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.

Latest podcast is up :

Extraordinary Everyday Lives #051 :

Guest is Mike Poole from Hong Kong - his blogs Greetings Earthlings and A Death in Hong Kong.

Get the show here.

Dave

Technorati Tags: social action

Which lead to the thinking about how I do what I do at Lifekludger, documented in the “Contexts and Clues” section of the About page as — “To get from one context to another takes a Kludge!“….

So just the other week I get a ping from @fang about the book kluge —–

Then I see a tweet from @kanter asking “what is the sweet spot between personal productivity and connectedness?”

My response (below) gets quoted by her in a blog post “What’s the sweet spot between personal productivity and social productivity?” here ……

Which leads me to read Stowe Boyd’s post about “Information Overload, Schmoverload“, and his thoughts on network productivity here ……

Then I talk about it with Mike on our podcast here …..

And so there I am, reading Stowe again, critiquing more mainstream media articles on the so-called ‘curse of multitasking’ and the over emphasis placed on ‘personal’ productivity - “…the war on Flow” here ….

And what do I read? “In the wonderful book, Kluge, Gary Marcus makes a solid case that the human mind is really bad at memory, and that we have developed all sorts of compensating techniques to counter that weakness. Our memories can be demonstrably changed by simple shifts in context ….”

From Context to Context via a connected kludge.

We need connection to others and to other’s thinking if nothing more than a technique to counter our weaknesses - we need a networked life.

And this holds true in any area of application - personal or professional.

That, my networked friends, is life network productivity.

Dave

Technorati Tags: beth kanter, connection, context, fang, information, overload, network productivty, stowe boyd

http://labs.summize.com/sentiment 

Kick-Off Discussion: The Value of Openness

JP Rangaswami (BT)
Elliot Maxwell (Consultant)

From: @wseltzer on Wednesday, June 18th at 00:17:54 [link]
To: @rafik
Supernova is http://www.supernova2008.com/ — good discussions of openness and innovation

From: @sarahdopp on Tuesday, June 17th at 21:24:14 [link]
We’re all stealing each others’ laptop powercords here in the openness panel. Openness is not hoarding the juice. #supernova2008

From: @carterkr on Tuesday, June 17th at 21:15:18 [link]
Pondering the Zen of Openness.

From: @abbepatterson on Tuesday, June 17th at 21:02:39 [link]
Is openness something society can effectively legislate or is it cultural and a state of mind?

From: @factoryjoe on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:56:24 [link]
Elliot Maxwell’s (http://emaxwell.net) talk on openness was very good. All openness is not created equal. #supernova2008

From: @LangDavison on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:51:47 [link]
#supernova2008 Elliott Maxwell: openness in health care will lead to evidence-based medicine, because you have information about what works

From: @wseltzer on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:51:27 [link]
JP Rangaswami: airport gate standardization as a model of openness: standard enables competition, transactions, scale. #supernova2008

From: @abbepatterson on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:45:28 [link]
How does the innovator, the entrepreneur make money? Who will invest in this business? Who licenses openness?

From: @abbepatterson on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:43:40 [link]
Technology is an openness enabler, true, but what is the business model for enabling openness?

From: @Ross on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:42:26 [link]
“openness isn’t about moving bits, its an attitude about letting people contribute their best”

From: @debs on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:35:17 [link]
openness is a continuum - me like that - death to binary thinking

From: @BJ on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:34:50 [link]
Openness is better because it fosters and creates community - at #supernova2008 from JP at BT - inspirational

From: @sarahdopp on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:34:01 [link]
“Openness means having no place to hide.” -@jobsworth #supernova2008

From: @Casablanca on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:33:36 [link]
To: @jobsworth
“Openness means having no place to hide” #Supernova2008

From: @AjitJaokar on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:33:20 [link]
JP Rangaswami at supernoava 2008 - Openness has value because of the community it generates

From: @gapingvoid on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:32:31 [link]
To: @jobsworth
: “There is no reason to believe in ‘Openness’ if you don’t believe in ‘The War For Talent’.” Totally, totally spot-on.

From: @LangDavison on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:32:08 [link]
To: @supernova2008
JP Rangaswami (BT) “No need for openness [in corporations] if you don’t believe in the war for talent”

From: @ccarfi on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:23:05 [link]
To: @jobsworth
openness “sets an ethics platform” and openness “attracts talent” #supernova2008

From: @davemorin on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:13:56 [link]
At the SuperNova Conference with @jsmarr, @daveman692, @t, @johnmccrea, @jobsworth and many other incredible people. Talking about openness.

