I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time recently on kagtum and making good progress.

So much progress in fact, I think I’m going to be able to start unveiling things in public soon. If you want in on the first round of invites, sign up for an invite now and the moment it’s ready for your discerning eyeballs, you’ll get an e-mail before anybody else.

The nice thing about this, is that I’m having to deal with some pretty big problems in areas of Computer Science I’ve never been exposed to. I’m really pouring my soul into the back-end mechanics, so I’m now trying to work out the human interaction and visual design issues. I have a business plan under all this work, but I’m actively enjoying myself right now - hence me working on it on a beautiful Saturday evening.

It seems like an age since the last one (in fact it was late February), so I’m pleased to announce the next co-working day:

http://manc-coworking.eventwax.com/13th-may

No networking, no OpenCoffee, just plain old straight format where those who want to meet up and discuss something can do, otherwise we crack on with work.

It’s the same day as GeekUp Manchester as well, so those of you travelling from outside of the city centre can get two events done in the same day and then feel really tired the next day.

A friend sent me a link yesterday with the short description of “Intriguing…”

It was a link to Clay Shirky’s article Gin, Television, and Social Surplus and indeed it is an intriguing article where he sets out his initial thesis thus:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

It’s not a new theory, however I’m not entirely sure it’s completely accurate. Urban life is not a new invention: Rome at one point is reckoned to have had 1 million citizens, and Athens had 300,000 citizens before it. Whilst they both had their debauchery, nobody has ever suggested that Rome needed wine and orgies in order to function as a city.

His parallel starts to get more interesting however:

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

I’m not sure the “wheels would have come off”, but there is no doubt that even people on very poor incomes have more free time than people of similar economic standing would have had for many millenia - if ever.

He goes on to talk about this surplus of time as something useful, interesting and powerful. His first example however directly contradicts my thoughts around The Vision Thing:

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

Actually, it’s a change, but it’s not one we should embrace unless we say it’s the thin end of the wedge. That eventually something useful and interesting is going to happen and society starts working on interesting things. Clay goes on to talk about how if even one slither of that time of staring at the flashing box in the corner is used to do something productive, it means something interesting is going to happen.

Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

To an extent I agree. I don’t know what 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year is going to look like, but there is no doubt that something, somewhere is going to happen of interest.

But what are those 10,000 projects? Do we have the creative ability to do 10,000 useful things every year? Do we have the will to do something more interesting than throw sheep at each other or spending our entire time photoshopping memes? Time will tell.

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged here about why Carphone Warehouse sucked. The conclusion of that was a refunded sale, and a new account being set up, complete with brand new modem being handed over to me.

Alas, on Monday of this week it still wasn’t working, however something different had happened: 3 Customer Services had sent me an introduction pack, which suggested that I was indeed now on their system and the problem lay somewhere else.

I made a phone call to their customer service team, and through the fact I was:

• Set up on their system so they knew who I was
• An ex-tech support guy who knew how to get them off the script they were reading at me
• The kind of person who had dug out various utilities to play with my Huawei E220 modem in ways they don’t consider sensible for the average customer
• Prepared to go on hold for 10 minutes to get one specific - and critical - piece of knowledge

I was able to get it working on OS X Leopard.

So, time to help the rest of you stumbling here via Google. To confirm, I have:

• OS X Leopard 10.5.2
• Huawei E220 mobile
• A contract with Three

You need two files, neither of which are given to you by Three - the downloads they provide are useless and not drivers. No worry though, because I have what you need.

The first is HuaweiDataCardDriver-2.7.gz So, you should install that now. You’ll need to install the right one in there for your Mac. If you’re on a Macbook, you want the Intel one if you’re not sure, but to check you can go to the Apple logo in the toolbar and click ‘About this Mac’. If it has ‘Intel’ anywhere in the text, you’re Intel. If it says PowerPC anywhere in there, you’re PowerPC. Double-click the one you need and follow the instruction.

Next, connect up the modem.

At this point the official guide goes wrong on two counts. First it tells you to open the HuaweiDataCardApp program - which Three don’t give you - and to then use it to enter an incorrect APN. So, first off here’s HuaweiDataCardApp.zip for you. Unzip it, load it up and in the box type ‘3internet’ without the quotes. Click configure, and it should tell you it’s configured the modem.

