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’.

16-bit Intel 8088 chip by Charles Bukowski

with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
five one dot five one zero five
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
minus zero dot one two five one four one
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

Confused? This should help you out.

*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.

You can read the story here.

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.

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.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

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.

We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.

The talk was entitled ‘We think: will the web be good for us?’ (here it is on Upcoming) and it focussed on how creative expression is changing in light of social media, open-source, creative commons etc.

It was an extremely interesting evening and it complemented the recent Clay Shirky talk beautifully.

Here are the (edited) scribbles from my notebook:

Innovation
Innovation happens in groups – most innovation is the result of a far more collaborative process than it may at first appear. The technology behind the iPod was developed around a century ago (Me: eh?).

ilovebees
ilovebees.com was used as an example of group innovation. It’s too complicated to explain in detail here but please consult wikipedia for the full low down.

The gist is that a website was created as a viral marketing tool promoting the Halo 2 video game.

The website contained GPS co-ordinates but no explanation as to why or what. People visiting the website worked out that there were a series of payphones at the GPS co-ordinates. What began was a treasure hunt involving these payphones and the web. Eventually payphones located all around the world were involved in the game. People were given messages down the phone line and they had to communicate them to the other people playing the game. Sometimes in only a few seconds messages had to be circulated round the globe.

What’s remarkable about this example – and the reason it was mentioned – is because of the complexity of the organisation of the group. There was no leader, nobody told people they had to figure out the GPS co-ordinates even, it just happened.

Craftsmanship
The web may represent a mass return to ancient ways of working. The notion of work as creative expression is actually a pretty archaic approach as a general approach in the work place.

If you consider Linux coders for example, they are a bit like bee keepers or iron mongers – these are specialist crafts that require specialist skills but also these people LOVE what they do; their jobs are their craft, their vocation.

Me: My work has always been my vocation so it’s hard for me to see how this is something new

Collaboration and creativity
Notions of artistic creativity are brought into question when creation is collaborative. Some things cannot be created collaboratively. Imagine open source poetry – ‘it would be awful’.

Me: Actually, open source poetry could be really interesting. Hmmm [hear those cogs begin to whir]

Is this kind of collaborative creativity a predominantly first-world thing? It’s certainly possible that the most radical experiments involving collaborative tools (via mobile phone of course) could take place in the developing world (this is one example of that, are there any others?).

Don’t make me think
The web doesn’t appear to be a place for people to think together because we tend to join together with like-minded people. I wonder what we can do about that?

Content free for all or lock down?
The question we are going to face on every project from now on is should this be opened up (open source)? Or should it be locked down?

The corporation approach is to keep their work locked down, unavailable to the masses. But ultimately this approach probably won’t succeed. Brian Eno agrees.

Some other documentation that I’m aware of:

Mark AM Kramer recorded it!
Blackbeltjones’s notes

Also these people blogged about Shirky’s talk at the RSA on Tuesday:
The Guardian blog
Joshua March

Brian Eno: We are much less informed now than we were in the 60s.

Clay Shirky: We’ve replaced planning with co-ordination.
e.g., ‘txt me when you’re nearby’

Brian Eno: Surely the government is spending millions figuring out online communities, assessing the risks and generally monitoring them.
Me: [chuckle]

Clay Shirky: In high-freedom environments, people use social tools for fun. In low-freedom environments they use them for political action.
Me: This is the stuff that gets me really excited. I’m going to write a dedicated post to do it justice. Watch this space

Clay Shirky: ‘Everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows’ is the key to producing a political movement…
‘Everyone knows’ = well, I know about it at least
‘Everyone knows that everyone knows’ = wow, other people DEFINITELY know it too
‘Everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows’ = now it’s in the public domain we’d better do something about it!

Brian Eno: The Microsoft model will fail. The Linux model will succeed.

Clay Shirky: A new corporate law is required. One that follows the creative commons principal that defines groups that are not commercially motivated.
Me: Also, a new approach to the concept of shareholders. Shareholders as taking a creative rather than financial interest somehow perhaps.

Brian Eno: We live in a much more dangerous and oppressive climate than we think. In a few years we will expect for Government to have access to our Facebook profiles.
Me: [more chuckles]

Clay Shirky: ‘Transparent conspiracy’ is a political tool of the future. In other words, you may as well announce collective action on a blog cos the authorities will find out anyway.
Me: Love the phrase ‘transparent conspiracy’.

Clay Shirky: The Masai all carry two things: a spear and a cell phone.
Me: !!!

Both agreed that the BEST thing about the web is it gives people a voice.
Before the mid-late 90s if you wanted to say something in public you couldn’t. There was no voice for the citizen. Now there is. So there.

lgSHOUT! is a ‘site that lets local government folk yell for help or holler about something fabulous’.

It’s very similar in concept to a much loved micro-blogging tool.

It’s tools like lgSHOUT! that will open up geek concepts like micro-blogging to a mainstream audience, making web 2.0 truly accessible to ‘normal’ people.

Good one Dave.

I’m not there but I’m trying to keep abreast with what’s going on. Fortunately, this is a lot easier to do than ever before. Twitter and Seesmic are updating me with observations from people who’s opinions I respect and my rss reader is busy gathering feeds. There are also a number of tools I can use to ‘manually’ find content – digg, del.icio.us, hashtags etc.

But sifting through the gossip, chatter, informed opinion, official texts, party videos etc etc to identify key themes, opinions and zeitgeist is a daunting task.

Established publishing channels such as Wired seem to be doing a good job of recording key moments and general observations. But I’m not totally certain their reporting is accurate. What if they are completely failing to notice the Twitter buzz around a new application?

What I’m faced with is my perception of trust and authority in the recording of this event. I need to employ a number of methods to build a complete picture of the conference as there isn’t one source to do that for me. I trust that I’ll be presented with well informed, intelligent, crafted commentary from the Wired blog, and I also trust my Twitter and Seesmic friends to reflect zeitgeist and offer their expert opinion.

What I need is a website where I can get a roundup of what the Twitterverse is buzzing about, what’s being discussed on Seesmic, what’s being blogged, rated, bookmarked and so on.

I’d still like to read ‘professional’ editorial and interpretation but this and the user generate content would complement each other in order to present a holistic vision of – in this case – SXSW.

I wonder if this is the approach established news publishers will need to move towards in order to survive changing perceptions of authority and the inevitable mainstream establishment of user generated content?

What do people think? Does anything like this already exist?

We can spend up to half our working day going through our inbox, leaving us tired, frustrated and unproductive.

A recent study found one-third of office workers suffer from e-mail stress.

E-mail is ruining my life! (bbc.co.uk)

The article refers to Deloitte’s short-lived ‘no-internal-email-Wednesday’ which it reckons has made staff think more carefully about the email they send and whether there is a more appropriate communication method such as picking up the phone or talking face-to-face.

I agree, we should be more considered in our communications but our places of work on the whole haven’t even begun to embrace tools like IM, RSS, collaborative working, online project management, social networks etc etc.

My personal email traffic (both in- and out-bound) has significantly decreased since engaging with some of these tools. I refuse to subscribe to email lists – choosing RSS instead, and I use IM (if I can) to have quick conversations with friends. I use Google Groups to manage extra-curricular projects, Twitter keeps me in touch with friends and acquaintances and I use Facebook to organise my social life.

If only I could (or, more appropriately, was allowed to…) work more like this in my 9-5!