beatnic - just wondering

This series of short articles explains some simple and free ways to use the internet to keep tabs on the subjects you’re interested in. I’m using East Dulwich as the example subject.

Previously: Part 1 - Google Alerts, Part 2 - Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 - Twitter tracking.

This article is about following Delicious bookmark tags using RSS.

In a nutshell: use your RSS reader to notify you whenever someone adds a bookmark to Delicious and tags it “eastdulwich“

Delicious

The website del.icio.us (pronounced as “delicious”) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in late 2003, and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.
[Source: wikipedia]

Instead of using Firefox “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” (sic) in Internet Explorer, you can save URLs (web addresses) of the pages and sites you want to remember to your account on Delicious.

This means you can access your bookmarks wherever you go, rather than being tied to using the same computer.

You can also share your bookmarks, and see other people’s bookmarks. There is an optional setting to make any bookmark private.

When you save a bookmark you can add tags - or labels - to describe it, to make it easy to find and to group it with other similar bookmarks.

This also means that you can use delicious to track the tags you’re interested in.

There is an RSS feed available for all tags in delicious. Adding a tag’s feed to your RSS reader means you’ll be notified whenever your reader picks up a new item.

The page for all latest public bookmarks for East Dulwich is at http://del.icio.us/tag/eastdulwich, and the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/eastdulwich.

As well as subscribing to feeds for tags you can also subscribe to feeds from people with accounts on delicious. My latest public bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/beatnic and the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/beatnic

I have my own public delicious bookmarks automatically published to this website, resulting in posts with a title beginning “links for yyyy-mm-dd” (where yyyy-mm-dd is the date I saved the bookmarks).

Other social bookmarking websites are gaining in popularity - see this list on wikipedia - delicious is easy to use and one of the most popular, so should give a reasonable representation of what’s getting noticed on the web.

In this series of short articles, I’m looking at different ways of subject-tracking on the internet.

Previous articles covered Google Alerts and Technorati Watchlists.

This article is about Twitter and its tracking feature, using East Dulwich as the example subject.

Twitter

Twitter lets you share your thoughts with the world.

You can do this by text message (SMS), IM (instant messaging), via the Twitter website, or using a downloadable desktop application like Twitterific (Mac only).

Once you’ve set up your Twitter account you can start “tweeting” your updates. Sometimes called micro-blogging, it’s a bit like writing status updates in Facebook.

Your tweets will appear on your page on the Twitter website. My page is at http://www.twitter.com/beatnic and is public.

People who want to subscribe to your updates can become your “followers” - don’t worry it’s not as cultish as it sounds.

Your updates will appear on the Twitter public timeline. If you’d prefer not to be so public you can “protect” your updates - in this case people will need to request your permission to follow you.

If you’ve set yourself up with an RSS reader, you can add Twitter update feeds of the people you’re following.

People are using Twitter in all sorts of ways, including:

• The BBC tweets news headlines and links to the full articles on its website
• US presidential candidate Barrack Obama tweets about his campaign
• Transport for London tweets traffic updates (using a service called twitterfeed to convert RSS items to tweets.

Twittervision is a mesmerising website showing what people are tweeting right now, and where they are in the world. It’s a mash-up of Twitter - using a feed from the public timeline - and Google maps.

Tracking subjects on Twitter

One of the features of Twitter is the ability to “track” subjects.

You can do this using by text message (SMS) and IM. At the moment, this is limited to text message (SMS) only. [thanks to Andrew M for the correction - see comments]

Text or instant message Track East Dulwich to Twitter. You will immediately recieve a confirmation message.

That’s it. You’ll now receive updates for any public Twitter update mentioning the subject/s your tracking.

If you’re logged in to IM your updates will be by instant message only. Your text message updates from Twitter will be switched off until you log out of IM.

To stop tracking a subject, send a text or instant message with the words Untrack East Dulwich. Again, Twitter will send you an immediate confirmation message.

The rate of updates will very much depend on the subject you choose and the timing.

I’ve received one update for East Dulwich in the last three days.

Last night I tracked England and Croatia and received about 300 texts!

Cost of using Twitter with SMS in the UK

Sending a text to Twitter costs your mobile phone company’s standard text-message rate - watch out if you’re with 3 or T-mobile, according to this article on TechCrunch uk:

Note also that the 07624 in Twitter’s number (+44 762 4801423) means it is actually billed as “international” by 3 and T-Mobile, making it a pricey service for those who like to tweet via SMS.

Receiving text updates from Twitter is free in the UK. In the United States you pay.

The same Techcrunch article suggests a newly added a UK limit of 250 incoming texts per week.

How do you keep on top of everything everyone’s saying about East Dulwich, or any other subject, online?

