Sethop’s Interesting Times

BarCampChristchurch was very cool. Already looking forward to the next one! I’ve had this post under construction for a while now, just been completely flat out for the past couple weeks.

I ended being MC by default, which is a pretty unfamiliar sort of role for me, but Ben was busy liveblogging and Stephen was running the laptop finding interesting content to go along with the talks, so I ended up being the one doing the talking between talks. The job was to watch the clock and figure out when and how to call time on each speaker, and since we had a lot of interesting people there and lots of good questions being asked, it was tricky. Didn’t completely fluff it. Everyone seemed to have a good time anyway.

A few notes on some of the presentations:

Ben didn’t quite manage the Steve Jobs effect since we couldn’t make the air-pointer driver work with Powerpoint 2007, but it was an excellent presentation on SaaS nonetheless, probably the best of the day from my perspective. And he thought he wouldn’t be geeky enough!

The lads from SLI definitely had the best schwag. Actually I think they had the only schwag. They also brought their projector which came in handy. It’s good to know there are some well financed web companies in Christchurch - hopefully Interclue will join them in that regard sometime soon. They’re hiring, by the way.

Marek showed off his new OpenID provider. OpenID was very much on the menu at BarCampWellington as well. There was some good debate about the pros and cons at both. I think it’s definitely an important standard, but it may take a while to catch on with the users. I hear that they have taken it off the menu for Firefox 3 which is a shame.

We chatting about hardware gadgets in an open session, with Phil telling us about Arduino and Eric Woods mentioning his recent investigations into the world of smartphones, and his conclusion that the best value to be had right now was importing a new Treo 650 from the states, for about NZ$300. I have a Treo 650 and I can confidently say it’s excellent value at that price, but the two things that really irritate me are the lack of 3G data - GPRS ping times are awful - and the camera being a poxy 640×480 that doesn’t work well indoors. The photo I’ve used here is an example of that. The sound recording for video is also pretty poor. Also if you want to use it as an alarm clock you’ll need to install an app, and most of the cost money. Google Maps works moderately well on it tho, and doesn’t cost money.

Near the end we remembered we hadn’t done the 3 word intro’s! A week later, the same thing happened at BarCampWellington! You’d think if anyone would have remembered to point it out at the time it would have been me, but my memory is reasonably atrocious at times. At Barcamp Christchurch we mixed 3 word intro’s with short talks by the people not wanting a half hour slot. Eg
Isaac from Wowza gave us a bit of a chat about user-centric data modelling that he expanded on here.

As a Finale, Roger Bays gave us a demonstration of his phenomenal augmented reality artwork, Semaphore. He was able to demonstrate using a monitor rather than using a headset like he did when he one the People’s Choice award at a recent exhibtion featuring 50+ artists (I think). I’m really looking forward to the day when they get this sort of thing working with descrete, affordable, non-bulky, wifi enabled dataglasses.

All in all, although I think in retrospect we should have given ourselves a few more weeks to prepare, and done it over a weekend, it was a really good day for the Chch tech scene and I hope it inspires more gatherings of it’s like as soon as we can organise them. Don’t forget to sign up to the TVIC mailing list to find out more about geek gatherings in Christchurch.

I recently ran across the web based Mindmeister while reading about the proceedings of a recent NZKM conference on the blog of the prolific Michael Sampson. The map seen there that inspired me was drawn by my old friend Julian Carver who I really must get back in touch with. It’s very cool, and it imports Freemind files, which is the free app I used for the map I did for my 2.0 talk. I feel much better having the map in a web-friendly format :-)

It’s pretty impressive how you can drag the nodes around and actually do one or two things you can’t do with Freemind, but there are definitely a few kinks to be worked out, eg I had problems when one node was on top of another, and kept selecting the one underneath. Printing also wasn’t too flash.

It’s way too big to use as an embed really, but I can’t resist playing around, so here it is. You can zoom from the bottom left and click through to the larger version from the bottom right.

[update: removed it - slowing down the page a bit much, I should probably get in touch with them with performance tips for embedded javascript widgets… Here’s a link to it tho - and if you haven’t seen Mindmeister in action, seriously check it out. Most impressive Ajax I’ve seen in ages]

Actually I’ve thought of another thing I could say when people ask what Web 3.0 means….Wittgenstein says “Meaning is Use” (roughly speaking) and therefore Web 3.0’s meaning is bound to whatever use people put that phrase to. In general, I think they use it to mean “Some funky web stuff that supposedly wasn’t part of Web 2.0″

Unfortunately the meaning of Web 2.0 is vastly more complicated, because people use the phrase for all sorts of purposes.

