tantramar

Lost In The Stream

I listen to a fair number of mixes online, you can't help it, they're everywhere. It's easily one of the best ways of discovering music. The problem has always been that you don't know what track you're listening to. Even if the track listing is supplied I find myself scrolling back and forth trying to establish which one of the bands I'm listening to. Sometimes I even try Shazaam or increasingly Soundtracking.

On a recent Fact Mix, by Animal Collective they list the exact point where each track starts. Amazing. Thanks. This is how it should always be.

ATP Animal Collective Mix by All Tomorrows Parties

• 00:00 OV (extract) – Orthrelm
• 01:38 Fireworks – Animal Collective
• 08:21 Norway – Beach House
• 12:23 Credit – Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti
• 15:45 House Jam (XXXChange remix) – Gang Gang Dance
• 20:12 Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping – Grouper
• 23:00 Cheaters – Teengirl Fantasy
• 29:07 Shina Blockas – Big Boi feat. Gucci Mane
• 32:43 Freeway – Kurt Vile
• 35:15 Up On The Sun – Meat Puppets
• 39:14 Vacuum Boogie – Floating Points
• 45:17 High Road – Deradoorian
• 50:52 Goumou – Khaira Arby
• 56:06 Oh Paris! – Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele
• 58:46 Gentleman’s Lament – Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
• 61:31 Night Cream – Black Dice
• 67:01 Discover Your Colors – Ear Pwr
• 70:13 I’ve Got Drugs (Out Of The Mist) – The Frogs
• 72:31 Trashy Boys – Tickley Feather
• 77:17 Good Time – Yi Yi Thant & Aung Heina
• 81:40 Rookoobay – The Brothers Unconnected
• 85:13 Grim Reaper Blues (live in Big Sur) – The Entrance Band
• 92:26 Mawak Lakhaal – Group Doueh
• 95:55 Raghupati – Prince Rama
• 101:07 How You Satisfy Me – Spectrum
• 105:16 Catch Attack – Drawlings
• 109:14 Al Anon – Eric Copeland
• 113:10 Melankolia (edit) – Vladislav Delay
• 122:01 Four Violins (extract) – Tony Conrad
• 127:34 Wended V – Mick Barr
• 135:45 Fuck Mixing, Let’s Dance – Zomby

More and Moore

Moore's Law is interesting. Working in a field affected by technology you see its effects almost weekly. Media is bordering on being free (in one sense or another) and I've become interested in what happens to people's experiences with media (and its consumption) when the hardware gets so cheap is virtually free as well. How does the (almost) free hardware affect the delivery of the (almost) free media?

I've been buying up old iPod Shuffles. Partially because they're great and also partially because they're so cheap on eBay. I've really grown into the idea of only carrying certain artists around again, like we did with minidiscs / tapes. I like the idea that you make a (musical) choice and stick with it. Choice does pollute so.

It echos the idea of the distributed phone, where a modular style phone is split into fucntionally specific parts. Sometimes you don't need all the functionality a smart phone provides, while running, for example. Just as with a music player you don't need to carry a 60Gb hard drive for a 20 min stroll to the post office.

As kids we used to give out tapes to friends to play on their tape players. When the player is almost free like the media, you can give someone a 'mix' and a player in one. Isn't that pretty great. I suspect a lot of people saw this idea recently, which is exactly what I'm taking about.

Now I'm probably the only human alive that doesn't like badges much, but the premise is fabulous.

Where does this go from here? DVD boxes that have screens on them, that are players too. Or perhaps simply projectors. Player and media combined as a single usage item. Experiments like this have been around for ages but are mainly novelty items. I think we need more of this silliness, relating to what I said recently about dreaming and being experimental. We need seemingly crazy ideas like stickers that are screens. That's how we create the new stuff, from the random throw-away ideas.

Temporary hardware, controlled, conditioned or formatted by a parent device, like a smart phone or tablet, which increasingly, many of us have.

When stuff like this gets cheap we can really start playing with it. When all these little tiny things connect together easily through blue-tooth, NFC or WIFI then we'll see a wealth of new experiences and delivery mechanisms.

Media experience ecosystems that span titanium to paper, I like that idea. Transmedia hardware. Let's go.

Online & Open For Comment

If you've ever designed anything for people to use, you'll know that access and restriction are really interesting things to play with. It's one of the key ways you create behaviour from design. You can only go to the shop when it's open. You can only upload a picture to a website when you have connectivity etc etc.

I read something intriguing the other day aout a girl, who when she went offline (out of the house) disconnected her Facebook - all the friends, photo links were intact but nobody could comment on her profile, tag her to pictures and things like that. She's trying to minimise risk, but what if this was the norm?