Now we’re back into familiar territory - the official guide almost makes sense.

1. Click on the Apple logo, go to System Preferences. Hit the Network pane open

2. Select the HUAWEI Mobile. The only box you want text in is ‘Telephone Number’ which should read *99# (if you’re a completely new to this Apple malarky # is found on UK keyboards by doing Alt-3). Username and Password are both blank. I would advise you ‘Show modem status in menu bar’ as well, simply as it gives you quick access on the desktop to being able to connect/disconnect the thing

3. Click on Advanced…

4. Under the Modem tab, vendor should be ‘Other’, you want to enable error correction and compression, have the dial tone ignored when dialing, tone dialing selected, sound as ‘off’.

5. Click OK, and then back in the basic settings screen hit ‘Apply’ if it isn’t shaded out. Hit ‘Connect’. Voila?

If that’s not working now you have two choices:

• If you drink in the same pub I do, ask me to take a look
• Phone Three on 0870 733 0320 and prepare to be put on hold a fair bit

Hope that helps somebody.

Many years ago I did some freelance writing. Some of it was painfully dull (filler articles for free magazines), some of it bizarre and seedy (your suspicions about readers’ letters in porn mags are well-founded: they are sometimes written by paid writers), but the biggest lesson I got from it was that it’s hard to make a decent living with that as your main gig.

When you need to rely on artistic output to pay the rent, it doesn’t take you long to realise that unless you’re going to get picked up by a large publisher or music label, you’re going to need another job.

Recently I’ve been thinking about this problem and the related crisis in the music and film industries in some detail. At its simplest, the problem is this:

People want to consume entertainment, but they do not wish to pay for it.

Artists do not have the right to be paid whatever they feel they are worth, they must compete in a market and persuade people to hand over cash just like any other industry. Punitive measures such as taxing consumer products in order to force payment of artists is in my opinion pure idiocy. We need to think instead about encouraging people to pay for the entertainment they love. I think that requires a few things:

1. Consumers should not have to fork out more money than they feel comfortable spending
2. More of that money needs to land in the artist’s pockets rather than distributor’s, so that artists on the ‘long tail’ can make a living off a smaller fan base
3. Artists need to find new ways to grow and engage with their fan base

Thankfully, the Internet makes all of these much more practicable than ever before.

One solution to the first problem has recently been played out with mixed results by Radiohead, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we had some sort of “tip jar” system in place for all artists? You download something via P2P, like it, and you can make a donation - of whatever size you want - to the creator. Well somebody is working on that but the question is whether it will ever work.

One artist working with a non-digital medium (paintings) has given this a whirl and it seems to be working. Ali Spagnola will - when it’s your turn - paint a picture just for you based on a theme you suggest and then send it you free of charge anywhere in the World. It’s not a con. I know this, because I’m currently staring at this picture painted for me sometime last year. Payment is completely voluntary. I’m ashamed to admit I still haven’t got around to throwing some money into the tip jar, but I’ll rectify that mistake this week. The painting has grown on me. I would miss it if I lost it. Ali deserves to be able to eat for giving it to me.

Does Ali make money? Perhaps. Do Radiohead? Definitely. So, it’s a model with potential.

As for the distribution problem, well I think it’s clear now that the current relationship with artists and the distribution chain is going to die within a matter of years. A band or a writer can now distribute directly via their website, and even authors can publish books cost-effectively without the need to get men in suits and lawyers involved. There is an issue of how to manage all this and as Kevin Kelly discovered when researching this, being your own tour manager, promoter, lawyer and roadie can be a gruelling and unprofitable exercise.

And then we get to audience engagement. The Internet has blown that apart as well - artists can now have a direct conversation with their fan base via blogs, social networking websites and video sites. It doesn’t scale (how do you stay personal with fifty million fans in 150 countries?), but that would be as they say “a nice problem to have”. Most artists don’t know how to do this well - they’re musicians, writers and film directors, not PR specialists - which suggests there will exist a niche industry helping bands do this very cost effectively within a few years. The current promotion and PR industries are not a good fit for where the industry is heading, they need to change.

