mjays

It is the first day of the #a2n_camp, the barcamp-y opener of Berlin Music Week and prelude to the #a2n conference taking place at the Kulturbrauerei Berlin. In the few panels I’ve been attending by now, one thing has become apparent: people here cannot not talk about Spotify. It creeps up in every conversation, it’s a talking point in every panel, as apparently streaming has become the main focus.

Streaming seems to have become the music industry’s weapon of choice for battling rampant piracy issues. Te best soundbite on this issues comes from Christoph Lange of simfy who, in the panel titled “Music in the Cloud”, stated:

”If I have a service that offers me music, now, and almost all artists – why would I have to use rapidshare?”

However, artists and managers are wondering about the economics of streaming, and especially those of Spotify, as most of them complain that there is no money to be made from streaming via this service. (Another tidbit from the aforementioned panel: apparently Lady Gaga received royalties of about €140 from the Swedish collection agency.) However, Spotify seems to be the only successful and widely adopted implementation of music streaming in Europe. So there is no real way to get around it, right now. So as much as they hate to talk about spotify, they can’t not talk about them.

I’m wading through the legalese and trying out Apple’s all new iTunes 10 to see how their “Social Network for Music”, labelled iTunes Ping works. It’s been dubbed as an improvement to music discovery building upon Apple’s iTunes store.

Dave Winer makes some valid points when he states that Ping is very likely not going to be confined to music, but will open up to all of Apple’s stores, but let’s focus on music discovery, an area I am pretty interested in and have just a couple of days ago submitted some ideas to one of my favourite music services, last.fm (check out my profile here.)

Now I’ve played around with Ping a bit, I must say: challenging last.fm this is not. MySpace, maybe. But only, because MySpace bet on a similar system, as closed platform (although they worked hard to change that, recently) with no way to get data in or out. Ping is the same, only with more constraints. It only runs within iTunes, and one might legitimately ask why that is.

Now, all the pundits say this might be a tool of use only for users heavily invested in their iTunes library. But for those, for the users that have a large library, it is incredibly hard to share recommendations (likes) on ping. They have to search a song or album on the iTunes store to recommend it, or must’ve bought it on iTunes to pop up in the initial “would you like to ‘like’ these albums” screen. Now, the reasonable place to recommend music would be in the music library itself, wouldn’t it? I’m listening to music, I’m enjoying it, let me recommend it to my friends.

Last.fm has a pretty straightforward to do that. You click on the menu bar item, then you click “Love”. There, done, I just loved a song. Compare that to aforementioned process at ping.

Now, User Interface stuff is one thing (and it’s quite surprising that apple got this one so wrong.) The underlying mechanics are quite another.

iTunes ping fails to recognize one basic fact about media consumption, especially music, nowadays. We are not exclusively listening to music on our machines, we’re not exclusively listening to music on our hard-drives. Most of our music lives on the web. That’s what I love about last.fm – it doesn’t really care where I listen to music—they provide the API and anybody can integrate it. This way, all the music I listen to on Spotify (here’s my profile), iTunes or hypemachine (here’s my profile) nicely gets registered at last.fm. Easy.

And here is the kicker—the people I depend the most in discovering do the same thing, too. They listen to new tunes on hypemachine, or even have their blogs feeding in there, listen to stuff all across the web, but ultimately, I find new, interesting stuff by going through the stuff my friends at last.fm listened to the most recently. Because that’s most promising to be interesting to me as well, and very probably is new stuff. I’d love to have this handled better on last.fm, but for now, it’s pretty good already. It’s far better than ping, because it accounts for the realities of my listening habits and those of my friends. We’re on the web, and we hardly use the iTunes store.

And that, really is, what it boils down to. I don’t see this as trouble for last.fm.

PS: my favourite comment on Dave’s post: “I have 184,000+ scrobbles on last.fm Why would I switch to ping?”—I share the sentiment, and applaud that enormous amount of music listened to.

If you use the internet at all, chances are you’ve stumbled upon the odd marketers, social media consultants or ninjas, however they may call themselves. Currently they’re a dime a dozen. It seems like the go-to profession when people don’t know what to do.

