After some discussion with a few people I’ve started working out what I want to do around publishing this blog. The original plan was to scrap it, however I’ve reconsidered and decided on a new course of action.

First, I’m going to move away from Mephisto to WordPress. Mephisto is Rails and therefore very nice, sexy and smooth on the inside, but I just need something I don’t need to babysit as much. I’ve found a few techniques that preserve content and comments through that transition, so I’m going to give that a whirl and see if it works. Expect breakage soon!

Next, I’m going to firm up the focus of what this blog is for: there are over 30 categories right now. In future, I’ll focus on tagging everything correctly (and making the tag cloud accessible), but there will be just five categories: Business, Technology, Trends, Announcements and Events.

The first three will concern the respective angles around innovation in the software industry. Note, I mean “software industry”, not just “web industry”. I’ve been too web-focused in the last two years, and whilst that’s where most of the interesting stuff is, I want to broaden the appeal a little.

‘Business’ and ‘Technology’ items will be news-orientated and ‘Trends’ a little more “polemic”. ‘Announcements’ will be stuff about Vagueware, although the quantity of announcements right now is going to be quite low. The last category, ‘Events’, will be the very slightly event-whore side of me coming through - I don’t expect more than a couple of posts a month in that category.

And I promise this is the last post about what I’m going to do with this blog!

The new main site for Vagueware is almost ready to roll, it just needs some more content writing before I hit the switch. What is currently at vagueware.com will move, and I’ll make an announcement about all that (very exciting) stuff in due course.

Any questions, throw me a line via paul (at) vagueware dot com.

I’m doing a lot of re-organising at the moment. There are a lot of things going on within the business that means I have to think about what is happening, where and when. Those of you who know me personally know that I have given serious consideration to wrapping the business up and doing something else instead. Over the last week I’ve made some decisions.

Whilst this does not go into immediate effect, a new website will be coming online at vagueware.com in the next week (and the site currently there will find a new home announced at the same time) which will in effect take over from blog.vagueware.com (the one you’re reading now) which will remain in place, but is unlikely to be updated much in future.

I started out wanting to talk about ‘Innovation in Software’ here but quickly discovered two things:

1. Too much of it is happening to make meaningful sense of it all
2. Most of it is incredibly dull

Therefore, rather than let this site languish I want to move things onto something more useful, pertinent and direct.

Those of you taking the RSS feed via feedburner (as I’m sure you all are), will notice a change in the name and content, but you will not have to make any changes to subscriptions: I’ll move you across seamlessly.

So, what’s going to be on the new site? What is this new direction?

Vagueware’s core activity is essentially building web applications and helping other businesses build web applications.

Whilst Vagueware Ltd will (for now) remain the holding company for Kagtum and Fluxish, I have found myself in the position of offering consultancy around architecture, deployment, developer liaison and industry best practice. Some of my work has started to cross over into project management, business process delivery and some rather wishy-washy areas that most developers do not have to touch, or choose not to because they think these things are unimportant: the new site will be focused on building that business with articles that should help do what I find myself doing in real life, that is bridge the gap between business managers and developers.

Believe it or not, when you start looking at development decisions from the perspective of cash flow, shareholder security and board authority you become a better developer. Likewise when you look at business issues from the perspective of development resources, 3rd-party frameworks and test driven development, you become better at business. That’s the niche I now find myself in: explaining to both the other side’s position. It’s interesting work at times, and allows me to be part-coach, part-developer, part-consultant and part-entrepreneur all at the same time. I’m now doing this for two organisations regularly and am applying some of the lessons to my own business plans.

Now I plan to share those lessons.

Some of you will disappear, others will arrive. I just hope that in the long term this is a right turn.

What it does mean big-picture wise though is a decision has been made: I’m staying in the industry. For now. I’m not dumping development any time soon but I’m certainly finding other things to do that have made life a bit more interesting.

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.

In the very near future, things are going to be changing at Vagueware.

