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Schmap guide to London June 30, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Flickr, London , add a comment

I have two of my Creative Commons licensed photos included in the third
edition of Schmap, which is an online / offline guide to London and other cities. Teh downloadable version only works on Windows though. It says “MAC OSX - coming soon” (where have I read that before? ).

Bank of England Museum

Bank of england

and

Moshi Moshi Sushi

Moshi Moshi at Liverpool Street Station is the pioneer of conveyor belt sushi restaurants.

Moshi Moshi

I’m also informed about “schmapplets” - customizable widget versions of the Schmap London Guide:

Schmapplets

The innovative technology behind Schmap Guides is also used by clients, partners and bloggers to power the display and syndication of schmapplets – a range of fully customizable map mashups and map widgets.

Schmap’s platform enables users to:

• Collate, edit and manage place related text, photos and maps.
• Publish fully customizable mashups directly to the web with a single click.
• Power websites or blogs with a range of templates and choice of mapping APIs.
• Syndicate content via fully customizable map widgets.
• Support mobile browsing, custom printing, and much more.

For a traveler or local resident, schmapplets are a great way to share recommendations, trip itineraries, local expertise and reviews. For the professional web publisher, schmapplets add an interactive mapping element to a website with a travel, events or local interest focus, and a compelling way to promote and syndicate map-related content to readers or fans.

A selection of showcase schmapplets can be viewed at www.schmapplets.com.

The link I was sent ( http://www.schmap.com/schmapplets/p=21372046N00/c=SE1001231)
leads to a page which says “Schmap New York Published Photographer: Andy Roberts” although I’ve never been to New York in my life, and probably won’t now. It doesn’t work either. Looking at the schmapplets page, the so called widgets will only work after you’ve downloaded something onto a Windows computer. I can’t see them leveraging a whole load of free word-of-mouth from Flickrites and bloggers with this one, but maybe I’m wrong.

Second London bomb found in towed away car June 29, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , add a comment

The two car bombs are said to be clearly connected. It doesn’t really seem plausible in 2007 but there is one organisation with a long history of planting bombs that mostly fail to go off.

Two car bombs found in West End
The second device was found in a blue 280E model Mercedes. It was given a parking ticket at 0230 BST on Friday after being found illegally parked in Cockspur Street.

I can’t believe the traffic warden gave a parking ticket to a car full of petrol, gas canisters and nails.

Update: Link to Wikipedia news

Car bomb averted in Central London June 29, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : London, UK , add a comment

A car loaded with 60 lites of petrol, gas and nails was left near the Haymarket in central Lopndon this morning.

Cop on Haymarket. Car bomb in the background photo by Olivier Laurent ( more photos in Flickr set and growing pool )


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6252276.stm

Police were alerted by an ambulance crew who saw smoke coming from the silver Mercedes, parked near the Tiger Tiger nightclub.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Britain faces “a serious and continuous threat”.

Reports say that Picadilly Underground Station remains closed although the Transport For London site doesn’t mention it.

Just the usual sort of thing: CENTRAL LINE: Severe delays are occurring due to a person under a train earlier at Liverpool Street.

Talking about wages is not the same as price fixing June 26, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : politics, COP, listservs , add a comment

My friend Miguel read the discussion in the online facilitation listserv and decided to note it on his blog rather than reply there, which is fair enough. I do that sometimes.

eme ká eme
Price-fixing and communities of practice.

This week there was an exchange that ended thus:

On 21/06/07, Elissa Perry wrote:

I belong to two other “professional” lists and both have stated in their rules and enforce a no pricing discussion clause as this can be construed as illegal price-fixing.

One group¹s rules state “Rule: 1.5 Please don’t discuss freelance rates on this list, as it potentially violates antitrust/price-fixing laws. This is non-negotiable.”

Another group has a rule which states

“Rule 72b: Anybody who interferes with a free flowing discussion by introducing unnecessary words of caution, calling upon laws of foreign lands and quoting rules from unspecified other groups shall be 1) cautioned 2) banished 3) deported to Australia.”
–
Andy Roberts

Andy’s quip is worth reading :-). But Elissa had raised an interesting point. Indeed that was not the first time that I have seen debate about freelance prices quashed in a community resource. A printing and pre-press forum is notorious for the squabbles whenever labour issues are raised.

Communities of practice are a queer beast in this sense. They are somewhat of a “vertical labour union” gathering different levels of professionals, often bosses and workers side by side, so they are awkward places to debate the sharing of the spoils.

And, when the members are indeed all independent service providers… they become a prime coordination environment. In the unlikely event of a profession-wide membership (or a membership wide enough to determine prices) it can indeed be perceived as a cartel. Which can be illegal, or not, depending on the country.

