Questions

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Nick Galvin, a Features Writer with the Sydney Morning Herald, asking if I’d be interested in answering some quick questions about what’s hot on the web for a feature in their weekly technology supplement for the “interested home user”, Icon. I jumped at the chance and thanks must go to John Allsopp recommending me.

The piece was published today and I finally got see who the other people were. I put a scan on my Flickrstream so you can read the full text at either Large or Original (bloody large). Huge thanks must go to the legendary Seng Mah for yet again allowing me to use his photo of me from last August as my publicly respectable face.

Update: Turns out the article did get published online, so it’s much easier to read there.

Answers

What I found most interesting is comparing my answers with those of Cheryl, Virginia, Tim and John. The differences are more telling than the similarities, I think. Cheryl’s answers are consumer-focused, John talks about the big picture and Tim can’t help but dish on what’s important to developers. Of the four, Virginia’s are probably closest to mine in ideas, although hers are expressed far more beautifully. (And she led me to a gorgeous new theme for my tumblelog!)

I copped a bit of a ribbing at work about the reference in the standfirst to ‘internet gurus’. Fair enough. I find it amusing too. Thing is, though, that I know some other internet gurus.

Anybody willing to spend any time at all reading my infrequent posts is automatically qualified as pretty damn interested in the internet (or related to me. Hi, Mum!). So I want to know what you would have answered. What are your responses to the three questions? You don’t have to stick to 180 words like we did!

1. What are the three things online that are exciting you most?
2. What gadget do you never leave home without? And given most everybody will say their phone or their laptop, why?
3. What will be the Next Big Thing?

Add answers or links to answers below.

Talking to some friends recently about the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter, I realised they hadn’t seen the Twitterific readme file. It contains some “Power User” settings that you can run in your terminal. Some you may find useful; others not so much.

I only use two. The first is straightforward. The discontinuity of real names in Twitterific jars me. I prefer the consistency of usernames everywhere, so I use a simple switch to displayScreenName instead. The real value, however, lies in the tweetTextFilter command.

This command allows you to define an ICU regular expression to filter pretty much anything under the sun. My example below isn’t very complicated. It simply blocks all tweets that mention either Techcrunch, or ‘griefer’, or refer to a user by name of ‘fanboi’. The difference between the last two being that I see no references to ‘griefer’ at all, whereas I can still see when ‘fanboi’ replies to me but not when others reply to, or reference, her or him. The first file is just my .gitignore file to exclude the actual filter I use.

Update: I’ve added the ‘Olympics’ and ‘080808’ because I’m a grouch. (Well, partly because I’m stupidly busy, but mostly because I’m a grouch.)

I decided to post this after seeing Tantek's work towards a Troll Filter for Twitter searches. There are people and sites I prefer to exclude from my life where possible. Mostly because they continually take time and energy for little return.

This is a simple method for cutting those sites/people from at least one part of your life. I still follow the occasional link to Techcrunch and similar sites that’s been encoded by TinyURL et al because I’m not quite ready for a scorched earth policy, but every other mention slips me by. And guess what? I don’t miss it at all.

As for the infrequent and occasional griefer or fanboi-inspiring micro-celebrity in my life, I carry on blissfully ignorant of whatever negative emotions they typically cause in me that earned them the brand.

I've posted the commands on Github’s Gist for anybody who wants to fork it and add their own parameters (and because I wanted to try out Gist). I’d love to see anybody expand on this, or any of the other power options. If you want to confirm your regular expressions do what you planned, there is a live testing page available.

I was very pleased to be speaking at Remix Australia this week. Thanks must go to Michael Kordahi, Shane Morris, and Nick Hodge for trusting that a guy who hadn’t done a public presentation in nearly a year could deliver the goods.

Talking ‘bout a revolution

Damian Edwards and I were asked to do the IE8 session together. The point of the session was to give an overview of the new features and capabilities, in particular the brand-spanking new standards-compliant rendering engine. We also decided to make the most of the opportunity to pimp standards-based design methodologies and concepts to the .NET and Silverlight focused crowd.

Damian took responsibility for developing solid demos to illustrate standards-based design techniques and the innovations in IE8 such as WebSlices and Activities. I delivered the historical context, the philosophy and the concepts we wanted to impart.

I think we ended up with a solidly crafted presentation that wove the themes of Internet Explorer 8’s development principles, standards-based design philosophies and best practice web innovation together. We’ve had some great feedback so far and one member of the Melbourne audience even said: That was the most concise succinct explanation of those concepts I’ve ever heard. This was the most productive session of the day for me. Obviously Damian and I are rapt that somebody felt so strongly about our work. That really made the day for me.

Huge thanks to Damian for all the work he put in to make sure we nailed it!