And the holy grail of this profession is Word of Mouth Marketing. You know, recommendations you give to your friend, be it in talking or on your favorite social network. Now marketers would love to know which recommendations you give out just for monitoring and researching purposes. Knowing why you recommend something is powerful stuff which people can learn a lot from. But even more than knowing why you recommend certain stuff they’d love to change what you’ll recommend—it’s marketing, after all, and they work for a client.

But the thing most social media ninja’s and WOM-Marketers don’t understand is: recommendations are tailored, and they are privileged information.

Leo Laporte came up in the last episode with the mention of secrets. The next big thing would be secrets. Because the very act of keeping and disclosing secrets would form a social bond. I wouldn’t restrict that to secrets. It’s the case with any form of privileged information. And I’d include recommendations here. Because the very act of disclosing which products or services I use for certain tasks discloses a lot about me, my identity, etc. It is privileged information.

It is privileged information to that degree that marketers will have a hard time to get to the bottom of it, the personal recommendations that are trustworthy, as opposed to status-driven displays that most recommendations in public currently are.

<rant>

To most it is no secret that I spend a lot of time following the news, especially with regard to the web and energy. I’m a geek for that – and is my job. I was thrown on the topic about one and a half years ago, and I couldn’t resist it. That was the time when the now soon-to-be-abandoned “social media” was still called Web2.0 (yeah, seems like forever ago, doesn’t it?), the iPad was still a year out, Android and Google were still good, in short, all was well.

It was an exciting time to jump the Smart Grid Bandwagon, as it wasn’t huge topic (it still isn’t, but the area has grown considerably), the tech seemed convincing and the prospect of the market was immense.

Fast forward 18 months and frustration mounts, as the most promising projects suffer under mismanagement and higher-than-anticipated costs, the press are suckers for every story that portrays the downfall of hyped-technology, especially in the context of energy. And then there’s the studies, as the latest by German market research firm Forsa for the German consumer protection agency saying that less than 50% actually know what a smart meter is, and even if briefed, most of them wouldn’t bother to have one. They fear additional costs.

Costs has been the predominant argument against any progress in the field. State regulators in the US fry utilities for their proposed smart meter rollouts, and the only successful widespread roll outs (Italy, I’m looking at you) have been justified with the ability to detect and prevent electricity theft.

The core of the problem: as the forsa study rightfully points out: the consumer doesn’t care. He never does, and especially not so in terms of energy. He cares when there is no electricity in his home, and he cares once a year when he get’s the bill and is enraged for the amount he is supposed to pay. But there’s a chicken-egg problem here. We clearly need to help educate the consumer, even some knowledge about the consumption levels would help. Ironically, the very means of achieving this education, a visualisation of consumption, is blocked by that very fact that this education is lacking.

Usually this would be a chance for the geeks. Build their own devices, building software on top of that, watching and waiting for the market to mature. And there is experiments. There is homesense (backed by EDF) which gives participants of its project Arduino kits and let’s them do whatever with them (arguably, their focus is on homeautomation, not smart metering) but that’s not enough.

Sure, it’s a tough market, dominated by oligopolistic players, heavily politicised and un-sexy as hell.

But when we want to talk about the internet of things, don’t we need to talk about energy? This is the prime implementation. Where are the geeks?

</rant>

Roll call: whom of you does not know who Vint Cerf is? If you do not, visit this Wikipedia-entry at once! (Hint: He’s the father of the Internet).

Apparently he works for Google now. And he’s working in the realm of the Internet of Things. And he’s been giving a very comprehensive talk about the architectural foundations which need to be implemented for the Smart Grid (and by extension the Internet of Things) to be reliable and resilient. Thanks to Igor for the pointer.

Ever since re:publica this year, we’ve been busy working on an idea I had way earlier this year. See, last year we had an amazing conference here in Berlin, called atoms&bits which was wonderful especially since it happened at the crossroads of so many different fields of activity. We had a politics track alongside a DIY/Makers track which was complemented with a track about art in the digital age.

