I have to say it immediately grabbed me when @StephenFry tweeted:

 Well, well, well! Move over FB and Google+ ? Can’t fault unthink.com for attitude – youtu.be/pxMqSdgB-uA

Unthink! What a great name! And it’s Stephen Fry right? The man is a hero, one of the smartest, nicest, funniest chaps on the entire planet, by co-incidence he’s actually living in the same city as me right now, and of course, he has a bazillion dedicated twitter followers, so getting a link from him is actually pretty powerful! He almost single-handedly transformed our Kiwifoo #blackout campaign a couple years ago when he blacked out his twitter avatar to help us fight Section #92a – which, by the way, the Labour party have actually admitted they were wrong about – and half the twittersphere, or at least it seemed so at the time, followed in his wake. We actually got the government to change it’s mind. The first time, I suspect, that Twitter was the most significant driver of a movement that changed the law, or impending law, of a sovereign nation, but far from the last!

…but then I actually watched the video, and my heart sank:

Here’s the problem: It seemed way too slick. I have a nose for these things. When it comes to spotting true revolutionaries vs PR companies pretending to be revolutionaries, I think I’d have a better chance than most.

So, I started digging. There wasn’t much on the unthink.com homepage, just a simple signup form, no privacy policy, no manifesto, no “about us”, just a great looking design and a not half bad slogan: “We are not another social network. We are a Social Revolution.” Uh huh. Right. I signed up with a fake alias and then immediately checked out their DNS records.

I started posting my investigations to Quora as they progressed….

(me:) They’ve got a *very* swish video up … tweeted by @StephenFry no less. Must confess the privacy angle is one I’ve often thought might be worth taking a crack with, but then Diaspora didn’t seem to be setting the world on fire. This is a much slicker attempt. Frankly, the production values reek of money, which makes me wonder who’s money

…hoping someone else would chip in. No one did. But 20 minutes later I pretty much knew who we were dealing with, and my trust barometer had dropped several notches.

Ok, I feel this is commentary relevant to recently breaking news, so I might as well tweet this now and then post a follow-up – if you have some thoughts, please do comment here or on my two quora questions, and/or feel free to link this post from your posts in other fora so that this post will show the pingback/trackback links.

Meta: Yes, I’ve been off the air for a while. Sorry about that. I got a bit distracted. Starting with that 6.3 Earthquake that left our city completely “munted” (to quote the Mayor) back in Feb, of course, but the parade of distractions since then has been somewhat epic. This unthink.com is hardly the most important, but you have to understand that for an internet geek, #privacy and #freedom fan like moi, it’s pretty darn interesting! And since I suspect I’m well ahead of the curve in digging into the details, and I wouldn’t want @StephenFry to inadvertently lead us into signing up en masse for something that in the end seems, contra initial appearances, a bit shallow, I fear, I felt I really ought to post something. But hopefully I’m completely wrong! Looking forward to finding out!

…I’ve updated my about page

Currently posting from Wordcamp Wellington, where I’ve met some cool people and learnt some very useful things. I’ve been feeling guilty about not blogging, or even tweeting lately, but I’ve been trying to pull a whole bunch of stuff together lately, and writing about it isn’t going to help when it comes to getting it done

On the other hand, my mind abhors a vacuum, and it doesn’t want to fill the ‘social media’ gap with more actual work, so it’s been filling it with ideas instead. I have 3-5 killer projects I hope to bring out *this year*, so watch this space.

Just to be clear, Interclue and Lazarus are still being developed! There is much to do, but i have a grand plan that should make, I hope, pretty much everyone happy about how we’re planning to take things forwards this year, and hopefully I’ll be in touch with you all about it within the next few weeks! And some of you, earlier, with a draft version. Lazarus 3.0 and Lazarus Pro are not far off either. Watch this space. 
  

I spent the weekend with 150+ wonderfully intelligent, diverse and interesting folks at the 3rd KiwiFoo (aka Baacamp) event, held in Warkworth, north of Auckland, near the home of Nat Torkington and his wonderful wife Jenine, who co-organise the event with Russell Brown.

Kiwifoo is an “unconference” inspired by the orignal Foocamp in Sebastapol California. That means everyone participates and no-one knows what will end up on the schedule ’til you get there. There is no “audience” at an unconference (in this way it’s a bit similar to the SCA event I went to last weekend, but it’s the future, not the past that happens at a Foocamp). It’s also free, by virtue of the many sponsors, this year including Google (as always), Vodafone and Telecom (logos rarely seen on the same T-shirt!), InternetNZ, Catalyst, Silverstripe, Throng, Project X, Shift, and SMC NZ. [nb: will come back and add links later]. By necessity, it is invite only, but the good news is that Nat is now talking about running more than one a year, so there will be more chances to get invited. Alternatively, buy a ticket to Webstock, where many of the same people are going – the timing of Kiwifoo this year chosen carefully so they could invite the speakers Webstock paid to fly into the country! We didn’t get all of them at Foo, but those we did were *great* to have along.

