weaverluke

Hermetic thoughts

2011-01-04T13:09:00.000Z

Hermes, by Trois Têtes

It has been over two years since I last posted on this blog, and indeed since I wrote at length on any topic not directly related to delivering projects for Weaver Digital or Elastik Mobile. It's a realisation that is quite sobering for me, as my desire to crystalise thoughts into prose has never really lapsed.

Naturally, I blame Twitter in part for my prosaic absence: it has seduced me into bite-sizing my thoughts, and worse, sidelining altogether those of them that refuse to squeeze themselves into a 140-character mould. Then again, my professional focus over the last five years has shifted progressively from an abstract, quasi-academic concern with Digital Identity, via wide-eyed startup entrepreneurialism (Blog Friends), to the delivery of strategic, design and development solutions for paying clients. Chipping away diligently at the Weaver coal face, it has been easy to forget to look up occasionally at the sky, be it blue or cloudy, and simply ponder. And a blog is nothing without pondering.

But enough of the retrospective angst. A new year brings new energies, and I have set an intention to revive and re-invigorate Weaverluke (the blog, and hopefully thereby the man) in 2011.

When I founded i-together Ltd as a vehicle for my startup projects (Blog Friends was the only i-together project to see the light of day, but a number of its abortive predecessors taught me much about technology, business and people), I was inspired by a vision of a world where networked technology helped people to live richer and more fulfilled lives — by empowering them to express themselves simultaneously as unique and self-determining individuals on one hand and as participants in diverse and multi-dimensional communities and groups on the other.

As my thirties have unfolded (I'm 38 now), I have lost some of my evangelic zeal about the blue-skies, "let's invent an amazing new technology that will revolutionalise the way we live our lives and relate to one another" i-together vision. Rather, what I have found is that I am increasingly interested in learning to live my own life according to i-together principals: exploring and expressing my individual character and spirit, while also learning to work and interact more effectively and creatively with others, within Weaver's team, with clients, with friends, family and my partner. And, critically, seeking an understanding of how the individual and collective aspects of my life can interact in such a way as to yield more than the sum of the parts. The change begins with oneself. Such a simple insight, but hard won indeed.

There's another nuance of the i-together vision that I have begun to appreciate more as time goes on: the power of separateness within wholeness. Implicit in the "i" of i-together, but not really acknowledged properly by me for a long time, is my personal need to clearly separate my alone, internal time from my sociable, collaborative time. I have started to learn the power of maintaining a hermetic seal, as it were, between these two realms of my life — of allowing the potential energy flow between my private and social worlds to build, in the process spinning up new creative energies in the vacuum between the two that may flow into both.

The recognition of my need to maintain a clearer separation between personal and sociable spaces may have implications for the kind of professional work I focus upon, and also the way that I manage the work itself. Strategic consultancy generally allows for a nice separation of a phase of engagement with the client from a period of reflection, analysis and synthesising of project findings in a way that, for example, a website design and build project, with the myriad change requests that invariably come with the territory, does not. And my Inbox Zero policy with email, much as it appeals to my compulsive nature, does tend to furnish my day with a constant stream of interruptions. Finding more opportunities to delegate, and more wholeheartedly — without losing oversight of the key aspects of Weaver's operations — could also play a part. The truth is, though, I don't know yet what practical changes are required, if any. Perhaps a shift of intention will suffice?

Weaver's revirtualisation at the close of 2010 — we moved out of our Soho offices, for a number of reasons I won't dwell on here — is certainly resonant with my personal shift of focus. It has been a time for me to draw back and reflect, taking stock of the amazing variety of projects I have been fortunate to lead at Weaver in the last few months and years, and renewing Weaver's focus according to the insights that emerge from that stock-taking process. Weaver's forthcoming new website will embody much of this change of focus, although it will no doubt continue to evolve along with our clarity around what Weaver is and what it is for.

So, there we have it. A nicely long and rambling, navel-perusing post to kick this blog back into life. Few may read to the end of this post, but here it is for those who do.

Hermes, messenger of the gods. A fun part to aspire to play.

Twitter.com

2008-10-28T15:33:00.006Z

I just wrote a short paper on Twitter.com, the wildly popular "microblogging" service (11 pages, 1.9 MB download).

In the paper, I look at the incredibly diverse ways that people are using Twitter, then tease out some common threads that run through all these User Experiences.

The whole is illustrated with pictures, quotations and hyperlinks. Enjoy.

Stone Age brains and the social web

2008-04-20T13:08:00.004+01:00

I just listened to a brilliant "All In The Mind" podcast on "Stone Age brains in 21st century skulls" while jogging around Highgate Woods:

Front up to your shrink, and you bring a menagerie of hunter gatherers, anteaters and reptiles from your ancestral past with you. Or so Professor Daniel Wilson and Dr Gary Galambos believe. Both clinical psychiatrists, they provocatively challenge their profession to look to the Darwinian roots of human neuroses, and the evolutionary battleground that is our stone-age brain.

The podcast confirmed my thoughts on the importance of intimate social context in our lives—specifically, social intimacy appears to limit the extent to which the dynamics between manic/dominant and depressive/submissive personalities become excessively polarised within groups.

Such polarisation of social dynamics is an adaptive behaviour that is deeply rooted in the reptilian brain: assertion of leadership by the few within a small community allows the community to function without constant fighting.

However, the exploded social contexts we live within in the modern world can distort assertion and submission into manic/psychotic and depressive behaviours respectively. Fascinatingly, we're told that all four of the major leaders in WWII (Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt and Tojo) had manic personality disorders of one kind or another.

Given all the above, how might we build social software that helps us rediscover intimacy of social context in an exploded society? Sounds like it's a fairly urgent mission.

LinkedIn's promise

2008-04-06T19:04:00.021+01:00

Pretty much all my business friends are on LinkedIn. According to Read Write Web, LinkedIn has around 20 million members and around 6.6 million monthly active users. They are the clear global market leaders in the business networking space—Centre Networks report that Xing, their closest competitor, had 5 million members in January 2008.

So just what is it that LinkedIn is doing so right? And could it be doing that thing even better?

The LinkedIn promise

The heart of what makes a service or product successful is the power of the aspirations it evokes. Once we identify the core "promise" that the service holds out to us, we can then look at how effectively the its functionalities, workflows and UI amplify, filter and channel that promise into a rewarding and effective, tangible user experience (UX).

So what is LinkedIn's promise to its users?

First up, LinkedIn's self-avowed mission: "to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the relationships you already have". Hmm, not exactly snappy, eh? We're going to have to read between the lines and read the subtle cues here...

I would sum up my actual experience of using LinkedIn feels something more like this: "LinkedIn promises to bring my business card to life." LinkedIn seems to say to me: "we will extend your carefully-constructed business card and CV across your network for you, bringing you a wealth of serendipitous professional insights and opportunities."

So what, specifically, gives me this impression?

Visual branding—"corporate" and "creative" in counterpoint

LinkedIn's visual branding is deceptively subtle. At first glance, you might think it minimal and conservative. Lots of greyspace and whitespace around clean-edged boxes and tidy little icons; tightly controlled areas of colour.

But look more closely.

Within this conservative visual framework, there is actually a wealth of variety of gradient effects, block colour shades, corner shapes, button and border styles, list layouts. I can feel that the LinkedIn designers have had fun with this UI!

To illustrate my point, here's a collage of fragments from the LinkedIn UI. (See if you can find them on the site itself—a treasure hunt!):

But so what? What does the subtleties of graphic design have to do with LinkedIn's core UX?

Well, the "corporate yet fun" visual branding perfectly expresses the "double promise" of LinkedIn that I suggested above: that you can both keep firm control of how people perceive your identity while also benefiting in serendipitous and unexpected ways by expressing that identity. In my experience, those two attributes tap into fairly universal human needs, so it's no surprise that LinkedIn is so successful.

Genteel gameplay

If LinkedIn was a game, it would be one that you couldn't easily lose at.

As you build up the various aspects your profile, a little "profile completeness" status bar creeps up towards 100%. But there are no wrong moves or puzzling challenges in the profile building game—just the gentle incentive of that status bar and the hope that your contacts will view your professional identity in a better light and opportunities will flow.

By way of illustration, I found this image by blogger Stephanie Booth (though note also the somewhat disgruntled comment exchange under the original image!):

The status bar is classic LinkedIn. It says: "take your time, stay in control, just follow the instructions - but maybe, just maybe, this could lead on to unsuspected opportunities." That's a potent double promise.

Cherry picking the social web

It didn't escape observers' attention that the latest iteration of the LinkedIn site drew on key features of Facebook for inspiration - the Newsfeed on the Home page and the Questions and Answers features being two of the most conspicuous examples.

But even when cherry picking the "bleeding edge" of the social web, LinkedIn keeps its brand promise. The content of the Newsfeed is just interesting enough to attract a curious glance from time to time (e.g. "[Your contact's name] added [someone else] as a contact"), but never strays into embarassing or awkward territory.

I will never read a message like "[Your contact name] just got the sack and is now unemployed" on LinkedIn. Engaging and potentially useful to observers as that message would be, it would LinkedIn's implied promise to help you maintain a positive professional image.

LinkedIn sucks, but it shouldn't care

When I asked my social media maven friends to tell me how well LinkedIn worked for them, their reaction was mixed.

Here are a few of their twittered gripes:

"I find it takes too many clicks to see someone's connections. Also, interface isn't consistent." - Jof Arnold

"Always struck me as kind of thing that should be useful, but just not yet. Loathe to bail in case it's useful after I've gone." - Tim Duckett

"[J]ust an address-neutral repository of people I know, and an occasional source of annoying recruiters." - Alan Patrick

"LinkedIn would be cool if it had some decent apps..." - Steve Lawson

"It seems like it should be much more useful & effective than it is." - Pete Goold

So LinkedIn clearly isn't serving the early adopter crowd optimally, and I would imagine that must be impacting negatively on the amount of "buzz PR" they are getting on blogs, twitter, podcasts and so on.

But then again, why should LinkedIn care too much?

As I said at the beginning of this post, pretty much all my professional friends are on LinkedIn—despite their reservations about its utility. For early adopters, the bottom line is that LinkedIn works for them as a rolodex. And for those early adopters who aren't already maxed out with gainful employment, there is an additional hope (not necessarily expectation) that being on LinkedIn could generate new opportunities.

If LinkedIn jumped to the tune of every fleeting, outré social web trend in an effort to excite us early adopters, they would be breaking their brand promise of keeping the user in control of a dependable and familiar environment. They would risk alienating their mass market of late adopters.

And Reid Hoffman is far too clever to do that.

A message runs through it

If you've ever had the dubious privilege of eating a stick of Brighton Rock, you'll know that there's some message or other written pink or green into the white sugar, and that message goes through the length of the sweet.

Great brands are like that. Everything they do communicates their brand promise.

Of course, I could only touch on small areas and aspects of LinkedIn's web (and indeed mobile) presence in this post. But it seems to me that wherever I turn on LinkedIn, I encounter the same double promise of safety and opportunity.

It's a great lesson in business focus.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to all my friends who helped me to clarify my thoughts on LinkedIn by sharing their own. While we're on the subject, why not check out their LinkedIn profiles, via my own (requires LinkedIn signin)? Maybe, just maybe, it could lead to professional opportunities for you...

[UPDATE: Special thanks to Chris Osborne for pointing out an error in my LinkedIn statistics references—now corrected]

User Experience made better

2008-03-27T12:29:00.069Z

Weaverluke provides world-leading User Experience strategic consultancy and research, design and testing solutions.(Social Design, User Centred Design, Information Architecture and Interaction Design—and consultancy, research and testing for the same—are other useful ways to describe what we do.)

We can help your company deliver a compellingly simple, intuitive and powerful user experience with your digital service offerings.

Beyond the sheer quality of our work as a whole, Weaverluke stands out from our competition in three specific areas:

we are recognised experts in the social aspects of digitally-enabled services;
we orchestrate an in-depth understanding of business, brand, technology, psychology and design to provide User Experience consultancy and solutions that reflect the whole of your business;
we are not afraid to apply our proven skills as creative User Experience innovators when your business goals require it.

Our clients

Our recent projects include:

• providing Vodafone with User Experience strategic consultancy and research, a User Experience design solution and skills training, helping them to evolve their Betavine.net mobile app developer community hub;

• working with social fashion trading platform Fashionspace.com to re-architect their service's Information Architecture and User Experience (a site relaunch is forthcoming; Weaverluke's work is not visible on the live site), transforming their ability to deliver on their business goals.

• leading the design and testing of interactive prototypes, over a three month period, of a world-leading news agency's social network for financial services professionals, on behalf of Flow Interactive.

Strategic benefits of investment in User Experience

User Experience is rooted across diverse areas of your business, including business and brand strategy, technology, design and even marketing. For this reason, the direct ROI on investment in User Experience proves challenging to quantify precisely.

Nevertheless, from a strategic perspective, investment in User Experience clearly makes excellent sense:

By properly researching, planning and designing services that meet your business goals by delivering compelling value to your users and customers, you reduce the risk of project failure.
In today's hyper-competitive market, every useability barrier is a costly lost opportunity. By the same token, improving your services' User Experience can boost your top line significantly, driving increased sales and avoiding unecessary service support costs (eg, helpline provision).

What we offer

Weaverluke can help you to realise the two-fold strategic benefits of improving your services' User Experience described above, by taking any or all of the following steps with your company:

Facilitating your development of a User Experience strategy that enables you to deliver on your business goals
Conducting an expert review and competitive analysis of your existing service offering
Undertaking anthropological research, user needs analysis and task analysis
Identifying key user personas and use cases
Creating interactive service prototypes
Prototype and service testing and evaluation
Full or modular solution development (in partnership with web solutions agency Brain Bakery)

Market-leading innovation

As CEO and User Experience/UI design lead for i-together Ltd., Weaverluke Director Luke Razzell was responsible for the Blog Friends user experience and graphic design, along with taking joint responsibility for the company's brand and business strategy, viral marketing strategy and community and investor relations. Blog Friends was a social blog reading app on facebook that grew from zero to 27k users—including 13 of the world's Top 100 bloggers—in eight months.

Here is what some well-known industry commentators had to say about the service:

"My favourite Facebook app is Blog Friends... It's delightfully simple but packs in a lot of features."—Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk
"I have been a big fan of the service since it launched, it has brought efficiency, variety and serendipity to my feedreading to the extent that I have pretty much stopped using any other reader."—Nic Brisbourne, DFJ Esprit
"The most useful (eventually the only) Facebook App I used."—Alan Patrick, Broadsight
And Robert Scoble, the world's leading technology blogger, put us in his Facebook Application Top 10.
"The team that built [Blog Friends] is widely known in London as being amongst the best in their field."—Mike Butcher, Techcrunch

Take a look at this two minute slideshow to find out just what it is about Blog Friends that people loved.

Contact us

If you think Weaverluke's User Experience consultancy, research, development or testing could be of benefit to your company, please do get in touch. It's never too soon to make your users' experience better!

Email: luke@weaverluke.com
Twitter and Skype: weaverluke
Mobile: 07985 119095

Hacking the nature of existence

2008-01-15T09:03:00.000Z

Nic Brisbourne concludes a thoughtful post "On widgets, social networks and the nature of existence": "[W]e find ourselves in a situation where internet companies might not even need their own website. A kind of virtual, virtual company if you will…."

I completely agree with Nic's sentiment at a high level. This concept of a virtualised service was what lead i-together to deploy Blog Friends within Facebook in the first place. However, the tactical view from within an early-stage startup like Blog Friends turns out to look subtly different than I expected. I left a comment on Nic's post:

Your "web brand virtualisation via open social nets" point is well taken. As you say, Blog Friends within Facebook is an example of this trend.

