But what if there was a way to automatically geotag your photos as you were taking them and with an accuracy of a few metres? What if the same tool also let you upload your photos while you were walking around town and could also provide you with good privacy options and tag suggestions? When you spotted a nice bit of graffiti or a book about superheroes, you'd be able to take a picture on the spot and have people in the area see it on the map within moments. Just like this:

I took this photo in my last trip to the US with my camphone and with just two rapid keystrokes it was being uploaded to the Internet complete with all the information needed to position it almost perfectly within the world. To get it online I used the prototype Zonetag client made by Yahoo Research Berkeley in conjunction with a portable Bluetooth GPS unit that I bought for £70 down the road. This combination of whatsits has made geotagging photographs in the wild absolutely effortless for me, and only took me ten minutes to set up. And no additional costs! It's all enormously good fun.

Which made me think that—given how much I use this stuff and how few other people I've met who know about it—this might be a suitable subject for a comprehensive online how-to guide. Which brings me to this article.

Over the next few paragraphs I'm going to work through the whole process of installing and using Zonetag and getting it working with a portable Bluetooth GPS device from beginning to end. You'll need a Nokia Series 60 mobile phone (more information on the specific makes below), a Bluetooth GPS unit (I'll recommend one further down the page) and the time to install the (free) Zonetag client. If you've got all of these things, it shouldn't take more than five or ten minutes to get you set up and geotagging your first photos in the wild. But I'm not going to skip through any part of the process so don't worry. What's below is every step in totally ludicrous and laborious detail. That way no one will have the excuse of getting lost along the way.

Introduction:
This how-to comprises four sections. The first part is about Which phones you can use with Zonetag, the second about How to install Zonetag and some of the common break-points, the third about How to use Zonetag and get the most of its functionality and the final one is How to get Zonetag working with an external bluetooth GPS device. If you've already got a version of Zonetag installed, then you can cheerfully skip straight to the fourth section right now.

Stage One: Which phones can you use with Zonetag?
The first thing you'll need to be using a Nokia Series 60 phone. I'd recommend using specifically one of the following: the 6620, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, 7610, N70 or N90 models. The really new Nokia phones running the third edition of the Series 60 software are still being evaluated for use, I'm afraid. There have been some significant changes to the security model which makes rapid prototyping a bit harder. I use the N70, which has relatively slow UI and is a bit big but is otherwise completely functional and handles this whole process really well.

Stage Two: How to install Zonetag and some of the common break-points:
Installing Zonetag on the phone is the next step and is relatively painless. It does not require you to have transitioned your Flickr account over to a Yahoo ID. You will however need a Yahoo ID to use the service. The one you use for Yahoo! Mail will do quite nicely.

I'm going to go through the whole thing in detail in a second but—just so you don't get overly intimidated—I thought I'd summarise the whole process first so you can see how simple it will be. To get Zonetag installed all you will have to do is:

• Click on "Install" on the Zonetag site and type in your name and e-mail, and then click "Agree" to the terms and conditions
• When prompted, click the button to log into Flickr and to say that you're comfortable with Flickr and Zonetag talking to one another
• Download the Zonetag client onto the phone and let it install itself
• Copy your personal authorisation number from the website into the phone to make sure they know they're allowed to talk to each other

As I've said, it's all pretty painless, but there are some special cases and some places you can get stuck, so I'll go through each of those now in a bit more detail. The first part of the process is to visit the Zonetag site and click upon 'Install' at the top of the page. You'll be presented with a page that warns you that Zonetag will keep a record of details of the particular cellphone tower that your phone was using when it took a picture. The zonetag client uses this information to suggest useful tags for you when you take a picture, and - if you want - can display this information in your Flickr tags for your photos. You can turn this feature off later if you want.

On this screen put in your first and last name and your e-mail address, tick the terms of use and click on 'I Agree' at the bottom of the page.

The next page presents you with an even easier job, particularly if you've got already got a Flickr account. Click on the 'Authorize' button at the bottom of the page and you'll be sent off to a page on Flickr where you will be asked if you're comfortable with the two sites talking to each other. Say yes and move on!

The next stage is where a lot of people come unstuck and it's normally to do with the defaults on your phone rather than anything with Zonetag itself. So at this stage, I'd recommend checking that your phone is ready to install the application and won't just reject it out of hand. To check these settings go to your phone and look for a folder called 'Tools' in your main menu. Inside that folder look for the 'Application Manager' or 'Manager' icon. I've put a picture below so you can see what menu options you're looking for:

Once you've found the Application Manager, click on it, select 'options' and 'settings' and you'll be presented with a menu upon which the first option is 'Software Installation'. This has three options - install all software, install only signed software and install no software. Make sure that 'install all software' is selected. If it is, you're now ready to continue with the installation process.

If you're based in the US, the Zonetag site (on the page you should still be on) has a feature that allows them to send you a text message with a link to the application inside it. Tell the site your number, and click on the link in the SMS that you receive. Your phone will go online and get the application and ask if you want to install it. Say yes and you're done.

If you're not based in the US, then the easiest option is probably to download the application from this URL: tinyurl.com/pygy8 via your phones web browser. Again it'll ask if you want to install the application. Say yes to finish the process.

Once you've finished installing the software on the phone, there's just one final stage. So click to get your authorisation code on the web site, and then on your phone navigate to the Zonetag application (on my N70 it's placed in a folder called 'My Own' in the main menu) and then click on the application to launch it. The first time you activate it, it'll ask you which data connection you want to use to send your photos and data to the service. Once you've chosen one, the software will prompt you for your authorisation code. Type the code that the website shows you into the phone and Zonetag has been installed.

NB. At some later point, you should go back to Application Manager and make sure that your phone is set only to install signed applications again. This helps to protect your from viruses and malware. You don't have to do this quite yet if you'd rather get on.

