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May
14
links for 2008-05-14
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give me substance of social. realised at the campfire one that ’social’ has become a buzzword beyond redemption.
May
14
Nostalgic iDial
Filed Under Web/Tech, Funny | Leave a Comment
iPhone skins.
Looking forward to the 3G version coming out in June. via Boing Boing.
Normal programming will resume shortly.
May
12
Models of data imprisonment
Filed Under Data, VRM, Autonomy, Web/Tech | 3 Comments
I have been thinking about my data and online data logistics a lot these days in connection with VRM infrastructure that I have been working on (the Mine! and FeedMe). As an individual my relationship to my data can be described in matrix of several types of imprisonment. I am interested in building an option where this is not the case.
Jail with visiting rights - closed platform a la Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Amazon, Expedia, online bank statements and any site that doesn’t allow export of data in interoperable format. My data is under lock and key elsewhere, and I cannot get more than a view of it through the bars of the jail. For instance I would manually enter my profile or other data into a Facebook applications (and now a few ‘trusted parties’), but there is little or no hope that I could get the data back out again, other to save the JPEGs of the resulting output (screen grabs) - which decimate rather than reflect the value of the original input. Further, my data starts losing weight, as any inmate locked up. As the original data is never at my beckoning, only its representation is what I can play with.
House arrest - desktop applications for data management, iTunes, Excel spreadsheet, word processing, etc. Example, my music (ripped not bought from iTunes store) is my data is on my computer in a format that is hard to share with anyone. The software is not designed to enable sharing of data - the net result is my data is nominally under my control, but it is just as locked up as Facebook. (No export or no guarantee that exported data is in a mashable format)
Open prison - online data management tools, Wesabe, uploading from iPhoto or Picasa to Flickr.com. This means I can share (better than house arrest) but the data is centralised a little like Facebook (almost as bad as jail with visiting rights) and although the rendering tools are more advanced and, being centralised, can be upgraded without user intervention, there is still a big similarity to glimpsing my data which is held within the jail.
Out on bail - feed readers and online calendars, e.g. OPML, Google Calendar, iCal. The data is more or less yours and mostly under your control for export, import and sharing. But it can’t travel far and there is only so much you can do with it. It certainly can’t be mashed up with data in other formats or on other topics than calendar or feeds. (Dopplr lets you go furthest in combining calendar, Flickr and map data etc).
Out of jail - I hold my data on (explicitly) my resource for sharing; I can share my data beyond just what Flickr, del.icio.us etc provide as a tool to render my data, and in more places than just those platforms - for instance with a supermarket or gym or others (vendor?) who could benefit from knowing what I am eating and when I am exercising. In short: the Mine! enables controlled sharing beyond the Mine!’s own rendering itself. The bars are removed and your data can go where you desire it to.
Hm, to push the analogy further, doesn’t that make Plaxo Pulse, Friendfeed and other such aggregators a prison parade? 
In case I haven’t made it clear enough, I want my data out of jail. By that I mean being able to exist online with four requirements met: take charge of my data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) it according to my needs and preferences and share it on my own terms whilst connected and networked on the web.
May
11
I haz a Mine! Let me show you it…
Filed Under Mine!, VRMHub, VRM, Tools and applications | 5 Comments
After many years of internet existence, scattering ‘digital detritus’ as I go, I am ready for tools that help me reclaim my online personae, help me piece together my fractured identity. And then allow me to drive it forward with all of the benefits that it can bring me and to those I interact and transact with.
In the last few months, I have been thinking about what would such tools do and look like. I knew that they have to be driven by me - adding value to me and allowing me to add value, flexible and modular.
The first hint was in the white paper was about the sharing mechanism, a feeds-based VRM. Using feeds to share and distribute data - called FeedMe - has always been predicated on the existence of something like the Mine! - a structural element that allows individuals to bring together data they would like to a) have in their ‘domain’ b) manipulate and learn from and c) share with others as you see fit. A haven for data, a playground and a spring board for further online existence. The foundation for individual being the platform and for creating an ‘asset’ to be used in further interactions, relationships and transactions.. Thinking through some of the details and implications has taken longer as the Mine! incorporates the feeds based sharing as described here.
The aim is to equip individuals with tools to take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) them according to their needs and preferences and share them on their own terms whilst connected and networked on the web.
