Pete Ashton’s Blog

Isobel, photographed by Mother

Dubber wanted me to interview Stef on the occasion of his turning 30, so we sat down and did it. Which also makes for easy blog content, especially as Dubber did all the tech legwork. Thanks Dubber!

We’ve been toying with doing a weekly-or-so vid/podcast with the two of us rambling about stuff. A good idea?

Dubber writes more about the video thang here

We were planning on having one of these anyway but being who we are and where we’d been it ended up being streamed live over the internet. Y’know, as you do. Here’s the video.

Apparently at least one person has found this useful, which is good enough for me.

And here’s the transcript from the chat room.

Of late I’ve been working on a few things, mostly theoretical but with the likelihood of being implemented in the real world, that would probably benefit from some kind of web forum. You know, the sort of thing that’s usually powered by phpbb. The thing is, I really don’t like forums, to the point where I’ll actively avoid any site that has a forum as it’s primary function. I like blogs and wikis and email lists and stuff like that. Now, while I’m sure I’m in the right I know a significant number of web users like forums and that they have their advantages, especially when you have a community in which everyone has the potential to start an interesting thread.

But given my aversion to forums and the fact that most of the blogs I frequent never mention them I’m pretty ignorant of the current forum scene. Anyone got any tips? To put things in some context I’m thinking specifically for the Custard Factory as one of the ways the tenants can talk to each other. Is setting up a phpbb forum there a good idea or just asking for trouble?

You start with an offhand comment sent to Twitter. Nothing meant by it other than an observation.

Then after some meaningless banter Bounder says this, presumably riffing off the “what is Bambuser actually for?” debate:

Being someone who can’t resist a really stupid idea…

I go and do it.

Here’s the video. Be aware that as I’m recording this it’s being streamed live and people are leaving comments, which is why I stop to read the screen every so often. But yeah, live eyebrow plucking. Enjoy.

On a more prosaic note, the integration of this with Twitter really works well. As soon as I start recording Bambuser sends out a message via Twitter to everyone who’s following me meaning I get an audience immediately. Pretty cool stuff.

Everybody’s live streaming, no-one’s quite sure why.

I’ll be next, no doubt…

—

Yup, there I am…

Okay, I’ve just had either the best idea ever or the most stupid notion to date, so I’d better blog it out and see where it goes.

These last few months I’ve occasionally joked about having blogging students, people who ask me for advice regarding their blog and with whom I have some kind of mentor relationship. And from this I’ve started thinking about how this sort of thing could be formalised, preferably with the community helping itself with a little guidance. In more grandiose moments the concept of Pete’s Blogging Academy formed in my head, complete with gowns and certificates, but I usually came back to earth and brushed it aside.

That said, there is a need here. People who start blogging go through some pretty well defined stages as they find their voice, get over the realisation they have an audience, become part of a blog-wide conversation, get their first comment spam, and so on. Having some kind of safe harbour to discuss such things would be useful.

But that’s not the best/stupid idea. Here it comes.

A new blog (natch) where I lecture on blogging and set homework. Each week there’s a new lesson covering the bases. Seminars take place in the comments. Homework is to be done on your own blog. This will involve things practical stuff like tracking who’s writing about you (or someone else if you’re just starting), hacking the code of a video embed so it’ll play on your blog and sending your feed through Feedburner. But it’ll also involve creative stuff like going to a gig or event and blogging about it or turning a notion you had just before falling asleep into a blog post. I’ll hopefully come up with better ones at the time. And there could be visiting lecturers on specific subjects. Someone could write about podcasting, for example, or video streaming, or a crash course in PHP.

But the magic comes from the community. Everyone who signs up for the academy gets their blog listed on the sidebar and when they hand in their “homework” the rest of the members are encouraged to “mark” it in the respective comments. This serves not only to help get feedback but to generate a social aspect where people who wouldn’t normally read each other do so. I think this could be the killer aspect of the deal.

And what’s in it for me and any other “lecturers” who come on board? Well, if you want some real mentoring on your blog then we’ll do that for a fee. Want me to have a look over your last few months and write a report? Here’s my rate sheet. And believe me, there are business blogs that want this kind of feedback. And that’s on top of the consultancy / training stuff I’ve been getting recently.

Any thoughts? Has it been done before? Did it work?

We Feel Fine is an infuriatingly interesting project when I’m trying to get some work done, so I’d better blog about it so I can move on.

Here’s how it works (edited from here:

At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.

Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database. Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”. If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way. If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence.

Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post’s author. Given the author’s username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user’s profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog’s owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.

Which is nice but it’s the interface that really kicks ass here. I particularly like how it displays photographs. Here’s a couple from Birmingham:

It’s like a social art project using automagically generated content and I’m loving it.

via D’log

Later: Thanks to Jon in the comments for reminding me of this TED talk:

Further to the Brum Twitter Cloud ponderings, Martin, aka @mawhin, has cracked it.

Keeping the techy bit short, he’s made a “bot” called mawhin_bot1 which scours Twitter looking for people who live within a 10 mile radius of Birmingham. This bot then follows them which means this is a rough and ready automatic aggregation of tweets coming out of the city, and it’s available as a feed.

Useless on a day to day basis, for sure, and I’m already following many of the people the bot has found, but should some sort of major event happen in the city this would provide a one-click snapshot of people’s reactions on Twitter. And at the end of the day it’s data which can be processed and turned into something else, which is kinda the point.

