Werd I/O

1. Elgg

I've written before about how Elgg got its name. I had just recently graduated, and due to an unwise predisposition for flippant humor, I didn't have a single serious email address to my name. I needed one in order to apply for jobs. My full last name is Werdmüller von Elgg, and a brief search revealed that elgg.net was available. I used ben@elgg.net as my email address for years, without any web presence - so when I wrote a prototype social networking platform for education, it made sense to put it there.

Nobody was very comfortable with the name. Alternatives that were suggested over the years included Learning Landscaper, but none of them stuck. Past a certain point, the project was well-known enough that changing its name would have been silly; and anyway, it was a short, easily-memorized domain name.

Imagine, though, if we'd decided to call it Learning Landscaper. While that fit our original idea, Elgg morphed quickly from a social eportfolio engine for capturing informal learning into a multi-purpose engine that anyone could harness in order to create a social networking site. Had we picked a more domain-specific name, we would have limited our scope automatically, and possibly even unconsciously. Had we picked a more rational name (Engine, for example), we would have possibly isolated Elgg's large non-English-speaking userbase, and cut out a huge number of opportunities to talk about it. I lost count of the number of times someone asked us "what does Elgg stand for?" - it was unusual, and people were curious about it.

In fact, my only real regret is that I no longer have use of my ben@elgg.net address.

2. Latakoo

A latakoo is a kind of African lark: a bird that flies high and fast. For a service that allows people to send media footage quicky from and to anywhere in the world, that makes some thematic sense. But there's a good chance you might have never heard of a latakoo before.

When we were brainstorming names, a close contender was Cloud Compressor. The "cloud" was a big innovation back then, and latakoo achieves the bulk of its speed improvements through data compression. On face value, it makes sense. But not only is it a lifeless set of words, like Learning Landscaper, it thematically contrains what the company does.

Today, compression is just one part of the Latakoo service. It's still core to what we do, but we use it hand-in-hand with advanced routing, access permissions, and both service and datacenter integrations. We take media footage via any Internet connection, and deliver it anywhere, in the format it needs to be, securely. That's in no way covered by Cloud Compressor.

Our customers use us as a verb: "latakoo it". That's both a wonderful endorsement of our service and something that would only be possible with the right kind of name. What do you think YouSendIt were after when they changed their name to Hightail? Try to construct an elegant sentence involving sending something with YouSendIt. Now, switch it out to Hightail. "Hightail it". The kind of word you choose matters, because the sentences people use to describe you affect the way they think about you.

3. Idno

Lately, I've been spending some time with Idno, which I started in order to explore what a social publishing engine might look like on today's web.

It's another weird name, whose origins lie in the very unlively term ID node. I lopped off the de, because I wanted the word to phonetically end in a vowel. The idea was to create something that was at once friendly (I think ending in a vowel makes it feel like a nickname), reminiscent of terms like "ID", "id", "know" and "number", and weird. (It's also sometimes used as an acronym for in desperate need of, and a shortened form of I don't know; neither are bad connotations.) My idea is that people would remember idno in a way that they might not remember a more normal name.

We'll see what happens. I've been talking about perhaps changing its name while I can, but part of me likes having a name that's a little unexpected. Maybe that's because I have a bit of a weird name, too, but I genuinely think that standing out and being a bit skew-whiff to everyone else is a positive trait. There are situations where choosing a very conservative name is appropriate - for example, when your customers are, themselves, very conservative - but typically in technology you want to be seen as innovative.

And the way you are perceived starts with what you choose to call yourself.

My employer, Latakoo, is an enterprise media management company. We help people send files - mostly video, but we're expanding - really fast using any Internet connection.

A lot of our customers are involved in news and journalism. Here's a sample:

Used @latakoo on Air Force One to ship video of POTUS leaving DC as the plane was taxiing! Pretty cool technology. pic.twitter.com/N2rABZcCzF

— Jim Long (@newmediajim) December 9, 2013

It's not uncommon for us to get support requests from journalists in places like Syria who need to get footage out quickly and securely. Shortly, we expect to talking to people in Sochi a lot.

