A schedule that means I’m never sure where I am more than a week in advance, means that I’ve been a bit bad at keeping in touch. I’m sorry for all the meetings, catchups and coffees I’ve meant to have had as of late, it’s just a bit hard to cram everything in (and do nothing some days) when I’m back in Birmingham!

As well as ‘proper’ work, I’ve been kept busy with a few side projects.

• Kitecrowd has grown over the last two months to achieving aroun37,000 unique visitors for each month. Further detailed breakdowns can be seen here. It’s great to see the community grow, and be nurtured by the great moderation team. It’s also doing well at becoming sustainable cost wise, with advertisers coming on board
• YetAnotherGin has been really attracting the traffic, last month it saw over 2,000 unique visitors, a whole 1,000 visitors up from the previous month! There has been some great feedback, interactions with brand PR companies, many a cocktail imbibed too.
• I decided to make a ‘web app’ and created an online spirits, wine, champagne price comparison site: Tipplepicker, it’s still very early days but a lot of the core functionality is there.

I also found out that a talk/proposal for SXSW that I submitted did get through to the ‘PanelPicker’ stage, but alas not in the first draw of items for the schedule (there is the potential it could still go ahead though!). You can read the proposal, as it’s online: ‘Online Communities, Get Them Growing, and Money Making‘.

I don’t know when I’ll be back settled in one place for a more consistant time, but hopefully I will be. After all I’m writing this in a hotel room, on my seventh trip to Prague in four months. It will be great to see the Birmingham faces on a more regular basis, but hey I’ll still be around on Twitter.

• @anywhere prototypes from the Guardian – Some interesting prototypes of the @anywhere system, as publically first revealed at SXSW, by the Guardian. Native twitter features, like hovercards, in third party sites. interesting
• 3D Interfaces – Got a set of data, with complex linked relationships. A demo of a strategy to deal with the connections when displayed in a 3D environment
• JESS3 Blog: SXSW Vicarious.ly Visualization – Amazing look at patterns and trends seen when running through location enabled data from SXSW.
• Chart Chooser by Juice Analytics: Download Tufte-compliance Excel and PowerPoint charts – Want to create a graph? Not got a copy of Tableau. Take a look at some of the Excel templates, that are presented in a 'nice way'
• Graphical perception – learn the fundamentals first | FlowingData – When it comes to visualization, especially on the Web, you have to be open-minded, and you should be willing to try new things. There’s no advancing otherwise. However, before you dive into the advanced stuff – like just about everything in your life – you have to learn the fundamentals before you know when you can break the rules.

The other week at SXSW I was listening to Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, talk about the future of the service as well as some interesting facts and figures. One aspect that caught my attention was the mention of involving a ’social’ aspect regarding music sharing.

Daniel Ek: Playlists are the mixtapes of 2010

Now along comes mflow, a service I had heard of, but only recently received a beta code to join the service (want to join, use the code ZANE444). It’s a way to share music that you like, amongst a group of followers, consider it a recommendation engine powered by your friends.

I believe that Spotify really needs to take a look at mflow, the social aspect of music is where it needs to, and apparently is, heading. For me, I’m not the biggest playlist creator, but I love finding new music, and listening to good playlists by my friends, and others.

What people love about Spotify, is the ability to listen in full, and with no restriction on play count, any song of their choosing that is in the catalogue. They can then create playlists of full albums, or selected tracks.

They can share these with a link, to their friends – but this is a manual distribution, via email, twitter, facebook or whatever media they utilise, (the only automatic sharing is to Last.FM). Daniel talked about how in the future the interaction would be occurring within the app, rather than outside it.

Daniel Ek: Music discovery is the future

On the other hand mflow, once you’ve added/found friends using it, allows you to recommend songs by ‘flowing’ them. The issue is, I can only listen to that track ONCE in full, thereafter I will get a 30 second preview. This is due to the licensing terms with the labels.

So Spotify, has a way to be social, yet it’s outside of it’s environment.

It’s been stated that Spotify don’t want for you to have to recreate a social network in their environment, they want to harness your existing social networks. To me, this is important, I don’t want to have to recreate existing social groups on every new platform I try.

