In @AshleighGardner’s session about reading/social media/location I proposed that Foursquare comes up just short of perfect by not letting me check into content in a meaningful way. I can say I’m at Jimmie Simpson Park but how do I tell you I’m there on a bench reading the latest issue of The Believer? And how do I find where other readers of the same magazine, or even the same issue, settled down to read? Conversely, how do I know what’s being read in my vicinity? In the age of the ebook, how will anyone know that I’m reading frickin’ Pynchon? 

When will the crowdsourced catalogue of LibraryThing be overlaid on the crowdsourced map of Foursquare?

@NicholeMcgill asked why anyone would do this. Took me a couple days to formulate an answer. It’s the same one I give to doubters of Foursquare and Twitter: wait until 3 of your friends are doing it then see how you feel.

Further thoughts from @RJWheaton in an old (*sigh*: they’re all old, these days) post from Datachondria.

Posted via email from nrm

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Watching Olympics coverage at my in-laws’ while muddling through a cold. Observed through a mucusy haze a few things:

• The provincialism of CTV is astonishing.
• Vancouver’s weather is governed by capricious spirits.
• I have no idea what I’m watching.

I’ve been obsessing lately about one of the principles espoused in The Brothers Heath’s excellent book Made To Stick: approximately, it’s that you’ll be heard best if you listen to yourself with the ears of your audience.

With extremely rare exception there are no sports announcers covering the 2010 games who are bearing this principle in mind.

Just now an announcer said, by way of “offering some perspective,” that mogul skiers move at up to “10 meters per second”. I have no idea what that speed means without picking up a calculator. So much for perspective.

What the announcers do talk about is whether so-and-so’s “program” was “technically challenging” and how “solid” their landing was while at no time speaking to the audience as if it’s the first time they’re seeing human beings do some of these things, which for many of us it undoubtedly is.

(Nature documentaries seem to understand this far better than presenters of sports. I guess because the participants are non-human it’s assumed that the audience needs some help making sense of what they’re seeing.)

Take the luge. For macabre reasons it’s in the spotlight these days. But does anyone understand how this sport works? Don’t most of us suspect it’s not really a sport at all, but a horizontal rebuttal to bungee jumping?

But we also know that we’re probably missing something. We know it’s bad to slow down. We know it’s hard to see what your heels are pointed at when you’re lying on your back. We’ve all tobogganned.

Among the things we don’t know is whether you can steer one of those little sleds. And it’s not clear how weight and height aid or hinder a competitor. We don’t know why some lugers come out of turns cleanly while others rattle against the sides of the track. How to tell when one is luging well or poorly is so elementary a thing that we almost fail to notice that it’s entirely obscure.

But wouldn’t it be cool if there were a channel (even if it’s just an alternative audio track on existing channels) that covered sports with commentary that informed the viewer of the principles at play? I’d seek out coverage of unfamiliar sports (cricket, anyone?) if the announcers told me how to watch what I’m watching.

• How do the rifles in biathlon work differently from a conventional hunting rifle?
• Why do mogul skiers all have those bands on their knees?
• What the hell is going on in figure skating?

Why not let informed audience members contribute the audio track as a sort of real-time audio blog? Let fans recruit and train new fans. Feed curiosity and grow the sport. You can’t make an aficionado in an hour but you can convey an illusion of understanding, and that’s enough for us dilettantes.

Am I the only one?

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Just a little off (to) the side (of gmail)

Got it? Alright.

I love that my non-twittering friends are now not only privy to my tweets (a dubious privilege, indeed) but able to respond at length without having to join Twitter themselves.

Not only this: they’re now able to converse with one another in the course of commenting. This is gold. When they said Buzz was like writing a message without a “To:” I wondered initially how that was different from Twitter or a Facebook update. I get it now.

With Buzz I can do what I thought I’d be able to do with Wave before I used it and got confused, frustrated, and finally bored.

I haven’t checked on my Wave account in months (has it been months?) but I’ve checked in on Buzz a dozen times already, not counting the emails (are they emails?) that alerted me via my Android phone that someone had commented on something in Buzz.

Of course I’ve checked in a bunch of times: it’s email. We all have email. Specifically, we all have Gmail.