However, we are now building a central presence for Blog Friends beyond 3rd-party sites. To start with, we plan to deploy some key new Blog Friends features exclusively at i-together.com, over the next month or so, keeping the main feedreader service within Facebook. Then we intend to comprehensively re-architect Blog Friends around a set of APIs, which will make it relatively trivial to deploy (or for others to deploy) Blog Friends on diverse platforms and devices. (Incidentally, we didn't start off with an API-based approach back in June 2007 because we knew we had to get Blog Friends out as soon as possible to catch the Facebook adoption wave—a decision we still regard as correct.)

But why do we not feel that spreading across multiple social nets alone is an optimum strategy?

Two reasons: firstly, having our own "place" on the web gives us an air of solid independence; it safeguards us against the varying fortunes of any given 3rd-party platform (witness Facebook's fall from grace amongst the In Crowd of late). Secondly, it is *so* much quicker to implement and test features when e.g. FBML and FBJS are not involved, and those features can be a lot richer and run much faster. With our tiny development resources (three of us!), and with competition breathing down our neck, we can't afford to waste even an ounce of effort.

Presence distribution is immensely valuable as a strategy, but the current state of the web and the tech that powers it, along with startup resource limitations can necessitate some toughly pragmatic tactical choices.

The social web is not a machine—it is (evolving into) us

2008-01-07T23:29:00.000Z

Chris Brogan wonders if the social web could be understood as a machine that we can learn to "program".

After adding a couple of rather emotive comments that didn't respond fairly to Chris's whole post (I've learned to open my mouth before thinking too much these days—I rarely regret it in the long run!), I managed to say what I really meant:

@Chris- My point (clumsily made, for which apologies) is that the programming metaphor only goes so far in encapsulating our activity on the social web, because we are (hopefully) not just using the social web as a “machine” to achieve a particular, pre-planned outcome that we desire (a blog in the Technorati Top 100, a new consultancy contract etc.), but rather are embedded in a complex and quite mysterious world of cybernetically-extended human relationship.

It’s only when we give up “knowing” where we are going or need to go that we open ourselves up to truth, surely? And your positivistic programming metaphor doesn’t seem to me to foster this kind of Zen Mind state.

All that said, the social web *is* at a stage right now where we do need “programming” skills just to use the damn thing, motivations not-withstanding. So from that point of view, absolutely I agree with the utility of your metaphor.

Let’s just not forget the larger goal—of facilitating the evolution of the web such that it comes to be transparent to our time and space-shifted *human* communication. : )

Powerful metaphors need judicious useage.

My hairstylist is a Blog Friends user

2008-01-05T17:28:00.000Z

Well, I must say I was pretty chuffed today when my Brazilian hairstylist, Pedro, told me that not only had he taken up my invitation to sign up for Blog Friends, but also that he really likes it and has found some great posts, including one that I had also read and that we both loved—Scoble's "What I've learned in 2007".

How cool is that? : )

Clearly, the days when all hairdressers were interested in was where you were going on your holidays are long gone. Seriously though, Pedro is one of the most thoughtful and interesting people I've met in a while, so the fact he enjoys Blog Friends makes me happy.

All of a Twitter

2008-01-03T17:32:00.000Z

I'm really enjoying using Twitter wholeheartedly for the first time. It's a bit like tracking down an elusive party—a lot of my mates are hanging out there already. I'm also getting lots of inspiration for ideas for the integration of Blog Friends with Twitter (which is actually what prompted me to get Twittering). And you can now track my latest Tweets (should you really want to!) in the weaverluke sidebar.

But where's Twitter's business model? Fred Wilson, one of their investors, clearly feels that it would be a mistake to worry about that too soon, as it could distract them from growing their userbase as fast as possible. Nic Brisbourne agrees, but also points out that web entrepreneurs should at least have a "Plan A" for monetisation in their back pocket.

I suspect Jason Calacanis is right to point to mobile advertising as an attractive monetisation option for Twitter, but I'd go even further: maybe Twitter should get themselves acquired by a mobile telco who could pay for the SMS bills and integrate Tweets with mobile ads..?

Advance Aid: a cause worth getting blogged up about

2008-01-02T12:51:00.000Z

Aha, this is much better: a really heartfelt description of why That charitable cause is worth getting excited about, from an email to me from one of its Directors, David Dickie:

It really is a good concept and one that can engender a culture of trade not aid on the continent of Africa. Our basic mission is simple: sending aid to Africa does not work; the only solution is to create real and sustainable employment there which will create lasting sustainability. The first project we have been involved is the opening of a plastics factory in Kenya which will create 300 jobs in Nairobi on day one. Believe me, this is a big deal out there and will lift lots and lots of families from the poverty trap.

We are really ready to spread the word now and need to use the cheapest and most efficient media for doing this. If there is a way in which you could help us get the word out there, that would be great.

Check out www.advanceaid.org for some more info.

I wish Advance Aid all the best for 2008—it sounds like they are indeed doing very valuable work. I can't help but feel, though, that they could do very well to blog (etc.) about it from the rooftops themselves and leverage social web tools to spread the word. I would certainly favourite them in Blog Friends if they joined, as I'd love to track and share with friends how they get on. : )

Greetings of the (silly) Season

2007-12-29T08:23:00.000Z

Received in an email from Fernando Barrio:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the Northern hemisphere’s winter solstice holiday, practised within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or the choice to not practice secular or religious traditions at all…and a
fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contribution to society have helped made our country great (not to imply that our country is necessarily greater than any other), and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform or sexual orientation of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration of the original greeting. It implies no promise from the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and it is void where prohibited by law and it is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.

This wish is expected to perform as expected within the usual application of good tiding for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish a sole discretion of the wisher.

LOL.

Christmas blessings to one and all

2007-12-24T17:27:00.000Z

Charla and I just walked home from some last minute Christmas shopping in Marylebone. Of course, we passed some homeless people along the way. I keep thinking of how sad it is that so many people will spend Christmas without loved ones beside them. My Christmas blessings to everyone who feels sad and alone tomorrow. And to those who do have something to celebrate, have a jolly good Christmas and make the most of it!

Leading "Buzz Marketer" shows how NOT to do it

2007-12-21T18:13:00.000Z

The other day, I received a request from a well-known "buzz marketer" (who shall remain nameless) to plug an organisation (which shall also remain nameless) on Blog Friends and/or on my personal blog. However, I politely declined. The organisation sounds like it's doing great and philanthropic things, but I'm not personally involved or engaged with it. And as all good bloggers know, blogging (and Blog Friends) is, at heart, about being transparent about one's personal passions.

The difficulty that this reknowned consultant seems to be experiencing is that of making clear distinction between (a) being paid for expressing his opinions in the context of an explicit, contracted mandate and (b) informal chats over coffee that touch on his subject of expertise, but where the value exchange actually goes both ways. He knows that he "knows it all", so his voice is surely the only one worth listening to. (Naturally, he will carefully explain to his anyone who will listen that marketing is a conversation. ; )

To get to the point, I believe the above phenomenon may explain this excerpt from Mr Buzz Marketer's part of my exchange with him:

Readers, please excuse his profanity, but poisonous boils are best lanced. This is the season of goodwill, and I bless this poor fellow and everyone else suffering with negativity.

UPDATE: I would like to point out that I am not referring in this post to my good friend James Cherkoff of Collaborate Marketing and Modern Marketing blog. By contrast to my correspondent quoted above, James doesn't just talk about respectful and authentic relationships but also engages in them online and offline.

A long overdue apology

2007-12-21T09:39:00.000Z

Back in the spring, I made much of my plan to co-author a grand series of posts on Startups and Identity, and indeed published the first few posts with my stalwart collaborator Nic Brisbourne. However, the sheer intensity of focus and effort required by my startup company i-together has fatally distracted me from this blog in general and the post series in particular. I kept hoping I'd find the time and brain space to get back to the series, but things are just getting busier (and more exciting!) at i-together.

So—I admit defeat.

My sincere apologies to Nic, my other prospective co-authors and you, my readers if you were looking forward to the rest of the Startups and Identity series.

Hopefully the New Year will bring me some new weaverluke-blogging mojo, but I think it's time to lay to rest that post series.

A Big Day for Blog Friends

2007-11-19T12:20:00.000Z

I feel like a bit like a trapeze artist at the moment, arcing through the air between swings. (Admittedly I feel like a trapeze artist very definitely in a metaphorical sense only, as I put my back out yesterday and am hobbling around the flat!)

We took the current Blog Friends service down a few minutes ago, and are now working furiously to get Blog Friends v1 Beta ready for prime time—hopefully sometime later today.

So whether you are an existing or would-be user of Blog Friends, please bear with us: we very much hope the wait will be more than worthwhile.

And the view up here is amaaaaaaaaaazing! ; )

[Cross-posted from The Blog Friends Blog]

Blog Friends v1 Beta launches tomorrow!

2007-11-18T13:09:00.001Z

I can't quite believe it but it's true—Blog Friends v1 Public Beta launches tomorrow, after months of preparation and weeks of testing and bug fixing (it's hard to convey to those who haven't experienced it just how fiendishly difficult it is to get a complex web service working properly in Internet Explorer ; ).

I'll be blogging about Blog Friends v1 Beta at The Blog Friends Blog tomorrow, but in the meantime you can find some more annotated screenshots of the app in action on our flickr group.

Looking forward to welcoming y'all to the new Blog Friends tomorrow. (If you don't yet have Blog Friends added to your facebook account, just follow this link.) Oh, and the current Blog Friends service will be out of action for much of tomorrow while Benjie updates the servers—not a trivial task now we have over 18,000 users!

Identity, embodied

2007-10-28T18:10:00.000Z

It's hard to believe that I was posting up to three times daily on this blog just a few months ago. Since dedicating myself to creating, launching and growing Blog Friends with Jof and Benjie in June this year, my to-do list has been continuously overflowing with design, administrative and business tasks, leaving little room in my schedule let alone my head for "identity" blogging.

That said, the real problem has not been a lack of time—it's been a profound shift of point of view on my part. For three years, I was on the outside looking in on the world of web-enabled business. Sitting on a cloud at 15,000 feet and surveying the landscape stretching out below me became a comfortable habit, and the resulting insights and musings ended up on weaverluke blog.

Not that I wasn't working diligently throughout those three years to realise my "i-together" vision of a world where each individual could explore and express their unique identity in rich community contexts. Far from it: I dedicated much of my spare time and my life savings (and then some), to create with various programmers three prototype applications of that vision, and wrote any number of supporting business plan drafts. Then Facebook's Platform came along, and I realised that there was a great market opportunity for a very specific aspect of the i-together vision—the social blog post sharing and discovery service that is now Blog Friends.

Soon afterwards Jof, Benjie and I launched Blog Friends into the world, rapidly gaining real users with real opinions and preferences. There were suddenly a million things to do by yesterday just to keep the service running, let alone planning and building new service features, iterating the business plan, networking with potential employees, partners and investors, and lastly—but actually most importantly—communicating one-to-one with our wonderful and loyal users.

June, July, August, September, October... The months have sped by and weaverluke blog has languished. It feels rather ironic that I've co-created a service for bloggers and blog readers, yet seem to have lost my own blogging mojo so catastrophically! We also now have a blog for Blog Friends itself that will need tending.

So how could what weaverluke blog has been transition into something that supports and is fed by what my life has become? In other words, what's the common thread (a weaver always needs a thread) that runs through my passions for identity and for Blog Friends?

Considering that question for a moment, I realise that as we adjust the designs for Blog Friends v1 by a pixel here, a shade of blue there, and as we plough through the nitty gritty numbers of the i-together business plan, it is all too easy for me to forget what so excited me about i-together and Blog Friends in the first place.

We are all preciously unique, but we have so much in common too. We thrive when we acknowledge and celebrate both our individuality and our commonalities.

I wanted to create a service that taps into these insights to help people discover and share stuff that really interests them, easily and intuitively. And I really feel that with the forthcoming "v1" release of Blog Friends, we are getting a whole lot closer to that goal.

V1 introduces a full-page feed reader, rich feedback options to tune your topic and author preferences and a whole lot more. Jof, Benjie and I have been grafting away for a couple of months on v1, and we're just days away from launching it into private beta testing now (do let me know, along with your facebook id please, if you'd like an invitation!).

Anyhow, this rambling and anecdotal post has wandered off topic, just like my mind has wandered from the purity and abstraction of "identity" these last months into the challenge of actually making something with and for real people! Because at the end of the day, it's all about relationship, right, this identity stuff? About sharing your passion and dreams with others, and witnessing them in theirs.

Hopefully, I can start to do some more of that on this blog and at the Blog Friends Blog from now on.

Blog Friends latest

2007-08-29T06:41:00.000+01:00

We must really start a Blog Friends blog so I can go back to just writing about identity at weaverluke! In the meantime, it seemed about time to write an update on Blog Friends' progress.

Firstly, I'm delighted to report that we closed some more seed investment yesterday, which gives us plenty of runway to launch the upcoming "v.1" release (of which more shortly).

We have 5,422 registered users as I write, and had 22,000 unique people in total use Blog Friends in the last month. Growth is gradually accelerating and currently averages around 150 registrations per day.

In the last few weeks, Benjie has been focusing on optimising the code and server setup in order to cope with our growing user base, along with various bug fixes, feature tweaks, and now support for multiple blogs (a much-requested feature).

So what next?

From user's feedback, and our own observations, we believe that we are doing a great job of serving bloggers and their friends (the reviews have been very kind*), but a lousy job of serving people who may only have heard of these curious things called "blogs", but have no idea how or where to find good ones to read.

For this reason, our forthcoming v.1 release (in a few weeks' time) will focus on redressing this deficit: our aim is that a new user, however little they may be networked on facebook, let alone with bloggers, should get a great experience from the get go!

We also hope to make Blog Friends much more useful and fun for all our users with a set of ratings and recommendation features that will help you, your friends and the whole network find more and more personally-interesting posts.

Finally, they do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... ; )

As ever, your feedback and thoughts are treasured—feel free to comment here or drop by our facebook group*.

*Link requires facebook login.

Identity Society—happenings and musings

2007-08-09T09:20:00.000+01:00

I found the Mobile Monday "Mobile Digital Identity" event at SUN pretty interesting. Alex Craxton (his report here) did a great job of organising and MD-ing the evening, and the panel session seemed to go well.

As ever, though, the topic of identity quickly escaped the confines of "mobile" and we ended up talking about facebook and its privacy implications! The discussion reminded me a lot of the "Dark Side of Social Media" Chinwag event the other month, with both panel and audience divided between the privacy worriers and the information-must-be-free advocates.

I guess I attempt to span both camps with my "i-together" philosophy, which goes something like this:

It's natural that human beings assert and protect the boundaries of their individual identity in "win-lose" situations (my money, not yours!—"i"); on the other hand, people allow those boundaries to become increasingly permeable to others as they discover mutual interests and common purpose (saving the planet etc.—"together").

The individual and collective aspects of identity look set to weave ever more intricately through one another in our evolving culture, creating all sorts of social patterns at many scales ("i-together"). And networked technologies like facebook and new mobile capabilities are only accelerating the pace of the identity loom's machinations.

A weaver's view, you might say.

Incidentally, Charla and I spent a lovely day with my friend John Madelin and his delightful family yesterday, and John and I took the opportunity to make some good progress on the Identity Society wiki. Do check it out and edit away!

Mobile Digital Identity event at SUN

2007-08-04T08:47:00.000+01:00

So I am donning my Identity Society hat on Monday evening and chairing the panel session at the Mobile Monday event on Mobile Digital Identity, held at SUN Microsystems' London HQ.

