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.

Wagoner, John Bernard (Jack) — On 21 February 2007, in Titusville Florida, USA. Aged 93 years. Loved husband, brother, father and grandfather. Survived by his wife of 65 years, Virginia; son, Rob (Kaikoura); brother, Bob (USA);daughters, Janice, Ann, Joan and Nancy (all, USA); grandsons, Seth (Christchurch), Luke (Hokitika), and Andrew (USA); granddaughter, Sarah (Dunedin) and step-grandaughter, Susan Lynn (USA). Will be missed by by family and friends in NZ and the US. At Jack’s request, no funeral service will be held. A celebration of his life, complete with fireworks as requested, will be held in Titusville, 4th of July 2007.

Grandad had a stroke a few weeks ago and he wasn’t doing too flash after that although it did look like he might pull through somehow. For the prior 93 years of his life he was mostly healthy apart from a few minor ailments, so on average he had a pretty good run. I do so wish I’d been able to get over there to visit him (and everyone else) during the last decade. My brother was lucky, he made it last year.

Grandad’s death has knocked the wind out of my sails somewhat, and because I’m the bottleneck, Interclue’s launch will probably be delayed again, so my apologies to all. There’s also been this insane madness with my (soon to be ex) Domain Name Registrar that I’ll have a long story to tell about later.

I toasted his life with a Johnnie Walker Blue Label at Dramfest 07. I think that’s a label he’d know and approve of, despite being more of a Bourbon man himself. I tried any number of rare and interesting Single Malts as well, but not so much in a mood for talking about it. Maybe later.

My parents have been very supportive as always. Love to them and all my family at this sad time in our lives.

Ah, you are. Good. I’m not, most of the time. Or rather, I’m paying attention to far too many things at once.

And of course, I am not alone. These days, attention is a scarce resource, and like any scarce resource, there are people trying to create a market for it.

The interesting thing about attention is that everyone has the same amount. You can’t get more than 24 hours a day no matter how wealthy you are – and unless you’re popping Ampakines (and given that they’re not currently available outside of clinical trials, you’re probably not), you’re stuck with a lot less than that.

In truth, I’m not completely sold on the AttentionTrust idea of recording everything you pay attention to specifically so that you can sell that information to people who want to market things to you. Ok, I can see in principal that it’s better that you have control over that data than others, but surely collecting your own attention data isn’t going to stop others from collecting and selling it as well, unless you put some effort into trying to stop them.

Attention is a limited resource – attention data, on the other hand, is increasingly common.

6-7 years ago I wrote a retail reporting application for a huge supermarket franchise operation, and I noted the way they were tracking people’s shopping habits using the first loyalty card in this country that worked across all sorts of different types of shop. At the time I thought “you know, these things are essentially tracking cookies in meatspace”. I never did get one of those cards, and shop people look at me funny now when I say I don’t have one. I presume the credit cards also aggregate shopping data and sell it, hopefully without any names attached, but who knows these days. The analogy isn’t perfect, shopping data isn’t attention data, they’re quite different, but still, I feel uncomfortable about people gathering that information, and almost as uncomfortable about gathering it myself and then selling it!

But keeping track of what you pay attention to seems like a good idea. I rather suspect it could be quite scary to see how many times my attention switched in any given day last year. I’m just not so sure about uploading that data to anyone else’s machine to do analysis on it. Perhaps I’m just being paranoid.

In any case, this year, I have resolved to be more mindful with my attention, because it turns out that the best way to get value for your attention isn’t multitasking, but to try your best to focus on one thing at a time. Well, not quite true – different parts of your brain can be paying attention to different things, but the language bits and the heavy thinking bits in particular are really not designed for heavy task switching.

A PC with a dozen applications open and a browser with 20 tabs open doesn’t help, thats for sure. This sort of technology driven reduction in attention span has two names that you might be hearing yet more of in 2007: Continuous Partial Attention (mostly benign), and Attention Deficit Trait (mostly malignant). Frankly I think I’ve been afflicted with the latter for this entire decade, while the former I’ve mostly managed to avoid. I don’t feel a huge need to stay connected to my peers, I’m an introvert. On the other hand I do feel strangely compelled to keep track of what’s going on in the worlds of science, technology, and politics, which has been a smeg of a lot lately, so I focus on a few key areas, but even those are impossible to keep up with.

PS: Our browser addon can increase your focus and reduce your context switching while you’re using the web. It’s by no means a magic bullet, but I’m hoping we might be able to raise your average working IQ a smidgen this year, and have you browsing a little more cluefully. We’re launching soon, honest, but do try the beta, we need more feedback.

PPS: Happy New Year. May it be a productive and prosperous one for all my readers. Sometime soon I’ll get around to posting all my New Years Resolutions, but like some other things I could mention, I’m still tweaking them for optimal performance.

Ok, so I showed this blog to my housemates, and they didn’t think it completely sucked, so perhaps I’ll actually tell other people it exists…

So, what’s all this then? Well, possibly a lot of things. For one reason or another, I haven’t blogged much in the last couple of years, so I’ve got a lot of posts to get off my chest. I’ve also got a new business launching soon, and that will get a certain amount of airtime here once it’s underway, but we’ll also have a dev-blog and biz-blog and that will be where I talk about that the most. This is more of a personal outlet.

The thing I’ll probably post most about here is philanthrogeeking, and philanthrohacking. Musings about what is good, how it might best be achieved, and who’s acheiving it. In general, I think an enormous amount of good can be done by smart people who are actually thinking about how they can maximise the beneficial effects of their time and money, rather than just work off some sort of internal guilt, or generate some positive PR for themeselves or their company.

Currently my philanthrogeeking is mostly in an observational role, with occaisional flights of fancy about what I might be able to achieve when I have more time and money. At the monent 95% of my time and money is going into the startup. I don’t really mind, because I think that as well as being quite profitable, our startup is going to do a lot of good for a lot of people. Mainly, just by making knowledge workers more productive, and their businesses more profitable, but I also think we might actually make the internet just a bit more valuable for everyone, and that makes me very happy.

What else is this blog for? Well I’ll occaisionally talk about software and web-apps that have impressed me or made my life easier. I might talk about productivity techniques like David Allen’s “Getting things Done” – a book that ought to be compulsary reading for every knowledge worker. If you’re really into this sort of thing, Gina Trapani‘s lifehacker blog is compulsary reading.

As a geek with a philosophy degree, I might get a bit wordy and esoteric at times, for which I apologize in advance. I may also mix up my English and American spellings, for which I also apologise in advance. Blame it on the blogosphere.