andylockran’s blog

Using the Long Tail

Posted by Andy under BECTA, Control, Digital Freedom, Hypothesising, Linux, Marketing, Microsoft, Personal, Personal, Political, SBLUG Planet, Software, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

Clay Shirky provides a fascinating insight into how a collaborative approach utilises more skills, and empowers more people than the old institutional model. Rather than coming from an Open Source background, he uses the example of Flickr to convey his point (and then takes a stab at Ballmer). It’s an interesting presentation, and shows how you can make the most of the information/data available in a field.

However, there’s an angle to his talk which isn’t covered in this short presentation; which I imagine is due to time constraints. That’s the opportunity for cross-discipline collaboration, and what that means for us.

One of the more interesting points made by Clay, is that he poses the current ‘$1 million question’ - Are Bloggers Journalists? - and then turns it on its head.

Journalists, and journalism came about to fulfil a societal need. How to communicate with the majority of the population. Gutenburgs’s printing press was a percursor to European journalism, and for the last 400 years or so, journalism has been an integral part of mass communication.

However, we now have a little something called the internet - which, as Gutenburg’s printing press did all those years ago, revolutionise access to information. The infrastructure required to become a ‘messenger to the people’ is in place for people to with it as they wish - create facebook pages, youtube videos, or wordpress blogs. Once the infrastructure becomes freely accessible, the applications of it become massively varied.

In Clay’s talk, he mentions a ratio. 80% of people do 20% of the work, and vice versa, using a lovely graph of the long tail:

An Example of the Long Tail Graph

Though a graph illustrating a different set of data, the concept can be re-applied to Open Source Project contribution. The Green area applies to the ‘core’ developers, who may even be employed by the project. The Orange applied to the people directly involved with the project, and perhaps some power users, and the Red section applied to everyone else.

The wonderful thing about the Red section, is that you get lots and lots of people contributing very little. However, it’s these people who can really add value to a project.  With so many projects now existing across different distributions, each system becomes pretty unique.  Where bugfixes and irrationailities can be spotted and reported on by end-users running their unique system - the value added is huge.

There’s also a question of expertise.  The guys in the Red Section are the programming experts, who are commiting code.  Those in the Orange Section are the users/implementers of the code - so will typically have a clear understanding of the direction of the project and the needs that the project needs to fulfil. Whereas in the Red Section are people who use the package, but often alongside other packages of greater interest/relevance to their line of work.  It’s this cross-discipline collaboration that is unprecedencted.

Getting average non-geeky end users to use Open Projects is a massive challenge, but one that is going to bring massive benefits to Open Source Software.  Some people talk of the digital tipping point from a technical standpoint - “Woo, when we get this critical mass we’ll overtake Microsoft within the next 5 years.”  To be honest that doesn’t bother me. Judge MS as you wish, but that’s not why I’m here.  I’m here because the potential contribution that end users can make to Global Knowledge, through Open Projects.

It’s going to be possible for a biological scientist and and engineer to be reviewing the same problem for different purposes.  It’s unlikely that these two disciplines would ever communicate were it not be for this open project, and it’s also possible that only with the combined knowledge and expertise of these two disciplines, the problem can be solved.

This is what excites me most about free software, and to think we’re only just at the beginning.

The Death of Quantitative Psychology - the birth of a Brave New World.

Posted by Andy under Control, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Political, Psychology, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

One of the first lectures in my first year entertained the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods in psychology.  We had three lovely, but definately qualitatively biased lecturers.  They spoke of the personal approach to psychology, and identifying individual differences, rather than group ‘norms’ - for they argues that norms did not exist across society, due to all the difference cultures and individual experiences.

However, our quantitative lecturers disagreed.  They liked to analyse and draw lovely graphs showing difference behavioural patterns.  Attach electrodes to heads to monitor electrical pulses in the brain, and quantify social experiments using hard statistics and probability algorithms.

Well, they’re now approaching the end of their careers in this field, as Google and the ‘database generation’ take over.

There’s so much information on the internet now, that we don’t need to know whether someone is going to do something or not - we can actually see records of what they do.  Having the browsing habits of thousands, or millions of people is almost priceless data.  It’s the stuff that quantititative psychologists can only dream of.  Any psychologist will tell you how valuable that data is to them.

Well, today Alexander Hanff - fighting for our freedom - heads to the House of Lords in order to prevent Phorm from getting their hands on our data; and to question why BT haven’t yet been charged on any count for gross invasion of privacy in regards to their trials of the Phorm software last summer.

In order to understand what we’re dealing with, I offer the following analogy to those less technically minded.

