David F. Flanders

Book Review: Barefoot into Cyberspace by Becky Hogge

dfflanders — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 10:11:58 +0000

‘Barefoot into Cyberspace’ is an inspiring historical read that interweaves two journalistic narratives side-by-side to show the reader the very real battles ongoing for our right to freedom on the Web. In my opinion the book’s achievement is that it makes the hidden battles we are undergoing for freedom in cyberspace explicit and has ignited my concern for our rights as humans on the Web once again.

The feel of this book as you read it is as a hard hitting documentary where a journalist has managed to hide out with rebel freedom fighters and survived long enough to bring this story back to the world to expose the real injustices that we are experiencing right now (the most obvious example being the continuous lies that the news corps tell us). The book asks its reader a very serious question: are you a hacker (even though you don’t know it) and if so are you going to fight for your right for freedom on the Web?

The author, Becky Hogge composes her book with two intertwined melodies, the primary motif of the story is about Wikileaks and its founders who -like many web start ups- experienced a meteoric rise to infamy over a two year period culminating in the Iraq war logs being released and the crackdown by the US government by any means possible to stop its leader: Julian Assange. This story is told with firsthand knowledge of the scenario and in such a way that it is personal and believable, and most certainly not a version you’ll find in one of Murdoch’s information empires (NB reading this book is in itself an act of hacking!).

The second leitmotif of the story (and the reason why I am strongly recommending this book) is a pseudo historical perspective of the “hacker” movement and how its roots can be traced back to the 1970′s Hippy communes inspired by freedom, peace and love (the sub-title of this book is ‘Adventures in search of techno-Utopia’).

While these historical links at times feel somewhat tenuous, they are inspiring and more importantly they are contemplative. This is the part of the book that touched me personally and made me start to think about the right we have to freedom on the Web. And indeed this post is a plea for other readers to read this book and turn around to request more on this topic by Beck hogge. I think the hacker movement needs more stories and histories arguing the trajectory and meaning of the hacker movement and why ‘the hacking culture’ is more than just about “getting free stuff” (NB though again reading this book is a self reflective example of hacking as you get the book free, but then once you read it there is more to reading this than it just being free – see my second post on how I “paid” for this book).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13686141

For me, this book has reminded me that “the hacker” is yet to be defined, and indeed many more of us are “hackers” than we know. “Hackers” who may or may not write code but none the less are looking for understanding to the radically changing world in which we live. The hacker world is driven by information and most importantly finding the knowledge needles in the information haystack. In a world where everyone is information overloaded the hacker movement is the definitive effort to combat the information being shoved down our throats. Hackers want to search for the real stories and complex truths, beyond black and white newspapers (and we aren’t afraid to deconstruct those truths to find more truths).

In summary, read the book and start looking into your rights on the Web. At first it might just be getting something for free but as you follow that path down into the rabbit warren you might find the hacker within you. See you at the next barcamp

The Graph Wars Begin: Battle the first – Open Social Graphs <– note the plural!

dfflanders — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 12:58:20 +0000

I’m preparring to do everything I can to get my friends and family on Google+ – Why? Mostly because I hate facebook. But why do I hate facebook? Well it could be that ‘the Zuck’ has finally riden is ego obsessed privacy violating hubris to the top of the wheel of fire and has a long way to fall; or, because my social graph on facebook is getting stale. Sadly the former is not enough motivation to get me to move but the latter is. Sociologically, humans are intended to have multiple social graphs.

My hope is that with the coming of Google+ alongside Twitter and Bookface, humans will start to realise that having only one company own your social graph is ludicrous (the physical equivalent of: only being able to go to one pub and meet people at the pub who are already on a preapproved list of people also allowed at that pub). Just like the physical world, so are we continually renewing or social graphs in the virtual world; and the ability to combine and join these graphs at their vertices is what makes carrying around these heavy social brains so valuable.

