Tom Hume

I've been thinking about this for a little while, spurred on by a combination of The Real Life Social Network (an excellent slideshow from a Googler) and going to see Robin Dunbar talk at the Ropetackle Centre back in February.

Dunbar was fun. Some highlights from my notes (which I forgot to post here at the time):

• Dunbar's number pops up everywhere: early hunter/gatherer clans were 150. Average village size in the Doomsday book was 150 (except in Kent, where it was 100). Hutterites split communities when they hit 150, because that's the point where they think you start needing a police force - and they want to avoid hierarchies;
• Urbanisation prevents coherent social communities: your 150 are scattered and you end up with isolated groups of friends, places to hide yourself from the unblinking gaze of your 150 - which leads to mischief;
• Lifelong monogamous relationships require computational brainpower: larger brained birds tend to be lifelong pair-bonders; the next biggest are annual pair bonders. This is driven by the need for bi-parental care: they need to coordinate to do it well;
• Primates have usefully generalised this pair-bonding to create friendships. They developed the skill of modelling the mental processes of others to help with this;
• Friendships deteriorate over time fast, without investment in them. By contrast, kinship deepens over time;
• Those from large extended families have fewer friends: your 150 gets filled kin-first;
• Military structures conform to Dunbar numbers: a section of 15 men, a platoon of 35-50, a company of 150, a battalion of 350. The seriousness of military endeavour means it's important to get coordination right. The company is the primary unit of loyalty in the military; most competitive sports are between companies;

I've been mentally collecting "lies of social software" since then, if that doesn't sound too melodramatic. So far I've come up with these, mainly based on my experiences with blogging, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook:

• "Your friends are equally important". Dunbar pointed out that we have concentric circles of friends: 5 close ones, 15 acquaintances, 50 rough friends, etc. Yet in my friends lists on Twitter and Facebook, everyone's equal (and usually alphabetical). I like what Path have done around limiting the size of your network, and the Flickr concept of Family, Friends and Contacts - but what about software for just you and those 5 of your closest? Or for you and your other half?
• "Your friends are arranged into discrete groups", with a corollary that these groups rarely change. Managing lists of friends is unpleasantly icky. I bet Google or Facebook could take away much of the pain of creating these lists by analysing my flow of communications. I bet they could notice and prompt me to confirm changes ("you're emailing Freda a lot at the moment - working late or is she a friend outside work nowadays?"). Perhaps the challenge is less technical and more how to present this to a privacy-concerned public;
• "You can manage hundreds of friends". Dunbar talked about Facebook offering circles of friends beyond the sizes our brains would naturally sustain, and mentioned that conventional friendships need sustaining interactions. I asked whether software might act as a friend-ship sustaining interaction in the absence of physical nearness - i.e. as a prosthetic primate-grooming tool. His suspicion was that without some physical contact even virtual friendships will fade, but virtual contact would slow this degradation. Conversely, in the real world, friendships don't last forever: why do we insist that they do in the virtual world? I don't know of any social network that times them out in the absence of contact;
• "Friendship is reciprocal and equal". Some people are more important to me than I am to them, and vice versa; we might not like to face up to this in every day life but it's true nonetheless, and our digital tools don't reflect this. More than that, commuting relationships into binary leaves them unhelpfully stark: what room for plausible deniability in a world built on flippable but certain bits?

I think that if we're going to use software for social purposes in future (that is, to mediate, extend or substitute our social relationships), we'll need to start fixing some of these bugs in the current implementation. I'm having some fun thinking about playful ways this might be done...

Another year, another LIFT. I didn't blog the sessions as-they-went this year, for lots of reasons: they're streamed quite nicely nowadays; Twitter has well and truly replaced my live-blogging urges with a flow of instant pith; and I've found my ideal conference bag combo (iPad+iPhone, for 2-screen action) which doesn't let me type fast enough. Plus I thought I'd try and pay attention this year. You know, just for a change.

So, brief notes follow.

