Looking back on 2011 what springs to mind in this eventful year? Well, it certainly has been an eventful year from all angles, both nationally, internationally, politically, socially and a host of other categories. Here are a few things that stood out for me in the past 12 months (in no specific order).

• Steve Jobs R.I.P. – a genius, a true innovator, an inspiration; a slice of madness that gave the world a pie full of greatness. Many will have their own take on “the Steve” but I’ll not hear a bad word against him. For as long as I can remember, the world of Apple and more importantly the world of Apple under Steve’s control, has been a source of wonderment and inspiration to me. Although a late adopter of Apple hardware (for financial reasons) I have now become an almost shameless whore for their products, with the exception thus far of the iPhone. I do now worry for the future of Apple without Steve. Albeit that Steve may have been one man, let history remind us of the harm and good that can be done by one man, I personally don’t think that Steve would have released iPhone 4s or at least if he did, I would have wanted it. We’ll miss you greatly Steve.
• Frank O’Sullivan – a dentist, a scholar, a gentleman and a friend. This one is entirely personal. In the latter half of this year, Waterford lost a great man, Dr O’Sullivan, dentist but known simply by most as Frank. Taken from us long before his time, Frank will be sadly missed by the many whose lives he made less painful and whom he made smile regularly, not just for dental inspection purposes.
• Hackgate – and so the Murdoch empire appeared before a special inquiry with respect to alleged hacking of phones by one of its newspapers. The absurd theatre took over the mainstream media and culminated in appropriate fashion by the youthful wife of Mr Murdoch defending her beau at millisecond reaction time, from a pie flinging malcontent in the audience of the inquiry. The actions of whom made for the most interesting press of the entire non-event in my personal opinion.
• Bye bye Fianna Fail[sic] – yes 2011 finally saw the fall of the tyrannical, pseudo-democratic empire that reigned over Ireland for so long. A regime that borrowed and borrowed so that a wall of money covered its ineptitude and so that people would turn a blind eye to such. They neglected to inform all concerned that the repayments would soon be due but not before they all had time to bugger off and take a hefty goodbye payment and cushy pension with them. My only regret is that the party hasn’t been dissolved or branded an illegal organisation.
• Queenie, Queenie whom has the balls – the first of two hugely significant state visits in the space of a month brought hope and welcome distraction to the people of Ireland. The visit of the Queen of England was yet another positive point in the rebuilding of relations between Ireland and England. Her visit to the garden of remembrance, a significance that no words would reflect appropriately enough. Following up this year with fond and respectful reference in her annual Christmas speech to the nation, hopefully the past will soon fade to the history books.
• Goodbye Osama, Hello Obama – just weeks after the U.S. finally nailed their long time prey, Osama Bin Laden, the Irish people were treated to another state visit. Of course that visit was of the American President: The one, the only, Offaly’s long lost grandson, Barack Obama. A flying visit to Ireland but one that brought hope to many and lifted the spirits of even more. Had it not been for these two visits (Obama and the Queen), the Irish news headlines would have been nothing but depressing this year. Now, however, one would be forgiven for thinking the year to be an unmitigated success in relative terms.
• John Patrick Byrne – who? Many will be forgiven for not knowing this name but I have no doubt that most will recall his actions. In July of this year, Mr Byrne selflessly jumped into the river Liffey in Dublin, to rescue his pet rabbit, which had been thrown in by despicable members of Dublin’s ever growing rabble. Mr. Byrne (homeless at the time of the incident) received worthy, high praise for his actions that secured the life of his pet rabbit Barney. I hope that both of them are doing well.
• EU Oligarchy Rumbled – yes, 2011 was the year that it all became hugely apparent, to all, that the EU is truly an oligarchical structure and not a true union of members. A few small fringe countries get into financial collapse due to monies recklessly loaned by the ECB (and even more recklessly abused by the recipient banks) and suddenly the entire EU is in collapse with fears for the future of the Euro. When the achilles heel is that easy to wound, one would really have to question the future for the EU.  What was worse was the reaction by France and Germany (the real EU). 2012 will be a very shaky year for the EU and the Euro; the Mayans may very well have predicted the end of this little fantasy world, if not the greater globe in which we live.
• English riots – yet again, just a few years short of 100 years to the day that Archbishop Ferindand was shot and much unrest began, so too did a single event (the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by Metropolitan Police) trigger wide-scale riots across England. These riots burned parts of London to the ground, devastation not seen since a small bakery fire in 1666. Violence, looting, arson, a litany of offences to report but the most unusual item reported was that relating to the use of social media to orchestrate the riots. Everything from Facebook to Twitter to Blackberry messaging was called into question and given partial blame for the rapid spread and precise organisation of the events. While we may have reached a point in our technological evolution whereby mass groups can mobilise themselves with such ease, the question really stands as to why they cannot be controlled when they do and further more, why so many people are so ill at ease, to a point where they are ready to riot at the next Facebook update.
• Middle-East riots – anything you can do, we can do better. Not to be out-done by the riots in England during the Summer, most of the middle-East countries decided to organise their own riots on social media at the beginning of the year and overthrow governing regimes that were in place for decades. Oddly enough, most have been successful in their primary objective, even if they have caused significant, resultant issues. One thing is for sure, social media has (allegedly) changed the face of the middle-East and rioting for a long time to come.
• Can you spell Gadaffi? – Not taking from the real news that was the death of Libya’s dictator but what struck me while reading about the events in various “rags of record” was the huge variety of ways in which his name was spelled. Everything from Gadaffi to Gaddafi to Gadaffy (duck?) to Gadafy to, well feel free to make one up, everyone else seems to. Of course this brings an end to the rule of Libya’s dictator and of note is the fact that this happened by local rebels teaming up with US forces to fight against a common enemy. Now that rings a bell, local rebels and the US fighting together, when was that again? Oh yeah, 1980′s Afghanistan when the US fought beside the Taliban, against the “enemy of the month” Russians. Let’s hope that this one pans out better.
• The God Particle – otherwise referred to as the elusive Higgs boson. In December of this year, the science world was alive with anticipation from Cern that they may eventually have found the “God Particle”, the sub-atomic particle credited with possibly being one of the building blocks of the universe. So far the news is that they are unsure. Oh well nevermind, continue to plough money in. After all organised religion has been doing the same for millennia without a single glimpse of God but keeps the donations coming. Looks like science and religion have finally hit a meeting point.

