It’s called a Snapper card.

Compare this to the London based Oyster card:

And the Hong Kong Octopus card:

This international sea food theme makes me think that we have definitely missed a branding opportunity here (and this for a country of fishermen). Our entire OV-chipkaart system has been grossly underdesigned on all fronts, so no surprises there.

So I’ve got two proposed alternative names for our low countries farecard system:

• Herring card (Haringkaart)

or

• Mussel card (Mosselkaart)

How do we get this change implemented? And anybody care to mockup a concept?

I want to create a simple visualization tool for Processing so I can input a set of values for each Dutch municipality and then color a map based on those values.

This is harder than it seems because there is no convenient source for the cartographic data for the boundaries of the Dutch municipalities. So the first step is to acquire those boundaries.

OSM

This blogpost in Dutch put me on track for this dataset. OpenStreetMap has a pretty complete picture of the Netherlands and they track municipal boundaries under boundary admin_level=8.

The data dump contains all administrative boundaries on several levels and is something of a mess. The informationfreeway link on the blogpost which should generate an OSM file with only the relations with admin_level=8 but that specific API seems to be down. Also the approach of importing the OSM file back into a PostGIS database before rendering anything struck me as somewhat too cumbersome. So an alternative approach was called for.

There are some readily available dumps at CloudMade both with OSM files (format) and Shapefiles for these administrative boundaries. That seemed to be a useful starting point.

An OSM file is just an XML file with series of nodes, ways and relations in it. It is filterable by the generic processing tool Osmosis with the options that I guessed --way-key-value to filter ways with the admin_level tag and --node-key-value to do the same for nodes. Osmosis does not specify anything for relations which I want to preserve to be able to identify each boundary by the name of the municipality.

Having done that, the resulting OSM file needed to be drawn to the screen. I made a simple XML reader in Processing to display the resulting boundaries. The result did not seem to be completely what I wanted both with missing and unlinked geographical features and I think not everything properly labelled. For this particular application a wiki-map does not seem like the most suitable source of data.

CBS

CBS (the Dutch statistics office) also provides a dataset with administrative boundaries of the Netherlands. It is a bit hard to track down on the site and there’s a reference to the Kadaster which isn’t entirely clear, but the generalized Shapefile is workable.

One problem is that Shapefiles are only understood properly by GIS people and there are hardly any libraries for web developers to work with the data format. Sunlight Labs recently released their ClearMaps library to aid developers wanting to work with Shapefiles, which is a big step in the right direction.

Another problem is that the file on the CBS site is from 2006 and that several municipalities have merged/split, so that adds some problems for correlating it to data. And come to think of it, this municipal rejiggering makes any historical data view of the Netherlands a daunting task. Somebody on Wikipedia has generated a similar map of the Netherlands for 2010 supposedly using data from the CBS, but I can’t find that dataset on the site.

Oddly enough there’s also nothing readily available to draw Shapefiles in Processing. Perusing the forum yields this post which points to Geotools which is a massive set of Java libraries consisting mostly of a huge dependency nightmare mitigated somewhat by Eclipse and Maven.

Geographical data

Viewing the Shapefile in qGIS shows that it does indeed contain the municipal boundaries with correct labeling. Having verified that, we need to extract the geographical data from the file into a format for easier reuse. Linking all the Geotools dependencies to my Processing sketch does not seem like an attractive proposition. Using the Geotools quickstart to setup Eclipse to pull in the libraries and run the Java code, did work pretty conveniently.

Poking around the Shapefile with Java and using the very poor javadocs (the User Guide’s usefulness turned out to be extremely limited) and sources posted online that are available of Geotools yielded something worthwhile after a full day’s work. I also found lots of forum posts of very confused people with few replies and little insight to be gleaned from them. This really seems to be an underdeveloped field.

It turns out the Shapefile read with Geotools contains SimpleFeature classes (UML for those, and the Wikipedia lemma for the OpenGIS standard) of which you can call the getDefaultGeometry() methods.

Geotools also provides a default Drawer.java which you can use to display the features (via LiteShapes) in the Shapefile using Java AWT Graphics. This turned out to be useful mainly for debugging purposes and to verify that Geotools does indeed properly read in the Shapefile. Using a GeomCollectionIterator to walk through the points and extract the coordinates that way turned out to be a dead end (especially because I didn’t get the role of the various Transforms).

Another idea was to generate SVG from the Shapefile but the GenerateSVG class did not seem to be included in my library checkout and fiddling with the maven file seemed risky.

Finally the following piece of code yielded for me the two pieces of data I was looking for, the names of the municipalities and the content of the SimpleFeatures as MULTIPOLYGONs.

  String gemShapefile = "/Users/alper/Documents/projects/muniboundaries/cbs/buurt_2008_gen2/gem_2008_gn2.shp";
  File file = new File(gemShapefile);

  FileDataStore store = FileDataStoreFinder.getDataStore(file);
  FeatureSource featureSource = store.getFeatureSource();

  FeatureCollection features = featureSource.getFeatures();
  FeatureIterator iter = features.features();

  int counter = 0;

  PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter("/tmp/geo.txt"));

  while(iter.hasNext()) {
  	SimpleFeature feature = iter.next();

  	Collection props = feature.getProperties();

  	if (counter > 0) {
  		String gemNaam = "";
  		String geoWKT = "";

    	for (Iterator it = props.iterator(); it.hasNext();) {
		Property property = it.next();

		if (property.getName().getLocalPart().equals("the_geom")) {
			geoWKT = property.getValue().toString();
		}

		if (property.getName().getLocalPart().equals("GM_NAAM")) {
			gemNaam = property.getValue().toString();
		}
	}

    	pw.println(gemNaam + "; " + geoWKT);

    	System.out.println(gemNaam);
  	}

  	counter++;
  }

  pw.close();

The funny thing is every feature has a property “the_geom” which contains the geometry data and its toString() method yields the geometry data as Well-known text. That turned out to be all we needed.

It turns out the coordinates in the Shapefile are in Rijksdriehoekscoördinaten which are cartesian coordinates based on a custom projection and associated rectangular grid for the Netherlands. This is easily verified using this web form to convert a pair back to GPS and looking that up in Google Maps.

The above code produces lines such as:
Leek; MULTIPOLYGON ( ( (224599.999985 582499.999985, 224999.999985 581299.999985, […] 223366.621185 581866.621185, 223499.999985 581999.999985, 224440.97068499998 582470.485385, 224499.999985 582499.999985, 224599.999985 582499.999985)))

This is a simple list of coordinates that define the boundaries of the polygons. A MULTIPOLYGON contains one or more POLYGONS. A POLYGON is one list of the boundary with zero or more lists defining any holes within that boundary. I figured that out looking at the specification for GeoJSON (same data model, different markup) which is the format I am going to republish this information in.

Drawing

With these coordinates, it became quite easy to write a Processing sketch to draw these boundaries. I looked up a datasource for the last European elections and hooked that up for the colors.

Making iterative sketches in Processing with Eclipse is somewhat cumbersome because you need to utilize quite a high level of abstraction if you don’t want your classes to interfere with each other but still Eclipse allows me to work quickly and lets you write Java 1.5 level code against the Processing core.jar (that alone is worth the effort).

I’m going to release a generic Processing sketch where you only need to add a data file with colors or values for each name. Publication as these boundaries as both GeoJSON and SVG is also forthcoming. I’m also looking for the more recent 2010 Shapefile from the CBS with all the current municipal boundaries in it. If there’s demand I can also extract the living quarter and neighborhood level administrative boundaries which are in the other Shapefiles.

Update: Some research shows there’s a very promising avenue to do this stuff by converting the entire Shapefile to GeoJSON as explained in this StackOverflow post and then drawing thath using either ProcessingJS or OpenLayers.

Update: Managed to convert the data to GeoJSON and draw it using ProcessingJS:

This opens up a ton of possibilities for interactive visualization and sharing. More to follow.

See the This Happened site for the presentations of this session.

The Papercakes presentation was interesting, though I would have wished that they’d focused more on the creative process and not so much on the implementation and user testing. It is a very compelling game and I’m now even more seriously considering buying a Bamboo for my desk.

The Love Hate Punch punching bag hit close to home for me as I used to have a bag like that at home and I definitely can relate to the aggression remediating effects of such a bag. It was an epic story of how to create something interesting using mostly home brew and tenacity.

The Swinxs is impossible not to like. The presentation was oddly paced, but still everybody thought it was great and got a great look behind the process of putting a digital toy on the store shelves (quite a feat!).

Daan Roosegaarde went off in all kinds of tangents talking about creating poetic interactions for public space. His installations are in a league of their own and are a custom designed experience for a certain area. I have experienced LiquidSpace but I had a hard time getting much more out of it than its novelty.

This Happens seems to have arrived at a next level with a space that is comfortable and organizers that are comfortable within that space. Let’s see what’s next.

There’s some confusion at Delft Science Center whether the exhibit is really open to the public, but it isn’t locked, so just head there and take the first door on your right. Maybe because of the confusion, the machines aren’t turned on, so it’s a rather static display of interactive environments.

Some pictures:

A long held dream came true for me with the delivery this week of my first light stand and umbrella combination. I wanted to play with studio photography longer already, but what really brought it home was following Dustin Diaz’s Project 365 where he did an interesting strobist setup for every day of 2009. I learned so much from that.

So now I can shoot portraits with off camera soft directed light. This is just the beginning:

Data coupled with Design is more or less my field of choice, my work and passion.

This is the same thinking that is behind my proposition that websites are not the most important thing online anymore. Websites are important in so far as they get data and facilitate interaction on that data, but both of those are taking place more and more on completely different locations. It is far more useful to think of the web as streams of data and actors that interact with that data.

The talk was well received though (as always) it stands to be improved greatly under the influences of feedback and ripening.

Update: This presentation is now in Slideshare’s top presentations of the day.

Kroes is slated to be the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. Thought by some to be a lightweight portfolio, we in the internet business know that it is of course at the heart of most important things: media, science, trade, communication.

Baroso’s brief is as follows (in part):

• You will take the lead in preparing the European Digital Agenda, to promote an integrated ICT policy framework, addressing both supply and demand for digital services, products and contents, ensuring that Europe remains at the technological forefront in this area.
• The EU needs high speed internet networks to realise the potential of ICTs. Therefore, I would like you to elaborate a policy framework to promote investment in high speed internet and set up a coordinated spectrum policy.
• I would also like you to establish an integrated single market for the delivery of electronic services. The EU possesses massive creative, cultural and multilingual potential, which efficient ICT tools can help to tap and transform into productivity gains.
• Europe must also invest in the ICT skills of its citizens. Your role will be to avoid a ‘digital divide’ and to give the possibility to all citizens to acquire e-skills.

(Mission Statement)

Her answers to the questions are here in Dutch, you may be able to find documents in other languages at the main site for the hearings.

I’d read about the question session and the next day Dutch public television put this debriefing with her online:

In one interview she kept saying something about ‘ICTs’ (Maarten said it sounded something like the interwebs) and in the above fragment she excells in vagueness. A lot of criticism on her has been indeed focused on her grasp of the field and her plans for the Digital Agenda which were termed weak.
More video here and audio about the second term this week.

The other criticism that she would not be a champion of the consumer but would take side with the big companies put forward by the Euro Socialists is frankly ludicrous (Dennis de Jong is our Dutch socialist —say no— representative), if you look at her record battling Microsoft.

Dutch pride of having at least one Commissioner in the EC is nice and all, but it would be nice for Europe to have a commissioner for the Digital Agenda who would actually use the internet? One who has at least a first hand idea what this stuff is about.

Given the vast out of touch Kafka-esque bureaucratic monstrosity that is the European Union, putting somebody in charge of the internet who both has a clue to the subject matter and can navigate the treacherous passages of European politics may be too much to hope for. Given that, Kroes may be a very good second and if she displays the same fervor to promote an open internet as she did attacking Microsoft, she may not be that bad at all.

Update: Today’s hearings went a lot better and it looks like she will get the post for Euro Commissioner for the Digital Agenda:

Update: And now it is almost a done deal according to this post on NOS.nl where they also mention that her advanced age may not make her the most suitable candidate for an internet portfolio.

The community of developers whose work you see on the Web […] deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise.

It’s a sham and it’s crumbling but slowly enough that if you’re mediocre developer you will not want for work for the foreseeable future (but you will not be doing interesting things either).

He says:

“Who in their right mind would ever want to be sacrificed in the name of innovation, who in full knowledge would accept an seventy hour work week for unhealthy low pay, who educated by the best would spend their days in cheap office space with Spartan furniture.”

Sjors comes to the same conclusion, but I would answer (free after Camus) that both choices are absurd, both being a cog in a cubicle of bureaucracy and the hopeless railing against the windmills of the upstart.

But if both are absurd, you ought to accept that and choose the more glorious one.

• London, and again in September for dConstruct, crashing at Cristiano and Melinda’s place
• Austin, first visit to SxSWi, definitely not the last
• Copenhagen, yearly Reboot, this time crashing at Mark’s awesome place
• Amsterdam, moving house over from Delft finally!
• Casablanca, flying in and out with Air Arabia on this Morrocan holiday
• Rabat
• Marrakech
• Agadir
• Essaouira

I hope to travel more in this coming year. Austin, Copenhagen and Brighton are definitely in again. A new visit to the Middle East is in order and a big trip.

I take it as a given to only collaborate with people who have very broad skill sets and who are great at communication, though people who can do all of the things in this list are very rare:

up-to-date knowledge of available and emerging technologies

extensive experience of implementing de facto web standards and programming patterns

database configuration and data manipulation

implementation across multiple platforms and legacy software applications

provisioning for mobile devices

data aggregation

graphics sourcing and creation

search engine optimisation (SEO)

a thorough understanding of the aesthetics and parameters of designing for the web

Carvill goes on to lump most of the UX profession’s skills into this set which seems to me to be something of a hard sell because people with all of these skills are even rarer. I am one and I know a handful of them. Many of the people who can do this are either in startup life or working for themselves in some other way because their abilities do not easily fit into the conceptual cubicles offered by corporate life.

Business relevance

The web is the most important business asset any company will have and they’d better get ready for it. Outsourcing your issues is rarely the answer unless you’re willing to enter in a long term relationship with a firm and build the entire stack on open standards, so when the relationship sours it does not turn into a choke hold.

Good businesses realise what an asset they have in their front-end web development team, and welcome their input into the product development process.

