2011-05-09
Pedestrian
1.
When you turn seventeen in Britain, you take driving lessons. Well, almost everyone does. It’s not quite as universal as in the US, when it’s part of the school’s responsibility, but it’s pretty close anyway. Anyway, I took lessons too.
The problem was, I was never any good at it. The very reason I was meant to learn - the fact I lived in rural Suffolk - made it a pain. Thirty plus minutes to the town where I had to take the test, an hour of lesson, then the remaining time home, and it felt like I’d barely learnt anything. It required a certain amount of physical co-ordination, and I didn’t have it. I had some weird ticks, like using the noise of the car to guage speed - which bit me when I drove one without a huge advertising triangle on the top.
Then I saw Autogeddon, a BBC production of the poem by Heathcote Williams - “the most vigorous sustained flow of invective against car culture to date.” I thought about how selfish cars were. I thought about how I was heading to university, and probably living in cities. I worried about the cost of all my damned lessons. I couldn’t afford a car anyway. I stopped learning to drive.
2.
For ten years, I lived in London. During that time, except for visits to my parents, I was in a car perhaps once or twice a year. That includes taxis. They’re expensive, especially once you move out to the fringes of zone 3, and anyway, if I stayed out very late, which was rare, there were night buses.
Of course, during the week, I never needed to drive, and it was folly to do so; £5 a time into the congestion charge zone, parking so expensive only bankers did it, and either the tube or cycling was faster, anyway. Oh, don’t forget the maze of one way streets - it’s one thing to learn your way as a pedestrian, but another to memorise all of that nonsense on top. Driving was for suckers. Rich suckers. I was neither.
At the weekends, well, maybe being able to drive would have been nice. Still, London’s commuter railways work the other way, too. Want to walk in the Chilterns, the North or South Downs, along the Kent or Sussex coasts, take a day trip to Southend or Walton? You can do that. It’ll take a while, but then, so does hacking around the bloody M25. It was rare for me to even consider thinking about it. Anyway, London’s got so much going on, why the hell would you want to leave?
In ten years, I don’t remember anyone being surprised that I never bothered to learn. Half the people I meet didn’t, either. It’s a choice, like not drinking.
3.
America is a car country. There are more cars than licenced drivers. There aren’t that far off as many cars as people, full stop. Nationally, only 8% of households do not have a car. The freeways are wide and flowing, and the journey is as much fun as the arrival. I know of friends who, as students, would just drive around late at night as relaxation, as a place of their own. The US loves freedom, and the car is a physical, and personal, manifestation of that freedom.
I now live in San Francisco. In six months, I can remember more than a few people being shocked to learn that I don’t - can’t - drive. It’s almost as if not having that skill means I’m not a functional adult human being.
Still, so long as you work in the city, you can commute to work without a car. It’s slower than driving, but cheaper; parking is, by the standards of the rest of the country, absurdly expensive and hard to find. If you work in the rest of the Bay Area, though, it’s hit and miss. Oakland’s OK; if you’re close to Caltrain’s line it’s doable. Otherwise? If you’re lucky you’re on a company bus. If you’re not, you’ve no choice but driving down 101 or 280. It’s a good thing I work in the city.
As for weekends, well, the best thing about San Francisco, I keep being told, is that it’s surrounded by wonderful countryside. There’s Muir Woods, Santa Cruz, Yosemite, and a list of others. To get there, there’s the roads; I-80 to Tahoe, I-280 down the spine of the mountains, and above all, there’s Highway 1 - the Pacific Coast drive, the scenic bends and swoops on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. It’s not as fast as I-5, especially if you want to get all the way to LA, but for a weekend jaunt, it’s perfect.
But. I’m a pedestrian. (I’m probably a militant pedestrian, but someone has to be.) I like being able to see the magic. Yet I overhear in a café someone who’s just started driving say that without the ability you’re a prisoner, and I see online that I can’t be a photographer without a car. I can’t go for a country walk without getting a friend to drive me to the country. So for the first time in twenty years, I feel the pressure to learn to drive. I hate it.
2011-03-23
post/4038393782
“If the world’s 6.9 billion people lived in one city, how large would that city be if it were as dense as…”
When I first saw this map, I was slightly peeved that London appeared to have lower density than San Francisco, or Paris. I lived in London for ten years, and have been in SF for a few months. I hope residents of the latter won’t be too offended if I say that, all too often, even relatively central neighbourhoods feel more than a little suburban.
I decided to go and have a deeper look at the figures. Firstly, at the original post, Tim De Chant (who designed the maps), writes that they’re based on
Strictly city limits. So the San Francisco map, for example, only uses density data for the city of San Francisco and does not factor in Oakland, San Jose, etc.