Ironically we are just starting to see the beginning of what I am going to call the “Graph Wars”, that is to say, the social graph is just the first of many battles to come where companies will collect a graph of data be that a list of a certain circles of friends, a list of the products we buy, a list of the places we visit, a list of the things we read, a list of foobar, etc. … all of these “lists” combined with the power of the Web have the capability to become “graphs”.

A ‘graph’ is therefore a more powerful ‘list’, in that we can share the graph because we have links to each of the entities on the list. Yes it is the all powerful ‘link’ that resides at the heart of ‘the graph’. In short, if we have an common identifier for talking about something we can leverage the power of adding meaning to that identifiers, and when you take this “voting” capability across the scale of the Web you get a graph.

But we still need to learn about these ‘graphs’ as a global community. The Web presents us with the first worldwide learning opportunity. The first opportunity being our understand of what a ‘social graph’ is. And indeed we are indebted to Bookface for realising a worldwide understanding for a shared definition of what a single “social graph” can look like (though it should be noted that the likes of Friendster, Bebo and MySpace were the original ‘social graphs’), none the less Bookface was the first to realise it on a truly global learnability scale.

The difference is now, that we must move beyond the single social graph that is Bookface and more on to a pluralistic environment where humans on a global scale begin to learn about multiple social graphs and (most importantly) how those graphs can be combined and joined to leverage new social emergence.

Google+ offers us this chance to start globally understanding the plurality of social graphs, not just because of their ability to group multiple social graphs with the Google+ platform, but because humans will naturally start to ask questions about how they use the different social graph platforms in coordination with one another. This is typified by the maxim: “twitter is where I store the people I used to know, where twitter is where I collect the people I hope to know better”… naturally this extends us to all ask the question, what kind of social graph will Google+ offer and more importantly how we might begin to leverage multiple social graphs for new ideas and enterprises.

But isn’t this a case of getting out of the Bookface frying pan only to burn in the Google+ fire? – Well, yes it could be. I don’t believe Google’s “do no evil” motto any more than you do. However, there is one small hope in the form the Google Data Liberation department, which actually does try and do good. If we can convince this group of libertarians to enable a truly open social graph API we will begin to see a new world of social graph combination. And naturally if Google+ opens up its social graph so Twitter and Bookface will have to as well and then we will have won the battle, but not the War.

There are many more graphs to create and lock down for making money and there are many more graph battles to fight. The ultimate battle and War will only be won, once we as a global learning hive mind agree that graphs are as much a human right as freedom. Let the battles begin

The Killer Use Case for Amazon Kindle

dfflanders — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 07:00:23 +0000

I’ve finally gotten into ebooks, and for worse or better it was due to Amazon. A recommendation by Paul Walk and Andrew Treloar has got me hooked on reading books on my Galaxy tab via the Kindle app by Charlie Stross, specifically ‘the Laundry series’. I hope to write a couple of reviews about these books in some blog posts anon (once I’ve had a chance to chat about some ideas with friends) , but right now I want to talk about what I think the “Killer Use Case” is for Amazon (or any eBook store).

First and foremost I should say that I was desperately trying to avoid DRM’d books, having spent hours downloading books from Guttenburg press (great tablet interface BTW), as well as scavenging around various other free options like Google Books and Calibre. Which while there are some excellent factual free books, the thing that I was missing was fiction. Fiction truly has the capability to drag you out of your own brain and into another world. The trouble with finding fiction is that it is all friend based, that is to say, there is no more powerful a search engine than your friend’s recommending books. More on this later, on to why this is the killer use case.

The killer use case for amazon is quite simple: keep people reading and as those people continue to read enable them to get their friends to read the same things. This is a feedback loop and only needs a simple adjustment to the pay model to capatalise on friends getting other friends to read books.