If Wave has failed to take off it’s because it’s

• in need of some enterprising gang (Basecamp, can you hear me?) to build a killer app on top of it so we don’t have to Wave in the raw and
• requires another signup and the inconvenience that comes with migration.

By anchoring in Gmail, Buzz removes signup and migration pain in one step. And it’s got just enough functionality to make it interestingly messy, but not enough to overwhelm.

Buzz isn’t perfect right now but I won’t get into my quibbles with it because they’re boring, obvious, and probably already fixed and being tested as I write this. And I won’t say “this will fundamentally change email” because prognostications are just as boring as complaints.

But I will say that I think sharing stuff on the internet with my friends just became a little bit easier and therefore made the internet a little bit more fun.

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Last week Joe Wilcox wrote an excellent piece on the decade that wasn’t at Microsoft. He included this point…

That’s another problem — and I’ve heard about it so many, many times from Microsoft employees: Most every technology decision must be justified by some data point.

Google. Microsoft. Both have a data-driven cultures but one is functioning and one isn’t.

You could conclude from this that Google is  destined for the same-fate as Microsoft — analysis paralysis. It is only a matter of time. But I am keen to see if Google can overcome this problem. Instead of having a bun fight with metrics, I wonder if improved data-flow within teams — that ambient awareness you get from twitter — can mitigate this outcome.

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A year after starting this blog (and a month into my new job) I’ve resolved to roll up my sleeves and learn how to deal with data.

Also, when my boss asked me for figures including median and standard deviation I got sweaty palms and goobered up my company iPhone.

So I bought a book; my usual stress response when confronted with my own ignorance. It’s an O’Reilly (my first, I think) from their “Head First” series, which seems to be geared towards impractically-educated people such as myself who are thumbing through night school course catalogues but not quite convinced that this subject is worth the scheduling commitment or risking entanglement in group assignments.

I worked through the first chapter last night (it was good, but you really do need a pencil handy). If I knock off 2 chapters every week I’ll be done before March.

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Flickr: Ross2085

The New York Times is featuring a rather empty article about data in retail whose thrust is basically more data = more opportunity. Uh yeah. The trend I am seeing with retailers — and my visibility here is more limited than it used to be — is an analytics or CRM vendor sells a retailer a data package that is tailored just enough for the purchase to make sense to the company’s executive but the package isn’t tailored enough to yield any intelligence to make better decisions. The mid-level users that need the intel are left saying WTF? That is an old management pattern but seeing it happen hurts my insides because the opportunity is really amazing but is being fumbled so badly. Creating a data-driven culture has to start with the analysts. Hopefully they know what to ask for.

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Your browsing history can be used to tell a lot of things about you. We are just beginning to see a raft of applications that leverage your history to provide a better web experience. One firefox add-on that I have just stumbled across is Wikipedia Diver 4.o. It tracks the research you have been doing on Wikipedia and gives you a granular info viz of your history. (http://thejit.org/)

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Brody observes that “portable” recording devices (which weighed about nine pounds then) made these conversations possible, and wonders about the effect of technology on our “expectations for information and aesthetics” generally.

The expectations-for-information-and-aesthetics bit caught my attention. As we have said here before on Datachondria new forms of technology are linked to new forms of criticism. The supercut is only one such example. Now if only we could learn how to use these tools we would be laughing.

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In this blog, I write about the world of online music discovery and recommendation.  I look at the tools available to help people find music.  I examine some of the issues that can make music recommendations go bad.   I also write about things that I find generally interesting including programming, data visualization, playing games,  and (of course) music.

Awesome. RSS reader => ADD.

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Every since hearing Chris, I have been keen on seeing the browser evolve. In the embedded video, the folks at Adaptive Path put forward one possible iteration — the browser as data manipulator.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

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I love ol’ hotdogsladies, but I think we do owe a bit of an explanation.

If you’re not already following Datachondria on Twitter, you can do so here. And if you want to get really personal with us datachondrians, you can do that too.