Stage Three: How to use Zonetag and get the most of its functionality:
Okay. So you've installed Zonetag - what's that got you so far? You should have just entered in your authorisation code, so you'll still be using the Zonetag app. You'll notice that there's a button called 'back'. If you click on that, the application will continue running on your phone in the background and be ready to do your bidding at any time. Click 'back' now. If you want to go back to Zonetag at any time you can navigate back to it through the folder called 'My Own' or—and this is a cunning Nokia trick you might not know—you can press and hold the button on your keypad which looks like a black circle and a white square caught in an existential vortex. That'll bring up the application switcher. If you want to have a play with that now, then do so, although it won't get you very much.

Now take a picture with your phone. Almost immediately after you've taken the photo a small dialogue box will appear asking you if you want to send the photo to Flickr. If you say no, it'll just disappear. If you say yes, your phone will take you to a screen where - if you want - you can add tags, or change your default options or add a title. If you don't want to do any of that, you can click on 'upload' and you're done. Your phone will start uploading the photo to the Zonetag servers and then after a few minutes it'll send the picture invisibly up to Flickr. In and of itself, I find that point, click, upload process pretty useful.

But it's worth exploring those things in a bit more detail. If when you take a picture you click on the 'add tags' button, Zonetag will present you with a whole list of things it thinks might be relevant to where you are in the world, things that it has worked out from the number of the cellphone tower you're in. Navigate up and down this list and click on the ones you think are relevant and click done when you're finished and you'll have tagged your photo in the wild.

If you really want to be hardcore, when you're exploring the suggested tags, click left and right to bring up whole new catagories of tags including things you've used before, nearby venue names and events in your area. It's all designed to make it as easy as possible for you to add useful information about your photos while you're out and about.

There are also Action tags which can do a bunch of things including rotate your photos before they get to Flickr. It's all quite smart. And if you're interested you can also change your privacy options on the picture so that your mother doesn't see all the dodgy things you've been up to. Having been to the Folsom Street Fair a couple of weeks ago, I can very much recommend using this option.

Stage Four: Using a GPS unit with Zonetag:
Okay, so you're all set up and familiar with Zonetag, now how do you get it working with an external GPS device. This is—frankly—ludicrously simple although there is one annoying thing: first you have to go out and buy a Bluetooth GPS unit.

I've so far tried two of these - both bought from Tottenham Court Road in London, but also available online in the UK and US. The Holux device that I wrote about a few months ago was pretty exciting, small and accurate, could use a standard Nokia charger or plug into your computer via mini USB which was extremely useful in terms of keeping down the number of cables and stuff I had to carry around. But I'm not entirely sure after a block of time using it that I'd recommend it. The GPS functionality is pretty solid, but the Bluetooth stuff is not. I'd often find that when I started it up the Bluetooth just didn't come online. If you look on the web you'll find some people recommending that you keep it in the freezer. Apparently this helps it work better. I'm not sure that's really the kind of way I want to live my life, and also it would be cold in my pocket so I've explored elsewhere and found one that works a bit more effectively.

Of the two I've used, I'd definitely recommend the GlobalSat BT-338. It's a little larger than the Holux and a little heavier as well, but it's still pretty tiny (see the pictures below to get some sense of scale). It uses a non-mobile-phone charger and can't use USB, but it has a staggering 18 hour battery life and it basically just bloody works. I've got better GPS accuracy than the Holux, it works in worse conditions and I've never had any trouble whatsoever with the Bluetooth. You can buy it from Amazon.co.uk or from Amazon.com or from good nerdy shops.

Right, let's assume you've got your GPS unit. Let's have a look at it quickly and see what's going on. Most of these devices (at least the screenless ones) have nothing on them but an on/off button and three lights. The top light tells you about the battery life of the device, and will glow red if the battery is low. The bottom one is normally blue and indicates if there's any bluetooth activity going on - ie. if your GPS is communicating with another device. The middle light is the most interesting. Turn on your GPS unit and go and stand outside for a few moments. The light will start off solid and green and after a few seconds will start to blink and flash. This means that it's worked out its position by using satellites in orbit and now knows where it is in the world down to a few metres and it's desperate to share that information one way or another. Literally, to get this device working all you have to do is turn it on and stand outside for a bit.

If you're interested in how it's all happening, then Wikipedia has a reasonably good page on GPS but as far as I can tell it basically works by picking up radio signals from a number of satellites and working out the delay between when they were sent and when they were received. This allows the device to determine its distance from each of the satellites. The radio signal also includes information about the satellite's current position, which allows the little GPS unit to triangulate its position anywhere in the world to within 15 metres.

Because the radio signals can't pass easily through buildings, you'll get a better signal when you're out in the open in a place without too many very tall buildings around you, but some of the newer GPS units even seem to be able to maintain a positional lock inside buildings (if you're relatively close to a wall or on the upper floors of a building. I've been very impressed indeed with the Globalsat on this front.

So you've got a functioning GPS device and a functioning version of Zonetag. You're on the home stretch. It's almost all done. Your final act is to combine the two. So start up Zonetag and click on 'Options'. Now scroll down until you see 'External GPS' and hit start. Your phone will start to look for Bluetooth devices in the neighbourhood. When if finds your GPS device, select it. If your phone prompts you for a pairing code for your GPS device (this should only ever happen once) then try 0000 if you're using the GlobalStat and then do a search online for your model number if that doesn't work.

If all this goes to plan, Zonetag will attempt to connect to your GPS unit and will then start spontaneously displaying the data that the GPS device has about your location. From now on whenever you take a picture using the camphone and tell Zonetag to upload it, the photo will appear immediately on Flickr complete with all the geo information you could possibly want - maps and everything! Enjoy!

Let's repeat that, just in case you missed it. Turn on your GPS device, turn on your phone and start Zonetags. Tell Zonetags to look for a GPS unit and when it's found yours tell it to connect. All done! Easy as pie.