Day One: Lady Gaga, Moustaches and Lossy Translations

• Macrowikinomics by Don Tapscott: a good run-through of "social software is changing the world" examples and a beautiful video of a murmuration but I didn't take away much of a conclusion from this one;
• Jean-Claude Biver was up next. I'd not heard of him but a few locals later apprised me of the high standing he's held in Switzerland. Like Don, I noticed he was using lots of technical language in his analogies (where Don spoke of "rebooting our institutions", Jean-Claude talked about education "formatting" children and wiping away their creativity). Like Don, rousing but I didn't feel I learned much: "failure is the only learning process" is a great soundbite, and I happen to think it may be true, but hearing it doesn't help me build a creatively strong organisation;
• David Galbraith gave what I felt was a strong talk, looking at 4 trends he'd identified: drawing a line from Rudolph Valentino to Lady Gaga, he put forward an economic model for celebrity (marred only by his insistence on financial valuations for data traffic built on the value-based pricing of SMS); real-person recommendations replacing algorithmic ones of Google et al (I wasn't convinced by this - it plays well to the "humans will also be superior" gut feeling our race naturally shares, but Dunbar's going to impose a limit on what you can achieve here IMHO); people-powered design (products designed for consumers outpacing those designed for enterprises, which we see with GMail vs Outlook); and the rise of separate public and corporate internets (the needs of financial services and markets meaning long-term we'll either lose net neutrality, get government-controlled networks, or have a separate corporate intranet);
• Ben Hammersley and his amazing moustache followed up with a talk entitled "Post-Digital Geopolitics": we're societally confused because the factor which we used to use to differentiate ourselves from others, distance, is less relevant nowadays. I didn't quite agree with his assertions that the Cold War fight against Russia was fundamentally different to contemporary battles against Al Qaeda (in both cases it was the West vs an ideology, manifested in many places), or that September 11th changed everything; but his conclusion that my generation's role is to translate between the worlds of those older and younger seemed reasonable... just as I suspect it has been for every such generation in the past.
• Alexander Osterwald (whose recent book I later realised sits, sadly unread, on my work-related reading pile) gave a sensible and solid talk about the need for startups to model a variety of different business models. Seems sensible, but I'd be horrified to think most people weren't already doing this.
• Then Dorian Selz, on virtual organisations. I was frustrated by this talk: clearly Dorian has managed to do what a few others (MySQL, 37signals) have managed, and many others have tried and failed to do. That said, I found his advice unhelpfully simple - "get rid of project managers" is a good rallying cry for anyone who's been badly managed or resents management, but I can't help feeling there's more to his success than this, and that perhaps he's internalised his lessons or is just innately really great at running an organisation;
• Couple Alexandra Bau and Birgitta Ralston followed, with a very personal story of building companies and a fantastic-looking home. I'm ashamed to say my notes are limited here, I was fading a little.
• Yasmine Abbas was next, on designing for transients - digita neo-nomads. It sounded interesting, and most of her subjects were probably watching in the room...
• ...and finally Jennifer Gay gave a 5-minute and deeply personal look into the world of professional translators; arguing that automated translations are naturally lossy and therefore not a huge threat to the high-end professionals, whilst confessing that cheap/instantaneous/approximate might present a threat to elegant/accurate/slower/costly human translators. I never knew the first simultaneous translations happened at Nuremberg (and threw the profession into turmoil); and I hadn't thought about the unique problems an event like LIFT might pose her trade, consisting as it does of constant shifts into the jargon of different domains. Respect due.

Day Two: Niche Communities, Understanding User Needs, and RoboMusic for Dyslexics

• Argh! I overslept and missed most of what looked like a really interesting and practically-focused talk from Tiffany St James. I'll need to go back for the video...
  
• Chris Heathcote took second spot, talking about those communities which tend to fall into the shadow of Facebook: USenet, mailing lists, and especially Grindr and Gaydar. Really nicely put together (especially the lavishly-gathered map of Grindr search results volume, put together over what was clearly a hard Saturday nights work). Everything becomes a community, it turns out; people want to talk and will duct-tape a conversational service like PingChat onto the likes of Grindr to help them do so. Oh, and a lovely soundbite: "Maps are the Hello, World of data";
  
• Azeem Azhar spoke next about online reputation and its importance for communities. The financial crisis (referenced by many speakers) gave us an opportunity to see what happens when the web of trust which supports a market-based economy is taken away: when Standard & Poor ratings no longer counted, governments had to step in. The notion of brands as proxies for personal trust had, annoyingly, not occurred to me before;
  
• Then, Steve Portigal. I've been a fan of Steve ever since reading an excellent article he wrote on personas and how they're frequently abused in the design process, and he didn't disappoint. His talk focused on research activities: how to understand user needs, particularly latent ones, and he gave a huge range of practical advice here: role-play, logging, homework, stimuli, participatory design (explained nicely as "people thinking they're talking about solutions whilst actually expressing needs"), and so on. He called for greater comfort with ambiguity (something we've noted is more important if you head down an avenue marked "agile"), and for researchers to reframe how organisers think by creating new stories, freeing designers up to manifest these stories. All good stuff;
  
• Having surfed on endorphin through Steve's talk, I crashed and missed most of Nick Coates on co-creation, and Thomas Sutton of Frog Design. I surfaced again in the afternoon, jolted awake by Yuri Suzuki and his "music for dyslexics" project: gorgeous stuff linking visuals to sound generation, often with a side-order of home robotics.
  

Day two ended with the ALP Venture Night, a presentation from 8 startups. Two stood out for me - Atracsys, who do interactive surface and projection displays, and NViso who do real-time emotional analysis of faces. Both quite interesting businesses, but I was struck by how many of the startups focussed on their product and features whilst giving little indication of how they would sell it or make any money. I didn't get much out of Scoble's closing talk - it was a walkthrough of a load of Valley startups, but with so many mentioned none of them benefitted from any depth of analysis.

Day Three: Rent Your Clothes, Algorithmic Feedback Loops, Robots and Space Travel

Day three kicked off extra-early for me. I managed to get a place on the workshop Christian Miccio ran, "Let's create a product again". It was a repeat of the same format he'd used the previous year, which I'd also wanted to go to - but he had clashed with my own repeat of Mobile Mountains (which I think is similarly themed: "let's make something, quickly").

