The Homemaker Plate - for Object Wiki June 11, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Wiki , add a commentI photographed a mass produced ceramic dinner plate in my possession which is from the the design classic series “The Homemaker” for the Object Wiki, a project from the Science Museum, which aims to collate information from the public on some of the objects from their collections.
I like the quirky design for being bold enough to champion household objects on a dish, for the seemingly impossible shape of one or two of the designs depicted, and above all for the cheerful optimism of 1960’s modernism. I didn’t even know it was designed by Enid Seeney before reading the Object Wiki entry, but this led me to explore the background to the plate on the C 20 th site which is also home to theatre memorabilia.
More Friendfeed tips - video 3 May 30, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : friendfeed, social objects, web2.0, tools , 3commentsFour more tips for getting to grips with FriendFeed
In this third video of the series I show four simple techniques for delving further into the productive use of Friendfeed as a social media tool.
So this being a Friday, you’re now all set for an exciting weekend experimenting and exploring the fast growing conversations in Friendfeed Rooms. Seeya there.
Note: due to a misunderstanding of Blip TV episodes you might have failed to view video 2 in this series which is here: Friendfeed and Social Objects
And if you can’t access video at all for some reason, there are some transcript notes included below and over on edocr.com at Friendfeed video transcript. Thanks to Allison Reynolds 100 eggs post for that idea.
Friendfeed and Social Objects May 28, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : friendfeed, internet, social objects, tools , 5commentsIn this second screencast video about Friendfeed, I talk about the way Friendfeed uses social object theory to add stickiness to imported feeds. There’s also a discussion of Friendfeed rooms, and a reply to Linda Hartley’s question about the first video in this series: Friendfeed for Microblogging.
Warning: This screencast is hosted on Google video Blip.TV because I overshot the length limit of ten minutes for youTube - oops.
Social Object theory or Object Centred Sociality has been explained by Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku.
If you are trying out Friendfeed yourself, you might subscribe to mine here: Andy Roberts Friendfeed
Friendfeed for microblogging - a screencast video May 26, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : friendfeed, social objects, web2.0, tools , 6commentsFriendfeed is more than just a clever lifestream aggregator for all your other applications, it’s also a micro blogging platform in its own right. Here’s a screencast video I made to show how.
In the next screencast video of this series, I’ll show how Friendfeed microblog entries can be social objects, and the use of “rooms”.
Meanwhile, I’d be interested to hear how you think the future will unfold in this area. Twitter has the best community at present but can it hold on to it? Friendfeed has some of the elements of Facebook but without the apps. Have you tried migrating to Jaiku or Pownce? Can’t understand what’s the point of microblogging is anyway?
Twitter writing competition - a story in 140 chars May 21, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects , 5commentsTwitter Story Contest
I was alerted to a twitter writing competition over on copyblogger and decided to have a go. The rules are that the story must be exactly 140 characters in length, and it’s only one entry per person with a deadline this Friday so I composed an entry right away. I could have waited to get the measure of all the other entries coming in, but it’s better to be quick and impulsive sometimes.
What is twitter for?
Twitter is the simple web and mobile application that allows for an exchange of public and private messages of up to 140 characters in length, and it’s the simplicity and brevity which make for the charm of the environment. That and the fact that twitter was the first micro-blogging tool to achieve critical mass, so it’s where everybody else is. The only Social Objects are the “tweets” (posts) and “twits” (twitterers) themselves.
Writing styes on twitter can vary from ugly txt speak (not gr8 !) through cut down sentences ( “need coffee. late for bus” ) to Haiku poetry, free expression and eloquent mini sagas. As with blog reading, the value is in following developments over time - days, weeks and months.
My humble entry for the twitter writing contest
Here’s my 140 character twitter story:
I feel my neighbours make far too much fuss about their precious lawns and flower borders. So stealthily from my side, I grow weeds at them.
But you can do better than that! Of course you can.
This is a very strong entry by Smithereensblog
We all expected nuclear war, epidemics, melted ice caps. But poisoning by plastic? A childless world? We had no contingency plan for that.
A collection of twitter stories
There are 263 comments on the blog post where the competition is now, most of them simply links to the twitter status updates as entries to the contest, and I’m not sure if the stories themselves will ever need to be gathered together on a wiki page for example, or if they can just be linked to in situ. It’s not very fluid to work your way through at present, and with nearly three full days to go, it can only get more unweildy. Following on the apparent usefulness of the ABblogpack drop.io I tried setting up a twitter story drop.io to allow for anybody to add their own links but that doesn’t seem to offer much more than the original list of blog comments really, so I didn’t proceed with it. Or should I?
Who else has blogged this?
Waiting in Transit: Twitter Writing Contest on Copyblogger
Blogscapes: Twitter Writing Contest
The Golden Pencil : Write 140 Character Fiction for an IPod Nano
Noel Feria : Twitter Writing Contest: Win an iPod Nano For the Best 140 Character Story
The competition entry page again: twitter writing competition
Is VIDEO on Flickr better than youTube? April 9, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Flickr, video, London , 3comments
Video uploading to Flickr went live earlier today so it’s a big topic of conversation, especially the inevitable comparison with youTube the leader in the field.
