Rather than appending to my previous post I thought I’d add this update as a separate entry.

Following my discovery that the Daily Mail had used one of my images without permission, a number of threads kicked off. I asked folks via my blog, on Flickr and on Twitter, what their recommendations were – and I was overwhelmed by the response.

My initial response was to contact the Mail and ask for attribution, but I received no response to my email. I then decided to contact the picture desk, and ended up invoicing them for use of the image based on breach of license terms. I was prepared to take the matter further had the attribution (at minimum) not been provided. They finally added an attribution yesterday – although that’s via an overlay on the image, so it’s not ideal as it’s not searchable, and there’s no link back to my original content.

It has been pointed out to me that simply retrospectively billing them may lend some legitimacy to what they have done here… and let’s be honest, unless someone had spotted the reuse of my image I wouldn’t have known about it. They hadn’t linked to my Flickr page so I wouldn’t have found it via search. I suppose one answer would be the use of a tool like Tineye. More importantly though, I think it’s completely unacceptable to use CC-licensed (or even fully rights-reserved) material in this way and news sites and other services need to learn to respect these licenses. As a result, I’ve had some other friends make contact with the Mail at a high level to make this point.

On Sunday I became aware that another site had reprinted the Mail’s story, and included my image. This time, it was a news site in Brazil. My initial approach to this was to use Google Translate to try to find contact details, and I ended up filling in a form in English. I then asked for assistance on Twitter, and @mauricioswg was able to put me in touch with a Brazilian friend of his who also contacted the site on my behalf. At first they took the image down, but they still wanted to use it and after some discussion they now have the “correct” unmodified version of the image with attribution by agreement, thus fulfilling the terms of the license.

The upshot of all this? Whilst it can sometimes be hard to locate sites that are using your images – be vigilant as far as possible, and insist on your license. It’s your material.

I’d like to thank everyone who has offered support and provided help. My Twitter and other online and offline contacts have been invaluable. Social networks FTW!

The Daily Mail posted a story on their website about my friend Andy Stanford-Clark, and used a crop from one of my photos to illustrate it. As it happens, I would have been perfectly happy for them to use it (and even to crop it) if they’d asked for permission. At the time I post this, they are not following the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence and they are also not linking back to my Flickr page per the Flickr terms and conditions.

Thanks to Nick for bringing this to my attention, and for those who have told me that they’ve posted comments (currently not through moderation) or sent emails. We’ll see what happens.

I’ve posted about my approach to CC licensing images before. In this case, it’s arguably more of a concern as it’s a national newspaper displaying what would appear to be significant ignorance about the morality of using user-created content.

Beyond all of this… if you want to learn more about Andy’s tweeting house, he was featured on the BBC News yesterday – it’s a nice piece, check it out.

I hadn’t intended to spend any time at all talking specifically about the iPhone 3GS here on the blog, but following a comment by Per[1] I thought I’d jot down a few notes.

Firstly, given my previous comments about O2 and the upgrade issue… I should explain why I bothered. I got the 3.0 upgrade on the 3G when it came out last Wednesday, and liked what I found, particularly the option to install more than the 2.0 OS limit of 144 / 9 pages of apps. It’s now effectively unlimited, since even if you don’t have space on a home screen, you can search for the app using Spotlight. That’s nice. However, I was already hitting my space limit on the 16Gb 3G, so room to breathe was going to be handy. I also liked the improved navigation and possibility to get the TomTom kit in the future, and once I’d tried the camera in-store, I thought that was going to be a big deal as well (more on that, below). There was a small amount of peer pressure too, given our conversation on last week’s Dogear Nation.

In the end I opted to get a PAYG phone, swap in my contract SIM, and sell the old handset to Mazuma. If I’d waited to upgrade and then wanted the same handset I now have, I’d've ended up on another 18 (or 24) month contract with the same upgrade trap in June, and probably on a higher tariff to subsidise the cost of a new handset. This way my existing contract will run out in due course, I stay on the same tariff, and the handset doesn’t cost much more than it would have done come “upgrade” time in 3-6 months.

So what’s good? It’s very clearly nippier. Every operation is obviously faster and cleaner. I’m liking the camera and video recording (zoom would be nice, but variable focus and auto-adjusting exposure/white balance work for me). It was a great move to retain the 3G body and form factor – my Clarifi case still fits perfectly, and the macro lens seems to let me focus marginally closer still than the 3GS can manage on its own (it does a good job by itself, though). Amongst the sprinkling of other functions I like, not specific to the new model, are the landscape keyboard and the improved podcast playback features – did you know you can slide horizontally to scrub through a track, and slide down to scrub more finely? Neat.

The real revelation so far though, has been the screen. The new smudge / grease-resistant coating is a marvel. So far I’ve not fitted a screen protector, and although I’m loath to allow it to become physically scratched, the new screen feels and looks so much better and remains much, much cleaner. It’s just… almost magic.