I loved it especially because of that, but there were problems, of course. We rarely had time to organise this thing, and with this widespread an audience, making sure people speak the same language (metaphorically) can be hard. So the idea was to have something similar this year, but with a thematic focus. To get those groups talking to each other again, but with an overarching theme. This was where the development of cities came to my mind.

Allow me to crosspost the introductory post from cognitivecities.com:

ANNOUNCING: THE COGNITIVE CITIES CONFERENCE

Our future will be played out in cities.

The projections tell us that our planet will resemble some very familiar fictional fantasies: 75% of the global population will be living by 2050 in cities or mega cities. Between slums and mass poverty on one hand and eco-sustainable living on the other hand, there will be both tough problems to solve and exciting visions to realize. We are at a point in time where the paths are set for the future of cities.

The Cognitive Cities Conference wants to pick up the vibrant global conversation about the future of cities and bring it to Germany. By bringing bright minds with different perspectives together, it is our ambition to enable not only an in-depth exchange about the current state of affairs, but also to foster new projects.

We believe that collaboration and diversity lead to the best results. We see the Cognitive Cities Conference as a platform for exchange and mutual inspiration and invite urban planners, designers, technology geeks, environmental experts, public officials, urban gardening enthusiasts and cultural influencers to be part of the conversation. We can only make our cities more liveable if we work together to improve them.

The format of the conference will be a combination of lightning talks and workshop style sessions. Participants will share ideas, thoughts and challenges based on their diverse backgrounds, thus presenting different perspectives and approaches to the challenges we share. We are planning a one track only event, with the option for break-out sessions at any time.

Where and when?

Cognitive Cities Conference
02./03. October 2010
Coworking Cologne

Who is Cognitive Cities for?

We believe that diversity is essential for mutual inspiration. Cognitive Cities is aimed at designers, architects, futurists, urban planners, web geeks, activists, urban dwellers, you name it. If you are interested in the future of your city, you are most welcome.

Who is behind Cognitive Cities Conference?

Axel Quack, Igor Schwarzmann, Johannes Kleske, Markus Reuter, Martin Spindler, Peter Bihr, Welf Kirschner. Powered by CognitiveCities.com.

Cognitive Cities is organized on a non-profit basis. We will provide more details and a dedicated link soon. Official hashtag is #cocities

I’m thrilled to see this going. And I’d love to hear from you what you’d like to talk about in this context. If you got speakers you’d wish to see, if you know sponsors which would be a perfect match, let me know.

And in the mean time: save the date. I hope I’ll see you in Cologne.

(Image: “Intersection of Day and Night” by 24thcentury under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 License)

There’s a thought I’ve been walking around with for a while now: For most users, privacy and security are mutually exclusive. That is why most users willingly surrender their personal data to corporations like Facebook. That is why 99.9% of email goes unencrypted. That is why most users don’t bother to check their privacy settings and ultimately, Facebook get’s to reap the benefits of the disclosure of user’s personal data.

The reason why I believe that for the average user, security and privacy are mutually exclusive is that the large majority just can’t be bothered to read into the technical details and acquire the knowledge that is necessary to set up proper security measures that do not compromise their privacy. Most users want turnkey solutions that provide them with some security (and arguably, in most cases the illusion of security might suffice). That is why I believe that any distributed system that aims at replacing Facebook – nota bene Diaspora Project, which should really reconsider their name – will need a turn-key, easy to use, set-up that just works for the majority of users while allowing advanced users to fine-tune their settings or even host it themselves.

Here’s my public key – Your public what?

Most users depend on software solutions as is. They have no desire to read into elaborate or even minuscule technical details. Point in case: email encryption. Email has been around like forever. Everybody knows that emails are easily intercepted. Yet almost nobody actually encrypts their emails. Why is that? Because it’s a pain in the ass.

I’m using a Macbook Pro for little over 2 years now, and I must say I’m pleased with the experience. It’s got a nice GUI, most software is quite amazing, and there’s tons of resources that tell you how you can modify those little parts of the OS using terminal to streamline your workflow. There’s only one thing that’s bugging me: I can’t, for the love of God, get mail.app to consistently and reliably use GPGmail.

