For the nomadic worker visiting Berlin I’ve put together a little list of “workable” places around the city. With “workable” I mean more or less dependable internet, decent coffee, okay seating and preferably a few available outlets too.

The places are mostly coffee shops located in Kreuzberg, Mitte and Friedrichshain. It’s a personal list and by no means a complete list. Any suggestions? Let me know. I’ll be updating the list as I go along.

Check it out here

Underveis (≈ “on my way”) is a simple glanceable webapp that uses Trafikanten.no‘s real-time API for Oslo to let you know when the next public transportation is departing from your stop.

Inspired by Russell Davies thoughts on secondary attention and Dentsu/Berg’s work on incidental media and glanceable interfaces, it’s intended to be used on a spare second screen stuck on shelf at home or in the office not demanding your unmitigated attention, but rather understandable by a occasional glance. It could also be used on-the-go where a quick glance on your phone would be enough.

Use geolocation or search to find your stop and bookmark or add to home screen for one-click access to the upcoming departures (the list is auto-refreshing every 30 seconds).

Try it out here: hekj.me/underveis

Twine is the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing. A durable 2.5″ square provides WiFi connectivity, internal and external sensors, and two AAA batteries that keep it running for months. A simple web app allows to you quickly set up your Twine with human-friendly rules — no programming needed. And if you’re more adventurous, you can connect your own sensors and use HTTP to have Twine send data to your own app.

Twine lets you create Internet-connected systems and objects anywhere you have WiFi. Compact, low-power hardware and real-time web software work together to make networked physical computing simple and versatile.

The Internet of Things, of course is nothing new, big companies have invested heavy in this for years, but like Russell Davies have pointed out most of what they come up with is top-down design and not based on what people might really want.

The problem, though, with the Internet Of Things is that it falls apart when it starts to think about people. When big company Internet Of Things thinkers get involved they tend to spawn creepy videos about sleek people in sleek homes living optimised lives full of smart objects. These videos seem to radiate the belief that the purpose of a well-lived life is efficiency. There’s no magic or joy or silliness in it. Just an optimised, efficient existance. Perhaps that’s why the industry persists in inventing the Internet Fridge. It’s top-down design, not based on what people might fancy, but on what technologies companies are already selling.

Like Davies I think many of the most exciting innovations are not going to come not from these companies, but rather from ordinary people turned D.I.Y. hackers and makers making stuff they want or need or just because it is fun.

The trend towards bespoke items and D.I.Y. culture is also nothing new, but has been growing steadily for the last decade at least. Social media in general and especially platforms and communities like Etsy, which have been going and growing rapidly since 2005, have contributed strongly not only to a shift from mass-produced goods to custom and personalized items, but also to a shift in how we see ourselves. We will no longer be seen as just consumers but also as creators and makers.

For physical computing and the growing movement of D.I.Y. hardware hackers nothing has been more important than the Arduino. A affordable and small circuit board that makes it possible to connect things to your computer and to the internet. The Arduino is an amazing device, however if you don’t already have a background in programming the threshold to get started is relatively high.

There are a few projects going on trying to make Arduino development more accessible, but there is still a way to go. Twine, with its simple “when this, then that” logic and the possibility to easily share ‘recipes’ online, seems better positioned to further the initial mainstreaming of The Internet of Things and broadening the potential user base outside the existing maker movement. Twine, might be the tool that brings us what Davies names “The Internet With Things“:

It’s not just about the thing. It’s about the relationships and satisfactions connected to the thing and to the making of the thing. That’s what we need to remember. The Internet Of Things will be useful and interesting, the Internet With Things will be a flourishing of ideas and magic at least as exciting and creative as we’ve seen with the Internet Of Screens.

If the popularity on Kickstarter so far is anything to go by, it seems like 2012 could really turn out to be the year of the makers.

Back the Twine project with a donation here.

The problem with recommendations based on what we already like is that it quickly becomes shallow and limiting. Eli Pariser’s Filter Bubble does a great job in pointing out exactly this. If we’re only served news based on what we like and our already established point of view it will hamper our ability to engage with multiple viewpoints, which is essential for a functioning democracy. The same goes for pop culture, if we’re recommended books and music solely based on what we most likely will “like”, the default will be dull and boring instead of unexpected and intellectually stimulating.

