In the past I’ve written about scale free networks in relation to the Internet and you can see how anything written by a big influencer has big sword power. Similarly, the new voice of the people via Twitter is now a massive influence driven by a bandwagonesque interest from traditional media.

Obviously, the Internet is already full of negative reviews but look across Amazon or Trip Advisor and you’ll see polarised opinions on most things. Feedback clearly has massive power on EBay already.

Does the same apply in a far smaller way to having just plain old good SEO? Let me take you through a ‘for instance’ to explain.

A while back we had some work done on the house. In general, it wasn’t a disaster but there was much about it that could have been a lot better, like finishing the work as per the plans, almost setting the house on fire, a small flood, that kind of thing. Fairly recently, the person responsible for the work pinged me on Facebook, by email and twice by SMS asking me to write a review on some listing site or other. Here’s the thing. I’m all for giving praise where it is due* but, as I considered a review and re-listed all the issues I’d forgotten in my head, it ended up fairly negative. Not wholly so, as I said, it wasn’t a total disaster, but certainly enough to put a prospective customer off. So, I chose to ignore the requests and do nothing. Live and let live, can’t be bothered with the hassle, whatever. Whether or not I owe it the world to provide any kind of warning.

Caution : May Get Grumpy When Disappointed

It then started to think about what would happen if I posted the review on this blog. Thing is, the SEO seems to be working here ( search for who invented angry birds and you’ll see ) so if I did a genuinely factual and honest review of the work done by the company, I’d very likely win the race to position 1 on Google for the company and thereby, very likely, kill online as a marketing vehicle for them. I may be overstating that slightly but it is certainly possible. And, since it’s a franchise, would have some impact nationally to others.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that but I’d love to hear what other people think. Would you ever do that? Would you ever use your SEO power as a threat? In any situation where your online presence trumps the supplier, does it even cross your mind? Have I just given you an idea? Would the number of Google link removal requests increase and what would they do?

Apropos of nothing, if my accountant is reading this, you’d better get it sorted soon, the stories I could tell!

* if you’re needing some work done on your car, J.B. Cleland in Davidsons Mains come highly recommended!

One of the very few benefits of being an old git is that you’ve been doing the same thing for long enough to know that there is very little different as the software industry fuels itself with faddish changes of language, methodology and the feature porn fetish of the modern web world. (I still find it astonishing that the social media news world gets so excited by the addition of tiny features).

There are very few constants in all of this. The obvious ones are that software and training companies make money from continual and, often unnecessary, change. Another constant is that every year, the Standish Group’s Chaos Report suggests that a lot of software projects don’t go well. And software engineers constantly refuse to accept that their new shiny toy isn’t the solution to these issues…

“Blah, blah, blah but we’re using insert faddish methodology here writing in insert faddish language here”

We must always remember Cobb’s Paradox:

“We know why projects fail, we know how to prevent their failure – so why do they still fail?”

Very few people ever seem to take note of this. Why would they? Everyone wants to play with the newest shiny so saying it will make no difference is a tough sell.

There is a key central constant. Good people deliver good software entirely independently of what methodology and language they use.

And good people… are spanners.

Every lifecycle has embedded within in it some form of analysis, design, development and test. These things are obvious and discrete in a waterfall world, they are buried somewhere inside more fluid approaches – but still get done.

In the same way that people who know how the compiler works write better code and those that can code come up with better designs, people who can span the disciplines contribute more to the success of a project than those that stay in one box.

This is not just because multi-skilled people have, well, more skills. It is because software development is nothing more than an elaborate game of Chinese whispers. Every time you introduce a transition from one phase or one person to another you have an artefact (I didn’t say document, I’m modern) that intends to communicate the knowledge to that point. How well the recipient interprets that artefact determines how much of the original intent is lost. Spanners prevent information loss at these crucial transitions. They know enough about both the sending and receiving end to ensure that things are picked up and continue on the right path.

If you can span your way across all the work in the project then the perception gap between desire and deliverable is reduced. In effect, if you can get the clever dev guy to talk to the end user and just get on with it, y0u’ll have much more success than if you let the requirements pass through multiple hands, mouths, documents, whatever like some modern day version of Incan Chasquis.

This is why (I have to say this or the evangelista will get grumpy) agile/scrum stuff works. It’s not because the methodology itself necessarily makes the people doing it any better but they are at least required to get on the same page together and have smaller gaps of time before they check that they’re doing the right thing. At the end of a two week sprint the perception gap can only ever be two weeks wide at most. More traditional waterfall projects can idly spent months heading in the wrong direction.

