Tag : technology

Last night I went along to the first Ad Hoc enquiries. It's a new approach to doing an event. Someone is invited to present on a topic within the broad sphere of innovation in the public sector, a diverse mix of people are selected to come along, have supper and frankly discuss and critique the topic of the day.

As with most social online applications, you can think of the data as more like a graph than very simple objects that stand alone. This kind of an application and data is my favourite kind of system to architect and here is why. I warn you, this might get geeky..

Of all the things I love to read, long form is my favourite

I have enjoyed long form journalism for a very long time. I like a story that's lengthy enough to grow familiar: events I can dread or anticipate, characters I can get to know and watch change. I like going on that journey.

Long form used to be a bit of a rare beast, but this has changed over the past year. There are more places to get your long form fix these days, and more and more of them are online.

Curiously enough, while the rest of the publishing industry endures a series of beatings from the world wide web, things in the long form corner are starting to look brighter. 

I am liking the idea of 'Meta-products'. What is a meta-product? The best  examples are Nike+, the fabulously daft Nabaztag and, more recently, Alertme. Generally speaking they're physical objects, rooted in networked technology that are driven by mobile and web services. There is nothing new about this idea, it's roots are well established in many sci-fi and computer science paradigms like ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing or more broadly the Internet of Things. 

A somewhat intentionally late entry to the question of “5 things you’re thinking about right now“:

1. The Opposite of Foursquare

Foursquare is huge, check-ins are big, but I wouldn’t play that game or use that service. Whilst the idea is sound and people will still use the service, I find the concept of what the network looks like to FourSquare so much more interesting. When I check-in on Foursquare, what does that look like? And how does the map of London, for example, change during the day as people check in and drop offline.

Given that a lot of people are not going to use Foursquare because each contact with the network compromises their privacy and reveals more and more information about them, I think there’s a hard limit to how successful the idea can be. However, the opposite of foursquare, focussing on the shape of the network rather than the individuals connecting to it, removes that limit. Each time I check in, rather than just appending my +1 to a long list of identical entries, I disrupt the fabric of the network and make it better. I think a lot about the way “massively multiplayer” games are anything but, and flatter to deceive on the promise of joining a virtual, alternate world. Flipping the idea of Foursquare and looking at the network as a constantly evolving organism has a lot of potential for fun, games and stories, and that’s what I’m thinking about right now.

There’s nothing like a dose of Kevin Kelly to blast away any weak thoughts that might start creeping into one’s brain after reading something like this super-alarmist article in the NY Times.

The proliferation of computer software and the internet has brought many powerful tools to the masses.

From desktop publishing to cheap and powerful design tools, from affordable HD cameras to global publishing platforms such as blogs and YouTube, and self-publishing and self-marketing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, technology has given power to the amateur and the semi-professional — the power to create media and content that can been seen by millions of people, quickly, cheaply, whenever and wherever.

Here’s a phrase I’ve been reading a lot on blogs and comments recently:

“I’m finally through with Facebook. Seriously, I’ve made my mind up and I’m going to quit (I haven’t yet, but it’s getting closer every day.)”

It’s sad. They sound a bit like smokers when they’ve got to the stage where they hate cigarettes but they can’t give up.

I should know. Somewhat shamefully, I am a smoker and I’ve been on Facebook since 2006.

I’ve been working on an open source SaaS solution for Rails over Christmas called Saasy (pronouced “sarrsy” – using a posh voice).

Saasy provides:

• Subscription management
• Recurring billing
• Credit card management
• User authentication and SSO
• Mailers for invoices etc

Fonts can be a developer’s nightmare if they’re not one of the ones installed on the user’s machine. There are alternatives such as sIFR and typeface.js but they’re quite resource intensive – we had to remove sIFR for that reason.