Joe's Jottings

I recently found this on my Twitterfeed: @jakebrewer: Yes! Note from newly devised Hippocratic oath for Gov 2.0 apps: “Don’t confuse novelty with usefulness.”  It is so true – and that comes from someone who spent part of his MBA working on the management of creativity and innovation.  There is a science fiction story by Arthur C Clarke in which two planetary empires are fighting a war.  The story’s called ‘Superiority’ for anyone who wants to read it.  In this tale, one side decides to win the war by making of use of it’s technological know-how, which is in advance of the opposing side.  Unfortunately, each innovation has some unforeseen side effect which eventually, cumulatively, ends up with the technologically advanced empire innovating itself in to defeat.

First of all, a definition.  For the purposes of this post, innovation is not the small improvements we all do to streamline and ‘finesse’ a process or product.  That’s just maintenance and responding to feedback.  Innovation is the equivalent of trading in the bike for a car.  It’s a big shift.

Innovation is an important aspect of our personal and business lives; through it we have a vital tool for adaptation and survival, but it’s important to not get hooked on the idea that innovation is always a Good Thing, and fetishise it as being an all powerful tool for all problems.  In fact:

1. Innovation is not always useful.
2. Innovation is not always indicative of progress.
3. Innovation does not always benefit all the stakeholders.
4. Failure to innovate can be expensive and risky; innovating for no reason can also be expensive and risky.
5. Innovating is not the same as being effective.
6. Innovation can deliver false confidence.

Innovation is not always useful

This usually equates to ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.  If you have part of your life or business process that is chugging along well and is meeting the targets you set for it, then don’t bother innovating it yet.  There is no purpose or use to massive change that meets no need.  Such innovation is useless.

Innovation is not always indicative of progress

‘Progress’ is one of those words that falls in to the category of ‘hard to define but we all know what it is’.   You may think that you have to innovate to stay cutting edge; but do you?  Sure, we have to be aware of where our market is going, and risks to our future revenue streams.  But innovating to stay on the bleeding edge of technical and social change is likely to expose you to risk.  Progress for your business or life does not always reflect social or technological ‘progress’.  Innovating purely to keep up with trends is ‘running the Red Queen’s Race’ – you will never finish.

Innovation does not always benefit all stakeholders

Innovation may be great for you, but not great for people whose incomes are affected, whose role is removed and whose job in the organisation is no longer needed.  When you innovate, bear this in mind and don’t automatically expect everyone to be pleased they belong to an innovative organisation.

Failure to innovate can be expensive…as can innovating!

Innovation always costs time and perhaps money, especially if done properly.  There is no such thing as free innovation, even if the cost is in terms of the time taken to make sure your innovation won’t break what’s already happening.  It’s easier to keep existing customers than to create new ones.  An innovative approach may scare existing customers away, and not get new replacements.  Be prepared. 

Innovating is not the same as being effective

I see a lot of people in software engineering spending inordinate amounts of time on new processes, new languages and techniques who don’t seem to always be hitting the market with product.  Don’t mistake skilling up with the latest languages and software design techniques as being effective.  It’s only effective if you put the techniques to use.  I have several clients who make a good living, thank you very much, on maintaining and providing applications that are based on 10 year old technology.

Innovation can deliver false confidence

The German Enigma code machine in World War 2 was a highly advanced and innovative piece of kit for the time.  If used correctly it would have been unbreakable.  However, the operators tended to use slightly dodgy procedures in operating it and that gave the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park an ‘in’ to the machine that they were able to exploit and hence read German secret messages.  Even when the Germans did suspect that someone had broken ‘Enigma’ they were so confident in their technologically advanced machine that they thought it impossible.

Enough said.

I’m not saying don’t innovate; that would be ridiculous.  Just think about your innovations and don’t automatically follow the ‘innovate or die’ mantra.  Take time out and read ‘Superiority’ and learn from it.

Well, I guess that as someone with technical credentials I should comment on the unveiling of Apple’s new tablet machine, the iPad.  The first thing I will say is that I’m not an Apple fanboi, and so am probably a hard audience to impress.  Anyway, here’s what Apple have to say - I like that price tag, although I expect the usual dollar / pound sterling equivalence will work giving a price range of £500 for the lowest memory / WiFi option through to about £850 for the 3G / 64Gb unit.    But, I have to say, that at first glance it looks beautiful.  Take a look at this from the engadget site (the start of the presentation is at the end of the page, ad the images run in chronological order up the page).

