one greener day

Cinnabar Moth Caterpillar

2010-08-02T10:21:00.001+01:00

Cinnabar Moth Caterpillar
Originally uploaded by timdifford

apropos of nothing... spotted this outside

Google Reader - Explore More

2010-07-28T14:01:00.000+01:00

I don't know about you, but I spend quite a bit of time on Google Reader each day trawling through my RSS feeds.

Sometimes it gets too much and I need to purge the 1000+ stories staring at me in my inbox, but more often than not I at least get to skim through what's in there, whether it's in Reader or in Newsrack, Reeder or one of the other iPad/iPhone apps I flit from from time to time.

When I'm using Google Reader itself though, despite having spent ages grouping my feeds into neat little categories such as News, Tech, Sports, Music etc, I tend to get more value out of browsing articles shared by Friends, or by dipping into the great Explore category.

Whilst Explore is populated by suggestions based on articles you've read, starred or shared it never fails to turn up a few surprises... you never know what you're gonna get.

Seriously, if you haven't already tried it. Give it a go.

Eraser USB Stick attempts to raise awareness

2010-07-23T09:33:00.000+01:00

Eraser USB Stick attempts to raise awareness: "

This Eraser USB Stick has a quirky design, but a serious message. It was made to help people to remember how hard it is for those going through Alzheimer’s, while also reminding you of the importance of your own precious memories. With such a serious message, it might be enough to remind you to back up those picture files you’ve been meaning to deal with.

This is a design that was created in New Zealand for those that live in New Zealand. These were sent off to local politicians and organizations along with a letter to help raise awareness of their Alzheimer’s charity. Thus far these seem to have worked pretty well and have gotten a positive response in that part of the world. It’s a great creative idea and it’s even better that they’re doing it for a good cause. There’s no word if there’s somewhere to purchase these online so far.

Source: Gizmodiva

Cool Gift Idea: Digital Picture Frames, check out our reviews.
[ Eraser USB Stick attempts to raise awareness copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

"

Thanks to Coolest Gadgets

Interesting stuff from Boing Boing

2010-07-23T09:30:00.000+01:00

Can you audit the software that goes in your body?

Can you audit the software that goes in your body?: "The Software Freedom Law Center's latest white-paper, 'Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices,' examines the strange circumstances around pacemakers and other implanted medical devices. Regulators like the FDA inspect the hardware designs for these devices in great detail, but the crucial software that runs the devices is a closed book -- a proprietary secret that's only ever called in for examination when the devices start to crash, with disastrous circumstances.

In 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States' ruling in Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc. made people with IMDs even more vulnerable to negligence on the part of device manufacturers.4 Following a wave of high-profile recalls of defective IMDs in 2005, the Court's decision prohibited patients harmed by defects in FDA-approved devices from seeking damages against manufacturers in state court and eliminated the only consumer safeguard protecting patients from potentially fatal IMD malfunctions: product liability lawsuits. Prevented from recovering compensation from IMD-manufacturers for injuries, lost wages, or health expenses in the wake of device failures, people with chronic medical conditions are now faced with a stark choice: trust manufacturers entirely or risk their lives by opting against life-saving treatment.

We at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) propose an unexplored solution to the software liability issues that are increasingly pressing as the population of IMD-users grows--requiring medical device manufacturers to make IMD source-code publicly auditable. As a non-profit legal services organization for Free and Open Source (FOSS) software developers, part of the SFLC's mission is to promote the use of open, auditable source code5 in all computerized technology. This paper demonstrates why increased transparency in the field of medical device software is in the public's interest. It unifies various research into the privacy and security risks of medical device software and the benefits of published systems over closed, proprietary alternatives. Our intention is to demonstrate that auditable medical device software would mitigate the privacy and security risks in IMDs by reducing the occurrence of source code bugs and the potential for malicious device hacking in the long-term. Although there is no way to eliminate software vulnerabilities entirely, this paper demonstrates that free and open source medical device software would improve the safety of patients with IMDs, increase the accountability of device manufacturers, and address some of the legal and regulatory constraints of the current regime.

Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices

(via /.)

(Image: Medtronic EnRhythm Pacing System, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from winton's photostream)

"

Cory Doctorow cc

More iPadgeantry

2010-05-31T18:41:00.001+01:00

I have to say that, having used an iPad for a couple of days now, I'm finding it hard to remember what I did before. I know all this "hype" is getting irksome for those who haven't got or simply don't want an iPad but I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before the user-experience delivered by Apple in the shape of the iPad will transform their lives.

I'm not suggesting that everyone will buy an iPad, but in exactly the same way that most of the game-changing innovations introduced by Apple with the launch of the iPhone have now become familiar 'hygiene factors' on many mobile phones and all smartphones, regardless of operating system or hardware, much the same will happen with the iPad, as its features appear on other tablet/slate products.

Before using it I was uncertain whether or not it would kill the netbook. Now I've never been more certain that it will. Yes I know that I wrote a post for The Next Web yesterday pointing out a few of its (very minor) early failings but those small gripes will be overcome in no time.

What is incredible is the fact that the device is always on. There's no booting up. You are only every seconds away from an immersive online experience and that's before you get into the rapidly growing range of diverse apps.

I know that netbooks and laptops don't take that long to fire up... but those few minutes feel like a few years compared to starting an iPad. There'll always be a time when you need the extra oomph of a MacBook or a PC, but it's amazing how much stuff can already be achieved very quickly and very effectively on the iPad.

It is really really good.

FutureEverything

2010-05-16T08:04:00.001+01:00

Attending Manchester's FutureEverything Festival is becoming a habit. This years's event is just coming to an end and again I was along for the ride.

Sadly, I only got to the Conference and not any of the Art or Music events... I'm particularly gutted to have missed Plaid at Victoria Baths. So, for my highlight I must choose from the list of diverse speakers who came to Manchester (as well as cities around the world hooked up by the GloNet experiment).

For me, session which captured the essence of FutureEverything and its heady mix of art, culture and technology was delivered by Shawn Micallef from Toronto. His session told about the Murmers project which has been running for several years in several city suburbs across North America.

Signs posted at key locations around the city invite passers-by to dial a number and share their stories and memories of that specific place. Visitors to that spot can then dial in to the service to listen to all recorded anecdotes associated with that location.

The project was established several years ago and predicted a future of geo-location enabled social media which be are familiarising ourselves with today. It reminded me a little of AudioBoo which captures audio snippets from smartphone owners around the world, making them immediately available to global listeners and forever tagging each sound file with the location where it was recorded.

I'd love to see a collaboration between the two projects.

How Green Is My Google?

2010-05-10T23:59:00.003+01:00

Great infographic from Intac:

The iPod Revolution

2010-05-10T23:55:00.000+01:00

Great infographic from Mashable:

[Source: Online MBA for Mashable.com]

Some tips on the use of social media by artists and musicians

2010-05-04T09:31:00.004+01:00

I recently gave a guest-lecture at Liverpool's Institute for the Performing Arts (LIPA) for a bunch of under-graduates who'd recently returned from assignments working in and around the music industry.

One of the students followed up with some further questions to contribute to her work on her dissertation. Here are my responses. I don't doubt that she asked many others... I'd be very interested in their responses too.

What are your opinions on management using social networks to promote an artist?

I think that management using social networks to promote an artist is unavoidable at the moment for a variety of reasons. The artists themselves might genuinely be too busy, may be unfamiliar with social media etiquette or amy be something of a liablility... who knows what they're going to say next!?!

Do you think that on sites such as Twitter that artists should ‘tweet’ and blog themselves or should their PR take control?

The question is, is the management pretending to tweet as the artist, or is the Twitterfeed, Facebook page clearly seen as a place to go to for updates on the artist?

Management pretending to tweet as the artist might have some short-term advantages... it ensures that the artists doesn't say anything too controversial, tweets are aligned with any overall marketing, social media campaign, etc etc. In the long run though, social media users can be a pretty savvy bunch and will rumble a false popstar, which could dimish credibility and at worst result in a backlash.

My view would be that it's better for the artist to do it themselves if they can, provided they are aware of how it works and the security risks around location-based services etc.

Good advice for artists when chatting with fans is, yes do reply to messages, but no more than once or twice in any conversation to any unknown fan.
Remember, for a fan any response from an artist is exciting... a common reaction is for that fan to think they're your best mate and try to start an extended conversation. Limit the engagement. @jason_manford does this very very well - he asks questions of his followers, answers them and recognises and respects their humour, but limits any one conversation to a few tweets. It doesn't mean, he won't ever reply to an individual again - I'm sure he doesn't maintain a list of everyone he's spoken to, it just means you're not going to monopolise his time all day.

Do you agree that social networks should be used for direct marketing, if so, what are your opinions on people regarding this marketing as a form of Spam?

Yes they should, provided that users can turn it off or unfollow to avoid being spammed. Users may follow a news-source for frequent updates on a product... that's their choice. However, being spammed is bad news. I think using Twitter for Direct Marketing is like trying to squeeze an old world business model into the new social world... as a result it is something of a blunt instrument at the moment. Businesses will eventually learn how to use it more effectively, by listening to, reacting to and collaborating with customers.

What do you consider the dangers of using social media to promote an artist?

The artist's privacy and security can be threatened via careless use of location based services, giving too much information, etc. Can promote stalkers. Artists can also get in trouble with the law by defaming others with careless talk. That said, with some basic training and common sense, the benefits of getting closer to users can add real value to the artist over time.

What measures do you/would you put in place to combat these dangers?

Social media training for artists that need it from social media experts not run-of-the-mill outbound PR types. Proxy tweeting from social media experts as part of an initial coaching/mentoring programme... to be transitioned to the artist asap. Management access to the artists passwords at all times! Everyone can make mistakes... sometimes action must be taken in minutes.

Are there any circumstances in which you would not use social media to connect with fans to market directly?

In such a rapidly evolving environment, I think it's unwise to say never. However, right now I think artists, labels and brands need to take advice around any campaigns which might compromise anyone's privacy or safety, whether that be the artist or the customer. Data security needs to be a big consideration in any social media 'transaction'.

Here's an AudioBoo of the same:

Listen!

Microsoft Demos New Messenger iPhone App at The Next Web

2010-04-29T11:29:00.003+01:00

Timothy Ferriss Delivers His Keynote at The Next Web

2010-04-29T08:27:00.003+01:00

Here's a minute or two of Tim delivering his keynote address on haters:

Tim Ferriss on the Startup Panel at The Next Web

2010-04-28T13:22:00.002+01:00

To The Next Web

2010-04-26T21:32:00.005+01:00

Last minute prep and packing small for an early morning flight across to Amsterdam for The Next Web Conference - their fifth... my first!

It'll also be my first chance to meet a number of the other TNW writers and editors from around the globe plus a great mash-up of visitors and speakers, including Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week.

It's going to be a work hard/play hard few days with quite a bit of social stuff happening around what promises to be a great conference, culminating in Queens Day celebrations across the city on Thursday.

I hope to blog here and on The Next Web, but mostly I want to immerse myself in the event and meet some people who are creating new and exciting stuff.

WiReD's Prototype iPad App

2010-04-16T09:41:00.001+01:00

I hope that this gets through Apple's Flash paranoia

I Can't Wait For My iPad

2010-04-13T11:08:00.002+01:00

I'm not the world's biggest fan of Alice In Wonderland... a bit creepy and twisted (I feel the same way about Roald Dahl books)... but this looks simply ace:

Inflatable Bubbletecture Pavilion Popping Up in the UK This Summer

2010-04-12T09:54:00.000+01:00

Check this out from the fantastic Inhabitat blog:

Inflatable Bubbletecture Pavilion Popping Up in the UK This Summer: "

German Architecture firm Raumlabor-Berlin has created an incredible inflatable pavilion that will be popping up in parks throughout London this summer as a mobile event space. Dubbed Portavilion, the futuristic-looking bubble building sets up in a snap and can be easily deflated and packed up after each event, saving on the manpower and resources required to erect a standard stage.

Touring throughout London this summer, the Portavilion will host a number of events including productions by the English National Ballet, the London Festival of Architecture, the Tate Modern and even the Royal Society of Arts. The structure consists of a van, from which an air-filled transparent membrane inflates to create a temporary space. According to the architects, “this translucent bubble can squeeze under bridges, wrap around trees or nestle into corners, providing a nomadic, inside/outside space in which people can perform debate, eat or simply hang out.”

The bubbly event space has been nicknamed “Rosy the Ballerina”, and it will be set up in 15 parks and green spaces in London between May and September, with the first show taking place on May 20th in Potters Fields Park. It’s not the first time Raumlabor has experimented with bubbletecture – just last year, their Spacebuster pavilion traveled throughout New York.

+ Portavilion 2010

+ Raumlabor Berlin

EVOL

2010-04-09T15:12:00.000+01:00

EVOL: "

photo: EVOL

EVOL is a berlin based street artist that transforms banal urban surfaces, into miniature architectural

surfaces through pasting. using pasted paper, EVOL transforms electric boxes, small planters and other

geometric city forms, into miniature apartment buildings and other structures. each piece of paper is

printed with a repetitive pattern of flat gray walls dotted with plain window frames. once applied to

a surface, the paper transforms the form into small building that EVOL often adorns with small

characters. EVOL performs this process within different cities and has even been commissioned to

do installations in galleries, where he was created entire blocks of miniature buildings.

http://www.evoltaste.com

photo: EVOL

photo: EVOL

photo: EVOL

photo: EVOL

photo: EVOL

photo: EVOL

photo: EVOL
"

Print in Century Gothic Font for Ink Savings [Printing]

2010-04-07T14:14:00.000+01:00

Print in Century Gothic Font for Ink Savings [Printing]: "

Looking into ways to save money on toner cartridges, a University of Wisconsin, Green Bay professor suggested the previously mentioned Ecofont to his IT department. IT came up with an even easier solution—the commonly available Century Gothic font. More »

Gorgeous Green House Wrapped in a Vertical Garden

2010-04-07T10:53:00.000+01:00

Gorgeous Green House Wrapped in a Vertical Garden: "

This gorgeous greenery-wrapped live/work space in Linkebeek, Belgium was completed by Samyn and Partners in 2007 after 8 years of construction. In the original plans, Samyn and Partners designed the building’s walls to be covered in ivy, while a patinated copper material was chosen for the roof. It’s a blessing that this project took so long to complete — during construction, the original concept for a “green” façade grew stronger and the ivy and copper roof were scrapped in favor of a lush living envelope that features a selection of exotic plants chosen by botanist Patrick Blanc.

Read the rest of Gorgeous Green House Wrapped in a Vertical Garden

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Post tags: 'green wall', 'living wall', 'sustainable architecture', energy efficient architecture, Green Building, green design, green roof, Milly Film, Patrick Blanc, plants, Samyn and Partners, sustainable design, vertical garden

Villa Bio: House With a Cantilevered Living Roof is a Feat of Engineering

2010-04-07T10:50:00.000+01:00

Villa Bio: House With a Cantilevered Living Roof is a Feat of Engineering: "

One first notices this striking home because of its lush living roof, modern facade and floor-to-ceiling window that cap the end. Upon further study, the home is completely composed of concrete in what looks like a fantastic ode to MC Escher. Appearing as if it were cut from one ribbon of concrete, the home splits into three levels and even has an underground parking ramp. What is even more amazing is that there are no internal beams supporting the concrete inside the home, even with the green roof on top.

