Programming is destroying my capacity for reflective thought

This article in the Guardian on Thursday really struck a chord, especially after spending a day and a half!!! on a newsletter template that simply refused to allow me to insert an image.

The worst of it is that even this kind of programming has a corrupting fascination, like a videogame you can't give up: there is always the hope that one more round of changes will take you through to the next level. This pleasure seems to me not merely uncreative but anticreative. Solving these small dull problems of syntax and memorisation is essentially a very large multiple-choice exam.

There may be a creative element in deciding what colours should go to make up a website, but there is none whatsoever in trying to discover whether the command to make this happen uses curly brackets inside quotation marks, outside them, or not at all.

Vaporware

Sounds like everything I'm working on.

Vaporware

Vaporware is a software or hardware product which is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge, either with or without a protracted development cycle. The term implies unwarranted optimism, or sometimes even deception; that is, it may imply that the announcer knows that product development is in too early a stage to support responsible statements about its completion date, feature set, or even feasibility.

Snackr

Now this is a bit more like it, an RSS feed built using Adobe AIR.
So it's basically a ticker tape of your RSS Feeds but what I like is the portential for doing something more visual with a feed.
I'm thinking this is the way to go with the design of the research section of th CAGD site

Too many feed things....

Just signed up for FriendFeed, this means I have a Google Reader, a Delicous account, a Digsby account, a Twitter account, a Tumblr account, a Ning account. As well as the usual Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, GMail, AOL, Hotmail and so on. After signing up for FriendFeeder I suddenly felt swampped. And I really don't see the point of FriendFeeder

Out of all these my favourite is Digsby, for this reason. It acts like an instant messenger, the information comes to you. If some one updates Facebook or you receive an email it tells you, you don't have to navigate away from the page. You can choose which stories you want follow up. Simply removing that step of having to go to another page makes all the difference. You only have to sign up once. It's not revolutionary but I really wish say, Google had a similar toolbar option. So you can see updated news feeds, emails, news and so on. They probably do, I know they have iGoogle but that still requires the step of visting the page.





See this from Google sounds interesting but still requires the extra navigation step
Socialstream
Social Stream project

Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master's program at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. This project was guided by three goals that built upon each other:

Initial Task: Rethink and reinvent online social networking

Refined Focus: Discover the user needs related to social networking and explore how a unified social network service can enhance their experience.

Prototype Goal: Create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.

NOISE Showcase

A couple of NOISE related October showcase things

Everything must go

Friday May 16, 2008
The Guardian
Last week, free music site Last.fm made its first foray into original content, with the launch of Last.fm Presents (last.fm/presents), a new series of video interviews with artists including Moby, Santogold, Neon Neon and Spoon. The short chats aim to discover what inspired these acts to make music, rather than have them wax lyrical about their latest product. It's a laudable notion, but it falls a little flat as you quickly remember that most musicians are much more interesting when playing music than they are when talking about it (the exception being Neon Neon's Gruff Rhys, who'd sound fascinating reading a phone book). Further video content ideas are expected from Last.fm soon. But, for now, the site's terrific core business - allowing you to stream millions of tracks for free and receive recommendations based on your current listening habits - remains its main attraction.

Although it's the kind of high-fashion company that sells T-shirts for £70, Diesel has long been involved in the scuzzy world of indie music. Its Diesel:U:Music campaign began life in 2000 as an unsigned bands competition and has since morphed into a slightly clunky website (dum.diesel.com) where new acts can upload their tracks to gain exposure. Now, for the month of May, they've taken things a step further with the launch of Diesel:U:Music Radio, which is broadcasting from the indie hotbed that is New Cross's Amersham Arms. South-east London residents can hear it on 87.7FM, while the rest of us can listen online. It's a pleasingly amateurish affair, positioned somewhere between a pirate and a student station, with mics turned too low and records frequently skipping. But with guest DJs including Late of the Pier, Kieran Hebden, Noah and the Whale, Mystery Jets and Erol Alkan spinning their favourite tunes, the music is certainly worth tuning in for.

More Dopplr

Quote from Matt Jones

One of the aspects of creating social tools that fascinates me is the ability to make the invisible visible, and what effect surfacing these patterns then has on us as individuals and groups.

For a while there have been carbon calculators on airline websites and environmentalist websites, but generally they have been about directly showing the impact of an individual action, rather than the patterns and trends influencing the actions in the first place.

That’s why I thought it was an essential component of from the start of Dopplr as a social tool for intelligent travellers to optimise their path through the world - and I’m delighted the beginnings of this are here now. Particular props to Boris and Tom for pulling off the design, which I’m pleased as punch with.

