One strand of it is people blogging about women who have influenced them and their tech/science/engineering/maths-life. So that’s what I’ll do.

This year, I want to write a little about Nancy Baym – Nancy is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, with a special personal emphasis on “personal connections in a digital age” (the title of her excellent book) and in the changing relationship between musicians and their fans.

I’ve been reading Nancy’s ‘online fandom’ blog for years, and was drawn in immediately by her scholarly approach to looking at the subject. Almost all the people who write about the changes that the internet has brought about for musicians and music fans do so from a purely anecdotal perspective – me included (albeit somewhat aggregated anecdotes that point to a sea-change in those relationships). Nancy is doing brilliant research and presents that work all over the world at conferences in both the academic and music sectors. Her book is one of -if not THE – key text(s) on connections online.

I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from Nancy and swap ideas with her over the last couple of years. I finally met up with her at a conference in Berlin last year, and have been interviewed by her twice for different books or papers she’s writing. It’s not often that an interview teaches me more than I’m able to impart but not only does talking to Nancy make me up my game just through her not letting me get away with any folksy fluffy BS about the internet being nice for musicians – at least not without backing it up – but her questions are the best questions and her responses reveal her to have the most astute grasp of the whole area of online communication as it relates to musicians of anyone I’ve ever come across.

She’s a brilliant academic, digital ninja, ardent music fan and brilliant analyst of what happens beyond the fluffy shiny stuff of our lives onine. She also wins at Twitter – follow her at @nancybaym – she manages to be funny, sarcastic, erudite and fiercely intelligent in 140 characters. Another rare trait.

There are still a few hours of Ada Lovelace Day to go - who are your digital heroines?

want to be a part of something fun that may make life a little easier for all of us? 

I’ve been working with the genius digi-gnomes at the Imperial College Dept Of Social Computing for over a year on a music sharing app/platform. It’s been through a few revisions, and we want to give it a trial now.

If you’re up for being involved, all that would happen is you’d get to download the app, and could then upload your music. There won’t be any financial transactions in the trial version of the app (though it will be a really interesting proof of concept to see if anyone who hears you chooses to go outside of the app in order to pay you for your music!) – so there’s no money in it, but there is some potential audience, and the chance to play with something very cool before anyone else. You need to have the rights to all your music – if you’re legally allowed to put it on bandcamp, you can put it here as well.

So, if you’ve got at least one album you’re happy to upload into the system (you’ll have the option to remove it again before any properly live version of the app goes out to the general publique.) let me know and I’ll send you an invite as soon as the app’s available (in the next couple of days)

 Sound good? of course it sounds good. Call me, m’kay? 

For the last three days I’ve been at the

There have been some amazing speakers, particularly James Jones the Bishop of Liverpool, Ellen McArthur, Larry Hirst, Stephen Howard… all offering an inspiring challenge to think big, get creative, redefine the rules of the game, challenge business orthodoxy… These have been contrasted with a few more circumspect views, starting from the point that businesses just need to get smarter and less wasteful at what they do in order the fix things, that the bigger questions about the foundations of the western economic project are not really up for discussion.

But one area of convergence has been around the topic of collaboration – pretty much everyone has talked about

• the need for greater cross-sector collaboration
• for a greater emphasis on open tools
• on the sharing of information related to best practices in sustainable business
• as well as online collaborative sharing spaces for businesses to share innovation and ideas.

All remarkable stuff, and it’s noteworthy that such suggestions are being made in this kind of event, but one has to wonder what the popularity of such ideas will be when so many people in business now see their IP as their most valued asset. If you make stuff, then the discussions around less wasteful ways of making that stuff are fairly safe, as the stuff you’re making is still yours to make. But if your main trading entities are ideas, then sharing those ideas to further the degree of understanding with your competitors may be a harder proposition to sell.

The key concept here to cut through that, it seems, is that of urgency - Toby Moores, CEO of Sleepydog, a company whose business is ideas, puts it succinctly ‘the future is too complex to go it alone.’ He recognises that an attempt to hang on to game-changing ideas stops them from being game-changing before you’re out of the starting blocks. Innovations at every level of business and industry are going to be needed for us to meet the immense challenges we face thanks to centuries of ever-increasing consumption and the catastrophic impact that has had on the planet and on the lives of its inhabitants, human or otherwise.

One vital part of the discussion that has begun here is the reframing of the language around future-business practice and human behaviours. The current terminology is rooted in a very particular industrial methodology, that specifically excludes a more holistic view of ‘sustainability’, beyond those things that show up on a share-holder report.