Firstly, the site currently at vagueware.com is going down. I’m going to release the code running the idea bank as open source and you’ll be able to also setup a free hosted version of your own on Vagueware’s servers. Think of it as a bit like wordpress.org & .com but for open innovation rather than blogging. This will mean you can create your own IdeaStorm for your company or product.

I think open innovation and getting customers or employees involved in product and service development is going to be big in the next few years, and I want to help people get involved. If you have Ruby on Rails skills, patches to the code base will be appreciated as well - it’s going to be MIT licensed so that it follows the “Rails way”.

That will of course need a new name, and given that it’s all about constantly evolving and changing what you do and how you do it, it’ll be named Fluxish.

There are quite a few major changes needed to get the current build ready for that release, so don’t expect it this week. The ideas on the current site won’t be lost: I’ll be creating a special little hosted fluxish install and moving all the data and users over - I won’t be destroying anything, just giving it a new home.

So what will go in the idea bank’s place at the main site? Well, the new Vagueware site will concentrate on selling my consultancy and development services. There will also be a mini-blog there about the business, freeing this blog up from posts like this where I discuss what is going on inside the business. I’ll be highlighting companies I’ve worked with in the past and occasionally posting a page up as a more detailed article about the process of development.

This blog will become much more focused on innovation and emerging trends within the digital sector. This is an area I’ve drifted away from in the last three months, and I’m keen to get it back on track.

In addition, I’m going to be blogging more elsewhere in partnership with other organisations.

I’ve agreed to start writing more for O’Reilly GMT to try and turn it into a more mature source of information for the technology scene within Europe. I’m still working out and proposing what kind of articles those will be, but obviously they’ll not be about vagueware, not about innovation in software in the sense this blog will be, but aimed at a tech-savvy audience.

Also, I’ve been asked to contribute articles to ‘Manchester is online’, formerly ‘The Mancunian Way’. It’s one of the most read Mancunian blogs, and I’m hoping to bring some insight to a slightly less geeky crowd than the usual readership I get to speak to here. This is more of an experiment right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. It’s the first time I’ll be stepping across into blogging for Mainstream Media, and I couldn’t be more pleased that I’m doing it with the team at the Manchester Evening News.

In short then, I’ve got a lot of writing to get on with over the next few months, so please don’t be too upset if this blog gets neglected at times.

Over the last year or two, there have been many plans to hatch a BarCamp in our own dear city of Manchester. For some time the NWDC meetings revolved around trying to find a venue that would be a good fit, we could afford and that would meet our original requirements of two nights with the whole of the night spent on-site.

Late last year, Andrew Disley of GeekUp and I had a chat about being more realistic. We cut the scope down to one day, I went and talked to people about sponsoring the biggest cost of the day - food and drink - on the assumption we’d somehow find a free venue. We could use MDDA if we had to, even though it would be a little cramped.

Somehow I ended up being in the position of half-announcing it and saying to people “look, keep your diaries clear around here”. The moment I did that, it was like an entire community sprang into life and offers of help and sponsorship started landing in my inbox. Within just a couple of weeks a venue we hadn’t even thought of approaching came to us, met with John Keys of MDDA and myself, and confirmed they wanted in.

The space at the headquarters of the Manchester Evenings News is almost a perfect fit for what we need in terms of capacity and layout, and MEN Media are really excited about meeting a group of people on their doorstep who are full of ideas. Match made in heaven. Well, if not heaven, made in Manchester which is near enough. :-)

And so it was on Friday night I was able to throw an e-mail out to various local mailing lists and say “hey, just to let you know - BarCamp Manchester is ON!”.

We broke the eventwax signup page straight away, and now nearly half of the 100 tickets available have gone in less than 48 hours.

It looks like it’s going to be a great event and I expect by the end of next week we’ll be out of spare tickets so if you want to come, sign up now.

Vagueware is not my only gig. My other Directorship is very low-key, doesn’t take much time, and is where I and my business partner experiment with various marketing revenue models. It’s primarily been a learning experience, and the frustration we’ve had over the last two years in getting various complex projects rolled out has meant we’ve been looking at partnering with technology companies and focusing on the marketing and customer communications side.