Conclusion:
Anyway, that's the end of my huge tutorial on every aspect of automatically geotagging photos with your phone. I hope you've found it useful and get as much fun from wandering around the place taking pictures of places and sticking them online as I have done. I really can't recommend playing with this stuff enough. And once you've got yourself a GPS device there are all manner of other things you can start to do with it, including map software on the phone and Open Streetmap

From self-expression to mainstream media

The breadth of the Supernova mission can be seen most clearly in the sheer range of panels. A panel on self-expression and community online (featuring Ev Williams from Odeo, Caterina Fake from Flickr, Mena Trott from Six Apart and Lili Cheng from Microsoft) will be followed by a discussion of the impact of Voice over IP. This in turn will be followed by a panel on connected gaming. The following day handles, in turn, distributed business, distributed attention and an astonishingly dense lunch seminar on public policy. The conference ends with a light panel on decentralised media distribution.

But in all of this diversity, recurrent themes still appear. From the first on-stage interview between Kevin Werbach and Jonathan Schwartz, issues of authenticity and trust appeared - in this context about the trust that weblogs can foster between manager and staff. Mena Trott and Caterina Fake took these issues further, discussing what it means to hold the public's memories with services like Typepad and Flickr. Similar issues also reappeared in the panel on distributed business, where Philip Evans of the Boston Consulting Group talked about how the visibility, transparency and frequency of communications that new technologies allowed built trust and lowered transaction costs.

Another significant theme was the impact of decentralising technologies on business, and the various ways in which businesses could react. The two panels ('Applications for a Mobile, Connected World' and the Dan Gillmore-moderated 'Reinventing Media' panel) that book-ended the conference talked about the democratising pressures on media. Ev Williams' Odeo, Mike Homer's Open Media Network and Marc Canter's Ourmedia.org each showing how content creation and distribution was being pushed in radical new directions. One positive response from business was represented by Chris Anderson's now-ubiquitous conference crowd-pleaser on The Long Tail, but the policy and Voice over IP panels revealed a more neurotic side to business - a side quite happy to turn to government to stop emerging technologies eradicating their business models.

Again, these differences seemed to represent divides between the various groups that attended the conference. And these divides sometimes took on a life of their own - with the gaming group talking in terms of generation differences. At one point, Raph Koster described many of the assembled audience as dinosaurs - a statement later picked up by Ross Mayfield of SocialText, who wondered whether gaming represented a generational shift beyond the social software, networked working environment of weblogs and wikis. Perhaps Supernova could be characterised not as being a collision of cultures but instead a collision of generations - with successive stratas of technologies (broadcast, communications, networked and play) all forced to come to terms with implications of decentralisation at the same time...

Conference highlights

The conference may have thrown up some common themes, but most of the highlights were in the unexpected collisions between disciplines.

One of those highlights was a session by Byron Reeves (the author of The Media Equation on MMORPGs. He detailed a series of experiments that quantified the 'arousal' or 'fun' that people derived from multiplayer online games. And as well as coming up with useful material for organisations that develop games, the insights he described had implications for all kinds of social interaction online. He explained that people who chose their own avatar in games experienced more arousal than those who had them randomly assigned and that people react completely differently when they think they're interacting with real people online as opposed to computer-generated characters. And he revealed that differences in the richness of the media had significant impacts in the brain - with the more photorealistic imagery resulting in more direct 'mirroring'.

But it was when he started to apply some of the affordances of gaming to our other interactions online - particularly work-related ones - that things got really interesting. He detailed an instance where cancer screens had been incorporated into the career paths of doctors in the game Star Wars Galaxies and revealed that you could get comparably accurate screening from aggregating the decisions of 30 game players as you could from one skilled doctor.

"Don't underestimate fun," says Reeves. "Engagement has a demonstrable ROI."

Another revelatory session on "Continuous Partial Attention" was by Linda Stone who co-founded and directed the Social Computing Group at Microsoft. She detailed twenty-year generations of 'attention' arising as a result of a combination of technologies and social changes.

For Stone, the period between 1945-1965 represented a time where authority was trusted and where people believed that service to an institution would bring ultimate satisfaction. 1965-1985 she characterised as a reaction against those restrictions, as a time of the self and self-expression. In terms of a history of attention this represented a move from a focus on authority and service to paying attention only to things that provided opportunities.

The last twenty years Stone characterises as the era of continual partial attention, where we're reaching out for a network, desperate to feel connected after the isolation of the previous culture.

"Continual partial attention is not motivated by getting things done," says Stone. "It's about feeling connected. So here we are today, overwhelmed and overstimulated - technologies like the iPod are as much about protection as they are about individuality."

From a business perspective, probably the core paper of the conference was John Seely Brown's "The Only Sustainable Edge" about "innovation ecologies, long tails, swarms and path dependencies". The core of this talk - and the premise of a book of the same name - was about changes in business culture based around increasing specialisation, harness (often external) cultures of innovation and accellerating capability learning inside organisations.

He gave a variety of examples including Toyota's relationship with its suppliers, where they don't rely on the market alone to drive down prices and create the best opportunities, but instead build long-term relationships with suppliers that have the lowest cost (rather than price) - relationships where each party can push back and between them find better ways to drive innovation and save money. He contrasted this with the Detroit manufacturing patterns which devalue dialogue in favour of competition and always go for the manufacturer with the lowest cost, even when that results in a disincentive to innovate.

In summary

There's no space to go into everything that Supernova covers or to fully represent the territory it covers. The conference is split between so many communities that it's hardly a surprise that each is directly underserved. But there is a power in the collisions and the intersections that can be missing in many other events. I've hardly been able to touch on whole rafts of stuff - from Jeff Weiner's insights into Yahoo!'s mission and emerging products through to Greg Glaros' take on rapid innovation in the Navy. Next year, maybe finding more opportunities for collision between the communities would make it more interesting still.

