak about how “we did these things” and “we did those things”. They often looked at creating a sense of a community or group of people working on an idea. The point is that whilst everyone has opinions which they want to share not all of them have the credentials to provide the content. Whilst as individuals our knowledge is not detailed enough to be of value if all of us work together towards a common goal then that work is of a greater value, hence the reason behind wikipedia’s success as a resource. During the Andrew Keen conversation talent was discussed and whether it is natural or whether it takes years to aquire. The discussion focused on the gatekeepers and how they were there to find talent, polish it and then commercialise it. He saw the value of transparency for trust. Both evidence and backing up the information help make resources more reliable. As a student you learn that there is no point in writing something down until you have found someone to backup your sentiment with research. Andrew Keen, to get a definite rise out of the crowd referred to bloggers as a mob and who can blame him. Whilst Journalists go out and interview people and do a lot of background research before writing about their topic of interest bloggers tend to go on what others have written. Whilst listening to this it brought up thoughts about how blogging would be better for content analysis since it is easier to read a collection of articles and write about them than to go out and get access to all those of interest. Andrew Keen made the remark that many blogs do not have original content, recycling what they found on a variety of resources. At one point Keen did accept that his book was written tongue in cheek and that whilst the book had a lot of success in Canada and England the Americans did not understand his point of view. He went on to say that he knew who he was writing it against rather than who he was writing it for. He said that it was a response to digital eutopians. At this point he made clear that he was not a technological determinist but a social one. In other words he believes that people, rather than technology determine the type of life and interaction we have with our environment. Towards the end of his conversation he spoke about web 3.0 as the rediscovery of expertise and professionalism, point which agrees with one of my earlier posts. He wanted the information economy to be about distributed trusted content. He also wanted it to be given a solid backbone. During the Q&A one person asked him whether he was a troll searching to annoy people through the writing of his book. He answered humourously that bloggers don’t read books. It was a clear and deliberate provocation but it was clear that he meant this as a joke rather than a direct attack. I don’t agree with all of the points made by Andrew Keen but he does make some interesting and valid points about the future of the media. it’s something that we must all think about. Culture production is an important aspect of our lives and it would be a shame, after centuries of hard work, to promote works of mediocrity. Finally if you would like to listen to the speech in person it can be found at this address

Playing with technology is fun especially when you could fit it into your shirt pocket. The ipod s one such device. it fits easily into the pocket and can play video, allow for the viewing of photos and more. I also like the user interface, whether the fact the screen is split into text on the left and images on the right or the ability to search through songs and such. Two of it’s disadvantages are the small click wheel. Whilst easy to get used to it may leave some people with broader fingers slightly frustrated. Another flaw is that when video is dark there’s no image. It’s only good for normally lit subjects. That’s a shame since you’re always in the mood for Film noire on the tube. The ipod classic has a newer user interface than the ipod I’m using at the moment and the search option is there. The most interesting feature is still the size of the hard drive  in relation to the device. I’d like to get a nano because it’s so small that for a night out it’s more appropriate than the classic but the classic is interesting when you’re in need of a data backup of your laptop for example. My laptop drive is the same as the larger classic so theoretically it’d be a good alternative. Of course small drives are more fragile so less dependable over time.

warzabidul - Jan 0, 2009

Except that I haven’t played it in months by now.

Travian is one of those games you would have loved to play after reading a few Asterix comics. There are three civilisations you can be, Gaul, Roman or Teuton. Each player starts off with one village and expands from there. There are four types of resources. These are wood, clay, iron and wheat. As your village begins you need to decide on what resources you want to grow. Click on the land type and you will see a display with the amount of time it will take for the order to be completed. The next step is to look at your town. Build a granery, a cranny, a warehouse and other buildings that make a village what it is. Overtime as your buildings improve so the town is large enough for more buildings. These are stables, palaces, residences for kings and more. Getting your village to expand is just one step. The next step is to make sure that you’re safe. Around you are many other villages and some of these players have been playing for a number of months. As a result they have amassed many resources and alliances. They will attack and pillage you therefore you must defend your land with troops. As you expand and form alliances so the game becomes more interesting. At this point you are competing not just as a village but as alliances to see which can be the most prestigious. It’s a fun game, reminiscient of such games as Civilization amongst others. If you need a two minute break whilst working on a long project then this may be the game for you. I’ve enjoyed it and so may you.

