Bringing in the New

We are in the middle of adding redirects for authenticblogging.com and presencelabs.com over to our new home at nodestone.com.

Surprise!

Hopefully it isn’t a surprise that you’ve landed here, but if it is, let me explain.   Libby Davy (of authentic blogging) and I (Graeme Sutherland of presencelabs.com) are putting our work and blogs together into nodestone.com.  So, we’ve built a new blog with the content of both of them, and I’m just now cutting over to the new site.

Basically, it should be business as usual once the transfer is complete. In the meantime, there might be a few little issues wih locating your favourite pages. Bear with us for the next few hours on that.

We hope you enjoy the new site.  We’ve had fun making it.  (Except for the late nights and the hard bits :-)

Technical Stuff

Don’t read this unless you care about the technical details of the changeover.

We’re basically putting in permanant redirects (301s) from the old domains to nodestone.com, with a bit of special redirect magic applied to make sure that old url parts map to the new ones.  This means (at least in theory) that google will still like us in the morning, and all our old paths will go somewhere relevant.  Permanent redirects also mean that records get updated permanently, so things like feed readers should get the new feed address if they have half a brain.

That’s all.  I’m off to arrange the nameserver changes for authenticblogging.com.   Ciao.

Shine weekend

We’re just back from the Shine Unconference. Lib was there for the lot, but I was only there for Sunday. I’m a bit tired to say much about it this evening.

But.. it was great and inspiring hanging around and chatting with a lot of people who are really going with their passions and doing great and good things. It was a very warm and friendly space, and I really enjoyed the sessions we did today.

Lib ran a short discussion on Authenticity Online which sparked a robust discussion of a bunch of issues around social media, free content, risk management, online reputation and online tools. There are a lot of questions out there around social media and the third sector. We collected some meaty questions which we’ll post over on the authentic blogging community in the next couple of days along with the beginnings of some answers. Thanks to all who participated in that discussion and hope you join us over on the community to work through the issues.

Busy afternoon — we then whizzed over to the “What’s in a Name” session being run by Neru. Lib and I are working on rebranding, so wanted to get some tips on choosing a new name for us. Interesting ideas from there. Thanks to the Neru team and all who threw in their thoughts. We’ll keep working on that new name and see what happens.

It always seems a long train ride home to Brighton on a Sunday, but when we got home it was still sunny and the air was fresh. It was quiet. You got the sense a lot of people had satisfying weekends and were now relaxing at home. I sure did.

Recommendation Ventures powers ahead: IceTV recommendations live

I haven’t talked a lot about Scouta for a bit… We’ve been internally capacity building. And we’ve been focussing on providing recommendations as a web service to web and media companies with members and content that can be enabled for recommendations.

We do this under the banner of Scouta’s real company name, Recommendation Ventures, which you’ll hear a lot more about in the coming months.

There’s a lot of specialist knowledge around providing good recommendations, and packaging a recommendation services as a set of web services makes a lot of sense. We can take a set of content (URLs) and some identified members and visitors, and produce personalized recommendations in real-time to embed in a website or provide on a set top box, mobile etc.

But, the big news today is that our recommendation services are powering IceTV’s new IceTV Recommendations. IceTV say:

IceTV customers can now automatically receive intelligent suggestions on TV shows that may interest them based on their favourite TV shows, series recordings and similar recording decisions made by fellow IceTV users.

IceTV Recommendations are provided to IceTV users on an ongoing basis thanks to a recent partnership with Perth based Australian start-up, Recommendation Ventures Pty Ltd. The two pioneering companies have teamed-up to give users intuitive recommendations, based on the individual user’s tastes. When combined with the existing value-add features of IceTV, Recommendation Venture’s intelligent technology will allow user’s to receive truly personalised suggestions and as a result, an even greater TV viewing experience.

We’ve had some good press coverage. It has been picked up by TechCrunch and Gizmodo

Moved to The Werks

I’ve moved offices and joined the emerging coworking community The Werks on Church Road in Hove. A dynamic and interesting space full of dynamic and interesting people werking away.

For those that know the space a little, I’ve got a permanent desk on the First floor in the back corner, sitting across from Jim Callender.

Week off next week

Just to let you all know, am taking a short break next week (14th - 18th April 2008) — off the the Isle of Wight with family for a few days of (hopefully) sunshine and spring air.

I’ll still be around for emergencies, but am really trying to get a little break in before school goes back and the big work push towards summer begins.

Recommendation web services

We’re starting to roll out recommendations as a web service as a part of the Scouta product set. See more info at the new Recommendation Ventures website.

Lib at Lift08

Lib has headed off to Lift08 in Geneva. Here she is giving some reflections so far…

Empower Controls

I’m really pleased to say I’m embarking on some interesting work with Empower Controls to help them with some stuff that I can’t talk about yet.

From their home page:

There is a significant waste of energy in home offices, home theatres and office workstations. Devices are often left on or in a standby state. We often fail to realise that devices such as a TV, DVD player, PC, scanner, printer or mobile phone charger consume power all of the time, even when not being used or when they are in a standby state. Hundreds of millions of devices all left in a standby state adds up to a lot of wasted energy.