At half an inch thick and about 9.5″ by 7.5″ it has a slightly odd page aspect ratio - it basically looks like an iPod Touch or an iPhone for giants.   It will run existing apps from the Apple App store, and will also talk to iTunes to get media.  There is a 30 pin connector to charge through and connect to other devices – including PCs.  The unit comes with up to 64Gb memory, has a 1GHz bespoke processor from Apple, called A4,  WiFi as standard an 3G as an extra, touch keyboard a-la-iPhone, GPS, accelerometer for motion sensitive UI, etc.  Ah, what the heck – here’s the technical specs.  No point in regurgitating what’s elsewhere!!  Like I said, think about a wider, longer iPhone.

It looks good – the processor looks pretty capable, and if one were to appear in my birthday bag or Christmas stocking I wouldn’t say no. 

I have to admit that I’m old enough to remember Apple’s first pass at pad computing donkey’s years ago – the Apple Newton.  It was a concept ahead of it’s time.  This machine looks like it really hits the spot on so many levels, but I’m always a believer in ‘Never buy Version 1.0 of anything’, and I do have a few reservations in terms of both business and technology. 

No SD Slot- I appreciate that this seems a small thing when you’re looking at something that can handle 64Gb, but it seems to be a problem with Apple gear that they always ship it with less memory than you want.  I can see lots of applications where media could be distributed on an SD card for plugging in to a gadget like this.

Battery life / replacement- not the life time of the battery in normal use – that 10hrs is pretty cool – but the problems about replacing the unit when it fails.  Are we looking at a similar situation to that experienced with iPods, or have Apple learnt?

Software Development- The Software Development Kit that is available is still unsurprisingly Mac centric – based as it is on the iPhone / iPod SDK and looks at first glance to be more of a conversion kit for existing iPhone / iPod apps than a new development environment.  It’s not available for any other platform than Mac, and Apple also charge for the privilege of belonging to the developer programme.  All in all, seems a little short sighted in terms of application development.  Whilst there are thousands upon thousands of available applications, the question is just how many are genuinely useful on a platform closer to a Netbook than a pocket phone.

Lack of ‘open’ connectivity- I would have liked to have seen a bog standard micro-USB port rather than just the Apple Docking port.

 Having said all that – it’s a nice piece of kit and one step closer to Star Trek.  I could see myself buying one and using it as ‘player / reader’ for media, rather than as a portable work tool.  I could imagine it being given out at high-end conferences packed with stuff for delegates.  I could imagine it as a brilliant teaching tool.  I can see lots of uses, but whether it succeeds or not must surely depend upon bringing the price point down, opening it up a little and finding the killer application.

It has the potential to be a ‘third way’ between phone and Netbook, or a solution looking for a problem.  And I’m not yet 100% convinced which way it will go.  Ask me when we finally see the UK pricing.

There is a wonderful phrase in film and TV script writing - ‘to jump the shark’.  It’s that point in the history of a TV series where the scripts veer off in to the surreal or when characters suddenly change their behaviour.  It’s reputedly named after an episode of the  popular 1970s sitcom ‘Happy Days’ when the hero ‘The Fonz’ ends up jumping over a shark on water skies.  Plausible, huh?

It struck me the yesterday, after seeing a site that had been bought to my attention via Twitter, that Web 2.0 may very well be at the point of jumping the e-shark.

Now, Web 2.0 has revolutionised the way we put web applications together.  Before we go much further, Web 2.0 is like pornography; we know what it is when we see it but we’d be hard pressed to formally define it.  So, here’s what I mean by Web 2.0.  It’s a piece of jargon that is used to loosely define web sites and technologies that facilitate interactivity, inter-operability between web sites, sharing of user information and user driven content, whether text, image or multimedia content like video and animation.  Web 2.0 sites are typically those where the content displayed to you and other site users can be easily modified and configured by the user.  Facebook is a Web 2.0 ‘poster boy’; my Internet Banking site is good old fashioned ‘Web 1.0′.

A lot of the technology that has been developed to make Web 2.0 possible has found it’s way in to all sorts of Web sites - things like Google Apps, for example, are a perfect example of the serious application of Web 2.0 technologies.