One such example was in the hugely inspiring talk given by James Jones, Bishop Of Liverpool, who said “In 100 years time, social historians will look back on now with incredulity at how we could so comfortably called ourselves “the consumer society”. The devouring society. They’ll say ‘didn’t they have the science? the knowledge? didn’t they know the damage done? Why weren’t they calling themselves with the knowledge they had, ‘Conservers’? why were they describing themselves with a suicide note, ‘Consumers’??”

That’s the kind of radical reappraisal needed for us to even start to think of the role of business as a pro-sustainability one, rather than as business as usual with a greener logo.

So, question: what kind of new terminology would be helpful in rescuing us from an unsustainable future as over-consumers?

It seems that one of the many obstructions to the balanced discussion about resourcing talent development is the semantic gulf between the

The role of narrative in providing context for art (as distinct from any narrative – or lack thereof within the art itself) can be a crucial link between the progressive practice of the artist and the need for some kind of measurable, perceivable output for the resource body.

In his book ‘The Sacredness Of Questioning Everything’, writer and thinker David Dark talks about ‘the space of the talkaboutable’, and that concept – of spaces where active, progressive exploration of the language around a subject is encouraged as a way of deepening understanding and relationships – may provide great narrative media as well as a place where the project, the participants, stake holders and the culture that the art exists within or responds to are connected and allowed to enrich one another.

Social media can provide fantastic low-friction ‘spaces of the talkaboutable’ – where democratised space (like twitter) or curated space (like a blog or forum) can be used to throw ideas, descriptors and concepts around as well as sharing ‘small media’ introductions to whatever work may be emergent.

Have a listen to the following Audioboo where Xander and I explore some of the themes that have come up across the weekend:

Mick Grierson is Co-Director of the Masters in Fine Art – Computational Studio Arts, BSE program in Creative Computing at Goldsmiths College in London

Goldsmiths are an ideal early partner in the Centre For Creative Collaboration as they’re already fairly focussed on interdisciplinary work, and as you’ll hear Mick explain as you listen to the Audioboo, they are already working on projects with some of the other colleges within the University Of London and with UCL

Mick highlights the need for collaborative work, given the focus on delivering measurable output for the public funding that the department is receiving, which often just doesn’t happen without collaboration.

Also, computing of the kind that Mick and his department do lends itself to modular work – where different teams can share the load and do what they’re great at.

The limitations of funding are what makes a project like the Centre For Creative Collaboration so vital in the current climate – as Mick says, the relationship between tiny-but-deeply-significant ideas and observable outcomes that the funding bodies need to see to be able to measure the value are often found when people have time and space to throw ideas around, to experiment, collaborate and see what’s possible.

The neutrality of the Centre For Creative Collaboration makes it an ideal place for that kind of idea-development to happen. The range of interested parties will allow for cross-disciplinary involvement in a way that may rarely happen if left to the departments within the various colleges to organise.

Have a listen to the whole conversation with Mick for more of his thoughts on this.

The tendency for people to shift their computing life into ‘the cloud’ is rolling on at great pace.

• their email to Gmail,
• their photos to Flickr,
• their back-up to Amazon or Dropbox,
• their documents to Google Docs

and are using collaborative platforms for sharing data, from Soundcloud for music files to Google Docs for spreadsheets and text.

This has been matched by a corresponding conversation about the impact of ‘Cloud’ ideas, technolgy and infrastructure on our ideas of culture and creativity. There are wonderful conversations happening about notions of ownership, what happens when a cultural entity can be made freely available to all, when people can actually build on the work of artists in every field, remix and mash-up other people’s work…

It’s heady and fascinating stuff, and much of it is explored in some detail in Charlie Leadbeater’s book ‘Cloud Culture’ as commissioned by the British Council.

The bit that seems like a massive stumbling block for me (aside from the obviously and gargantuan obstruction of the Digital Economy Bill, in all it’s neanderthal, regressive, stagnant, authoritarian lunacy) is the issue of mobile access to the cloud.

You see, at the moment, access to the internet is shifting from being perceived as a privilege to a right. This belief is impacting on education policy, and well as international development considerations, with regards to building infrastructure in those countries euphemistically labeled emerging economies.

But at the moment, the ‘right’ seems to be to ‘internet access’ rather than ‘permanent/constant/consistent internet access’, and one of the big issues with Cloud concepts is ‘what do I do when I can’t get to my stuff?’

Clearly, mobile access is the key to this, but the mobile industry is SO far behind in making itself cost effective, consumer friendly and up-to-date tech-wise, that it’s hard to imagine a greater technological discrepency than that between the potential of ‘cloud computing’ and the cost, openness, inter-operability, capacity and bandwidth of mobile comms, particularly in the US and UK.

