Ben Werdmuller

I was the inaugural Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, working with Rohan Gunatillake and the Edinburgh Festivals on open data and digital accessibility.

Here’s a video from Rudman Consulting for AmbiTIon Scotland about the Festivals API portion of the project:

It’s nice to see my favorite musician embrace social media a little more:

Here she is on Twitter and Facebook. I came to the project late, and I’m not sure how the photos were contributed; there’s a site at whichside.net, but it’s not hugely inspiring. Nonetheless, the song is, and it’s a great start.

Most data on the web comes as a river. Blog posts, photos, Facebook updates, tweets, news stories, videos, cloud files – all lists with the newest at the top. It’s the design pattern of the Internet.

Within this design pattern, there are four main places where innovation can occur:

• How you consume the river.
• How you filter the river.
• Where the river lives.
• How and what you post to the river.

Right now, all the value lies in the first three. Social news apps suddenly declined when Facebook changed how its river works; Technology Review recently moved its content into an RSS feed after users abandoned its apps. Consumers want their content in one place, convenient for them, interconnected with the other services they use.

Facebook, Google and Twitter want your river to live on their services. Facebook and Google want to do the filtering for you; Twitter wants to give you the tools to filter it yourself. But if rivers are truly to be the future of publishing and content – which it looks like they might be – two things are likely to happen:

• Savvy publishers will own their own rivers of content.
• Savvy readers will want to consume content on their terms, with their own filters.

It doesn’t make sense for content producers to be subject to sudden changes like the one Facebook imposed recently. And the smart ones won’t stand for it.

The question is, who will help them regain control of their brands, their property, and their content?

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act just passed in the House, during a vote that was moved up a day and staged during the NFL draft. It vastly expands the already onerous act into one that allows significant domestic surveillance.

As TechDirt notes:

Basically this means CISPA can no longer be called a cybersecurity bill at all. The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a “cybersecurity crime”. Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all. Moreover, the government could do whatever it wants with the data as long as it can claim that someone was in danger of bodily harm, or that children were somehow threatened—again, notwithstanding absolutely any other law that would normally limit the government’s power.

This bill must be blocked in the Senate. If you’re a US citizen, you need to call your Senator now. This action list over on Reddit is fantastic, or, once again, Grassroutes makes this easy. Just click a button below:

(If you’re reading the feed, you probably won’t see the Grassroutes widget above. Click here to see the buttons, and to get the code to paste the widget on your own site.

At the end of last year, I was asked to contribute my wishlist for Linux on the desktop for an issue of Linux Format magazine. Here’s what I submitted:

I want an activity stream for my activity on my local computer, and across my network. When, for example, I make a change to a document, I want my PC to record it on my activity stream as “Ben Werdmuller edited ‘Linux Format wishlist’ in LibreOffice Writer.” By default, those changes are private to me only, but I can set access permissions per file, application, location on disk and type of update (“status update”, “text file”, etc). In a network environment, I can share my activity streams across the network, and see the updates that other network users have allowed me to view. This stream is at an infrastructure data level, so I can choose a number of applications to view it with – although I can easily imagine Ubuntu, for example, shipping a beautiful default app.

Then, I want to be able to program against the activity stream, and the activity streams I can see on my network, using a simple API. This would allow me to sync files, status updates and other things, while not being bound to any one application or utility. It also could provide an interesting underlying basis for social web applications running on Linux servers.

This is a little convoluted, so let me explain: I want my activity on my computer, my activity across my enterprise network, and my activity on the web to be saved to a single activity stream that I control. I want to be able to conditionally share and have access to the entire activity stream – and then do stuff with it, using tools like the excellent ifttt.

Consider the following unified stream:

• Ben Werdmuller saved Technical white paper to Work out tray 3 seconds ago
• Ben’s mom sent you an email: A little family news to ben@benwerd.com 15 minutes ago
• Ben’s cousin sent you a message: I’m engaged! on Facebook 1 hour ago
• Your task: Finish technical white paper is due 3 hours ago
• You were tagged in a photo: ElggCamp San Francisco 2012 on Flickr 4 hours ago

In the example above, the act of saving something to the folder Work out tray could automatically cause it to be uploaded to Basecamp, or emailed to a few people for review. Similarly, my being tagged in a photo on Flickr could cause it to be automatically downloaded into my local Photos folder.