Our latest venture is quite a departure for us. Excuse me whilst I shill for a couple of paragraphs:

Whilst cash back websites are not brand new, we’re hoping that with a really solid technology platform underneath us, we’re going to be able to do something special in the way of helping people make shopping a little more fun - and save cash too. I do however, need some eyes and ears because I’ve had no control over technology roll-out, so I’m interested to hear of problems people might have.

As you can see, the concept is really simple. You sign up, we give you a fiver. You shop online, we give you a percentage of what you spend. You refer friends, we give them a fiver, and we give you a fiver as well once they qualify for payout. We’ll point you in the direction of freebies that pay you money as well. We’ll be launching a blog to highlight particularly good offers. Occasionally e-mails with super secret codes will land in your inbox and you will consider yourself a wise old bean for signing up with us. It makes things cheaper if you’re doing a lot of Christmas shopping online, although for various reasons we’re late to the party for that one, so our strategy is a little more long-term.

End of shill

I mention it here, because I’m interested in problems an educated audience (that’s you, dear reader), might see. We know for example that the back end systems are rock-solid and everything is nice and secure, but are there ‘quirks’ we’ve yet to spot that only a geek can spot? Maybe you just think the business model is odd, or we haven’t explained it very well. Either way, I wanted people whose opinions I respect to take a look before the big marketing push over the next 12 months, and see where we can make improvements.

Allow me for one short moment to go a little off-topic. It’s for a good cause, and I promise this is less painful than rattling a bucket in front of you.

One of my best friends needs some help from you all.

Last year, Sadhana’s father almost died but the heart and renal teams at Hope Hospital managed to save him and she wants to give something back. By the sounds of it, he’s going to be spending a lot more time there in the future so she wants to make sure that they have everything they need for him, and the several hundred other patients they deal with each year.

So, she’s running a charity day to raise money for the unit, in the hope that they’ll be able to help more people, and more easily.

It’s taking place on Saturday the 1st December at Monton Memorial Hall. All money goes to the Renal Unit, and at the very least you can chill out to some meditation.

Now, I’m not that into yoga myself (hence my terrible posture), but I’m doing whatever I can to lend a hand, so if you know anybody who is into yoga who wants to go down there, you fancy it yourself, or you’d like to sponsor her or anybody else attending, you should e-mail her and let her know.

Incidentally, Sadhana is - according to her students who should know these things - a really great yoga teacher. So if you know anybody looking for a teacher (or considering it yourself), throw them the URL.

On the train back from BarCamp Leeds today, Manoj Ranaweera and I were talking about various things. One of the points he made was that he found it very confusing what the difference between “Vagueware Ltd” and “vagueware.com” was.

In his head, Vagueware Ltd is a development consultancy, but vagueware.com was the idea bank, a place for people to share and collaborate ideas. He was convinced I should move the idea bank somewhere else and give its own separate identity. Give it a new name, a new purpose and have Vagueware as a consultancy and holding company for that site (and the others like Kagtum and Fluxish I’m hoping to launch soon).

At the start of the conversation I was adamant he was talking rubbish, but I reflected on it and within 10 minutes had changed my mind completely.

This then crossed over into another thought that Guy Dickinson led me to a while ago. Guy said the site as it was lacked focus, and it wasn’t immediately clear what type of ideas were suitable. He suggested narrowing it down.

So now the two ideas merge, and I’m thinking of something completely different.

What if you could have your own idea bank like Vagueware? What if for your company you were able to get customers to add ideas and let other customers vote on them? What if you could set up idea banks for open source projects, or private space for developing new product ideas with colleagues inside your company? What if you could have access to a clean idea bank in a few seconds? What if you’re running a BarCamp and you wanted to vote on talks as we did today (but ultimately abandoned as somebody was gaming the system)?

My vagueware ideas would have their own place, and that would be open. I might have a closed version for products I work on with clients in private, and I might have more public idea banks around specific products. You could get access to one if you wanted, and you could choose who has access and moderate it yourself.