The internet is an exchange of bags, each containing a little bit of information.  Let’s say you pass one bag a second from your machine across the internet to an ‘internet server.’  It’s very easy for someone to look into any of these bags - but mainly due to volume (but also due to simple logistics) people tend not to bother looking in your bags.  It’s not to say they can’t though.

Well, phorm contains software that looks through all your bags, and analyses them for ‘key-words’, from which they can then target adverts at you.  If you’re communicating with someone, why do you want them looking through your bags - you don’t!

When you deal with your bank, you’d put a padlock on the bags, that only they and you have the key to unlock.. so your online banking details are safe..r.  If you’d rather not have someone looking through all the information you exchange across the internet, charging you for the pleasure, and then holding more information on your browsing habits than you even do yourself.. say Yes to Phorm.  else do the sensible thing and “JUST SAY NO!”

GPG as Identity Management

Posted by Andy under Digital Freedom, Hypothesising, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

It’s quite nice how people can see that all my different email addresses can be linked via a gpg key.  If you deal with me through this blog, you can see the companies I work for, and vice versa.

I like that.

David Davis - The Digital Debate

Posted by Andy under BBC, Chaos, Conspiracy Theory, Control, Debian, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Linux, Marketing, Political, Python, SBLUG Planet, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

Too many D’s for my liking… but a fantastic marketing point.

After David Davis resigned from the Commons today, the speech he gave focused on where technology and policy collide.

We will have, shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world, a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictator should have with thousands of innocent children and millions of innocent citizens on it.

We witness and assault on jury trial - that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary abuse by the state, short cuts to our justice system will make our system neither firm nor fair and the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.

It’s definately time for the debate to happen.  Just because we can do things with technology doesn’t mean we should.

Digital Debate

Posted by Andy under Chaos, Control, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Hypothesising, Marketing, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

It’s a massively important area of discussion, with huge social implications.  However, because it comes under the “geek umbrella” - most people choose to ignore it or ’switch off’ from the conversation.

“Digital Rights, and what “feature creep” can achieve in terms of illegal/immoral operation.”

It’s something that I think needs to be put in the forefront of the public psyche - in so far as legal issues are regarded by the majority.

Leaving social issues to a group of people often stereotyped as having negligible social skills doesn’t seem to be a sensible idea.

Facebook Chat - Privacy Issue

Posted by Andy under Digital Freedom, Facebook, Stupid, Tech Geek

Just discovered a pretty random ‘feature’ on Facebook Chat.

I don’t know how many of you use facebook’s relatively new chat feature.  It’s a small box in the bottom right of the browser.  Anyhow, yesterday I logged into my account on the iMac downstairs.  It’s a private PC that only me and my family use, so I left my facebook account logged in downstairs.

Earlier this afternoon, I spoke with one of my friends on the facebook chat.  We had a short conversation, without any confidential/personal information being discussed - but a chat nonetheless.

Anyhow, I just turned the screen on the iMac, and the facebook page was still up in Safari - and to my horror, the chat that I’d had upstairs on my own PC was shown up in the bottom right of the screen in the Safari browser.  Therefore, I can only assume that what I typed upstairs was broadcasted to my logged in account realtime - without me knowing.

Normally when I log into a site, I expect it to log me out elsewhere - especially with Instant Messenger.

Watch out for the same thing catching you out!

Open Source @ Construction Company

Posted by Andy under Birmingham, Control, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Linux, Marketing, Microsoft, Projects, SBLUG Planet, Software, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

Over the past few weeks I’ve been helping my Uncle out by setting up a few computers for him. He wanted a laptop to take out ‘on-site’ - and a Desktop for a new employee.

Unfortunately, the ASUS eee901 is not yet available, and the 7″ series is slightly too small for his perceived ‘on-site’ usage, so he ended up getting a Toshiba Laptop and HP Desktop - both running Windows Vista (against my advice).

So, three weeks on, he’s not happy with Vista at all. Having already spent a fair bit of cash on the two machines, he was little disappointed that some ‘core software’ (his term) was still not installed. The new “Live Mail” application was also far too complicated compared to his Outlook Express - the change in UI wasn’t welcome.

So, I installed Mozilla Thunderbird onto both computers, and OpenOffice.org. I do have to admit to setting the default file-format to Windows 97/XP/2003 formats though (.doc, .xls and .ppt). I’d like to not do this, but for simplicities sake when dealing with clients - it was the easier option.

