Hacking the Good days…

Am at a conference Social Tools and IBM’s Luis Suarez is sharing his musing on thinking outside the inbox.

From an average of 30-40 emails to his inbox a day, Luis has reduced that to 20 emails a week and now is a *zero* inbox.  There are 2 main drivers for Luis to shift his information collaboration hub to social software such as wikis, twitter, internal facebook or even IM:

(1) Content is dead – one you hit the publish button your content is outdated already. Information moves fast – we need to train ourselves and our system to filter signals from noise, and email is not helping at all.

(2) Young people – ‘emails are for grandparents’, they are the champions of Instant Messages / live communications.  In the age of where firewall no longer applied to companies with staff armed with increasingly powerful personal phones, companies will become obsolete if they do not accommodate these new medium of communications.

So as a social computing evangelist @IBM, Luis shifts from

*me -> my email -> fighting my way through corporate membrane*

to

**me -> my social network -> my community -> getting the work done*

What I concur the most is that email does a very bad job in collaboration, but I am not sure if wiki can be a complete substitute.  As although I identify with the fact that focus should not be tool or business (process),  but people; it is a challenge to have the confidence to shift your work-social-network to another medium given the vast diversity of technographic profiles of your workmates.

Key takeways:

We live in a post-firewall paradigm, so don’t even think of controlling information access for next generations of workers.  How can companies build and continue to evolve a fluid and effective knowledge system for now and the future? Think about open collaboration, many-to-many resolutions, and infrastructures that encourage reciprocity of knowledge management, e.g. Visibility of internal facebook-software, colleagues chime in when you’re on holiday.  But start from you – and others will follow.  Have the guts!  ;) hah.

I did a lengthy post for YDN links here.

For those who’re interested in the presentation on Wikipedia’s Community deep dive, check out the deck here:

| View | Upload your own

It’s been almost 4 years since I started observing and learning from the growth of the Wikipedia community… so the deck is actually pretty dense, and I’ve been too swarmed to do any fancy ppt magic – forgive me!  Any comments/questions, just give me a shout!

Oh and Rain requested me to post a photo of me playing with Diablo under Ian’s patient instruction,

Incidentally the one and only one computer game I was addicted was Diablo I – I killed Diablo when I was 14! Probably more than just once as well.. Thanks Ian for bringing back my Über geek memories…

from IHT:

One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.

My usual response to outside-the-box ideas that blend arts and science by default, is in awe. But this feels too weird – (a) mouse + (b) living cells that keep on multiplying + (c) shapes like a coat but is living…..

/yike

You might have noticed that earthquake has shaken SiChuan, China, and thanks for those who raised their concerns. I have no families and friends who are affected as someone from Hong Kong, but looking at the devastating state of situation, I want to show you why we’re working in an industry that is bigger than just figures, but also meaning and promises to peoples’ life.

To date [BBC News],

About 10 million people in Sichuan province have been directly affected by the 7.9 quake that flattened entire villages, state media said.
Nearly 15,000 people are known to have been killed, and another 26,000 are still trapped in the rubble.

Figures are figures, you might want to see the videos (notes: unpleasant images) of the rescue effort.

On the blogasphere, at least two prominent figures on China, Elliot Ng and Rebecca Mckinnon, founder of Global Voices immediately started mobilising other bloggers and connected individuals through their blogs, twitter, and facebook.

A great example of how technologies break down bystander apathy (i.e. it’s your problem) is Pledgebank, where Rebecca promises that she will donate $500 more to Chinese earthquake aid when 500 more people donate at least $20.

What can we do?

Do it and share it @Pledgebank.

Web 2.0 minus the hype also means that aggregated effort matters – do put the link on your IM status (Y!IM, GTalk, Skype, Adium…etc), your twitter, forward the link, or to put that on your blog or simply track back to this post or pledgebank.

I have also cross-posted this blog post as email to people I work with.

This is the time where I’ll think of Marshall McLuhan,

“We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 24

“As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of “do it yourself”.” 1957
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone “Essential McLuhan” Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 283.

And finally,

“Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.” 1957
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone “Essential McLuhan” Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 272.

For those who are info junkies and geek in one – you might as well be curious about how the issues of surveillance, freedom (both positive & negative) unfold on the almighty World Wide Web. From Lawrence Lessig’s mapping of the history of copyrights development, to general international interests in how internet surveillance works in China (The Atlantic has a great article on this and they interviewed Andrew Lih, former new media professor and an avid Wikipedia contributor), Havard’s Berkman centre for Internet and Society will of course not miss this space as one of the thought-leader in this area:

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generativity,” or innovative character—is at risk.

The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”

Just bought the book – can’t wait to check it out… For those what are in Boston, man, don’t miss the book talk on the 25th of April!

A while ago I wrote about the buzz around Fire Eagle, and I’m happy to announce that Steve Marshall is giving a presentation on Fire Eagle, at the Over the Air hack day here at Imperial College.