I’ve added the presentation to Slideshare, although it won’t be anywhere near as cool without all the demos and we used the slides for points of reference rather than as detailed content:

| View | Upload your own

Turns out Damo posted the code from the demos on his blog.

Rolling with my homies

As ever, the absolute best part of the conference was all the amazing incredible talented people I got to meet, talk with and hang with.

Mark Pesce delivered a stirring call to action for all developers in the keynote. We hold the key to the future. We’re the ones who can empower both the public and our own organisations by building the right tools. You can read his speech in its entirety on his blog and the video has just been posted. Go get some!

I met the incredibly friendly folks from Soul Solutions at the first speaker rehearsals. Bronwen Zande and John O’Brien are two of the nicest, most genuine people I’ve met in a long time and they build awesome stuff too as I discovered when I watched their demos in the Windows Live Platform sessions. I’ve been expecting to see presence indication in more and more sites and it was cool to see how they’d integrated IM into their applications seamlessly.

My favourite presentation of the conference was easily the one covering the new possibilities in Silverlight 2. Jonas Follesø built an awesome Twitter/Flickr mashup in front of us in about 35 minutes, while explaining in precise detail every step and the reasoning for it. The source and slides are available at that link. If that wasn’t incredible enough (and it was), José Fajardo demonstrated some really astonishing DeepZoom prototypes he’d built.

José decided that people haven’t recognised the true potential in DeepZoom and so he asked himself 3 questions, then tried to answer them each in code within 30 minutes. He showed us the results and convinced me, at least, that we need to be looking much further ahead than we have been with interactions on the web.

His questions went something like this:

1. What if every image on the web were DeepZoomable?
2. What if we had full control over every document on the web?
3. What if people could share DeepZoom images easily?

I don’t have the precise questions and I don’t want to steal his thunder for when he blogs it (you are blogging this, right, José?), but his examples were simply phenomenal. I’m going to be asking myself a lot of questions like this in future – to help myself stretch my knowledge and use of the technologies I know. And to stretch how they’re used by everyone. 30 minute prototyping exercises are the way of the future!

In combination, the presentation by Jonas and José convinced me that I need to learn Silverlight. There is much potential for awesomeness there, if used properly.

I also met the very talented, very cool Hege Rokenes. She’s a Norwegian graphic designer who’s freelancing in Melbourne for the next year or so. She won the Silverlight video clip contest with her Step Back video (Silverlight required – of course). She’s looking for more freelance or a position with a Melbourne company. If you want a talented designer with an interest in web standards and Silverlight, you’d be crazy not to look her up.

I finally got to meet Tatham Oddie, who I really should have met by now as he’s into all the same things I am, but comes at them from a Microsoft technologies angle. He was even at Web Directions South last year! Go read his post on Location Awareness to see why I’m very keen to see what he gets up to next!

And lastly, there were so many other amazing people that I ran into in hallways, stairwells and bars. I have a bunch of business cards, contact details and new Twitter followers, so I’ll be keeping in touch with them too.

Whole lotta love

Many people asked me why I was going to a Microsoft conference. The previous section of this article is why. There are brilliant talented friendly people in every community. Cross-pollination of ideas, philosophies and experiences can only help to push the web forward. Exposure to different ideas and techniques that are new to me can only help me.

I talked to people about my work, both at Atlassian and outside. I shared concepts about integrating with large-scale CMSes, modernising legacy codebases, and promoting the open web. I compared notes on Ruby, Rails, .NET and Java. I learned about new technologies and techniques. I saw cool prototypes and interactions. I think I even convinced a few RIA developers to go learn HTML!

Next time you have the opportunity to go to a conference, do it. Seize the experiences and make them your own. What you get out of a conference comes from what you put in. It’s not just about sitting in sessions and heckling via the backchannel. It’s about participating in every way you can.

I appreciated every second of this week. Remix sums it up nicely.

I was recently incommunicado for roughly a month. I was traveling, and living life mostly offline but for occasional travel arrangements etc. This resulted in the kind of online buildup you hear about from such circumstances: a couple of dozen direct emails (gradually being responded to this week); several hundred mailing list emails (deleted); thousands of RSS items (all marked as read); 14,000 unread in Gmail’s spam folder and a relatively small selection of bacn, including 74 adds from Twitter users. 74 in 4 weeks? WTF, Twitter?

Break it down

I wanted to use this sample to give myself some idea of who these people are so, as I processed the requests, I started listing how many I blocked, how many were bots and how many I thought of as Real People™ (possibly not the same thing as actual real people). And being the anal-retentive pedant I am, this lead to creation of more categories for those who didn’t fit the above three. In turn leading to some people meeting multiple categories and this loosely-premised article looking even less scientific - if that’s possible.

