I’ve been thinking a bit about geek conferences since “The Future of Web Apps” took place in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, a couple of interesting conversational threads that it inspired.

The first was best summarised by Chris Messina in his piece “The Future of White Boy clubs” (executive summary: “far too many speakers and attendees at these things are white men; how do we change that?”).

The second cropped up in multiple conversations. For a lot of attendees FoWA was an odd conference, because they’d seen most of the speakers giving similar talks before, usually some time in the past 12 months. This isn’t a criticism of FoWA as such - what they built, very successfully, was a cheap, quick and engaging “Best Web Conference Speeches in the world… Ever!” album.

I personally found it very rewarding, but I’m a latecomer to the conference scene, and haven’t done the usual round of SXSW Interactive, Etech, OsCon, FooCamp/BarCamp, etcetera.

One conclusion you could draw from this is that a lot of ‘alpha geeks’ attend too many conferences; that there are only so many things to talk about. But conferences are hugely useful in providing ‘face time’ with creative people from all over the world, and every occasion provides opportunities for new connections and conversations. Maybe the problem isn’t the number of conferences, but the fact that they’re all focussed around listening to clever people talk about… stuff.

There might be a solution to all this, though, and I think I saw it pioneered this weekend on the main Yahoo! campus.

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I feel like a failure.

Not because I’ve really failed at anything, but see, I have this enormous backlog of photos, reaching back to May of this year, and I just haven’t got around to adding them to my flickr stream.

Every time I get around to titling, tagging and uploading a few more photos I feel strange that the events depicted happened so long ago.

It is, perhaps, the price of an ever-more immediate world in which current events are photo-blogged the minute they unfold, and every current event is dissected and commented upon in thousands of blogs, as it happens. (more…)

We never had a modem at home (the call costs in the UK were ridiculous), so my first serious encounter with the Internet happened when I got to university in 1996. I spent hours in college computer rooms, falling in love with the endless reams of useless information and software which were already floating around the web.

In those days web search was a very nascent industry, and my first guide to the sea of sites was a weird little directory called “Yahoo!”. I was studying English Literature at the time, and natural nerd though I always was, if someone had told me that 7 years later I would land an engineering job with the very same Yahoo!, I would have laughed in their faces.

From Yahoo! I jumped to using Altavista, still owned by DEC at the time. And not long after, I remember the buzz of discovering my first online “meme” - the Babelfish translation service, and the hilarious things it did to texts when you translated them through successive languages and back to English.

Over the past three years I’ve been directly involved in working with all three of those early online inspirations, and it’s been an amazing experience which has taught me a great deal, allowed me to do work of which I’m truly proud, and inadvertently catapulted me 5000+ miles across the globe.

But it’s time for a slight change, and so today marks my first day working on something slightly different - as of now I am the latest engineer to join the talented and possibly slightly insane team at Flickr. (more…)

So I know - this site’s been pretty quiet for the last 3 months or so. In part that’s because I’ve been too busy to write much.

Habitual visitors will notice that, as of today, there’s been a bit of a rebuild. It seemed like it was long overdue, for a mixed bag of reasons…
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Now, I’ve been mulling this over for so long that, in fact, the “podcasting” goalposts have moved some considerable distance since I first heard the term and choked most unpleasantly on my morning cup of tea.

Which is just the first problem - what the hell is podcasting anyway?

For the sake of some brevity, I want to tackle two things which seem to fall under this latest abortion of a word:

1. Recording yourself rambling on about something, and releasing it on the web.
2. Using RSS Media Enclosures to distribute audio content.

The majority of my scorn is reserved for the former.
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Tagging - it’s where the action is right now. At it’s heart, it’s like all great technology ideas; so simple that you wonder why it hasn’t been a mainstream concept for years.

If you’re new to it, tagging is nothing more than assigning keywords to a piece of content, usually at the point of publication. A good example is the photo site flickr. When I upload a photo to the site I choose some words which are appropriate to describe the picture. These usually take the form of place names, people or objects found in the photo.

This is all about simple yet rich metadata, and it’s suprisingly effective. On flickr, for example, it’s now trivial for me to go back and view all my photos of wood, or those depicting Half Dome in Yosemite.

Apply the concept across a diverse group of photographers, and you get a collaborative picture of Half Dome which is built from the combined micro-efforts of each photographer to apply the tag.

Tagging, of course, doesn’t just have to be about photos. delicious uses the same concept to categorise bookmarks, and we’re even starting to see blogging tools that allow users to apply tags to their posts.

As a descriptive mechanism and a search tool, tagging is incredibly powerful. It is not, however, a “folksonomy”. Here’s why.
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I’m getting mellower in my old age. I mean, look at this place. Movable Type all over the place, photos and delicious links in the right-hand column… What is this, a blog or something?

Nuh-uh. You’re not even close. Still not a damn blog.

I guess that some people would probably accuse me of dabbling in mere semantics at this point, and I think, to be fair, they’d be correct. This site (particularly on the other side of the fence, where I write an irregular diary about relocating from London to Silicon Valley) has an awful lot in common with others which fall under the banner of “blogs”.

But the semantics of the issue are important to me.
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Ever since I first wrote a short text titled “Not a Damn Blog” back in August 2002, I’ve been watching with some interest the emerging trends in internet technology, and the ways they’re being described, jargonised and lionised.

The good news, from an observer’s point of view, is that not a lot has changed. That’s the bad news too.

We’ve entered a new “tech bubble”, without anyone quite realising it. It’s still about hyperbole and over-valuation, but the action isn’t on Wall Street this time. Instead, it’s taking place in convoluted blog threads, and the commodity being shifted is buzzwords; a new one seemingly every month.

Will the bubble burst? I’m honestly not sure. The nature of language development suggests that we’ll see more of a deflation, the majority of buzz phrases fading into obscurity after a few short months or years of excitement.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: it’ll be an absolute hoot for cultural historians years from now.
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I’m frustrated in an unexpected way by a lack of internet connectivity in my apartment at the moment.

In short, the fact is that I can’t do a lot of the programming I’d like to do without an internet connection.

This isn’t because it suddenly prevents me from firing up a text editor and bashing out the code which is flitting around in my subconscious; far from it.

But without the internet I have no access to any of the code libraries I might want to install to support my applications, and I also have no way of testing the pieces of code which need to communicate with other machines elsewhere out there on the network. (more…)

There are lots of lovely tech developments to look out for, according to The Guardian’s 2003 Survival Guide . Shame then, that a lot of the piece is complete bollocks. Let’s burst a few bubbles, shall we?
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