The Mine! as VRM infrastructure v.1.0.
Also in pdf (although I recommend the linked version that will be edited and revised and edit as I go along).
May
9
links for 2008-05-09
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if not for google autofill I would have lost my OpenID url recently. don’t use it often enough to remember it.
May
8
links for 2008-05-08
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Alec’s take on Identity
May
7
links for 2008-05-07
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May
6
links for 2008-05-06
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tim bray having a go at feed based VRM
May
5
links for 2008-05-05
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great critique by JP of what appears to be deeply ignorant commentator on open source in HBR. Another phrase I use in this context - make something work, money will follow
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“We are not just realizing a revolution occurring with organization IT resources, but the revolution is happening across the board for users suppliers programmers resellers organizations and vendors.”
May
4
links for 2008-05-04
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tim bray hits the nail on the head. the internet is about disintermediation, it allows you to follow the source, not just the commentator. so why don’t we? perhaps we need to disintermediate our minds. and aggregation is not the same as filtering.
May
4
Disintermediation of minds?
Filed Under Communication, Social web, Web/Tech, Media | 4 Comments
Commenting on the false rumour that Twitter is going off Rails, Tim Bray hits the nail on the head. Again.
If you want care about Twitter, follow @biz or @ev. If you care about Rails, follow DHH here or here or here. If you care about Sun, read what the people at Sun say. Same for IBM or Microsoft.
The internet is about disintermediation, and about zero distance:
The Net is a giant zero. It puts everybody zero distance from everybody and everything else.
One of the things that underpins what I do is getting across to individuals and companies that they don’t need the media. They can put their side of the story out there and do their best so that people follow them and hopefully trust them. The internet levels the playing field, power law notwithstanding.
One of few things that unites bloggers is linking to others and to their sources. So for any opinion, rumour, news or guess, there should be linkage supporting that view (only rants are excused from this requirement). Even most media commentators - after years of bashing from the blogosphere - are now linking to sources of their stories.
So given that we can follow the source(s), not just be at the mercy of the journalist or the commentator, why don’t we?
If you care about the Big New Thing that’s going to change your life, wait till it comes and touches your life. Then you’ll know what it’s really about, not what some overworked underslept Bay-Area meme-promoter thinks.
Perhaps now that the internet has disintermediated media, we need to disintermediate our minds. We rely on aggregators, top 100 rankings, meme generators and promoters. Sayz Tim:
The other problem with the aggregators is that there are a lot of smart, hungry, imaginative people working really hard to game them and get noticed. Sometimes it works.
Yes, we need to manage the flow of information that is growing by the day. We need some way of filtering the bits that we are interested in from the noise. But aggregation is not the same as filtering. Our way of handling information still dates back to the era where authority and approved sources made it easier, if not better in terms of quality of information and complexity. I have mainly media in mind here. We used a range of sources, not unlike a radar scanning a designated area, to see if anything new came up. The effort was considerable but limited by the scope and number of sources. Once that got out of hand, we started to lose the battle to contain the information - we either keep scanning faster or throw hands in the air saying that there is just too much information.
The internet is a network, so why not use its nature for information handling. Instead of a delineating a radar field, we can build a spiderweb of sources that will ’shake’ the web and alerts me when there is something of interest. Our feedreaders could be constructed that way - the nodes in the web, sources that filter for us and the points in between insider sources that we might be occasionally interested when something happens in their sphere.
There has been a proliferation of tools that help me aggregate but there are still very few tools that help me filter. Part of the reason may be that the human mind is the best filter of all but, surely, there is room for tools that can help me to it easier and better.
Note: I covered this more visually here (about 6 minutes into the video).
May
3
links for 2008-05-03
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it’s a wild west web out there and security it not going to get better. Why? Complexity and humans. Obviously, really.
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best innovation comes from solving simple problems, scratching one’s itch
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“The leaders of our healthcare industry don’t yet get technology and the power of embracing an engaged consumer with a platform, a service, and their own neighborhood doctor that talks the way they talk.”
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excellent cartoon, very true. but the answer is not to switch off the computer, just assert your own autonomy. if socnets are an excuse to leave the web, they have won. And not in a good way.
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London VRM meetings
