participatory

Iphone

2008-08-30T23:05:00.001-07:00

So I did it - I went and signed on the dotted line and come home with my very own iphone... after resisting the ipod touch and ipods of all varieties for so long (although I did buy one for my wife) I am now the proud owner of some apple hardware and a 3G phone to boot.

Up until recently I have been sold on the N96 as my next phone, with a great camera, GPS and all the rest of it, it sounded like the N95 (which I also coveted for some time). However after reading a few reviews on Engadget I decided that the N96 was not really for me, the main attraction was the camera, and that was something I decided to I could live without in a phone.. well that many megapixels anyway.

The Iphone does have a camera, and a GPS and that lovely touch screen - and what seems like an endless supply of applications, some free and some not - applications that allow you to have fun with the GPS and camera and all the rest of it. Another bonus that I had not counted on was the kids - they love it, with a screen they can touch - nae - are meant to touch and buttons, that actually look like the things they do... the camera especially - they are able to pick the thing up and take pictures, with minimal instruction (they are 3 and 5) not that I let them get too far with it :-)

So now that I have it - would I make the same decision again? definitely - the full touch keyboard and large screen make it an excellent tool for social apps like twitter.friendfeed and facebook - and lets face it that where I spend 99% of my time these days. I am betting it is only going to enhance my hyper-connectivity, which can only be a good thing right?

technology populism

2008-08-22T04:48:00.001-07:00

I love this recent post from RWW - talking about the recent Gartner research report and emerging trends for CIO's - in particular the first point that is raised is something call technology populism; here is the excerpt from the post....

Technology Populism: Web 2.0 and social networking in the enterprise. Workers are provisioning their own tools, especially when IT can't provide. IT had best look towards integrating Enterprise 2.0 into their organization - if they don't, the end users will simply go find their own apps to use. The risks of ignoring this trend include compromised security, comprised privacy, and poor control of intellectual property. (We discussed this concept in more detail here).

........ and I now realise that this is essentially my attitude to CIO tools in my work area - if they are not available easily from internal IT why not just use the tools on the web. I have never really had a name for it before, but once you are exposed to things like google doc's, google reader, delicious, twitter, yahoo pipes and the list goes on why would you even bother to try and recreate such things inside the firewall. I just don't understand the reticence, well I do - everyone is worried about security etc, but for most things the security offered by web services is more then sufficient, and sometimes superior to what can be provided by internal ICT that there is no argument.

The other point I will make about this is that there is not widespread adoption of the web2.0 ethic about sharing everything with everyone - well not quite that free, but a lot more transparent then is currently the case inside govt firewalls...some of my colleagues call me a digital hippy, which I did not really understand until the free love reference was made clear to me, and in some ways that what web2.0 is about... in some ways. Technology populist - I can live with that!

Hugh Mackay Web2.0 and democracy

2008-01-31T12:04:00.000-08:00

it has been a thought of mine recently that if we could only get everyone connected to the internet and engaged in the decision making of the country that we would have a better system then the current westminster parliment... however reading "Advance Australia Where?" has given me pause for thought - thought for pause. Hugh basically says that if everyone is involved then we end up with chaos and that we need leaders - people who can consider the facts and make informed and sometimes popular decisions. I agree... however I feel that my recent thinkings about the involvment of everyone in the process has been a lack of voice within the decision making process - a government, now deposed that was making decisions that I did not agree with - bad decisions - decisions that got them unelected.... during those times however I wanted more engagement and web2.0 seemed like a natural way to go. Now that we have someone in govt that is more to my way of thinking.. I don't feel so angry about a lack of engagement.

all that being said we still need transparency in govt and better consultation and engagement with the populace and web 2.0 has a great many tools and ideas that can further that cause.

hhmmmmm...

is anybody out there

2008-01-14T13:45:00.000-08:00

Despite all the neat tools and all the neat communications channels and all the neat photostreams and all the neat neatness... sometimes it still feels kinda lonely out there - despite all the tweets and the never ending streams of status updates - all these people, all the time but still it feels somewhat empty.