Here’s the thing; when you are looking for new people, don’t let the job specs have too narrow a focus – you’re looking for people who can reach across the lifecycle. But don’t ask for spanners. That could go horribly wrong.

They chuckle, sort of, and wander off vaguely bemused. Actually, I should say ‘shuffle off‘ as that has much better pun potential in this regard.

It does demonstrate the pace of technology these days. A device that was released in 2006/7 is considered an outlandish freak now. When I think retro, I think of things from the 80′s – not 80 minutes ago. But such is the way of things.

My MP3 player is an Archos 504, the 80GB one. And I love it. Here’s a picture of it. My actual one. Looking pretty sleek, I’m sure you’ll agree.

My Big Fat Lovely Archos 504

So, let’s get the main questions out the way:

1. Does it have wi-fi? – No.
2. Well, how do you get it on the internet? – You don’t.
3. Then how do you get apps onto it? – You can’t.
4. Eh? Then, erm, no apps? – No, there are no apps for it.
5. Can it at least play videos? – Yes!
6. With a lovely touchscreen interface? – No.
7. No, touchscreen! But a really nice interface?  - No, it’s pretty rubbish.
8. Does it do anything cool? – It can record off the TV if you buy the docking station.
9. So, you do that? – No.
10. But it’s mega-portable and light and everything? – No.

So why, you may ask, given it’s obvious limitations and bulky demeanor do I love it so much? Well, I won’t deny an element of nostalgia. It has been with me for a good number of years now and have accompanied me everywhere I have been. But that’s sort of the point. It has survived being baked on the dashboard crossing the desert of Northern Spain. Last winter, I left it in the glove compartment of the car when the temperature dropped to minus lots and it, sluggishly, came back to life. It gets thrown in bags, around the car, around the world and still performs like the day I first took it out the box. This, I think, is uncommon in modern devices that are built expecting to be quickly obsolete and replaced.

Funny thing is, even when I travel with a smartphone AND and iPad, I STILL take the Archos with me. Despite both of these devices being capable of playing the music and movies I might want to watch, I still use the Archos. Is this simply because I’m a quasi-OCD creature of habit or is it because it genuinely fills the niche better?

One thing is for sure, a device for watching movies on is better served by not being touch screen. Much as I am learning to adore the iPad almost as much as the Archos, the constant battle against fingerprints is a little wearing.

Part of it is also the realisation that with device convergence comes battery reliance. I always need my phone to work so why run the battery down listening to music or watching a movie on it? The big chunky battery in the Archos goes forever, despite it’s age. And if it dies, I can still make phone calls.

I don’t think there is any device that has a good enough battery that allows it to be solely relied on for everything. In fact, if anything, you need to be more careful now with smartphone battery life than ever with their insistence on doing all they can to eat the battery while you’re not watching. This is particularly true now that I will often tether my iPad to the phone for browsing and email. Recently I was getting on a plane with a colleague who’s boarding pass was only on his iPhone. The battery died in the queue to board the plane. Queue a frantic charge off a laptop. This is not how the future is supposed to be.

I use the Archos most of the time in the car and this is where its robustness is ideal. I did let it down a little by getting a not entirely attractive case (causing it to be referred to as ‘the purse’) but it means it can be flung about the car without much worry. I don’t feel comfortable doing that with either the phone or the iPad.

Perhaps all of this is just post-justifying stubbornness and resistance to change but something tells me it isn’t just that. If I look on the Archos site now at their latest set of products, I don’t see anything that fills the space of my Archos 504.  Lots of storage and a big enough screen to watch movies on. That’s all I want it to do. Of course, everything converges hoping to be the one device you buy and, I suppose, the product strategy/marketing people make the assumption that people only want to buy/carry one device. Do you happily carry multiple devices or are you fervently chasing a “one device does all” life?

I recently bought a new battery for the Archos. I’ve not used it yet. It’s just insurance as I’m sure the battery will die eventually and I wanted to buy one while they are still available. With the new battery, no reason to think that the Archos can’t carry on for many, many years. The purse will go on.

One episode of Northern Exposure that stuck in mind came back to me recently, it contained this quote:

Ed, you’re dealing with the demon of external validation. You can’t beat external validation. You want to know why? Because it feels sooo good.

