Presence Labs

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.

I wish I’d done this ages ago

I picked up a Efergy real-time energy meter for £39.95 from Maplin. At this kind of price it finally seems worth it, and after bringing it home and quickly installing it, I’ve now got a sense of how much power the house uses. I’m very happy with it so far, easy to use and nice clear display. It sits in the kitchen.

With all the lights off and the fridge idling, there’s still a little over 100W needed to keep the place running, which is mad. That is going to be a bunch of plugpack transformers (wall warts) that are just making heat while doing nothing. More of those are going to get switched off now.

Turning on the kettle is a shock. I know the kettle is going to use up energy like mad, but watching the display go from 0.100 kW to 3.100 kW was more shocking than I expected.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m hoping this will give us all enough awareness to drop our consumption of electricity about 20%.

Nice Job: Web/design manager with social media for charity

My favourite environment charity and excellent client, Global Action Plan, are looking for a Web and Design Manager, based in London. This is a nice role — you get to manage the design side of things for the organisation, but also manage websites, and lead the organisation into the social media world. This is the sort of role where you can practically make a difference by getting GAP’s messages out there more widely and have a lot of fun in new media land.

Web & Design Manager - London £28,000 plus bonus (3.1) Inc LW The Web and Design Manager is responsible for maintaining the quality of the brand for all Global Action Plan communications, both off and online. This will include writing a comprehensive web strategy, developing the Global Action Plan websites (including monitoring and reporting) creating electronic communications such as newsletters and delivering print design across the organisation. You will need a minimum of 3 years marketing experience in developing and designing print and web materials. You need to have proficient IT and CMS skills, including knowledge of basic web packages, have a strong attention to detail, be capable working under pressure and to deadline. Experience working for a charity would be advantageous.

More info at http://globalactionplan.org.uk/jobs.aspx Be Quick if you are interested. Applications Close this Friday 9th.

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

Dopplr adds carbon calculations

I’m delighted to see that Dopplr has added a carbon calculator for the trips you take. This is just what we need. Once actual carbon data is visible, people can go ahead and make changes in their travel and lives.

Without the real data, we just all live in fear, doubt and uncertainty (and even denial).

Google App Engine

Thanks Google, what a tasty birthday present. I’m thinking the Google App Engine is going to be a lot of fun. I guess the devil is going to be in the scaling. Haven’t read that bit of the docs yet.

Authentic Blogging Community

We’ve started up a Ning community for Authentic Blogging.

Lib pressed the button on this a few days ago and a bunch of interesting people have shown up and some very interesting discussions are taking place around authenticity, blogging and all sorts. If you are interested in the bigger questions around blogging, voice, authenticity and what it all means, then please come and join in.

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.

Scouta Wins Australian Startups Carnival 2008

Scouta, our social recommendation service startup, has just been awarded first prize in the Australian Startups Carnival 2008. This is brilliant news. The competition results are here. More info and commentary on the Scouta blog.

This means we’ll have a stand and will probably be presenting at CeBIT Australia 2008.

Resilience or “Trapped in First Life”

I’ve just finished my BarCamp2 presentation, all about resilience when the power goes off. How do we build an ad-hoc communications system from the common component we have lying around? And can we make a local internet without needing more than a few laptops, WiFi/WiMax routers and a few antennas.Here’s the presentation as a PDF:  Resilience or “Trapped in First Life”There was an interesting discussion.. Some key points:

• The difficulty of getting stuff configured. Are we really all that capable at solving networking problems and making stuff work under some pressure?
• How do we practice to test if it works?
• Can we use the One Laptop Per Child as nodes
• We needed this for Hack Day last year :-)
• Running a bunch of servers at home use a lot of power. Replace them with laptops.
• Can we demo/test some of this stuff out at another BarCamp? Could we build a solar powered, operating private Internet at BarCamp.

So, going forward, there is some interest. Next steps? Some research on the idea, I guess. I’ll publish more here under the Resilience category.

Live video from BarCamp Brighton 2

Barcamp Brighton 2

I’m spending the weekend at BarCamp Brighton 2.

We’ve just been milling around at the grid and have just started talks. First up for me, I’m enjoying Dirk talking about Accessible Javascript.

Blogging for Change Agents

Libby has just started putting up info for her next series of authentic blogging courses to run this year: Blogging for Change Agents.

These are focussed on entrepreneurs, social, environmental and ethical enterprises, charities and other third sector organisations that are looking to spread their wings in the blogging and social media area.

For more info please head over to authentic blogging for the course details.

Degree Day Adjustments for Heating Energy Calculations

As a part of my work for Global Action Plan’s EcoTeams project, I’ve been building reporting tools to predict household heating energy consumption into the future from some measured readings. This post is all about how to predict energy consumption based on a process of degree day adjustment.

(NB — what follows is a bit technical..)

The Carbon Trust succinctly say:

Degree-day figures quantify how hot or cold the weather has been as a single index number for the region and month (or week). They allow you to account properly for the effect of weather on energy consumption.

