How I’d like the web to work
July 24, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Enjoyed a good chat with Niall Larkin and Bohoe at Open Coffee Dublin today. Whilst attempting to pry some information out of Mr L about his super secret patented project, we got on to talking about semantic web.
Semantic web is one interpretation of the future of the web based around how information is catalogued. It’s an orderly system of organising reams of information. You can read more about it here - in an interview with John Breslin of DERI.
My critique of semantic web is that it will remove the randomness that I know and love from the web. Just because I have shown myself in the past to be interested in dance music, doesn’t mean that I want to be presented only with dance music online forever. I may grow old and change my tastes to opera or something.
I want my web to continue to present me with randomness. Niall refers to what I want as semiotic web.
What would be really cool I think is to have a future where we can switch on and off our preferences for the kind of web we want at a particular time. So if I’m online and looking around for myself, I’ll go for semiotic web. But I’m on the hunt for info on a theme for a client, I’ll go for semantic web.
What do you think?
Really Cool Sites I Like
July 23, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Here’s some cool sites that people told me about at Reboot, and that I like:
- Gelaskins - gorgeous sexy designs to customise your apple kit. Comes with handy “I’m protecting the cover” excuse for use. I seriously deliberated sharing this with you.
- Song Meanings- bring out your inner teenager and obsess about what music lyrics really mean. Browse artists or song titles, and get the full lyrics plus a whole load of people’s opinions on what they mean. One of my favourites is this.
- Urinal Spiders - Schipol airport brought these in in 2005. Spider is embedded in the urinal in mens toilets. ”Spillage” improved by loads of percent. Now you can buy the spiders as stickers to add to your loo. Perfect gift for fathers day!! I can’t find the link to the shop that sells them. If you know, please let me know.
- Kronomy - cool way of keeping your pix, video, and life all in one place. Cynical me had a quick glance at the terms & conditions to make sure they can’t use my life/pics for market research or selling to marketing firms purposes, and they can’t. So go, enjoy, with my blessing!
- PC Live Podcast - because I’m on it tomorrow morning! Actually this is a great podcast with varied news about technology that you will find interesting. If you like the randomness of this blog, you’ll like this podcast. Sign up on iTunes, search for pc live podcast. Or click on the “Listen Now” left hand panel on the PC Live site here.
Bad Blogger
July 17, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I am one. Nope, I’ve not been off sunning my body on a warm Mediterranean beach. Nor have I been exploring interesting little towns in remote hillside places, sampling local delicacies and fine wines…. I’ll stop here before it all gets Too Much.
You see - I have a Plan. My Plan is to take holidays in the really woeful times of year in Ireland and then get to be here to enjoy our wonderful country and its super chilled out people when the weather is good. It would be a worthy plan to aspire to if we actually had a summer in Ireland. Instead, it’s July, I had my light on this morning because it was dark. Everyone’s off on holiday. And I have to wait quite some time before I can consider a bikini again.
So while the rest of Ireland battles it out at the check-in desk in the 3rd world airport that is Dublin, I’ve had my head down and been working hard for my beloved clients. There’s always a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on that I just can’t tell you about or show you… but here a couple of interesting sites that have kept me occupied these last while.
Official Excuses For Not Blogging:
- Kanchi - love love loving this site. When I first met the Kanchi team, they told me that their mission was to change the world. They mean it. And they are set about doing it. I feel honoured to play a little part in this mission. I also enjoyed working with the finest talent in town - Ray on Design, Ken on Uber Accessible Cut Up, and Jess on Sexy Video Action.
- Atkins Global - sure now even the engineers and road planners are at video content - why aren’t you? If your target market is local authority planners who are jaded with dull and boring engineering websites, then Atkins is a stand-out for its innovation.
- Image Matters - super sexy site and seo for Dublin-based image consultant, Frances Jones. Got to work with designer to the techcrunch stars, Sabrina Dent on this one.
Meteor Site Map
July 2, 2008 at 10:27 am
I wrote a post recently about embarrassing omissions on Irish sites that should know better. The latest culprit I spotted is Meteor. Large mobile phone company that has probably invested a lot in its online presence. It’s a pity they forgot their site map.
iPhone app for Irish Rail
July 2, 2008 at 9:00 am
Dave Barrett showed us all what he got up to last weekend…
…With a lovely little site that’s made to look like an iPhone app but is accessible normally through the web. The site simply serves the busy commuter or tourist who needs to plan a journey where the Irish Rail site fails. I’ve often been frustrated at the Irish Rail site and how pedantic it tends to be. For example, if you don’t put in your station exactly as it appears on the station picker list, then it pushes you away. I ask you - how many people know that Dublin (Connolly) should be like that? Normal humans would probably try with Connolly…
Anyway, Dave came up with this little site so he can access train times from his iphone whenever he’s on the move. I love it! Don’t like the site so make his own version!
