It’s been a long time since I last wrote here and I don’t have the energy right now to document all of the exciting things that have happened since (here are some). Tomorrow I fly to San Francisco for a week to show Chatsum and BlogRadio at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. You can read more over on the Chatsum blog which is where most of my blogging energy has been going recently. I’m planning to get my flickr on while I’m away and I’m sure Matt, with his beautiful website, will be taking some photos too.

Wish us luck, we might need it!

I’ve busily been getting some visualisations of Chatsum activity ready for the RCA Show and have completely redesigned them so they no longer look like a 1980s videogame. Above is a picture of the huge videowall monitors I’ll be showing them on.

For those that are interested, the visualisations are all made in XHTML and JavaScript. I’ve been using the Canvas tag a lot recently and I’m really in awe of how powerful the open standards of the web are becoming. It seems like JavaScript is being totally reborn and I just can’t get enough of positional CSS. It really is true:

Chatsum has gone public beta! Anyone can now sign-up and give it a go. Just click this banner to join:

Yesterday we had a massive influx of Brazilians and boy can they chat! They generated over 15,000 posts in under 12 hours and for the first time there was more chat going on away from www.chatsum.com than on it.

Unfortunately though, with all of the activity came a single spammer who posted the letter A into the chat repeatedly, several hundred times, forcing us to ban them. We started by only banning them for half an hour but they came back later so we’ve had to ban them indefinitely. I hate the fact that we had to do it as we’re working on some really nice user blocking code that puts the power in the users’ hands but until that’s live I had to come over all moderatory and I don’t really like that. Chatsum is meant to be a totally public space with us only really wanting to moderate the chat that happens on our own websites (chatsum.com, imgeorge.org and pixelhospital.com) in the hope that others will moderate their own.

If anyone would like to come and see Chatsum in the RCA Summer Show (as mentioned below), it’ll be in The Show: Part Two 23rd June - 3rd July. It’s always a really good show with lots of beautiful things to look at from lots of very different departments. Last year the Silversmithing and Photography blew my mind.

Let me know when you’ll be coming and if you need a place to stay and if you’re really desperate to come to the private view, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

There are now only 17 days left until I have to have everything ready for the Graduation Show of my MA in Interaction Design. I’m going to be showing Chatsum itself alongside different ways of looking at the social data its use produces.

We’ve just entered the second phase of beta testing Chatsum which involved inviting in another 1,500 users to test our new Member Profile pages, you can check out my profile here. We’re letting users bring in feeds from lots of other web services so when you’re looking at someone’s profile you can also see their photos, blog posts, bookmarks, videos and upcoming events. There’s something beautiful about these pages that will hopefully get us a lot of press. I think it’s a different approach to a lot of other sites - we pull in content from the internet’s Web of Data rather than trying to replicate Flickr, YouTube, etc.

If all goes well and I don’t have to look through the MySQL slow queries log again then we’ll be taking Chatsum into public beta in about week or so. The prospect of doing this so close to the show, when my part in it relies on Chatsum working, is terrifying but as the MBA students that Lucy has put me in touch with keep saying, “it’s also very exciting”.

I’ve spent the last few days wrestling with various requests for text that describes my current master’s work and thought it would be a good idea to post some of it here to let people know what’s currently at the forefront of my mind. First of all, here’s my text for the show catalogue which had to be less than 100 words:

As we digitise more and more of our lives, from photography to letter writing, banking to ID cards, we invite the Internet closer and closer. But the Internet has a secret, it was designed by scientists that believed in sharing information for the advancement of human knowledge, an ideology that now seeps up through all we entrust to it. Attempting to protect copyright in this lawless frontier is futile, this space crosses international legal borders and can move more fluidly than even the most advanced of legal systems. Instead we must devise new modes of production, protection and revenue.

Then we move onto my dreaded ‘Statement of Intent’ which, thankfully, only had to be a draft. You’ll see the obvious similarities but this one is much more challenging of the reader:

Copyright is dead. At least it is in my field and it’s most definitely dying in yours. Everyday we take more steps towards the digitisation of everything possible. We’ve done music, TV is underway, film’s really just started and photography happened quicker than anyone could have imagined. E-mail and mobile phones silently replaced letter writing and slowly everything is moving towards using the Internet as its carrier. But the Internet has a secret, it was designed by scientists in the 1960s, scientists that believed in peer-review and sharing information for the advancement of human knowledge. It is this ideology that now seeps up through all that we entrust to the Internet. Attempting to protect copyright in this lawless frontier is futile, this space crosses international legal borders and can move more fluidly than even the most advanced of legal systems. Instead we must devise new modes of production, new means of protection and new sources of revenue.

