Bruce Sterling issued The Last Viridian Note last week which led me to re-read the original manifesto from January 2000. Check the final section which covers 'where we are' (circa 2000), 'what we want' and what 'the trend' is likely to be. Have a think about what's happened in the past eight years. One part I did pick out was the following:

"Energy meters, for instance, should be ubiquitous. They should be present, not in an obscure box outside the home, but enshrined within it. This is not a frugal, money-saving effort. It should be presented as a luxury. It should be a mark of class distinction. It should be considered a mark of stellar ignorance to be unaware of the source of one's electric power. Solar and wind power should be sold as premiums available to particularly affluent and savvy consumers. It should be considered the stigma of the crass proletarian to foul the air every time one turns on a light switch."
from the Viridian Manifesto by Bruce Sterling, January 2000

This takes me back to an earlier post where I talked about the real need to have access to data about what we consume in a meaningful form we can act upon. Having an energy display in the spaces in which we live rather than confined to the meter box is a simple enough step. Hopefully with awareness comes action.

3 original comments:

You certainly find out a lot of extremely interesting things when you have an energy meter – you can buy ones that plug between an appliance and the socket.
I wouldn’t normally be so crass as to include a link, but we’ve done quite a few tests for living:
http://living.morethan.com/tag/power-meter/
The short story: Want to save energy? Turn your fridge off.
Comment by handolio — 6 December, 2008 @ 4:00 pm

I think it’s quite ironic how the new technologies of the past 10 years or so (mobile phones, wireless broadband, cheap laptops etc) actually use up an incredible amount of energy. The media is telling us to use less energy via forms of communication that actually increase it! The only way we’re really gonna decrease our energy consumption is if we force ourselves to make decisions like “I can either turn my router on or cook a roast but not both because they use too much energy”. Having an energy meter would really help inform this decision and track it’s effects on energy consumption. No one wants to live like that but if people are serious about lowering their energy bills turning appliances off and charging batteries less often is really the only way. (N/B I’m as guilty of reckless energy consumption as the next man)
Comment by Joe — 7 December, 2008 @ 12:02 am

Handolio, I’ll let the link pass as it is actually relevant but I should add a disclaimer here for other readers that I currently work with Handolio at an agency and as part of his job he writes content for a website paid for by the insurance firm More Than called ‘Living’. The site aims to encourage:
“… customers to do their bit for the environment by incentivising and rewarding green behaviour”
Obviously there is a tension here as More Than offer car and travel insurance and the best ‘bit’ for the environment you could do would be to not own a car or fly abroad when you go on holiday.
Joe, I reckon your router probably uses a trivial amount of energy compared to cooking a roast but as you say knowing this information would be a big help in decision making.
Thanks for your comments!
Comment by Mark — 9 December, 2008 @ 2:33 pm

Twitter. I felt vaguely uneasy when I first came across this. The usefulness of any tool like this is completely dependent on the number of friends you have using it and currently most of mine are just not that taken with our shiny new online future. I would have left it well alone if it were not for Channel 4's newsroom blogger and the great Stephen Fry. These two sources only serve to emphasise how little other people have to say, especially when you get gems like this:

'We've now got the number for the Saudi pirate ship,' announces our foreign editor...
10:11 AM Nov 21st from web

'We tried calling it but just a got a bloke who said, "There's nobody here". Which clearly isn't true.'
10:11 AM Nov 21st from web

I love the slightly snarky tone they seem to have adopted as they go through the process of sorting the day's events into a programme. More please! I need to invent a term for these amusing bite-sized diversions. Stephen Fry is also brilliant, recently keeping up an impressive stream of tweets from Africa where he was filming. What's really interesting is how he's collected 20,587 followers in slightly under 2 months. What's even more interesting is checking out what Google has to say about Twitter usage in the UK:

Twitter's UK growth

It's popularity is suddenly taking off and right at the top of the list of sites also visited is... stephenfry.com.

