Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

PaperCamp

Posted by Roo - 24/01/09 at 07:01:18 pm

It’s been a whole week since PaperCamp (a fringe event to Jeremy, Russell and James‘ BookCamp) organised by Matt Jones.

I drifted between the two events (meaning I missed a couple of things, including Karsten Schmidt talking about fiducial marker generation and machine readable origami markers). I mostly stayed at PaperCamp though, so here’s a handful of what I did catch…

• Aaron Straup Cope talked about a lot of great stuff including papernet and pocketMMaps.
• Tom Taylor demonstrated his adorable microprinter project, an implementation of something like Matt Webb’s social letterbox idea, which made pretty much everyone in the room drool. I’m making one as we speak.
• Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino got us making things. I made a thing. The first time I’ve used scissors and Prit Stick for ages.
• Chris Heathcote gave a charming talk entitled Pirates and Scalpels about travel guides. He makes me want to cut things up. You know, in a good way.
• Nick O’Leary shared his paper graphs, with a pop-up paper pie chart. I can’t wait for the big pop-up book of statistics and the pop-up topological travel guide to San Francisco.
• Sawa Tanaka shared some lovely projects, including Spot nocturnal animals (a glow in the dark book), The Egg Book (a thermochromic ink book) and a breathtaking book about Hiroshima (with photos from 1945 printed using soy sauce, overlaid with modern photos shot from the same angles).
• Beeker Northam got us thinking about taking and sharing photos of books. There is something about the texture of paper and the uniqueness of an individual copy of a book which LibraryThing (et al) don’t capture. Someone (?) suggested taking and sharing a photo of the front cover when you start reading a book and the back cover when you finish it. Genius.
• Jeremy Keith started a discussion about an idea: a shared social guide book which grows over time. (Incidentally, Jeremy probably made the best notes about PaperCamp).
• Matt Ward wrapped up, coining a new phrase.

A very good time was had by all. I hear that a PaperCamp is happening in New York in a couple of weeks. Whatever you do, don’t miss it if you’re in NYC on 7th and 8th of February.

Advice on using Wikipedia

Posted by Roo - 09/01/09 at 07:01:36 pm

Steve recently wrote that the BBC should engage with Wikipedia. I agree.

[photo credit: Steve Bowbrick]

Here’s some advice for anyone at the BBC wanting to get involved, which includes some things to consider if you’re not already familiar with contributing to Wikipedia. Feel free to ignore it if you don’t work for the Beeb, but perhaps it will be interesting and useful to other people too and of course I’m keen to hear what (presumably many) important things I’ve missed.

First of all, it’s worth knowing that the BBC has editorial guidelines about using open access online encyclopedias.

“…When correcting errors about the BBC, we should be transparent about who we are. We should never remove criticism of the BBC. Instead, we should respond to legitimate criticism. We should not remove derogatory or offensive comments but must report them to the relevant administrators for them to take action.

Before editing an online encyclopedia entry about the BBC, or any entry which might be deemed a conflict of interest, BBC staff should consult the house rules of the site concerned and, if necessary, ask permission from the relevant wikieditor. They may also need to seek advice from their line manager.”

Once you’re comfortable with all of that, the next place to look is Wikipedia’s own documentation.

A good places to being in the guide on contributing to Wikipedia, which says that although you do not have to create an account to edit articles on Wikipedia, there are many good reasons for you to do so. See especially the advice on why create an account. BBC employees should be open and transparent about their BBC status (which will be obvious from their IP addresses anyway, like this well publicised example) and the best way of doing this is by creating and using a user account.

More good places to get started include the Five Pillars, avoiding common mistakes and the perfect article (although it’s worth remembering that perfection is not required).

The policies and guidelines are important. Anyone considering editing Wikipedia you take their time in absorbing and understanding all the policies and guidelines. Here are some highlights. What follows it not a complete list, just a taster to get you started.