Obviously, this is likely to reveal far more about how I use Twitter than any data about Twitter itself. I found it interesting. You’ve been warned.

The numbers

By major grouping

I counted:

• 41 Real People™,
• 8 of those odd link-freaks,
• 16 purely promotional vehicles,
• 2 fake personalities, and
• 17 bots.

I added 14 of these and blocked 26 - which included all 17 bots.

Let’s work our way through in reverse order before we get into the Real People.

Bots (17)

You’ve all been added by them. In permanent use by spammers and unethical promoters, I block them immediately upon identification. I direly wish Twitter had a “Mark as a Spamming Sod” option like Pownce does. It’s about time the application stopped treating every account as if it were a person. That’s blatantly no longer the case.

That’s not to say that Twitter bots aren’t useful. They’re fantastic, actually. But only when they’re opt-in. The ones that come to find you are the type of loathsome evil that I associate with marketers who call your house or cheerfully knock on your door on a Saturday morning while normal people are still hungover.

Fake personalities (2)

Some I like, some I don’t. Most fade away within the kind of period that makes me not bother adding them. Especially since they’re unsolicited.

Purely promotional vehicles (16)

In this sample, they varied from sites and companies to bands or American political propagandists. They’re kind of like bots, I only find them valuable if I’ve sought them out for a purpose.

Link-freaks (8)

There is an obvious visual pattern created on a Twitter profile when somebody adds a link at the end of every single tweet. It’s readily detectable within milliseconds. Somehow it is even more obvious when there is the occasional comment or reply thrown in.

These folks confuse me. They’re not bots. Most of them don’t seem to be using automated submission of links and yet they post more than 90% lame link action.

Nobody knows that much interesting stuff. Nobody has that much original information at their fingertips. These folks are just re-posting stuff they find on aggregation sites. If I cared about the generic links that get posted repeatedly in every link graveyard on the net I’d subscribe to feeds from Digg, SlashDot, Techmeme or any one of 15,000 others. I don’t need it on Twitter.

Quit grumping and talk about the Real People™

I broke down these folks even further based on what I thought were interesting differentiators:

• 6 total newbies with virtually no posts but following 40-odd people;
• 13 people following 3,000+ people and seemingly attempting conversation with all of them;
• 2 people who used to follow me re-adding me (now that I was completely quiet?);
• 4 colleagues;
• 4 people who seem to use Twitter prolifically but don’t have a bio or a link off-site;
• 7 people who had recently replied to Jeremiah Owyang; and
• 21 self-identified Social Media Enthusiasts/Evangelists.

What the fuck is a Social Media Enthusiast? I know what a social media enthusiast is. Some people would probably classify me as one. But as something that warrants title case? Is it a job title? Who pays people just to be enthusiastic about stuff?

One answer to the last question would be: no one. Every single one of the SM Enthusiasts appeared to be a self-employed consultant. I would love some of those folks to let us in on how well that’s working out for them.

Evangelists, on the other hand, is a familiar (if conflicted) term. The big consultancies all have Social Media consultants now. I can easily see them called ‘Evangelist’ to ride the wave of familiarity with that particular term in technology circles.

Some folks even provided the slash themselves. They are both ‘Enthusiasts’ and ‘Evangelists’. Either that or they find themselves torn in that reputedly tricky limbo in between?

So what?

It’s a valid point. I don’t know that any of this means anything (except that @jowyang is an exceptionally popular Twitterer amongst a certain subset of users). I do find the numbers interesting in an abstract kind of way. They’re indicative of a broad range of Twitter uses that hopefully illustrates out the pointlessness of all those Twitter Etiquette posts that spring up every time some blogger cracks it with those he is following on Twitter. Pruning according to need vs satisfacton is the answer to that issue, not complaining that nobody does it the way you want them too.

I’m curious to see if others break their requests down in similar fashion (even on a one-by-one basis) or if I’m a little too obsessive. What do you do?

Twitter is a strange beast. Adored and loathed in probably equal parts, the debate of Twitter’s usefulness will continue unabated. Just as the debate about MySpace’s attractiveness or the virtue of OSX over Windows, it seems destined to become one of the tech world’s ‘holy wars’.

It is once you make the decision to have a Twitter account, though, that the real issues begin. Public or private? Friend or follower? Site name, real name or a fresh pseudonym? And how much is too much?

For some people, these decisions are easy. But others have circumstances complicated by personality, friendships, exposure, gender, and employment. These issues have been confronted by the users of all new personal publishing platforms. Twitter is no different, but its immediacy brings new scope to concerns about privacy.

What do you use Twitter for and how does your concept of its use conflict with others?