But for all the value, have we finally hit a point where many sites and applications being delivered as part of the Web 2.0 revolution are trivial, absurd and effectively worthless to the vast majority of Web users, effectively showing themselves to be ‘portfolios’ for developers or sites of interest only to the digerati being passed off as the next ‘big thing’?

Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these directions, provided that we appreciate it and that we don’t get ourselves so tied up in having the joy of having a Web 2.0 site that we miss the point of what the site is supposed to be doing.

And so on to  http://omegle.com/ .  To save you the job of visiting, it’s a chat site that allows you to talk to….total strangers anonymously.  Yes, a technology that trumpets the fact that it facilitates communications between individuals the world over now allows stranger to speak unto stranger.  Maybe I’m a bit hard on this site, but to me it encapsulates so much of what is wrong with some of the more over-hyped Web 2.0 applications.  It’s no doubt regarded as ‘cool’ and ‘clever’ by some; it’s essentially pointless, does little that can’t be done elsewhere.  It’s almost ‘out of character’ for the original aim of Web 2.0 – to facilitate communication and interactivity.  After all, anonymous communications are not that useful for most things.  And you have to admit that talking to randomly selected anonymous people is pretty surreal.  Assuming that the people on the other end are real people and not just ‘bot’ programs….

So…are we heading for Web 2.0 shark jumping in 2010?  And why is it important? 

Well, shark jumping almost always precedes the demise of the TV show.  And it would be a shame if the good stuff that the interactive web has bought us were to be drowned under a wave of over-hyped nonsense.

I am currently tinkering with a phpBB3 installation for a forum I ran until the summer of this year – Coffeehouse Chat. I shut the site down in the summer, but am now contemplating opening it up again. However, I want to try a few new things out on the site, including some ‘embedded content’ where I include content generated elsewhere on my site in forum posts and pages.

The easiest way to do this seemed to me to be use the HTML IFRAME tag, but I wanted to do this within the context of Forum posts, and didn’t want to get in to having to create separate template pages for these special pages within Forum threads. I therefore decided to use BBCode tags and use those to code IFRAME tags.

There are always warnings about implementing any form of BBCode that can in principle allow a user to put code from another site dircetly in to your page – and quite rightly so. However, I felt reasonably comfortable about the approach I was going to take, as rather than make available a ‘generic’ BBCode version of an IFRAME tag, I was going to create a series of BBCodes that would only insert an IFRAME tag with a pre-specified URL and other attributes in to the page.

The approach was as follows:

Install the code that I wanted to run in the IFRAME within a sub-directory on my web server.

Tweak that code so as to run within a window that would fit comfortably within the space available for a conventional phpBB forum post.

Within the phpBB administration screen, create a new BBCode to generate an IFRAME specific to the application in the sub-directory.  For example:

Here I decided that to add my game of ‘Battleships’ to a page I would simply create a BBCode tag called [battleships].

Write the corresponding HTML code that will be inserted in the page when the phpBB is encountered.  In this case, it’s as follows:

Because the URL is pre-set to a location within my own site, there is no problem if users of the Forum choose to use the BBCode on their own posts within the Forum.

The BBCode command can thus be placed on any page and brings in content generated from the predefined URL. I’ve used this approach to embed some Javascript applications in Forum posts, and it works very well as a means of delivering customised content within posts.

I’m currently renovating a site of mine - Coffeehouse Chat - with a possible view to re-opening the Forum side of it with new and improved features – including better integration with Social Media and User Blog hosting on the site.  And there was the issue – I wanted to install WordPress-MU – the multi-user edition of WordPress – in such a ways so as to support user blogs in sub-domains on the main site domain – e.g. something like joesblog.blogs.coffeehousechat.co.uk

This is a two stage process that is outlined in the documentation.  the first part is the setting of Wildcards in the DNS settings for the server, and the second part is installing a .htaccess file that actually handles the processing of the redirected incoming requests.

Installing the .htaccess file is nice and easy.  the file is below – it comes with WordPress-MU named as htaccess.dist – simply put it in the directory containing the WordPress sofwtare and rename it to .htaccess.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase BASE/

#uploaded files
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/$ index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*wp-content/plugins.*
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/(.*) wp-content/blogs.php?file=$2 [L]

# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.*/wp-admin$
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule . - [L]
RewriteRule  ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-.*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule  ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

So in my case – WordPress-MU installed in a folder called blogs – this file goes in to that folder.

