Writing about how to engineer serendipity for last month’s parallax entry got me thinking about the nature of serendipity. I already concluded that serendipity is a state of mind and cannot easily be learned or taught (think ‘tips on how to win a beauty pageant’: 1. be beautiful 2. win the pageant). On top of that comes that serendipity is favoured by random and/or unexpected events. Unexpected events are actually a conditio sine qua non for serendipity.

Now, if you look at the social web of today, you’ll notice that what a lot of sites and services are doing is really try to remove as much randomness as possible. The general strategy is as follows: 1. create a profile / account so you can be tracked 2. your online behaviour is tracked 3. your online behaviour data is clustered and classified so it can used to eg recommend similar content and profiles. That means that the social web is constantly looking for similarities. Something which is hindering serendipity.

Below I’ll use three well know websites as an example of how we are creating a suffocating cocoon of similar information around our own online profiles.

Amazon

If I search Amazon for a book on statistics, the most popular or most sold book shows up first. Then, when I visit that book’s page, Amazon kindly shows me other books which customers who bought this book, also bought. Then, when I decided to purchase the book, I will get either informed by email or after logging in a next time, about new editions of the book, similar popular books and so on. All this is great if you are constantly looking for the latest and greatest on statistics but it will deny precious serendipity time.

In contrast, if I search for a book on statistics in my local bookshop, chances are that I will first have to fight my way through 3 pallets of Harry Potter junk before passing the International Cooking shelf only to be redirected by the staff to the proper section (via Sports and Travel, up the stairs and then the top shelf at the South wall); plenty of opportunities for serendipitous discoveries.

So Amazon has excellent algorithms to help me find ‘more of the same’. Thanks Amazon.

Last.fm

Last.fm is a music aggregation site. It tracks the music you play on your computer and so builds up a profile of your musical taste. Based on that profile it can recommend similar artists, provide information on relevant live concerts in your area, suggest tags and it shows your so called neighbours (people who have a similar taste to you). That makes last.fm great for finding John Coltrane if you are playing your Miles Davis discography or finding a rare live recording of that cool Bad Brains track. But you will probably not find anything wildly different from what you were listening to.

Some might argue that the neighbour system allows for some serendipity, which is true. But the sad paradox is that the more music you play and is tracked (scrobbled) by last.fm, the better last.fm’s algorithms will be able to find an exact copy of you. Each played mp3 increases the stranglehold on serendipity’s throat.

Google.com

When I start typing a search term in Google it seems Google knows what I am searching for better than me myself. Especially with the new ‘search as you type’ functionality, you are guided to the most likely outcome. When you start typing brit , Google suggests you are either looking for Britain, British Airways or Britney Spears. This might seem like serendipity (great! you found an airway when looking for your idol) but it’s not. It’s not random. Every time, anybody who types brit , will get the same suggestion.

Google prevents me from making mistakes while mistakes are a possible source of serendipity. Moreover Google overloads me with a pile of (similar) data of users who did searches like mine. Google is not a good place

I don’t want to be a mussel!

The solution is simple: look for the human factor. Sites or services with a high human factor will provide the biggest opportunity of doing serendipitous discoveries (think twitter, blogs).

By the way: shouldn’t you have noticed already but Hans and I think serendipity is a good thing.

No more albums

Content sources are disaggregating. Courses, albums, newspapers, and even TV programs (i.e. the 5 min YouTube video) are fragmenting into smaller pieces. Which, of course, increases options for re-creating/remixing (smaller the size, greater the opportunities for repurposing).

Virtual Business

A virtual business employs electronic means to transact business as opposed to a traditional brick and mortar business that relies on face-to-face transactions with physical documents and physical currency or credit.

Along with connecting customers with physical products, virtual businesses are starting to provide important services as well.

Groups of people can assemble online and enter into an agreement to work together toward a for-profit goal, with or without having to formally incorporate or form a traditional company.

Internet growth is sigmoidal, not exponential

The more important question to ask when someone proudly starts their presentation and points to their “exponential” growth is to put your hand up and ask “when do you think the inflexion will come? What factors might cause an earlier inflexion?” (In the past the answers used to be “As soon as Microsoft enters the market” and “I think I just answered that”, but now it’s become “As soon as Google enters the market.”)

