I spent this past weekend at Bar Camp London 2 - It was a very worthwhile weekend, though I got no sleep. My favourite talks were a "we'll answer any questions" panel, and the accessibility panel.
It's also left me feeling inspired to make some webapps. Watch this space..
Went to see starlight express at the new wimbledon theatre the other day. It was ... different. I enjoyed it, but the idea of trains being in love with carriages was just a bit .. odd.
It made me wonder how scary it is inside the mind of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Though, I have to say, the skimpy outfits some of the female "carriages" were wearing were ... interesting. The general consensus amongst the group I went with seemed to be that Rusty should have run off with Dinah, rather than that slutty Pearl.
The journalism trade magazine, Press Gazette has closed down after 41 years in operation. I've had dealings on and off with them since 1998 when I was working for their parent company. I wrote the system their web site runs on and I currently host their website. All their staff have been made redundant with immediate effect.
Any one of you who ends up catching this, good luck finding new jobs.
Update: This article indicates that Press Gazette is perhaps not an ex-parrot. For my part, I have had contact with the MD, who has promised that hosting bills will be paid and that I am to continue hosting the website, which does look positive. So far as I understand it though, all the editorial staff were made redundant.
I've been meaning to become more formal about the MVC idea for a while. I've been loosely following the idea in my own programming for a while, but trying out a framework has been long due.
I did briefly try Ruby on Rails, because all the cool kids use that. However, it has the disadvantage in being in a language I am not especially familiar with. This slowed my progress and I kept ending up with more pressing things to do than spend time learning Ruby (I'm sure I'll get around to it real soon now).
Anyway, I just started a new temporary contract this week, with Draft London (seems like a decent place to work on first impression, at least the people seem nice). They're using Cake, which has been heavily inspired by Rails, but is in PHP (a language with which I am much more familiar with than Ruby).
I had been meaning to try cake out, but it had been on my to-do for a couple of months. I was a little concerned that I might spend the first day of my contract with little productivity due to learning a framework. So much for that. I learned the basics of the framework, and made the model and controller for a simple calendaring app in about 4 hours. I can see this cake being a major boon to my productivity....
Recently, due to an abundance of spare time, I have spent some time using social bookmarking sites, such as digg and reddit, amongst others.
Out of the ones I have tried, reddit seemed to provide more useful and interesting content than the others which I had investigated. However, there is room for improvement. One of the problems I have seen in general with the "web 2.0" social collaborative model and has been noted by many people is the prevalence of groupthink. Dictionary.com provides the defition of groupthink as being:
As much as I dislike groupthink, I think it affects every one of us. As someone who considers myself "slightly left of centre" politically, I choose, for example, to purchase the Independent in the morning as opposed to any other paper. Another paper may present news in a way attuned to people with another point of view. Another paper may present news in such a way that I don't end up thinking that anyone who thinks differently than me on various issues is not morally or intellectually inferior to me.
I find it somewhat amusing that some of the people on reddit (mostly American liberal agnostics or atheists) seem to think that their chosen social bookmarking site has not fallen into the groupthink trap. I regularly see even reasonable dissenting views way down into the minus points. I regularly see those with religious beliefs lambasted without any dissenting views (or that those views are again, moderated into nothingness).
I see things like this meaning that eventually, the only types of people who will post dissenting views on sites like these will be those who are trolling for a reaction. These types of people will generally be voices of extreme dissent (or attempting to appear as such to get attention). These kinds of challenges to ideas only reinforce peoples current viewpoints, as they are "proof that everyone who thinks differently is a silly nazi/commie/neocon/liberal/christian/muslim/atheist" (delete as appropriate).
A question that I have begun to ask myself is whether there is really a decent way of building a community of this type that defeats groupthink, and whether the result of that would produce a community that people would actually be willing to participate in. Although I have not been involved for long at all, it seems that reddit has made several attempts at using technical and social measures to try to minimise groupthink. I think, however, that the model with which reddit and digg choose to rate their stories is implicitly vulnerable to groupthink. The only way to stop groupthink using "upvote, downvote" bookmarking systems is to encourage the users to act in the spirit of the system, using upvote and downvote to denote whether a story or a comment is an interesting point of view, as opposed to whether or not you agree with it.
The problem, however, with asking users to vote that way is that most people don't. If you see a story that made you angry, your automatic gut reaction is to say "this is bad" and vote accordingly. Would you, for example, give money to a political campaign you didn't want in office because you wanted to hear their point of view being put across? Asking people to vote up a story they found interesting but disagreed with is asking people to be selfless. I feel people are less likely to be selfless on the internet because they have a certain amount of anonymity (examples of the way that people talk to each other in "flame wars" should be a good example of the shield that people feel they have).
So, I have concluded that upvote/downvote to judge the quality, as opposed to the moral/political/ethical positioning of a story is unsustainable. So, here is my question.
Given the presence of opposing, but not extreme groups of sufficent size, I believe the difference in the voting patterns of those groups be used against each other in order to always show people to content that will interest and challenge them. The key lies, I think, in not automatically ranking a link by upvotes - downvotes, but to rank links individually for each user, and instead of only then providing recommendations that agree with what a user would think, also provide recommendations that would specifically disagree with what a user would think.
This would also require a mechanism for a user to show that they were disinterested in the content also. I feel this could be dealt with in one of two ways.
I think a system like this, with sufficent tuning and a large enough community could direct users to interesting content consistently after a period of training. I am, however, unsure of how successful such a system would be, as I wonder whether most people are actually comfortable having their ideas challenged. Would people retreat to the familiar groupthink?
As an experiment, I am currently building a site that will test my ideas of how this model should work. If you are interested in being involved when I get around to launching it, or have any opinions on what I have said please contact me via the contact section of this website.