Policies

Neutral point of view

“All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources.”…

Verifiability

“The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true.”…

No original research

“Wikipedia does not publish original research or original thought. This includes unpublished facts, arguments, speculation, and ideas; and any unpublished analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position. This means that Wikipedia is not the place to publish your own opinions, experiences, or arguments.”…

What Wikipedia is not

“Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information; merely being true or useful does not automatically make something suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia” …

see particularly the policy on news reports

“Wikipedia considers the historical notability of persons and events. News coverage can be useful source material for encyclopedic topics, but not all events warrant an encyclopedia article of their own. Routine news coverage of such things as announcements, sports, and tabloid journalism are not sufficient basis for an article.”…

Guidelines

Conflicts of interest

“Activities regarded by insiders as simply “getting the word out” may appear promotional or propagandistic to the outside world. If you edit articles while involved with organizations that engage in advocacy in that area, you may have a conflict of interest.”…

see particularly How to avoid COI edits and How to handle conflicts of interest

External Links

“Wikipedia’s purpose is not to include a comprehensive list of external links related to each topic. No page should be linked from a Wikipedia article unless its inclusion is justifiable”…

plus What to link, including What should be linked, Links to be considered and Links normally to be avoided

Reliable sources

“Keep in mind that if the information is worth reporting, an independent source is likely to have done so.”…

Notability

“Within Wikipedia, notability is an inclusion criterion based on encyclopedic suitability of a topic for a Wikipedia article. The topic of an article should be notable, or “worthy of notice.” Notability is distinct from “fame,” “importance,” or “popularity,” although these may positively correlate with it.”…

see particularly General notability guideline and Notability of article content

“Keep in mind that an encyclopedia article is a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject, not a complete exposition of all possible details”…

You’ll want to be careful to follow Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines to ensure that any proposed edits, new pages or external links are worthy of inclusion, and always be open to correction from Wikipedia’s users and editors.

Toshiba Qosmio G40

Posted by Roo - 06/12/08 at 12:12:49 am

I recently received a very generous and interesting offer from TalkToshiba; they offered to lend me a laptop on the condition that I write an honest review of it. I get to play with a nice toy for a few weeks, you (and they) get to hear how I got on with it. Sounds fair to me. Let me make that perfectly clear: if the offer had been on the condition that I write a positive review, I’d have said no. The fact that they asked me to “post up your thoughts about the laptop on your blog … whether they be good or bad” and being able to tell the truth about the machine is the only reason I even considered it.

Unpacking it (from a big, heavy box that I’d assumed would be mostly packing material. Oh no, it really is that size) my first reaction was that I had never seen a bigger, heavier laptop. Opening it, I was struck by the distinctive design. Shiny, intricate and odd. Over time, that wore off and I now think of it as odd, and more than a tiny bit irritating. That’s partly because this isn’t the right laptop for me. Commuting every day means I value portability. Don’t expect this to be portable. It truly is a desktop replacement. In fact, you’ll want to plug in a mouse and keyboard too, because the layout is pretty dreadful.

On the plus side, it is quite powerful, has every connection you’d ever need, and the sound quality is amazingly good. When it did sometimes feel sluggish, I blamed the fact it was running Windows Vista. Oh, how I hate Vista. That’s not Toshiba’s fault though, and I should have installed Linux really.

Here’s what it looks like. The speakers vents are huge, and the visual aesthetic here seems to be ‘turbine’.

It’s big. Here it is stacked up against my wife’s MacBook and my MacBook Pro. The two put together are almost exactly the same height as the G40.

And here it is up against my MacBook Air. Perhaps not a fair comparison, but look at it. Insanity.

It’s covered in unnecessarily bright and numerous blinkenlighten. Not very soothing on the eyes.

The biggest problem, especially given the machine’s generous proportions, is having a teensy-tiny trackpad with two teensy tiny buttons, with a fingerprint device right in the middle, just in the way. The design is, frankly, dreadful.

The MacBook Air, despite being a much smaller laptop, makes room for a good-sized trackpad. There’s no excuse for a monster like the Qosmio G40 to have me scratching around on a surface half the size.