It’s a first step, and as with everything we do part of the bigger, beautiful jigsaw of the web. As MattB’s said it’s plugged into AMEE, and you might be already be subscribed to things like WorldChanging or EdenBee that can help you decide what to do about it.

It’s not enforcing any particular course of action - it’s the weighing scales, not the diet.

What we all do with this information is up to us.

Cluster Cities

Building Dopplr

We’re sitting on the grass in the sunshine with a bunch of early Dopplr users, including Stowe Boyd and Stephanie Booth - when Stephanie is the first to voice something we’ve heard a lot from Dopplr users since: “make my trips more ‘fuzzy’”.

By which, she and others meant that they would like to see coincidences in the surrounding area of ‘social spacetime’ to their trip - i.e. “show me if there are going to be people I know nearby the stated destination of my trip when I’m going to be there, as I’d probably like to change my plans a little to see them.”

This is a cornerstone of our goal to help optimise travel for Dopplr users - surfacing information about such near coincidences to let them judge whether to alter their plans to make their trip more worthwhile.

We’re going to be releasing a lot of functionality to exploit fuzzy, social spacetime through the early part of 2008, but the first part of it has leaked out into the journal.

Cluster Cities are the way we’ve made this happen. To explain them, here’s Matt B. with the science bit!

To make the database queries perform well enough to implement this feature, we needed to classify cities in densely populated areas into groups. By considering groups of cities as one, we cut down the work the database has to do when calculating who is affected by someone arriving in their area. We decided that these groups should be small enough that a traveller could reasonably expect to travel between any two cities in a group within a day.

Algorithms to cluster a spatial dataset are well known and not hard to implement. Unfortunately, they take a bit of tuning and experimentation to achieve satisfying results. Intuitively we expect cities like London, Tokyo and San Francisco to be at the centres of their clusters. In reality it’s rather hard to teach the cultural/social/economic conditions that cause this to an algorithm that’s only looking at latitude and longitude.

After some initially disappointing results, I stopped looking solely at the geographical data and considered what I could do if I incorporated the historical trip data that Dopplr has built up over our first year. I quickly came to the obvious conclusion: weight the clustering by the popularity of trip destination and let our travellers decide whether San Francisco or San Jose is the gravitational centre of Silicon Valley.

In analysing the top 2000 destinations I discovered that many of the top cities are very close together — for example, Glasgow and Edinburgh are only 40 miles apart. Again I used our trip data to eliminate overlaps. Within any 50 miles radius, only the most popular of two popular cities gets to be the cluster centre. This decision is one reason for the beauty of our central Raumzeitgeist visualisation. The layout has an appealing rhythm to it because the points in popular areas are a natural and fairly efficient circle packing.

Rubbing Shoulders

I guess what interests me about this for the publication, is setting up a network, members and non-members. How do you identify members of the group? How do people join the group/network? What are the rules once you join? How do you interact with members/non-members? How do memebers of a group communicate?

I also like the promotion of the event, just using stickers, flyers and some info on a website. Just the way that something that has a lot references, a lot of depth about social networks, social interaction, communication and so on. Can be done very simply with a lot of humour.
I also laughed at the Marshall McLuhan massage reference but nearly two years on the MA has made me a bit sad like that.

Rubbing Shoulders

 
"Everyone is invited to join the Rubbing Shoulders social network,
promoted on billboards in the city by Grennan and Sperandio's cartoons
and identified by specially designed stickers that every member of the
network will wear. When meeting people across the city: strangers in
the network overcome social barriers with a secret handshake; those
that know each other already give/receive back rubs; when meeting
non-members, they play with keeping them out of their 'personal space
bubble.' A truly citywide art project that aims to, "bring the people
of Manchester closer together."



Rubbing Shoulders is a project on safe hands-on social networking. On
joining the Rubbing Shoulders social network, people are given a set of
instructions on how to interact with people known and unknown:

• When meeting people NOT in the Rubbing Shoulders social network,
  participants are instructed not to let them enter their 'personal space
  bubble.' This causes playful scenes as people in queues and in crowds
  try to maintain a distance of 50cm between themselves and others around
  them.


• When meeting other people who ARE in the Rubbing Shoulders social
  network, people are able to greet each other with a secret handshake.
  This highly formal social interaction can be a discussion point on how
  different people usually greet each other.


• On meeting someone else in the social network they know very well,
  members ask each other if they have a stiff neck. If the answer is yes,
  and if they are invited, they give/receive back rubs as an antidote to
  online social networking and the back problems caused by hours hunching
  over the computer.
  