If you're not home no one can call for you. If your Instant Messenger is off then no one can chat to you. The physical linking to the digital in such a literal way. Wonderful.

Taking this further. If I'm not online then you can't see any of the content I've ever uploaded, created, or engaged with. It would be like high street shopping. You can't go to Asda at 2am; that's not how the system works. What if you could only access my content daily from 2pm until 5:30pm. What a great chaotic mess that would create.

Massively impractical and I suspect very annoying but it's a fun idea and I like fun (often stupid) ideas. They're the best ones.

Smarter Usage

I have a bit of a utopian view of our digital ecosystem which is why it constantly disappoints. We're not there yet, we're not even close to achieving what we can. It's annoying. I've not read Cognitive Surplus yet, (Russell made some notes), but I hope it's about sharing and what we could achieve - the idea of the redundant potential in our aggregated connected lives.

Freecycle gets me pretty excited as does Neighborgoods:

If we just thought about the power of the connected system a touch more (that's what we have right) the world would literally (Mark) be our oyster. The trouble is most systems and services just think about themselves, as this is about money most of the time (sadly).

The RIG contribution Newspaper Club, utilising redundant newspaper presses again is a great example of 'lets make use of something being under-used' which others can gain value from.

One of the really big offenders here is cars, clearly. Millions of people have them sat in their drive all day 5 days a week, doing nothing. StreetCar and Zipcar are one option; the 'don't buy a car, use one that we have' routine.

Well in my opinion that's pretty good, but better would be 'use a car that's already kicking about'. This is what Whipcar offer. You list your car as available, on your terms - say Monday - Friday 10am - 4pm and the rental cost is set by you, the owner, of course.

You can see a few bonuses here:

• Your car pays for itself.
• You can use your neighbour's car if you can't afford to buy one.
• Less cars parked on streets that don't have enough space for moving traffic let alone stationary traffic.

Clearly some people would feel funny about a stranger driving their car. So some people are out straight off the bat but they'll be a lot of middle ground people here. People who want to lend their car to members of their family or friends. You can apparently have a closed group who you lend to. So you could lend your car to a friend through Whipcar and all the insurance is taken care of. Easy right. You set the fee and the terms.  Any companies reading this?

Anyway, I think we need more concepts like Whipcar out there...

Chrome Dreams

I'm not really sure how I feel about the Chrome browser. Some good points, some bad. Firefox (what I use now) is certainly the old guard.
What I am sure of, is that when Google align Android and Chrome things are going to go a bit nuts.

Chrome, once a simple (quick) browser will have toys like an App store, thousands of ad-ons and bells & whistles leading towards the Chrome OS. This is all getting closer to the dream of cloud computing - you know, all your need is a browser, all the data is on the cloud, nothing stored locally etc etc.

The thing that got me interested recently was the chrome-to-phone idea - where you can push data to your phone from your desktop PC. It looks to me like Google have skipped the whole idea of syncing, which for the uninitiated is one of the hardest things to get right across multiple platforms with online and native elements.

This isn't big, it's huge.

Splicing Android and a Chrome OS means you don't have a browser on your phone and on your computer; you have one browser everywhere, platform agnostic. One system, one vision (que Freddy Mercury).

Whatever happens on one device happens on the other instantaneously. No data needs to be synced or transferred because it was always there. If the browser is the platform and the web is the future, then this browser OS fluid transitions between platforms is pretty damn cool.

You look at a Google map on your desktop computer, turn on your phone and there is the same map, just like that.

The thing that is frustrating though is like all Google products (being engineer led) they are amazing technically but not that nice to actually use. It's all good being in Beta the whole time but the experiences are often pretty weak compared to some other big market players (Apple for example).

I think it's coming soon, the big vision bit, but for now you can put up with Chrome-to-phone.

...go to the Chrome-to-Phone Google Code page for instructions on how to make this work. Basically, you just install a Chrome extension and an Android app and you’re good to go. This all works because it syncs through your Gmail address over AppEngine.

From Techcrunch

Google TV

We've waited and now it's here. Google announced Google TV yesterday at their developer conference. The video explains it pretty well. Apple TV Vs Google TV. This is the new heavyweight battle for the living room and it may go a few rounds.

Name = Search Term

It was a familiar scenario; I was in a bar in Portugal drinking cheap beer I'd regret in the morning jumping about badly, pulling muscles in my back, again which I'd regret in the morning. Then the DJ played a stormer of a Baile Funk tune.

I hobbled over to ask what it was and he signaled for me to wait while he got paper and pen. Amazing right? No cupping my hand to my ear, struggling with language or accent. Easy. Except he passed this back to me. (pictured above).