Good points

• I liked having a fingerprint reader to log in. Probably my favourite thing about it, and the one feature I now miss on my MacBook Pro and Air
• Having 5 (!) USB ports, and good connectivity generally. HDMI, s-video, SD/Memory Stick etc, even coax TV-antenna, I was almost expecting to see a SCART socket on this thing
• Good speakers, nice and loud with the best and most sound quality I have ever heard on any laptop
• Reasonably powerful

Bad points

• Unnecessarily ugly with lots of wasted space. 17″ inch screen feels small
• The screen seemed quite dim too. Certainly dimmer than the Pro or Air, even when powered by mains and turned up all the way
• Dreadful layout: tiny little trackpad with tiny little mouse buttons and a fingerprint reader plonked in the middle of it making it even more uncomfortable to use. I like the fingerprint reader, it’s just in the wrong place. The whole layout somehow manages to feel sprawling and cramped at the same time; I kept pressing the navigation wheel thing on the right when reaching for Return (pressing the soft touch ‘back’ button)
• No way (that I found) of dimming the enormous numbers of decorative lights
• HD-DVD. Seriously. I think the battle between BluRay and HD-DVD has been decided, hasn’t it?

It’s doesn’t really matter though because, being over a year old now, Toshiba no longer sells this laptop. The G50 has an even bigger (and I hope brighter) screen, but I don’t think I’ll be buying on. I like my laptops to be something I can put on my lap without fear of injury, and I returned the G40 without being terribly sad to see the back of it. Thanks to TalkToshiba for the loan though.

(More photos on Flickr if you’re interested.)

Tasty Tag Pages

Posted by Roo - 09/11/08 at 03:11:54 am

I’ve been improving Watchification and Speechification tonight.

Part of the enjoyment of both sites is the idea that we’re not just curating our favourite stuff, we’re weaving links between it, with those links becoming increasingly fun to explore. Tonight’s hack was a small improvement in order to pull in a few things that the web knows about every tag, but also every presenter, director, editor, and in fact any search term. Here’s what happens when you search Speechification for shows in which Stephen Fry is the presenter.

It works for normal tags too, and they’re handled in the same way. Ever wondered what Speechification has on Malcolm X? or Chris Watson?

I took exactly the same approach at Watchification, though had a bit more room to play with in the layout.

Other examples: ‘politics’, ‘music’, and shows in which Simon Amstell is the presenter.

As well as the obvious embed of (Creative Commons licensed) photos from Flickr, I used Monitter for the realtime Twitter monitoring, and a delicious.com feed of relevant bookmarks.

I have lots more ideas for other things to usefully enhance the page too. Watch this spaces. Um. These spaces.

Update: at the suggestion of Dan Hil, I’ve moved the widgety stuff to the bottom of the page.

This could be heaven or this could be hell…

Posted by Roo - 05/11/08 at 05:11:32 pm

Roo Reynolds plays “Hotel California” from Tom Armitage on Vimeo.

Thanks to Tom for capturing this video. That was fun.

ARG Panel at Virtual Worlds London

Posted by Roo - 18/10/08 at 09:10:57 pm

On Tuesday I’ll be moderating a panel on Alternate Reality Games at the Virtual Worlds London conference.

ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) have become a hot topic in recent months. It’s hard not to think of an ARG as a virtual world in which the interfaces (including websites, email, text message, even telephones) are those we know from everyday life. Is there even more to them than that? Recent franchise tie-ins raise startling questions about business models, while war-stories about user engagement will be of interest to any virtual world designer. Do virtual worlds have anything to learn from ARGs? Find out from a selection of real-life ARG designers, developers and experts.

I’m going to be joined by Dan Hon (Co-founder and CEO, Six to Start [bio]), Kim Plowright (Production Manager, Oil Productions Ltd [bio]) and Fiona ‘Foe’ Romeo (Head of Digital Media, National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory [bio]).

Just some of the questions I’m likely to ask include:

• Why do people play ARGs? Does there need to be a prize?

• How do you balance getting someone through the story vs keeping an interesting challenge?
• How do you maintain a believable universe?
• How do/can ARGs make money?
• To what extent can ARGs be user-created?

(I already have many more ideas than we’ll get through during the panel, but if you’d like to suggest topics for conversation or questions then I’m all ears.)