Here is how I encounter this use case: As I come to the end of the book and watch the percentage bar creeping towards 100% I begin to have a kind of dread. On one hand I can’t help but read faster as I want to get to the end of the plot, on the other hand I don’t want the book to end. As I come to the end of the book and the thoughts begin to flood in, after “The End”, I can’t help but want to talk about what I have just read. More significantly I want to talk about it with someone else who has read the same thing (NB trying to explain the plot to your partner and then talk about it with them is just cruel). So what do I need? Quite simply, a little “donate book to a friend for a £1″ button. I’ve already just spent $3-£$5 on the book and if Amazon gave me the option to send that same entire book to a friend for an additional £1 of $2 why wouldn’t I send it to them? I like giving gifts even if I disagree that they are DRM’d.

Side note: best of all Amazon could start to take over the much despised Hallmark gift card market by allowing you to send the book to a friend with a little gift card. How much better to send a friend a book with a gift card than a paper gift card with a sentence or two (and save a tree!).

The point being, Amazon needs to play on the powerful emotions of a reader as they come to the end of their book by allowing them the immediate satisfaction (and bargain) of sending the same book to their friend to read would result in more profit, why:

This creates the most powerful feedback loop for humans: the gift giving culture – the ‘unspoken’ obligation to send a gift to a friend after you have received one from a friend is hard-coded into a special part of our brains.
The best advertisement in the world for books is having 2 or more friends talking about it with other friends, it creates book clubs and other such advertisements for books that could never be achieved otherwise.
Readers get bored and eventually stop reading the same author, but if their friends are reading the same books and then sending them new books by the same author the reader is likely to pick that author back up. This is a good sell to authors for why they should adopt a cost model.
By having a pile of books stacked up waiting from your friends to read will get people to read more. As easy as it is to dowload a book from Amazon the convenience also makes me wait to download it (unlike finding it at a book store and wanting to buy right there). You wait because you know you can get at it any time and might as well not download until you know you have the time.
Keep it similar to the cost of hallmark cards, it will replace this psychological market in the reader’s mind
And worst of all, it will justify the use of DRM. People are used to being able to give a paperback away to a friend to read after they are done with it, why not enable this natural feature and make a little money on the side? By selling the book at a cost that is plausible to buy the book in the first place (£2-5) and then allowing you to send it to a friend for £1, the reader is likely to send it to several friends, bringing the total cost of the book up to £7-£15. Let alone you’ve just created a market segment of reader who are likely to use your eBook store. Of course you need to figure out what to do about the people who have been gifted the book for a £1, if they can re-gift for another £1
If this feature is not enabled, the natural course for people like me would be to jail-break the DRM via a programme like MobiDeDRM - but this takes time and if it is only a $1 to send it to a friend anyways I might as well save the time (which is worth more than the pound).

What is a “Graph” and are “Social Graphs” the only type of graph that matter?

dfflanders — Sat, 07 May 2011 13:50:05 +0000

Preface: the Web is a global phenomenon like we have never known, and one of the most amazing things about the Web is that we are all learning about it together – bound together on a gigantic global learning curve, we are starting to realise what the Web actually means together. The below is an attempt to summarise the first lesson we have learned as a global hive mind in what I am calling the “World Wide Web Class: 101”. As preempted by the marketing term “Web 2.0″, I also believe we have begun another global learning process that has us all learning the meaning of “graphs”, or rather what I am calling the “World Wide Web Class: 201″. I’m hoping this post is the first in a series of posts that helps draw out the importance in the way we are globally learning about the Web and what we can expect next as we move through this global learning process together that is the “World Wide Web course” – “classes 101, 201, 301, 401… and beyond”. The following is the start, from course www101 into www201…

What is a ‘graph’?

First off, I thought I’d attempt a layman’s description for “a graph” as contextualised by the contemporary use of it as a “social graph”: definition: “a ‘graph’ (like a piece of graph paper) is made up of lines and the places where those lines cross (we’ll call these line vertices’s ‘nodes’);

However, unlike the uniformity of graph paper a graph occurring in the real world is not evenly distributed and some of the nodes are more significant based on the number of lines that intersect.