As for growing your fan base, I agree with Robert Rich’s words in his message to Kevin Kelly:

Companies can use demographic models and track people’s search patterns to pander to their initial tastes and to strengthen those tastes, rather than broaden their horizons. This problem doesn’t lie within the technology of the internet, but within the realities of capitalism and human psychology.

There is a problem here with collaborative filtering - it’s locking us into tastes, not broadening them. However, it can also be the most powerful tool an artist can have working for them.

Four months ago I had never heard of The Courteeners and yet last Saturday was in the crowd at their sell-out gig at Manchester Academy having paid several times face value for the tickets off eBay. That only happened because last.fm algorithmically said “you should listen to these guys, because you like James”. So far The Courteeners and their label, promoters and distributors have directly received at least £30 off me they would never have got without that technology helping them. I expect they will get hundreds off me over the next decade providing they keep doing something I like.

However, I’d like to share that music. I’d like to say to my friends “look, listen to this, you’ll like it” and give them a copy. DRM and the law prevents me. It is working against them, because I know for a fact I could recruit at least another half dozen fans for their next tour and album release. They are working against me by insisting I do not put their album up on a website for anybody to download and listen to. I will happily work as their unpaid promoter and recruit whoever I can into giving them money, but that little circled “C” prevents me. They could have licensed it under a creative commons license, but they chose not to.

This one act alone has probably cost them a couple of thousand pounds in future lost revenue just through me. Scale it up to the 2,000 people who were at that gig the other night, they’re probably losing millions. Not millions in five years when they try and break America: millions of pounds right now, this week.

So, we need to find more new ways to openly and cheaply distribute art and leverage a fan base so as to be able to make a decent living - perhaps even an indecent living - for artists and fans alike. I have more ideas on how to make that happen, but I will share those with you tomorrow.

I bumped into somebody last night on the way home from the shop, and the conversation was an interesting one for me.

The person concerned - Ikem Nzeribe - did a presentation at BarCamp Leeds last year about mapping that blew me away. It was clear he’d thought through the problem he was trying to address and he’d come up with a social, interesting, useful solution. After the talk I handed him my business card, and suggested we sit down and talk at some point.

So we did. Between then and now we’ve regularly met up and discussed plans either directly or as part of a larger group Ikem pulled together from his networks.

I hadn’t spoken to Ikem since The Vision Thing got rolling, and he clearly hadn’t seen it. I basically summed it up like this:

“There’s a chance I’m going to quit the industry in the next six months”

Two things struck me about that sentence. First, that’s the first time I’ve been completely upfront about where I was heading when I wrote the original rant. His reaction was incredulous, he thought I was winding him up: “You? You are going to quit? YOU?”, etc.

Yeah, me. I’m now thinking the change might not be that dramatic because I can now see ideas forming that address my concerns about how screwed we are right now, but I’m leaving it that open until something more tangible forms.

The second thing that struck me was the word “industry” in there. Which industry did I mean? Web development? Consultancy? Internet business development? Open innovation? Kagtum? Writing blogs and the occasional article?

A very good first step to me trying to stay in the industry is to start saying “no” to proposals, invitations to events, opportunities to comment, and so on. I’m fortunate that so many people want to work with me right now, but it’s stopping me from servicing my current clients and working out how to build great applications that don’t ultimately get monetised through “raising brand awareness” for soulless multinationals who want 75% profit on every unit of sugarwater they sell.

Ikem understands. I hope other people do too. For the record if it’s not one of these or doesn’t directly help one of these, I’m not doing it any time in the next six months:

• Accounts software with Adaptavist (coming to a close soon)
• The “Florida project” (I’ll explain more later in the year).
• My local consultancy project around corporate social responsibility
• The “open innovation” thing with Guy Dickinson and Simon Wheatley
• Kagtum
• Blogging
• BarCamp Manchester
• The occasional co-working day

That’s more than enough for me right now. Please don’t feel offended if I say no to an invitation to get involved in your great idea.

