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…

Kind of lite version of Second Life from Google which requires a simple download and a Google account. I’m guessing this is a strategic attempt for Google to stick a virtual rocket under their social networking effort. Coming to Orkut and Facebook soon, perhaps?

If someone had told me about this I can imagine I’d be sceptical; the bells and whistles of MSN turn me right off. But whilst there’s plenty to be said for a text-only chatroom, the strangeness of disembodied words stands out when you’ve got a chance to.. just be present.

Pros and cons, then. The urge to customise stuff to match your style is irresistible. But it’s nowhere near the level of sophistication of Second Life and it regularly crashes out. Sometimes the crash handler itself crashes, causing a cascade of apologetic alerts. Also, it’s only on Windows. It allowed PicasaWeb photo album feeds to be displayed in picture frame but that was buggy and it off right now. You can similarly have virtual TVs looping YouTube clips but that gets annoying very quickly. Public rooms devoted to sex seem to be irrepressible currently.

Still, I like the general idea and implementation and I think I could be a great place for certain small communities to just hang out. Just wish they’d done some testing on it first.

I don’t own an iPhone (woefully) and I’m only an occasional Facebooker, so I’m just squatting here on the fringe and speculating.   But the latest post on the Facebook blog seems somewhat significant.

It notes that 1.5 million people regularly use the Facebook iPhone website since it launched a year ago.   Then it announces a Facebook Application for the iPhone (see left) which — along with a speed increase — features instant photo uploads and live chat.  Location sharing is in the pipeline.

This puts Facebook ahead of Google’s Jaiku in the mobile social network stakes for now.   Both have converged on the ’status stream’ model which has massive room for innovation.

For instance, I can see Google allowing posts to reference places in Google Map.  If your friend is at a bar, Google will want to show you where that is.

Facebook will take a big step forward when it allows the targeting of updates to specific circles of friends (like plurk).  A lot of diversity in your recipients is a natural consequence of a general social network (rather than a niche one like Twitter) inhibiting but is damn inhibiting.

home.html

I abused the computer science web server in 94 or 95 with multicoloured buttons and blinking text.   Along with my geeky friends I could see a future in which everyone had their own home page on Geocities.

Then Myspace came along and Facebook chased it up.  I was late for both.

e-mail

It was an introduction to Hotmail from a non-geeky friend in 1998 that weaned me off university e-mail accounts and onto webmail.  I later shelled out a couple of quid on eBay for a Gmail invite wanting to beat the inevitable rush.

Hotmail still trumps Gmail for numbers although ‘Facebook mail’ may ultimately bypass both.

web 2.0

From the Summer of 2004 I was tagging my photos in Flickr and bookmarks in del.icio.us.  Both were giving me stuff of real quality and motivating me to contribute.

I got the Blogger hoodie when they sold out to Google and paid off their paying users in 2003.  Five years later and most hardcore ‘bloggers’ are using Wordpress (without switching to ‘pressers’).

Before Twitter had sprouted it vowels, I’d registered as the 3018th user.  A couple of years — and SXSW events — later and I am now able to follow a selection of the local digerati.  But most of my geeky friends are declining to tweet, or even blog.

Facebook is a one-stop shop mail, photos, videos, status, sharing are all made supremely simple whilst actually being technically sophisticated.  Yet my adoption of it is only marginal at best.

my point

If I search for “welcome to” in the subject line of my inbox I get 130 hits.  I’m a serial tinkerer.  An inveterate fiddler.  A compulsive invite-requester.  But I’m clearly not an early adopter.  Rather than being further down the road I’m actually off the beaten track. Instead of being ‘ahead of the curve’ I’m actually zipping off it at random tangents.

There’s a small swarm of us in Brum who wouldn’t be without Flickr, Gmail, Delicious, Wordpress, Twitter et al.  We all get fantastic value out of these tools which connect, organise and inspire us to create.

Now, I don’t expect ordinary users to join us later on.  And I don’t find that a problem.  We adopt these apps whilst Facebook apps are adopting everyone else.  We are motivated differently.

So what does this mean for the ’social web’?

