Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

The first FT Blogger Meet

Posted by Roo - 25/06/08 at 03:06:14 pm

Ben Matthews from Hotwire PR recently invited a handful of UK bloggers to spend an afternoon with The Financial Times. I was intrigued. Or rather, I was interested while also being nervous that my soul might be sapped. I went along anyway.

I’m glad I did. I got to meet Neville Hobson, Sarah Blow (Girly Geekdom), Patrick Altoft (BlogStorm), Andrew Donoghue (ZDNet) and Robert Andrews (UK editor, PaidContent). From the Financial Times side, we got to spend some quality time with James Montgomery (Editor, FT.com), Kate Mackenzie (Interactive Web Editor), Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson (Media Editor), Tim Bradshaw (Digital Media Correspondent), Tom Glover (Senior Communications Manager), Sam Jones (Alphaville), Steve Ager (video team). We briefly met Rob Grimshaw (MD, FT.com) and Robert Andrews got an interesting interview with him which you can find here.

Do I feel like I’ve been duped into thinking about and linking to the FT? Not really. It was quite nice to be invited in. The tour of the news room alone was worth the trip. I think Ben and Drew at Hotwire set up an interesting day for us, and I was particularly impressed with the level of access we got, especially to James Montgomery and the news room. My biggest bit of feedback was that internet access would have made our lives a bit easier. Despite being encouraged to live blog, Tweet etc, there was no guest wifi internet access provided for us.

Some notes..

• This is the first in a series of blogger events. “We’d like you to take an interest in FT.com and we’d like your views. We’d like to pick your brains about blogging”.
• In October 2007 the FT.com access model changed to be more ‘blogger friendly’. Return to non-subscription based. Now, anyone can access 5 articles per month without registration. 5 articles per month = register, 30 per month = pay.
• The pool of registered users has grown from nothing to over 450,000 registered users since October last year.
• Embedded video ‘mini player’ being added to the site very soon (next month?)
• Kate Mackenzie fielded some predictable hassle about not offering full content feeds. (And even hinted they might remove them from the FT blogs which do still offer full feeds). Big discussion about letting go of control and finding a way of opening up content without damaging the business model.
• Anecdote about Alphaville, which apparently didn’t see a traffic drop when they switched from full feeds to partial. Hmm. There’s a bigger picture here. The desire to be open and helpful is in tension with metrics and revenue streams which rely on pageviews?
• (Catching up on this today, I dug around. If you’re an Alphaville user looking for the full feed, Paul Murphy gives a helpful link in this chat transcript. The full feed is still out there, you just have to look for it. This made Felix Salmon happy too.)
• “Digg is the only social bookmarking site which gets us any significant traffic”. del.icio.us is used by some people on the ground, but not seen as a traffic source.

Other people’s thoughts:

• Patrick at BlogStorm
• Neville Hobson
• Robert’s PaidContent interview with Rob Grimshaw

My CV, as a Wordle tag cloud

Posted by Roo - 18/06/08 at 03:06:48 pm

Inspired by Ian I’ve just dumped my CV into Wordle (which I bookmarked last week but forgot to write about. It’s great). Lots of options for fiddling with and it’s really easy to make something gorgeous.

Update: compare and contrast (inspired by Andy) the tags on my del.icio.us account

I’ve wanted a beautiful tag cloud generator service for ages. Thanks Jonathan.

She Went Of Her Own Accord (.com)

Posted by Roo - 10/06/08 at 11:06:06 pm

In case you missed it, the super secret new side-project has finally gone live.

Nick and I have wanted to do this for a few years. I registered the domain recently and we quietly hacked an instance of WordPress in our spare time last week to get something usable in place. Today, shewentofherownaccord.com is a modest but fast-growing user contributed collection of jokes. Specifically, and this is important, jokes in the following form:

My wife’s gone to the Caribbean.

Jamaica?

No, she went of her own accord.

There are as many of these jokes as there are place names and the imagination to create (sometimes quite convoluted) puns with them. The 1st line is a setup, 2nd line is a place-pun, 3rd line is a retort. It’s all about respecting the constraints of the form, in the same way that Haiku are more beautiful because of the constraints, not despite them.

My favourite feature – and I can say this with full modesty because, as with most of the interesting features, Nick added it – is the master map.

In the four days since we quietly launched the site it has already grown from 24 to 62 jokes meaning that we’ve already reached a stage where user contributions outnumber our own. Some of them are really funny too (someone calling himself Gruff has been responsible for some of my favourites so far).

