Rightly or wrongly, I’ve felt that, although we’re more or less drowning in an ocean of inanity and disinformation, the best way for me to help with that issue is probably not by attempting to dilute the ocean with what I hope might pass for wit or even wisdom in some circles, and hopefully appear as less than complete inanity in others.

Of course, one person’s inanity is another person’s deeply personal and touching remarks, and the debate over what qualifies as “disinformation” will probably go on forever, although arguably it’s something worth debating, and I may have a few words to say on that subject at some stage in the future.

Now, apart from having so many other things I need to do, the reason I’ve been so quiet here is that I felt if I was going to say anything new, it ought to be something important, which is why I’m a little ashamed that my only post since the Feb 22 quake that (quite literally) upended our existence, which was already in a somewhat unstable state it has to be said, was about Unthink, a start-up hoping to capitalise on the perennial outrage over the privacy problems that plague most consumer focused websites, and of late, Facebook and Google in particular, as the largest incumbent aggregators of our collective inanity and disinformation.

Now, it’s entirely possible their startup adventure began with noble intent, and I hope it ends that way, but I do not see much chance that it’s actually going to work out for them. Facebook is the world’s best example of a “network-effect” start-up. People log into social networks because their friends are there, and all the privacy and control in the world isn’t going to interest anyone unless there is a sufficiently large audience of friends and family there to treat our inanities as deeply personal and touching remarks.

Meanwhile, on the monetization front, the merchants of disinformation are really not interested in advertising to people who care so much about privacy and control that they’re willing to switch to a site that at least initially, will have almost nobody on it. The idea that being a “brand ambassador” (as opposed to another pair of eyeballs for the advertisers) will somehow be sufficiently appealing to people that they’ll switch over and bring their friends also seems a little hopeful if you ask me.

And of course, the people who really do care about such things have other alternatives they already find more appealing – such as Diaspora nodes, which add such interesting adjectives as “distributed” and “open” to the promises of privacy and (one hopes) proper personalization.

I must admit, I found Unthink initially appealing, as did, apparently, Mr Fry. But I imagine that he, like myself, eventually decided that as in the parable of New Coke, a sip test is an insufficient indicator of an audience’s underlying desire for a bold and brash new flavour of an otherwise familiar product.

My best wishes to the Unkthink crew in their attempt to prove the doubters, such as myself, absolutely wrong, and eventually rise up to replace our current over-centralised consumer-grade conversation hub(s) with something newer and shinier at their own URL, but for me at least, the shine has worn off before I even get around to logging in, which I may or may not do at some time in the near future.

As, according to comments on Techcrunch today, they are finally into limited beta, and the rush to see what US$2.5m in start-up capital and some well deserved resentment towards the status quo can buy you in terms of traction has already crashed their servers, or at least, timed them out.

So instead of joining the Unthinking masses I’d best get back to my own little start-up, which managed to raise about a fiftieth of their pre-launch investment before we lost steam trying to build an IE6 version, and had to switch to bootstrapping in order to pay our bills (want a website? Or a browser add-on? We actually build pretty good ones..), in the hope that if we hang in there we’ll finally turn our often appreciated and occasionally acclaimed free (and eventually, freemium) products, with well over 3m downloads between them now (did I mention we have the 21st most popular Safari Addon according to extensions.apple.com?), into a sustainable business, which sometimes I feel ought to be inevitable, but for some reason I keep on inventing and innovating away on new ideas in private rather than doubling down and delivering on our existing products in public, and that really does have to change.

So I hope I’ll be back to blogging more often sometime soon, and with some worthwhile changes to announce. I think know we’ve got some serious potential, and despite the moderate irony you might have detected in my use of the words “hope” and “change”, I nevertheless still have hope that we, and for that matter the much maligned Obama Administration, can deliver you up some sustainable and successful innovation in the years to come, despite the obscure, and occasionally more obvious obstacles we all too often face, often of my own making, that are usually of not much interest to anyone, but real enough for us.

