Another in my series of experimental, filmic, soundscape, found sound, ambient, folk, classical montage mixes.

Headphones recommended. Darker in tone than my previous mixes, but that darkness is punctuated by positivity and possibly resolved.

Listening in eeries places (like whilst on the London Underground alone) is perhaps not recommended.

A Gift to Future Selves:

00:00 First Commercial Message (1890) - P T Barnum
00:09 For Francis Bacon (Part 2) - Anduin
06:42 Terrified Bad Music Will Be Made Into Records - Sir Arthur Sullivan
07:11 Past Tense Kitchen Movement - Ezekiel Honig
10:58 Saffron Revolution - Fennesz
16:06 Reeds of Brown Lake - Lawrence English
17:48 Footpath Apparition - Loren Chasse
22:40 Melodia (li) - Johann Johansson
24:16 Porselein - Machinefabriek
30:47 Last Light - Svarte Greiner
37:57 Intercepted Communications - Lawrence English
38:02 The Raven - Edgar Allen Poe
41:14 Terminal Motor - Lawrence English
45:01 Silver Wings - Inca Ore
50:11 Figase - Gultskra Arikler
55:06 Forest Mountain - Nalle
61:15 San Solomon - Balmorhea
63:24 Final Farewell - Florence Nightingale
64:05 Voice in the Headphones - Mount Eerie With Julie Doiron And Fred Squire

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Announcing Twadio - The silent radio station that plays in your head

Twadio is another in my series of micro-startup web ideas with Andrew Dubber and is a cute little idea: you follow a user on Twitter (the tweejay) and every few minutes you get a music track title and artist name in your twitter stream.

Sounds simple, but the cute thing is that you will definitely already know that nearly every track that the station ‘plays’ and just from the title you should be able to get that song stuck in your head, at least until the next song plays. Hence - ’silent’ radio. You can listen to Twadio in places where you can’t normally listen to music even or use it to shake that awful Spice Girls track out of your brain that you heard in the taxi - at least that’s the idea.

And if you don’t know a track or you suddenly realise you have to have it in your collection, you can get a thirty second sample of it on the site under “how does it go again?” and then buy it from Amazon on MP3 (and hopefully iTunes soon). We get a tiny percentage of any sale - that’s how it pays for itself.

So far we’ve had some great comments back from our ‘alpha testers’ (thanks all!), the best of which was “this is somewhere between genius and WTF” from spookydirt - thanks!

This was something of an experiment.

On Saturday morning at 6am (don’t ask) I sat with Dubber’s list of tunes that he had hand-picked for the task, decided to teach myself as much Python as I needed to do my first Google App Engine application and set to work. I had it all online by about 11am, and then spent a few hours that evening and Sunday morning tweaking the graphics and trying to get the domain name to work.

Seriously - that was more complicated than the whole app - registering domain names on Google and getting them to point to your Google App Engine site is feindishly complicated and requires having at least twenty tabs open in your web browser. Then, a morning of testing with our generous twitter alpha testers, and we released it at 4pm.

So a total of 34 hours start to finish, with a trip to the ever excellent Ikon Gallery all saturday afternoon, lots of playing with my toddler, doing a few bits and bobs around the house and some sleep of course. So let’s say fifteen hours work?

Anyway - just shows what you can do with freely available tools and friends who have crazy ideas.

What’s your web idea that you shelved in 2008 because it sounded too hard?

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How would you feel if everything you tried to access on the internet were filtered for “unacceptable content” by government censors?

That’s a possibility Andy Burnham, secretary of state for culture has proposed this week.

He’s concerned about the fact that he can’t leave his kids for two hours alone on the home computer without fear that they will be exposed to inappropriate content. The problem is that the internet doesn’t take into account the user’s age when they access it and doesn’t have a 9pm watershed.

How can a dad trust that if he lets his ten-year-old daughter use the internet for a while unsupervised that she won’t accidentally click on something that’s not meant for her, be exposed to something frightening, violent or sexually explicit and suffer nightmares for weeks afterwards? Or even, how can he trust that if he gives his 14-year-old son a free email account that he won’t be inundated with sexually explicit spam email?

The answer is that parents and guardians of kids just can’t. There is no internet-wide, internationally agreed method for parents to filter out what is, and isn’t, appropriate (in their view) for their kids.

So Mr Burnham commissioned an excellent report into these issues by clinical psychologist Dr Tanya Byron who neatly summarises the problem: “Many parents seem to believe that when their child is online it is similar to them watching television … in fact it is more like opening the front door and letting your child go outside to play, unsupervised.”