There’s lots of work still to do but if you’re inspired to add your own or want to find out more then come join us. It’s already a lot of fun.

Hansard on the Internet

Posted by Roo - 27/05/08 at 05:05:41 pm

Hansard (the “edited verbatim report of proceedings” of the House of Commons and the House of Lords) has been online for a while. The official site currently has records of debates and answers to oral and written questions dating back to November 1988). The paper records date back a lot further of course, and it’s a huge relief that someone is putting older proceedings online in a public experiment on the Hansard prototype site.

For one thing, the moment when Mr Cash withdrew an unparliamentary remark (he called Mr Dalyell a “boring old twat“) in 1986 would otherwise have been very difficult to find, and would probably have involved trawling major libraries.

As well as searching for naughty words, I thought it would be appropriate to celebrate Hansard on the internet by finding early references to the internet in Hansard.

Do you remember when people still said things like “information superhighway” with a straight face? Here’s Mr. David Shaw on December 15th, 1994 making a brilliant speech about ‘Internet’. He actually makes some great points, but when it comes to helping his parliamentary colleagues understand (?) why it’s not a threat to Britain’s leisure industry he somehow manages to be slightly confusing about it.

We may ask why people should use the system. Sometimes it presents a challenge: at the conference that my hon. Friend the Minister and I attended recently, I found it quite enjoyable to challenge some of the industry’s specialists by asking them why people should want to communicate through the information super-highway rather than—like most people—having a good night out in a pub, restaurant or cinema. Why indeed? The traditional British methods of entertainment and communication have been established over many hundreds of years and are very successful; certainly I do not want the leisure industries in my constituency, such as pubs and restaurants, to be done out of their trade.

Most people realise, however, that the new service presents a tremendous opportunity—not just for communications within the local town or county but for worldwide communications, entertainment and sources of information. The only question is whether the information super-highway can be made as friendly as a visit to the local pub or restaurant in good company.

Anyone who has ever spent time scanning through the furiously adolescent comments left on YouTube videos will know that David Shaw’s dream of a “friendly” information super-highway has either not arrived yet or it came and went some time ago. The screenshot below shows the first 5 comments from a randomly selected ‘featured’ YouTube video.

(Slightly offtopic, but the video in question, ‘Planning an overtake in Wales’ is a motorcycle training video. The person who posted it was bemused by the enormous number of comments which started arriving on his educational video after it was featured on the YouTube front page, saying he wish it hadn’t been and that he had initially been concerned by the volume of comments which made him think he’d “picked up a virus”. I feel for the guy.)

But back to the celebration of Hansard on the internet via finding the internet in Hansard. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Technology (Mr. Ian Taylor) here makes the classic mistake of confusing the potential audience with the actual audience when he tries to convince the house that this speech is likely to be read by every nethead in the world:

I am inspired by the fact that, rather than addressing a thinly attended House, I am probably addressing 30 million people through the Internet system. My hon. Friend undertook to make sure that his speech and mine were downloaded on to Internet. I feel that all of our words of wisdom this morning will get their just size of audience. The figure of 40 million Internet addicts around the world has been given, but I like to be conservative in these matters.

…

I am also able to tell the House that I have my own e-mail and Internet address. This is, I believe, a first in Government. I am the first Minister to be on Internet, and my address is taylor@mintech.demon.co.uk.

In case you were wondering, don’t bother emailing the first ever online-MP’s first ever email address. ‘PERM_FAILURE: DNS Error: Domain name not found‘.

The public prototype is for experimentation (e.g. don’t cite it as ‘Hansard’ yet) and goes back, with some gaps, currently to 1885. The plan seems to be for it to go back to 1804 by the end of this year (?). I do hope that happens, since I bet early 19th century swearing was top notch.

If you want to go back even further than 1804, there’s ‘PARL18C‘ (the 18th Century Official Parliamentary Publications Portal) which apparently contains over a million pages of Hansard from 1688 to 1834. There’s plenty to whet your appetite in this press release:

Sir Ron Cooke, Chairman of JISC, said: ‘This is an impressive resource which uses cutting-edge technology to make universally available materials of immense importance to the history of this country’.

and

Paul Seaward, director of the History of Parliament Trust said: ‘… These sources, vast in their scope and comprehensive in their coverage, are now available in an easily-searchable format, providing everyone with instant access to a treasure house of historical material’.

