A friend, let us call him Mushy, defines a sport as any activity that cannot be accomplished while smoking or wearing slacks. As a definition, this leaves something to be desired since clearly Synchronised Swimming is not a sport despite being a bit difficult to do while smoking or wearing slacks. Even in the office.

The obvious Third Law of What Constitutes A Sport is that it has a clear result without resorting to subjective judgement. This neatly excludes Synchronised Swimming, Ice Skating, Ballroom Dancing and Ski Jumping so we are onto a winner.

Until now.

News has just reached me of a sport that cannot be practised while smoking and the wearing of slacks is prohibited by its Laws. Moreover, it has a clear winner: everybody.

I cannot decide whether this means Western society has now reached the acme of its achievements, or whether perhaps this is a clear sign that we are in a decadent spiral of decline. Here come the Goths!

We have a long and dishonorable history in my country of introducing temporary legislation for a particular situation, then allowing it to become both permanent and general despite the eventual amelioration of the situation that it was intended to address.

The classic example has always been our ridiculous alcohol licensing laws, which confuse overseas visitors so much (with good reason). These were brought in as a purely temporary measure during the First World War to ensure attendance at munitions factories at a time of national crisis. We also have these “temporary” laws to thank for our stupid British Summer Time upheaval twice a year. Thanks, but my Realm doesn’t need Defending against the Germans so much any more. Can we repeal these temporary measures now?

Thus, it was inevitable that the UK anti-terror legislation brought in during the panic after New York’s World Trade Centre was destroyed in 2001 would both outlast the situation and be used for purposes not strictly to do with combating the terrorist threat.

A cynic might say this was planned all along, and the public mood since 2001 has been used as an opportunity to bring in a series of oppressive laws under the guise of defending the nation (again). Many people have said exactly this but I was reserving judgement until there was clear evidence one way or the other.

Yesterday provided that evidence.

The UK-held assets of an Icelandic bank were frozen to protect the interests of UK depositors when it became clear the the bank was in trouble. The legislation used was the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 that I linked to above.

The UK government’s motives may have been entirely sound and in our national interest, but the precedent has been set (if it hadn’t before). This is no longer anti-terrorism legislation, it is a fact of our lives and is here to stay. And it will be used for whatever purposes suits the government of the day.

Which, in case you hadn’t noticed, may well be formed by the Conservative Party after the next election. Now there’s a frightening thought.

Big thanks to Sig for helping me out with my Firefox CSS issue. He was dead right - it was a MIME issue that was easily fixed by setting the MIME type to text/css in the header of the dynamic CSS.

More details here: Generating Dynamic CSS with PHP

I’ve left the demonstration in place here: Dynamic CSS MIME demonstration but adjusted the text to make it clear I was at fault, not the browser.

Why do the other browsers behave differently? Well the CSS was returned to the page within an element of the page’s header that declared the contents to be text/css so it was fairly easy for a “smart” browser to guess my intention. And also quite easy for me to make the fatal assumption that that was enough.

We live and learn. And Firefox is a strict mistress.

I’ve come across a problem with a website I’m developing. My nifty code works fine for all browsers except Firefox. Yes, that’s right - Firefox fails to render the page as intended but Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera all work fine.

I’ve put a demonstration of the problem here.

I’m surprised that Firefox behaves so differently from other browsers. We all know which browsers we think are non-standards-compliant. If I’d been posting this about an Internet Explorer behaviour then I wouldn’t have expected any surprise or sympathy. But Firefox. I’m getting cramp in my eyebrows - they’ve been permanently raised since I discovered this.

I’m hoping there’s a way I can code round the problem. The latest version of Firefox (3.0.2) still exhibits this odd behaviour.

OK, I’ve seen a few things online recently that amused me and I’d like to share them. I don’t want to add them to delicious.com because that’s what I use for links I need to find again someday. These are things I’ve seen and enjoyed but they are gone. For me they are yesterday’s newspaper. But you may not have seen them and I think you should.

So I’ve decided to add them to Tumblr. Easy. Tumblr is a great tool for doing this, it makes it easy to add videos, links, pictures, anything. I am very happy with this choice.

But this has now repurposed Tumblr in my social data flow from an output device to a content provider. Before, it just used to receive my status updates and micro blogs. Now it is the place where I link to things that have amused me.

Here’s how I needed to reconfigure my social data flow:

1. Add Tumblr to my aggregators. Now my Tumblr posts will appear in my All Activity feed.

2. Remove Tumblr from my syndication list. Now Tumblr will not receive my status updates or micro blogs. This is important because otherwise these updates would appear twice in my All Activity feed.