If this is what good businesses do, —which I believe— how many good business do we have? Being good right now may not be the most important criterium, but how many businesses have a coherent vision on their web strategy to move forward to a better situation?

The other thing that stood out to me was:

Even better businesses have a User Experience team which encapsulates all those values, skills and judgements necessary to make great websites.

If having a UX team is not a given in this day and age, then the article starts to make a lot more sense.

Future

Like Carvill says, knowing your value and receiving the recognition for that can be two widely different things. I very quickly got fed up with railing against existing infrastructures and arbitrary corporate structures. The way forward for me is making cool new stuff in ad-hoc collaborations with nice people for money and fame.

Keeping money safe is not rocket science and can be done perfectly on a local (city/province) scale with proper safeguards and insurance. Matt Mullenweg also wrote a post about how he would improve the state of banking using common (web) sense.

For the discussion I was looking for Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s recommendations for not getting out of this crisis, but making sure it never happens again. I had a hard time finding them with Google, but they’re in a PDF on Taleb’s site Fooled by Randomness.

I don’t think we can read these principles often enough (at least until they are implemented by our legislators), that is why I have taken the liberty to copy out the headlines here from the PDF:

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.
4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.
5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.”
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement.
10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.

These are only the headlines. Be sure to read the full recommendations in the PDF.

There have been a couple of these concepts floated around recently among which the digital Sports Illustrated and the Mag+ demo for Bonnier:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

These magazines with rich media and builtin games and other interactions look great, but who’s going to make them? From what I know assembling a publication is an efficient but quite messy proces. It gets the thing out the door before the deadline, but not much more.

The web part of the publication is usually bolted on and content is copy pasted from one into the other usually to the detriment of the web versions. And now we need to add another layer of richness somewhere inside this flow?

Like Hammersley says digital publications are just a symptom of a bigger problem. And the bigger problem of assembling such a magazine is just part of the transition from the old process of creating, assembling and publishing print media to the new way of doing things.

Device capabilities

Of course everybody is waiting for Apple’s tablet offering which will most likely set the industry standard, but imagining what a flat high resolution interactive tablet will look and work like, is not too difficult. A (multi-)touch screen, some hardware buttons, network connectivity and HD image and video display. Do you need much more?

Using that hardware to reimagine the concept and use of a magazine including its more indirect properties such as coffee table displayability, spine information etc. are what Jack Schulze talks about in the Mag+ video by BERG.

Toolmaker and platform

Being a more technically inclined, I’m very interested which platform will be used for these publications. Right now two obvious contenders would be:

• A Flash/AIR version which is not very hopeful from an openness point of view. And also what we’ve seen from the current Flash web magazines and applications, the user experience will probable be nothing to write home about (page turn animations anybody?).
  If the current state of Flash on the iPhone is an indication, Apple will not allow this.
• A HTML5 version which seems a very likely contender. Apple is already pushing this hard for advanced stuff using HTML5 on the iPhone and with a similar sprinkling of Webkit specific extensions it should be more than possible to deliver the experiences enivisioned in these prototypes.
• Native applications seem too cumbersome for the publication release cycle and building a CMS-like solution for digital magazines in a native language yields the same problem: how to markup the magazine in the CMS? Which would result in a more or less complex markup language (such as HTML).

Adobe probably already has tools that make it ‘easy’ to create rich publications from their existing publication tools such as InDesign and Flash though I can’t find anything about such tools except this news release on a collaboration with Condé Nast. If I go to Adobe.com, there’s nothing about what I can do to ready my business for this transition.

It seems that there is a big opportunity for new toolmakers working from agile principles and using open standards to create the authoring and collaboration environments for the publications of the future.

What’s also interesting is how much of the magazine will be downloaded offline (like the podcast, App Store model) and how much of it will rely on a web connection. And how big will a Sports Illustrated filled with high res images and HD video be? Probably more than 1G. How does that impact your immediate reading experience?

Photo-/Videographers

Another thought is that because most of the publications are not as space constrained as print media, they can allow much more space for beautiful photography and video material (as the Sports Illustrated issue does). Depending on the compensations paid, the increased demand could at least herald an interesting new age for professional photographers.

Future

I’m interested in what Hammersley will write as a solution to all this. I have no experience in print and am writing this as a bystander with an interest in the web.

Dirk Geurs and myself along with Bart Schoenmakers had seen the runaway international success of UX Book Clubs and wondered why there wasn’t an Amsterdam edition yet. I visited the Zuid-Holland edition organized by Jeroen van Geel when I was still living in Delft and that was definitely a lot of fun.

Because it’s an open source initiative, having this itch means you get to scratch it yourself. So we got cracking. We rounded up some interest (thanks Peter Boersma), made a page on the wiki and one on LinkedIn (Join the LinkedIn Group if you want to participate!) and got it underway.

One hurdle (or maybe I should call it an advantage) is that because none of us can provide a location, we need somebody in the book club to sponsor every event. This is some extra work but it also adds some variety to every event. Also, if you want to participate and your office has room to spare to have 10-15 people talk about a book for an hour or two, get in touch!

The event

The first event was graciously hosted by Stijn Nieuwendijk from valsplat. An awesome user research (very important!) firm based in Amsterdam.

The first book the group chose to read was “The Back of the Napkin” by Dan Roam about clarifying ideas and solving problems using simple drawing and visual methods.

There was food (though we shouldn’t count on this in the future):

There was discussion:

And there were back of the napkin sketches, this one depicting the UX Book Club process:

The discussion was too wide spread and far to summarize coherently, but I think I can try a one paragraph version:

The main concensus was that The Back of the Napkin was not a complicated but still quite a good book with some simple methods to use drawing and visual problem solving in a business context. For UX practitioners who are already well versed with visual methods, drawing and dealing with large amounts of information, the techniques laid out in the book may be overly familiar. I still thought it was nice to have everything laid out in a coherent framework. All in all an interesting book, but more suited for our non-visual colleagues.

Looking forward

The event being a success we are now looking forward to the next one. It’s not a very difficult event to organize (though it is a lot more work than you would suspect) but having one under the belt can only make the next one easier and better. We now already have a venue for the next event (to be announced shortly) and will be starting the book choice.

For the book choice we are still looking for a method that will ensure enough interest so that the people voting for the final book will also be present for the event.

So stay tuned, watch the LinkedIn group and I hope to see you at a future UX Book Club.

I had been interviewed for this event a couple of weeks earlier talking about how TipiT could be a business model for new online media initiatives. Video (in Dutch):

Alper Çugun (TipiT.to): Micropayments werken als je maker webcontent kent | Show me the Money #2 from Mediacontainer on Vimeo.

It was a nice event, with some very interesting keynotes. A lot of fun was to see a large part of the Mediaminds together for a live taping of the podcast:

Matt Thompson had a great talk:

But I would recommend you watch the video for Chris Thompson’s talk (twitter) about the Guardian Platform. The things they’re doing there are really very inspiring:

My biggest takeaway from these industry events is that the industry is in nowhere near as bad a shape as they claim to be. The whole ‘the media is dying’ thing is mostly fear mongering. Money is still being made in the media industry, just not the same ridiculous amounts as they used to make and not wholly by the same people. I understand that this may upset some incumbents, but it’s not the disaster it’s made out to be.

Book review: “An End to Evil” by David Frum and Richard Perle — Very interesting to read these neocon perspectives in an time when the world and America have shifted away from a position when those points of view were desirable and feasible.

Maxed out — Interesting take on pornography and how it reflects on society.

I hope Aaron includes this code sometime soon.

Further support including all the other transit modalities, GPS coordinates and routes should follow but no idea yet when I’ll find the time.

Thanks Kilian for the indispensable git-advice.

And Kars noticed that there’s a flurry of activity around the digital city these weeks in the Netherlands. Tonight Visible Cities in De Verdieping, Urban Screens this Friday at the same and Terrains Vagues next week at Tumult in Utrecht.

Update: And my code and data are now in the mainline and browsable at the application.

CC picture by Grace Oda

Brief

The brief was by a friend of a friend for Sarah van Sonsbeeck, artist in residence at the Amsterdam Rijksakademie. Sarah does a lot of work in making sound —its presence and its absence— visible, tangible and experience-able in unexpected ways.

For a recent project she was going to walk through part of Monickendam with some people while both discussing their experience of the sounds and also simultaneously measuring sound levels and recording GPS coordinates. For the sake of simplicity we ignored measurement error and interference. This was not an attempt to make a scientifically accurate measurement of the dB levels (though such attempts do exist).

Map of the various walk paths through the area

Silence Area picture by Sarah van Sonsbeeck

We would then take the data generated from these walks and plot them into a computer representation of the area and generate visualisations from that. Building an audiogeography superimposed on the physical landscape with the sound levels as experienced by somebody who would walk through the area.

A small project, limited in scope and budget, we took the challenge to see what we could make.

Background

CabSpotting was the original very conceptual brief for this project where the streets are defined with data from a derivative activity providing a skeleton landscape similar to the physical world. Adding intensity to this mix would naturally lead to something like a physical intensity (= height) map of a landscape:

Or a suitable realistic representation of a landscape such as the Moon would already display visual indications of its height:

Sound and its different representations are treated more often in art. Sarah pointed us towards work of Simon Elvins and Justin Bennett curated on the weblog “Displaced Sounds”.

In computers, representation of sound usually is in the form of jagged edges like these found in professional audio systems and music visualizers:

We didn’t look very much into the treatment of sound and its perception in architecture, but previous work by the artist and brief inquiries with friends would suggest that it is a niche and often ignored part of that field.

Methods

The first task at hand was to find a dB value for the entire area based on the samples given to us by Sarah. She had made some circumnavigations and cross sections of the area, but she (of course) hadn’t been everywhere.

After some tries we found out that this is a non-trivial problem which is not solved well by a naive approach. It is a common problem and its solution is similar to a simple sum of squares linear regression of a set of data points in two dimensions.

The best way (according to GIS people) to do this is called Kriging and it’s implemented in proprietary GIS packages. The open source implementations in R and C are quite hard to use and figure out in terms of input and output values.

We found a post on Stack Overflow with a fairly thorough discussion of this problem and a set of approaches which led us finally to an Inverse Distance Weighted interpolation of the data points which was fairly straight forward to implement and performant enough.

This method yielded the following interpolation which we could corroborate with the area and some of its features:

After the interpolation we would have a matrix of arbitrary detail with a smooth set of values for the entire measurement area. It is easy to color these values based on a scale to show ‘height’. Transforming these values into a 3D mesh as a landscape based representation turned out to be somewhat more complex. Kars took most of this work upon himself emulating the properties of a seasoned 3D programmer.

Processing turned out to have a library called unlekkerlib which can be used to create and output 3D models based on generated data for visual display and output into formats suitable for re-use in other 3D modelling packages or to put straight to a fablab.

Generated mesh

Some of the work Watz himself has made with unlekker are in this Flickr set.

We then exported this mesh into a DXF file which could be read by Google SketchUp and re-exported into something renderable by Sunflow, a high performance raytracer written in Java.

Render from Sketchup

Results

The end results were 2D and 3D versions of the silence landscape both from straight interpolation with some filters added to it to make it resemble a heightmap:

Remapped silence landscape

And a high quality raytrace of the same landscape:

Sunflow render

Delivered to the artist to be repurposed and recontextualized in her own work for the project Een Dijk van een Kust with this map.

The 3D and 2D models can also be fablabbed into various forms which was one of our recommendations. By changing the medium of the data and therefore the modality of the experience alternative insight may follow. We are very curious how that is going to turn out and how this will add tangibility to the data.

Reflection

This was a fun project to do because of its limited scope and free form. It gave Kars and myself a good reason to work together (which worked out quite well). We took it far and wide to see what we could create using our skills and ready-to-use tools and we think the end results are pleasing.

One of our limitations is that both of us are not graphic designers. This means we may not be the best fit for a mostly aesthetically driven visualization project. Given our Tuftean sensibilities, we like to let the data speak for itself with integrity and without overmuch visual embellishment.

Our focus as interaction designers and our skills in programming the Processing visual environment, would direct us towards more dynamic and interactive visualizations where our iterative interaction with the data builds up layers of meaning and we add controls and affordances to the final product so a user can interact with the data themselves and find their own meaning.

Collaborating with an artist is very interesting because the story and the context of her art imbue your work directly with more depth. Aligning technical possibilities and visual output with an artistic vision is however difficult and probably served better by more attunement and iteration than we could invest in this project.

Now here’s a case of a new movie “Where The Wild Things Are” which gets extremely favorable reviews both by him and by the Times but which is set to release January 14th, 2010 in the Netherlands (almost three months after its premiere).

I’m especially thrilled with the fact that the creators of this movie are uncompromising to mediocrity and dare to be great. From the Times:

[…] a film that often dazzles during its quietest moments, as when Max sets sail, and you intuit his pluck and will from the close-ups of him staring into the unknown. He looms large here, as we do inside our heads. But when the view abruptly shifts to an overhead shot, you see that the boat is simply a speck amid an overwhelming vastness. This is the human condition, in two eloquent images.

I’m quite sure I want to experience this movie in all its splendour in a cinematic environment but I don’t know if I can resist the inevitable torrents coming our way much much earlier than halfway into January.

The studios are complaining about declining revenues but it looks like it’s their own fault.

And here another interesting image in a movie littered with them:

“Newpapers are so dead. Aside from the Wall Street Journal and stuff. Honestly just think about the concept of a newspaper. You cut down a bunch of trees, you boil them, you make paper out of them. In the old days oyou used to have lead movable type, and a bunch of ink and a unionized shop printing them out. Then you get a bunch of trucks and you drive around the neighborhood and you throw them onto somebody’s driveway, you throw onto somebody’s driveway yesterday’s news. That’s what we’re trying to defend.”

It’s a cheap shot but the group offers some great high level business perspectives on the media industry in music, film and news with a final word of advice to young people starting out in the business. Summary: media is changing, nobody knows how to pay for it.

Update: I had already made a circumstantial argument why I don’t read newspapers anymore but now I’m also beginning to doubt entire quality argument. Newspapers are always paraded as bastions of objectivity and quality, but I don’t think this has ever really been the case. The only difference is that for most of history we did not have an alternative. The recent financial crisis has only served to punctuate the lack of quality and in depth analysis.
I see room (and necessity) for one quality newspaper in the Netherlands similar to the Guardian in the UK but I don’t know who’s going to bring it. To even make an attempt, all the current newspapers need to significantly up their game, the current standard is just not good enough.

