vanderwal.net

Off to Berlin

Off to Berlin this afternoon to participate and absorb at Design Engaged. The usual travel info works for me (usual phone forwarded to the GSM travel phone).

Interview regarding Digital Identity and the Personal InfoCloud

Today I appear over on Under the Radar: That cloud kinda looks like you! in an interview by Scott Hirsch who is a partner at MIG5. The interview focusses on digital identity, which is integral to the Personal InfoCloud and interacting with other people and services in the digital world. Increasingly it seems digital identity is tethered to physical world identity for access to buildings, accessing our computers, medical services, etc. This has some problems around privacy that must be addressed and there must be trust in the services that interact with out digital identity.

Focussing and Shingle Hanging

Three trips in the last four weeks has me playing e-mail catch-up. My outbound e-mail is not fully functioning on the road as the provider changed the SMTP port recently I have not updated the settings.

In the same time period I also have left my job and am now consulting and working on my own projects. I am focussing on helping organization better connect with the people who have an interest in their information and media. Building efficient conversations and interaction is the key to successful relationships, be they interpersonal or organization and people. Organizations also need to better understand social networks and providing information that can be used and reused across devices and the Model of Attraction and Local and Personal InfoClouds are just the tools to help provide the framework to think about this as well as making smart decisions regarding Web 2.0. Lastly, the ever present folksonomy will be a focus as well. Along all these lines I am doing research, analyzing, and providing direction and focus to help people and organizations think clearly in these changing times.

I will be posting here a little more often and you can expect more postings over at the Personal InfoCloud. There is much to be investigated and written, which I have not had the time to do in the past. I am also tackling article writing that has been a victim of elusive time. I will also be launching a site for the new company in the near future.

Please send a note with questions or inquiries for services. My time is filling up, but I am always interested in helping others as well as looking for cool projects and difficult problems. I have quite a few people and organizations to keep in touch with and get back in touch with, but if you would like attention more quickly shoot an e-mail to get my attention.

Closing of the First Phase of the Fall European Tour 2005

I am back in Amsterdam tonight after a wonderful trip to Brussels for the Euro IA Summit. It was quite refreshing to talk to people that have a different perspective from Americans on IA, mobile, technology, privacy, and the possibilities for social interaction with digital devices. Last year after Design Engaged in Amsterdam I believed Europe to be farther ahead on internet and mobile (including mobile internet) than America. I now firmly believe Americans have a lot to learn from the Europeans.

I wanted to come and present the InfoCloud information in Europe because I thought they would be more ready for it. They would be able to provide criticism and questions that I do not get in America, mostly because the Europeans have been implementing mobile and trying to work through a means to access information in the environment and context where the information makes sense. Boy, was I right. The InfoClouds are more than mobile, as they are a means to think about information access, personally managing that information (or providing people the ability to manage, use, and reuse the information intelligently) and reusing it as that information is needed and framing the information in ways that make sense (web 2.0 fit this bill). I ran into smart thinking about web 2.0 here, not the just go do it, just open your information up, but working to think about if it made sense to do the cool and how they would do it intelligently.

The Europeans also really get cross-cultural sensitivity and are smart about how to approach working with other cultures. I was delighted to find what American's call internationalization is referred to as localization. How brilliant. How understanding. How unalienating. There is a distinct understanding that people are different and we need to understand that and embrace that. Hmm, there is a very strong reason why it is called the Personal InfoCloud and not the User InfoCloud. If you are not thinking in a local sense you will not get to the personal sense. You can get from localization to personalization, or from the Local InfoCloud to the Personal InfoCloud and also back. We all deal with more than one Local InfoCloud and I received some of the best questions about the interaction between the various Local InfoClouds and the Personal InfoClouds. Interaction be between the social part of personal it of immediate interest here. People are very tied to their communities here, it is a strong part of their identity.

I found myself surrounded this weekend by insanely smart people, who love what they do, and are doing things to help others. Everybody was incredibly friendly and genuinely interested in learning everything they could and sharing what they knew. I could not have asked for a better way to have spent any of this time. I would do all of this again in a heartbeat.

Thank you to all of those that I had the pleasure of sharing time with. Who were incredible hosts in their countries. Who asked and listened and from whom I learned to do the same, as when you listen you can learn. I learned an incredible amount. Thank you again. I am ever so much looking forward to my next two trips.

Peace!

Amsterdam Time

I have been getting adjusted to Amsterdam time today. This means coffee and a little snack, followed by coffee, then coffee and a little snack, an then coffee, and then lunch with coffee and carbonated iced tea (that is a little odd as bubbles in iced tea usually mean it has gone bad long ago).