I and a few other volunteer Product Managers arrived 45 minutes early, and brainstormed some ideas for products. Unlike most brainstorms I've run, Christian started out with no constraints at all... which was liberating if initially quite daunting. Our little group managed to come out with a diverse range of ideas:
everything from an ATM finder through a Kindle-for-sketching (which I note someone has done), through to travel assistants. We settled on a rental business for clothes: as a traveller, arrive in a city and you can have the clothes you need for your trip ready and waiting for you. The rest of the group arrived, we presented the idea to them... then listened to their reactions, answered questions and gathered feedback.

They had a ton to say: hygiene was an issue for some (though we felt this was a problem the hotel industry had successfully dealt with), as was clothing-as-identity. Could they buy clothes they liked? Buy locally appropriate outfits? Would this be appropriate for men and women? And was it, as one person noted "like James Bond"? We noted this all down, sent our erstwhile customers away to caffeinate, and Christian gave us some feedback on our performance so far: rightly chiding me for selling the idea to the audience rather than presenting it, steering us away from thinking about pricing so early, and discussing the key issues of hygiene, identity and gender.

We reconvened, and presented a more focussed product: a convenience-oriented version stocking suits, tuxedos and shirts in major European business cities. Feedback from customers was correspondingly more specific, around product details and pricing. They generally preferred this version too.

An interesting exercise: in 2 hours we'd dreamed up a product, run 2 rounds of simplistic customer research, and come to something we and they were happy with. We had no idea of feasibility or the cost structure of the business of course, but left thinking that it might be worth looking into... and overall the session was really enjoyable. In my head, I likened it to a less tactical and more strategic complement to Mobile Mountains, though I think that may have been a function of the idea we had decided to work on (which was more of a business than a specific product), than the format Christian was using.

Talks followed:

• Hasan Elahi gave an entertaining talk about his choice to expose every aspect of his life online as a commentary on the US terrorist watch list;
• Tara Shears updated us on the latest from the Large Hadron Collider;
• Kevin Slavin did a phenomenally interesting presentation, drawing a line from techniques for stealth aircraft to frustrate radar (by making themselves appear to be many smaller objects, like a flock of birds) to black-box trading (where large financial transactions are broken up into tiny untrackable pieces). With 70% of trades apparently being either algorithmically driven trades or attempts to flush out the same, financial markets are dependent on network topologies: an office 200ms nearer an Internet hub can bring serious trading advantages. And with the financial crisis providing an example of the consequences of algorithmically driven supply and demand, where else might we see these closed loops appearing? In Hollywood, say, in a world where 61% of Netflix video rentals are rented on the basis of algorithmic recommendations, and where companies can algorithmically decide what films to make - implying our entertainment industry is due a banking-style flash-crash (if it isn't already in one). Fascinating;
• Sabine Hauert followed later with a great primer on the current state of robotics: both the hype the field receives ("I read robots can feed on dead bodies") and the reality of the Roomba, Google Car, and modern warehousing robots from the likes of Kiva Systems... stopping by gliding robot-swarms bringing ad hoc comms networks to disaster areas, the Google Lunar X prize, and ending in a call for Roboethics committees;
• ... and then I stopped taking notes, sat back and watched a quad of incredible presentations: Honor Harger of Lighthouse in Brighton, presenting her work on the sound of space; Lucie Green on the sun, Jennifer Magnolfi of Herman Miller on the problems of designing habitats for long-term life in space, and Claude Nicollier showing us his holiday snaps ("me fixing the Hubble telescope", "me in my space ship", etc.) - in an endearingly humble and fantastically uplifting fashion;

Summing up

One of the things to love about LIFT is the obvious effort that Laurent and the organising team put into it. They're overtly self-critical and actively ask for, then act on, feedback from attendees. This year in his opening remarks Laurent talked about the need to balance far-looking stuff with more practical sessions, and I think they spent more time working with speakers to hone talks than normal.

The event had a really good hit rate of talks: David Galbraith, Steve Portigal, Kevin Slavin, and Claude Nicollier all really stood out for me, as did Sabine Heurt and Chris Heathcote. I took a lot away from the workshop Christian Miccio ran too.

Much of the more near-term stuff seemed to be around social media and reputation, which both felt a bit more mainstream than I'd expect from LIFT; they're the kind of things which get covered well elsewhere. But that's a minor quibble - there was plenty of amazing content, my head was stretched in new directions, and I left LIFT, as ever, already impatient for the next one.

I spent yesterday camped out at the Googleplex in Victoria, taking part in a hack day Rewired State were running to support UK Online centres.

UK Online is an organisation with a straightforward remit: there are many practical and social benefits to being online, and there's a significant number of folks in the UK who never get these benefits - either because they've never made it online, or because they're net.illiterate. It's not just about lack of access: 10% of these people live in a household which has an internet connection.

The goal of the day was to improve and drive usage of the search facility which the UK Online site provides, letting visitors find their nearest centre, and to get the data underlying this search improved. Mr Thorpe and Sym Roe had prepared for the day by providing APIs onto the centre data, and this made a huge difference to our productivity: everyone was immediately able to poke around and start building on top of their great work.

I ended up working on a couple of things: making the search facility accessible by text message and by a telephone call.