In nutshell, Fire Eagle is,

Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy, [...] We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.

An interesting example Steve started with is a Wikipedia-Geo app wikinear.com – which finds Wikipedia pages near you geographically. That’s pretty awesome – the brilliant thing is the results – such as ‘Tokyo Diner’, ‘West End of London’, ‘The Ivy’ etc when you’re in London. Pretty cool, imagine when you’re strolling in new city – you literally become a walking Wikipedia :) :) :) One person asked how Fire Eagle knew where you were, and Steve mentioned that some Nokie updaters worked with Fire Eagle, and since it’s completely open, users can actually play around and check out how your phone can sync with Fire Eagle.

*Privacy note: You can purge your data from Fire Eagle anytime, and you can ‘hide’ yourself as well, more information check out readwriteweb’s review.

*For developers: A Yahoo! Group for Fire Eagle Developers (at the time of writing there are 450 members).

*Update: Steve’s blog on Fire Eagle links here.

This cracks me up – ironically I found this out on my ‘funwall’:

Even more ironically I’m feeling very very dreadful whenever I see all these pending ‘requests’ from my facebook. Weekdays we troll through thousands of work emails, and when we get home during weekends there’s another hundreds of stupid facebook apps out there – apps are probably just a phase, ultimately from a user’s point of view, I only care about how facebook helps us connect with one another:

Talking about application development, I was at the Over the Air hackday today and am really intrigued by how mobile can take on to become the next springboard of technologies connecting people together in an asynchronous manner (i.e. people are connected not in real time, instead our phones become an aggregating tool where users can choose when and who to respond to, just like our email, which is what the net is for). People often make parallel between facebook applications and mobile widgets, as in if there are many people using facebook applications, there can be a room of widgets for mobile.

One the contrary, partly stemming from my cynicism towards the facebook apps development trend, I see that a more timely and relevant comparison should be on how users discarding desktop computers and shifted towards a laptop paradigm for three reasons: the evolution between generations of technologies has much more to do with (1) hardware improvement, (2) providers’ cost reduction and (3) how users perceive new technologies. With the continuous price drop + expanding storage of mobile phones and flat rate for mobile internet service, next for the whole mobile/internet industry is why users should be using the internet on their mobile.

The key problem, as I learn from today’s keynote and our mobile engineer’s, Ricardo’s presentation*, is definitely compounded further by the challenge of interoperability – how can you create a functional tool that is workable on any mobile device? If I were to submit a hack tonight, it will probably be a knowledge-sharing platform that speeds up the mobile development process, probably a portal aggregating all resources as a directory in one place where developers share insights in the most efficient way they can, so that we can progress to a standardised, incremental approach more quickly than we are today. But how can we add value to the developers and what kind of functionalities this portal should possess, so that developers will look more than just their interested areas?

I quite like Yahoo! Go 3.0 bundle concept in this regard because once you created a widget and ensure it is supported by Yahoo! Go 3.0, we have a team of 200+ engineers making sure that your widget works with as many phones in the market as possible. When Ricardo was presenting this to the hackers they look pretty intrigued – hopefully by tomorrow there will be some interesting hacks coming out! :)

Updated: Ricardo’s presentation slides are available on his blog here

Update: The invite doesn’t work anymore… you might need to try and see if Dropplr gets more invites later on

My blogger, new media professor friend Gab had pinged me yesterday asking for a ‘favour’, turned out that she wanted a fireeagle invite from Yahoo!. I was sad that I didn’t have an invite until this morning wonderful Graham has told me about a workaround.

Sign in to Dopplr, and go to http://www.dopplr.com/account/fireeagle,

Then ‘Click here to get an invitation’, sign in to Yahoo! -*bang* you’re in!

More on FireEagle from TechCrunch,

They first described it to me as a Twitter for location. And it does stream your location information in a similar way that Twitter streams short messages. The service opened into private beta today. But it is also more than that. FireEagle has (well, will have) open APIs to send data in and get data out. That will make a variety of other web services much more useful, since they’ll be able to figure out where you are without asking. Flickr images, for example, can be auto-tagged with location by comparing the time the photo was taken to your location at that time in FireEagle.

Update: For developers, you might want to go ahead and check out the buzz here (FireEagle Group)

And Tom Coates presenting FireEagle:

Jake McKee’s presentation made my day, thanks to Jeremy for flagging it up. Jake is a ‘revolutionist’ that led the Lego Mindstorm Programme involving 20 core fans, and literally drove a cultural reform in Lego. From some random marketing handouts I found that mindstorm outsold its predecessors by more than 2 fold and generated significant word-of-mouth (correct me if I am wrong). I have been running around in our company pointing out how ‘cool’ the Lego programme was, but of course, there are usually an avalanches of ‘ROIs’ questions where I’m still trying to deal with.