So here's the thing. We're a small, very agile (with a small "a") startup, and we need a little bit of help getting some of our upcoming projects out the door. They're all high profile, directly affect customers who themselves high profile, and are full of really meaty, interesting engineering problems. Oh, and they're based out of Austin or San Antonio in Texas.

Here's what we need:

• A freelance Objective-C iOS developer to help us with our completely redesigned iPhone and iPad apps.
• An experienced freelance PHP developer to help us build our media management interfaces, further expand our international file upload network, and integrate with things like ElasticSearch and CloudFront. Knowledge of HTML5, WebRTC and real-time application development are a big plus.

Sound interesting to you? Great. Email me at ben@latakoo.com, and let's talk!

Please, please, please, no agencies, offshore or otherwise. I want to work directly with individuals, and you have to be local to Austin or San Antonio.

The following is doing the rounds on social media. It sounds like fun, so I thought I'd adapt it:

I, Ben Werdmuller, promise to send a small work of art for the first fifty people who comment on this post by replying from their own website. Twitter or Facebook is not enough. Just link to this post and let me know you want in; I'll update this and provide an easy way to do that shortly. (If you're a developer, you can get started right away.)

***You may in turn post this on your own site and make something for the first fifty people who comment they want in on your post.***

The rules are simple: it has to be be your work, made by you and the recipient must receive it by the end of 2014 . It can be anything: a drawing, photo, video, a conceptual work of art or anything in between ...

This weekend, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich called on the world to examine Firefox's source code to protect it from NSA intrusion:

Through international collaboration of independent entities we can give users the confidence that Firefox cannot be subverted without the world noticing, and offer a browser that verifiably meets users’ privacy expectations.

Firefox is the only major web browser that's fully open source; by extension, it's the only browser that can be publicly verified to be free of unwanted surveillance code (and other malware). This is a great example of how open source software is more secure, and can be more trustworthy than closed source platforms.

However, browsers are more than their core, so it's important to bring up the issue of plugins and components. These are not necessarily as verifiable, so users should proceed with diligent caution. (Perhaps a site could be established that verifies software and plugins in an auditable way?)

For example, the closed-source h.264 video codec has typically not been supported by Firefox's core code. Instead, the browser links to operating system libraries if they exist, or can use the Adobe Flash plugin to play these videos. In most cases, neither the OS libraries nor the Flash plugin are open source, and therefore are not verifiable. Additionally, you may remember that Cisco has released a component that will allow for cross-platform h.264 support:

We plan to open-source our H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Cisco will not pass on our MPEG LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use in WebRTC.

Note that it's the binary module, not the open source codec, that will be license-free, and this is what will be incorporated into Firefox:

We are grateful for Cisco’s contribution, and we will add support for Cisco’s OpenH.264 binary modules to Firefox soon. These modules will be usable by downstream distributions of Firefox, as well as by any other project.

This remains a great move by Mozilla, because it opens up sites like YouTube (and latakoo) without forcing users to install Flash, but it does mean that the h.264 codec component in Firefox will be unverifiable. In turn, this continues to highlight the importance of truly open source, license-free media codecs, not just to maintain a healthy software development ecosystem, but to protect all of our privacy, too.

The problem is not that there aren't any open source h.264 implementations; it's that the MPEG-LA issues licenses for the technology based on patents it controls, which effectively means that anyone who wants to create h.264 files at scale must build significant license costs into their model. Cisco's binary distributions include an agreement that they will pay for these license costs.

It's worth noting that Mozilla continues to work on Daala, its fully open source codec, and Google has made some strides into kind-of-license-free video with VP9. However, h.264 has established itself as a standard - we use it at latakoo for that reason - and is unlikely to be displaced in the near future.

The moments when I do my best thinking are always the quiet ones. All my devices are off, there's no sound around me except for (when I'm lucky) the gentle breeze through the trees, or the swish of far-off cars. My mind is at peace; uncluttered and uninterrupted, while at the same time free to meander.

Which is at odds with where my brain is for most of the rest of the time. Compared to many of my peers, I use a relatively small number of devices on a regular basis: really just one phone and one laptop. Nonetheless, I find myself checking social media potentially hundreds of times a day. I'm a dopamine addict, and I'm pretty sure it's killing my creativity, concentration and productivity.