My first reaction was delight to discover that the flickr video upload and sharing is totally integrated into the photo sharing community aspect of flick that made it so successful. Videos appear in the photostream alongside stills, and can be community tagged, commented on, sent to sets and groups, and blogged using “blog this” which is fantastic. The quality of the video and audio is superior too, with up to 150MB file sizes acceptable for a 90 second video. Why the 90 second limit? Well this is to avoid the problem of being used as a file download service for copied music videos, TV clips and films etc and to encourage home made movie clips from digital cameras, phones etc. So Flickr can avoid the enormous copyright problem that google inherited when they bought youTube.
“long photos”
Central to Flickr’s philosophy for introducing video is the concept of the “long photo” which kind of fits in with the use of digital still cameras that have the capacity to take video clips. This service is for genuine user generated video, short clips about everyday life, surroundings, little art videos and so on. Not so much about long videos of talking heads recorded straight from webcams saying “um” and “ah” a lot either.
London Video group
Flickr groups by default can accept both pictures and video but I thought it might be useful to have a group for London Video that focusses on video only, still linked to the London photo group, London Flickr meetups. I’ve invited some flickr contacts from London and from the social media cafe as well, but anybody interested in video is welcome to join and upload anything vaguely London related.All in all, it’s going to be very interesting to see how creative people use the opportunity that Flickr video is offering.
To give an idea, here’s Billy’s bacon video from Flickr, embedded on this wordPress blog.
I know, you can already do all that with youTube but I feel there are some significant advantages with the Flickr Video implementation, aren’t there?
Google cheat sheet - embedded pdf viewer from edocr April 7, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects , 2comments
There are a few document sharing sites taking off at present and I like this one called edocr where I found this Google cheat sheet:
Above is a short document called the Google Cheat Sheet which contains a list of Google services, urls, international and some other at-a-glance stuff. It’s being presented here on my blog as an embedded object, much like is done with youTube videos. There are a few buttons which can help you view the document, including a zoom and text cursor so you can copy and paste from it. There’s probably a way of clicking back through to the page of the person who uploaded it onto edocr.com too.
Update:
There doesn’t seem to be a way to click through to the original document from the embedded widget thingy above so here’s another option for bloggers, a thumbnail with link to download the document:
London social media development February 14, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social media, social objects, London, cider , add a commentIt was Wednesday evening so I went along to the Coach and Horses in Greek St, Soho to take part in an early user testing session for i-together’s new twitter and google maps mashup project. The usability test was run by Ofer Deshe of Flow Interactive who introduced himself as coming from a background in cognitive psychology, using techniques borrowed from ethnographical anthropology, so being chosen as the user to be observed was something of a privilege. I was sat in front of a laptop running a web service with no explanation or guidance, asked simply to explore and try to make sense of it. Well I just hope my slightly flummoxed attempts at navigation and comments provided some useful data.
Afterwards we had some wide ranging conceptual discussions which touched on ideas about public identity and personal security, activities or events as social objects, the natural development of some online communities into face-to-face meetups and much more. There’s still a fair amount of work to be done on the prototype service, both in explaining the concepts and making a winning user interface, but if anyone can do it then Luke, Benjie and Jof are in position to succeed with support from the vibrant and friendly London social media development community.
The Coach and Horses is also the venue for Social Media Café on Friday, and I was happily able to use the free wifi to update the cider wiki to mention the Westons Old Rosie currently on tap.
London Google Maps mashup with what’s on listings December 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : object centred sociality, social objects, London , 1 comment so farThe LondonPaper has launched a website which mashes up Google Maps with up-to -date listings data to provide a service which will also be available by mobile phone using Monilink.
They (News International, Rupert Murdoch) call it “The London Knowledge” and the listings information is apparently supplied by Londonparties, one of the best Time-Out style online guides to London nightlife. The checkbox allows you to map any or all locations for categories Cinema, Theatre, Comedy, Art shows, Live music, Nightclubs and ‘Something different’
The Search box accepts street name , venue or postcode for 5,000 listings of cinema showings, music gigs, theatre shows, club nights and art events for any specific day, so you can find out what’s on at the London theatres for example.
The one fatal drawback at this stage though, is NO PERMALINKS !
It’s all done within Javascript, Ajax, Flash or whatever within the same initial page URL so no social objects, no ‘email a friend’ and no community reviews, community content. If this is engineered into the software design then Trusted Places have nothing to fear for a long time to come, except for the mobile phone aspect perhaps, which Londoners may take a liking to especially for finding out what’s on last minute nearby when you’re already out and about.
Open Social Objects? November 2, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : theory, social objects , 2commentsOpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:
- Profile Information (user data)
- Friends Information (social graph)
- Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)
The details aren’t yet out so it’s possible that the Activities API allows for discussion around social objects but there’s also a chance that the common mistake of designing only for links between people and people has been built in to the framework.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