Thanks Mawhin!

A little under a year ago we got notice to leave the legendary Bournville Flat in Bournville and went our separate ways. Dr Andy moved around the corner, Andy and Alex moved to Erdington and I moved to Kings Heath. And then my life started going a little crazy and, other than a couple of accidental meet ups, I haven’t stayed in touch with that lot. So when Alex and some of the old gang turned up at the Curates Egg gig tonight it gave me cause to pause and reflect on how things have changed this last year as we tried to summarize our respective news.

The first thing that struck me was how I was at the gig. A year ago I would have turned up, probably on my own (I went to more gigs that my friends could manage so it became a necessity), take a bunch of photos and then blog about it. The likelyhood of chatting to anyone would be slim. Tonight I had conversations of varying lengths with Pippa from 7 Inch Cinema about what she and Ian are looking to do this year, Sandra from Friction Arts about how to deal with awards, Harry Palmer about his Victorian Gents Toilet art excursion, Little Chris of Brumcast about how the likes of us can get into education, and, of course, Al Hutchins of The Courtesy Group about his strategies for keeping the Curates Egg gigs going by bringing in more hands so he can step back and get on with the music, as well as a project he wants to do with his late brother’s photographs. Oh, and I also talked to Alex about the possibility of coming into her school to do some digital media-type work with the kids. I think that’s it. There may have been others but the point is I was just there for the gig. None of this was premeditated.

Now, I’m not saying this is a big deal. These people aren’t superstars or anything and it’s not that you need to be in a certain social group to talk to them. They’re just people who are doing interesting things who I’ve gotten to know over the last year, people I can work with, exchange idea with and mutually learn things from. I don’t feel like I’ve “made it” in any careerist way but I do think this is a nice illustration of where I’m at right now compared to where I was when I started messing around with blogging about the city. And all in a year.

I’m at that stage in writing this post where I can either get into an embarrassing gush about how grateful I am or I can get all defensive about it all and neither of them are really right, so I think I’ll leave it like this - a milestone post, nothing more. This year is moving so fast with so many things passing through my head that it’s good to take stock once in a while. And the stock, it looks to be fine.

In a cafe this afternoon Jo and I were wondering whether it would be possible to get a feed of all the Birmingham UK based Twitter streams. I can’t speak for her brain but I’m interested in treating this as ambient chatter that can give a snapshoot of the mood of the place, possibly picking up on major events such as a tornado or whatnot.

Since the location data is not included in the default feeds and I’m not that savvy on playing with their API I’m blogging some of the stuff I’ve found in the hope someone else might be able to hack something together.

First off, a user search for “Birmingham UK” brings up 131 users. A long winded solution could be to pump all of their feeds into a Yahoo Pipe but it wouldn’t be updated with new users. Still, it’d be something. Of course you could also scrape those pages and turn the page URLs into RSS urls which could be automated once a week.

Twittermap lets you search for “Birmingham UK” and produces this:

Which is perfect, except the data isn’t available as a feed or even a list. The points on the map is actually quite long-winded and useless, truth be told. Still, they can obviously get the data from somewhere.

They’re doing interesting things with geotagging tweets but I’m not sure how this works exactly.

There’s a page on the Twitter wiki about tracking earthquakes which has some stuff on ways to geotag but it mostly seems like speculation.

Finally, Mawhin has produced a Yahoo Pipe that filters those your following according to a specified city that matches their profiles. I’m not sure exactly how it works but if this can be applied to the complete public feed it might be useful. If, of course, Pipes can keep up with the full public feed.

What I’m after is a big stream of nonsense that’s related purely by location. The equivalent of walking down New St waving a microphone about. It won’t be useful but it might be interesting. Anyone want to have a hack at it?

iJustine asks the music types about the hot topics in Austin from a week earlier. With Hi Lar Ee Us results!

As I mentioned at the time, the shift in culture on the last evening of Interactive and the eve of Music was quite dramatic. I’m not sure I could have dealt conceptually with doing the whole festival.

via Jo

Another unfocused ramble about some ideas I can’t shift from my head…

One of the things I have to think about is how people or organisations who either can’t blog or don’t want to blog can engage with the blogging world. Say, for example, your company just can’t do the human voice thing without sounding really fake but people are talking about what you do online. Or say you’re dyslexic or just not very good with words.

I can’t pin down where this came from - it might have been an aside at SXSW or it might just be really obvious and just bubbling to the surface of my brain - but it strikes me that while people need stuff to talk about they also need stuff to talk around.

Ah yes, that was it. Hugh MacLeod talking about working with Stormhoek Wine on the Self Replicating Awesomeness panel. Amongst many other things he got them to send bottles to bloggers who were having parties, not with the intention that they then blog about the wonderful wine - that would be naive - but that the wine becomes part of the experience. Or something.

Now this seems blindingly obvious to me and I’m sure there’s more to Hugh’s strategy there, but the notion of throwing things into spaces where social activity is interesting, especially when it’s done in a passive way. I’m not talking about advertising or anything that shouts in an aggressive, attention getting way. In fact I’m not really talking about marketing strategies at all. It’s more like putting a surprising “thing” in the way of people that makes them think about their environment in different ways. That could be a piece of public art, a new idea, some constraint on their usual patterns of behaviour, anything really.

I’m sure this has been thought about before. Something related to Alt Reality Games?

One to ponder more on. (And, again, feel free to use this a jumping off point for your own musings should you have the desire.)