This would all be under a new name (yet to be decided), and at the start it would be free.

Is this worth going on with? I’m now almost completely convinced a new name needs to be found, but what about a new kind of product?

Thoughts welcome in the comments. I’ll make a decision mid-week and by Friday “Decisions Will Be Made”, so speak up now or forever hold your peace.

Whilst pretty rough around the edges - and I’ve not got many ideas in the system yet - vagueware.com is now up and open for business. Depending on when you measure it from, it’s either a few weeks or a few years over-schedule. At least nobody can argue it’s over-budget.

Right now you can:

• Add new ideas - the whole point is to get ideas for innovative software solutions into the system. What counts? If it’s software and it doesn’t currently exist, it counts
• Edit existing ideas - It’s a wiki. I’ve still got to sort out proper version control, but any registered user can edit ideas so that collaboration can start with developing the idea itself. At the moment you can only add tags, not delete them, but that’ll get fixed in the next update
• Vote on ideas - voting up or down allows for a weak interaction. People who don’t want to comment but have an opinion can provide it, and hopefully better/more popular ideas bubble to the top
• Comment on ideas - It’s a conversation after all

There is a long, long way to go to get to where I want to be, but at least it’s now up and people can start getting involved in what I’ve been talking about.

Over coming weeks and months I’ll be adding features (you can of course suggest features by adding them and tagging them ‘vagueware’), but for now the basic framework is in place and ready to start taking ideas.

Some time ago I setup an online bookshop with Amazon.co.uk and their aStore tool. It’s not had much love for the last six months, but I’m going to be putting a fair bit more time into it in the next couple of weeks. If you have any suggestions for products or books that should be featured, please let me know in the comments.

The observant will also notice that as of today, at the bottom of each post above the comments is a little ‘tag cloud’ of relevant Amazon products. Amazon’s algorithms are a little whacky at times, so it might take a while for genuinely useful products to show up. I’m tempted to change this into something more traditional, but I want to see how this new kind of advertising might work.

I also intend in the next few weeks to introduce a very small Google AdSense block onto individual story pages placed between the headline and the article body. If you’re reading this site through the feed - and if you can’t or don’t want to use a feed reader, you can now subscribe to feed updates via email using the form in the sidebar - you won’t see any adverts, ever.

These moves are just meant for the 11,000+ people who pass by here every year without ever stopping by again: they obviously didn’t get any value out of what I wrote, so perhaps somebody else can help them.

If people find these moves really intrusive, I’ll obviously reconsider them.

[UPDATE]: within 12 hours of fixing it, I’m getting the spam bots floating by. Yay. It might be time for a move to something that support Akismet…

When I turned comments back on I noticed that leaving more than one comment wouldn’t work. Apparently this is a known issue in Mephisto under certain conditions (I was at the time using Apache22 + fcgi), but nobody is completely sure how to fix it. It was time to move over to Mongrel anyway, so now that move has happened, everything is fine.

The last week, incidentally, has been hellish. I’ve found it hard to get the time needed to do all sorts of things, including the 1st October launch of the main site, but I now have a relatively quiet weekend, in that I’m only going to be working 10-15 hours over the course of it. That means I can make some progress on other areas. Yes, that includes deploying this code. Stay tuned, but with all this expectation you might by now be expecting something polished - it really is alpha.

To a weekend of success then…

I turned off blog comments a little over two months ago [and explained my reasons why] at the time. Virtually everybody I personally know who reads this blog disagrees with that decision. Most of them never commented, but that’s not the point. They feel there is an injustice in the fact they can’t unless they blog about it themselves.

My life has been a little easier without having to log in daily and moderate the spam out of the system, but overall I think it’s harming the blog not to let people give some feedback directly. I’d love it if they took the time to write up an article on their own blog and link back, but that’s just not happening. It’s time for a re-group.

From this article forward, comments are back, and will never close on any article.