My friends Dave Birch, Ajit Jaokar and Alan Patrick are amongst the panelists. As I don't pretend to know a great deal about mobile technology, I hope to learn a lot!

Blog Friends has been Scobleized!

2007-08-01T13:57:00.000+01:00

Blog Friends is no. 7 on Robert Scoble's list of his favourite facebook apps. An honour indeed. : )

Blog Friends' tendrils spreading

2007-07-30T17:05:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd give my readers a quick Blog Friends progress report. : )

As of today, around 1,400 bloggers have signed up to Blog Friends (the official facebook number of over 1,500 is slightly out, according to our logs). Amongst them are many well known bloggers such as Robert Scoble, J.D.Lasica and Ethan Zuckerman. We are growing at about 100 users per day, and churn (people deleting the application) is at a low 8.9%.

Technology, social media and marketing are popular subjects amongst our users' blogs, as might be expected. However, what has been really amazing is tracking in our user logs the incredible diversity of subject and geolocation: we have blogs on ethical palaentology, knitting in New York, Music from the 80s, blogs from India, Africa and China, and many, many more topics. Truly, bloggers are a rampantly eclectic lot!

Benjie, our developer, is on his hols for the next week or so, but we have a load of new features that we are itching to roll out on his return!

Watch this space—or rather, watch your Blog Friends profile box on facebook. ; )

Bloggers' likes—and dislikes!

2007-07-20T08:40:00.000+01:00

Three days into the Blog Friends public beta, and a picture of the most common interests and dislikes of bloggers (as told us by our users) is beginning to emerge. Interesting for me, as a musician, to see music at the top of the likes list. Some of the dislikes are quite funny: I have highlighted my favourites for your chortling convenience.

Top dislikes

1. sports (6)
2. fashion (5)
3. gossip (4)
4. iphone (4)
5. politics (4)
6. dogs (3)
7. gadgets (3)
8. sport (3)
9. celebrity (3)
10. children (2)
11. pop (2)
12. football (2)
13. music (2)
14. kids (2)
15. microsoft (2)
16. sex (2)
17. cats (2)
18. games (2)
19. personal (2)
20. food (2)
21. tennis (1)
22. benjie (1) [our erstwhile developer]
23. us (1)
24. pretentiousness (1)
25. life hacks (1)
26. drugs (1)
27. fish (1)
28. advertising (1)
29. romance (1)
30. creationism (1)
31. parasites (1)
32. scarf (1) [?!]
33. criminal law (1)
34. business (1)
35. hype (1)
36. hot topic (1)
37. jof (1) [our wonderful project manager—hum, tit for tat?]
38. sms (1)
39. poetry (1)
40. fried worms (1)
41. monte cristo (1)
42. internet (1)
43. sap (1)
44. parliament (1)
45. bad (1)
46. nothing (1)
47. mac (1)
48. rants (1)
49. bioconservativism (1)
50. junky stuff (1)
51. h0|2r13u|_ (|-|4&i`c7Â£rs (1)
52. mpaa (1)
53. patent trolls (1)
54. arrogant. (1)
55. loads (1)
56. us politics (1)
57. hip-hop (1)
58. pineapple (1)
59. apache (1)
60. digital marketing (1)
61. silliness (1)
62. negative people (1)
63. h0|2r13u|_ (|-|4&i`c7Ã‚Â£rs (1)
64. jem (1)
65. united states (1)
66. pinheads (1)
67. judgmental people (1) [these last two presumably by different users!]
68. investment. (1)
69. mats (1)
70. drinking (1)
71. general stupidity (1)
72. dogmatism (1)
73. fish&chips (1)
74. windows (1)
75. heights (1)
76. celebrities (1)
77. high maintenance people (1)
78. routers (1)
79. facebook (1) [a bit worrying for us, that one]
80. code (1)
81. dog shit (1)
82. brussels (1)
83. web 2.0 (1)
84. personal finance (1)
85. fascism (1)
86. bugs (1)
87. blogging (1)
88. apple (1)
89. lifestyle issues (1)
90. religious fundamentalism and ignorance of any kind (1)
91. colleges (1)
92. other things (1)
93. avocado (1)
94. journal (1)
95. when people do not respond or thank each other for (1)
96. aging (1)
97. web (1)
98. wifi (1)
99. annoying people (1)
100. environmentalism (1)

Identity & startups: the web (2)

2007-07-17T17:37:00.000+01:00

Luke Razzell and Nic Brisbourne

The story so far

This post is the second in a series that explores the strategic relevance of identity for startups (a full introduction to the series, and a link index of the posts, is here).

In our previous post, we identified a key challenge for any startup: to help users to personalise their experience according to their unique identity. We then looked at how while networked services are great at helping us to transcend the limitations of physical space and even time, they are not yet very good at helping us to integrate the diverse aspects of our networked presence (identity)—let alone doing so without jeopardising our privacy. And so long as these challenges of presence integration and privacy remain for networked services, we asserted that startups will struggle to deliver excellently personalised user experiences.

Exploring what a networked service ecosystem that did enable true personalisation—a notional "Identity Web"—might look like, we came up with four key requirements:

1) The Identity Web must allow us to integrate the various aspects of our presence (rather than forcing us to re-make our presence anew for each service we use).

2) The Identity Web must allow us to segment others' view of our presence (although relaxing attitudes towards privacy may erode this requirement for some or many contexts and demographics).

3) The Identity Web must support diverse, mutually-independent services if it is to offer true choice and privacy-enablement (benefits that cannot be provided by a mere handful of megabrands).

4) The user themselves must be the only unifying node in their presence network within the Identity Web (no-one else should be able to put together all the pieces of information about that user).

Finally, we identified a potential benefit of the Identity Web for individuals and services that mediate their online experience:
The individual should be able to monetise (directly, or indirectly through discounted/free services) the value of their identity by selling access to their identity information.

Where there's a successful startup, there's a great service and a successful business model: so just what might the business and service models that drive the evolution of an Identity Web look like?

Piecing the Identity Web jigsaw

We want to acknowledge at this point that thousands of businesses are of course already delivering incredible and diverse innovations in service personalisation. Hats off to them! However, such innovations—while often highly valuable in their own right—are mostly confined to tactical, rather than strategic aspects of the identity problem space: a bilateral personal information sharing arrangement with a third-party service here; a useful topic-specific, personalised recommendation feature there; a special offer for sharing your opinions with marketers over there.

The big identity picture remains fragmented, like a partially pieced-together jigsaw.
Meanwhile, the big identity "walled gardens"—Google, Yahoo!, Facebook et al—continue their inexorable rise. One of the keys to success of these mega-networks is the way they tie each user into their suite of services (and partner services, in the case of Facebook) by integrating the presence of that user across those services (with a single login). These jigsaws are much better pieced together—but at the cost of users not being able to choose their own pieces, or indeed shield the big identity picture they create within the service from the view of the service itself.

Unless startups can find ways to create a commercially-viable, distributed identity ecosystem—an Identity Web—to compete with and complement the big network's identity lock-in power plays, there seems to be real potential for innovation around identity to become stifled, thereby eroding both choice and privacy for the end user.

There is everything to play for!

Yet without a good map of the identity jungle with which to plan their route, startups are having to hack their way through its dense undergrowth.

So let's make a start towards plotting such a map by taking a look at the business and technological drivers, blockers and unknowns for two service types that seem likely to underpin the Identity Web (and can already be seen embodied in embryo in diverse web services): identity aggregation and identity federation.

In the remainder of this post, we will explore the identity aggregation service type.

Identity aggregation—"lifestream" services

Identity aggregation or "lifestream" services help people to gather personal and personalised information from multiple sources. These services enable their users to integrate various pieces of their online presence into a more coherent whole—with a number of potential benefits detailed below.

So what are the business and technology drivers, blockers and unknowns for startups with regards to the identity aggregation service model?

Business drivers

+ Identity aggregation services allow users to re-aggregate the value of all their diverse fragments of presence, either for their own insight (e.g. Garlik, which helps individuals track what information about them is "out there") and/or for showcasing them to their community/audience in order to enhance their personal brand (e.g. Wink, which publishes aggregated information about individuals' presence across multiple services).

+ Identity aggregation services also could enable users to personalise services via standardised preferences modules. This is the capability that Facebook is building with regards to third-party service integration into users' Facebook profiles (via Facebook Platform).

+ Identity aggregation services can leverage the value to marketers of their users' attention, selling attention information with users' permission, and possibly directly sharing that value with their users (in real or virtual currency).

+ Identity aggregation services have the potential to turn the advertising model on its head by enabling users to opt in to personalised offers, which they would be incentivised to do either by improved personalisation over push adverts, and/or by being paid.

+ Startups may be able to be more transparent about revenue sharing arrangements with users than incumbents (c.f. Google's opacity around AdSense royalties), thereby gaining user trust. Furthermore, startups can avoid the conflicts of interest around revenue sharing transparency that established companies with legacy business relationships can suffer from.

+ Startups within a distributed Identity Web may be in a better position to monetise users' presence information across a broad range of partner services than incumbents, who's identity lock-in approach effectively limits them to monetising their own properties (because they cannot track users' presence information beyond those properties).

+ In the medium term, it seems likely that major advertisers will continue to target fairly broad demographics with their branding messages, so a critical volume of users will still be necessary for advertising platforms (witness the success of Google Ads, targeted across the entire web). Therefore, media properties, with their limited subscriber numbers, are likely to struggle to leverage their users' presence data (e.g. clickstreams) effectively on their own. ISPs may well be in a stronger position to leverage presence data, partnering with ad networks to offer personalised ad services to e.g. media properties. Facilitating this process would seem to represent an interesting opportunity for startups—an opportunity toturn the current ad model (and maybe the whole internet model!) on its head. In this scenario, instead of sites selling space on their pages, the control goes back to the owner of the data “pipes”.

Business blockers

- The GYM club (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) and social network (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo) incumbents are busy building and/or acquiring their own identity aggregation capabilities—and it is not in their interests to share control of their users' presence information!

- Social networks and start page services (Netvibes etc.) can enable their users to integrate 3rd party services into their profiles (via widgets, Facebook Platform etc.), thereby potentially neutralising the competitive threat of a distributed identity ecosystem (on the other hand, this opportunity for exposure on the large networks does give startups a platform upon which to grow their user base).

- The large networks have the potential to enable users to segment their presence (in the context of a single account and login) into various personae, each with their own page. In fact, Netvibes is already doing this, effectively, with its Tabs, which can each be publicly shared independently of one another.

- Large networks, with ownership of or advantageous relationships with ad networks, are in a stronger position than small startups to monetise value of user's identity information to marketers.

- Micropayments to and discounts for users for divulging their personal information to marketers seem unlikely to take off in a big way as a business model in its own right: established services such as Pigsback and Greasy Palm have only seen relatively modest growth. It seems more likely that successful business models in this area will integrate cash incentives for personal information disclosure into a more rounded value proposition that includes personalised services and information provision that are useful in themselves.

Business unknowns

? No-one really knows how the issue of privacy will play out across diverse online demographics. Will people come to accept it is unviable to stop others viewing "their" information? Or will they demand ways of protecting it? Or will both the above be true, but in differing contexts? The answers to these questions may play a large role in determining the true potential of the information aggregation market.

? Could a few high-profile abuses of users' trust (such as the debacle over AOL's inadvertant exposure of its users' search history data last year) set back the identity aggregation service market significantly?

Technology drivers

+ The maturation of mobile web technologies will open up the "location" dimension of personal identity for innovation in identity aggregation services (although, given the lock-in on handset-generated location information that mobile network providers enjoy, startup business models in this area are unclear).

+ Widget platforms (Netvibes, Spring Widgets etc.) and distribution ecosystem (Netvibes, Snipperoo, Facebook etc.) are beginning to provide a springboard for startup identity aggregation services.

+ OpenID looks set to enable a distributed jigsaw approach to user authentication management across the web if adoption by services and then (more importantly) users reaches a critical mass.

+ Microformats are beginning to enable a degree of automated rich-content discovery and exchange across services.

+ APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) promises to enable the automated exchange between services of various kinds of personal attention data (information about what someone pays attention to—in other words, their implicit identity information).

+ The Atom publishing protocol has become established as a standard "wrapper" for rich content exchange;

+ Windows Cardspace looks set to provide desktop-based secure assertion management in forthcoming versions of Windows Vista, providing a degree of protection against identity phishing (a topic whose in-depth coverage is beyond the scope of this post—look out for a future post in this post series on the subject of identity assurance!).

Technology blockers

- People don't think or communicate according to "data standards"! We humans understand the meaning of information in a hugely complex and semantically and socially contextualised way—not according to a patchwork of standard, fragmented data types.

In this light, the standards-dependency of both Microformat and API-based data exchange (not to mention SOAP Web Services, the RDF-based Semantic Web and a host of other standards-dependent data exchange technolgies and data models, many of which have quietly fallen by the wayside over the years) appears to be a severely limiting factor for their potential applicability for the distributed exchange of rich and complex personal and personalised information.

It seems likely that we will have to evolve semantic, distributed data exchange technologies that reflect our innate, human ways of understanding and communicating information if we are to evolve an effective Identity Web. Yet progress in this area is at a very early stage—the data integration problem remains a massive and largely intractable one.

Technology unknowns

Ease of use questions over OpenID:

? How easy is it for anyone with a less-than-unique name or pseudonym to find a memorable, simple and appropriate personal URL? This issue alone may prove to be something of a stumbling block for OpenID in the mass market of non-geeks.

? Even if they can find an appropriate URL, it is currently far from easy for a non-geek to navigate the domain registration and hosting process. Will ISPs begin to be much more proactive in assisting their users to do this kind of thing in a pain-free way?

? Will the open-source aspects of Cardspace get implemented on the other major operating systems (Mac OS X and Linux), thereby creating a consistent cross-platform user experience for handling identity assertions?

A final question

? And finally, perhaps the most important question of all, and one that is relevant to both technological and business aspects of the problem space: will identity aggregation services in general become easy and useful enough to garner mass adoption, and if so, when? Clearly, execution is key here—many innovations at the user experience level will be necessary to get us to the point of having truly compelling and accessible identity aggregation services.

Conclusion

There are massive opportunities, sobering challenges and unknown factors, at both business and technological levels for startups who venture into the world of personal identity aggregation. After all, there has been a widespread recognition of the potential value of the market for personal identity aggregation services in the tech business world for some time now—and many, many more companies than we have space to mention above are striving to seize a share of that market.

But we are not yet finished with our survey of the problem space: identity aggregation only represents one side of a coin whose flip side turns out to be identity federation. In our next post, we will look at the opportunities, threats and unknowns for this service model—a model that represents the natural complement to that of identity aggregation.

Blog Friends public beta is now live!

2007-07-17T13:12:00.000+01:00

I'm really pleased to be able to announce that Blog Friends public beta is now open to all! (Well ok, all bloggers with facebook accounts then, if you must nit pick.)

My sincere thanks to all my friends who participated in the private alpha test. In particular, special mention must be made of Alex Newson, who not only gave great feedback on the alpha service, but also provided us with some invaluable pro bono legal advice, and Andy Roberts, who has been tireless in seeking out bugs and feature improvement opportunities.

Also, thanks again to the guys at Brain Bakery, who have done an amazing job at bringing to life the service specifications I delivered to them just 16 days ago.

Finally, my thanks to Savvas Voudouris of Peelme Visual Communications, who has brought an elegance and sophistication to our graphic identity that is second to none. : )

Blog Friends private alpha launched today!

2007-07-13T19:03:00.000+01:00

The Blog Friends facebook application private alpha launched today—hooray!