On the other side of the matter is the Conservative party, who spend most of their time criticising Blair for looking smug and - as far as I can tell - just making stuff up. Their former accusation is pretty much indisputable, but it's also a bit rich when it comes from a man who honestly looks like he's had to be trained how to smile and still hasn't quite got it right yet. The rictus he perpetually exhibits is hideous and creepy - which at least suggests a certain honesty, because the tactics used by the Conservatives appear equally hideous. They're playing on the most clumsy of rabble-rousing near hate-speech: making people think about their daughters being attacked or raped by early-release prisoners and regularly playing the race card. I'm stunned that anyone could vote for them in good conscience.

And finally, you have the Liberal Democrats. I genuinely like them, I respond to their principled positions and on their decision not to engage in negative campaigning. I can see them doing very well out of this election. But on the other hand, what do they really have to lose? It's easier to be principled when you're the third party in the country. And even here there are some policies that creep me out. I've had to do my taxes for the first time this year and I hated every moment of it. Forms, complexity, nervousness, insecurity. The idea that I'd have to do another set of that stuff for some kind of local income tax as well horrifies me. Note - I'm quite happy to pay some more money, but it just seems like an enormous extra burden of paper, and fiddling and time-consuming misery.

There are a range of tools on the net that I've been using this year to try and get my head around the whole thing. One of the most useful and involving isn't really about the election at all, but more about politics in general. Political Survey 2005 is a stunning site that gets your opinions and explains how you stand in relation to the British public and to the major political parties and newspapers. If you're interested (and I guess in the spirit of full disclosure, which I hope will make it easier for people out there to properly interrogate the assumptions that I base my writing on) you can read my results - which suggest that my opinions tend towards internationalism and liberalism in social matters but also towards free market economics. On one spectrum I'm seen as being closest to Guardian and Independent readers, and on the other to people who read the Daily Telegraph. For the most part, people who answered like me have tended to say they'll vote for the Liberal Democrats. Fascinating stuff.

Another slightly less elegant site is Who Should You Vote For, which uses your opinions on over twenty explicit policy areas to work out which political party you are most likely to agree with. In my case, again, it's telling me to vote Liberal.

In terms of tracking what's going on, I'm sticking with old reliable BBC and their election coverage, in particular their poll tracker, which this morning alarms me by suggesting that there are in fact many weird-ass Conservatives in the country prepared to vote for that grinning evil. From there the next logical step is to go and find out about your constituency to get some background on what impact your vote is likely to have. My constituency is the heavily Labour and poshly-named (but slightly unpleasant) Regent's Park & Kensington North. This tells me that it's relatively unlikely that Labour won't win around here - so the question becomes whether to register a protest vote with the Liberals or stick with Labour just in case of Conservative ground-swell.

Finally, They Work for You and The Public Whip are really good places to actually find out what your current MP believes in. Karen Buck MP and I would disagree on a range of core issues, particularly ID cards and some of the more draconian anti-terrorism laws, but would agree on others. Again, I can't help thinking that a Liberal candidate might more accurately represent my opinions.

Well anyway, there you go - there's my decision exposed in all its glory as honestly as I think I can present it. Hopefully the resources I've been using will be of value to some of the rest of you out there trying to work through your own decision. And I guess we only have a few weeks now until we find out who we're stuck with for the next few years...

A buddy-list for television:
Imagine a buddy-list on your television that you could bring onto your screen with the merest tap of a 'friends' key on your remote control. The buddy list would be the first stage of an interface that would let you add and remove friends, and see what your friends are watching in real-time - whether they be watching live television or something stored on their PVRs. Adding friends would be simple - you could enter letters on screen using your remote, or browse your existing friends' contact lists.

Being able to see what your friends were watching on television would remind you of programmes that you also wanted to see, it would help you spot programmes that your social circle thought were interesting and it could start to give you a shared social context for conversations about the media that you and your friends had both enjoyed.

Obviously there might be some programmes that you might wish to view with a significant other, but wouldn't necessarily want to advertise to the rest of the world that you were watching. For this reason your personalised settings would have to have all kinds of options to help you control how you were being represented to the wider world that were as simple to use and unobtrusive as possible. Primary among the tools at your disposal would be your ability to tell your set-top box not to advertise that you were watching any shows marked as for adults only and to mark certain channels as similarly private. These settings would obviously be on by default.

Presence alerts:
One of the core functions of a socially enabled set-top box would be to create the impression of watching television alongside your peer group and friends - even if you were geographically distant from one another. One key way to do this would be to create a sensation of simultaneity - to remind you that there are other people in your social circle doing things at the same time as you. This would allow you to create a mental impression of what your friends were doing.

Here are two versions of an alert that could fade up gently onto the screen when someone on your buddy list changes channel. These alerts would work in two ways - if the person was changing channel and landed on a station as a programme was just about to begin or within the first three or four minutes of a programme, then the alert would be immediate. This would give you the opportunity to change over to that channel as well without missing too much of the show. If - however - they were changing over to a channel in the middle of a show or they changed the channel again within ten seconds, then the alert would not be sent. They would have to have been watching the new channel for a few minutes before an alert would be sent. There would be nothing more intrusive and irritating than watching someone compulsively flick between channels at a distance (except perhaps being in the room with them as they did so).

The most important part of all these alerts is that they provide you with the option to join the person concerned in whichever programme they happen to now be watching...

Watch with your friends:
Now we have the concept of joining a friend to watch a show, we have to ask what should that experience be like? How should your parallel engagement manifest itself. Traditionally, net-mediated social spaces have tended towards text as a communicative medium. But this would seem like an enormously clumsy way to interact during a television programme.

Television is an audio-visual medium and there's no reason why your engagement with your friends shouldn't also be audio-visual. For this reason a simple high quality webcam above the television would help you see how your friends were responding to what was on screen - it would help you feel an experience of shared engagement without there being a need for overt discussion. By default your conversations with your friends would be muted, and you could - of course - minimise their images if they started to get annoying, but if you wanted to shout and scream alongside your friends, then you'd simply turn the sound back on. This would be the perfect form of engagement around certain sporting events, or for making a well-known television programme or film just the backgrounded context for a shared conversation.