They will be moderated, and I’m going to be inclined to block one-liners or unrelated comments, whether they be spam or not. Of course, even if your comment doesn’t get published I’ll still read it, so feel free to be abusive if you wish. :-)

[UPDATE]: it would appear the comments stuff got broke whilst having a rest. No more than one comment gets attached to each post for some reason. I’ll look into it ASAP. So, for now, first mover wins. :-)

After a conversation with Manoj at OpenCoffee this morning, I fell asleep at the laptop, only to wake up a few hours later with my code editor open on screen, a half-finished cup of coffee next to my keyboard and a weird cryptic message on the website.

What can it all mean?

This weekend just gone, I attempted to compete in Railsrumble 2007 with an application I call ‘Kagtum’. The idea of Rails Rumble is to take 48 hours to build a Rails app from scratch in a competitive scenario. At around 7:30pm BST last night I realised I wasn’t going to finish the app and so I asked to be withdrawn, as I explained:

Maybe it was the fact I decided to try and compete on my own, and therefore didn’t have the advantage of a team. Maybe it was the fact it took half the first day just to get a working application stack up on linode. Maybe it was the Saturday afternoon spent in the company of friends rather than coding. Maybe the idea was too ambitious.

Maybe I just wasn’t good enough.

Whatever it was, I didn’t get enough of my idea implemented on the weekend of the 8th and 9th September 2007, that I wanted other people to look at it. I failed. There is no app here.

The ideas I played with in those 48 hours though, intrigue me, and they will be worked on over the coming weeks and months. The end goal is going to either be very interesting, or an exercise in futility. If you want to find out which, you can keep an eye on the blog and I’ll be making announcements there.

I will be judging, and I look forward to seeing other apps, so good luck. Until next year…

The first day did kill me - linode was under heavy load (not surprisingly, with over 100 teams trying to get their application stacks set up) and the guidance we had been given by way of a screencast was inaccurate in places. Top tip: when you’re in a hurry leave the rdoc behind and always pass “-d” to gem install.

Anyway, I still hope to judge - and I’d advise anybody with an interest in innovation to look out for the announcement that you can sign up for judging and take a look at the apps that were finished - but I thought I’d talk about Kagtum a little bit here, because the core is almost done and I’m confident I can get a working app out of the door soon. I’m also tempted to open source it.

It all started about 2 years ago when I was left distinctly underwhelmed by Wikinews. The problems with wikinews are many and pretty obvious to anybody who spends a few minutes digging.

The primary problem to my mind is that they’re using a piece of software designed to build an encyclopedia to build a news website which means all articles are given equal footing. It seems reasonable that they should be given equal footing, until you realise that unlike an encyclopedia, not all news items are equal. A world-famous opera singer dying is not equal to a drunken brawl in my local town centre, and neither are equal to the Iraqi PM losing the confidence of the Iraqi citizenship.

However, the core idea - news written by, and for, everybody is a great idea. I’ve spent the last two years playing with lots of ideas in my head and watched emerging developments in the online news and journalism scene before I came up with an answer: quite simply it comes down to targeting relevance.

If I am in Manchester UK, there are stories that are local to me I’m interested in that somebody in New York doesn’t want to see. Likewise, there are stories happening on the other side of the planet which are important to me because they have an impact on me, or because they are in an area I have an interest in. The “perfect” news website will know this, and present just the articles I need to see. Ideally, I also don’t want to be bogged down with partisan and opinionated pieces - I want impartial, simple, Economist-news-page-style articles that give me the leader and then show me what is out there being written about it.

Thus was born the concept of Kagtum - the phrase “kag tum” means “to bring news” in Sumerian, the script of which is the oldest written language currently known to mankind. Kagtum will be a wiki news site that helps target articles based on relevance to you and your life. Relevance is everything.

The idea is quite simple, but the algorithm needs some polish before I can roll it out: we create a news story perhaps based on a report in MSM, or perhaps as a first-hand eyewitness account, that points to online sources if available. We then attach to that story some “impact profiles” based on location or a tags.