So, OrangeJon and myself decided to run a little experiment to see whether we were actually early adopters or just a little freaky.  We approached Vale Festival which pulls in several thousand students for a day with much going on and offered our services in order to answer this question:

Given the very specific context of a large, diverse festival, what is the viability of crowd-generated postings via mobile devices?

Can we turn happy, ordinary students into twitterers, basically.

Setup

To maximise participation, we realised early on that it should require minimal effort to contribute. We are, after all, talking about students drinking free beer in the sun. Flat-rate data plans and iPhones were presumed to be thin on the ground.

We reduced registration to nothing, making it retroactive. Students could text their messages straight to an advertised number (standard txt rate) which would automatically register them (returning the details by SMS) and post their message on the event-specific page. This page was mobile-friendly and hosted under Bodder.

To make it even more real, we grabbed a 1.5m LED scrolling display off eBay and rigged it to show recent posts from the crowd (accessed via a generously loaned 3G dongle - thanks Pete!). Visibility was reduced in direct sunlight but it was still usable.

On top of this, we had a big poster, some t-shirts, a stack of business cards and a funky blue parasol (which later went ‘walkies’).

Results

The raw data is reproduced below for the record.  It shows the message in the order they were posted. Each post is preceded by a nickname and user id.

Si#1 is testing all Bodder systems, live at Vale Festival! [6 days ago]
Carys#120 Carys rocks [6 days ago]
anon#121 Vale fest is awesome! [6 days ago]
anon#122 Get you SLIT out darling! [6 days ago]
Si#1 is being threatened by a large slice of lime! [6 days ago]
Alex#14 is happy that Bodder is going up in the world [6 days ago]
OrangeJon#2 Carys is blonde. Oh so blonde. [6 days ago]
anon#123 hi mum [6 days ago]
anon#124 Fifty Quid to the first person who jumps in the lake. Holla at me. You know you want it. [6 days ago]
Carys#120 check out DJ Cro in the dance tent [6 days ago]
anon#125 Gta rule myspace.Com/gtaunderstand!!! [6 days ago]
anon#126 If you are reading this after party at mine for the sexually adventurous. No uggos. You will be denied entrance. 10 downing street ask for chima. Add me facebk [6 days ago]
anon#122 I’m bored, text me on 07912 482088 [6 days ago]
anon#127 Shout out to everyone at yoonee. Woohoo [6 days ago]
Si#1 kinda likes those toffee apple beers. can someone bring one over to the blue hairy brolly? [6 days ago]
anon#128 What is point bodder.com? [6 days ago]
anon#129 We’re all doomed and you hippies can’t do anything about it. [6 days ago]
anon#130 hey finnn^ [6 days ago]
anon#131 Shit and piss mate. [6 days ago]
Jonny#90 Shit and piss. [11 days ago]
anon#132 Paninis and baguettes [6 days ago]
anon#133 The jd kicks butt [6 days ago]
anon#122 Hannah lewis, text chris on 07912482088 x [6 days ago]
arjun#134 The red n blue clown is scratching the singers beard. [6 days ago]
anon#127 Get your freed beer from yoonee! RIGHT NOW! [6 days ago]
arjun#134 The red n blue clown has gone missing. [5 days ago]
arjun#134 The red n blue clown is snoggin the roman guy wearing a leaf with an ice cream in his hand. [5 days ago]
OrangeJon#2 wonders if anybody can really be Boddered [5 days ago]

Notes

• Carys was helping us out. At one point she misarranged the letters on a banner to spell ‘BODEDR’.
• Yoonee was a stall adjacent to us which was busy handing out free beer in exchange for marketable personal details.
• The messages tended to come in salvos, often triggered by personal introductions by us.
• We managed to hold off from censorship at this 99% student event.
• One guy asked if he could use our connection to check Facebook.
• Out of interest, we texted #122 with an offer to buy him a beer. This sparked a lively SMS conversation in which we established his name was Chris, certainly drunk and seriously besotted with the individual he subsequently named.
• The ‘red and blue clown’ was with Misty’s Big Adventure.  This was the closest to live-blogging.

Conclusions

This was an incredibly useful exercise for us in a bunch of ways.

Apart from the hassle of having to take our power cable up through the trees, we had no real technical problems.  People posted and their messages appeared as we checked them.  We even found time to streamline the moderation process on the fly.