Graphs in the real world look like spider webs, and like spider webs, graphs must have more connections to single nodes than other nodes to assure they are stronger based on the environment in which they exist.

It is also worth mentioning that graphs (like spider webs) continually change to adapt to the ever changing environment. The most significant graph -that is commonly known- is the Internet (aka the Web), and for the first decade of the Web it was HTTP “pages” that were the most significant ‘nodes’ in the graph. Our “World Wide Web 101″ understanding of this global phenomenon was mostly understood as a graph that consisted of nodes that appeared to be ‘pages’, like the kind in a book or the essays you might write down in a paper notebook.

However as the Web has changed to adapt to its environment, we have started to realise that it is the lines between the *human nodes* that are often the strongest and most important to create, this is the ‘social graph’ and is controlled by many so-called “Web 2.0” companies like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

The Social Graph Anti-Pattern (what is NOT a ‘social graph’)

Hierarchies are perhaps the best non-graph example as they are usually controlled by a single person or group, whereas a graph like facebook is dependent upon many factors in how it is created, formed and reformed (though don’t be fooled into thinking that graphs are not sometimes capable of becoming hierarchies – it is usually just more difficult to make a graph a hierarchy because it is distributed) .

The factors for how the nodes relate to one another in a graph can be described as ‘edges’. Edges are how the nodes in a graph relate to one another. A hierarchy -as opposed to a graph- usually has a very clear pattern for how the edges between the two nodes are created. For example your boss as a ‘node’ has a line pointing to you (as a node) and the ‘edge’ of the node is pointing to the next person below you in the hierarchy. The pattern of these edges moving in the same direction is what creates a hierarchy (getting the edges to move all the same way in a graph is very difficult). Hierarchies are dependent upon ‘edges’ going in one direction, whereas a ‘graph’ has no clear direction for which way the ‘edges’ are pointing between nodes. For example, in Twitter anyone can point their nodes’ edge at another person’s node by “following” them. This edge is a single direction (“a unidirectional edge”) in that it is just pointing from you to them (i.e. you are receiving their information they “tweet” but they do not receive the information you “tweet”, unless they “follow” your twitter node).

Facebook on the other hand requires a two way link (bidirectional edges) where your node’s edge points to them and their node’s edge points to you. When both nodes are pointing at each other’s edges then Facebook calls this “friends” (though I think most of us would agree this is just an “acquaintance” in human parlance).

Social Graphs are just the first of many graphs…

As you might have picked up in my laymen’s description of ‘the graph’ above, what I am trying to do is give you some mathematical terms (i.e. nodes, edges, unidirectional, bidirectional, etc). These terms are explicitly related to a type of mathematics called ‘Set theory’. Without having to go into the maths, their is a significant point to make in that there are predictions that Mathematical Set Theory has suggested for the evolution of graphs; in the same way that Einstein was able to predict how Relativity Theory would work from his maths, so can we know how the Web is going to progress via the mathematics of Set Theory.

To predict the future we must first realise that the Internet was the first time that the world realised the power of a big “set of things” aka a “graph”, and now we are starting to realise the importance of other kinds of graphs (aka ‘sets’); in this case the ‘set’ of things known as ‘the social graph’ or ‘the social network’ is starting to emerge and be understood on a global scale. In essence by using the Web we have all been enrolled in a course call “World Wide Web class 101”. So while many marketing experts are calling this new kind of ‘social graph’ the Web 2.0 phenomenon, in actuality we are just beginning to all learn about the power of ‘sets’ or what many are calling ‘graphs’.

So while we may be in the Web 2.0 phenomenon, in actuality it is more like we have all just graduated from “World Wide Web Class 101”, in that we are starting to understand that the Web is a ‘set of things’,

And now as we enter our next course in the “WWW Class 201”, we are starting to learn that there are sets within the graph that can be linked together, with the dominant example being the social graph.