In a team with Premasagar Rose, Daniel Morris, and Sym, we produced a mobile-accessible version of the search facility: text in your postcode to a shortcode and get some info back on your nearest centre. We used the excellent Taykt service to put this together, and you can give it a go by texting "UKONLINE BN14EW" (or whatever your postcard is) to 82958. There is a 25p charge for each time you text in; it's best for UK Online if the cost of this is carried by the end-user.

I hadn't done any real development for some time, and wasn't feeling too confident when I fired up Eclipse... so I opted to work on a teensy little piece of this app which was pretty simple, and pressed a few buttons for me.

It really bugs me when you text into a shortcode and get back lumpy, unhelpfully worded responses which clearly have been spat out of a database. We've known for a while now that people treat computer systems as though they were people, and I've seen this first-hand when trawling through records of text messages people have sent in for mobile services that we run. There's an awful lot of conversational stuff in there from folks who clearly think there's a human being sitting at the other end of that shortcode.

And if your users think you're a human being and will treat you like one, does it not make sense to act like one? If someone texted me to ask for the details of a nearby pub, I might give them a little more than "Park Crescent, 01273 604993"; I might mention that there's no parking nearby, that there's amazing Thai food available until 10pm or that there's a rather nice lemony beer there. I wanted to try and bring a sense of this to the results that anyone texting in to find their nearest centre would get back.

With a single text message topping out at 160 characters, and with a huge variance in the lengths of names and addresses of the centres, the content of messages was going to vary. A short conversation with the UK Online folks revealed that the most important stuff, by far, was the name of the centre and its telephone number. The full address was less necessary: centres would rather have people call up before popping in, and many local visitors would know the centres by name. Equally, opening hours (which we had previously thought might be really important) were not so useful, mainly because of a lack of confidence from UK Online as to how up-to-date the data was.

In the end I managed to drag together a small Groovy script which took a CSV of the centre data, cleaned it up a bit (capitalising names properly, removing centre names duplicated in addresses, etc.) and spat out the best-possible-message for each. Sym then took this and merged it back in with his RESTful API. This "best possible message" could include the centre name, full address, instructions to find it, car parking details, creche and cafe facilities - it depends what we have available and how long the entries for each are. Best case you'll get a result like "Oaks Millennium Technology initiative (OMTI), 105 Farm Rd, Barnsley. Housing estate. Limited on street car park. Cafe. Call 01226 215 829". Worst case, it'll be something like "Shirley Library, Church Road, Solihull. Call 0121 744 1076". Zero rocket science involved, but it scratched an itch for me.

I had a couple of hours spare between finishing this off and the hack demos deadline, plus I was feeling a bit more upbeat, so I turned to a service Chris had mentioned early on. Twilio is a nice webby API for scripting voice systems; you bind a phone number to a URL and can then script the messages someone dialling that number hears, gather audio recordings or keystrokes from them, and so on. I decided to plug this into the search API which Sym had produced, and was shocked at how straightforward it was: within about 90 minutes I had a simple app on App Engine which would welcome callers, prompt them to type in a city name, search for it and read out the results.

Twilio and their API was very simple to work with. The only icky bit was turning a phone keypad into something suitable for entering letters, to let callers type in a town name: the Twilio APIs tell you what digits someone has typed ("53937" for Lewes, say), but no more. I can't decide whether the approach I took was elegant or disgusting: I grabbed a list of UK city names from the Geonames site, then then wrote a bit of code which takes this list plus a sequence of digits, and removes all the city names which couldn't have been typed by that sequence. So, if someone has typed in the digit "2" as their first letter, we know the city name must start with A, B or C - and all others can be removed. Repeat this for all digits, and you very quickly whittle through all possible cities. It's like predictive text, but made out of cardboard boxes and sticky-back plastic, and I was pleased to get a chance to do a miniscule bit of TDD when putting it together.

You can try out the service by calling +12052898881; sorry, Twilio only do US numbers so far, but I think you could hook up a Skype forwarder to them. The voices definitely need improvement, I think - the text-to-speech engine Twilio currently uses is frequently hard to understand.

The demos were good fun. I was particularly humbled at the polished presentation which Chris and his team had given to their web app, designed to give net.illiterates who might find the open blankness of the Google search page intimidating, a good "first reason to go online".

All in all, a good day. I stumbled back onto the London/Brighton line, tired but happy.

• Romain Guy and Chet Haase do a lovely presentation on animation techniques;
• Mogotix: "The easy way to create and manage any event with mobile tickets";
• Fancy Hands: "a team of a assistants ready to work for you right now. You should focus on what's important, let us focus on the rest";
• Cute idea for raising app quality in stores: charge $50 to submit an app, so "if the developer doesn’t believe their application is going to return at least $50 they will be unlikely to submit it or burn through cash and be stopped that way."
• Excellent lecture on problem-solving from Barry Nalebuf. I will never eat a banana the same way again.
• Smule announce the winner of their "I am T-Pain" competition. "you can call me Steve Jobbs cuz i got soo many app" I *heart* Smule, so I was chuffed to hear they raised more funding at the end of last year
• Android and iPhone users are very similar: US-only but still interesting (and other smartphone owners aren't that different either). I also note that Android seems to be recognised more by consumers in this survey than I'd expect...
• Completely non-technical, but I was intrigued to see the old Head of Theology from my boarding school, Father Hunwicke, is now blogging. Much of the church-politics side of things goes over my head, but his online writing retains the distinctive style I remember from his teaching and is well worth a read: "I doubt if our culture of instant polybonk delivers a quarter of the pleasure of wondering whether she really meant to brush your hand with hers as she offered you another sandwich."