Some people use it for keeping up with real-life friends and some use it for keeping up with interesting ideas. Some people use it for networking. These are all really the one use: a simple low cost-of-entry method for learning about somebody you’re interested in. It’s the end points that differ.

What do others do with all that information I publish everyday? They read it, skim it, skip it. Sometimes they respond in public, via Twitter or a blog post. Sometimes privately, by email, direct tweet or IM. My Twitter ‘friends’ aren’t the only ones with that information - Google and Technorati index it and anybody can find it.

And once it’s on Google…

It becomes permanent. That information is never going away. It will be forever available in various caches and search engines for the lifespan of the internet as we know it. No wonder some people feel uncomfortable. Caught-in-the-moment tweets may be regretted later. Twitter will let you delete them, but Google won’t.

Many of my friends keep their Twitters private, restricted only to those they select as friends. This banishes the spectre of permanence, but creates fresh social dilemmas. Technology offers no solutions for how to let someone know that you don’t want them to see your tweets.

Going back to high school

This is both exclusive and excluding. It leads to bruised feelings and hurt comments, creating pain on both sides. Reminds me of adolescence…

With good reason, because these hurt feelings exist as we, the users, have not evolved to match the technologies. And I don’t mean that our sharks don’t have frickin’ laser beams on their heads. We’ve not yet equipped ourselves to cope with the social implications of using them. Twitter is just the latest in an ongoing line of disruptive technologies that are not only changing the way we view and use this thing we call ‘the Web’, but also changing the way we interact with each other.

We often refer to technologies as ‘immature’ to show that we see further development; that it has not yet reached its fullest potential. It is not a term people use to describe themselves in relationship to a technology very often, but it fits with increasing frequency as what we build progresses further from how we think.

New technologies require consideration

Joining Twitter requires as much careful consideration as starting a blog or publishing photos on Flickr. Sure, you can just throw yourself out there and damn the consequences, but there will be consequences. Or you can carefully consider the possible benefits for you versus the potential downsides, weigh them up, then choose. I figure most of us fall somewhere in between.

There will always be people who embrace everything full throttle. And there will be always be those who turn away and pretend it isn’t happening. I don’t think that web professionals can afford to be either. We need to have a sense of proportion; to balance the thrill of the new against the hard-won experience. So, dive in to Twitter, folks. Get with it. Learn about it. Feel the pain, the joy and the undeniable banality. Teach yourself all the tricks and pitfalls. I guarantee you’ll find that useful, no matter what you ultimately decide about Twitter.

This has been a long time coming. I’ve always followed the conversation. I read every site. I scoured the web for content as an increasingly voracious consumer. I stuffed more and more of everything into my brain and I couldn’t get enough.

Then I got the agency job. One that had me slaving 14-18 hours most days to produce slick high-quality standards-compliant accessible websites, usually for government departments. I never installed a feed reader on my new machine. I never had time.

Work was my life until Web Essentials in 2005. Everybody there was talking about Flickr, telling me it was a revolution. A new kind of application. A new form of online community. A new paradigm!

I scoffed at them like any other sensible person does when faced with such fervent reverence. But, after the conference, I looked at the photos and I wanted to comment… Trapped! Once I had an account, it seemed almost churlish not to post at least one photo. This started a long term obsession with photography, mostly self-involved.

More importantly, it started an attitude of experimentation, a willingness to sign up for any and every app that comes along. To subscribe to every feed, for at least a little while. It also meant that, after a while, I was actually giving back. Producing content and contributing in some small measure to both sides of the signal/noise ratio.

And then there was Twitter…

I’ve been writing small blips of bollocks there since October sometime (actually it was 10:53 AM October 27, 2006). And, for some reason, I can’t stop.

I love putting ideas out there. I love discussion and interaction. I love sharing my thoughts, then watching my thoughts and your thoughts grow and commingle.

In 2005, Molly Holzschlag told me I needed a blog, so I asked her what I should write. Being the woman she is, Molly said: “Everything!” Since that time, others have suggested it occasionally and I’ve always asked the same question. Their answers vary dramatically and that was my excuse for not building this site. I never knew what I would write about, and I still don’t. But I am going to write.

My hand has been forced by one of my favourite evil geniuses, Andrew Krespanis. The sneaky bugger slaved away for weeks to give me LachStock as a gift. Aided and abetted by a secret squirrel pact, he left me totally overwhelmed.

I still don’t know how to say thank you for that gift. I’m not even sure that is possible. The only appropriate response is to do this, and do it right. So, after 6 years of living, breathing and talking web, I’m finally making some web of my own. I’m joining the conversation I’ve followed for so long. I don’t know what I’ll be writing or where it will take us, but, fuck, I reckon it’ll be fun!