So what’s to be done?

Mr Burnham is currently considering a couple of options that have set bloggers raging: How about websites having cinema-style age ratings like they do for films? Or how about forcing the internet service providers, like BT and Virgin Media, to filter out sites that host ‘inappropriate’ content? Neither of these ideas will work, and here’s why:

There are currently one trillion web addresses in Google’s index of the web. But some estimate that the size of the ‘invisible web’ – the password protected pages, the things that aren’t linked to anywhere – is about ten times that size, so let’s estimate that there are 100 trillion web addresses out there (strictly, it’s infinite but that’s another story).

If you or I were to attempt to go through each of these sites by hand and decide whether they are appropriate or inappropriate for our kids, one page every second, it would take over 30 million years! Or put another way, you could have 30 million people employed to do the job.

That’s just the web. People often conflate the words ‘web’ and ‘internet’, but there are a huge number of services that use the internet that don’t appear as ‘web sites’. A big one, that’s hugely popular with kids is MSN – it’s like text messaging on your phone, but quicker, more fun and free. Are we going to have some kind of system monitoring every message that gets sent for ‘inappropriate content’ too?

Obviously this is an impossible task to be done by hand, so the government would need some sophisticated software to do it. The trouble is that computers find it very difficult to analyse a piece of text or an image and decide if it’s ‘bad’ or ‘good’ depending on some criteria. The web is very different to the world of film (or games). Once you’ve released your film, that’s it – it’s done and can be quite easily given an age rating. But websites change from day to day or are even so dynamic that pages don’t exist until requested. One minute a site could just have pictures of kittens on it, the next someone could upload some legal, but adult content. How would you rate a photo-sharing site like Flickr where around 5million images are uploaded every day, a handful of which might be ‘inappropriate’? Over 18 only? That would make hundreds of thousands of blog posts suddenly image-free for the filtered user because bloggers tend to use Flickr images to illustrate their points.

And how are we to legislate for websites that are produced or hosted outside the UK?

And furthermore, who decides what content should or should not be permissible to be viewed?

Earlier this year Birmingham City Council’s internet filter ‘Bluecoat’ amusingly barred employees from accessing prominent atheist Richard Dawkins’s blog because it contained “occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism” [since writing this it's been brought to my attention that this is not actually the case, although plenty of websites were filtered], and in fact my own blog was blocked to council employees for some reason too. [this is definitely the case, but my blog is no longer blocked]

If we were to roll out something along the lines of what the Australian government is attempting this year, where every internet connection in the country is filtered with a system like this, we would see more of these kinds of ‘false positives’ occurring. And a flurry of lawsuits from legitimate but banned website owners would follow.

But surely it is ultimately the responsibility of the parent to help their kids navigate the dangers of the online world? The government putting out the message that they’ve got the kids protected with an electronic system will just mean more kids will be left in front of computers for hours at a time, and if you’ve ever done any work with young people you know just how easy they find it to get around any filtering system.

What alarmed me the most, though is this comment from the interview with Mr Burnham in one newspaper: “There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical.”

I disagree entirely. Once something is on the internet it is potentially always accessible, because it can be copied by anyone. Wish-thinking that this is not the case does not help. If you take some content down from one site, it will just reappear elsewhere.

Put simply, rating websites and filtering internet connections are unworkable ideas, and the Byron review draws the same conclusions, so it is confusing to see them even being discussed.

Here’s an alternative suggestion. One of Mr Burnham’s predecessors made free museum access for all a reality. So how about something of similar ambition for the web?

This year, the UK e-commerce market grew a whopping 28 per cent and is set to continue growing in 2009. The digital media industry could prove to be a big success story in a time of recession.

How about free WI-FI access in every UK city? Or upgrading our national broadband network to the level that Korea enjoys?

Either of these ideas would be by far a more constructive project and lead to marked benefits to the UK digital economy and are precisely the kind of ambitious projects that only Mr Burnham is positioned to undertake.

In the mean-time the solution to the problem of kids and the internet is simple. Parents need to get familiar with the technology themselves so they can help their kids navigate the digital world. That’s where the government can help – by educating parents and breaking down the generational digital divide.

But some quick advice to parents. You should make sure the computer is in the living room so you can see the screen (not in the child’s room) and you should not leave your kids browsing the web unsupervised. You could also install something like NetNanny for younger kids, try out KidZui for kid-friendly content and install the Glubble kid-safe browser. None of which requires any government spending.