I'm not alone. Earlier today, Tantek Çelik adapted an old saying for the modern age:

In the land of the distracted, the singularly focused person is king.

But how negatively is social media affecting the way I think?

Note that the problem is with multitasking, not lack of focus. Unfocused thought can be an advantage:

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to outline the surprising benefits of not paying attention. Sometimes, too much focus can backfire; all that caffeine gets in the way. For instance, researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity—people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. Other studies have found that employees are more productive when they're allowed to engage in "Internet leisure browsing" and that people unable to concentrate due to severe brain damage actually score above average on various problem-solving tasks.

The results regarding multitasking, however, are not so positive. Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Stanford, noted the effect of multitasking on students at his institution, specifically with respect to smartphones:

The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. [...] We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted.

They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And even - they're even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they're actually worse at it. So they're pretty much mental wrecks.

Furthermore, just as second-hand smoking has effects beyond the original user, this multitasking behavior affects others too:

On a test following the lecture, students in view of multitaskers performed significantly more poorly than those who weren't in view of multitasking. The difference was 17 percent, enough to drop a solid A to a B-. Less surprisingly, a second study confirmed that the multitaskers themselves, not just those who incidentally witnessed multitasking, similarly suffered a drop in performance.

I've struggled with low self esteem for much of my life, which is associated with dopamine levels, and may make me more susceptible to this kind of addiction. Regardless of whether there's any truth to this or not, in 2014, I want my brain back.

Already, I've reduced my social media usage by posting to my own site here at werd.io rather than directly to the silos in question. This month, I'm reducing the number of quick-fix sites and networks I participate in, and have already jettisoned Instagram and Snapchat. It's not that I'm becoming an Internet hermit; instead, I want to focus on the kinds of content and interactions that are enriching to me. If I'm learning, growing and being productive, that's great. If I'm persisting because I get superficial rewards with no real lasting value to me, then it's time to jump ship. Long-form communication and engaging conversations are important.

As is spending more time with everything switched off, a cup of tea in my hands, leaves rustling in the breeze.

It's traditional to create resolutions for the new year. I've been thinking a lot about where I want to take my work in 2014; these are some ideas.

Write.

Specifically, I want to write more for other people, following from my previous work for the likes of ZDNet, IBM DeveloperWorks and Packt Publishing. I'm also interested in guest posting on blogs and sites around the web, about the social web, #IndieWeb, open source and responsible application development.

Empower independent content creators.

How can we put independent creators on a level pegging with the world's largest media companies? One thing I've been thinking about is that 24-7 news channels are obviously not a future-facing content medium given the web, where you can look up breaking news whenever you want, wherever you want, from whomever you want, without having to wait for a newscaster to restart their 30-minute cycle. Despite the ease of the web, leaning back and watching TV (or some screen) is sometimes pleasurable. Could you create a video newscast that aggregates stories from multiple providers based on your interests and context? Google News meets CNN?

Help support niche communities on the web.

The strength of the web is that we can all publish and communicate with each other, in a variety of different media, and it can all interlink as a single, continuous mesh of conversation and information. Unfortunately, that strength has been undermined by the proliferation of data silos, which make it harder to establish these kinds of links, and also limit certain kinds of content, topics and conversation through conservative design.

There are so many things to talk about, in so many ways, and by limiting ourselves to the platforms that the likes of Facebook provide, and by funneling the value generated by our communities to those sites, we're not using the web to its full potential. I want to help support the full range of communities on the web, and help them be self-sustaining, so that the people who create safe spaces for niche topics can continue to maintain them.

Idno is certainly a part of this idea, and I will continue to develop it as a first-class social publishing platform for both groups and individuals.

Figure out open source for designers.

Open source software suffers by treating designers like second-class citizens.

The open source process for programmers is well-established: we have many different flavors of version control, and the tools that surround them are first-class. I'm as happy as I've ever been working with Git, and software like GitHub and GitLab.

Working with design media is harder. Not only is it hard to represent visual changes using version control, and manage them in a sensible way using our project management tools, but even the accepted file formats for design work are closed. Photoshop comps are the norm, and UX wireframes often use closed software like Omnigraffle. That's because those tools are absolutely the best ones for the job, but standardizing on those formats make it harder to build open tools for design collaboration. And even with this aside, issue trackers are all written with source code in mind.