Empower Controls solutions allow everyday people to intelligently switch off these types of products when not in use and to significantly reduce their energy consumption, with a minimum of fuss.

It is so nice to see this awareness coming to automation. I’m delighted to be a part of this.

2008 Predictions: Internet and Social Media

It is traditional. Writing some predictions for 2008. I’m going to focus on the Internet, social media and associated technology.

Google Search: Trust

I think 2008 will be the year when we’ll realize that we can’t have search being a closed algorithm any more. I get the feeling that it is going to be just too easy for a couple of folk at Google to work out how to pervert search a tiny bit and make a couple of billion extra in revenue. Given that you can do that, it is going to happen eventually, isn’t it, despite the ‘Do No Evil’ thing, which is just sounding more and more defensive these days.

Time to dust off that wikia vision of open search and get moving on it. Ooooh look, the are launching something on Jan 7th. We’ve only got the one Internet, and it would be a pity if we lost trust in our search results.

Also, I’ve always been really uneasy about the whole SEO thing. It feels to me like the SEO gurus are like high priests claiming to know what God is thinking.

Facebook. What?

2008 will be the year we collectively forget about facebook. And give up on social networking for the sake of social networking. My hope is that Open Social and similar will help make possible really useful applications that are socially enabled.

Web $2

You pronounce that web two dollars. I predict the end of Web 2.0 rounded corner build-it-and-think-of-a-business-model bubble. Why? Because with weakening economies in the US and Europe, VCs belts are going to tighten and there will be less money lying around for the high-risk punt at gathering a few million members to somehow later.

Those that have collected the few million members will start the money making machines. I’d predict some good old-fashioned outrage as fun Web 2 sites start to sell their members data or attention to stay afloat.

I’m hoping the focus goes back on to decent revenue-making businesses and some really good ideas emerge and start and work. And people actually pay for it and are happy doing that. People don’t mind paying for stuff, as long as they can really see the value. You need more than (another plain old) social network to pass that test.

The answer to the question that twitter is

I think this year we’ll see the answer to the question “What is twitter for?” And I’m not sure we are going to like the answer. See Web 2$ above. I’d love twitter to stay its lovely simple self, but I’m just a little worried it can’t be.

A new A-List :-)

The old A-listers will collapse en mass from spending too many long nights mumbling into seesmic and will be replaced with a new widgetized microblogging A-list that say nothing useful but say it all the time all over the place. Oh hang on, has this already happened? :-)

Widgety Goodness Highlights

What a great conference Widgety Goodness was. Congrats to Ivan for pulling it off, from idea to hundreds of people showing up in six weeks or something.

It was good, really good. I got to spend a day with the concepts and details of widgets. I had the sortof skeleton of an idea of what the whole widget thing was about, and then spent the day really adding flesh and ideas to that ever so slippery widget concept.

And some neat and interesting ideas have come out of it all too. Here’s a few of my highlights and thoughts:

Physical Widgets

Russell Davies helped fill in my Amazon wish list with a couple of real-world widgets. Real physical things that talk to the internet and physically exist in the real world.

Firstly, the Wattson which is a sexy-looking real-world implementation of the Viridian Energy Meter proposed by Bruce Sterling in a design competition in, gee, about 2000. This idea here is that if you can see your energy consumption via something sitting on the kitchen table, you might just go and turn off some more lights and appliances on standby. I want one of these.

And I’m still deeply intrigued by the Nabaztag WiFi bunny.

Platforms

There was a lot of talk about widget building, distribution and management platforms. All good stuff. I think some of the vendors did a bit much spruiking their own stuff rather than addressing the big questions, but you get that. It was good the the full lifecycle was represented, and I was delighted to see a lot of talk about metrics around widget usage rather than simply downloads, placements and impressions. This is getting towards the behaviour-based or participation-based metrics we are starting to get out of our scouta media recommendation platform.

Distributed Rights

Great to get into a discussion about content ownership among microsites and widgets. Who owns the data you put in a comment field? I hope we can get something together to come up with a simple way to represent terms and rights next to every input box. A litle rainbow of colours or something. Thanks to Kris from js-kit for originating that discussion.

Freshness and humility

These days, I value more and more the people that are brave and real enough to accept and talk about their mistakes and what they don’t know:

• Google can’t be as cool as their speakers always say they are. Sorry, but I just don’t buy the perfection. It just seems arrogant and unreal.
• If you are a widget platform vendor, I’m happy enough for you to tell me once that you have the best platform. But please don’t do that for half an hour. Move on. Tell me what you are worried about, or confused about. I want to find the human becoming in what you are doing.
• Will McInnes filled the room with fresh Oxygen with his presentation about Nixon-McInnes evolution into a social media agency. I like the humility, I like the experiment. And thanks for the name-check Will!

Just being there

Gee conferences are marvelous things (though the afterparty++ hangover wasn’t). Just getting out there and sharing. Wow. In the day I threw a couple of new ideas out there, worked a couple more through with people during drinks, and chatted probably complete nonsense well into Friday morning.

The value and power of getting together face to face to share and work on stuff is remarkable. Nice one, Ivan.

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