Nominet 4th Annual Conference 2010 Morning Session.
One of the things that I am immensley proud of is that the company I work for is a nominet registrar. That is I act as an agent for clients to register a domain with nominet. When you register a .uk domain regardless of who it is they will be a nominet registrar.
So last November my MD and myself went down for the 4th annual conference which was hosted in the Science Museum. The moderator for the day was Sarah Montague from the Today programme on the radio.
We started with the introduction and a celebration of 25 years of the .uk register. It boggles my mind that in 1985 a couple of individuals registered the first .uk domains. I mean I was still in junior school. Nominet itself was started in 1996 after the register has grown to 26000 domain names. This register had been maintained by a handful of volunteers who vetted and checked each registration.
But we are in the age that looks to the future, so the morning keynote was from Johnathon Margolis, who is a technical journalist for the Financial Times and an author. He started speaking about 4G mobile internet and the fact that you can get 100mbps when years ago the very idea of mobile tech being able to do this (at a time of 9.6kbps speeds on modems ) was laughable. 4G will be due out in 2012, current testing in a pub got 70mbps. Nice.
Of course the general point of Johnathon’s talk was that Technology experts get it wrong, but people who are generalists with imagination will get it nearly right. Jules Verne made a prediction that was very much pointing towards the current delivery of MP3, except Verne described it as music will get pumped via a main pipe into a house from a music factory. (Hmm, bit XFactor really).
There is also now a hydrogen powered motorbike out, however clean and nice the technology is, the infrastructure is not there for it to be taken up by the masses. There is only one filling station in South London and it takes 15 minutes to fill up a motorcycle tank. Hmmm, as Johnathon points out you can see how this would cause a huge time sync with a car, 30 minutes to fill a tank. You can also see why oil forecourts will not stock it yet either really. Johnathon pointed out that as electric vehicals are quiet pedestrians could get knocked over and as electric cars will be required to have a sound he made his prediction: Car Ringtones, it makes sense, people will want their own sounds to make their cars sound unique. Makes me shudder really, although to be fair, car modders with their stereos already have their own ringtones so to speak.
I wonder that with all the doom mongering about flood planes and global warming that perhaps there will be a product that lifts your house up and down on hydraulic lifts to be like stilt houses.
Johnathon also explored the idea of the fact that facebook now has to deal with familys wishing to leave their facebook page online as a memorial. It reminds me of one of Anne McCaffery’s short stories about Students proccessing dead peoples online storage and data with the moral implications. Of course the fact that you leave a digital footprint online whenever you use your smartphone, online services or a credit card you leave something of yourself. The opinions of people online are already surviving their death, in greater numbers. It also reminds me of the current premise for Scify channels Caprica, where one of the characters is an avatar created from information including, school, medical records, bank statements etc.
The slightly sci-fi imaginings continued with the possibilities of conscious machine intelligence and what rights they have. Whats more some professors are already pondering this issue.
The panel afterwards was rather thought provoking as well. Phillip Sheldrake of 6UK was of the opinion that the internet is about due for a midlife crisis and that in 10 years Facebook will be on it’s way out. The next stage of the internet is the semantic web, which is understanding the data on the internet. Internet Nomads are less worried about computers than they are about the connection to websites and other people. IPV4 is running out of address space only 4 billion addresses available and there are currently 7 billion people on the planet. IPV6 can handle way more than that. Any device in the future like your fridge (if you want it to order stuff for you or tell you what’s in it) will need a human readable address, that will use a domain name.
There are also some rather interesting issues for writers that use some online services when doing their writing planning. Who owns it, the online company that owns the tool that collates your notes or the writer/writers estate when they pass away. Of course the workforce of tomorrow are teenagers today, one of the Facebook executives have postulated that every 5 years that those people will want a wipe clean button to delete their past. Not truly possible, and if it was then I can think of a rather nasty possibility that someone will take that data now, store it and then offer it as a checking service to employers. If I suspect this then I also think that there is a pretty good chance that there is a start-up somewhere preparing to do just that.
My apologies Pandora, however the box is open.