The medium is the massage."

Friendsnetwork "online"! Aram Bartholl Performance

Original post

"Friends

The project Friends is a workshop which translates the so-called social web
- online services such as Facebook, Myspace, etc. - into a paper-based
form in physical space.All workshop participants contribute a profile
page to the big Friends Book and make their own personal friends
booklet in which to collect as many friends as possible. With their own
hand-made profile photo stamp and a large amount of prefabricated web
2.0 service stamps, users trade among each other information about
their favorite online services and web activities. In order to be
recognized as Friends workshop participants, users can wear a button
with their own profile photo or display their Web 2.0 preferences on
Friends Tattoos.

Social
networks in the internet, which have become hugely popular over the
last few years, have given the term "friend" a completely new meaning.
In contrast to the usually restricted and time-consuming circle of
friends in everyday life, in the internet it is possible to find a
large number of friends quickly with just a few clicks.And only a few
of these friends are actually personally known by the user. Without a
great deal of effort it is possible to have hundreds, thousands or even
hundreds of thousands of friends in the Internet. Who has the most
friends? Who is the best-known and the most often to be seen? The
development of the internet in recent years enables the individual to
gratify his/her desire for recognition and attention in quite a new
way.

With reference
to the classic German poetry album or the friendship book in the USA,
the Friends workshop takes this development as the central theme and
opens a debate over the many-layered types from friendship. The
time-honored paper-based technology and tools used in the workshop as
well as the handicraft skills of its participants contrast with the
screen-limited but highly efficient online world of the social
networks. In contrast to the obvious open contact with private
information in the social web, the classic paper document conceals a
high degree of obligation and protects privacy.The data from the web
services documented on paper during the Friends workshop pose anew the
question of the private and public nature of web identities.

Who is my friend? How well do we know each other? Where do we meet?
How does the Social Web effect inter-personal relationships?

Aram Bartholl 2008"

Simon Yuill FSF - 'the free social foundations project'

Link

FSF maps current use of spaces of free and open assembly in Manchester. A map will be created in collaboration with local people through workshops and interviews. The map will provide an index of how 'the social' is afforded and sustained by the physical environments in which we live - in other words, to what extent are the physical foundations of our social lives 'free'?. These will identify areas in the city where people are able to gather and grade each area in terms of how 'free' and 'open' it is, ie what kind of costs are there in using a given space, what kind of restrictions apply to its use? The mappings will be linked with local oral histories of places which have specific significance, such as being sites of important public debate and protest, or places where an important local subculture has developed. The spaces may range from public parks, and street corners, to shopping centres, cafes, clubs and community halls.

A version of the map will be produced through an online mapping tool where spaces can be identified and either rated or tagged according to the criteria described above and linked to local history accounts. The history accounts will be gathered through recorded interviews. Public participants will have access to enter and edit their own map and historical information. In addition to the online map, physical versions will be available in a free printed format that will be distributed across each city in libraries and shops, etc. A gallery version of the project will present a large blown up version of the map filling a wall in the gallery space. This will be accompanied by a display of the project on a computer and a pile of maps from which visitors can take a copy. The free printed maps take the project back into the physical areas that it documents and enables it to reach audiences who might not have internet access, or who would not normally visit a gallery.

Archigram

During Mark Shepards discussion, there was a mention of Warren Chalk and a quote about how external influences which you can't effect alters how a city/ space is used. For example rain on Oxford Road, London means less people on the streets, less activity in the city. Something simple like this has a far greater impact on the use of a space.

The whole discussion was very interesting looking at cities as social networks, the links between architecture and current web design. Anyway the Warren Chalk quote led me to looking at some of the work by the Archigram architectural group.

"In late 1960, in various flats in Hampstead, a loose group of people started to meet: to criticize projects, to concoct letters to the press, to combine to make competition projects, and generally prop one another up against the boredom of working in a London architectural office. It became obvious that some publication would help. The main British magazines did not at that time publish student work, so that Archigram was reacting to this as well as the general sterility of the scene. The title came from a notion of a more urgent and simple item than a journal, like a 'telegram' or 'aerogramme,' hence 'archi(tecture)-gram.'...By this time Peter Cook, David Greene, and Mike Webb, in making a broadsheet, had started a new Group."?

Thus begins Archigram, a chronicle of the work of a group of young British architects that became the most influential architecture movement of the 1960s, as told by the members themselves. It includes material published in early issues of their journal, as well as numerous texts, poems, comics, photocollages, drawings, and fantastical architecture projects. Work presented includes Instant City, pod living, the Features Monte Carlo entertainment center, Blow-out Village, and the Cushicle personalized enclosure. Archigram's influence continues unabated: direct descendants of the group's work include Lebbeus Woods, Neil Denari, Takasaki Masaharu, ?and Morphosis.?