The future of search

We’re all familiar with 80-20 problems, where the last 20% of the solution is 80% of the work. Search is a 90-10 problem. Today, we have a 90% solution: I could answer all of my unanswered Saturday questions, not ideally or easily, but I could get it done with today’s search tool. (If you’re curious, the answers are below.) However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work. Coming up with elegant, fitting and relevant solutions to meet the challenges of mobility, modes, media, personalization, location, socialization, and language will take decades. Search is a science that will develop and advance over hundreds of years. Think of it like biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s: it’s a new science where we make big and exciting breakthroughs all the time. However, it could be a hundred years or more before we have microscopes and an understanding of the proverbial molecules and atoms of search. Just like biology and physics several hundred years ago, the biggest advances are yet to come.

Open-source economics

Law professor Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they’re paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants.

sources:

http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2009/08/13/no-more-albums/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_business

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2007/nov/26/wanttoimpressyourfriendst

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/future-of-search.html

http://blog.ted.com/2008/04/16/yochai_benkler_1/

I choose this particular format because I wanted to think about what was really important to me given two obviously ubiquitous dominant technologies. Polarising them as the ends of a spectrum forces you think about (1.) the nature of the spectrum and (2.) possible hierarchies or gradients within that spectrum. I decided to start at ‘Internet’ and then see how that would trickle down to ‘microprocessor’. For each item I reflected on why I think it is important. The ‘cannot live without‘ from the title is highly overrated (i.e. for me) and is only there to satisfy search engines.

1. The Internet

The Internet for me equals connectivity and exchange. Connectivity and the open exchange of data and ideas allows and enables innovation at an hitherto unseen speed. Moreover, it democratizes the means of production by putting (access to) generative tools in the hands of everyone willing to create or share products and ideas. I realise there’s a cultural bias here as not everyone in the world has an equal opportunity to access the internet. Let’s be positive and assume that will only be a matter of time.

2. The Commandline Interface: CLI

This was the hardest item to pick and at first sight it might seem like the stranger in the midst of these 5. But choosing one particular, ‘most important‘, tool to access the internet left me hopelessly undecided. The closest would be the web browser, in particular Chromium, but the problem with a browser is that it does not have any direct link to my local computing device. That’s why I choose for the cli, for me the glue of any OS and the bridge between the Internet and you(r computer’s files, databases, programs, tools, whatever).

3. Linux

I use Linux as a placeholder for FOSS. Together with open standards, FOSS is such a powerful combo that it’s a mystery to me why governments don’t invest more money in it or develop more legislation around it. Of course, for me Linux is also synonym to all my favourite (cli) tools like vi, grep, bash, wget, rsync, R, find, sed, awk, php, apache, python, [endless list of tools I myself never even heard about]. It’s your workstation and server in one. It can do everything you want. If you can’t do it, you probably don’t want it.

4. My Laptop

A laptop is still my computing device of choice. For me, being mobile is a number 1 requirement. Of course there’s a boom in mobile devices nowadays (smartphones, tablets, netbooks) but I still feel these all fill in a niche whereas my laptop is really more like a Swiss army tool of productivity: I can create and edit documents, images, audio, video, browse the web and do programming. There was a hard fight with the netbook for this position. Still, the powerfull processor and the slightly bigger screen give me that extra edge that makes me opt for a laptop.

5. The Microprocessor

The microprocessor is the driving engine of most of the technological developments of the last 30-40 years. Together with it’s older brother, the microchip, it’s becoming to dominate actually everything. Think about the rise of the internet of things, Sensor Webs or just your bank’s debit card. The microprocessor is already at the stage of just being there. I think The Internet will also reach that status some day soon.

Looking at points 1 through 5, the eerie feeling comes over me that it seems to be a gradient of less and less choice. You can choose to live and function normally in society without the Internet for example. But I doubt if you could live in a Western society without microprocessors or microchips. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, as long as the choice within those levels stays open and free.

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about DrupalJam 6 by commenting on 7 tweets that have a #drupaljam hashtag. You can read Hans’ post with the same title here.