In the “miss” column we have the voice control feature, which I’m not sure I’ll be using much; and shake-to-shuffle (is this actually supposed to work if the display is locked, by the way? seems not to do so for me, which makes it even more pointless). Oh, and battery life seems worse, but I suspect the compass and the notifications feature are contributing to that, as are the wider range of ways I’m actually using it. May have to think about a Mophie Juice Pack Air.

I used the video function in anger for the first time today, uploading one clip from the Hursley Tri-Department sports tournament directly to YouTube, and later grabbed a set of clips from the phone via iPhoto (yes, iPhoto manages video from the iPhone, go figure) and edited them together in iMovie. It’s not the best quality but probably still as good as my cheap USB camcorder – plus the screen and on-device editing features are nice additions. Rumours are that the chipset is capable of 720p video, but I doubt we’ll get to see that in the current generation of device. I’ve posted a bunch of sample photos to Flickr as well, if you are interested – the Blue Eyeball shot was taken at close quarters with the Clarifi.

Really nothing more to say here. There are more than enough people getting excited about the device and as I said, I hadn’t planned to write up any thoughts – blame that Danish guy

[1] just because I responded to audience pressure this time, don’t expect me to do it every time, m’kay?

There’s only one week left for YOU to support my friend Jasmin in meeting her target of raising AU$10,000 to help change the lives of a community of 30 women in the Philippines. The goal is a microfinance project providing loans to help them set up their own businesses and build themselves up out of poverty.

Jazz is absolutely inspirational to me. It’s staggering that she has spoken of me as a blogging buddy and mentor when she started out, and to see where she is now. For the past 6 months Jasmin has been using social media (blogs, podcasts, photos, videos) to raise awareness of poverty as an ambassador for Women’s Opportunity International. She even organised an event in support of the cause in Melbourne, using social tools.

Ask yourself right now – can you spare $10, $20, to contribute to her target? (AU$5,000/$4,000 US to go this week) It’s a worthy cause and you WILL be making a difference. It’s simple to donate, particularly if you have a PayPal account set up… really, it won’t take any time at all. If you read this post and donate just $20 right now, she will hit that target in no time.

I know many of my friends and blog readers have already helped her – thanks for your support! If you haven’t had an opportunity to contribute so far, just do it – a few clicks and a few dollars and you and @wonderwebby can use social media to change one corner of the world.

My friend Per and the guys who write the WebSphere Community Blog have already posted today to note that developers can now download and use WebSphere Application Server version 7.0 for free.

Nada. Zilch. Zip. Nuthin’. Nowt.

What’s the big deal? Well, before now IBM hasn’t made WebSphere Application Server (also known as WAS) available for free, you’ve needed a license. Although the Java Enterprise Edition programming model is broadly the same regardless of the choice of vendor, it’s always a good idea to develop, test and deploy on the same version of the runtime you’ll be using in production. Plus, you get the opportunity to learn more about WAS administration and hone skills with the product. It’s well worth a look.

And look, let’s be honest, I don’t post about WebSphere stuff half as much as I “should” – this is newsworthy stuff. Go take a look.

Simon tagged me in a Facebook meme (by the way, I now have a Facebook username). I don’t generally participate in these things, and I’m not going to tag anyone else, but I found it sort of intriguing… so here are my results.

The idea is that you shuffle up your iPod and write down the first 15 songs that come up (no cheating, skipping, picking out songs that make you look good!).

Well I actually only have a tiny subsection of my iTunes library on my iPhone – of ~11000 tracks so far ripped, I’ve got 1449 on the iPhone at the moment, which I think is only about 5.5Gb of the 8Gb capacity, the rest taken up by photos, apps and video podcasts.

Here’s how it came out – without any cheating.

1. The Butterfly Collector, Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller
2. Loneliness, The Feeling
3. A Life Less Ordinary, Ash
4. The Ghost of an Unkissed Kiss, Trembling Blue Stars
5. Not a Love Song, Uh Huh Her
6. People Move On, Bernard Butler
7. Swara Suling, The Schubert Club Gamelan Ensemble
8. The Sad Day, Jody Talbot
9. Once Around The Block, Badly Drawn Boy
10. Deep Water, Jewel
11. No More I Love Yous, Annie Lennox
12. Be OK, Ingrid Michaelson
13. Kung Fu, Ash
14. Dreamer, Uh Huh Her
15. This Corrosion, The Sisters of Mercy

If the list interests you, my “social music networks” are Last.FM and, to a lesser extent, MySpace (where I tend to find new and interesting artists, or connect with ones I already know).

Oh, and on a vaguely related note – anyone else massively underwhelmed by “shake to shuffle” on iPhone/iPod OS 3.0? It only appears to actually work if you have a playlist underway, or, say, shuffle all the tracks on the phone, in which case it’s the equivalent to hitting next anyway… what’s the point?