Sam Leith of the Evening Standard and Wall St New was up next. He reminded me of Hugh Grants foppish acting in Notting Hill and the like. But Sam soon won me over by talking about the future of online privacy. It’s a fairly new concept when you think about the whole of human history. We were used to bringing up our children in large family groups publicly, that’s changed quite a bit.
The concept of privacy can be dated to the Protestant reformation, by the idea that worshiping and your relationship with God should be private. There is a pressure on Privacy on the Outer/Inner-self. It’s all starting to become public again. This pressure happens because the goal is to make life easier, and people trade privacy for this and other benefits like power and influence. The state applies “systematic pressure” to make it easier for civil servants to do their job. People are willing to use Oyster cards as there is a reward in reduced fares, but the data from the journey’s you take are stored somewhere.
The trouble is that people have a trust in the database that they should not. Errors creep in. The DNA database alone has half a million errors, imagine the implications for miscarriages of justice because of this false trust. In addition to this databases can walk, people carry copies on memory sticks and laptops and loose them. That data can be sold on elsewhere. People use supermarket loyalty cards, which is a real boon for the supermarkets as they can get marketing data for free. They are also quite free to sell that on. Even if you have indicated that you do not wish them to.
The panel continued on much the same subject so In addition I learned from the information commission office that you don’t own your medical records for example, the Secretary of State does. The public has no control over what data is stored and what any government does with it. No recourse. Frightening isn’t it?
The folly of programming closed source after opening up WWW.
Over a year ago there had been some excitement in the August 2009 what with the Open Source Awards being announced and a certain software house offering “free software up to 100k”. The software isn’t really free though as you can be restricting yourself to their file formats and paying for it later.
On the 1st of September 2009 I went along to hear Robert Calliau talk about the internet at the Runrev conference.
The talk was entitled “Tale of two Revolutions”.
It was a very interesting talk that resonated with a high percentage of the audience. Robert summarized the pre-history of the web and how it got to the inital stage of hypercards, the World Wide Web etc.
However the most important part of the speech was about what Calliau did that was most important for the world wide web. He spoke to CERNs Lawyers and persuaded them to let the protocol and development be opened up. So that every one could develop tools to use it and access the data on it. When Robert told us this, a sudden rousing round of applause came up. Mr Calliau was gratified by that. I’m not entirely sure he understood why he got that round of applause though. There were a number of Open Source users and developers within the room. More than a few were ruby developers who had heard of the event from Techmeetup.
So later on when Robert Started talking about how programming language syntax can be a real bind and how good runtime was caused a bit of disquiet among some of the developers. RunRev is a natural language programming language. You can get free compilers for it, however the underlining engine is closed source. Runtime is a small edinburgh company with over 20 employees. Within any propriatory language there is always a danger that the company can get taken over and the language or product disappears after aquirement by another company..
At least with Open Source you can look at what’s under the code. You have a freedom of choice as to whether you develop a program using that code your or paying a developer to do it for you.
I’m concerned that we are going to repeat 30 years of history again. I’m all for making computing easier for the masses and helping start ups. But perhaps instead of using tools like runrev and offers of propriatary software for free for a long trial period we are locking in the next generation again to only having a few very expensive choices. I do not mean just in terms of expense in cash, but expense in time with trying to get old formats to talk to new formats. Especially if the standard that they are based on is locked up within Intellectual property. Free Software does not just mean free as in no cost. It means the freedom to do what you want with the information that you are using.
Look back to my post about the user who was very excited about Open Source. It was not the cost aspect. It was the possibility of being able to access her data in a meaningful way to her. Not what a programmer thought was meaningful.
The Dangers of Easy Electronic Communication
I have just created another twitter account so that I can post to LinkedIn using Twitter. There are a few reasons for this. But it’s mainly to enable me to update my network status for LinkedIn from Tweetdeck.
I like Tweetdeck. Admittedly Tweetdeck is not Open Source. I got introduced to it at Social Innovation Camp Scotland 2009. I run multiple Twitter accounts from it, some personal, some organizational. It’s an extremely powerful tool enabling you to follow mentions of a subject or users. Plus I can be logged in to multiple accounts at once. It’s running nicely on my upgraded Karmic Koala Kubuntu Laptop as it runs on Adobe Air so it’s not a tool dependent on the operating system, you just have to make sure that you can run Adobe applications on your chosen system.