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in. [Also in this series: Part 1 - Google Alerts, Part 3 - Twitter tracking, Part 4 - Delicious bookmark tags]

This article looks at Technorati Watchlists.

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

To get the most out of these tools and techniques, you’re best bet is to set yourself up with an RSS reader or aggregator. Don’t be put off if this sounds a bit geeky. The popular RSS readers are fairly intuitive to set up and free to use. For further information about RSS and how to set up a reader, see this page on the BBC website.

Technorati Watchlists

Set up a Watchlist on Technorati, and find out when somebody writes a blog post mentioning East Dulwich (or whichever subjects you choose). Currently Technorati tracks 112.8 million blogs on our behalf.

Technorati is a search engine which covers the “World Live Web” - a subset of the World Wide Web - and claims to be no more than 10 minutes out of date. Read more about how Technorati works here.

Setting up an account on Technorati is quick and free - look for the link titled “Join”. Once you have your account set up, here’s what you do:

1. Visit the Technorati Watchlist page
2. Enter your subject in the Add to your Watchlist box
3. Hit the Add button.

That’s it. You’re now watching the “World Live Web” for the subject you entered.

To view an example of what a Watchlist looks like for East Dulwich, click on the thumbail image below.

You now have 3 choices for keeping up to date with your Watchlist:

• Bookmark the web address for your Technorati Watchlist
  This is not the most efficient method, as you’ll need to remember to visit fairly regularly to avoid missing anything.
• Subscribe to the RSS feed for your Watchlist
  Using this method, your RSS reader does the work by regularly visiting your watchlist and looking for updates. Any new content will be listed in your RSS reader, a bit like new email in your inbox. Then you can scan this list in your reader whenever most convenient.
• Subscribe to an RSS to email service
  If you’d rather not user an RSS reader, you can always have updates emailed to you. Technorati doesn’t offer this service, so you’ll need to use another website to do this for you. I’ve set up an account on FeedBlitz - I will review this separately, but so far it has not scored high on usability!

Is anyone blogging about you? Why not set up a Watchlist for your name.

How do you keep on top of everything everyone’s saying about East Dulwich, or any other subject, online?

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in.

This article looks at Google Alerts.

[Also in this series: Part 2 - Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 - Twitter tracking]

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

As well as for personal interest, these techniques are useful if you want to keep an eye on what people are writing about your industry, company, product, service, or your competition, not to mention your favourite sports team, tv programme, pop singer… So if you work in marketing, product development, corporate communication, the press office, public relations - to name but a few - take note.

Google alerts

Google Alerts is a service which emails you when it finds a new mention of your chosen subject.

So rather than you having to search for East Dulwich every now and then, you can get Google to do the searching for you.

You can have alerts sent to your preferred email address, but you’ll need a google account (free and quick to set up) if you want to edit and manage your alerts.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Visit google alerts
2. Type in the subject you want to track, e.g. East Dulwich or SE22
3. Choose the type of search you’d like. The choices are news, blogs, video, web, groups or comprehensive (an aggregate of recent results)
4. Select how often you’d like google to email you. The options are as it happens, once a day and once a week.

That’s it. Now you’ll never miss another mention of your chosen subject - as long as google picks it up of course.

You can set up as many alerts as you need.

The alerts are in the same format as the search results. They highlight where your subject is mentioned and link to the original source.

These are the text message (SMS) templates that came with my phone:

1. I am late. I will be there at
2. I’m at home. Please call
3. I’m at work. Please call
4. I’m in a meeting, call me later at
5. I will be arriving at
6. Meeting is cancelled.
7. Please call
8. See you at
9. See you in
10. Sorry, I can’t help you on this.

I’ve never used them. I’m not sure I ever will.

“Sorry, I can’t help you on this.” Seriously!

I mean they all seem to be written in some strange language from a bygone era. For starters they all have complete words and correctly used punctuation.

It got me wondering what templates you’d end up with if you went round asking people what text messages they send the most.

Count your opinions

Originally uploaded by Beatnic.

So I thought I’d add my input to the survey being run by London Underground on personal safety at Elephant & Castle tube station.

Unfortunately I didn’t understand how to use this “Opinionmeter” until I’d already started using it - at which point I had already mistakenly answered the first question.

I think the reason I got it wrong is because I expected it to be like a cashpoint (ATM), where the instructional text would appear on the little screen above the numeric keypad.

Only in this case the questions and instructional text are on the poster above the machine.

Being my usual self and therefore not reading the instructions I pressed the “1″ button, because that’s what it said on the screen.

A quick fix would be to have an highly visible label on the Opinionmeter itself pointing me towards the text above.

I really don’t understand the purpose of the screen at all.