Top sites also visited by Twitter users

Google says the site passed the 15,000 daily unique visitor mark recently. Stephen Fry acquired 20,000 followers even more recently. Coincidence? Probably, but at least it saves us from the echoes of all the people working in marketing.

2 original comments:

[...] also point out that the Twitter data above pre-dates the Stephen Fry effect (disclosure: Stephen is a client of We Are Social’s, and we were the ones that got him going [...]
Pingback by Social media more popular than ever / we are social — 31 December, 2008 @ 11:14 am

[...] to the public. With our help, Stephen Fry was one of the first celebrities to use Twitter and his phenomenal popularity has led a slew of British celebrities to follow suit, including Jonathan Ross, who’s making [...]
Pingback by First they ignore you… / we are social — 9 January, 2009 @ 5:23 pm

I loved this game when I first played it ten years ago as the silent Gordon Freeman wandering the Black Mesa Research Facility. Martin, you thought it was pretty good too as I remember? Proves that Physics PhD's can mix it up with the best of them. It's interesting to read that a team of dedicated people have re-created the game using the Source engine. I'll look forward to revisiting it.

3 original comments:

I recently installed windows on my mac for the solo purpose of playing the hl sequels. The original is the best, probably – especially given what a quantum leap (no pun intended) it was for storytelling in those sort of games.
Comment by Martin Austwick — 20 November, 2008 @ 3:24 pm

Half-Life itself didn’t grab me, but Counter Strike… my god.
Comment by handolio — 23 November, 2008 @ 10:42 am

Agreed. That was my first foray into online gaming and it was extremely satisfying.
Comment by Mark — 26 November, 2008 @ 6:06 pm

"There is no guilt greater than to sanction ambition, No calamity greater than to be discontented with one's lot, No fault greater than the wish to be getting. Therefore the sufficiency of contentment is an enduring and unchanging sufficiency."
from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

1 original comment:

“Live slow, die happy”?
Comment by martin austwick — 17 November, 2008 @ 10:39 pm

Barack Obama by Peter Yang

I saw this photo the other night. Is just a great picture. Obama looks like a cartoon character yet very human and completely candid. The presence of the stickered-up Mac is a bonus.

Update: I've just watched Obama's first address on YouTube. Over half-a-million views in two days. Not bad. I can't imagine any other politician doing this and me feeling okay about it. He does it quite naturally and I'm intrigued by the idea he may continue to do some sort of web-based activity with the ten million-odd supporters he has contact details for from his campaigning database. Social politics happening at home with a global audience able to watch online. I find the idea of him potentially communicating with and getting feedback from an engaged and motivated electorate without the filter of the news media to be fascinating.

When you browse the web you do not have to wait, eyeballs peeled through the advertising break. The savvy user can even block out billboards as they roam. This always make me want to ask the people from the marketing departments I meet to talk about social stuff where their feedback department is? When I research a topic and find people expressing a strong opinion it generally has to do with their personal expectation or disappointment. Neither is the preserve of the marketing department, whose hyperbole tells you what to expect and never listens to your opinion. The person who takes the time to offer coherent thoughts will usually have ideas as to how a product or service may suit them better or how it could be improved. Admittedly people like this are as rare as habitable planets in the galaxy but at least when you find them the web makes them easier to reach. A large part of my research involves finding those places where people do talk about things that interest them. Reading their discussions makes me wonder: why deal with marketing departments at all? These opinions are most relevant to the people who thought up the original idea, ironed out design problems and solved engineering conundrums. It's relevant to the people who will work on the next iteration, not to the people who are responsible for pushing out a message. When you create a product or service you're asking people a question: is this useful? Your answer comes back through sales but you may wish for a more refined perspective. You may even wish to ask: will this work? The more research and development conducted in a consultative and collaborative process, in an open way, the less need for an online marketing campaign; the online conversation becomes self-sustaining. Don't shout in the echo chamber, cultivate people with feedback and create a loop. So where is the feedback department that filters the answers? Is it the marketing department I should be speaking to or customer services? Or now we have tools of mass communication is it no department at all but everyone who contributes to the product and service, users included?