The trouble is that so many social networks are actually trying to connect to each other now. Since I am trying to be more accessible to groups that I am professionally socializing with I want to connect up with them in anyway that I can. Although then there is the worry of posting the wrong thing, at the wrong time, to the wrong audience. Admittedly this could still happen on Tweetdeck, I’ve added in my Facebook and Myspace accounts as well. You trade off on a higher risk for more convenience.
I have a net-name that I have been using for years. For the non business socializing, it was used at first for all of my on-line interactions. It’s easy enough for someone to google that and know that it’s me. Which is not always a good thing. I’ve been using the onepict blog to post about Open Source and how it affects my and my dealings with other people. I’m very easy to find on-line now. I don’t however want to pollute my on-line CV (which LinkedIn effectively is) with my social tweets. Especially the ones from down the pub.
So I have created a new twitter account @onepict. My LinkedIn profile points at this website and I have a LinkedIn button on here. People will still know who I am and will connect my other on-line identity to me. In-terms of what people can find on the Internet, a mildly net-savvy person will find you. They will be able to join the dots. I don’t however have to put a great big light bulb flashing sign on my CV about my past net history though. They need to work a bit harder than that.
Once I have some more tweets that are appropriate I will change the Twitter feed from my @shandydann one. I’m planning a more personal website that’s for the non Open Source part of my life anyway so the @shandydann Twitterfeed will sit on my shandydann.com site anyway.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve gone too far with the on-line mullarkey.
Using the Internet Classifieds to Rent out a flat.
I’d recently finished doing up the flat so that I could rent it out. I had considered using a factoring agency to fix the flat and rent it out for me. But in the end I ended up getting the flat upt o spec and arranging for it to be rented.
I managed to get the flat rewired up to standards which included a mains wired smoke alarm and the carbon monoxide detector. I also got my gas fire looked at as I had been informed when the kitchen was put in, that it needed to be fixed or replaced. As it turns out the person who had condemned the fire was wrong to as I got another qualified gas guy to look at it and he did not understand how it was condemned in the first place. Brett also did up the bathroom by tiling it and replacing the shower head and rail.
With this done we put up an advert in gumtree and waited. At first we did an advert without pictures. We managed to get some responses. However we re-posted the advert with pictures, which got some more attention.
The advert was roughly worded like this:
Bright Spacious 1 Bedroom Flat with Dining Kitchen.
10 minutes minutes walk to the city centre and 5 minutes walk from the beach. Close to two supermarkets, two cinemas and 3 gyms. 5 minutes walk to King Street for easy access to Bridge of Don and Altens. Also handy for Buses to Garthdee. Easy distance for Aberdeen University and The Robert Gordon University City Centre Campus.
Rent £amount per month short Assured tenancy with option to renew, 1 month deposit, plus 1 month in advance. Bills and council tax not included.
I also included a few of these pictures:
In the end we ended up filming a walk through of of the flat.
Gumtree has an option to embed you-tube videos. I would advise anyone thinking of renting out their flat to do a video walk through. It gives a good impression of the layout of your property. Keep yourself out of it, otherwise it may look a bit cheesy.
It does look really cool with a video option in the advert.
It also sorts out who is seriously interested.
We got a phonecall from a tenant who is currently in Austria. They haven’t set foot in the flat, but on the basis of that video the flat has been secured by deposit. Ironically on the same day someone else was interested in renting the flat out as well. However the Austrian tennant got in there first.
So to summarise:
To rent out the flat using gumtree
- Clean your flat from top to bottom. Get the most unsightly jobs fixed.
- Take pictures of your flat, ideally on a bright sunny day, but failing that with some light.
- Take a video of your flat and do a walk through
- Upload the video to youtube, take a note of the embed link details
- Create an advert on gumtree, choose 3 pictures and include your video.
- For the text tell people about the flat and the advantages of your location. (E.g Close to the shops and leisure facilities. )
- Include useful details like council tax bands.