Read the rest of Villa Bio: House With a Cantilevered Living Roof is a Feat of Engineering

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Post tags: Architecture, cloud9, concrete, eco design, feat of engineering, green design, green roof, living roof, Spain, Sustainable Building, villa bio

The YikeBike: A Fascinating New Form of Urban Transportation

2010-04-07T10:49:00.000+01:00

The YikeBike: A Fascinating New Form of Urban Transportation: "

Two wheeled urban transportation has never been so effortless, portable, or head turning. Hitting streets in carbon-fiber black, the YikeBike, provides an electric drive train that allows users to sit up and take in their commute. The YikeBike can go as far as 9-10km (around 6 miles) in one charge and comes with its own carrying bag weighing in at a total of 10kg (22lbs). If you have a longer commute and are worried about your ride home, you’ll be happy to know that the bike charges to over 80% in less than 20 minutes.

Read the rest of The YikeBike: A Fascinating New Form of Urban Transportation

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Post tags: bicycle, bike, electric bicycle, electric bike, Electronic Transportation, folding bicycle, folding bike, green transportation, sustainable transportation, Urban Bicycle, urban bike, urban transportation, Yike Bike, Zero Emission Transportation

More Tales From The Next Web

2010-01-13T11:47:00.002Z

Here are a few more of my stories from The Next Web's little family of blogs:

European Tech Investment Set To Rally

Denmark’s Digital Healthcare Out In Front

Sky News Launches Mobile News Service as iPhone App Records 1m Downloads

BBC Brings Website Cuts Forward

Tech Partner Sought for UK Football’s Premier League

Tories Offer £1m to Harness The Wisdom Of Crowds

Tech and Social Media Dominates Oxford English Dictionary’s ‘Words Of 2009′

Social Media Train Steams Ahead

DirectGov iPhone App Helps With Those Holiday Travel Blues

For Sale: Alastair Campbell Sells Football Ticket on Twitter

SpotifiTunes Lets You Stream Your iTunes Library Using Spotify

The Guardian Crowdsources Data to Create Trending Stories for iPhone

Tweetdeck Adds Map View to Latest iPhone App

Apple Introduces Streaming Music Previews Without iTunes

Top-Heavy Napster Removes CEO and President

Will 2010 be the Year of Social TV?

Tech and Social Media Dominates Oxford English Dictionary’s ‘Words Of 2009′

The Music Industry’s Dismal Digital Decade

Heroes meets Planet Of The Apps

GQ Magazine Enters iTunes App Store On A Pay-Per-Issue Deal

New Social Media Blog

2010-01-13T11:39:00.004Z

Check out the Intro Video to the SocialITe. It's a new Social Media blog being kicked off by Computing's Mark Kobayashi-Hillary.

My Albums of 2009

2009-12-21T23:13:00.000Z

OK, here goes.

Ask me again tomorrow and I'll probably pitch up a different list...

The xx - xx [Spotify]

Fever Ray - Fever Ray [Spotify]

The Unthanks - Here's The Tender Coming [Spotify]

Prefuse 73 - Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian [iTunes]

Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport [iTunes]

Tortoise - Beacons Of Ancestorship [iTunes]

Broadcast & The Focus Group - Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age [iTunes]

John Mayer - Battle Studies [Spotify]

Cluster - Qua [Spotify]

nsi - Resident Advisor Podcast 162 [RA]

The Next Web

2009-12-16T17:19:00.008Z

In the spirit of trying to wear as many hats as possible I've joined the team at The Next Web.

Some of the posts that would have come here are going there... you might find some of my recent stories interesting:

BBC Opens Up Learning Material to UK Licence Payers
16 Dec 2009 | care to comment?

Apple Enables Video on iPhone 2G and 3G [updated]
15 Dec 2009 | 17 comments

Twitter Makes The Earth Move For You
15 Dec 2009 | 2 comments

UK Stumbles In The Race For Super-Fast Broadband
14 Dec 2009 | 2 comments
The Guardian’s iPhone App Hits The Store – At A Price!
14 Dec 2009 | 3 comments
What’s Your Single Of The Decade? Vote Now!
14 Dec 2009 | Comment
Don’t Know What To Do Next? Your Phone Does.
14 Dec 2009 | Comment
Reach For The Stars with Spacehack
11 Dec 2009 | Comment
Has Twitter’s ‘Follow Friday’ Had Its Day?
11 Dec 2009 | 1 comment
Google Code Used To Create New Works Of Art
8 Dec 2009 | Comment
Lady Gaga for Less? UK Music Price Comparison Site Goes Live!
8 Dec 2009 | Comment

A Split-Screen Browser for the iPhone… but is it geared for the Apple Tablet?
7 Dec 2009 | care to comment?
Don’t Panic! Facebook to support new Internet Safety Code.
6 Dec 2009 | 4 comments
The Internet Under Your Desk
4 Dec 2009 | 4 comments

Appetite... Part 7

2009-12-01T12:15:00.007Z

OK, after a brief intermission I'm back with the Appetite series where I take you through a whistlestop tour of the apps currently residing on my iPhone's homescreen.

Homescreen 7 kicks off with Sky News which serves up news headlines including sports, business, politics, world, etc. You can set it up for alerts, but these are delivered by SMS not as push notifications. Also, there's little in the way of integration with other services such as Twitter, Delicious, etc, but that's hardly surprising given Murdoch's stance on free content. The app includes the latest video snippets for Headlines, Showbiz and Weather, along with a Radio Bulletin. There's also an option for you to upload your own on-the-spot news report direct to the Sky News Room including photographs.

Next up, another Murdoch product. This time the Sky+ app. Interestingly, this wasn't the first Sky + Electronic Programme Guide to hit the app store and not even the first to enable you to log in remotely to record programmes on your box at home. That honour went to TV Plus... more of which later.

This app more accurately replicates the look and feel of the on-screen EPG (actually it looks like the look and feel Sky are currently retiring in favour of a more functionally rich version) but it takes forever to load each slug of programme data, preventing you from skipping quickly through the channels. I have it, but for performance alone I prefer TV Plus despite it's poorer look and feel.

The Skype application is pretty good for when you are out and about and for making calls from abroad when you've managed to find some free wifi. In 3G mode you cannot hold a voice conversation but your can text-chat easily, which is for many people, their preferred method of using Skype.

Spin is an iPhone-friendly version of US based music magazine Spin. It contains a pretty extensive database of reviews which you can search by date, rating or artist. It also carries up to the minute news and is worth dipping into.

Spore Origins is an iPhone friendly version of the game which created a big splash across multiple gaming platforms last year. You create a tiny creature and, as it grows, modify its appearance. As with all games, the more time you invest in it, the more you get out of it. I don't get much out if it ;)

Stanza is an eBook reader which has resided on my phone for ages. It hooks up directly to a wide range of online bookstores enabling you to download for free the usual raft of out-of-copyright tomes (you know, Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Jack London's White Fang) as well as pay for newer book releases. I hadn't really bothered with it until I read a review for Cory Doctorow's latest novel 'Makers' and, given his stance on Creative Commons, I thought I'd check it out on Stanza. Apart from really enjoying the book (I'm 43.85% through, fact-fans), Stanza itself is a revelation.

In a world where your can't open a Sunday supplement without some blather about standalone ebook readers such as the Amazon Kindle, I didn't expect a huge amount from Stanza, but actually its a real pleasure to use. The page-turn mechanism is a breeze, you can even fold over the top corner of pages you'd like to refer back to. There is a wide choice of font and backgrounds, along with night time settings and a dimmable screen which is operated by a simple downward swipe on the screen. I'd recommend this app.

Tap Tap Revenge was an early entrant in the Games section of the iPhone app store. A knock-off Guitar Hero, this version has been superceded by a plethora of updated versions. I'm not over-bothered as this app fits into my entertaining-bored-kids category. It'll do.

The Sims 3 is too unwieldy for iPhone in my opinion, plus the early releases of this app were extremely buggy. If I had more time, I'd get more out of this. If I had more time, I wouldn't play it on the iPhone.

Tiltshift is a great app which enables you to monkey with images from your photo library to distort the depth of field and create some really odd effects. This is a full sized Routemaster bus parked outside the British Museum and given the Tiltshift treatment to make it look more like a toy:

Time Crisis is a game I do actually like and play. This version is the old PS2 version where you used a gun instead of a standard controller to aim at the screen and kill bad guys. Of course there's no gun, you jab your finger at the screen instead. It's still lots of fun though.

Goodness knows why I bought Timedock. All it does is plonk a series of sleek looking clock-faces on the screen of your phone instead of the standard homescreen display. Fine, but given that you have to keep the app open to benefit from this, it pretty much disables the rest of your phone whilst you are staring at the clock. If you stand your phone in a cradle by your bed at night you can disable the auto-screen-off function to use this as a kind of alarm clock, but even on its dimmest setting it's still pretty bright and given that you're asleep, it doesn't seem very green does it?

Travelodge lets you find the nearest Travelodge to your location and make a booking. Fine, but I tend to book ahead rather than in the instant I need somewhere to lay my head so the very fact that I can only use my current location rather than enter a city name or postcode renders this app useless. Sorry.

Trism is another multicoloured shape-sliding puzzle game to pass a few minutes on the Tube.

Leonardots is a simple but nicely executed memory game. It's slight, but if you have an empty corner on your homescreen, its worth a look.

Guardian is a weblink to the newspaper's excellent mobile site rather than an official app (although one is strongly rumoured). The site is well designed, but the content which we know and love is syndicated via RSS, Twitter and all the other places I tend to hang out, that I rarely have cause to delve in here. I don't feel too bad about this as it supports the Guardian's view that the best websites are the ones you don't need to visit due to their content being widely available everywhere else (as expounded by The Guardian technology head, Nik Silver, at this year's Agile Business Conference).

Speaking of RSS, the last app on this homescreen, is a back-up RSS reader, there in case my favourite reader (NewsStand) falls over... which it has a habit of doing. This app is not bad, but not the best. Like NewsStand it's integrated with Google Reader. On the whole, it's OK. If it didn't hang onto read items and dribble new and unread articles in between them, I might be tempted to ditch NewsStand for this app, as it performs much more quickly. Until, then though, NewsStand is still the best feedreader on the iPhone in my view.

In Conversation With...

2009-11-19T17:06:00.005Z

...Lloyd Davis.

Despite a string of cancelled trains I still managed to get into London in time today to call into the British Museum to have a conversation with Lloyd before heading on into the office. Why?Well I was keen to catch up with Lloyd after we both attended Huddersfield's first Social Media Surgery on Monday, but really it was prompted by the fact that he'd been busy letting people know that he was going to be facilitating real live conversations with all-comers throughout the day.

This is part of a project Lloyd's working on for the British Council and whilst it sounds a bit 'emperor's new clothes' it's worth asking yourself when the last time was that you embarked on a conversation with someone for the sole purpose of having a conversation.

As it was, we had good old chat, bouncing around a whole host of social-media-centric subjects.

We ticked off who we knew and who we didn't in the 'Twitterati' feature in the latest edition of WiReD. Lloyd reckons he won, but I reckon he cheated. We then debated whether the Twitterati really were the angel-funded start-up kids producing the tools or the end-users of the tools themselves. We sort of agreed around the latter, but didn't want to offend anyone.

We then discussed the 'elephant in the room', but as we were at the British Museum and not the Natural History, the 'elephant' was purely hypothetical.

This elephant was the secret untold story of how active social-technologists can afford to do what they do, hopping from train to train as they jet from one glamourous location to another... and Huddersfield.

We concluded that they were either fortunate enough to have jobs with sufficient scope and autonomy to enable them to justify all this activity within a roomy job description, or frittering away a lottery win whilst trying to stitch together enough odds and sods of paid work to put iPhones on the table.

By this time, my own day job was calling, so I bade farewell to Lloyd as he put out another call for his next conversation.

Until next time...

Appetite... Part 6

2009-11-18T13:26:00.005Z

Screen 6...

... starts with another weblink which will be of little interest to anyone unless they are Under 8 and want beating by my son's football team ;)

Peggle, is a simple, fairly nice-looking game for passing an idle few minutes. You'll have gathered by now that whilst I like the idea of games, I rarely devote much time to playing them. Sorry about that.

Photofx, does what it says on the tin and is a handy addition to the photography apps I already have as it has pages of interesting filters grouped into different categories including Face, Fun, Wild, Classic, Lens, Portrait etc.

Photonasis is more limited and reminds me of the basic photo-editing software that you sometimes get on non-smart-phones, i.e. noddy UI and basic filters. Still, it's OK. I haven't ditched it yet.

Pixelpipe frustrates me to bits. It's meant to let you quickly and easily upload photos direct to blogs, social networks etc, but whenever I fire it up it seems to insist on scanning my entire photolibrary for me to select from which takes f o r e v e r ! Why it assumes that I might wish to upload my entire collection everytime I open it I have no idea, but I rarely get this app passed egg-timer (spinning-wheel?) mode. I've upgraded, reinstalled, you name it, but the early Twitter support I received from @pixelpipe went along the lines of 'no-one else seems to have a problem' and got me nowhere. Given that I have lots of alternative tools for uploading media from my iPhone, this app will be in the dumper soon. Thanks for coming.

Quadrum C - another time-passing game where you move brightly coloured bricks around until you get enough of them linked together in a chain for them to disappear, with the aim of clearing the board. Whilst I don't profess to playing this much, it is one of my most used game apps.

Radio Flare is a nice cartoonified 2D arcade game with a decent soundtrack. I should play this more than I do. Obviously.

Radio Times is a very well-put-together app which features all of the programme guide information from the Radio Times magazine. You can customize your channel listings based on your satellite, cable, terrestrial provider as well as slicing and dicing by category... Sport, Films etc. It's handy if you want to know more than just what is on and when (if that is all you need there are simpler faster-running apps). It's also integrated with Twitter and Facebook if you fancy sharing details of your programme choice, which you can star/favourite. Early on there was a suggestion that the app will tie up with Sky to enable you to set your Sky+ recorder directly from this app than from the standalone iPhone apps which offer this service. (more later) No sign of this yet, unless I've missed it.

Remote, lets you use your iPhone as a remote control for your PC or Mac based iTunes library via your home wifi network. Pretty easy to set up and effective too... on screen, the details of the entire library are presented to you in just the same way as if they were on your phone's internal player, cover-art and all.

Scrabble I hardly need to explain. It has more going on than many of the games on my phone. Plus, I'm a wordy sort, so I do kill time I haven't got with this app on occasion. You can play two-player by wifi.

Shazam I've used since it came out. In other words, well before the iPhone. In those days (as with now on ordinary phones) you dialled a quick number before your phone could hear the tune you were listening to. Now this is all handled in the app which captures the sound, tries to identify it (it usually succeeds) and enables you to link to Last.fm to stream it or iTunes to buy it. The obligatory Twitter integration is there too. They've this week brought out a premium version, but with very few bells and whistles over and above what you get here, there's not much to recommend it yet. For now though, the basic Shazam app is essential.