I’m planning to upload slides and notes asap after it’s all over. I don’t have any pre-prepared slides, but will be creating them on the fly in a similar way to the Augmented Reality panel I moderated at LA recently.

See you on Tuesday afternoon? According to the schedule, the ARG panel is 4:45 – 5:45pm on Tuesday. I’ll also be catching some former colleagues hard at work, including Rob‘s panel and Ian‘s talk on Tuesday morning.

Paul Carr on ‘the fringe of web apps’

Posted by Roo - 15/10/08 at 07:10:32 am

Here’s something to help you forget your woes during These Troubled Times. No need to risk censure by having fun in the sun, just read Paul Carr writing about his experiences on ‘The Fringe of Web Apps’.

Paul’s (sensible) approach to conferences is ignore the talks, especially the keynotes, and mingle. Here, he gets behind the scenes at FOWA expo in London:

I arrived late to the venue following a silly disagreement with some security guards over the fact that I didn’t actually have a conference pass. Fortunately I de-escalated the situation and gained entry by explaining that I was “on MySpace” and gesturing at the bus. Not “with MySpace”, you’ll note. Just on it. Fortunately the distinction was lost on them.

I’m not actually on MySpace.

I can think of no better candidate for description as Gonzo 2.0. Paul is evocative of what what happen if you stripped Hunter S. Thompson of his guns, dressed him in Converse and dropped him in the 21st Century. Wonderful stuff.

The credit crunch, startups and optimism

Posted by Roo - 13/10/08 at 08:10:21 am

Jason Calcanis recently wrote about (The) Startup Depression. As you may know Jason is (still) retired from blogging in order to concentrate on a smaller, closed community via email. He initially wrote the essay as an email to his mailing list, but later opened it up on his otherwise now-dormant blog.

“I promised myself I was retired from blogging to focus on my email newsletter, but I’m getting pounded with so many requests for this essay that I’m giving up and posting it here. This does not mean my retirement from blogging is off, this means I’m posting this so I don’t have to respond to hundreds of emails asking for a copy.”

Clearly, this highlights an important (and obvious) difference between email newsletters and blogs. It seems Jason was taken by surprise by the popularity of the message. It’s a good’un, and well worth a read.

The market will tell you what it wants. You just have to really listen.

Full of advice and tips regarding startups and economic (and clinical) depression.

Since the outside market is out of your control, the best you can do is focus your energy inward. Here are some things you can do after you’ve assessed where you company is at.

1. Execute better…
2. Grow the talent you have … Invest in training and education of your top people, because they are the ones who will lead your company through this mess…
3. Firing the average people… I highly recommend firing anyone who is good or average…
4. Cut spending every where you can: Recurring costs like connectivity, phones, rent and insurance are things that you can easily cut. Go to each of your providers and ask for 20% relief immediately or you’re leaving…
5. Find a revenue stream and ride it: If you don’t have a revenue stream right now, you’d better find one on Monday…
6. Focus on your profitable clients: If you have revenue, start focusing on which clients are most profitable…
7. Make your top ten 10% better: Look at the top ten aspects of your business and come up with a plan to make each 10% better in the next 30 days…
8. Hold an optional off-site breakfast meeting on a Sunday and see who shows up: If folks don’t show up for you to grow/save the company on a Sunday for a two hour breakfast, they probably aren’t going to step up when the sh#$%t really hits the fan…
9. Build marketshare…
10. Raise money …Build a plan based on revenue and taking market share and folks will consider funding you.

Stowe Boyd responds to Jason:

There is a revolution in the works, and the spark for that often comes from deep despair when dreams are smashed by events. … perhaps now the green fields might not be media, but the actually development of green technologies and web solutions to tie that into our everyday lives. We need to move into a new tomorrow, and innovators and entrepreneurs still have a big role to play.

Fred Wilson also responds to Jason:

“I don’t think we are in a “depression” in startup land. We are in a down cycle driven by a bad global economy. I think the web and information technology is one of the few bright spots in an overall gloomy economic outlook”

Well, a few days later, and Seesmic certainly seem to be going through some tough times. Loic says that he has to let seven employees (1/3 of Seesmic?) go, partly because “advertising is plummeting”.