Projecting energy consumption for heating forwards involves some calculations — you need to consider changes in the outside temperature, and what impact that is going to have on the energy required for heating inside your building or home. When it is getting colder each month, the amount of heating and energy used for heating goes up. And when summer approaches (we hope) that the outside temperature goes up, and the requirement for heating drops away.

Each year, the weather is different, so the degree day values for each month or week change.

The meaning of degree day values

So, what do these degree-day numbers measure and how are they calculated? I’ll explain a bit.

There’s an assumption used here, that if the outside temperature is 15.5C, the building will be able to warm itself without needing to use energy for heating. Buildings are warmed by people, by heat from the sun, by the heat from equipment in the building among other things to bring the outside temperature up to a reasonable internal temperature.

A degree day is then calculated using the 15.5 degree value as follows:

degree day = 15.5 - outside_temperature * days

A weekly degree day value sets days above to 7, while for a month, it is set to the length of the month in days.

So, the degree day value is bigger when it is colder, and the degree day value is proportional to the energy required to heat the building to a normal comfortable temperature. This gives us the information we need to predict future energy consumption, or compare enery consumptions in different months even though the outside temperature was different.

An example

Say we wanted to work out our energy consumption for Nov 2007 compared with Oct 2007.

Let’s say in Oct 2007 we used 500 kWh heating the house. And in Nov 2008 we used 680 kWh heating the house. We were trying to reduce our energy consumption by turning down the boiler. Did we succeed?

So, we get the degree days values for South-East England:

Oct 2007: 166

Nov 2007: 248

Okay, we can immediately see that November was a lot colder than October, as you’d expect. So we’d expect our energy consumption to go up a lot. But let’s do the calculation:

energy_used_oct / dd_oct * dd_nov = predicted_use_nov

or

500 kWh / 168 * 248 = 738 kWh

So 738 kWh is our predicted energy use for heating adjusted for the relative warmth of the two months.

But we actually used only 680 kWh, so that means we’ve saved a fair bit by turning down the boiler.

Conclusion

So, using the degree days values we can make these calculations, and end up making much more reasonable comparisons between months than if we just take the raw kWh values. Very useful.

References

You can find some historical degree day data from the Carbon Trust (PDF doc) .

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.

User Generated Content needs terms framework and rights icons

Khris Loux did a brilliant, interactive, presentation at Widgety Goodness today based on this js-kit mini-site. js-kit provide widget-like tools for adding features to existing websites.

We debated a number of topics, including Content Ownership. The issue is something like this: you embed a js-kit comment widget on your existing website, and users leave comments there. The question of who owns the content is a real interesting one.

Is it owned by js-kit, who own the widget and persist the comment, or is it owned by the embedding publisher, or the user, or some weird combination of all of the above?

Here’s my answer: It is pretty much all of the above. What we need is something like what creative commons did for adding clarity and simplicity into copyright by developing a set of generic licenses. What I’m talking about is a terms framework that is made clear and simple (via several options). It has to be clear and simple enough to allow the terms, conditions and ownership to be expressed next to a comment box so that it is clear who has which rights, and clear to the content creator just what is going on. Seriously, these rights icons could go all over the place. Every blog comment post. Every forum post. Every review field. Anywhere user-contributed content is being created.

And apart from the icons, this ought to be ripe for some microformat development too, to perhaps allow browsers to help with presenting the terms information.

A nice big non-trivial project. Who wants to take this one on.

Also, if we simplify this down, it ought to be a lot easier to mashup the rights of a widget provider and a publishing/embedding website and end up with rights that actually work and can be explained in a few icons.

Reflect a moment

Tim O’Reilly comments on Google’s Renewables initiative announced this week:

The stakes are high. If our worst fears about global warming are right, we’re going to bring our technological progress to a halt unless we get new sources of clean energy. Google’s goal of beating the cost of energy from coal is critical, because coal is the default lowest-cost choice for electricity generation, and the worst from a global warming perspective. And let’s be clear, the internet industry we know and love is a huge consumer of power. I love Nick Carr’s estimate from last year that a Second Life avatar consumes almost as much energy as a real human. While Nick’s calculations are provocative rather than authoritative, he makes a good point. Our electronic lifestyle has hidden, off-the-books costs. Google is very smart to acknowledge this fact.

Thanks Tim (and Nick). Beautifully put. Point made.

And remember, if we just ignore this, we end up back at Web 0.0, with either no electricity, or no livable planet.

Get the DVD of An Inconvenient Truth. Watch it again. — and make sure to watch the updates a year later. See? Climate change is accelerating. Bickering about who’s fault it is so 2005. We move on now. We fix this.

Global knowledgy-porridge

There is this wise and beautiful observation from New York Times writer David Brooks, writing about his outsourced mind:

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook — I’ll be there, too.

