It seems a couple versions ago someone decided at Apple that we never actually listen to audio podcasts anymore. No folks, that’s just not allowed. How uncouth. Don’t you know that since youtube we all watch videos. And podcasts are only ever video. I mean, come on, get with it.

So now when you’re in iTunes and go to mark a podcast feed to indicate you’ve listened to them all you’re greeted with the menu selection “Mark as Watched“.

Excuse me? Since when do you watch an audio podcast? Why doesn’t it say “Mark all as Listened”?

What happened to Apple finesse?

For years Apple prided itself on the little finishing touches that made us feel that things were just okay with the world. Often unseen things were simply just right, like dates changing format with column widths and context etc. But now it seems things just get changed on a whim.

Come on Cupertino. Don’t just settle for flashy wow innovation on new devices. Wow us with the finesse and continuity of thought and attention to detail we are used to.

IMAC 24″/SD
2.93GHZ INTEL CORE 2 DUO
4GB 1066MHZ DDR3 SDRAM-2X2GB
NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 130 512MB
640GB SERIAL ATA DRIVE
APPLE MIGHTY MOUSE
WL KYBD & USER’S GUIDE-X
COUNTRY KIT,IMAC 24-AUS

Now, don’t panic, I’m not ill and don’t intend on dying anytime soon. But it will happen. And it so happens that with recent changes in living arrangements I’ve been in the updating Will mode for a while. (Read there – I’ve been slack in finalising it.)

Anyhow, I was thinking about how we talk about how the things we do digitally are so more ’sticky’ or permanent and how one should be careful of what we put online as it will be ’searchable forever’. But will they? Forever is a long time and while I understand the sentiment in such arguments, the fact is that if I let my domains expire that a lot of what I do would be inaccesible. And someday even the information from them that is stored in google’s cache will be expired. Then, it will be gone. Much is said about how to not do things personally online that might jeopordise opportunities in the future, but I don’t see much about what to do if you actually do want to ensure the ongoing nature of the opportunities you have taken.

Now it might not be so bad for things to disappear, really, when it comes to anything personally I do. However I thought of Lifekludger as an entity and how I believe in what its potential is and how such potential might not be realised in my time. Lifekludger will depend on the increasing nature of online connetedness between people and so while progress and time might be on it’s side, time and progress isn’t for individual human beings.

So I thought about how much of what I do online is important to me and how much I value what it is I’m building oline – whether personally or otherwise. And I figured that if I was serious about it then I should do something to help it survive after me. Hence I thought of the Will.

Here’s my plan. I’m going to put in my Will that a certain sum of money be taken from my estate and put in an interest bearing account with responsibility of maintaining given domains and hosting company fees falling to a pre-determined and informed trusted person. I figure all these online cost are likely to get cheaper in future anyway so the outlay won’t be huge and interest might even account for most of it. At current prices I’d only be looking at about a $3-5k amount. And if Lifekludger finds legs before then well and good, my personal domain will survive even longer … FWIW

So there you have it. Have you thought about the longevity of your digital identity?

Dave – Lifekludger

PS: As would happen, after writing I see there’s a startup called Legacy Locker that deals with the distibution of passwords to online accounts. This doesn’t however allow for ongoing expenses involved but I might consider using a service like that in conjunction. That said, who will guarantee survival of a Third party online service?

I visited a few online ‘gobetween’ sites and soon found a minefield of caveats.

http://soocial.com – looks very promising but only does contacts. It syncs from mobles (NOT WM yet), Mac, via a Prefrences app, Outlook, Gmail. All pretty well. Except that’s slow in showing the effects and I got in a heap of a muddle not letting the results show before tryig something else. Anyway, only a part solution.

http://goosync.com – syncs PDA< ->google, does calendars by default. neat, easy to understand, works with PDA using a wifi/3G connection and an app on the PDA. However, to get it to do contacts and tasks it’s a premium service payable by the month and being in UK that’s expensive.