Gary Vaynerchuk (whose keynote at Web 2.0 Expo NY I really loved) is, as ever, up-beat. In this recent video he covers

ROI. I am talking about Return on the Investment of your advertising dollar. Traditional media advertising is incredibly expensive and doesn’t provide nearly the rate of return you can derive from intelligent web-based marketing campaigns in 2008 and beyond.

In the video, he theorises that print and TV media will struggle, but online marketing, especially adverts in social media websites should pick up business because of return on investment.

Oh go on then, I’ll embed it.

Some quotes:

You think it’s smart to buy this [newspaper] ad, Macy’s? I don’t. I think you get a twitter acount and start interacting with your community. Get 30 interns and you make much more ROI.

[Holding up a full-page magazine ad] Gucci would be far better off going to every watch blog and buying ads there. … The value they get on the backend is so much better, and they can track it. You don’t have to guess what it meant, you can track it.

So. A difficult week. Cause for optimism or pessimism? You decide.

Gary Vaynerchuk (and others) at Web 2.0 Expo NY

Posted by Roo - 12/10/08 at 11:10:08 am

Gary Vaynerchuk (Director of Operations at Wine Library) presented a high energy, passionate and fun keynote on ‘Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape’ at the Web 2.0 Expo New York last month.

Highlights:

• “There is no reason in 2008 to do shit you hate. You can lose just as much money being happy as hell.”
• Community. Don’t just listen to your users. Care about them.
• Start with yourself. Whatever you love, do that. “If you collect smurfs, smurf it up”.
• Legacy is greater than currency. Has everybody grasped that your great great great grandchildren are going to watch and see everything you’ve ever done.
• The only thing I fear in the world is Internet on planes
• We only get to play this game one time: one life.
• You have to do what you love.
• Which tools should I use? All of them.
• Reality TV isn’t real, but we like it because it’s somewhat real. The space we play is very real.
• How do you get money to do what you love? You don’t. You position yourself to succeed. You work 9-5, you get home, you kiss the dog and you go to town.
• “Everybody has time. Stop watching fucking Lost“.

Of course, there were plenty of other interesting presentations. Here are four more of my favourites…

1 – Clay Shirky‘s keynote presentation on It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure is well worth 20 minutes of your information-overloaded time.

• We’re always dealing with information overload.
• We’ve had information overload since the 1500s … what’s changing now is the filters we used are breaking.
• Yitzhak Rabin quote: ‘If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it’s a fact’.
• Rather than asking what’s happened to cause an increase in information, ask ‘what filter just broke’?

(Incidentally, if you somehow missed Clay’s presentation at the earlier Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, about ‘Gin, Television and the Cognitive Surplus’, it’s great. I wrote some notes on it here in May, and Gary Vaynerchuck’s point about “stop watching Lost” resonates strongly with this.)

2 – Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) on what he learned from being Fake Steve, which includes a nice overview of the history behind the Fake Steve blog, and what Dan learned from it.

• Why did he do it? Boredom. Plus staying relevant to avoid being laid off.
• Parody of Naked Conversations idea of an open blog by a CEO. What would a CEO really blog about if it wasn’t a PR exercise?
• Steve is ripe for parody. (I found it touching that he stopped because Steve was looking too ill).
• Even after being outed, people still suspended their disbelief.
• Fake Putin and Fake Chomksy (commenting on Fake Steve). It was a performance space.
• It’s a shame he had to rush at the end, because he was in some really interesting territory about how media companies can benefit from openness, giving up control and fostering creativity in participatory spaces.

3 – Ben Huh on I Can Has Cheezburger.

• A brief history of lolcats and I Can Has Cheezburger.
• Simplicity. Think about just two people sharing, rather than the complexity.
• Value proposition of the site, never explicitly stated: ‘make users happy for 5 minutes a day’.
• 100% user-generated content. Simple tools to release pent up creativity.

4 – Irene Greif, IBM fellow, talking about the lovely Many Eyes tool.

