MomoSho: Mobile technology: art or science?

The second Mobile Monday Shoreditch (and my first). I think Helen (@technokitten) is aiming for these sessions to have an edgier, less corporate feel than the bigger Mobile Monday London events. The sofas for the panel certainly made it feel more intimate — and there were many fewer suits in the audience than at the typical Momolo. I’ll be coming back!

Vic Keegan

http://www.victorkeegan.com/ @vickeegan

• used to write technology for the Guardian
• now focussing on poetry and other creations
• http://www.shakespearesmonkey.com
  
  • been going for 15 years!
  • still hasn’t come up with any poetry :-)
• SMS poetry competition at The Guardian
  
  • got people writing who had never written a poem before
• artwork in Second Life & Inworldz
  
  • re-enacting Da Vinci’s Last Supper with avatars of women
  • garden with artistic trees

Alfie Dennen

@Alfie

• QR codes feel clunky
• Layar is pretty but do you use it after the first couple of times?
• Google Glasses
  
  • hipster nightmare - being followed by a million bots
• bionic contacts
  
  • closer than you think: a man already has an electronic camera eye!
• makies
  
  • can extend with arduino & raspberry pi
• the whole of human history has been about craft
  
  • we’ve stopped crafting in the last couple of generations
  • 3D printing may be bringing this back
• Bus Tops
  
  • computer art in local context
  • project unfortunately coming to an end
• Big Art Mob
  
  • attempt to catalogue all public art in the world
• Street Ghosts
  
  • take pictures of people from street view and paint them on the wall of the actual place
• mobile is more an extension of computing into ubiquitous technology than anything different by itself

Panel

• Chair: Helen Keegan, @technokitten
• Vic Keegan
• Alfie Dennen
• Andrew Bennet: Mobile Lead @ Burberry
• James Nash: Symbian > Nokia > Accenture / Developer > UX @c1rrus
• Brett King: Head of Tech @ a•mo•bee

Creativity

• AB: agile & lean seem to get rid of creativity - it’s seen as waste
• JN: coding is creating too, not just visual
• BK: anyone can create something now
• AD: it normally just starts with a stupid idea!
• BK: always looking to innovate within boundaries
  
  • would love to start with just a crazy idea but would probably get lynched!
• JN: boundaries & constraints often inspire creativity
  
  • demoscene, 5K awards
• AB: a creative person should know their tools
  
  • just coming up with an idea and having no idea how to make it doesn’t work as well

Alfie: “All mobile art is shit!”

• AD: the art for mobile should involve using the sensors that make mobile different from desktop — otherwise just digital art
• VK: not completely true: using a phone to draw & zoom in to add detail
  
  • also poems made for phones — short and fit the screen
• JN: Japan has lots of book written for and on mobiles
  
  • Jürgen Scheible mobispray: virtual spray can using a projector and an N95
• AB: for me, art is in a room with lighting
• BK: guy using darts to recreate a Jackson Pollock style piece of artwork that others can join in to create

Creativity

• BK: iAd platform hooking into gestures & gyroscope
  
  • improving engagement
  • recent project — recreating a universe with gyroscope: achieved 90s engagement per unit
• AB: brand slickness can get in the way of creativity — afraid to show things internally without making the UI slick
• JN: a lot of people have a hard time imagining low-fi mockups as the real thing

Ilicco Elia: has anyone seen any decent mobile ads?

• Mobile is like TV advertising at the beginning — started as presenters reading out adverts on air
  
  • seems to be web ads squeezed down into mobile screen
• JN: South Korea — lunchtime sun sculpture
  
  • at noon, the shadows made a QR code that gave you a voucher
• BK: hooking in to where am I and what is my context?
  
  • how can consumers create content that feeds into the campaign?
• AB: don’t want banners — haven’t clicked on one for years
  
  • create a service, a site, an app that does something useful to engage people
• VK: people don’t want banners on mobile
  
  • location-based advertising full of potential — and will be full of potential for years to come…

What in the last week, created by mobile that stuck in your head?

• AB: lenticular image, move the device to see around
• AD: art spotter
  
  • not focussed on selling stuff
• JN: robot game that just looked so beautiful
• BK: creatives project — james alloban
  
  • using your voice to select objects and create art

Social input?

• HK: Tracey Moberly — artwork from instagram
• AD: Normalize: the de-instagrammer app
• BK: ascii art through twitter — playing out a car journey
• VK: making art out of the spare bandwidth in QR codes
• HK: social is reinvigorating arts & crafts
  
  • we can share the learning — it’s on the internet
• JN: open source & creative commons
  
  • created an open source RPG with various international collaborators

some of the best art comes from taking a poke at society

• harder in mobile? squandered due a need to monetize
  
  • flashmobs one counterexample
• HK: rich people sponsoring art?
• VK: certainly, but other sources of revenue available
  
  • last column in Guardian: can you make an app cheaply?
  • cost £300 in total
  • profit share is an alternative (Ed: but still profit driven)
• JN: lot of people just create stuff for fun or a hobby
• AD: technology has decimated artistic creativity
  
  • artists left behind by technological development
  • arts trying to address it through Digital R&D fund
  • trying to retrain visual artists digitally
  • my projects funded by people who will give me money for them!
  • starting with friends
• BK: technology is not expensive, ideas are free, the hurdle is learning
  
  • “just learn enough to get you over the next hurdle”

gamification & serious games?

• AD: Jane McGonagall turns the whole world into a game
  
  • academically led premise
• AB: contextual tips as you’re playing are a great way to learn
• VK: toby roland games manufacturer
  
  • learning maths by playing a game — http://mangahigh.com & http://king.com
  • people need to learn to pay again…
• AD: game where you play a real guitar at the device to progress (Rock Prodigy?)