No tagging from me, but I’m assuming Simon will see this so he’ll know I lived up to my part in his meme. Looking down his news feed, I see a 25 albums meme in there too. I abstain

I have just finished talking to a group of university students who were invited to IBM Hursley today. I had about 15 minutes to discuss Enterprise Collaboration, and I used the time to take a quick tour through IBM’s size, diversity and organisation, and talked about how the way I operate has changed since I got engaged in blogging internally four years ago, and how I “broke through” the firewall.

Towards the beginning of the talk, I asked three questions to get some group discussion going, and asked the students to shout out some answers. Here’s a summary of the responses.

1. What kinds of tools do you think enterprises use to communicate internally today?
“Skype”, “online meetings”, “MSN” (email and phone came right at the end of the list)

2. What kinds of tools would you like to use in a work environment?
“Facebook”, “Skype”

3. Is it a good idea, or appropriate, to communicate and share through firewalls?
“It’s important, for networking”, “companies could have their own version of Facebook internally”

I didn’t seed any of these responses! Very interesting… I think I’d expected the answers to question 1 to be email, wiki, blog etc., but those are all old school (and possibly, irrelevant) as far as this group was concerned. I guess the outcome of this entirely unscientific survey will be old news to some people, but I found it fascinating.

Update 17th June:
Thanks for all the interest in this post! I should just reiterate that this is not new news – as @andysc said to me after the talk yesterday, the idea that “email is how I communicate with my parents” is as commonplace as the idea that some of us may have had that “snail mail is how we communicated with our grandparents”. The point here is about the expectation of speed of spread of technology within corporations. I found it a very interesting perspective, although I guess I’d half-expected some of the answers. I just hadn’t expected the “old tech” to be buried so far down in the consciousness. But then, when I left university, web browsers were just emerging and I had a desktop email client at home, but yet I suddenly found myself at work using a green-screen terminal emulator to access what was, to my mind at the time, a hideously hard-to-use mail system called MEMO which required the use of line-editing commands.

One other point, given my own interest in these two technology spaces – Andy C asks below about microblogging, and I certainly mentioned our use of these tools internally and externally, but it didn’t seem to be on the students’ radar; secondly, I spoke about attending meetings in virtual worlds and the relative effectiveness compared to a teleconference, but again that didn’t come up as an idea in the responses to the questions at the start. So it seems (again, based on a highly unscientific study of a limited pool of London MSc Management students) that the technologies that are “expected” in the enterprise are those that have reached widespread consumer adoption outside it.

I work in the IT industry, and it often surprises people when I mention that my academic background is as an historian. Looking back on my school career, when I came to choose options for A-levels I had a fairly open choice between “arts” and science subjects, and I just went with my strongest interest – history. That extended on to university, where I studied Modern History.

When I was visiting my in-laws in Poland recently, they unearthed a couple of fascinating booklets – fascinating to me, anyway, since one of the the countries I specialised in during my academic studies was Russia and the Russian Revolution, covering the early 19th century through until Stalin’s death in 1953.

 

Click the image to go to a Flickr set containing images of each page, or download a PDF

Click the image to go to a Flickr set containing images of each page, or download a PDF

 

The book on the left (published in the same year I was born!) presents a version of Lenin’s life, in the voice of a father talking to his child. It’s a highly and unsurprisingly romanticised account, talking about his struggle to free the poor, and how very hard he worked… ending with a note about how sad everyone was when he died, but how his ideas are remembered – “work and life are organised according to the new system”. The booklet on the right, published a year later, contains a number of stories. I’ve not had all of them translated to me, but one story involves Lenin getting a Christmas tree for all the poor children!

This portrayal of Lenin as the hero of the poor working classes, friend to children everywhere, is classic stuff – I’d read about the way in which his image was manipulated in order to romanticise and legitimise the Communist system, particularly under Stalin and his successors, but here I had two booklets which were being used as recently as 30 years ago to teach my wife and her siblings (although not all of them remember it so vividly, given that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Poland is now celebrating 20 years of democracy). The back pages of each booklet contain the publishing information noting that they were printed in “ZSSR”. The Communist themes, symbols and colours are prevalent. Of course, it also elevates Lenin to an almost religious position of reverence, ironic given the Marxist opposition to religion, but convenient for Stalin’s purposes in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. I felt very strongly that it was worth preserving them, so I engaged in a little digital archaeology / restoration with the aid of a scanner and Apple’s Pages 09.

Talking to my wife, she remembers these books being read to her as a child… she told me that she remembers her mother not seeming exactly sure about them or keen to tell the stories, but looking back she can see that it was because it was not the done thing to speak out against the materials – if her child had gone to school making comments against comrade Lenin it would have been a problem!

It’s absolutely true that my own initial views of Poland were based on the grey news footage of Solidarity strikes in the 1980s, and when I first went to the country in 2002 I was astonished to find how “modern” and vibrant a place it is – of course, I can now see that I was just seeing the place through the filter of 15-year-old news coverage of a period of unrest and hardship, in a particular region of a large country. What I know now about the way people lived is based on memories which are fast slipping away. I can talk in very broken Polish to my wife’s grandmother who lived through the war and remembers it; to her parents about the hard times they lived through; and get the occasional remark about my wife’s childhood. Materials like these books make it much more real. I hope you’ll find them as interesting to think about as I did, even if you don’t understand every word written inside.