Extras to remember:
- Register as a private landlord at http://www.landlordregistrationscotland.gov.uk/. This is not optional. You are required to do this by law. Even if your flat is not multiple occupancy. You will get fined heavily if you are not registered.
- Get the electrical wiring checked and certified, arrange for this yearly.
- Get a Gas Safety Certificate. Arrange a check yearly.
- Take a copy of all of the manuals for the appliances. Give the tenants a copy.
- You can get copy of legal forms and advice from the city councils. Edinburgh Council has a fairly helpful website and some form templates for the legalities.
Twitter account hacking
I was informed by my partner that my twitter account had been hacked. Now I had a secure password set for my account and I do not have a windows desktop or laptop. I run Ubuntu Linux Jaunty Jackalobe. Of course the only windows device I have is an htc touch pro, which is windows mobile 6 pocket PC. I use hellotwitface to tweet when I’m out and about. So could that have compromised me? I’m unsure. The passwords been changed on my twitter account and I’ll see what happens before I tweet from my phone.
My account tweeted one weightloss spam advert. The tweet was done from the web. You’ll see my initial tweets after the event on the site as I have a twitter feed on it. The thing is I have advertising on this blog. However I try to keep it discreet and on the sidebar and at the bottom of the web page. But I expect my microblogging to be ad-free. No one want’s ad-spam.
According to my initial google foo, my account was one of hundreds being used to send out this spam. According to Ben Parr on mashable, last week twitter apparently suspended thousands of accounts that had been compromised and were sending out spam after being infected with malware Koobface/Win32. The only advise symantec gives is make sure bluetooth isn’t turned on. There’s no sign of infection on the phone, plus no initial sign of hellotwitface being the culprit.
Of course it isn’t the first time twitter’s been hacked. Back in july drabdavid wondered if twitter had been hacked. Although this was because of all the porn followers that that appear out of no where and do not tweet. I suspect that’s just bot account creation though.
Although perhaps someone has guessed the password to a twitter staffer again and has managed to use the account to send out tweets with thousands of accounts. The staffer compromise happened earlier this year and thetechherald has a bit more detail about the account compromisation and how the news broke as someone posted images of how they got the staffers password through social engineering. So does ZDNET which details how the person got onto the account in the first place and promptly offered access to various high profile accounts back in January.
I’ve always felt that you do need a bit of psychology to be able to get past peoples barriers to get at secure system. The greatest danger to the security of any system is always the human element.
It’s very embarrassing being told that your method of communication is being hacked. I remember losing my mobile and thinking I’d left it in my flat. I only got alerted to the fact that someone else was using my phone by my partner when he got rude messages from my phone that were completely out of character. Of course they’d signed my phone for porn and I had to change my mobile number. So I feel I’ve got off lightly this time.
Regardless of what’s happened or how it’s happened, I’ve changed my password. Deleted the tweet and explained what happened to my few followers. I’m just waiting to see what happens with my facebook account. In fact I think I’ll head over there and change the password on that too . Then I’ll need to put a lock on my phone.
Protecting your Online Presence
It’s no longer a question of whether you should go on-line, but how, and as with anything else, there is a range of products and service levels that vary in price and quality. Sometimes a cheap service wih occasional downtime for web pages or email is fine - for example, a site for a hobby or a local pub band. For business purposes, being online is more than just advertising, it is also a vital means of communication. So companies need to be careful how they buy!
The term ‘online presence’ simply means that a company has agreed to display your web pages and accept mail on your behalf. These companies are called ‘hosting providers’, and they have computers in air-conditioned data centres who do this job for many companies at once.
If you’re shopping around for a hosting provider, ask them what happens when:
- The Hosting Provider’s machines stop working (do they have spares?)
- Lines to the Hosting Provider’s data-centres are cut (Do they have alternatives)
- The Hosting Provider goes out of business (Will you lose your email?)
Then there is your domain, the words after the @ sign in your email address, and after the “www.” in your web address. For example, http://www.bbc.co.uk. Do you own your domain? If you do not own your domain then you can’t control what happens to it, and if you’re not happy with your current website or email provider (or they go out of business) then you can’t easily move that domain to be hosted by a new provider.