ShoZu is, for me, more successful than Pixelpipe in enabling quick photo-uploads to a wide range of sites, including all the main blogging and social networking platforms as well as a raft of media brands inc BBC, CNN, ITV, all keen for you to send them your scoop 'from the scene' pictures of the latest happening. That said, I tend to use Flickr's own app (reviewed later) but keep this on stand-by in case I happen to see Britney slipping out of a limo in Huddersfield.

Signal Fire is another on of those geo-location non-apps. It doesn't seem to do anything other than capture your location, and enable you to mail a map reference to someone. It does fire up Brightkite if you want it to, but Brightkite does all this itself, so I'm not sure quite what it's USP is and will probably ditch it soon.

SimpleMindx is a basic mind-mapping to for creating brainstorm-like spidergrams on the fly (SPIDERGRAMS... ON THE FLY!!!). It's alright, but can be a bit like reading a newspaper through a keyhole.

Sirens is a daft application which plays a range of siren sounds from the US and Europe including police, fire and ambulance. Sounds stupid but it's ideal for encouraging toddlers to eat their lunch by suggesting that the Restaurant Police are pulling up outside. Invaluable. There's nothing like a fear culture to instill good old-fashioned family values.

iPadio is similar to AudioBoo but is gunning for a more corporate market. Being so used to AudioBoo I find the iPadio interface a bit baffling, along with its weird insistance on making an actual telephone-call. For me this is where AudioBoo wins hands down, in that they're not reliant on telephone-call audio quality. Yes you can use iPadio on any phone, but with the introduction of PhoneBoo, you can now do the same with AudioBoo. In fairness, I must do more with this to give it a real test.

Death By Powerpoint or Death OF Powerpoint?

2009-11-17T12:11:00.002Z

I've been trying out the fantastic Prezi.com which offers up a great way to create engaging and entertaining presentations without the routine bulletpoint-after-bulletpoint plod that we've all become usefd to. Once you've got up to speed on the videos and tutorials you are away. It's easy to share and embed amazing presentations and, in digging around the site, I even found several useful Social Media presentations! Here are a couple to check it out. Tab through the presentation by pressing Play triangle.

Huddersfield Social Media Surgery

2009-11-16T17:52:00.002Z

I've just dropped by the very first Huddersfield Social Media Surgery (#huddsms) - couldn't really resist with it being on my doorstep. I'm a bit late but its looking pretty busy, with a variety of local organisations popping in for help and advice.

Well done to the team for pulling this together!

Appetite... Part 5

2009-11-16T08:53:00.007Z

Screen 5...

...starts with a web link to a PDF copy of the local bus timetable. This is of little use to anyone unless urban types want to have a laugh how long it takes to get from A to B in rural areas for extortionate amounts of money, whilst they're sat on their free trams.

HTAFC is a weblink to Huddersfield Town's website. I don't use this very often as I get Twitter updates as well as RSS feeds.

Mashable is a web app which brings together all the latest news and archived content from one of the major sources of Social Media goodness. It's quite nicely designed but, again, I rarely have cause to consult it as I read the Mashable Twitter and RSS feeds. I used to retweet a lot of Mashable posts until I realised that everyone else follows Mashable anyway.

Melodica was one of the first apps in the store to let budding amateur musicians, enthused by the possibility of Little Boots' Tenorion but unable to afford one, create some simple but effective melodies. I fire this app up quite a lot. The app has been updated with save options, different instruments for different moods and a method of sharing your melodies with other Melodica users.

MemoryInfo is absolutely essential for those moments when your iPhone seems to just grind to a halt. Increasingly, I find this happens after only a short while hopping from application to application, each activity leaving lots of stuff resident in memory and zapping your iPhone's performance. This app lets you stop all superfluous processes with a single click and voila, your phone is working at pace again. There are a number of similar apps in the store that do this kind of thing now. Some applications seem to suck of all of the available memory just to do their thing. NewsStand, which I cover below, was one of the worst offenders. However, I think there was a problem with the install of that app on my iPhone, because it has behaved itself since I deleted and reinstalled it. Alex at The Next Web has lost the will to live with his iPhone, partly around performance issues. Read his post here... it's very good.

MoBank is an app which encourages you to hand over all of the user names and passwords for your online banking accounts just so you can get a read only view of your balance and recent transactions in one place. What's more, it wants to charge you for the privilege. Within its little 'walled garden' you can also send people flowers via Interflora or chocolates via Thorntons... bless. This old-fashioned, design over content, paid-for, ecommerce portal approach reminds me of AOL and Compuserve's first forays into banking 10+ years ago. I keep this on my iPhone for research purposes only.

Monkey Ball is a game I quite enjoy on the big screen and it's implemented well here for the iPhone. That said, I rarely play it.

Moonlight is a Mah Jongg game of which there are many in the store. I like Mah Jongg, but I rarely play it.

Morse It is great even if you have only a passing interest in codes and cryptography, although day to day uses are few and far between. Play it a stream of Morse Code and it translates it into plain text right in front of your eyes. Similarly, it converts any text you write or copy into the app to Morse code which can then be flashed on screen or beeped to anyone who needs to receive it. I'd have given my right arm for this when I was 10. Now I only have to give 59p.

National Rail costs £4.99 and replaced a load of perfectly acceptable free and cheap apps which provided journey planning and timetable information for the UK rail network, which were 'cease and desist'ed out of existance. Nevertheless, the app is pretty useful if you are a digital nomad like wot I am. It even gives live updates of delays and details of the progress of the train you are on, or due to connect with.

Night Camera helps you take better, clearer photographs in dim lighting conditions. It does this by using the iPhone's accelerometer to only release the shutter when you are holding the phone perfectly still. You can tweak its sensitivity, use the built-in timer, change resolutions, use zoom or timers.

PanoLab is a photoapp which lets you stitch together photographs from your camera/photo library to create Hockney like panorama effects. You can see from my results how intuitive is isn't:

PayPal would let me log in and transfer money directly to other PayPal users if I so wished. It also lets me check balance, history etc, but as I tend to use PayPal as part of a store's online check-out mechanism I rarely need to access this.

Mobile Receipt is an app not dissimilar to the Business Card Scanner apps which allows you to photograph receipts, bills, invoices etc to creat expense claim forms with an image attached. There's no OCR magic going on here so you need to input expenditure details into the form yourself. A separate form is created for each item (which is irritating) so you can't easily group similar/related expenses into a single claim. Plus, it doesn't sequence with corporate expense claim processes (how could it?) so it's really one for self-employed consultants. Don't forget, a Griffin Clarifi case with its integrated close-up lens is essential for iPhone 2G and 3G users.

someecards lets you email pithy, nicely drawn ecards to friends and contacts. They've got in trouble once or twice from Apple for including cards in questionable taste. However, email as a mechanism for sending this kind of tat is so OLD. Why isn't this integrated with Twitter, Facebook etc?

NewsStand is my RSS feedreader of choice. It integrates directly into Google Reader which I use on the PC, so anything I've marked 'as read' or 'starred' in this app are synced directly across to Google Reader and vice versa.

I've had one or two mishaps with the app. When you first sync with Google Reader, any feeds set up in an old version of NewsStand overwrite anything newer in Google Reader. When I did this, I didn't realise how comfortable I'd become with my chosen RSS feeds and how annoying it was to have to try to remember and rebuild them all. The other main gripe is that it can get itself confused and start sucking the iPhone's memory dry, sometimes requiring a fresh install. This is less problematic than it sounds and when it works well, NewsStand works very well, but I do keep a backup RSS reader tuned and ready to go on a later screen just in case. NewsStand includes some daft unnecessary 'newspaper' style graphics which can be switched off and ignored. Despite my gripes, I love this app and use it to share interesting stuff on Twitter as well as saving things to Delicious, Instapaper and other integrated tools.

Appetite... Part 4

2009-11-14T18:50:00.011Z

First up on Screen 4 is Fire Eagle. It's a geo-location tool from Yahoo. This is a web-link to a mobile website rather than an AppStore app. You can hook it up to other services, such as Brightkite, and it then plots your location here at Fire Eagle. However, seeing as no-one ever goes to or looks at Fire Eagle, I'm not sure that there's a point. Every so often, the service emails you to reauthorise its connections with other apps. It bears all the hallmarks of an in-house Yahoo R&D assignment that has long since been left to rot. Writing this prompted me to think about deleting this link.

Google Earth... other than a passing a bit of time searching for the roof of your teenage penpal in Connecticut's house, what's the point? Google Maps incorporates satellite imagery plus much more and so represents a better everyday app. I'm sure I'm missing something.

Instapaper lets you save webpages from your Safari web-browser, several Twitter apps and even from the desktop for reading offline at a more convenient moment. It transposes web content into an eBook style format, which can be customised and it even includes a scrolling feature, the speed of which varies based on the angle of the iPhone screen.

iProRecorder isn't really necessary now since the addition of the Voice Memo app which comes out-of-the-box with iPhone 3.0 software. However, the built-in audio quality options and UI experience is great. I used this app to record Interactive Voice Response scripts which I then sent to the AudioBoo team to use for their PhoneBoo service, just using the built-in iPhone microphone and the quality was excellent. They didn't use my recordings in the end because @katiemoffat beat me to it by about ten minutes. Grr. Not that I'm bitter ;)

Labyrinth cleverly replicates those little childhood puzzles where you guide a ball-bearing around a little wooden maze by tilting it. I rarely play this now, but it fits neatly into my entertaining bored kids category.

LastFM is quite good, but I always think of this service as a great example of one of those websites that are so good, you never have to visit them. LastFM's integration into many other services and devices which enable scrobbling, means that whenver you use your iPod or listen to Spotify (except the iPhone app version) every track you play is automatically 'scrobbled' to your LastFM library. This means that when I occasionally do fire up this app my 'Neighbourhood' playlist automatically digs out things that I'm likely to enjoy, based on what it has learned. I also use it to play specific artist's music by creating a 'station'... this is another good way of finding other artists who play in the same ball park. That said, it does seem to like forcing certain artists down your throat with alarming regularity. More frogs to be kissed I'm afraid.

LinkedIn - the world's dullest social network has its own application. It's UI is fractionally better than the web version but it seems to insist on you logging in every single time. Still feels like work though.

London Tube - Although I sometimes feel like I know the London Underground network like the back of my very veiny and multi-coloured hand, occasionally I use this as a quick refresher. It's quite nicely designed, much like the tubemap itself.

LotteryView - I don't always buy a lottery ticket, but when I do I check the results here. I suspect that this has been surpassed by newer and better apps but it does the job.

LowGrav - is a cheap rip-off of the ancient but great Playstation anti-gravity racing game WipeOut, which I love. It's a reasonably fathful facsimile, but I'd be SO much happier playing actual factual WipeOut on my iPhone.

AppBox Pro is one of those applications which actually brings together a bunch of seemingly random but useful tools. They're pretty useful to call upon when you need them I suppose. It's just that you don't often need them. Nonetheless, it's quite pretty. There's a Spirit Level, a National Holidays Calendar and even a Ovulation Calculator!! But the Unit Conversion Tool is probably the most useful.

Card Snap Lite lets you take a quick photo of a business card for scanning (fine on the 3GS, you'll need a Griffin Clarifi case with built-in close-up lens on a 2G or 3G iPhone). It then uploads the photograph to the cloud somewhere and within 24 hours the data is OCR'd off the card and sent back down to the app... and automatically added into your address book. The full version of Card Snap is prohibitively expensive at £8.99 (it was £11.99 until decent competitors appeared in the AppStore last week) but it captures more fields from the card. It's pretty accurate, but it is frustrating having to wait up to 24 hours for the OCR'd data to be returned to the app. A competing App, (BC Reader, more later) does everything in the iPhone there and then, has a sexier UI, but is much less accurate.

TVCatchup is great! It's a weblink rather than an app, but it lets you stream live TV (actually 20 second delayed TV) on your phone. It's good over wifi and pretty good over 3G.

It's restricted to UK IP addresses, but is very useful. It's available on the Web too with even more channels, but the small screen size associated with the iPhone makes it a more powerful proposition. A must have. Fire up Safari, go to iphone.tvcatchup.com and add a link to your homescreen.

WordPress. I haven't got a WordPress blog but often wish I did. I just can't bear the unintuitive setup process. I know that if I stuck with it and maybe forked out some cash I'd end up with a pretty sexy blog with all sorts of nice bells and whistles, but I'm time poor and it's an 80/20 deal. Blogger, even though it's a bit noddy, is good enough. Nevertheless, maybe one day someone will over to port me across to WordPress. I'll hang on to this app just in case.

Amazon.co.uk now has a proper iPhone app as opposed to the mobile website tuned for iPhone which I made house room for to accommodate this. I'll be honest, I kind of preferred the webapp version. This avatar makes it look like a cheap, tatty knock-off compared to the slick 'a' which the webapp uses. Plus, it doesn't let you browse round the different departments... it's Search only. This seems a pretty fundamental oversight. However, they've left this out to give house room to an experimental service called Amazon Remembers where you take a photo of something you want to remember and it tries to find a product similar to it. Odd.

Foursquare is, as far as the UK is concerned, one of the newer kids on the geo-location block. It's very London-centric, although they did launch in Manchester two weeks ago. Look and feel wise, it's not half as much fun as Gowalla (more later) and if you want to add a new location, you have to work pretty hard to complete full address details. As with similar tools, it integrates with social tools including Twitter to enable you to update your followers as to your whereabouts. I'll stick with it for a while, but other geo-location apps are more fun.

Appetite... Part 3

2009-11-12T09:09:00.007Z

Onto Screen Three...

...which starts with a web link to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB)'s iphone-friendly site. This is a very well known and well established database for finding details about films, TV series, actors, directors etc etc. It get used most often in our house to settle arguments which tend to start with 'I'm sure I've seen her in something!' Of course, the answer is nearly always The Bill.

iCinema is another weblink. Very handy when you need to find out what films are on at local cinemas, starting times etc. The site even links through to IMDB reviews and even trailers. Trying it right now though I can't get any results at all, so I'm wondering of they were leeching someone else's data and have been 'cease and desist'ed... so maybe this one is no more.

ColorSplash is another great additon to my photoapps collection. It enable you to create striking effects by leaving only selected elements of a photograph in bright colour, whilst the rest goes monochrome. Here's an example where I've cludged together this effect with a filter from the CameraBag app:

Done is a very simple planning tool. I must have tried tens, if not hundreds of planning tools/To Do list applications on different devices over the years and most of them, rather than helping you free up time by being more organised actually suck time because you spend forever becoming a slave to their constant demands to reschedule, reprioritise, update, etc.

This one, Done, is as simple as they get and all the better for it. It lets you quickly add tasks, prioritise as 1, 2 or 3 and link it to a category such as Work, Home etc (you can set these). It lists them in priority order and you tick them when your done. Shake the phone and all completed tasks disappear. That's it! Beautifully limited.

eBay lets me check the progress of bids, sales, wins etc. I'm not a massive eBayer but we all know it has its uses. Most recently used to acquire a samba whistle to accompany me to A Certain Ratio's recent gig at the Band On The Wall.

