Firstly, the genius ethical-social-media guys at Dharmafly have put together OpenFreecycle at Yahoo’s OpenHackLondon to win the top two prizes. This massive Yahoo! endorsement is great stuff and very encouraging for my own little project.

I’ve now open-sourced this hacky swing at it with the carefully non-trademark-infringing name: freelist2web. There’s also a demo installation. Sadly, if you go there you’ll notice the most recent posts are starting to age. This is because I was banned last week from the Birmingham Freecycle Group (also from the Birmingham Freecycle Cafe Group). I queried it to hear that a member had complained after finding his posting on it. I’ve offered to limit post information to group members and hope when the Group owners get a chance to confer we’ll find a way that benefits everyone.

The obstacle is disappointing since I’d taken care to obscure e-mail addresses and assumed that Freecycle posters wanted their message to reach as many people as possible. I’ve tried to make my case on the OpenFreecycle blog post which I recommend as a place to carry on discussion about moving Freecycle on from a closed mailing list.

I’m still passionate about the principle of freecycling, if not the current dominant implementation. I think local community building through resource sharing is a fundamental social instinct that hasn’t yet found an online platform. I’m still bookmarking interesting sites like vSkips, GoodNewsForPolarBears and JustForTheLoveOfIt.

Without a critical density of users it’s an uphill struggle though. Maybe Facebook could be a cable car with a well-integrated app? The Facebook marketplace – now powered by Oodle – is already a reasonable service that allows you to give stuff away, support a cause or request stuff within a radius of your location.

In case any data junkies want to get a snapshot of freecycling activity in Birmingham over the last few months, I’ve made the post metadata available. Would love to see some cool data visualisation or mining insights.

The talk by Erik Duval stuck out as particularly TED-ish.  He polished the old chestnut about the historical scarcity of information and how the resulting all-you-can-eat habits overhang into the age of information abundance.  The challenge, as I recall him putting it, is not to produce information but to filter it to match the type of stuff you like.  The reason I don’t follow TechCrunch any more is that I pass it through the GuardianTech filter to improve the signal.  I might miss the odd story there but with the time spared I can stretch to a more diverse bunch of sources.

I guess the next challenge will be to connect you to the stuff you’d appreciate but wouldn’t normally stumble across. That is, the value of the source is given by the inherent interest of the stuff it feeds you divided by the probability of finding it otherwise.  That’s non-trivial.

The other thing that tickled me was the phrase ‘Personal Learning Environment‘.  I thought this must be another name for Virtual Learning Environments like Moodle at first.  However the stream of associated terms — tagging, feeds, peer-to-peer, blogs, podcasts, wikis and mashups — made it all sound mighty familiar.  Back home, they’d call it ‘social media’.  Fascinating to see the same technology used from an alternate perspective with different aims.

The established way of doing this online would be freecycling, i.e. via the Freecycle network facilitated by Yahoo! Groups.  The Birmingham Freecycling group works off a mailing list which comfortably tops 4000 posts a month.  Even with a daily digest mode that’s a hefty load to your inbox when most mails will be of not interest to the recipient.  Going to the group page and searching is clunky and doesn’t really cut it.  Also missing is any way to dodge collectors to regularly fail to show.

A better solution is a dedicated web service, as any good blogger will be able to tell you.  There are already some excellent examples out there such as: Reyooz, Freebootr, SnaffleUp , Free2Collect, Gigoit and Freemesa.  However, starting from scratch is a long, rocky road.  People often gravitate towards the crowd irrespective of technically superior alternatives.  I think Reyooz rocks but I’m the only one who’s posted anything in Brum so far.  It’s a shame since all these implementations have the same general goal as Freecycle: to get stuff re-used.  They shouldn’t be competing.

Some lateral thinking produces the obvious transition for improving Freecycle: scrape the Freecycle data (e.g. by parsing the constant flow of emails) to maintain a database which can then be exported, filtered and viewed in all sorts of ways.  I spent a few spare hours over the odd Sunday afternoon hacking up a proof-of-concept.  Before putting it out there I need to check I’m not indulging in some kind of Edison voting machine.

So, I did some belated research and turned up possible non-technical issues.

The Freecycle trademark is fairly vigorously protected with a established association with Yahoo Groups.  There’s some controversy in the history of The Freecycle Network which you can read and assess for yourself.  Although there are general goals to wean Freecycle off Yahoo Groups, the beta my.freecycle.org serves only as a simple control panel for this.  They may not be completely laid back about their name and data being used outside their control.