Continuing some of the posts about Mac software and tools I use, this might be of interest – a few of the applets you’ll find in my menubar. The vast majority of these are free.

View full size

1. LittleSnapper – handy for taking annotated screenshots or grabbing webpages. I don’t run this all the time, but it was running to take this shot.
2. Google Quick Search Box – I’ve been a Quicksilver user for a long time, currently I’m trying out QSB instead.
3. Camouflage – hides the icons on the desktop. Great for recording screencasts, or just for tidying up.
4. DropBox – handy for sharing files between Windows, Linux and Mac.
5. Caffeine – disable screensaver for watching movies and presentations etc.
6. iScrobbler – for Last.FM support
7. Skitch – my screen capture utility of choice, which I do have running all the time. Not as good for annotation or web page capture as LittleSnapper, but quicker to use.
8. Evernote – todo lists and note taking (syncs with iPhone)
9. Eject applet
10. Canon printer/scanner utility for the MP620
11. SoundSource – very handy tool to select input and output sources, great for podcasting etc.
12. Displays (enabled from System Prefs) – useful for presentations and viewing video on the TV.
13. Language (enabled from System Prefs) – quick access to language, special characters, keyboard viewer, etc.
14. MagiCal – pop up monthly calendar

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been dipping into Tara Hunt’s book The Whuffie Factor. I’d intended to write a post discussing the book in more detail, but a case study has just presented itself which brought my plans forward!

Disclaimer: it’s worth restating that all content on this blog represents my personal opinion and my own experiences.

Image courtesy of missrogue

The Whuffie Factor talks about the importance of establishing, growing and maintaining social capital in your market and with your community. The concept of “whuffie” is drawn from Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which I just started to read), which presents a world in which an individual’s social capital, or reputation for good deeds, is visible to others in an augmented reality, built-in heads-up display which everyone has. People can earn whuffie through good deeds and behaviour, spend whuffie in asking for favours, and lose whuffie in acting in some negative manner. Tara suggests that organisations and individuals that participate in online communities have exactly the same experiences, although whuffie itself may be less immediately tangible than in Doctorow’s imaginary world where everyone is wearing a whuffie badge.

So, on to the case study.

I’ve been an O2 customer for a long time. Before I got the iPhone 3G on UK launch day last year, I’d been an O2 customer on previous handsets and price plans. Actually, I had a relationship with the company stretching back to when they were BT Cellnet – a looong time.

My experience with the iPhone has been wonderful. Ignoring the device itself (this post is not about that) – the tariff was reasonable, I had unlimited data at varied speeds anywhere in the UK, and access to two wireless hotspot networks, the Cloud and BT Openzone. Life was great. I believe it was the best deal in the world on the iPhone.

Last month I decided to switch broadband suppliers, after Tiscali/Pipex were acquired by the Carphone Warehouse. Listening to the advice of many of my friends in the Twitterverse (Whuffie lesson – socially-connected individuals value personal recommendations above any others), it didn’t take long for me to select O2 as my new supplier. I felt comfortable with that, having had an excellent experience with their mobile service. I have to say the switch was painless and the service and performance of my new connection has been excellent.

Whuffie++!

Just after the switch, I thought about getting a broadband dongle for my Mac. Naturally, as an O2 customer with two of their products, I thought I’d ask in an O2 store what kind of deal was on offer to loyal subscribers. “No special deal, sir” – I’d have to go with their regular package, which is far less competitive than T-Mobile, 3 or Vodafone (I only really wanted to use the 3G modem occasionally, so I didn’t want to sign up to a contract on that).

Whuffie fell off.

Yesterday, Apple announced the iPhone 3GS. It’s an exciting device with some mouth-watering new capabilities – a better camera at last, a speed bump, voice recognition, a compass, and greater memory capacity. Oh, and it has the capability of being used as a 3G modem, which would mean I wouldn’t need a separate dongle for the Mac. Seems ideal. In short, I’d take one in an instant. I also discovered yesterday that O2 has a Twitter account, which I started to follow when I realised that it seemed to be a real person engaging in conversations, and not just a stream of PR pronouncements.

There’s a wrinkle here, though. In order to take an iPhone 3GS on launch day, I’d need to buy myself out of the final 6 months of my existing 18 months contract (in my case I’m guessing that will be a straight 6 x £35, not cheap), and then buy the phone on a new contract. So the reward for loyalty and being prepared to sign up for a long contract is having to pay more for an upgrade to the new technology. People are also concerned about the cost of O2’s tethering plans, which don’t entirely surprise me given my 3G modem experience.

Whuffie? Plummeting.