Email encryption is such a no-brainer that it hurts to see that Apple, for instance, still hasn’t implemented it, or given documentation on the mail.app API, to make it easy to use. Don’t even get me started on the lack of encryption for emails on the iPhone. Further, why doesn’t GMail allow for email encryption on their web-interface? Surely that would be a way to attract customers and set its own service apart from the competition. Further, it would strongly improve the recognition of their human rights claims that have been scrutinised given the latest events in China.

I presume a lot of other people think like that. How else would it be that I rarely get email with a public key attached? So the thing is: even though I know I really should use encryption for my email conversations, the facts that

1. it is not possible to properly implement without giving up my current workflow and requirements and
2. of no use without convincing my friends and communications partners to do the same

hold me back severely.

Closed systems reduce complexity – that’s why they work

The beauty of closed systems is that they reduce complexity for the users. Facebook sees this currently. as the complexity for the user rises because of Facebook’s pursuit of opening its platform to the rest of the web (or taking over the web, as the pundits might have it.) The thing is: many users are willing to give up their personal data and surrender their privacy for ease of use and the illusion of security. Now, we all know that storing that data on centralised servers is not really secure, after all the attacks on the major German social networks StudiVZ and SchülerVZ have shown drastically that security on centralised servers can be breached.

However, if we were to have this thought experiment, I’d argue that if users were to host this information themselves, they might have more control over their privacy settings, but their information would be even less secure. How do I come to this conclusion? One of the prime examples for this seems to be WordPress.

WordPress has a beautiful model. The software is relatively open, everyone can download it for free and host it on their own servers. And then there’s the hosted models, for which you either pay or have less control over your site. WordPress has grown so popular in fact that it is now a major target for attacks. Which results in a lot (and I mean a LOT) of WordPress sites ending up infected and delivering malware. This rarely happens on blogs hosted on WordPress.com though. Now why is that? People trade a level of control over their site to the reduced complexity of having Automattic take care of the security of their site. They don’t have to worry about uptimes, performance and security breaches.

That is why closed systems, albeit being the pronounced opponent of the openness of the web, work. It’s only after a technology has grown to widespread adoption and has been around for long enough that enough people venture out there as they have gained sufficient technical skills to have outgrown the comfort of the closed environment. That’s basically the story behind the rise and fall of AOL.

So where does that leave us?

Coming to terms with this paradox is not exactly easy. There are a lot of trade-offs to be made. And not all of these will turn out in favor of strengthened data protection. I wish the folks of Diaspora Project the best of luck, as we clearly need an alternative to Facebook. But it bears being reminded that complexity is the enemy of any widespread adoption. And I’d really like to be able to encrypt my email now…

I just stumbled upon this video which is a nice intro documentary on “Web3.0″ – or, as others might call it – the semantic web.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

I have just a quick couple of thoughts on this, as certainly, I need to dig deeper into this:

• Additional meta-data must be implicit, thus no further human interaction to add meta-data should be necessary. This is even more necessary when it comes to item-to-item relationships, especially in the real world
• There will not be one semantic web, just as there is no one Google search results pages anymore. Everything will get filtered by prior knowledge about individual preferences and behaviours, which need to be harvested implicitly, as well. There is no one way of representing the world.
• It is necessary to make implicit data capture and analysis more widespread and accepted before notions of a “semantic web” will come to fruition.
• The term “Semantic Web” itself is misleading, as in the end, we are not talking about making sense of information on the web, which should prove to be hard enough, but make sense of the physical world around us.

Please let me know if you have further input or disagree with my statements.

PS: On a related note, Dustin Curtis has an interesting take on how the iPad and the “Death of Files” plays out. I’d argue that this points into the same direction.

With Facebooks recent policy flaws in terms of privacy and the trust this company has gambled on, the question of identity and identity providers has reached new importance.

Jeff Jarvis has nice piece on that, where he basically pinpoints the two biggest issues right now: how can I manage information that is available about myself, and how can I prove that I am indeed the one I say I am?

