Preoccupations

Become a much, much better digital photographer

It would be great to pool ideas and know-how. I know far too little about digital photography and am not even sure I'm using the best format of file for shooting.

One resource I have found is this Flickr group (newsfeed here). Another (in the making) is 43 Things: see more progress on "become a much, much better digital photographer"...

Eccentricity

Eccentricity has always abounded where and when strength of character has abounded: and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

John Stuart Mill (via creativity/machine)

'Design dissolves in behaviour'

I'm getting the picture clearer in my head …

Naoto Fukasawa:

Good design means not leaving traces of the designer and not overworking the design. If you overdo the design, it will touch the beholder's consciousness.

I think that when people and things are within the boundaries of consciousness they are at their farthest from heaven.

Fabio Sergio (2002):

I've always had a desire to make the area where people, design and technology meet my playground, but I think I fell in love with the idea of a connected culture in 1996. What somewhat brought it all together, and pointed me in the direction I am still following professionally today, was one of Fritjof Capra's books, "The Web of Life".

Coming from a slightly more philosophical and ecological angle Capra created a coherent scenario, coupling Chaos and Complexity Theory-derived concepts with intuitions driven by the emerging internet phenomenon. He envisioned that the western world and its underlying cultural matrix were shifting towards a new network model. Even though he was not the only one to do so, just like others he was right. Needless to say I've been interested in understanding where that model would take us and our culture ever since.

Peter Morville (2002):

How do knowledge workers learn? How do they decide what to learn next? What motivates them to share? These questions are central to the challenges of knowledge management, and yet most corporate portals and online communities are designed in ignorance of their answers. The truth lies within the social fabric that connects people to people and people to content. Relationships, trust and serendipity play key roles. …

We use people to find content. We use content to find people. Success in the former requires we know what other people know and who other people know. Success in the latter demands good search, navigation and content management systems. We might also think of the documents themselves as "human surrogates," representing the knowledge and interests of authors. And of course, we humans also serve as surrogates for one another. …

We humans are very social animals. It's about time more of us started recognizing this in the systems we design.

Matt Jones (2003):

At the moment, it seems to me, the discussion of social software is massively technocentric, seat'n'screen-centric, expert-user-centric; possibly as an innocent result of those in its vanguard. For a real great leap forward IMHO, we need to cross the streams of social software and smartmobs with adaptive design. Expand and map the discussion from:

software-that's-better-cos-there's-people-there

to

places-that-are better-for-people-cos-there's-software-there;

and in both cases have the emphasis on people.

Caterina Fake (of Flickr; December, 2004):

I posted this from 43 Things, specifically the Crawl the Cafes of San Francisco "thing". 43 Things is social software in which you create a community of like-minded people who share your goals and aspirations, and in the case of this "thing", I was noting that I'd already "crawled the cafes of San Francisco" and was deeming it "worth doing". 43 Things is being built by a bunch of smart people, formerly of Amazon, who formed the Robot Co-op in Seattle. These guys came up to visit us a couple months ago, there being a lot of overlapping interests between our two companies, and they really get social software. Last night Stewart told me something that Matt Jones said when asked to define social software. "Social software", Matt said, "is something that gets better the more people are using it." This is a lot harder to achieve than it looks. First, it's really hard to build something that people will not only visit, but return to again and again. And then, once they're there, you find that most web sites get significantly worse the more people that are on it -- think Usenet or Yahoo chat rooms. And then, to look at social software that works, think of Amazon or Craig's List. One thing that both the 43 Things and Flickr teams have done is create a gregarious piece of software: it doesn't wall itself in, but interacts with other software, as evidenced by my ability to post on 43 Things and this blog at the same time, and likewise with photographs on Flickr.

And what, indeed, is del.icio.us without the Inbox? Matt Jones (December, 2004):

… a personal linkdump and lightweight way to spool things to the web …

Heaven is other people, and great social software temporarily without them is purgatory.