I wonder how many other people this has happened to.

Better still, why not build it in to my ticket machine / Oyster top-up experience? Anonymity guaranteed of course.

Where there’s smoke there’s mirrors.

Don’t be put off by the name!

If you’re interested in anything vaguely related to technology there’s something to listen to here.

I finally started catching up with some of my blog, news and podcast subscriptions recently and that coincided well with the arrival of my Nokia N95.

Some podcast stuff I’ve been listening to and would recommend includes:

• Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake telling the story of how Flickr started life as part of a massively multiplayer online game by Ludicorp and wound up becoming the darlings of the Web 2.0 world and getting bought by Yahoo! where she is now scattering the seeds of design thinking in everything there.
• Ideo boss Tim Brown talks in threes about design thinking - inspiration, ideation and implementation - and how it’s being picked up by big business.
• Irene Au, director of user experience at Google. On setting up a central user experience department, not biting off more than you can chew, and hiring T-shaped people.

If you’ll pardon the pun.

I’ve just been sent this info about an event taking place in July. I’ve added in the link showing where the venue is on Google maps.

Title: Gas Organ exhibition
Venue: The Sassoon Gallery
Location: Blenheim Grove, Peckham Rye, London SE15
Date: 16th - 18th July
Time: Midday - 9pm
Cost: Free

On three sultry nights in July, the sepulchral vault of Peckham’s underground venue The Sassoon Gallery will reverberate to the eerily melancholic strains of the infamous Gas Organ.

The Brain-child of founding collaborators Lou Smith and Rufus Burdett, the Gas Organ is a fabulous musical instrument, able to play itself, or be controlled or played remotely.

Constructed from freely available plumbing, electrical and laboratory components, the Gas Organ is a fusion of Art, Science and Engineering, beautiful in its clinical appearance and mesmerising in its auditory effect. Witnesses of the event have their credulity challenged as they view the ephemeral chaotic turbulence of a flame producing such incredible range and depth of sound; how can a science lab experiment evoke such an emotional response as this? I am watching this, but I don’t believe it.

Weblink: www.experiment1.co.uk

I will definitely be checking it out.

It’s my younger son’s first birthday today.

He has been given some amazing presents, most of which make various electronic noises and tunes when bits of them are pressed.

It struck me that a lot of them don’t have an “off” button, or “parent button” as I call it. Some do, but many, like the fabulous Baby Einstein Animal Melodies, once they start you can’t do anything about it!

I was on the bus on the way home last week when I kept hearing a playful voice every now and then, followed by a little melody. And then 20 seconds later “Hug me”. It took me a while to realise the voice was coming from the John Lewis carrier bag at my feet containing the very cute and cuddly Fisher Price Laugh & Learn “Learning Puppy”!

Every now and then I read something that seems to coincide with my life so perfectly I imagine there must be an Amélie-like character who has placed it in my path.

This is certainly true of John Maeda’s book The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life).

Maeda is a world-renowned graphic designer, visual artist and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

At work we have a big simplicity theme going on at the moment which I’m closely involved in. The book is the perfect reference for this work.

On a personal note I found it covers themes which are incredibly important to me in the way I work and think as a technologist, designer and facilitator and also in my non-work life.

There are ten laws. If you’re really pushed for time the tenth law “The One” summarises them all:

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

The book is deliberately 100 pages long. Just knowing that when you’re reading it is reassuring and offers a feeling of simplicity in itself.

I must admit I enjoyed the book so much I broke the third law immediately by taking my time to ponder the content.

There’s a great explanation of how the iPod became more complex before it became simpler, like so many other things in life!

Maeda also covers Gestalt, one of my favourite subjects, and how it helps when designing and understanding design.

If you don’t want to buy the book, much of the information in the book is available on Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity blog, though I find the fact that the book packages the ideas and is itself simply designed means it works much better for me.

Prompted by DulwichMum’s comment in my previous post, here’s some info on MBTs.

MBT stands for Masai Barefoot Technology and is the “invention” of a Swiss doctor who observed that the Masai tribe in Africa had fantastic posture and back problems rarely occurred.

So he created this shoe which simulates the effect of walking barefoot through a desert.

Basically they make you look like you’re walking around on a couple of boats!

It makes it impossible for you to stand still so your body is constantly working out and it’s supposed to be especially good for your core stability - like you’re doing Pilates all the time.

Available via the internet or at Dr Boo’s on North Cross Road.

I haven’t tried them myself, but maybe after this plug I may be sent a pair to try out :-)

Just read this brilliant and incredibly timely (for me anyway!) post from the always passionate Kathy Sierra.

To avoid the Zone of Mediocrity, you must suspend disbelief.