I’ve resisted blogging this, as the BCS have been a little incompetent and booked a smallish lecture theatre for what is likely to be a well-attended talk, however there is a backup plan those of us with an ear to the ground will have in place, so here it is:

Free of charge evening talk organised in association with the Manchester branches of the BCS and IET.

‘Free Software in Ethics and Practice’ - speaker: Richard Stallman

Thursday 1st May, 2008 - Talk starts at 6:45pm (ends approx. 8:30pm) with refreshments from 6:15pm.

Venue: Room D1, Renold Building, University of Manchester, Sackville Street, Manchester M1 3BB

There is no need to book a place - just turn up on the night.

Note that last line is perhaps the most stupid move anybody has made for a talk in Manchester involving an internationally-renowned figure in the computer industry, ever. I could be proved wrong, but I somehow doubt it…

Abstract:

Richard Stallman will speak about the Free Software Movement, which campaigns for freedom so that computer users can cooperate to control their own computing activities. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, often erroneously referred to as Linux, specifically to establish these freedoms.

About the speaker:

Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.

He’s certainly well known as a controversial figure, so it sounds like it’s going to be an interesting evening.

How exactly I ended up agreeing to him staying at my flat, I’m still not 100% clear. I have though, and will be pleased to host him for the evening. I was always brought up to be a good host even to those I sometimes disagree about some issue with so I only hope the fact me being an organiser of the local BSD User Group isn’t going to cause xkcd re-enactments. :-)

Those of you who follow me via twitter (which synchs to my Facebook status unless I’m directly replying to somebody, so you might have seen me there too), will know that in recent days I’ve been rather annoyed with Carphone Warehouse.

All I can say is, I really can’t suggest you buy anything from them if you’re in a hurry. Their incompetence is worthy of superlatives I can’t come up with right now. I don’t normally do “bitch posts” here, but I know a lot of people reading this are UK-based and thinking about mobile broadband. Here’s the story of why you should deal directly with the network, or at the very least be careful as to which dealer you choose.

Certainly, it would seem, Carphone Warehouse’s online ordering system is pants, especially if you want to pick up in-store. It just quite clearly doesn’t work.

Anyway, I’m spending more time on the road now than I have in recent years. I need to stay connected online even outside of the range of WiFi, and I’ve been hearing good things about three’s USB modem. I only need about 1Gb/month on the road (all my heavier data transfers can wait until I’m home), so the £10/month is less than what I was spending on WiFi in coffee shops anyway, plus the coverage was wider, even in WiFi-saturated Manchester.

I’ve been a CPW customer now for about 8 years. Before that I dealt directly with the network, and before that with CPW again. They have very occasionally mucked me about, but it’s always been resolved with one phone call. I figured it would be smooth-sailing. Here’s what happened:

Day 1

Jumped on their website in the evening, found the package I wanted and ordered it.

I knew I was going to be on client sites the next day and Citylink (who CPW use) are notorious for turning up at random times of the day, and if you miss them you end up having to go to the depot in the middle of nowhere (unlike Parcelforce, say) with 87,236,538,475 form of ID, plus letters from all your family, friends, lovers (ex- and otherwise), dead grandparents, etc. to confirm you are who you say you are. Thoughtfully, CPW offered to deliver the modem to my nearest branch. Living in the city centre, that seemed reasonable, and they offered me the branch on Cross Street, 10 minutes walk away. Nice.

Day 2

I get a tracking ID sent after it’s been dispatched both via e-mail and to my O2 mobile. Fine.

Day 3

I notice it’s now been delivered at the store. I needed to go to a client site in the morning, but on the way back I’d swing around and pick it up.

On doing so, the guy in store had a problem closing the transaction. He picked up the phone. He tried putting the contract through a couple of times. He asked me to verify the company chip and pin card. Twice.

Eventually, he tells me I can leave the store with the modem, that “the eOrders guys didn’t set the transaction up right” but that it would be resolved that day.

“It will work within 24 hours”, he assures me.

That evening, I spend a fair bit of time just trying to get OS X to see the thing. The guides three give you border on the useless through mild contradiction in places. If I hadn’t worked in the ISP industry and therefore knew what PPP and setting up modem drivers was about, I honestly think I would have struggled to get that far.