For example, a story happening on my street (say, planning permission for a new development) would have a geocoded location and an impact radius of the local neighbourhood. A story happening in 10 Downing Street would also be tagged with that location but could have an impact on the whole of the UK. Suppose the latter story was a policy announcement on Iraq - we’d add Iraq as a location impact as well.

I then login and give my location as my postcode or street, which is geocoded, and the software knows that the story in my street is relevant to me, so is the story in Downing Street. It knows therefore, what is relevant to each and every user and displays the appropriate stories.

Let’s suppose however I have no interest in Iraq. We can tag stories and users can also add tags to their profile that they’re very interested in or very disinterested in. If I said I wanted all stories marked “Iraq” to be pushed down the queue then its relevance to me would be lowered - it might still appear, just not as prominently.

In theory then, when I log in to kagtum, I would see stories about technology, politics and cricket, particularly with stories about my local neighbourhood (stories about technology in my neighbourhood would be even more prominent), whilst my friend who doesn’t care about anything but beer and football will see something perfectly tailored for his interests.

It may also be the case that there are multiple profiles for each user (home vs. work) and that a user can add multiple locations - where they live, where they work, where they grew up, where their parents live - and sees a mixture of stories about places they care about.

The biggest problem I had this weekend was developing the specifics of knowing which stories to show to each user. The problem isn’t hard algorithmically, but providing a technique that doesn’t harm performance and can scale to more than a few hundred users online at a time is proving a little tricky using standard ActiveRecord associations and using the methods baked into GeoKit by default.

There is also an issue of what we mean by “radius”. Saying “this story is important to everybody within 5 miles” is simple enough, but what if I say “to everybody within Greater Manchester”? I somehow need to know if a given longitude and latitude is within that district or not. The Radii Problem (as I came to call it whilst muttering to myself) is important and it’s difficult. I discovered it as I added a story in Washington that was important for the whole of the US - if I added a simple radius of 3,500 miles (to take in California) it of course also covered a huge chunk of Canada, Middle America, the Caribbean, the whole of the North Atlantic (including Ireland!) and most of the North Pole. For a story about domestic US politics, this is obviously needlessly “grabby”.

I have ideas on how to solve this problem, but they’re going to take a few weeks of playing with datasets from the UN and other agencies to be able to get them working smoothly.

There are other aspects I have planned for the site around developing narratives and helping individuals become kagtum journalists, but I’ll keep discussion of those for after the roll-out of both kagtum and the new vagueware.com.

I’ve turned comments on for this article, so if you have thoughts, ideas or suggestions, please leave them.

I’ve always been impressed with the work over at CSS Zen Garden because it’s such a simple idea that also communicates an inherently powerful message: given the same HTML output, get designers competing to push the boundaries of what is possible, and show just how powerful CSS really is.

Wonder of wonders then, that Manchester has its very own physical event based on a similar theme in the form of CSSHackNight being hosted by Andrew Disley. Andrew, for those of you unaware, is the instigator of GeekUp and so I’m sure within 3 years this will also become a monstrous beast of an event stomping over the North of England sucking up all the good, healthy, geek meat it can.

The idea is, as with CSS Zen Garden, ridiculously simple.

Turn up at one of the leading digital marketing agencies in Manchester at 7pm one Autumnal evening with a laptop. Sit yourself down in their rather funky offices, take a look at a site belonging to a community group somewhere in Manchester, and hack away at that CSS. You have the whole night, so you’d better do something good - just adding a bit of padding (about the strength of my design skills) isn’t going to cut it.

In the process, you get to hang out with - and compete with in the healthy sense - some of the cool kids on the Manchester design scene, spend a night discovering just how badly sleep deprivation manifests itself in your aesthetic judgment, and help a community group get some design grooves going on leaving you with a little warm/fuzzy feeling inside your belly.

Actually, the warm/fuzzy feeling is probably a symptom of sleep deprivation as well, but it’ll pass.

There’s space for just 40 people apparently, so if I were you - and sometimes I wish I was - I’d get yourself registered.