Yeon-ho Oh, OhMyNews: the story and future of citizen journalism

OhMyNews is direct democracy in media; every citizen is a reporter. Our ideas are not just commonplace, they're common sense. All online newspapers have users participating in many ways.

Shows an example of a Korean citizen journalist covering Chelsea football instead of sleeping. Many users have written >1000 stories. The passion of their reporters far exceed those of other staff at other newspapers.

Is citizen participation always good? When it's done for the right reasons. Sometimes citizens need someone to facilitate their passion. We also have staff reporters, who work with the citizen journalists. There were 4 staff when we started (including me)

...

Basile Zimmermann, University of Geneva: Technology and Cultural Difference in China

What's a cultural difference? Language and alphabets: web sites and email addresses are usually written in English. Why do character sets get corrupted or fail to display when you move between languages? Because English-speaking users were the first target for producers of computer systems - ASCII anyone?

How to enter Chinese text: type it phonetically, then choose from homophones. But after a while, people forget how to write by hand: knowledge of strokes isn't required by the system.

Shows the Google logo evolve over time. Compares to Baidu. Google has 30% market-share, Baidu 60%. Shows a Yahoo page with a version of the Baidu logo created with the reverse Chinese/English emphasis on the parts of the logo. IT LOOKS WRONG.

If you want to work with China, take a look at the Wikipedia page about unequal treaties with them. Every Chinese person knows about these, few people in the West know.

...

China will soon be one of the top 3 nations economically. The shift will reverse: China first. How will technology look on the day it was reinvented by the Chinese to fit their own needs?

1. China is reinventing operating systems, DNS, and input mechanisms to suit their language.
2. Computer technology embodies "western logic". Computers are great at chess, but bad at Go: the logic for these games is different. Perhaps the internal logic of the computer is something essentially Western, and Go just doesn't fit into it?
3. China is the #1 country for the internet in terms of users and pages. The Chinese government thinks it'll help the economy, but they want to find out what is dangerous and what is not.

It's time to learn Chinese.

Chinese Internet users have a different way of reading web pages, the aesthetic is different. They tend to go online to have fun, where our bias is more for work. We use email a lot and IM less; in China the balance is reversed. Chinese users don't care much about censorship; while we in the West believe China is a dictatorship, it's not like that. Everything relating to religion, politics and pornography is monitored closely; but censorship isn't unique to China. The government there wants to keep things under control and avoid bad things happening, but that doesn't mean they want to control everything: think of the parent/child relationship as a model.

Jamais Cascio, Institute For The Future: Wired for Anticipation.

Future as process, not destination.

Normally we're thinking about the end of the world; but the future isn't just a threat, it's adaptation and resilience. Shows a seed vault in Norway: a bank of seeds, "just in case" of global disaster.

Civilisation was born in the fires of catastrophe. Last great supervolcano drove us down to about 5000 hominids. After this time you see superior tools; grammar emerged; and ballistics (throwing things at a target), which uses the same neural mechanisms as prediction.

We tend to hang onto the future visions that we come up with. Think of foresight as a means of testing strategy, and you need a number of possible endpoints to think about. Most big businesses do scenario planning.

Shows Thorazine poster. What are the things we talk about now, that in a decade or three will look ridiculous? Grey goo nanotech? We're making a new future, but it's not one we want. It's not a supervolcano but could make many of us deeply unhappy. Futurists are trying to build a world where we're sensitive to different outcomes, so we can make a future we want.

The carbon footprint of cheeseburgers eaten in the US in a year equals the footprint of SUVs in the US for a year.

Futurists (by which I mean all of us) are the immune system for civilisation: seeing the potential of change early enough to take action.

Shows photo of Saturn eclipsing the sun - only visible from the far side of Saturn.

Channels Sagan.

All our tools, our manifestations of our ethics and culture... we act on the basis of how we understand the world. As we become more as gods, the imopact of our choices become more consequential. Technology is culture.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, tinker london: A Day in the Life of the tech-nerd-shop that brought us the Arduino

In year 3 of the business. Mainly employ jack-of-all-trades. Developed a platform called Arduino. Stopped doing it to let others carry on. Do lots of education, to get people to know them through tech they use.

Office in Silicon Roundabout. Work on building knowledge internally. Allow for idle time, but don't work it in.. it becomes work. They just allow people to do stuff, which eventually becomes something they talk about at conferences.

Open source everything.

Fabian Hemmert, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories: Making Computers Stiff, Scratchy and Stubborn

Works lot with mobiles. Ideal phone is light, thin, smart, slick, easy to use.

Think about alternatives: this is dull. Very interested in resistance: bounces light around, indicates physical tension. Make computers stiff, scratchy and stubborn. e.g. button with force-feedback that changes its resistance according to what you do with it - press hard to delete a contact, press light to take a photo.