He didn't give me the title or artist of the track, merely what he had typed into Limewire to get it! Frustratingly, it's not 2001 and I don't use Limewire anymore. I gave him a blank look and he smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and went back to the mix.

But what intrigued me was the idea of a potential paradigm shift in naming. What if there were so many things with names, so many artists, so many musicians, so many books, so many years of people not researching their names properly that everyone started doubling up.

Your name actually becomes your search term.

It's happening now but picture this is 30 years time. It could messy trying to find things right? So maybe finding things through their search terms instead of their given name would become practical. It's a slightly subversive idea, but I quite like it.

There might be more than one Charlie Gower living in Stoke Newington. But I doubt there are many country music listening, folk art collecting over-weight wannabe surfers who like sign painting living in N16. I'm betting there's only one.

This is a bit like finding someone on Skype, half a Billion users means lots of Andy Smiths but only one PIMallardtheduck.

Of course to fight back against this trend parents will start naming their children after mid 2000s WIFI passwords.

Stupid but amusing.

Signing off aA!&D0gi3pzY56£

McLuhan Still Rattling Around

 

This really stuck with me when I recently gave this a little re-read. I think it's really spot on in regards to how our digital media is destroying the analogue charm of our old media.

When Digital Communities Fail

 

With great power, comes great responsibility. And some people out there aren't behaving very responsibly.

Many people will be aware of the class action lawsuits in America connected with Yelp - the community recommendations site.

Context: Yelp is accused of strong-arming people  to advertise on Yelp or offering to remove bad reviews in exchange for money. If this is true then this is Yelp behaving like a modern day digital mafia. It's pretty incredible and seems like it might be true...

A friend of mine in San Francisco recently told me a story relating to Yelp:

'Good friends of mine own a very successful wine bar (in SF) and it has achieved good reviews on Yelp. Yelp called up the wine bar recently, saying, we see you're doing well, would you like to further that growth by adverting with us. The wine bar owners declined, stating that they thought they were doing fine without advertising. The very next day all their good reviews vanished from Yelp! Yelp seemed perplexed when questioned - we don't know why this has happened, we will look into it.'

Quite incredible. However what to me is more amazing is that the people, everyday Yelp users, are doing this too.
Another friend in San Francisco (a different one, honest) told me another story:

'I was going to get a suit altered by a small tailoring business. The tailor coyly asked me when I need the work done by. I said as soon as possible - but I don't know how long it takes. That's good, exclaimed the tailor, people have been threatening me with bad Yelp reviews if I don't deliver the same day'.

I was pretty shocked by this and when I checked out of my hotel I asked the desk clerk if he had been threatened by bad Yelp reviews 'oh yeah' he said, 'happens every now and then'.

Digital crowd sourcing has mainly (in the past) been done by the elite, the techy folk and people with niche interests. Now these services are starting to run mainstream, with businesses such as Yelp achieving mass audiences and it's getting messy.

Ideas like Linux and Wikipedia did well because the people taking part were engaged and passionate. People writing Yelp reviews aren't really so focused on the dream of collective intelligence, or growth by group participation.

With new sites like Unvarnished launching; where you can anonymously criticize others, I wonder whether we'll start to see a dark side to all this idealism materializing. Of course, we've been living in a dream world so far - sites where you can delete bad feedback or pick which reviews you promote! It's a bit of a hyper-real community. Have you tried leaving bad feedback on eBay? It's much harder than leaving good feedback, that's for sure. Perhaps it should be harder, but how much harder? 

I think we have a lot to learn about the mechanics of crowd created content. Comments on YouTube for example are such a joke now that they serve no real purpose (see below) except for taking up space.

Digital services need to go mainstream to reach critical mass to enable monetisation but this can start causing real problems as we're seeing with Yelp. And chances are, we'll learn the hard way that editorial control is important and having subscription charges to weed out the troublemakers might be worth thinking about again.

Yelp has funding to the level of some $56M and these recent events could easily destroy them if the community at large no longer trusts the Yelp community. As the phrase goes, one bad apple could ruin the whole damn bunch.

This Is Talking Carl

This is stupid, but I like stupid, and it made me laugh...

Location Gold Rush

 

I wrote a little piece about the 'location gold rush' currently occurring for the Fjord Blog, over here.

Some people won't be interested... some people might...

Bing Maps

Microsoft often get a raw deal for doing really lame stuff. But most people who saw the photosynth work a while back would agree it was pretty strong. Well as promised they've developed it. A wealth of potential unleashed and my imagination aptly stirred.

Who Owns the Physical Digital

 

I read recently (on Wired) about a patent that Google has been granted. They want to update advertisements that appear on Google Street View. It's one of those, 'oh yeah, that's pretty smart' moments when Google aptly demonstrate why they're winning.

