post-Shirky

The last post ended abruptly and somewhat unedited when I read clay Shirky’s new book and it changed and connected various things that I had previously not.

Paul Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest, and the associated website WiserEarth.org, talks about how all NGOs are at some level connected, and on some level don’t contradict each other. Child Poverty is related to Health which is related to Air Pollution which is related to Global Climate which is related to Indigenous Peoples which is related to… You can get from any one to any other.

Cognitive Surplus is mostly a guided instructional tour on the potential of what could happen if 99% of TV watching didn’t change, but 1% did. The entire of wikipedia has taken the cognitive load that is spent in the US, in one weekend, watching adverts on TV. That has a profound scope for changing things without much effort.

One of the groups I spent time with is various environmental groups. Its amazing how much is done by so few; and how widening that gap and gaining the interest of disparate groups will do. And one of the things the internet brings you is different point of view in a way that previously would have been impossible. Acting with support of others and networks, 2 people (full disclosure: one is a friend) have effectively, currently temporarily but hopefully permanently (consultation is still open) stopped all peat digging in Salford: http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=618

But if everything is connected, then that begs the question what joins these ideas, and is there somewhere that these connections discussed? And it turns out, that there is. The Long Now Foundation has a long running seminar series – “the slow conference” in the words of Paul Saffo, it just has a big intermission between each speaker. And over the last few years, the seminars, all of which are available online, has served as a shining example of something that might only be possible in a communication based society. http://www.longnow.org/seminars

I saw this earlier this week: http://infovegan.com/2010/06/24/why-developers-are-so-important/ Just as the cost of a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables is nearly 10x the cost of a conventional diet the cost of a high-fact, low-opinion information diet is too costly for most of society. Developers, as the new gatekeepers of information, can change those economics by not only building better tools for people to process that information, but by making it easier to become data literate.

The thing that surprised me most from this budget is that the BBC calculated the financial cost to me of last week’s budget is £3 per year (excluding the VAT rise). Given the high cost that those who will be hit harder will pay, there is interesting potential for engagement here. Last time, there wasn’t the communication networks to make this voice heard: http://deeplyflawedbuttrying.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/single-parenthood-and-victimhood.

One big difference is not that those connections can be made – they always could – but they can now be made by far more people. Shirky references the South Korean protests about beef imports, and how a significant proportion of the protestors were teenage girls who read about it on a boy- band fansite. The UK Government is currently asking for input on it’s budget plans which would cut a lot of spending on the young, and spend more on the elderly. Partially based on the fact that the elderly vote, and school/college/university student can’t/don’t. But maybe they don’t need to. Completely coincidentally, the labour party is running a leadership election, and is letting anyone under 27 join for £1. The labour party has a membership of 200,000. I’m pretty sure that there are internet forums which have a young UK readership higher than that.

If Ed Balls wasn’t so far behind, I’m sure Guido would be pushing his readership to be members and vote appropriately: http://order-order.com/2010/06/26/saturday-seven-up-37/

The UK government is asking for people’s opinions on things; what happens when they start to be provided,not just in the form of feedback into your freedom, but other service that use that as the start, not the end…

While you think of that, for now, I’m off to find a gin cart…

Update: Tom Watson reports that the labour membership has grown by 25,000 since the election and 1 in 3 are under 30. There’s roughly 10% of an increase in the party. And Ed Miliband wants votes at 16, almost all of whom will be affected by current cuts. Assuming that the next election is in 2015, if that happened, everyone in secondary school now would have a vote then, and they would have all grown up with the networked tools everyone else is figuring out how to use – to them, they’re not “new tools”, they’re just tools, and they’ve not been indoctrinated into the conventions of political games. They may also have the biggest motivations for long term education and opportunity. Do school cuts, or discussions of university funding, look a bit different now?

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posted: 05 Jul 2010

Two weeks with the iPad

My  iPad is now a fortnight old. Having taken it to a few meetings with electronic notes or with agenda and reference documents, it does make finding things a lot easier. Its also works for handing meeting notes or reference material. Where someone is talking about a document they don’t have in front of them, it can be found, displayed, and the iPad handed to them as if it were a piece of paper. While this seems like a good idea, if that person has never used an iPad before, they will immediately get distracted as they start playing with it, and derail the meeting for around 5 minutes. Per person. At a seminar a few days ago, I was asked 7 times if that was an iPad, in probably around 7 minutes. It gets old.
One thing I would really like is a google docs for iPad either app or html5 site, which would get round the irritating problem of transferring documents. As long as it cached, the fact that theres sometimes not an Internet connection – and I’ve been in places where there was neither. I’ve used about 2mb in data, in about half a weeks work. But I suspect this week isn’t enough to tell you anything about the usage levels, because I was in heavy-wifi areas more, and used the iPad less, than I’d expect to in future. Somewhere, I have turned something on which is using battery life at about 4% per day even if its just in my bag. It’s not the 3G, as that’s been off for the last week; I wonder if it’s the push notifications for MobileMe (needed for “where’s my iPad?”, so I’m hesitant to turn that off). Although, I think the lowest battery I’ve ever had was about 30% after watching a couple of videos while crashed out on the sofa; a whole 3 feet from a power supply. Battery life is not an issue.
One thing that’s become more noticeable over the conversations over the last week is the mobile phone micro-SIM deals and impacts that might have on people who are non-technical, but are thinking of an iPad. Generally, they would all probably use the 3G. That includes professors who want tech to just work, and a colleagues mother who just wants something for email, a little bit of the web, and photos from her digital camera. As many of my colleagues spend a lot of time on trains to and from meetings in London, the thing that is currently missing is a T-Mobile microsim, the data plans for which will hopefully also give access to the t-mobile hotspots on every virgin train to and from London – and probably save money in the process. I can see that would actually both save money and increase benefit to those who spend as much time on trains with those hotspots as we do. Both on the iPad, and also when people are taking their laptops. Work ditching oracle calendar and moving to outlook, while likely to be less reliable for email, will also let people sync calendars to iPad. With the VPN as well, that should make things work pretty well wherever people are.
But, typing this on the iPad keyboard, the one thing that is starting to feel out of place in the. iPad is the on screen keyboard. Its the only bit of the UI that hasn’t been redone for the ipad, and is the same keyboard there has always been. I wonder if there’s anything coming from apple that revolutionised is that interaction method. While my typing speed on the iPad has increased, the error rate has remained rather unhelpfully high, as getting fingers slightly out of alignment and autocorrect means that there are random words appearing that then need significant retyping to correct, rather than just bits.
The most technically based user focused discussion on the
iPad is this from the Mac Power Users Podcast.
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posted: 13 Jun 2010