Why should my activity stream just contain stuff that happened on the web? Now that we have apps like Google Drive, these separations are arbitrary at this point. What matters is that I did something, not where I did it.

For the past few years, my friend Helen Steer has been working with the Geography Collective on Mission: Explore, a new way to promote exploration and curiosity:

Mission:Explore is a game, but not as you know it. There are two aims to the game. One is to collect points and unlock rewards. The other is to experience the world in new ways by doing vitally important random and warped challenges. The more missions you do the more rewards you’ll unlock and the more fun you’ll have during your stay on planet Earth.

Mission: Explore’s web application is an inventive take on the geo-gamification meme we’ve seen for years with the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla. Rather than checking in with brands and getting offers, participants are encouraged to travel 100 metres without being seen or put on a show for a security camera controller. And of course, they get rewards and an endorphin rush for doing so.

Because the site’s mostly aimed at kids, there’s less community or real-time interaction than there could be – what if one of the missions was to join up with six other people and solve a puzzle or make a shape? – but I love the humanity of the intention behind it. And the execution is great, although I find myself wondering what it could be with Geoloqi‘s geofencing.

Mission: Explore offers bespoke challenges for private groups, as well as a dead tree version. It’s all been done with a lot of love, and is great fun – to the extent that I wish more adult geo-apps would take a leaf from its book. If I had kids I’d be all over it.

If there was any doubt that the Internet is radically changing democracy, check this out:

Spain’s new political party, the Partido de Internet, is a policy-agnostic political party that makes its decisions based on the will of a community based on Agora, a virtual parliament platform.

PDI is a policy-agnostic political party that does not have, nor will ever have, a political ideology. It has a single and radical proposal: PDI elected representatives will vote in congress according to what the people have previously voted through the internet using Agora.

[...] Agora is a software project with a clear aim to improve our democratic system. The project is well underway but still not complete, and is driven by voluntary work donated generously by members of our team. We welcome anyone, developers, researchers, security enthusiasts, designers, or anyone else who shares our vision, to collaborate and help bring this vision closer to reality.

Representative democracy as we know it today emerged because it was unfeasible for each citizen to participate directly. The Internet fundamentally changes that, and reveals political parties to be gatekeepers: unnecessary levels of organizational abstraction that are unduly influenced by capital rather than the will of the people they declare themselves to represent.

This is a sea change in how government works, and incumbents can see it coming. It’s worth examining the UK’s Internet surveillance plans in this light. David Cameron said that monitoring emails, web use and phone calls would protect against “terrorist threats that [...] that we still face in this country”. Could that include citizens peacefully organizing to push for greater democracy?

I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to also look at policies regarding anonymity and privacy online in this light. Tracking doesn’t just relate to advertising; it’s also always been used to monitor political dissent (alongside agent provocateurs). This is a subject that relates to how we are governed and – though it sounds almost insanely melodramatic to say it – the balance of world power. Owning and controlling your own data needs to be a democratic right.

I’ll be watching the PDI with interest; together with the Pirate Party, they represent a very interesting new phase in how technology and society interact. And just as news, publishing, entertainment and retail have been disrupted, the incumbent political parties had better take notice.

Photo of the Armenian Parliament by PanARMENIAN Photo, released under a Creative Commons license.

A few weeks ago, my friends Mark and Sana got married in Oxford Town Hall. My sister Hannah and I were invited, but sadly couldn’t attend, on the grounds that we were over 5,000 miles and an ocean away. They’re both wonderful people, and I’ve known Sana in particular for a very long time, so this made me very sad indeed.

So, here’s what happened.

On Saturday morning, I woke up at 5am, brushed my hair and dressed up (from the waist up). Celia, who was able to attend the wedding in person, brought her MacBook Pro. And as friends and family gathered to watch the ceremony, she FaceTimed me.

In fact, it almost didn’t happen. Mark and Sana had checked with the venue beforehand, and it looked like they had wifi – but on the day, it wasn’t working. So Sven switched his HTC Desire into hotspot mode, and I attended the wedding via FaceTime over a 4G cellphone connection. Not a planned backup – he just happened to have a broadband connection in his pocket (as many of the guests probably did). Thank you Android; thank you Apple.

