Helsinki Bike Show

So i went to the Helsinki Motorcycle show on Saturday.

It was interesting as it was much larger this year, and the spreading out allowed it to feel less "crowded".
The effect was to have three "halls" or area's; the mainstream/manufacture's hall, the small dealers/misc-stuff hall and upstairs there was the custom/vintage hall, along with a cinema showing Easy Rider.

The mainstream all was crowded and not so much new, although the Finnish Ploice stand was interesting as it was projecting videos of chases of speeders, and showing what was the average speeds and the actual offical speed limits in those places.
Most of the stands had a couple of girls in tight clothing sitting on bikes.

The small-dealers/misc-stuff hall benefitted from not being crowded by the custom hall, so the ailes could be a bit wider, making it wasier to browse or just walk as you choose (other years the aisles were smaller making it a bit more difficult to just walk around as the people buying/fondling the merchandise would fill up the aisles causing blockages).

The custom hall, was kind of interesting, as the same as last year a couple of the local workshops had transplanted themselves to the hall and were showing their work live(ish).

Overall, a good afternoon out.

My pictures from the event are shown below:

I think i might have figured out why i don't like Twiter

So at the day job we have finally got more than 50 people signed up for Yammer, and with that number of people the activity has started to get interesting.
This caused a slight parting of the clouds/light bulb moment about why i have struggled with Twitter and why i don't really like it.

The Yammer web interface will show threads (if people use the reply option!), bubbles active threads to the top (like Rejaw), reasonable clients (web, Adobe Air desktop client, SMS, IM...) that offer multiple ways to post, self made groups AND daily summary emails.
If all this sounds rather familiar, it should, this is the feature list of Jaiku (without the presence stuff, but normally you have some form of IM client to do that).

So why do both Yammer and Jaiku work so much better for me?

Well, it finally occured to me that, what i like about this is that i can add my thoughts/comments at a time that is convient for me, and i don't have to be online ALL the time, and can actually do the tasks that the company gives me money to do.

The real-time nature of Twitter might be useful for some, but it fails spectacularly as i see it, because Twitter has no "do not disturb" option like a true IM client does (other than closing the client).

Videos and memes i helped friends discover over the xmas break

So as i was traveling around the UK visiting various friends and catching up with them in real life, i was telling them about various things that i had seen via various places on the internet.

Everyone seemed to enjoy them, so i thought i would gather them all together here in one place.

Silly ones:

Numa Numa guy
Leave Britney alone
Chocloate rain song
Baby Panda Sneezing
fat cat fail

Interesting ones

Money as debt, very interesting/scary explanation of how the banks work
where the hell is matt, view the three videos and read the FAQ.

I also showed Spotify to a few people. This post is a good explanation of how it works

In other news, I also attended my first Tuttle club meeting, and had some very interesting conversations (and geeked out a little :)

Another post on the subject of Thoughts on Mircoblogging

Another slightly long one.

So some of this post has been sitting in the "queue" of ideas fermenting away, and then over the past couple of days a minor flurry of activity was kicked off, that prompted me to finally post this. More on this "controversy" further down.

First, after some thought, here is my current view on the two oldest microblogging services:

Twitter feels more like old school blogging.
From how i see twitter, it has the same "mental model" as blogging.
Someone creates a single post, then there are some responses to that, comments == @ replies and DM == emails.
The difference is that unless you do some work (or use a range of third party tools), it is impossiblevery hard to figure what was said (the original author can figure it out i think, i am not enough of SocialMedia bigshot to have any real experience with that :)
Also Twitter, due to it's limited functionality, but existence of an API that exposes all of that functionality, has caused an eco-system to grow up around twitter. This eco-system also has a secondary effect, in that now there are not only people writing about how to use twitter but also what tools are best to use with it.

Jaiku feels more like a forum.
This is probably due to the threaded nature of the conversations.
The fact that replies can use markdown and can be longer also contributes to this feeling.
The channels also help to separate off some of the noise as well.
Another thing that helps, is that the social circles in Jaiku seem to be slightly tighter, or at least that is my experience. For me this shows up as the same names showing up in threads, even though i am not following that particular person, so i can take a longer time getting to "know" them before following/friending them.

now about what inspired me actually do something with the ideas written above:

Ville Vesterinen put up a post on the Arctic Startup blog, where he outlines his idea that he will be spending more time on Twitter as the majority of the people he met at LeWeb08 were on twitter, and he thinks that he will get more from using that as his primary tool.
This caused a bit of a stir on Jaiku (along with a slight uptick in the number of Finns registered on Twitter i would guess).
Ville, to give him credit, follows this up with a second post and third post about the responses.