The weather and the lighting today is stellar. I spent much of the day chatting and going around Bensterdam, which ended hanging out on Ben's houseboat and watching the boat traffic and chatting. Amsterdam has come to life as a livable city more today than any other time.

I have been focussing intermittently on the presentation for tomorrow. I will post it tomorrow evening or Friday morning.

Blogs for Select Audiences

Mena posed a clarification as a way to echo what Andre stated about closed blogging in Live Journal.

I can relate as I have been using Yahoo! 360 for much the same as what others post to Live Journal, it is closed and I have a decent idea who is reading what I post. For the last couple years I have been self-filtering and needed a venue to get about posting 50 percent of what was going on with me. Getting to 60 or 65 percent helped (the other 35 to 40 I save for face-to-face with people I know and trust, maybe it is LJ).

I am not a huge fan of Yahoo! 360, but it is decent and has serviced its purpose. It really needs a lot of social network filtering work (see granular social networking for a hint at the idea). Everybody I know has three or more lives and distinct and diverse social groups that they would like to keep separated for one reason or another (the poker night with the guys and your knitting group may not, well see eye to eye or you may not want them to). Providing a means to use one blog-space to write for more than one social group is a dire need. I know a few people who have more than one LJ persona they maintain.

We each have diverse lives, why are our tools not as malleable and diverse. We and our tools will get there. We have to.

By-the-way, I loved Andre's line, "The best weblogs are the ones in everyone's 'drafts' folder. So much of what I used to write and like to write about won't work today." I am hoping to get some of those things out, as I have time and/or I do not need to have a filter on some of those things any longer.

For a Brand New Day

Today will be filled with mixed emotions. It is my last day working in a building I have been in since November 1999. I have been a program manager (translation: over see many projects) who is also charged with keeping his hands dirty (less dirty than I wished) and providing solutions) for the same group since December 2001. I have been working for the same company since October or November of 2001. All of these are records for me. I am somewhat amazed I have made it this long (I know others are too) as I have short attention span and like to iterate quickly and build, test, and tinker toward perfection then move on. That is not the environment where I have been. It took more than 3 years to do what I believed would take 6 months.

I will deeply miss working with the great people that have been around me. I will miss working for INDUS Corporation as they have been a wonderful company to work for, even long before I worked for them. When I was working on a previous project they staffed and lead one of the GIS portion of the project. They would always ask what I needed to make the project run better and meet our goals and deadlines. If I needed a Java developer they would make one available the following day and the developer was usually stellar. I had never seen this before, particularly not in government contracting. They believe deeply in their employees and the success of their client%#039;s projects.

But, it is time to move on and focus my full work attention on the things that have been keeping me up at night and inside on sunny weekends. My passion for building and helping others design and build tools for people to use and reuse information more easily. This information in social contexts in the digital and physical environments needs more attention. The Model of Attraction and InfoClouds (Personal InfoCloud and Local InfoCloud), which include folksonomy, are my focus. Today findability of information and media is getting rather good, but refindability sucks. It is long past time to fix this.

Subject of a Life Scrape

The past few months have been quite interesting to watch as I can see people doing a "life scrape" on me. A what? Yes, life scrape. This is somebody searching your digital being online. Let us say you meet a wonderful person at a happy hour and you start seeing a lot of traffic coming into your blog or other web property from a wide variety of inbound links in your referrer logs. You check your web access logs and see that many of the broad inbound links were the result of one IP address. This is a life scrape. Just like search engines will scrape a web page for its content a person's digital life can be scraped to get an understanding of who they are, for what ever the reason.

I am coming up on 10 years of having a personal website, blogging for 5, and have been commenting around the internet for more than 13 years. There is a fair amount of digital life to scrape. People could be doing this for due diligence (they are going to use me for work, hire me, write about me, or stalk me (white-hat stalking or black-hat stalking)), but I am never sure. The past couple of months I have been getting this confirmed by the people doing the life scrapes. I think the people doing the life scrape are a little more freaked out that I figured it was them (I sometimes know what search engine they have used because of the order the inbound links come in and the source of the inbound links). The web is not as anonymous as many think and with a little context (I met person X at a happy hour and they want me to help review a project for them) I have a decent idea of the probable suspects.