You must be willing and able to turn off (temporarily) The Voice inside that says, “We’ll never get away with this. People will hate it.” That doesn’t necessarily mean The Voice is wrong, but until you can shut if off, you’re virtually guaranteed to stay with safer, incremental ideas. But remember–”safer” really isn’t safer anymore, unless you’re looking only to avoid criticism. Safe will keep you safely out of the spotlight. If that’s what you want (and sometimes that’s the best approach), then fine. But if not…

(side note: this is somewhat like The Inner Game approach or Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or any of the other approaches to creativity that get your logical “talking” mind out of the way so all the more useful but non-speaking parts of your brain can get on with the important things you’re trying to accomplish.)

And it’s not just suspending disbelief about what users (or critics) will say… you must also suspend disbelief about what your company will let you do. I first experienced this at Sun, where it was almost impossible to creatively brainstorm about ways to improve things without someone jumping in with, “Yeah, but they’d never let us do that.” End of discussion. End of chance to do something amazing. Every time I do an internal workshop, the partipants are far more negative than when some of those same people are in a public version of my passionate users workshop. By taking them outside their company and having them brainstorm or work on fictional or other people’s projects, their minds are free to move about. I’ve nearly quit doing in-house workshops because the “they’ll never let us do that” syndrome is so strong.

You can’t help users kick ass until your employer lets YOU kick ass.

[Source: Creating Passionate Users: Dilbert and the zone of mediocrity]

It reminded me of the city of Mediocritaxa - well worth a visit.

Key in *#06#

1. Turn off your handset.
2. Turn it on again.
3. Allow the handset to load completely.
4. Press the following keys one by one: * # 0 6 #
5. Read the screen. As you press on the last #, a number will appear with the title IMEI number

[...]

If your mobile phone is stolen, call or go to the nearest service center of your mobile network, and give that IMEI number to staff and ask him to block that number for a period of time, so no one can use your mobile phone for any illegal purpose.

Source: WikiHow

This worked on my phone without having to turn if off and on again.

“I get it!” said the Wealthy Industrialist. “We tell all the fish and frogs to live upstream!” “Not exactly,” said the Frog. “We pass a Law to make you take your fresh water from downstream of the factory, so you become responsible for cleaning up the water after you’ve used it.” “Won’t that involve me in additional cost, thereby impacting my ability to deliver enhanced shareholder value?” said the Wealthy Industrialist, sadly. “Quite,” said the Frog.

And their clothes are great too…

Great promo video for the British Humanist Association

Find out more about Humanism

Akismet has caught 7,250 spam for you since you installed it.

You can delete all of the spam from your database with a single click. This operation cannot be undone, so you may wish to check to ensure that no legitimate comments got through first. Spam is automatically deleted after 15 days, so don’t sweat it.

That’s about 900 spam comments per week! Thank you Akismet :-)

A person who blocks innovation and progress by taking a one-size-fits-all approach to life and in particular technology.

Ban illegal timber. Greenpeace.

Courtesy of, and arty credit to, my mate Paul.

It usually doesn’t.

Progress means simplifying not complicating.
Bruno Munari

I knew it all rang a bell

Simplicity is in the air…

The following quote via Euan Semple’s The Obvious?

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity

- Charles Mingus

And this from Mark Hurst’s Good Experience blog following eTech

Sometimes - here’s the real heresy - sometimes the best option for users might be less technology. It’s less cool, and makes for decidedly less exciting press, but it could very well be the more useful option.

Less is more, more or less.

“The trick… is to make sure that each limited mechanical part of the Web, each application, is within itself composed of simple parts that will never get too powerful.” - says Tim Berners-Lee

What are Microformats?

Via Peter J. Bogaards’ Understanding by design

This from CNNMoney.Com:

A new Web revolution is picking up steam, and the next Google or Microsoft could emerge from the companies that are in the vanguard.

Via a certain high-profile blog on our intranet! :)

11, 10, 9, 8…

It’s not getting quite the same hype as the Y2K “bug”, but this year we get an extra leap second in our countdown to the New Year!

According to BBC News:

A leap second is added to Co-ordinated Universal Time (UTC) to keep it in step with solar time - based on the Earth’s rotation on itself - to within a second.

Tidal friction causes the Earth’s rotation to slow down, which means that solar time tends to drift out of sync with atomic clocks.

If this disparity was not corrected, the “error” could increase to several seconds within a few decades; and, claim astronomers, eventually make some of their software and possibly hardware obsolete.

There have been 22 leap seconds added - and no subtractions - since the first one on 30 June, 1972.

The new leap second will be inserted at the end of the final minute of 2005, giving the familiar “six pip” BBC radio time signal an extra pip before the long pip marking the hour.

Make the most of it :)