This is where mflow is lacking, if I was able to instantly see who of my friends were using mflow then I might use it more, it’s a service that works well when you are being given a constant stream of new/old music to discover. For me, I have to ‘hunt’ my friends out (I’m the user Neil on the service, find me, add me!)

Spotify and mflow are not in direct competition, mflow is sitting in the music discovery space, and it works well (I consider it more usable than Last.FM). If it was able to link in with Spotify (to hear songs more than once), then it certainly could hit a critical mass more easily.

mflow: Music’s better shared

A differentiator between mflow, and Spotify (when it has a social aspect), is that you purchase music that someone has flowed, then that user gets 20% of the price as a credit. If there was integration with Spotify, that likely stop the incentive to buy music through mflow.

Spotify, currently have a revenue stream based on user subscriptions (and selling of advertising, alongside subsidised bundles with mobile operators). You can purchase music through Spotify (but that would be targeted more at the non-subscribers), after all Spotify want ‘music to be like water’ if you are a subscriber, it’s always with you – on any device.

Spotify is not dead, it’s still developing it’s feature set including addressing a social aspect. As well as ‘revision’ histories of playlists etc. mflow, well I’m not sure where they are heading yet, they seem like an open company and hopefully they will take on board some of the points myself, and others raise.

In other news, check out the numbers:

Spotify Numbers: (Source: SXSW Talk)
7 Million Users, in six countries.
320,000 Paid Subscribers
Over 100 Million playlists, 30% are just full albums
Around 10 Million tracks

mflow Numbers:
None known at this moment.
Edit:
Expected 2 Million tracks at launch (15/04/10): Source

I agree with the majority of things discussed, rethinking timeslots, how you approach deadlines, and things that are really needed to be done, will no doubt make us more productive.

Also checkout the Rework Book, which these ideas come from.

1. Distractions, everywhere.
You can’t get anything done at work, you have to do work ‘before work’, or ‘after work’ when there are no people you can – but not ‘at work’ times.

Meetings, end up being the bain of your life, perhaps take the view that if not providing content of interest to you/your work, then most are a waste of time. How often in meetings do the people attending actually care about the subject?

A lot of work you need to do doesn’t fit in the small available timeslots that you have in your day.

The simple fact is that the work days ultimate enemy of productivity is interruptions and distractions.

2. You are working too hard

More hours do not equal more done, it just appears that you are getting more done (to other people, in their view).

Multitasking, if you can’t dedicate time to focus on one project then you won’t be doing your best.

Most organisations reward the wrong thing, a workaholic does not equal a hero. The culture of ‘look at X he pulled an all-nighter – isn’t he great’ should not exist)

Most deadlines are imaginary, don’t burnout, cool down

Productivity over time, is better than peaks just so you can hit goals

3. You are in over your head

Sometimes you put yourself in this position, you guessed a timeframe, but guess what your estimates suck.

You treat deadlines as a promise, not a best guess.

Things crop up in your schedule, like meetings. You are issuing time estmates based on ‘a perfect approach’. Sure you could do it in 3 full 8 hour days, but you don’t have any! (See Interruptions above)

It can be obvious why we give outselves bad dealines, people use ‘bad words’ ASAP, need, can’t, easy, fast – These corrupt the natural reasonable time it would take to do a job, we change our deadline due to the pressure in place.

The word easy, is something someone else uses to describe your job/task ‘Can you make a quick change, that’s easy right?’

There can be a sense of false emergency, neither true or required Is a Friday deadline really worth it, who’s going to look at it over the weeekend etc?

5. You have to take charge
There is a personal responibility for your own productivity, decisions are progress.  There is a choice if you see that you are not going to hit the deadline

Remember, that sometimes good enough is fine.

What ever happens, not making decisions = bad (for you, and everyone). Do not be tempted to put your head in the sand.

Do less, most things can be droppped and it won’t matter. Take a look at your list of priorities and start to remove out items that aren’t really required.

Deadlines, can helps focus your mind.

• What can you drop?
• What is really necessary?

Part of this is about setting up the right cultural environment

Always keep goals in mind, restate the problem, and maybe considering giving up. By being able to walk away from X, you might be able to allow Y to continue.

Your results show value, not the time you have spent at work.

Again, these aren’t my idea’s – all come from the Rework book, from 37 Signals.