There has been some great feedback from Blog Friends alpha testers so far, which is hugely gratifying. My heartfelt thanks to all my Blog Friends who are currently giving us the benefit of their experience and insight. Also to the tireless Benjie of BrainBakery Ltd, who has coded like a demon over these last twelve days. We are aiming for public beta early next week—at which point I can spill the beans on exactly what it is we are building.

It strikes me that I've been working, with various friends, on myriad iterations of business plans and a number of prototypes for i-together for three and a half years, yet it has only taken three and a half weeks to take Blog Friends (i-together's first service offering) from a twinkle in my eye to launch.

Go figure!

Identity & startups: the web (1)

2007-07-06T12:19:00.000+01:00

Luke Razzell and Nic Brisbourne

Introduction

This post is the first in a series that explores the strategic relevance of identity for startups (a full introduction to the series, and an link index of the posts, is here).

In a society where people increasingly expect to be able to customise their experiences according to their own tastes and preferences—in other words, to have their life fit around their individual identity—startups must help users to personalise their experience better than their competition does.

The conceptual framework that we will develop through this post series is intended to help anyone who is, or would like to be, involved in building a startup to understand what opportunities, threats and unknowns identity represents for your business. We hope that non-entrepreneurs with an interest in the startup or identity worlds will find much food for thought here also.

The series will span diverse topics—including mobile, branding, law, retail, entertainment, government and mainstream media. But we start with what is arguably the single most important transformative technological innovation of our times, the pervasive digital network—and specifically the web.

I am delighted to have as co-author of this and forthcoming posts on identity, startups and the web reknowned Venture Capitalist and blogger, Nic Brisbourne.

Extending identity across the network

We experience our life through the ever-present lens of our own sense of identity. In fact, without a consistent sense of personal identity, it would be impossible for us to make sense of life at all—particularly given the incredible complexity and pace of change in modern society.

Networked technology offers the extraordinary promise of allowing us to carry our sense of personal identity beyond the geospatial and, to some extent at least, the temporal limitations of the physical world.

These new freedoms have, of course, driven the explosive growth of networked (and in particular, web-based) applications of all kinds, particularly since the advent of the web. In many ways, these applications are making our lives richer and more convenient. More and more, we are able to develop and explore our social connections and our personal interests regardless of where we, our friends or our information sources are.

So virtually far, so good!

However, there is a big catch.

The online "presence integration and privacy" problem

If we compare our offline and online experiences of identity, it becomes clear that networked applications' capacity to mediate our innate and natural ways of experiencing and expressing identity remains rudimentary. While the network gives us abilities to transcend place and time that we (quite literally) only dreamed of before its advent, it is much less good at enabling us to transfer some fundamentals of our offline identity experience into our online life.

How so?

In the physical, face-to-face world, we quite naturally carry our sense of identity about with us, yet we are also highly adept at managing which aspects of that identity we disclose to whom and when (maintaining our sense of privacy). Unfortunately, it turns out that enabling online the same kind of integrated yet privacy-enabled experience of identity that we enjoy in the physical world is a very thorny problem; a problem that has diverse technological, social, business and legal factors—and one that remains largely unsolved.

Perhaps we take an integrated and segmentable experience of our identity so for granted offline that it seems we forgot to design it into the architecture of our digital networks and the applications that run on them? Perhaps the task of constructing a truly identity-enabled network—let's call it an "Identity Web" for brevity's sake—brings up such difficult challenges that we are only beginning to figure out how to do so?

Whatever the reasons for the current identity deficit in our digital networks, we must develop a clear understanding of them if we are to remedy that deficit. Let's start by clarifying the key features that a successful "Identity Web" must exhibit—in the course of which, we will discover a potential, new economic benefit it could provide both to individuals and to the companies that serve them faithfully and transparently.

Four key requirements for an Identity Web

1) Presence integration

The Identity Web must allow us to integrate the various aspects of our presence in order to simplify and enrichen our online experience. This need for integration applies to both the aggregation and federation of personal information (information that is "about me") and personalised information (information that is "of interest to me" or "[co-]created by me").

By way of explanation: whether information represents our name and address, a blog post or photo we created, the data about our interests we tacitly generate as we interact with online services ("attention" data; e.g. our search history and clickstream on Google)—it is all potentially of value to us and we may want to be able to bring all or some of it together for re-publishing, posterity, our own insight and to improve the personalisation of other services we use (news or music recomendation services, for example).

2) Presence segmentation

The Identity Web must allow us to segment others' view of our presence—to present different views of ourselves to different individuals and groups, such as spouse, work and family—if we are to maintain our sense of "privacy". We can already achieve this kind of selective disclosure within the context of specific services—make certain photos we upload to Flickr visible only to family members, for example—but the challenge of providing users with this kind of privacy control over information across distributed and heterogenous services of an Identity Web proves to be much, much more difficult one.

It is worth noting, however, that the whole notion of privacy seems to be changing in our society: children and teenagers, in particular, are happily sharing intimately personal information and images on social networks like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook (albeit often under cover of multiple pseudonyms), and they may well carry these attitudes into their adult life. (Of course, they may also carry forward the stigma of ill-considered, online personal revelations, preserved for posterity in Google's indexes, when they come to look for employment!). It may, then, be more useful to think of presence segmentation in terms of cost-benefit tradeoffs than in terms of the complex and arguably fading concept of "privacy".

3) Online presence that is service and device independent

The Identity Web must support diverse services. We already enjoy a choice of networked services and devices that are both broadly-integrative—such as Apple's iTunes and iPod integrated computer, web and music player technology solution—but also highly-specialised and niche networked services and devices—like Twitter, which focuses solely on publishing timely, short text messages. However, unless we are to give our lives entirely over to a handful of megabrands (or perhaps just Google, ultimately!), the Identity Web must allow us to benefit from choice across diverse niche services while still enjoying the same benefits of presence integration we would get from using suites of services within the "walled gardens" of the major services.

4) The individual as unifying network node

Each of these requirements above have in common another, higher-level requirement: that the individual user should be the only entity that can aggregate and control dissemination of all the information that pertains to their identity. In other words, the user themselves must become the only unifying node in their personal identity network.

And that eventuality gives rise to a very significant commercial opportunity, for both startups and the individuals they serve.

Presence monetisation—a potential benefit of a functional Identity Web

In an Identity Web where the individual effectively becomes the only party who can both integrate and manage the disclosure of the complete set of their presence information (whereas the services the individual deals with can only access a subset of that information), that individual should be able to monetise (directly, or indirectly through discounted or free services) the value of their identity by selling access to the information. By the same token, the mediation of specific aspects of that personal identity information retail process would seem to represent a very large opportunity indeed for startups.

Conclusion

So we have suggested four key requirements for, and a potential business benefit of a functional Identity Web—a necessary overview of the problem space.

However, identifying the high level features of a future Identity Web raises some tough questions:

• What will be the business models that drive the evolution of the Identity Web?

• What are likely to be the technological, business and social drivers, blockers and unknowns that inform startups' strategy in seeking to deploy those business models?

In the following posts in the series, we will dive down into complex, multi-faceted and messy reality of the contemporary web-enabled business world and discover some possible answers to those questions.

Where (the heck) is weaverluke?

2007-07-02T07:28:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the long blog silence. I have been busy raising seed capital (done!) and procuring a development solution (done—development starts today!!) for Blog Friends.

I also will be spending some quality time on the Identity Society wiki over the next weeks, and probably going into hospital to have a tiny fragment of dental filling that is lodged in my sinus removed with a drill and an endoscope (gulp—but I have had a headache since October last year!).

So bear with me, friends. I have not forsaken you. ; )

Blog Friends

2007-06-20T07:28:00.000+01:00

I came up with the name "Blog Friends" for the service for bloggers I'm creating.

Without giving away the killer details yet, let me just say that Blog Friends will make finding and sharing great blog posts and growing your readership a more sociable experience.

Our strapline? "Blogging just got friendlier." : )

Here's our concept for the logo:

Like it?

weaverluke—now also on Facebook!

2007-06-13T10:19:00.000+01:00

So I followed the stampeding herd and set up a weaverluke outpost on Facebook. If we aren't "friends" there already, please do stop by and friend me. : )

What's Google trying to say about me?!

2007-06-07T09:09:00.000+01:00

I note from a perusal of my MyBlogLog referrer logs (the web addresses that site visitors surf from) that weaverluke blog is currently the top result for the Google search on "kolkata prostitute phone number".

Honoured, I'm sure, Mr Google!

I heart London Olympic logo

2007-06-07T08:16:00.000+01:00

I like the London Olympic logo! And so does this guy, rather articulately.

After all, being British has never been about fitting in. : )

Rolling up my sleeves!

2007-06-05T15:09:00.000+01:00

It has been a really rewarding experience to blog daily over these last few months. I have certainly deepened my understanding and love of identity in the process, even though it has been an arduous one at times. Mostly, it's just been a lot of fun to shoot off opinions on pretty much any subject that catches my fancy in the name of "identity"! ; )

However, I've come to sense that my focus is now required on a number of larger scale endeavours—a shift from short story to novel form, you might say. Three projects are starting to fill my horizons:

My forthcoming collaborative post series on "Startups and identity". I am enjoying some exhilarating brainstorming sessions with my co-conspiritors at the moment, and I need to give these substantial individual posts—and the overall project—some quality thinking and writing time. My poor brain is straining at its limits with this stuff!
My own startup, a service for pro bloggers. I recently met someone with great experience and knowhow, and who I clicked with really well, who could just help me get this project off the ground big time, after months and years of planning and effort. I think it's time to jump in feet first!
Identity Society, the research and discussion forum I co-founded. This autumn, the DTI is offering £10 million pounds for research into the impacts of Identity Management (the ID Card etc.) on society, and I believe there is a great opportunity for Identity Society here. Having left this project out to graze somewhat since our launch event, I am now working with co-founder John Madelin and a number of other leading figures in the identity world to take it forwards much more proactively.

So, the upshot of all this is that, even when I'm not teaching piano, my working day is going to be fairly comprehensively accounted for by these three projects. Accordingly, the frequency of my blog posts is likely to fall quite a bit for the time being.

Please don't quit on me, though—I'm really excited about the "Startups and identity" project, and you will hopefully find those posts appearing not too infrequently on these virtual pages!

Here's to new adventures... : )

Identity and startups: an introduction

2007-06-05T14:40:00.000+01:00

Why is understanding identity important for startups?

What strategic relevance does identity have for technology startups? The answer, in a nutshell, is that understanding and catering for people's experience of identity—individuals' unique experience of who or what they, other people, things and information are—seems to be key to understanding how to create and monetise value in our increasingly fluid and personalisable society.

People are coming to expect to be able to customise and integrate more and more areas of their life in their own, individually unique way. To be competitive, startups must work out how to enable that customisation and integration in a way that is radically more effective than their competition. And more often than not, innovations in technology and its applications provide that opportunity.

The problem—a complex topic covered in an inconsistent and piecemeal way

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Just work out how your target users experience identity and build your service accordingly.

However, there's a catch: identity, even in its practical, applied (as opposed to abstractly philosophical) sense, turns out to be a hugely complex and multi-faceted subject, spanning psychology, economics, branding, business theory, law, politics, anthropology and many other fields. You simply cannot reduce identity to any one of these perspectives if you hope to understand it clearly, because identity is something that informs our whole life! Yet while there already exists a good deal of research on and discussion of each niche area of identity studies—much of it of great merit in its own terms—there has been little work done on developing cross-sector approaches to understanding identity.

Where is the poor entrepreneur to start?

The solution—an integrated conceptual framework for startups and identity

What seems to be needed is a clear, comprehensive and integrated conceptual framework within which startups can plan their identity strategy. Such a framework would enable startups to identify opportunities, threats and unknowns that identity represents for their business across commercial, technological, legal and social spheres—in a straightforward and consistent way.

In a forthcoming series of posts over the coming weeks and months, myself and a number of co-authors, each a thought leader in their specialist field, will develop just such an overarching conceptual framework for startups and identity.

We will begin by looking at the opportunities, threats and unknown factors around identity that digital networks—with a special focus on the web—raise for startups. Subsequent posts will go on to explore mobile, governmental, legal, branding, retail, banking, mainstream media and psychosocial aspects of the problem space. Links to each post will appear below as they are published.

I'm looking forward to learning a lot in the process of co-authoring these posts—I hope you will accompany me and my collaborators on the journey, and help us along the way with your comments and criticisms!

Would you pay for your "own" personalised information?

2007-06-04T08:22:00.000+01:00

Can you imagine a future where we pay retailers to provide us with copies of the personalised information we generate as we shop (our favourite products and brands, regular purchases and so on), so we can use it to personalise our shopping experience across all the retailers we engage with?

Once you get beyond the moral certainties of information "ownership" in these grey areas of consumer-brand interaction, that kind of business model suddenly looks a whole lot more plausible.

Flooding the personal information market

2007-06-04T07:54:00.000+01:00

Glyn Moody on the benefits of enabling supersurveillance through radical openness:

Hm, a novel approach:

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market."

Not only effective, but fun, by the sounds of it!

FOI automation—a distant pipedream

2007-06-03T09:35:00.000+01:00

Andrew at IMPACT blog points us to this press release from the Information Commissioner's Office (my bold):

Freedom of Information is fast becoming a fixed feature of 21st century democracy and should not be seen as a battle ground between public bodies and the people, according to the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas. Speaking at the annual FOI Live conference in London on 24 May, the Information Commissioner [stated] that the transparency and accountability brought by Freedom of Information reinforce good government, and should not be seen as a threat. However, he will also stress that those using FOI must act responsibly.

Readers will know that I believe that the trend towards information transparency is ineluctable, so I quite agree with the Information Commissioner on that point.

But what of the misuse of the FOI that his last sentence touches on? Of course, if search technologies could step up to automate the resolution of FOI requests properly (which it falls so far short of doing right now), the problem of human resources in government and business being stretched by nuisance FOI requests would disappear.

However, to achieve such automation, we would need to develop search technologies that can mediate the individual, richly-structured, socially and semantically contextualised ways people think and express themselves. And even Google is light years away from achieving that goal.

In the meantime, it is hard to see how government and business—and indeed the legal system—can avoid the overhead of having human beings sort through FOI requests written in natural language in order to make judgement calls over the validity of those requests.

Bob Blakley on Real ID

2007-06-03T09:19:00.000+01:00

Writing in response to the DHS’ Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee report on the implementation of the REAL ID Act, Bob Blakley summarises its message in plain language:

The REAL ID act is a bad idea. The problems with the REAL ID act listed in the Committee’s report should not be fixed, because fixing them will not address the core issues the REAL ID act raises. Fixing the problems the Committee has identified will simply produce the best possible version of a very bad system. If the REAL ID act is implemented, there is no chance it will meet its stated goals; there is every reason to believe it will have many unforeseen adverse consquences; and there is every reason to believe its costs will be huge in proportion to its benefits.

I wonder if the US government will listen to its thoughtful critics here as the UK government really has not to date (although there are signs that that may be beginning to change...)?

London Lite finds a fan

2007-06-02T17:06:00.000+01:00

Overheard on a bustling, rush-hour street near Victoria Station yesterday:

"London Lite*?"

"Thanks, I'll take two."

TWO?!

*London Lite is one of three free London papers that hordes of enthusiastic vendors brandish under your nose from every angle as you attempt to navigate the metropolis's pavements.

Nuanced relationship and Facebook

2007-06-02T09:37:00.000+01:00

Michael Arrington writes:

When you confirm a friend on facebook, you are asked to state how you know the person. But the options are simply too narrow. “We hooked up” is rarely an appropriate way to describe someone you know through blogging, networking, etc. In fact, most of the options are not really useful for the millions of non-college student adults flooding into the service. It’s time to add more options.