19112007(001)

2007-11-18T00:00:00.001-08:00

school fete

2007-10-27T03:33:00.000-07:00

So today was my first time helping out at our schools annual fete. Lots of things going on, lots of stalls staffed by volunteers - all selling donated goods/services to raise money for the school. I participated - helping out at the icecream stall... which predictably was very busy with all the kids around. It got me thinking though - on the one hand it felt good to contribute to the school, but helping out at the stall, and doing some of the pack down work afterwads, but in terms of the social networking that was acheived how does it stack up (not that this was the purpose of the fete mind you) against time invested online, in virtual social networks? virtual communities... how effective is that kind of activity in creating the social bonds so very important to us - how much of the interaction, with the selective memories most of us possess will be remembered? How co-hesive a group was formed from the day and what did most people take away from it. My experience while I was with the kids, was that I was somewhat isolated, because they have specific needs, and want to do things that I wouldn't necessarily want - things that sometimes stop meaning social connection. Perhaps the organising committee was able to establish much better working relationships - but for those on the periphery who were helping people who were primary organisers of a stall etc - what of our connection to the group... not everyone can be in that inner group - is my effort worth less social connection then the primary organiser?

That being said would the addition of online communication between the people/parents involved including those at the periphery have necessarily improved social connections - or would be just better informed? How does the knowing of status/progress/events enhance our social connection with a group? is it the same as being there?

enough questions for now

social information network - info revolution

2007-10-25T04:43:00.001-07:00

I love this video for so many reasons - but most of all it highlights the power of us!

Twine

2007-10-22T05:08:00.001-07:00

Another interesting aspect to the participatory web has been rise of social networking - born of bulletin boards, forums, list-servers, wiki's and blogs - social networking has seen the growth of platforms that allow direct instant and delayed communications with friends and acquaintances - comparison of likes, sharing of music tasks, photos of the dog and latest camping trip and all the other fun things people fill their time with. The recent announcement of (see the O'Reilly Radar post here) Twine.com by Radar networks promises a platform that will allow social networks to develop information streams, that are correlated by an automated tagging system and most importantly by people... which is a very intriguing idea, since ideas come from people and who better then the source to best illuminate what is meant by that particular paragraph. It also relates by the recent Radar post about in-stream documents - documents are no longer a discrete file, to be opened/read/edited - the information they contain are objects that can be assembled based on search criteria into dynamic repositories of data. Can't wait to try it! Also interested to see how these platforms will play with efforts like Fedora

Live Writer

2007-10-21T14:09:00.001-07:00

I keep seeing references on the web to the windows new blogging tool - and since Ecto wants you to pay for that software I thought I might try it out... and so far I am impressed by the ease install and setup - it auto detected everything about my blogger site - guess the test will be to see how well it lets you embed things from other services etc

how about a Youtube video...

data stacks

2007-10-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

Peter Brantly over at O'Reilly Radar has another interesting post (The New Stacks) up this morning with respect to the changing face of libraries and the changing in their operating models - basically as brokers of licensed content - however and this is where it gets interesting, Peter states that we are in the middle of revolution...

"That is right. And by this, let us know that we do not refer to our physical, constructed caverns of electronics, racks, fiber, and cooling ducts, but rather, data that constitute within the clouds of our networks, and that permit us to reach out to embrace citizen science, new forms of expression, and foster new forms of creativity. Each encounter with our burgeoning network a new walk among the shelves, and a new fashion of browsing, no longer limited to what merely we see to the left, to the right; now also to further reaches of our imagination...."