Day 4

It gets to 4pm. Every time I try and connect, it sits there “authenticating” and then disconnecting complaining about being unable to establish a connection to the PPP server. I used to run PPP and Radius setups, so I know what this probably means: the modem hasn’t been activated.

I phone three’s USB modem tech support direct. They plug in the phone number, the IMEI, my name, my postcode, and there’s nothing there. They’ve never heard of me. “Phone CPW”, they say.

I go on hold over at CPW for 15 minutes. “You need to verify your chip and pin card”, they tell me. I explain I have already. They tell me it’s not gone through, I need to take the modem back and get it sorted.

Day 5

Back to the same store. Young girl looks a bit confused at the terminal for a bit, does the verification and tells me that in closing the transaction they’ve added insurance. Ah, the insurance. Actually, that’s almost useful - on my O2 phone I’ve had to do a claim and from losing my phone to getting a new handset in my hand for just a £30 excess, the process took 4 hours. I’d regret it if I didn’t take it and then needed it one day, but narked they’ve just “added it”.

She hands me everything back: “It’ll work in 24 hours”.

Day 6

It’s still not working. I phone up three. They still haven’t heard of me. I phone up CPW. “It takes 24 hours”, they say. “It’s now 26 hours”, I reply. They look at something. “Ah, it didn’t go through until very late last night. Try again in the morning”, they answer.

Day 7

Guess what? It’s still not working. I’m busy so I leave it until later in the evening.

I phone three. They still have no idea who I could be. I phone CPW. You’ll never guess what the suggestion is next.

“You need to go back to the store and then verify your chip and pin”. I point out I’ve done this a total of 3 times already. They go away and look at something and put me on hold for 20 minutes. They phone three.

“Your details still haven’t been sent over”, is the conclusion. I’d guessed that bit. “What we’re going to do to trigger it again is ask you to go back to the store, and we’ll do a refund and resale. Sorry about the inconvenience, but there’s nothing we can do”.

By now I’m thinking maybe it would be quicker if I just saved up my loose coppers and bought my own 3G phone license and network. I’ve certainly decided this is their last chance: if I don’t get a satisfactory result on this trip, I’m done with them.

Day 8

The same girl who served me on day 5 is there. She recognises me. She confirms she’s spoken to CPW and basically think they’re being odd. I tell her that they said there was some note on the account as to how she could fix it right now. She goes and looks.

Somebody is looking over her shoulder. “I’ll need to do a refund here”, she says. The onlooker mentions a credit note. “That’s it, there”. Looks like they’re learning something new.

After a few minutes, she actually cheers and raises her fist in the air. “Yeah, we’ve got it sorted. Give me one minute”. Her enthusiasm makes me smile - she does actually seem to care about the mess they’ve put me through.

She takes my modem and puts it to one side and gives me a brand new modem. She prints out contracts - including the insurance - and I sign them. She puts everything in a bag.

“Let me guess”, I say with a slight grin on my face, “it’ll be working in about 24 hours?”

“Yes, should do”, she answers.

That was 3 hours ago. We’ll wait and see what happens tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath.

As most of you now know, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking recently. I’ve even been ranting a fair bit. I sound downbeat when I talk about it (as I did at GeekUp this week), but there are small shards of optimism I can extract from all of the discussion, and it’s those I’m going to focus on.

For several years now, an idea has been bugging me. It addresses hard problems, big social issues I care about, and I believe I can actually do something useful, innovative and entertaining in the space. I have called it Kagtum.

The article I found the most upbeat about my rant has actually make me think it’s worth dealing with this set of problems again from a fresh perspective and push the ideas forward into code.

In the years thinking about these problems I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to make it happen. I’d spoken to a lot of people. I’d sniffed around investors. I’d watched blogs by people in the same space and saw where they were heading and thought about where they might trip up. I’ve watched people trip up (90% of them by focusing on the wrong thing), and made mental notes.

Today, something clicked. I realised can actually make the beta happen, in my spare time quicker than I thought and not break a sweat whilst having fun. And, even better, I don’t need to drop any of my current commitments around vagueware, idea banks, other business ideas.