1. bertboerland @arjenvrielink you can still do a BoF at the#drupaljam

I submitted a proposal for a presentation which was refused. But one of the organisers informed about the possibility of a BoF via twitter, which is very cool (considered but didn’t do a BoF after all). Furthermore, I learned  something since I didn’t know what a BoF is. Luckily wikipedia did.

2. arjenvrielink Would be cool if solr could build spatial indexes from shapefiles and geotiffs to allow semantic spatial search #drupaljam

Tweeted when watching a presentation by Robert Douglas on the excellent Apache Solr, which integrates beautifully in Drupal. Two slides later, Robert announced integration of of geospatial indexing in Solr. Supercool!

3. ijansch #drupaljam not sure I get it. If drupal and solr are free, what’s the added value of the commercial aquia search wrapper?

Common misunderstanding of the freemium model. I think Acquia is a great example of how freemium can be successful: release your software as open source and offer paid services around it.

4. kanariezwart @shderuiter Die views overtuigen mij niet zo. MySQL views zijn toch sneller? part 2 tippeldip? #drupaljam

rough translation (ed.): Those views are not really convincing to me. Aren’t MySQL views faster? part 2 tippeldip.

Two issues: 1. I think he completely misses the point of Drupal Views. Drupal Views are so powerful because it basically puts the tools of a DBA in the hands of a non-techie (the Drupal admin).  2. tippeldip  = tippelphip = tippelvip = drupal lingo for template files which end in .tpl.php. Nice to see that all communities have their own idiom and language.

5. shderuiter Loving the changes to theming in Drupal 7, but upgrading’s gonna be a bitch. So basically nothing new… :-)#drupaljam

Drupal is not backward compatible and upgrade paths are not always clean and smooth. I think this fundamental design decision is one of the forces that drives Drupal’s success. The developers are free to create the best thing that the current state of technology allows for. Moodle for example suffers from the opposite decision. Lot’s of ‘bad’ design choices in Moodle can be traced back to the quirks and limitations of early MySQL and PHP versions.

6. regnard RT @arjenvrielink: Design for the mental model, not for the implementation model. Drupal7 UX #drupaljam

Another reason why I love twitter: twitter is a mental note taker; tweet was about that often techies tend to design from the perspective of all the cool stuff they’ve build where they should be designing for the people using it.

7. hansdezwart What is the reason @mortendk has chewing gum in his mouth while presenting? To make sure we can’t hear what he is saying?#drupaljam

This was tweeted by several other people and the presenter apologised afterwards. The best presentation of the day severely wounded by chewing gum sounds. Bummer man.

All in all it was good to be at the Drupaljam. Met some cool people, got some fresh ideas and had fun hanging out with Hans.

Please, if you ever read a book in your life, and you found this article interesting, sign up to goodreads.com, you can find me and Hans there as well

Reflecting on the title of this post, none of these books actually caused a radical change or severely disrupted the course of my life. Sure is that without these books my current me would have been different. Another certainty is that these books are changing with me. These books shaped me into who I am but at the same time they change themselves as I am the one who values them. I don’t exist without these books and these books don’t exist without me. That kind of symbiotic evolution is what I love about reading. Me and my books; we got each other in a loving stranglehold.

Please note that for the Dutch books I kept the original Dutch title. It feels very strange for me to translate the title to English. Moreover, I don’t believe there are English translations of these works.

1. The Sea Of Fertility - Yukio Mishima
Cheat number 1: The Sea Of Feritility is a tetralogy. The four novels include Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel. This is Mishima’s Magnum Opus. If I have to summarise this or all of Mishima’s work in one word it would be: decay. Throughout his work Mishima explores the themes of Buddhism, Shinto, nihilism, beauty, post WWII Japan, reincarnation, knowledge and action, truth and suicide. One of his famous quotes is “To know and not to act is no to know” There are so many layers and levels in these four novels that you can just keep reading and re-reading them. Worthy notice is that after the completion of the final work of The Sea Of Fertility, Mishima comitted seppuku, ritual suicide; history is a record of destruction.