Er, ok, if you’ll bear with me, before I damn them with feint praise, I feel I should point out that the Obama Administration probably have more hidden accomplishments than you might have previously imagined, but with a congress that finds some way to block almost their every move, and in a media environment where the majority of viewer attention still goes to the “news” station that is somehow still saluting, and in some cases, even employing, the has-been salespeople for arguably the biggest foreign policy disaster of all time, you know, that one with projected costs of well over 3 trillion at this point, which, of course, turned out to be cheaper than their colossal failures on the domestic policy front (you know, the ones that have led to people occupying Wall St lately) – I think you all know what “news” channel I’m referring to here – is currently casting considerable doubts on the merits of the latest implementation of the Obama doctrine, you know, that multilateral mission that cost no American lives, didn’t require torturing anyone at all, created no new reasons for masses of Middle Eastern people to turn into potential terrorists (at least, that I’m aware of), has cost well under a thousandth of the price of another Iraq style operation, and arguably delivered more hope for the Libyan people than the Iraqis ever got from Team Bush, well, you’d have to say any hope team Obama might have had for an appropriate level of appreciation in next year’s elections must now be somewhere between modest, and minuscule. Which is unfortunate, in my opinion, anyway.

They’ll keep on trying I’m sure. And so will I. Double down. Deliver. I’ll do my best.

Just finally, let me point out that, by contrast, Karl always delivers, and generally in double quick time. If you need some great HTML5 work done fast, or a brilliant browser add-on that more than lives up to your expectations, well, his time is currently available and at a very fair price – at least until I finally figure out the 500 other things you need to make a successful start-up function properly – starting with focus, focus, focus.

Well, if you’ve made it this far you deserve more than a penny for you thoughts, and although I can’t promise to pay you back immediately, I’d be very eager to hear them.

There were many excellent talks of both a technical and general nature – leaning heavily towards the technical, but that more or less suited the participants (I won’t say ‘audience’ because at an unconference there is no real seperation between organizers, presenters and audience!)

At some point we all gathered ourselves together to show solidarity with the 120 people in Wellington hashing out the PublicACTA declaration that day, via twitter. It was unfortunate that we’d already announced the date for the barcamp by the time PublicACTA was announced, as there were certainly several people who would have liked to have gone to both events (including moi!).

#bcchch showing their support for #PublicACTA

As one of the nominal unorganizers of this particular unconference, I’d particularly like to thank CII for hosting the event, my co-unorganizer Pete for doing much of the publicity, getting the ball rolling, and buying the beer, Stephen for organizing the Pizza and doing much of the MC work once things got going, and everyone who showed up, got into the spirit of things, and shared a great day of talks with us, despite it being nice and sunny outside!

A few highlights of the barcamp for me included:

Rus Werner from CrowdFusion gave us a quick demo of how to put together a website using the CrowdFusion framework, which looks to be a highly advanced content management system targeted at large group blogs, but capable of supporting all sorts of content management scenarios. Rus is the only NZ based developer, the rest of the team were in LA that day to put their latest client live – TMZ – which is one heck of a big site.

We were very pleased to have CJ down from Wellington and she joined her fellow Hitlab member Rob Ramsay to talk about a really fascinating idea they’ve had for combining augmented reality and the DigitalNZ APIs into a new kind of mobile-web game. Actually it appears to have got a long way past just being an ‘idea’ and we’re eagerly looking forward to seeing this come to life later this year.

Later on in the day Pete wowed us with his demonstration of what’s possible with HTML5 and Webkit, culminating with a live demo of the Quake engine running at 30fps *in the browser* – I had already heard about this awesome demo (done by some Google guys to show off what’s possible with HTML5 these days), but it’s another thing to actually see it running.

It was great to hear that we have a Camino developer in Christchurch, and Chris gave us an update on the Camino project, entitled ‘Not dead yet!’ or something along those lines. I asked about what it might take to get extensions into Camino, and he seemed open to the concept. My feeling is that it will be best be done using the new Mozilla Jetpack framework, as that does not use any XUL, which Camino avoids in favour of native Mac ‘Cocoa‘ componentry.