Managing identity is crucial, but it not only happens around the web. It happens with information we gather about ourselves, it happens with data that is gathered about ourselves, identity is much bigger than the web. Identity is my risk-profile while driving, information that can be gathered utilising my GPS and the accelerometers built into basically every modern car. Now with platforms like , this information can be discerned and analysed. This information is part of my identity, this information is way more valuable than the menial status updates we currently consider when we are talking about facebook and privacy. But when we are talking about identity providers, or identity providing systems for that matter, we regularly fail at taking into consideration these aspects of our identity. Numbers, that seem to say nothing to us – yet.

When we are talking privacy controls, when we are talking identity, we need to realise that we are not only talking about our profile pictures (which to remove in protest indeed creates powerful imagery, but actually helps nothing at all) or our social graph (now this gets interesting) but our everyday behaviour that shows in the numbers.

In Eastern Standard Tribe, a very interesting read indeed, Cory Doctorow approaches this issue in two or three paragraphs when he let’s his main character fantasize over possible user experience improvements of mental health institutions. In this scenario, the main character thinks of public prescription stats of mental health professionals, and more to the point, tracking of patients by means of their badges, measuring proximity to other patients, mobility, cross-referencing that with their therapy and group plans and subsequently tracking their progress. We are doing this already, albeit in a different context. Visa recently came forward with a press release in which it disclosed that the company was now able to tell whether a couple was about to get a divorce, just based on their purchase history and some statistical modelling.

It’s this data that we really ought to keep an eye on. it’s this data that in the long run really matters. My social graph probably tells a whole lot about me, after all, the saying is that if you tell me your friends I indeed know who you are. But there is way more data available about who I am if we use standardly available statistics. Efficiency 2.0, one of the hottest start-ups in the energy efficiency field, manages to provide custom tailored recommendations on how to improve energy efficiency in the most economical way using not only my usage profile which is derived from a smart meter but by additionally taking into account my demographic data: which neighbourhood do I live in (rich or poor, inner city or suburbs?), my age (a student might have a shorter time span for ROI) etc. Using these kinds of statistical modelling, Efficiency 2.0 is able to provide surprisingly valid feedback on how to curb energy consumption.

Similar data is used in methods called score modelling. These methods are used by rating agencies trying to provide credit ratings for individual customers. These models not only take into account my personal credit history, the amount of money I have or owe, but further use aggregate demographic data: how likely are people that live in my area to default? how likely are people that moved as often as I did to default? in short: they are creating risk profiles based on statistical models which include personal and aggregate data.

On the other hand, in opening up this personal data lie tremendous opportunities. By using anonymised aggregate data, banking service mint.com is able to give recommendations for financial planning based on comparisons with other users, basically opening a pool of experience. Similarly, Efficiency 2.0 might learn to give better recommendations if certain projections just don’t work out.

So I think what I want to say is this: we need to discuss Facebook’s privacy issues, because they matter to most users. But we may not limit ourselves to thinking that Facebook’s privacy issues are all that matters, because identity is not only what is portrayed by our status updates there. We need to think about systems that allow us to take some amount of control over the data that comprise our identity by capturing what we really do.

So I’ve been reading this amazing piece in the New York Time’s Magazine called “The Data-Driven Life”. In the article, Gary Wolf, a contributing editor for Wired, dives into the world of self-analytics via data of different activities. There are people tracking their focus and mood-swings as they try to get off the caffeine, and there’s people tracking their lives to an utterly incomprehensible extent. But they learn valuable insights from the data about their own behaviour; uncomfortable at times, as information gathered from data is not subject to the bias of self-preservation of the ego we so often apply to our own memories.

What persists through the story, though, is the fact that although capturing and analysing this data costs time. in most cases quite a lot of time and effort. Time, a lot of people are not willing to invest into this data capture, for the most different reasons.