Now, granted, it was a little fuzzy – that’s a picture of the happy couple after signing the registry book to the right there – but it was more than enough to see and hear what was going on.

Let’s step back for a moment and think about what this might have required ten years ago. Two sets of ISDN lines, a webcam and specialist software? Some kind of satellite connection? Yet today, it was possible with commodity hardware. It didn’t even use much of Sven’s cellphone data allowance.

People talk about the Internet as being information at your fingertips, anywhere; I like to think of it as being a way to connect anyone to anyone in deeper and deeper ways. Here’s some footage from the wedding reception, a little later on, which I recorded using the screen capture software Screeny (that’s Mark playing drums):

Forget flying cars, or scaremongering tales of social networking making us more emotionally isolated: the future we’re living in is more human, more democratic and more personal than ever before. Sitting in Berkeley, getting choked up over a wedding 8 timezones away, I felt more grateful than ever before for all the ways that technology brings us together.

Video technology is still underdeveloped on the web. Over at latakoo, we’ve just started a technology blog to talk about what we’re doing:

We’re proud of what we’ve built. Yesterday, someone sent a 2gb HD video file from Myanmar over satellite phone in nine minutes. At TechCrunch Disrupt last September, a visitor to our stand remarked that what we’re doing is mathematically impossible! Talk about gratifying. [...] In this blog, we’ll be talking a lot about the technology that makes latakoo possible.

You can read the first post here.

Confession: I want to like Google+. I think competition is a great thing, and Google is in a unique position to do something fascinating with social platforms. It’s also significant that a lot of really brilliant people from the decentralized web community – Chris Messina, Will Norris and Stephen Paul Weber, for example – now work at Google. (Not to mention Elgg’s Evan Winslow.) I have nothing but respect for those guys. And, hey, I’ll admit that I’m a little envious that they get to work on it.

In my opinion, search needs to be at the center of social software. It’s how you find new people, resources and shared conversations. As I argued on a panel at SXSW 2011, it’s far more natural to visit someone’s profile by typing “Ben Werdmuller” (for example) into a box than typing “http://benwerd.com/” or “http://facebook.com/ben.werdmuller”.

Google has over 66% of the US search market, so it’s in a great place to be where that happens, which is presumably what was on their minds when they decided to build a social platform. They also have traditionally had a problem with the “deep web” – the non-public bits of information that its spiders can’t get to. More and more, that’s because these web resources are subject to user-centric access permissions within web applications. Because the Google search spider isn’t a user, it doesn’t have access to these resources, and they never get listed.

Which is why I’m so surprised that Google+ has remained a monolithic social dashboard, akin to Twitter or Facebook. (In fact, it’s more so than Facebook, which has done a great job at turning itself into a very impressive social platform.) You share stuff using +1 buttons or the interface on the Google+ site itself, and are limited to the small number of data types that Google have provided on their own site. You can post links, photos, videos and text updates.

But Google is great at making platforms. Because of its openness, Google Maps is still the go-to standard for displaying cartographic information on the web. (It’s significant that its creator now works at Facebook.) Google Analytics is just about everywhere. And Google APIs are typically easy to use, fast to integrate and powerful.

So why isn’t Google+ a platform? The Circles functionality is brilliant: nuanced access control made simple. If Google integrated those access controls throughout the whole web, allowing anyone to integrate them into their sites and applications with search and universal sharing across all of them, they would effectively become a social application operating system. It would be a new kind of platform altogether, and would cement their search portal – and thus, their advertising – as the default place to look for connected resources. To keep privately-shared resources secure, social objects could be stored in the Google cloud, presenting themselves to a requesting application only if the authenticated user had access. At Elgg, we wanted to do this with a feed format called the Open Data Definition half a decade ago, but didn’t have the resource to execute to our satisfaction; Google has those resources. Universally shareable social objects with privacy controls, searchable via a unified Google interface, would transform the web.

Maybe this is what Google is warming up to. But right now, and probably for the foreseeable future, Facebook is a more interesting social platform.