First read:
I still clearly remember buying the first two novels of the tetralogy. I was in Jakarta in a mall looking for something to read in the air plane back home. (If you’ve ever been to Indonesia you probably noticed that you hardly see anyone reading a book. I always wondered if there was no one reading books because there are no book shops, or there are no book shops because no one reads.) So I finally found this department store which had a book section. Even an English book section! Well, English book shelf. I never heard of Mishima but judging the back cover it shouldn’t be too bad. After reading one page in the plane it bored the hell out of me. I stopped reading the book and instead watched a Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter movies and body wrecking air plane travels are inextricably connected in my life, having done Harry Potter nor air plane travel any favour). Anyway, the cursed Mishima’s stayed in my book shelf for about 2 years or so until I had absolutely nothing to read any more at home and thus finally gave them another chance. Blessed be that day.

2. Firefly – Haruki Murakami
Firefly is actually a short story and a not novel or a book. Murakami based his later novel Norwegian Wood on this story. Although I truly enjoyed reading Norwegian Wood, I never really liked it as much as Firefly. Firefly has everything that makes a short story really stand out. It’s crisp, it’s got lots of room for interpretation and it’s fragile. How many writers can write fragile stories? Remarkably, this story doesn’t have typical Murakami ingredients like magic-realism or pop-culture references. It’s very focussed on human relationships. For me, this story expresses Japan as Japan really is: the things not said, the things implied, distance, humbleness, to be retreated. Action and consequence.

First read:
On a cold, cold winter night at around 12 o’clock lying in my bed just about to sleep. Reading Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of short stories, I thought “One more paragraph of the next story and then I’ll sleep”. That next story was Firefly. I didn’t put the book down till I finished the story,

3. Een Uitzinnige Liefde – Bob den Uyl
Bob den Uyl is not really a well known writer in Holland. Too bad for the people who never heard of him because he is the funniest Dutch author in my opinion. If you can appreciate ironic, sarcastic observations of the meaninglessness of life, Bob den Uyl is the man. Well, I, for one, based my whole being on ironic, sarcastic observations of the meaninglessness of life. That’s why Bob and me go along pretty well. As a bonus, Bob is fond of biking, just like me. Life is without purpose so why not read one of den Uyl’s collection of short stories. If you’re finished with ‘Een uitzinnige liefde’ try ‘Gods wegen zijn duister en zelden aangenaam’, ‘Vreemde verschijnselen’ or ‘Een zwervend bestaan’ for equal reading pleasure.

First read:
Easy, I picked the oeuvre of Bob den Uyl as my reading list subject for my high school Dutch exams. So I read all his books in 1994/1995. I guess I was one of the few who actually enjoyed reading for his exams.

4. De Man Die Werk Vond -  Herman Brusselmans
Three words: boredom, fear and loneliness. Brusselmans’ best work in my opinion is this early novel of his alter ego Louis Tinner and his days as a librarian in a Brussels Ministry’s library. If you truly still believe life has a purpose, if you still believe there’s a deeper meaning in things, please read this novel and you’ll  be cured for the rest of your life. To top it all of, Brusselmans writes about his misery and pitiful life in a lovely ironic and sarcastic way. Plenty of laughs on the journey to the back cover as well then!

(Did I hear Gerard Reve? Anyone said Reve (‘De Vierde Man’)?)

First read:
Now, there’s a blank in my memory. It feels like I read this book 20 years ago but looking at the publishing date of the edition I got, it can’t be more than 3 or 4 years ago.

5. The Plague – Albert Camus
Of all the philosophers I read or read about until today, Albert Camus stands out as being the closest to my personal thought. The crucial point being that he acknowledges that life in itself is without meaning. Then, if that is true, knowing life is without meaning while still we greatly value it (the absurd paradox of life), why don’t we kill ourselves? That would be the rational consequence to take. However, Camus stated that meaning, though fragile and unstable, can be created through your own actions, interpretations and decisions. I myself love this absurdness of life where meaning is constantly challenged by death and decay. Let it be clear that I am an admirer of the complete works of Camus. In The Plague Camus covers the major themes of exile and separation, solidarity and community. Quoting the English wikipedia entry on Camus: “only by making the choice to fight an irreversible epidemic are people able to create the ever-lacking meaning to a life destined for execution the moment of its creation.”