Possibly as a response to this (and also due to the general rumblings on #jaiku) Jyri announces in a blog post his understanding of some of the future plans for Jaiku.
Interestingly he also posts it to both Jaiku and twitter.

One of the hightlights of this was the comedy moment when this jaiku thread started up in response twitter post by one of Jaiku's more prolific contributers

Another highlight was @Spongefile's comment here

Jaiku is like a constant huge cocktail party hosted by your friends with interesting conversations to drop in on with semi-strangers.

Twitter is like getting constant voicemail from everyone you know. You can reply via the same method, but that's no way to communicate.

which i think has to be just about the best description/comparison of the two services i have seen in a while.
And also ties in with one of my all time favorite Merlin Mann quotes here

My notes from the afternoon sessions of BarCampHelsinki2

What happens to Seniors? by Summpi
continues/expands on a Lunch time discussion:

--
What happens to designers & Programmers when they get to the Senior level (not how do we help OAP's , as i first thought from title).

Options; change company, become Project manager, Start a company, Consultant.

Reactor as an example.
Interesting projects, good team, good tools
Interesting point - not so good pay, but amazing conditions. Only 3 people have left, now approx 100, can pick clients.

Fjord's senior people get pleasure from mentoring.

Conversation morphed into/onto business models (which had been mentioned during Myles session earlier)

Web2.0 - do it cheep first then monetise.

How to get over the gap (only need a few 10k s to get to an intial level), then need to get 6 months to one year money to get to VC level (few 100K's users)

Jaiku - changed purpose. What was their business model.
--

Tools for Distributed teams by Antti
Antti had prepared slides, but decided to change to a more group discussion type thing

--
Basic idea - Teams should not be distributed.
Discussion : for a more succesful project you must get everyone togeather physically at the start of the project for some period of time (time length depends on number of factors, but few days to a week seemed to be consesous )

Tools used for Project management? Kisko is using Basecamp

37signals - all products are basically a productised wiki.

Yammer.

Campfire used in kisko. Scrumwords.

Timetracking methods;
- enter using emacs & text file this is then parsed via excel.
- checking time spent by svn logs, emails etc.
- Stimmer - Scred team bills by second.
- Github - times stuff via checkins?
- Fogbugz - investigated by

Discussion: Estimating, accuracy and best practices. Joel Spolsky's essay on software estimation was mentioned.
--

Beer - Why does it taste so good by me
Originally i had posted this on the Wiki as the i saw that the proposals were getting a little "heavy", and late one evening after slightly more than one glass of beer it seemed like a good idea.
As there was only a few sessions on the board, i put mine up there (if only to fill the last 10 minutes before going to the pub!)
I basically gave a short summary whiteboard presentation of the Wikipedia pages on beer.
2 main types - Lager and Ale (i started off drinking Ale in UK, and prefer it).
Beer is made of only natuarl ingrediants; water, mated grain (normally barley), hops and yeast.

A couple of days later i came across this article about an ancient yeast being used to make beer.

User Experience by Niko Nyman
Niko volunteered to give this as Sergio was not yet back to give his talk.
Niko will be using the same slide set at Web 2.0 Berlin
--
Experience is ...
Excellent ideas and pictures.
Worth of the admission price when presented at ??
Example of hyundai - they provide new purchases with lots of reasons for their purchase after they have bought the car, as they know you will get lots of commetns for your unusual choice.
Dvd player with coffe cup button
He has put his slides up on slideshare now

One thing is that the graph on slide 50 was refered to a number of times in the conversation in the pub afterwards.
--

An excellent presentation of basic fundamental concepts, my notes/wrtie up is short as the session was near the end of the day, and appart for the graph (which kept being used in the beer session in Kaisla afterwards), there was only a single fundamental idea presented.

Niko pointed out that he does similar workshops at corporates to help managers understand design and user experience fundamentals.

Design Ethics by Sergio Palomo
Presentation and discussion of the ideas presented by Gabriel White. The original can be seen here

--
We do not want to be evil.

Ethically is good design enough? Are designer's responsible for their product.
Discussion - Example of guns & knives

Use principles & heuristics
Question - rules for ethics? Is good will enough, or something else

Overview of heuristics.

Discussion - if/how social web sites are addictive

Use of resources (multiple devices not ecological), how to re-use
Make it easy to do double sided printing.
More principles & heuristics - gives a language to have the discussion/negotation.

Discussion on ethics.
--

It was a real shame that this came so late in the day, it could be seen/felt that everyone in the room really wanted to take part, but was really just too tired.