Chaos and Creativity

I've blogged about chaos and creativity before (here). This from gapingvoid struck me:

Chaos can be a positive thing. Chaos is inherently part of the creative act. To embrace creativity means you must also embrace chaos. Things don’t happen when everything is neat and “just so”. Creativity is all about distruption. The people who tell you that creativity is pain-free are liars. The people who tell you they’ve got a plan are liars. There is no plan. There’s just you, God and the need to invent. And this uncertain world is what most of us now find ourselves entering, willingly or otherwise. …

The Creative Age is upon us. The Chaotic Age is upon us. We are scared. Damn right, we should be scared. But out of the terror comes the amazing opportunities for us to expand both on the material and spiritual level. The fewer safety nets there are to save us, the less choice we have to be anything other than ourselves, the less choice we have besides doing what is meaningful to us. And finding ourselves, doing what matters, becoming the person we were born to be, this is what God put on this earth to do.

We live in amazing and interesting times. If we're lucky, while on this earth we can do a damn good job proving it.

Text-messaging glossaries

Lingo Dxnre, a dictionary (pdf) of text-messaging shorthands.

Also: 10meters.com and Environmental Studies.

Software patents, the EU … and Poland

Cory Doctorow writes:

For years now, the forces of good in Europe have been fighting against reforms to EU patent laws that would allow software patents to be filed in Europe. Software patents have existed in the US for some time now, with disastrous results -- rather than encouraging innovation, these patents have been used by companies who produce nothing except lawsuits to shut down whole classes of technologies or to extort money from them.

… the Euro-activists have won again and again, every battle, and the greedy jerks who support patents have strong-armed and cajoled the European Parliament into breaking its own rules to overturn the victories of the activists. But at the very final moment, the Polish Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Science and Information Technology stepped in and blocked the Patent Directive, taking it off the EU agenda (for now, anyway). It was an incredibly brave and important moment, one that will keep the European technology industry and the citizens who rely on it free and safe.

ThankPoland is a site that is collecting thank-yous for the Polish Undersecretary of State, particularly from the EU, but also from around the world. We owe him a debt of gratitude and it's an honor to thank him today.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

Via Metafilter, amazing colour pictures of early twentieth century Russia: 'Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii took three b&w photos of his subjects using red, green, and blue filters. Now, they've been digitally composited'.

The Emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan (1880-1944), taken in 1911, shortly after his accession

A couple in traditional dress in the mountainous interior region of Gunib on the north slope of the Caucasus Mountains (now the Dagestan Republic of the Russian Federation)

For an explanation of "Digichromatography" and for much more about Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, see here.

Standard time

The graffiti reads, "thank god, now I can regulate my life".

Flickr

Broadband Britain

Via Smart Mobs — Demos has published a report (available as a pdf download here, Open Access licence) looking at the way Broadband is being taken up in the UK and its implications:

As the number of connections grows by 50,000 every week, broadband internet is increasingly a social phenomenon and a political issue. However, as broadband opens up the public realm, its political direction may be determined as much by users as policy-makers.

Demos has carried out in-depth research into public attitudes to broadband, and will paint a detailed picture of how high-speed access changes the way people use the internet. Broadband Britain is the interim report of the project.

Broadband access makes possible the ‘end of asymmetry’; a shift of power from institutions to individuals.  Far from an anomaly, a music industry revolutionised by broadband is but the leading edge of a set of changes that may sweep across our creative industries and public services.

Broadband users are already changing fast, becoming increasingly confident and pro-active:

• The majority have posted content online, and 18% post daily
• A fifth maintain websites and the same number have logged on before breakfast
• A quarter have organised get-togethers online

As a result, we argue that public institutions will increasingly be judged against four emerging principles; flexibility, personal support and engagement, community and citizen leadership.  Broadband may help to unleash a set of challenges to which our public services must respond.

It's Christmas

From John Quiggin's Xmas message (posted in 2003, re-posted 2004):

CP Snow once said that most ancient British traditions dated back to the second half of the 19th century. The same idea recently popped up in the London Review of Books, with Stefan Collini referring to the

second half of the 19th century, the palaeolithic age of so many British cultural institutions.

Christmas provides an ideal illustration of this.

All the central features of Xmas date back, more or less exactly, to this period, including Christmas pudding, mince pies and cake, Christmas cards and Santa Claus. Although Dickens’ 1843 Christmas Carol, tiresomely readapted every couple of years since, presents a ‘traditional’ Christmas, it is much more accurate to see him as The Man who invented Christmas and his book as a work of invention.