A couple of people have noted on Twitter that those complaining about the situation are either whinging in general, or that they don’t understand the concept of a contract. In my case, I fully understood that I was signing on for 18 months – it just seems bizarre that it is non-transferrable and that I’m actually penalised for staying with O2. It’s not like I’m heading off to another network.

Shane Richmond over at the Telegraph has an excellent summary of the issues, so I’m not going to pick through the situation point-by-point. Some of the commenters are right on the nail, too.

The Twitterverse is fairly upset about all of this, with one person going so far as to set up a petition (I’ve not signed it, as twitition doesn’t use Twitter’s OAuth option for login).

I phoned O2, at the suggestion of the O2 Twitter person, since “upgrade costs will vary”. The lady I spoke to claimed that no pricing information was yet available (odd, since there’s a page on the O2 website with that information), and then said that for upgrades, they were offering existing customers the option of downloading the new software onto their current phones, or buying themselves out of the existing contract.

I’m disappointed. Right now, I’m actually thinking that the Palm Pre looks interesting. It’s a shame, as I’m an Apple user and I think the iPhone is an amazing platform – but O2 just jettisoned the good reputation that it had built up, and made themselves far less likely to be recommended by me in the future.

End of case study. The conclusion here is that Tara Hunt has it completely right. In today’s social web-connected world, whuffie is important – potentially vital – for companies, as well as for individuals.

How did I hear about Tara’s book? I’d been following her (@missrogue) on Twitter for a long time, recognised her as someone I respect and like through her great blog, HorsePigCow, and I was excited to hear about her book directly from the source. Here’s my personal recommendation: get hold of a copy of The Whuffie Factor, read, and inwardly digest. It’s a great, enjoyable book. I think you’ll like it, too.

Update: levelling off…

OK. Having followed some of the discussion on the @O2 Twitter channel today, my attention was drawn to the notion of the Priority List, which is an account feature I’d previously been unaware of, as I’d opted out of marketing material from O2. The only thing is, there’s no easy way to find out which “level” of priority my account was set at. I logged in to my account through the website, and found a contact number which got me through to a really helpful lady (evidently not the same number I’d called this morning, not sure what happened there). I explained that I potentially wanted to upgrade, and that I’m a customer of both a pay monthly tariff and the home broadband service. The customer service rep very helpfully and patiently went through all of the upgrade options with me… and it looks like it’s not quite as dire as I’d thought – my potential upgrade date is earlier than I’d feared, but I’m still unlikely to be getting an iPhone 3GS on launch day.

So kudos to the helpful customer service staff, and I’m also impressed with the resilience and patience of the @O2 person. That has gone some way to restoring my opinion, even though I’m still disappointed with some aspects of the upgrade process. The Priority List is actually a way of rewarding customer loyalty, but it just hadn’t been on my radar.

The final word on this, from my perspective, is that it’s still somewhat confusing, and I’d particularly advise O2 to make their Priority List stuff more visible and simpler to understand. I’d also suggest that people give them a call and check individual circumstances!

I’ve posted a couple of times now about my experiences creating audio and video on OS X. A couple of weeks ago, I had a brief conversation with my friend Ian Hughes, aka epredator, who was trying to get himself setup:

Good one. All I knew was that DIVX AVI files were playing on my machine fine, through QuickTime.

The answer, which I’d evidently missed before, is Perian. This is a really simple, installable package which enables support for a whole range of “other” file formats in QuickTime. You’ll also want to install Flip4Mac, which gives support for Windows formats like WMV. It’s also worth adding the Xiph component for formats like FLAC and OGG. Once you’ve got those in place, you should be fine to import, play and edit in iMovie and other QuickTime-based applications.

It seems like just a few short months ago that I discovered Poken – neat little USB keychain devices which you can touch together when you meet someone else with one, in order to electronically exchange social network IDs and contact information. Actually… it was only a few months ago – we talked about them on Dogear Nation episode 88 in February, and in an example of serendipitous discovery, I picked one up a week later at Twestival in London. I immediately thought the idea was cool, but I was disappointed to discover how much they cost, and how few people had them.

I mentioned Poken in my presentation at SOMESSO a couple of weeks ago. Whilst I love the idea, I simply haven’t come across enough people who have a Poken to have made it worth my while. My basic comment at the time was that I felt they needed to make themselves more widespread in order to be useful. Since then, I’ve continued the discussion in comments on a couple of blogs. To quote myself:

However, I think there are a few issues…

• [they] cost more than most people are prepared to pay for what is essentially a small capacity but cute looking memory stick, and they are not very readily available;
• the cuteness factor can also be off-putting to some people, particularly those with a business purpose in mind and the disposable income to buy them;
• too few core connectors and salesmen have them (see Gladwell’s The Tipping Point), IMHO they should seed more;
• the value-add of the site (which actually manages the contacts) is low, so the business model is presumably centred on selling the devices.

I had yet another conversation about Poken at a tweetup in London last week, and again heard comment that they were too toy-like for business users, and too few people had them.