Along with Carl from e2-media I gave a talk on Web 2.0 tonight, to 20 or so folks from the Canterbury Software Cluster. Just 20 minutes each, and it was frightening how fast those minutes wizzed by.

I was particularly pleased that a few folks there told me that they’d been been using Interclue and enjoying it. Thanks very much to Dave Tinkler of Holliday Corporation for inviting me to speak and helping to steer me in the right direction as I began to run out of time!

It was good to have an excuse to talk about the 2.0 Big Picture for once. Normally I lose people in the first few sentences…for a more gentle introduction, I’ve got some great videos on my 2.0 page linked in my menu above.

Of course lots of folks wanted to know what I thought Web 2.0 really is, and I put forward my opinion that “Web 2.0 is what Tim O’Reilly says it is“. I’m at least half serious about that. Tim and his company have been the thought leaders of this revolution, almost as much as they’ve just been “Watching the alphageeks” as Tim calls it. Of course they wanted specifics, so I gave them Tim’s compact definition, which is:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

If I’d tried to give them the long version I would have been there all night…

Of course, I live in a slightly different universe to most folks, so I was somewhat thrown by the followup question “So, who is Tim O’Reilly anyway?”. This is why I love the web. We can explain these things with hyperlinks, and not slow down the information flow for the people who already know. Interclue makes it even better because you can view the main body content at the end of the hyperlinks in the context of the current page, without all the cruft around the outside of the page that could distract you off into the distance.

I wasn’t quite sure which bits of 2.0 the audience was going to be interested in, but I had faith in my ability to wing it, so I prepared a little mindmap of the various things 2.0ish that have caught my attention over the past couple of years (distracting me and slowing down the progress of Interclue quite considerably as a result). Unfortunately it’s a bit large. Click the image for a version large enough to actually read!

Also please note that this certainly isn’t a map of all things 2.0 - just the people, projects, platforms and protocols that I think I know a little bit about. And it’s not a complete map of those either.

I wish I’d had time to highlight the bits I find particularly interesting/important, hyperlink relevant articles, and add some more detail, but I’ll regard this as a starting point and post an update later. If anyone sees something they want to have a chat about, feel free to get in touch, or just leave a comment about something they’d like me to blog about in the future.

Ben, a very smart fellow Cantabrian who’s blogging up a storm about SaaS lately suggests my prediction of 5-10 years of useful life left in the standard email platform might be a little er, optimistic. Perhaps. But we live not just in interesting times, but accelerating times. Things change faster than they once did. I’ll stick by my aggressive prediction because I know I’ve been vague enough about what I’m really predicting to get away with it. ;-)

There are essentially two reasons I suggested that email as we know it, ie as based on SMTP/POP3/IMAP, will be gradually replaced with something better and browser/HTTP based. The first reason is that email is a significant source of pain for users and even worse for systems administrators. The second reason is that the existing plethora of clients, servers and gateway applications that deal with email means that it’s more or less impossible to make any significant upgrades across the ecosystem.

Ok, just looking at the pains for users, here are some things that are wrong with email at the moment. The list of pains for the poor benighted sysadmins is just as long, but I just don’t have time right now (and may not have time for weeks, already wasted too much time on this really, Interclue really needs 150% of my attention at the moment)

Security - it’s too much hassle, and most people just can’t be bothered. Microsoft, for some unknown reason, doesn’t want Outlook to have PGP, most PGP/GPG solutions for Windows are either flaky or a pain to set up, and they’re not all compatible with eachother. Alternative mail security solutions exist but aren’t as common and are probably just as hard to set up.

File Attachments - The brokeness of email attachments has led to about a bazillion online services that try to make this bit easier.

Confirmations - you can ask for a confirmation that someone’s read a bit of mail, but they don’t have to send it. Frankly I’d just like a confirmation that they *got* the mail and it didn’t end up in a spam/virus filter somewhere.

Lock-ins - using your ISP’s provided email address locks you into that ISP, because they don’t want to risk losing emails from long lost friends. ISPs love this. Ditto hotmail/gmail/etc. Switching mail clients can be just as much of a pain due to the problems of getting all your mail archives in one place so you can search them.

Mobile email - a pain, and remarkably inconsistent. Email from a friend of mine in the UK will usually end up in my spam filter because it has some unusual stuff in the headers or whatever.

“Rich” email - if you use HTML in mail it can trigger spam filters, and you are less able to rely on it getting to the other end. To make matters worse (well, actually there are pros and cons) Outlook 2007 changed the layout engine it uses for rendering HTML mail, to something more secure but it increases the difficulty of getting something in the right format.