If you search the web for ‘whois’, you will find websites that run the whois tool on their website for you to list information about a domain. You put in the name of a domain e.g. ‘bbc.co.uk’ and can find out who it is registered to and who has the rights to administer it.
If you find that you do not own your domain then follow these steps.
- Contact who set up your website and ask them to arrange to put the registrant information for your domain in your or your companies name.
- Ask them to change the contact email for the registrant in your email address.
- If you have no joy with this, then you can contact the registrar directly. Different registrars have different procedures so you may have to contact the, directly to find your position
- Contact the registry for the domain (for .co.uk domains the registry is nominet)
- Consider asking help from another Hosting Provider.
Unfortunately it’s often not until a website owner would like to change providers that they find out that their movements are restricted. It can take longer to move a website to another provider if your last website provider has entered in the wrong details in the domain owners (registrants) area in the domain listing.
You can prevent that just by checking if you own domain. This can help to remove a possible issue or threat to your business.
Originally Published in Kirknewton Konnect Directory as Esther Payne, Operations Manager, Gladserv Limited.
Domain hosting pain
A friend of mine registered a domain with a large on-line provider. Then she asked for help from her friends for advice on hosting her website. She’s not a technical web expert, so this is perfectly reasonable.
I responded with what I did and that fact that I work for a hosted services company and we were a nominet registrar like the large online provider. She didn’t know that the work I did involved that.
I also gave her some advice regarding the fact that the large provider would probably provide web-hosting as part of the deal or for a bit extra per month. Of course I did also tell my friend that we could host the web site and email, although it would be easier for us to administer the hosting and any backend changes (like moving a server or changing to a shiny new one) if we were the registrar for the domain and could look after the DNS records directly. Otherwise there there would always be an additional delay in any domain changes. Either way it was up to her.
My friend decided that she would prefer my company hosting it as at least she can trust me. Meanwhile she had a rather frustrating afternoon trying to get the password to access her current hosted providers cpanel as they had not sent the password yet. She is also trying to get them to change the tag to us. The provider should do this for free, but not everyone does. A domain owner can change the tag through nominet itself (if the domain is a uk top level domain). However this can cost 11.50 per domain. This I suspect is because an ordinary domain owner is not a member of nominet so there is a charge.
The help desk for this company also charged 50p for phoning their support. Their online pages were also running rather slowly (during office hours). Needless to say my friend is less than impressed with their service so far. My friend still doesn’t have her control panel password.
What annoys me is that if I thought to actually let people know what I do and socialise more both online and offline, I could find out what my friends need and either help them directly or point them at the appropriate resources.
So for a start I’m posting an article that I wrote for a local magazine. It’s a basic article and not very technical.
At somepoint I will also put the link here to my personal blog. I’ve been under a rock for a bit too long, and it’s caused some pain points for others who did not necessarily have to go through the frustration.
Social Innovation Camp Scotland
I’m reviewing my notes from helping out at Social Innovation Camp. Mainly routing Brett where he needed to go and registering web-domains for the projects that needed them.
It was interesting looking at the projects that came out of the ideas submitted to the camp. Already the projects are gaining momentum after the final presentation. There was one winner, although a few of the other projects are already looking at ways of keeping going.
Other people have blogged about the projects already.
I took some notes of what I thought about each project and I’ll put them down just now.
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Fixthebuses
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Angelfish
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Wee Day out
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Flocklocal
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Citipedia
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MyPolice (Winner of Social Innovation Camp Scotland 2009)
Website link : hitch ‘n bitch
Also called hitch ‘n bitch. It’s a mechanism for getting realtime information for where the buses are. You text a number with with the format of
fixthebuses@gmail.com <route no> <current location>
It will return how long it will take for the next bus to be there and will also give you the time for the next bus on your route to be there.
You can also do this with the web interface. What the web interface also does is allow you to complain about how long the bus is taking or what you think about the bus service. So it can be a feedback service as well.