That sounds like a plan.

So, it’s time to kick things off. I’m trying to recruit a user base of people interested in news, current affairs and emerging technology against which to bounce ideas off. I’ve started that process by setting up a page on Facebook and CPC’ing people on FB interested in those topics. If you want to become a fan, please do so and you’ll be behind the wall on the first release.

The Vision Thing will continue. However, now I’m going to try and deal with the issues not by complaining, whining, ranting and criticising, but trying to find a way to be optimistic and beat a path. I will aim to show, not tell. Maybe I’ll mess up and people will laugh, maybe I won’t. Should be fun finding out, either way.

At tonight’s GeekUp (Briton’s Protection - just 50 yards from the usual venue - 6pm), there is another social discussion event. This time, another area I spend a lot of time thinking about is up for consideration. From the announcement:

Discussion Topic: “The Future of the Internet”

• How do you see people using the internet in 5/10 years time?
  • What features do you want to see browsers supporting?
  • Will people still be using browsers? If not, what will they be using?
  • Does anyone actually use 3G video chat? Will VoIP mainstream follow too?
  • Will Google always be the number one search engine?
  • Will Google be even bigger? Perhaps it might run our lives …
  • Will IPv6 actually be adopted by the masses?
  • Anyone up for a 3G wireless dongle biometric implant to hook your memory up to the net?!
  • Semantic Web - is it the future? what does it mean?

How we intend to get through that lot in a couple of hours I have no idea. I expect I will be writing up notes and reporting back tomorrow if people can’t make it, but if you can make it, you should.

So, with just a couple of days of throwing ideas around, some interesting strands are coming together.

Firstly, those who are developers tend to agree with me: we’re a broken industry in need of a fix. Secondly, those who aren’t developers think I personally am broken and in need of a fix. Some think both are true.

With the private e-mail I was getting and IM chatter, I figured it would be better to produce a sandpit where anybody could get stuck in and post things up, link to articles, etc.

http://visionthing.vagueware.com is the current sandpit. We need to give this a better name and identity, but as you can see there is now a little momentum building.

You can also see that a few of us are playing with the idea of a Manifesto. It’s not enough to say what we’re angry about: we should be talking about what we want this industry to be, what we believe it is capable of, to lay a framework down to make sure we look after ourselves, our users and potentially our investors without breaking a fundamental philosophical barrier.

I think it might be worth just touching on a couple of the responses though, specifically those who suggest the problem is me.

OK, I’ll admit it, I’m tired. I need a break. I might not know what I really want out of life (who the heck does?), however those aren’t the problems we’re talking about.

The real problem is the abundance of froth in this industry right now, with no real substance and meaning to it. I am not condemning the entire industry - I just question the meaning of parts of it, and whether we can’t use our collective skills to do something better. This is ultimately a philosophical and political position to take, and it’s one many seem to share with me. We don’t know the details yet, but we know we want to try and hammer them out and at the end say “this is what we believe in”. I don’t expect everybody to agree with that position: a philosophy that has 100% belief isn’t a philosophy, it’s a law of nature.

We know we’re jaded and tired, but we’re jaded and tired for a reason.

As a group of geeks we hate spin, bullshit, lies, marketing speak and so on. We are an industry moving to a foundation built on those principles rather than the ones we admire: hard problems being solved with skill, and adding value to society. We want to help those with a financial interest satisfy their curiosity, but we want to encourage them to do it with the same sense of purpose that drives us to all-night hacking sessions.

I just had a niggle in my head the other day. Now we have the beginnings of a community prepared to work out how to make this industry better. We’re going to have detractors labeling one or all of as burned out as they look at that angry stare in our eyes when they explain their “social networking for lampshades” idea to us, but I feel all the better for knowing there are people who are thinking about this the way I am, and I hope they feel better too.

I have a problem with “the vision thing” in the industry at the moment. I don’t know where we’re going, or why. The technology - and our insight on how it can be applied - available to us has the ability to change the World, and instead we’re producing pointless crap and obsessing over details of page animations as if they alone will save the World.