You only need be at an event where people are tweeting a lot from mobiles and a couple of people are streaming video via 3G to experience the crunching stand-still that happens when the system is overloaded. And try accessing a Vodafone signal from an Orange-registered phone when that’s all that’s available? Forget it. What about accessing mobile data overseas? Better visit your mortgage provider first…

While mobile hardware has come on in leaps and bounds in recent times (and looks set to expand even further, under the influence of the Apple iPad, if not including the device itself), the mobile networks are making no noticeable steps at all towards ‘access’ becoming anything that resembles a ‘right’.

Just to underscore this point, having been out of contract for a while now, I called Orange, and told them that as I didn’t need a new handset, I’d like to switch to a sim-only contract, and I’d like to have whatever was the cheapest monthly option that had unlimited data (which, I think, is actually 500meg on Orange, under their ‘fair use’ policy… WTF?) – I was promptly told that the cheapest one they had was £30 a month – almost the same as I was paying already. Which seems a little odd. I asked what would happen if I said I was leaving to another network, at which point, I got the baffling response of ‘well, if you get a new phone, you can have it for £15 a month’ – way more minutes/texts than I need, unlimited data and a Nokia 5800 for £15 a month. Could I get it without the phone? Nope.

It’s nuts, it’s a totally stupid business model, is environmentally unsustainable, and the total lack of interoperability between the networks makes it all too common for people to not be able to access their data in the cloud.

So, what do we do? Cos crap mobile + Mandelson and his big internet scissors cutting off coffee shops based on what their patrons download is going to make public access to wifi a commodity in short supply – the extra strain the mobile networks have to take up if the Digital Economy Bill kills free public wifi will almost certainly be too much for the network as it stands…

Solutions anyone?

Of course I’m going to write a post about the iPad – isn’t it obligatory if you’re a blogger?

First up, I need to say that I don’t really get the way that people feel affronted when a product falls short of their expectations. Crap products are made all the time, and in a supply and demand environment, we’re all free not to buy them. If the iPad turns out to be a pile of crap, we don’t have to buy it, Apple will be left with loads of them unsold and will have to go back, do some better market research and make something we want.

That said, I do take issue with the way things are marketed – marketing is a very powerful force, and not generally held as a conversation. So when someone makes statements about something that are patently untrue, and does it with the weight of a multi-million dollar marketing budget behind them, I get a little antsy.

So, the iPad – what don’t I like about it?

In a nutshell, I don’t like what it says about the relationship between content producers and content consumers on the web.

What I mean is this: if you have a laptop, with a keyboard, a mic and a webcam, you have the same tools at your disposal to respond to online content that the person posting it has. Sure, there are degrees of quality of camera and editing equipment, but I can post a response via text, audio, video or photo in exactly the same way as the content producer. If someone writes something I like, I can endorse it, if someone writes something I disagree with, I can express that. Built into the hardware I’m using is an equality of opportunity that says ‘go on, do it! join in!’ – there’s the implicit tug to break out of the 1:9:90 ratio of content producers to content sharers to content consumers and become part of those putting good things on the internet.

And, I think that that potential for collaboration – for ideas to be developed, built on, for blog posts to become joint works between author and commenters - is the single most awesome thing about the internet. Certainly my own online content would be about 1/10th as useful without the people who take advantage of that technological parity and add their great ideas to my thoughts.

The iPad breaks that. By marketing it as a replacement for a Netbook, Apple are saying “you don’t need a computer optimised for content creation – you’ve got a camera somewhere else, use that, if you must. If you need to comment on something, we’ve put a crappy touch-screen keyboard on here so you can slowly type ‘hehe, LOLZ’ onto a youtube video, or hit the ‘like’ button on Facebook. But srsly, you can consume without thinking about responding, remixing, mashing-up, creating your own thoughts, ideas, media in response to it – just watch what the big boys and girls do and consume.”

Everything about it says ‘consume don’t create’:

• The keyboard is an optional extra
• There’s no camera
• All the software has to come through the app store
• there’s no USB socket for peripherals
• >no jack socket for an external mic (though there is one built in – whoop-di-doo!)
• no removable media (though there’s an optional ‘camera connection kit’ – more proprietary BS to stop realtime video happening…).

Everything about it says “walled garden”: do it our way, use our platform, our software.

The heirarchy is there not just between content producers and consumers, it’s there in the only access point being iTunes and the app store.

Apple are free to make whatever crap they like, to fill it with DRM bullshit, to lock down their software and content delivery mechanisms, to leave off keyboards, and instead make massive phones that don’t even work as phones. But please, don’t put your marketing weight behind a campaign that says this has anything to do with replacing a netbook without acknowleding that is breaks the single best thing about the internet.