ECB Cricket - I used this official scoreboard/news update service predominantly for the Ashes series, but keep it here as it includes news, photos, video and podcasts too. The real-time scoreboard is pretty nifty.

Evernote is one of my favourite apps as it lets me quickly capture notes, photos, sounds, weblinks etc and instantly sync them across various devices browsers. That said, I do get in a bit of a mess sometimes as I try to distinguish where this app sits alongside different but similar apps/services such as Delicious, InstaPaper, ReadItLater, etc (more of those later). I use them all but come back to this regularly.

Everytrail is a geo-locative tool which plots your progress in terms of distance, direction and altitude on a set journey... once you press Go it starts recording your location, updates your position on Google Maps and allows you to save it for future reference. As with other apps of this sort, it requires you to keep it open throughout the journey, so thanks to Apple you are thus prevented from using any other apps/tools whilst it's running, which is very frustrating. However, an even bigger problem is that the app requires data connectivity to constantly update your position which is fine unless you want to use it in a very rural area with spotty data availability... which is exactly where you will most likely want to use it. This kills things really as you can see from the map of my trip round Holme Styles reservoir in West Yorkshire. Patchy data updates make it look like I can walk on water. I'm good, but I'm not that good.

FastCamera another photoapp which tries to overcome the inbuilt 2G and 3G camera's inadequacies. It doesn't add much value and I can't remember what its benefits are meant to be now as it seems to do the same as the built-in app... I thought it was one that let you tap anywhere on the screen to take the shot rather than trying to find the the soft button but, it seems not. There are a billion photo-apps out there, some great, some less so. It's probably worth having a trawl through the App Store... prepare to kiss some frogs.

Flight Control is a well established addictive little game for killing time in those few minutes you have spare when in the dentist's waiting room or on the bus. Alternatively, if you are a student, you might wish to play this all day. You have to create safe flight paths for a sky-full of catastrophe-bound planes and helicopters. It's not bad. It gets regularly updated with new airfields upon which to land your tiny aircraft. It even tweets your high scores which, in my case, is a highly embarrassing feature. Not as popular as it was and now accompanied by several 'me-too' clones. I keep it around for old times' sake but rarely play it.

Four Track is a pretty sophisticated four-track porta-studio application which lets you create quick, simple and surprisingly effective multi-track recordings on the fly. Twinned with a decent microphone such as the Blue Mikey, this app can be used to create pretty decent demos should the muse take you when you're not ensconced in Abbey Road.

Byki French is a pretty good learning aid for those trying to improve their French language skills. It focuses on listening and repetition and incorporates a wide range of vocab for use in different situations. It tracks your progress, so you can use it as a learning programme in its own right. It is even integrated with Twitter so you can find real time examples of how words and phrases are being used in live conversation.

This is the standard Google app for the iPhone which is a one-stop springboard for most of the major Google services and apps. It includes Voice Search which doesn't work too well if you are British unless you are Hugh Laurie.

Facebook - I'm not an avid Facebooker but do use this to check up on my friends who either don't use Twitter or who use Facebook for different content. The UI has been improved but still isn't great. That said, it is still probably better than the web-based UI. I still get amazed by what people share. Twitter is, I find, more circumspect.

Eurosport - Nice to have, but seldom used. Much like the TV channel itself. To be fair, it isn't bad, but between Sky, BBC and RSS feeds, I tend to be up to date on the sports news that is important to me.

Touchnote - The fact this this app is only on Screen 3 on my iPhone might suggest I've had it a while. I haven't, it's just settled there in place of an old app I've got shut of. Now, I really like Touchnote. It lets you turn any photo from your camera or photo-library into a real postcard which is then printed locally and sent to its destination address along with your accompanying message the very next day. It even includes a little Googlemap pin showing the location where the card has been sent from. To UK addresses each card costs £1.49 ($1.49 in the US) - instantly payable through PayPal, which sounds pricy, but if you think of what cards and stamps cost and add to that the degree of personalisation, customisation and rapid delivery this includes, I think it is competitive. I've seen the cards I sent recently to my parents and they are really nice quality.. almost plasticised. Check out their web-based service.

Right, Screen Four next...

Appetite... Part 2

2009-11-09T12:35:00.012Z

In the second of this short series, we'll take a quick whizz through another bunch of applications currently taking residence on my iPhone. Today...

...Screen Two

Firstly, BBC iPlayer. I should point out that this isn't really a stand-alone app but rather web-link saved onto my home-page which fires up Safari and opens up the mobile interface to BBC iPlayer. The content available mirrors that available on PC, PS3 etc, i.e. the last seven days' TV and selected radio highlights from BBC channels. Delivery is pretty good but is, of course, down to your 3G/WiFi bandwidth. Given my rural location and BT's spotty WiFi broadband provision outide of urban areas, I tend to get quite a bit of stopping and starting. This mobile interface has been around for some months but word is getting around.

Second up, 12 Seconds. As I have an iPhone 3G rather than a 3GS, I'm still restricted to a version of this social app which creates a 12 second-long video snippet by cludging together three still photos from the onboard camera or photo-library with some freshly recorded audio. On other devices, you can create these little snippets using actual video footage. That said, there is something pleasing about the effects that these mini-montages can create and, whilst I don't use it very often, I keep the app around just in case. 12 Seconds is integrated into Tweetdeck's desktop app too. It also sends a tweet when you upload an new instalment. Here's one of mine that I quite like.

[iPhone] Three man cuppies and a manic street preacher on 12seconds.tv

Ambiance - For some reason I love this app. Basically, it's a sort of iTunes store for everyday, ambient background sounds. So everything from whalesong, rainfall, busy football stadia, birdlife is in there. Everything is well recorded, the accompanying photos are top quality and the looping required to enable you to listen to an endless stream of soothing noise without pops and clickcsis seemless. Once you've acquired the app, individual sounds are free. The library is extensive and regularly updated and the app itself is frequently refreshed with improved look'n'feel updates and additional social hooks. It's not for everyone but I like it a lot. One of my favourite sounds is of the inside of a busy commuter train carriage. I often listen to this when I am in a busy commuter train carriage just to be post-modern.

Around Me - This might get dumped soon. There's nothing wrong with the app at all. It uses your current location to highlight and direct you local amenities via Google maps. Fair enough, but given the pace of development in the geo-locative world, it seems a bit humdrum now.

Art Camera - I dislike this app's name and icon as well as the UI design of the app itself. Nevertheless, it has a really great selection of filters which you can apply to your library of photos to achieve a wide range of quick and easy effects, several based on the styles of named artists - hence the app's name. New filters are added from time to time and whilst I've augmented my photo-app collection, I don't plan on getting ride of this one despite some downsides.

HUD+ was one of the first Heads-Up Display type apps to hit the app store and I confess to have being intrigued at the prospect of lying my iPhone face-up on the dash and reading a heads-up display of relevant metrics in the windscreen whilst driving along. It works and the phone's GPS means it displays your speed and position as set against speed-cameras etc, but in reality I seldom use it... mainly because I don't want my phone rattling around the dashboard. The app is regularly updated but I haven't explored the updates in any great depth.

AudioBoo has got to be one of my absolute favourite applications and I am not alone. This mini-social-podcasting tool has received lots of rave coverage and is an essential for anyone's iPhone. Dead easy to use and powerful too. Here are a couple of my efforts:

Listen!

Listen!

Beatmaker is a mid-price music app for building some pretty amazing sequences from the loops and samples provided. It sounds great through good quality headphones and allows you to create, save and edit. As with many PC/Mac based sequencing tools you could end up investing lots of time learning how to construct elaborate tunes... on the other hand you could just load up one of the many standard kits and use the pads interface and tinker about happily for ages.

Bliin - Still giving this house-room but it is a Dutch geo-location tool that smacks of under-investment. They presented at Futuresonic 09. Not sure what their plans are but they are rapidly being surpassed by newer fancier tools. Bliin updates your location live as you move around, but you have to leave the app open so... not so great.

Bloomberg - See my comments about shares on my 'iPhone homepage 1' post about the Stocks app. The same applies, here. However, this app is pretty slick and integrates stock search functionality with text and audio newsfeeds.

Brightkite - Now one of several geo-location tools which buddies up with social networking services such as Twitter to broadcast your location, along with some comments, pictures etc. Based on your GPS co-ordinates the app suggests local spot where you can 'check-in'. The selection is a bit random as it draws this data from a range of public domain data sources. Losing out to Gowalla and Foursquare right now, more of which later.

Brushes - a pretty simplistic paintbox application... one of the first to hit the app store, but now accompanied by several others, some of which are better, eg SketchBook (more later). I keep it here because it's a simple way for toddlers to amuse themselves when in restaurants.

BuddyFeed - A iPhone client for FriendFeed. Don't use this that often, especially whilst the world waits to see what Facebook does with FriendFeed since the acquisition in the summer. FriendFeed itself is a good tool for live-blogging events in a way which doesn't spam all of your followers including those who might not have in interest in the specific event. This kind of functionality is being superceded by the likes of Posterous and, potentially, GoogleWave, whilst Facebook fanny about.

Camera Zoom - Another photo app designed to compensate for the woefully underspec'd camera built into the iPhone 2G and 3G models. This one enables a crude zoom function which then does its best to sharpen up the selected area. It's OK. Tries to make the best of a bad job.

CameraBag - Another photo-app with some simple but nifty filters built-in to enable you to quickly create some great effects. Quite a bit different to those available in ArtCamera, plus a much nicer UI.

DFireworks - A simple Disney Firework-exploding game for young children. Another basic, easy-to-use distraction mechanism for bored children.

Onto Page Three of my iPhone homescreen next...

I Think I'll Call You... Appetite

2009-11-08T08:14:00.003Z

This could well be of little interest to anyone, but, in the first of a short series, I thought I’d do a quick rundown of the many apps I’m currently giving house room to on my iPhone, one screen at a time.

Screen One

Not that much to say about the main home screen as most of these apps are fixed and shared by everyone. You’ll see that I’ve left the fixed bar at the bottom of the screen untouched. It’s tempting to swap in a Twitter application or even Spotify but the fact is, I access Phone, Mail, Safari and my iTunes library just as much.

Some brief comments on the rest. Messages I do actually use although I never ever get anywhere near to the limit of my bundled free texts from O2. I used to have a separate paid-for and pre-loaded MMS app before it got bundled into the OS as standard but occasionally I now use Messages to send pictures to people who don’t regularly access Twitter, Flickr or email.

Calendar is pretty rudimentary, although it is hooked into my Google Calendar. However, my Google Calendar isn’t synced to my work’s Lotus Notes/Blackberry calendar as corporate security wrappers put this firmly in the ‘too hard’ box. Therefore, this calendar tells me everything I’m doing at evenings and weekends, but gives no clue as to where I am or what I’m doing during weekdays. This is less than ideal as you can imagine. I suppose it’s my fault for being Timmy Two Phones.

Photos - I currently have 1051 photographs in here dating from my very first iPhone. They’re backed up elsewhere but I keep them here as they tell quite a nice chronological story which is good for the odd peruse when bored. As well as photographs I’ve taken, are others I’ve tinkered with using ‘photoshop’ type apps (of which, more later), pictures I’ve saved from the web, screen-grabs and email attachments.

Camera – well my iPhone is a 3G not a 3GS, so I needn’t detail the constraints here. Recent software upgrades have, I think, made the camera even slower to open up and operate than ever. Newer apps which really require a 3GS such as barcode scanners and business card scanners are a bit frustrating so I recently bought a Griffin Clarifi case for the phone which incorporates a neat little close up lens which slides across the main camera lens. This is a surprisingly effective and, given the limited range of new toys associated with the 3GS, represents a reasonably economical alternative upgrade.

Weather – I rarely consult this. Right now have have forecasts set up for Holmfirth, Huddersfield, Manchester, Liverpool, Holy Island, Blackpool, Birmingham and Ashford.

YouTube – I don’t often use this, mainly because of the frustrating lack of rural broadband bandwidth BT bless me with at home. If a ‘tinyurl’ in a tweet opens up this app, I tend to close it down before it starts.

Stocks – Whenever I’ve been given shares I’ve always sold them straight away as I consider them to be added stress. Therefore, I don’t have a great deal of personal interest in this app. It’s reasonably well done though so I’ll sometimes use it to look into the performance of companies I’m researching or who I’m working for or with.

Maps – Yes I use this pretty regularly, often for directions to and from West Yorkshire’s various junior football pitches. Google Streetview will grow increasingly essential as it becomes mashed-up into other augmented reality applications but, for now, I don’t often use it.

Contacts – I use this. Not much to say. My business card scanner apps integrate with it.

Clock – Yes, alarms. No surprises.

Calculator – I use this occasionally but often forget it’s there and fire up the rubbish Windows 3.1 calculator which still pollutes Vista on my laptop. I never use the scientific view which presents itself in landscape.

Notes – I do use this occasionally for shopping lists and the like, but I dislike the cutesy design. I prefer Evernote, but don’t necessarily need perpetual multi-device access to ‘Eggs, milk, toothpaste, Cheryl Cole CD’.

Settings – I’m in here quite a lot. It’s frustrating how some apps have all their mechanics in here whilst others handle it all in-app.

iTunes – I seem to be using this much less than I used to. I tend to browse favourite categories for new releases which I then scout for on Spotify. I used to buy and download straight to iPhone but regularly lost these tracks when syncing with my laptop which was a pain to resolve, so I don’t bother now, unless it’s a current podcast which is free and I don’t care about losing.

AppStore – I browse this place more than I even used to peruse the iTunes store. I’m forever scouting just-released apps esp in the Social Networking, Utilities, Productivity, Music and Photography sections amongst all others. I frequently acquire free/cheap apps to have a play. Few of them stick around for long. They all used to be 'for peanuts' and quick to download, now some are prohibitively expensive or prohibitively huge in terms of file size.

Voice Memos – I rarely use this as, prior to its inclusion in the standard OS I’d already acquired a pretty decent voice recorder which I prefer. Mrs D uses this on her iPhone… she recorded a script she need to deliver at an audition and relistened to it as a means of rehearsing on the fly.

Next... Screen Two.

Photographs & AudioBoos from the Agile Business Conference 2009 and AgileCamp

2009-10-28T11:49:00.002Z

All AudioBoos captured at the event can be found here.

Stephen Carver at the Agile Business Conference

2009-10-28T11:08:00.006Z

Those who attended this year's Agile Business Conference were treated to a phenomenal keynote presentation from Cranfield's Stephen Carver who brought to life the problems faced by project and, separately, programme managers through an extended analogy with flight. The session integrated Battle of Britain strategy featuring an analogue intranet for the first time!, with the ups and downs of commercial airliners and Stephen even got delegates making their own paper aircraft for an 'end-of-session' flight test.

Here are some AudioBoo clips of Stephen's session including a brief interview.

Listen!

Listen!

Listen!

Listen!

Same Difference

2009-10-22T14:41:00.001+01:00

Here's me delivering an evolving version of a presentation I've been presenting to different audiences for a while now. Hey, nothing wrong with reuse! It's surprising just how Social Technologies and their application loop throughout so many discussions right now. Plus, it is interesting that they can just as easily be used to knit together teams, communities, families and culture whilst injecting pace, rigour and control into business projects.