From: @olivermarks on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:12:50 [link]
#supernova2008 @jobsworth and Elliot Maxwell kick off ‘the value of openness’ open flow track

[Flickr photos by meteo - 1 | 2]

I have no idea what Mike’s up to but caught odd fragments via twitter while sitting in a cafe eating my lunch that he was doing some kitchen experingmenting with DNA and fruit.

And a reference to Milton the Monster which I couldn’t help but respond to as Milton is a fondly remembered cartoon from my childhood.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeblogs/tags/uofaoday/

Some tweets….

Technorati Tags: dna, fang, milton the monster, uofaoday

As part of the ruthless cull I packed away in a box over 100 cassette tapes that I hadn’t listened to for over 10 years…no over 15 probably. I’m giving them away.

But of them there was some I just couldn’t part with and so kept them aside and made a list to see if I could get them digitally as I never listen any other way than through my computer. It was always a pain before digital computer based music for me anyway as I had to have someone put tapes in/out for me.

So as I was typing out the list of must keeps, I thought I’d share it here. Most of these were taped off albums (yes kiddies, real black vinyl ones with little grooves) which have long since left my shores. If you hadn’t noticed, the 70’s feature heavily … go figure

Cassettes: artist-album;s (no particular order)

simon and garfunkel-central park
eagles-hotel california; the long run
alan parsons project
paul young
tex don and charlie-sad but true
bob seger
the daisy heads-demo
stevie wonder-hotter than july
pink foyd-the wall
randy stonehill-love beyond reason; between the glory and the flame
robbie robertson
the violet burning
hoi polloi
rick elias
pete townshend and ronnie lane-rough mix
spinning john-casual
t rex-electric warrior
stevie wright
ozark mountain daredevils-it’ll shine when it shines; nuclear fishin
moody blues-long distance voyager
joe cocker-mad dogs and englishmen
supertramp-breakfast in america
cold chisel-breakfast at sweethearts
van morrison-wavelength
steve gibbons-down in the bunker
margaret becker-the reckoning; never for nothing
goanna-spirit of place; oceania
bruce cockburn-christmas 1991; 1992; a humans/internet tribute
redgum-caught in the act; virgin ground; frontline
lynard skynard-second helping
doobie brothers
talking heads-more songs about buildings and food; little creatures
nitty gritty dirt band-gold from dust
breakfast with amy
lou reed-new york

Dave

Technorati Tags: music

This is advance notice I got about the last performance coming up.

It’s awesome and worth getting up early if you need to to experience it.

Saturday 31st May 2pm SL time

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Havens%20Beach/224/25/701

Technorati Tags: pinkfloyd, secondlife

For someone special I know.

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

I’m never good at the one-line message that newspapers seem to want, I have trouble encapsulating all my thoughts in a short space, so I rambled on a bit and they picked something out that I guess they thought relevant.

The photographer was great. Used a Canon EOS-1D Mark II N. Original colour shots are here and here.
Dave

I was awake at 5am the other morning so I could go to a artistic performance in Second Life.

The performance was of Pink Floyd’s The Wall concert set to the original music from The Wall.

And it was spectacular. It is so popular we had to be there an hour before start to make sure we could get into the sim.
The group who put it together used particles, objects moving, photos and digital puppets all coreographed the the soundtrack to great effect by the CARP team.

During the performance the wall was slowly built until the climax at end when at the crowds shouting “Tear Down The Wall” saw the wall of bricks all tumble down at which point everyone was invited to go dance on the bricks.

It was at hat point you got to see just how big a stage it was. These bricks were huge.

Interestingly we were told to turn the music stream on beforehand and leave it on and not pause it or it would then be out of sync with the performance. It reminded me of just how much we a still at the infancy stage of the virtual world emergence - a sense of almost analog linear performance in a totally digital environment.

Brilliant stuff. See the slideshow on Flickr below.

Slideshow: http://flickr.com/photos/dnwallace/sets/72157604647772637/show/
Flickr set: http://flickr.com/photos/dnwallace/sets/72157604647772637/

Found this great slideshow of the event on the second arts blog:

Peace - Dave

Networks don’t have people. People have networks.:

“Networks don’t have people.  People have networks.” - Demian Entrekin

In it he has some key thoughts from others including Doc Searles (writes), Dave McClure (writes)and Kevin Werbach (brings it home).

The right point of integration is around the individual.  Each of us is the center of our own universe.

(image credit goes to the inimitable david armano.  cross-posted to the conversation hub.)

It’s about the people, people.

Dave

This show we are joined by Richard Birkin (biff) from Naked. Biff is from Derby, England.