So I gave up and thought I’d bypass online altogether and bought Missing Sync http://markspace.com. Figuring it’s been around long time, rather pay once for a PDA< ->Mac solution than ongoing for a PDA< ->online one.

After three days trying to get MissingSync to work I spat the dummy and wrote asking for a refund and let me go on my way to preserve my sanity. They want to try help me get it working, poor dears, [sigh] and so that saga’s still underway.

So, back to looking at using online as intermediary and find maybe a service that’d do contacts and another calendar using google as a PDA< ->online< ->Mac gobetween.

Google’s own sync offerings seemed best way to go – http://www.google.com/sync/

A big stumbling block I came up against here is that the Google sync offerings for Mac< ->google only work on Leopard versions of OSX (10.5.x & later) and I have Tiger (10.4.x).

So I gave up on the whole idea of using my Mac iCal and Address Book and instead focused on the PDA< ->Google sync. And just use online offerings.

I used the mobile sync for WindowsMobile found here http://www.google.com/mobile/winmo/sync.html and it works a treat. A trap for wary players – when you first setup ActiveSync on your WM device it defaults to overwriting you contacts on the PDA with those from Google. I’d cleaned mine out on Google intending to fill with clean lot o my Macs Address Book. So I filled my PDA WITH NOTHING! And remember, I can’t sync my Mac< ->Google as I am a lowly Tiger user.

Never fear, if you are in that situation, use this excellent little app http://bborofka.com/A_to_G/A_to_G.html to export your Mac Address Book details and import into Google. Then reset ActiveSync to “Keep the item on my device” if there is a conflict (found in ActiveSync on your PDA, under “Edit Server Settings”, “Advanced” button (bleedin obvious, hey), and re sync.

So, I’ve got flawless sync happening between my WM5 based PDA and my Google account’s Calendar & Contacts. And the Google< ->Mac side of things will just have to wait until I get Leopard on my Mac.

At that stage I’ll then use the inbuilt Address Book gmail sync (after using this hack http://lifehacker.com/393855/enable-google-contact-sync-without-an-iphoneipod-touch) and to sync iCal on Mac to Google calendar I’ll use “Gsync” http://googlesync.sourceforge.net/ or http://code.google.com/p/calaboration/ to get ‘inbuilt’ iCal sync.

Phew

Dave

Interesting what vanity searches turn up sometimes. Often lead you to services and sites either never seen or long forgotten.

A link to me turned up in my email this morning pointing to the Flickr search tool over at HiveMind [http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/].

It does really fast searches on tags, interestingness, user, contacts and allows searching by license too, which makes it a great tool to find Creative Commons materials.

Check it out.

Dave

Technorati Tags: flickr, hive mind, creativity, tools

When the Review of the National Innovation System was released last month we thought it was worth talking about on our podcast. So Myself, Mike and Laurel hooked up, to be joined during the show by Kristin.

I had created a aggregated feed around the topic using Yahoo Pipes and pimped it on Twitter and through our blogs. During the podcast we talked about the desire to extend the conversation around the Review. Right there and then we found the domain ventureaustralia.com.au was available and Laurel snapped it up for us to do something on.

A big focused was on the report being released initially locked down in PDF format. We tossed around the idea of setting up a site and posting each part of the Review in it. Since then it’s now been unlocked and released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. Which is good to see.

I tossed around ideas of how to make better use of the aggregated pipe feed at the new domain. I contemplated turning every feed article into a blog post at the site, but in a sense that would just be centralising the debate. So I hit on the idea to parse the pipe through something that simpified the pipes layout, bought it under the venturousaustralia.com.au domain and added ability to promote sharing. A kludged Simplepie implementation was what I stumbled on.

See the results at http://venturousaustralia.com.au

Dave

Technorati Tags: innovation, venturous, nis

Over a month back on my Lifekludger blog I mentioned in a blog post titled “Mind control interface a near reality” the Epoc Headset, being developed by Emotiv.