Whilst the actual work is carried out at a grassroots level, the self-named Modsquad don’t do the hugely tedious work for money.  I guess the reward is similar to that of wikipedians in making a small but discernible positive difference with recognition in the form of responsibility.  They are naturally going to be cautious about endorsing any change to the current model.

Despite these caveats, there’s some fascinating insights to be mined from the growing database about large-scale freecycling.  There’s a whole blog post there but here’s a taster:

• The most common postcodes map to Northfield, Woodgate, Erdington, Tamworth and Kings Heath (thanks, wikipedia!).
• Of 481 freecyclers, 10 have posted 10 times or more.  Over 40% have posted only once with a fairly even split between ‘wanted’ and ‘offered’ posts.
• 10 pianos have been offered (1 taken).

Projects

Having done the courses, read the books I decided to take the time to see what I could make out of the original Bodtracker idea that had long been itching for my full attention. I renamed it Bodder and got stuck in.  I wanted to find the flaws in the idea and kick myself well outside the comfort zone that academia affords.

On the basis that you learn by your mistakes and time is money I wanted my entrepreneurial education hard and fast.  I gave myself 6 months and learnt a lot about myself, other people and how things get going.  It clarified an awful lot for me and is really going to take a series of posts to do it any kind of justice.  Nudge me.

Once I’d pushed that as far as my bank would let me, I got back to regular work.  I soon got lucky with a cutting-edge project driven by infectious passion which aims to do something unique and valuable.  Trips to Lancaster, Paris and Helsinki convinced me this  stuff has massive potential.  Now the learning curve is levelling out I’m enjoying making major contributions to the development and direction of the project.

Local geekery

Next week Birmingham bloggers celebrate the first anniversary of their formation into an IRL social crowd organised via Facebook at the start of the year and groomed by Twitter following its second big push at SXSW in May. Highlights of the new-found connectivity included Pete’s eyebrows, the blogging bus driver, the coworking crawl and #twitpanto.  There’s certainly a whole bunch of other stuff I’ve missed but you can’t be everywhere, ambient intimacy or no.

All the other stuff

Reflections on Eggheads, the engaging number 33 and other personal non-geekiness to appear elsewhere.  Consider this a virtual clearing of the throat as I recklessly pledge to spout off more.   If nothing else, I want to chase niggling ideas out my head, nail the buggers and check I can still write something other than code.

Fast forward to A-levels and I was playing with my programmable calculator. I was the biggest Casio fx 7000G nerd in school. I took it everywhere and would spend breaks cramming those 422 bytes with racing games, rotating prisms and Mandelbrot generators (clearly not all at the same time).

The lesson I’m sidling up to is that learning should be interactive. Ideally, play.

If you’re not a reader of my personal press then you may not know that I’ve spent the past month getting into a new job. It’s based in the Maths department of the University of Birmingham on a project called STACK, conceived and developed by Chris Sangwin. My job is to extend it and ready it for the big time.

What’s it all about? In plain English: it’s an online tutor/tester that really ‘understands’ maths and so can intelligently interact with a learner.

More geekily: At the heart is a computer algebra system which gives you lots of high-level commands for generating and processing mathematical entities. On top of this you can build arbitrarily-complex potential response trees to analyse, credit and give personalised feedback on student input to randomly-generated problems. This whole thing then plugs into Moodle, a supremely modular virtual learning environment. It’s open source from end to end. The STACK acronym alludes to these layers.

There’s a lot of ideas and research behind this project and a book in the works. Maybe a few blog posts too.

Twitter earned support by offering something for free that previously wasn’t, essentially paid for by VC funding. Buying in a decent search engine must have left them strapped last month.

As bounder put it:

no SMS? Am I going to have to start using my phone to text? Gawd.

Why the UK networks no want to play ball? It might just be that they want to protect their revenues. They still just about manage to charge for txts and they’d now like the masses to also take mobile internet packages.

Let’s be clear. SMS is a dead-end, legacy, push mechanism for messages that demand your immediate attention. It was always going to be a temporary catch-all for old phones and habits until mobile internet gets a grip.

Bluemilkshake sums it up:

Twitter is just a site that doesn’t have as many features as Facebook.