BarCampLondon6: The Guardian Open Platform

Simon Willison @simonw (at Guardian since October last year)

Context — stuff available before the Guardian Open Platform

http://guardian.co.uk is built and runs on a completely custom CMS called R2. This was built recently as an 18 month agile project supported by ThoughtWorks. It’s written in Java, using Spring to hold things together.

Everything on the Guardian site is based on tags (you can see the tags as headings in the right had column). These tags are a controlled vocabulary, created and maintained under editorial control.

Every page that is not an article is almost completely controlled by tags. You can visit a tag home page (like http://guardian.co.uk/technology) and by default it will show a bunch of articles appropriate for that tag. Alternatively, editors can take control of a tag page to highlight articles etc.

The system also supports “tag combiner pages” — pages showing articles from multiple tags, like http://guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change. These are generated in exactly the same way as the single tag pages but will have fewer articles due to the extra filtering.

In addition, any tag page can generate its own RSS feed — just add /rss to the end of the URL. RSS feeds are full fat, sometimes with ads, but their Ts & Cs are currently for personal use only.

What is the Open Platform?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

The new Open Platform allows for commercial use of the Guardian content. The Guardian have made everything available to which they have full rights (so no third party feeds and no content with restricted rights from freelancers). This includes full articles, audio and video (the audio and video is not served directly through the API but it provides enough metadata to link to it). There are currently around 700,000 articles stretching back at least a decade and sometimes longer.

The commercial terms seem reasonable and practical: you can build an interface that links to content on the Guardian web site for free, but it you want to publish the content on your own site then you’ll have to display Guardian adverts alongside it. This works for the Guardian too — they already get orders of magnitude more readers on their web site than their print circulation, and anything that increases their online advertising placement is therefore a good thing.

They have also built an API explorer (with a UI modelled on Firebug) that allows you to play with the data and discover the requests you’d like to make. All the data is URL based, with each article having a web URL (its location on the Guardian web site), a data URL (its location in the Open Platform API) and multiple tag URLs. The other entry point is the search URL, where you can search by text, tags and various dates.

Data is returned by default in a structured XML document, but you can switch this to JSON using the explorer UI. There’s also an ATOM feed available by appending &format=atom to the URL — this data is the least rich at the moment, but easier to feed into other services like Yahoo Pipes.

The explorer makes it easy to browse the content — following links between articles and filtering any searches by picking out tags. Each search returns not just articles with full metadata, but also a section detailing the tags of all the articles in the search. In the tag data you get the number of articles in the search with each tag — so it’s easy to see how further filtering will affect your search results.

At the moment, the results only list topic tags, but there are also contributor tags and other kinds — all editorially chosen, and selected as interesting topics. For example, not every MP has their own tag, just those that show up in the news. The other kinds of tags will be added to the API shortly. These tags strike me as one of the most useful areas of the API — essentially the Guardian have built up an ontology of topics and they’re making it available for free. As far as I understand, if you use the tags but not the content (or at least link to any content on the Guardian website) then you don’t even need to put Guardian adverts on your site (this may be totally wrong — I haven’t read the Ts & Cs in full yet).

The Open Platform site has some examples on it already — the one that Simon Willison highlighted was a Stamen project: http://guardian.apimaps.org allows you to annotate Guardian articles with geo data (which isn’t built in by the Guardian yet) — then view the results on a map.

The Data Store

http://guardian.co.uk/data-store

As well as the content of the articles themselves, the Guardian have opened up some of the data that they use to prepare them. They have a team dedicated to collecting and updating various statistics from bird populations to government budgets and everything in between. The team is putting this data online and available as Google Spreadsheets — currently there are over 100 (up from 86 at launch).

Some of this data is the result of weeks of effort from the Guardian team — the sheet of government data by department was so impressive that the Cabinet Office called and said they’d like a copy as they couldn’t get the data themselves! All the data is vetted and has been published in the newpaper, so you can be reasonably confident of its accuracy.

New data is regularly published on the Data Store blog and the Guardian is trying to build up a community of data wonks around it. Already some people are getting involved, taking the data and doing new things with it — see various examples at http://ouseful.info such as pulling in the MP expenses spreadsheet into IBM’s Many Eyes visualisation system. Previously published data is also being regularly updated by the Guardian team — Simon Rogers has pledged to keep updating various of the data sets he has created.

BarCampLondon6: Intro

This is easily the slickest, best organised Barcamp I've ever been to. The Guardian offices are amazing and perfect for a barcamp format, the food is not only very tasty but nutricious too (fresh broccoli & sugar snap peas make a welcome change), and the talks are, as usual, mind expanding.

The new Guardian offices in Kings Place (behind King's Cross and St Pancras stations) are truly a treat. They overlook the canal on two sides and make full use of the view. There are large glass windows in all the rooms -- if they don't look out onto the water, they have a view of the full height, glass atrium up the centre of the building. Unlike Barcamp London 3 at Google, all the rooms are right next to one another and you can see most of the people most of the time. Kings Place is also a new arts venue, with folk music, jazz or classical most nights -- I look forward to seeing more of it.

The only small niggles are the lack of space around the session grid (I'm sure there are pictures on Flickr of the crowd) and a possible lack of comfy furniture. The bean bags at previous Barcamps and similar events I've been on have been fantastic for encouraging a laid-back atmosphere -- here there are plenty of chairs but the floor is a bit hard. It feels a little more formal but that isn't a completely bad thing. I'm not sure how it worked for those sleeping over as I'm heading home for a proper night's sleep.

I've kept notes on several of the talks I've attended and I'll post them shortly, but I want to say thanks to the organisers for doing a fantastic job. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's sessions.