I find it funny that programmers still generate code by tapping buttons on a keyboard. Code, unlike normal prose, is highly structured with a relatively tiny lexicon. We make up notation like curly braces and semicolons to show this structure to the computer. To help ourselves, we graphically highlight the structure using tricks like indentation and syntactic colouring. Code editors also do their bit with tab-completion to select entities and block folding to hide structural complexity away. Spelling mistakes, dodgy formatting and syntax errors inevitably creep in nevertheless. Is there a better way?

When you recognise code is effectively built rather than typed then graphical environments are the natural way to go. Far beyond representations such as the Block Editor in Google Apps Inventor and Visual Studio Architecture views, I’d love to see the development of a fully-fledged, expressive and scalable software visualization model.

More than that, this representation prompts the use of a new interaction model based on physical gestures. Crack a method open to check it’s innards. Tug a variable to see where it is declared. Pinch for a breakpoint. Much of coding is actually exploring to see how it all fits together. That’s why I’m excited by demos of Kinect hacking like this:

The range of gestures that you can express with your whole body (or even just the upper part!) is far richer that you can get out of a keyboard and mouse. This ought to make interaction more efficient and, I suspect, satisfying. The ergonomic improvements over slouching in front of a keyboard and screen should not be underestimated.

Peering even further into the future, I look forward to the blooming of a sub-field of HCI based around physical gestures. I like to imagine it’ll converge on something resembling Tai Chi, combining efficient, expressive and intuitive movements that are also highly ergonomic. It wouldn’t even be surprising if different camps emerged, akin to the different martial art styles. Hopefully this will result in healthy, chilled-out geeks that happen look ultra cool in movies.

Code ninjas might even start looking the part.

The unique campus has been the picturesque backdrop for my work since I came back in 2001 to study and research. It’s been a fairly eventful period of my life, taking in a PhD, a startup failure, half a dozen homes, a quiz show appearance, a lot of juggling, three relationships winding up in a marriage. I’ve met lots of awesome people there and had some great times. Leaving it feels like a fairly major deal.

Looking back, I realise I have some many memories of Brum I can only take on board a meagre fraction at a time. I started taking photos, inspired by the emergence of the local Flickrmeet. Many good friends from Circus Society which seemed to attract cool geeks like a steaming coffee mug attracts juggling balls. The crystallisation of Birmingham’s creative digital (or is that digitally creative?) scene. Luminaries, all.

For the last two-and-a-bit years I’ve been working on the STACK project at the University of Birmingham which has been a great lesson in being the buck-stop for a complex, innovating open-source code base that depended upon other complex, evolving projects. I got to show it off in Helsinki, Slovakia, Aachen, Paris and… Milton Keynes Central.

Whilst I’ve bounced around different corners of Brum, my knowledge of London is relatively sparse. I’ve taken up a research post at City University and I need to find a houseshare thereabouts. The excellent Airbnb has been sorting me out with a roof over head meanwhile. After three months or so, Naz’ll join me and we’ll get ourselves a flat or somesuch.

It’s been a while since I’ve kicked off in a new city but it’s something that I genuinely enjoy. Naturally, it’s unsettling and that’s all for the good. A chorus of alarm bells start to go off when I get too comfortable and I’m expecting London to take a little while before cosy familiarity starts to set in. Watford Junction.

My new job title includes the phrases: Research, Web Intelligence, Semantic Web and Social Networks which makes me happy (as you’d know if you’d read this blog for any length of time) especially as I’m still fuzzy on what some of those terms actually mean – plenty to learn.

In any case, having been at the job for a couple of weeks, I’m happy there’s a big opportunity to make an impact and try stuff out. London Euston.

It’s really my own fault for repeatedly clicking through and clueing them in that right now I’m ready for a spare battery, protective case or memory card. The only surprise is that I don’t see more ads like this. In contrast, when I skip away to see if I can get away with ‘clueing‘ I see an advert for a flat belly method crudely illustrated by a shrinking blonde in a bikini. That’s a waste of space, loss of potential revenue and adds absolutely nothing to my day.

So, I would make the following deal with Google. In return for accurate and up-to-date marketing opportunity information about myself, I want a piece of the action: give me cashback on purchases I make after clicking through. A bit like Quidco but smarter, better informed and ever-present.

I could probably engineer the above with AdSense on my own site if it wasn’t explicitly against program policies. Digging a little deeper, Google does encourage me as a user to edit my interest categories but this is hardly advertised and it’s extra work for me with not much incentive. Moreover, it doesn’t get as specific as the mobile phone I recently bought and am buying accessories for. That inference is obviously being made by Mobile Fun themselves from my cookie number but, unlike the big G, they don’t let me see or control what they know about me.