Even more tantalisingly, but belying the phrases “universally available” and “everyone” above, is the conclusion:

The JISC programme represents a total investment of more than £22m in the digitisation of high-quality online content, including sound, moving pictures, newspapers, census data, maps, archives, journals, parliamentary papers and cartoons for use by the UK further and higher education communities.

That last sentence is a clue to a major annoyance most people will have with PARL18C. Unless you are on a .ac.uk, .parliament.uk, .bl.uk, .tcd.ie, .ucd.ie, .ucc.ie, .ucg.ie or .nuim.ie network then you (like me) won’t be able to access it. The project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) whose mission is limited to supporting education and research. While I’m pleased that students, academics and researchers can access this treasure trove of information, I’m more than a little frustrated at not being able to explore what was being recorded in Hansard during the industrial revolution for myself.

That said, the 1804 – 2004 Hansard public prototype is open for all (thank you!), a what pleasing couple of hundred years of British parliamentary history it is. There’s even a Google Group, and source in case you want to make suggestions. The best of luck to Robert Brook and the rest of the team. This is a great project, and I wish it every success.

Speaking at Open Tech 2008

Posted by Roo - 26/05/08 at 09:05:57 am

Open Tech 2008 is

an informal, low cost one-day conference on technology, society and low-carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and technologies that anyone can have a go at.

The Schedule includes the very lovely Kim Plowright talking about art history with Matt Webb, which will be worth the price of admission on its own. Other things not to miss include Gavin Starks talking about AMEE, Suw Charman doing ORG things, Simon Willison on OpenID, Gavin Bell on that and other distributed federated stuff, Tom Loosemore on ‘The Bastard Child of Biard and Berners Lee’, Adrian Hon on ‘We Tell Stories‘ and many many more.

I’ve offered a short slot on Current Cost meters which has been accepted and is scheduled to happen during the 4-5pm session in the Upper Hall. Nick O’Leary has agreed to help me out too. It will mainly involve us talking about how (and why) you’d want to track your house’s electricity consumption. (In case you’ve missed it, the interwebs have recently been filling up with interesting hackers’ discoveries about the Current Cost recently. In addition to Nick’s Google Chart API tricks and my radial Google Charts charting stuff there are details of the XML format from Rich Cumbers, tips on how the serial connection works from Chris Hand and previously unknown details about buying official cables from Current Cost via James Wallis. There are tips, tricks and ideas galore to share). By the time the events comes round, there will be even more to talk about too I’m sure, and in a way that feels more like an informal but useful talk rather than a blog post full of links.

Open Tech 2008 will take place on Saturday 5th July 2008, 11am-6pm, at ULU, Malet street. Tickets cost a mere £5, paid on the door.

(I’m also doing 3 minutes at Interesting 2008 on Saturday the 21st of June. Something about LEGO).

Jordan, Jesse, GO!

Posted by Roo - 23/05/08 at 10:05:08 pm

Jordan, Jesse, GO! is probably the best entertainment podcast going. I’m a few weeks behind (I’ve clearly neither been flying recently nor mowing my lawn enough) but here’s the episode I’m listening to tonight. Join me.

Any show which has a forum and a voicemail account hotline (+1 206-984-4FUN) has to be good.

I’m not sure everyone will fall in love with it as instantly as I did but the theme music alone was enough for me to know that this was something deeply adorable. I’ve listened to so many episodes this year (usually while flying somewhere or mowing something) that I now have some sort of semi-pavlovian reaction to it. Putting it on makes me feel comfortable and happy and strangely like I’m at home regardless of where I actually am.

Jesse Thorn has a public radio show (also podcast), The Sound of Young America. You may have heard of him. He interviewed Stephen Colbert and not only some of the stars of ‘The Wire’ (the best TV show ever by the way) but also geek hero Merlin Mann. That’s as mainstream as anyone needs. It’s co-presented by Jordan Morris (correspondent for Fuel TV’s Daily Habit). Both of them are younger than me. Dammit.

Policing vs Guidelines

Posted by Roo - 20/05/08 at 08:05:04 am

I regularly get asked one particular question when I talk about social software in the workplace: “How do you police it?”

The answer, which might surprise you, is that you don’t, You can’t. You physically can’t monitor, review and approve everything all your employees are doing. Instead, you need to use trust.

