I caught up with the Amplified team at Civil Service Live recently and got interviewed by the lovely (and uber-talented) Steve Lawson about the work I’ve been doing on Monitoring Dashboards at Ministry of Justice (amongst other things).
Work
Veni, Vidi, Fodi
And so the wonderful twitter updates from MarsPhoenix have come to an end.
The Mars lander sent her last message on 10 November with the binary for ‘triumph’:
01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3
http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix/status/999383469
I can’t help feeling a little sad.
The tone of the updates generated a genuine relationship between the lander and her followers. Her tweets were – in the truest sense of the word – delightful.
Using Twitter in this way was inspired. The audience was ideal and the tweets were perfectly pitched to be informative, geeky, funny and often very cute.
As I tweeted when I first started following her:
I HEART the @MarsPhoenix tweets.. imagining a little wide eyed robot scurrying over the surface pointing, jumping and squealing with glee
http://twitter.com/jennybee/statuses/827012873
Read more about the mission and the social media strategy here: Mars Phoenix Lander Runs Out of Juice.
Oh and in case you were wondering; ‘veni, vidi, fodi’ means ‘I came, I saw, I dug’.
Blogging and other platforms
I finally got round to reading that Wired article that everyone’s been talking about. The one where they said:
Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.
And I agree. Sort of.
What the article identified is a shift towards seeing the web as offering myriad ways to communicate and participate.
I enjoy reading blogs and I like having the opportunity to comment. But for most of the blogs that I read, their authors also have a Twitter stream, their photos are on Flickr, they stream video to Qik (amongst other things). And this content is becoming more valuable to me than the stuff on their blogs. It’s valuable because it’s instant and it allows me to participate in a conversation much more easily.
Platforms
I was wondering the other day why it is I don’t religiously scan my Google Reader subscriptions every lunchtime anymore (see?). And I’ve come to realise it’s partly because I’m already getting updates and ideas and comments from the bloggers I’m subscribed to from their other web activity.
This is not to say that blogging is dead but we’re in an age of platforms now. Where we are no longer identified by our blog but by the sum of our web activity. It’s what FriendFeed attempts to facilitate – although it’s worth noting that the way FriendFeed is designed can make an entire feed of one person’s web activity appear overwhelming.
For me, I feel a redesign of this blog coming on to truly reflect my web activities on the platforms I currently describe as ‘Social habits’.
All is full of love
I’m full of love for the web at the moment.
Well, I’m always full of love for the web, but every now and then my tolerance for navel gazing disappears completely and this time it’s been replaced by a desire to just sit back and enjoy for a while.
Bathcamp is a matter of weeks away and I’ve been mulling over what I might contribute. Whatever it ends up being, it’ll be a celebration. Pure and simple. And preferably without any explanation or discussion.
I might host a film club – bring a clip from your favourite video sharing site. Or perhaps the same thing but bring a film, a flickr photo, a (demonstrable) meme or a website.
In case you were wondering: today my 3 favourite things on the internet are:
Urinal Bitchie – Hello (because of the entire spectrum of wrongness)
The 21 Steps google maps story (because of the potential it represents)
The sneezing lamppost (bless you)
Tell you what, while we’re on the subject, what’s your best thing on the web, reader? Post me a comment…
I also like the idea of actually making stuff during the weekend. Something creative, not just your standard documentation of conferences guff (handy though that is 
). So that’s something else to ponder.
If you’re coming to Bathcamp, keep an eye on the wiki to find out what I come up with (in case you need to bring anything!).
If you weren’t planning on coming to Bathcamp, I’d strongly recommend reconsidering. And – hurrah – there are still a few tickets available!
It all began in Needless Alley…
Perhaps I was a story teller in a past life because despite not being involved in the story telling community, one of the things I immediately noticed* about Plurk was its suitability for just that.
*Actually I believe @philcampbell mentioned it first and I agreed.
I tried it out once on Twitter but it didn’t really work. Plurk’s self-contained conversations are much more suited to it though.
Knowing that there was a small team of folk online and ready to go I began with:
Once upon a time on a dark night, something stirred in a Birmingham side street… what happens next plurkers?
It was greeted enthusiastically and a handful of people began contributing to the narrative.
The story was location-based so I thought it could be fun to plot the locations on a Google map. Someone on Twitter suggested the Birmingham side street could be ‘Needless Alley’ which is a real place in Brum. Perfect!
In creating the map I was inspired to add satellite co-ordinates into the narrative as a plot device so these were discovered engraved on the back of the protagonists watch in chapter one.
Quite how the map element evolves, and whether other web elements are invoked remains to be seen but I like the notion of layering the narrative in this way.
Because he’s a master of such things, @philcampbell suggested creating a podcast out of the story but I’m not best qualified to take this on.
What I do think could be fun though would be doing a live reading, with two or three voices and possibly someone ‘operating’ the google map etc. But we need to see how the story evolves first. What particularly excites me about this is that the story might be being ‘performed’ as it is being written by the audience.
We’ll have to see about that. For now though, come to Plurk and help write Jonny Snake’s destiny.
Folksonomic Interface Development
The concept of ‘folksonomic interface development’ was discussed briefly at yesterday’s Creative Coffee Club.
It’s potential thesis juice so I thought I’d scribble down what’s in my head around the subject.
Folksonomy is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.
It captured my imagination because I recently labelled the entire contents of my Gmail inbox (groan) and I struggled to define a useful naming approach. I’d have liked to have been able to select some off-the-shelf labels to get me started.
Either way, my labels are forever in ‘beta’ and there will be plenty more hours spent re-labelling everything when I come up with a new genius way of managing my mail (delete button is probably the best option).
‘Folksonomic’ doesn’t quite describe what I’m interested in however (which is a shame cos ‘folksonomic interface development’ sounds really good!).
What I’m interested in is the notion that users of software might be able to alter the user interface and then share their changes with a community. The key word here is ‘users’. I’m not describing open-source development by software creators.
Imagine if in your favourite piece of software you can re-arrange functions and buttons. You can add and remove functionality. You can skin the interface to make it look pretty. Then you can publish your version of the UI for others to use.
That’s about it for now. Most of that thinking was done on the 159 bus on the way to work this morning. There is much more to be done.
*sigh* popjustice.com
I heart popjustice.com.
It’s occasionally almost like having JockeySlut back – almost being the operative word.
The electronics shops factor is a good sign – the last song we remember hearing this frequently while in Currys Digital was Shanks & Bigfoot’s ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’ – and that was a massive hit, so ‘Dance Wiv Me’ could be Dizzee’s biggest hit since ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’. Although Currys Digital was called Dixons in those days, so the goalposts have shifted slightly.
Note to self
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!
Happy Birthday Florence!
It’s Florence Nightingale’s birthday today.
She’s one of my a design heroes: she invented the polar area diagram.