We don’t just hold people accountable for helping us maintain privacy; we also hold the architecture around us accountable. We look around a specific place and decide whether or not we trust the space to allow us to speak freely to the people there. That said, we’ve also had a notion that “these walls have ears” that dates back to at least Chaucer.


“But sooth is seyd, go sithen many yeres, / That feeld hath eyen and the wode hath eres.”
– “Knight’s Tale” by Chaucer (1387), lines 1521-1522


In highlighting the fact that the architecture might be untrustworthy, this idiom is really pointing out that there’s always the possibility of eavesdroppers, of people listening in who we don’t actually account for. This is unnerving, confusing, and frustrating to those who are trying to properly assess a situation.


When people assess a situation, they develop mental models based on probability calculations and the expectations they bring to the table. They make guesses about who is more or less likely to run across them. Their calculations are completely reasonable, as it’s an efficient way of getting a decent handle on the social context, even if they are sometimes wrong. This is true both offline and online. People need to know how to behave so they use whatever information is available to them to make their best guess.


Unfortunately, online environments are not nearly as stabilized as offline ones. While the walls in the streets may have ears, digital walls almost always do. More problematically, online architectures have affordances that are quite different than offline ones – persistence, searchability, replicability, scalability. [More info: Chapter 1]


But, practically speaking, security through obscurity is not as stupid as some folks think. Most people out there never get much attention, even when they are desperately seeking it. This is true offline and, for the most part, online.

From Danah.org, an Extract of some of the talk on ‘Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity’ delivered at SXSW 2010.

Privacy, on the internet is something I’ve always struggled with. Just look at what domain this site is on, Rasga.co.uk, the same pseudonym that I’ve used since I first had an email address. The same name I’ve used in countless chatrooms, forums and other places. How does one achieve privacy on the net, when you yourself are causing yourself to be identified by a single name. You choose an online name other than your given name to try and retain some sense of privacy, but it just doesn’t end up that way.

We live in a society where anything about you that was on the internet, is likely still to be, we leave vast trails of detritus throughout our life on the internet. These may be things we were happy at one point in time to be found, but now with hindsight that post your wrote when you were 13 is not funny anymore. We try to have security through obscurity, but at least for me, I find it hard to escape.

Meanwhile the digital architecture has changed; we aren’t just leaving in a world of emails, and chatrooms. Google came along and indexed all the content it could find. Social networks exploded, as the place where you could be found, and find others. How do you deal with an all aware society, where minutes after an embarrassing photo is taken, it can be found on Facebook, Twitter and disseminated without your control?

What’s worse is when you think you understand the online environment you life in, you know the rules and then the provider goes and changes them (like with Facebook), like with the failure of Privacy in the initial Google Buzz deployment.

For me, the internet was always a place I could escape to. Yet now, how do I escape and say what I really think? Is another totally separate persona needed, or is it a case of ‘if I offend you, I’m sorry, it was never meant to be that way’.

We live in a place where comments can be throwaway remarks, yet can have the potential to be seen by hundreds. There are times when I know I’ve said something, that in the cold light of day I wonder whether that was truly the best thing to have said.

I come to accept that everything I put online can be found, that things will likely appear that perhaps I would rather wish didn’t but that is how things are now. The fact is, we have the opportunity to find out so much about each other, but just because the information is public, it doesn’t mean that it necessarily wants to be publicised.

There is also the fact that information that is put online publically may be aimed at a certain audience, Danah has some great examples from her research and they remind me of my own experiences. Whilst it is easy to be private in public in an offline environment, that you trust, doing the same online is not easy. Just because you can see it, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should go and view it.

This is a topic that I really do think will come to the forefront as we continue to merge our online and offline worlds; the new generation may make no distinction between the concept of privacy and publicity in the different environments. We need to learn to trust, and have boundaries, so we can respect the privacy that all can have.

Citation: boyd, danah. 2010. “Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity.” SXSW. Austin, Texas, March 13.

As I have mentioned before, the schedule is busy, stupidly so, punishing so. As you can see from below, there always would be, and there were, scheduling clashes.

