Armand David’s personal weblog: technology, media, stuff and nonsense.
I know lego is awesome. You know lego is awesome. I even knew that some people were doing Eddie Izzard sketches in lego, which were, you know, awesome.
I didn’t know people were doing random film scene reenactments, which is, you know, awesome. Grosse Pointe Blank and Anchorman follow. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again - the Interwebs is wonderful.
Saw this video whilst scanning through anecdotes of Twitter’s uptime on its blog.
Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.
Interesting not because I think its a particularly useful application of Twitter to turn lights on and off, but because of the growing chatter around ‘IPv6′, a technology protocol understood by few people outside the networking but that will come to have more relevance as the Internet carries on its ongoing march.
Essentially, every Internet connected device there is has a unique address. In your case, it may be your broadband modem, and every other machine connected to that shares that IP address. This IP address under the protocol we currently use, IPv4, is a unique identifier of that device and takes the form of four three digit numbers separated by full stops. For example, 222.129.228.110. The upper limit on each three digit number is 255, I think due to some relationship between the way the protocol works and hexadecimal base.
What’s happening thanks to cheaper and cheaper technology allowing connectivity, more and more advanced devices supporting connectivity and the general all-around goodness of Broadband is that people have more and more devices they’d like to enable as unique devices on the Internet. You might already monitor an IP CCTV camera remotely, or login to Slingbox, or want to use Twitter to turn your bedroom lights or oven off.
Gradually, as these requirements grow we’ll use up the 4.3 or so billion addresses IPv4 allows and we’ll really need everything to switch up to IPv6 - which supports trillions. There’s been limited imperative to move over to IPv6 in the past as people genuinely haven’t been able to understand why they would every need more than 4.3 billion addresses. Well, the maths has gotten a little bit easier to understand thanks to growing ‘net penetration and an understanding of how we can use the net in different ways that makes things like giving a light bulb an IP address useful.
Which is pretty cool, from where I’m standing.
NB There’s absolutely no need for the light bulb in question here to have its own IP address, but it is the principle I’m talking about here, people. Sure, it’s just massive geeks doing this stuff now, but Facebook just had geeks on it for a while and look at it now…!
I’m sure these guys meant well. They’re trying to explain the micro-blogging Twitter service to people — whether because they were paid to, or because they just want to promote it… but: it wholly misrepresents the usefulness of Twitter.
I do like the style of the video, though
Sure, there’s times when its helpful to know the minute details of the lives of the people you follow - but mostly, it’s a fantastic collaboration tool. Does anyone know… Can anyone recommend… Has anyone done… Can anyone make it to… Once you have a network of people in place you get wholly enlightening and entirely useful responses.
Oh - I’m here.
I’ve been reading Tom Standage’s book on the history of the telegraph this week. It is a fascinating read - Standage is totally accessible and every bit as brilliant as he gives the impression of being (he’s business editor at The Economist so I speak to him occasionally as part of my day job). Tom P and Matt made the point when they saw me with the book that it should be very short - simply reading “there wasn’t one” - but the parallels Standage draws to today’s Internet and some of the fantastic quotes he draws from makes it entertaining reading**.
A choice sample, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, writing around 1840:
“The telegraph may not affect magazine literature… but the mere newspapers must submit to destiny, and go out of existence.”
A conversation (and a destiny) that is very much going on today.
There’s another quote in there that I can’t find at the moment but talks about how the telegraph made it seem as it you were in the same room as the person you were talking to — which I found particularly amusing given that I spend quite a bit of time talking to journalists about how my client Cisco’s TelePresence achieves the same effect in ever-so-slightly higher definition…
Anyway, it’s an interesting read, and occasionally pops up cheap on Amazon.
** I admit freely that part of this fascination with all this may derive in part from the fact that I studied the History of Science at university and spend a increasingly large proportion of my time talking about the Internet’s impact on communications / news dissemination.
I’ve seen a couple of mentions of online poker sites being blocked by mobile broadband providers… But I wonder why this is happening, if, indeed it is at all.
Cheating poker jockeys would find the appeal of cheap (as low as £10 per month) mobile broadband very strong - they could have multiple IP addresses at a single location and, well, cheat to their hearts’ content. Well, cheat until the algorithms/monitors looking for anomalous behaviour caught them out. But y’know, they could cheat.
So it’d have to be the poker sites blocking access to people from mobile broadband connections rather than the other way around, given that, if anything, online poker would provide an incentive for people to sign up to mobile broadband.
For the record, I love poker, don’t have a USB mobile broadband dongle, and wouldn’t cheat at online poker even if I knew how. Cheaters are wrong. But was just wondering about it, inundated as I seem to have been with mobile broadband adverts lately.
I got a bit overexcited earlier today and posted disagreement with Kate Bevan’s piece in yesterday’s Guardian on Twitter troll & spam, which I’ve since taken down.
It turns out I agree with her, if I think she used a (IMHO) misleading headline (”Why are there no spam or trolls on Twitter”) — whilst there are plenty of ‘friend whores’ on Twitter, as I commented yesterday, the extent to which they irritate consists of occasional emails as Twitter notifies you that you’ve been added by someone completely random, not the relentless onslaught of botnets sent to drown you in waves of computer generated link-hogging spam. But anyone who uses Twitter with any regularity will have experienced the troll-like idiocy of the friend whores and therefore be confused by the headline. But maybe that’s the point…
Thanks to DoctorVee for pointing me to the story. I hope no-one works out a way to turn it into a spamfest, as I’m rather fond of Twitterland.
People continually say to me that they don’t get Twitter, the microblogging service that integrates with Google Talk, amongst other things. “No-one needs to know I’m having a cheese sandwich for lunch,” they say.
Well, they’re right. No-one does need to know you had a cheese sandwich for lunch. But Twitter brings usefulness and joy to me in a number of ways.
