The Day of Snow Poles and Mastodon

Byrichard 1 December 20221 December 2022

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Today during the walk I saw an orange van moving by the side of the road slowly. It was stopping regularly. I crossed the road and looked towards it. I saw an open door and a person placing traffic snow poles into the bollards at the side of the road. Winter is coming and the roads are being made ready for when it snows. I wanted to film but I was told not to, so I didn’t.

It would have been nice to film such a scene, because it signals the change from Autumn to winter. It doesn’t matter. I respect peoples’ right to privacy. I can’t think of a security reason not to film such an event.

Mastodon

Through Musk buying Twitter, and through its swing to the Far Right people have finally decided to dump twitter to try something else. That something else, for many, is Mastodon. People are re-discovering what some of us have longed for, for a long time. Social media and the social web, without adverts, once again. For many years the web was seen as an expense, and everyone questioned whether it was profitable, so it was filled with enthusiasts, rather than others.

Today, with the slow demise of Twitter (theoretically) people have chosen to emigrate from Twitter due to political differences. Instead of going to a centralised network with a single point of failure people are migrating to the federated web where activitypub is used to share content between web servers. In theory every individual and business could have their own server.

This is good. The flaw with Twitter is that it had a board of people who decided that they would agree to sell Twitter to a single individual. This move has made a lot of Twitter users uncomfortable, me included. Social media and social networks are about conversations and communities, and what Musk has done, and those that agreed to sell to him, is show that social networks with a single point of failure, are bound to fail at some stage. Twitter won’t vanish overnight but the golden age of capital driven social media is over. Users are regaining hold of the social web, and people like Musk will have spent 44 billion, for a network where users are volatile.

I don’t mean that they’re flaming each other. I mean that if you open the jar usage stats will evaporate. As Mastodon picks up users at an increasing speed, so it will be more interesting for people to migrate from Twitter to Mastodon, and leave the sinking ship behind.

The Internet, and the web, were designed to be modular and adaptive. If one site or node is taken down, we just move to the next, and the next after that. WordPress has provided bloggers with this flexibility for decades. Now Mastodon provides the same, for microbloggers.

social networking | tech related | twitter

Discussing NewBcamp introduced a new point of view

Byrichard 4 November 2007

Twittervox is back on the air and there will be an episode at some point this afternoon, probably around 4pm GMT. During the most recent episode we were discussing Podcamp Boston 2 and one of the people that joined the conversation was Sara Steeler of Pygmae and NewBcamp. Her ideas are interesting because she wants to involve more people into using current technology on a daily basis rather than produce content for people to hear, read or watch.

What makes the NewBcamp interesting is that it’s about creating an event where non creatives can meet and learn about the possibilities of new technology. She describes it as NewBCamp… I am designing it especially for people new to technology, I welcome people to suggest topics they would like to hear presentations on, as well as presentations they feel qualified to give. It differs from podcamp and barcamp events because it’s goal is to get more people to take advantage of all the content that is being provided.

I want to get other people involved, people like the students in my classes, like my mom, like random people I know who have a thirst to know about how to do computer stuff.

One of the things that frustrated me as a university student is that radio students, of all people, did not understand the purpose of podcasting. They want to do radio and to be on the well known broadcasters. They do student radio but how many of them took advantage of creating podcast friendly content. How many of them would create content that could be put on an RSS feed and downloaded for convenient listening? For a short period they had podcasts but that stopped quite quickly.

It’s a shame because whilst I love the idea of listening to a friend’s content whilst on the move I hate the idea of having to be by the computer listening to a live stream, especially when it’s non time sensitive audio discussions. NewBcamp could help change that attitude, help develop awareness of what podcasts are and what you can do with them.

It’s also about awareness. What podcasts are out there and what audience would find them interesting. At the moment we find technology geeks, current affairs and more but what about other programs.

I’ve seen a few snowboarding podcasts, a few history podcasts, several environmental shows but the problem is that their audience lacks familiarity with the medium. There are a few universitites that have audio podcasts, there are a few radio stations that offer additional content.

Through projects such as NewBcamp I hope that a new audience will discover and enjoy the pleasure of listening to a new form of distributing content and that the will experiment with it. I’d like to see a diversification in the type of content offered whilst including a broadening of topics covered.

If you have some thoughts on the topic then don’t hesitate to come up with suggestions and participate in the conversation.

random | tech related

People From The Past

Byrichard 9 July 20076 May 2020

Since I started using the world wide web one thing has become clear over the past year. The web has become personal. We have seen a migration from a worldwide web of strangers where everyone is hiding behind an avatar to a worldwide web where no one is hiding behind an avatar, where everyone wants to be seen.

In the early days of the world wide web when no one was sure what the world wide web was about many people created websites and web rings and such were formed. Webrings were an early form of tagging whereby a list of websites on a particular subject would be put together to help promotion between websites. Over time this disintegrated.

Another difference is the mentality of webmastering. Whereas before a website was designed to provide text-based information within the smallest amount of data (due to network limitations) it has gone the other way. From HTML pages to Flash-based video players. The Web has become a far more important tool now that broadband is so popular.

At the same time, broadband and “always-on” connections have meant that whenever you turn on the computer you’re online. In the early days, I had a friendship with a Swedish girl, via e-mail. The friendship was an interesting one because it was one thousand word e-mails one to two times a day for an entire month before it ceased completely. That’s a lot of communication between two countries at a time when social networking was in its infancy, at least online.

