London Geek Dinner: Jaiku

I’m heading off to the London Geek Dinner tonight to hear all about Jaiku from Jyri Engeström.

I think they are onto something. Whereas twitter and co are really just messaging, these guys seem to be talking about continuous presence
(all the time). Which is quite different to chatting sometimes.

I’ve got a lot more to say about continuous presence; really need to write an essay about my own ideas sometime soon. I just need a catalyst to start writing.

And Jason Calacanis is going to be there too. He raised an interesting question on LinkedIn sometime recently, and I want to share a few thoughts with him if I get the chance.

Upcoming event

Scouta #6 Web App in Australia

Our social media recommender playground scouta.com has come in at number 6 in the top 60 web applications in Australia as named by Read/Write Web.

Google Developer Day

Today I’m heading into London to join in the fun at the 2007 Google Developer Day.

Pretty much all the day is going to be focussed on getting the most out of Google’s APIs. I’m most familiar with youtube’s APIs at this point, but I’m pretty intrigued with what is going on in the mapping and mobile areas.

The rhythm of IM is a powerful thing

A year or so ago I proposed that we needed a timeline graph for Skype online-ness.

Well, I’m pleased to see that somebody has done something similar for Twitter.

Sean Voisen has made TwitterViz which does exactly what I was talking about — but for Twitter, not Skype. I want to know more about the rhythms of life of my online community, and this will do it.

I mainly think of this kind of tool in a business environment, because I’m always working with people on the other side of the globe, and understanding their rhythms really helps.

But, for me, I want this averaged over days or weeks. I want to help my brain get a clue of when they are about, based on the last month or few months with the exceptions thrown out.

Nice once Sean. I aim to catch up with you for a chat and see where this might be going. When are we both online, I wonder?

How people and the phone work together

I did a really useful days sales training yesterday with Robin Nyman of Unique Selling Pointers.  Thanks Robin.

I think I learned a lot there, just how to turn sales and partnering calls into a process that even I can do.  And he did some live call examples, showing us how to get to speak to the person you want to in an organisation. Behind it all there’s lots of psychology I guess.  People really want to help other people, and big organisations either purposely or unwittingly make it really hard to find the right person to talk to.

It all feels a bit like social engineering, where we use people and psychology to defeat security systems, however this is done with honesty and integrity, not to cheat and steal.

Media Object Metadata

One of the things I’m working on at the moment is to model a reasonably complete set of metadata associated with an online media object. This is to give us in Scouta the best internal representation of media objects that we can get, to help with recommendation generation, searching and content delivery and embedding.

The source for all this metadata? Well, we start with RSS 2.0, then add on the Media RSS extensions and the creative commons licensing extension.

Then add in the Atom Syndication Format. Then add in the data returned from who knows how many online media site APIs. Also ID3 tag information from MP3s and other embedded tags from other file formats.

There’s a bit to work through here, as you can see. I’ll try and post a summary here when I get something reasonably complete.

Scouta in Australian Anthill

There’s great article about our Scouta in the latest Australian Anthill.

The startup CTO/COO

So, these web ventures sure do a good job of using up all the slack time, which is why posting here has been normally infrequent.

Perhaps I’ll write a bit here about just what’s going on in Scouta for me and just what sorts of things I end up working on day to day wearing my two hats, technical and operations.

Here’s kind of a list off the top of my head:
Tech

• Manage new development. That means:

• getting some consensus amongst the team about features we need to do next;
• trying to pick stuff that is doable so things get moving, avoiding the really hard stuff or invisible stuff;
• working out what we can do later;
• keeping focus in the team on the next goals;
• trying not to get sidetracked by things that don’t really matter;
• keeping development linked to the community/member/customer need;
• Try and maintain a technical vision that is longer than a few weeks away;
• Test things before release and encourage the rest of the team to do that too;
• Be aware of standards and technologies out there; work out if they are important and need to be incorporated;
• Work with industry and standards bodies (like APML working group)

Operations

• Make sure lots of things happen, like:

• Backups
• Servers get paid for
• Stats are collected
• Logfiles are kept
• DBs are backed up/replicated
• Automated email logs are scanned
• Check site security

• Check things like:

• Can people join up?
• Are outgoing emails working
• Are servers up
• Are response times reasonable

Manage:

• setup and config of new servers
• relationships

Wow, that’s enough. That explains why i’m busy :-)

Actually, I don’t do all of this on a daily basis and I do get to dip into the code itself a fair bit. At the moment I’m doing a lot of work on Scouta’s incoming and outgoing RSS. Metadata. It is all about metadata.

Brightoncisco

Brightoncisco, has a just spontaneously materialized to discuss Brighton as a potential Silicon Valley:

Someone proposed that Brighton could be the ‘next Silicon Valley’. Someone else said it was more like another San Francisco. There is a lot of activity around startups and tech industries here. There are two universities and a lot of talent. But some things seem to be missing. Maybe it’s the VCs. Maybe it’s the networking. Maybe something else. Let’s work it out.

Time to go look at Richard Florida’s Creative Class and see if we can spot what is missing.

Sounds good to me. The Wed 10am Brighton OpenCoffee is a bit of a struggle for me right now, but I’ll get there one day. Perhaps we can do an evening or weekend event?

Scouta launched!

We’ve launched scouta.com, our new online video and audio recommendation service.  Please go over and take a look and join up.  Members have more fun!

It was a big push to the launch and then I had a scheduled, booked holiday at Rottnest Island for a few days.  So…  I called and occasionally dared to go online via the mobile at £7.50 per MB (thanks T-mobile.. you’d think they were hand-crafting each bit at a price like that)

There’s been a lot of blog and press coverage..  See a summary on the Scouta blog.

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