CC picture by Anne Helmond

Paris has its vélib system and other major metropolitan cities may have similar bicycle sharing systems, but ov-fiets (literally ‘public transportation bike’) is Netherlands wide and has a great service design backing it up.

The idea is you get a subscription (based on your id and bank account to prevent abuse) for €9,50/year which is hooked up to your rail card so you can use that same card to get your bike. With one card you can get up to two very decent bikes at any issuing point (most larger railway stations in the Netherlands and more). Payment is deducted automatically from your bank account, so that eliminates another step from the checkout process which is very quick indeed. At stations which don’t have a large bike facility and for return at night there are also unmanned facilities where you can get a bike from a locker using your secret code.

CC picture by FaceMePLS

Most importantly for us Dutch, the system is very cheap. Renting one bike for 20 hours costs you €2,85. If you have multiple errands to run in a city, this is cheaper than using public transportation (and you have more freedom and you don’t have to wait for buses). Most people I tell about the system can’t believe how cheap it is. I do hope it is cost effective. I will gladly pay more per ride if it means the system will be around in the future.

OV-fiets is a great solution for me. I visit various cities irregularly. My method of entry, is almost always by train and that part of the journey is usually relatively quick, clear and comfortable. After that part comes the hell of navigating and waiting for local public transportation. There isn’t a city in the Netherlands that can’t be biked around, so a bike —if you have access to one— is almost always preferrable.

This is a great example of our urban future where objects that used to be our property are abstracted into a network of services.

San Francisco

An afterthought: When I was in San Francisco last year, I had some appointments in the Valley which I tried to do using Caltrain and then either taking the bus or walking. This turned out to be impossibly time consuming.

I tried to rent a bike to take with me on the Caltrain but most bike rental places were not open as early as I needed them to be. A system where you could rent a bike at the Caltrain stations similar to OV-fiets would have been perfect. (Hint.)

There is a movement in design which says that design and the affordances it creates has values embedded in it. Not considering the potential for abuse your design allows, can be deemed bad (because negligent) design work in itself.

Scoble addresses the fact that location tracking applications and games such as Google Latitude, Bliin, Plazes, Brightkite, Foursquare, Gowalla and the like freak normal people out.

Among the techminded early adopters I know, use of such applications already isn’t as clearcut as some of us would like to think. A lot of people aren’t comfortable broadcasting their location to the world at large (or to a massive American company). Just talk to a ‘normal’ person about this and see if they don’t get absolutely freaked out.

There are two aspects which are both very important though they may not seem so at first.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Firstly “presenting [yourself to] people as you’d like others to see you” is very important as discussed in Goffman and countless studies on social posturing and signaling that have followed. This is an important human need and basic freedom.

Privacy of Location

But more pregnantly for the mainstreaming of your application Scoble says: “(and if I’m freaked out, imagine how freaked out the average user is)”.

Privacy is important for quality of life. People leading more interesting/complicated lives than I do and people trapped in abusive power relations (corporate, domestic or otherwise) cannot afford to use this type of software.

The software may be pre-installed on the rom, it may be baked into the baseband itself. The fact that it is present on cell phones, may lead to an implicit social practice it is impossible to opt out of without social ostracism. It can and does encroach more and more into our lives.

Questions and the pre-empting of them will lead to self-censorship and (self-)limitation of freedoms which used to exist. The possibility to create some leeway in your day to day obligations to make life more pleasant/tolerable will disappear.

Just try to figure out all the edge cases, the ambiguity, the risk and the potential for catastrophic error. This is not a solvable problem and I think we need a hard design principle here: Any location based social application needs to provide a way for transparent spoofing to prevent socio-technological tyranny.

I think it’s more likely that AT&T asked for them to remove it, than T-Mobile but it was definitely a telco because Apple has zero interest in making their hardware less capable.

User Experience

Apple probably needed to remove this ‘feature’ because of pre-existing agreements with telcos and to be seen as a reliable partner now and in the future and be able to operate in this space. So the fact that Apple is in an abusive relationship with the telcos, means users are getting shafted.

Apple’s control over the hardware platform which I’m mistakenly supposing I own is making me consider and reconsider switching to another company for my next cell phone but that is only presuming Android ever get their act together.

Industry Play

We shouldn’t forget that Apple with their iPhone introduction and deals with telcos made it possible for a large audience to use a capable cell phone with an unlimited internet plan. Something never seen before. That they needed to give some concessions in this phase of the development of the industry was to be expected.

So my experience with tethering being a bad one, doesn’t mean I should be mad at Apple. Without Apple, mobile internet on the cell phone would still suck. If Apple could offer free tethering, they probably would and they would move more units of their own product.

Business Case

Personally I wouldn’t mind paying €5-10 a month for this capability which is already in my cell phone and in the network (it worked fine for the past couple of months) and not have to carry around (and forget) a 3G dongle. I don’t use it that much, but on occasion when I need it, it is very useful to have.

T-Mobile could try to sell me one of their more general laptop dongle solutions, but I’m not interested in dragging around another gadget and already being a user of the T-Mobile network means I don’t want to pay through the nose for the privilege of using their piss poor 3G coverage network.

We could pass the Open City Motion here in Amsterdam but there is in fact nothing in it which is new or contradicts current legislature and initiatives regarding open data and open source. It’s all already in place, it just is not being done (properly).
The biggest problem is that the issue is mudlded by a bunch of directives —is this NOIV or some other initiative?—, a lot of people don’t know what they’re doing and the political will and prioritization from the top is missing.

After a significant enough portion of the populace has become more web literate and one or more election cycles have passed we may get a group that will implement this, but I and my early adopter tech friends can’t really wait for that. So what to do?

Last weekend I went to my fourth —I guess, I lost count— annual capoeira camping in Wapse and it was again a resounding success. I’ve got the pictures to prove it.

I thought it may be worthwhile to share those notes here, so here goes.

Coming change to more digital behaviour embedded in the fabric of everyday life is going to force us to focus on context.

How do you design for context?

Does Buxton deliver on the promise he makes at the start of the book? He tells a nice story but where’s the sketching for software?

He talks about designing agents systems and complex behaviours. Doesn’t emergence play a large part? Don’t we need foundational guidelines more than anything?

p. 13 This is a start. It is a rough sketch.

Many participants of the bookclub thought the book fell short and was overly meandering. No it is not a howto guide to designing user experiences.
By Buxton’s own admission it is a sketch an initial concept for how a book like this should look. But still I don’t know any other book which provides such a broad view on the field of UX and such an in depth treatment of one of its foundational processes (sketching).

Physical devices can recast a problem in a new light.

p. 37 We must make our best efforts to understand the larger social and physical context within which it is intended to function.

p. 37 We ideally need to be able to experience our designs in the wild during the early stages of the process.

p. 38 Without informed design, technology is more likely to be bad than good.

p. 47 Why shouldn’t executives want to have their company create breakthrough products that generate great returns?

Great realistic analysis of the Apple design process for executives. In that light the piece “You can’t innovate like Apple” is also worth a read.

p. 53 Everyone is essential but no person or group is sufficient on his or her own.

What’s the relevance of (software) product design with its version iterations to website projects which are unfortunately mostly one off?

p. 71 My underlying approach in what follows will be to put forward a holistic approach to experience-based design. Along the way, I will show how the weaknesses of software product development can be complemented by the strengths of traditional product design, and likewise, how the weaknesses of traditional product design can be complemented by the very real strengths of software developers. But my strongest argument is for the need for an explicit and distinct design process, integrated into the larger organization, supported by appropriate executive leadership.

p. 78 Get the right design. Get the design right.

p. 80 It takes very strong and brave management to admit that we don’t know what we are doing at the start, and therefore need to accomodate that in our process.

My addition: The act of sketching constrains your freedom. Every stroke you make in a sketch finalizes something. That is the whole point and that what makes the process converge. Then if the result doesn’t please you start anew with a blank sheet.

p. 105 [a sketch is] a graphic means of technical exploration

p. 111-2 Sketches are:

• Quick
• Timely
• Inexpensive
• Disposable
• Plentiful
• Clear vocabulary
• Distinct gesture
• Minimal detail
• Appropriate degree of refinement
• Suggest and explore rather than confirm
• Ambiguity

p. 117 By examining the externalizations, designers can spot problems they may not have anticipated.

Ambiguity but also the resolution of complexity.

p. 135 “Sketching Interaction”

How do you sketch tone of voice? For instance by employing product personas that act out the interactions your product has with users.

How do you sketch look and feel? By creating broad mockups supported by mood boards?

p. 139 “Sketches are not prototypes”

Prototypes may be less disposable but they can also be very agile and reusable. But admittedly prototyping would take place post-sketching.

p. 143 Arguing for the need for user involvement in a modern book on product design is as pointless as a discussion about the need to know the rules of arithmetic in an advanced mathematics textbook.

p. 147 A healthy team is made up of people who have the attitude that it is better to learn something new than to be right.

p. 151 “You make that sound like a negative thing”

Design rationale and strong criticism are essential to move forward but hard to find.

p. 154 “If someone made a sketch in the forest and nobody saw it”

A communal corkboard provides:

• Shared awareness
• Baking in
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Juxtaposition
• Critique

Yesterday I was present at a lecture by Dirk Overduin on some succesful interventions around the use of public space.

It’s hard to strike a balance between the use and abuse/overuse of public space. Mostly perceived ‘abuse’ of public space stems from other social problems (homelessness etc.) and regulating public space too rigidly impoverishes all of us.

Looking at the street scene from China, I’m disappointed that we do not have similar uses of public space here. To be able to play tavla on the sidewalk in the city while drinking çay…

Gecekondu on the island at ARCAM is a fun initiative and they have a full program for the next couple of days so be sure to visit them.

Robert Gaal and I initiated the launch in Amsterdam and it looks like it is really taking off right now. Dutch daily NRC.next wrote a two page spread on the site and quoted me and some others in it. Normally I don’t bother with papers, but I went to our neighborhood store and bought a copy:

It’s a nice balanced overview piece of the service and the trends towards more ubicomp in your nightlife experience. The big question is, these guys have delivered, will anybody else match them in the foreseeable future?

Local social network Hyves is bluffing they will introduce similar functionality but it begs the question why they didn’t already? I’ve seen this concept come by in briefings more times than I care to count and nobody has been able to get the buy-in and pull off the experience.
And when was the last update of the Hyves iPhone App? Or of the Facebook App for that matter?

In other news: There was some drama recently with people from outside of Amsterdam adding venues outside of Amsterdam and getting rebuked by some people within AMS.

Foursquare’s policy is that anybody who wants to play in whatever fashion should be allowed to do so. The data generated can always be filtered better later on using better algorithms and more insight. Just think twice about friending me if you plan on checking in outside of Amsterdam.

I’ve given her a name but it functions mostly as a teleport to a random location in the city where t < 15m. Already being familiar with the topography of Amsterdam is a plus and tearing through the city, riding faster than most people without any effort is fantastic.

Now comes the more difficult task of keeping this bike in this city.

Mony is helping me out scanner-wise and I must say I’m amazed at the quality, the vibrance and sharpness this ‘old piece of junk’ shoots and this archaic process returns.

And added to that I’m completely untrained and have hardly any experience with this stuff, so who knows how much improvement is still possible. Here’s to film in a digital age.

After your fourth time attending such a great and small conference as Reboot, it becomes familiar like a reunion. This year’s action theme meaned the two days were completely packed. There was so much to do and so much going on that the first day was over already before you knew it.

The one thing that struck me as being odd was the fact that many speakers on the large stage weren’t asked any questions (I had one or two for Richard Falkvinge). If anything, Reboot does not strike me as an event where one person can rain down the gospel unquestioned. So for a next time more interactive maybe even adversarial formats may be nice.

It was a great event and a lot of fun cruising around like a local on the Yahoo! bike and crashing at Mark’s place with Anne (his writeup). The opening talk by Matt was great (as always) and the Bruce Sterling’s closing talk was also fantastic. Ton has a great writeup.

But yes it was very awesome. I don’t know many tech conferences that can pull off a street party like this one:

Update: And the talk by Bruce Sterling just got posted:

I’ve recently been involved with several government initiatives to make government data more accessible and to show what’s possible if that data is publicly available. The premise is that if government data is open, developers and other third parties kan reuse that data and make useful stuff with it. Stuff that can for instance serve as inspiration for our Dutch show us a better way contest: Dat Zou Handig Zijn.

Most recently we had a Hack the Government devcamp/unconference where people interested in this stuff could exchange ideas and build stuff.

photograph by Anne Helmond

A while back I did a project on widgets which was mostly a supply side initiative triggered by a listing of readily available data.

Simultaneously Ton and James did a project on process recommendations for the public sector when it comes to releasing their data. As a part of that project I helped them sift through the currently available data sources from a technical point of view and to see which of those sources could be repackaged in an interesting and more user and developer friendly way.

That wasn’t very easy. Dutch government does publish a ton of data online but usually in rather unaccessible formats and interfaces and without clear descriptions on what it is. We picked two data sources and we managed to realize two new websites based on that data: Schoolvinder (‘School finder’) and Vervuilingsalarm (‘Pollution alert’).

School finder

A Dutch institution called the CFI already has a store with a lot of data on schools. We used their search interface and output (which though ugly and slow was remarkably reusable) and rebranded that into a simplest possible school search engine which is easily understood by parents looking for schools in their area.

Besides that we also create a canonical URL for every school in the Netherlands so other parties can refer to that and we can build stuff on top of those school pages.

The first problem this fixes is that the website is poorly usable and worded almost exclusively in jargon. Employees from the ministry of education told us later that the CFI data is not meant to be used by the public but we think this is still a fix.

Secondly it fixes the fact that this information is quite hard to find and to refer to. Our search engine is easy and open and school data is republished at unique URLs using microformats.

We would have liked to link our school pages to some numerical data from another database of the CFI but that was too hard to realize within the alotted time. Even linking to that other site proved to be too hard because those webpages were shielded in a needlessly complex ASP.NET environment.

Pollution alert

Pollution alert takes the predicted particulate values for a number of sensor stations and makes those accessible. I made a scraper to take the predicted data from the RIVM site and store it in Google App Engine. From our own store in Google App Engine, we show the geocoded stations, we push alerts out to Pachube and Twitter, graph the data and provide an API. We believe there is a lot of latent interest in the general public for this kind of data but that usable presentation forms have not been forthcoming.