It made me think again about external validation. This is what I thought, well, as much as I can remember as I type…

The Cast of Northern Exposure - Ed on the right

Over the last few years I’ve dipped my toes into a number of things. I spent quite a lot of time writing a book (and not enough time editing it). At the same time, I bought a DSLR and got into photography fairly seriously. When you’re writing a book and, in particular, your first book, it is very easy to wonder what you are doing. Hour after hour is sunk into thinking, writing, worrying and, mainly, doubting. If  you try it and you’re dumb like me, you’ll embark on attacking a book with no experience and just hope that you can pull it off. Trouble is, as you go, the doubts creep  up on you. You think you’ve written a good bit but there is no one hanging on your shoulder shouting “Wow” and applauding. There is no immediate feedback, there is no feedback at all. This makes sustaining enthusiasm and focus tricky. Remember, this was all being done after coming home tired from work, cue violins.

Compare this with digital photography. You take a picture, off the camera on the internet and someone can be using it,commenting on it, telling you its good within minutes. Boom! External validation. And we know how good that feels right? And beyond comments the photos then turn up on the web, on books, on TV and well, how you can resist that drug and spend hours writing a book that you may never finish and, in all probability, hardly anyone will read? Because of this, I’m quite pleased with myself that I did finish the book. With such ready access to the external validation drug it would have been easy to give  up. Which led me to think…

The growth of the social internet has been fuelled by feedback mechanisms. Ostensibly this has been used to determine good/useful/entertaining content. Lots of Diggs/Stumbles/Likes indicate popularity and this fundamental mechanism helps filter the content and let the stuff we really want to see bubble through the million miles of froth the to top.

More mechanisms like this come along all the time. Now we have retweets, Facebook integration everywhere and even things like Follow Friday on Twitter is that kind of thing.

But there is a problem. For as much as these feedback mechanisms form the fabric of social sharing and the language of measuring popularity, they also create and feed our innate desire for external validation. And this, I’m afraid, weakens the fabric.

From here on, I will try hard not to be too harsh or cynical, it’s not my intent – hopefully you’ll see what I mean…

People like to be loved and the social media mechanisms put into place for sharing and measurement of popularity provide an excellent mechanism to receive that love. Unfortunately, the desire to be loved means that people will inadvertantly, subconciously or, in some cases, deliberately subvert the process. How many times do you get followed by someone/something on Twitter knowing that you are only being followed because they want you to follow them back? How often have you seen people comment copiously on things in the hope that you will reciprocate? Even someone as innocent and potentially useful as Follow Friday on Twitter has been reduced to religiously spouting the same list of friends every week. To what end? I bet there are some people (no one I know obviously!) who do this simply in the hope that someone will reciprocate.

The noise very quickly overwhelms the signal. And this is repeated across every social channel you can think of and is massively endemic in how kids view their interactions on Facebook. You need to get anything you submit “liked” – if it doesn’t get enough attention then fights can, and do, break out. “Why didn’t you like that?” etc.

Please Like Me (Look, I've Even Got a Button at the bottom of the post)

The effect is amplified by one of the better sides of human nature; the basic desire to be nice. I notice this on photography sites especially. Everyone is nice about each other’s photos. I don’t mind this but sometimes you wonder if the process and everyone in it would be better served with honest feedback. I’ve seen many healthy debates about this on a number of forums ( there is a good example here on Blipfoto ).

Thing is, with so many people hell bent on being nice and so many people feeding of the external validation we must, to some extent at least, be becoming addicted. The basic mechanisms that have been put in place to make the social internet function tie directly into a fundamental human need. Someone cleverer than I is doubtless already thinking about what impact this is having on us a humans. I was lucky enough to hear JP Rangaswami talk recently. He spoke about how the kids of today have developed to cope with multi-tasking and dealing with rapid stimuli across a number of simultaneous channels. If young brains can grow to work in this way, is there a direct impact on their emotional development of their thirst for external validation is magnified by the way they run their social lives online? You can’t beat external validation. You want to know why? Because it feels sooo good.

So as we all troll around giving to receive and desperately wanting to be loved, do we leave the outcome with any validity? Probably, the process is saved by volume and our collection of small victories have not much bearing overall. But what impact does this process have on us? Will this post get retweeted? Will anyone comment? Eh? Come on, I need it, I NEED IT.

The Green Man in Northern Exposure was right. You can’t beat external validation. So much so, that we have built a myriad of ways that we can now receive it instantly, daily, constantly. Are you hooked?

I’m not, I’m off to write another book, see you after another few years of pain and doubt…

I admit, this is a bold claim but bear with me. To give this some context, in Wester Hailes in the 70′s there was NOTHING to do. All the open spaces in which you could play football were decorated with Vulgarian “No Ball Games” signs. If ever there was an entrepreneurial landscape; this was it. Forget the iPad infested SXSW love-ins. This was invention as a necessity, not as any kind of glory hunting, fortune seeking, “look at me I made a thing” creativity. So, is it any surprise that this is where Angry Birds was really born?