The underlying problem here is that we all think about and express the nature of our relationships in different ways, but computer systems aren't yet very good at inferring similarities between these different descriptions. Which is why they straightjacket us into using a few, standardised descriptions, rather than allowing us to make up our own.

Roll on natural language research for the inspiration of better data integration system design! Until we progress in that area, I suspect these kind of data standardisation issues will remain rather intractable.

weaverluke blog is 3 today!

2007-06-01T11:26:00.000+01:00

Happy birthday, weaverluke blog—I can't quite believe it, but it has indeed been three years today since I posted my first entry about an itinerant Native American spiritual leader called Walking Eagle!

I never did hear from Walking Eagle again—I wonder how he's getting along on his globe-trotting travels? I have certainly learned a whole lot about myself, identity and life in general on my own three year blogging journey.

What will the next three years bring for weaverluke blog, I wonder? I hope that you'll tarry along the winding path with me to find out—and help me avoid some wrong turns along the way, I'm sure!

Privacy, lost and found

2007-06-01T09:24:00.001+01:00

photo by weaverluke

What are the chances of an identity nut like me stumbling upon this on an Islington pavement?!

With the exposure of their personal crib note into the public domain, I guess the author has lost a tiny fragment of their (arguable) human right. Ah well, nothing like the University of Life to bring dry academic lessons home! (Although did the note's author really care one jot about the loss, I wonder? Was the note even deliberately discarded after an exam? Perhaps that is the lesson—notions of privacy and the personal only matter to us personally when we feel we have something precious to shield from others?)

A privacy law shambles

2007-05-31T08:17:00.000+01:00

Andrew at IMPACT blog points us to an "[i]nteresting article on The Independent website" From the article's introduction:

Legal Opinion: An over-complex privacy law may trigger new legislation

"There may never have been a simple answer to the question: what is the law of privacy? But a recent spate of cases has added to the dense jungle of rulings and legal principles through which even experienced judges are finding it difficult to navigate..."

This topic begs a very thorny question: precisely what constitutes "personal" information? Information is generated as we interact, in a rich, fuzzy and complex way, with one another and with the world around us. Ownership of that information is surely bound to be moot in very many cases...

A paen to the social web

2007-05-31T08:15:00.000+01:00

A great post from Euan Semple which resists partial quotation, so here it is in full (presented under the terms of a Creative Commons license!):

A recent client engagement combined with reading Nick Carr's review of Everything Is Miscellaneous have yet again made me question whether those of us who drank The Cluetrain kool-aid seven years ago are mad or simply facing the growing pains of a new world as it emerges from the old.
Sometimes it seems that the naysayers are right. There is nothing fundamently different about the web and human nature stays the same no matter what technologies we have to hand. Having read John Gray's Straw Dogs I am aware that ideas of progress are pretty relative and while that at one level technology has enabled us to save more people through medicine it has also enabled us to kill more people more efficiently. Did the printing press make the world a better place or did it just allow ideas to circulate faster and wider?

The apparent simplicity of what we are talking about also presents challenges. In a world where real work takes effort and things worth doing are hard the apparent promise of the transformative effect of "getting it" appears, and sometimes feels, naive. Helping people to "get it" appears a soft option in contrast to doing or building.

And yet, and yet ....

I am only half way through David's book but I have to say I am loving it just as much as I loved The Cluetrain and Small Pieces Loosely Joined. What has happened to me since embracing the web has felt transformational and enabled connections and relationships that would never have happened otherwise. And these are not just appealing because they enable cozy conversations between like minded people. They enable exchange of ideas at a frequency and a quality that I never experienced before. I have also seen at first hand the effect this capability can have on an organisation. Being able to get quick, quality answers to questions, get collective heads around major cultural issues, and fostering connections that spark innovation are all non-trivial things that all organisations aspire to but which are notoriously difficult without web approaches.

It is good to catch ourselves sometimes and question the things we take for granted - whatever our views. But I am glad to report that I still get excited about the ways that the web is making the world different as described so well by David and others and I feel lucky that I get to pass on that excitement to the people I work with.

Ironically, given that Nick Carr makes much of the fact that he didn't get past page 9 of David's book I gave up on his tedius, rather self-indulgent post after the first couple of paragraphs.

Euan, you really put your finger on the issue here. The naysayers are too busy seeing the fragments of the evoving web to see either the mysterious and majestic evolution of the whole or the incremental increases in intelligence enjoyed by each one of us who engages authentically within conversations with others who we just wouldn't have been able to dialogue with pre-web.

I know that I am a more effective thinker and communicator than I used to be thanks to my blogging (although I also know there's still infinite room for improvement—which, of course, is a great motivator to continue the process), and I see you and all the other bloggers I read becoming better thinkers and communicators each post, week, month and year that goes by.

What a blessing!

The City as a Green action focal point

2007-05-30T08:41:00.000+01:00

Bruno Giussiani, reporting on a new initiative by the Clinton Foundation to tackle climate change with action around energy efficiency of buildings in cities, summarises "the possible role of big cities in tackling global problems such as climate change":

The basic idea: If cities start acting as global actors towards sustainability, new mobility solutions and traffic strategies, clean energy, water resources management, etc, when you add it all up there could be significant progress even without national policies and international treaties.

I guess we can easily relate to cities both as obvious causes of the climate change problem, with their massive energy use per capita, but also as the creative and entrepreneurial centres that can produce solutions for that problem. It is always easier to galvanise people to action when they can identify clearly with a simple set of concepts and a clearly-defined associated community. It seems that the City is becoming a key focal point in this regard for climate change action.

UPDATE—Jerry Fishenden of Microsoft (who are the technology partner for the Clinton Foundation project) has some intelligent words to say about this issue.

IM bots masquerading as humans

2007-05-30T08:40:00.000+01:00

Seamus McCauley observes that on the internet, not many people know that you're a bot:

J: Would you like to hear a joke?
A: Sure, tell me about it.
J: Why don’t blind people skydive?
A: Perhaps it is impossible.

I hear worse jokes told by real people almost every day. And the above, of course, was the product of two chatbots talking to one another (Discover, via BoingBoing).

The Turing test is all very well, but in artificial lab conditions where you've been told to watch out for one robot and one human you've got a 50/50 chance of getting it right just by guessing. People just aren't generally paying that much attention, and at a time when many "people" communicate (almost) exclusively via 160 or even 80 characters of text I'm not at all convinced we'd spot the robots if they made up three-quarters of the online population.

It's not hard to imagine lots of devious phishing applications of these kinds of chat robots—they could be primed to ferret a certain kind of information out of you, such as your shopping preferences.

And the moral of this story? Don't waste your life indulging in the inane drivel of chat rooms, Twitter and so on? ; )

Pub wisdom

2007-05-30T08:14:00.001+01:00

photo by weaverluke

This one's for you, Glyn. : )

Keywords, natural language and search

2007-05-29T18:01:00.000+01:00

Seamus McCauley has written an interesting piece on "Keywords vs. 'natural language'":

Keyword-based search works so well, so intuitively, because if you watch people interact with other people you'll see them watch out for the keywords too. Google's trick wasn't to invent anything - it was just to pay attention to how we were doing things already and then train computers to do it too. Which really isn't good news for all the people striving to make search work more like "natural language".

As usual, Seamus's observations are most thought provoking, and he's quite right to point out just how serviceable keyword based search has turned out to be for very many use cases. However, I wonder if he isn't rather glossing over the extraordinarily richness and precision of natural language in implying that we can dispense with it for search. My cursory reading around natural language syntax has left me with a strong suspicion that the fuzzy and interlinked hierarchical syntactical structures that researchers are devining within natural language syntax are what enable us to resolve the meaning of individual words within the complex webs of semantic and social contexts that we use to order our understanding and perceptions of the world (try typing that sentence into Google and see just what kind of insights it comes up with!).

Of course, web search predicated on the matching of isolated keywords to unstructured and semi-structured web pages does clearly provide massive value, as Google's extraordinary success proves. Unlike in the case of a pidgin speaker of a language, who might get their basic needs met to an extent with a few keywords and phrases, but who will struggle to understand much of the information they elicit with their questions, native speakers who use keyword based search are able to use their fluent language skills to sift through and analyse the rich language of their search results. Also, it turns out that very many combinations of two or more keywords are sufficient to narrow down search results with at least a tolerable degree of accuracy.

However, when it comes to a question like "what highbrow movies that my friends rate are showing on Sunday evening in the town where I am holidaying?", keywords alone are clearly never going to cut the search mustard. The rich set of highly-personal social and semantic contexts that this phrase evokes implies the need for a very different approach to search than that of brute keyword crunching, if we are to make search into something that is not only intuitive but also truly personalised.

So, while keywords have enabled the creation of incredibly valuable search services like Google, let's not throw the rich-personalised search baby out with the natural language bathwater. To understand natural language would be to go a long way to understanding how we perceive and understand our world—and that is surely going to be key for the continued evolution of search.

STOP PRESS:

The friend I had arranged to meet at the British Library turned up at the British Museum (we spent ten minutes phoning each other trying to work out why each couldn't find the other!). Oh well... ; )

The intrinsic limitations of identifiers

2007-05-29T08:31:00.000+01:00

Mike Neuenschwander, wrestling hopefully with OpenID, has encountered there an intrinsic problem with identifiers:

OpenID ... calls into sharp focus something I’ve believed for years. It’s a kind of axiom, so I’d like to give it a name. I’ll call it, “identifiers.axiom.neunmike’s.axiomproxy.info”—that way you can easily refer to it unambiguously from anywhere. Here it is:

There are no identifiers, only attributes

Names are slippery. Most people have many more than one legal name, none of which are unique. They also have several dozen nicknames. There’s no practical way to get any of these every-day-use names onto a global namespace. And what’s a name after all but a synthetic attribute—a foreign key that we hope the receiving party stores somewhere so we can remember them later? Names are invaluable communication aids, but they have little to do with recognition, which is what’s at issue in most identity management contexts. Biologically, creatures don’t recognize others based on names but rather the confluence of attributes appearing within a certain context.

Lao Tzu (who goes by several dozen names) had a pretty good post on this idea over 2000 years ago. In a section called “Ineffability,” he writes:

The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way;
The names that can be named are not unvarying names.
It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind. (chap. 1, tr. Waley)

I understand why from a programmer’s perspective, it would be so much more convenient if everybody could simply have one globally unique, unambiguous, resolvable name. But such a quaint design constitutes a wanton disregard for reality.

The tech industry is adolescently ID-fixated. But I’ve had it to here with IDs! Would somebody please start seeing my avatars as something more than identification objects? So here’s to being an OpenAttribute power user!

I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with Mike's axiom. I'd go further still, and extend the thought it embodies to its logical conclusion: the location metaphor for digital networks (like the web) that the concept of unique "identifiers" entail is completely unsuited to the modelling of our perceptions of identity—or our imagination—which are themselves not bounded by 3D limitations.

Personal data mining: benefits and costs

2007-05-29T08:03:00.000+01:00

Nic Brisbourne has written a thoughtful post called "Mining personal data - the next big frontier":

[Last] week Eric Schmidt of Google said he would help us answer questions like “What am I going to do tomorrow?”. I applaud the sentiment here, I really do, but I don’t think Eric is the right guy for the job, and he certainly isn’t going about it the right way.

A lot of people have a bad reaction when Google does things like this - Does Eric Schmidt want to sniff the armpits of my mind? is a very funny example, and indeed this post was in part inspired by some friends saying at dinner last night how much Schmidt’s arrogance pissed them off.

Underlying all this are some very real privacy concerns which I will come back to, but first I want to focus on how useful these sorts of services could be.

Nic goes on to discuss how some potential benefits to end users of allowing their behaviours and preferences to be tracked in exchange for cheap/free services and better ad personalisation could offset their privacy concerns.

I'm looking forward to chatting with Nic this week in preparation for a post I'm planning on "Identity for web startups—opportunities and threats": I'm sure his insights into the economic aspects of the topic (Nic is a Venture Capitalist at Esprit) will be extremely helpful.

Genomics, privacy and economics

2007-05-28T10:55:00.001+01:00

Glyn Moody reports on disquiet around developments in personal genomics:

Good to see some others concerned by the imminent arrival of personal genomics:

In addition, many scientists fear cheap genome sequencing could have other, worrying consequences. Professor Steve Jones of University College London, said: 'If you make your genome public, you are not just revealing information about yourself and what diseases you might be susceptible to, you are also giving away crucial data about the kind of illnesses your children might be prone to. Each of your children gets half your genes, after all. They might not want the world to know about the risks they face and become very unhappy in later life that you went public. Your other relatives might equally be displeased.'

And by its implications for civil liberties:

However, there are other concerns, as Professor Ashburner points out. 'Anyone who commits relatively minor offences can have their DNA taken and analysed. At present, the main use of this process is to create a DNA fingerprint that can be used to identify that individual. But soon we will be able to create an entire genome sequence of that individual from a swab or blood sample. We will end up knowing everything about their genes. In the end, we could have millions of people on a database and know every single genetic secret of each person. That has to be a very worrying prospect.'

We had better think carefully about these issues, for genetic information is, ultimately, just another kind of information, and information wants to be free. Google's investment in a genetics startup is also worth noting. However, given the high value of our personal genetic information, it seems likely to me that we will try to guard and control it much like we do the money in our bank accounts.

One of the biggest strategic uncertainties facing any business, government or organisation these days is that of privacy and its associated economic ramifications:

how will attitudes towards privacy evolve across society and its constituent demographics?;
where will each demographic seek to draw lines between high-value, private information and low-value public information?
what technological, legal, business and social factors could undermine the ability of people to maintain such segmentation between public and private information?
to what extent will re-aggregation of lots of pieces of low-value information enhance its aggregate value?

No-one knows the answers to these questions yet, but they are among the ones we will need to keep asking ourselves and each other if we are to work together to create a future society we want to live in.

Mobile moolah

2007-05-28T10:55:00.000+01:00

Om Malik reports another example of the convergence of "real" and "virtual" currencies:

Necessity, they say is the mother of invention. It couldn’t be more true in case of Africa, where pre-paid airtime is fast becoming the ‘virtual’ currency for Pan-African trade, overcoming conventional currency exchange and lack of banking infrastructure. It started out as phone users in Nigeria, especially in the rural areas trading minutes, but then the transactions took a mercantile trend.

Instead of paying cash, people started paying in airtime. Minutes became moolah and since the trend has caught on, and is being used for cross border trade as well.

Networked technology enables us to codify and transact information in a systematic way. It stands to reason that people will find more and more ways to tie the ephemeral values of that information to tangibly valuable things and services. And they don't need banks or governments to mediate the process (although the taxman is bound to take an interest soon enough!).

Amendments to the FOI - bad news

2007-05-27T10:47:00.000+01:00

Andrew at IMPACT blog laments the impending weakening of Freedom of Information in the UK, as the Bill proposing changes to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for England & Wales and Northern Ireland looks set to progress:

Given that the Freedom of Information regime is, broadly, about the public interest in the good government of this country, it is disgusting that a Bill cutting out the very heart of the legislature from its effects could make it through. Parliament does nothing to improve its public perception by seeking removing itself from public scrutiny.

I quite agree: citizens must watch the watchers if we are to keep their power over us in check. This Bill seems designed to make sure that we cannot.

China abandons blog identity plan

2007-05-27T10:25:00.000+01:00

BBC News reports:

The Chinese government is backing down from plans to force millions of Chinese bloggers to register their real names.

There are an estimated 20 million bloggers in the country and the plans announced last year provoked huge protest from Chinese internet users.

At the time, the government said it thought the system would make bloggers more responsible for their behaviour.