I managed to pre-filter some of these down to a ‘top five’ or even ‘top seven’, and in some cases I ignored my pre-selected items to go for something that caught my eye. In the majority of the sessions I took notes, but I’m not going to bore you all with the details of what went on. Instead, I’m noting down what sessions I attended (mainly for my own benefit), and will be linking to my notes where appropriate. [This is to come, once I've tidied them up -bookmark and checkback if interested]

As with any event with hundreds, or thousands, of other people in the room there will be a plethora of coverage on the net. I’ll try and link to the presenters notes, the twitter backchannel, and any other blog post coverage etc – so if my notes are a tad shoddy you (and I) can see what other people got out of the sessions.

Friday
Smackdown: Consumers Privacy vs. Advertiser Revenue (OK)
What Are Analytics? A Guide To Practical Data (Mediocre)
Cooking For Geeks: Science, Hacks & Good Food (Fun)

Saturday
We F*cked Up: Happy Cog and Friends, Exploring Failures, Together (Great)
Playing with Place: Location-Based Games and Services (Walkout)
Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity (Amazing)
BBC Digital Planet Live at SXSW (OK)
Booze Blogging: Liquid Conversation (Great)

Sunday
Why You Aren’t Done Yet (Amazing)
Ditch the Old to Build Your Dream Life (Walkout)
Fans, Friends & Followers: Creating Your Own Cult (of the Non-Apocalyptic Variety) (Great)
Search Patterns: Tangible Futures For Discovery (OK)

Monday
The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions (Amazing)
Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends
REPO MEN: Extending a Movie’s Narrative Online (Interesting)
The Next Generation of Social Media – Keynote with Evan Williams and Umair Haque (OK, part watched)
Beyond the Desktop: Embracing New Interaction Paradigms (Interesting)

Tuesday
Great British Breakfast (Decent)
Pervasive Games and Playful Experiences: Rendering the Real World (Interesting)
Swarming Plato’s Cave: Rethinking Digital Fantasies (OK)
The Future of Music Delivery – Keynote Interview with Daniel El and Eliot Van Buskirk (Interesting)
Interactive Infographics (Fascinating)
Closing Remarks by Bruce Sterling

As you can see it’s been pretty jampacked, there were a few times to relax and miss a session for a well rested recuperation lunch. There are only so many times that you can eat meals that solely contain of a snackbar, or free hotdog. In such times, silliness sometimes occurred such as Surprised Lego Kitty (there was a whole corner piled with Lego in the convention centre) and Audioboobs appeared. Or getting ready for the UK Olympic Shuffleboard drafting. Plus, sunshine breaks on the terrace are always a welcome change.

The list at the top is just the daytime sessions, the evenings were varied. From networking meals, Dorkbot, Nuclear Tacos, seeing Motorhead play, getting driven around the place looking for parties, or watching We Are Scientists at the closing party. Too much to go into here, buy me a drink and I’m sure I can regale some story!

You can take a look at some of pictures on my Flickr stream.

It’s amazing to think that one of the biggest things that has happened here is the conversations that I have had with other Birmingham, and West Midlands folk. For whatever reason being in Austin has helped start discourse that would never have happened back at home. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet a whole set of people from my area, that I’ve never really connected with before.

Of course, now that the event has ended I can indeed celebrate that with a Mojito, poolside downtime Austin whilst waiting for the bats to appear an then heading off for some BBQ action. [I may have attended the closing bash, and stayed and had free drinks from 8PM-2AM, and watched 'We Are Scientists']

The amazing thing for me, is that the ideas and lessons, and experiences from the panels and talks I’ve attended have started to solidify into practical real life uses. I’m wondering whether some of the things that we are doing on Kitcrowd are not the right things to be doing for our community. I’ll go into that in more detail later, as there are a ton of ideas and notes taken from all the panels which I’ll try and form into a series of blogposts, and aggregate in other notes taken by people and that have been published.

Today, music has come into town and the atmosphere has certainly changed. I’m also on the guest list for Motörhead this evening, so that will definitely be a deafening experience!

For me, this has certainly been a worthwhile experience, it will take further time for it all to settle out. And hopefully I’ll be able to use my travel time to get some of this out of my head, and do a full braindump!

The journey over was long, a 9AM flight (UK time), and an arrival round 8.30PM (Austin time). Luckily after meeting up with some of the other West Midlands (#WXWM) folks we managed to pick up our event passes without the need to queue. Which meant that a few beers could be had before heading off to our Arts Council of England accommodation (nicknamed the Big Brother house). It also had the side benefit of being able to have a decent lie-in, as things were not kicking off till 2PM on the Friday.