I’m sure that there are many other noteworthy events of the past 12 months but for me, right now, that about wraps it up. Have a great New Year everyone!

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The striking thing about my connected life until now is the vast array of apps that I needed to interact with the various networks and also the frequently, limited functionality of those mobile apps compared to their desktop counterparts. Sometimes so bad, I’d rather make the slowest quip in the world than try to broadcast it from my phone. I used to be very anti-smartphone, not getting the phone-omenon in the early days. I still stand by my opinions at the time as things were just not ready for mass market in my estimation. Times have obviously changed and even I have now gone through several smartphones and a vast array of apps for those devices. I guess knocking the adage on its head applies here: There’s no whore like a reformed prude.

Upon investigating Google Plus for the first time, the interface was immediately apparent, as a well thought out, socially unifying experience. Facebook has always been shrouded in privacy concerns and locking down information was ultimately more trouble than it was worth. Of course, I still believe that if it’s that sensitive then don’t put it online! Facebook was great for getting back in touch with old friends whom I haven’t seen since school days and it served its purpose in such regard. However, I saw little benefit in joining groups related to my interests because updates were easily lost in the deluge of friend status posts and other garbage (sorry folks). Facebook allowed me to connect with lots of people, share photos to my friends in a more private way than Flickr but not much beyond.

Twitter grabbed me from the word go. As soon as I heard about the service, being a long time blogger (back then) I could see immediate advantage to concise information broadcasts from trusted peers and leading experts. It was like a 1950′s vision of the future cartoon, where all the information on the web would be available in one, tiny, 140-character burst – get your proton pills folks! However, as time went by I found myself craving more detail from Tweets. Twitter still features in my daily life; a convenient disposal chute for my garbage and a constant stream of what is happening in the world at any moment in time.

Foursquare was an experiment for me. Although not liking the idea of broadcasting my location to all and sundry, I decided to throw myself into it 100%. Within two weeks I had succeeded in annoying lots of folk with Foursquare checkins, cross posted to Twitter and Facebook. Straight away there was a problem. So many of my friends didn’t use Foursquare and so many didn’t care about my checkins, to the point of annoyance. Little value in such a service – all things considered. It was partial fun while it lasted. I gained a multitude of badges, held 20 mayorships simultaneously, uploaded some tips and photos of locations that I visited. However, ultimately the experiment yielded a big fail for me. Foursquare has potential but not within my catchment area. People don’t actively use tips, nor post photos of interesting things at locations. Businesses are not savvy enough to capitalise on rewards and offers for regular visitors or even the mayor. Then there were all the reasonably regular (at least at one stage) “Foursquare is over capacity” messages that prevented you from using the service to checkin. Ultimately it boiled down to a silly game/ego trip that produced very little of value.