1 original comment:

I agree with your comments Mark. I have become increasingly frustrated that feedback seems to only hinge around the quality of service when goods are bought and delivered i.e “quick delivery”, staff have a good manner on the phone….” etc. I have a great deal of difficulty finding feedback about the goods I might wish to buy. Are they reliable?, do they do the job they are expected to do? etc etc. I have no idea how to go about finding this information. Does anyone have any ideas. For instance I want to buy a dust extractor for my woodwork shop. There are hundreds out there but which one will do the job I want or more precisely how do I eliminate those that are not suitable?
Comment by Robert — 4 November, 2008 @ 12:43 pm

Charlie P always hits me up with great links, this one he dropped in my delicious was an interesting read. A chap from Auntie with a long job title (incorporating the word 'multimedia' no less) said the other day that linking out from bbc.co.uk is a 'vital' future development. This is apparently in part due to the BBC Trust being disappointed with referrals from the Beeb in a review they conducted. The trial the BBC conducted in August wasn't impressive, they still seemed overly concerned with keeping people on site. This is exactly what I was talking about when I said that major newspaper sites weren't good web citizens. They behave like black holes, you can see a huge number of links being sucked in, indicating the presence of a major hub. If you follow one of those links you won't escape once you're inside, you'll be forever trapped looking at their content and no one else's, a significant chunk of it informed by stuff happening elsewhere on the web that they won't reference properly. This makes for a less relevant web experience for the visitor and is thus a bad thing. I'd be interested in seeing how people start behaving if this policy gets properly implemented at the BBC. As I've stated my philosophical position is that you should link in a relevant way as often as you can as this gives people the opportunity to explore a topic further and helps the search engines figure out what we think is important to that topic, helping the accuracy of future searches. Whether people actually do engage in active exploration by following external links as much as is sometimes claimed is something I've been giving thought to recently. I'm going to leave this for a future post, maybe if I can get some data to work through to draw conclusions from. If nothing else one can always look to one's own experience; in my case I read a lot of content in situ on my favourite blogs I arrive at directly and rarely follow off-site links. It's only when I'm pursuing a line of inquiry I behave in a way that exploits the network of links that exists between pages of content.

Been a little busy so no posts recently. Not short of ideas for things I want to write about, but they always seem to drift past when I'm without web access and the desire to catch them fades by the time I sit down. For me blogging is an immediate activity and not one that should be laboured over.

Inside The Kingfisher Reserve at Wakehurst Place

Anyhoo, I spent the last warm day of the year out at Wakehurst Place a couple of weeks back; Joe and Rose documented the event. More recentIy I went to the wedding of two lovely friends of mine, Sarah and Justin, in the beautiful Shropshire countryside. Two nice things to have done as the nights start to close in.

Amanita muscaria growing at Wakehurst Place

2 original comments:

Mushroom Identification time!
Red and white mushroom: Amanita Muscaria (or fly agaric) – heavily psychedelic, but not deadly.
Grouped mushrooms (taken from below): Sulphur Tufts – inedible/mildly poisonous
Red Mushrooms: unsure, but likely to be ‘Sickeners’ – causing vomiting
Other mushroom: An anamita, but I’m unsure of the exact species; either a Blusher, Tawny Grisette, or Panther Cap – the former two are edible, but the latter is heavily psychedelic, and has been reported to be fatal.
If eaten by dogs (who are strangely attracted to them), they can cause ‘brain death’ within minutes!
Cheers, and before I forget….
REQUIEME!
Mike
Comment by Wilkins — 2 November, 2008 @ 8:35 pm

The indomitable Michael Wilkins knocks it out the court with mushroom identification from the Wakehurst Place flickr set linked to in my post above. Mike, I’m thinking we set up some kind of mobile service where people can message in photos of ’shrooms they find while out walking and you can identify them, strictly for information purposes. We’ll get legal advice, really good public liability insurance and maybe base the operation out of a former Eastern-bloc state just to be sure… whadaya say?
Comment by Mark — 12 January, 2009 @ 5:37 pm