Touch-screen which has a pen with break, to stop you moving it.

Breathing mobile phone. If you miss a call it gets excited and breathes faster, you need to calm it down by patting it.

Shape-changing mobile: an ebook that tells you how many pages are left to read by getting fatter/thinner.

The Transition from Broadcast to Multiplatform for a public service broadcaster: getting attention and measuring success, Alice Taylor, Channel 4

Channel 4 Education's target audience is (will be) 12-19 year old. They weren't watching much TV in the morning slots, so now CH4 go where they are: online.

One myth about teenagers is that they have the latest technology. They don't: it's mostly broken, hand-me-down. Only 1/4 of teenagers self-describe as mainstream.

In broadcasters, digital projects are usually "support". That's not the case for Alice's folks. An hour of TV usually costs 100k (40-60k if it was cheap, 150k if it was expensive): a rough audience of 100k for £100k. Can online do better?

What kinds of things? Games, TVs with tools, TV/app blends. Not much iPhone (3.5% of UK have iPhone, a subset of them are teenagers). The majority is on games.

In the UK, all top 10 destination sites for UK teenagers are American.

Using Bittorrent for distribution of Science of Scams. Unusual for a broadcaster.

Success is a combination of number of target audience reached, feedback from interested parties, feedback from critics, divided by cost: a blend of qualitative and quantitative.

Games lead to long dwell times: 15-25m. TV *can* do, but adding things around it (a celebrity for Science of Scams) can help.

Jean Burgess, Youtube's unfolding history

Youtube is 5 years old this year. Started as a dating-ish site. Youtube was underdetermined from the very start. Bedroom as vaudeville stage. Large proportion of content was video-blogged, a format that predates Youtube. A subset of the Youtube community sees itself as, and functions as, a community. The most subscribed channels have emerged organically from this "Youtube social network" - very few are large media brands.

Is Youtube a file-sharing/piracy site? No. The company is quarantining off big media into curated areas, away from the messy activities of Youtube users. Youtube is the biggest museum of television in the world, but its content has been selected collectively by its users - so it's an archive of public culture and has public value even though Youtube is not a public organisation.

Then there's remix culture: Downfall parodies, say. The messiness of our everyday practices when it comes to audiences or producing content are not compatible with the dominant business logic of the broadcast media.

Participation in user-created content is not universal.

Aubrey de Grey: Prospects for regenerative medecine against aging

Aubrey doesn't work on immortality, he works on aging, for a US nonprofit called SENS Foundation, interested in combatting aging using regenerative medicine.

Death from aging isn't just "natural causes": it's anything that mainly kills old people. Don't think about longevity, think about keeping people healthy. When we're good at this, people will live longer - but that's a side-effect, it's not the main purpose. 2/3 of the 150k people who die every day die of aging (90% in the industrialised world).

And aging isn't fun, even if you don't get nasty diseases.

Being old and frail is extremely expensive: $200bn p.a. in the USA alone. The last year of life, if you're over 60, costs more than the rest of your life. So it makes economic sense too.

Why is aging defended? Rational denial: it's both ghastly and inevitable. And it's rational to put ghastly inevitable things out of our minds. But what if it wasn't so clearly inevitable? Aubrey thinks we'll have a big effect on it within our lifetimes.

What is aging? The accumulation of damage, the side-effects of normal metabolic processes. Our existing treatments against aging are "the geriatrics approach": trying to do something about the pathology of old age. This is a losing battle. The other approach (gerontology) is that prevention is better than cure: clean up metabolism by slowing down the accumulation of damage.

But metabolism is incredibly complicated: we only understand a tiny amount of it. If we try and interfere, we'll fail.

In the "maintenance approach", we don't try to slow down the creation of damage, or its consequences: we repair it periodically. Damage isn't complicated, compared to metabolism. Damage is junk, cells, mutations and protein crosslinks. No new types of damage have been confirmed since 1982, we can be confident this is a complete list.

This would lead to an extra 30 years of human life. These are all maintenance therapies, applied to people who are already middle-age: making 60/70 year olds biologically younger.

Longevity Escape Velocity: the rate at which rejuvenation therapies must improve to outpace the accumulation of so-far irreparable damage. By the standards of most technologies, we're going fast. So anyone getting first-generation treatment should live for as long as the therapies keep developing.

He has a book; is interested in donations of money, or research time.

Doomed to be forever young, Antonio A Casilli

Shows his cousin and grandmother using MySpace and Youtube respectively. What does "digital native" mean?

There is no empirical evidence for digital natives. Not all children are computer-savvy (there's strong variability in language/linguistic skills/etc/). The situation is changing quickly and sharply.

The myth of "wired kids" was created in 1982, and has flourished ever since. Let's look at artifacts (computers) and how they've been at the centre of two social dynamics: reterritorialisation (computers have changed the place where they sit: military bases to factories to offices to households) and miniturisation.

The commercial names of computers performed a "dismissal of adulthood": the Piccolo, the Husky, the IBM PC Jr, Microbee, Apricot, Apple. The worst performers in the market: Vixen, Power 10 Cortex, Dragon, Charlemagne.