The other day on the New Inventors on the ABC here in Australia my friend Mark Pesce gives a shoutoput to me. Ref 1min in.

See the snipped video below.

[green]qiQFNSOBEDY[/green]

Followed a Twitter on Sat afternoon that she was streaming live on Qik – unfortunately she quickly experienced the bottleneck that exists to any serious entry of Australia participating the Information Economy – our network access.

Click here for full image of above.

Dave

Technorati Tags: beth kanter, cup08, network, cu08, connectingup

http://dnw.thisismyjam.com

Dave

Dave

Technorati Tags: ksolo, myspace

I read with interest my good mate, Hugo Ortega’s UberTablet blog. Hugo was the very first guest on our Extraordinary Everyday Lives podcast and, outside of my regular colleagues, has been the single biggest supporter of my Lifekludger endeavours, and indeed myself, in a substantial way – providing equipment to try with my mouthstick especially.
So as I read in his latest blog post about how he’s been snowed under with the things he’s been doing to promote all things Tablet in Australia I’m reminded of what Mike keeps telling me and what we’ve been trying to avoid with Lifekludger.

People Don’t Scale – Networks Do.

But it pays to remember I’m talking about people here when I refer to Networks. Maybe it’s better stated:

People Don’t Scale – People Networks Do.

Hugo has found that he’s become a bottle neck – we each only have 24 hours in our day. It’s a lesson we need to heed in this age of exponential growth in available information and rapidly advancing technological growth, if we are to somehow turn it into knowledge and practical outcomes that can benefit and grow us as people enriched by the age we live in rather than enslaved by it.

Just how we grow a network that can scale and how we can do that while keeping the true to the spirit of why the network exists is another matter. It’s an issue that seems to be evolving at the same time as the rest of the technical issues are that are underpinning it. Maybe why we are seeing such attention paid to social networks.

The answer though cannot lie back in the centralised past as centralisation creates bottlenecks. It can’t rest on one point of contact, a single node. The end goal might be node focused but that doesn’t have to mean node centred.
Maybe, like so many other things, the answer lays buried somewhere in the natural world, the small pieces [people] loosely joined [network], the strength of the geo-desic dome, in the triangle of abundant, heterogeneous, creative people – the ecosystem of humanity.

Connection and Openness.

An human ecosystem based on connection and openness [sharing], focused on a node. That’s the Lifekludger vision.

Dave

Reference (from Mike coming out of discussion with JP) :

ABUNDANCE: speaks to the post scarcity world of the internet – where the cost of storage and distribution approach zero, some very different rules kick in. Kinda crucial to the longtail and the jewels therein.

CREATIVITY: coming up with new ways of doing stuff – sometimes just for the pure fun of it. Whether solving a problem or scratching an itch. Either way, leave your past solutions and old habits at the door. You are not a mindless, replaceable unit of production here!

Using Virtual Worlds and Emerging Technologies for People with Disabilities

This two-part, interactive event will take place in two locations online:

First, the live discussion in the virtual world of Second Life at 9am PST
The follow-up discussion will take place for the rest of the day, 10AM PST- 6PM PST, in TechSoup’s Accessible Technology & Public Computing forum at: <http://www.techsoup.org/go/accessibletechnology>
Event Schedule:

9 AM PST in the Nonprofit Commons Amphitheater in Second Life.

Simon Stevens (aka Simon Walsh in Second Life) <http://www.simonstevens.com> will be speaking about his work in Second Life. Simon Walsh is chief executive of Enable Enterprises which manages the Wheelies nightclub for people with disabilities in Second Life and the Second Ability Second Life simulator. In real life, Simon has cerebral palsy and lives in Coventry, UK. He is a disability consultant and trainer working with many organizations large and small.

