Sethop’s 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.

In the universe I co-inhabit “Mashup” means “Create a new user experience by combining 2 or more websites and/or webservices”. But of course, Web 2.0 stole that word from the music world, where “mashup” means “Create a new auditory experience by combining 2 or more songs and/or samples.”

So I thought I’d mention that one of my favorite bands, Salmonella Dub, has a remix contest going to help promote their new album, “Heal Me”. The idea is that you take their samples and recombine them with some of your own to create a new bit of music. This sort of thing is exceptionally common in the age of digital production, and sometimes bands release albums constructed entirely of remixes/mashups of their music made by other people. Eg, the amazing “Outside the Dub Plates” or “Halfway between Ape and Angel” - remixes of iconic albums by Salmonella Dub and Pitch Black.

I first heard Salmonella Dub live at a Kaikoura Roots festival, and frankly, they were incredible. Andrew Pennman then actually moved to Kaikoura and the latest album was mixed there in his new studio. My parents live in Kaikoura and Andrew is now friendly with my Dad, who among other things makes these awesome ceramic art speakers that I’ll blog about again once he finally gets them into regular production.

Kaikoura Roots was also my first live experience of Shapeshifter, and Pitch Black. I saw Pitch Black the other week and they haven’t lost their touch. Shapeshifter are performing in Christchurch this Saturday and Sunday.

Here’s the first single from “Heal Me” which is not the track subject to the competition.

Check out some more Salmonella Dub Videos.

BTW If you haven’t heard any Salmonella Dub before, the album you simply have to buy is Inside the Dub Plates. If you don’t like it you might want to think about getting your hearing checked out.

(will come back to this and add more links…)

I spent the weekend inside or outside various neo-gothic landmark buildings in Christchurch with 150 other brave medieval re-enactors from around Australasia, all wearing the warmest woolen garb in our pre-17th Century wardrobe, and gosh did we need it at times. The event was the coronation of a new King and Queen or Lochac.

I belong to a worldwide group known as the “Society for Creative Anachronism“, which has something like 100,000 people involved globally. It’s the largest reenactment society in the world, probably because it’s very non-specific and inclusive - any attempt at pre-17th century costume is ok. Some people take it very seriously and dedicate a significant portion of any given week to going along to weekly meetings to discuss the finer points of 16th Century German Frocks, 14th century English turnshoe construction, or whatever currently interests them. Or, like me, some folks just turn up to a few events a year to catch up with everyone and try to forget about the real world for a bit.

There was a “Queens Champion” tournament on Sunday. As martial arts go, SCA combat is probably about the world’s most inconsistent, and yet somehow it all works out and has become quite popular. It’s all based on an honour system - you get walloped with a bit of rattan cane that somehow slipped past your defenses, and you have to figure out if, had that been a real weapon (sword, mace, spear, whatever), whether it would have maimed or killed you. If you lose a leg, you drop to your knees and keep on fighting. Loose an arm and you typically stop the action briefly to put the now useless limb behind your back, and in a tournament your opponent will give you time to change to your other hand if you just lost your swordarm.

The inconsistency comes because everyone has a slightly different idea of how hard is hard enough, is wearing differently constructed armour, using weapons of different sizes, shapes, and weight, and has a different repertoire of offensive and defensive technique - as opposed to most martial arts where the equipment is standardised, there are masters who teach novices the same set of techniques all around the world. In this shot, I’m the one in the foreground.

Well, nothing like launching a new product to discover how many things you were leaving “until after the launch”. And after the initial publicity burst (which I didn’t really do enough of anyway), they all assaulted me at once. But I’m beginning to get back on top of it. I even managed to tidy up my desk, which was covered in stuff sitting waiting to pounce on my valuable attention stream when I looked away from the screen.

So I piled it all up to process it, GTD style. Didn’t look too bad at first.

The problem was I found that my filing system had gotten in a bit of dissaray during the rush of the last few months, so that pile stayed about the same size for quite a while as I added stuff from my files to the top as fast as I was creating new ones to file stuff in.

But it’s done now. This is one of four drawers. Everything alphabetical within 5-6 major groupings. By the end of the process it was really easy to find the right folder for stuff again.

I also created a tickler file for the first time, which consists of 43 folders - one for each day for the next month, and one for each month. Business Pundit suggests using them for the purpose of prompting a reviewing of decisions, which is not a bad idea. Might try that.

It feels good to have gotten that bit out of the way, and I’ve got a much better idea of all the things that need to be done. I really need to get back on the publicity wagon! Been trying to drum up a few reviews from the Mozillazine crowd to get us out of the AMO Sandbox, that’s also a priority. On the whole they seem to really like it but not many of them have posted reviews yet. Will be posting about how to access the AMO Sandbox and post a review over at the Interclue Blog shortly.

Go check out the website.

Incredible thanks to both Karl and John for their long efforts, and everyone I’ve mentioned on the credits page for making Interclue possible.

I had a great chat with Jon Udell last night. I noticed on his blog that he was coming to Wellington and left a note for him to get in touch if he was coming to Christchurch. He emailed me to say he was heading over here that very day! Bizzarely, the first I ever heard of the GOVIS conference he was keynoting at was via his blog post, if I’d found out about it earlier I would have been there, brandishing Interclue. Looks like there were some really interesting presentations there.

Among other things, we talked about how the internet is transforming education, and I mentioned that I’d spotted a video with some fantastic stats a while back that was originally designed to help educators understand what they were up against, and that I’d blog about it. He’ll probably recognise it when he sees it. But as JP mentioned recently, there are still a lot of other people out there who haven’t seen this one, and they really should.

Some background and references for the statistics.

He mentioned the real thing scaring American Universities was that soon more parents were going to start auditing podcasts from their kid’s lecturers to see if this education they were paying for was actually worth $x/minute!

We also chatted about his new job a bit. He said he went to Microsoft with a mission to help more people get value from the power of technology - to spend some time helping out on the trailing edge after so many years on the bleeding edge. I told him I thought Microsoft was showing pleasing signs of trying to build more value from co-operation than competition - he said Microsoft was still competing plenty hard but they were continuing to move towards less destructive forms of competition.

Then I came home and saw this. Sigh…

Anyone who wants to check it out ahead of time, ping me for the password to the site if you haven’t got it already.

Interclue is a browser extension (for firefox currently, but for IE pretty soon) that helps you stay in flow while you’re surfing the net. It’s a great boon for knowledge workers, bloggers, and other heavy web users.

We’re probably not going to tell the world what it does before Wednesday, but:

• It’s free. No signup required either.
• 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 two minutes long. After that it starts saving you time.
• If it’s not for you, it uninstalls just as fast.