Walking City - a self-contained mobile pod of urban elements.
The Suitaloon - a garment which converts into a dwelling.
Living Pod - an add-on domicile with all modern conveniences.
Blow-out Village - an entire temporary city which inflates from a hovercraft.
Cushicle - a vehicle which becomes a private cubicle/chaise longue.
Bathamatic - automatic bathing and relaxation device.

Other far-out innovations by Archigram include: The Electronic Tomato, Tuned Suburb, Plug-in City (after which the local gallery is named), Instant City, Free Time Node Trailer Park, and more! Due to its size, the exhibition will take place in two locations, 286 McDermot and 2nd floor 290 McDermot. Models, plans and concepts by this amazing group will be augmented with a multimedia display and projects from the Archigram Archives. Tours of the Archigram exhibition will be available beginning Friday, June 7 and continue until the end of the summer. After, take a break in the Inflatable Lounge, where visitors can relax with reading materials and refreshments.

Fun, play and pleasure were the rationale for Archigrams projects, not as recreation, the pause that refreshes, between stretches of productive labour, but as an epistemology and an end in itself.

Dopplr Raumzeitgeist

Shown by Matt Jones at FutureSoinc
Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007: Where we went last year

Nine Inch Nails/ Futuresonic

Forum post that pretty much sums up Scott Cohens discussion at FutureSonic about buliding a fan base and distributing to that audience

Quote from SHOUP:

What has happened to Trent? I remember it used to take 5 years on average to put out a new album. Now he's putting out new music every year. Did he get the Jack White creative fever?

I am a big NIN fan and probably biased...and although i have liked whatever...I would imagine he is just trying to be cutting edge and now that he is 100% free of labels he is releasing whatever he feels like...online...to his fanbase.

At this point (besides interesting junk) I think he is trying to work out the best approach to "new age" distribution.. Testing what works and what doesnt as he already has a loyal base, but feels he has somthing to prove given the hostile market he has worked in for years

FutureSonic Notes

Lots of notes from FutureSonic will edit these over the next few days, really excellent conference. Very inspiring and made me more confident about the work I'm doing.

FutureSonic

Matt Jones
2001 Gov Stats=ONS
Cost of tech

People/kids using (online) Space to hang out- not do things
User need
Friends offline
Technology as enabler
Anonymity -Group space
Online/ offline cross over
“Friending” not just friends, hierarchies of friends
Replace relationships with the word transactions
What can you give me, how do people interact
familiar/ strangers
Strong bonds
Patterns
Library book example, used well, thumbed dog eared. Thats the one you go for.

Living patterns
Rural/ urban
Outside/In

Crumb-art org

Nature networks
Peer review
Friends as trophies/ social capital
Find another way to describe these interactions

James wallbank
Facebook/social networking is crap
updating status, not engaging with real life
14-19 year olds social skills
online vs offline
Anti communication
age? of speaker :0
surprise finding new stuff
Google “known unknowns”
serendipity
the unknown unexpected
Audience laughter
Helping it along
Active member of a community
Familiarity of a space neg notice board
Discussion with Graham Hibbert
“Autistic terms”
Money


Citizen participation
Physical space/ real space
community online
social offline
migration benefit this has for real people and commnites
community ownership
self manged
all real projects
visualize online/ offline
closer interaction

Ravi
Social from history
real/physical
blogging collective
blogging group
using these tools to reclaim from the masses
blogging as documentation
proving identity
lang
social knowledge
bloggers questioning
reclaim/ redesign
public space

Gerd
end of control
net as printing press, television,phone
It's there, can't go back
no online /offline
ultimate connectivity
web 1 receive
web 2 make
web 3 filter
web 4 smart filter
turning off. can't be done
learning to learn
din of “stuff”
Google
copyright from a western perspective
everyone is a “criminal”
them creating for us. we receive
now it is us creating
s networks as broadcasters
good/ bad?
Chris Heathco (Nokia)
Social etiquette
One sided
Information relationshiops
Technology happens!!
Good/ bad

Dopplr
How people use a site
can't force people how to use a site
people choose how they are going to use a site
easy use is a bug
make the site difficult, make people aware of what they are doings
add clues
speed bumps
dda pattern floors
people to decide how to use tech
people don't use the manual