Many mention human curators as a possible way to break out of our filter bubbles, but they can only be part of a broader solution. Filtering algorithms helping us navigate the enormous sea of available information are an inevitable part of the future, but they will need to go beyond simple “like” based recommendations.

One possible way forward is to shift our focus from simple recommendations to contextual discovery. This is a big challenge and would entail algorithms not only showing us what we’re already interested in, but also extending our horizon to things that are entirely new, and to things we didn’t know or we things we thought we wouldn’t like, but which in the given context might be of relevance to us.

Google is working on contextual discovery based on location, Prismatic wants to change the media industry and is working on collective discovery and recreating the serendipity that newspapers used to provide. However, the most fascinating example might be the start-up Small Demons and their idea of the Storyverse.

Suppose someone took every meaningful detail from all the books you love. Every song mentioned, every person, every food or place or movie title. And what if they did that for all the books everyone else loves, too. The ones you’ve never heard of. Suddenly you’ve got a whole world of seemingly random people, places and things, all gathered in one place.

Together they create something vast, wonderful and entirely new. A Storyverse. A place where details touch, overlap and lead you further. To new music to listen to. New movies to watch. Places to visit. People to know. And of course, new books to read.

Being a pop culture nerd and knowmad, this instantly strikes a chord with me. I spent the better part of my late teens and early twenties jotting down interesting references from books, films and music constantly leading me to new discoveries of all kinds and types, all given context and texture from it’s preceding reference.

When talking about the future of books, it is easy to get caught up in the excitement surrounding new technologies and the possibilities they give us to “enhance” the experience of books. However, the greatest asset is still the text and how we imagine and understand it in our own mind. What makes me excited about Small Demons is their focus on the text itself, letting the text’s metadata lead the way to new discoveries and connections.

As Small Demons keep mining books for metadata and expand the context and range of information available about any given book and establish their connections to other books and things, they could end up have a big impact on the publishing industry and if nothing else they have at least made name dropping a whole lot easier.

With their new Open Graph, Facebook makes it possible for third-party apps and sites to automatically share everything you do inside the app after a one-time initial authorization. Signing in to Spotify with Facebook, now means that what you listen to, you also share. Everything you read in the new Guardian app your friends will know.

With 500 million users logging in every day and the possibility to have a more or less constant presence in their ticker/news feed there are obvious reasons for why content producers and brands are ready to sign up. Facebook, on their part, probably can’t wait to get hold of even more personal information, which they can quantify, add metrics to and monetize. But, are we, the users, ready for sharing without friction?

First of all why do we share things online? I can think of a few things:

• To strengthen relations with others. Sharing content brings sharer and receivers closer together.
• Feel part of a community or group by sharing for example inside jokes.
• Increase own social capital and status. By sharing content that is valuable or limited in availability for a wider audience.

Sharing things becomes a big deal because they are such visible identity markers, which others use to identify and interact with us. This means we want control over the content and information we share. Following Goffman’s ideas about impression management it’s obvious that effective social interaction depends on people understanding their environment and in a given social situation having the agency to adjust how they present themselves and what they share.

So, basically no I don’t believe we can share without friction. Making sharing automated and passive is a way of commoditizing social interactions at the cost of agency. And by doing so it potentially lowers the value of the interaction itself, as much of its value is often generated through the act of overcoming friction.

All of this is not to say that there is not a great potential in leveraging our (passively) created activity data. An obvious example is the growing Quantified Self movement, where users share and collaborate on various self-tracking projects. The idea being that by tracking things like daily coffee consumption and sleep patterns we can capture and analyze personal data, which in turn will help us make better informed decisions and ultimately to adapt our behavior for improved life quality.

The same logic is extendable to web browsing, lately I’ve been trying out voyurl, a browser plugin that captures your click stream data and serves up personal analytics for your browsing habits and use it to fuel new content recommendations. Unfortunately, voyurl, so far at least, hasn’t been able to create a product that actually works, but the idea is great and your data remains private until you explicitly choose to share it.

Facebook, of course, is in a great position to be a central hub for all kinds of such aggregated activity data and executed well it could provide a lot of benefit to its users. Facebooks plan, however to push every little bit of this activity data out as individual public shares seems to me as very counterintuitive to what the main benefits of leveraged activity data could be. Instead of creating even more noise in an environment already overloaded with trivial status updates, such data could be used to let us learn more about ourselves, our friends and lead the way to new and unexpected discoveries. Whether Facebook, with its history of privacy violations, is the right place to store such information is another question.