So, whilst I was talking AudioBoo, geo-location, hashtags and Twitter to a predominantly financial services audience, James Clay ( ALT Learning Technologist of the Year 2009 ) was talking about Mobile Learning at the BECTA LSIS Embracing Technology Conference to an audience drawn mainly from education.

There's an audio stream of James' talk on his blog. It a fun listen. Despite the difference in subject matter and audience, there are a number of common themes.

Photo Credit: Benjamin Ellis

Get Ready

2009-10-11T11:02:00.002+01:00

Busying myself pulling together various threads ahead of this week's Agile Business Conference and AgileCamp events.

I'm parking my presentation here for safekeeping whilst I get other things moving:

Social Technologies Boost Agile Projects

View more presentations from Tim Difford.

Current Issues In Arts & Media

2009-09-04T13:43:00.002+01:00

Maria Barrett asked me on Twitter if I had a take on current issues in arts and music management. Not really, but I like a challenge. Did a quick brainstorm over a cup of tea using bubble.us... see below. I'll have missed loads but hey it's a collaborative tool so sign up for bubble.us, let me know here in the comments and I'll open up collaboration so you can improve on this start.

More on the Demise of Teletext

2009-07-20T23:03:00.001+01:00

Teletext's History on Dipity.

The Cutting Room Experiment

2009-07-11T15:07:00.002+01:00

Jon and Ben from Cahoona have made their Social Media Cafe presentation available...

Cutting Room Experiment #smc_mcr

View more presentations from cahoona.

New Adventures in Eye-Fi

2009-07-10T22:49:00.006+01:00

@technicalfault and @paulie asked what my experiences with an Eye-Fi card were and I had more than 140 characters on the subject so here goes.

I bought a 2gb Eye-Fi Explore SD Card from eBay a few weeks ago. It arrived in a sealed pack sitting inside its own USB connector. When I plugged it into the PC it was instantly recognised, but when it fired up the browser to connect me to eyefi.com to register and configure the settings it told me that it had a known fault and it was impossible to register, configure or otherwise use. Doh!

However, the site captured my name and address and committed to send a replacement f.o.c. within a few days from the States. This replacement duly arrived and I was able to register it straight away and configure it.

(Config is about telling it your router's WEP key, setting up a directory to dump pictures into when it's near youe network and giving it your Flickr (or similar) login details should you wish it to automatically post stuff there. You can also input your Twitter details so that it sends you a DM to let you know when it's started uploading photos and when it's finished.)

If you don't want it to automatically send all you pictures to Flickr you can configure it only to upload photographs that you have "protected" in your camera's settings.

Once you're configured, you just need to set your camera so that it doesn't automatically switch itself off after a couple of minutes and, provided you're within range of your network it starts uploading your pictures.

In theory, provided your camera is on, it should start uploading pictures whenever you're in range of an open wifi network but I've never experienced this and remain to be convinced.

Anyhow, the Eye-Fi card works fine in my little Fuji Finepix Z20fd. However, I was also hoping to use it in my old trusty Canon EOS 300D, which actually takes Compact Flash cards. So when I bought my Eye-Fi card I also bought a converter so that I could slide an SD (or SDHC) card into a CF shaped adaptor and use it in my Canon. The good news is that the adaptor works, in that I can take photographs and they are saved on the SD card. However, the automatic upload functionality of the Eye-Fi card don't seem to work whilst it's in the Canon even if I set it so that it doesn't switch off automatically and where I opt to 'protect' selected frames.

A point to be aware of is that it does takes a long time to transfer the photographs from my Fuji, so if you take a lot of photographs like me do opt for the 'protect' option and be selective about which ones you want to upload in this way. Either way, it's a real battery drainer. I always carry two spare batteries with me along with the one in the camera and I've sat and watched it drain all three and still not be finished uploading.

Given that I've not really seen it work on an open wifi network, I'm only using it at home and, frankly, it's quicker, cheaper and greener to take the card out of the camera, bang it into the PC and whizz all the pics across in seconds/minutes than go through all of this palaver. It would be useful if I could set it up to recognise networks at friends', family, the office etc, but to configure this I'd need to input all the individual WEP keys and, as the config is done on the laptop, I'd need to trail it round to everywhere to set it up before I ever might want to upload from the camera 'in real life'.

So on balance, I like the Eye-Fi card in principle but they're expensive (£80ish) , faffy and, given that SD cards are pretty cheap, I don't think they currently offer huge convenience or represent value for money (but I'd love other's views - @spooons?).

Furthermore, chatting to @documentally about them, he tells me that a friend of his had some problems with one breaking inside his camera... the plastic does seem a tad more brittle than a conventional SD card... so if you're going to have a dabble... take care.

SMC at the BBC

2009-07-08T11:46:00.009+01:00

Last night saw Manchester's Social Media Cafe take another step forward as it tried out another new venue thanks to Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) who'd arranged for the event to take place in the bar of BBC Broadcasting House on Oxford Road.

The venue enabled the parallel sessions from Joelly Black (@thecharmquark), Dan Donald(@hereinthehive), Ben and Jon from Cahoona (@ben_cahoona, @jonthebeef) to take place in clearly defined areas so that attendees could easily settle into the session of their choice or, like me, take a tour around all three.

Each session was well attended and opened up into broad ranging discussions immediately afterwards. This bit is always the best part - it's encouraging for the speakers and it also keeps the subject matter open-ended and free-flowing.

Speaking of free-flowing, the subsidised bar was busy all night and as the sessions wound up, the emphasis reverted to the S of SMC for a little while whilst preparations got under way for the next stage of evening.

Maria (@marialittlestar)from Littlestar had co-ordinated the production of #thejoyofceefax - a short film "crowdsourced" from Twitter-based conversations, through filming by individual contributors right through to its premiere at the Social Media Cafe. Before, the attendees could settle down to watch it though, we made time for a game of Ceefax Bingo as prepared by Dave Mee (@davemee). The crowd were issued with bingo cards each featuring 'random' page numbers selected from the Ceefax, Teletext and FourText archives.

With thousands of numbers to go at, it took a while for anyone to get a line, although Chi-chi Ekweazor ( @realfreshtv) did put in a fraudulent claim at one stage (see the video evidence below). Eventually the highly sought after Ceefax buns, which were put up as prizes, were shared by two eager winners.

So it was onto #thejoyofceefax film at last... a lighthearted look at people's memories of soon-to-be-no-more analogue teletext. @innovationmcr suggested that it would convert easily into an episode of Creature Comforts from Ardman Animations and I know what they mean. As it is, it's a neat little artefact in itself and I'm pleased to have contributed. I hope to share it here when @marialittlestar puts it up onto YouTube later on.

In the meantime, enjoy some photographs and video of last night's event.

[By the way, I bumped into that Rufus Wainwright on the steps of Broadcasting House. He asked me where everyone was heading, so I told him #smc_mcr. He was keen, but I informed him that his name wasn't on the list. Next time, eh? Use the wiki like everyone else mate. ;) ]

Integrating Agile

2009-06-19T12:26:00.009+01:00

Met some great people at yesterday's Integrating Agile conference at Hoofddorp in the Netherlands. Organised by the Agile Consortium Benelux, the event featured a number of high-profile speakers and attracted Agile afficionados and those keen to learn from across Europe.

I encouraged the conference team to promote the use of the #iagile hashtag to enable delegates to discuss the event in real time using Twitter, and to share their thoughts with colleagues back in the office and around the world and beyond the Claus Conference Center (great venue btw!).

I can't beat Sander Nagtegaal's (Twitter @centrical) excellent summary of the event so please go to his blog to read it. Many others were tweeting so search #iagile to pick up some useful comments and links.

In the meantime, I managed to grab some photographs, audio and video from the event, so please enjoy and share as appropriate.

Here's the Flickr stream:

Here's an interesting Audioboo interview with Keynote speaker Rob Thomsett (btw within minutes of tweeting the link to this AudioBoo, Mark Rock (Twitter @markrock) - AudioBoo big cheese - commented that their own funky iPhone mini-podcasting software is the product of an Agile house - w00t!:

Listen!

Here's a mix of videos from attendees and speakers. Look out for Rob Thomsett's take on Integrating Agile, plus Pete Measey on the event's introduction of CHANGE - the International Association for Business Agility. This exciting new venture is aimed at reinforcing a genuine understanding is what Agile is about in the business world... taking it way beyond its software development roots.

Integrating Agile

2009-06-18T08:48:00.003+01:00

Just getting under way is the Integrating Agile conference. I'm here to participate, listen, learn, understand and interpret, but also to introduce an element of social media to the proceedings. No Qiking, but participants will be encouraged to tweet about the proceeeding using the #iagile hashtag. I'll also be using my trusty Kodak Zi6 for capturing quick interviews with some of the attendees and speakers. They'll be tagged in the same way.

Here goes looking forward to it.

Fear Of A Green Planet

2009-06-16T17:54:00.003+01:00

434 comments and counting for Bjorn Lomborg's Guardian piece from Monday on the downside of instilling eco-fear in children.

How Organisations Must Adapt to Social Computing

2009-06-16T10:57:00.005+01:00

I picked this up from a tweet posted by @leebryant... a useful slidepack created by @oamprimo and worth a read:

The Adaptation of Organisations to a Knowledge Economy and the Contribution of Social Computing This is the presentation Olivier Amprimo (who has a great blog) gave at the British Council in Singapore for the Information & Knowledge Management Society (IKMS).

It is built along these lines:

The changing nature of organisations, work and workplace
How knowledge management is the principal "movement" for supporting this change
How social computing is part of the KM movement
How social computing is used by organisations
Things you need to know to get started

PhoneBoo... It's For You...

2009-06-05T15:14:00.009+01:00

Those of you without iPhones may have yet to discover the joy of AudioBoo - essentially they are mini-podcasts, recordable and quickly uploadable in great quality via the iPhone. Like an audio version of Twitter, these mini-recordings are ideal for observations or even mini-interviews and are increasingly being used by bloggers, journalists and regular-social-media-joes.

Now, anyone with a phone can join in using PhoneBoo. This service enables you to quickly register your phone number with the service and, if you already have an account, link it to your existing AudioBoo stream (Here's mine). From there on in recording AudioBoos is simply a case of a quick phone call and, within seconds it's live on the AudioBoo site and you've Tweeted a link to it to all of your Twitter followers.

This is me attempting to use PhoneBoo and, in this case, stuffing it up by forgetting to Press 1 after pressing the # key to put it live. Doh! (Eventually, I did get it right... audio quality not bad in the end... have a listen.)

Listen!

People who follow you on AudioBoo can also pick this up via iTunes by subscribing to your stream as a podcast. Sweet. I'm already looking forward to VideoBoo on the new iPhone... it's already available for the Mac...see a useful heads-up on the Mac version from David Wilcox's Social Reporter blog from last year and actually made using Qik:

Bing arrives, Google Waves.

2009-06-04T15:40:00.007+01:00

In the same week that Microsoft has beta-launched its own Google rival, known as 'Bing' - officially described as a 'decision engine' as opposed to a 'search engine' - Google has nudged ahead again with the announcment of two new innovative products.

Grabbing most of the column inches has been Google Wave, a new social media platform which will sit somewhere between Twitter and email as a messaging and collaboration platform. It's not available to play with yet and no-one's really sure what it is and what it will do... but they're pretty sure that it will have a major impact on the way we connect with friends, family, customers and colleagues.

Adopting a slightly lower profile, sneaking out of the back door via Google Labs but available to try right now is Google Squared. Always keen to share new ideas with the world, the Google Labs team release products relatively early on in their development in order to capture input from real-life users across the globe. Google Squared sounds a little lumpy, but comes to life when you try to use it. It is basically a tool to enable you to carry out and collate research very quickly, presented in a spreadsheet-style format, on any given subject. For example, a search on UK Banks, quickly presents you with a neat summary of all of the major players including logos, description, locations, employee numbers, revenue. Missing banks are easily added and more obscure overseas subsidiaries just as quickly removed. Hover over any cell and it will reveal the source of the data and allow you to click through for more.

Results are not perfect, several fields tend to be blank and findings can be inconsistent, but to get you mobilised at the start of a new research project it could save hours of trawling around separate stand-alone corporate websites trying to piece together the basics. It's always easier to fill in the gaps than to start from scratch.

It's not all work, work, work though. I tried searching for 'Smith's lyrics', 'UK Birds' & 'Booker Prize' all with fascinating results.

Thoughts on Avatars

2009-05-28T15:27:00.003+01:00

cone
Originally uploaded by timdifford

Interesting to listen to @documentally at yesterday's DM:EX event in Manchester. He touched on loads of interesting aspects of Social Media stuff including some comments about his own striking avatar, it's pros and cons and the benefits of sticking with it.

Faces, portions of faces and something distinct in terms of colour, style etc seems key, but using it across all social media channels is also vital.

Not long ago I moved from a borrowed abstract photograph to a picture of myself. It's the one I use across most social media channels, except this blog and Facebook, where the pics are so much bigger and my avatar look so much scarier. I quite like the idea of using this pic as an avatar.

But won't be doing.

Geogiddy

2009-04-07T09:54:00.001+01:00

The Credit Crunch has taken the Climate Crisis off the front pages. We pick up a sense of inevitability about it all, even in places like the New Scientist. For a while it looked like public opinion, awareness and sentiment might just contribute to a more organized lobby aiming to slash carbon emissions.

In the corporate world, Big Green Projects are getting axed in favour of Cost-Cutting programmes. On the one hand, I can understand why. Green and sustainability initiatives can, on the face if it, seem like luxurious nice-to-haves when stacked up against projects which will drive up revenues, save costs and minimise expenditure. However, a longer look at the business cases for those green projects often reveals that they also talk directly to the bottom line by ultimately reducing energy and wastage costs, albeit over a slightly longer timeframe. Companies facing in-year budget challenges, with landords demanding upfront rents etc, etc simply can't wait... or so they think.

This psychology is echoed globally as quick fix remedies push longer term strategies off the agenda. Climate Control becomes someone else's problem, as we read more and more about the potential fixes available through geo-engineering, including capturing CO2 and sinking it below the oceans, seeding the same seas with iron filings, and spraying the clouds to reflect the sun's rays.

These geofix strategies have some merit but carry great risks. These are risks we may need to accept as we look increasingly unlikely to get our own house in order.

[An update with links later...]

Geolocate this post.

Posted with LifeCast

All Aboard... The Social Media Express

2009-04-02T08:38:00.004+01:00

It's been too long... since I blogged and since I caught up with the editorial team at Manchester Climate Fortnightly (@mcr_climate on Twitter). Yesterday, Common hosted the catch-up and an interesting idea-bouncing session over skinny lattés.

We ranged around flash-mobbed guerilla-gardening opportunities, setting up a Geofix Debate, through to green-trains, through to...

... The Social Media Express...

I got to musing on the Jazz Trains, Folk Trains and Blues Trains which run from Huddersfield to Sheffield and back on the Penistone Line on Mondays (#uktrain, @johnpopham's fabled Ghost Train). You buy your ticket, they have a bar on board, they have a band on board. You get on, drink, chat, listen, sing, get off, go home.