His big point here is that all our actions, blog posts, emails, clicks for goodness sake, become a part of something bigger. All this browsing and commenting and writing and photographs becomes part of something bigger, some store of global actions, events and knowledge. If I get all misty-eyed about the future I’d say something rash like we are making a global consciousness but for now let us just say we’re making a world-sized bowl of knowledgy-porridge.

So what? Well if you want to be a part of something bigger, an optimistic feeling that I am familiar with, then you have the opportunity. Go and click on stuff, recommend stuff, rate stuff, comment, write, make videos, sing songs, podcast, act. Add your stuff to the global soup.

Your stuff persits, or at least some of it does. It may well live longer than you. This is a tiny piece of your immortality, happening today.

You impact is non-linear. The butterfly effect can apply. That comment you make on that unknown blog post might change the whole world or help an important movie to get a major release, or stop something bad happening, or change a law.

Let this sit for a while. I’m going to. Then I’m going to write something about the who, how and why of gatekeepers controlling access to all our stuff in the global knowledgy-porridge.

Pipes to the rescue

I’ve always though that Yahoo Pipes was a pretty cool thing. I’ve done a lot of work inside Scouta working with incoming and outgoing RSS, and the idea of doing ‘arithemetic’ on feeds is intriguing.

So, a problem just came up: for Widgety Goodness, we wanted to feed in all posts about Widgety Goodness and Widgets and Brighton into the WG07 backnetwork, but backnetwork would only accept tagged posts from registered bloggers that have activated their accounts. That limits the amount of blog articles that can be seen in backnetwork, which is a shame. Here’s how I got around it:

1. I constructed some searches in Google Blog Search for appropriate keywords
2. For each of these blog searches, I got an RSS feed, and then fed them into a Yahoo Pipe Fetch Feed block
3. Made a Union of these feeds
4. Sorted by ascending publish date
5. Removed duplicates
6. For each item in the resulting aggregated feed, I added the tag to the item.desciption with a Loop/String Builder
7. Fed the resulting into backnetwork, via a new user created called WG Feed.

Because backnetwork will aggregate all tagged posts from participant’s feeds, these posts now appear in the backnetwork Posts page.

It works nicely. One little issue is that all these posts show up as authored by the WG Feed user, but clicking through to get the full article goes to the right place.

Look at the pipe on Yahoo Pipes.

Widgety Goodness coming to Brighton

There’s been a commotion around the office for the last couple of weeks — as Ivan brings his Widgety Goodness conference to life — Brighton, December 6th.

Widgets matter. As Tom Coates was saying at d.construct this year, your product must be more than your website. Widgets are one of the big ways to spread fingers of your product into many corners of the online and mobile world.

Lib is working on the Widgety Goodness backnetwork, helping to bring people together online before the conference itself and using the back network to richen delegates’s experience on the day. Altogether shaping up to be something quite interesting.

More info about the conference and registration over on the Widgety Goodness website and blog.

Men’s Yoga

Assuntina over at yogabrighton.net is running a Men-only Yoga class on Monday nights in Patcham. I’ve miseed the first couple of weeks, but I’ll be there.

It is sounding great from the comments here.

Wordpress.org links

These are my top sources for doing good and fancy things with Wordpress. I mean the wordpress dot org host-yourself version, not the free Wordpress dot com hosted version.

If starting out of for quite complex issues, the best place to begin is the Codex at codex.wordpress.org which seems to have documentation for almost every circumstance.

For example, to find out about how to host or arrange multiple wordpress blogs in many combinations, the codex entry for Installing Multiple Blogs has a great set of links to downloads and hacks of various sorts.

Developing Themes:

• The Loop In Action
• Theme Development
• Dissection of a Wordpress Theme

Plugin Development:

• Writing a Plugin

Really, I just end up referring to the codex mostly.  But, the codex has gaps and the Wordpress support forums are  often useful too.

At the end of the day, too, there’s nothing too scary going on under the hood so those with PHP experience will have no problem find out what is going on.

Adding RSS blog posts to a web page

If you have a blog and a regular website, often it is really nice to get headlines or a little bit of blog info into the regular website. You can put a news sidebar on a page, and give people links to go further into the blog.

Hosting changes for barkingowl.com and presencelabs.com clients

Over the next couple of months we are going to be moving our hosting clients over to spanking new scalable virtual servers from slicehost.com.

As we do that, we are also changing the environment a bit to drop some little used services and update lots of things to make it easier for everybody. Here are some of the changes planned:

• We are moving to a single php code install for wordpress blogs, so we can easily track and keep wordpress updated. This means that you’ll always have the updated version of wordpress available to you, making blog spam catching better, security better, and keeping you at the leading edge of

• We’re moving to Ubuntu as operating system from the existing Debian. That’s a little change really, but makes the latest and best packages available.

• We are making web serving changes to enhance performance and security. You won’t notice anything here, except things will be faster.

More on this closer to the time — I’ll be in touch with you all personally to talk through the migration beforehand.

In Rainbows, How Much?

BBC Radio 1 are running a poll on how much people are paying for Radiohead’s new In Rainbows album..  See the poll results and comments here.