RIVM to their credit does publish most of their data online, but definitely not in the most accessible formats nor in ways that enable normal people to audit their living environment.

Principles

The sites we built are very advanced prototypes which are completely functional and even highly scalable. During building we followed some principles which may be interesting to touch upon here.

Friendly design

Both sites have a pleasant and friendly design created by Buro Pony. This is important because people are more inclined to use sites that look nice and experience those sites as being more user friendly.

A nice design needs to be accompanied by clear and simple writing without jargon that connects with the way people think about the stuff you’re describing.

Most websites can be improved massively by just implementing these two points.

Playing well with others

Both websites also connect with a bunch of other sites that improve upon the concept. They’ve been built on Google App Engine a system which is easy to develop for and which is readily scalable. Maps are retrieved from Google Maps, graphs are provided by Google Charts and sensor data is pushed to Pachube and Twitter.

The experience on the main site is just a part of the whole. The data needs to be accessible from and easily pushable to where it’s needed most.

On the Hack the Government event somebody said something along these lines: ‘systems integration is difficult and complicated and if you’re good at it, you can make a lot of money with it’. This is a well known Enterprise IT mantra but if there’s one thing that the abundances of mashups proves, it’s that integrating systems on the open web is everything but complex.

On the open web we have usable and developer friendly API standards with tooling, besides that we have proper standards for identity and authentication.

If you don’t dig yourself into a hole, it really doesn’t have to be that difficult. And none of this is exactly new, this technology has been around for ages and it just builds on the strengths of the internet.

Standards based

Both sites are completely standards based. As an experiment I wrote both in a conservative form of HTML5 (and validated that) partly out of curiosity to see how it would turn out and partly because I think that our current Dutch industry standard XHTML is a dead end.

Added to that I have sprinkled in some microformats in places where it was obvious to do so (e.g. school addresses). The notion that it takes significant extra time to add microformats to a project is absurd and these days the advantages of adding them keep piling up.

Yes, it takes some effort to learn to use standards and microformats properly, but once learned I think it actually takes more effort not to use them.

Quickly

Finally, both sites have been built in a couple of days over the course of about a week and a half. We wanted to show that when we’re talking about a quick project, it really can be quick and that building a non-trivial usable beautiful website does not need to cost a lot of time or money.

All of this can be improved. Let’s get at it.

It’s nice that they’re optimistic for improvements in HTML. Seeing what disasters both the XHTML and in a somewhat lesser extent SVG tracks of the W3C standardization process have been, we could definitely use them. They should admit though, that a full fledged HTML5 with rich CSS3+ is the death knell for Flash.

The more sites we see like the Holland Festival one the more it means that clients are choosing for an open and more semantic website with gradual improvements in JavaScript and CSS. It may take ten years, but we may see the first signs of a shift in this industry.

No mobile?

He’s right to say that it’s difficult to deliver a consistent HTML5 experience across browsers on the desktop. The fact that he conveniently ignores mobile browsers is more than a bit misleading.

Mobile internet usage is exploding and most of that usage is centered around Webkit based browsers. Mobile webkit is also pretty rapidly incorporating HTML5 features and things like CSS transitions. This gives developers who want to make a great mobile site for a big and important part of their audience a single very compelling target to develop for.

Like Gruber said, one of the most noteworthy non-announcements for iPhone 3.0 was no Flash. Who really needs it anyway on the iPhone? And why would Apple let somebody else in on their platform?

Is Flash dead? No. Is there for the first time a clear path forward to a world without Flash? Yes, finally!

The headline for the piece accompanying this video reads: “Odds of getting fined doubled” in Dutch.

The video is in Dutch but you should still be able to make out a very interesting and frankly somewhat scary urban systems play.

There is a Google Streetview like car which drives through Amsterdam. It has 3 cameras on either side to be able to scan the three predominant parking patterns (queue, fish and orthogonal). The cameras OCR the license plates of all parked cars and check them with a database.

Another necessary ingredient is a new class of parking ticket machines where you need to punch in your license plate before you get your ticket. The machines are pretty poorly designed, causing a lot of user frustration but they are an essential part of the system. These ticket machines are connected and they push your license plate and the time you have bought to a central server.

So if the scanning car finds a license plate which a ticket machine has not designated as having bought a ticket, a third party is dispatched on scooter to check if there is in fact no valid parking ticket lying under the windshield. If there isn’t, he writes a fine.

Changes

The system dramatically increases the odds of you getting fined compared to the previous system where parking inspectors would walk the street samplewise. This approaches a total and real time assessment and billing of urban space.

The fact that the scanner does not need to get out of the car is interesting from a division of labor point of view. The person actually fining the car gets an SMS and then does a tactical strike with the urban rapid entry vehicle of choice. This minimizes the contact surface with the parking inspectors reducing both potential aggression and being able to see parking inspectors coming (and making a mad dash to the ticket machine).

When Google’s car scans the street all kind of privacy concerns are paraded even though the end result benefits and harms the entire public equally. Nobody even realizes yet what the consequences of this approach will be until we get to feel and see it more directly. It is difficult to ‘feel’ a higher accuracy of parking inspection except that people who normally would hardly ever get a fine, will get them now.

I’m also interested in people’s reaction to changing a leaky implementation of a system of regulations with its faults and errors but a human scale to a totalitarian implementation such as this one which covers enough as to be nearly foolproof. Protest? Quiet resignation? We will see.

And for all you militant free parking advocates out there, put this on your reading list: The High Cost of Free Parking

Took a stroll around the house and happened upon some contemporary dance (more).

Yesterday night we saw a live gig here in Delft by Kyteman (myspace) and his hip-hop orchestra and we stood agape with wonder. This guy is a recent musical sensation in the Netherlands and if you can catch a show by him run to it!

Kyteman is a hip-hop artist/conductor with a trumpet who leads a 21 piece orchestar with a full brass section, a string section and a host of M.C.s. A definite mashup formation with hip-hop, funky and blues sounds. I write orchestar because it is reminiscent even of more balkan influences like Bregović and Beirut. The sound they produce is rich and dynamic and the performances spectacular in their grandeur.

The music is awesome, but the live gig is where it’s at. 3voor12 made a composition of audience recordings at Pinkpop to give you an idea of the explosion.

Trivial mashups

I recently did a survey to see what relevant mashups I could find as examples and I was surprised to find that there are not that many serious ones. Especially if you want to go beyond the chewn out examples of Flickr, last.fm and Google Maps, there simply is not that much there.

This is indicative of how much work remains to be done in creating data sources and adding semantics to the web. All the things we have made thusfar are mere proofs of concept compared to the potential that is still there.

One of the reasons why this may be the case is that it is hard to build a decent business on top of a mashups either because the license of the source is not permissive enough or because building on top of somebody else’s web app is a shaky foundation.

Channels

In the widget project we did, the channel was set namely: widgets. This both makes sense and doesn’t. Widgets are a general enough target for displaced information but for some types of information they are not the ideal channel.

Calendar information should be in your calendar whether that be Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar. It’s nice to have it in a widget but that’s not the most relevant place. Similarly for videos you should have a podcast link with all the video formats embedded as enclosures. The video widget we developed is finally live (embedded underneath) and displays the latest videos quite nicely, but it would be nicer still to integrate this with iTunes and Boxee and be able to watch it on your television.

So a more wholistic approach is necessary that recognizes the values and affordances of various forms of data and provides a consistent brand across channels. Widgets already say that your website is irrelevant, now take it one step further.

Also a small test of the open syndication facility of iGoogle. A bit hidden away but works nicely.

And to finish off the week, yesterday evening we had a nice ride through Rotterdam during the alleycat. I’d never done the Maastunnel before, nor seen most of Zuid, the Cuyp and the Brienenoord on bike before, so it was a great day of discovering Rotterdam.

Unfortunately no pictures of glorious Rotterdam during the golden hour as I crossed the Erasmus bridge for the last leg of the race. Too busy biking.

Tuesday morning I went to foam to see the last couple of days of the Avedon exhibit and I’m glad I did. Spectacular work! The exhibit is done in Amsterdam, but maybe you can catch it somewhere else (tweet)? It is very much worth it.

Then I went to report on an event about practical applications of OpenID. The event was heavily suit oriented which struck me as interesting. My report in Dutch is posted on Frankwatching (tweet).

Wednesday morning was filled with a symposium on Context Mapping at the local faculty of Industrial Design (tweet). Interesting collection of people and great content on the topic (tweet, tweet). I picked up the thesis “Brining the every day life of people into design” by Froukje Sleeswijk Visser (tweet).

Friday morning had a ridiculously early start (tweet) at the Rijksmuseum for a ‘hard hat tour’. It is interesting enough to see the construction and reconstruction from the inside. The reconstructed artwork is quite beautiful and I’m anxious to see the end result. For some of my friends this was the first time they had ever set foot in the building at all (which is a shame), and this will stay the only opportunity for the following year or five.

After more coffee (like I said, it was an early start), it was off to the soldering irons at Mediamatic for the RFIDuino workshop given by Marc Boon. After a lot of fidgeting and my first real soldering experience in I think 15 years, some of us managed to build a working RFID shield for their Arduinos. Lots of unpredictable behaviour (tweet) though. Where is that post-mortem debugger with hot code replace for your hardware setup?

Vodafone presented their app manager which will be rolled out to Vodafone mobile users. The app manager makes it easier to find and install widgets/apps to the mobile phone. Widgets can be submitted to the app manager in an App Store like proces and in due time —I think the word was come September— you can even charge money for your widget in a 70/30 split.

CC BY-NC-ND photo by Anne Helmond

The mobile widgets by Vodafone are a W3C standard and the app manager is an application which wraps the widget rendering components of the Opera browser into a user and developer friendly package. Opera has quite some experience in mobile rendering engines, widgets and web technology in general and it shows.

The afternoon was widget building workshops and a contest for which I built two widgets: a pollen prediction widget and a Dutch government job search widget (if you run Opera, clicking those links will actually do something).

The documentation is a bit sparse (as are the APIs) and the environment is mostly unfamiliar but that probably will be fixed over time. I built and tested these on my desktop Opera browser. I don’t have a mobile phone that runs these widgets, which is a problem.

Depending on your target audience you may or may not want to build for this platform. In any case if you have your data, APIs and design in order, it shouldn’t be too difficult to build a basic widget.

I think you can find more detailed coverage, slides and maybe even streams of the day if you look around a bit. Here are some observations.

Terminology

There is a lot of terminology confusion in this space: widsets, widgets, apps, gadgets and applications which can get pretty unclear here and there.

Simple is not important

All the talk focused on how simple it is to get a simple widget running. It hardly ever is about the simple stuff, we can believe that that works. It’s about the tools and documentation, the nooks and crannies and the 80% of effort necessary to nail that last 20%. Every new platform, however simple it may be, adds another of that 80% of extra overhead.

OpenSocial

There is a lot of overlap with OpenSocial and I find it hard to believe that it would not be possible (not to mention wise) to converge the two. Both specifications deal with rendering a bit of HTML in a tiny window with specific Javascript APIs, social APIs in the case of OpenSocial and device specific APIs in the case of mobile widgets. Added to that OpenSocial feels like it has more momentum, a solid implementation and better documentation.

One difference here is that the widgets we ran today must be rendered by the Opera browser whereas an OpenSocial widget is processed on the server and the resulting HTML can be rendered by any standards compliant browser.

In any case more consolidation and convergence can only be a good thing, especially when the essential differences are so minor. I found a brief reference to that possibility by a CETIS guy.

I also think it’s curious that OpenSocial/iGoogle gadgets don’t run in more places. Why isn’t there an OpenSocial container for Vista and OS X desktop gadgets just to name one?

Promises, promises

Many of the presentations were promising a lot of things and the current SDK and capabilities we have been presented are just a taste of what is to come.

There currently aren’t any APIs yet to access any mobile specific device features from your widget. These are ‘forthcoming’ somewhere but the process and timeframe in which these should be available were vague. Without these APIs the widgets you can make don’t go much further than a twitter search or your daily fortune, with those APIs really serious things become possible (as does really serious abuse).

Vodafone positions this app manager framework as a platform to reach the vast masses who do not yet use the mobile internet and do not yet run applications on their mobile phones. To reach them a lot of components must be in the right place and the experience to get and run applications needs to be smooth as silk and even then it remains to be seen if it will work. This is a big promise with a huge potential payoff.

In that future being able to install and share widgets/applications across platforms with minimal effort will have serious consequences for the very notion of what a mobile app is. Just a web service with a bit of logic and access (control) to device hardware using uniform APIs?

As Chipchase wrote: “[…] the interesting trend to watch will be the mainstreaming of just-in-time discovery and consumption of highly focused and contextually useful applications.”

I can’t wait to see if and how we will get there.

One set we found was the incident reports of Dutch first aid services which are published at P2000 and parsed by the site Alarmeringen.nl into nicely Google Mapped displays with RSS feeds and SMS alerts.

What it didn’t have yet was a decent output to Twitter. So to prod things a bit I made twitter feeds for the four major cities in the Netherlands. Meet:

• @al_amsterdam @pk2amsterdam
• @al_haaglanden @p2khaaglanden
• @al_rijnmond @p2krotterdam
• @al_utrecht @p2kutrecht

I think it’s easiest to attribute the quote to Matt Jones who in this presentation noted that the best people on Twitter aren’t in fact people. I agree but here the Tweets represent the aggregations of groups of people: the incident and its cause, somebody noticing it and dialing dispatch and finally the fire fighters, paramedics or policemen moving to the scene.

It’s interesting imagining what has happened and where, but I don’t really see this feed changing people’s behaviour.

Ideally we would achieve a greater granularity intersecting your location with the path of the dispatch, so when you see a police car whizz by, you’d get a tweet later telling you why it was dispatched and what the result was.

Update:
As Pascal points out in his comment, this data was not supposed to be public at all but is de facto public because of technical architecture decisions. It is clear that these services have not been thought out with an internet enabled world in mind.

Joris points out a bit later that Remco van Zuijlen is piping these alerts straight from the air into twitter feeds on his own site.

Given that I was more interested in this as a proof of concept than to make it a long lasting durable service anyway, I’ll take down my twitter feeds after I’ve given its subscribees time to switch to Remco’s accounts.