Well – things appear to be changing. For want of a better phrase, it seems as though Poken are going slightly more corporate.

In particular, I was delighted to discover that they are being used in a much broader context at IBM’s Information on Demand conference this year – shedding the cute image, and hopefully becoming a bit more widespread.

This is all great stuff. I engaged with the idea of Poken as soon as I heard about the concept, and I hope that I’ll be able to share and manage my information more easily in future. Maybe Poken won’t be the answer, but I’m glad to see the idea broadening out, and hopefully reaching a wider audience.

I’ve frequently told folks who come to my presentations that “my content is my CV”. Sometimes, that content can feel a bit dispersed, especially given my habit of playing with a lot of the new services that come along.

I posted about a similar topic a few months ago, but mainly talked about the different blogs I contribute to. Time for a quick round-up of some of the main places you can find that content (you’ll find longer lists on my About, Audio/Video, and Writings pages).

• right here… in general, I use this blog as a way of aggregating / calling out my major pieces of content
• SlideShare
• my YouTube channel
• Flickr
• Dogear Nation
• and, of course, my continuous content stream!

Oh, and the easiest addresses to remember may be andypiper.co.uk or theandypiper.com – both of which will bring you back here.

What is really called for on my part is either a visual CV, or something a bit different like a launch page or an experimental format. When I have time…

You wait three weeks for a video, and then two turn up at once. No wait… that was buses.

The video of my talk from SOMESSO London 2009 has been made available. Unfortunately I’m not able to embed that here on my site, so follow the link if you want to see it. It’s about 20 minutes long.

You can also watch an interview I gave towards the end of the day.

You’ll sleep better tonight

Amongst a small swarm of gadgets which recently invaded my life (various coupons and things being spent… more soon!) I picked up this little gem – a diddy MIDI keyboard, about as wide as a 13″ MacBook and perfect for the odd GarageBand composition. I made a really quick video which is posted on my YouTube channel.

I’ve been thinking about making a change to my broadband arrangements for some time now. When I heard that Tiscali (owners of my long-term ISP Pipex) had been snapped up by Carphone Warehouse, it seemed like a great time to make a switch.

I’d heard very good things about O2/Be from my Twitter friends and since I’m an iPhone customer I was able to get a lower bundle price, which was even better.

The transfer process was painless – actually the hardest part was arranging the delivery of the new router! Incidentally the router itself (the “O2 Wireless Box III”, a Thomson TG585n, although I disabled the 802.11n wireless in favour of my Airport Extreme) is pretty big and ugly compared to the Netgear box I’d had before, but I had to change in order to take advantage of ADSL2+. It came pre-configured with everything except my static IP address (I had to call O2 in order to find that out). One issue was that the default time server that’s set on the box is apparently dead… I found some commands on the forums which enabled me to add some known valid time servers and that sorted it out, but weirdly the web front end didn’t give me a way to change them when logged in as the default Administrator user – hunting the forums produced the SuperUser information, which opens up a whole bunch of more useful options in the web UI (including, for example, logs!).

9 months ago I was getting a speed reasonably close to my theoretical 8Mbps max out of Pipex:

The funny thing was that when I called to get my MAC code to transfer, the Pipex chap insisted that I’d only ever get a max of 7-8Mbps off my line “it’s the official BT number, sir”. O2 were quoting a theoretical max of 14Mbps. Turns out that this is probably due to the ADSL2+ technology that O2/Be use… here’s a sample of the speed this morning, I think the peak I’ve actually achieved has been a shade under 13Mbps.

What will I do with this extra bandwidth? Well, let’s just say that Facebook and FriendFeed had better be ready for me

One of the first people I met at SOMESSO on Friday was Giles Bryan, who is one of the founders of ipadio. I mentioned that I was experimenting with a tool called AudioBoo on the iPhone recently… well, ipadio is similar, but there are a few key differences. It works from any phone; it records and streams live as you talk (the audio quality is not as good as AudioBoo, but the uses are arguably more flexible); and you can conference in multiple people to a call, so you can effectively have group chats or interviews live on the web from any phone.

Giles was good enough to let me have a look at a development pre-release version of their forthcoming iPhone application, and this morning we had a discussion about ipadio, some of the celebrity users, and some of the things you can do with it.

I’m honestly not sure how often I’ll be using ipadio, but I have a “phlog” (phone blog) over on their site, so feel free to follow it if you’re interested. It’s clear that there’s a lot of interest in the online audio space so it is interesting to see these services develop.

This was fairly tedious, so I thought I’d share it with you, my loyal blog readers

Over time, my address book has become unmanageable. Until today, what I had managed to achieve was a curious fusion of useful family postal address data, mostly from the pre-social network, pre-email, pre-mobile days of 10-15 years ago when I had loaded it all into Evolution on Linux; several personal and work mobile phone SIMs worth of numbers in various formats, covering probably a 10 year period judging from the names and numbers in there; and lots and lots of email addresses, covering a similar period, but recently bloated by the habits of Gmail and Apple Mail of storing some data automagically.