However as the fixthebus team pointed out, this is not a technical problem, the data is out there. The problem is that the data is locked up within the transport providers own systems. They are unwilling to open up that realtime data as they see that data as valuable commercially. The team got the live data by scraping the data. It was not based on timetable data. Admittedly you could use the timetable data and compare it to the actual realtime data.
This service could be valuable to the bus companies and the local council to pinpoint problem routes. Not just interms of how late the bus is, it could take passenger comments about how unsafe they feel at certain times of night. It could look at how traffic at certain times of day affects the bus routes and become a planner to advise passengers of alternative routes.
Brett and I have watched this team put all this together in such a short while. The texting service was live for the presentation. It only covered the Edinburgh area at that point, although I feel that it could expand nationwide.
What’s more you can help! Yes you can, how can you help? Campaign for the Freedom of live bus information. Not just the timetables say where they should be, but where the buses are at any given point in time.
Is a community microlending project. There are other successful microlenders out there so they did have some good precidents. They seemed to concentrate more on the design, business plan and marketing then they did on the technical part. So while I liked the concept of encouraging local people to lend small amounts to local businesses to enable them to improve the local community, I’m not sure that it technically followed the remit of social innovation camp.
One part of the presentation I found interesting was to get people that were savvy with computing and social networks to be place in each participating community would be connectors and would guide people who were not familiar with the technology on how to use it. I was reminded of Brett’s Internet Tours that he told me about back in the mid nineties.
Twitter link: weedayout
Now the idea of listing accessible toilets did touch me as my mother is disabled. When I was visiting South Africa it was interesting noting what attractions we could and could not wheel her wheelchair to.
If you have to care for a severely disabled person then you will have to plan any days out around what toilet facilities there are.
Wee day out is designed to map accessible toilets throughout Scotland. However this is no mere listing on googlemaps. What this will also do is enable feedback to those toilet owners and to other disabled users. So if your toilet is locked and the key to open that toilet is up a flight of stairs in the security guard’s office, it’s not very accessible is it! This tool will enable disabled users and their carers to feedback pictures and comments about sites with accessible toilets. This will also mean that other sites that aren’t listed on existing accessible maps but do have accessible facilities can be listed.
Accessible attractions can also be listed as nearby to the toilets, after all you would not go on a day out just to go to the loo!
Twitterlink : flocklocal
Flocklocal is the idea of utilising flashmobbing to do good. It’s purpose is to utilise impulse volunteering. The domain is flocklocal.net.
The only data that is stored on the site is your email address and your avatar. No other data will be collected. The team wish to encourage impulse participation by publicity with career fairs, facebook, twitter etc.
So when you logon to flocklocal you can register yourself as a volunteer or register a local project or event that needs people. The flocklocal team demonstrated that concept by setting up a flock for a local garden project.
Twitterlink: citipedia
Utilising google maps and a unique interface to allow people within communities to target unused spaces within cities and towns. You can enter in where the area is and then select various components to plan a park. Each park component like a see-saw or a pond has a cost associated with it.
Utilising this tool you can start to create a plan for the public space along with costings and use it as part of a campaign to get the derelict space used for every one rather than creating yet another soul-less estate of lego houses.
Twitterlink : mypolice
- MyPolice is designed to be a feedback service about the police. It came out of a very personal incident to the team leader as a friend’s flat had been broken into and she did not feel satisfied with the way that the police liased with her about it. The police do not always respond well to complaints, although by the same token the public can also use this mechanism to provide compliments about a police station or officer.One person had felt powerless to complain to the Police after a protester was jailed for 7 days without charge for doing nothing more than peaceful protest.
The public will be able to leave details of their experience with the police and the stories will be mapped to the given location of the stories. People can leave a name or be annoymous. Others can comment on the stories.
There will also be a local page where people can read existing stories about the local policeforce. There will be moderation on the stories and these will be sent on to the police. They have planned for ethical guidelines for the moderators.
MyPolice wish to get the word out to victim support, CIB etc. They feel that the site must be independant of the Police, but they wish to work closely with Police Organisations.
The Police are of course concerned that some people may plant false stories or negative feedback.