But Chinese bloggers condemned the proposal as an attempt by the government to control information.

The situation in China with regards to freedom of expression is more nuanced and complex than the mainstream media would have you believe. This development seems to be a sign that the increasingly economically-focused Chinese government is beginning to recognise that information wants to flow freely in a prosperous modern society.

Googling spacetime

2007-05-26T09:52:00.000+01:00

Dave Birch writes: "[T]he 'tagging' of real world items so that we can google spacetime (as the phrase goes) is a significant and inevitable trend."

Sounds plausible. And the prospect of "googling spacetime" makes me feel like a citizen of the universe. Rock on!

Angelina Jolie's semantic tattoos

2007-05-26T09:18:00.000+01:00

The Daily Mail reports: "After attending the world premiere of her latest movie, Angelina Jolie revealed her latest set of body art - geographical map coordinates accurately detailing the countries of birth of each member of her 'rainbow family'."

Well, that's one way of performing your identity, I guess!

The Green Web?

2007-05-25T07:49:00.000+01:00

Katie Fehrenbacher writes:

[O]rganizations and companies are gravitating towards using the web to organize and communicate about climate change. Media, content distribution, collaboration tools and communications are all migrating to the web, so why not put them to use for a crucial issue.

The topic of climate change is also uniquely suited to the web. The information is often localized and action-oriented — what’s the best public transportation route in my city, or where do I recycle my e-waste. The topic also has a feeling of urgency (if not at times alarmist) which helps to quicky disseminate it around the web.

I'm sure Katie is right that the web can become an incredible tool for concerted and focused positive Green action. On the other hand, the production, use and disposal of technology itself creates a very significant negative environmental impact. Let's just hope that the Green benefits of the web begin to outweigh its costs. As both an ardent technologist and commited inhabitant of Planet Earth, I sincerely hope they will, and massively so.

Kate Moss as cultural vanishing point

2007-05-25T07:12:00.000+01:00

(I think) Sam Jacob thinks we are at once subsuming and exploring our individual identity within our cultural identity via Kate Moss:

Every culture has its centre of gravity, every era its ground zero - a vanishing point that everything disappears into and flows out of. Often it's an abstract idea like beauty, truth, valour, or honesty. And often that quality is personified in figures like John Bull or Liberty, Right now and right here, that might well be Kate Moss.

Last month saw the Kate Moss / Top Shop launch that had been anticipated in magazines as varied as Vogue & Take a Break. We've seen this kind of deal before - celebrity-designers with ghost-written collections for high street retailers, (most recently Madonna's terrible Weimar lesbian outfits for H&M). We've had high fashion designers knocking out mass-market clobber causing riots at opening time. This time it feels different - and it's a lot to do with the protagonists. Both Kate and TopShop fascinate because they scrape across the normal stratification of culture.

It's a collision of the everyday with the singularly unique, of high style with high street of individual liberty and mass consumption. They are opposites that folds in on product like a Klein Bottle, a non-orientable surface with no distinction between the "inside" and "outside" that keeps on flowing into itself. Counter culture flows into shop counter.

I find the interplay of identity contexts Sam is grappling with here quite fascinating. The concept of a governing quality for a culture at any given point in history is also attractive at first glance, but I suspect that that quality is in the eye of the perceiver. Surely there is a whole, evolving web of attributes that inform the direction and focus of a culture, and the particular one that Sam sees as primary may be secondary to another observer? An intriguing piece, nevertheless.

Googlephobia growing

2007-05-24T15:06:00.000+01:00

Ivan Pope reports on growing Googlephobia (and that in advance of their launch of a mobile phone network that will know where you are and what your voice sounds like):

You know something is hitting the popular imagination when it makes front page news. Today the Independent, with a hint of sensationalism, has put Google on the front page. So what’s brought it to this? The Independent story starts with Eric Schmidt’s somewhat daft comment that “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’.” However, there is a lot more to it than that, as anyone who follows online news will be realising. The Techmeme news service is flooded day after day with Google stories as they make the tech weather. Here are seven recent Google stories that go into the Googleophobia mix:

Google want’s to tell you what to do tomorrow (see above)

Google buys Feedburner and knows what RSS feeds we are reading

Google invests in human genetics firm

Google buys Doubleclick to control the human sum of banner advertising

Google wants us to report ‘paid links‘ so they can police them

Google launch their ‘Web History‘ product and reveal just how much they know about you

Google installs ‘virtual spyware‘ on Dell computers

That personal and personalised information Google is tracking is all adding up...

NEWSFLASH: O2 to deliver Google's mobile network

2007-05-24T13:46:00.000+01:00

A fairly senior source at O2 confirmed to me this morning that O2 is indeed working with Google to deliver a Google-branded mobile network in the UK, as speculated by Mike Arrington of TechCrunch yesterday. I can't vouch for the reliability of that information, but it sounded pretty definite the way my source told it.

Justin.tv—sousveillance personified

2007-05-24T08:08:00.000+01:00

Jamais Cascio points us towards Justin.tv:

"Justin of Justin.tv [...] wears a live-streaming wireless camera on his hat all day, every day, recording everything he sees."

This guy is sousveillance personified! Not sure I can see hat-cam wearing catching on with the public at large, though—can you?

Identity web as mirror

2007-05-24T08:07:00.000+01:00

Joshua Porter writes:

Over time, we’re going to learn a tremendous amount about how people interact socially with one another because we can record things on the Web. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had lately with designers that ended up like “well, we’re doing design, too, but we’re really doing a ton of psychology”. The amount of effort and design energy being focused on the social interactions of people around a service is growing.

I have often observed on this blog that networked technology is a tool that allows us to extend our innate ways of relating to one another and expressing our identity. Interesting, then, to be reminded that it can also provide us with insights about how we do these things by reflecting our behaviours back to us.

So the Identity Web could be a hologram, superstring universe and mirror all at once? Well, I guess if we could contain it within a single metaphor, it would lose its mystery!

Traffic wardens get video cameras

2007-05-23T13:16:00.000+01:00

BBC News reports:

Traffic attendants in Salford are to become the first in the UK to record their work on video.

Some wardens in the area will start to wear head-mounted miniature cameras from later this month.

NCP, which supplies traffic wardens in the city, will use the film to resolve disputes over tickets and to prosecute motorists who assault or abuse staff.

Good grief.

Real and virtual currencies converging

2007-05-23T08:51:00.000+01:00

Another sign that real and virtual currencies are converging:

A UK panel is urging governments to start treating virtual currencies in the same manner as real life money to help combat fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion.

Value is value, whatever its manifestation. And where there is value there will be people trying to filch it.

Identity: personal and personalised information

2007-05-23T08:11:00.000+01:00

If we take the subjective experience of identity as being the most practically-useful definition of identity (as readers will know I do on this blog!), then we can say the following of an individual's online projection of their identity:

The online projection of your identity is made up of information that is both personal (about you) and personalised (of interest to you).

Online identity is often equated exclusively with personal information, but that approach proves to be pretty limiting for designing personalised services in the pseudonymous and probabilistic world of the web.

Taking the broader concept of identity, conversely, we can approach the intimately related topics of personalisation and identity management within a self-consistent conceptual framework. And that should make thinking about all this stuff simpler!

Of course, a observer may not be able to tie your personalised information to you as a unique entity in any given instance: for example, Google cannot when you make an anonymous search. However, Google will be able to infer the valuable insight that you belong to a certain demographic or group identity from your search queries and the links you click in the search results (and track you as a defacto persistent individual or group identity via your IP address on your return, of course, unless you know how to hide that information from them).

Furthermore, your personalised information may be far more detailed and rich than your personal information is. After all, it includes not just the huge quantities of information we generate implicitly through our surfing and searching, but also the information we explicitly (co-)create and express—such as this information I am expressing right now, on this blog! (In codifying it into my own words, I am literally "personalising" the information that I have absorbed from others or encountered in my own imagination.)

Your personalised information is not only relevant to your own experience of your identity, then: it is also highly relevant to observers of your online presence who seek to obtain insight into your identity (and then show you just the right adverts, for example). Personalised information allows those observers to build a much more complete, albeit fuzzier, picture of your identity than they could just from your (uniquely-identifying) personal information.

And, of course, should observers be able to tie your personal and personalised information together, they gain oversight of a very complete picture of your identity indeed.

Technologies of connectivity—and alienation

2007-05-22T09:38:00.000+01:00

Sherry Turkle is techo-disillusioned. She writes:

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected—or more alienated.

...

We live in techno-enthusiastic times, and we are most likely to celebrate our gadgets. Certainly the advertising that sells us our devices has us working from beautiful, remote locations that signal our status. We are connected, tethered, so important that our physical presence is no longer required. There is much talk of new efficiencies; we can work from anywhere and all the time. But tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people.

Sherry offers us "five troubles that try my tethered soul" (she clearly has something of a poetic bent):

There is a new state of the self, itself
Are we losing the time to take our time?
The tethered adolescent
Virtuality and its discontents
Split attention

Sherry's full post is well worth a read—I found it hard to find much to disagree with, although I would suggest that just because we increasingly have the opportunity to be "networked" in every moment, that doesn't mean that we cannot learn to turn down that opportunity as our soul's care requires. I'm certainly enjoying putting some boundaries around my blog reading time (strictly on the exercise bike in the morning only!).

Google to launch mobile service in UK?

2007-05-22T09:32:00.000+01:00

From TechCrunch:

We’ve heard from a good source in the mobile industry that Google may be preparing to launch its own branded mobile network in the UK in the next few weeks. If our source is accurate, Google will become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) via a deal with UK mobile phone company O2.

So we Brits could be the guinea pigs for a seamlessly Google-mediated virtual life? Well, I guess we are the global leaders in the evolution of the Surveillance Society...

I Am...

2007-05-21T09:08:00.000+01:00

What a great image! Roll over the picture above to put it in context of loverfishy's other images. Then click on it, and roll over the word "fat" on the original image.

Don't you just love all that identity recontextualisation? ; )

Image courtesy of loverfishy.

The Emperor's New Identity Web

2007-05-21T08:40:00.000+01:00

Piers Fawkes imagines:

...a possible future where we'd have to manage our identity in a way similar to the way we manage our image today. In the same way we dress and style ourselves to say something (or nothing) about ourselves, we will dress our personal information to do the same thing. Some of will don red coats to show off, some will don black coats to hide.

The basic premise behind this vision is that our privacy is dead. Our data is already out there.

I don't suggest that 2007 will see us trying to don our red coats just yet - for one thing the tools are not built to do this just yet - but I do think that the general public will have a privacy epiphany as they become aware of their lack of privacy and flow of personal data.

I engaged with Piers in the comments section of his post:

Interesting piece, Piers.

I completely agree with you that privacy, in its traditionally-understood form, is dying. [weaverluke readers will know that I have written as much on this blog.]

However, what you seem to be getting at with your (admittedly evocative) "red coat, black coat" analogy, but don't spell out, is that, as more and more information about us is available online, coats of either colour will increasingly become as invisible as the Emperor's New Clothes to those observers who choose to look through them to the "naked identity" of the wearer.

Even that metaphor breaks down when you examine it, because all we can ever see online are assertions, which we ascribe to certain people, about other things and people (or about themselves). (Of course, we cannot see people or things themselves, because they exist in the physical world!) But how do we really know who such assertions are from, and if we can trust them?

We can never really be sure what's what or who's who in the slippery world of the Identity Web (as the Kathy Sierra debacle illustrated all too well). All we can do is establish relatively strong hypotheses—and, until the sophistication of identity-mediating technologies approaches the incredible efficacy of our human cognitive perceptual mechanisms, those hypotheses will very often remain moderately confident at best.

Posted by: weaverluke | May 20, 2007 1:48:14 PM

Thanks for your great comment, Luke. In response:

We can never really be sure what's what or who's who in the slippery world of real life. Think of a time you interviewed someone for a job - you never know whether their CV was 100% true or 100% false. And I'd bet that despite your cognitive mechanisms, you'll only know slightly better by the end of the interview too.

Posted by: Piers Fawkes | May 20, 2007 8:30:52 PM

Piers,

Very true! However, if you then met and talked with that person again, your ability to verify their facial appearance, voice print and body language would allow you to be almost certain that they were the same person as you met before. This is not really the case on the web, where the cues may be hugely diverse, but the identification methods available to us are far less integrated than our biologically-evolved ones.

Conversely, it is easier to build a rich picture of *someone* (even if you are less than certain of the persistence of their underlying identity across all the constituent pieces of information than you would be having grilled them face to face!) online than offline.

Then again, if we consider our extended offline social networks as analogies for the links of the (social) web, it becomes clear that—as you say—we rely on pretty fuzzy cues for identifying the deeper characteristics of people offline too: we ask friends' opinions of other friends and so on.

My takeaway from all this—we must learn deeply about the "Human Web"—how we interact with one another and our world via our intricate and sophisticated, biologically-evolved organism—if we are to understand how to build an effective Identity Web. And privacy is a concept, of relatively recent provenance, which may prove to have relatively shallow roots in that organism.

Garlik DataPatrol report

2007-05-20T08:22:00.001+01:00

So my first Garlik DataPatrol full report has arrived, some three weeks after I registered (this follows an initial credit report which arrived just a couple of days after registration).

The report is beautifully presented (online), and contains some really useful information—such as a view of how the credit agencies see you and a demographic analysis of your residential area. I also learned where to go to stop junk mail—the Mail Preference Service—and that I could opt out of the Electoral Roll ("just put a cross in the box on your annual Electoral Roll renewal form") and restrict access to Companies House information on me (also with the MPS), all in order to reduce my risk of suffering Identity Theft.

However, I am apparently doing a Bad Thing in putting a link to my CV on my blog, and using my real name on my blog. This is a tricky one, because the professional benefits to me of having this information openly discoverable are considerable. But it does bring home to me why many bloggers blog pseudonymously...

One aspect of DataPatrol that doesn't work well yet is the Connections section, where your supposed personal and company connections are listed. Perhaps this is partly because us bloggers put ourselves virtually around somewhat, but the results here really don't give a good picture of my important connections. I haven't even met many of the individuals listed—they simply work for a company that employs someone I do know.

The other thing that was a bit creepy was having many of the people who live on my street listed by name and address! That just brings home the perils of being on the Electoral Roll, I guess. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I want to snoop on my neighbours. Perhaps Garlik should consider omitting this category of information from their reports?

These niggles aside, I would certainly recommend my UK readers give Garlik a try—it doesn't take more than ten minutes or so to register, and you will surely gain some useful and thought-provoking insights into how your identity is represented in the public sphere.

Mobile operators poised to mediate identity management

2007-05-20T08:22:00.000+01:00

Dave Birch writes:

[T]he position of the mobile handset as the basis of practical identity management in the real world is becoming unassailable. [...I]t passes all of the tests: it's portable, has secure storage, has its own keyboard for PIN entry and so on. But [...] it is controlled by the mobile operators, so people who want better identification and authentication to be used by "ordinary" people (ie, not nerds like me) such as governments and banks will end up having to cut a deal with them. But why wouldn't they prefer to pay the operator a penny every time you log on to your home banking if it saves them millions and millions in development costs, operating costs and fraud?

I'm sure Dave's right that our mobile will increasingly become our tool of choice for asserting our identity as we go about our lives—and that the mobile operators are in a fantastic position to take advantage of the massive new markets that will emerge around such identity management.

Exogenously unbounded identity

2007-05-19T08:55:00.000+01:00

Kermit Snelson writes:

A few days ago, David Weinberger issued the following challenge to the readers of his new book: “Can you come up with the Everything Is Miscellaneous elevator pitch? Lord knows, I can’t.”
How about this: “To equate identity with location is an instrument of autocracy.”