In short: a total mess. I had multiple entries for several of my close friends and family; original home addresses of university friends I have not been in contact with for 12 years (!); and outdated information for many other folks.

The iPhone was really the final catalyst for sorting all of this out. More than once recently, I’ve tried to find a number for a friend, and had several entries for that person, several of which were out of date. I’ve called a good friend’s brother on a phone he gave him more than seven years ago, twice in the past 6 months. That’s how useless I’ve become at managing this stuff.

Since the iPhone was core to the issue, and since it syncs with the Address Book, I decided to use that as my core tool for fixing the problem.

Here’s more-or-less what I ended up doing:

• Cleaned up multiple entries in Address Book, merging into a single entry for any one contact, including work and personal data, and adding company names where possible.
• Deleted redundant entries such as the university addresses which I knew were going to be wrong.
• Read through the various hints on this page for information on how I could get contact data from LinkedIn and Facebook and elsewhere…
• Exported my LinkedIn Contacts as a .vcf file for import into Address Book… imported and checked the merge information.
• Grabbed my Facebook Contacts phone details using a Greasemonkey script and a tool called AddressBooker (see the above linked hints page for details). At this point I had an issue. Downloading from AddressBooker as .vcf caused all the names to be exported as just FirstName fields, so when I tried to merge into Address Book everyone came up as a “new” contact. A better solution turned out to be to import directly from AddressBooker into Google Mail Contacts first; do any data merging and cleanup there (GMail Contacts has a nice “merge contacts” capability if you have multiple entries for one person); and then export as .vcf, and import into Address Book, checking the merge information as before with LinkedIn. Sounds long-winded, but it would have taken longer to manage manually in Address Book.
• At this point, Apple Address Book contained my “authoritative” contact list. To get it back into GMail, I scrubbed my whole GMail contacts list (slightly scary, but necessary), and then played around with the Automator action described in the Maciverse tips page, trying to use Numbers instead of Excel. Ultimately that was a disaster as it just couldn’t encode the tab-separated to CSV files correctly. The final answer turned out to be a brilliant little (free / donationware) utility called A to G. Get it. Use it. Donate.
• Result! And next time, I’ll try not to let this get so out of hand…

I see another wrinkle in this whole space. Although tools like Google Voice tend towards centralising all your contact details behind a single number you control (great idea – dear Google, when can we get it in Europe? hint hint!), the proliferation of social networks means that we all have multiple profiles and IDs. In particular, I find Skype and Twitter addresses hugely useful. Apple’s Address Book, of course, doesn’t provide “official” spots for those… there’s no entry for Skype in the IM drop-down list, and no space for arbitrary URLs, you have to edit and maintain a list of them. Something more extensible and easy to keep in sync would be very useful.

Update: the broken part
Google Talk appears now to have completely lost my contact list. Gah. So if you were connected to me on Gtalk then you may need to reconnect, or you may get a new connection request from me. Sorry about that…

Couple of things:

• I added a c. 20 min audio commentary to my deck on Slideshare – hopefully it will make the slides a bit more meaningful!
• Here’s a snippet from Susan Kish’s summary of the day, where she mentions my talk:
  

The nice folks from AudioBoo caught me for a quick interview after my presentation yesterday and you can hear the short summary of what I talked about on their site, or by playing the embedded audio here.

I was also interviewed on camera by Daniel and Eduardo Vidal (hope you feel better soon, Eduardo!)… and my whole presentation was recorded as well, so those should appear over the next couple of weeks.

Oddly I seemed to spend a lot of time discussing Poken after the talk! I guess my use of Poken as a prop at the start of the presentation raised a lot of interest. My mention of Home Camp and sustainability also generated some additional conversations. I also detected a lot of interest as to how IBM had achieved the cultural changes required to adapt to a social web (answer: I’d argue that openness has been in our corporate DNA for some time now), and also in how we put together our Social Computing Guidelines. Again, I would draw attention to one paragraph in the guidelines which I think sums up the approach and background:

In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Internet—at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees’ Internet access. In 2005, the company made a strategic decision to embrace the blogosphere and to encourage IBMers to participate. We continue to advocate IBMers’ responsible involvement today in this rapidly growing space of relationship, learning and collaboration.

I thought the SOMESSO London event was just superb. A series of short (15-20 minute) presentations from some smart people who I was quite frankly honoured to be on the same bill as; and I really didn’t think that there was anything superfluous, it was just great content and information. The Emirates Stadium was a great venue, too… once I’d found my way into the conference centre in the morning, avoiding the queue of contestants lining up for X-Factor auditions! If my camera battery had lasted I would have posted a lot more to Flickr, but I’m afraid there are only a few shots up there.