Now, San Francisco is a city of 600 km², with a population of roughly 800,000. It’s embedded in a larger “combined statistical area” - including the aforementioned cities - of nearly 8 million. The densities for the two? 6,688.4/km² and 320/km² respectively. There’s almost a factor of twenty difference there.
By contrast, London’s nearly 8 million fit into an area barely one-fifteenth that of the Bay Area - making the entire city nearly match San Francisco’s density. The central London boroughs - like Islington, where I lived for six years - come top of the list of districts by population density in the UK, with double the population per square kilometre of SF. (I haven’t bothered to calculate the density of the old LCC boroughs, but my bet would be they handily outrank SF, although I doubt they approach NYC.)
Similarly, the incredible showing by Paris is helped by the fact that the city is still defined by its medieval extent, excluding a large chunk of its metropolitan area: to paraphrase Wikipedia, the city has a population of two million, but the metropolitan area has a population of nearly twelve. The density of the latter is roughly one seventh that of the former - and lower than that of London of SF.
This is, perhaps, too much effort to put into a single graphic, especially one that does such a good job of showing how sprawling a car-centric US city can become (hello, Houston). However, it’s an interesting exercise in noting that defining a city is harder than it may appear.
2010-12-23
The Post-Delicious World
The fallout from the “sunset: Delicious” slide continues to echo around. Perhaps because bookmarks are a simple place to start, there are a few people beginning to host them locally; for example, here’s Jeremy Keith’s recent post (quoted approvingly at No More Sharecropping). Meanwhile, Phil Wilson said on Twitter that he
doesn’t really understand why people are looking to move their content into other, 3rd party, proprietary bookmarking systems.
And Les Orchard made a worthwhile post with its own summary:
Don’t depend on Delicious; host your own, pay for it elsewhere, or hope for the best. Use real-time feeds to stitch the bookmarking diaspora back together into topical aggregate indexes.
My answer is related to my post on Saturday about why I’m sticking with Delicious: the network. Tom Insam asked
what does the delicious network do that I can’t also do with an RSS reader and independent linklogs?
It’s a fair question. I’d say the main issues are UI and, more seriously, discoverability.
The Delicious network page is built for links. It shows notes nicely, and also displays tags and who posted something in a compact fashion. (The Pinboard network page does the same, to be fair.) By contrast, generic RSS readers are, well, generic. In dealing with everything from links to photos to long form text to podcasts, they have to make compromises, but for browsing links, it makes them a poor interface.¹²
The more pressing problem, to my mind, is discovery. There’s a few facets to this. Firstly, below every link, both Pinboard and Delicious allow you to see who else bookmarked it, which can be useful for finding people with a similar set of interests. Secondly, both provide a central place where you can enter someone’s nick and see if they exist.³ Thirdly, Delicious allows you to browse the network of another user, which is another route to finding people you may want to follow.
If people move to independent linklogs, how do you replicate these issues of discovery? Jeremy Keith dodges this question by syndicating his links into the framework of the centralised services, which works, but the larger challenge of a fully decentralised system that still allows the network effects seems to me to be at least an order of magnitude harder than getting people to self-host, and even that’s tricky. (After all, most people have moved to Pinboard or another hosted service, like Diigo, rather than downloading their bookmarks).
Still, all of the most interesting problems are hard ones. I’d love to know if I’m missing people working on this (as it seems like the sort of thing Tantek Çelik, amongst others, would care about) and, if not, who else is thinking about it. That, or be told I’m overstating the problem. Anyone?
¹ The confusion in the various RSS formats over whether links should point to the final destination or the post describing the destination hasn’t helped.↩
² I’ve heard good things about Fever° for browsing link-heavy feeds, but I haven’t really played with it.↩
³ Neither Delicious nor Pinboard provides a proper “people search” feature, but they at least have a central list, which makes it far easier to build than one based on a general search engine.↩
2010-12-18
Sticking With Delicious
The leak of a Yahoo slide and a bunch of speculation has led to a burst of signups for Pinboard over the last few days. Despite that, I’m sticking with Delicious.
Personally, while I’ve always valued the site for its ability to store stuff, what’s always made Delicious most useful to me is its network pages in general, and mine in particular. It’s set up for one-key access in Safari, along with a very few other places. The lack of functional social features - it has a network, but you can only see your own, and friend finding is basically impossible - is why, despite the fact I signed up for Pinboard when it first hit beta, when it was still free, I never actually visited it. (Of course, that is to a large extent by design.)