Now, the second part – the Wildcard DNS settings.  Some time ago when I set up an installation of WordPress-MU I had to get my hosting comapny to deal with this for me.  However, this time, a little advice from Samuel at Prime Hosting showed me how to set it up from within cPanel, so I’m going to share that with you here.  If you’re not using cPanel, there may be other ways in your own control panel to do this.

In my installation, WordPress-MU is installed in a fodler called blogs off the root of my public_html directory.  I have set up a subdomain – blogs.coffeehousechat.co.uk – to point to it, so that when a user enters this domain they go to the blog create / sign in page.  Now, after checking that this worked happily, I logged in to cPanel for the coffeehousechat.co.uk domain and selected the ‘Subdomains’ control from the Domains panel.

Now the cunning bit…note that this may not work for you in complicated web site set-ups where multiple redirects are involved – but it worked for me.

In the ‘Create a Subdomain’ box, (below) enter ‘*’ as the subdomain name – giving *.coffeehousechat.co.uk in my case – and enter the folder on the server where you want things to redirect to as the ‘Document Root’ – in my case public_html/blogs.

Once this is entered, press the create button.  The grid at the foot of the screen should be updated to reflect teh changes just made:

And that is that! 

A user entering, say, www.test.blogs.coffeehousechat.co.uk will be directed to that blog if it exists, or be prompted to create it.

I’m currently doing some development work using ASP.NET against an Oracle database.  I have to say that I’ve had more frustrating development experiences, but most of those involved mainframe computers or…oh yes….Visual BASIC 6.0 against Oracle.  Just what is it about Oracle and Microsoft?  Gah!

Anyway – rant over.  In this piece I’d like to share a few useful tips for developing with ASP.NET and Oracle if you’re used to developing with ASP.NET and SQL Server.  There’s nothing magic here, and I’m no expert, but hopefully these pointers might assist anyone else in the position that I’ve found myself in!

Identity Fields

One thing that looks missing from Oracle in the first instance is the ‘Identity’ field that is often used a Primary key field in SQL Server.  It IS possible to implement this in Oracle – one has to use what’s called a ‘Sequence’ and either include a trigger on the ID field of the table to give you the sequence number added automatically or remember to add it via the INSERT command:

CREATE SEQUENCE table_seq
    MINVALUE 1
    MAXVALUE 999999999999999999999999999
    START WITH 1
    INCREMENT BY 1
    CACHE 20;

This generates a sequence called table_seq, starting at 1, incrementing by 1 each time, and going up to a VERY large number!  The CACHE 20 line tells Oracle to generate a cache of 20 values from the sequence.  To use this sequence after creation, you can access it via an INSERT command as follows:

INSERT INTO datatable
(id, name)
VALUES
(table_seq.nextval, 'Joe Pritchard');

the ‘id’ field is the PK field of the table, and the table_seq.nextval gets the next value from the sequence.  To create a truly ‘auto incrementing’ PK field, you create a trigger on the table:

create trigger datatable_trigger
before insert on datatable
for each row
begin
select table_seq.nextval into :new.id from dual;
end;

Run this and then you can add a new row to the table without specifying the id field:

INSERT INTO datatable
(name)
VALUES
( 'Joe Pritchard');

Boolean Fields

Oracle doesn’t support them.  the best approach I’ve found is to have an integer field and treat 0 as false and 1 as true.  This then works well with ASP.NET checkboxes.  For example:

<asp:TemplateField HeaderText=”Is Admin.” SortExpression=”IsAdministrator” > 

<ItemTemplate > <asp:CheckBox runat=”server” ID=”IsAdministrator” Text=’<%# Bind(“IsAdministrator”) %>‘ Checked=’<%# Bind(“IsAdministrator”) %>‘ />  

</ItemTemplate>
 </asp:TemplateField>

Don’t forget the provider Name

When setting up a SQLDataSource control, don’t forget to specify the provide Name in the ConnectionString.  If you do, the error message obtained is not exactly meaningful at first glance, referring as it does to Unicode!  