This idea of new stacks for me continues the conversation about in-stream documents - libraries and the books they contain represent discrete bodies of information at the book and institution level, but as efforts like google book scanning and others become more mature, data will be freed from this physical and institutional bounds, available as packets across multiple reference points - building complex representations of ideas on the fly. Follow the link for the whole post.. lovely thinking

Documents In-Stream [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

2007-10-15T21:00:00.001-07:00

Email to a friend,

thought this might be of interest to you after your reference to the New York times article you pointed me at yesterday - the idea of the document format going away and document becoming inline is intriguing to me... as some point through meta-data/tagging/geotagging information will no longer be contained in discrete documents but will rather be part of the collective memory - at least that is how it will appear to the researcher - obviously stuff still needs to be stored in databases etc - but being able to pull together on all relevant info about a topic on the fly in some sort of co-hesive format will be something neat! inline documents - streaming documents...

Ben

Sent to you by presariov2000 via Google Reader:

Documents In-Stream

via O'Reilly Radar by Peter Brantley on 10/14/07

By Peter Brantley

In ODF enters the Semantic Web, Rob Weir writes in his blog, An Antic Disposition, of the challenges of encoding the wide range of possible metadata describing a document in a semantically meaningful fashion within the constraints of a schema....

....

The concept of a document as being a single storage of data that lives in a single place, entire, self-contained and complete is nearing an end. A document is a stream, a thread in space and time, connected to other documents, containing other documents, contained in other documents, in multiple layers of meaning and in multiple dimensions. What we call a traditional document is really just a snapshot in time and space, a projection into print-ready output form, of what documents will soon become.

.....

Google LatLong: Community maps in your search results

2007-10-11T06:42:00.000-07:00

I love Google! Click through to see the new community maps you can now access as part of your search in google maps - so not only can you see the pizza places that are listed in the local directory/advertised, but now you can see the pizza places that people have mapped and made comment on. These are exactly the kind of tools that we should be using in our environmental work. Click through for the post on the google lat/lon blog.

Google LatLong: Community maps in your search results

“Wiki the Vote” on Congresspedia | Sunlight Foundation

2007-10-10T06:40:00.000-07:00

Congresspedia has started a new wiki that will enable peer production of wiki entries for every political representative standing in the upcoming election - as Lawrence Lessig was saying in his recent appearance, the power of web2.0 will help us take back democracy among a whole range of other activities that it is currently enabling - peer production and greater public scrutiny of the political process and a greater transparency can only be good for democracy! Lets see if we can get done with money politics! See the story on the sunlight foundation page here “Wiki the Vote” on Congresspedia | Sunlight Foundation

another example of user generated data

2007-10-10T06:27:00.000-07:00

There was a story on radio national today about climate change and how the migration patterns of birds are being affected by changes in the timing and severity of the seasons - part of the story was of particular interest to me because it talked about using data collected by citizens.

So Dr Lynda Chambers from the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre was delighted to discover two dairy farmers had kept records of the arrival and departure time of birds on their farm since 1973. The records of 20 species of water and land birds were taken at Middlesex in southwestern Australia.

This is an example of data being collected by individuals for their own purposes being put to use for the greater good - providing the tools for people to capture and manage this data online will only increase access, awareness and benefits for all. This needs to be co-ordinated across themes and environments and its needs to be co-ordinated now!

participatory

2007-10-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

This post by Mark Pesce http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=39 was really cool for all the futurists out there, me included, the idea of a pervasive network linking the community outside of the realm of telco's etc was a very exciting idea - that and peer production and the power of the mob... Rheingold'esque

A real world example of this popped up in this interview with Lawrence Lessig...

Lawrence re-iterates the rising wave of peer production as a powerful force to capture the detail of money politics in this instance but I would argue of citizen participation in general. The tools of social networks and collaborative spaces like wiki's, blogs and forums, cell/mobile phones provide we the people the organising tools like never before. The ability to organize in physical and online spaces with thousands of like mind individuals across socio-economic and geographic boundaries.

Let the participation begin!

Rheingold EDUAUSEM2007

2007-10-02T05:20:00.000-07:00

Photos from my recent trip to see Howard Rheingold talk at the educationau seminar... excellent trip - more later! - a shoutout to Laurel Papworth who was my table buddy and interpreter

Howard Rheingold eduausem2007