IBM recently published a refreshed version of its social computing guidelines, an update of the older blogging guidelines to include other social networking tools. On read these guidelines, you’ll probably notice that they’re not very prescriptive. They don’t need to be, since every employee signs a set of Business Conduct Guidelines every year. (IBMers, with their great love of acronyms, predictably know them better by their initials: the BCGs.) All the social computing guidelines need to do is explicate the BCGs and make sense of them in the context of social tools such as bloggs, Facebooks, Twitter, etc. Should I be anonymous online? How can I make it obvious that my blog reflects my opinions and ideas rather than those of IBM? These things are more are the sort of things the guidelines help make clear.

Not all companies have this type of annual review of conduct guidelines. I have friends whose behaviour would be – if they were ever to contravene it – compared to the wording of an initial contract of employment. Others suffer under an ever-changing set of policy documents which they never have to review and are always somehow out of sight, probably hidden on an intranet page somewhere. Still others probably don’t have a single place they can check to see what is acceptable and what is verboten, and they are at the mercy of every manager (and, for some reason, the IT Department) to tell them what they can and can’t do on an hourly basis. It’s Friday, let’s block access to Facebook. Email at work? You must be joking. Instant messaging is a waste of everybody’s time, let’s ban it.

I like the IBM approach. One consistent, annually revisited (though not necessarily annually revised) document which lays out the values and principles associated with being an IBMer. You want to read it? Sure. Here it is. (Its placement on the IBM external website, in the investors section, is probably no coincidence.)

Layered on top of that foundation are the social computing guidelines (and virtual worlds guidelines too. I wrote more about these on Terra Nova last year). Everything after that is common sense and personal responsibility.

If you’re an IBMer with a good amount of common sense who fully understands the BCGs and is also a native of the interweb you probably don’t even need to read the social computing guidelines. Your common sense will ensure you do the right things. You should read them anyway of course, because they’re interesting, but I think a good portion of their existence is to make sure IBMers feel comfortable and secure that IBM supports them in getting involved, and that IBM as a whole ‘gets it’ at least as much as IBMers do individually. Which, considering that they are written not by any one legal eagle or executive in corporate headquarters but collaboratively, by any employee with an interest in the area, should not be a surprise.

“Where do you find the time?” Clay Shirky and the Cognitive Surplus

Posted by Roo - 16/05/08 at 11:05:56 am

Clay Shirky and the Cognitive Surplus might be a good name for a band.

I found this video of Clay Shirky at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco via Warren Ellis. It is 15 minutes long, and the territory covered includes…

• The critical technology for the early phase of the industrial revolution was gin.
• The TV sitcom is the today’s gin. The new social lubricant. The heatsink for the cognitive surplus.
• “Where do people find the time?”
• Wikipedia has taken roughly 100 millions hours of culumative effort so far.
• Americans watch 200 billion hours of TV between them per year.
• “It’s better to do something than to do nothing”
• Even lolcats are an invitation to participation “if you have some sans serif fonts … you can play this game too”
• Media is becoming less about just consumption and more about consumption + production + sharing.
• “This isn’t the sort of thing that society grows out of, it’s the sort of thing that society grows in to.”
• Anecdote: a four year old searching behind a TV, looking for the mouse
• “A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken”
• “Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for“

There’s a transcript of the speech on Clay’s blog. If you’re not into video, go and read that instead.

Mark Morford discusses Clay’s speech on SF Gate. He’s critical about the potential of participatory media for art, creativity and independent thought, saying

if social networking is the future of creativity, the future is bland indeed.

I think he’s missing the point. Yes for sanity’s sake, let’s do more than networking with our surplus. Of course. Let’s make amazing things. Even (gasp) more amazing than Wikipedia. I’m increasingly seeing social networking tools as a radar which helps me (to reiterate those three key points from Shirky’s speech) consume, produce and share. In themselves, those tools are indeed faddish (Twitter is still hot. The love affair with Facebook has come and gone for many people) but the underlying reasons for networking (whether physical or online) remain. Someone’s social network shouldn’t be confused with a tool which helps them maintain and extend that network online. These tools are often (if they want to be successful) a means to an end.

Mark Morford is also concerned about the danger of ‘groupthink’ in collaborative projects:

Wikipedia’s unusual success aside, few things are worse in this human world than creation by committee, by crowd and consumer and the masses. Few things destroy true vision and the integrity of a unique idea more than bowing to the forces of groupthink.