All of this is a part of having a digital life. It would be nice to be able to see all the inbound links for any information we as people have out there. We can examine the inbound traffic for our own websites, our RSS feeds, what others are saying, but we can't see who is hitting the external information. It is sort of the digital equivalent of having your ears ringing (somebody is talking about you says the old wives tales).

Travel Update

I am on extended stay in the Bay Area (more than the 12 hours I was here in August). Yesterday driving down 101 from San Francisco toward San Jose there was a lightening and thunder storm. So strange as they never (or rarely) happen in the Bay Area. They are common at home in the DC area. I guess it was my gift. [Yes, I discussed the weather (I loathe, utterly loathe, chatting about the weather. We have this thing called the internet and you can see instantly get weather info. Abnormal or drastic weather conversations are fine. My son seems to have picked up on this and asks every morning, "is it raining?", to which my wife smirks.]

I am still baffled by rental cars. I enjoy my beast I drive when at home, but rental cars in the U.S. only seem to serve the purpose of what poor cars the U.S. car makers produce. In the intermittent downpours yesterday the fact that not all cars (particularly the one I was driving) do not have Anti-lock Braking Systems (ABS). I have not owned a car in 10 years that has not had ABS.

No More Waiting...

I suppose I should note here that the last day at my current job will be October 6, 2005. I am not sure what the next full step will be, but I will be focussing my full attention what I have been passionate about for the past few years. Rather than spending a few hours every evening and weekends on my passions, it will become my full-time job. The details will show themself in the next few weeks and months. I need the time to persue some options and have time to think about and consider others.

For the last couple years I have joked I commute to my day job, but telecommute to my private life. Well, my private life is where most of the Model of Attraction, Personal InfoCloud, Local InfoCloud, and folksonomy work takes place. Pieces of this work make it into the day job, but not enough to keep me excited or engaged. I am really wanting to see more great work and products that easily functions for people across devices, across platforms, and is easy for real people to use and reuse.

The world has been shifting to a "come to me web". We are seeing the easiest way to make this easier for people attract what they want this is to learn what each person has an interest in, as well as what their friends and peers have interests in. This will help the findability of information and media for people, but the real problem is in the re-findability of that same information and media for people so they can have what the want and desire at their finger tips when they want it and need it. We have all of the technology needed to make this happen, but it needs research, quick iterative development, and removing the walls around the resources (information/media, unwarranted device restrictions (American cell companies have created the failure of the missing robust mobile market), and unwarranted software restrictions). Paying attention to people and people's interactions is the real key to getting things right, not trying to beat your competitor (focussing on the wrong goal gets the poor results). Make the products people need that solve problems people have (with out introducing problems) and you will have a winner. People have so many needs and desires and every person is different so one solution will not fit all and we should never make things just one way.

These will be a long few weeks with more small steps for me. There is a lot to get done and to consider in the next few weeks. In this is preparing for speaking and traveling on top of the other needed work to be done to prep for this next step. I will pop back up and fill you in when I know more. but, the count down has begun.

Back from "Vacation"

I am back home from a week (um, with an interruption) at the New Jersey Shore. It was a good week, but a different week. Our usual destination of Spring Lake is undergoing change. Over the past seven years we have been going there we have watched the housing prices rise. But this year we were seeing many of the stores we knew replaced by real estate offices and many stores were saying good bye to us as it was their last year, they too are being out priced and replaced by real estate offices.

The oddity is that many who go to this quaint little slice of the shore love the quiet, the wonderful neighborly nature of the community, and the main street (3rd Street). The increasing residential housing costs have hit the main street and part of what has made Spring Lake a great destination (very much like going back in time) is being thrown away. The success is killing what has made it a success.

We also noted there were far fewer people this past week than there have been in past years. Many have said the B&Bs are getting overpriced and a couple have left the marketplace. We also have noted that the homes that are for sale are on the market for a lot longer. The quiet nature is getting some of the pushy New York feel (which is fine in NYC or the Hamptons, but that is not what we have been wanting on a week away).

This trip also had a quick jaunt out to San Francisco thrown in the middle so to speak at BayCHI. I ordered a car service that picked me up at 5:40am that took me to the Newark airport. The driver was one of Jackson Browne's road keyboard players in years past. We talked about the music industry, travel and kids, Europe, and the changes in Spring Lake (echoing all that we had heard). I got to Newark to find out Continental had overbooked the flight and I did not have a seat (had I known this I would have booked on an other carrier), but it turned out well.

