After two years, twoeditors and 140-ish posts, I'll be stepping back from my role as a contributing writer to Corante's Mobile Messaging 2.0.
The first couple of years for MM2 were a sponsored curation of thought leadership and conversation around mobility. As my first paying gig as a professional writer, I learned a great deal in terms of discipline, leads, brevity and the economics of digital publishing, as well as the distributed camaraderie of working with other writers such as Ewan Spence and Debi Jones...all things which helped secure my contributing role at Giga Omni Media's Web Worker Daily.
Sadly, my work at MM2 will fade away as the site transitions towards being an automated aggregator, rather than curator of original content. I haven't decided whether to republish my MM2 contributions, blended here with my personal blog, or to host an MM2-branded site for posterity.
11 - 12th June: Liverpool plays host to this year's bTWEEN, previously held in Manchester and Bradford.
19 - 21st June: Sheffield's third BarCamp rounds out the Digital Spring.
There's been a little controversy at the overlapping schedules and content - but personally, I think it's cool. Every city's conference or festival has something unique to offer...Manchester's music, Newcastle's ingest of global speakers, Leeds' student show and grassrootsy content, bTWEEN's media focus and Sheffield's newly minted Digital Campus. But the overlaps might actually be helpful as speakers like Stowe Boyd can commit to a few weeks touring across the North and various events, the same way ETech and SxSW's proximity make for a productive conference season in the US.
Ian Forrester is encouraging LSx, Futuresonic, TD and bTWEEN to coordinate more closely next year, so there's great potential to cross-promote and synchronise where we can.
Katie Lips, in her own unique fashion, is attempting to bring some harmony, between TD and Futuresonic in particular, by running a Tech Bus Tour between both conferences (via Leeds!)
2010 already looks like a promising year as FutureEverything spools up and LSx seeks to merge with Live At Leeds...now where will bTWEEN end up in '010?
There's been an interesting confluence of commentary recently on why precision is not only unnecessary, but perhaps undesirable, in the formulation of communication services...
In Valleywag's Against Realtime, Owen Thomas argues that Facebook's recent makeover has emphasised recency and buried relevancy - in apeing Twitter, Facebook is assuming that 'the only news is breaking news' (Thomas' piece builda on comments from Om Malik's discussion of Facebook's identity crisis)
Dopplr it seems has been motivated by understanding context and what might be useful in a given situation, where Facebook's embrace of the realtime web has been driven by the faddish pursuit of a competitor.
Regardless, there are useful social models and design patterns that need to be abstracted from the Twitter, Facebook and Dopplr articulations of time, space, serendipity and relevancy, patterns that might enhance other services. There's an assumption that relevance and seredipity can emerge from simply aggregating together news items from social connections. Yet there's a growing anxiety that we're all drinking from a firehose of data.
Why can't Twitter, for example, learn to whom users grant their attention over time...or Facebook understand to whom I'm 'nearby' (at Matt says - 'hereish-and-soonish/thereish-and-thenish'), helping users make relevancy rather than recency based choices, that wire serendipity into the fabric of social software.
I first started following the work of Neil Gershenfeld during my various visits to MIT Media Lab, and of course through his book Fab, along with speculating about fictional HP DeskFabs and Fabster P2P networks...a miniature attempt at Bruce Sterling-eqsue Design Fiction!
So it was a huge surprise to learn that Gershenfeld would be stopping by Manchester's Manufacturing Institute, last Tuesday, for a half-day discussion forum on the launch of the city's first Fab Lab. With 50-60 people in attendance, I was surprised that no one from Manchester's tech scene was there.
Here are some of the interesting snippets from the forum...
Gershenfeld characterised digital/additive fabrication as materials that contain information - essentially embedding 'code' into materials.
Gershenfeld 's influence on Squid Lab's Saul Griffith was evidenced by his illustration of sending design code into universal protein strings to 'fold & fab' 3D structures - similar to Griffith's TED talk noting that the 'secret to biology is the way it builds computation into the way it makes things'.
The fab wet-dream of self-replicating Von-Neumann machines is nearing reality with the RepRap project - the rapid-prototyping of rapid-prototyping machines.
Gershenfeld namechecked an experimental prototype alarm clock with which you had to arm wrestle to prove you were indeed awake!
Fabrication is still at the 'mainframe' stage, with the greatest impact set to come from the personalisation of technology - analagous to the transition from mainframe to personal computers.
Gershenfeld envisages an opt-in network of 'Fab Labs' across the globe - equipped with laser cutters, sign cutters, milling machines, electronics assembly and microcontroller programming - that can democratise manufacturing and mobilise people and projects across this network. A little like a super TechShop; the network currently includes locations in Jalalabad, Utrecht and Amsterdam.
Perhaps more interesting than the progress of the science, are the socio-economic drivers that're making the introduction of a Fab Lab to Manchester so appealing. The city was centrai to the industrial revolution, with it's eastern areas known as the 'workshop of the world' - apparently, the first transatlantic communications cable was manufactured in the Bradford area of East Manchester. Yet, though the area has found new purpose with the recent Commonwealth Games and the presence of Manchester City (the world's richest football club), large parts remain deprived and struggle in a post-industrial economy.
Regeneration officials see the Empowerment > Education > Problem Solving > Job Creation > Invention cycle of Fab Labs as a critical component in reviving manufacturing in the area, energising brownfield sites, as well as retaining local skills and raising educational standards. Upon being asked on Fab Labs' model for civic sustainability, Gershenfeld quipped that people 'don't ask whether public libraries have a model for civic sustainability' - implying that the labs hope to provide a similarly essential role in civic culture and education.