Sometimes when stuck on a station, because the NS had messed up again, it could actually have been useful to take a Lovers train from Haarlem to Amsterdam. In reality this never worked out. Nobody knew when those trains actually departed and where to buy tickets for them.

The privatization was stalled and the NS was granted a monopoly on the main rail system until 2015. Now if we want to be in good shape to turn another privatization attempt into a success by then or hopefully before, we had better get our digital infrastructure in order.

Solution

I think two ingredients are now slowly getting into place to turn another privatization attempt of the railways into a success:

1. Full dynamic and open transit data
2. Seamless transit payment

OV-chipkaart terminal
CC picture by mooste

Neither of these is fully there yet, but in a couple of years we may expect both deployments to mature significantly. In that future perfect you will always know which train will take you to your destination regardless of the operator who runs the service. Payment of that service should be as easy as the check-in, check-out system of the OV-chipkaart right now if not easier.

Rail services would then finally be completely commoditized and by extension we could do the same to all of transit.

Breaking it open

Rail is one thing, but the transit experience entails the door to door planning and execution of a trip of which rail is just one part. Data and payment are just as essential to a nationwide transit infrastructure. Probably even more so because of the greater diversity of transit providers, many of which are not bound to fixed rail.

For my day to day transportation needs I want to get from A to B at a certain time for a certain price. A mobile device would know my location and when given my destination it would be able to show me a list of offers from which I could pick my preferred one. Some of the planners available do just this but because they are usually limited to a single operator, their offerings do not differ much.

Google goes for a more modus agnostic integrated and modern view of the experience:

Further opening up and integration would benefit travellers enormously. Ideally we would have one planner for all transit options, which includes rail, (micro)bus, lightrail, ferry but ideally also taxicabs and private individuals willing to carpool. This would add options and level the playing field.

What we would need

The following data dimensions would influence your choice of transportation option and would need to be offered to you by your planning tool of choice:

Time: How fast will this get me somewhere? How long do I have to wait before it leaves? Or did it already leave? How many times do I need to change?

Money: How much does this trip cost me? How much does it cost me in terms of CO2? Is it offset? How much would it cost me (in time and money) if I’d taken my car instead?

Quality: What is the quality of service offered? Are there different classes with different amenities? Is there WiFi on board? Do I get assistence getting on/off or with my luggage?
These would probably be standardized per modus of transportation but the class separation is pretty ingrained and influences the cost.

Reviews: What do people think of this particular operator?
In the case of standardized operators, you will usually know what you will get, but especially useful for modi where there is a great variety of operators performing services. Taxicabs would be a very nice target for community judgement.

Of course you should be able to set your preferences as to which modi and operators to prefer and which to never take unless no other options are available. Complicated but also a very nice UX problem to solve.

Planning and Negotiation

Some extra functionality may also be interesting to incorporate in this dynamic transit fabric:

Planning: Submitting a tentative plan may be interesting for transit operators so that they can optimize their services ahead of time. Many commuters know when they will travel which route a year or so in advance sometimes. Marginal discounts may be offered to those who submit a plan and stick to it (penalties for those who deviate). Publishing the statistics of trips requested and trips completed would show over- and undercapacity and give the various operators the chance to adjust their offerings.

Submitting a plan may involve a negotiation step: e.g. it will be cheaper if you walk to a certain place (stop) or the bus will swerve round to pick you up for a couple extra euros, which do you prefer?

A plan would then need to be finalized, either at the point of getting on/off (and paying the fare amount) or ahead of time to reserve a (type of) seat in a vehicle or for remote locations to guarantee the fact that the vehicle will pass by your area at all.

Renegotiation: Changes do happen, most impactful are those due to calamities: vehicle failure, track obstruction. Being able to flexibly catch these will vastly improve the transit experience. A good system would both inform transit operators so they can allocate extra resources where suitable and help travellers replan their journey in light of changed circumstances.

In a dynamic system with the planning functionality as described above in place, others’ change of plans in the system may influence your journey but no more than a couple of minutes. What would happen when those changes propagate through the entire network?

Conclusion

If we could achieve the openness and added integration of more information and more transit providers described above we could make very satisfying complete transit experiences.

I’ve made a mockup what such an application could look like:

Being able to compare and contrast various transit options would of course be fantastic, but that isn’t so far off anymore. For me the most promising idea is to provide the information and the incentives to enable the transit problem to be made transparent and to be crowd-sourced.

Kicking it with the Wakoopa guys who I shared a room with. Nice to hang around with a Dutch crew and some crazy stuff happening in the nights.

It was very interesting to see how people would behave in an environment with adequate bandwidth and Twitter saturation. As noted in tweets the immediacy of social interaction with your social subset, the people aimlessly wandering the corridors absorbed by their mobile displays and the HUGE backchannel were just symptoms of more to come.
For us Europeans attending an event such as this without a data plan is somewhat annoying. After leaving the convention center, war walking will only get you so far.
Also the realization that you don’t need a laptop or a DSLR (thanks Derek!) to enjoy a conference was a golden one. An iPhone, a charger and a small notebook will do just fine and won’t wear you down as much. Most of the time you’ll be busy talking to people at parties, walking around or eating, which does not require you to lug a complete digital office with you.

Steven Berlin Johnson’s talk on the Ecosystem of News (text) should not be missed. He painted a picture how the developments which look so bad for newspapers are actually good for news and journalism as a whole leading to a much richer and much more diverse ecosystem.

I almost missed the joint session by Jon Gruber and Merlin Mann but a quick tweet got me in the room shortly after it’d started. These are my favorite two bloggers and having them speak on the old theme of how to be yourself and do cool stuff was a lot of fun even if they’re both dicks (by their own admission).

The food all around Austin (more on it later) was great. I caught some burgers with the guys from Mangrove at Daddy’s which is a combined sports bar / burger joint and it was as awesome as a typical American experience can be.

The New Think for Old Publishers panel was odd in that the publishers did not do any of the new thinking but sollicited the panel for ways to go forward with their industry. Fortunately it had Clay Shirky on who’s usually right about stuff. I got to ask a question to the panel (on a Spotify-like service for books more on which later) which was well received by the audience and by Mr. Shirky (which was pretty damn cool!).
They handed out copies of “Here Comes Everybody” which I hadn’t bought yet for som reason or other. I started reading it in the plane and it is as good as everybody says it is. Compulsory reading for everybody who thinks they’re doing stuff on the internet.

The Fray Cafe 9 at the Red Eyed Fly was a very cool podium live speaking event where some awesome speakers told their true stories. I don’t know exactly where or when the recording will become available but definitely recommended.

Of the parties around the event the Facebook party was one of the best. The two DJs they had spinning were very good and got the dance floor filled up and moving. Nice after that was drinking a bottle of vodka at our afterparty in the Hilton lobby.

There also was a Django lunch which is usually nice but it was extra interesting to meetup with a couple of guys from Sunlight Labs who are pioneering a lot of very interesting open government stuff in the USA.

Hearing Bruce Sterling talk makes his rambling essays a lot more bearable. He gave a very unadulterated piece of his techno-nostalgic cynical mind with some interesting perspectives on the future.

The Designing Change in America talk with the design team who did the Obama campaign was fantastic with a lot of interesting stories from inside the campaign and its break neck pace.

At the SxSWi closing party there was a mechanical bull and not being from America I of course could not resist the chance of riding it (movie). As they say, when in Texas…

No visit to Texas would be complete without some Tex Mex. Being fed up with the conference scene offerings I caught a cab and headed to Polvo’s on South 1st. I’d heard a lot of good things about it and it turned out to be a very nice place for Mexican food. I don’t get why people at SxSWi wait in line for the places near the convention center instead of rounding up some people and catching a cab.
On the last day I took the Wakoopa crew out for some good Tacos at Torchy’s Tacos on a recommendation from Nikhil of Turn2Live. I love the abundant availability of Mexican food in this part of America and it always makes leaving a painful experience.

The last night we were in Austin I magically found a group of Dutchies and we walked up 6th and Red River a bit randomly sampling bands in the cafes. The music festival hadn’t really started yet but still there were a lot of very cool bands (punk / speedrock) playing. The next day walking a bit along 6th during noon they were just building up and it already was really busy. Maybe next year I’ll stay a couple of extra days to see more bands.

And of course all the other people I met who are too numerous to list here. That is the real charm of the conference, the number of people I’ve just met randomly because they’re all there, has been staggering and is the real value of this event.

Reisinformatie ‘nieuwe stijl’ is ook maar een woord om te verhullen dat de manier van informatie aanbieden die de NS hanteert jaren achterloopt en dat ze zelfs actief mensen die zelf dit niveau proberen op te schroeven zoals Trein.app het verhinderen.

De reis app die door de NS uitgebracht is werkt op Java wat mobiel niet het handigste platform is en waar ook niet de interessantste gebruikers zich bevinden. Versies voor iPhone en anderen schijnen nog te komen, maar deze versie heeft al een jaar op zich laten wachten, dus wanneer is erg onduidelijk.

Wat hadden ze dan moeten doen?

Het wil de NS en de andere vervoersaanbieders in Nederland niet aan hun hoofd dat hun core business het vervoeren van mensen is en dat het essentieel is dat de informatie over hun vervoersmiddelen zo wijd en vrij mogelijk beschikbaar is.

Mensen willen waarschijnlijk op ontzettend veel verschillende manieren vervoersinformatie tot zich nemen. Teveel om aan één aanbieder over te laten. Er zijn genoeg mensen die iets kunnen maken, maar het niet makkelijk beschikbaar zijn van de gegevens maakt het te kostbaar en ingewikkeld om aan de slag te gaan.

Als de NS de actuele treintijden en routes vrij zou geven via een API dan zouden de kosten voor andere ontwikkelaars om ermee aan de slag te gaan sterk worden teruggebracht en denk ik dat er een bloei aan interessante applicaties zou ontstaan. In zo’n situatie zouden er wel afspraken gemaakt moeten worden gemaakt in een gebruiksovereenkomst, maar de hoeveelheid controle die de NS op dit moment wil uitoefenen is onrealistisch en contra-productief.

Reisinformatie

9292ov heeft pas iets slimmer maar nog steeds bijzonder kortzichtig een wedstrijd uitgeschreven waar studenten een reisapplicatie kunnen maken. Deelnemers doen wel afstand van al hun rechten (!) en er is hier ook geen publieke databron beschikbaar.

De noodzaak voor publieke data heb ik hierboven al beschreven en een volwassen reisapplicatie vereist een toegewijd team dat eraan blijft werken, niet een situatie waar deze overgedragen wordt aan een andere partij die de capaciteiten mist (want waarom anders die wedstrijd uitgeschreven?).

Usability

Uit de review van Raimo maak ik op dat deze applicatie ook weer nodeloos ingewikkeld is. Waar Trein.app ook de mist in gaat is het dynamisch reisplannen. In veel gevallen is mijn reis nogal flexibel: ik wil op een gegeven moment ’s avonds weer terug naar Delft maar ik weet niet wanneer. Ik weet dus waar ik heen wil en de applicatie weet al waar ik ben en kan beschikken over een actueel reisschema.

De enige vraag die er voor een gebruiker dan toe zou moeten doen als je de applicatie opstart is: “Waar wil je naar toe?” daarna moet de applicatie me laten zien wat mijn opties zijn. Dit is het simpelste geval wat opgelost moet worden, de rest is extra.

Update: Ik was net op Radio Online waar ik beknopt pleitte voor het vrijgeven van de vervoersgegevens. In het voorbereidende gesprek met Tonie vonden we het al frappant dat bijvoorbeeld Tunesië en Egypte betere Google Transit dekking hebben dan Nederland.

First, it’s nice to see newspapers do stuff which is innovative instead of being stuck in the headlights and waiting to die.

Secondly, this adresses a real problem. On any commute I make with my iPhone, I theoretically can read all the news from the world’s best newspapers instead of grabbing a free newspaper from the box on the station. I’ve done so for a while, but lately I don’t bother anymore.
The reason I don’t bother is that it is too much hassle to lead the newspaper’s awful bloated websites over what passes for 3G in this part of the world, then select what I want to read and then read that. There are too many actions involved and the cognitive load is too great.

A simple app which works like a specialized RSS reader where you can triage for a specified set of newspapers and categories the articles you want to read and then get those in rapid succession would be a godsend.

The presentations promise to be interesting again, it’ll be nice to catch up with people and I’ll be writing a blog report of the Q&A sessions. So it would be nice if people would ask questions worth blogging and worth talking about after the event. I’m pretty sure comments will be open.

MIMOA

Of the people presenting I’d already heard about MIMOA. I’m pretty interested in architecture and I gave the site a brief test run.

It’s a great open catalogue (or is it a personal architectural guide?). It’s mostly functional and I saw that they also syndicate their content to for instance the Stylos site. Some of the flows and layouts of the site are a bit jarring and could use fixing but they don’t detract from the core usefulness of the site.

The only thing I’m curious about is whether MIMOA could be used as a tool to bridge the gap between architecture professionals and us naieve end users (or should I say victims) of their creations. The current blurbs and comment system do not really invite to such.

The architectural student association Stylos is celebrating a lustrum this week, so there were lunch lectures every day, but unfortunately I could only attend the one.

Check out the details in the set.

Here’s a short video demoing the box the phone comes in (and if the box already is this cool, you can imagine what the phone is like):

Android G1 Box from Alper Çugun on Vimeo.

And today I also got wind of two new songs released. The dark ‘La Llorona’:

And the more traditional ‘My Night With A Prostitute from Marseilles’:

It clearly shows when I started blogging on this Wordpress in April of 2007 and then how my blogging has become more and more sparse with initially some dense areas and later on some blank ones.

I’ll probably do some iterations on this concept, one with some interaction and another one with blocks aggregated by day of the week.

They find a loft in New York.
They find 9 people willing to plunk down some cash ($1000 each).
They setup a Limited Liability Company.
The LLC subleases the loft from the current leaser on a year contract.
Membership dues and workshop money (and the occasional party) pays the rent on the space.

This story is a stark contrast with what you would need to do in the Netherlands to setup something similar. I know because I’m in the market to expand our current coworking space both because we will be kicked out in April and because we could use some more space for stuff and projects.

So how is this different and much more difficult to setup in the Netherlands? There are a number of factors which contribute to this difficulty.