So imagine my surprise as, just as I finished writing my Statement of Intent, this e-mail appeared from the Arts Council:

Dear colleague,
As you may be aware, the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts is currently supporting a UK survey into the development of new business models for creative artists, based on the use of ‘open content’ copyright licensing. The research is being conducted by Open Business, who are based at the Young Foundation in London.

For further information about Open Business and the artist’s survey, please go to http://www.openbusiness.cc/ or see the attachment.

Please forward this email as appropriate. Apologies for cross-postings.
Best wishes,
Nxxxxxxxx Nxx

All I could really say was “Wow!”. This is one serious move in the right direction and I’m really impressed. The site is obviously still quite young and can be a little confusing to navigate but it’s great to see spaces for the discussion of business models for the post-copyright era start to emerge. Once we’ve had a bit more time to analyse and dissect our current Chatsum model it’ll be great to compare it with other people doing similar things.

Here’s hoping to be equally as impressed after the Arts Council supported Westminster eForum on IPR & Digital Rights Management next week. More on that after the event!

Today is both a terrifying and an exciting day for me. There is a project that I have been working on for the past eight years that keeps coming back and has refused to go away until it is realised. It’s a project that people have referred to as my ‘Killer App’, something that only adds to the terror and excitement.

Every six months or so since 1997 I have been working on this project, conjuring up new ways to get around the technical limitations that have stopped me realising it only to have my dream quashed by another technical limitation. Along the way I have produced several projects that have edged closer and closer but never quite close enough for me to rest. Being more of a scripter than a programmer this was starting to dishearten me, despite being happy working with Applescript, Lingo, HTML, Javascript, Perl, PHP and SQL I have always thought that I would never have the skills that I really needed to write the software I wanted to write. That was until Web 2.0.

With Web 2.0, Javascript and HTML are back and in a big way. Suddenly, skills that I thought I needed to upgrade are cutting edge again and with my knowledge of these two languages and a lot of help from Lee ‘Pixel Hospital‘ Parry I have got not only closer to the dream than I ever thought possible but blown it open to reveal so many more possibilities.

So today, with much trepidation, I lay my dream on the line and present the Chatsum beta:

Ever since I began my love affair with the Internet it has pained me that I have no idea who I may be sharing this virtual space with. Every day our requests are served alongside thousands of others over a finite number of wires and yet the only indication we have for the human traffic around us is an imperceivable change in the speed at which web pages are served to us.

The Chatsum beta allows you, through either a Firefox extension or a Dashboard Widget, to not only see, but also chat to other Chatsum users as you browse the web.

For those that love scenarios, imagine a typical late night browsing session: you’re the only person up in the house, the limitless stream of information coming from the web into your mind is acting like some kind of consciousness ray keeping your mind awake while your body tries to sleep. The question enters your head “I wonder how many other people are up this late looking at these exact same sites at this exact same time?”. You pop open your Chatsum sidebar and low and behold, not one, but three other people. You launch an opening salvo by chancing 6 characters: “Hello?”. A message comes back, “Hey, you like this site? I’m trying to find this page I was looking at earlier, but I can’t find it anymore”.

Type “What was it about?” to talk to the stranger.
Continue browsing to leave this room and enter another.

Really this is just the beginning, without people to chat to there is no point in Chatsum, with users driving the development it could go in any number of directions. That’s why we’re opening it up to beta so early. We really want lots of test users who will steer the development in the direction most likely to increase usage. This direction could be tighter integration with existing instant messaging services, it could be bookmark sharing, it could be for recommending websites, it could be for guided tours of the internet. We’ve got plenty of ideas that we’ll be trying out, all of which can be followed through the Chatsum Development Blog.

Please take a look a www.chatsum.com, register as a beta tester and tell your friends. We’ll be sending out an e-mail some time next week with instructions on how to install Chatsum and get started.