If I hear one more wannabe-startup tell me that they plan to change the World and get rich off the back of social networking I will scream. If I see one more aggressive pitch for a site that a teenager could put together in a weekend under the guise of it being “World leading” I will hurt somebody. If I’m asked just one more time to give a quote to develop a site “a bit like eBay but with a social graph” I’m going to quit and go and be a farmer or something.

When I first got into computing, it was because of the potential of what you could do with this technology. When I first got on the Internet in 1996 I genuinely believed we were on the cusp of changing everything. An anarchic communication system where ideas could flow easily, people connect and work together to have a positive impact on society? I’ll take one of those please! Except 12 years later I think we’ve used it for mostly plastic, soulless and philosophically bankrupt ideas because “that’s where the money is”. There are exceptions, but the fact they are by definition exceptional means I feel we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

I know I haven’t made any great personal contribution so am as guilty as anybody, but at least through efforts around BarCamp, Co-working and support of GeekUp I’m trying to get the conversation rolling. Maybe I’m just hacked off we’re moving so slowly. I know we have the collective talent so why are we all - me included - not getting on with it?

Over the next ten years we have the potential to fundamentally change the way the World works. Not just our World, but the Third World too. There are threats, opportunities, risks and rewards - not necessarily all financial - but for me the “vision thing” we should be working towards is about making people’s lives better not by trying to replace TV or other media, not by providing entertainment, but helping enhance people’s relationships - somehow providing meaning. And no, I don’t mean social networking, business networking or anything else where a friendship is defined as clicking on a “Confirm” button. I mean genuine enhancement of whatever it is we’re here to do.

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about whether I want to stay in this industry. Last week I was ready to serve out the 6-month contract I’m on at the moment and then go and do something else for a while. Over the long weekend something niggled me and I think I know what I’m going to do next. I’ll explain more in coming weeks/months, but right now I want to see if I’m alone in having the niggle.

Comments are still broken here, so maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, but I want to know what other people think of the “Big Picture”. Specifically I’m going to do one of those slightly annoying “tag things” where I point to the people whose opinions I’m genuinely interested in who will hopefully respond to this post with one of their own and then tag another five people and so on so we can try and get this conversation going. Tagging posts with “thevisionthing” with Technorati might help us keep track of where it ends up.

What the hell are we doing in this industry? Why do we spend so much time talking about Ajax and definitions of “Web 2.0” and virtually no time whatsoever trying to work out what people want? Is this just all an aspect of the industry being over-run by complete geeks, or is the industry lacking any sense of philosophy? Are we being over-run by ideas and concepts from the advertising industry and mass media generally, because they’re becoming more dominant in the industry? Should I turn my dev environment off and go and do something less boring instead? I just want to hear what people think.

I tag (in alphabetical order):

• Guy Dickinson
• Matt Lee
• Katie Lips
• Manoj Ranaweera
• Tom Smith

That said, if anybody else wants to respond to this - say, Hugh who sounds about as burned out right now as I feel, Seth Godin who was in the industry way before me, Guy Kawasaki who is simply on the ball constantly, or anybody shoving their feed into NorthPack - I’d love to hear about it. I have a horrible feeling this will fall flat on its face and people will simply suggest I take a holiday (probably a good point), but it’s worth a punt…

Update: we have a few responses in:

• Andy Mitchell makes my point better than I did
• Guy Dickinson broadly thinks I’m wrong
• Tom Smith feels the pain, but thinks I just need a holiday or to do something different

They all make valid points, but there is something here. Via e-mail Andy and Steve Ireland have continued the discussion a little more. I think there is something in trying to advance this a little. Stay tuned.

For some reason, Mephisto isn’t behaving on my server right now, so comments aren’t working. I plan to move the whole shebang over to Wordpress sometime “soon”. That said, I’d like as a gentle introduction back into me blogging here again about “Innovation in Software” (less ‘what is happening in Manchester’ in future), to talk about comment systems.

This cartoon from the excellent xkcd strip sums up my problem with comments right now:

The problem I have is this: on any popular system where users are allowed to comment, as the number of users able to comment without fear of genuine peer review increases, the signal-to-noise ratio drops exponentially.