Summary

What we have yet to understand as a global populace is that there are still many new types of graphs to follow, just like the ‘social graph’ is a subset of the ‘internet graph’, now we will begin to realise that the social graph (while very significant) is a graph that can be combined with other graphs to form new graphs (let alone the subset of graphs that exist within the social graph, e.g. your business social graph, your old schoolmates graph, your future people you want to meet social graph, etc). It is here in the complexity of graph combination and subset of graphs that the maths becomes interesting. But more on this later…

Pay it Forward 3D print build @ CASA – University College London (UCL)

dfflanders — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:04:00 +0000

05 Feb 2011 (UCL, London). After @gklyne did some serious tweaking on the RepMan (mark 1, “Darwin”) over the past 6 months we finally are spitting out parts for the mark 2 “Mendel” RepRap. Our first build of the Mendel is taking place at UCL’s CASA dept where @frogo is inheriting the next #pif3D printer (I believe he is planning to ‘pay it forward’ to Edinburgh University). The next PIF3D 24 hour build party to be announced soon, watch the PIF3D announcement page and if you’d like to host your own print party sign up on the PIF3D wiki.

We are hoping to complete this build in 24 hours (Sat Noon to Sun Noon) and below are the video blog updates of that build process:

Build start: Saturday at Noon (Graham and Steve did the setup from 10am).

So from the video above it took about an hour and a half to get the main triangle structure built:

In the below video we are building the separate components, primarily the slider for the X axis and Z axis and then the extruder (which sits on the X axis). Been about 3 hours since the video above. We started in on the pizza and beer as well (thanks to CASA .

posted at 18.41

The mandatory midnight post (we are half way through the build with 12 hours elapsed). We’ve got the main triangle frame structure, the Z and X axis parts built and moving on the frame. We still have the Y axis board, extruder head (including the hot end nozzle), belts and electronics to do over the next 12 hours.

That’s right, the 5am update post below! It is now an official PIF3D PRINT PARTY! What better way to celebrate than going over skeinforge and gcode! We also had some interesting conversations of the endless possibilities that having multiple people in the UK 3D printing community offers.

Everyone feeling refreshed after a quick nap and we are into the homestretch of the build (side note: I actually found the whirring of the printer quite peaceful as it lulled me off to sleep). Thanks to Andy for the Pif3D Printer Party Pizzas last night (and beer!), we marked up a quick logo for your printer to show our appreciation <– this is what the printer was printing in the above post (shown in the below video).

And if you’d like to see the whole thing in timelapse mode watch this brilliant production by @frogo:

And last but not least the build teams:

We’ve got the electronics to attach, but on the whole the build has been a success! And great fun at that. Can’t wait to schedule the next 24 hour weekend build party. Let us know if you’d like to sponsor your own pif3D build party so you too can have the ultimate geek gadget!

Update on the Form/Factor of my Galaxy Tab

dfflanders — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:54:23 +0000

I’ve started to figure out where in my life my tablet fits, and (unlike my netbook) I think it is here to stay. Some quick thoughts below, which I’m hoping pulls in some of your thoughts via comments or on twitter @dfflanders

I’ve still some questions on if I would want the screen slightly bigger (basically 7inch in portrait mode for reading PDFs as opposed to the current 6inch screen – or let’s just get beyond the PDF!!!), however saying that I think it *needs to get lighter* before it gets bigger. It is not great for laying in bed on your back and reading with the device over your head: arm gets tired more frequently which requires more moving (this device is all about being sedentary)!

This image made available via creative commons, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/dm-set/3907606493/

Also the tablet doesn’t lend itself for holding it while laying on the back: the book enables a better form-factor for holding – I’m on the look out for a cover that will enable me to hold like a book (though even this contorted hand form-factor could be improved).