Viruses - Existing email protocols make it to easy for them to spread - for instance by allowing them to fake the sender header so that you have no idea who sent you the virus.

Spam - The problems regarding spam, well, you could write a book on them. Sure, if you want people to be able to contact people who aren’t already on their list of contacts, or you want the ability to contact people anonymously, then there will always be spam, but existing email protocols and practices just make it way too easy.

Antispam - Almost as irritating as spam is all the problems that can result from the security measures taken by various users and systems to stop spam from getting in, which often get in the way of legitimate email as well.

Depending on the situation you’re in, you might also have trouble with Search, Archiving, Backups, Filtering, File corruption, Software Updates, Virus Checkers…there are a lot of things that can go wrong or were designed wrong with desktop email clients. Some webmail clients are just as bad. I’ll save them for another post.

I have a pile of MoCo bloggers in my feed reader, and I’ve noticed that most of the chatter around the call to action that inspired my post seems to be about what they’re going to do with Thunderbird and why. Only Myk appears to have picked up the thread of building “something better”. But I suspect the seed has been planted and we shall see more of this particular meme.

I think this might herald the beginning of the end. The CEO of Mozilla corporation declared that it was time for Thunderbird, their free desktop mail client, and one of the best out there, to find its own way, so that Mozilla could increase its focus on Firefox and “the open web”.

The venerable communications tool known as “e-mail”, the Internet’s original “Killer App”, is broken, and probably needs to die. At the very least, it needs to evolve, and it might be *too hard* to evolve it, we might be better off coming up with a replacement and a migration strategy. Actually, I think I might even have the beginnings of such in my head from a brainstorm the other night, but it’s competing with a few other things to get out of there right now. Oh and by “evolve” I certainly do not mean this.

Hence, a prediction: Within 5-10 years what you and I know today as “e-mail” will be where usenet is today - a communications platform still loved by a few aficionados, still distributed by many ISPs, but mostly supplanted by web based systems with richer interactive possibilities and fewer opportunities for spammers to gum up the works.

I met a few Mozilla Folk while at Kiwi Foo camp. It struck me that they were all very much Alphageeks, wicked smart, and on top of their game. The Kiwis were Roc, giving talks on the future of the Firefox layout manager and reinventing the debugger as a side project, and Ben, who has mostly moved onto new projects with his new employer, and I particularly liked Asa, who thinks and talks about Mozilla and the Open Web at a meta-level far above the average technical evangelist.

On the other hand, I might just be flattering myself by saying that the MozCorp people are brilliant, because they usually seem to think the same way I do about stuff, most notably about the increasing importance of the web as a platform and the role of Firefox in evolving that ecosystem and keeping it open.

More thoughts on this later…but here are a few links:

From Web Worker daily, who disagrees with me.

From a Seamonkey developer, pondering that this is the second time Mozilla Corporation has attempted to reduce the importance of email.

And thoughts from one of the two key developers of Thunderbird.

And finally a quote from Tim O’Rielly: “Are we moving into a world where Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are just device drivers for Firefox?”

Nope, some of them are at least half serious. Most people I know still haven’t figured out what Web 2.0 is all about, but for a lot of the people I read, it’s getting pretty old hat, and a few of them are trying to define the next revolution already.

ReadWriteWeb asked people to come up with their own definition of what Web 3.0 means, with tickets to the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo on the line. My contribution was:

Web 3.0, highly abstract noun:

1. Term used by Web 2.0 startups to differentiate themselves from other Web 2.0 startups.
2. Term used by Web 2.0 pundits temporarily bored of writing about Web 2.0 startups.

I didn’t win. I probably should have made it even more snarky.

Of the winners, I really liked Robert O’Brien’s  definition. I think he’s right about the way things are heading in terms of personalised and integrated information flows. Interclue is definitely headed in that direction.  Stowe Boyd and Fred Wilson have been talking about this sort of thing for ages.

Realistically, there will be no “Web 3.0″ until O’Reilly change the name of their conference. They are the thought leaders, and despite one or two recent missteps by Tim, I can’t see them losing thought leadership anytime soon. So the question is, what would inspire them to make that change? See my list of potential factors after the cut.

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Ok, so I started this post 3 weeks ago, and have only just got around to finishing it. Bad Seth, slap hand. But there’s been so much going on, and I’d sorta been waiting until Interclue was definitely nearing launch before poking my head up in the blogosphere again.