Now, the excuses:

• I am a happy new daddy who just started a new job.
• Ryan, daddy of a toddler, has more going on at work than I care to consider without a drink in me
• Rob’s writing a book and was recently promoted
• Mark’s the last to have posted here so he doesn’t need any excusing, though you really should check out the fine work he does on his main blog

Now, the promises for posts we’ll be serving up soon (though perhaps later):

• We’re divided on Twitter’s new native retweet functionality — yes, at least one of us actually likes it
• We’re not sure about Foursquare; who’s it for and why would they use it?
• We’ve tried (and failed at) conducting our weekly meeting on Google Wave
• I suspect my family still resents me pushing them to Twitter for updates on the birth of The Boy
• We’re just about ready to post our first podcast.

That’s to say nothing at all of electronic reading, parenting and mobile apps, job transitioning with social media, digital guidance to analog pleasures, and however serendipity leads us to those moments of palpable transition that we’ll forever try to capture and share with you.

Thanks for sticking with us.

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Twitter allows two things to happen very well: mobs feed on themselves, and the slippery slope gets very steep and extremely slick. There’s also the snowballing analogy… Bottom line, there was a lack of respect for the topic, a clear void in researching the audience, and just bad presentational ability. A perfect storm, if you will. And once the tweeting started, it simply became more fun to be in the stream than put up with the presentation. In a way, it was less about being snarky towards the speaker, and more about amusing each other by sharing and exaggerating the pain.

We touched on this a few months ago: the idea that Twitter is, as yet, a social space largely unregulated by norms of behaviour. There are further thoughts elsewhere about this particular example and some possible lessons: are we moving from a model of passive consumption in conferences to one of active participation? Does the ‘unconference’ model so successfully employed by, for example, BookCamp Vancouver last week, provide more value to attendees? Has the burden changed from audiences (to pay attention to the presenters) to presenters (to better know their audiences)?

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ThisIsIndexed.com

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Itzbeen 10 days since I last slept 3 consecutive hours

Apologies to readers and fellow Datachondrians for my lack of posts last month. I have a great excuse.

Over on my wife’s blog you’ll find a review of Itzbeen, a gadget that over the last 10 days has become vital to our sanity.

It’s basically four non-lapping mm:hh stopwatches kluged together with a backlight & nightlight. There’s a L/R breastfeeding switch at the bottom that’s not connected to anything electronic, basically a binary abacus. That feature doesn’t get used because wifey’s got a solution she likes better. The display is as it appears. There’s no counter. You’re not accumulating hours slept or counting poops: you’re just gauging the chronological distance from now back to the last occurrence of event X.

Change a diaper: punch the diaper button to reset that clock. Feeding: punch the bottle. Etc. The wildcard “*” button worked well for timing doses of post c-section pain meds.

Couldn’t be simpler. Lost the manual minutes after unboxing.

When you’re sleep-deprived and not yet attuned to the signs your baby’s giving you for his various needs (there aren’t many, but what baby wants he wants very much and very soon) you have a hard time remembering much of anything, let alone when the last time was that you successfully satisfied any of your offspring’s needs. These needs are steadily recurrent, which is nice, but then not remembering the most recent time you guessed right means you also don’t know which need is likely the next one due for serving.

On top of that, if you’re stuck in a hospital you’re going to be talking to a lot of nurses just after your baby’s born and they’re going to want to know things like the last time he ate and how long he’s been wearing that diaper and even though that’s an unreasonable type of question to ask someone in your state you’re going to feel terrible if you don’t know.

Before I had a kid I could estimate the last time something happened reasonably well. If there was a technique to it, it went something like this: first I’d eliminate a third of the day because nothing could have happened while I was sleeping, then depending on what kind of thing you’re asking about I could narrow it down to a likely span of only a few hours.

When did you check the mail?

About 10. (It was before lunch but late enough that there would have been mail to take in.)

Brilliant. Chronological estimation by triangulation. That I ever had this skill now amazes me. And I’m in awe of you who now possess it.

This little device’s greatest value is the confidence it gives a new parent. When you’re sleeping 2 hours at a time all over the clock and eating whenever you’re hungry and able you literally lose your gut feel for time. And you can’t rely on higher faculties while you’re not getting enough sleep. But even a lab rat can punch a button to mark an event. With this thing you’re suddenly the sleep-deprived halfwit who knows to a minute’s precision how long baby’s been sleeping.