Why this dismissal of adulthood? Economic reasons: younger generations buy high added-value services, so are targeted by more aggressive marketing campaigns. Cultural reasons: technology associated with a futuristic optimism (post-Big Brother), leading to a change in our perception of age cohorts and generations. Political reasons: the divide between digital natives and immigrants mirrors a real-life divide between old and young that we see in real life.

Actually, digital natives never existed. Economic, cultural and political factors account for the creation of this myth. With 2bn people online, perception evolves.

How is my generation being transformed by technology: Julian Zbar

Anyone my age is an expert on the Internet. We are no different to any other generation; some preconceptions about us are true, some false. We've not known a world without the Internet, it's a given for us. One physiological change: the Internet is our extra limb. We're as cost-conscious as you, but expect everything to be free.

Connectivity is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity: whatever you're doing, you need to be connected to the Internet. It's not as important what you're connected with.

Everything beyond hardware should be free. What we do on the Internet has no monetary cost, there's no opportunity cost for us to be online. We don't consume out of necessity, but there's lots of music I wouldn't own if its ownership had meant giving up something else.

We're accustomed to receiving an awful amount and giving back nothing at all. The internet is feeding us all the free lunches we can stomach. You wouldn't download a car? If I could, I would.

Short attention spans. Interchangeable sources. Instant information. When it becomes so easy to get something, you have less interest in it. Articles would be more interesting if I had to wander somewhere to fetch them.

We discard the things we don't like, rather than choosing the things we do like: choosing things takes too much time.

The Internet follows us everywhere. We are never doing nothing. Don't confuse this with exponential growth in productivity, it's just very easy to fill every waking moment with activity.

On social media: 2 years ago a few people were resisted, today everyone has a Facebook account. Being social is no longer an active decision: your social scene falls onto your lap without your wanting or seeking it. Facebook is a paparazzi magazine of everyone you have ever met. The beauty of meeting people and forming relationships has been lost. When you meet someone, you already have a great deal of information about them: it changes the way you act even when you're not using it.

Everything is classified and exposed: like, ignore, add, etc. Social actions are trivialised: judging, rejecting, commenting is all less important. You don't get the human reaction to your own actions in front of you.

It's easier to use Facebook and Skype to say difficult things; it's as though we're forgetting the spontaneity of conversation. Like road rage, two drivers sitting in their cars and cursing each other for a trivial motoring incident.

No-one is consciously worrying about privacy. Google stalks your searches, Facebook knows your social info. How can you worry about your privacy?

Every situation is documented and exposed. Little judgement is given to what is put up. This distorts our scale of value: everything is consistently and repeatedly replaced by something new.

Twitter doesn't add any value over and above a Facebook account. It hasn't caught on for my generation in Switzerland.

• PatientsLikeMe, crowdsourced health information;
• Starling, a social TV platform. I think there's going to be so much mileage in this stuff... television is a social medium;
• The literary platform, a top-notch blog covering publishing and digital content;
• The data-driven life: "without good time calibration, it is much harder to see the consequences of your actions. If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them.";
• The Five Second Test, for getting quick feedback on designs;
• Realtime visualisation of European flights, particularly lovely to look at whilst they were all volcano'd out;
• No Bugs: "This isn't a matter of finding defects earlier; it's a question of not generating them at all"
• Designing for iPad - a pile of practical hints, tips and thoughts on iPad UI;
• SCVNGR, a very interesting-looking Google-backed location-based gaming platform;
• Authenticating against App Engine from Android... slowly, slowly, tying all that infrastructure together...

Digital Media and the Future of Politics - Rahaf Harfoush

How are social networks and collaboration technologies changing the way we support and influence governments and campaigns?

What did the Obama campaign do that was different? MyBo.com allowed participants to connect, blog, write, demonstrate support. Traditionally candidates ability to reach into different states was limited by their resources - it's expensive to reach lots of states. This tool let the campaign tap into a network of millions of volunteers, who could self-organise.

2 million profiles created in 2 years; 35,000 volunteer groups created (e.g. "Chihuahua owners for Obama"); 400k blog posts; 200k offline events.

Traditionally voters would be distanced from a candidate - they'd see them on TV news, but that's it. With this campaign you'd be reading their thoughts on the blog, see cameraphone pictures from the campaign team, see unscripted moments (e.g. Obama playing basketball). This bond translated into a feeling of closeness to the candidate and personal investment in seeing them succeed: supporters become friends.

The McCain campaign raised $360m, the Obama $750m. In September 2008 Palin said that she felt campaign organisers didn't have impact. The Obama community was built on the opposite belief: that anyone can get out and make a change. This galvanised Obama supporters into demonstrating what their community organisers could do - in 24h they raised $10m. By end 2008, they'd received $150m, two-thirds from online.

Today there's a focus on open data and transparency in government. The community that supported Obama in the 2 years before he got into the white house aren't going away.

The Sunlight Foundation works with the Obama administration on data.gov and recovery.org (to track spending related to the Recovery Act).

Google are mapping government requests, to see how governments are interacting with our data.

Ushahidi.org: a citizen journalist site from Kenya which allowed people to report instances of threat to the political process: took something not spoken about and made it open to the world.