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To celebrate the launch of I So Wish, Dubber and I decided to grant a random wish that someone had made. Ben was nearby and had made a wish that we could grant, so we did - check out the video of his reaction!

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If you could wish for one thing in 2009, what would it be?

About six months ago Dubber and I came up with an idea that we called “I so wish” - a site where you could make wishes and share them with your friends. It was quite cute, and showed what we could do in only a few days of web development time. The trouble was, that once you’d made your wish what happened next? Not much.

Last month, after watching the ITV show that I was on, a nice guy called Dan got in touch and suggested solving the problem. What would happen if we turned the site into a community of people that could respond to eachother’s wishes and actually make them happen.

Dubber and I thought that was a pretty smart idea, so for the past couple of weeks we’ve been busy building a new version of I So Wish and we’re launching it for Christmas (and we announced it at Birmingham’s Social Media Cafe today) with one simple question:

What do you wish for in 2009?

Our plan is to make it so that, for some lucky wishers, their wishes will be granted by other people on the site.

Would that be great? You wish for something and then it actually happens?

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A cute new service for new Twitter soon-to-be dads: Goingtobeadad.com

I was astounded to see how many people were announcing to the world that they are going to be dads every day.

So I thought - wouldn’t it be nice to have a page on the web somewhere that welcomes all of those people?

So this is a simple one page site that shows you all of the tweets by soon-to-be-dads who tweet “going to be a dad” with a big “Congratulations!” message from the big blue Odadeo dad.

You can get an RSS feed of all of the tweets and I’m also planning on retweeting some of the tweets as “@username is @goingtobeadad!” but I’ve just got to figure out how to filter out ones that aren’t quite relevant, like “my brother is going to be a dad” and so on.

I guess this is one step even before Tweetlet!

Now… who’s for family planning on Twitter?!

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I’m a big fan of making and doing with my two year old daughter and we’ve been encouraging her to scribble, paint, stick and make things whenever possible. I like joining in, and it’s very therapeutic to stop the hard work and do something simple like making some animals or sharing a drawing, even if she’s only scribbling at the moment.

In fact, here’s a pledge I made on Odadeo about it:

I pledged this on Odadeo

This morning though, I was sitting with my laptop over breakfast (I know - bad geek dad behaviour - minus 10 points on Odadeo), and she started taking an interest in some of the pictures on the screen. So I asked “Would you like to draw an animal?” She said “Yeah”… “Which animal?”. “Bear!” was her reply…

The results after some creative direction along the lines of “Ear! Ear! Body! Nose! Rabbit! Robot! Pink! Yellow!” are pretty good I’d say - maybe I should make a series?

But seriously - my advice is to use whatever skills you have, and just drop the ‘I’m being a serious adult’ thing for five minutes from time to time and see what happens.

You may surprise yourself and delight your kids in the process.

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Twitter has really taken off in Birmingham (UK) this year. Here’s a list of some of the people who are using it and I think you should be connecting with you if you haven’t already!

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that answers the question “what are you doing now?”, but it’s also becoming a substitute for blogging as well as being a great way of chatting about interesting things in a public way.

There wasn’t much activity in the city until around the South By Southwest conference in Texas about nine months ago. Now, though, it’s there’s a vibrant community forming.

I think more people should be using it, but it can feel a bit confusing at first unless you have friends who are using the service.

A ‘getting started on Twitter’ list for people you should connect to (In no particular order):

(You can find me on twitter as aeioux)