In other words, if I and 5 million other people can comment on a YouTube video without any fear of us being reminded of what we said not just in the future but the very next time we meet a friend, we are more likely to be flippant, irrelevant, and “noisy” than if we knew people whose opinion of ourselves mattered to us were going to be reading that comment and evaluating it.

It’s why social network status updates and posted items are relatively sane and measured and why blog posts are more considered. We care about what the readers think, because what they think will have a direct impact on our future relationship with them.

So, whilst thinking about kagtum a lot recently (background if you’re unaware), I’ve been thinking about this problem. How do you allow for user comments without them descending into noise?

The “mission statement” for kagtum in its current form is something along the lines of “delivering relevant news and event information”, where “relevancy” is the secret sauce that gets quite complicated. How do we make sure every comment you see is relevant in order for it to stay within that mission statement?

I have a possible answer, but I need to keep it close to my chest for now. Normally my ideas are thrown out into the wind as being worthless, however my answer has a direct consequence on execution of a business plan. That said, if you come and meet me at an event and ask me, I’ll tell you what it is if I trust you. ;-)

I was asked last week to write up an op-ed for Crain’s Manchester Business on the City council’s “Digital strategy”. The result can be found online at their website now

Note how the recent sleep deprivation is showing nicely in that photograph. I meant what I said in the penultimate paragraph:

“After a decade of growth and a realisation that we are now at a tipping point of being dominant in the technology sector regionally, nationally and maybe even continentally, Manchester needs to make sure the opportunity isn’t wasted.”

The next couple of years are make or break time for us as a city in this sector. What are we doing to make sure we make it? Are we doing anything that might break it? Geography isn’t important until you factor in community and we have one of the strongest communities in the World, but we still seem to be lagging in a few areas.

I wrote this article about a week ago, but resisted posting it. Reading it back, I’m now even more convinced I’m right.

The simple truth is, OpenCoffee as a format doesn’t work in Manchester and we should be glad about it.

Here’s the basic format of an OpenCoffee meeting:

• Meet in a coffee shop (or hosted environment with coffee available) early-/mid-morning
• Meet people involved in startups who want to network
• Ideally grow businesses through that networking

Now, here’s an exercise. Spot the two big reasons from that format why it struggles in Manchester.

First, there is timing. The people who would be interested in meeting developers, entrepreneurs and technologists in Manchester tend to fall into one of three categories:

• Working for somebody else, in a salaried job. They can’t do OpenCoffee because their boss would notice their absence doing networking for the new company they’re about to start.
• Working for themselves and insanely busy and so find it hard to justify taking a couple of hours out of their schedule just to meet up
• Working strange hours that means they’re almost certainly fast asleep 7am-11am which are the “prime” traditional times for an OpenCoffee

Then there is the fact that OpenCoffee comes with an agenda: I am here to meet people to help my business. That just doesn’t work in Manchester. Ideas flow freely and sometimes get turned into business agendas, but the one thing that will kill an event in Manchester is an explicit attempt to progress your own agendas. Just meet, chat, see whether there is anything you can do for each other, if not just see what is going on.

People in London and New York don’t “get” this. They hate it. They need OpenCoffee. We hate the London events, and we should be glad about that. It’s what makes our community ours.

So, let’s design the perfect event for Manchester then:

• It should probably happen in the evenings when most people are about
• It should have a focus, but not an agenda
• The networking should be casual, not explicit
• Given it’s after work, some people will want beer, not coffee

Congratulations, we’ve just designed GeekUp. What’s that? You want investors in the room and a more structured event? Oh, OK, well, that’s NW Startup 2.0. You don’t want to pay for NW Startup? Well wait until the next BarCamp and we’ll try and get some investors in the room.

Remind me again, exactly what the point of OC would be if these events exist?

Co-working is likely to go on incidentally - it makes sense for those who want to explore ideas together and collaborate in a way that doesn’t feel like a wasted day. OpenCoffee - for Manchester at least - is dead.

If people - and I mean people prepared to actually show up, because personally I’m tired of doing the announcements knowing it’ll be dead - howl in protest I’ll run it one more time to see if there is real interest, but I suggest that for now we just let it go.