Simon will give a virtual talk via text chat in the Nonprofit Commons amphitheater, in the virtual world of Second Life

10AM PST- 6PM PST –the follow-on discussion will continue in an all-day, asynchronous (not-live) forum on TechSoup. This event will occur in a question and answer format in the TechSoup Accessible Technology & Public Computing forum <http://www.techsoup.org/go/accessibletechnology>

Online Event: Using Virtual Worlds and Emerging Technologies for People with Disabilities in this forum, Feb. 29th, all-day, asynchronous (not-live). No registration is needed; just show up here and post your questions!

Accessible Technology and Public Computing message board, TechSoup

Dave

The Flickr Manager was released prior under a GNU General Public License. The Photodropper plugi has been released as Copyrighted. Even to my basic level of understandig this appears to contravene the GPL.

Wikipedia states:

“The GPL is the most popular and well-known example of the type of strong copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft. Under this philosophy, the GPL is said to grant the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved, even when the work is changed or added to.” (emphasis mine)

But as wrong as that might seem, this get’s me angry for reasons that transcend pure legality. Let me try to elaborate why.

My colleague Trent is a talented programmer, he’s also a fast learner and a mate. When I hired him last year to work for the place I work and be a part of the small IT team he was just finishing Uni. He’s now starting his Honours. He hadn’t heard of Wordpress much less participated in any wide open source endeavors or dipped his foot into the Web 2.0, read/write online world. His first task was when we had to rework a project that had been put together hurriedly prior to his starting that documents the History of Disability in SA. I had conceived and built that site using as many Web 2.0 and collaborative techniques I had absorbed in the prior year and the time and our budget could afford and done so with the emerging nature of online interaction in mind. I rapidly threw everything I had learnt about the emerging Web 2.0 technologies and the culture of cooperation, sharing, collaboration and openness I’d been immersed in. And Trent picked it up quick, very quick, soaking it in like a sponge then mixing in his own thoughts and ideas. Right there he embraced the re-mix culture of ideas.

In no time we quickly were exploring all kinds of ideas and rapidly developing tools and techniques focused around building a kick-ass back-end infrastructure on Wordpress that we could implement for our redevelopment of the History project and ensuring the things we built were suited to our longer term vision of redeveloping the centre’s information systems framework, which we had decided was, and is, to be based on wpmu.

One of the key tools Trent made was a plugin for Wordpress that could better handle the images we used on the History project site. You see, the project uses images on Flickr that we put there. It was planned that way – use tools already existing that do the job we need and build a site using data that is actually distributed. So we used Flickr as the centre’s and projects photo manager. To better allow staff to easily control the integration between the images and the other associated text (stored locally) Trent developed what became Flickr Manager plugin for Wordpress.

Encouraged by me he released it into the Wordpress community under a GPL license. And started a blog. Our desire to be part of the culture that we exist in – the Web 2.0 space online – and to support the Wordpress community was blossoming. The Flickr Manager plugin, released onto the Wordpress Extend plugin site got fast take up and rapidly Trent developed more features and made heaps of bug fixes. A lot of time went into getting it just right, aided by a lot of messages from users of the plugin and helping them when they had problems with it. The community was working. It turns oput that his Flickr Manager was the first Wordpress plugin to actually allow uploading to Flickr from the Wordpress dashboard, not just retrieval of images from Flickr..

I managed to convince the Director that getting Trent and myself to WordCamp in Melbourne was a good investment in the future – no mean feat in the climate of funding cutbacks and total upheaval we were in, are still in, trying to regroup the way we operate and fight for survival.

All this effort and passion that goes on behind what the end user, the world sees, is where the real heart of Web 2.0 anmd the collaborative, participative, sharing and caring nature of open source culture exists. It’s openness of people at their most human, fundamental level. People connecting with other people.

So to have some un-appreciative, un-creative leach come and claim something they ‘badge engineered’ as theirs is like introducing a vacuum back into culture. And it makes me sick. And if you love anything thats good about humans, culture and this online place we share – it should make you sick too.