The eye-opener for me was the social aspect of the model.  We’d believed that, given the ability to address the crowd, people would jump on it.  Conversations would be sparked.  Wry observations made.  Although we saw some of that, we were prepared for more.  I can’t say for sure, but this is how my interpretation breaks it down.

Awareness.  It was a big festival and we only got properly involved close to the day.  It was quite possible to spend the day out there and not check us out.

Familiarity. This is a novel mash-up of technologies, texting to an LED display via a mobile-friendly website is a trickier and more alien concept than the Wishing Tree (pictured above) or Tent of Hope.

Motivation.  The above are comforting since they can be worked on.  The big, hairy hurdle may simply be disinclination - why bother? People are either with their friends at the festival or just a text message away.  Everyone else is just eye candy.  Whilst they enjoy being where the action is, they don’t feel the need to interact with it in a big way.

The fact that many of the posts came from personal introductions suggests that a real social connection is important.  Essentially, most people like to know who they are addressing before they show themselves since it shapes their message.  Posting to the world (i.e. a lot of random people) doesn’t make sense.  They have nothing to say to the world and they don’t presume the world to be interested.

I also suspect that the relative anonymity of posting devalues it.  Where’s the social pay-off when you are not easily associated with your message?  Facebook walls are hugely popular exactly because they deliver the social pay-off of targeted visibility so effectively.  You friend sees the message and their friends can see the message (and your mutual friends see it in their news feed).

Getting the message out is easy.  Matching it to the right context - getting it in front of the right people - is the fiddly bit.  More thought required…

Plurk has attitude and attitude counts.

It counts because it’s so easy to knock up a status logger (heck, I even rolled one myself). Whereas I never took to the minimal asthetics of the Twitter bird, the headless quadraped of Plurk (a dog?) somehow does it for me. The blog is spiky, witty, philosophical, informative and also cuts to the bone. I give you:

Don’t get us wrong, we love to eat our own dogfood, but we put real effort to ensure that our dogfood tastes good to all breeds of dogs around the world, and not just some small band of cliquish poodles who gather for crumpets every afternoon while sipping on their macchiatos and waxing philosophical on things that don’t matter.

Feature-wise, the timeline may be kind of a gimmick which I can’t see being easily reproduced on a mobile (where all the action is). Plurk also features karma in an incentive to drive recommendation and can embed video and pics from third-parties like Flickr and YouTube. Oh yeah, and threaded comments. No more hacky tracking @s.

The most significant feature for me is ‘cliques’, although I’d call them ‘circles’. With a clique you define an audience, allowing you to separate you personal from your professional from your whatever without all that messing about with separate profiles. Trying to work out the appropriateness of an update for a particular diverse context like Facebook gives me headaches. If Plurk could similarly let me target my cross-posting to sevices like Twitter and Facebook then I would be utterly, utterly sold. If a whole bunch of other people feel the same, is Plurker going to hit the same scaling issues as Twitter? I think not and here’s why:

Twitter’s scaling problem is not the Interweb’s problem.

We don’t need a monolithic status logging any more than we need a universal webmail provider or blogging platform. Users should be able to pick the one that suits their style and receive updates from the others, probably via some kind of pinging mechanism between services. Beta bloggers are likely to continue to hang out on Twitter. College kids will update their status on Facebook. The niches of different crowds will be met with myriad different services yet to emerge, all with a different take yet all working with each other.

It’s just starting to get interesting.

join me on Plurk

This changed when I got to try Evernote this morning.  It feels a bit like Picasa for notes, enabling you to enter in a stream of tagged notes which can also be sorted into notebooks.  The kicker is that it can search images for likely matches of search terms and it’s extremely reliable, even for low quality mobile pics and handwriting.

This makes it a (slightly clunky) photographic memory and threatens the loose scraps of paper littering my workspace. I don’t have to file my notes; Evernote will throw up likely matches as I type into the search box.

Check the video below to see it in action:

I hooked it up to ShoZu which can automatically mail photos to Evernote in the background straight after taking them (flat-rate data plan essential).   Snap, forget and search.

I have 20 invites if you want to give it a spin.

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