I had another whirl wind trip through the Bay Area and had not enough quality time with people I wished I had more time to hang with. I met a few new people that I a really would like to have gotten to know a little better. I must apologize to a couple people I cut short at as I was leaving PARC, as I was running late to, drive up 280, return my car, have a quick face-to-face meeting, and get on my plane. I am now trying to sort out my next trip back.

I got back into LaGuardia the next morning at 9am (after changing planes in a quiet Cleveland). I took the shuttles to Grand Central then to Penn Station to catch the New Jersey Transit train back to Spring Lake. I was running to get a ticket and then catch the train, but did not get the arrival time into Spring Lake. I figured I could get the information on my Treo easily enough as it was New York and it would be mobile enabled. Um, wrong. The web version is only JavaScript enabled (with no thought for no script versions) and therefore does not work on a mobile device (it can be a rather slick site on a laptop or desktop), which is what I needed.

I had a nice last few days at the shore and it was more relaxed than the first part. I had a nice chat on the beach, which may turn into a trip north in the end of September.

It is rather nice to be back on my laptop with a broadband connection. Using my Treo for connectivity to my digital life was a stretch. It was better than the year prior, but there were also times then the advances of the web toward AJAX, general DHTML, and rich interfaces left the needed information unaccessible from a mobile device. The page size for these pages was huge (many over 200kb), which is fine on broadband, but not smart on a mobile device. The lack of a link to a mobile version (I have not found a version of a site that I needed that offered a mobile option) was quite silly (a page without the JavaScript would have worked just fine or search for mobile could have been a solid solution).

Lastly, my Treo 600 seems to be on its last legs again. It has been only 18 months (or 20) since I got it, but it is not keeping up with the my wear and tear. My Startac and my Motorola 270c took more punishment and kept going for twice as long. The OS is getting buggy and crashing on me, which was not happening until my last day at the Shore. But it is a recurring problem tied to Snapper mail and the web browser in some way. The limitations of the memory, the added large SD card does not help, really show when trying to use the devices as one's main devices for a week. It is just an intermediary device, which it is designed to be, but the rigors of vacation use for light web, 50 plus e-mails a day, calendaring (although not dealing with iCal subscription) really made live tough. I did not have access to del.icio.us, Flickr, nor my RSS feeds (although I could have loaded FreeNews from FreeRange Communications if I could get Java running on my Treo again without it crashing).

Well, I am home. I have a ton to catch up on this weekend and to follow-up on from this week. I have to nail down some arrangements for the "Fall Tour". I will be back shortly with some more stuff here or over at the Personal InfoCloud site.

Quiet, Not for Long

Things are going to be quiet here for a few days...

Right, okay. We are fine on this end, but have just been a wee bit busy. We will be filling you in on the Fall Tour in a few days as we have been setting the initial groundwork for travel and blocking out dates.

In the short term Thomas is off the the Jersey Shore for "rest" and relaxation. Oh, since the Jersey Shore is in close proximity...

Right, okay. Thomas will be in the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday the 9th to speak on the BayCHI - Are you ready for Web 2.0? panel. Drop by and say hello.

Brain Damaging Wind

Could have been a little too much sugar or summer heat, but this is the conversation:

Brian: Wow, the weather alert is, "Rain, damaging wind, and lightening."
Self: Huh? Brain damaging wind?
Brian: No! Rain, damaging wind, and lightening
Self: Brain damaging wind? What is that first word?
Brian: Rain!
Self: Brain?
Brian: No! Rrrrrain
Self: Oh, Rain comma damaging winds comma and lightening.

QI Explained

David has posted about QI (Quite Interesting) after taking photos. I had done some digging, but David has solid info. I am already planning a trip to Oxford after speaking in London at the end of November and QI will definitely be on my list of stops, along with where I studied, read, dined, drank, and lived. Ironically, I received my Oxford University Society Alumni Card and first magazine today.

Jean Jacket Memory Hack

A while back I stopped in the Gap to look at a black mechanic jacket, but they did not have my size. They did have a jean jacket and I put one on for kicks. It was like some trove of great memories from childhood and college were unlocked from the darkness. The fit and feel was just great. My last jean jacket was worn during college, it was a Calvin Klein number with swatches of black jeans on the underside of the arms, under the collar, inside the cuffs, and under the breast pockets. Were that jacket a Levi jacket I would have kept it when I moved.

Well, while in Portland (I lived there from 3rd through 6th grade and I wore Levi jean jackets then - with my Toughskin jeans and LaCoste shrits) I trekked down to the Gap and found they had one in my size. I thought about it through the day and went and picked it up later on. It was like magic with the memories and enjoyment that eased out of me.