The Lolita Story is visual artist Edvarda A. Braanaas‘ interpretation of the classic novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. It features 50 iPad drawings and 24 texts, which together form a narrative enabling you to experience this literary classic in a new way.

Being her first foray into digital art, she also wanted to keep the presentation and distribution part digital and independent of the traditional art institutions and gatekeepers. To achieve this we turned The Lolita Story into a iPhone app and created a Augumented Reality Exhibition at the Munch museum in Oslo.

A fun project, which also earned quit a bit of press in Norway for being the first of its kind. If you want to check it out The Lolita Story is available for download at the AppStore.

Also check out Tom Hulme’s 15-minute talk discussing the framework:

HackFwd: Visualize Your Business Model in 15 Minutes Flat from IDEO on Vimeo.

Russell Davies – Buttons, Behaviour, Robots and Toys. What Happens When We Put Data in Things

Amazing talk about what could happen when you stop putting the world on the web and start putting the web in the world.

Kevin Slavin – Algorithms That Govern Our Lives

Slavin’s brilliant talk about how algorithms are not a passive object without agency, but are increasingly affecting our social norms and culture.

Matt Stinchcomb – Community Matters | Etsy

In the same way Zappos are more or less the default example anytime anyone are talking about customer service, Etsy could be the same when talking about community building and management. Here’s Matt Stinchcomb talking about how they see Etsy as a manifestation of the community itself, connecting first as humans and secondly in ecommerce.

If you haven’t tried turntable.fm yet, it can quickly be summed up as a place where users either set up or join listening rooms where they can they can play music for each other (maximum 5 DJ’s, 1 song per turn and a unlimited (?) audience), at the same time they can all chat, and vote on each other’s selections as awesome or lame, earning the DJ’s points and turning the whole thing into a kind of social game.

There’s a lot of other nice details too: you can either upload your own tracks or search turntable.fm’s own and impressively big library of music, preview tracks before playing them, the avatars shows if you’re on a PC or Mac, heads bobbing to the music and you can send the songs playing to other services like Last.fm and Spotify.

So why do I think turntable.fm is so great?

First of all, music is the perfect social object. Music is universal, everybody have an opinion on music and most love to share it. Turntable.fm’s chat lets users connect and engage through music without having to share much else in common. DJ’ing on the podium with an audience bobbing their heads in approval is also a very strong and positive form for self-expression, quickly bordering on addictive.

Many of the comments I’ve seen so far about turntable.fm mentions spending too much time there, forgetting about work, how addictive it is, etc., in other words, like with a great video game, it seems like many turntable.fm users get so immersed in the task at hand that they lose track of time and place, they are in the zone or in a ”state of flow”.

In my opinion turntable.fm is a great example of how efficient game mechanics can be for user engagement. The set-up is simple enough play music – get awesome votes from the audience – get points that earns you gradually cooler avatars (until your a superuser with a Daft Punk helm) + add in a very intuitive user interface and you have a nicely structured experience, which is very easy to get into. In this respect (structure & rewards) it’s similar to Foursquare and a growing number of services integrating game mechanics and catering to our extrinsic motivation (e.g. check-in to get a free coffee).

However, people are not spending hours DJ’ing on turntable.fm because they desperately want the Daft Punk avatar, but more so because the real reward is intrinsic. The votes, points and avatars become symbolic tokens of acknowledgment and recognition of your musical taste and “coolness”. That’s the real reward and this is something every music fan craves.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly in my opinion, turntable.fm is a very social experience. Either if you’re in a room full of good friends or join a room filled with strangers you become a collaborator and co-creator of a shared common experience. Upon entering a room, people often quickly learn that being a “successful” DJ is not about playing your favorite tracks, but to fit in with the mood and flow of the others selections and together collectively build a great DJ-set. When the trolls stay away and the collaboration runs smoothly, then suddenly you’re no longer just on an individualistic mission to win points and status, but you’re also a conscious collaborator in a spontaneous community where the shared experience and commonality often can transcend the purely individual rewards on offer.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say is: Come join us in the RadioNeukolln Room!