My old friend Neil from Screaming Duck software talked about his new lightweight browser plugin (plugin as in something like Flash, rather than an extension like Interclue) ‘thefbi‘ that allows for a subset of native x86 code to run inside a sandbox in the browser. I think there may well be a niche there despite the fact that HTML5 may make most plugins irrelevant in the long run (and many of us would be very happy about that).

Andrew from Morningstar Security gave an overview of the huge scan of NZ based ‘websites’ he originally presented at the last Kiwicon. Apparently lots of really crazy stuff has public facing content on Port 80 these days – Printers, Voip-phones, drilling equipment, you name it. Much of this stuff should only be available behind a firewall or at least a login, but as you would expect, this is not always the case.

Personally I did a presentation about “Personal Idea Management” and although it was ok, I put it together in a bit of a rush and didn’t really get in all the “ideas about ideas” that I wanted to. I got some good feedback afterwards and I look forward to reworking the presentation and giving it another go sometime in the future. Maybe as a Pecha Kucha talk, or at another unconference. At the very least I’ll make a blog post on the subject at some stage! For this talk I was mainly talking about the special class of ideas that could form the core of new tech projects (or even new startups), which is a type I am particularly prone to. This is a pretty tiny subset of the general field of “ideas”, and although in an ideal world one might have software custom designed to help out with it, it’s probably going to be handled mainly within the standard note-taking / brainstorming apps such as Mindmappers, Hierarchical Outliners, and Personal Wikis. I have tried a bunch of these and have never quite settled on one I’m totally happy with, or a system that was in any way ideal, but working on this presentation and the feedback I got afterwards has definitely given me some ideas and I look forward to trying them out. Since the presentation I’ve had two new ideas for iPad apps, and they will join the backlog of 50+ things we could be building if we had any spare capacity right now. Certainly I look forward to the day when some of that backlog hits the front burner!

Many of the folks at the barcamp said we should have another one soon – which hopefully means “within the next year”! I may or may not still be living in Christchurch at the time, but I will try to be there regardless! Remember there’s nothing stopping anyone from getting another barcamp ball rolling at any time, anywhere. Come up with the nugget of a plan, make a post to barcamp.org about it, tell your friends, and you’re on your way! I may make another “lessons learned” post with a few hints about what went right for us and what went wrong this time around, but really all the info you need is at barcamp.org, and if I do make that post I’ll try to find a place for those thoughts there as well.

Anyone who missed Barcamp but would like to present a tech talk in an informal setting, I encourage you to come along to a Spacecraft gathering, and let people know in advance what you’ll be talking about. There are also the monthly TVIC tech dinners – the last one was very good with possibly as many as 20 geeks in attendance.

I had a couple ideas of my own that I thought might fit the bill, and I managed to get one of them out of my head in sufficient detail to submit*. Amazingly, my idea seems to have ended up in the 16 Idea Themes that over 3000 Googlers distilled from over 150,000 submissions!

My submission was one of the two bundled into this theme (other themes had as many as 6 relevant submissions)

As you might imagine, I’m pretty stoked. Of course, “Enable people to submit bug reports about problems in the real world” is just the first line of a longer submission – not too long – Google wisely required everyone to refine their submission to answering 6 short questions and supplying an optional short video. Good thing, given they got 150,000+ ideas to read through!

Three things you might be wondering at this point:

Surely this isn’t a new idea?

It’s certainly not a new idea in 2009. There a lot of similar projects underway right now. One of my friends was telling me about his at the Digital NZ hackfest just the other day. A recent silicon valley demo contest even featured a SaaS version of the idea, Citysourced, targeted at American Cities, and it was noted as one of the few potentially world-changing products among the 50 launches. It probably wasn’t a new idea when I submitted it for this 10^100 contest a year ago, although I hadn’t heard of anyone else doing it back then, and I also doubt it was a new idea when I submitted it for an informal blog post based competition 6 months before that (ironically, I was trying to win a ticket to Google I/O, and missed out!). Way back when I first thought of it, circa 2005, it may have been vaguely original, but there was little point in implementing such a project back then because cellphones with GPS didn’t actually exist at that stage, so it ended up on the backburner with the other 5-10 “big ideas” I usually have fighting to get out of my pile-o-notes and into some sort of coherent project plan.