• It’s an iPod touch for people with clumsy fingers or bad eyesight
• a digital photoframe that shows websites (though not Flash-driven ones, apparently)
• it takes everything that’s bad about the mobile web and makes it less mobile.
• Instead of streamlining the laptop computing experience, it clumsifies the mobile experience.
• You’re going to need some effing big pockets to make this thing truly portable in a way that beats a netbook or laptop.

So, if that all works for you, please, buy one – I’m not against people who want that feature set having one, I don’t think Apple are the bad guys for making it. I’m not an iPad hater, any more than I dislike any other fairly rubbish poorly thought-out incomplete piece of tech (like V1-3 of the iPhone, iPod, iMac… there’s a pattern here…). I can’t see any use for it for me that isn’t already met by my Nokia N97 and iPod Touch combination, or a proper laptop.

The basic laptop design, let’s not forget, is brilliant – the built in keyboard works as a lap-stand and screen cover, as well as somewhere to house CD drives and sockets. If you want a smaller one, you can get one with a breakout connector to those sockets and add-ons. Need to put it away? no problem, close the lid and your screen is protected! hurrah! what’s not to love about that? If Apple add touchscreen tech to their laptops, and update OSX for touch, the way we were hoping they would for the iPad, I’d be all over it. even a lappy with a detachable keyboard for trips where those extra few ounces of weight are critical. That’d be cool…

For now, I’ll not be buying one, and will happily tell anyone who asks why. Via some typing, on a keyboard, the old fashioned way

So, the iPad is here – massive Dom Joly iPhone? half a laptop? eReader? The Daily Prophet for Muggles…?

I read a couple of people on Twitter making claims that it was going to ‘kill books’. In response I tweeted this quote from Douglas Adams, which I got via Neil Gaiman:

“Nothing is as good at being a book as a book is.”

And commented that eBooks ≠ MP3s for written words.

So what’s the difference? Why are book-sellers in a different position to those who were in the business of selling music-in-bits-of-plastic that are now crapping themselves that their livelihood is vanishing?

Firstly, digitally downloadable music is the most malleable, useful format ever for music, and we lose nothing in the quality of experience by going that route. Sure, the quality of files sold on iTunes is lower than CD, but don’t forget that CDs are just containers for digital music – they’re overly large computer discs – and that the audio on them is of a quality deemed acceptable to all but the most audiophile of listeners. With digital downloads, there’s nothing to stop us upping the quality to the point where the changes are undetectable – 24bit, 96k files are probably about as good as you need to go before the changes are imperceptible. We can do that, and once the headphones are on, or the speakers are playing the music, the experience is the same as any other format for listening to recorded stereo (or in the case of DVD-A, 5.1) music. Nothing is lost, portability and positively variable quality is gained. If you want the experience of popping something flat and physical in a slot while listening, you can make a piece of toast at the same time.

eBooks are a whole different proposition – the act of reading requires us to continually look at the thing we’re reading from. That’s what reading is. Otherwise, it’s memorising, and the act of memorising requires us to read – or listen to – the words before we learn them.

So books and eBooks aren’t just a delivery mechanism – they are the stereo system as well as the record. They are carried around as part of the experience.

This isn’t to say that eBooks ‘aren’t as good as books’, just that they AREN’T books. They are a wholly different way to consume the written word, with all kinds of fun multimedia potential too, but also with all kinds of issues surrounding readability, shareability, discovery, portability, flexibility, the ability to scribble notes in the margins and the format for gifting.

Comparing once again with music – if I want to give someone a CD, it’s quite possible for me to record a digital file onto any kind of transferable media I like and pass it on without losing anything. The same can be done with an eBook, but it’s much tougher to transfer from eBook to book – the cost of printing a document of book length at home is not comparitive with the cost of dubbing a CD and printing a nice picture on it.

Readability is a huge issue – the Kindle gets round it by using ‘E ink’ or ‘virtual ink’, rendering it much easier on the eyes, but making the screen much less multi-purpose. As far as I know, no-one yet has done a hybrid E-ink/normal screen. So you have the variable use of an iPad-style screen with its eye-strain issues for longer documents, or the Kindle which is a one-trick pony, all be it a fairly brilliant one trick pony.

The Kindle is utilitarian – it does its one function very well, without too many concessions to pointless stylization. The iPad may well be used by a lot of people as an eReader, but the experience won’t be the same as reading a book, it won’t be any more portable than an individual book, won’t fit in your back pocket and even if it did, would break if you sat on it.

This isn’t an anti eBook rant – I love the idea of downloadable, sharable books, I love the idea of subscribable news, of blogs and newspapers and novels living side by side in harmony, like Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, but it’s worth considering the fundamental differences and why, as I said at the top, eBooks ≠ to MP3s for the written word.

….if you don’t believe you, go and download my eBook… for free!