<asp:SqlDataSource ID=”SqlDataSource1″ runat=”server” ConnectionString=”<%$ ConnectionStrings:ConnectionString %>“ ProviderName=”<%$ ConnectionStrings:ConnectionString.ProviderName %>“

This also requires you to specify the Provider in the ConnectionString:

 < add name=“ConnectionString“ connectionString=“Data Source=www.myserver.co.uk;User ID=jp;Password=test;Unicode=True“ providerName=“System.Data.OracleClient“/>

Watch table and field name lengths

This can be extremely frustrating.  And I mean extremely!  If you are likely to find yourself explicitly specifying the table name and the field name in a SELECT statement, for example, then the combained length MUST NOT exceed 30 character (this includes the ‘.’ separating table and field – so keep table and field names as short as is practicable.

Quote marks around table and field names

When putting SQL statements together for use by SQLDataSource or other ASP.NET controls that use the OracleClient provider, don’t forget to surround the Oracle field and table names with quotation marks:

SELECT "id", "name" FROM "names"

or

SELECT "names"."id", "names"."name" FROM "names"

Parameter Handling

If you are using Parameters with a SQLDataSource control, don’t forget that the OracleClient uses a colon instead of the ‘@’ sign:

DeleteCommand=’DELETE FROM “moad_agrippa_users” WHERE “UserID” = :UserID’

The other thing to note is that the parameter does not require quotation marks around it.

I hope this piece has been useful – it will act as an aide-memoire for me the next time I come back to work on Oracle / ASP.NET sites!

I just came across this on my Twitter feed – a reference to a ” ‘Future of the web’ Turtle” at Open 09.  Yup – a turtle.  After some Googling about and learning more than I ever wanted to know about our green, aquatic co-travellers on Planet earth, I eventually went to the Open 09 web site where I found the following:

“And in the true spirit of social media, the content of the sessions will be decided by the delegates contributing to what will happen on the day via the OPEN 09 blogs. The blogs are the virtual spaces where the themes for sessions – we’re calling them ‘Turtles’ – will be debated and decided. We’ll be adding more Turtles that focus on particular areas of the creative industries.”

Ahhh…that explained it.  A blog for a session / seminar.  Cool.  So why call them turtles?  This seems to be an increasing habit amongst the more bleeding edge practitioners of web development to create a new (and often meaningless) lexicon to describe what they do.

Sorry, guys, but this is the sort of meaningless jargonny media-waffle that just produces an exclusive air around a lot of these sorts of events.   My own impression is that the same people attend the round of conferences and seminars, chucking ideas around, hatching turtles, but rarely communicating what the Hell is actually happening to the rest of the world.

I earn my crust through web and software development.  As I said to a potential client / colleague yesterday – I’m a ‘meat and potatoes’ sort of developer.  My clients expect me to deliver reliable, working systems within budget that add value to their business.  For many businesses, Social Media is still something that swallows up their bandwidth rather than adds to the bottom line, and I’m not sure that this sort of jargon helps us get any sort of message across.

My view of jargon is that it’s used by people of a shared culture to reduce the amount of communication necessary to get a particular concept over to their co-practitioners in an agreed form.  This fad simply makes it looks like we’re trying to keep these sorts of events as ‘parties for the cool kids only’ and that cannot be good. 

Or that we’re trying to hide the fact we have nothing relevant to give businesses – which is even worse.

Many moons ago I posted a piece on here - ‘Am I a twit not to twitter’.  Well, I’ll admit it.  Yes, I was a twit not to Tweet, and I’m happy to say that.  I can’t argue with objective facts, so here’s my brief thoughts on what converted me.  Just in case anyone wishes to follow me, I’m on twitter, funnily enough, asJoePritchard.  Serious lack of imagination there but no excuse for missing me! 

So, here are my hints and observations from a beginning Twit!  There are plenty of articles around with more detailed hints and tips of how to use Twitter, and I’m not going to re-hash what’s said elsewhere.  These observations are my personal thoughts and insights, for what they’re worth, as to how I found that Twitter could be useful.

Two Way Street

I think the first thing that I learned about twitter (or rather had it pointed out to me) was that it’s a two way street; if you want people to follow you you need to follow people, and that you need to have an idea of what you want to gain from Twitter.