Collectively, this all means that welcoming designers into an open source community is extremely difficult. Nonetheless, design is an extremely significant part of any software project. It's worth thinking about the first steps towards making this easier.

Build bridges.

It's hard to share from, eg, the Twitter app to my own website, whether it's based on Idno or something else. I'm planning on building a shim that allows me to do that more easily, based on Android's share dialog. But there's more to do. There are ways to take ostensibly closed platforms and find ways to pry them open. For example, functionality to share closed content by email can be used to integrate directly into other, open software. Other integrations are possible, exploiting "growth hacking" features designed to find more people to lock into these platforms.

Work from everywhere.

I've still never been to Seattle. Or Tokyo. Or Melbourne. And it's been too long since I was in London, or Oxford, or Edinburgh. I want to travel more, and use the fact that I can work anywhere there's an Internet connection - and that I am not responsible for a family at this stage in my life - to see more of the world.

If you'd be willing to host me at your office for a few days, wherever you are in the world, let me know!

As part of the Nieman Journalism Lab's Predictions for Journalism 2014, Jason Kottke writes:

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

He then goes on to discuss the death of the reverse-chronological stream, as well as the inevitable move to what he calls tightly-bound social media sites. Thematically, it's an interesting companion piece to Anil Dash's seminal The Web We Lost, which was published last year at about this time.

And, despite some hedging on his personal blog, it's clearly true. Almost none of you will have found this link through a feed reader (although my stats show that some of you are using Feedly, Digg Reader, and even Livejournal's RSS feature). Most links will have come through Twitter and Facebook, with a straggling number showing up through app.net and similar sites. If I'm lucky, someone might submit this post to an aggregator like Hacker News.

Note, though, that you're still reading it. The article isn't dying; you can think of the blog, or the stream, or the feed, as the container that the article sits in.

Medium exploits this in a clever way by presenting articles nicely, and then providing a magazine-style site for you to consume them in. Indieweb arguments about whether you should publish posts on a site that you control or on someone else's aside, there's no doubt that Medium's injected new life into long-form text on the web. That's great, and like Facebook and Twitter, you can choose to think of it as a well-executed proof of concept.

If you buy the idea that articles aren't dying - and anecdotally, I know I read as much as I ever did online - then a blog is simply the delivery mechanism. It's fine for that to die. Even welcome. In some ways, that death is due to the ease of use of the newer, siloed sites, and makes the way for new, different kinds of content consumption; innovation in delivery. Jason talks about the ephemerality of Snapchat (which is far from a traditional feed), and there are an infinity of other ways that content might be beamed to us on whichever device we happen to choose to be using at any particular moment. But these content forms are minor details.

The beauty of the independent web is that we can choose to represent ourselves online - and therefore, publish content - in a manner of our choosing. I happen to like the reverse-chronological feed, but if you prefer to publish in the form of an immersive 3D world, or a radio show, or full-screen autoplaying video with annotations, then, hey, that's up to you. It's all part of a rich, interlinking medium. Independence means not necessarily going with the flow.

The counterpart to that is how you read content. In the past, we've been very stream-heavy: RSS readers, Twitter feeds, Facebook timelines, and so on. But there's no need for that to be the case. Part of the joy of a diverse web is that while I might choose to read in the form of a feed or a newspaper, you might want to mash your reading list up in entirely new ways. You could have a robot announcer read to you while you drive to work in the morning (wouldn't that be better than the radio?), or mash related articles up to provide new kinds of content that provide better insight than the sum of their parts. And I can choose to use a completely different form to you. Each one of us can have a completely different experience.

That's a tough concept to get across to an audience that's used to mass media, where everyone consumes the same content in the same form. But we don't need that anymore. Not only can content be personalized, but the form of the content can be personalized. Facebook might agonize over the algorithm that decides which posts are surfaced, but in the future we can each have our own algorithms. Form and content will be separated.

These new kinds of readers will begin to appear in 2014, powered by simple web technologies like HTML and microformats. They will eventually be as easy to use as Twitter and Facebook. And they will make us all more empowered readers and creators, once again connecting us all, but this time on our terms.