Should I vote for Seth’s idea?

Well, the idea behind the competition is to help as many people as possible. So pick the idea theme you think will do that. However, here’s why it might be worth picking my one: Cellphones with cameras** will likely be more or less ubiquitous in 5-15 years, we all share an environment that has it’s occasional problems, and people who want to know about those problems (and pretty soon, autonomous systems will want to know too), and the usual ways in which information about these problems is transmitted, routed, stored, organised and displayed is really inefficient and fragmented compared to what could be enabled with todays technology, so a good implementation of this idea would eventually help everyone on the planet. So the real question is, could a project sponsored by Google in the next year or so create a significantly better outcome than would be achieved by leaving it to other players in this space***? And how does the importance of getting this done right, sooner rather than later, stack up against the other 15 big ideas? I may post a follow up considering one or both of these questions, but this post is getting long enough already.

Why isn’t Seth’s (or anyone else’s) name mentioned in this list?

I was initially a bit disappointed about that, but I think they quite rightly want people to focus on the ideas rather than the people who submitted them. I was also initially disappointed that they didn’t link the submission titles to copies of the complete submissions, but I guess the point is to get as many people as possible to read all 16 ideas and then vote, and linking to a bunch of extra information would not have helped! On the other hand, after the voting process is over and the “final five” are found, I hope Google will provide more information about the individual submissions and submitters.

In conclusion, go vote!

PS: I made my final submission in a bit of a hurry, typing it direct into Google’s webform, and wouldn’t you know it, when I went to recover the text I’d entered using Lazarus I discovered I didn’t have it installed in the browser I was using! Hopefully Google will send me a copy of my submission even if it doesn’t make it into the final 5 – I’d like to blog it for posterity.

PPS: If you actually managed to read this far, why not sign up for my RSS feed?

* I’m working on a blog post that explains the other idea, which I still think is well worth doing.
** GPS helps, but isn’t essential, phones can do a reasonable job of nailing down location using signal triangulation.
*** Of course, some of them would probably be invited to answer Google’s RFP, and an ideal solution would probably allow for open and distributed interop between both new and existing players in this space.

Among the various hacks there was an iPhone app and a Drupal module, and I got most of the way through building a Search Plugin for Firefox and IE, which is a relatively trivial hack in theory but I’d never built one before so it was a useful learning experience.

Unlike fully blown browser extensions such as Interclue or Lazarus, search plugins are just an xml file that when loaded using a special javascript method (only available in certain browsers, such as Firefox 2+ and IE7+) will cause your browser to create another search provider for the search box, which by default in Firefox only has a few general purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo available, and a few site specific ones such as Wikipedia. But anyone can create a new search plugin for the search on their website, and getting users to install it can mean that they come back to your website more often.

I found a few little niggles, such as that the xml file had to be served up with the right MIME type by the webserver, and that the best way to provide the icon was using a “Data URI” – essentially a way of encoding an image using text. Fortunately Hixie has a kitchen for that.

My attempt is here, and in theory it should install fine in IE7+ and Firefox2+ by clicking the link on this page, but so far, it doesn’t, and I’m not quite sure why. I’ll update this post once I’ve fixed it! [update: fixed]

DigitalNZ has a “roll your own search engine” system set up for their growing collection of Digital Kiwiana, and it should be simple enough to extend that system to build a search plugin for each derived engine, since they will share the same pattern apart from the target URLs. There are also standards for search completion (guessing what you want to search for) and autodiscovery. I’ll make another post in a couple of days once I’ve had a chance to figure it out properly.

[updated because I forgot their mission was only to index the metadata, the digitizing and putting online bit is up to the contributors and partner organizations]