Thanks to Arjen Strijker, Mary Harrington, Susan Kish and others for putting the day together. On the basis of yesterday’s conference, I highly recommend future events in the series, and would also encourage you to get involved in the SOMESSO community if you are at all interested in social media in the enterprise. I’m really looking forward to following up all of the new connections I made yesterday.

Finally, some links to some of the books I referenced in my talk or during the backchannel conversation:

• The Future of Management
• Grown Up Digital
• Me The Media
• The Whuffie Factor

Today I have been speaking at the SOMESSO conference in London. I inherited the topic from my friend Luis Suarez… it was billed as “Knowledge management: Security, Intellectual Property and Privacy” but I spun it around a little to look at how exposing your company’s expertise and ideas to the web can actually improve innovation.

I’m completely indebted to Adam Christensen for his words (much retweeted today as something I’d said) about IBM’s approach to social computing, and for allowing me to reuse a couple of slides. I also loved Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent post 12 Rules for Bringing Social to your Business, and reused his graphic from there. I thought there were some fantastic synergies with the previous three talks during the morning, and was able to continue some of the threads whilst taking them in a slightly different direction.

For more background on IBM’s approach, I recommend taking a look at an interview with Jon Iwata in which he discusses the loss of control, but the value of social media.

One of the coolest things I’ve seen this week at IBM IMPACT is some of the new technology that has just been made available in a WebSphere Feature Pack. The technology is for Communications Enabled Applications (CEA) – yes, it’s another one of those great technology industry TLAs!

I sat down with Savio Rodrigues for a discussion and demo of the Feature Pack. It is very, very clever stuff. What it essentially enables is a simple “click-to-call” button on a web page which can create a secure voice and cobrowsing connection between two users. If you’re familiar with Skype, or voice chatting on Yahoo Messenger or Google Talk, you’ll understand the principle that there’s no need to make calls over the phone all the time – I’m increasingly making use of voice-over-IP technology for my day-to-day tasks, so this is a natural capability to expect in web applications as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve probably explained the cobrowsing concept in a clumsy way, but Savio has described the experience on the IBM CEA blog. There are also some great videos up on YouTube which demonstrate how this works. Here’s one of them:

The best part? The amount of effort required to build the functionality into a web page is really small. Obviously you need to be running on WebSphere, but the front-end website code is trivial, just a few lines of HTML and some Javascript includes.

The Communications Enabled Applications content was slightly low-key at IMPACT, compared to CloudBurst, BPM BlueWorks, and other big splashes – but don’t overlook this capability.

This was one of the videos used between keynote presentations here at IBM IMPACT this week. I really like it.

I’m not going to run down all of the announcements that came out during the first day of IMPACT yesterday – you can take a look at Sandy Carter’s video summary for some of the key ones, like Smart Work, and the new WebSphere CloudBurst appliance (it’s very purple – and I want one!). There is a slew of cool new stuff being announced and coming out over the coming year.

Sitting in the keynote yesterday morning I was feeling as though several of the worlds that I live in / things I’m interested in were really coming together. It’s an exciting time. For example, we had:

• connections between Service Oriented Architecture and IBM’s Smarter Planet vision;
• more talk about green IT, which connects with my interest in energy monitoring and Home Camp;
• 3D visualisations, virtual worlds and “serious games” with the INNOV8 Business Process Management simulator;
• throughout the conference, social media at the fore, with YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and blogs all being used to connect and collaborate.

As an “SOA event” it’s easy for me to see it as all to do with IBM’s WebSphere brand of software alone, since that’s what I’ve work been working on for almost a decade now. The truth is that IMPACT spans everything that IBM does, particularly in software. We are talking collaboration and social software (Lotus); monitoring and intelligent management (Tivoli); modelling and productive development (Rational); and sophisticated data analytics (Information Management). It’s a real showcase for the broad reach and range of IBM’s software portfolio.

Highlight of the day for me was absolutely nothing to do with IBM software – it was the opportunity to hear Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester speak on the Future of the Social Web. Jeremiah clearly understands this stuff in all the many facets that have been expressed by other people I follow, like Don Tapscott – I did recommend his book already, right…? I am glad to have made the connection with @jowyang, since I’ve read and followed much of his work in the past couple of years, so it was a bit of a treat to hear him speaking. I tried not to take over the Q&A completely

Oh, and the play part? Billy Crystal was the compere for the morning session and kept us amused despite the early start – and there were plenty of opportunities to catch up with friends and Twitter connections at the networking sessions. I call that a win. Oh, and wait a second, I almost forgot – we had a tweetup yesterday, with a couple more scheduled later in the week. Looking forward to them.

I’ll try to post another IMPACT-related update later in the week. Photos are on Flickr, and there is a very active ongoing discussion in the #ibmimpact hashtag on Twitter.

Photos I’m taking at IMPACT 2009 are up on Flickr – this slideshow should auto-update as more are added, since it selects from the tagged images in my account. I’m taking snapshots using my compact Canon camera (often without flash to avoid distracting the presenters) and uploading via Eye-Fi so the results are varied