Iggi

A quick micropublishing hack for BigShinyThing. Takes a friendfeed lifestream, and takes certain categories of entry and auto-twitters them. Twitter and FF are increasingly important to us as distribution…

Lifestreaming Malarky

Ok, so I haven’t added anything here since November. Yawn. Doesn’t mean I haven’ been busy doing things — just haven’t felt inclined to be writing them up. That might change. Or not. In any case, I’ve added a lifestreaming thang here to Cluster so you can see what I’ve been up to. In fact, I’ll probably even change the default RSS feed from here so you pick that up instead of the one generated from postings (as the lifestream should include those as well if it’s working as it should)… until then, point your RSS reader at FriendFeed.

Tall Giants

Or, to put it elsewise: 1675: “If I have seen further [than certain other men] it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” 2007: Once you see the value of giants, it’s a small step to notice that some giants are taller than others. The tallest giants are networked communities — and they are legion. Social media is the fastest way to get access up on those shoulders, head in the Cloud. Up where the new things happen.

Dark Energies

Businesses adopting emergent media tools to canonify tacit knowledge are going to get much much more than they expect…

Days Like These

Every day, I receive emails, newsletters and catalogues informing me about some small subset of the thousands of potentially interesting things on in London. If I’m really paying attention in the moment, I might actually get around to typing some of them into my ipaq and maybe even get around to booking. More usually, though, the moment that I see the information is a moment when my attention is mostly occupied with something else: looking though email for an important messsage from a client, or opening letters in the hope of finding a long-chased invoice. Most event invitations simply get …

(Not Necessarily) Talking ’Bout a Revolution

[adapted from an email exchange with Axel at SMLXL] It’s funny how bottom-up, transformative organisational change is usually portrayed as a gung-ho, networked culture youth thing… When I worked for (as it then was) Yamatake-Honeywell in Tokyo, we used to go out to places like the Nissan car factories, where the kaizen quality control systems were entirely bottom up — individual guys on the line had almost complete freedom to find ways of improving process, and the organisation had very well organised systems and communities in the corporate hierarchy to make sure that those tweaks and improvements got picked up, …

VFD

Rain on the terrace dissuades me from going outside today. Strangely entertained by the Wikipedia Votes For Deletion Notes.

Sensing and Modeling Human Networks

And from the INSA list: “[…] the first experiment in learning the face-to-face communication patterns of a large group by equipping the people within the community with wearable sensing devices. The main contribution of this thesis is to have demonstrated the feasibility of learning social interactions from raw sensory data. In this thesis we have presented a framework for automatic modeling of face-to-face interactions, starting from the data collection methods and working up to computational methods for learning the structure and dynamics of social networks.” I haven’t read this yet. Looks interesting.

Ambient Orb

Tim points this one out. This is exactly what I mean by glanceware. That it is entirely non-linguistic is even better. Know that you know something, without necessarily being aware how you know it. Their Stock Orb is exactly what I was proposing here.

Brand Seduction/spambod

There’s a lot of hype surrounding the current crop of Social Networking applications (LinkedIn, Friendster, Huminity etc.) But I’m wondering about a couple of issues. The first, is that there are too many of these systems, with no common architecture. How many times do I want to have to code my social network? Possibly once, probably not at all — let the software work it out for itself. Which is why I think Friend-Of-A-Friend architectures, which allow various spiders to work out the links for themselves, are ultimately better than an archipelago of unlinked proprietary systems. The other concern is …