So, mashing up this idea with Manchester's Social Media Cafe, I wondered whether The Social Media Express (#smc_smx) might have... er... wheels.

Here's the basic idea. We get on a train at either Manchester Piccadilly or Victoria (a three or four carriage rattler would be ideal, plus you can join at your local station) and head off for somewhere about an hour away. In each carriage, someone pitches up to speak, just like at #smc_mcr. We also have a bar on board. People gravitate to the carriage and speaker of their choice. After the talks/discussions, people mingle and chat. At our 'destination' we stay on board and run through the talks again so people can pick up on other sessions or we run new talks, depending on supply/demand.

I think we could create a useful buzz around this for #smc_mcr as well as for creative use of public transport... Maybe one of the talks could/should be green/sustainabilty oriented.

I'm thinking aloud here... anyone think this is worth pursuing...?

Posted with LifeCast

Manchester's Social Media Cafe starts kick-starts 2009

2009-01-15T13:57:00.009Z

Another Social Media Cafe under our belt and they just keep getting better. Last night's #smc_mcr at The Northern proved to be the busiest and buzziest yet, with the Unconference Barcamp format proving to be a winner.

Some great presentations and discussions on a wide range of interesting topics. I even chipped in with one on how Social Media tools can help in the project world, which seemed to stimulate quite a lot of though-provoking conversation (Thanks all!!) The group which gathered around for that session discussed whether or not Social Media tools could be described as such if they are being used in a project environment for purposes other than just social interaction... a good point and an interesting debate in its own right.

I was also fascinated by David Bird's comments about his experience in using Twitter with teams in different geographies. In my slides I was suggesting that tools like Twitter might be the glue that energises and connects productive teams regardless of timezone or location. In fact, I have begun to see this work between joint teams in the UK and India. However, David suggested that, such is the 12-by-12-hour time-difference between the teams he's brought together between the UK and Australia, the chatter tends to naturally cluster into two groups which operate at strictly opposite times of day. So rather than Twitter creating and supporting a single multi-site team, the end result looked more like two loosely-coupled units with only limited interaction. A surprisingly counter-intuitive 'us-and-them'. SM Fail?

During the conversation I also suggested that the 'always on; always available' feel of tools like Twitter might actually be adding to the stress of the work-'place'. In the same way that when people discovered that mobile phones and email meant they could contact anyone 24/7, it also meant that they themselves were contactable 24/7 by employers, clients and team-mates. Will Twitter heighten this overload? Years ago, 'presenteeism' was often described as the person who was the first in the car-park and also the last to leave being seen as the most productive. Now that many of us work in scattered locations, are people tweeting 24/7 in order to prove just how productive and available they are? Fascinating stuff!

It wouldn't be #smc_mcr if there there were no lessons to be learned. The timetable didn't necessarily let attendees sit in on all the sessions which interested them... so maybe some sort of speed-dating mechanism next time, with sessions being repeated once or twice.

As for me, I had a list of things I needed to chat to people about, specifically about how we might build a conversation about the use of Social Media in the fight against Climate Change into #smc_mcr's plans. Just didn't get chance to connect with everyone on this subject last night.

Luckily, I did manage to further some conversations about how we might make the most of the underlying passion for music which runs through the group. The freshly minted #smc_mcr spin-off group might just enable us to give this exciting area some real air-time. On that note, last night's event was soundtracked by the group's very own last.fm radio station, the eclectic nature of which only goes to demonstrate the wide-ranging inputs and influences people are injecting into #smc_mcr.

Are Social Media tools the key to unlocking truly productive multi-location projects?

2009-01-14T18:00:00.001Z

Can the face-to-face demands of collaborative team-working be replaced or simply augmented by Social Media?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: onegreenerday @timdifford)

For those who couldn't make tonight's Social Media Cafe event (#smc_mcr) at The Northern in Manchester, here's a slideshare version of the presentation from my session. Without the commentary and interaction from the night it's not quite the same, so feel free to ask questions in the comments box or by following me on Twitter (@timdifford). For those who were there, these slides might be a useful aide memoire.

SlideShare Link

One Greener Year for Twitter?

2009-01-02T15:54:00.007Z

I've been neglecting one of the key themes of the One Greener Day blog recently... climate change/global warming and our attempts to tackle it. Today's Independent has brought me back down with a jolt, as it suggests that geo-engineering might be our only feasible route to sensible carbon management.

As I've taken my eye off the ball and begun to immerse myself in all things social media, things haven't been getting better for the climate. Not that I really thought they would, but we DO need a mechanism for keeping this stuff 'front of mind'. Twitter could be such a mechanism... in fact I do follow a whole host of Green Twitterers, but whether they're not linking to powerful enough content or whether I've not yet gravitated to the most relevant green tweets, I don't know. I just know that it's hard for me to find headspace for interesting green themes in amongst the rich and fascinating hotch-potch of social-media which makes up my twitstream.

I'm not really a New Year's Resolution kind of guy, but if I was I would be aiming to create a service, message, application or channel which merges the power of social media with the urgency associated with the climate crisis.

Think, think, think, think.

The Unbearable Politeness of Tweeting

2008-12-09T10:23:00.010Z

Another decent turnout for the Social Media Cafe (#smc_mcr) at the The Northern last night and a tip'o'the hat to those involved in organising the event.

It's encouraging that such events can actually be arranged so quickly and, in that sense, social media is working very nicely thank-you.

Since the first #smc_mcr, the group's wiki has a more lived-in feel with plenty of people putting their names forward to both speak and attend the events (although, oddly, not last night's speaker). The group has even spawned it's own sub-group on last.fm which takes the concept of the 'silent disco' one step further in that you don't even have to turn up. You can observe what other smc_mcr's are listening to from the comfort of your own garrett. Encouragingly, Boards of Canada are at the thick end of the group's dinky Long Tail after just one week, proving that those that have signed up on last.fm are a right-thinking bunch.

Anyway, at the inaugural #smc_mcr last month I tweeted, during the proceedings, that it might be a good idea to have a screen or a ticker showing what people were tweeting about during the presentations. Within minutes that idea took shape and well done to Julian at Littlestar for organising two big screens for last nights event. However, and I shall be the first to admit this, the idea was fundamentally flawed. In putting Twitter on the 'big screen' we inadvertently turned the back-channel into a highly visible front-channel. Frozen in the glare of the throbbing plasma, the great and good lost all control of their critical faculties and struggled to muster any decent comment/challenge re the 'speaker' of the evening.

I say 'speaker', because that generally creates an impression in the reader that someone with presentation skills is being described. Sadly that wasn't the case last night. Heather Corcoran from FACT, lovely lady though I'm sure she is, turned up with an online connection to some pleasant enough non-controversial arty bobbins obviously thinking, 'that'll do'. It wasn't enough really as she mumbled through link after link of fractionally-diverting, grant-attracting shenanigans. However, to her credit and with Paul Dirac-like aplomb, Heather inadvertantly created Anti-Twitter, as the assembled crowd, reserved and British to the last, refused to comment or acknowledge this faux-pas ridden 'elephant in the room' on the back-channel.

Itchy fingers hovered tentatively over iPhone touchscreens as the North West Twitterati tried to psyche themselves up to saying what they really felt. Those who did tweet, favoured safer topics such as 'are geek's sexy?' and 'will these links be on the wiki?', the rest stayed stock still formulating their next drinks order or putting off that nagging visit to the loo. One person at the back held on so long, they needed to be held over a grid.

Never mind. Lots learnt and we move on. It was a great opportunity, before and after, to put faces to avatars and I wasn't the only one enjoying some interesting and fun conversation. I'm looking forward to the next #smc_mcr as it continues to evolve and must remphasise the point made by those who organised the first two events, that we're all part of this thing and can play a part in shaping and organising these events. Any criticism in this post should be taken in this spirit as I'm as keen as everyone else for #smc_mcr to go from strength to strength and to guard against it becoming 'the scene that celebrates itself'. I'm happy to play a part.

The Mysteries of Twitsburg

2008-12-01T12:47:00.006Z

After a while you kind of get pulled under by Twitter and before long there's a form of acceptance about what you experience. However, when you take a step back, there remain a number of oddities and unanswered questions about the Twitterverse and what goes on in there.

Whilst there are number of over-riding similarities in Twitter behaviour, there are just as many, if not more, huge differences.

Why We Tweet?

Some Twitterers seem to be set almost exclusively on Output mode. 'It's all about ME!!' I guess they see this as an opportunity to sell themselves without opening up any meaningful dialogue with an audience. Replies seem to go unread. They are certainly unacknowledged. Odd. (I suppose for some of the really popular Twitterers, a self-imposed 'no-reply' policy might be the only way to handle volume, but if @stephenfry can manage the odd reply...)

Others are obviously set to Input and whilst they seem to follow others, sometimes many others, they rarely tweet themselves. It's hard to tell whether they are lurking, or whether thay have simply left the building.

Then there's The Conversationalist with Nothing to Say'. These Twitterers only tend to communicate in reply to someone else. Every single tweet is usually prefixed with an @twitterer and they are happy to offer views or add value to someone else's tweet without ever kicking off a conversation themselves.

Then there are those textbook Twitterers who will ask sensible questions, often in the form of 'Pointed statement or question. Discuss!' in order to invite replies or attract people to their blogs. Quite often though, these Twitterers don't acknowledge their Twitter replies or the comments received on their blogs, so it all breaks down.

A Certain Ratio

Some Twitterers seem to be an a race to gain as many followers as they can and do this by following as many others as possible in the hope that most of them will follow back, which they often do. This can lead to a quantity over quality problem, however, as these Twitterers may never hit a point where thay have more Followers than people they are Following.

On the other hand, some Twitterers seem to have vast numbers of followers whilst they themselves seem to follow very few. This seems unfathomable at first, as the Tweet content of these ostensibly popular Twitterers is often patchy and banal. Then it dawns on you that, these ratios can also be because you are:

famous,
pretending to be famous.
a very pretty lady* with your picture on your avatar, or
someone pretending to be a very pretty lady with a picture of a very pretty lady on your avatar.

So that seems to be the key to successful Twittering. If you've nothing much to say, get a picture of a sexy lady or Stephen Fry on your avatar and you'll never be short of friends.

[*Sorry guys, not being sexist here, but, @stephenfry aside, blokes looking straight into the camera for their avatar picture don't look sexy. They look like serial killers.]

Social Media Mavens: Get like Gladwell, Know Your Woofers from Your Tweeters!

2008-11-22T23:56:00.005Z

Reading Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Blink' has got me thinking. I'm only on page 35, but already he's covered the topic of 'thin-slicing', i.e. by relying on first impressions, rather than always drilling down for more information, it's surprising how accurate our intuitions can be.

In this way, Gladwell cites how specialists can predict how robust a couple's marriage is by observing no more than 15 minutes of them in conversation on any topic. In another example, students correctly assess the effectiveness of a series of lecturers completely unknown to them on the basis of only two seconds of video. On their first glance, two experts on Greek statuary turn over 18 months of detailed and costly analysis validating the authenticity of a recently 'discovered' marble, exposing it as a fraud, purely based on instinct.

In short, it's probably not really worth reading pages 36-277 of Blink, as I already have that gut-feeling that it is a fascinating work. However, whilst I've been reading I've also been fidgeting with Twitter and listening to the new album from the School of Seven Bells on my iPhone. So what? Well, there is a connection...

I received a Tweet from WiReD (it's Listening Post blog) the other day which provided enough of a hook in it's 140-max characters to prompt me to click on the embedded TinyURL. This took me to an article about Musebin, a new service currently in private beta which cludges music reviews with Twitter by enabling contributors to submit reviews of albums in less than 140 characters. As I said, it's in beta, so it can still be a little flaky in its efforts to search for album-art within a quirky pop-up form, but by and large, submitting mini-reviews is a liberating little experience.

How is it possible to capture the essence of, say Genesis' 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway', Kraftwerk's 'Autobahn' or Christina Aguilera's latest 'Best Of' with only 140 characters to play with? Well, of course, the answer is 'easier than you might think'. The trick is to start with albums you know and love, I suppose. Once you've registered, Musebin allows multiple reviews of the same album and makes no judgements regarding whether or not the album was released in the last thirty years or the last thirty minutes

Other visitors are encouraged to give your reviews a Yay! or a Nay! based on whether they accurately capture the spirit of the recording. They can even leave a comment longer than the review itself if they wish!

The 140 character limit is no accident. Register your Twitter details and your reviews are automatically added to your Twitstream and those of your followers, who get to click on a TinyUrl to Musebin itself. (Whilst it's still in beta, this prompts followers to log-in or register which will unfortunately put a few people off for now). What's more, if as a Twitterer you decide to follow @musebin, your reviews, along with any others posted on the Musebin site will arrive as Tweets into your Twitstream, teasing and tempting you to check out something new, revisit something old, or log into Musebin to set the record(!) straight about Guns & Roses' Chinese Democracy by posting your own review.

Brilliant little synchronicities emerge. I'd waivered over the new School of Seven Bells album in the iTunes store for a few days, figuring that it was my kind of thing, but still hanging back from clicking that all-too-worn Buy Album button. Then a couple of hours later, this Tweet appeared and I needed no more encouragement:

Via @jasonvo: Ethereal. Quirky. Beautifully musical dissonance and head bobbing beats make this dream pop... http://musebin.com/schoolof33N

Working together, Twitter and Musebin provided me with a little nudge in 140 characters, but maybe I'd have got round to buying the SVIIB album sooner or later. I don't know. However, this tripped my train of thought onto one of the questions that I hate the most. 'Where on earth do you find out about these bands?' It drives me nuts! Why I'm not sure. Certainly, there is an childish element within me that prefers bands at that sweet spot just before they hit the charts or make it big. Somehow, after that happens they're not mine any more. I'm not like that with everyone you understand. I certainly don't just like things because they're obscure. Indeed, I'm happy that a lot of the stuff that is somewhat obscure stays that way. Similarly, bands that I 'collected' as my own personal 'property' in their formative years, might still get a visit from me today (my foray to Geneva to see REM [#remgeneva] a couple of months back being a good example). On the whole though, I haven't got a really good answer to the question 'Where on earth do you find out about these bands?' I just do.

I suppose it's a mix of purposeful and subliminal multi-channel overload, but I can't put my finger on it. All I do know, and this brings us back to Malcolm Gladwell in a couple of ways, is that I'm not not to bad at judging books (and CDs) from their covers. I suppose I have a diverse range of interests, but I don't often bring home or download a dud, even if it's something I haven't heard or even heard of before, from deep down in The Long Tail somewhere.

I'm so used to it, I can buy at a 'Blink' and get it right most of the time. What's more, the compelling stickiness of powerful Social Media tools such as Twitter, when combined with Musebin, combined with, I suppose, 'knowing what I like' could maybe transform me into a Maven and a Connector (two of the stars of Gladwell's The Tipping Point) at the same time. Hardly Paul Revere, and I certainly couldn't lay claim to assuming the role of the third of The Tipping Point's stars 'The Salesman', but maybe I'll think about that one tomorrow

By the way, Musebin's a Brooklyn based startup and currently looking for an Intern to help with the office admin along with some of the beta-testing and bug-fixing. How did they advertise for the role? On Twitter of course. Want to apply? Apply @musebin. Your resume/CV must be no more than 140 characters long. Good luck!