First read:
Late spring 2006 in Hveragerdi, Iceland. I joined my wife on one of her fieldwork campaigns. Iceland, like Indonesia, is one of the countries which make you think different about life. Add to that a healthy dose of Camus, 160 km of biking through beautiful windy plains, plenty of free time, horrible food and no alcohol and you got your character defining experience.

6. A Feast in the Garden – György Konrád
Konrad is a Hungarian author which I got to know through a tv documentary by Wim Kayzer. Especially the interview with Konrad impressed me a lot so I started reading his novels. I especially like the dualism in Konrad’s work. Quoting (poorly translated by me): “(…) at this moment the duality of everything. Saint and hedonist at the same time. Spontaneity and the beauty of decadence; the attraction of the forbidden.”

First read:
Fall 2004 in Fuji, Japan. One of the enormous pile of books I always drag along on my foreign trips. Fall Japan = late summer Holland; around 20-25 degrees Celsius great food and the most mind twisting country you’ll ever visit. The country actually really suits Konrad’s style of writing. Write and wrong, black and white, plastic and authenticity live right alongside there.

Cheat number 2,3,4,5 and 6: of all the authors mentioned above (including Mishima) I actually love all their work. Reading more than one novel of an author provides new perspectives and insights on previously read work and on his genre as whole. Combine that with your personal growth as a reader and you get a self strenthening spiral.

Bukowski, Deelder, Dostoyevksi, Celine, Verhulst, Lanoye, Selby, Nooteboom,Sartre, Hermans, Mulisch, Pirandello, Kafka,Eco, Slauerhoff, Lucebert, Vlek, Hemmingway, Miller, Proust, Dazai and all the countless others: sorry, I could only pick six…

Poetry is greater than prose

The bums have won

Reading review and comparison sites I found out that Kodak also jumped the band wagon with it’s ZiX series. Comparing the Flip and the Kodak most sites agreed that the Kodak Zi8 was the gadget to have. I bought one for 155 Euro (including shipping) and the mailman delivered it to me in one week.

It’s exactly what I wanted: a camera producing good quality video (HD 1080p though you can also opt for 720p to save space) and easy to operate. I like gadgets for which you don’t need a manual. The whole thing is just self explaining. Hit the camera button and you’re in camera mode. Hit the red button and it starts recording. Hit the red button again and it stops recording. Nice. Plain and simple for a video amateur like myself.

The thing I maybe liked even more is the extra stuff you get with it:

I’m quite happy with my purchase. Now I just have to get expert at video editing.

Verdict

Maradonna as a player: easy to use, lightweight, connectivity, video quality

Maradonna as a trainer: butt ugly sticker (though it peels of easily), no SD card included

Then came Google with Android. Android is an open platform. I like open platforms. But I didn’t like T-Mobile’s G1, which was the only Android phone for a long time in Europe. So I had to wait a few more months and be patient and then there came HTC with it’s new Android phone. Fine, I bought one, I got one, I’m happy and I’m satisfied. Finally I have an internet enabled hand held, pocket size open platform. Great. Now I can be even more productive.

For comparison, here’s my old phone and my new phone together. A small step for mankind but a major leap for me:

When I returned from the shop I figured I’d be the whole evening editing text files and configuring the devide in Linux. But…

Ubuntu

…the days of swearing at your Linux box and threatening to throw it out of the window are over! Here’s Ubuntu 9.04 and my precious new toy worked out of the box! That’s truly amazing to me but I do realise that that is actually what you should expect.

It works!

After playing with it for an evening I produced my first crappy result which is the header on top of this page. Looking back at it after a week I decided my blog theme looks like crap. So why not make a nice project out of it? I will gradually update the blog theme and report on the progress in this blog. As a starter, here’s the screenies for bleeding pre-alpha version (at time of posting it’s actually the current layout):

life is easy, just do the things you like with nice people

Luckily, since I changed jobs, I am filled with tons of energy and a massive amount of ideas flooded my brain. I decided to start setting up projects and ask my friends if they would like to join. So far it has been a great success.