Identify what you want

Apart from keeping up with your friends and colleagues, I’ve found Twitter invaluable for getting a good newsfeed from sites of interest.  In fact, I’ve found it a better proposition than RSS feeds.

Use a Twitter Client

When I first tried Twitter out, I used the Twitter web interface to use the Twitter service. It didn’t work well for me – so this time I decided to try out a couple of dedicated Twitter applications.  I have Twhirl and Tweetdeck installed and they’ve both made using Twitter on a regular basic much easier – I just leave them running quietly in the background, they dynamically update, and they make it a pleasure to Tweet.

Think of it as less intrusive MSN

I’ve actually used Twitter as a form of MSN with some people – it’s more spread out in time than a typical MSN conversation, more compact than Email and certainly doesn’t clutter my inbox with lots of short mails.

Use it for promotion

I’ve recently re-activated this Blog and integrated it with both Twitter and Facebook, and have been studying the referral logs to see where blog referrals are coming from.  There does appear to be a fair amount of traffic from Twitter.  A recent event I participated in – ActionForInvolvement’s Climatewalk - made significant use of Twitter in the run up to the event to promote it and encourage re-tweeting about the event.  Again, I gather that the results were well worthwhile!

If you need to, run multiple accounts

I was considering tweeting on behalf of my business from within my ‘personal’ Twitter account but I’ve decided to set up a separate account for the business.  The reason?  People following my business may not be very interested at all in everything else I do.  Let’s call it ‘brand protection’ – I want my business brand and my ‘JoePritchard’ brand to be different entities online.  Whilst folks who know me will know that I run ‘em both, the separation will be useful for business connections who I really don’t want in my personal life – and vice versa!

Be picky in following and blocking

Spam has certainly increased on Twitter.  When someone follows me, I’ve got Twitter configured to mail me.  I always go and check out their profile, and then determine first of all whether to block or not.  Folks who look like spammers always get reported; if someone seems to be mainly pedalling MLM or just looks ‘dodgy’ in terms of their content or places linked to – again, block ‘em.  I can’t understand why American High School kids of either sex can think that I can be interested in reports of their weekends drinking or shopping and don’t bother completing any parts of their profile  - sorry guys, you get blocked.  I know this sounds arrogant of me, but I want followers who know me or who are interested in what I say or consider that I somehow add value for them.  If you are a US High School kid who IS interested in what I say, then let me know – but have something of interest to me on your profile, somewhere!  In return, when I follow, I want to be following people that I know, am interested in or who add value to my online life by introducing me to new stuff or ideas.  Twitter does seem to encourage the ‘numbers game’ in people.  I prefer quality.

And that’s that – I’m going to start using Twitter Lists shortly and will let you know how I get on.  And then there’s the API stuff….watch this space.

One of my interests is in GIS systems – Geographical Information Systems – and other aspects of computerised and online mapping.  Thanks to Googlemaps, it’s been possible for developers to create map-driven applications for nothing – Google allows access to their mapping infrastructure free for many applications, and it’s brilliant.  To anyone who hasn’t taken a look or had a play, have a look at Google Maps and for you programming types out there, take a look at the Google Maps API.

Now, what really peeves me as a UK citizen is that our own Ordnance Survey – the folks who make maps – haven’t got any facility for getting hold of mapping data free of charge.  I am aware of a rather scrappy ‘trial set’ of data that is available for use with GIS systems, but honestly – the OS was traditionally funded by the UK Government and it is only in recent years that it has been spun off.  It should not be beyond the capabilities of the current Government – who’ve always whined about innovation and creativity being a driving force of British business – and the OS to make available a system similar to the Google Maps one using UK Centric OS data, at negligible cost to software developers and end users, to actually make it easier for the development of geographically based applications on the Web, on the Mobile Internet and on our desktops.

But it hasn’t happened yet.  And this morning I find out about the ‘Geovation’ project - a project to attempt to generate innovative ideas based on the use of geographical data and concepts.  Hey, it’s supported by the OS!  I can see nothing on the site that suggests that there’s any OS data available to play with – indeed I think the only data set mentioned is Google Maps!

To be honest, this is shaping up to be an astonishing lost opportunity for the Ordnance Survey – they could have leveraged this project by making data or even some sort of API available at a reasonable cost for small businesses  or zero cost for non-commercial development and research.  It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen – I get the impression they’re going to lurk around picking up good ideas from people and then take them back and see what money they can make from them.