Biff outlines the Naked ideas and how it works and the ‘kernel’ of what the service offers. We talk about closed being the new open, notions of privacy and trust. There’s lotsa banter and ideas about what we as people want in our lives and how technology needs to meet that - and biff seems to take copious notes on applying all our ideas into Naked [poor guy].

http://dnw.thisismyjam.com

Dave

An extremely relevant topic, this show has already had the largest amount of downloads on a single day this month.

Get your ears around this!

Extraordinary Everyday Lives show #44 - Al Upton and the miniLegends

DOWNLOAD AND SAVE - Right-click. 1:05:03 22.9Mb

Once again this edition of the show is sponsored by Nick Hodge, Professional Geek at Microsoft. Our thanks to Nick for his tangible support.

Dave

The rules:

1- Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2 - People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3 - At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4 - Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

My 8 Facts:

1. I like and collect elephants (no, not real ones)
2. When I was 18 I’d never broken a bone - so I broke my neck,
3. I love eating lamb anything (well within reason)
4. I never really liked school except for Tech Studies and Art
5. I love peace but like to think I would kill or die for my family and close friends
6. I once sang in school choir at Adelaide Festival Centre (where later on saw Skyhooks in concert)
7. Favourite musician is Bruce Cockburn
8. Second life saved my sanity

Now, the 8 I get to tag. And if you’ve already done it before, just let me know?

Nathanael Boehm
Gary barber
Eshi Otawara
Naked Biff
Nick Hodge
Tracey Crisp
Roy Blumenthal
Rick Clise

Dave

Dave

Technorati Tags: ksolo, myspace

My first Womad experience was a memorable one.

We nearly didn’t get in as the people at the ticket office were trying to tell us that my carer with me needed to have an ‘official’ carers card! I mean what the hell. My family carers for me, they don’t get paid, and yet aren’t official’ because they don;’t have a card saying so? There was no stipulation about this when purchasing the ticket online as I did and none stipulated on the printed information booklet I had with me. In fact this seemed to be an unwritten, unstated Womad law. We refused to accept no as an answer and sulk away with $145 ticket strapped to my wrist and so after a while insisting they relented and walked us through security (who, as it happens wasn’t scanning anyone’s tickets anyway as the ’system’ was down…telling me it was!)

So once in we quickly settled into getting our bearings and found something to watch and listen to. The dust was thick and the night balmy. I met up with Mike and Mandy after a comedy of SMS message exchanges and we settled into a great night. It was a pity the day time heat was so bad it meant I couldn’t go to more, however I’ll be going next time around.

Below are a couple video clips of the fire lanterns and other pictures can be found here on my flickr account.

Dave

One was a woman from Rwanda where millions were killed a few years ago. She was from tribe A, Tutsi, massacred by tribe B, Hutu. She’d lost husband and children. She was at a “truth and reconciliation” session arranged by South African Bishop Tutu, (Church and State have a different relationship depending on where you are in the world).

She identified her family’s executioners in “court” that day. Then she asked to be lead across the room to the man. I forgive him, she said, and want to take him home to be my son.

Too much, isn’t it! You or I couldn’t do that. We’d want revenge (we call it justice) because we’ve been brought up on retributive justice. We’ve rarely heard of “restorative justice” where all aggrieved parties and the offender(s) are in the same room together to seek truth and reconciliation

The only point I want to make here is that it seems possible to forgive, even if not forget

Powerful stuff from Bob [as usual].

Got me thinking about openness as a restorative agent, or moreso, environment. How much real justice exists in our world, in court or out, depends on how much openness exists in or hearts.

As Bruce Cockburn [another who writes powerfully as usual] wrote :

“Everybody
loves to see
justice done
on somebody else”.

“Justice, Inner City Front, 1981″

Think about it. I did.

Dave

Technorati Tags: father bob, openness, justice

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!

Naked Yak 27/01/08 8:04 AM NakedBiff

Nurturing

The more we share the more we know each other, the more we have in common. In this sense, how we use the technology that is available to us is key - we should use it to share. And we are!

From Boston Now:
“People may make fun of blog or Twitter posts about what someone had for breakfast or how they like a certain video game, but it is all part of how humans build a cooperating society that works. It can’t be rushed, and it can be nurtured, even with simple text messages.”

In the long run, sharing technologies may just help bring about World Peace, by making us more aware of each other.

Not us and them, but we. (kudos to Father Bob)

Dave

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

The Extraordinary Everyday Lives Show #042

Why are we now paying to watch ads?

It used to be TV was paid for by the advertisers so we could watch free. The Media companies were paid by the advertisers to provide a service to the consumer. Now the Media companies are being paid by the consumer via subscription AND the advertiser.

It sucks.

Academic Award for Year 1.

And yet he finds school boring because it’s too easy.

Definitely must only get his good looks from his Dad.