Piers Jones

The history of the internet video

Apologies if you have seen this already, but this 'history of the internet' video is well worth a look and very nicely animated.

I had never realised that the evolution of the internet owes so much to the cold war.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

via information aesthetics

a nice cup of tea

a nice cup of tea, originally uploaded by vanilla.sky.

Tired of the recession? Find yourself a nice cup of tea...

This feed taken from from the main Guardian website and then filtered using feedrinse  does not contain any of the following keywords:

Recession, Credit Crunch, Downturn, Unemployment

How to send an RSS feed to your email account

From the RSS Blog a new and very simple service which allows you to send a website's RSS news feed to your email account called http://www.feedmyinbox.com

Great idea

UPDATE:

some additional tools that do this

mail chimp provides rss to email updates 

A similar service to feed my inbox called feedmailer

If you know of any more please add them to the comments below

Tim O'Reilly's response to Andrew Keen and 'the cult of the amateur'

Great video from adders from the web 2.0 expo in Berlin of Tim O'Reilly's response to the question 'what do you make of Andrew Keen'

Tim O'Reilly on Andrew Keen from Adam Tinworth on Vimeo.

RSS adoption rates still low according to Forrester report

There was some debate overnight in content of my googlereader inbox about the implications of a recent Forrester report saying that adoption of RSS stands at around 11% of internet users. Apparently the full report calls on marketers to make more efforts to explain the benefits of this technology to consumers if usage is to grow (I haven't read the full report, it's $279 and although I was interested I am going to make do with what I can get for free).

Steve Rubel feels that usage may have peaked there since "According to the research, of the 89% of those who don't use feeds only 17% say they're interested in using them" . Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins of Mashable counters that usage is in fact much higher than 11% since so many sites and features rely on RSS to provide content and users are already using these tools without realising it.

Whatever the true figure may be if you ask the average person in the street about RSS people rarely have a clue what you are talking about and why should they? I'm of the opinion that most of the 89% have no real interest in a piece of technology for the sake of it, they'll become interested if someone explains something interesting that they can do with it, easily.

The name, RSS explains the format if you are geeky enough to know what it stands for but it doesn't explain the benefits to anyone of actually using it. Feeds, feed readers, news feeds are all a much better explanation, we should choose a better name and then stick with it. News feeds are probably the best that I have seen so far.

Despite some tutorials that explain the principles of RSS just like the eco-kettle in the office where I work, if you need an instruction manual to understand it, its just too complicated. Even if you like the idea of an eco-kettle, when you want a cup of tea you just want to press a single button and for it to work. Yes I have learnt to use the kettle over time but it was a barrier to adoption.

We haven't quite got there yet with the usability of news feeds (or of eco kettles for that matter). Just because the technology has been invented it doesn't mean that we can stop there. RSS still has a long way to go in the way that it is explained to the non-technical user, concentrating on the benefits rather than the features and by supplying tools that are ridiculously easy to use. And of course finding a better name.

If that were done successfully I think the adoption rates of news feeds would be much higher than 11%.

eco-friendly packaging

Sennheiser CX 300 - eco-friendly packaging, originally uploaded by spjwebster.

It's not often that I notice the packaging for any product. Apart from the fact that there is far too much of it, it just gets thrown away and is a complete waste.

One exception to the rule is the Sennheiser in-ear headphones which I recently got for my iPhone. They were posted (via Amazon) in a really cool cardboard box made entirely from recycled paper.

I hope other manufacturers follow suit and do away with all that unecessary plastic stuff.

Simple ideas work best - number 1

3 simple ideas that I have seen lately that have really impressed me;

• Having white roofs and lighter colour pavements could help reduce global warming
• A great simple tool for working out whether a website is down for everyone or just me? (via Lloyd Davis on Twitter)

• Probably the most successful idea from tv series dragon's den is a plastic cable tie, that just got a £36m order

Yep, the simple ones are the best.....

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

A really excellent and fun video on the ethnography of YouTube
from Michael Wesh who apparently is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

His original machine is using us video:

From: Johnnie Moore's blog

Book review: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

I have just finished reading 'Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations' by Clay Shirkyand I enjoyed it so much I thought that I would jot down a few thoughts here. I'm not quite sure how I came across the book, I hadn't heard of Clay Shirky before but he clearly has a deep understanding on how the internet has had an impact on society and how groups behave.

Every once in a while it's good to take a break from the day to day immersion in the here and now and reflect on some of the changes that have happened. I found this book to be a very valuable way of looking at those changes now that the use of collaborative tools are available to anyone that can get online or receive an email.

Here are my favourite thoughts and insights from the book:

• Some very succinct explanations of concepts like the Coasean floor, the tragedy of the commons and power law distribution which added a great deal to my understanding of why social tools have had an impact.
• A good debate around the changing nature of journalism and how this is now an activity as well as a job. Also a nice explanation of why 'User Generated Content' has value.
• Some good high level thinking about how the obstacles to collective action have been removed by the internet's new tools and more importantly how they might be used in the future to change the way we live.

If you like all this type of stuff I thoroughly recommend it as a good read.

If you dont have time for the book, here is the author's presentation to the TED conference from 2005 which covers the same themes in around 20 minutes.

Flash mob dancing at Liverpool street station

I was just on my way to get the train back home when the station filled up with people wearing large headphones. I wonder if we'll look back and remember this as a very 2008 kind of thing. Fun though.