Here’s a short overview of the projects I set up and am working on right now:

Geospatial mashups and usability website

No name yet. The idea is to do mini-projects related to the use and abuse of GIS and geo-spatial data in organisations and institutes, the web and the government. We will write about how to make nice maps, how to improve crappy maps, how to use open source software for your mapping needs and how geo-spatial data can increase the usability of your organisation’s website or service. I do this project with my way back friend who is working in a GIS job for the Dutch government.

www.bikes-r-us.nl

In my spare time I like to ride around on a bicycle (race,CX,MTB,fixie,SS, whatever). This site will host tutorials and how-to videos on how to repair your own bike. Aside from that we will give our own comments on the recent biking news and events and scandals. I do this site with my crazy friend from the biking club.

Secret project X

The guy which replaced me at my previous job in Stoas is such a nice guy that I thought it was a shame we never worked together. But hey, It’s not 1986 any more, there’s the internet and since when does the guy that’s paying you decide who you collaborate with? So we thought of a great idea and currently we’re implementing it. I can’t discuss any details for now yet but when we’re in beta I’ll write a nice post about it.

www.janjanssenclassic.nl

Major biking event in July in the middle of the Netherlands organised by my biking club. I will rebuild the site using Drupal and it’s e-commerce modules.

www.tcw79.nl

The site of my biking club. I will rebuild it using Drupal, integrate with our existing phpBB and provide a richer internet experience for my club mates.

www.keru-korosu.org

I registered this url somewhere like 6 years ago but never did anything substantial with it. Liking the tumblr.com idea very much I’ll make a WordPress mashup on that. Topics include why you shouldn’t go to Starbucks or McDonalds, music I like, guerilla art and subversive poetry. Some of my friends are contributing content.

www.burntheforest.org

Having been employed in the tropical forest monitoring business for about 6 years, you get really cynical and sarcastic about the void between the political and the real world. This site will be dedicated to all the blabla lobbyists and conference junkies. Expect serious politically incorrect content.

enryo.redcube.nl

The  blog of my wife which I maintain and sometimes write for. For the new year we plan to do Japanese cooking videos! And we’re thinking about making a ‘field-survival-guide for gaijin in Japan‘.

brndmp.redcube.nl

On this blog (brndmp) I will write about these projects, which tools I use, how the project teams are set up and how we collaborate.

www.redcube.nl

and last but not least, the site of the RedCube Foundation itself. RedCube are just a bunch of friends who do some here and there consultancy and web development. I’ll work on the site if I can find the time.

So there you go. Some of the projects already started and I must say it’s really rewarding to be creative and productive. I love learning new things and I find that being productive is a major catalyst in my personal learning.

Reflecting on the title of the post: that was one of the questions which occupied me the last year or so. I see all these creative and nice people around me; how to collaborate and make them productive and actually do something? I defined this problem as ‘collaboration in loosely organised distributed teams’. Distributed because you don’t share a physical location. And loosely organised because there is no economic or professional incentive which ‘forces’ you to collaborate.

The above projects are my answer to the problem. The coming year will tell me if the answer was correct and if I can continue to the next round. I the meantime I’m gonna have lot’s of fun.

Hardware:

Dell Studio XPS 13

I like to keep my laptops small and portable. This one does just that while having plenty of computing power and storage space to keep me satisfied for the next few years. The real thing happens on the server anyway. In the office I have a big screen to connect to to satisfy my greed for pixels.

Software:

OS: Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04. After being an avid KDE fanboy for years I choose Gnome for the XPS because I feel KDE fits more comfortable on a big, lotsa pixel, screen.

I’m done with spending a whole weekend setting up and configuring an OS on my system. Ubuntu just works on an enormous pile of hardware and it has all the goodies of Debian (apt!).

Apps:
Firefox, Opera and Chromium for browsing. Firefox has a new plugin with which you can create and synch collections of addons over the web.

Eric, Geany, git for development

MySQL and PostgreSQL as DBMS

F-spot, Inkscape, Scribus, Gimp for graphical related stuff

Amarok and Picard for management and playback of music

Cheese to play with the webcam

Dropbox to synch my files over multiple computers

What I actually would like to see is that my OS and settings become independent from the hardware