Now, a lie-in would have been nice bit unfortunately, the jetlag had a side effect which meant a 6.30AM start. A productive morning ensued of catching up on the admin that I hadn’t been able to look at for Kitecrowd for quite a while.

Session wise, I’ve managed to visit a wide variety, from panels, solo speakers, core conversations and duo talk. I must admit in some cases I’ve learnt a) how shoddy my hearing can be, or b) how badly setup sound wise some of the rooms are.

That experience means that some sessions I chose based on their locations, as well as their content. The other key point is not to be afraid of walking out of the session if it’s not what is expected. After all there is always something else occurring around the corner.

Another side benefit, is free. Free is good, whether it’s water, coffee, beer or food it can be found if you know where, and when to look!

I’ll be doing a catchup of sessions I’ve been trying to hit and we’ll see what my notes really look like. Meanwhile, checkout the Saturday opening keynote notes, by Danah Boyd on SXSW.com. (Also available, her full talk notes ]]> http://rasga.co.uk/2010/03/14/sxswi-the-halfway-marker/feed/ 1 http://rasga.co.uk/2010/03/05/spotted-february-24th-march-5th/ http://rasga.co.uk/2010/03/05/spotted-february-24th-march-5th/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:39:36 +0000 Neil H http://rasga.co.uk/?p=212 Spotted: February 24th – March 5th:

• LastHistory » Visualizing Last.fm Listening Histories and Personal Streams – LastHistory allows you to analyze music listening histories from Last.fm through an interactive visualization and to explore your own past by combining the music you listened to with your own photos and calendar entries.
• BBC – BBC Internet Blog: A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services – An interesting look into the way the BBC deal with their Digital branding and site development, to keep everything looking similiar.
• Foodspotting / SXSX 2010 FREE Food Noms! – Tastespotting are publishing a list of places to find free food suring SXSW – checkout their twitter @sxswfreenoms
• Guardian graphics visualising BBC spending – With all the furore over potential BBC spending cuts, just how much does the 6 Music, and Asian Network radio station really cost – and how much is that of the BBC budget. Just take a look at this simple, but insightful visualisation
• The State of the Internet – JESS3 – The State of the Internet, a video by JESS3 – showing the facts about the online world of the internet
• Information is beautiful: The BBC-O-Gram – An infographic showing the BBC, in all it's disparate ways – and where the money goes. Another good display by the team at The Guardian
• Information is beautiful: 30 examples of creative infography – This is a beautiful set showing how creative an infographic can be, pretty inspiring.
• http://infochimps.org/ – Looking for a dataset, take a look at one of the widest collections of the worlds datasets.
• Oracle 10G – SQL for Modeling – Now it starts getting a bit more complex, I'll write a dummies guide approach. But basically, you are able to 'model' the output of your data, based on a predefined set of rules.
• Oracle 10G – SQL for Analysis and Reporting – Oracle® Database Data Warehousing Guide – SQL For Analysis and Reporting.
  So we are all aware of the plain, Select, From, Where etc. But how about the advanced analytics. Worth a read through, to extend those SQL Skills

From talking to SXSW veterans I can tell that this is going to be an interesting experience. There is a lot going on, from the panels, conversations, networking opportunities, parties and of course food.

That said, I’m slightly concerned about having the time to get some food, anyone who knows me will know that I’m a bit of a ‘foodie’. At the other end of the spectrum, is how do I take the best notes.

Every panel and keynote at SXSWi will end up as a podcast, so that covers having a verbatim copy of what was said [but these can be put up months after the events]. Instead does one go with slate, paper, or laptop.

I’m thinking laptop will be the winner, from an ‘immediacy’ point of view, and being able to quickly add and edit as I go (and no need to re-transcribe across).

The only real unknown, is how loud the speaker systems are – as with my hearing, it’s likely I won’t be able to hear much – unless I’m in a ‘prime’ position [read: near a speaker stack]. If they aren’t loud, then I’ll definitely be needing to rethink my approach to the event!

I’ll report back after the event, as to what I’ve learnt from a tip perspective, as well as any notes I manage to take!