• peteashton - Pete Ashton - Blogger extraordinaire
• bounder - Jon Bounds - Err… blogger extraordinaire
• emilyquinton - Emily Quinton - Birmingham wedding photographer
• joannageary / bhampostjoanna - Joanna Geary - Journalist and err… I’ll drop the blogger thing.
• marcreeves - Marc Reeves - Editor of a newspaper
• podnosh - Nick Booth - Social media consultant and podcaster
• catnip - Julia Gilbert - Twitter show-off police
• paulbradshaw - Paul Bradshaw - Lecturer on journalism
• twm_driver - TWM Driver - Local bus driver and man of the year?
• celentari - Catherine Bray - Talent magnet
• ellielovell - Ellie Lovell - University website editor
• chrisunitt - Chris Unitt - Blogger on Created in Birmingham
• citizensheep - Michael Grimes - Charity website manager
• supercoolkp - Katie Parry - Designer
• star_one - Simon - Council web developer
• getgood - Nicky Getgood - Digbeth blogger
• jamestimbrell - James Timbrell - Christian, geek, human
• alexhughes - Alex Hughes - Cartoonist
• editorialgirl - Emma Jones - Writer
• dubber - Andrew Dubber - Music industry futurist
• pigsonthewing - Andy Mabbett - Web guru
• richbatsford - Rich Batsford - Pianist
• charlottecarey - Charlotte Carey - Women/creative enterprise academic
• anamilgram - Ana Milgram - Artist
• genzaichi - Nikki Pugh - Artist
• azeem_a - Azeem Ahmad - Environmental website manager
• claireprocter - Claire Procter - Arts blogger
• sukhidehal - Sukhi Dehal - Creative director of a design agency
• getfrank - Frankie Ward - Student radio station boss
• ironmanrecords - Mark - Music networker
• bsag - But She’s a Girl - Biologist
• kerryfused - Kerry Thomas - Independent magazine boss
• clareedwards - Clare Edwards - Music festival director
• karmadillo - Karmadillo - Faitrade retailer
• john383 - John383 - Designer
• andy383 - Andy383 - Designer
• stevegerrard - Steve Gerrard - Photographer
• tomscotney - Tom Scotney - Journalist
• tomscreenwm - Tom Carson - Screen agency connector
• anthonyherron - Anthony Herron - Music industry label boss
• probablydrunk - Danny Smith - Blogger
• mrvinyldeck - Phil H - Web producer and radio DJ
• daveharte - Dave Harte - Regional digital strategist
• keridavies - Keri Davies - Radio writer and DJ
• toneebrown - Tony Brown - Mentor
• katchooo - Fiona Cullinan - Copy fluffer
• johnmostyn - John Mostyn - Music industry stalwart
• russl - Russ L - Blogger
• cybrum - Mark - Twitterer?
• filmfake - Rachael Marchant - Film-maker
• si - Si Jobling - Digital media networker
• domster - Dominic Barnes - Musician and blogger
• hmobius - Dan Maharry - Technology author
• davedev - Dave Evans - Technology entrepreneur
• graphiquillan - Shona McQuillan - Artist
• deplorableword - Tom Martin - Web conversationalist
• nicklockey - Nick Lockey - Idea engine
• simoncrisp - Simon Crisp - Tweeting with a Brummie accent
• shuckle - Matt Machell - Web developer
• brucel - Bruce Lawson - Web standard bearer
• tobybarnes - Toby Barnes - Games Master and new about town
• nickcarson - Nick Carson - Talent magnet and magazine editor
• jonhickman - Jon Hickman - Interactive culture lecturer
• sharl - Robert Sharl - New media futurist
• davidburden - David Burden - Virtual worlds architect
• soullastylianou - Soulla Stylianou - Virtual worlds architect
• hanuman - Ian Edwards - Blogger
• regengirl - Regengirl - City regenerator
• hellocatfood - Antonio Roberts - Artist
• marksteadman - Mark Steadman - New media junkie
• bobbiejane - Bobbie Gardener - Community musician

I’m sure I’ve missed lots of people, but as a starting point for people new to Twitter in Birmingham, follow a bunch of these people and you will suddenly find yourself in the middle of a conversation that actually makes sense!

For even more people to connect to, try a search on Twellow.

Suggestions for other people to include in the comments please!

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As Helga said “shame they used models for the cover shot” (ahem) that’ll be me top left then…

Last week I was picked as one of the top 5 in the Future 500, which is sponsored by Courvoisier (the brandname-dropping becomes relevant), with a pretty amazing piece of print that went out with every copy of the Observer nationally, meaning about 1.5 million people at least glanced at a copy whilst recycling it.

Aside from the promo just being generally great, these guys have put together a social network to connect up with others who are in the list.

Quite obviously, Courvoisier have realised that they have to keep refreshing their image and relevance for each generation of people who might be their customers, and given that their whole brand proposition is about opulence and quality it seems like they’ve made quite a smart move by doing this campaign for the second year. Basically, it may be expensive but what they are banking on is connecting with some very smart and talented people (as well as jokers like me) and basically associating their brand with them and their networks.

The step on from organising a good party or two like other brands though, is that they’ve quite smartly put together a social networking site, using the freely available Ning.com service. 4IP have adopted it as their platform of choice for basic social networking tools. Think of it as roll your own Facebook.