Otherwise (with the #ukSNOW) it has been a great homebody device, lying in bed watching the Onion (hilarious!), reading the Guardian / NYTimes / HuffingtonPost; pulling down books from the Guttenberg mobile platform (not reading them past the first chapter), listening to podcasts on GoogleListen and crusing the Apps Market for crap novelty apps like “Wire Goggles” has been a hoot. I even bought my first app, well “live wallpaper” – I bought a geeky binary clock (partially to invoke my soapbox speech on why binary is the new roman numeral of our time), and felt the developer deserved the 99p despite their being a free version: could this count as a donation for tax write-offs?

On the whole I really think the form factor for the device (and why it will stay in my life) is the difference of sitting, laying, shifting and generally being lazy with the device, rather than being sat leaned over a keyboard. That and the mobile phone is just slightly to small to allow for complete laziness, the arm always has to be crooked with the smaller screen.

If you haven’t seen my video on form-factor on “how many devices do we need” please do have a watch

API 2.0 – layering your API for the social web (slidecast 3 of 3)

dfflanders — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 16:37:03 +0000

I was invited to the “Census Web Services Working Group” (CWSWG) last Friday. One of the interesting conversation CWSWG was having was around the kinds of APIs developers would want to work with when the census data is made available? Thus far they are focused on ReSTful APIs (they are using JAX-RS to expose compact SDMX files; they are also playing around with a little RDFa).

The below video is one of the slides from my presentation to CWSWG which outlines a possible way to manage APIs into the future (for context please also see this post on why exposing APIs for the developers of the social web is essential, especially for public sector organisations). I wasn’t originally going to show these patterns (as I have just started to notice these trends emerge in some of #jiscEXPO projects), however as the census data API won’t be released until 2013 I thought it was a good group to unleash some my musings? To preface this ideas I would quote Ray Kerzweil:

I’m an inventor. I became interested in long term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not in the world in which it is started.

The first half of this slide is here (it explains the usual step-by-step process by which a database driven website is created). The above is the second part of the slide and talks about the core infrastrucute idea I was trying out: why organisation should consider triplestores as a lower level layer in the stack that will enable API flux over time. To note: I am a believer in the well worn maxim “there is no problem in computer science which cannot be solved by one more level of indirection”; however, this maxim only works when there is a *real problem* to solve. For me the problem is: will there be a need to maintain and build new APIs as the Web grows and changes as a social entity? Or am I just “architecture astronauting” here, and creating a layer as a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist?

APIs 2.0 – Additional Layers? (slidecast 2 of 3)

dfflanders — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 12:48:13 +0000

This is video slide 1 of 2 on how we might structure APIs for developers as part of the social Web. For context please see this high level overview on why we need to make sure developers are seen as users of the social web (not just components).

For the second half of this slidecast please see this post which provides the explanation of this presentation:

http://dfflanders.wordpress.com/2010/11/13/api-2-0-layering-your-api-for-the-social-web/

APIs 2.0 – The Social Web for Developers (slidecast 1 of 3)

dfflanders — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 12:04:58 +0000

I was invited to the Census Web Services Working Group this past Friday to talk about the various activities that the Digital Infrastructure Team has undertaken in making APIs available to developers. I wasn’t due to present until the end of the day so I got the chance to hear about the ongoing plans to make the upcoming Census data available to the wide world. I am pleased to report that this government effort is well ahead of the curve as they are not only actively planning to deliver the future Census data from a ReSTful API (aside: they are also playing around with RDFa!), but they are also planning on building their central website from their own API (eating their own dogfood!).

There are two more slidecast videos that follow on from this video on architecting APIs for the social Web:

slidecast 2 of 3 here on how we normally build APIs, and
slidecast 3 of 3 here on how we might come to build APIs

How Many Personal Devices Do We Need? – Questions on the Form-Factor of Tablets?

dfflanders — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 11:30:31 +0000

I bought the new Samsung Galaxy Tab this past weekend, though rather than talking about the software apps and tools (which are great), I’d like to focus more on the form-factor of what this device has really made me start thinking about with regards to the number of devices we need in our day to day lives?