3. Er…

4. That’s it.

Simple.

John Whiteside made a perceptive comment about my post “Cycling to work - why people hate cyclists, part 3“. I completely agree with him - what he said in his comment is what I intended to say in my post. Sorry it wasn’t clear.

The post talked about collisions between cyclists and pedestrians. I said

The cyclist will see a pedestrian many metres ahead and will calculate his own trajectory and the pedestrian’s to ensure there is no collision.

John correctly commented that pedestrians don’t have a “trajectory”. What they have is a “radius of occupation” - a theoretical circle around them that they could be anywhere in when the cyclist reaches them. The radius of the circle is a function of the pedestrian’s maximum velocity and the distance the cyclist has to travel before impinging on the pedestrian.

Here’s what I meant to say: the cyclist unconsciously calculates this “radius of occupation” and avoids it.

Of course, there are some parts of the circle that the pedestrian is unlikely to occupy. The sophisticated cyclist might try to calculate the probability distribution across the entire “radius of occupation” and choose to clip a part of the circle where the pedestrian is unlikely to end up. This sort of calcuation will be correct most of the time, but ultimately will result in a few collisions.

I think such collisions are the fault of the cyclist. My diatribe against pedestrians was intended to include only those collisions that the cyclist could not possibly avoid.

Benjamin Waber has a grim piece of news for managers and CEOs: You’re out of the loop.
- Wired magazine, 16 August 2008

This is something we all suspect about large organisations - unless you’re a senior manager in which case you probably think all valuable communication goes up and down the management hierarchy. Clive Thompson’s short article in Wired makes me want to read the full MIT paper by Benjamin Waber and his colleagues (how can I get a copy?).

Almost every time he analyzes a group, Waber discovers that the super-connector — the crucial person who routes news among team members — isn’t the manager.
- ibid.

The research team discovered this by putting location-aware badges on everybody and mapping how long they spent in proximity to each other. Using this information they could identify the Jan Molbys of the organisation - the midfielders who made and received the most passes. Information was flowing through the organisation in ad hoc patterns, enabled by these super-connectors. The data was good enough to predict when and where some of these exchanges would take place in the future - information that could be used to make sure the super-connectors were able to do their unofficial function more effectively.

I have worked in organisations where this data would be used to quash this sort of unofficial communication. Where is the cost-benefit analysis, managers would cry? How do we know these people aren’t simply gossiping? How can we keep them at their desks longer?

This is why the permanent use of such location-aware devices isn’t going to happen in any organisation I know. Such snooping would certainly be verboten by the Workers’ Council in any German organisation. For every benefit to the organisation and its employees there is a potential Big Brother use too - what’s to stop the people in possession of the data from identifying people who spend too much time in the restrooms for example. There’s a trust issue, and if you’re in an organisation where the senior management is trusted then its communication channels are probably in a fairly healthy state too.

So the permanent use of location-aware badges is unlikely to happen in your organisation, but the knowledge gained from this experiment could be of lasting value. It might be possible to identify the super-connectors in your organisation without such intrusive monitoring. If you value their networking skills then you should find ways to support them.

In an attempt to remove the latency problem from my social data flow, I’ve rearchitected it a bit. Unfortunately the reworked flow is not quite as elegant as the original but then it had more sophisticated design goals so that’s not terribly surprising.

Here’s the revised flow with notes below:

(Click on the image for a bigger version)

Notes:

1. Now I can allow ping.fm to update Twitter and identi.ca immediately so I have removed the latency problem from the previous configuration. Once again I can use Twitter in a conversational way instead of it being a mere receptacle for RSS updates every half hour.
2. You’ll note also that Twitterfeed can now update identi.ca and other Laconica-based micro-blogging sites. Thanks, Mario. This means I can promote identi.ca to be a peer with Twitter and receive all my updates including real-time micro-blogs (tweets).
3. The three subscription points are the same: Writing, Status Updates and All Activity. The URIs for those resources have not changed.
4. I have distinguished between blog posts such as this and the notification of those posts. To subscribe to the full post stream use the Writing feed. If you subscribe to the All Activity feed you will be notified about posts but only see the title not the whole article. Unfortunately if you subscribe to both you will see both the blog post and a separate notification of its existence - I can’t do anything about this yet.

