Monthly Archive for June, 2008

walking vs. driving

Published
by
bru
5 monthes and 2 weeks ago
in Chaos
. 2 Comments

Today I read on WorldChanging this post about the debacle concerning the climate impacts of walking vs. driving.
John Tierney writes:

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.

Now, Karl Schroeder in the WorldChanging post linked above already scores a few points back to the walking practice but I think he’s missing the major one: where does your food come from? I don’t have any number here but I’ve this very strong feeling that practices like the 100 miles diet can help reduce our impact quite considerably, together with possibly tightening a bit our ever-loosing bound with the local territory.
Of course this is not applicable everywhere, as I guess harvesting food in antartica would be quite troublesome, and similarly growing bananas in the uk I think (again, just guessing) would be far from eco-efficient: but do we need bananas in the uk? maybe the same principles could be found in other local products, that we could produce and consume in a shorter timespan, thus saving chemical treatments, freezing, and so on.

On the run for digital ground and its value

Published
by
bru
5 monthes and 2 weeks ago
in Coffee
. 0 Comments

Plenty of news these days, but not the right time to talk about those.
Just wanted to quickly point out this thing that dawned on me now, sa I was finally having a closer look at Plurk.

Plurk, you may say, is yet another twitter clone. I like to say it’s twitter with added motion sickness, because one of the main features is this visualisation mode where you scroll messages horizontally on a timeline (btw, if you’re interested in this kind of visualization effect, have a look at the great SIMILE project).

Feba\'s timeline on plurk

The other added feature is Karma (of Slashdot’s fame), that is used to turn user’s experience in a sort of game. Higher karma means more colorful messages for you and added motion sickness fun for your readers.
All in all, a quite clever strategy to get people in, would be nice to find out if it will be able to be sticky enough and thus if it is here to stay.

So, now that the main rush has passed, today I went and tried to subscribe. Only to discover that (unsurprisingly enough, it’s three letters and pretty open to interpretations) my nick was taken. Now that’s really no big deal: I’m not particularly attached to it and in networks where 3 letters are not enough (why why why?) I use other permutations already.
The interesting thing is, that the nice brazilian girl who claimed “bru” on plurk apparently has a lot of my Italian friends now in her roster. Which, being plurk a game, is totally cool!

However, that raises a few interesting issues:
How valuable is the claiming of digital ground?
Is the whole concept of friends/followers still valid?
What happens to physical relationship metaphors when not only space and time collapse, but identities fragmentates too? People may say “I’m a friend of bru”, and being asked “yes, bru… but where?”
And maybe even Where’s the point in claiming identities, if the whole point is just connecting to more people? Just get them all!

What’s in a name, would the Poet say…..
Again, this is totally cool in a context like Plurk, but could be annoying or even awkward in other environments to find you’ve just declared your friendship with a bunch of perfect strangers :)

Oh, btw, I’m iBru there.

post BarCampLondon4

Published
by
bru
6 monthes ago
in Coffee and London
. 1 Comment

another day, somehow shorter than the first, but equally engaging.

I eventually did my small presentation, with the effect that I realized a good title for it just while presenting it. Here you can find the slides, published on google docs:

Geeky note #1: presenting in google docs is ok… for a barcamp at least. But no nifty transition and no timer yet :(

Geeky note #2: the speech was meant to generate a discussion, no demo was presented, although some code already exists and I’m looking forward to push it to github soon.

Among the conversations I participated to today:
* Distributed social network primer, Ben Ward exploring XFN and microformats
* Guy Rintoul on the geography of technology - from a pretty abstract start this one developed in a quite rich discussion on scenarios of possible future perceptions of space and place.
* Pedro’s Agile Low Cost Usability Testing - a few tools and guidelines to squeeze usability testing into “everyday life” of development projects
* Some eye tracking case studies (cool to see a Tobii output again after quite a long time :) )

Kudos to Ross Bruniges and the whole staff. This has been a great camp.
Oh, and thanks to the sponsor too: eBay’s rubik’s cube’s been keeping me busy since I jumped on the train (and will probably haunt me for the next few weeks).