In the mock-up below, you can see the cameras of three of your friends on the right. One person has wandered away from their TV...

Chatting and planning:
If your friends were in the room with you during an ad break, you might chat about the programme you've just been watching or bitch about the adverts in front of you. You might turn the sound down low for a few seconds and talk about something else completely. There are lots of contexts where the programme on television might not be the main focus of activity around the television. These might be times when it's still important to have a sense of what's happening on the screen, but where the social activity has been dragged to the foreground.

Set-top box social software would have to support such engagements. So how about a second view when you're in one of these social situations? From having the programme in the foreground, one simple switch of the button could drag your friends into the limelight. The programme could be fully or partially muted, and your friends automatically unmuted. Then you could chat to each other about the programme you'd just watched, or wait for the adverts to end together. You could even use these opportunities to plan what to watch next. If this was handled in a similar way to group formation and parties in online gaming structures like Halo 2, then perhaps one person could even set up the next programme and stream it to everyone else, or cue forward to show their friends the best part of a particular dance sequence or the key quote from a political interview.

Choosing channels and playing games:
Having this technology in place under your television could create a tremendous platform for all kinds of other applications or games to be layered on top of your television experience. And these could be equally usable with people in the same room as yourself. If you gave everyone a personalised remote control (or installed universal remote control software in something like a mobile phone) then people could propose changing channels but be over-ruled by other people in the room. The wonderful browsing experience of flicking through music video channels could be turned into a game, with each song being rated on the fly by everyone present or telepresent and records kept of channels and songs that people tended to enjoy. The same controls could be hooked up to other forms of interactive television or to net-enabled functionality on the boxes themselves...

Sharing a social library:
And finally, to return to the idea of media discovery and regenerating a social context around television programming, how about if the shows that many of your friends had decided in advance to record were automatically recorded by your device too. How would it be if you never missed the show that everyone was talking about? And if you had - your box could ask its peers for some kind of swarmed download if anyone still had a copy and it could appear in your local library overnight.

All this of course, is just the very beginning of the kinds of things that you could create with a socially-enabled TV set-top box. It's all basically just extensions of stuff that we're already doing in other media. There are still technological barriers of course - bandwidth and synchronisation being core problems. But we're gradually on the way to solving them.

To repeat - If you'd like to download this piece as a simple to read and print PDF presentation then you can do so here: Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb).

Addendum:
Here are a few related links that people have brought to my attention since posting this stuff up or since I finished work on the presentation and illustrations. I'm a little cross with myself for not posting this stuff up before, but hey...

• A post on Corante on the subject of social television - infuriating how bad my timing has been...
• PARC to make TV watching more social - yet another thing posted within the last twenty-four hours
• Ivrea project on circles of care includes 'TV together' - thanks to Molly for digging this one out
• Tryst - software based on VLC designed to let people watch movies together. I couldn't get this to work very well, so I can't comment on the experience.

One area of the board that I really think could do with more rigor and more enthusiasm is around the area of science and technology. The culture is a little too heavily weighted towards philosophers, social scientists and humanities graduates at the moment, and I think it could really benefit from having other perspectives and knowledge of the kinds of innovations and developments that you can read about in publications like New Scientist or on Slashdot or Boing Boing, Pasta and Vinegar or We Make Money Not Art.

So I'm putting out a call for renaissance geeks, scientists, webloggers and technologists with a wide range of interests to come and join our little community. I'm looking for a group of twenty or thirty people who could really take hold of the Laboratory forum and push it in exciting areas - and who think they could use the extraordinary enthusiasm and multiplicity of perspectives from the rest of the board as personal inspiration.

The board's membership at the moment is highly limited and pretty much invitation-only, so if you're interested in joining then let me know by e-mail - my address as ever is tom@ and then plasticbag.org. If you could put in a few lines about the work you do and about your interest in science and technology that will make everything easier (and I'm afraid I really need people to have work or university or personal domain-name-based e-mail addresses - no gmail or hotmail ones will work). And as soon as I've got a decent number of people, I'll send out an invitiation to all of you at once.

If you are not a technologist or scientist and still want to join then don't despair. There is another approach to getting on the board at the moment as outlined in this thread: The practical facts about our new system for membership 'by invitation only'. I'm particularly keen to see people interested in art, design and fashion join up along with young film-makers and - as ever - political activists / indymedia types. But my personal preferences aren't going to stop you joining. That stuff's up to the rest of em.

"The BBC was the first British broadcaster to podcast when we made In Our Time available last year and this trial will enable us to further explore the editorial, technical and distribution issues involved."

Some of the programmes that you will be able to subscribe to include (in full or part): The Today Programme, The Reith Lectures, In Our Time, In Business, From Our Own Correspondent, Sportsweek, and Fighting Talk plus highlights and documentaries from Radio 1, 1Xtra and the World Service.

For more information see the BBC Press release and the article in Media Guardian. I'm really excited by this stuff, for a whole range of reasons personally. And with sites like Odeo on the horizon, I can't help but think this whole area's about to explode.

Anyway, my newfound love for my site, my new simple clean aesthetic (which everyone will hate) and my long-standing desire to create some kind of weblog-related swag (as was the fashion a few years ago) leads me to a fundamental desire to get some weird business cards made, through which I can show off. Unfortunately, I have an incredibly precise vision in my head - and it's of totally clear, square-cornered cards made of some substance like acetate. I want to place a few plain black words in a couple of fonts onto this shining piece of clarity and nothing more. But I can't find anywhere in London that does anything like this at all.

So I'm appealing to you - my fellow aesthetes and egomaniacs - does anyone out there know where I can get something at once so simple yet brazen and showy as a thin totally clear plastic card? Please?