My notes from the before lunch sessions of BarCampHelsinki2

Once again, the sessions were a single stream, with the titles written on the big board.
As was the case last time, it was quite a slow process to get the titles on the board. As there was no better suggestion we took the sessions in the order they were written down in.
I will link the title of each session to the relevant Jaiku thread, where i have already posted my "rough notes", so i don't plan to duplicate those here, but expand on them slightly.

Does Silicon Valley culture work in EU? by Myles Byrne
This was an interesting session as Myles was on a flying visit to Finland, i think around his stealth startup that was doing something with Neuroplasticity.
Myles started off by quoting some "stupid big numbers" such as 170 guadrillion transistors, 55 trillion links, 2mhz freqency of email, 31khz freqency of txts, etc
In Silicon valley this adds up to 1 big machine, this is referred to as "The singularity" (the idea that this 1 machine will soon be equal a single human brain)

There was then an interesting discussion that seemed to conclude that in Finland, generally, people are practical and direct but in the "Valley" there is an environment where dreamers and big ideas can exist. @Pe3 pointed out that it is quite funny to be talking about Finns as all the same.

Myles then talked about the clock of the long now apparently it is featured in the latest Neal Stephenson novel

The discussion then morphed into how the two places viewed risk (mostly with regard to starting your own business.
The conclusion of this seemed to be that the EU was more about Social risk whereas the US was more about financial risk.

Doing one thing properly by Henry Lehto
Presentation available here
An interesting presentation on the idea that it is better to do only one thing really well, rather than multiple things to a good standard.
This lead to a number of interesting discussions, around each of the points raised.
For me one of the eye opening discussions was sparked off by the example of the Disco app, which only does CD (DVD?) burning, costs approximately 20$ to buy, however it duplicates the functionality of the built in OS X burning app, but does not come close to the functionality of Toast. The interesting thing was that Mac users are willing to pay 20$ for an application that is prettier than the inbuilt application. I knew this on some level, but had not realised that the hard core Mac faithful regarded this as normal.


Bridging the gap: explaining RSS to grandma by Tina Aspiala
Tina went back to basics (presentation wise), with a whiteboard based discussion/presentation
She started off with a couple of lists; Two basic platforms that exist today (and hence you should consider when developing a solution) are Computers (Mac's, PC's Desktops, laptops etc) and cell phones.
Changing and/or enabling technologies; RSS, Wiki's, Social media, CMS & blogs. these are things that are obvious to everyone in the room, but hard to explain to non-tech literate people (example of email now used by virtually everybody)
Tina then asked that if there is all this cool stuff "out there" why is it not more used. The discussion came up with a number of reasons, and tina gave an example of how she tried to get the market stalls in Töölöntori to make use of modern technology, but was not able to make them change.
All this was leading to the point that eat.fi had just launched an updated version of the site, and how best to get Restaurant owners to update their own information. There was a good flow of ideas supplied by everyone present (be aware that free advice is worth everything you paid for it!).
Future expansion plans for eat.fi is that no matter where you are in Finland, you will be able to find an eating place near by and have information about that place (average price, quality, opening times, food types etc)

Just one reason i like hanging out on Jaiku

So i check my Jaiku stream this morning and i see this post as shown below

The comment does not seem to relate to the original Jaiku at all!

So i click through and look at the original thread, and suddenly everything become clear

Hierarchy of Communication

Once again, the almost ever happy James Whatley, has posted something that was in my "should post something about this idea" queue, before i manage to get my post out. So in response to that, i have mostly tied up my thoughts and here it is.

I had been thinking about this (but from a slightly different point of view), as i had been rather busy on multiple projects at my job recently. So busy in fact, that i got to mostly dictate the communication methods other people could use (which in fact turned out to be email only).

For me, i think of the various ways that other people send information towards me in a hierarchy of increasing order of interruption (something like):
Social network/microblogging
email
IM
SMS
Phone call
Face to Face meeting

Digging a little deeper into these,
- Microblogging or social networks
they have an "ambient intimacy" idea going for them == i check in when I have time
- Email
I can check this when i get a short break in the day i.e. 2-3 times per day.
- IM
pops-up on your screen, but can be ignored until you are ready to deal with it (or you can set your presence to be do not disturb or away if you need quite/thinking time)
- SMS
again it can be ignored, but is not usually. For me, this is probably my preferred method of communication (low interruption, little expectation of response, i can respond on my schedule if needed, etc.)
In fact, i have found that in Finland SMS is actually a very valid method of business communication.
- phone call
I need to be almost 100% focused for the duration of the call, with conference calls at least i find i can do small "tidying" type tasks (sort out inbox, desktop or temp directories etc.).
To a certain extent i also use the "divert to voice mail" to judge how important the call was (if they leave a voicemail, it was important!).
- Face to Face meeting
The most expensive in terms of interrupting me or stopping me doing something else productive, due to the fact that as well as the duration of the actual event, there is some period of time before and after the meeting where there is not much else i can do because i am focused on the meeting.