It’s anathema to everything we are trying to achieve as a connected people.

Dave

He picked up on a Tweet I left ;

“dnwallace : tryin out Pointui on WM5 and liking it. Finally, ‘touch’ features without a finger – http://pointui.com/“

There’s too much to say than I have time right now, this is just to point you onto the lifekludger blog rather than here.

More to say on the subject later…over on Lifekludger.

Dave

It gets even weirder, because of the friends blurring with business colleagues.

Maybe the nature and title of the relationship needs to reside in the hands of the one making the connection, not an outside imposed technological ‘cubicle’ definition.

Relationship specification and definition should perhaps be inverted and opened up – individual centred relationship context – self configurable extendable fluid relationship matrixes.  Just like cones of silence need to be. Supported by technology not defined by it.

It’s kinda like the personal social side of Docs VRM stuff.

Just a thought.

Dave

EELS 32 – 24th August 2007 – Introducing kent

Interestingly, Chris Carfi, who we had on show #30, has posed a timely post on one of the topics we talk about on the latest show.

From his full post here :

quote from Debra Aho Williamson: “[Display advertising] is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ and the real potential of social networks has yet to be tapped.”

Dave

[tags]chris carfi, eels032, podcast, advertising[/tags]

Was catching up on my rss feeds on my mobile phone while travelling in the van on the way home, as I tend to do. Scanning through my friends Facebook status’ feed to see what they’d been up to, I saw Laurel had been cyber-streaking (is that again) and Mike was enjoying what was happening on the wall at the virtual danah boyd conference (yes, I know it’s not called that but it might as well be) while Beth made her fundraising goal and was buying gear for Cambodia.

I had the thought. Why couldn’t I change my status without having to go onto Facebook? (which is hard in the back of a van travelling in peak hour traffic with a pen in your mouth, pda perched, balancing on your hand, and on a 4inch screen that’s half taken up by a on screen keyboard).

It then struck me. That’d be just like a Twitter clone. You follow your friend’s status feed and post your own.

So, who’s gonna be the first to make that little bit of connectivity work? Unless of course there already is and I don’t know about it. In which case the question is, whose going to be te first to tell me where it is?

Dave

[tags]facebook, twitter, danah boyd, mike seyfang, laurel papworth, beth kanter[/tags]

The median age for Too Open is probably Generation X. The median age for Too Closed is probably Generation Y.

Ay, there’s the rub.

It occurred to me that from the Enterprise standpoint Facebook looks very open yet really there’s a further level than that, one which predominately the Gen Y’ers live in and are after. That must scare the pants off them Enterprises if they were to see that level without having a sense of vision for the future.

Certainly, in these rapidly changing times many long held positions are challenged and it can be like peering into a long, dark tunnel. Just yesterday at work, where we are going through massive change anyway – not specifically due to changes in the Webspace – I was challenged inwardly over decisions about service provision and business models. And we are talking tiny scale. Still, my mind went straight to the tension of closed v open and sustainable business development.

JP has had a lot of talk in comments about the generation thing being a furphy. However what I think JP is hinting at, regardless of the labels you put on it, is attitude. As Mike hits on – the stance has been a CLOSED default, the switch is being flipped to OPEN default and Gen Y, M onwards are flipping it. What are you as a participator in technology (and in Enterprise) going to do about it?

Just like the 60’s again…the individual is the new centre of gravity. Linda Stone’s spot on. So was Bob Dylan.

Read this as a cry to people and Enterprise (of all size) today :

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Might be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

Dave

[tags]jp rangiswami, linda stone, bob dylan, gen y, closedvopen, mike seyfang[/tags]

*Dylan Lyrics, “The Times They Are A-Changin” : Copyright © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

History of Disability in South Australia.