The city is due to open its first lab in late 2009, anticipating the 2010 edition of the city's Big Bang Fair for young scientists and engineers. The lab will be free for individuals, who will be encouraged to share their ideas and knowledge freely within the international Fab Lab community and beyond.
Personally, I'm really interested to see where the intersection of digital 'make' services like Etsy, Ponoko and Folksy, with the potential 'Napsterisation' of manufacturing. Indeed, my friend Steve, suggested that the d_shape robotic building system be used to 'endlessly replicate copies of the RIAA building!'
I'm wondering if Fab Labs has a natural analogy in the global coworking community - one for 'atoms', the other for 'bits' - indeed, is there a useful and natural crossover between these two grassroots global communities?
Next week sees the opening of the second edition of eComm, taking place in Burlingame, just outside San Francisco.
Like the 2008 edition - and its two predecessor conferences of the O'Reilly ETel franchise - I've been part of the advisory board, roping in interesting speakers and contributors working at the intersection of telecoms and social media - in design, human factors, hardware hacking and mobile.
Sadly, this year I won't be attending (I'll be on vacation in New York), but I've gifted my own pass to PhoneFromHere's Tim Panton and gave away complimentary pass to local geek Jonathan Powell, to raise money at the recent Leeds Twestival.
There'll certainly be a 2010 edition - and I'm hoping next year I'll be able to add to the platform again :)
This week's episode of Lost - '316' - features a gratuitously self-referential shot of Hurley reading Y, El Último Hombre, the Spanish language edition of Y: The Last Man, written in 2004 by one of Lost's current principal writers, Brian K. Vaughn...
Nothing's ever a coincidence in the Lostiverse. Hurley is reading the fourth volume, One Small Step, a story with a very Planet of the Apes ending...what does that mean?!
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Y: The Last Man is currently being adapted into a movie trilogy, but I've always thought it'd make for a great Abrams-esque TV quest :)
We opened registration for the Leeds' third Girl Geek Dinner, on 12th March (we also managed to secure a great speaker for the fourth dinner in the Summer)
FOWA's Leeds stopover will be one of the tentpoles for LS2, the second Leeds web festival. Next week, we're hoping to tell you a little more about the other great events we have planned for May and June :)
"For a moment
of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars— pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time."
I've had a great, warm relationship with O'Reilly Media over the last half decade or so, hanging out at various ETech and Foo Camp events, striking up friendships with their people, helping plan both ETel conferences and contributing to Web2Expo Europe. Tim O'Reilly and I recently spoke about his background and it turns out his mother is from my hometown of Bradford, a place of which he has a lotta fond childhood memories. Indeed, Tim recorded a special message for us back in November...
With that in mind, it's a total pleasure to bring my favourite tech/media luminaries to my adopted hometown of Leeds for their first Ignite evening in the UK, a rapid-fire succession of lightning talks, pioneered by Brady Forrest in Seattle. Ignite organiser Craig Smith, of O'Reilly UK, was keen to hold the first O'Reilly-sponsored Ignite in the North of England, bringing together people from around the M62 corridor and the North East. Craig's originally from Huddersfield and along with Tim's heritage, has helped to locate the event in the heritage of O'Reilly's own people as well as celebrating the region's emerging grassroots tech scene.
We're expecting around a hundred attendees - from London, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Newcastle - and have scheduled eighteen talks in two blocks throughout the evening. We're really proud of the quality of speakers and their submissions - it really wouldn't be possible without their efforts. We have speakers from local startups, international charities, venture capital firms, national broadcasters, academia and healthcare. Wow...and wow!
As well as a great mix of cultural, creative and technological sessions, there'll be opportunities to hang out, socialise and also appreciate the work of some local artists (just before we open up)...here's the schedule for the evening:
19:00 Katie Lips: Bringing Social to Coffee on iPhone
19:05 Jeff Allen : IT in Africa 19:10 Tim Panton: Don't forget voice! Telephony hacks for web 2.0 hackers 19:15 Michael Sparks: Embracing concurrency for fun, utility & simpler code 19:20 Dean Vipond: Perfection in design
19:25 Alexandra Dechamps-Sonsino: Could hardware hacking save us? 19:30 Ian Pringle: No News Is Good News 19:35 Dominic Hodgson: The Future of search 19:40 Ed French: Funding for technology startups
19:45 Break & refreshments
20:05 Tom Scott: My Life In Twenty Graphs 20:10 Stuart Childs, Richard Garside, Dave Lynch: FriiSpray Digital Grafitti with IR tracking 20:15 Katie Brown: Recovery 2.0 - Digital Inclusion & developing social models of recovery in practice
20:20 Arturo Servin: Practical Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning 20:25 Glen Smith: Mass customisation and the one-to-one future 20:30 Guy Dickinson: The Future Of Reading 20:35 Philip Hemsted: Psycho teams and theory of mind
20:40 James Boardwell: James Boardwell: From patterns to patterns! 20:45 Ian Forrester: Tweethookup
20:50 Wrap Up 21:00 Close
Ignite will also be a great example of where Leeds' coworking community is flourishing, particularly the residents of our venue at Old Broadcasting House. Kensei Media will be providing a live HD webcast of the event with True Media filming each presentation for later publication online. So if you can't make it on Thursday, we'll have everything available online within a few days :)
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