C’mon Google – deal me in with your targeted ads and I’ll make sure they stay super relevant. If you don’t then Facebook or someone else surely will…

Fishing for a way to test whether people were engaged or not I headed down the altruistic route. I asked my followers to nominate a charity and pledging to make a donation to the most popular if I got a minimum number of responses. I estimated 10% was a realistic stretch. As it turned out, the diversity of nominations meant there were no clear favourites, so I decided to pick the winner at random (hence ‘roulette’). I overestimated the response slightly but the result was interesting enough that it was well worth a donation anyway.

The main result was the vast majority of the respondents were people from uni. This might suggest they felt familiar enough to make a nomination – except several of them I’d hardly spoken to. More likely, they were doing little or no filtering and giving each one genuine attention. Most followed less than 100 people. The lesson from this experiment could be: unless someone is following a small number of people, ‘following’ only means they’ve noticed you at some point. Unless you are on their ‘unmissable’ or ‘faves’ list.

I like the charity nomination model. I think I prefer it to the model where the charity with the better marketing scores a standing order then tries to ratchet it up.  As I’m generally ignorant, it seems better to spread it around and learn about causes that are not so well known in the process. I’ve cancelled my usual standing orders and am going to play with this for a while.

Awesome Note

Makes the native notes app look like a phone number scrawled on a bus ticket wrapped around piece of gum. Awesome Note is not just massively functional with folders, views, synchronisation (Google Docs + Evernote), passcodes and embedded pics/maps but also very gorgeous. Notebooks should allow a little personalisation and this does it. *sigh*

Reeder

I consume content via Google Reader and Reeder makes snacking very tidy. It’s supremely streamlined with all the sharing features, hooking up to Delicious, Twitter and Instapaper. Synchronisation is very handy and includes pics – ideal for catching up with Flickr activity. Great when you are abroad and just want to stock up from a wifi zone. *sniff*

Hipstamatic

Rather than trying to be more than a cameraphone, Hipstamatic revels in the lo-fi. It doesn’t let you really see what you get until it’s done messing the picture up. With the recent addition of geotagging there’s a very good case for putting the native iPhone app under the patio. I love it, as my recent glut on Flickr will attest. *tear*

GeoDefense Swarm

If the measure of a game’s addictiveness is the number of times you reinstall it after deleting it for being so disruptively addictive then GeoDefense Swarm is very addictive indeed. It’s tower defense distilled down to it’s purest form with abstract – yet massively over-stimulating – graphics and sound. Scaling the long trail of seemingly impossible challenges sucked hours our of my life.  A built-in clock (or, better, alarm) would be a useful safety feature.  *relief*

Each one can cost as much as a top-end laptop and so I’ve frugally waited until they’ve both conked before I look at replacing them with the latest and greatest.  Now the second is buzzing its last squeak, I’ve been checking out how far the technology has shifted in the last decade.

No integrated iPhone apps as yet (although there is a free hearing test app – check yours!) but I can pair the aids to my iPhone via Bluetooth which opens up all sorts of possibilities.  There are also multicore processors and open-source, solar-rechargeable hearing aids for South Africans in the pipeline. Perhaps more interesting than these incremental technical improvements though is the stuff users are doing for themselves.

Blogs and forums have since emerged for users to scratch their own itch.  From hearing aid hacking:

We’re frustrated that we’re behind the technology curve and pay huge dollars/pounds/euros for good hearing aids that are unaware of and incompatible with anything resembling recent advances in consumer audio tech.

We’re willing to blaze our own path because no one will do it for us until they realize there is money in them thar hills.

There’s a nice transhumanist vibe to this.  I’ve just added Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human to my reading list.  In the future, everyone will have something invisibly lodged in their ears.  Maybe not a plastic babel fish but something that augments their aural environment nonetheless.

On the surface, I’ve finally made the blog the trunk of my online presence rather than an arm, i.e. stripped the /blog part.  This is currently at sihammond.com with simonhammond.com to follow nicely later.  Snappier and all that, although I’m still sweeping up.

Behind the scenes, I’ve moved the blog onto WordPress.com hosting rather than running WordPress on my own web hosting.  I resisted this for a long time, partly because it didn’t have quite the flexibility I wanted and partly because I wanted to ‘own’ my blog — whatever that means.

Then I realised by lingering on my own hosting, my blog was my social media anomaly.   My mail, photos, bookmarks and status updates have long since emigrated to proprietary third parties.  Dedicated specialists do a much better job than I can in maintaining and extending them.  I’d rather focus on the content.

The key thing is not really who maintains the infrastructure but who controls access to the content.  This means not just being able to export the content but also minimise disruption from broken links and disused spaces.  A WordPress site under a domain name I own is ideal in this respect.