• Scaling the audience to increase the network effect
• The impact of the visual display of information
• Desire to analyze and visualize data
• People find surprising uses for the tools and data.
• Allowing people to take the data into their own blogs is important
• Word visualizations are particularly popular and interesting. Comparative tag clouds, graphs of word sequences and the spinoff of Wordle.

A tale of two ISPs (and two social networks)

Posted by Roo - 10/10/08 at 07:10:23 pm

I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the speed, reliability, cost and (worst of all) usage limits on my ADSL service from PlusNet. Last night, following up on some new from a friend about O2, I asked Twitter whether I was mad to be considering switching to O2. With 1000+ Twitter followers (how did that happen?) it’s like being able to conduct a little survey of self selecting participants from a reasonably large pool. Even if only 10% of people who follow me read it, and even if 10% of these people reply, that’s still a couple of handfuls of useful feedback. Of course, Twitter is more to me than a survey machine, and rarely do I ask questions directly of my personal clan, but when I do I’m increasingly excited by the results.

Here are some of the responses (I grabbed it via search.twitter.com, so it doesn’t include anyone with a protected Twitter feed).

I was particularly impressed that someone from PlusNet noticed and replied to me, asking if there was something specific they could help me with. It’s a brilliant use of the tool, and I want to congratulate them for it, but it’s not enough to make me want to stay with them. While their customer service has always been excellent, and this latest example is really very impressive, my problems with PlusNet lie elsewhere.

In addition to the feedback on Twitter, there’s also Facebook. I actually pay very little attention to Facebook, but I do have it set up to automatically update my status based on Twitter (which is where a good chunk of my online attention is).

Although it’s a little clunky (I never remember that response to Twitter’s question of “What are you doing right now?” is being slurped into Facebook’s “X is…” model, which can makes the syntax is a little weird) it’s a good extension. I occasionally feel guilty about not paying more attention to my friends on Facebook, because it’s usually a pretty one-way experience for me at the moment, but when people reply to my Twitter-injected status updates (either as a comment or on my wall) I’m reminded of people I have sometimes not seen for a very long time. Handily, when someone comments on my status, I get notified via email (which is one of the very few ways Facebook demands my attention these days) so I can log in and reply. I like the way my Twitter experience is extended into a whole other group of friends in this way. I often get into conversations that wouldn’t happen on Twitter alone, because many of my friends on Facebook don’t use it.

Conclusions:

• PlusNet have some interesting people experimenting with customer service in an era of social media.
• I still don’t like their service enough to stick with them.
• I’ve signed up with O2, and will be switching across soon.
• I like it when my friends help me make a decision.

I’ve requested (and recieved. I told you their customer services is good) a MAC key from PlusNet to allow me to switch providers. It should take O2 less than a couple of weeks for the switchover, which will hopefully be pretty seamless.

It’s £12.50 per month for 8 megabit ADLS line (only £7.50 if you’re an O2 mobile customer) and £15 (or £10) for. The best bit is the unlimited data, with a fair use policy that seems to actually be about fair use rather than setting a monthly cap.

This monthly limit is quite a differentiating factor for me at the moment. PlusNet offers 2 gigabytes per month for £9.99, 15 gigs for £14.99 (which is the option I’m on at the moment) or 30 gigs for £19.99, and will charge an additional £1 for every gigabyte over the cap. I know they have to pay for bandwidth, but it’s a bit steep. At least they’re honest and open about why they’re not offering ‘unlimited’ bandwidth though; it’s undoubtedly better to be up front about your fair use limits than call it ‘unlimited’ but hide a fair use cap in the small print.

O2 really does seem to be offering genuinely unlimited bandwidth with a genuine fair use policy though. From their broadband terms and conditions:

4 What about excessive network usage?

There is no limit on the monthly network usage. However if we feel that your activities are so excessive that other customers are detrimentally affected, we may give you a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, if the levels of activity do not immediately decrease after the warning, we may terminate or suspend your Services.

Assuming they’re true to their word (and initial research makes this seem likely), it seems like a good deal.