So there’s an emerging gap between those select sites that I use to do stuff and those sites that merely receive notification of that activity. My strategy will be to keep to a minimum the sites I use for doing things, and maximise the number of sites that are notified about it. This way I can keep all my pictures, links, writing etc. in one place but all my disparate multiple friend communities will get equal notification of new activity in one of those upstream sites.

I think the new slightly less elegant social data flow is functionally better and I’ll try to stick with it for a while to see how it performs in practice.

Firstly, apologies to anybody who couldn’t see the social data flow diagram in my earlier post - I’ve now hosted it on my own server so it shouldn’t disappear quite so often.

(Click on the image for a bigger version)

The new data flow, using ping.fm to syndicate my status updates and micro-blogs and FriendFeed to aggregate my other activity and consolidate everything into a coherent set of feeds, is working quite well. I would like to be able to have more control over the format of what both ping.fm and FriendFeed do for each target system, but the defaults are adequate for now.

Here are the issues I’m experiencing:

1. Using Twitterfeed to take my FriendFeed RSS and pipe it into Twitter introduces a degree of latency that’s a bit inappropriate for Twitter. Twitter should be near real-time and conversational (whilst not being an instant messaging system), but Twitterfeed only reads my FriendFeed every half an hour. If I get ping.fm to update Twitter directly then I’m going to get some updates twice, which is exactly what I’m trying to avoid.

2. Some of the connected systems (identi.ca for example) are Twitter-like, and I’d like to treat them the same way as Twitter: as an output device for all my activity. But Twitterfeed is Twitter-specific and I haven’t found an equivalent for identi.ca etc. yet. In any case I don’t want a different Social ETL tool for each output system; I want Twitterfeed (or something) to do this for a number of target systems.

3. There’s no class solution for location-based systems yet. Obviously I’d like to be able to update my location and travel plans in one place and have it propagate to TripIt, Dopplr, BrightKite etc. I think FireEagle may be trying to do this but it’s short of two things at the moment: co-operation from the other systems and an invitation for me. If anybody has access to FireEagle I would appreciate a way in.

4. Now I need to do the other thing - deduplicate my profligate friends’ updates. When Myrto uploads a picture to Flickr, for instance, I get notified about it four times. I can rationalise this a bit but I can’t ignore her FriendFeed or Twitter because I would miss some of her updates, so I’m condemned to hearing about her new pictures multiple times unless (a) she adopts a version of my social data flow or (b) I find a solution to deduplicating the same update coming through multiple channels. This duplicate filter is necessary until everybody adopts my architecture, i.e. for ever. Does anybody know of a solution out there?

This all seems quite difficult to manage and well beyond anybody who is either busy or technically challenged. There’s no real way of developing a packaged solution until all the social systems adopt a single sign-on technology like OpenID, and many of them have sound technical reasons for not doing so (OpenIDs can be created by anybody anywhere so it’s a bit like expecting system owners to trust a digital certificate that has no trusted root certification authority).

Anyway, that’s the state of play at the moment. More to come I’m sure.

I got in a bit of a tangle with what Web 2.0 application was updating what so I’ve tried to rationalise the data flow like this:

(Click on the image for a bigger version)

Having done this I’m fairly sure of three things:

1. There are no feedback loops: no update is going to propagate to another site that feeds it back where it came from
2. There is a specific feed for three appropriate levels of details that does not omit anything relevant.
3. There is no need for any other feed unless you’re interested in particular asset classes, e.g. photos.

There is one publisher, one syndicator and one aggregator. Each of them can be replaced at any time without affecting the principle of how this works.

So here is the guide to subscribing to updates about me:

Give me everything!
I love hearing about what you say and do and I can’t get enough of you
OK: subscribe to this feed

I want to read what you write about
I’m not interested in where you are or what you’re doing today but I am interested in your thoughts
OK: subscribe to this feed. And to this feed for what people are saying about my writing

I’m interested in keeping track of you but I don’t want to read your boring writing
I’m a stalker not an bleeding intellectual
OK: subscribe to this feed.

Hopefully that will cover everybody. If you’re interested in specific stuff like photos then go to my FriendFeed page and choose the source you want.

Notes on how I rationalised this:
1. I now use Twitterfeed simply as a mechanism for posting RSS to Twitter, specifically my FriendFeed stream. I’ve classed it as “Social ETL” in the diagram

2. Twitter is now just an output device and a way of feeding my updates to mobile phones, for example.

3. I have tried to remove all Facebook apps that update my status except for ping.fm

4. Sorry for the multiple and egregious posts while I sorted this out today

5. Thanks to Myrto for the ping.fm invite.