As the Judges deliberated, I was chatting to one of the team members for mypolice. She was already thinking of alternative options incase they did not win. She felt that they would need a cooling off period and then would try to raise funding. One thing she and I both wondered was how long the losing projects keep going. I remembered that useful visitors seemed to be moving along. Certainly compared to the last winning project the good gym.
Here’s the video that thepeoplespeak produced about this camp.
While I’m glad that MyPolice won, I was really rooting for fixthebuses. This is because before I learned to drive I took alot of public transport from Aberdeen to Edinburgh and used it for getting about in Aberdeen. So anything that can aid the use of public transport and is a simple text service I love the idea of.
I did enjoy the weekend and would be interesting in helping out at another camp in the future.
SICAMP will be happening in Central Eastern Europe and also in Austrailia.
SICAMP Twitterlink: sicamp
Social Innovation Camp Website: http://www.sicamp.org/
@Social Innovation Camp
I’m presently sitting in the Saltire Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University. This weekend it’s hosting Social Innovation Camp Scotland. This is the first Social Innovation camp hosted outside of Social Innovation Camp’s Headquarters.
But what is Social Innovation Camp? It is a project designed to link up various professionals such as designers, entrepreneurs and computing experts with people who have ideas to fit a specific social need. The idea is to help the outside community, and should utilise social networks and mobile technology. In the words of their Social Innovation Camp? It is a project designed to link up various professionals such as designers, entrepreneurs and computing experts with people who have ideas to fit a specific social need. The idea is to help the outside community, and should utilise social networks and mobile technology. In the words of their twitter bio:
“Bit of an experiment in using social tech for social change”
The camp picks six ideas that have been submitted by the public. You can see this particular camp’s six ideas here. The teams are made up by what people are interested in. People can move between the teams over the weekend. They then have 48 hours to get their idea up and running with some marketing and some sort of online application.
Here is the winning presentation from the last camp. The Good Gym.
The Friday night was a getting to know you affair with the Saturday being the start of the proper work. They will have until 14:00 hours on Sunday to discuss the strategy for their
I’m involved as Gladserv has offered a years hosting as a prize to the winner. We are also providing additional services for this camp.
So far we have:
- Made sure that developers can tunnel out of the restricted point to get to their developer areas
- Registered two domains fixthebuses.com and citipedia.co.uk
- Set up 3 virtual machines for 3 of the teams
It’s only just past mid-day now.
Mobile Blogging
I’m sitting in Kwik-Fit after bashing a wheel while driving down the back road where i live. It’s got tiny buttresses to wreck the tyres of the unwary.
As I was sitting here, I thought I would get the blog tool on the phone working.
I post more on that later.
Usefull Broadband/Telephone Exchange Tools
A friend of mine just posted a couple of ADSL tracking links on his blog. So being the curious sort I clicked on a couple of them.
Sam Knows Exchange mapping is a tool that maps out what telephone exchanges are in your area. It’s another google maps based application. Just type in your post code and lo some little blue monoply houses appear! (Well that’s what they remind me of.) If you click on the blue houses a bubble will appear listing what broadband services are available on that exchange. What the really handy part of it though, is that you can show the coverage of that particular exchange. The coverage shows up as blue as well.
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/mapping/mapping.php
Plusnet seem to be trying to be more open with it’s customers with an Exchange Status checker tool.
After typing in your postcode, you can see the various states of whats available for the exchange. This includes Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC), and you can also get an rss feed for it.
http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/
Another tool had also been suggested by the the guys who run Open Source For Business that you can use to monitor adsl performance is l8nc (Latency). It gives you nice little graphs of your latency etc
Which means that you can see when your line drops, if you have packet loss. Plus it’s pretty.
Moo Cards
A while ago I bought a set of moo cards for my self as moo had very cleverly got themselves into an alliance with livejournal. They have also got involved with flickr, fotolog, habbo etc. What they offered was the chance to get a set of free cards either text cards or photo mini-cards. I was quite intrigued so I got my free set of 10. Then I was hooked.
The cards had a fairly positive reception and the company appears to owe some of its success with a strategy that is based on very effective viral marketing across the blog-sphere. The cards are smaller than a business card and are quite fun. They remind me of calling cards from Jane Austen but radically updated.