The only bad thing about Kiwifoo is that no matter how much you do, you end up missing out on a lot more – there are 4-6 simultaneous session streams, and often you are torn between 2-3 of them or simply spending more time with someone new and interesting that you just met.

This year I attended some really enjoyable sessions on various diverse topics, including the Future of News, a session led by the formidable Julie Starr, who mostly managed to keep a lid on all the unruly journos in the room (not looking at anyone in particular). I was interested to hear that the pay rates at our major dailies are sufficiently low that most senior NZ print journalists are now independent – which doesn’t really surprise me.

On the other hand I was irritated I didn’t get to any of the economy/finance/banking sessions, which would have been really good since we had Rod Oram and Bernard Hickey at the conference, and if anyone should have a few clues on how well NZ is doing or going to do in the economic maelstrom of 2009, it’s those two. I did get to see them in action on the chosen saturday night debate topic of “Is New Zealand fucked?” (Rod: No! – Bernard: Yes!).

There were many folks I wanted to meet but didn’t, perhaps because a little more planning and a little less serendipity might have been required on my part, but the conversations I did have were superb.

eg (1) A chat with Ben Goodger over breakfast, (yes, that Ben Goodger), who told me some history of the Google Chrome project. One thing that surprised me was that they managed to keep such a major project under wraps until it was released. “We like surprises” was his comment on that one. Earlier on there was a valuable session co-hosted by Ben and Roc on the future of Browsers, which I intend to make a separate blog post about, adding some of my own thoughts with respect to user-scripting and other factors.

eg (2) Really enjoyed sharing a dram (or three) with Russell Brown and various other appreciators of fine scotch whisky. Russel had a very nice Springbank 15yo which didn’t last long, and I’d brought along a bottle of The Glenrothes Special Reserve, which was definitely my Whisky “find” of 2008, and folks agreed it was a very fine drop. It was sourced from the most excellent Whisky Galore, which has an excellent catalogue of whisky online for mail order purposes [and my birthday is October 2nd in case you were wondering ].

Most of the Public Address bloggers were there (at Foo, not necessarily the whisky table) including Emma Hart who just happens to be the partner of Interclue Senior Developer Karl Dearden, who was also there and having a great time.

Many folks asked how Interclue was going, and were impressed to hear that we’d racked up over a million downloads in the last year. Tim Norton was a bit shocked that he hadn’t heard how well we were doing, but I hadn’t exactly publicized that fact, partly because our download stats on AMO have been broken (alternatively reporting 0 downloads and over two million) and our internal stats are a bit off as well (but I roughly know by how much, and we’re almost certainly over a million at this point).

One thing I really should have done was type up a list of people I wanted to meet and things I wanted to see before I got there – it’s far too easy to miss rare opportunities, such as the chance to see a self-replicating machine in action, otherwise. I think the best idea would be to write down 20-50 and hope to achieve at least half, while allowing for as many serendipitous conversations and discoveries as possible.

I’ll blog more about Kiwifoo tomorrow! If you want to find out what other people thought, search for “kiwifoo” on twitter.

I’m about to head off for a weekend of medieval mahem in North Canterbury. Fortunately this year Canterbury Faire doesn’t conflct with KiwiFoo/Baacamp as it did the last two years! Unfortunately I’ve been so flat out with work that I’m only going to get to go to the last 3 days worth of it anyway. Still, better than I managed last time. One day I hope to have a bit more free time for the SCA, but it may be a while. It used to be my full time hobby. This is a pretty neat video they shot at CF two years ago. Some quite good fighty bits at the end, I like the way they fit the footage to the soundtrack.

There are about 250 or so people expected this year at Canterbury Faire. In the US they have much larger events. Here’s a clip from one of their major wars:

SCA Combat is a bit of a weird sport. It runs on an honour system, whereby when you get hit you have to figure out whether the blow was good enough to kill you or take a limb out of comission. In practice this leads to a lot of talk around “calibration”. In an ideal everyone would “take blows” more or less the same, in practice some folks need a bit more convincing before they’ll fall over. Egregious “rhinohiding” will get you a stern talking to from the Chivalry. The only significant rank in SCA Combat is “Knight”, who are the folks who have shown sufficient Honour and Prowess to be asked to join the Chivalry. I’m hopeful some time in the future I’ll spend enough time practicing that I might get up to Knighthood level. It’s certainly good exercise, so that’s one good reason to do more of it – tho I’ll need to upgrade my armour a bit I feel, based on the bruise I got last week.

If you think you might be interested in the SCA, it’s a worldwide (tho mostly US based) association, there’s probably a group near you, and they’re always welcoming to new people who want to get out and have fun in a medieval type fashion.

…according to Typealyzer, anyway, which says that INTPs are:

“The logical and analytical type. They are espescially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagining far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.”

Most of that applies to me as well as my blog. Especially the “…finding subtle connections between things and imagining far-reaching implications” bit. I seem to be doing that all the time, and I really need to get myself into a position where it works to my advantage, rather than against it. The problem at the moment is that every new idea or insight is just another distraction keeping me from doing all the things people are expecting me to do (or, depending on the time of day, getting to sleep that night).