I still find its pared-down interface slightly too minimal, and the ability to pull in feeds from Twitter and Instapaper has led to some people falling foul of link pollution. (If you could control whether links were marked as private per-service, that’d help, but for now that’s not an option.) (I should also admit that the prevalence of packratius links on Delicious proves that there’s at least some role for aggregation.)
Frankly, despite the burst of migrations, my delicious network is still more full of good links, although it’s been starved of some of the most interesting posters. I suppose I’ll either have to get used to hitting two pages, or relent on RSS reading and use Fever or some other aggregator. I’m annoyed that it’s come down to it, despite the fact I can see exactly why people have moved.
(As a side note, I think this also proves beyond all doubt how important the social aspect of any service is. For all that individuals can download their links, the value I get out of the site is not my 3,500 bookmarks, but the 345,681 in my network. The continued utility of that is what’s most at risk.)
Anyway, since Pinboard can mirror from Delicious but not vice versa, I’m going to keep using the latter as my primary service. Pinboard can carry on being what it’s been for the last eighteen months: a hot spare, but not the service I really want to be using.
2010-12-16
Thoughts On “Archive Fever”
Matthew Ogle’s Archive Fever is a great call to arms. He sums it up himself as:
“Using real-time services inadvertently creates rich personal life archives, but they’re currently hard to get at. Let’s fix it”
I’m glad to see such a well-thought-out post emerge, because I certainly couldn’t have written one that good. There are a couple of things I’d like to add, though.
Firstly, I’d like to mention one site Ogle doesn’t: Flickr. Perhaps he doesn’t mention it because it’s not “real-time” (although neither, really, is Dopplr). However, it managed to tick all three of his demands, more or less:
- APIs with no limits - Pro users can fetch their entire library, and search by date (posted or taken)
- Infrastructures for historic data - the site doesn’t care if your photos are 1, 10 or 100 years old; it can find them anyway
- New UI patterns - how about archives organised by calendar?
None of this is to say that the site is perfect. The archive pages seem to go unnoticed by many, and they’re not necessarily the most effective way to find things. (I’ve noticed plenty of friends who use tags with date information, since tag navigation is more prominent.) However, the comprehensive API let Photojojo build their Time Capsule service, and if one wants to experiment with a new UI idea, the data’s there.
Secondly, I’m encouraged by the response to a couple of iOS apps recently. Momento (review) and Tweet Library (review) both offer the archives that web services themselves seem to be neglecting (although, of course, in the case of Twitter both are hamstrung by the current 3,200 post limit of the API). The realisation of the post-real-time web (as Ogle has it) might have its detractors - note the first comment on the Tweet Library review, arguing Twitter has a paradigm of forgetting, and see @snookca’s comments in this discussion - but perhaps third party apps are a nice way to encourage services to open up archives for everyone.
2010-12-03
Flickr Tip: Delving For Good Photos
It’s already the time of year when people look back and try and pick out the best of the year. If you’re inclined to do that with the photos you’ve posted to Flickr, here’s a good way.
The search function has three key features that make this work. Firstly, the “interestingness” (a somewhat arbitrary, but still useful, measure of how, well, interesting a photo is) is available as a criteria for sorting. Secondly, there are ways to filter by time (either by date taken, or by date uploaded). Thirdly, you can limit photos to your own photostream.
Putting that all together gives you a this URL: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=&m=text&s=int&d=taken-20100101-20101231&w=me
The arguments, from right to left, make it search through all photos (that’s the q=, an empty query), in text mode (as opposed to tag mode), searching by interestingess, taken between the dates specified, and limited only to photos by “me” (which magically maps to the logged in user). If you’re tempted to find a best photo from those you’ve uploaded this year, why not use that as a starting point?
2010-10-07
Incompetence, Malice and ereading
I’ve been meaning to write about URLs, text and non-web online publishing for a while, but now I don’t have to, because Craig Mod has, and he did it better than I could have done. (He’s also going to get more attention, which is great, because it’s more likely things will change.)
Some choice quotes (although you should read the whole thing):
Am I reading text? If the text in your ereader isn’t text but is instead an image (.jpeg, .png, etc) then, by golly, your ereader’s incompetent.
Can you copy text? If you can’t, your ereader’s incompetent.
Is there a publicly facing pointer (URL, etc) by which you can reference the content in your ereader?
As Mod notes, it’s amazing that things like the iPad Wired app, which fail all three of these points, have been so highly praised. However, I’m more inclined to put malice (or its close relation, “business reasons”) as the reason for some of these decisions, in some apps. Despite the fact that Twitter, Facebook and email can drive readers to a site, it seems some companies would rather their magazines and newspapers lived in hermetic isolation.