You can use this nice little Irish Rail for iPhone app too. And if you have any great ideas on how to enhance it, like integrating it with GPS or something better, please tell Dave (and he’ll probably knock it out over the weekend!).
Thoughts on Reboot 10
July 1, 2008 at 10:46 am
This blog was featured in last week’s ebusiness supplement of the Irish Independent. While I was delighted by the publicity, I noted that the impression I’ve made on the journalist is of a kind of tech-scene party girl! It is with some trepidation therefore that I’m posting below my thoughts on Reboot 10 which I attended last week. I will try and keep them serious and meaty and will not make any mention of the kicking street after-party.
I come to Reboot every year to get my brain pulled out and squeezed and then unceremoniously dropped back in again. That’s not entirely what I got this year. There was less optimism about the future and a sense of darkness was evident from some speakers.
Howard RheingoldTor Nørretranders - Share your Shit - was the first message I took from Reboot 10. He made the point that biological organisms exist by consuming the shit of other organisms. So too with us. We must share in order to thrive.- Stowe Boyd, self-declared webthropologist (I like that title) reminded us that we are living at the end of the Industrial era, the start of the new. Whereas last year, this signalled excitement, this year I detected a dark message of caution. He paints a grim picture of the gap between rich and poor, about the billions of people who live without government in feral cities whose lives are controlled by warlords and criminals. Individuals have discovered that happiness doesn’t come from being a cog in the mass civilisation that’s been sold to us. According to Boyd, the shift to many-to-many communications sees more people living on the edge. So for those on the edge (Edgelanders) with the most connections, we/they owe it to the world to create linkages and build bridges to the ones that are overlooked. The web brings us a sort of freedom, but we must use this freedom to reach out to those people who governments have missed.
It seemed to be quite retrospective. I heard too many speakers start off with ‘the history of things’. Even Howard Rheingold did a piece on how the invention of the printing press opened the way for a wave of transformations, and how it’s the same with the web today… yada yada…Maybe I liked it because it was at the start and I was feeling fresh and open. But Lee Bryant gave us a history of how industrial practices have changed. Jeremy Keith’s talk was billed as ‘a starting point for discussions on ideas such as public domain, copyright, and the emergence of the reputation economy on the web” whereas it was in fact, him talking about the history of Irish traditional music! The art appreciation vibe was carried on by Cennyd Bowles who gave a talk on “Beauty in Web Design” in which he referenced not one website but talked instead about what art is and Don Norman’s cognitive science on beauty.Who was briliiant and inspiring?
- JP Rangaswami the coolest CTO that’s ever walked this earth! He got up and talked on topic (yes folks, the theme this year was free!!) and obviously straight from the hip. He made several succinct points:
- Value is what drives the decision of where something is free and not free. It is the customer who decides that. They are always willing to pay for something they value. He gives the example of his kids who’ll pay £4.99 for a ring-tone but not £9.99 for a music download.
- Artificial scarcity - for each and every artificial scarcity there is an equal and opposite artificial abundance. Hacker culture is simply about trying to get at stuff with artificial barriers. People are fundamentally not thieves. What some companies call stealing/hacking, is where they created an artificial barrier and others are simply trying to overcome it.
- Figure how what people want to pay for and apply it. Stop trying to charge people for what they have an aversion to pay for, and charge them for things they value.
- Chris Messina raised my awareness of the fact that there there is no ‘view source’ in Silverlight. The ideology is that we don’t want to share (either bugs or ingenuity). The ability to view source is necessary for our evolution of migrating from A to B and something better. This Olympics will see around 2 billion people get Silverlight because all the web content for the olympics is on it. That’s developing the web?
- Jyri Engestrom who just is Rock & Roll! His background is sociology and I like the way he approaches technology from that standpoint.
- He talked about social objects, they are what connect people. So you’ve always got communities of interest based around a thing. He talked about communities of potato growers in Italy. I thought about all the social networking groups that I am active in are all around areas of genuine interest to me - books, travel, photographs… I’m not an avid FB’er because that’s just about collections of friends. Mine aren’t all online, so it doesn’t hold the same interest to me. “Good web apps take that thing and add value to it. What makes an item interesting is what people say about it and do with it.
- Social peripheral vision. How in the next 2 years we’re going to see services that make us more socially aware, eg. Maps that show where my friends are. Photos with facial recognition, etc.
- When asked the question “Is privacy still dead?” he answered that it’s going more in the realms of audience management.
All up, I enjoyed. And I will be back for Reboot 11. It got me thinking and that’s what counts. Surprised that I was the only one in the Irish delegation. Took it upon myself to take good notes and party with the best of them as a result. My heartfelt thanks to the organisers who are stars. Big love to Copenhagen which wins my heart more every year. (And it’s got cheaper cocktails than Dublin).