Zoning

Zoning laws prohibit using something like a loft for commercial/office-like purposes. If you’re doing a startup, the boundary of what is your house and what is your place of work may blur, but in the Netherlands an office is an office and a home is not an office.

Municipalities especially will not want livable houses to be extracted from the housing market and occupied by businesses because a lot of them already face a housing shortage.

Personal investment

People just dropping in some cash to get a space started is probably easier in New York too. One factor Max mentioned was that leases are ridiculously expensive anyway so people are used to paying a lot of money.

But a more important factor probably is that there is a bigger culture in the US of personal investment. What is annoying to startups here is that there are so few European angels. There has hardly ever been a significant internet cashout in the Netherlands and neither do we see a lot of reinvestment happening. On both coasts of the US there seem to be more people with money who are willing to invest it into cool stuff. The vast majority of people with money in the Netherlands are more boring than anything.

Liability

Limited liability companies in the Netherlands are called a B.V. and they require a seed capital of €18′000 to start. This money does not have to remain there but it is still a sizable hurdle. In comparison a British Ltd. costs €100 to setup.

Setting up a Ltd and using that to enter into a lease agreement in the Netherlands would be frowned upon because Ltds have a historically bad reputation.

Another way around this may be to setup a voluntary association or a foundation but to be able to shoulder liability, these would need statutes which need to be acquired from a notary and require a significant fee.

Subleasing

Subleasing spaces in the Netherlands is usually frowned upon especially when the sublessor makes a profit. This is because a lot of houses in the Netherlands are rent controlled and are rented out at half or less of their market value.

This means that a lot of houses are not being utilized to their full market value and that the supply in houses is far too small (and the supply of officeplexes too big). Rather than having the market clear this mess up, we are stuck with this heavily entrenched real estate system.

Lease agreements

Office leases are usually agreed upon for a period of 5+5 years, which mean you get a five year contract with the option to extend it for another five years. This five year contract is in fact meant to protect the lessee from fickleness on the part of the lessor but it does not take into account the fact that businesses may not want to be tied down.

This would not be so much of a problem if limited liability companies were easier to setup (the company would then take on the lease) but I treated that above.

Critical market

To be able to partially fund a space on workshop and party revenues, it helps if there is a large pool of potentially interested people. With the scale of something such as New York that may be possible, it’s a bit harder for us in Delft. We are at the moment somewhat pressed to find a fourth coworker let alone people who’d be willing to pay money to support us.

Concluding

None of the things I mention above are insurmountabel but I think they do in large part explain why Dutch business and venture culture is not as dynamic and booming as that in the US.

• Berlin∗
• Amsterdam∗
• London
• Copenhagen
• Nantes
• Meppel
• San Francisco∗
• Oakland

It could be debated whether Meppel is a city or not, but I’ll let it.

I’ve had a trial subscription to the fashionable Dutch morning paper: NRC.next and I got called today warning me that it is about to finish and whether I’d like to prolong my subscription with them.

I declined for the following reasons (of which I only communicated the first to the girl on the telephone):

• I don’t really have the time to read a morning newspaper. Most days I forget to get it out of the mailbox in the morning and if I take it with me I don’t really have time to read it at my place of employment anyway.
  Also my mailbox is too far from my house to reasonably pick up the paper in the morning and read it at home over breakfast.
• I don’t believe in using physical resources to convey something as ephemeral as the news anymore. Yes, paper has a ‘better feel’, but I don’t think your outdated dead tree fethishism is a good excuse to impose on the environment as you do.
  The free newspapers are even worse offenders handed out by the thousands, littering the trains in the morning. I think physical newspapers both free and not should be taxed to make some amends for the environmental damage they cause.
  Solution: Read your news on your iPhone or other digital device.
• I don’t believe in broadcast media anymore. A physical newspaper has a lot of surplus, delivering to me not only the news I’m interested in, but also all the other news I’m not interested in. This is a waste. Not to mention the news from other newspapers I’m interested in which I’m not getting —a waste of opportunity.
  Solution: Mix and mash a selection of news which is of interest to you from various newspapers, magazines, blogs and other media.
• I don’t agree with the selection of news or authors that this locale provides. Dutch newspapers write about Dutch news, from a Dutch perspective and focus almost exclusively on Dutch sports, opinions, science, books and arts. This is a narrowness of vision which is offensive if you’re interested in the world at large.
  If you have a wider interest, you will probably read some English language publications and get information on the same topics days or weeks before it has been processed for the Dutch public.
  Being bound to such a small locale also means that you get the best writing, the Dutch language has to offer, which is globally pretty insignificant. The New Yorker and the Times have a larger pool of talent to dip into, which explains the chasm of quality that separates them from most Dutch publications.
  Solution: Learn English.
• And lastly but most importantly —taking from Talebs philosophies— reading a daily newspaper propagates the delusion that the world can be understood and controlled. Something, which is clearly not the case. It certainly cannot be understood and explained by journalists, just as much as it can’t be controlled by the people reading newspapers. Additionally being kept up to date of all the world’s events and miseries on a daily basis does not make us any happier.
  Solution: Accept. Stuff happens and the world is unfathomably complex. Go to a lot of parties and people will tell you about important current events over a drink, which is all we can really hope for.

So no paper news for me and good riddance.

As a prerequisite for building these widgets, we need to work on the data sources to make them easier to use and better fitting to the available data and potential uses. Getting these data sources sorted out also provides a longer term benefit for any other party who would be interested in using this data. Our widgets are but one potential implementation in a realm of possibilities. Anybody can take the data source the widgets use and make something different and/or better. That vision is beyond the scope of this current project but it is also being worked on.

For this project we need to find a way to develop widgets which are deployable to a multitude of platforms with as much ease as possible. There are far too many widget platforms out there, as can be seen in this presentation by Niall Kennedy and because this is a Dutch project there is an elephant in the room we have to take into account.

Data sources

The data sources we got were already halfway there. Some were not machine readable, those that were, were either not very well formed or did not include as much data as one would like. We filed change requests for some modifications but these move slowly in some cases. The data sources we are going to use and republish would ultimately be:

• RSS, preferrably well formed Atom and in some cases RSS 2.0 with media enclosures and/or geodata
• iCalendar (or xCal) probably wrapped in RSS
• generic XML or simpler still (CSV, TXT)

Personal vs. Public Dashboard

For widgets there are two major contexts in which they are run, either on personal dashboards such as iGoogle or Netvibes (or on public versions of these but dashboards nevertheless), but much more interestingly on social networking profile pages as a display of identity.
Ideally the widgets would work on both, though the uses of some of the data sources do not lend themselves well to be displayed on public vanity pages. Nevertheless being able to deploy widgets to both would be very welcome.

Taking the greatest common divisor of platforms restricts our set of functionality. There may be specific API methods available on each platform —most notably the social APIs exposed in the social networking platforms— which would enable us to make socially aware widgets. Incorporating sociality and the notion of a specific user is beyond the scope of this project. We most probably will rely on the cross platform nature of the client side and rely on the platform to supply us with a HTML rendering environment.

Important target platforms

Clearspring has a list of ‘drop targets’ which is pretty large. Because this is a project by the Dutch government and it is principally aimed at the Dutch public, we need to cover the online places that Dutch people use a lot first and foremost. This mostly means that we are not so interested in Orkut and Hi5 but more so in Hyves and MSN Live.

Hyves has a coverage of about 5M people in the Netherlands, MSN messenger and by extension the entire MSN platform should be bigger than that. This alone makes them very important to support and test for.

Considerations

The government has some additional considerations which need to be taken into account when choosing a platform and or a technology.

• Dutch government tries to adhere to open standards and open source software wherever possible. This is not a hard requirement but it does influence decisions as far it is practical do so.
• Dutch government should strive to be independent of commercial partners and definitely should not mix commercial branding with governmental information.
• We need to consider a wider growth path towards the future so sustainability and scalability of efforts and platforms are considerations.
• In some cases exerting tight control over appearance and functionality of a widget may be desired.

Platforms

There are a number of technology platforms that can be used when developing a widget. Each of these has its own advantages and disadvantages and implications for eventual deployment.

Flash

Any platform that allows the use of embed codes in the HTML is a suitable host for Flash widgets. This type of widget is very popular mostly due to its ease of development and deployment, and full graphical control within the widget. Disadvantages are that ease of modification and reuse are severely limited because the platform is not very open and well known (at least not as well known as HTML), which will deter reuse and remix of widgets in the future.
After some deliberation we chose not to use Flash. Creating or reusing Flash widgets necessitates the use of an expensive authoring environment. This does not fit into the widest possible reuse, either within government or outside of it. Most of our data sources also mandate more text based and less graphical widgets, so Flash is not strictly necessary. And finally anybody who wants to make a Flash widget can embed it into any of the chosen technology platforms without any problems.

Straight HTML and JavaScript

A widget is a piece of a webpage and it happens to be that a (piece of) a webpage can also be used as a widget. Any webpage that displays a very specific piece of functionality on a limited amount of screen can function as widget.
Allowing the upload of a simple HTML page and wrapping that in an <iframe> or similar is the approach taken by some platforms and it works quite well. An advantage is that the widget may be rendered by a fragment of the same template that rendered the main webpage. Disadvantages are that the widget is not aware of its surroundings and does not have a way to set or retrieve settings.

iGoogle Gadget

An iGoogle Gadget is a web page as described above wrapped in an XML document with some metadata extensions and a wrapper around some javascript calls to provide settings functionality and proxied XMLHttpRequest.

OpenSocial Gadget

An OpenSocial Gadget is an extension of the iGoogle gadget platform with some social extensions to the API which make a gadget aware of its social surroundings (logged in user, profile user, friend list) and allows gadgets to send messages to various activity streams. An iGoogle gadget will run in an OpenSocial container and essentially function as an OpenSocial gadget without social functionality.

Netvibes UWA

The Netvibes Universal Widget API is a way of creating a straight HTML page in such a way that it can be recompiled and served to a series of target platforms. There are some metadata extensions which have to be followed, the scripting environment is both extended to include settings and sizing, and the DOM is severely crippled. The UWA relies on the fact that most widget runtimes are de facto HTML rendering environments with many similarities and bridges the differences.
Just this week Netvibes announced the release of an OpenSocial compliant UWA which should make UWA widgets run on any OpenSocial container and make Netvibes itself also an OpenSocial container. A release of this new version is still forthcoming.

Facebook

Facebook applications need to be written in the FBML which is specific to Facebook. There are some widget distribution options which wrap a widget and republish it as a Facebook application but currently Facebook is not a large priority for this project.

Sprout

Sprout is a very interesting platform which provides a web based Flash widget builder where anybody can very easily use drag an drop to build their own widget from standardized elements (no programming required) with both simple controls and complex ones backed by outside data sources. The provided set of elements should cater to most needs, but being able to modify and build additional controls would have been very nice.
For this project it may not be the best starting point but if we make our data sources clean and standard, anybody can plug them into the Sprout Builder and rapidly build their own versions of our widgets.

I have made a diagram (PDF) summarizing the various options, platforms and eventual deployment targets in the widget landscape. This diagram is not complete but it gives a good impression of the complexities involved.

Test application

To define a simple test application to write and run on the various runtimes. The application should:

• Display some HTML
• Use custom CSS to style the elements
• Be able to display images
• Be able to retrieve RSS/XML data from the same server
• Be configurable with user preferences

And some softer requirements:

• Be able to embed Flash content
• Be aware of its own dimensions
• Respond to resize and refresh actions of the widget platform

Here is the test application as a plain HTML file, a version which should run on the iGoogle platform and a version for the Netvibes UWA. It looks quite horrible because it does not have proper styling, but it does most of the things listed above. Translating the base HTML version to the specific platforms was not too difficult, but somewhat idiosyncratic. There are some specific metadata elements which need to be accounted for, the DOM is altered in some cases and there are platform specific calls for XMLHttpRequests that use a local proxy to retrieve data. What is immediately apparent when working is that the documentation on the Google platform is far more comprehensive.

This test application was then run on the various platforms and galleries where applicable to see if it would work and what the options for redistribution per platform were. The experiences of these tests have shaped our impressions of the various distribution options. Our findings are discussed in the next section.

Galleries

Galleries sometimes have widget building options but most of them are concerned with spreading a widget to as many platforms as possible and monitoring the reach of the widget. Important considerations when picking a gallery (if any) are:

• the input options, what kind of widgets this gallery will accept
• the output options, to what platforms can this gallery spread a widget
• look and feel of the gallery and of the widget wrapper

Netvibes

The Netvibes ecosystem provides a way for people to browse widgets submitted to the ecosystem and install them to either Netvibes or to a number of other platforms. The gallery also shows an install count per widget.
The Netvibes ecosystem accepts: UWA widgets, iCal files, SWF files.
The Netvibes ecosystem publishes to: a blog, iGoogle (install and gallery submit), Vista, Live, Dashboard and seems to work all right.

Clearspring

Clearspring is a generic widget gallery service with methods to widgetize page content and completely manage a widget.
Clearspring accepts: SWF, HTML, Javascript (not very clear how this would work) and Image widgets.
Clearspring exports to too many platforms to mention, notably: Blogger, embed, iGoogle, Live, Dashboard, Wordpress, delicious, e-mail, Facebook, Netvibes, Typepad. Clearspring can also publish directly to the Netvibes, Live and iGoogle galleries.
The options look fairly good but the inwidget functionality borders the widget with an ugly border through which the functionality to add the widget to other platforms is implemented.

Gigya

Can’t really get Gigya to work. It looks mostly focused on Flash widgets but the site is a mess and the documentation is very sparse.

Widgetbox

Widgetbox is a partner of Netvibes
Widgetbox accepts: Flash, HTML+Javascript pasted or remote, Atom/RSS, Google Gadget
Widgetbox exports and shares with some platforms such as Blogger, Netvibes, iGoogle and Wordpress.
A Widgetbox wrapper also includes a very ugly border button that enables visitors to add the widget to their platform of choice.

Widgadget

Widgadget has severely limited creation and publication option, documentation is sparse.

Spring Widgets

Spring Widgets offers an SDK for Flash based widget development and seems to be exclusively focused on Flash widgets.

Various OpenSocial sites (Hyves, LinkedIn, Ning) have their own galleries for applications and their own policies on which to include. Most of these sites also have sandboxes where inputting the address to the gadget.xml file suffices to run an application. Hyves for instance has to give their approval of your gadget before it is included in the site.
On the subject of galleries our clients remarked that the appearance of control and non-commerciality needs to be maintained. Widget galleries which are all too present on the widget and exert a lot of control are not preferred. It is completely undesirable (and understandably so) to see the Clearspring logo mixed with government branding and data. So because galleries are not essential, they are mostly out of consideration for now.