Their life's work in 140 characters or less!

2008-11-15T10:47:00.003Z

I'm loving Musebin which accelerates the drive towards the Twitterisation of everything by creating a platform for creating, sharing and rating albums in 140 characters or less. It's a great discipline for focusing your critical faculties as you try to describe the latest Xtina Best Of or the earliest eurohippy noodlings of Kraftwerk before they discovered Stylophones.

It swipes your reviews straight into your Twitterfeed too.

Musebin is still in beta... ask them for an invite.

The Conversation(s) - #smc_mcr goes live

2008-11-12T14:53:00.007Z

I attended the first Manchester Social Media Club gathering at The Northern last night. A pleasant hour or so. Well attended, well organised.

The debate got a bit too blogged down.

The electric current which drove most people to attend is probably Twitter and its related appendages, Brightkite, Twinkle, Fireeagle, etc. They weren't overly mentioned, which is a shame as I think that Twitter is the glue that holds all the already established blogs and sites together. I also think that the limits imposed by Twitter can enrobe an author in a veil of mystique and glamour which is often quickly whisked away when the link to the their blog is clicked. I tend to enjoy people's twitstreams without always bothering to read their blogs. 'Fun and foxy' across 140 characters can sometimes translate to 'dull as ditch' over a full post. (Sorry to those of you who're paid by the word). The medium is, yet again, the message.

Social Media works when it results in a room full of people talking to each other, but there was something else going down last night throughout the debate which was even more fascinating. People in the room Tweeting away, liveblogging or commenting (sometimes with some acidity) on the quality of the debate. How weird is that? A load of people who don't know each other but discover each other on Twitter, get together in real life, to stand next to each other Twittering on their phones.

Who cares? It was fun, with some real socialising done too. Until next time #smc_mcr.

Spare Planet Req... Apply Here

2008-10-29T11:06:00.004Z

Such is our reckless burn rate of the earth's natural capital, it's predicted that we'll need a spare planet as back up by 2030. Well at least it's something to take your mind off SachsRossBrandGate.

A standard method for measuring carbon footprints will be welcomed... at least by those trying hard to set themselves meaningful green targets. It'll be less comfortable for the greenwashers who have, to date, been able to think of a number and find some pseudo-science to back it up.

New hydro-kinetic energy Vortex from WiReD.

Here's the full Living Planet Report from the top story.

The Tweetest Thing

2008-10-26T13:36:00.005Z

Once you get the hang of the Twitterverse is surprising just what interesting and relevant stuff turns up.

Aside from Stephen Fry's adventures in Africa, which everyone seems to be following, there's all sorts of great stuff to follow. Check out global tweets here as they happen.

Also, pop over here for like minds... and vote! Unfortunately, green projects will be hit by the credit crunch, mainly because those holding the purse strings don't realise that, if implementedly correctly, green initiatives can save money... and even generate new revenue streams!

The Sweet Spot

2008-10-10T07:33:00.003+01:00

I didn't even realise I'd sent a letter to the editor until someone mailed me and said they'd read my missive in this week's Computing. I'd actually commented on a blog which was spun off the Computing site. My comment got topped and tailed and turned into a Letter to the Editor in old world parlance. Anyway, all publicity is good publicity I suppose. It's worth perusing the actual blog post I commented on... as ever the IT world is obsessed with hardware and datacentres as the 'low hanging fruit' for green first movers with little thought as yet as to just how projects (green or otherwise) are delivered.

You can have non-green products delivered in a sustainable way OR green products delivered in traditional non-green ways. The sweet spot we're aiming for is where green products are also delivered using green and sustainable tools and delivery techniques.

This is where I was coming from at the Agile Business Conference and where I'll keep coming from as a I gather up Bright Green Solutions which hit this sweet spot.

Green Agile

2008-09-24T06:30:00.008+01:00

I'm speaking at the Agile Business Conference today on Green Agile. As project delivery techniques Agile methods are a natural fit for the green and sustainable agenda as they already established, proven and green 'out of box' and place great emphasis on the reuse of software, hardware, tools, techniques and other artefacts.

Agile thinking also focuses strongly reducing waste by ensuring that teams share ideas and collaborate closely throughout the life of a project. The parallels with reduce, reuse and recycle messages which resonate throughout a media keen to demonstrate how we can all be greener in our daily lives are obvious.

Beyond today's Conference, the soon to launch IT Green Alliance will evolve Green Agile thinking and extend the focus of current green projects and programmes beyond hardware ('my server's more energy efficient than your server!') through software and on into business processes... ('it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it').

I'll keep you posted here... in the meantime get involved!

I always said McFly were brilliant.

2008-09-16T14:13:00.007+01:00

If you like to get your news and views from a less mainstream source, perhaps with a more local edge, you could do worse than by taking a look at Only Planet.

Compiled by a passionate team of North-West based campaigners, writers, thought-leaders and, dare I say it, activists, Only Planet is being launched in an eco-friendly book-format at Manchester's Sandbar at 8pm on Wednesday 17th September. If you can't be there, look out for McFly (or the Manchester Climate Fortnightly to give it its Sunday name).

Viral Banking. What is it?

2008-09-03T09:17:00.005+01:00

I was in a creative innovation lab session yesterday and came up with the term 'viral banking'. I think it's usually best to come up with the jargon and then re-engineer it into a concept which is likely to have resonance with customers and industries. So what could it mean then?

Well, bearing in mind that Faster Payments as a policy-driven initiative being overseen by one of the UK banking industries overseers (APACS) is about to speed up all of our banking transactions, maybe viral banking is a threat to mitigate against. As processing times for our funds transfers speed up from around four days to something less than 15 seconds, everyone is rightly nervous about the opportunities this presents to fraudsters looking to make a quick cash-grab and disappear. As you can imagine, introducing the scheme without opening the door to criminals in this way has been top of the list for the security conscious banks.

But what are customers getting from this... could they be the real beneficiaries of viral banking on the back of the Faster Payments initiative? Rate watchers, day traders and the financially astute have become used to tracking their investments on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour and even minutes-by-minute basis. Ultimately though what Faster Payments could deliver is the means to transfer allegiances around the financial services marketplace within seconds based on new deals, new offers or even scare stories!

Imagine the queues running round the block for days on end which we witnessed when Northern Rock ran into trouble being over and done with online in a matter of seconds. Have you ever been sitting there clicking refresh, refresh, refresh trying to buy sought-after tickets for, say the Led Zep reunion only to be disappointed and to read later that the event sold out in something like 11 seconds. Well viral banking could be like that. Marketeers used to spending weeks or months developing, focus-grouping and readying new banking and saving products will need to be on their toes to keep up with the ultra-responsive mechanisms available to all customers across all channels.

The impact on brands? My guess is we'll see more 'limited edition' products and rates as banks use the energy created by the increasing momentum of the industry's payments traffic to further stratify their customer base and try to understand the true meaning of loyalty when the value of a new offer can be assessed, rejected and countered in minutes!

Cars and Girls. Well, just cars actually.

2008-08-26T10:49:00.003+01:00

Lots of ad's plugging new cars and their green credentials, which usually amount to one or two modest features and fail to take into the account the carbon cost of creating a brand new vehicle in the first place. It's better run your thirsty old banger into the ground, or buy a second-hand replacement than to buy a new vehicle, even if it's a Prius.

Elsewhere, Europe's car manufacturers struggle to meet EU targets for reducing CO2 emissions from all new cars. In a way it's fingers crossed that fuel prices keep rising, as it's the only thing getting us out of our cars.

In America, where the right bear car-keys is almost enshrined in the constitution, rental companies are finding that most of the SUVs are left sitting on forecourts, shunned by customers selecting economy hatch-backs which are now in short supply.

Meanwhile, the Church has seen the light.

Don't Chill Out...

2008-08-15T12:05:00.003+01:00

We're pretty certain what weather we're going to experience over the next few days and what we're likely to see over the next century. It's less certain what's going to happen over the problematic medium-term.

This week's New Scientist suggests that we might have cracked this mid-term forecasting problem (seems ocean cycles our the best guide to changes here), but that the messages these mid term forecasts are throwing up some issues which might just scupper the current political momentum towards effective measures to drive down average temperatures and limit the volmes of CO2 in the atmosphere.

It seems that we might be in for several years of cooling and possibly a slow-down in overall global warming in around 5 years which is only going to make it harder to convince people to do the right thing. Apparently, the cooler 2008 we're experiencing to date is already driving up the 'global warming is a hoax' stories.

Trouble is, even several years of cooling won't change the longer term trend towards significant warming. It's just going to make us less likely to mitigate.

Love Saves The Day... or What Really Killed Top of the Pops!

2008-08-10T21:27:00.004+01:00

Cramming to credit all my references for a project I'm working on, I came across this when re-reading George Monbiot's Heat:.

'Love Miles: The distance you must travel to visit friends and partners and relatives on the other side of the planet. The world could be destroyed by love.'

In other reading (like I said, I'm cramming) WiReD's Chris Anderson has a book from a couple of years back, 'The Long Tail', which neatly explains the economics behind why our tastes and choices have, in the past, been constrained by only being able to access goods in the physical world and the limitations imposed on us by suppliers who have only been willing to stock what they are pretty certain they'll sell.

Now that we have a virtually infinite catalogue of books, CDs, movies etc at our fingertips, our tastes are broadening rapidly. The importance of what lies at the the top of the charts is beginning to diminish as the aggregate of all of the more obscure books, films, music tracks selected by people who, in the past, could never have even found them in Tesco or Wal-Mart begins to dominate the numbers. Fascinating stuff, but still all about our capacity and desire to consume more products.

How to balance the economics of commercial innovation with those of green innovation?

I Melt With You

2008-08-07T17:01:00.002+01:00

Today's Guardian takes a lead on DEFRA's warning that we need to prepare for a catastrophic 4C temperature rise only the day after George Monbiot and Julie Burchill debated on Radio 4's Today programme just how ordinary people are being lectured on the green agenda.

It's hard to avoid the lecture approach when the situation is this dire. In a much softer way it feels like the mid 90s when early adopters of the Web drove through a more commercial internet than the academic/military comms network which had existed before. The man in the street wasn't interested then and certainly wouldn't be lectured on the changes likely to impact his life for the better... and yet now who hasn't got a mobile phone, thinks nothing of texting, updating their Sat Nav over the air and pausing live TV with their Sky Plus or TiVo.

This time, people are being hectored about more life changing events... more likely to be for the worse than for the better.

Elsewhere, I noticed irony-free reporting of the international fight over much easier access to previously unobtainable supplies of oil and gas underneath the ice-cap at the North Pole which is melting due to excessive use of... you guessed it. It's like a Dan Brown.

Round Up

2008-07-26T15:30:00.002+01:00

A Greener iPhone.

Green cow dung.

China's Melting Glacier.

Oysters Dying.

Freecyclette

2008-07-21T22:59:00.005+01:00

Recycling is everywhere in Poitou Charente. On the whole, I think the French are ahead of us in this regard. (No surprise seeing as they've been driving us mad with their lack of free carrier bags at supermarche checkouts for years.... now we get it!!!).

Anyway, these are roadside collection bins are in a car park in Saumur. Room for bottles, magazines, and embellage (polythene bags, etc). I even saw a bucket for collecting used batteries in the Super U.

Interesting Freegan stuff in today's Telegraph.

En Vacances

2008-07-20T10:33:00.004+01:00

We stayed here for a couple of days. It's called Huttopia. It's a chain of green/ethical campsites throughout France. We stayed at the one in Rambouillet and used it as a base to get into Paris on the train for the tourist trail.

At Huttopia, the focus is very strongly on the environment, with all sorts of optional activities planned, plus huts and other facilities made from reclaimed materials. There's even a fresh-water swimming pool which looks great and completely different to your usual holiday poolside scene.

Read a bit more about the concept.

Also, this is good on what comes after green.

Papa's got a brand new bag...again!

2008-07-17T22:06:00.004+01:00

It struck me the other day as I bought yet another reusable bag at Sainsbury's because, yet again, I'd left mine at home, that we could all be damaging the environment even more than previously as demand for these hefty thick plastic bags outstrips that for the old thin ones.

Let The Sun Shine!

2008-07-14T09:37:00.004+01:00

Of course solar panels have been around for years. As the price falls, we see them reaching ubiquity in garden centres everywhere, as they are used to power outdoor nick-nacks from the essential to the completely unnecessary. However, innovation in this area continues to surge forward and provide betters answers for our more serious future domestic and industrial energy needs.

Perhaps surprisingly, it's through the treatment of ordinary windows with transparent dyes that can readily convert them into effective solar panels. This technology could revolutionise solar power and, from a cost perspective, begin to challenge the national grid. Why? Well instead of coating the whole panel with expensive solar cells, the units can just be attached to the sides. The special dyes which coat the surface of the glass automatically route the energy to the edges of the frame where it can be harnessed. This means 100 times less photovoltaic (PV) cells at 100 less cost!

Don't panic if you've just gone solar and can see the solar equivalent of Moore's Law catching you up! It's not just windows that can be converted. Existing solar panels and arrays can also be upgraded.

This breakthrough has been made by teams at MIT and widely welcomed by the likes of Greenpeace.

Weekend Update

2008-07-12T20:14:00.003+01:00

Nearly missed this green innovation!

I love this letter in this week's New Scientist.

Getting closer to getting paid to be green.

The Age of Stupid:

Scream if you want to go slower!

2008-07-11T11:31:00.002+01:00

My wife and I have a got a new game. (No it's not that kind of blog!)

We're having a race to see who can drive the most economically. Everyone's doing it. Even Jeremy Clarkson. I promise I'm only doing it on the days when public transport just isn't viable, but hey, yesterday I improved my average from 31.6 to 42.1 on a 50 mile round trip. Admittedly, I couldn't see where I was going, because I'd steamed up without air-con. Plus, I had to whistle without the radio on, but still.

Have a go! It's the new speeding!

The Cornerhouse Rules

2008-07-10T23:56:00.001+01:00

Went to see Peter Saville talk to a smallish crowd at the Cornerhouse earlier.

He referred to his artwork for New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies as his career high, but I asked him about his biggest mistake.

Head in hands he offered an unexpected insight into the concepts of reuse and waste management and their application in the adjacent but quarrelsome fields of art and design. Invited to show at an Art Fair for the first time in his career ('a designer at an art fair is like a pop star in a movie... they've accepted the invitation to fuck up in public'), he and his team had spent some time experimenting with the digital transformation of rejected design projects. In other words, waste projects were pulled out of the scrap and given a deluxe 'photoshop' treatment, via the Wave filter, and re-presented as art.

A version of a Maurice Lewis painting was given this treatment by Saville and selected as his showpiece at the Frieze Art Fair. So far so good. Then on preview night Saville wandered on past his own piece and down the aisle only to pass a Maurice Lewis original hanging only feet away. Both were presented as art. Saville was embarrassed... for four long days.

