In 2006, Giles Turnbull blogged about Freecycle’s shortcomings, from a usability and webapp point of view. It boils down to “Freecycle is a great idea unsuited to living inside a mailing list once the size of the list is >100 people”. Giles’ proposed solution was a web app, and his post contains some pretty detailed design descriptions. I’m sure that there’s an interaction designer in Giles trying to get out

(There’s probably something interesting there about group psychology and Dunbar’s Number, but I’m more interested in finding a practical solution.)

Other people have tried to build Freecycle-like philosophy in a webapp form, e.g. SnaffleUp, but they (so far at least, but it’s early days) lack the one thing Freecycle has in spades: a critical mass of users. Oh, and a snappy brand.

What if, instead of building a Freecycle-like webapp in competition with Freecycle, an app were built on top of the existing mailing lists, teasing out all that lovely data and metadata and making it queryable, sliceable, diceable and geo-plottable?

There are three pieces of information pertinent to an item on Freecycle:

• what it is
• where it is
• whether it’s still available

There’s no API to Yahoo Groups at the moment, but it’s possible to get Freecycle mails sent to a mail account on a *nix box, where they could be parsed and inserted into a database for querying by item name, description or location. If we group items by sender, it should be possible to determine that when a “taken” follows an “offered” with the same/similar subject line, then that item has changed from being available to unavailable.

All of that data is present in a Freecycle email, but the inconsistent way in which people format their subject lines makes parsing out the item and location a bit of a challenge.

An ideal Freecycle subject line looks like this:

[BathFreecycle] OFFER: Cat basket (Combe Down, Bath)

However, they are often more like this:

[BathFreecycle] offered cat basket bath

(As an aside, Bath’s Freecycle list is a great test case, as the name of the city is also the name of an item. Supposing someone wrote “Offer: baby bath”, one would assume that they weren’t trying to offload their offspring but had merely omitted their location. Formalising this in the parser would be hard, if not impossible, such that it may have to be flagged for review by a human.)

A way around this would be to prime the parser with a list of possible locations. Once you remove the list name, the offer/wanted/taken/received prefix and the location, you’re left with the item.

The variability of people’s use of grammar, spelling and format (despite the fact that your messages are moderated until you’ve demonstrated that you can write a subject line properly) makes the subject parser the biggest challenge in implementing this solution.

All of this does raise the issue of increased ease of, and cross-group, querying. Already there are scammers on Freecycle lists, making bogus offers then directing people toward pyramid schemes and the like. Also, it’s seen as bad form to post the same item to more than one group simultaneously; having said that, it’s ok to subscribe to several lists (if you can keep up with the volume of email).

This geocoded database would make it much easier for people to snap up “big ticket” items, possibly to sell on (it happens at the moment). If Freecycle’s aim is purely to keep usable or servicable items out of landfill, does this really matter? Also, I can imagine the central Freecycle organisation not being happy if this “hack” were built on Freecycle outwith their blessing and control.

I know other people find Freecycle frustrating. Does this (very rough) outline of a solution sound like it makes sense?

I recall Phil saying I was “all about the 2.0″. And I still am, in that I think the New Web needs to be about real community if you’re going to profess that your site is a Community Website. With the increasingly common use of the term “Web 3.0″ (usually taken to mean The Semantic Web) in The Valley and similar bleeding-edge places, and “Web 4.0″ (both serious and satirical) the danger is that we’ll find, like Microsoft did with its software, that the version numbers soon get a little silly.

Their answer was to use years instead (Office 2003 etc.), but the answer for the Web is not to use artificial version numbers at all. It’s not as if there is anything fundamentally different, technologically, between the so-called “Web 1.0″ and “Web 2.0″. It was always meant to be a state of mind or a way of seeing the Web experience, not a particular technology. Web 2.0 (or the concept meant by it) is any, all or none of the following:

• Ajax / rich interfaces / RIAs
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Social networking sites, like MySpace, Facebook etc.
• User-generated content (YouTube etc.)
• Forums (though these are as old as the hills)
• New things that almost defy description (Twitter)
• “Communities” (however you define them)
• Mashups, APIs and easily-linked resources

The trouble is that you can ask ten different people “what is Web 2.0?” and you’ll likely get ten different answers, possibly including some of the above list.

I do believe that Tim O’Reilly couldn’t have predicted what the monster he created has become, and the term was actually useful in 2003 to get a handle on the ways in which newer Web sites differed from old ones. But that time has passed, and the term “Web 2.0″ (and all succeeding x.0 versions) needs to be retired. Now.

I just wonder whether Twitter has reached a natural end. You know “it was fun while it lasted” sort of thing. And it was fun, until relatively recently. Then the number of “spam” followers increased, thanks to the ease of scripting against the API, no doubt; on the other hand, the API also allowed fantastic tools like the Twitter Twerp Scanner to me made, so I don’t think Twitter shouldn’t have an API.

With or without an API, the problem with Twitter (as has been said numerous times) is that it doesn’t scale. It’s a centralised (if clustered) service unlike email, blogs or Plain ol’ Websites, which can exist anywhere and conform (roughly) to a standard. To Tweet, you must Be On Twitter. This is its fatal flaw while being central to the way it works. Mike Arrington wrote on Techcrunch a while ago on how Twitter might be decentralised.

Twitter: a highly-addictive social experiment that just goes to show, by counter-example, the merits of decentralisation.

Fast forward to 2007. Three has the best-value data packages of the UK mobile operators: £2.50 per month for 10MB of data, which is plenty for mobile e-mail and the odd bit of Twittering and Mobile Facebooking. You can get “unlimited” (actually 1GB fair use) for £5/month, but that’s overkill for me. It’s the same price as ten train times lookups via the official, paid-for service on Planet Three, so in those terms: why not?