Of course now there are lots of little icons and logos and buttons - mostly proprietorial - that advertise the presence of wifi, so there probably isn't the need any more. But at the time I had in my head some kind of image like the RKO pictures logo, but instead of beaming out lightning or pulses - it would instead be firing off packets into some kind of surrounding network.

Anyway, forever and a day later I find myself trying to convey an image of broadcast radio sets engaging with some kind of networked future in a useful way for a presentation and I return to the same image, and after an extraordinary amount of fiddling and arsing around come up with something fairly mediocre in execution, but interesting to me in terms of imagery...

You can download a larger version of the image here: Radio / Network hybridisation. So now I was wondering if anyone had any sense of how maybe to push it forward as an image? Or whether there was someone out there more expert in illustration than I who might be able to turn it into some kind of logo or badge or button. And - of course - I thought maybe it might be a good time to actually see if it makes any sense to people at all.

This is completely throwaway, though. Please don't think I'm taking this terribly seriously. I just knocked it up while trying to do something else and failing and thought that it might have more value being exposed in public than just sitting on my hard-drive forever.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? This is a really tricky one for me. Probably my all-time favourite book is Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 which I'll talk about in a bit. But another favourite of mine is a book called Ready to Catch him Should he Fall by Neil Bartlett which I think is one of the few books that I've read that managed to capture a powerful and natural-feeling, balanced idea of a non-hetero-orthodox gay relationship. I found it incredibly powerful and interesting. More importantly, I'm much less confident that anyone else would look after it in a dystopian future than I am about Slaughterhouse 5, and someone has to stand up for the poofs and it might as well be me.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? God, I have absolutely no idea. Probably when I was much younger I thought that Keill Randor from Planet of the Warlord was unbelievably hot and there was some weird S&M plot in that book too which probably did a lot to confuse my teenage mind. There are many characters in books that I've idolised in various ways - Des Esseintes in Huysmans' Against Nature was probably a core one. And Dionysus in Euripides' Bacchae. But I think probably I have more crushes on fictional characters from TV shows, comics and films than I do from books. This probably suggests that what people look like is important to me. So I'd talk about Booster Gold from his original comic book series, Dr John Carter from the first few seasons of E.R., Ricky Fitts from American Beauty, Han Solo / Indiana Jones and maybe the Colonel from Stargate. I'm so shallow that the slightest drop of water would find no rest in my embrace...

The last book you bought was: Terrifyingly it was Getting Things Done by Dave Allen. I bought it months ago and have bought no books since because I've been busy and found it difficult to focus. I read about half of it. Then got stuck. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

What are you currently reading? On my last count I had 160 open tabs in Safari, I had 30 open tabs in NetNewsWire, I had 3000 unread posts in my newsreader and I had 27,000 unread e-mails across my work and personal e-mail accounts. What the crap do you think I'm reading?

Five Books you would take to a desert island:

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers - A sprawling, indolent and defiantly (arrogantly) colloquial / personal autobiography that pushes many of my fantasy buttons - being able to hang out with my brother a lot, being relatively free in the world, being able to be creative and misbehave, working and living in San Francisco.
• The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster - or ideally a huge anthology of all of Paul Auster's books. The thing about these books for me is that their resemblence to reality seems entirely incidental to the clean arcing groves of plot and narrative that don't necessarily convey you through character but which one feels (if one could move abstractly in a direction orthogonal to the book) would look so perfect and structural when observed from 'above'.
• Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein - honestly because it's the longest book I've ever read and because it's wide and deep enough to get lost in for long periods of time. It appeals to the completist and the geek within me, always looking for consistent continuities and wanting to be convinced that the world could be something other than it is.
• Slaugherhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut - a time-travelling blackly comic war novel. I think that you can deduce much about my character from this book. Science fiction books and fantasy novels are read by people ill-adjusted to reality, the same people who write comic books and aspire towards making future technology that will make everyone happy. This book has that in it. These people are also kind of childish, and if confronted by the world directly seem to only be able to understand it in terms of black humour. This book has that in it. There's also a desperation and a wit to it as well that I really respond to. I don't know if this is a particularly happy description of my personality, but there you go.
• Gravity's Rainbow or V by Thomas Pynchon - because I haven't completely read either of them, and they're rich and deep and thrillingly written enough to last a while and continue to resonate and mean for a long period of time (and because I'll never read them in the meantime).

I'd also take with me about four hundred dodgy comic books and a pile of DVDs. But hey. Anyway, I hope that's satisfactory and interesting enough for you filthy voyeurs out there in realspace. I'm going to pass the challenge on to some people who almost certainly won't want to go near it: Dan Hill because he's my boss and needs to suffer, Stefan Magdalinski because he's a stroppy bastard and as such I'd enjoy hearing his rants and Matt Jones because he reads weird shit...

When I was a kid, I remember hearing on the news about a study that had determined that there were a few specific life-cycles for the way a hypothetical person's might react to any new pop-song. One type of song would get more popular the more times it had been heard and then would plummet in popularity when a person had heard it around fifteen times. Others took longer to get popular but would stay at the top longer. These studies were used to help radio networks determine what to play - how to make songs into hits and how often to play them once they had become hits. Does anyone know anything about these studies and where I might be able to find them?

If you know the answer to this question feel free to either post it on the thread (if you're a Metafilter member) - What studies have been done on the lifecycle of pop songs and how people respond to them over time? - or below if not...

If you want to use blogs for what they're most naturally useful for, if you're trying to exploit what makes them brilliant, keep the individual at the heart of it. Knowledge management, or community building, or publishing Wonkette style, keep the individual at the core, be conversational. Even Fleshbot has an editorial tone, not that I've ever been, and neither have you, and nor should you.

It was a very interesting evening all things considered, although I sometimes get the impression that I look like I'm having too much fun or am misbehaving when I do these things. Hopefully I didn't say anything too out on a limb. I'll probably stick up my notes at some point.