A more verbose but less gnomic summary of the argument might go like this: In the physical world, everything must occupy a single location. In the realm of identity, however, different rules apply. The fact that the Mona Lisa cannot “be” in the Louvre and in the Prado simultaneously doesn’t mean that it cannot simultaneously “be” a piece of old wood, a masterpiece, and a tourist attraction. Laws of physics and laws of identity are not of the same ontological order.

I couldn't agree more. Indeed, this was one of the key points that John Madelin and I argued in our white paper of 2006: we unconsciously reproduce the 3D limitations of our physical world in the location metaphor of the the web's addressing architecture (DNS), but in so doing we distort the web's ability to mediate our exogenously unbounded, subjective perceptions of identity.

More of my thoughts on the original post as a whole are in its comments section.

Your network increases your effective intelligence

2007-05-18T07:16:00.000+01:00

Jamais Cascio, pondering trends in outsourcing, writes:

Ironically, it's entirely possible that the carbon footprint of shipping may add so much cost to outsourced manufacturing that those jobs get re-localized, whereas the knowledge jobs (needing only an Internet connection) end up being globalized.

So are we headed to a world where the only stable jobs are those that absolutely require hands-on contact—health maintenance, grooming, and the like? Or to one where wages even out across the world of skilled workers? Neither strikes me as terribly appealing or stable.

I think Jamais' observation about the likely re-localisation of manufacturing is quite persuasive. However, I have a feeling he's a bit off target with the second paragraph. While stable jobs for all but the most worker location-dependent tasks may come under threat, my guess is that the economic well-being of the successful knowledge workers will actually only continue to follow a power-law curve, with the richest continuing to get richer.

Knowledge workers don't get hired only for what they know or what they can do, but also for who they know—and, as Clay Shirky long since pointed out, winners take all in social networking. Why do people with great networks get hired? Partly through plain old nepotism, of course, but also because who you know effectively increases both what you know and what you can do by enabling you to outsource task fulfillment across your uniquely-valuable network.

Is music the universal language?

2007-05-18T07:14:00.000+01:00

Laura-Lee Balkwill asks of a neurologist, a psychologist and an anthropologist, in a most wonderful All in the Mind podcast (30'):

Is music the universal language?

One person's spoken language might sound like gobbledy gook to another - but when it comes to music do we beat to a common evolutionary drum? Could music be the universal language - linking minds across cultures and ancestral time? And, which came first - music or language? Don your headphones and climb aboard for an acoustic adventure. Does music lie at the heart...and brain...of what it means to be human?

An excerpt from the podcast transcript that summarises the interests of each speaker:

Laura-Lee Balkwill [interviewer]: So why is music interesting – that's a complex question with a lot of different answers depending on who you talk to.

Catherine Falk [ethnomusicologist]: Music is utterly entwined with notions of memory, of emotion, of identity, of relationship with place and time; of relationship with other human beings, with all living and inanimate objects, relations with the heavens, with the gods, people's ways of interpreting their worlds or their cosmologies in their own specific, very culturally specific ways.

Laura-Lee Balkwill [psychologist] : I find music interesting because of its power to evoke emotion, to express emotion, to make people feel. And that's how I got into studying music and emotion to begin with because I wanted to explore how that worked and whether that worked the same across cultures.

Ani Patel [neurologist]: And it presents science with opportunity to study the relationship between brain function and complex cognition, which is one of the big topics in neuroscience today: how does brain circuitry give rise to the mental experiences that we have of the world? And music is a wonderful domain to explore that because of its complexity and its reducibility, I would say.

A summary of some other points that fascinated me:

Cathy Falk: archeological evidence of Neanderthal dwellings suggests music may pre-date language;
Ani Patel: alternatively, we may not have evolved a capacity for making music so much as creatively adapted other cognitive mechanisms such as those responsible for language;
Ani Patel: "modern neuro-imaging has shown us that both sides of the brain are very much involved in processing music. Language as well – but language does have a strong left hemisphere bias whereas music seems to draw on both sides of the brain – and does importantly, integrate different aspects of brain function in [...] waves of integration as opposed to simple processing chains";
Laura-Lee Balkwill: Some aspects of music, such as certain fundamental characteristics' evocation of particular emotional responses, seem to be universal;
Patel & Falk: whereas many others are culturally-specific;
Ani Patel: "Some very deep and evolutionarily ancient reward centres of the brain [are] activated by [...] music. And these are areas that are typically activated by biologically significant behaviour such as eating, or reproducing or so on, and yet they [are] activated by this abstract acoustic stimulus with no obvious survival value";
Cathy Falk: "Music is not an universal language any more than language itself is an universal language. I don't understand Swahili; it is a language. People construct the syntax of music very much in tandem with the way they construct themselves socially in their own very culturally specific ways."

I very much recommend listening to the podcast itself, which is interspersed with some great audio illustrations of diverse musics.

Music taps into our richest, deepest selves: our emotions, our language skills, our imagination, our universal humanity and the culturally-contextualised aspects of our identity. To understand music (and, in many ways, we are only just beginning to) really would be to go a long way to understanding what it is to be human.

Widgets and identity

2007-05-17T21:22:00.000+01:00

The Chinwag event last night on "Media Widgetized"* was well attended by people from startups and big technology brands alike. The panel all had interesting and informed things to say, and Steve Bowbrick was a funny and effective Chair. Two good writeups of the content of the debate are here and here.

For readers who don't know what a widget is, take a look at the first writeup link above for a choice of explanations and a picture of some widgets.

My identity angle: widgets enable us to track, interact with and remix diverse information-based "stuff" (weather updates, stock prices, mini games, our social network profiles etc.) within the unifying framework of our own online personas, both public (blog, public start page etc.) and private (desktop widgets, private start page etc.).

Widgets are as much about performing our identity superpublically as they are about witnessing the world through the filter of our identity (i.e. our preferences and interests). Which is precisely why the commercial world is at once desperately keen to leverage widgets to extend the reach and resonance of their brand, and yet also petrified of their potential for disrupting and subverting that brand.

A notional example: would McDonalds want a Big Mac mini game widget placed ironically on a high-traffic blog documenting that company's role in the ongoing destruction of rainforests? I think probably not. It will be interesting to see how masters of big media marketing like McDonald ("I'm loooooving it!") cope as the web encroaches increasingly on their branding comfort zones.

One thing's for sure, though: widgets are conspiring to make the process of brand identity evolution a whole lot more fluid, transparent and predicated on authentic engagement and relationship by the brand with its community. And that has to be a good thing.

*"Widgetized" spelled with a z for search engine optimisation, seemingly—though quite why Chinwag prefer to get the attention of Americans and Australians at the expense of us Brits who are the ones likely to attend their events I'm not entirely sure!

C21st living: act locally, be surveilled globally?

2007-05-17T08:57:00.000+01:00

Bill Thompson writes:

Those of us living in the west, with cheap easy access to computers and the internet and a sophisticated technological infrastructure surrounding us, are increasingly living our lives online.

This is no more frightening than any other vast social change, but it will be resisted by many who see in the loss of privacy something threatening, who believe it is dangerous or dehumanising or somehow against nature.

But we should never forget that we make human nature, it is not given to us, and we can therefore remake it.

Our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing, so it should not surprise us that we are finding new ways of constructing an identity online.

As I spread myself around over the network, updating my Facebook profile, commenting on MySpace, flying through Second Life, blogging, twittering, updating my calendar and posting photos and videos and audio I am finding a new way to be Bill Thompson.

While it's a nice sentiment, I think we need to consider the broad sense of Bill's notion of "remaking human nature" in the context of the insights of evolutionary psychology: our psychological experience is founded on our evolutionary heritage, which has, for example, seemingly optimised us for social interaction within relatively small groups.

However, at the same time, I wholeheartedly agree with the previous clause of the same sentence: that "our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing." I have myself argued that, in a world where information flows ever more freely and pervasively, we have no choice but to completely re-conceive the role of privacy in our lives. Given the relatively recent provenance (as Bill points out) of the Western concepts of privacy and individual identity, it seems likely that their roots only penetrate the topsoil of our culture rather than the deep clay of our evolutionarily selected traits (such as our predeliction for interacting within small groups), so it may be that we can reinvent this aspect of our experience.

Perhaps we will continue to seek out small groups to engage with proactively while at the same time coming to tolerate, accept or even enjoy the fact that our audience for that engagement may be unknowably diverse and global.

My question remains:

How can we find sustenance and protection for our intricate and bounded, biologically-evolved, deeper, softer selves in the always-on "surface" world we are creating?

Yahoo and Google try to out-Green one another

2007-05-17T08:55:00.000+01:00

This kind of tussle for the technology behemoth Green brand identity high ground can only be a Good Thing. : )

Identity web as hologram

2007-05-16T07:49:00.000+01:00

A metaphor that I like to use for the identity web is that of a hologram. Just like when you shatter a hologram, each piece reflects cloudy images of the whole original, the identity web promises to embody an ever-greater proportion of the web’s knowledge in each of its nodes—which, in principal, would come to obviate the need for a location-based discovery and navigation metaphor for the web.

I am brought to mind of those multi-dimensional tangles of superstrings that physicists tell us may be coiled up within each of the tiniest spaces of our universe. Perhaps that is our challenge in evolving an identity web—to roll up the web into a billion locations, thereby making the very concept of information “location” redundant?

And yet, each node also defines what it is not by its differences from the whole. The piece of the hologram embodies the whole within the unique context of its identity.

[This post was inspired by a blog conversation with Kermit Snelson—thanks, Kermit!]

Sound branding

2007-05-16T07:00:00.000+01:00

Noel Franus writes about "Building Brand Value Through the Strategic Use of Sound":

Most organizations have relied almost exclusively on the sense of sight to communicate who they are, what they do and why they matter. Pirates have their unmistakable skull-and-bones flag. Nearly all religions have their own unique symbol. And today, practically every brand on earth has its own visual identity. Other senses are rarely part of the equation.

Yet sound has unquestionable potential in creating impressions. Consider the sonic snippets in your life—imagine Chariots of Fire or Rocky without music, a PC commercial without that Intel Inside bongggg, or a Harley-Davidson hog without its expertly calibrated tone. Sound triggers recall and reactions. And much like good visual or industrial design, it also has the ability to convey value and strengthen brand reputations.
Forward-thinking brands are catching on. In this first of a two-part series based on my co-presentation at the “Gain” conference last October, we introduce the practice of audio branding and identity – the intentional use of music, sound and voice to create a connection between people and organizations.

The full post has some great examples of the use of sound for brand identity enhancement. As a musician and identitologist, this topic fascinates me. Music has the ability to resonate with us on so many levels. The "food of love", indeed!

At Chinwag tomorrow

2007-05-15T09:01:00.000+01:00

In case any readers are going to be in the central London area tomorrow evening, I will be attending the Chinwag Live event on "Media Widgetized" and would love to see you there!

Virtual relationships—eroding authenticity?

2007-05-15T09:00:00.000+01:00

Kermit Snelson laments the erosion of authenticity in a world of virtual relationships:

Even if the old question "Who are you?" has increasingly lost its meaning as we all become Google-able, another old question should probably remain: "Have we met?"

I'm sure that's very true. You just can't beat a good old face to face natter—which is why I'm excited to about the great new venue for London OpenCoffee, the tech entrepreneur and investor meetup event on Thursday mornings!

Simple is viral

2007-05-14T10:02:00.000+01:00

Eric Sundelöf points out that a viral marketing message needs to describe the identity of your service or product in a really simple, intuitive and exciting way. I'm sure that's right: bringing simplicity out of complexity is one of the most valuable things anyone can do for us in this crazy age.

I am building, with friends, a web service* that will provide "TLC for your blog". Does that phrase cut the mustard as a viral marketing message? I sure hope so.

*More details to follow as we move towards our private alpha launch... : )

Memory loss treatments discovered

2007-05-14T09:57:00.000+01:00

From BBC News:

Mental stimulation and drug treatment could help people with degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's recover their memories, a study says.
Scientists found mice with a similar condition to Alzheimer's were able to regain memories of tasks they had previously been taught.

This is great news for Alzheimer's sufferers. And given that our sense of identity is tied up intimately with our memory, could the following conversation be heard in doctors' surgeries in a few years?

Patient: "Doctor, doctor, I feel like my identity is disappearing, I just can't remember who I am or who anyone else is. Who are you, by the way?"

Doctor: "Don't worry, just take four Identilux daily with a glass of water and you'll be right as rain in no time!"

; )

Kettle Chips—a product identity perspective

2007-05-13T09:39:00.000+01:00

Charla and I love Kettle Chips—they are an indulgent pre-dinner snack we occasionally treat ourselves to when a long week in the city has pummeled us into submission. Once opened, the whole contents of a large bag invariably disappears within ten crunchy minutes.

Kettle have been the leading premium potato crisp brand in the UK for some years now, but they haven't rested on their laurels one bit: they are always coming out with some new flavour, complete with evocative title and expressively-designed wrapper. The flavours are usually delicious, and when they are less than that, improved versions are often forthcoming pretty quickly. Kettle Chips also strike a friendly yet respectful tone in encouraging customer feedback—I get the strong impression that the company is run by people who are genuinely passionate about creating amazing crisps.

So what's not to like? Well, nothing at all, but I do have a hopeful observation about Kettle's product identity and branding to offer them.

While the titles and wrappers of each flavour are boldly differentiated from one another, the flavours themselves are far less so—while each tastes great, it does so in a way that is far more similar to the other flavours than it is different.

The pack of the Mango Chilli flavour, "Angry Fruit" (pictured above), proclaims: "the chilli takes time to arrive, but when it does you'll know!" Well, not really—the chilli is really very mild. There is a mismatch, a disjunction, between the pack's promise of a wild and challenging tastebud adventure and the actual soothingly familiar and pleasant crisp experience of perfectly crunchy, salt-savoury-with-just-a-hint-of-something-exotic munching. It's a bit like searching for a barely-perceptible note of cinnamon or aniseed in a delectable high-class dark chocolate ganache that is far too refined to shout out its differences from the others in the box.

Kettle, be bold—have the courage of your branding convictions and give us chillies that burn, limes that bite, and mangos that sweeten us! Let the identity of your crisps, so brilliantly captured by your marketing department, shine through the humble potato itself. Take us on the daring crispy escapades you promise us, and you will have (at least two) loyal customers for life.