Conclusion

During a final meeting based on this research, we presented our findings and got some more input as to in which direction we should focus and the consequences that would have on our final platform choice.

HTML vs. Flash

Using HTML in favor of Flash proved to be contentious but the compromise was chosen to have the basic functionality of widgets be done in HTML markup. Interested parties can always have a Flash widget developed and embed that in a chosen technology platform or use it standalone.

Platform choice

Based on the techology choices and the platforms that it definitely should run on: iGoogle, Hyves, LinkedIn, Ning our choice of platform is quickly reduced to either UWA or iGoogle. UWA widgets can already be compiled to iGoogle gadgets and with the upcoming release of the next version they should also more easily run as OpenSocial apps, but this version has not been released yet. The coyness of the Netvibes team, together with the sparsity of their documentation makes you wonder if this latest release of OpenSocial support isn’t a last ditch attempt to regain relevancy. For all we know Netvibes may cease to exist tomorrow, so sustainability is certainly a question.

On the other side if we choose for iGoogle gadgets to be the widget platform of choice, it will run on most of our target platforms and with the new version of Netvibes it will also run in their OpenSocial container. The only thing that we will not be getting are Netvibes recompilation options for Dashboard and Vista. iGoogle/OpenSocial looks like the platform with the most momentum and momentum is worth a lot.

Genericity

There is a strong desire to make the widgets in the project as generic as possible to enable reuse for other applications. At a certain point there was the idea that we could make one widget to do everything, this however is not really advisable.

We defined a set of widget archetypes (news, events, images, videos, geodata, calculation, infodisplay) where a widget may fall into and we think that for the future it would be useful to have reference implementations of each archetype on file so that a request for a new widget can quickly be fulfilled by taking an archetype widget and customizing that.

For this project though, we will be making specific widget implementations which can be easily generified to their archetype. So after we make a branded news widget, any interested party can swap in the RSS feed and their own logo to make it theirs. We thought it would fit better in the modest scope of this project to deliver conclusive results instead of half-finished products.

Gallery

Given this choice of base platform, if we were to use a gallery to ease distribution and monitor its reach, we would probably use Clearspring because it seems to be the most mature and functional of the lot (Clearspring is also used by the CBC (see their presentation at the Widget Summit)) with Widgetbox as a close contender. But because of the all too visible branding of Clearspring and other containers, we will not be using either.

Call for comment

Fortunately we do not have to make a definitive choice right now. For our set of widgets we will first be designing the functionality and doing some reviews. After that the basic functionality of the widget will be prototyped in HTML and finally the HTML will be modified to run on the target platform(s) of our choosing.

We’re not committed yet, so some of our choices are still open and most of it is up for debate. If you have any questions, additions or things we have missed in our survey, we would love to hear from you in the comments.

Update: Though not visible on the site yet, Techcrunch reports that Spring Widgets will be shutdown by Fox Interactive.

Update: Sprout Builder recently announced a pricing model to their up until then free service.

Update: The overview overlooked the yourminis widget publishing platform. Yourminis takes SWF files and distributes these to a number of platforms.

As a prideful New Yorker, this is what I think. I think that all of the questions about privacy can be addressed. A smooth space of payment and mobility can be designed with clear strong provisions to protect anonymity and privacy. I don’t think that’s at all out of the question. And so it’s just a question of political will and as somebody who, I take a great deal of pride in being from New York and I wouldn’t want the city to persist into the 21st century very much longer, with what is essentially a 19th century model of payment for services. It’s just, it is a shame to me.

Replace ‘New York’ with ‘the Netherlands’ and this quite accurately summarizes my feelings about the OV-chipkaart fiasco.

Listen to the entire thing, it’s worth it. There’s also a part one.

This is Divino playing something awesome which we’ll be learning very soon.

This is a precursor to how amateur media are going to become even more important to the dissemination of news and how new media can flatten information asymmetry quite effectively.

One question remains about asymmetry and that is asymmetry in mainstream media reporting. The British press has a reputation to have one of the more fair and balanced reports on the conflict (as does for instance Ha’aretz). I am curious if Dutch mainstream media have aired this fairly graphic clip, I can’t find anything on either the NOS playeror the main NOS site and neither on RTL Nieuws.

Anybody seen this on Dutch television?

To riff a bit on the the spime concept, I thought it would be nice if you could scrobble location information along with the track and the moment you listened to it. I describe it in more detail on the last.fm board but nobody there thought it was interesting. At least it was a good excuse to use the term psychogeography.

More explanation here. And I guess this blatantly labels me as a programmer, no?

My findings are online in the report (Dutch only, sorry!) I’ve written of the conference for Frankwatching.

After some months of silence we heard some signals from the community that a new iteration of the event might be appreciated. A lot of stuff has happened, people and projects are moving on and catching up while drinking a beer could be a nice way to spend part of a Friday
afternoon.

So announcing the next iteration of Open Beer Delft, the VrijMiBo for
entrepeneurial and freelance Delft. Beers on us at our office Studio 4 Stagioni
Friday November 14th, 17:00 – 19:00
Hooikade 2, Delft

Come one, come all and invite those that may not be aware of this
event. A quick reply to confirm, so we know how many people to
expect, would be appreciated.

Hope to see you guys here, for a chat and a beer.

But at the risk of sounding like an old man, this ritual – make no mistake, that’s what it was – invested the purchase with meaning and value for me, and I despair at a world that doesn’t at least offer the possibility of similar adventures to its inhabitants.

This resounds simply with the fact that things that are worth doing are oftentimes difficult to do or to learn and things that are worth having are the ones you invested effort in getting.

Just to narrow this down to music, 99% of the music I listen to has no meaning whatsoever to me. This has no bearing on the quality of contemporary music, which I think is actually quite high. Only a couple of albums and artists have managed to strike a chord with me that makes their music merit a repeat listen.

This may be different for others but the real investment of Fl. 45,– or so back then was quite significant, distribution channels were few and the diversity they offered near zero, you got your recommendations either from mass media or from word of mouth. The experience was radically different.

Yes, something has been lost in the transition but the abundance we have gained in return makes it more than worthwhile for me.

But the piece is about the loss of serendipity and shortly after he writes:

Yes, I suppose you could always switch the thing off, leave it behind, deliberately “forget” it. But when you’ve lived your entire life through the intercession of a mobile and benevolent Delphi, is that realistically an option? I suppose we’ll find out.

Having spent two and a half weeks in the United States most of which in and around San Francisco. I can testify that it is indeed not an option.

San Francisco is so well mapped within most online services that the experience you have there using the internet is unparalleled. Most services originate there which results in San Francisco being completely mapped in Google Maps, well covered in Yelp and there are ample Twinkling Twitter users in the proximity.

Unfortunately for a visiting European like myself it is prohibitively expensive to use roaming data, meaning that most of the time my iPhone was a multimedia brick. Being disconnected like this, made me acutely aware of how reliant I have become on the real and virtual compass my iPhone provides. Walking around without a continuous stream of data coming in on the iPhone felt as if a sense was missing.

What is a sense other than a mapping of external information to a part of your brain? The services on my iPhone provide me with a sense of presence and sense of direction within my spheres of contacts. My brain is conditioned to receive regular updates to this sense and withholding those updates used to be called something like “withdrawal from information addiction” but since this is a sense we’re talking about, I think “sensory deprivation” may be better suited. Without this sixth sense so much of your peripheral ‘vision’ is cut off that you feel like you are wandering around half blind.

Profesionally relevant books which are being used to remain up to date in a given field of knowledge are deductable. Books which you are using to deepen and widen your knowledge however are study books and these as such are not deductable.

This is of course pure semantics and it can never be proved that you are using books either way, so given an audit just be sure never to mention the word “study” and you’ll be fine.

And to think our government is trying to create a knowledge economy.

Adjusting to the superficials will be easy enough, but as after every big trip and after having seem some truly splendid natural and metropolitan vistas, adjusting the mind to a realignment of the world brought about by new experience will be somewhat more difficult.

And now my days are filled with:

Tomorrow it’s back to the city and doing some last things before flying back early Sunday morning.

The concept of the plugin is very simple. There are a ton of avatar standards out there the most widely used of whom is gravatar. Gravatar uses an e-mail hash and was acquired by Wordpress. There are some others which rely on a <link> in the head of the page or some other convoluted agreed upon standard.

hAvatar does it by following somebody’s profile URL that they leave at a comment and seeing if there’s an hCard on that URL. If there is an hCard there, hAvatar retrieves the linked image representation and displays that. The approach is decentral and uses existing standards and conventions so I thought it interesting enough to build. If there’s interest I can check out the source code and make it run on the latest Wordpress and see if there are any bugs that need fixing.

Interesting talk about blowing up the social network and there’s even more possible than what he’s describing, seeing as hAvatar is half a year old. The stuff Open-CI can do with remote profiles and avatars is further along but still rather poorly documented. And I’m missing a big part of the stack which is necessary for notification (mostly XMPP).

P.S. Four Starters is unofficially defunct. Most of our attentions have slipped back to our personal weblogs. We’re looking for a good way to preserve the content there and save it from the spammers.

If you’re in the Netherlands, there’s an event along a lot of the same lines called Volksopstand2008(lit.: uprising) where a group of people will gather in the Hague to protest the attrition of privacy by our government and other institutions. I recommend you go, though I’m a bit late in doing so

In short, deleveraging means we are all going to have to downsize. You life is going to get simpler, you will shed excess baggage. The second hand stores will flourish. The malls will shrink and there will be fewer of them. You will spend more evenings at home around a table with friends than in high priced restaurants. You might even learn to play an instrument to entertain yourself and your friends rather than shelling out $200 a head for Rolling Stones concert seats. You will put up your solar roof and sell power back to the grid. You will drive a hybrid or use mass transit. Your garden will become a prime source of your food.

A call for simpler, more meaningful and more passionate lives not built on consumptive and external validation. Sounds like a good idea to me.

He also linked up this hilarious fictional dialogue between Obama and Jed Bartlett in the Times.

When I got there Friday night hoping to see “Adrift in Tokyo” and “The Strange Saga of Hiroshi the Freeloading Sex Machine”. Unfortunately the first was totally sold out (Friday night, figure), so instead I bought a passepartout and got my tickets for the rest of the weekend.

I ended up seeing these six movies and I was amazed at the overall quality. Is Japanese cinema this good or did I have a lucky pick?

1. Afro Samurai turned out to be a great anime blending various cultural and historic elements with humor, classic anime action and beautiful animation sequences. Recommended if you can look beyond its initial flat gangsta surface.
2. Funuke, show some love you losers! was a great funny and blunt family drama with some strange dynamics in a family where both of the parents die in a crash and their daughter comes back home to the country. Each family member has to deal with their own past and with the others. Alternatingly very funny, dramatic and uncomfortable. Highly recommended.
3. Tokyo Gore Police is a horrible movie both in its premise as in its execution. I won’t bore you with the details but the movie shocks as it should and is pretty funny at that. Funnier still were the people in the audience who did not make it through the movie when certain breaking points in them and in the characters in the movie had been reached. I wouldn’t recommend it, others would.
4. What the snow brings is a beautiful film about a family reunion at a draft horse racing stable in Hokkaido. The landscapes are stunning and the treatment of the characters and their histories is subtle but all the more heavy hitting for it. Slow pace but highly recommended.
5. A Gentle Breeze in the Village (official site) is even better, beautifully filmed set in the Japanese country side details the lives of a small group of children and their school. A new boy arrives from Tokyo and Soyo falls in love with him. Slow coming of age movie with a lot of telling clos-ups of the ground and feet (you have to see it). Highly recommended.
6. Sword of the Stranger (official site) is a simple and predictable story about a young boy hunted by bad guys and a stranger who finds him and helps him. What makes this movie great is the fantastic execution in characters, story, action scenes and overall animation. Classic, highly recommended.

Like I said I saw so many good movies but because of their very limited releases most people I know will never get the opportunity to see any of them. The Camera Japan festival is touring through the Netherlands in the following weeks so let my list be a guide and catch a couple of these movies: 26/9 – 28/9 in Kriterion, Amsterdam and a more limited set in various other cities.

These days with Amsterdam revving up again for the PICNIC cross media week you guys will have been getting a slew of friend requests and other invitations related to the event and its social networking website.

I encourage you all to register on PICNIC even if you do not plan to attend the conference (and friend me!). The PICNIC network website is built by Mediamatic on the latest version of anyMeta that implements the Open-CI standard for social networking. Open-CI is a standard tat enables social networks to work together, share connections and content and exchange real-time updates.

Sequence diagram for adding friends across sites

Since last spring, when we got together to talk about these issues, Mediamatic has been building Open-CI to make their social networks talk together because they were running into the same duplication and user tedium problems as the rest of the social networking world.

Their development team with the addition of XMPP-Ralph has been steadily at work and they have implemented the standards and created the semantics necessary for social network interoperability.

I’ve been working with them to write a white paper with an overview and explanation of the benefits of such a system and Willem recently gave an interview talking about the high level benefits of Open-CI.

Update: And it is done. You can now use your account on PICNIC to login to Mediamatic.net (and vice versa) and once logged in you can do everything you want on the site. See the screenshot:

I have the inverse problem. It sometimes happens that I’m (vainly) trying to reach inbox zero at some ungodly hour writing replies to people where it wouldn’t come over as too professional to have them receive e-mails created at 02:42 or thereabouts. I would like to have my outgoing e-mail delayed until 09:00 the following morning and sent in one big batch to create the impression that I’m a decent person who adheres to business hours.

So I have revamped my categories to make them simpler and added a main category Language under which to classify my posts by language.

English readers who want a feed of only English language posts should change their subscription to point to: http://alper.nl/dingen/category/lang/english/feed/
Dutch readers have a similar feed and bilingual or polyglot readers will not have to change a thing.

Then after some more back and forth I retrieved a similar dataset from the ANWB site: the time to travel a similar distance at a similar time but this time by car.

The juxtaposition of those two datasets made for some interesting results and some nice applications of interactive filtering. Kars has a full writeup of his process.