At least the Guardian’s iPhone app, which is far from flawless, has the ability to email a link and post to various services, although (oddly) it fails to have a simple “Open in Browser” option. From what I’ve seen, neither the Wired app, nor any of the Mag+ publications, have such obviously useful features.
At least, as Mod notes, we’re only six months into the life of the iPad (and barely a couple of years into widely-used mobile devices). Perhaps with time will come a realisation that locking things down isn’t the best idea.
¹ Hat tip to dan w for the links.
² In one of his footnotes, Mod approving notes Instapaper, which I agree gets almost everything right. Hopefully at some point I’ll write about the (somewhat weak) social aspects of the app, though.)
2010-06-02
The Future Of Magazines
I have a worrying feeling that Instapaper isn’t the future of magazines; it’s a short, brief possible now of magazines, for those of us who understand it.
Yesterday evening I started reading this Wired article, which I found via the Instapaper front page. I got home to find it was also in the print edition of Wired UK, but of course I’ll finish it on the phone, on the way to or from work. I also read far more on the Guardian in Instapaper than in its own app. Generally, I seem to be able to find more than I can manage during weekdays from my delicious network and other recommendations.
Meanwhile, every publisher seems to want to get their icon onto my phone (and, if and when I get one, an iPad). The Times are pushing their app on video screens in the Tube; Wired and Popular Science are just two of many magazines which hope to bring not just interactivity and a nice experience, but that promised land of a sustainable business model.
But, but; does that mean that each of them ends up in a silo, or a glass box, with the web sites turning into vestigal stubs, paginated into unusability? If that happens, where does that leave my Read Later bookmarklet? And are those of us who do graze on articles and reviews and, yes, blog posts, no matter where they come from (and with less concern for who published them than whether they’re interesting) just too small a tribe to be on publisher’s radar?
I hope I’m being overly alarmist here. I hope the app fad dies down, and that the focus returns to good simple texts on generally available web sites. Still, I’m a little worried.
2010-05-08
A First Look At Annotations
A couple of hours after I gave my talk about Flickr machine tags and their possible lessons for Twitter’s new annotations, Raffi Krikorian gave a talk at Warblecamp on that very subject. He’s now posted slides of the talk, which are well worth a look.
In them, he expands on the format for annotations (they consist of types, attributes and values; types can be repeated, but attributes can’t), and mentions an annotations “explorer”, which will contain both “statistics of most used, adopted and trending attributions” and a “wiki page so developers can document their attributes”.
This dual approach pretty much fixes the main points I was worried about, combining a “pave the cowpath” method (looking at actual usage data) with a more editorial take on the wiki.
Anyway, the talk touched on even more (including the beta rollout plan, which will be based on OAuth-enabled apps, rather than feature flags or user lists), and mentioned release dates (which are reassuringly close). All in all, it’s pretty exciting, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they get used in the wild.
Edit: there’s now a video of the talk, thanks to Farhan Rehman.
Annotations and Machines Tags
I’m at Warblecamp (unsurprisingly, they also have a Twitter account), where I gave a short talk about Flickr’s machine tags and possible lessons for Twitter’s upcoming annotations feature. You can download the slides (6MB PDF), but they’re very much from the “big word / big picture” school, so feel free not to bother.
The idea was to breeze through Flickr’s implementation of tags, machine tags, machine tag extras, and exploring hierarchies via both URLs and the API, and point out the features I liked and how, perhaps, Twitter might learn from them.
The discussion afterwards was interesting. One point, which was well worth making, was that Twitter’s stream of text is very different from Flickr’s archive of photographs. (One more difference is that tags (and machine tags) are editable later; annotations are set in stone at post create time.) Aral Balkan suggested a registry of Twitter annotation namespaces, along the lines of his Twitter Formats proposal. Personally, I prefer the “pave the cowpaths” approach of discovering what’s actually in use in the wild (and is also why I built the machine tag browser). I didn’t mention this at the time, but there was an attempt at a Flickr machine tags wiki, which failed, perhaps colouring my view.
There was also a question about size limits for annotations (turns out it’s 512 bytes) and a discussion on the more RDF-ish aspects of triple tags (and how you say what a thing is, which also touched on establishing concordances). Generally I don’t get hung up on the semantics of machine tags, but I’m sure there are people who do, and they might be reassured by the points (mentioned in the Twitter preview post) about the use of schemas:
People could add some agreed upon “meta-annotation” that points to something which *describes* the annotation or annotations that person is using. Think something sort of like XML DTD, though not necessarily machine readable.
For a few slides knocked up the evening before, I’m vaguely happy with both the talk but very happy with the response and the way it’s made me think more about the idea.