Matt Jones
Helisinki image visuliztion (bat sign)
Same designer as Pixiltae
Dopplr viaulize of Earth
Models
, we like to make to models
Building information
World lines-possibiltes
Wiki quote for parqua/ free running
Tracer
New map openstreet.org
game noise/ gps
Shaping things Bruce Sterling

Small ideas things for further interaction
Theo (?) Arnall
Readable grids
recreating-movement.com
the invisibles (comic)
Cities are slow computers
“The Ghost Map” Johnson
Trulia Hindsight(site)
Invisible/ visible
Justin Stewart
Nike +
Matt Ward
Personal Data/ GPS
Map current
Sensors – Blogs, cctv, things within the city
Personal/ berocurta
cityofsound.com
The Street as a platform
“Everyware” Adam Greenfield
London Oyster Card
“Seeshell” Johanna Brewer

Chris Heathcote
Data and Metadaa
Automatic communication

Who what where
(meta)
Last FM collects meta data, no one else does this. Why?
Time- Designing for the future
What are you going to do ?
what have you done?
Rare to find sites that map what you intend to do
flickr maps records what you have done, when you did it
Real calendars vs virtual calendars,
How people interact, time slots, chunks, blocks of time

Flickr
Tagging people, only tagging places
Personal data
Facebook Apps- meta data
Small groups/ networks
Dunbar(?) 150 people to make a network
Navigation, place meta data
Data trail
Unreliablity of GPS/ tech in general
Geotag Flickr, lack of data,
More relevance
Fuzzy data, that is less accurate but is of more use
Tieing things together
Privacy issues
Social ettiquete
Losing meta data
Issues with corporation stroing thiis data
How it is used

Mark Shepard
andinc.org
propagative urbanism
Adam Greenfield lulu.com
Situations technologies (New York competiton)
“Space is a social product” Lefevbre
The Naked City
Situationist
Living City (book) Archigram 1963
Warren Chalk – Oxford Street, how rain effects the city/ urban
Simple level of tech
Wireless wifi hotspots cafes
Plugin City Archigram Ron Heron 1970

New spatial practices
Product
New spatial conditions
Skateboarding
Re-apprproiating space
Georg Simmel
'Staring for hours' on the tube, never happenede before trains, trams etc
Ipod cutting of social situations
Wifi access hotspots wifimaps.com
geocasting gps

Aleks Krotoski
Superstar Tokyo
Sticers photos upload images to the site (NOISE)
Rider spoke (GPS)
Penguin We Tell Stories

Social Music
Jonas Last FM
Free indierect payment
Consumption
Owned by CBS now
Data pereception

Scott
Orchard
Not a mussican? Why here?
Narrowed taste
Feed or find
Finding an audince
netaududiolondon.cc

Last FM
Extra features, cosmetic minor cost 1.50
1,000 pays for the 10,000 free users

Mathew Fuller
Software in education
GPL Licence
seed platform for the social
free- redistribution
information flow
17th century onwards
web2.0 relationship, art, software
access to code source
access to redesign
access to reinvent
software not as tools but where we live
software as culture
not just a functional tool act first think later
reflect as you make
softaware as art

Aleks Krotoski
Nintnedo DS
Engaging with others
Second life, WoW
Replacement for real spaces
Matt Jones- getting rid of friends
A Rape In Cyberspace
emmotional connection
Mapping friends facebook, twitter becomes meaninless
Connection type Robert Scoble
Information about relationships
Inffluence amount
Things in common
Connections
Social networks can be more real
Learn, adapt, collaberate
subtle relationships
nuance through play performance
mutual experience
Achsyninicity learning (turned based) scrabble
vs real time
MA Publication

bbc.backstage.co.uk
BBC online but not part of the net(see software not as tech community, spaces to be
alternatives to our content
audience
more importnt things to do
splitting time
telling their own story
expect particiaption
expect time shift
everything
expect sharing
taking note
explore beyond
have great distribution methods
content is never finished (perepetual beta)
you (audience are in control)
BBC backstage is a license similar to Creative Commons
Backstage cahnging the BBC
Ian Forrester BBC Backstage

BBC Radio Labs
Collin Murray Black Hole
Audienece participitation
ten hour take over
listener six mix
sms visualize- they need more, ambition.
Trying to visualize what is happening- sound index
MMS
Networks visulization
ownership
personal relationship
community
visualises
showing off sharing
Radio Pop
Last FM Competiton role of Radio Pop
Radio Pop API

Olinda Radio, combining web and physical
information labs
Visulaizing radio
Whats being turned up turned off
Whos listening to what
Volume
Mapping, linking, aesthetic etc