The initials INTP refer to Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving, and INTP is one of the 16 Meyer Briggs Type Identifiers (MBTI).

The last time I seriously looked into MBTI, maybe 4-5 years ago, I thought I was borderline INTP/INTJ. But after recently spotting Typealyzer (via Stowe), I started digging into MBTI again, and now it seems to me I’m well to the Percieving side of the INTJ/INTP divide. (eg, one classic INTP trait is to ignore the humongous to-do list and focus on understanding whatever currently has their attention, which in this case, is MBTI theory)

The Judging type, apparently, like to come to conclusions and move on, while the Perceiving type tend to suspend decisions until they have more information. If you could see my web-history and todo list, I’m sure you’d agree I’m a very P-type thinker.

Fortunately, Karl is very much on the J side of the spectrum, or Interclue never would have had a prayer. And perhaps with a little more self-knowledge and self-awareness I’ll be able to get more done in 2009.

Has anyone else tried Typealyzer? Did your blog’s personality match your own personality?

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone! May it bring great reward to us all, despite the, er, ominous signs and portents.

(more…)

US$700bn. A lot of money. As Jeff Jarvis says, that’s a whole lot of OLPC’s or college allowances.

Only one problem. The USA doesn’t have $700b. What it has is outstanding IOUs for ~$10.5t, and the credibility to borrow another ~$1t without anyone really thinking too hard about it.*

But if their entire investment banking sector and half their retail banking sector collapses through undercapitalization/overleveraging as a result of ratings downgrades due to the collapse of their credit default swap counterparties in a great big game of financial dominoes, that credibility might end up somewhat…strained.

As it turns out, the ~$70t CDS game is a global phenomena, so the collapse of American banks has the potential to indirectly cause the collapse of many other banks around the world, and since, quite frankly, I quite like being able to buy books from Amazon and cheap Chinese-made electronic gadgets (and on a more serious note, global economic depressions kill people, m’kay?), I’m really hoping the US Congress has it’s shit together this week.

On the other hand I tend to agree with Paul that it would be good if the US Taxpayers got some upside from bailing out their wayward Ibankers, although I fear that they really might not have enough time to work out the details. Perhaps a convertible bridge loan facility with similar conditions to the AIG bailout might be a suitable alternative to simply overpaying for distressed MBS to help the banks meet their Basel II obligations and hoping no-one complains too much about it.

* They’d better not think too hard about it, or they might remember the US Govt is currently on the hook for ~ $50t worth of unfunded Medicare & Social Security Obligations, and then start talking about a ratings downgrade on US Sovereign Debt, and frankly I’m not quite sure what happens after that.

Disclaimer: IANAB. No need to take any of this stuff seriously. I’m sure they’ll work it all out. But, you’d have to agree, interesting times.

Things have been going well, but it’s been extremely hectic. Have just recovered from Kiwi Foo Camp, which was awesome, and am now on the way to catch the end of Canterbury Faire. More details on those and the other things that have been happening after I get back.

Julian has been LiveMindMapping instead of liveblogging, and he’s doing a pretty good job of it. Here’s a link to the topics he’s encountered so far during the BarCamp.

Marek is talking about OpenID now and whether every Kiwi should have one. He’s been working on his own OpenID Provider recently. Fascinating.

I’m in Wellington for BarCampWellington, focused on Government 2.0 in New Zealand. There have been some really fascinating discussions and presentations, with many different viewpoints being expressed.

Currently sitting in a presentation from Julian Carver, one of the Christchurch based attendees who’s well known in Wellington from his consulting work on Knowledge Management. He’s discussing the imporance of interop between the various agencies charged with protecting and enhancing the environment in New Zealand. This is the sort of thing going on behind the scenes which really makes a difference, but a lot of people will never hear about. Here’s an interesting site he pointed us to where the public can interract with the agencies relevant to this.

The last week was a bit of a whirlwind as I tried to tie together my thoughts about how Web 2.0 could enhance the policy process, on top of getting various things done for Interclue, and wanting to write more about the great time we had at BarCampChristchurch last week. Since getting here I’ve been having some fascinating conversations around this, particularly with Jayne, who has a wealth of experience in the New Zealand policy process from her pre-entreprenurial days. We’re going to be talking about it in a session later on in the day.

Tim offered me use of his flat but I ended up staying with Jayne and Glynn because Marek is staying there as well and we’re all going to Barcamp. They have a really nice place, with excellent connectivity.

I’ll be in Wellington till Tuesday night, if anyone wants to meet up, please get in touch.

About 40 of us have gathered in the CII Building for BarCampChristchurch so far and more are expected later. I was surprised how many folks turned up on time. Steven made the nametags, Nic and Terry set up the Wifi, and it’s all going rather well.

I failed to get my talk on Browser Addons into shape. I brainstormed a hundred things I wanted to talk about and didn’t manage to get it down into a presentable set of slides. I talked more about Web 2.0 again instead.

Everyone else has given a great info packed half hour. Loving it.

We need more beer. Anyone bringing beer would win much kudos.

Marek is Liveblogging. Ben too.