Well, it’s a good job that Three’s 3G coverage is patchy near our house. I do find that I don’t want to miss anything on Twitter, especially, while mobile GMail is a strange mix of regular email, commercial marketing that I have signed up for, and mailing lists. The latter, like Twitter, plug me in to online community to such an extent that I find it hard to resist continuously checking for replies and new conversations.

Perhaps I’m filling a void because I don’t get out much IRL. Hey, having just had another baby, I don’t have the chance to get out much! My evenings are mostly cook (unless Kathy’s done that), eat, clear up, do some housework, rock Abi to sleep and then go to bed – preferably early so I don’t feel the effects of broken nights too much.

Online community is most of the community I get at the moment.

BarCamp Bristol (Bristol’s first) will be taking place on October 12th-13th 2007 at Sift’s offices in Victoria St., Bristol.

More information is available at BarCamp, Upcoming and you can sign up, too.

What’s all this BarCamp stuff about, anyway?

BarCamp is an unconference, which means that there is no distinction between attendees and speakers. This is because everybody who attends has to give a talk or lead a discussion; there are no “tourists”.

It’s a chance to tell other people about the one thing that you know heaps about but others perhaps don’t, or lead a discussion about the best way to solve a particular problem. What it isn’t is a Hackday-style geekfest; we want people to feel comfortable attending no matter what their level of technical knowledge.

We have got sponsorship for the event from various companies, so the event is basically free to attend. We would like people who sign up to put £5 down so that their money’s where their mouth is, so to speak

Come on then – what are you waiting for? Sign up now!

The subject of my talk was “Microformats: The Semantic Web for the Rest of Us”, and the slides are available online in lovely s5 format (a simple html file plus CSS and Javascript magic).

I managed to bag a couple of beers (for later consumption, I should add – I thought it best to be compos mentis during the talk itself) and then began the presentation. I described what the Semantic Web is, what Microformats are and what the point of it all is before showing some real-world examples. The main, meaty part, though, was to dive into some HTML and add some Microformats for contact information and events — the two Microformats I know best.

In the end, the talk ran to about an hour (which I’d hoped it would, but I wasn’t sure). There was a good amount of questions and feedback, and several of us carried on the discussion in the Watershed bar afterwards. I’m not sure how well it’ll come out on video, but never mind!

It’s not quite as simple as that, though. You can’t just blog anywhere; you have to use the History Matters One Day In History site. You must also agree to their Terms and Conditions and waiver copyright to your blog entry, which can be used by the British Library in published works, media etc. as pointed out in the blog form’s footnotes:

Your diary will be stored in electronic form in the British Library’s Web Archiving Section which is a part of the Modern British Collection.
Members of the public will be able to consult your material.
The History Matters partners own the copyright of any materials that you submit and be free to use them in any History Matter related materials such as any media stories, published books etc.
Please see the Terms & Conditions for further details as to the use(s) of material submitted to ‘One Day in History’.

Now, I’m no Cory Doctorow, but I care about the overuse and downright abuse of copyright law to benefit the wrong people. I’m sure that the History Matters project thinks it’s being really revolutionary by having “one of those new fangled blog things”, but is playing the same insidious All Your Posts Are Belong To Us game that I would expect of major media organisations like NewsCorp.

The second old-economy mistake that HM makes is centralisation. There is no need to force people to use the ODIH (sounds like “oh dear”; well, it is made using an ASP CMS) site; RSS and other open data standards, combined with tagging (tag=odih, for example), would have made it perfectly possible to have a decentralised blog day effort. This could have been harvested by archive.org or the British Library after the event, in case the original blog posts went bit-rotten over time. If the bloggers used a suitable Creative Commons license, then their posts could have been repurposed as derivative works by the HM project and the British Library.

I can understand why the ODIH blog operates in the way it does: centralisation lowers the barrier to entry for people who probably don’t have a blog to speak of. Raise the barrier too high, and you won’t get the participation required to make the event a success. Decentralisation would have meant that the HM project would have had to exercise a degree of trust in the data quality used by the bloggers and their content. However, as they make no guarantee of quality or suitability for the data submitted to ODIH anyway (We may remove any postings or other material or interaction at our entire discretion.), there’s nothing to be gained in that regard by centralisation. It really does appear to be all about the snatching of copyright over the submitted work (If you do not want to grant the Partners the rights set out above, do not submit your material to the Site. Um, OK).

These same people probably don’t exercise themselves about copyright and freedom issues, but may take exception to the handing over of their intellectual property in such an all-or-nothing way to the HM project. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to be aware of Creative Commons and the range of licenses that it offers as alternatives to full copyright.

It seems churlish to advertise this as a mass blog, yet potentially exclude those people who have made blogging so important for the project even to exist: bloggers themselves.

In conclusion, my initial enthusiasm for the project has waned and I don’t plan on blogging via the ODIH site tomorrow. I will probably blog on my own blog though, as a mini-protest against the lip-service paid to blogging by the ODIH site.

As an aside, it would be wise to consider these issues as we enter the Brave New World of community web sites. You have to trust your users, not take away their rights.

1. display RSS feeds in a manner that is pleasing to the eye (reading loads of feeds is hard work, man);
2. use the space bar to both scroll down or go to next unread if there is no more item to scroll.

Most Mac-based RSS readers seem to work this way, but I thought that I was out of luck at work in MS-land. A quick bit of googling turned up a program called GreatNews. It has six different display styles (I’m using “newspaper”), renders RSS quite nicely indeed, thankyooverymuch, and is freeware. Oh, and the space bar does what I want it too. I’m a happy RSS bunny again.