Social media made the Iran protests something larger than "just inside Iran" - e.g. green-tinting of avatars to draw attention. Effectively, people who weren't in Iran were expressing a desire for the story to be given prominence.

In Rhode Island, citizens are looking for a new Mayor and are rethinking the political process with Uncaucus: putting out a job description, deciding what the role of the mayor is. In Canada, an unpopular decision from the prime minister Stephen Harper to dissolve parliament led to a Facebook campaign to see if an onion ring could get more fans than the prime minister - it could.

In Mexico, drug dealers are using Facebook and Twitter to support their business (e.g. tweeting about government roadblocks). Governments there are writing legislation to monitor and regulate these tools. This legislation will include creating a police force to monitor social networks. They're considering banning Twitter (as in Iran they're banning access to GMail, and in China they've banned Facebook). Expect more of this.

In Kurdistan last year, 80% of their bandwidth was taken offline for two weeks, just as the government was taking pressure from Russia to shut down a US airbase... once the parliament voted to shut the base, the attacks stopped.

US Government asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance, so USG could monitor the election situation in Iran.

Retweeting something isn't getting involved.

Q: Do you have any examples of how to combat hijacking?

A: On MyBo you could organise meetings in your neighbourhood. There were lots of examples of people organising meetings against Obama. It's important for your supported to understand the mission, that they become your advocates. You can't control everyone, you can't be everywhere at once - but you can turn your community into your eyes and ears. We had our community spotting these groups, eventually. Objectionable content was spotted and removed within two minutes of it being posted. This is a risk that comes with the territory.

Claudia Sommer, Greenpeace Germany: Greenpeace social media strategy and on-line campaigns

Greenpeace has done mass-media comms for decades. What we do now is "open campaigning" - giving people more opportunities to get involved. In Germany we have some obvious problems solved, but the big ones (climate change) remain. In the past we've pushed these into the spotlight with TV or print campaigns. We need to create peer pressure and visible actions. We will do this by getting in touch with people who are already active and who are willing to mobilise others.

Facebook and Twitter work well for us (8700 and 8100 fans respectively). Flickr is interesting for us, we want to publish our photos under Creative Commons but it means renegotiating rights with photographers. At the same time we think it's important for us to be independent of any one social network.

Greenpeace can't solve issues like climate change alone; we need wide public support. If we campaign against Nestle, say, it's important for us to have good backing - they own large media companies. GreenAction is our platform to kickstart online campaigns: it's independent, with no advertising, political parties or companies. Initially designed for Greenpeace, it is available for other environmental campaigns too: "open source" campaigns.

8 months in, 6050 registered users, 15-20% launch campaigns (500 so far). Three different user groups: individuals, campaigners, organisations like Bund. There's a tendency to "mash up" (or combine) similar campaigns. Very few terms-of-service violations.

Shows the Nestle Killer campaign, which they started on GreenAction. Just over 5000 people involved on the site, spreading the message, talking to Nestle directly via Twitter. They took a digital Twitter-wall to Nestle. The story in German press discussed the Twitter-wall, but no-one mentioned Greenpeace: this was very successful. They've reached 1m people via these tweets.

Gorleben campaign, where documents concerning the siting of a nuclear waste storage facility in Germany have been digitised, placed online, and made searchable.

Media, audiovisual content meets the digital universe: Catherine Lottier and Virginia Mouseler

Dividing lines in content are blurring: fiction/documentary, say. We now have hybrid genres: X meets Y (fiction with a bit of documentary benefit, documentary with a real-TV aspect to it, mix of real and virtual worlds.

On 9/11, CNN was a major news source for officials, never mind the public. Nowadays events come to our attention not via TV/radio, but social networks (think not just of the recent volcanic ash, but of the Mumbai attacks in 2008).

Visual codes of the digital universe (URLs, hashtags) are migrating into broadcast. Instead of story-telling, immersion. Comment culture: lots of programmes are now comment on other media, whether it be satire (The Daily Show).

How does this change things? See The Execution of Gary Glitter in the UJ, Mes Cheres Etudes in France, or The District in the US.

Also showed a clip of "Stand out from the crowd", a new Noel Edmonds property which looks like it was written for Charlie Brooker to take the piss out of. Edmonds' face bursts out of advertising hoardings to offer innocent members of the public a chance to WIN CASH PRIZES.

Mercedes Bunz

Algorithmically generated news in the US: "not to replace journalists, but to deliver material that journalists can build on".

Guardian Zeitgeist.

"Newspapers produce masses that don't even need to gather"

Design principles for Mag+: Bjorn Jeffrey, Bonnier R&D

1. Silent mode. Less distractions. "Continuous partial attention" is a good thing in many ways, but not all your media experiences should be that way. We thought of interactivity in terms of layers: just as you have silent mode on a phone, you should have it in a magazine. It starts silent, but when you decide you want more it can move from passive to immersive.
2. Clearly defined beginning and end. Simple linear flow, a defined storyline, a sense of completion.
3. Designed for the screen. Don't make the user zoom in or out, make the content constantly readable.
4. Advertising as content. People like advertising as long as it's relevant.