Flickr image by jurvetson

His personal trajectory gave a hearty account on how he dealt with Lego’s corporate membrane. For those who are working at the forefront on community management in the corp world while still believe in what they are doing (with ’symptoms’ such as strong squeamish reaction towards the word ‘customers’ – well we know that it’s key to view users as as clever, if not more intelligent than the corporate dudes, right?). I filtered the 45 mins presentation and put together my favourite three key points:

1. Org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical

If you have the critical understanding of the market and know what it takes to move your company’s needle, don’t shy from it and make it happen. If you do add value to the business, the chances that key stake-holders will endorse you are really high – but bear in mind that medium-level marketers are the hardest to sell – they have the numbers to sale, which makes them the hardest parties to convince – and the only way you can convince them is to first convince the senior management like VPs and CEOs so that they can do the corporate-membrane breakthrough for you.

Good news for shit-stirrers!

2. There is no secret

‘Tell me why we can’t release it?’ Jake explained how he pushed his colleagues to explain why things are kept secret, while fans are creating the most amazing derivatives from their products and needed their support. The chances is that most people who claim they things should be kept secret can’t articulate why! So – challenge them *grin* (that actually reminded me of my primary-secondary school years asking all the ‘why’ questions, can totally imagine that both Jake and I would be the classic nightmare for oldschool teachers!)

3. Don’t force-build a new community, support and nurture the current ones

This is particularly insightful a lot of business leaders, who randomly decided that communities are the new key and have their company ‘building’ their own. If you are a long-standing company, what is the odd that fans around the world are already involved and engaged in their own means?

The key is to work with what you have, and respect who they are (and are not).

Exciting, now I just need to think of how to break the ice with the figure-driven people…

It’s been more than two weeks when close to a thousand of private/sex photos of various female popstars with Edison Chen are released and I have been trying to resist the urge to blog about it – until yesterday, bear with me for the summary of this story before I elaborate why.

International press started chiming into the ’sex scandal incident’ in Hong Kong when the Hong Kong media has been getting absolutely frantic (see EWSN’s brilliant summary here) and the police started arresting and detaining suspects who might have ‘distributed’ indecent materials on the internet without trial,

The police have arrested nine people in connection with photographs and videos on the Internet in the last two weeks. Three suspects have been formally charged, including a 24-year-old man in Kowloon who was charged Tuesday with publishing obscene materials after he was said to have posted two files containing 100 photos.

What’s so indecent of these photos, you have to ask? Basically they are photos of female stars posing and revealing their private parts, as well as various photos of them performing oral sex on Edison Chen. These photos were taken but weren’t meant to be for ‘public consumption’, however when when Mr. Chen took his laptop for repairing, they got stolen and distributed. (that I have to say, it’s simply and utterly inconsiderate and stupid).

The police are looking to capture the ‘cultprit’ and also almost randomly tracking down people who distributed the photos. The reactions from the ‘moralists’, the ‘authority’ and the ‘public’ all reveal issues more than skin-deep in this psuedo ‘Westernised’ society that I have known of. The most apparent issue, is what John Kennedy coined at white terror,

Pornography is openly sold by many street newspaper vendors in Hong Kong and versions of the photographs have been seen on the covers of most Chinese-language dailies every day since the first batch of photos appeared online two weeks ago, despite that under the city’s Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance, distribution is prohibited.

The moralists are urging the film star to admit that they are ‘wrong’.

Now, let’s get two things clear. In many of Hong Kong daily newspapers, there is a PORNOGRAPHIC section where anyone, ANYONE, who can afford 30p can go and get a copy. Where as in this case, these young pop stars were meant to be taking *private* photos in their bedrooms. There is no coercion, no intimidation. What is wrong with that?

As early as the days where Eve Ensler produced the Vagina Monologue, a screenplay about how people were never able to respectfully speak aloud the word ‘vigina’ to where we stand – the conservatism and the hypocrisy is what getting to me. People went into details accusing one of the pop stars as hypocritical and should apologise in the public. Now why does , e.g. Gillian Chung, need to apology – what has she done wrong? EWSN translation of thosewerethedays blog illustrated part of the problem,

In the Hong Kong entertainment industry, some artistes have become upholders of morality. They criticize the media for being very yellow and very violent; they preach morality; they say that this or that magazine should not have published something or the other because corrupts young people; they describe themselves as clean, self-respecting and pure beyond belief.

Grow up, Hong Kong. We freaking need to revamp our sex education starting with a healthy attitude towards sex and relationships. We can never *change* the media – we *are* the media. We are the lowest in the media ecology foodchain and they produce these low-quality, high fuss stories because we are asking for it. I would applaud if the Hong Kong government steps up and announces that they will reform Hong Kong’s liberal and sex education, otherwise just joining the moral [panic] folks and picking up the pitchfork is totally, utterly immature and useless.

Updates: thanks Christian for pointing out that I miss-spelled vagina. Not sure if I was taught to spell that in Hong Kong anyway ;)