A month ago was what we in NZ call “Waitangi Weekend” or roughly “the weekend closest to Waitangi Day”. For the last decade or so I’ve celebrated this particular weekend by going back into the past, doing Medieval re-enactment with my friends in the SCA.

This year I instead paid a trip to the future, having scored a late invite to Kiwi Foo Camp (aka “Baa Camp” (an in joke too long to explain), organised by Russell Brown and Nat Torkington, who are both awesome overachievers in their own different ways.

In fact, most of the people I talked to during the weekend were awesome in some fashion. As an invite only event, with the karma of O’Reilly and the two organisers behind it, sponsored by Google and Rod Drury’s Xero, they really were able to pick and choose, and although there were plenty of people they realised ought have been invited, the ones they did choose were pretty damned interesting. I think I may have been one of the last ones to sneak onto the invite list, apparently later on it was more a matter of “Ok, if it’s Jesus Christ come to announce the second coming, then *maybe* we’ll let him in…

So Jayne and Glynn, thanks for prodding me to ping Nat about it when you did! Was good travelling with you (and Damien and Phil).

The event started with everyone introducing themselves with 3 relevant words (eg I was “attention deficit infojunkie”, and Rod Drury was “Stock Options. Hiring”), and filling out forms with among other things, the top 3 things they would bring back from the future if they had the chance (I chose Immortality Pills, a Pocket Quantum Computer, and an iCar, but later I decided I should have gone with a USB2 compatible storage device containing a copy of the future’s version of Wikipedia - or, if their drive was big enough, a copy of the future’s Internet Archive Project…now that would be a big drive.)

Then everyone wrote down on big sheets of paper what they were going to talk about. Goodness, but there were a lot of interesting sessions. The problem was that there were 5 different sessions per slot, and I usually wanted to see at least two of them! Later on I discovered it was even worse, because there was usually someone hanging around the common area who I really wanted to talk to *as well*. So I usually wanted to be in 3 places at once.

Highlights

Our Minister for Communications was great value. I think everyone was impressed by the depth of his understanding of the issues surrounding telco reform. He also was able to get a sense of the consensus in the room regarding the need for peering policy, which is something that has driven everyone a bit batty since the major Telco’s stopped doing it - for a while now traffic that used to travel from one box to another inside the WIX or AIX has had to go via Australia, because our local BigCos are hoping the SmallCo’s will pay them interconnect fees. Judith Tizard was also there, and definitely seemed to be enjoying herself.

A fantastic performance from the Vospertron guys. Conversation overheard in the carpark afterwards was along the lines of: “so, what microprocessor do you use in these light suits?” - “Uh, it’s a PICAXE…” - “Wow, AWESOME, I market those. I’ve got something to write about on our site tonight!”. The other cameraphone in this video belongs to Russell Brown, who I introduced myself to afterwards. He’s a really down to earth and severely clueful media guy, who’s right across technology and politics in this country. I like him.

Showing Interclue to a bunch of people, who were actually pretty impressed on the whole. My actual presentation wasn’t as good as I wanted, I wish I’d spent more time preparing for it, but the week before was just madness. Got some useful feedback on things people wanted to see, none of which we’ve actually managed to implement yet, but it’s all on the drawing board.

Rod Drury’s demonstration of Xero - wow, now that was what I call a presentation. You’d almost think he’d done this sort of thing before…

The Firefox 3 show and tell - some great things coming up there.

Talking with Asa Dotzler, who is a very clever man. In fact, all the Mozilla guys there were wicked smart. But Asa was speaking my language - the big picture stuff, why Google needs Mozilla, how Firefox is assuring the future of the web as a platform, etc. Asa is the head of QA - essentially nothing gets into the final release of Firefox without him signing off on it! He also started the Spread Firefox website, and is a key evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation. [1]

Chatting with Mike from Pitch Black, his friends in the entertainment space, and seeing their awesome multimedia mashup demos. I first saw Pitch Black perform at Roots Festival in Kaikoura - they had the last set of the night and by the end of it I remember thinking “Pitch Blue”. Awesome electronica and great visuals. Kudos to Nat and Russell for inviting some people from the more entertaining side of the geekosphere.

Chatting with Peter Guttman, Stephen Viles, Andy Linton, Charles Coxhead, Colin Jackson, Rob McKinnon and any number of other terribly interesting folk.