Remember the Geocities chatrooms, those that were text-based were a popular question was A/S/L… Those days were more interesting. In those days you’d chat with someone and try to keep them interested and establish a friendship which would result in getting an e-mail address to stay in contact. Profiles and logins became more advanced and chatrooms are now designed so that everything about you is clearly visible (that you choose to make public) therefore some of the more basic questions are no longer needed.

I have been a member of many online forums and I have seen how they have changed from being fairly simple places for people to share ideas a post at a time to massively complex social networking websites such as myspace, Facebook and others. This brings me to the idea of portals.

I remember when companies like yahoo attempted to give you as much information as possible on their main page and the most activities to enjoy were numerous so that you would stay there. A few years later and one of the top social networking websites is Facebook where not only do you have all your friends as members of the network but additionally they may choose how much they share with others. It’s become a central node for the web-based user experience.

In this time those networks have demonstrated one thing, the ability to re-establish links. On Facebook it’s getting back in contact with school friends I haven’t seen for more than a decade whilst in other situations, it’s about people we met during vacations in another country. It’s a way for friendships to be created and to remain alive thanks to the virtual communities that have formed.

I wonder how long it’ll be before my friends use Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce or other SMS enabled social networking communities online. In America, with Facebook, this is already a reality. For other countries with patience, it will be a reality as well and we will be truly connected.

I’m already experimenting with that idea via twitter.

17 After the Event- Carrying the Conversation Forward

Byrichard 22 September 2007

There are two key events I have been to since the beginning of summer. These are PodcampUK and the Twitter Meetup. Both of these events have been followed up by a continuing collaboration between participants.

The first event was the London twitter meetup. I went there knowing just two participants, Sizemore and Jess. Over the night I would end up with interviews with quite a few members of the London twitter community but nothing much would be done with this footage as a result of not having known that I would be doing these interviews.

It meant collaborating with Jess and getting an edit ready in the hope that GETV would use it. They didn’t so that was slightly dissapointing.

I met another individual. Nik Butler of Loudmouthman.com. Following on from a good conversation on the twitter meetup night we decided that we would collaborate on other projects. One of these is ongoing, Twittervox. Twittervox is a weekly roundup of the week’s twitter news in review. It’s had over 2600 views over that time with up to four live participants at once around the world ranging from the US to different parts of Europe.

That project has been featured by Operator 11 on a number of occasions which I would like to believe is testament to it’s good content.

Twittervox is also of note because it introduced me to Phil Campbell and his work. Since this was a few weeks before Podcamp UK it meant that I would know at least two members of the conference.

At Podcamp UK I got to meet quite a few of those who are part of the British podcasting landscape, from teachers to academics, broadcast professionals and hobbyists. This broad range of people would lead on to more projects.

There were some interesting conversations and presentations which brought me some new ways of seeing certain aspects of the podcasting stream of content creation. It would make me think of podcasting as the equivalent of Amateur sports in relation to it’s “threat to broadcasting.” Within a week I was sitting at the Frontline Club listening to Andrew Keen but that was written abo

I’m glad I met Documentally whilst at Podcamp because of possible future collaborations we may work on in the near future. As of yet nothing is set in stone but already I’ve met him a few times to work on three or four projects which you can find on his website and on a number of video sharing websites already.

From what I’ve described above what I’ve found is that the conversations from events are leading onto some interesting projects and that it’s been a good transition from the student life into the professional one. It’s been a great opportunity to meet some interesting people and through blogs, twitter and meetings in the real world the conversation is as healthy as ever. I feel I’ve gained from these events and their aftermath and look forward to participating to many more in the weeks and months to come.

jaiku | twitter

A typical Jaiku thread

Byrichard 14 May 2008

For any of those that have never used Jaiku before here is a typical conversation from the users. They’re all interested in mobile phones and what they can do. It’s a nice change from twitter’s web 2.0 and social media slant.

twitter

I’m not the only one.

Byrichard 28 June 2008

MG had noted that, after a week, Twitter seemed to realize that it was a problem that the replies still werenâ€™t working, and was pointing people to Summize for a workaround. I said â€œI hate having to rely on the web version of Twitter, first of all, then having the reply tab bork, and THEN having to go to summize, and hit reply there and pray that twitter works. Itâ€™s why I only check Twitter once or twice a day now.â€

source

So you see I’m not the only one that’s complaining about the lack of service from twitter. More and more people are getting tired. Remember when hotmail was unreliable, soon after it became part of microsoft. That’s the phase twitter seems to be in although it’s funding rather than being bought. The early adopters are “leaving” because they’re tired of the site being down but that doesn’t matter.

Awareness of twitter is going up and if within a week or two they iron out the bugs then there’s a good chance that the middle to late adopters will come and enjoy twitter. We’ve seen that in shows like TWIT the later adopters are there now. More and more people arrive and because they’re not part of the “echo chamber” that we, as the early adopters inhabit to them it’s a new service that they’re learning about.

Whilst I was not twittering I did watch the different conversations about the fail whale and how crap twitter had become and we see the negativity. Look at the timeline though and see what new arrivals are saying. What’s the point of twitter? How do I use it? Those questions mean one thing. It doesn’t matter that twitter is broken when they join for the simple reason that they don’t know what it was like before.

Now it’s up to twitter who have purged the geek community through inefficiency to take advantage of that to get many more real life conversations going rather than all this web 2.0 and marketing chatter. If twitter does make an effort I look forward to when it’s properly fixed.

As an addition taking a few days off from twitter did help me feel more relaxed about the bugs.

A typical Jaiku thread

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I’m not the only one.

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