I’m glad you liked the quip. I’ll probably blog a reply myself but meanwhile I’d like to say that I view communities of practice as essentially horizontal, not vertical. What practices do managers have in common with workers? Employers have more to discuss with each other, even in competitive corporations, as do workers of the same trade regardless of who they work for. So I would think it perfectly reasonable for practitioners who organise together in communities to discuss pay and conditions.
The confusion with price fixing cartels of the rich and powerful is not helpful, nor ever likely to be applicable.

( Read Miguel’s further comment on his site )

The mention of deportation to Australia, by the way, for readers unaquainted with UK history is a reference to the Tolpuddle Matryrs, who were dealt with such in the 1830s precisely for organising a combination of agricultural workers against poverty wages in the rural economy.

In response to another post, I wrote:

I would reject the idea that a group of people disclosing
their individual pay rates could constitute a cartel. Monopolies which
seek to inflate profits through artificial price fixing of commodities
and workers seeking to ascertain a going rate let alone a decent
living wage, are two very different scenarios.
The issuing of warnings about implausible legal ramifications is not a
neutral action, however well meant. For a start, there is the
question of which counry’s legal system, if any, holds sway over
different individuals. Presumably the people who would urge caution
would logically need to take the laws of the most repressive state
represented in this international group, and quel the discussion down
to a level which complies with the most draconion of legal systems.

It can’t be illegal in many places in the world simply for folks to
talk to each other, and if that were to be the case then the best
attitude to take is not to voluntarily export such repression onto the
internet, but to secure new freedoms there.

Coincidence June 26, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

Hmm, Yesterday I wrote that comments are social objects too .

Now today, Roberto has closed his down, and Euan can’t turn off annoying captchas.

Open: LinkedIn to open up. MySpace next? June 26, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , 1 comment so far

Some news, analysis and links from Antony Mayfield about Facebook and LinkedIn.

Open (finds, minds, conversations)…: LinkedIn follows Facebook into the open: MySpace next?

LinkedIn is to open up: a pretty essential move to ensure its continuing relevance in a world where Facebook is hoovering up professionals to its social network.

According to Dan Farber at ZDNet, LinkedIn’s founder told him:

…over next 9 months LinkedIn [will] deliver APIs for developers, ostensibly to make it more of platform like Facebook, and create a way for users who spend more time socially in Facebook to get LinkedIn notifications

Sooner the better in my opinion. Although LinkedIn has added new functionality it has never been more than a live contacts database for me.

It’s good to see Linkedin thinking about defining itself in relation to Facebook, this may add to the usefulness of both services.

As John Naughton’s article in yesterday’s Observer neatly illustrates, open platforms rather than controlled spaces look like the smart bet when it comes to social networks.

Open platforms rather than controlled spaces sounds good to me. .

That’s the goal to aim for, once you already have an established user base and an agile development team.

The link to the Observer provides a comparison of Facebook with MySpace:

But it isn’t just the age dimension that marks out Facebook from MySpace. An intriguing contrast in strategic vision is also becoming apparent. Murdoch bought MySpace because it had become one of the most visited sites on the web. The challenge for the Murdoch team was how to ‘monetise’ those eyeballs. Their solution was a traditional combination of advertising and control. (It also helped that Google paid $900m for the privilege of providing search facilities on the site.) The advertising bit is self-explanatory; the control freakery is exemplified by the Murdoch philosophy of not allowing other people to make money on his platform. In that sense, MySpace is really Rupert’s Space.

Because comments are social objects too June 25, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, blogs and community , 1 comment so far

Applying the theory of object centred sociality to a blog, it seems reasonable to deduce that the main social object is the blog post or article, ( that which used to be called a ‘blog’ before weblogs themselves took the name). Comments are logically subsidiary to articles but it can also be the case, especially with popular blogs, that each comment has the potential to become a social object around which new activities can be linked. So it was bothering me on this blog, ever since I upgraded to Wordpress 2 and adopted the regulus theme, that the permalinks to individual comments were broken.

Sometimes it’s necessary to deep link in to a particular comment in order to provide context for a further response or to show where a point has already been answered etc. Or a discussion elsewhere may wish to crosslink.

Not only that, but the “Recent Comments” section in my sidebar needs to go straight to them, which was not happening correctly.

I checked out the theme author’s site for bug reports, but he’s done a great job and moved on. The work is considered ‘finished’. So I’d have to get my hands dirty and do a bit of PHP coding myself. That’s not something I’m currently experienced in, but neither am I afraid to tackle new languages as long as there are some examples to follow.

In the end I added one line of code into the comment.php file and changed another. That’s it. Done.

commentcode

I should now try and find a way to offer the modification back in case the author would like to incorporate it.

Dinosaurs June 25, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : video , add a comment

I went dinosaur watching yesterday.