So without further ado, here is the dataset under a Creative Commons Attribution license. It’s a JSON file: Traveltimes with as keys a four digit string for the postal code. The value is a dictionary with this key-value mapping:

lat

Latitude GPS coordinate

lng

Longitude GPS coordinate

place

Inferred name of the location

time

The time it takes using public transportation

carTime

The time it takes by car (a small amount of null values where the time could not be retrieved)

All times are from the center of the 4 digit postal code as well as can be determined to Dam Square in Amsterdam around noon on a given day.

I find it interesting (and somewhat appalling) to see how large the difference is between taking the car or going by public transportation. Doing a sampling for 08:00 on Monday morning during rush hour might somewhat equalize this, but I think it’s safe to say that car owners will remain at an advantage.

So next up is e-mailing GroenLinks and Rover to see if they can use this data or these visualizations.

Anyway here’s my list for August. I think the fact that this is an extremely slow summer both in terms of weather and waves somewhat explains this amount. Also that I’ve refound a lot of focus in reading and fun in keeping track of my shelf on Anobii.

• Catch-22, Joseph Heller (8th)
• About Face 3, Alan Cooper c.s. (15th)
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (22nd)
• De Engelenmaker, Stefan Brijs (25th)
• Urban Computing and Its Discontents, Adam Greenfield & Mark Shephard (27th)
• Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton (27th)
• Subject to Change, Adaptive Path (29th)

I haven’t been too lucky in my choice of novels. I had a lot of trouble finishing Catch-22 but on the whole it was worth it, Pride and Prejudice was more boring than not and the Engelenmaker turned out to be a fast paced but forgettable medical thriller about religion and morality.

The most interesting book this month was “Sketching User Experiences” because of its marriage of design, sketching, interaction, products and business in a visually very pleasing book.

What I’m most afraid of is that if we get a significant bombing in the Netherlands, that will be the only excuse necessary to implement these random searches and violations of our civil liberties on Dutch soil. And the populace will swallow it wholesale supported by our MSM.

Terrorism is nothing to be afraid of compared to the complacent fascism hidden in the average person.

Last weekend in Wapse with friends was quite awesome, here are some stills:

One such friend is Mony and during his yearly holiday to Bulgaria he has produced a very nice set of street photography out of Sofia:

Picture by Mony Nedkov from the set Sofia.

For me it’s of particular interest to see pictures of a city neighboring my love Istanbul. I have just this one picture I would call a good street photography shot. The effort it takes to get even halfway decent shots is staggering.

On a different photograpic note, I’ve brought away the 120 film I shot this weekend for development. I hope the repairs on my Yashica worked out and the pictures are in focus. Shooting manual metered medium format film is a very different experience and pace than I’m used to from my 350D and something I could very well get used to. The digital set is still being edited and should go (partly) up tonight.

As a wandering free agent, you end up in strange places and if you’re stuck somewhere, it could be useful to get some work done in the neighborhood. I was not the only person with this problem and I couldn’t find a good WiFi map either, so I thought we could start something up.

A conversation about coworking on Jaiku quickly turned into the idea to gather those locations onto a Google Map and see if we could make that work. So talking back and forth a bit, I made a custom Google Map and invited people to add their offices with drop-in coworking spaces on it. This took off a bit and we had a functioning coworking map of cool companies and startups in the Netherlands willing to host a nomadic worker. Robert had the domain coworker.nl lying around and he pasted the code for the map on that domain and Coworker.nl was born.

After some time, other people also started to add coffee shops with WiFi with a coffee cup icon and a public utility was born.

Attention

A lot of people have seen the map by now (22′000 and counting) and I have never launched a project as small as this which got so much attention in so little time. Robert and myself didn’t have any problems getting this featured in various publications and even in a national newspaper. This says something about the immediate appeal of a simple geo-visual application and about the climate in which we launched this.

Independent web workers are seen as the vanguard of the hot Dutch new economy. Small shops, people setting up office in lunchrooms and coffee shops are seen as a ‘new’ trend. These workers also are in need of more flexible office space solutions (of which there are precious few in the Netherlands). Our map provides a handy visualization of this trend, it exactly fits a niche and appeals to people.

Values and Misconceptions

What differentiates this map from most other WiFi maps and other custom maps and geoapplications is its incredibly narrow focus based on a shared set of goals and values. The initial participants in the map all know on a near instinctive level what is meant by coworking. They understand the problem of needing a place to work and are willing to share their offices.

A lot of outsiders who find the map do not really get it and just a link to the Coworking wiki is not nearly enough to explain the shared values and history this map is built upon. Some people think we are an exchange for short-term office space, others want to sell their office space on a per day basis to make an extra buck. All interesting tangential applications of this map, and it’s nice that people are running with it, but we should stay true to the original goal.

The Tools

We should be really thankful of Google for providing these powerful and easy to use tools like Google Maps which we can use to hack something together in literally no time at all. We could have built our own database and map editor etc. but that would have taken some days if not weeks and would have greatly reduced the appeal of a small project such as this.

The fact that we could paste some minimal code to Jaiku and invite people to edit the map made all te difference. One additional step which would help in the management would be to add some kind of versioning or backup facility so if somebody accidentily deletes the entire map, I could easily restore it to a previous version.

The Data

The data is available as a KML file to anybody who wants it (feel free to take it, distributed backup is the best kind) and I think we’re willing to publish it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license but I would appreciate it if you let us know if you’re going to build something.

Build your own local

Because this is so simple to setup local versions have already been made (Coworking São Paulo by Michel Zappa) by others but the vision is to eventually cover the entire world both with maps and locations one country at a time, so to get this started here’s a small recipe how to set this up:

1. Create a custom Google Map
2. Call out to your local scene on Twitter, Jaiku and whatnot to ask if they’re interested and if they have spaces they know.
3. Invite these people to edit your Google Map, be sure to allow them to invite others as well to help your map grow virally.
4. Get a (short and memorable) domain and paste the embed iframe code of the Google Map onto the domain for better visibility. You can also copy our CSS and JavaScript for extra ease.
5. Let it grow. You don’t have to go about it too agressively, in our case we built it to scratch our own itch. Any value others derive from it is a plus.

Once enough countries have their own map, we may be able to combine them all into one massive global coworking map, for those people hopping countries.

Tangents

There is some stuff which this map is not really about but wich bears talking about anyway:

The fact that the map also houses coffee shops with WiFi and a place to sit may not really be about coworking, but these are spots where you can get some work done and they show that there was no high quality WiFi wap for webworkersin the Netherlands. I expect this is the same in other countries.

There are quite some commercial spots available with meeting rooms and desks which you can lease by the day or some other period. These are not exactly in the coworking spirit, but they do serve a need, so for now we have allowed these to be on the map as well.

As I already wrote there’s a shortage of office space which you can lease flexibly. The map could be used to show policy makers and realtors in which regions of the Netherlands there’s demand for flexible office solutions and in the future we may add a vetted exchange to the map to help freelancers and small companies such as ourselves to get suitable office space.

Most of the people on the map are either free agents, people working in small companies, startups or a combination of these. So that way the map also serves as a list of interesting companies and people in the Netherlands who are active in the web scene and who have an open attitude. I think that is also a valuable thing to have for a nascent scene such as ours.

I wasn’t very hungry so instead of my regular döner I got some green pistachio baklava. This stuff is so ridiculously delicious it explodes into pure sugar and pistachio in your mouth and it fills you up pretty fast. I don’t get why you would buy mass-produced candy from the supermarket. If you want to get fat, why not get fat eating good stuff?

Now if  only I could find a place around here that sells künefe, things would get really crazy.

Picture by elifayse

What do you think about the switch to English? Writing English regularly at least has made me acutely aware of how much I still have to learn about the language and how much I need to develop a feel for it.

(This post mostly for the benefit of my designer friends.)

I had prepared a bit for the day by listening to the photographers’ commentaries on their pictures. As is the case with many artists, the artist should not try to explain his art but in some cases the commentary really adds a lot to the picture.

I would recommend Platon about his portrait of Poetin, John Moore about the Bhutto assassination and Brent Stirton about the preservation of gorillas.

Polls show that Europeans overwhelmingly support Barack Obama and would like to see him in office as opposed to McCain. This makes it extra annoying that our power to influence the process is severely limited. American elections are in a large part dominated by money and the raising of it. Unfortunately non-Americans are excluded from making donations. Something about foreigners not being allowed to elect the American President.

This is of course stupid. The people electing the president are still the Americans. Seeing as campaign financing has been regarded as a form of free speech, don’t people from outside the USA have the right to speak their minds on this matter? I’m sure that if Trichet would look under the sofa in his office, he could find a spare €50′000′000 —per the wishes of the European electorate— to give Obama’s campaign that extra push.

This keyboard has improved my workplace conditions massively. It’s a pleasure to sit down at my desk and start typing on it. I’m currently pairing it with my old Logitech MX500 mouse but that is bound to go wireless as well. I may be tempted to haul the whole installation on the road but I don’t want to end up looking like this.

Now I just need to find something to prop up my Macbook much much higher. I’m currently putting it on a pile of UX books, which could be a sign I need to increase my reading speed.

About the sizing issue. The Bluetooth keyboard’s size is perfect. The layout is nearly identical to my Macbook keyboard’s layout, which means I have no switching costs going back and forth. A numerical keypad I would hardly use anyway, and the six buttons above the arrows are easily replaced with the Mac key chords.

His current piece is especially pertinent as the iPhone 3G release with builtin GPS and accompanied unlimited data plans will herald the location based revolution. Many of my friends say that they do not want to broadcast where they are and know where their friends are most of the time. That they would rather get together using premediated consensual communication.

I think in user research you have to adopt the same maxim that everybody lies maybe unknowingly or unwillingly. It remains to be seen how many people will not succumb to the temptation of total information. Broadcasting your location, but even more attractive knowing where your loved ones are at any given moment. The same initial reaction to mobile telephony didn’t prevent everybody I know from getting a mobile phone.

What this will do to the mystery of travel and unknown locations is a whole different question asked by Babak. I think unequality in economic, communications and political circumstances will always keep parts of the world shrouded in mystery.

Normal service will resume here at least until half of August when I will break shortly for Wapsen and maybe thereafter a bit longer for the former Yugoslavia.

Now Shaun Inman has launched a somewhat more circumspect but more cross platform way of invoking the same functionality: Shortwave. His initial list, though useful is not what I would use the functionality most for in my Saft days. So I’ve added some links to dictionaries I use a lot and some I don’t use that much: alper.nl/wave.txt

Additions for the linguist’s shortwave are most welcome. Still looking for decent French, Mandarin, Arabic and Russian dictionaries.

Seasoned travellers as we deem ourselves and busy as we are, we have dispensed with most of the preparation one would think would be necessary. We have some camping equipment, surfboards and roof carriers and lots of good humour to go around. That should be enough for any holiday.

That’s also a reason I won’t be getting my iPhone 3G right away like a lot of people are. I’m planning on travelling some more and this device is more of a hindrance and a risk than it is a benefit on the road.

I’m still debating whether or not I should take my laptop. Odds of us finding solid power let alone WiFi are slim and 7GB of CF memory should be enough for a week’s holiday: 1GB/day. And a week of disconnection will probably do me more good than I realize.

The second day started off with a talk about Free by Jerry Michalski which reminded me a lot of the topics that I had covered the previous day in my talk. Jerry’s talk being in the main hall made this turn out a lot differently than my talk.

David Recordon followed with a talk about the open web and reminded us that not that much has changed in the last six months since I saw him on the same topic in Berlin. The big social conglomerates that have each other in a chokehold make for glacial progress.

I dropped in on the Arduino workshop which was a very nice introduction into building electronic stuff. Because I was already somewhat familiar and I wanted the freedom to bounce around the conference, I hadn’t registered but I did get some questions in to further my own ideas.

Joshua’s talk proved to be one of the best of the conference —with this great quote— marred slightly by the fact that his partner could not make it for a more complete stage presence. His work and vision how technology works towards freedom is very relevant and interesting though we usually stare ourselves blind at Silicon Valley and the likes.

After the conference we made a yearly chaotic meetup somewhere in the city trying to get something to eat more or less succesfully after which we made our way to Vega. The party in the bar was quickly replaced with a party outside with tipping beers and music where everybody had a great time. Even the arrival of police could not really stop our party.

The next day I was going to get some coffee at Kafeplantagen when I remembered that some people were having a post-Reboot brunch at Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus. I was a bit hesitant to join after having already spent two days with these people but I’m glad I went inside. I got to catch up with Chris Messina, Brynn Evans and Janetti Chon and talk about the differences between the USA and Europe.

I’d signed up for a session and got slotted on Thursday morning so I spent a good part of Wednesday preparing and running through the story. Of course after having gotten over my early flight and having eaten something at the Laundromat.

My session on Free Economics was filled over capacity while it was meant to be a cosy conversational session. Fortunately that also meant more than enough people willing to participate and add information, so I think it went well and it proved a good starting point for the rest of the conference. My stress relieved could follow the rest of the sessions.

There were a number of other Dutch presenters most notably: Kars, Ton, Ianus and Iskander. Unfortunately I didn’t see any of them present, but I’ll catch up on that when the video’s are posted. Being programmed against Andy Budd meant that I missed his presentation as well, but maybe I wouldn’t have fitted in the completely full small room anyway.

Thomas Vander Wal’s talk —always nice to have him over at this side of the ocean— gave us some great elements for social software to base our thinking on and concluded with a way to get organizations to think about the dichotomy between keeping information and sharing it.

It was a joy to hear music in the presentation on Tradition by Jeremy Keith. More music is usually a good idea as we would also see in the final party.

On Reboot I never can keep up going to sessions and usually it’s better not to. The interactions in the hallways and the lobby especially during the lull when there are sessions going on are more interesting on a personal level than anything else.

The first day’s talk got concluded by a fun treatment of information by David Weinberger. During dinner it was also very interesting to get a preview of his session from Siert Wijnia about his Fablab and what the commoditization of the production process will do to product design and manufacturing.

Copenhagen has become familiar territory and I’ll be there for only four days. Acclimatizing on Wednesday which kicks off with a boat trip. Thursday and Friday will be conference days during which I hope to see a lot of people and I have been alotted a small session where we’ll talk about Free Economies.

Saturday will be spent recovering, maybe a run along the lakes or a decent brunch or burger and Saturday evening my train will depart for the Netherlands. The train journey back I’m looking forward to a lot more than the plane ride in.