This was when toys didn’t have batteries. Toys didn’t do things. You did things with toys. They were inanimate lumps of plastic or lead painted metal. In the grim urban squalor (am I over-doing this yet?) of Wester Hailes what else could you do but to get violent and use the toys to get angry. People will tell you that modern video games make children violent. Well, we managed it with long before I became Quake fodder.

So, the game. Stuart had the traditional box of cars, lorries and toy soldiers. Sadly, no bike, this still scars, taunt him, you’ll see. You took turns to select a car or lorry or whatever from the box until they were all gone. Then you did the same with the toy soldiers. Then you had your defences and your army.

The next, crucial, phase is to arrange your cars etc into a defensive position and the place your soldiers behind the barricades. There was one special soldier, a knight who had a cross on his shield. We called him “The Priest” (for reasons only an entirely irreligious 8 year old could explain). He was special because he was the only weapon.

Taking turns, you threw the priest at the opposing defensive position aiming to knock over the soldiers. Starting to sound familiar yet? The winner was the team to have the last people standing. Once you took out the last opposition soldier – a whoop of delight and the recriminations would begin.

Most often, the most damage could be done by aiming for the defences. If you could move a vehicle you could take out a lot of soldiers. It meant you had to throw hard, which meant you’d often get a plastic soldier in the face.

This is *exactly* what our game looked like

It’s Angry Birds innit? The similarity is as astonishing as it is entirely unenforceable in law. But I don’t care about the money. Or the fame. Or the glory. None of that.

One memorable game we took the whole game down the burn and setup the opposing army on either side of the raging torrent of water and low grade sewage. It was like Helm’s Deep long before WETA and CGI.

So, Rovio blokes, two wee boys got there first. You have stood on the scrawny, mince fed shoulders of small giants. But it doesn’t end there, you have more to learn. Not only am I not going to chase you for prior art, I’m going to give you more ideas for free. Here goes…

Angry Birds : Battle Edition

Connect two iPhones/iPad/device of choice. Each player gets the same scenery at either end of an open battlefield (or over a burn) and has to decide where to place their birds. In advanced levels you could also place the scenery, cars, lorries whatever. Once all the birds are in place, the battle starts. Same game, same rules. First person to take out all the opposition wins. It would be proper good fun. Get on with it. I’d pay at least £0.59 for it, perhaps more. Might go to a quid.

There you go. The next big thing in mobile gaming. Made in Wester Hailes. Whodathunkit?

Next week : how we invented the game “Diving about in dog shit“. Rovio – get it touch if you want to get in early…

I used Google’s Picasa. I have all my photos organised in Picasa, so that makes things easier, but you don’t need to have your photos imported for this to work.

It’s a very simple three stage process.

1. Pick a Photo

The only thing to bear in mind when picking a photo is that, when you rotate the iPad. the image rotates too, so you want something that will work equally well in landscape and portrait. Get the photo into Picasa, either by importing or just drag it onto Picasa from a folder.

2. Make A Square

Because of the rotation, iPad backgrounds need to be square. Picasa provides a very quick square crop function. Create a square crop how you want it. Bear in mind that this doesn’t alter the original, one of the benefits of using Picasa.

3. Size it

iPad backgrounds are ideally a 1024×1024 square so, export the cropped photo from Picasa and set the size to 1024. The finished iPad background will be in the Picasa export folder which will appear when the export is complete.

And we’re done. Whack the image onto the iPad and happy viewing.

Being far more of a techy than a writer, I obviously spent far more time worrying about how to organise the writing process rather than doing much writing and thinking.

Clearly I could have repeated my previous process, write in Word and backup via FTP to various places on the web. But where, frankly, is the fun in that? It’s not like I’m writing for a living, it has to be entertaining!

The surprise appearance of an iPad in my technical arsenal has brought with it a lot of new possibilities.

Firstly, I’m loving the pared down writing experience you get with iAWriter. I can’t deny tendency to be easily distracted, so the no frills environment is a major plus for me. I actually managed to write quite a bit when out and about with the iPad and indeed in the house. Combined with PlugPlayer to stream music off my server, it provides a very simple and effective setup.