You can go there to find out what it’s all about. I wanted to relay a few details about it. I kind of wanted to put a (beta) sign on it as there’s much more in plan for it. We want to enable a way to comment on the articles and stories, to allow conversations about and around the content while it adds to the richness at the same time. You know, “I went to that school too, I found…” type discussion.

My major focus when building out the infrastructure was to allow it to scale over time and be easy for the staff who adds stuff to do so. Also not having access to bunches of resources (including our funding which was recently cut in half) I wanted to use tools and services available where possible and not re-invent the wheel.

It’s based on a wordpress backend that’s been modded for easy content management, Flickr for images and lots of custom kludges to bring it together. The whole thing is tag based so offers extreme flexibility for future. We plan to also build fulfilment services in and make use of classification of resources ongoing by incorporating the ability for people to add to the collective by submitting tags. Search also is anticipated.

All these things should be relatively easy to implement given time due the nature of wordpress.

There’s been lots of behind the scenes things that conspired to never let it come to pass, but at least now we have the first building blocks down.

Technorati Tags: history, disability, dirc

The point I tried to relay was how the future, the very near future, will depend on this infrastructure. And not doing all we can to build good infrastructure as soon as we can is like entering the industrial revolution and ignoring the importance of building factories.

Later on in the day I saw this. Watch it.

Ahh…filter=signal

Munge Twitter Pipe

From Park Paradigm, via JP

Just wish I had a clearer view…persevere, it’s worth it.

Edglings – some previous thoughts about life on the edge

Dave

Because I’m not watching them as a twitter user they don’t know.

Be afraid.

Dave

PS: Does this mean I have no recognition or anything useful to say?

PPS: Because I’m not a twitter user and one of my friends has a closed list, does this mean twitter is a silo or maybe a ‘clique’?

I took the opportunity to capture the opening and snipped together my versy first video with iMovie and on YouTube. See what you think.

Bruce Cockburn video on YouTube.

Interesting as you don’t see much of Bruce outsideCanada/US. At last a personal useful thing I’ve found on YouTube.

Now what I find interesting about the clip itself is it has an incredibly Second Life feel about it. Virtual buildings textured with the lyrics of the song, with fly arounds and yet real people inside.

If you’ve ever seen Second Life, have a look at the video and tell me if I’m dreaming about its SL resemblance. Maybe SL will become a channel for video production mashups…..machinima meets MSM.

Turns out one of the public computers was acting up….nothing new, they always get a bashing. However this time things typed by staff on a computer, about 8 metres away, across the other side of the office was showing up in the text boxes of the public computer.

Over the week I was away my colleague had tried many things, even a complete reinstall of XP, only to have the bizarre behaviour return.

So I immediately thought virus, trojun or spyware, and set to scanning both systems. Couple hours later, no threats but still no change.

Being nearly lunch, and way past the fifteen minute rule, I retreat to my office and call the cavalry…in the form of a mate who works in the trade.

He offers a suggestion, which he has witnessed before, yet seems ludicrous given the positioning of the computers involved, and I hasten to give it a go.

And viola! It works and the mystery was solved.

Now, given the clues, do you have any idea what it was? Leave me a comment if you do.

Dave

The release of the iPod nano in colours again twigged something I’d written in this blog back in April titled Classic colour

Apple’s done well to foster this ‘emotional connection’ via music with the iPod. I’m wondering perhaps we might see a colourful return? After all, what evokes emotional connection besides music….oh yeah, colour!

Came across this interesting article in the Metroplolis Magazine (a design mag) focused on the use of colour in Apples computers.

I had one of the first Macs they talk about so it was a nostalgia trip for me (and a nice one now I’m trapped in WindowsLand due to work).

It finished on an interesting note:

People are no longer satisfied with good looks and ease of use. They expect all that, and an emotional connection too.

Apple’s done well to foster this ‘emotional connection’ via music with the iPod. I’m wondering perhaps we might see a colourful return? After all, what evokes emotional connection besides music….oh yeah, colour!

Link – Metropolis Mag