Playing Werewolf for the first time. I didn’t last long. I was a werewolf. I picked the two smartest fast-talking villagers I knew, killed the first one in the first round, but failed to convince the other two werewolves to nab the second one, who fingered me in the next round. Doh! Unfortunately that particular game ended at 4am, I was somewhat drunk, and I forgot to set my alarm. So much for sunday morning :(

Top 3 things I really regret missing out on:

Quinn Norton’s session on Bodyhacking (apparently she was appearing with the aid of Provigil, which is marketed under the brandname “Modavigil” in this country, you can get it for “Shift Worker Sleep Disorder”, and yeah, it’s useful, but it’s not a magic bullet.)

The session from the Public Address bloggers, who are great value.

Chris di Bono’s session on the OLPC project, a project I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, as it is one of the definitive Philanthrogeek projects of our time…but I was having a good conversation with Asa Dotzler at the time, so I missed it. Bugger.

There are a lot of people I want to get back in touch with and continue conversations started at Kiwifoo, but every time I started an email I got to a certain point and remembered that I didn’t actually have time to talk, and that anyway I should at least get the new website up, which we still haven’t finished. I’ll go back through my drafts soon and ping them.

After it all, I came back, caught up on sleep, progressed an important deal for the company, and then headed out for the final night/day of Canterbury Faire. I was probably the freshest person on the site, apparently everyone had been having a fabulous time, and I’m so sorry I missed all the action, but well, Kiwi Foo was a bit of unique event (well, hopefully not unique, and hopefully not on Waitangi weekend next time). I did make the Steward pretty happy when I fetched cold caffeine for him and his crew during the hot and dusty packdown.

[1] I’m pretty Bullish on Google and Mozilla at the moment, but Microsoft have finally shipped Vista and Office, which means that they have a bundle of manpower that’s suddenly not completely overoccupied, they’ve been hiring some very smart people like Jon Udell, and Google has decided that they want to start charging for their online office apps, so it’s seriously game on at this point. We (Interclue) are intending to stay more or less neutral, and support both IE and Firefox (and Safari, and Opera, and others) as best we can with the resources we have. We wanted to launch with both Firefox and IE supported, but IE just proved to be a bit more difficult to work with than we hoped - we are almost there, but I decided to give priority to giving the best possible UX for one rather than an average UX for both at the beginning. Hopefully I made the right call on that.

Hi all,

We’ve pushed out the second closed beta of our browser extension for knowledge workers, bloggers, and other heavy web users, and we are looking for feedback. At the moment you’ll have to sign up and accept the beta embargo to find out what it actually does, but we can tell you that:

• It’s free.
• It’s not spyware or adware.
• It takes about a minute to install and although it has many options it works great “out of the box” for most users.
• The learning curve is about a minute long. After that it starts saving you time.
• After accepting the embargo and reading about the extension you can always choose not to install it. But if you take part in the beta program you’ll be given a free upgrade to the subscriber version when we release it.

Sign up at beta.interclue.com

At the moment we’re only releasing the firefox version. You can sign up at the same place to get notified when we release betas for other browsers, or when we release the first production version(s) to the public.

This will happen to you eventually, if it hasn’t already.

A while ago I reached the point where I’ve been reading the blogosphere long enough to identify sufficient numbers of really smart people blogging about stuff that really interests me, that more is published by them in any given hour than I can actually read in that hour. I’m inclined to call this my “information saturation point”, where I must forever give up on being able to absorb all the information I would like to absorb, because it appears faster than I can read it. Filtering out junk is no longer sufficient. Even filtering out boring is no longer sufficient. I have to filter out the interesting stuff, and that’s hard.

Now, I’m not a real fast reader, and I do have rather a lot of interests, but I suspect everyone is going to hit this point eventually, simply because the volume of posts on any given topic is is constantly increasing, and the net helps you find more topics to be interested in, while the available daily reading time of the average human remains more or less a constant. Skimming, and simply learning to read faster, will only get you so far.

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Getting Things Done. It’s a mantra worth paying some attention to. Dave Allen started it - he wrote a book, mainly for managers I think, but it’s given a huge number of time-poor project-rich geeks a new lease on life as well. Just google for GTD and you’ll find a lot of them blogging about it. Some of the tools Izeal is working on are going to help people Get Things Done, and I’ll certainly let you know about them after we launch.

Here are my first two GTD hints.

First hint: If you haven’t done so already, read the book! Reading people blogging about the book is insufficient! It really is worth reading cover to cover, particularly if you feel you don’t have time to read it!

Second hint: If you have already read the book, are comfortable with writing in WikiMarkup and are looking for a cool, free, browser based tool to help you manage your stuff, try this one, or this one, or this one. Actually, try all three, and stick with the one you like. The good news is that they’re all adaptions of TiddlyWiki, which means that moving items from one to another isn’t going to be too difficult.