At first glance, that does seem to be a valid challenge. How often do digital-era collaborative social surplus energy projects ever actually feel like committees though? Aren’t they more like communities? Flexible to the point of being fickle perhaps, but not bowing to any (traditional) pecking order other than a very fluid meritocracy which respects contribution over seniority. There’s a creative advantage to projects which use the cognitive surplus of people outside their salaried day-jobs which may make them immune to the influence of the sort of groupthink which Morford has no doubt endured in the real world. Since the participants’ investment in spare time projects is very portable, there’s little danger of them remaining involved in a bland, tired dead-horse project when they can hang out with creative, passionate people doing something authentic in the virtual team next-door.

And let’s not confuse the size of the potential pool of participants with some sort of “how on earth can we scale a team to that many people?” problem. If he wants virtual teams working online with creative integrity, we don’t have to wait; there’s no shortage of them today. The creative energy of the world doesn’t have to be scaled horizontally to include the masses. It might stack. The next Wikipedia is no doubt already already happening, and it might be quite a lot smaller. The good thing is that it won’t be alone.

In search of the perfect blogging tool

Posted by Roo - 13/05/08 at 08:05:38 am

I’ve been hunting for a Mac equivalent to Windows Live Writer. Here’s my personal checklist/wishlist of what an offline blogging tool should do.

.urgh {border-spacing:0px; border:solid 1px black; margin:0px; padding:0px; border-collapse:collapse; }

	Ecto (Mac & Windows)	MarsEdit (Mac only)	Qumana (Mac and Windows)	Windows Live Writer (Windows only)
Easy (mouse-free) way to add links by selecting text	+ [1]	+ [2]	+ [3]	+ [4]
WYSIWYG / rich text editing	+	-	+	+
WordPress categories	+	+	+	+
WordPress tags	+	+	-	+
Scheduled posting	+	+	+	+
Easy to add Flickr photos	+ [f]	+	+ [e]	+ [!]
Easy to add YouTube (etc) videos	+ [e]	+ [e]	+ [e]	+ [!]
Undo	+	+	+ [w]	+
Creates nice clean HTML	+ [u]	+	+	+
Post to blog as draft	+	+	-	+
File upload	+	+	+	+
Web preview mode (what will it look like on the blog)	-	+ [f]	-	+ [!]

+ = yes
- = no (or if it’s there, I couldn’t find it)
[1] = ⌘+U (or Shift+⌘+U to use clipboard text and bypass the dialog)
[2] = ⌥+⌘+A (or Shift+⌘+A to use clipboard text and bypass the dialog)
[3] = Shift+⌘+L
[4] = Ctrl+K
[f] = with a little bit of fiddling
[e] = via HTML embed codes
[!] = really stupidly wonderfully easy
[w] = only in WYSIWYG mode, for some reason
[u] = Generally not too bad, but <span style=”font-style: italic;”> rather than <em>? Urgh.

Windows Live Writer is by far the best blogging tool I’ve ever used, but sadly it’s Windows only. It’s the benchmark by which I’m judging the others, but it would get big additional bonus points (if points were being given) for making it stupidly, wonderfully easy to insert Flickr photos and YouTube videos, without even needing to paste any HTML. Pasting in the URL for a Flickr photo / YouTube video into the editor is enough to make it do the right thing, which is a wonderful timesaving feature. The web preview auto-detects what your blog looks like, which makes an accurate preview trivially easy too.

Qumana is free, but a bit ‘monetized’ (there’s an Insert Ad button I have no interest in using, and the website says things like “Make money from your blog content by inserting the ads of your choice…”) but it’s nice enough. Each post automatically includes a “Powered by Qumana” link, which can be deleted by hand. The biggest problem with it is that alt+left/right doesn’t do anything, and instead you have to use ⌘+left/right to jump left/right by one word which is just wrong (or at least grossly inconsistent with every other Mac app I’ve ever used). Given my desire to use the keyboard for just about everything I do, this alone is a showstopper.

Ecto costs $17.95. Flickr support comes via a plugin, but sadly the output doesn’t follow the Flickr terms of service (the image should link to the photo page, but doesn’t until you add the link yourself). Rich text editing is nice though.

MarsEdit costs $29.95. It’s Flickr tab makes it very easy to add your own photos. No rich text editing but does have nice support for macros. If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty with some HTML, it’s great.

Depending on whether you like hacking HTML or really need a rich text editor, you’ll probably prefer MarsEdit or Ecto respectively. I’m enjoying MarsEdit enough to stick with it for now. I still have yet to find anything quite as nice as Windows Live Writer on the Mac though. Have I missed any?