Another excellent iAWriter feature is the ability to sync files with a DropBox account. I’ve never really been excited or otherwise about using Cloud technology, but this small step into it shows a little of what it is capable of. Not from any great technical perspective (although those aspects exist) but from a simplicity/usability perspective. It drops the network/host/setup out the equation. I was obviously very cool with the whole FTP thing, but there are many, many more who will never be. So “push here to magically save somewhere safe” is a pretty compelling proposition. And when you add to that the ability to access easily from anywhere, it gets an awful lot better. I have DropBox setup on the laptop and the iMac so, last night, for example, I started writing on the iMac and continued later on the iPad with no file transfers/emails/fuss. That said, with only 1 ‘active’ copy, I’ll need to be a wee bit careful doing it that way, so maybe the occasional backup of everything will still be a good idea.

It’s worth noting that writing in only plain text is actually pretty decent. You’re not tempted to muck about with pointless formatting, after all, I’m decades away from a final proof.

Recently I added the Index Card iPad app to the mix. In theory, I could write in that alone but I’m going to combine with iAWriter. A very simple app, Index Card has helped a lot with organising thoughts and, as each section completes, I’ll drop it into Index Card and I’ll be able to generate a current full draft as an RTF and easily reorder the plot etc with a simple drag and drop about the iPad screen. And Index Card saves to DropBox too, so more stuff happily wheeched off into the cloud.

Can’t say any of this will make the writing any better or worse but, if feeling upbeat about your setup helps, then I’m on the right track.

There is an obvious a delicious irony associated with me writing this post and not the book, but there’s football on so I wasn’t going to be writing tonight anyway.

I had the good fortune of being in the pub yesterday with members of Team General Ignorance and I said I’d make some iPad backgrounds of some of the favourites images from the trips for us all to use. So, why not let everyone have them if they want them. I have the Split image on my iPad and it looks kinda funky.

So,  here is a small selection of iPad wallpapers from some of the destinations you can visit on both Sucata Run and Sucata Split. There is a bigger collection of photos from the trips here and scattered liberally about my internets.

Click on the thumbnail to download a version of the image you can use as an iPad background.

Split	Bruges	Lake Bled
Dubrovnik	Dubrovnik (for @aigwilson)	Salamanca
Strasbourg	Bilbao	Strasbourg
The Beloved Citroen	The Revered Volvo	La Rochelle (for @gordonwd)

Now, to be honest, I can’t really decide what works best as an iPad wallpaper, so I’ve tried a bit of a range of things to try. Love to hear what is good and bad and I might do more.

Click on the thumbnail to download a 1024×1024 version of the image you can use as an iPad background.

1. Get an API Key

Your site needs to have an API key to enable it to contact Blipfoto and identify itself. There is a simple form to fill in here. Once you have completed that, you’ll get an API key. It’s a long string of letters and numbers. Keep that handy, you’ll need that in a minute.

Note that the API key will expire after a month. Once everything is setup and working to you can make everything ‘live’ – it will get reviewed and your key will be made permanent.

2. Add the Code To Your Site

Step 1

Download this Javascript file.

Then edit it to put your API key and your username as the variables at the top, viz:

var apikey="<API Key>";
var username="<username>";
var numBlips=1;

numBlips is the number of blips you want to display. They will be displayed as a column, one on top of the other.

Save the updated file as blipfoto.js and upload to your site.

Step 2

Add this script to the page you want to display the thumbnail on by adding the following between the <head> & </head> tags. If you’re not sure, put it immediately before the </head> tag.

<script src="blipfoto.js"></script>

Note, if you are using the script it a blog or similar, you want to specify the full URL path to the script file so you don’t have issues with directory structures etc.

Step 3

Find where on your site you want to put the thumbnail(s) and insert the following code.

<div id='latestblip'></div>

Step 4

Find the <body> tag of your page and add:

onLoad="loadThumbnail()"

so it looks something like:

<body onLoad="loadThumbnail()">

Your body tag may already have other tags, you can add the onLoad alongside those. If you already have an onLoad trigger, just add the call to loadThumbnail() with a ‘;’ in between.

That’s it! Load the page and your latest blip should appear as a thumbnail which is linked directly to the page on Blipfoto.

Once you’re happy everything is working, go back to your application page on Blipfoto and indicate you’re ready to go live by clicking the button. Your site will then be reviewed and, all being well, your API key made permanently active.

You can add any styles you like to the <div> the image appears in and, if you’re the tinkering sort, you can play with the code that generate the thumbnail code to do something else or even add more info from the API such as number of views etc.

Thanks to Graham and the guys at Blipfoto for their help putting this together.

If you have any issues or thoughts on other stuff to do with this then give me a shout, either by email or a comment below.