Yes, there’s an app for that. But the thing with babies is, usually there are at least 2 people who have to look after them. So one person gives up their main communications device so that diaper changes and feedings can be tracked? Does it sync with both of your phones, regardless of make? What if it’s docked for charging? What if you need to use the phone? What if it gets peed on?

Sometimes you really do want a device to do just one thing very simply and very well so you can free your mind to do other things. I’ll have a more properly Datachondrian post later on how we used Twitter to keep all interested parties up to date from the first labour pains. For now I wanted to give praise to this single-purpose device and single-purpose devices in general — scales, measuring cups, watches — that yield only the data you want exactly how you want it and in a way you can understand even when your capacity for understanding is stretched to its limit.

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In unconnected, but related news I discovered the recently acquired Mint.com has been creating data visualizations as well. Surprisingly some topics are kind of fun.

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The failure in that case wasn’t in the algorithm and it is wasn’t with the consultants and wiz kids. The failure was in the business. No one in the company — quite possibly the whole industry — new good data from bad data. It wasn’t anything anyone thought about.

Thinking back it would have be better to take a human-centred data approach by asking the inventory managers what decisions they were likely to make and what data was likely to change their mind about those decisions. Now that would have been a worthhile starting point. A little data innovation would have went along way. In fact it would have been revolutionary.

As Chris Dixon points out in a recent blog post “breakthroughs come from identifying or creating new sources of data, not inventing new algorithms.”

I wonder how many data-innovation teams are out there in the business world. Probably not many that are off wall street.

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post@posterous.com would be a perfect user experience if it weren’t for the layers of complexity we’ve grown accustomed to and are frustrated in trying to locate in it.

When Mark said to me the other day that Posterous’ unique take on the sign-up process was that there wasn’t one, I thought he was being glib for the sake of argument. Apparently not. And I didn’t dream that that non-existent process was carried through the entire user experience.

The internet… is that the one with email?

One email and you’re blogging. Another email and you’re still blogging. Carry on forever if you like and never set a password or edit a profile.

When has the link between intention and action in written communication for public consumption ever been this direct? Even Luther had to let the ink dry before leaving his house with a hammer and nail.

Though I’m still not sure what I’ll do with it, I’m giving it a go (Posterous, not Lutheranism — I remain a staunch former-Catholic). I’ve never had the motivation to set up a blog and I can take no technical credit for administering the one you’re reading. I’m not saying it ever looked exactly difficult to sign up for a WordPress or Blogger account, but it was always more trouble than I was willing to take.

Posterous is so damn easy it left me with no excuse for not starting immediately. Blogging already represents a very low barrier to reaching a huge potential audience, and Posterous drives this ankle-high barrier nearly into the ground by stripping away administrative inconvenience.

It’s not unlike the difference between very cheap and free and I wonder where else we’re going to see invisible inconveniences like sign-ups rendered visible by their abolition.

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There were a couple of reasons I quit using it, the least of which was the delay between my sharing the item in GReader and its appearing in Twitter. I never knew when a post I shared would be tweeted and for some reason that bothered me. I think I was afraid that I’d be in the middle of a really witty exchange someday and be interrupted by some asinine thing that hours prior I’d thought was worth showing around (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

But the main thing that made me dump Twitterfeed was the lack of context. Soon after I found out that it would tweet just the (shortened) link preceded by the headline I found that my sharing behaviour changed. For a number of days I shared only posts whose value was self-evident.

I told myself I was actually becoming a more selective GReader sharer, that the quality of my feed was improved for having the burden of a larger subsidiary audience. But this was not actually true.

What I’d become was a highly impersonal sharer, pointing at posts but saying nothing while at the same time trying to limit my sharing only to posts whose value was self-evident. In short, I had become intentionally obvious, which is a polite way of saying “boring”.

The value of GReader isn’t just the eclectic mix of posts you get to read by following your friends and others who share what they’re reading. It’s the ability to easily editorialize that makes it so compelling. Because GReader users can comment on the stories they share (and on the stories their friends share) they’re able to offer more than just a cool link: they’re offering context in which to appreciate the value of that link.

Seeing someone’s GReader shares through Twitterfeed is like watching Seth Godin give a talk without the sound on. You can see he’s saying something, but you’re constantly wondering, “Why are you showing me this?”

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