Now in terms of the volume of information that is transferred, for the interruption of time, i see it as something like;
Email is best (least intrusive, most information), face to face gives good value as you can draw pictures etc., SMS, phone call, im and microblogging brings up the rear (filtering out the noise from all of the status Updates can be a relatively major task)

Services like Spinvox would probably help me by moving phone calls further down my interruption hierarchy. In fact judging by my current phone behaviour, i might even just leave the phone in "silent" mode and never answer it again.

Getting back to why i was thinking about blogging this, was that i have seen that unlike James' pictures, I don't see the other half of the picture as normally a mirror. From what i have experienced, the order changes slightly, or some options are not even there.
Like most assumptions, this thinking that the other person likes to be contacted in the same way can cause dis-connects and friction.

EDIT: Follwing on from @whatleydude's comment/request, i created a diagram that sort of summs it up.

update on 100 press-ups challenge

So i stumbled across someone else doing the "One Hundred Push Up Challenge" on Jaiku.
Seems they have quite a number of their company has also started.

This lead me to finding a new channel - http://jaiku.com/channel/hundredpushups
This is important to me, as i use Jaiku as my Facebook status update via the rather good Jaikubook application.
What this means in practice is that i think twice about what i post as my main Jaiku, but i am very free with posts to channels and comments.

It then occured to me that once again, somthing that is obvious to me, might be useful for someone else.
As a long time PDA user, it was obvious to me that there must be some sort of "countdown" app out there.
Sure enough some searching later and i came up with this Stopwatch/time application
Much easier than staring at the second hand on my watch.

As to progress, i have gone back to Week 3, but this time doing column 2 instead.
On day 2 i missed the final set by 3 or 4, but yesterdays set was a bit of a disaster.
Oh well, onto week 4

some hints and tips for new Jaiku users

With Jaiku now moving to unlimited invites for everyone, over the weekend i dropped a ton of invites over on Jaiku Invites (and it seems a fair number of other people did the same)
This resulted in a mini-flood of new users on Jaiku, and i could see a need for something like this. Please bear in mind that these are my opinions, and as far as i can tell there are no official etiquette rules on Jaiku, just a bunch of friendly people.

• read the help pages


• One of the original purposes of Jaiku was to help prevent the two most common questions when starting a mobile phone conversation; where are you, are you free to talk


this means there are a couple of things that people can miss if they are not using the mobile client


• Jaiku is a presence application - shows the in use profile of your phone (silent, vibrate, general)


• location updates. This is done by cell-tower, so you can name places (if you are the first Jaiku user there), so pick a good name (not home, office etc!)


• think about joining some channels that interest you


• #jaiku is a good one :)


• use the search box (on your home page) to find people of channels that you might be interested in


• add your feeds from things like; your blog, LastFM, del.icio.us, flikr, Dopplr etc. to your profile


• FriendFeed & Twitter - no so useful


• use JaikuBook to get your Jaiku's to be used as your facebook status


• this is only your main Jaiku's, not comments or feeds


• feel free to post comments on anything


• use comments, rather than creating new Jaiku's
• from this thread you can see who will see your comments (so no need to create a new Jaiku using the twitter @ syntax!)


• If you are not interested in someone's feeds, you can unsubscribe from just that feed


• you can also unsubscribe from their Jaiku's, but as long as you are following them, you sill still see any comments they make


• there is no need to "block" followers, just stop following them yourself


• to get a "new line" in comments, you need to place a blank line in the comments box


• clever use of "ku" suffix is encoraged


• hence things like; meetku's, jog-ku's...


• if you are looking at a Jaiku of Somones feed, and there is a link which says something like "and 5 more", if you click that link, the "5 more" appear in a box on the left where the google adds normally appear

Some things that are known bugs/features/problems:

• there is no equivalent to Twitter's direct message


• everything in Jaiku is public and we like it that way


• use IM or email, they were designed for that task




• only 12 channels will display in your manage page


• The Jaiku development team is still quite small and is concentrating on the port to Google App Engine


• the mobile (S60) client is a bit old and does not support channels


• realistically, we need to wait for the port to be complete before the team looks at new release


• There is no iPhone client currently, but the recent iPhone DevCamp was looking into this


• use the #wishku channel to ask for features, BUT read it first to see if it has already een asked for

In this post, @acuk gives some good tips on how to gain more followers.
Basically, commeting on other peoples posts will bring you to the attention of other people who might then start following you.
Also, some poeple will follow you if you ofllow them, others will look at your home page, and then decide if they want to follow you.