Aside from running the proprietary accounts software “Foundation Evolution” - I’ve got the company running on a very open-’saucy’ setup. The best thing about it has been the change in attitude towards the software since originally buying the PCs. After initially thinking that my enthusiasm for the ASUS eee was due to the Linux OS on it - it seems likely that when the 9″ series come out, that will be an addition to the “Construction Computing Team”.

The best new was though that I received a call this morning asking me how to install OpenOffice.org on all of the computers and get rid of MS Office & install Thunderbird on all the machines. With the old setup, there would have been a training overhead in having to run different versions of the same software on all four PCs - however, with the Open Source Setup, all the computers, despite being purchased at different times, can run the same software - giving the users the opportunity to use the computers to help run the business, rather than having to work out how to use that particular version of the program.

Smile

Free Software - Who benefits?

Posted by Andy under Birmingham, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Linux, Marketing, Microsoft, Projects, SBLUG Planet, Software, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

I’ve been thinking alot recently about the power of free software and how it could be put to better use to innovate in companies.  At the moment, most of it is used to replace old proprietary blobs around offices, and has very much the same components as the old system - only cheaper.

However, with free software there are many more benefits that just being cheaper than paying for a legacy software license for things like file storage and printer servers.  There are many cases when I look at small/medium sized companies and see how their entire business model could benefit from adopting an Open Source system as the backbone to what their business does.

In the past, IT has been a tool which allows businesses to go about their business - only recently has it actually become the business of businesses.  It’s a shame though, because as more and more businesses sell services based on free software - in essence it becomes standard customised solutions at a slight discount to the client, and without licensing overheads for the vendor.

What I’d like to see is the promotion of open source and open standards, and the ability for as much software to work in tandem with other stuff.  There’s a heck of a lot of quality free software out there that companies should be able to utilise.  Rather than simply provide free software on a plate, efforts should be made to educate the users on what exactly they are getting.  How extensible the packages are and how to utilise them to their greatest benefit.

I don’t know how other people feel, but setting up a new company legally incurs some costs - and when you add MS licenses to the mix, for just a single PC, it can double the cost.  I’ve recently set up a business who’d just bought a couple of new PCs.  They both came with Vista (laptop and Desktop).  I’ve been runnning purely Open Source Software on those two PCs for the company (aside from Vista) - and they’re very happy with all the software, it does exactly what they need.  The next step is for me to speed them up, by switching them over to ubuntu.  I can see this happening within the next six months.  However, I’ll also leave 1 Windows XP machine intact, so they can use it for remote-desktop connection for running some legacy software.

Neat!

Time to learn GPG

Posted by Andy under BBC, Conspiracy Theory, Control, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Personal, Political, Software, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

I think it’s about time that people became aware of the advantages of the GnuPrivacyGuard.

Why?

According the to BBC the government are considering keeping a database of every phone call made and every email sent. Now, it’s already possible to do this with your current email communications - and very few people bother to encrypt their mail to make sure that only the recipient can read it.

Email passes over a network in plain text - thereby anything sent in a email is easy to ’sniff’ out and read. With gpg - you encrypt the mail with a password - then the only person that can read the mail is the person that knows that password.. the recipient of the email.

It’s a clever system, so here’s a link to Red Hat Magazine’s article on GPG.

For a Windows-based solution, try WinGPG.

If we can’t change the system, then we at least need to protect ourselves from it.

Stop Tracking Me!

Posted by Andy under Conspiracy Theory, Control, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Hypothesising, Political, SBLUG Planet, Software, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

I’ve just read an article on The Register which detailed a system that Shopping Centres are now using to track people’s movements around a shopping centre using their Mobile Phone.  When a phone registers with a network, it gets a TMSI address (a bit like a dynamic IP address) - and this PATH software is able to locate a handset to within a couple of metres - good enough to track which shop punters are going into.

Even though the makers say that each individual TMSI is refreshed at each phone reset - with more and more people leaving their phones on for sustained periods - it’s not particularly outrageous to say that if I worked out my own TMSI, then the data is no longer anonymous.

Anyway - that’s a little beside the point.  When I walk into a shopping centre, there are plenty of CCTV cameras.  I believe the mandate for putting them there is for my protection, rather than tracking my consumer habits.  Imagine some ‘hoody’ walking into a shopping centre, stealing something - then getting his phone confiscated by Police to work out the TMSI to see where the ‘hoody’ has been for the last few hours.  It’s technically possible with this new system.

With the advance of technology, there are loads of completely un-sexy but massively important questions that need to be answered.  At the moment the government and authorities are simply seeing £’s.  There’s technology being put together and used that infringes far more on our civil liberties than someone owning a copy of a terrorism handbook.

So, let’s get un-sexy and start discussing what we want from technology.  Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.