If Google starts collecting cash on digital representations of physical billboards, then more questions than you can shake a stick at arise. Such as, if Clear Channel pay for an adverting hoarding to be erected (IRL) and Google photographs it then who owns what percentage of that advertising space. Sure Google are paying for hosting the image but they'd have nothing to charge for had Clear Channel not put up the hoarding in the first place. Clearly these questions have been answered somewhere already but they're still nice to ponder on.

 

Also other good questions arise, like who owns the digital representation of my house? Or can I advertise on my house or attach hanging data to the windows like hanging baskets of code...

These are very intriguing questions.

How is the digital world different from the real world in economic terms? As these two arenas become increasingly linked together we're going to have to figure this out. Do I have less rights? What is the law differentiation about occupied land in a digital space compared to a physical space?

I like problems like this. I think they challenge the way we live and it's about time we thought about our personal relationship to the digitised world a bit more and it's place amongst the buildings and the grass.

2010; the year we make contact...

It's that time of year when everyone lists either their run down of the previous year's digitalness or what they think will be big in the coming year. Well I think you were all there last year so I'll skip that and the predictions game is pretty obvious next year.  I thought I'd put my top 5 wishes (instead) for interactive digital stuffness:

1) Mobile phone operators

I want them to start worrying about what we actually want from them, namely connections. Not trying to provide us with one uber landing page, or some insanely over dramatised OS. We want to be connected as much as possible and as fast as possible - that's your job, please do it better.

You have too many problems with your legacy systems to innovate but you can make the connections amazing. It's not like you're strapped for cash!

2) Useful services

That we (in the fat rich countries) start making digital services that actually improve life, help people and start making a difference instead of fluffy cute Apps that don't really serve a purpose. I quite enjoy some of these Apps to be fair but the use of mobile in other countries far outstrips ours.

From SMS elections and banking in various African Countries to (again SMS) tools for rallying governments in Argentina. I'm not saying we need those exact tools but we could have a go at making something that is actually game changing / life improving or awareness making. Politics seems a good starting point.

3) IPTV

That someone makes a bold leap and actually gets somewhere with IPTV and social TV. I mean really, it ain't that hard. Boxee is making ripples, eyetv is pretty impressive and I hear Apple is in talks with Disney and CBS. Of course that's the one that would knock IPTV into next week but we'll have to wait and see.

4) Mobile Web

Can everyone stop making Apps please and wake up to HTML5 and caching. C'mon people wakey wakey, this is where the future is at. I'm bored of waiting already. I guess the Chrome OS and Google Gears coming out from behind the curtain will really speed this up. But seriously I'm very annoyed of looking at loading pages on the mobile web.

5) Better Use Of Voice Technology

I don't like screens very much I think they're a bit rubbish. That's probably another rant (or manifesto) but in short, most of us have voices and they're a touch underused in modern controls and computing. Google looses a ton of money (millions and millions) deliberately on it's 411 service to learn about the way we talk. They're doing this because they're smart and they know what's coming. Well can we get there already.

----

So yes, that was sort of me complaining wasn't it. Sorry. Moving on.

The Piracy Of Privacy

Something occurred to me recently.  I was at the Wired Intelligence briefing and was dutifully writing down words people were saying and something struck a cord.

I was reminded of something Adam Greenfield had said; that digital footprints had changed how the world treats us. Cities used to be somewhere you went where you could 'start again', reinvent yourself, should you so desire. That's not so possible now with the persistent recording of personal digital activity that's occurring. So you're now the same person everywhere, like it or not. Well maybe that's ok but it's another little chip of privacy that's falling away.

Most people that work in digital (in various fields) accept that the idea of privacy has changed massively, accepting that what we once knew as privacy has pretty much gone.

Anyway, listening to Tom Loosemore a few weeks back (at Wired), he said something else that intrigued me; that his kids completely ignore the idea of privacy, they are totally open. They don't give it a second thought.

So two things then. Firstly, if everyone is transparent, then that picture of you on Facebook with puke on your jumper doesn't matter as everyone has one just like it. Doesn't mass transparency put everyone on a level playing field? Possibly. And secondly, the younger generations have deleted privacy without consulting anyone. To me, the second one is the interesting one.

Everyone in (generally) older generations is worrying about privacy issues of digital openness, big brother, CCTV etc etc but that generation is shrinking. Everyone behind them, the digital natives have pressed the delete button on digital privacy, and no one has noticed. Sooner than you think they will be running the world and the notion of digital privacy, even privacy itself will be different, and the rest of us will have simply blinked and said wha' happen. Is this systemic change from the bottom up? Feels like it might be. Golly.