According to recent articles myspace is losing user share in relation Facebook but this is not necessarily a bad thing. When you think of facebook you know that it’s a glorified phonebook therefore everyone “needs” to use it to remain in the loop. In contrast Myspace is a specialised music sharing site for artists and creators of music to come together and collaborate as members of the same art form. As a result of many users leaving myspace for other social networking websites so Myspace will have far less noise, in other words extra chatter that does not contribute to the appreciation of music. I for one have found myself using Myspace slightly more due to certain bands using the website. There are a hardcore group of people that are part of many social networks at once and they are able to cope with the demands. Most people spend twenty minutes in front of facebook getting up to date with their friends before disappearing.  “MySpace’s lead in terms of “attention” is almost embarrassing: it scores 10.79% against Facebook’s 1.67%.” source. People look at more content on Myspace than Facebook and user involvement is what counts to advertisers. Myspace is good for the sharing of music you create without people having to install extra api whilst Facebook is personalised by adding api and hoping that your friends install the same. Both will co-exist happily for another few months whilst waiting for the next site of interest.

Everyday at least one friend has one of their friends lose their mobile phone and all numbers on that device. As a result you find that there are hundreds of groups with the title “named individual has lost their phone” where everyone is expected to post their mobile number for quick synchronisation. It would be quite simple to implement. As everyone adds their contact details into the database and as you acknowledge that those in your contact list are your friends you could develop an api that would allow you to download all that information straight to your phone whether HTC, motorola or nokia. It’d be an interesting application to have.  It would also slow down the rate of “i lost my phone” which in itself would be a great improvement.

When the VMA are advertised everywhere and where there is easy access to information about everything that is going on around the world MTV appears short sighted. If you’ve got an award ceremony that you’re telling the world about then you’d better give the world access to all the footage for the simple reason that you’re missing a good advertising opportunity. By restricting access to the footage two things are happening. You’re frustrating the users that have heard bad things about the performance and how bad it was and you’re missing the hype wagon that would follow behind such an event taking place. Those in charge of such channels should take the time to take advantage of the global reach especially with a medium such as a world wide web page.

If you’re the head of a company that’s doing as well as Apple there’s something you’ve got to be admired for. It’s the ability to sell a phone with no keyboard and get people to love it. It’s also about selling it for $599 and taking it back down to $399. What appears to be an act of generosity is a great PR stunt. Everyone that got an iphone and saw the price drop was angry so they wrote complaining. Steve jobs then “decided” to take the price down. The effect of such a move is clear. He’s proved to his shareholders that the market was ready for a device that was $200 higher than it needed to be. Investors have a boost in confidence in the company and he gets glowing reviews from the blogosphere.

Playing with technology is a great way of learning new skills but occasionaly you are let down by it. This happened to me tonight when I wanted to do episode four of twittervox. The entire day I had an excellent connection and things were downloading at a good speed. Wait until it’s time for twitter vox and the connection crashed down to just 500 bytes per second up and 1.5 kilobytes per second up. That’s hardly enough to do text chat. There are two reasons why this problem may occur. The first of these is that someone is downloading torrents and this is eating up all the bandwidth. The second option is that because this home is using a cable rather than adsl connection the speed ebbs and flows according to how many people are using the connection. Tomorrow at some point during the day I will record some answers to the various points in such a manner that I will have participated even if it’s with a lag of several hours. If I can’t use the technology when I want then there is so much redundancy that I will use other methods.