Social networks have always existed. The web just supplements existing structures for maintaining them. Online platforms led by Facebook, Orkut, Bebo and Hi5 are doing the job of coffee mornings, playground games, church meetings, etc. They provide a lightweight way to maintain and develop interaction with the people that you know, directly or indirectly, and you go by your ‘real world’ name.

Social media (as I understand it) is qualitatively different in that it isn’t based on an existing relationship. It means that you are more likely than not to have never met your followers. Many are brands, bands, organisations or bots.  As such, you generally follow them because of what they post rather than who they are (unless they are a celebrity, in which case they are really a brand). Asymmetry rules. Myspace and Twitter are the biggies here. Blogging was always social media.  With social media, you address the world and not just your friends.

Twitter is interesting in that it’s adapted from a social network pitch to a social media one. Their original front page pitch:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

…is now social media simple…

Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.

Of course, there is always some overlap. Social groups form around a shared interest and if you’re into social media then that can be the focus for a social network just like anything else.  Phenomenal social offshoots like Twitpanto wouldn’t work for Facebook.

Conversely, the most desirable place for brands is the voluntary endorsement across social networks — online or off.  This ‘tell your friends’ marketing approach has always been the golden strategy and online social network platforms only put a rocket up it.

If you are not sure whether a social web platform is social media or social network then a scientific, quantitative test might be to check the structure of the graph; if it’s heavily clustered around a minority of publishers then you are looking at social media. If it’s more evenly distributed then it’s more like a social network.

If you don’t have time for this analysis, perhaps a facetious snap test of whether something is social media is whether someone can make a living explaining how to use it

Firstly, the genius ethical-social-media guys at Dharmafly have put together OpenFreecycle at Yahoo’s OpenHackLondon to win the top two prizes. This massive Yahoo! endorsement is great stuff and very encouraging for my own little project.

I’ve now open-sourced this hacky swing at it with the carefully non-trademark-infringing name: freelist2web. There’s also a demo installation. Sadly, if you go there you’ll notice the most recent posts are starting to age. This is because I was banned last week from the Birmingham Freecycle Group (also from the Birmingham Freecycle Cafe Group). I queried it to hear that a member had complained after finding his posting on it. I’ve offered to limit post information to group members and hope when the Group owners get a chance to confer we’ll find a way that benefits everyone.

The obstacle is disappointing since I’d taken care to obscure e-mail addresses and assumed that Freecycle posters wanted their message to reach as many people as possible. I’ve tried to make my case on the OpenFreecycle blog post which I recommend as a place to carry on discussion about moving Freecycle on from a closed mailing list.

I’m still passionate about the principle of freecycling, if not the current dominant implementation. I think local community building through resource sharing is a fundamental social instinct that hasn’t yet found an online platform. I’m still bookmarking interesting sites like vSkips, GoodNewsForPolarBears and JustForTheLoveOfIt.

Without a critical density of users it’s an uphill struggle though. Maybe Facebook could be a cable car with a well-integrated app? The Facebook marketplace – now powered by Oodle – is already a reasonable service that allows you to give stuff away, support a cause or request stuff within a radius of your location.

In case any data junkies want to get a snapshot of freecycling activity in Birmingham over the last few months, I’ve made the post metadata available. Would love to see some cool data visualisation or mining insights.

As while ago I fed my Tumblr – which acted as my scrapbook of web postcards – into Facebook for a straight win. I carry on posting to Tumblr but now it reaches friends who I know wouldn’t see it otherwise and who jump on the chance to comment on it. When I spotted a familiar comic on a friend’s Tumblr I headed straight over to Facebook to comment, on a good hunch they also imported.

The case with Flickr is not so simple. By importing those, I’m also sharing my stuff with people I know. Those not on Flickr can give me flickr-esque feedback but it’s become detached from the source where I’d much prefer it. However, I know that Flickr isn’t everyone’s preferred photo biscuit. Since I’m Flickr faithful, I put up with this fracture even though it’s one more little nudge towards the Facebook vortex.

Reader seems to be chasing Facebook with the sharing and liking (formerly starring). Its far smaller user base seems to be mitigated by its users tendency to be reading the same sort of stuff as me. Of course, it’s also where I scan through recent photos from my Flickr contacts.

My Twitter posts rarely seem appropriate as Facebook updates somehow. Not only are they are lighter and more ‘disposable’ but they’re generally read by a different crowd (probably the one also using Reader). A better place to ‘host’ Twitter is probably FriendFeed which nicely integrates and enriches it with built-in friend lists, proper conversational support, inline images and expanded links.

Mine’s a complex, messy setup that doesn’t seem to have some about by design but really as an incremental series of reactions between what I want to do and what is available at the time. It’ll doubtless carry on evolving as the options multiply and I try to bind it all together in a way that makes sense.