"Global privacy invaders" awards

2007-05-13T09:34:00.000+01:00

Kim Cameron points us to this story:

Privacy International announces global privacy invaders

02/05/2007
In an event in Montreal, Canada, Privacy International ran the first International Big Brothers Awards ceremony. At the 'Computers, Freedom and Privacy' (off-site) conference, with over 200 attendees, PI outed the most invasive companies, projects, officials, and governments. A special award for the 'Lifetime Menace' was also announced.
Background

PI's 'Big Brother Awards' have been running for nearly ten years, with events run in eighteen countries around the world. Government institutions and companies have been named and shamed as privacy invaders in a variety of countries and contexts.
This year was the first time that Privacy International ran an international event to identify the greatest invaders around the world. The event was hosted by 'the pope', as presented by Simon Davies in full regalia [my emphasis!]. Previous hosts include 'Dr. Evil' and 'The Queen of England'.
Nominees and Winners

After reviewing the variety of nominations received from around the world, Privacy International and leading international privacy experts selected the following nominees and winners in the following categories:
Most invasive company
Nominees

Google, for their retention practices and their purchase of Doubleclick, an on-line marketing and profiling firm
Choicepoint, for their vast databases of personal data, sold to nearly anyone who wishes to pay
SWIFT, the international banking co-operative for sharing personal financial transactions with the U.S. government
Booz Allen Hamilton, the international consultancy, for taking the knowledge and contacts of their senior executives, mostly from U.S. intelligence agencies, to sell and share their experiences with firms and governments around the world

Winner: Choicepoint

Worst Public Official
Nominees

Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain, for his relentless work over ten years to expand the UK into the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations
Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, for returning the surveillance policies of his nation to the age of the Cold War
Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency and now undersecretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, behind and at the forefront of most disastrous U.S. surveillance policies, most recently the EU-U.S. agreement on Passenger Name Records transfers
Alberto Gonzales, current Attorney General for the U.S., for pushing expansive interpretations of the U.S. Constitution in order to create new powers for the Bush Administration without Congressional authorisation and judicial oversight

Winner: Stewart Baker

Most Heinous Government
Nominees

China, for implementing even greater surveillance policies and continues its oppression of various groups, and moves towards the international stage with the Beijing Olympics with additional surveillance schemes
The U.S., for leading the world down the path of greater surveillance and its disastrous influence on policy and technology
The United Kingdom, for being the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations, rivaling only Malaysia, China and Russia as it also leads other countries across the EU down its same path
Tunisia, for being stupid enough to have invasive and despotic practices even while hosting a UN summit on the information society, and then oppressing guests and groups from around the world while in the public eye
The European Union, for pretending to be founded upon a bedrock of civil liberties and fundamental rights but then spending decades establishing invasive policies without any democratic oversight

Winner: The United Kingdom (for more information please see Taking Liberties documentary (off-site))

Most Appalling Project or Technology
Nominees

U.S. Border Policy, and most recently the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, for fingerprinting visitors from around the world while hoisting fingerprinting and ID card programmes upon citizens around the world, including Americans
International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN agency, for implementing a variety of invasive policies behind closed doors, including the 'biometric passport' and passenger data transfer-deals
India's Ministry for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions for requiring government employees to disclose their menstrual cycles on job appraisal forms
the CCTV industry, for promoting a technologically 'effective' policy around the world despite all the evidence to the contrary

Winner: The International Civil Aviation Organization

Lifetime Menace Award
Nominees

The Biometrics Industry, for selling a limited technology to governments and public institutions around the world, promising much while delivering very little except for minimisation of personal privacy
The Military Industrial Complex, for being behind almost every invasive surveillance policy around the world, where we showed the example of General Dynamics, contractor to a variety of governments, who own companies such as Anteon (UK) who in turn own 'Vericool' (UK) who is responsible for selling surveillance technologies to schools that want to fingerprint their students to verify class registries, library privileges, and cafeteria purchases
The Intellectual Property Industry, for promoting and pushing invasive policies around the world in order to keep track of the habits of on-line users to pursue their agenda of 'protecting' content
Communitarianism and the proponents of the 'Common Good', because every bad policy around the world is justified based on the philosophy that is good for society and the individual must sacrifice his or her selfish rights in favour of the needs of the many

Winner: The 'Common Good'

Winners were given the classic BBA award, a golden statue of a boot stamping upon a human head, as promised by George Orwell in 1984 on a vision for the future.

Sounds like it was quite an evening!

Don't just do something, sit there!

2007-05-12T11:32:00.000+01:00

As I fuss around with this and that this morning, achieving very little satisfaction, my cluttered and somewhat chaotic state of mindbody reminds me of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh's ironic adaptation of Bhudda's words:

"Don't just do something, sit there!"

So I'm going to stroll onto Hampstead Heath and sit me down on a sun-kissed park bench (my favourite one on Parliament Hill) for a little life contemplation.

: )

Snap previews—like 'em or loath em?

2007-05-12T10:01:00.000+01:00

As an experiment, I've turned on Snap previews for the links in these posts and in the sidebar too. Roll over a link and you'll see what I mean. Usually, you will see a miniature image of the linked-to page, but for Wikipedia pages, Amazon product pages and various other kinds of sites, you will see specially-formatted summaries of the page's content.

Hopefully this provides a useful timesaving functionality to my readers, but it could, conversely, becoming a bit annoying to have those boxes pop up all the time? Let me know if you have strong feelings one way or the other—I'm happy to turn Snap back off if you all hate it!

Sexuality, violence and vunerability

2007-05-12T09:03:00.000+01:00

Seamus McCauley points out the illogicality of the media's conflation of real and virtual paedophillia in their discussion of recent disturbing happenings in Second Life. He also contrasts this reaction to virtual sexual abuse with the widespread tolerance of extreme virtual violence. I recommend a reading of the post in full, too long and integrated to reproduce here.

My thoughts: Sexuality can be one of the most vunerable and emotive aspects of human identity, so it's perhaps no surprise that people often switch off their higher brains when thinking and talking about its abuses. By contrast, violence numbs and brutalises us, and it seems we find it far easier to distance ourselves emotionally from its virtual depiction.

Gordon Brown promises an ID Card review

2007-05-11T20:25:00.000+01:00

So, according to tonight's Evening Standard (no online version available!) Gordon Brown will review the potential impact on civil liberties of the ID Card scheme when he becomes Prime Minister. That's good news if he really means it (you never know with these politicians). After all, with the right technology (and only with the right technology), a government-issued ID Card could be a useful thing for both citizen and government.

Meanwhile, the government also chose today to sneak out the news that the scheme has gone even further over budget. A massive budget overrun for a UK public sector IT project? I suppose we would be rather amazed if that did not happen!

LSE's Identity Project site

2007-05-11T07:46:00.000+01:00

Anyone interested in the London School of Economics' work in advising the UK Government not to accelerate the arrival of a Surveillance Society with a poorly-conceived ID Card implementation might want to check out their project site.

Google as "the Internet"

2007-05-11T07:44:00.000+01:00

Seamus McCauley muses on "Google" as synonym for "the Internet" (click the link for a nice bonus photo illustration!):

I've been wondering for a while how it came to pass that "Google" became visual shorthand for "the Internet" amongst advertisers.

The current campaign for Thomson holidays exhorts holidaymakers to use "our Google Maps" (which turns out to be a slightly customised version of what is very clearly Google's Google Maps). Mobile phone companies in particular, when they started wanting us to know that we could access the web on our phones, showed us phones with Google on them. Here's another one.

So I'm intrigued by the sudden cultural shift implied by Nokia's latest online ad for the N800 (left), a phone with Internet access, majoring on the BBC website and Flickr and MySpace and Wikipedia without a mention of Google. "Take the Internet to new places", it says. Or, in other words - not just Google search.

Google has an incredibly powerful brand (BBC) that for the last couple of years has been semiotically synonymous with the Internet. Assuming, not unreasonably, that advertisers are on the cutting edge of understanding cultural significance, that psychological dominance of what people mean by the Internet may be coming to an end as consumers are considered able to accept more nuanced symbols of the web.

When millions of people identify your brand with the Internet itself, you know you have a decent business. Whether or not Google can continue to convince the masses that they are "the Internet" will play a huge part in determining their future fortunes.

However, it's also intriguing to note that the growing privacy concerns around Google provide them with the inverse challenge of convincing people that they are not too omniscient for their users' comfort—when striving for omniscience kind of goes with the territory of trying to be "the Internet". This would seem to pose Google with something of a strategic and branding conundrum.

There's money in that there identity—we just don't quite know where yet.

[also left as a comment on Seamus's post]

A new low for the British service industry?

2007-05-11T07:31:00.000+01:00

I tried to chase up a hospital appointment yesterday afternoon, and after being ping-ponged between the referring clinic and the x-ray department a couple of times, I got to talk to the appropriate staff member.

"I'll just go and check your file."

1 minute passes.

Voices can be heard chatting in background.

5 minutes pass.

Voices continue to chat in background.

8 minutes pass.

I hang up and ring back immediately.

No answer after twenty rings.

I look at my watch: it's 4:50pm.

It seems they have clocked off for the day.

Naming baby for Google

2007-05-10T09:04:00.000+01:00

Nick Carr writes:

Here's a sign of the times. Expectant parents are beginning to google prospective baby names to ensure that their kids won't face too much competition in securing a high search rank.

In Britain and elsewhere, surnames traditionally served to denote the shared identity of a family trade, as in "Smith", and first names were drawn mostly from a relatively small and familiar stock. These days, names are having to carry the weight of our desire to stand out from billions of others—we want them to function as our unique identifiers.

Well, while I have now met another L. Razzell, Google has yet to inform me of another Luke Razzell...

The Encyclopedia of Life

2007-05-10T08:38:00.000+01:00

Well, this is a grand identity project indeed: The Encyclopedia of Life!

The species information tree-navigation interface (shown in the video) looks pretty cool too.

[Via BBC News]

A virtual identity custody battle

2007-05-09T14:10:00.000+01:00

Dave Birch writes:

Who cares about custody of the quids [sic] when there's virtual assets at stake! A divorcing couple in China are fighting for the custody of virtual identities in the Zhengtu Online virtual world. The couple met each other through the game in September 2006 and got married in November. The two jointly own more than 10 Zhengtu Online accounts (each of which is, in essence, a different virtual identity) that are each above level 100. This, incidentally, makes them a liquid asset as they can be sold for 10,000 Yuan each online. The husband wants all the game accounts and in return is willing to give their newly purchased and renovated apartment to his wife: in other words, he wants the virtual stuff and she can keep the real stuff. As they say in Yorkshire -- or they did in the era when my mother was born in Catterick -- there's nowt as strange a folk. The dispute? The wife wants to split the real and virtual stuff equally... how old fashioned.

Which is all further proof that "real" and "virtual" aspects of value are becoming practically indistinguishable—if someone cares about something, it has value, whether that something is a game-world avatar or an apartment.

Innocent family: not so innocent?

2007-05-09T08:00:00.000+01:00

Innocent, purveyors of the eponymous smoothies, are playing happy families:

Hello.

We were wondering if you'd like to join the innocent family. Don't worry - it's not some weird cult. It's just our way of staying in touch with the people who drink our drinks i.e. you. Every week we'll email you our news and give you the chance to win lots of drinks. We'll also invite you to nice events like Fruitstock (our free festival) and maybe send you the odd present if you're lucky. Finally, we'll very occasionally ask you what you reckon we should do next, as we sometimes get confused.

All the practical aspects of this—engaging with customers, giving them perks, asking their opinions—are clearly great ideas, but I can't help finding the "join our smoothie-kissed happy family" thing rather creepy.

Families are groups of people bonded for life by shared bloodlines, and may be happy and harmonious, unhappy and discordant or (in very many cases) a rich mixture of both. A company, by contrast, provides products and services to customers, once or over a certain period of time, in exchange for money. Relationship exists in each case, but of a very mutually-different kind.

Innocent make great smoothies—so why don't they concentrate their marketing activities on conveying their passion for doing just that, rather than spinning us with some delusional fantasy of intimacy?

Participation ladders and value spirals

2007-05-09T07:55:00.000+01:00

Charlene Li at Forrester blogs about their new "Social Technographics" report. The report's executive summary:

Many companies approach social computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed – a blog here, a podcast there – to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes social computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term "Social Technographics" to describe analyzing a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other company pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers' Social Technographics first, and then create a social strategy based on that profile.

There's a nice "participation ladder" diagram in Charlene's post which I dare not reproduce here from fear of their terrifying Terms of Use. ; ) Nevertheless, what I find interesting about the ladder metaphor is that it focuses the potential for a customer's relationship with a company to evolve to encompass ever-greater degrees of pro-activity on that customer's part. This is very much like my Value Spiral metaphor in the "Towards the Identity Society" paper (section 5.2.2 in this pdf). (And I guess if you combine ladders and spirals, you get DNA...)

I suspect that human relationships in any context may be usefully described in terms of such iterated evolution. Of course, that evolution ceases when one or other party in the relationship feels that the relationship has reached a ceiling of potential value—there's only so much personal information I wish to share with any given social web service, for example, and this is where Google may begin to run into trouble as it continues to diversify its integrated web service offerings.

weaverluke gets a strapline

2007-05-08T13:33:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking that weaverluke blog needs a strapline, so I came up with this one (displayed beneath the blog's title):

"Drawing together the threads of Identity"

I guess I better make sure I put in at least one wrong stitch into my tapestry in case God gets angry with me (hmm, somehow I think that shouldn't be a problem then... ; )

Shaping the evolution of human language

2007-05-08T12:27:00.000+01:00

BBC News reports:

Researchers in the US say they have firm evidence that apes communicate using gestures - shedding light on the development of human language.

The team analysed the way bonobos and chimpanzees used hand and limb gestures to make themselves understood. The scientists found the apes used gestures more flexibly than the way they used facial and vocal expressions. They say the findings support the theory that human language developed through the use of hand gestures.

These research findings would seem to chime nicely with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's ideas about overlapping cognitive processes for visual and auditory gestalts forming one basis of the evolution of human language. My speculation (which may very well not be original): having learned to gesture, did our distant ancestors take inspiration from the shapes both of the objects around them and of their own gestures to form the sonic shapes of their first, rudimentary words?

Not-so-not-so-green Apple?

2007-05-08T08:49:00.000+01:00

This news is a few days old now, but I wanted to update readers further to my "not-so-green Apple" post: Steve Jobs has blogged positively about Apple's environmental footprint, current and future, and Greenpeace have given him a qualified thumbs up. There is some intelligent commentary from Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm.

weaverluke

Hermetic thoughts

Twitter.com

Stone Age brains and the social web

LinkedIn's promise

The LinkedIn promise

Visual branding—"corporate" and "creative" in counterpoint

Genteel gameplay

Cherry picking the social web

LinkedIn sucks, but it shouldn't care

A message runs through it

Acknowledgements

User Experience made better

Our clients

Strategic benefits of investment in User Experience

What we offer

Market-leading innovation

Contact us

Hacking the nature of existence

The social web is not a machine—it is (evolving into) us

My hairstylist is a Blog Friends user

All of a Twitter

Advance Aid: a cause worth getting blogged up about

Greetings of the (silly) Season

Christmas blessings to one and all

Leading "Buzz Marketer" shows how NOT to do it

A long overdue apology

A Big Day for Blog Friends

Blog Friends v1 Beta launches tomorrow!

Identity, embodied

Blog Friends latest

Identity Society—happenings and musings

Mobile Digital Identity event at SUN

Blog Friends has been Scobleized!

Blog Friends' tendrils spreading

Bloggers' likes—and dislikes!

Top interests

Top dislikes

Identity & startups: the web (2)

Blog Friends public beta is now live!

Blog Friends private alpha launched today!

Identity & startups: the web (1)

Where (the heck) is weaverluke?

Blog Friends

weaverluke—now also on Facebook!

What's Google trying to say about me?!

I heart London Olympic logo

Rolling up my sleeves!

Identity and startups: an introduction

Would you pay for your "own" personalised information?

Flooding the personal information market

FOI automation—a distant pipedream

Bob Blakley on Real ID

London Lite finds a fan

Nuanced relationship and Facebook

weaverluke blog is 3 today!

Privacy, lost and found

A privacy law shambles

A paen to the social web

The City as a Green action focal point

IM bots masquerading as humans

Pub wisdom

Keywords, natural language and search

The intrinsic limitations of identifiers

Personal data mining: benefits and costs

Genomics, privacy and economics

Mobile moolah

Amendments to the FOI - bad news

China abandons blog identity plan

Googling spacetime

Angelina Jolie's semantic tattoos

The Green Web?

Kate Moss as cultural vanishing point

Googlephobia growing

NEWSFLASH: O2 to deliver Google's mobile network

Justin.tv—sousveillance personified

Identity web as mirror

Traffic wardens get video cameras

Real and virtual currencies converging

Identity: personal and personalised information