Twitter was always much more formidable in its community spirit than its feature set. Now it doesn’t have any features that your average freelancer couldn’t roll into their own home-grown app. When APIs mean I can update Twitter/Facebook/RandomApp from anywhere then status sharing becomes a service where the only real difference between each app is that it can represent a different crowd to share the update with (the problem of duplicates remains unsolved in practice but trivial in principal).

If Facebook could let me restrict my updates to subsets of my friends (like Plurk and Pownce) and even optionally forward them to Twitter then I think I could have a second honeymoon with them.

There is more online stuff that I would love to partake of than I could ever conceive of doing so.  Shared items from social networks, blogs and recommendation engines only swell this ‘fire hose’.  Declaring ‘bankruptcy’ on email/feeds by marking all as read only throws the baby out with the bathwater and should only be a last resort.

Therefore, given I only have a finite amount of time, I have to be prepared to selectively trim my sources.  If I don’t then I am handling important stuff with the regard as the fluff and sampling everything at random.  You can call this process prioritisation or just cutting out the crap.

My target is 1-2 hours a day.  In this time I’m aiming to respond to all email, read all essential blogs/subs and get the latest stories on the social feeds.  I’ll have to continuously refine my ‘diet’, dropping some things as I add others.   Maybe this comes naturally for some people but I expect a challenge in curbing my appetite.  I’ll post any lessons if I can fit them into my regime.

It may sound severe but the goal is more fun all round.  Other people will be happy since I’ll be more responsive and sociable.  I’ll be happy because I’ll have focussed my online attention on the stuff that’s important to me whilst consciously bounding my online activities to make time for talking, reading, visiting, drinking, thinking, snapping, writing, creating, listening, playing…

In the bigger picture, still waiting the day when getting signed is not the defining moment of a band’s success…

Whereas the first meet was more formal and the second more sociable, the third was a union of both: formal then social.

The formal part was a panel on the SXSWM trip which was of less interest to me, just because I’d already read the tweets and the blog posts, seen the videos and chatted to Stef about it. But for people who hadn’t heard about it, this was a good time to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

There was a lot of discussion about ‘evangelism’, ‘conversion’ and ‘spreading the word’ about social media which struck me as odd language. It bordered on missionary zeal at time which I know some people found a little off-putting. One guy told me straight that his blogger girlfriend had been put off from coming by the ‘formal’ idea.

For me, the killer feature of the meets for me is just in getting a critical mass of creative web fans in a room. Add a little beer and conversational sparks fly, knowledge is exchanged and connections spring up. Some will want to explore the latest ideas and models in social media while many just want to arse about on the web. I measure the quality of the meets by the diversity of ideas, approaches and people that pop up. I’ll be worried if everyone starts singing from the same hymn book.

I’m not too worried right now. With the panel over, one discussion was replaced by a dozen interesting conversations, a sizeable portion of this later migrated over to the Rainbow. I talked to a cartoonist, a journalist and a couple of entrepreneurs among others. My only gripe was there were too many fascinating people to talk to and not enough time to get round. It felt rather like the Crystal Dome.

Other people seem to be as impatient as me about continuing these chats. More frequent mini-meets could be the way to go, or even a techie solution where people can spontaneously organise ‘coworking‘ sessions in cafes around Brum. I know people are actively working on this problem so maybe by Blogger Meet 4 we’ll have something on the go.

Every day I use the online Guardian to get my liberal prejudices, Facebook to stalk zombie sub-acquaintances and Google to basically function online. All these are dependent on advertising revenue yet I blithely ignore them. Hell, I even try and block them using various Firefox extensions when they get particularly annoying.

Maybe I delude myself that it’s some kind of penance, that merely by suffering irrelevant and gaudy adverts I am satisfying a sadistic advertiser’s desire.  A straight transmutation of pain into gain.

The rational alternative is that online adverts are there to be clicked. But since I’m not clicking them, who is? Judging purely from many the adverts, its that specific demographic called Idiots.  My surfing adventures are being powered by the infinite supply of compulsive clickers.

Here’s the kicker.

Who is going to pay for the bleeding-edge social media tools we all know and love if not the early-adopting, kool-aid drinking aviators like me?  If the mighty Facebook is ‘breaking even‘ with everything it knows about you, all the opportunity it has to target you and all the aforementioned demographic, what chance for lean, hackerphilic platforms like Twitter?  Google has put it’s money on Jaiku, so no help there.

Answers on a postcard, in comments or indeed tweeted at me if that’s what turns your key.  But preferably in comments.