Blogjects and Tweetjects

Posted by Roo - 24/04/08 at 10:04:59 pm

Before there were blogjects, there were blobjects. In the closing speech at SIGGRAPH 2004, Bruce Sterling started by talking about blobjects, or blob-shaped consumer items.

Blobjects are the period objects of our time. They are the physical products that the digital revolution brought to the consumer shelf.

Sterling goes on (via ‘gizmos’, the current state of the art) to introduce spime.

At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

This subject is covered more completely in his Shaping Things book, which is reviewed here by Cory Doctorow. Cory handily sums up Spime thus:

A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities

Meanwhile, to fill the gap between blobjects and spime, we have blogjects. Julian Bleecker’s ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ introduces Blogjects, describing them as an “early ancestor” to spime. While spime is still speculative, Bleecker says

I can make Blogjects now because the semantics are immediately legible — objects, that blog. Tonight, I can go into my laboratory and begin to experiment with what a world might be like in which I co-occupy space with objects that blog.

Bleecker says there are three key characteristics of a blogject:

• Blogjects track and trace where they are and where they’ve been;
• Blogjects have self-contained (embedded) histories of their encounters and experiences
• Blogjects always have some form of agency — they can foment action and participate; they have an assertive voice within the social web.

The last point is important, and while he’s not expecting them to pass the Turing test, they need to interact. Good bloggers don’t ignore their comments; thats where most of the fun happens. In the same way, blogjects participate and converse both between themselves and with us.

The significance of the Internet of Things is not at all about instrumented machine-to-machine communication, or sensors that spew reams of data credit card transactions, or quantities of water flows, or records of how many vehicles passed a particular checkpoint along a highway. Those sensor-based things are lifeless, asocial recording instruments when placed alongside of the Blogject. … The social and political import of the Internet of Things is that things can now participate in the conversations that were previously off-limits to Things. … Things, once plugged into the Internet, will become agents that circulate food for thought, that “speak on” matters from an altogether different point of view, that lend a Thing-y perspective on micro and macro social, cultural, political and personal
matters.

If a blogject is an object that blogs, a tweetject is clearly an object that tweets (an intransitive verb: the act of using Twitter).

There are already lots of examples of objects using Twitter to interact with people, usually to report about the state of things in a convenient form. Botanicalls is an interesting project, aimed at “enhancing person-plant communication” using tools that can be used by people as well as plants. As a result, Pothos is a plant that knows when it needs watering (learn how to make your own).

Gareth Jones wrote about getting his laptop to tweet when Bluetooth devices come in and out of range. For a while that script was updating as gareth_laptop on Twitter. As long as some relevant mobile phones and laptops have Bluetooth enabled, there are some useful and interesting elements of personal presence detection here. Who is nearby? With some additional second-order agents running to work out what these devices are and what they mean (is Gareth at home? If he’s at work, who is nearby?).

Andy Stanford-Clark has an impressively complex home automation setup in his house on the Isle of Wight. It’s been online for a few years already, but has more recently been exposed via Twitter as andy_house. (Although Kelly raises bots as one of her Twitter pet peeves, she makes an exception for Andy’s house.) Andy also Twitter-enabled the Red Jet ferries which go to and from the Isle of Wight, where he lives.

There are many more tweetjects out there too.

There have been lots of weather bots on Twitter for a long time. Here’s one for Brighton and here are links to many more. Radio 1 is tweeting the playlist and summary information about listeners’ text messages. Mario Menti set up a lot more BBC bots too. Tom Morris hooked the various London tube lines up to Twitter. The Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank tweets what it’s pointing at (and it’s not alone). Tower Bridge lets us know when it’s opening and closing (and for what). The Heavens Above user updates Londoners with the times and directions of Iridium flares and International Space Station flybys over their city.

There are many more, and lots more will no doubt be added this year. Currently, most Twitter bots are one-directional. Things will get really interesting when more of them converse as well as simply report.

Further reading:

• In this post I’ve already linked to both Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling (and the 2004 SIGGRAPH speech), as well as Julian Bleecker’s ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ essay.
• Everyware by Adam Greenfield is relevant, though it deals mainly with the near-term. Andy Piper has a review which you might find helpful.
• OpenSpime is a project to enable “individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors”. Read Tish Shute’s introduction on UgoTrade too.