Some things dinosaurs have in common:

Social Objects applied to PajamaNation June 19, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, object centred sociality, Pajamanation, Microjobs, distributed research, London , 4comments

I’ve been thinking about Jyri Engeström’s geek dinner where he outlined the Five Principles of Social Objects. In particular, if this approach is significantly beneficial for designing sucessful social websites then what sort of implications, suggestions and ideas can be generated by applying this to pajamanation, the global microjobs exchange?

  1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.

    2. That would be the microjob. So using the theory, pajamanation is not all about connecting people to people, it’s about connecting people to microjobs. And there are at least two ways to be connected. One person places a microjob onto the marketplace and others apply or bid for it. When a contract is awarded to a suitable bidder then this connects two people together in a working relationship, but this exists via or around the microjob which is central. The pajamaworker and her profile or his portfolio are important too, but they are not the objects around which the action takes place.

    Each microjob therefore, needs to have its own page, permalink, unique resource location (URL).

    That is the case at present. The url could be more friendly, it could be displayed on the page and there could be more options available to do things with microjobs, but the basic stuctural design is in place, for example:

    http://www.pajamanation.com/microjobexchange
    /projectdetails.php?jobid=380

    Fast typist needed to type 200 page book into a word document

  2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It’s clear what the site is for.
    • AWARD a microjob
    • UPDATE a pajamaworker profile
    • CORRECT a microjob listing
    • SEARCH or FIND microjobs - not sure how to resolve this one.
    • VIEW profiles and portfolios

    3. This is harder for us. “Buy” and “Sell” can get confusing when applied to services. A worker is selling his labour, and the job “provider” is buying a service but when you start “bidding” for microjobs it can sound like the other way round. In reality, the bid is an offer to receive a payment hence the description “reverse auction”. It can even get confusing to talk about providers since both ends of the transaction could be regarded as providing something - skills or microjobs.

    Additionally we have two major verbs on the website “find” and “search” and it’s not immediately obvious what the difference is. So this needs looking at.

    One recommendation would be to have a prominent “Place a microjob ad” button on the main page. Is “place” clear enough?

    so the main two verbs should probably be PLACE and BID with these others featuring less prominently

  3. How can people share the objects?

    4. Good point. I guess we need an “email this microjob to a friend” button as well as options to add comments and tags right there on the microjob page.

  4. Turn invitations into gifts.

    5. As above. If you’re browsing for work and you come across something which isn’t quite suitable for you, but puts you in mind of an appropriate friend thne what better gift than to point them towards an opportunity? So change the wording to reflect that - “Give this microjob opportunity to a friend”

  5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators.

    6. Here’s a rub. The original business model for pajamanation is to charge a moderate annual subscription for access to the local market, a bit more to go global. That’s already different to ebay and many straight job sites which charge commission or make entry level free with a premium service for those who require additional privileges. The idea of charging publishers would imply that the microjobs can be viewed and bidded upon by anybody for free, thus building up a large and valuable readership which is then so sought after by the microjobs providers that they would pay to be allowed to publish jobs, or perhaps to place more than one per month. Something like that. We are currently focussed on the problem of not getting a high enough proportion of microjobs for the registered workers, so charging for placement would appear to be the opposite of what’s required. It’s not completely implausible though, and a flexible approach may help to get geared up for the big picture once things start really moving. I also remember hearing that posting jobs to sites which accept free job ads is a waste of time because they get filled up with rubbish that nobody wants to sift through.

Ok, that process certainly helped to surface a lot of ideas and suggestions for development of the pajamanation site. I hope this starts a dialogue leading to fruitful exchange, faster growth and development towards a world changing service. I published my thoughts here on my blog where participation by all will be welcomed, especially my most valued spectators :-) Thanks again to Jyri for inspiration and bringing theory to the social media world.

Flu bloggers validated June 18, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Bird Flu, blogs and community , 3comments

Via Nancy White a report that seems to show how ‘flu bloggers’ are making a difference over in America:

Spare Change: HHS Flu Blog Success?
We’ve got a clear clarion call from the Secretary of HHS, to go forth into our communities and spread the pandemic awareness message. We’ve been validated, at least unofficially, as being partners in the national effort to prepare for a pandemic. And our voices, for the first time, have been heard on this issue.

In case you hadn’t gathered, the flu bloggers are on a mission. The general apathy about this burning issue is blamed on the Media, Government and public. The story, so it goes, just isn’t exciting enough at this stage:

It often moves at a glacier pace, much of the `action’ occurs in remote areas of the world where few reporters have access, and with the exception of a few dedicated flubies, most of the public simply doesn’t care about the latest genetic sequences or the seroprevalence studies on cats in Jakarta.

It’s a bit like 1999 when billions of people around the world failed to dig their own bunkers, stock up on cans of beans and guns to defend against looters in preparation for the inevitable barbarism that would follow Y2K. Outside of the United States we just don’t seem to have that ‘circle the wagons’ mentality.