It’s invitation only, meaning that only people who’ve been in the list can join, and once on there you can connect with them, suggest collaborations and so on. The thing is, that because this is a free service that they’ve used, the ration of expense to them ongoing versus the benefit to the members is amazing. They can invite us to events they are hosting without sending out loads of printed invites. They can give us special offers and guarantee that several of us will take them up. They like it, we like it, everyone wins.

Effectively, what they’ve created is a tool to generate “good will via association”. Every time something good happens through the network, we might associate it with their brand, and think more postively about it.

I’ve already made some great contacts through the site (no I’m not being paid for this) and hopefully there’ll be more where that came from.

I think there’s a lot to be learned by other luxury brands in this time of economic downturn. It’ll be those brands that innovate quickly and find smart ways like this to connect with their market that will do well. They’ve obviously ‘got it’ that people want more for their brand loyalty, things that go beyond discount deals, special offers and competitions. We want opportunities to connect with other people that think the same way as us. By basically targetting smart young entrepreneurial types and offering them something valuable, they’ll be getting a lot more back in return in my opinion.

At first I felt very uncomfortable about associating with a brand I new little about, but once that wore off, and I took the whole thing at face value I started to see what they were doing and more than accepting it, I felt pretty honoured to be in amongst a group of amazing people.

Anyone have examples of other brands doing similar things?

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Hypercube by Ecyrd

“It’s Mr Neologism again” was the first reaction to another of my on-the-spur-of-the-moment word-coinings.

I’m not claiming the word “hypercontext” is completely without precedent, but I think there’s a new use for it after I brought it up at a media training day that I went on as part of the Clore Leadership Programme last week at Ashridge (the UK’s top ranking management training centre dontchaknow).

Public speaking is now without context

When you’re standing up in front of an audience, and talking about whatever it is that you’ve been asked to talk about the advice you’re given is to look around the room, make eye contact, watch the body language, don’t ‘err’, drop in a gag or two, keep it relevant, and so on.

What’s become clear to me in the public speaking I’ve been doing over the last couple of years is that you can no longer just rely on the audience an your personal delivery to get the message across. There’s a whole other audience to consider. The people watching the recording/webcast of what you’re saying, after an edit or two, via the web.

And those people watching will more often than not be dropping in via ‘deep linking‘ so will probably not have the background info on what you’re talking about, or know what the story is behind it.

They are viewing ‘without context’, and potentially a much larger audience than the people in the room.

Self-editing

With web broadcast comes some interesting issues. If what you say is edited (as in the famous George Bush mashups) the entire meaning of what you were saying can be changed. YouTube has now enabled timeline linking, which means that people can deep-link directly to the moment in a video where you said that, missing out the context of the words.

This is dangerous stuff, as well as being amazingly powerful.

What it means is that you have to self-edit for that audience, to make sure that if you refer to something out of context that you give a quick explanation of what it is, perhaps, not use jargon or acronyms and so on. Should you imagine everything you say without the context of the previous paragraph of speech?

Hypercontext

“the multitude of contexts that the transmission or recording of an event gains when experienced via the Internet” (can you do better?)

For me, this means that whatever people say in a video-recorded public moment means that they are now part of a hypercontext - the physical context of the environment in which you find yourself, as well as the environment of the online deep-linked video world where potentially people will be directly commenting on the timeline of the video of you saying something, remixing it, pulling it apart and changing the way it could be interpreted.

But it’s not just in public speaking ‘on stage’ environments. In the mobile-enabled world, we’ve got cameras and recording devices everywhere, so potentially we could soon reach a time when people just accept that their words are part of that hypercontext as soon as they are out of their mouths.

What does that do to political transparency? What does it do to the psyche? How will it feel if you’re constantly worried about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time?

I spoke at ContentLab a few years back, and put forward the idea that we could be looking at new startups in the future where ‘content’ is banned from a semi-public environment. No cameras, no mobile, no wifi. The complete opposite of internet cafes where people feel they can talk freely in a semi-public environment.

I think that’s probably a few years off, but seriously - what happens when we all start getting sick of the always-on, people twittering about something you did without asking you, Barack Obama’s speech writer getting humiliated for a light-hearted drunken moment, and so on.

Personally, I hadn’t realised that I’d been taking all of this into account whenever I stand up and speak. Incorporating an awareness of the hypercontext of what you’re saying is really important, and I think is something that everyone should be thinking about if they’re standing up in front of an audience.

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