1) With my friends/personal contacts, I catch little snippets and insights into their days. Great for pub chat later, as you have immediate, real, interesting things to say to them beyond “how was your day” or “how was work”. Knowing that people are working on specific projects, or have been reading certain things etc., is a nice enhancement to the relationship.
2) For keeping in touch with several of the journalists I work with (Chris, Simon, Sally’s ‘Getting Ink Requests‘ blog & others), it has great moments. For a PR professional, knowing people are writing about things, thinking about things, or just some context about them helps when you pick up the phone and pitch them stories. I have no doubt there are parallels for this kind of usefulness in other industries.
3) On a more practical level, it’s a great, great way for polling interests, opinions, and the knowledge of a large number of people in a short time. Dennis, Mike, Hugh, Drew & others do this with great frequency. Even people who are relatively new to the medium are getting into it.
4) I get breaking news faster than my RSS feedreader can bring it to me.
The third element here is probably the most useful. Group IM for polling knowledge has huge potential, in business and personal life both. If Twitter extends its functionality such that you can group contacts and ping people with specific expertise/relationship to you on a specific front, that would be fantastic. Think messages like “@friends Anyone for the pub tonight?” or “@workcontacts Anyone know why Microsoft doesn’t support Silverlight on Windows Mobile yet?” or… whatever. It has cool potential.
I have two frustrations with Twitter (not including my issues with the various client applications I’ve tried, none of which is adequate, and the frequent downtime the service has). First, I don’t understand the “friend whores.” I’ve just been added by someone into Semi-Professional American football, following over 2,000 people with only a third as many followers. Why?
Second, I simply don’t have enough of my friends and contacts on it. If I had more of the people I actually speak to in real life, it’d be more useful as a service.
I get great links, insight and have useful conversations on Twitter. And I learn what (a couple of my friends) have for lunch. It’s all good.
Pat was going on at me to watch the new Iron Man trailer, so when I caught it listed (atypically) on The Superficial, I naturally checked it out. It is awesome, Robert Downey Jr seems to be an inspired piece of casting and I’m getting increasingly excited about a character and film I didn’t give two hoots about. It may also be that Toby R & Pat and people telling me how amazing the new spate of Marvel films are going to be is sinking in…
But the bit that makes the interwebs cool was when I googled “Iron Man Theme” because I couldn’t remember where I heard the rockin’ riff at the end (and I didn’t want to pay Shazam any money, and yes, shame on me)… And found this. Music and lyrics included. The awesome randomness of the Interwebs.
For those of you with an interest in technology, public relations, marketing and the media, my agency, Brands2Life, has done a really interesting piece of research looking at how journalists’ jobs have changed in the 15 or so years the Internet has been around. The headlines on point to journalists across all media types (not just technology or online) working harder and having to manage multimedia content and reader communities — a very different brief to what “traditional” journalism usually entails on a day-to-day basis. You can read the story in depth by downloading the research report from here. There are some graphs up on Flickr if anyone wants them.
The name - “From Shorthand to Broadband” - inspired this video which summarises the development of the media story. Have we got the whole story in? Is there something else you would have included / subbed out?
My personal view? From a business perspective, we’re at a really interesting point; one business model (traditional, ad-sponsored, print and broadcast media) is struggling in the wake of having to share its revenue with the online world, and the online world hasn’t yet developed a business model more substantive than relying on Google adwords. From a consumer perspective, broadband and web technologies are available and accessible to the point where the way everyone interacts with media has changed, whether they realise it or not. Not everyone’s there yet, of course, but where a few years ago you wouldn’t have been that surprised if someone from a different generation didn’t know how to Google something, today I’m having conversations with my mother about Facebook, and helping her organise to deliver a plenary speech at a conference via Skype video conferencing.
From a PR perspective — with journalists having to work differently, is it surprising that PRs will have to as well? Conversations in the industry — even with technology companies traditionally on the edge of new things — indicate how early on we are with this part of the story. A lot has changed since the ‘Martini lunches’ of legend, and even more is set to.
Be interested to hear from people who’ve been in one side and out the other — whilst there’s a lot of “web 2.0″ that’s hype, I have a feeling that where we are with “social” media today is a pale, pale precursor to the way we’ll interact online in the future.
I’ve been using Plaxo on and off for a few years now. It started off as a contact management system, which was useful, and a social network of sorts. Then it added calendar synchronisation, also good. Its latest incarnation, Plaxo 3.0, aggregates feeds from ALL your contacts social networks and plays it back to you…. which, of course, makes it completely useless as you get far more information than you need. With Scoble, Calacanis in my “network”, and people like Simon and Chris, I get far more updates than I could reasonably shake a stick at. Seriously, I start shaking the stick and it just shatters under the weight of Twitters, Flickr updates etc. etc.
Anyway, that’s not what this post is about, pointless though Plaxo Pulse is. This post is about the “known issues” with Plaxo that have forced me to abandon my $50 investment in the service. The known issues are…
1) The de-duper also deletes random contacts for no reason other than, well, it feels like it
2) Calendar synchronisation over multiple PCs in the same timezone results in recurring appointments sliding further and further back in time
3) And not an issue, but could I sync my contacts with Google Mail, please?
Repeated searches through the forums flagged both of these as recurring issues for some users, and therefore you’d have thought they’d be addressed… sadly, not. I should probably log them as faults and see if I can reclaim my investment, but I suspect they’ll put it down to the vagaries of my system configuration… which will do me precisely zero good, yet waste me considerable time.
sigh. Well, my Google Analytics referral list has taught me that blog posts will sit up here and gather traffic like dust on a pile of messy PC cables, so I’ve at least put this out there for others who experience similar issues. If any of you find a solution, please let me know!
Recent comments