I think the best speaker of the evening was John Dale who has been putting to gether Warwick Blogs for Warwick University (which look like a pretty stunning implementation of the weblog concept inside an academic context). I think the part of his talk that surprised me most was that of everyone I've ever seen trying to market and publicise weblogs they seem to have done it best. They had a whole series of pretty stunning stickers and posters and fridge magnets that they distributed all over the campus. I've never understood why weblogging companies don't explicitly target these venues - surely if you get them when they're young, imaginative and have a lot of free time then they're likely to stick with you for years. Here's a lifted image from the Warwick blogs site to give you a sense of the way they branded the thing:

Checking out his site, I see John was at ETech too. It's a shame we didn't meet each other in that context too. That could have been fun.

For those of you who are not familiar with the plasticbag.org feed, or with newsreaders in general, then I can recommend the Wikipedia article on RSS and newsreaders and if you're using a Mac, then NetNewsWire remains the client of choice.

This little job is just the first of a large number of changes that you should be seeing around the site over the next few weeks as I work to redesign the place from the ground-up. I can warn you now that many of you are not going to like what I'm going to do with the place. I'm taking it very stark and simple. But I'm finding it quite exciting. If you're of the speculative sort, then why not have a look at my page on a design history of plasticbag.org and see if you can spot the trends.

Several years ago, the professional career counselor Margaret Newhouse wrote an essay for The Chronicle called "Deprogramming From the Academic Cult." Newhouse argued that graduate school in the humanities indoctrinates its students into believing that they are failures if they do not remain inside the ivory tower, even if there are no suitable academic jobs for them. Career counselors, she argued, have to find ways to persuade unemployed Ph.D.'s to believe that the outside world is not evil and that they are not apostates if they do something besides teaching and research.

Although I am currently a tenure-track professor of English, I realize that nothing but luck distinguishes me from thousands of other highly-qualified Ph.D.'s in the humanities who will never have full-time academic jobs and, as a result, are symbolically dead to the academy. Even after several years, many former graduate students grapple with feelings of shame and failure that, to outsiders, seem completely irrational.

A little under seven years ago I left a doctorate in Classics that I'd been undertaking at Bristol University. I'd been working on my PhD for three years - time initially very well spent and which produed enormous amounts of reasonably good-quality work. Over the first two and a half years or so I produced around sixty thousand words on models of the mind, mythology, story-telling and identification; I'd taught various undergraduate classes on drama, mythology and Ancient Greek language and I'd produced two papers (on on anachronistic interpretation and one on The Bacchae) which I delivered at national conferences in Nottingham and New York. However, from the end of my second year I started experiencing a slow deterioration in my work, had a number of crises of motivation and started to feel that I was being overwhelmed by the material and sheer amount of commentary and opinion that I needed to get to grips with. I started to feel that I was never going to be able to produce work that I was going to be happy with - that I was never going to find the answers that I was looking for. Then followed a few months of highly self-destructive behaviour when I felt that I was starting to fail, followed by a few months of anti-depressants and then the final realisation that if I was going to complete my work it would take me years of penury and misery and that I was likely to have problems finding any kind of employment afterwards. And then the realisation that I no longer had faith that the work I was producing would have any kind of impact or be taken in any way seriously. And that's when I decided to quit.

If you believe the narrative that I've just told you (and there's no reason why you should simply swallow it whole - I've taken considerable license with it for speed and clarity) then you might well be asking yourself why I went from doing good work to leaving academia completely, and whether I regret it. I ask whether you believe it because I'm not sure that I believe it myself - I find the whole period difficult to interpret and difficult to feel confident about because of the sheer weight of the different interpretations, personal relationships, arguments, tensions and various senses of betrayals that I came - by the end - to associate fully with my time in doctoral work. And here's where the article about the cultishness of Graduate School comes in again. Because whlie I don't necessarily believe that it does have cultish tendencies, I do feel programmed by circumstance to forfeit my right to a public opinion about it. Any statement I make about academia - or my experience of academia - that isn't entirely complimentary must necessarily be seen in the context of my own failure to complete the process. Because I'm not now Doctor Coates, any statement I make that puts any blame on anyone other than my own inadequacies can be dismissed as sour grapes or an inability to accept failure or inadequacy in one field or another.

I'm not going to fight this assumption - I feel comfortable in admitting that whatever else may have led to my ungracious departure from academia, I clearly did not have the necessarily discipline to carry through the work I'd started to its conclusion. I failed. But I've seen a lot of other people fall hard off the back of the academic lorry as well, and a good number of them I believe have done so not because they've failed the system but because the system has failed them. And they feel similarly confused and conflicted - unable to determine where the failure was their own. Even many of the people I know who have completed their doctorates have experienced the burn of tarmac on their departure from the academy. These people were intellectually able, self-disciplined and strong and fought through the academy with all the discipline and strength they could muster and were still brought low by it. And worse still, these people feel the same anxiety that I do about talking about it - any rejection is in itself an admission of failure. Here's where the academy's cultishness emerges most strongly - because it's an institution where you can only fail yourself and your leaders. They can never fail you.

I want to talk a little about the reality of post-graduate work for people who are considering it because I think you should know what you're letting yourself in for. Courses which are mostly taught are almost always achievable. That's not what I'm talking about. I'd recommend a Masters course to almost anyone. On the other hand, Universities often encourage their pupils to stay with them at their University because they get money for students. I would advise you to never do this. It can be very difficult for undergraduate students to adjust to the new roles and status that undertaking a Masters should afford you. It's particularly difficult if you're doing those role-changes with people you have been used to being highly deferential towards. And why would you want to work more with them anyway? Unless they really are the world-leading experts in their fields, you should be looking elsewhere for different perspectives, different expertises and different lessons to learn. You'll learn much more from a new teacher than from the one who has already articulated much of their approach and beliefs and ways of seeing the world through your undergraduate work with them.