Sure I would like to have my spending better under control, see how much money I spend on coffee or take-away dinner each month, and learn from that data to adjust my behaviour accordingly. But grabbing into my pocket, getting out my smart-phone to record every single purchase I make along the way seems a little cumbersome to me – so I won’t do it. And it’s not just my spending I would like to be able to make better informed decisions about – without having to remember to record every single transaction. There is a lot of information that can be useful in educating us, in bringing us to making better informed choices if it weren’t for the clumsiness of current methods of capturing this data to make it available for analysis.

Making data capture easier

But then I remembered the talk Johannes and Igor gave at #rp10 about “playful cities”. One example stuck with me, namely the use of foursquare’s historical check-in data to discern the areas of movement in a given city. By using the game-approach and the social network behind foursquare, which puts up completely different incentives than those deferred gratifications I get from recording that odd sandwich I get on the way to work every morning, it basically piles up a stack of data containing my movements through the city. It gives me clues about my hotspots, about where I spent my time, and helps me to realistically evaluate how I move across the city, without the bias of my own mind.

It turns out this is a pretty reasonable approach for capturing data on the go. But it is still far from perfect, far from anything I would consider ‘usable’ for the purpose of tracking my own behaviour.

But even this game-approach will not work for most purposes. For some stuff, there probably won’t be an application, which will give you instant gratification instead of deferred one, which only comes when the data is analysed and you learn something from it.

For these, and in my opinion for most applications, we need embedded, ambient sensors, that measure what we want to measure. We’re talking Internet of Things stuff here.

What don’t you measure yet? And why?

Coincidentally, I work in the energy sector, more specifically, I work on concepts on how Smart Metering will affect customers and their behaviour. How will customers consume electricity, if they have better knowledge about their consumption? Because as it is, hardly anybody knows how much energy consume. When I held my talk about the Smart Grid at #rp10, a quick survey produced about two people in an audience of about 60 that actually knew their annual electricity consumption. And worst of all, this falls in line with a lot of different aspects of our every-day life. Just as we don’t know how much electricity we consume, we most often do not know just how much water we us or how much time we spend on certain activities and tasks. We think we have an idea of this data, but this is prone to personal bias.

I try to track my energy consumption closely, at least a meter reading a week. Again, this is a very cumbersome approach, but I do this testing one of the products we are currently developing, and it gives me a good idea on the fluctuations of my energy usage. I can see whether I’ve worked longer hours in the office, or whether I’ve been home. I can tell when I had a lot of guests over, or whether my roomie has been away. This all shows up utilising a rather bad resolution of readings, namely, once per week. With a better resolution, I could have an even better analysis of how I consume energy, and accordingly, how I could use energy more efficiently.

This, of course, would be more sensible if I didn’t have to take notes of my meter readings, type them into a webform and then get an analysis of my consumption. This would be far easier if my meter directly communicated with said webservice, skipping the tedious steps of note-taking and entering numbers. And as I said, I’m doing this, because I work in the field and test a product. If I was average Joe, I’d probably not do this, nor would I know my energy consumption.

It works with the web…

Conclusively, to get a more widespread adoption of measuring data of our individual lives, to enable us to make more informed personal choice about how we go about our daily routines, we need embedded sensors that do the tedious task of recording our actions for us. We have these mechanisms in place when we use the web. I discover new music by letting last.fm analyse what music I listen to. I have stats on my workdays by tracking my software usage with Wakoopa. And it is in this realm that most users are already familiar with data analysis.

But the biggest player in the consumer-faced web-based data dissemination business might just hinder a more widespread adoption of personal data analytics in our everyday lives. I’m talking of course about facebook, which with its recent steps creates an atmosphere of uncertainty when it comes to the security and privacy of personal data. With its modification of the ToS and Privacy Policy, with its recent introduction of the open graph API and the near impossibility of retaining your data from facebooks servers, users are given the impression that putting data out there will always mean that they cease being in control of their personal data.

Further still, if my photos and my personal information are at the whims of a monolith software company, most users will probably consider whether they even want additional data measured, as their prior experience with companies data-driven companies is unfavorable.

I’m still trying to get my head around a lot of issues concerning this space. Please consider this article a stream of thoughts. As always, I’m thankful for any hints, tips or comments.