I may be wrong on all counts – I genuinely and sincerely hope I am, and that there is a nice, cheap, API and full UK dataset out there waiting to support companies and individuals looking at the Geovation Challenge.  Why do I think there isn’t, though?

Well, both Microsoft and Google have stated that they’re adding the capability to search Twitter feeds in real-time to their search engines.   What does this mean to us mere mortals who tweet and search?

The example that I’ve seen given about the usefulness of Real Time Search (RTS) is to do with skiing – not a topic close to my heart, or one which I know much about.  My knowledge stops at things strapped to your feet and the requirement for snow…  Anyway, the example given is that you Google your favourite ski resort and along side the nromal search results returned by Google, there would also be a number of relevant, recent Tweets, that could, for example, include information about current conditions on the slopes.  The Tweets will appear based on their content or, if the Tweeter has set their account up accordingly, the location from which the Tweet has been made (geocoded Tweet).  On a purely technical basis, this is quite something.  The hamsters powering Google’s server will be running around in their wheels like crazy…

There has been an add in available for a while for Firefox using Greasemonkey that does something similar, and the effect is pretty cool, although I’m yet to be convinced about the value of most Tweets in terms of conveying information meaningful to alot of people, except in a few sets of circumstances. 

As for the importance of this combination of Tweets and Search Engine results, it’s pretty early in the game to tell but I have my own concerns and thoughts on the issue that I’ll share here.  And then in a few months time I can come back and either pat myself on the back or quietly remove this post…

Privacy

A little while ago I published this item – ‘Google and The Dead Past’ in which I commented on the convergence of search technologies – Search Engine, Twitter and Facebook being three data sources – and expressed a fear that we might be moving very slowly towards a form of voluntary surveillance society, where our regular use of Social Networks  would result in much of our lives being available for review on search engines in near real-time if we weren’t careful.  Well, we now have Tweets being folded in to the Search mix; I assume that it won’t belong before Twitpics get included, and then if Facebook open up their API to facilitate searching,  my comments in that article are coming closer to reality!

Of course,  just as with standard Search Engine manegemnt on a website, it is posisble to exclude your tweets form this search.  Google have had a few gremlins with this, but they’re getting there, and it’s likely that, were they ever to join the party, Facebook would do the same thing. Whether people would avail themselves of these tools is another matter.

Relevance

Just how the search engine’s ranking system will be applied to Tweets is an inetersting question.  For example, Google’s Pagerank algorithm relies on many things, including links to a page, links from it, the nature of the links, etc.  as well as content.  This is simply not going to work on Tweets, so it’s safe to assume that some other form of relevance rating will be used.  And Bing will have something totally different – as will any other Search Engine involved in searching Tweets.  I am forced to wonder how relevant the results of Real Time Search will be.  Obviously it will improve with time, but so will the ability of spammers to game the system.

Perspective

Those of us old enough to remember the TV news reports of the Falklands War in 1982 would remember that events could happen in the South Atlantic a good few days before we saw it on the news.  By the time of the First Gulf War, CNN was reporting on events as they happened from it’s own reporters and within hours from the wider military theatre of operations.  By the Second Gulf War, in 2003, there were journalists embedded with infantry units carrying satellite phones and digital cameras and literally reporting on ongoing fire-fights.  It’s been said that the Falklands were reported from the point of view of the Government, the First Gulf War from the point of view of the generals and the Second Gulf War from the perspective of an infantry Platoon leader or tank commander.

The result is that whilst the Platoon Leader point of view gives us immediacy, it allows no time for contemplation of wider issues.  And the immediate perspective of one person in a large news event, for example, can give a very distorted view.  I very much expect that Tweets in search result could easily give rise to ‘firestorms’ of rumour that flare up and then get corrected within minutes.  What impact this will have on news gathering and the general emotional health of people doing searches on new stories – to be seeing a view of the world that is from the bottom up, changing every few minutes, I’m not sure.  Whilst this sort of immediate citizen journalism is great in theory I’m not sure that it’s good in practice;  tweets available to all on a Real Time Search might manipulate the news as much as report it.

So…Real Time Search important?  Conceivably yes – but perhaps in the wrong way.