Masters aside then, what of the research degree? Here I'm going to be blunt. First things first, please believe that academic departments get money for postgraduate students and that more money means more and (and more stable) jobs for the staff. You must never forget that while all academics have altruistic motives, they also have a vested interest in encouraging you to stay with them. Again consider why they're suggesting you continue your work, and think particularly hard if they're advocating you staying with them.

Next think about your skills and expertises and whether or not you actually want to be an academic after you've tried to complete your course. Now think about whether or not you're going to be the person who actually gets the really hard to come by academic job afterwards (this is particularly true in the Humanities). If you don't want to be a History lecturer and do academic research for the rest of your life, then don't do a doctorate. If you're not sure, then get sure before you sign on the dotted line. Academic jobs are not easy to get and they'll all be looking for certain skills and expertises that are relevant to the teaching of your discipline. If you want to spend years doing research into an incredibly obscure branch of history, then bear in mind that no one may wish to teach courses in that particular obscure branch of history. If you're going to be revolutionarily cross-disciplinary, then consider - are there any departments in the world who could hire you when you were done? And if not, then don't do it!

Doctorates don't count for much outside academia - and in fact they may count against you. If you can't find a directly relevant area for subsequent professional work, then many employers are likely to look at a 25-30 year old person with three-six years of post-graduate work as being a strange and slightly worrying employment prospect - they're going to be too smart for their own good, too ivory-towerish, too specialist, out of touch with the way that the "real world" works. If you're working in an area where there's a lot of commercial interest (say the way in which people use technology) then you may very well find enormous career opportunities open up before you. This is not likely to happen if you've spent six years writing on gender roles in Baudelaire - no matter how ground-breaking the work.

And here's the other lesson - doctoral work is professional training. You have to think about it like that - you're being made into a lecturer / professor / teacher / researcher. The aim of doctoral work is not - no matter what anyone tells you - to think up good stuff and write great works and reveal your genius to the world. The aim is to make professional people who can teach undergraduates, deliver papers and - yes - also (subsequently) push the discipline further in one direction or another. You have to approach your post-graduate work in this way. The most successful doctoral students in my experience are the ones that are thorough and careful and take on relatively unambitious projects which don't stretch the assumptions or structures of the discipline too much. They're the ones that finish their doctoral work and go on to useful teaching positions (and then may or may not start exploring more widely). It's definitely not the best and the brightest, the most imaginative thinkers or the people with the great ideas that get through. If they get through it's because they're thorough and they're careful and they're professional and treat it as it should be treated - as a job of work rather than a calling or an exploration.

Which brings me to drop-out rates. Another thing you won't be told is how many people don't complete their doctorates. I've heard various figures mentioned, but I believe that around 50% of people who start doctorates don't get a PhD out of it. This may be humanities only or it may be throughout the academy. An enormous proportion of people simply never finish the things because it's not quite what they were expecting when they started. And many of these people will feel like failures, will come into the job market late and will find it harder to get ahead in their new chosen career. It's not clear to me whether it's harder to get a job with a completed irrelevant doctorate or an incomplete one. It's not easy with with either.

And then there's the day-to-day atmosphere of it. When you're doing research, you work almost exclusively alone - for three to five years. You should spend large periods of that time in a library - ideally (again taking into account that this is a training course and a career) you should use the working hours that you might expect from a job - eight hours a day. You will get paid either nothing or a barely livable wage to do this work (again - more true for humanities students). This is not a glamourous occupation, by any means. And as I've said before, there is no glamour in the work itself, a restricted chance that you'll get a career in academia and a very real possibility that by undertaking this work you're going to make yourself less employable. The "positive" aspects of the lifestyle (apart from your gradual progress towards getting your doctorate) are limited, but you do get relative freedom to think and explore ideas, you are forced to be self-motivating and self-determined and - when things are going well - you will get self-respect and the respect of some other people (who in my opinion are rather easily impressed). These freedoms, and the self-respect and the respect of others that you get from undertaking a doctorate will stay with you (to an extent) if you go into the badly paid field of academia. If you do not, they will swiftly evaporate.

Which brings me (briefly) to my final point. Do not believe there is no worthwhile life outside academia! It's difficult sometimes, when you've been in the education system for getting on for twenty years to remember that there's an enormous panoply of jobs outside academia and not all of them are sullied by the feeble crust of crass commercialism. It is more than possible to find enjoyable, ethically-sound, world-improving work outside academia - in fact it's probably no harder than it is to find similar work inside the Academy. The stereotype (and the assumption of many potential postgraduate students) that study for the sake of study and the stretching and mental gymnastics of intellectual work are somehow naturally superior and elite practices would hold more water with me if such warming-up regularly translated into actual attempts to build or refigure the world in positive ways. If such goals are your intent - consider carefully what effect you are actually likely to have. Is the respect of a narrow and dishevelled set of peers (and a steady stream of undergraduate neophytes) enough to get you through the night? If not, consider that there is good work to be done outside University and that some of it pays rather better and is equally interesting.

If you're considering a longer research-based degree, please consider carefully what you're letting yourself in for. Remember the key facts: only fifty percent of people come out of the other end of this process with a doctorate and even then they have to look towards finding (mostly pretty badly-paid) work. Many of them won't that work despite having proved their discipline, committment and intelligence. Do yourself a favour and make sure that you go in with your eyes open - that you know how unpleasant the work can be, that you know what a risk you're taking with your time and with your life, that you're strong enough to deal with the self-doubt and the humiliation and the shame and the anxiety that the work can cause and that you're totally sure of the career path that you are choosing for yourself, before you agree to continue with your studies. If you don't do this, then you may very well find yourself in a cult that genuinely believes that everyone else is basically wasting their lives and from which there is no easy or elegant way to escape.

Note added 25th September 2004: Thanks to Phil Young for sending in this link which I hope might be useful to people who enjoyed this article: Beyond the Ivory Tower.