Moving on, there were plenty of Factory anecdotes, but I was keen to hear what he might have to say about his role as Manchester's Creative Director.

Like Ray Hammond and James Bellini at the Visions of the Future event a couple of weeks ago, Saville is interested in work... what it is, what it isn't any more and what it might be in the future. In particular, he's keen to understand just how people will live and work in a future version of Manchester which, right now, is probably best summed up as mostly about 'Universities and Football'! In short, Saville suggested that 'the world will know about Manchester when Manchester is doing things that the world is interested in'. Yank a random boy off the streets of, say, Sao Paulo or Beijing and he'll know all about Manchester. United! This isn't a bad thing of course, but, for Saville, Manchester clearly needs to work up a more rounded global personality.

Before rushing for the train back to London, Saville suggested that Manchester needs to keep hold of a few more of those visionary and ambitious people who come to the city to study... and then leave.

Nocturnal Emissions

2008-07-10T23:41:00.005+01:00

I was only telling someone last week, who'd come up with the idea of capturing the kinetic energy emitted by the hundreds and thousands of footsteps taken by employees as they pad around the office every day that there was a nightclub in Rotterdam which does exactly that... i.e. capture the energy from all those dancing feet via a specially sprung dancefloor and convert it into electricity to help power the club and its all important sound and light show.

It was, therefore, a bit surprising to hear an item on this morning's Today programme on Radio 4 about tonight's opening of the Surya nightclub in the King's Cross area of London and its claim to be the world's first eco-nightclub, with its own piezo-electric dancefloor and other green gadgetry. Well, it's not quite the first as clubbers in Rotterdam and, apparently, San Francisco will attest, but let's not nit-pick because it's a good story and a useful initiative. As the club grows in popularity, they hope to share some of their excess N-R-G with the neighbours. On tonight's guest list, it will be the politicians who'll be voting with their feet.

Spray it with bombers.

2008-07-09T11:03:00.008+01:00

Sadly, and rather annoyingly, I'm going to miss the Guardian Climate Change Summit 2008 due to an unfortunately timed but still welcome holiday. (No long haul flights this year... it's a lengthy drive and ferry to the Poitou Charente region of France... maybe a staycation next year?)

Nevertheless, it will be shame to miss the summit, especially with it coming so hot on the heels of the G8 summit which is flooding our news bulletins, papers, websites, blogs and tweets for some of the right reasons and quite a few of the wrong ones.

Elsewhere, Chris Mooney writes about a radical route to a cooler earth... spraying a million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere from military jet! Would it work?

My quest for the perfect man-bag may be over.

Can't do right for doing wrong!

2008-07-08T07:05:00.003+01:00

Found this on WorldChanging (and if you haven't got the book yet, why not?). It dates back to June but relates directly to my earlier post and some of onegreenerday's overall thoughts around doing the right thing.

It's worth a read... particularly as it suggests that the small steps which individuals and organisations are beginning to take to be greener might actually have an adverse effect as consumers do their bit and then relax...

"I've changed my lightbulbs now, so now I'm off to the shops in my new 4x4 to pick up my new plasma tv!"

What's the big idea?

2008-07-07T08:53:00.001+01:00

Solving the climate crisis isn't rocket science. Well, actually, some of it is a bit like rocket science but, in the main, it's the small incremental changes that we can all make, which will make a big difference, whilst we wait for the REALLY BIG IDEAS to come along.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when you ask a group of people for green ideas, a number of common themes begin to emerge. Lots of thoughts about better transport, about home-working, about better lighting, less wasteful printing, etc.

This tells us that the real killer apps and ideas are harder to come by, but it also suggests that there is still a huge amount to be done to address the more everyday themes on people's minds.

All Tomorrow's Parties

2008-07-05T09:48:00.013+01:00

The world population explosion, driving up demand for food, clashes with the West's desire to reduce its dependency on the world's major oil producers by growing biofuels. Biofuels seemed to be a brilliant response to declining fossil fuel energy reserves, but are they just adding to the chaos? So it seems according to a leaked World Bank Report which estimates that the drive to biofuels has driven up world food prices by a massive 75%.

Doh! Gotta think of something else! In our rush to address the multiple interlinked crises we are beginning to face by seizing the latest innovation, we usually find it is too good to be true. It's usually only as we alter our behaviour and begin to relax that the true implications of the gear shift become clear. Biofuels is one example, carbon offsetting is another as people and organisations continue to burn through fuel whilst outsourcing their conscience to some corporate-accounting jiggery-pokery.

Still, it's hard. I even felt myself exhale calmly, at last week's New Scientist event, as Ray Hammond hinted that artificial intelligence may soon come to our rescue by solving all of the problems that currently reside in homo sapiens' 'too hard' box. It might, but we can't stop trying to solve our problems in the meantime just because we think that the world's greatest agony aunt might be a few technological iterations away. We are continually challenged with seeking out, adopting and quite often rejecting new technologies, tools, techniques and behaviours as we try to keep the plates spinning until the 'singularity' event, when our computers' intelligence eclipses our own, occurs.

As markets transform themselves in the face of technical, cultural and commercial changes, will their new identities pass the green test? Take the music industry for example. Always one for predicting its own untimely demise, it is in fact a multi-billion dollar industry which has proved itself more than adept at coping with the demise of vinyl, the rise and fall of the CD, the spectre of Napster and the rise of legimate and illegitimate downloads. Its current response is to shift its emphasis away from making the bulk of its money on the music itself and diverting its attention to the huge revenues which can be generated from mammoth tours and festivals, with all of the merchandising and spin-off activities that come with them.

So whilst we all take a greener route to accessing our media, through downloading music or video, those savings get trounced as the entertainment industry ramps up its spend on ever more expensive energy-sapping tours, events and festivals which, the the UK, US and Europe, fill up almost every weekend from Easter to autumn. No doubt there's some convenient carbon offsetting going on... so that's OK.

Festivals. I'm rarely drawn to them. I usually skim across the vast line-ups sprawling over multiple stages and several days and circle those acts I'd like to see. I generally come up with less than a handful... enough to fill a couple of hours really. However, this week saw the line-up revealed for September's "All Tomorrow's Parties" festival. Unusually, I found that I was circling more acts than I was striking out. I'd love to go, but even if I could afford it, how could I justify flying to New York's Catskill Mountains for the weekend.

Where will we look for experiences to rival the live gig/festival experience? Probably to technology again as the avatars we create in our Second Lives become more closely integrated with our most closely-felt perceptions and experiences. In the meantime, I suppose that I'll just have to wait for another opportunity to see Bob Mould, Dinosaur Jr, Tortoise and Mogwai on the same bill. What are the odds?

UPDATE:

Here's a useful perspective on this stuff from today's Sunday Times.

Your survival is not mandatory.

2008-07-04T09:05:00.005+01:00

I went along to last week's Visions of the Future event at London's Science Museum as organised by the New Scientist. The aim of the event was to present awards to those who had won a competition to decide which technology would have the biggest impact on our working lives in 50 years’ time. However, shoring up the awards ceremony were futurologists James Bellini and Ray Hammond and I was keen to hear what they had to say about how our lives are going to change over the the remainder of this century.

My trick back meant that I took a seat towards the back of the 500 or so guests as they milled about quaffing wine and eating canapes. So whilst I saw very little of the speakers, I had the opportunity to sit and think about what they had to say instead of shuffling from foot to foot.

Bellini kicked off with some definitions. Most importantly he makes a differentation between digital natives and digital immigrants. Those who've grown up with the internet and mobile phones are without doubt digital natives, whereas those who've begun to adopt and adapt tend to form the digital immigrant community. The main point though is, when over 50% of the world's population has yet to make a phone-call, most of us are still digital immigrants!

A lot of the commentary which followed focused on work and its shift from being somewhere we go to, to something we do. This, combined with our ongoing immersion in an always-on, always-connected, networked world introduces wider concepts such as the wisdom of the crowd and the worldwide conversation. By 2020, Bellini suggests that 80% of all workers will be free-workers or teleworkers. Yes people will still meet up. The hotdesking trend of the '90s continues, but human nature still intervenes as regular staff get in earlier and earlier to bag the same hotdesk every day!

Hammond followed on from Bellini with a number of clear themes which he feels are going to shape our future. Firstly, the world population explosion actually underpins a number of the subsequent themes, particularly the energy and food crisis, as we seek to find enough water for a global population set to almost double in our lifetimes.

Unsurprisingly, the climate crisis was up next. Hammond refuses to use the term climate change, which sounds more like a lifestyle choice or global warming which almost hints at being a good thing.

In discussing the looming energy crisis Hammond reassured his audience that oil will never ever run out. This is simply because it will become far too expensive to burn.

Globalisation is a theme which can probably contribute the most as a force for goodness and peace across the planet, as it lifts millions out of poverty.

A revolution in medicine will see us shifting towards the prevention of the disease and extending life. Nano medicines and stem cell technologies may see us regrowing and replacing organs within 15 years!

The exponential accleration in technological development is a critical theme, as it just might contain some of the answers to the challenges set by the others. As the Moore's Law curve reaches the near vertical we will draw closer to what Hammond describes as a singularity event between 2028 and 2035.

If this sounds like science fiction, that's because it has been to date, but around that time computers will become as clever as humans. In the years to follow, they will carry on along that same curve. So after a year they'll be twice as clever as we are, after two years, they'll be four times as smart, and so on. Scary stuff for Terminator fans. However, we simply don't know what lies beyond the singularity and just how technology will be brought to bear on the other challenges we face.

Will this super-human intelligence be able to deliver renewable energy sources quickly enough to enable us to reduce the density of carbon in our atmosphere in sufficient time to avert disaster. Will it enable us develop new crops and food technologies to meet the needs of the world's burgeoning population.

Of course, we simply don't know, but it just might be too soon to give up hope for Lent.

On the other hand, something reminded Hammond of a final theme, just before the close of the event. The others... the bottom billion people on the world who don't form part of the developing 2.2 billion. If we don't do something for them, the revolution in cheap and ubiquitous communications means that they will see our lifestyles and they will come and take it for themselves by whatever means necessary. What's more, we may not notice this final theme until it is too late.

Having the idea is the easy part!

2008-07-03T10:14:00.002+01:00

Most organisations are keen to hear new ideas from their business partners and suppliers, whether innovation is 'baked into the deal' or not! Even if they like the ideas, the business case stacks up and the return on investment is incredibly attractive, many companies stall at this point. Why? Well it's often to do with the fact that the very things which the organisation would benefit from the most are often the hardest things to do.

For example, most companies would be responsive to a proposition which would see them saving costs by reducing duplication across their business, streamlining processes, and sharing and collaborating across divisions and subsidiaries. In fact, central to the drive towards true Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the sharing of common services across often complex business and channels to market. SOA aims to break down the business silos which many organisations shape themselves around in order to strip out inefficiencies, heighten competitiveness and accelerate their speed to market. The trouble is, most companies like their silos. In most cases, their whole organisational structure, culture and ethos is based around these silos, as autonomous divisions take responsibility for their own P&L, strategy and behaviours, sometimes in direct competition with group colleagues in other divisions and subsidiaries.

All of this brings us back to why it's often so hard for companies genuinely looking for new ideas and innovations to simply do the right thing. It's even more difficult to do the green thing!

Many large organisations are beginning to appreciate the compelling case made by energy saving software which ensures that everybody's PCs and monitors are switched off automatically when not in use and which tells you just how much energy (and cash) you are saving to boot.

However, in any organisation of size, several business areas would normally need to come together to fund a pilot and then a rollout of such software... a corporate dance requiring quite elaborate choreography. However, and here's the kicker, even if you could get everyone round a table signing up to co-sponsor this, when will they see the promised ROI of, say, six months?

Well, possibly never, because energy savings are picked up by central facilities and not by the individual departments occupying the floorspace across the corporate office estate. These meetings often end abruptly as stakeholders rush off to spend their limited budgets on projects where the benefits are realised within their own empires. This further compounds the silo problem, sends SOA further into the future and inhibits an organisation which so desparately wants to do the right thing from actually doing it.

Just tell me what to do.

2008-07-02T09:24:00.007+01:00

On the face of it it's encouraging to read the report in today's Guardian that, based on an ICM survey, voters now believe that taking positive action to address the climate crisis is more important than tackling the recession. This news is particularly welcome after last week's Ipsos Mori poll which suggested that people's interest in the green agenda is waning in the face of the economic downturn.

There are, however, some caveats to the more upbeat ICM findings which hint that people don't really want the responsibility of tackling climate issues and are instead, looking to the government to take the lead.

This reinforces the need for regulation and intervention and mirrors many attitudes in the corporate world where businesses and their subdivisions clamour to be seen to do something green (and don't get me wrong, the small steps are important) but large scale energy savings, recycling and reuse benefits will only ever be derived when the CEO or the Board mandate it.

When companies suddenly find their carbon performance taxed and their senior executives find themselves having to deliver on green targets, this will all of a sudden ripple down organisational hierarchies which will leap from 'greenwashing' PR activities into true green action programmes.

What do we want? We don't know. When do we want it? Now!

2008-07-01T21:02:00.004+01:00

"We've got Innovation baked into the deal!" sounds great in the board-room and, in fact, innovation features in the vast majority of all new contracts between private and public sector businesses and their technology and business oursourcing partners, but do those businesses really know what they're asking for and would they recognise it if they got it?

In fact, innovation is often quite high on the list of 'must haves' when organisations set out on a lengthy procurement process to find a new business partner, but ask them what they are really looking for and you'll often be met with a 'dazzled in the headlights' stare.

Why is it so hard? Well, it's not really. It's usually a matter of definitions. A quick trawl around Google throws up a huge selection of wide and varied definitions of 'innovation' from as many wide and varied sources. However, the one thing that the clear majority seem to agree on is the word 'new'. By and large, an innovative idea should be about something new but, and here's the easy part, it doesn't actually have to be brand new!

Don't worry if you are full of whizzy, blue sky ideas that no-one could ever create other than you, those ideas will do fine thanks very much. Often, however, an idea based upon something you are already doing for a client in another industry or in a different geography can be just as innovative and fresh to your new customer. In fact, these ideas can often blend a mix of new thinking with a degree of referenceability which, daring and dynamic as your new customers think they are, will often give them the reassurance they will really need if they are going to fund your new ideas and adopt them for their business.

So really, it's not just about the ideas, it's also about how you come up with, develop and communicate those ideas. It's not too hard to create some structure around how you attract both brand new ideas and tweaks to existing products and services, especially if you use the most important resources already at your disposal... your colleagues, staff, customers and business partners. People love being asked for their input. Plus, if there's a chance of their idea becoming a reality, people suddenly become incredibly creative!

Be happy to start small. Organise a competition amongst the teams within your organisation. Offer some prizes to get people moving but, other than that, don't set too many ground rules as they can put people off. Also, don't tell people that they will have an opportunity to pitch their idea straight to the Board! They'll stay away in droves. Instead offer simple templates (problem/solution/benefits) to those that want them. Otherwise accept all ideas in good faith... from two lines on a Post-It to a detailed white paper.

The best ideas are often the simplest and easiest ones to explain!

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