Google Plus on the other hand offered granular privacy out of the box, through the concept of circles. The notion of circles was instantly intuitive and worked so well that not only did it guard whom you shared information with but also allowed you to filter friend updates from those whom you may follow just for interesting material (e.g. tech experts and others). Sharing is so powerful, yet so easy on Google Plus. My photos, my status updates, interesting articles I find, videos I like, links that are worthy of a +1, it’s all there under one roof. On top of that they have nailed the checkin system of Foursquare in a way that Facebook never did, in my opinion. I always found Facebook checkins pointless because cross-posting from Foursquare to Facebook just annoyed people so why do it directly? With checkins on Google Plus I can checkin somewhere and only share that with a select circle (e.g. family). That way the valuable information is broadcast to those who may be interested and it doesn’t annoy anyone else. I love the way I can filter, follow and organise my contacts. I like that the interface is simple yet feature rich. I love the Android app for Google Plus. It makes using Plus on the move an absolute joy. No clutter, no mess, and no inhibiting limitations unlike so many other apps for similar services.

I’ve been so taken by Google Plus that I’ve hardly interacted directly with Facebook since getting my Plus a/c. The only thing bringing me back occasionally is a group of friends who haven’t made the jump to Google Plus yet. My Twitter activity is probably more or less the same in terms of my output but I’m finding more and more interesting stories/discussions and in greater detail, through allowable verbosity, on Google Plus. Facebook looks like it may have served its purpose for me and as soon as other friends have migrated to Google Plus, I can see it fading into the distance, barring any shake-up on the horizon. I’ve gone from regularly using 4/5 services to now using almost Google ‘Plus’ nothing.

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Back in 2000, the patterns, principles, and best practices for building web information systems were mostly anecdotal and folkloric. Roy Fielding’s dissertation on the web’s deep architecture provided a formal definition that we’ve been digesting ever since. In his introduction he wrote that the web is “an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system” that aims to “interconnect information networks across organizational boundaries.” His thesis helped us recognize and apply such principles as universal naming, linking, loose coupling, and disciplined resource design. These are not only engineering concerns. Nowadays they matter to everyone. Why? Because the web is a hybrid information system co-created by people and machines. Sometimes computers publish our data for us, and sometimes we publish it directly. Sometimes machines subscribe to what machines and people publish, sometimes people do.

Given the web’s hybrid nature, how to can we teach people to make best use of this distributed hypermedia system? That’s what I’ve been trying to do, in one way or another, for many years. It’s been a challenge to label and describe the principles I want people to learn and apply. I’ve used the terms computational thinking, Fourth R principles, and most recently Mark Surman’s evocative thinking like the web.

Back in October, at the Traction Software users’ conference, I led a discussion on the theme of observable work in which we brainstormed a list of some principles that people apply when they work well together online. It’s the same list that emerges when I talk about computational thinking, or Fourth R principles, or thinking like the web. Here’s an edited version of the list we put up on the easel that day:

1. Be the authoritative source for your own data
2. Pass by reference not by value
3. Know the difference between structured and unstructured data
4. Create and adopt disciplined naming conventions
5. Push your data to the widest appropriate scope
6. Participate in pub/sub networks as both a publisher and a subscriber
7. Reuse components and services

1. Be the authoritative source for your own data

In the elmcity context, that means regarding your own website, blog, or online calendar as the authoritative source. More broadly, it means publishing facts about yourself, or your organization, to a place on the web that you control, and that is bound in some way to your identity.

Why?

To a large and growing extent, your public identity is what the web knows about your ideas, activities, and relationships. When that knowledge isn’t private, your interests are best served by publishing it to online spaces that you control and use for the purpose.

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2. Pass by reference rather than by value

In the case of calendar events, you’re passing by value when you send copies of your data to event sites in email, or when you log into an events site and recopy data that you’ve already written down for yourself and published on your own site.

You’re passing by reference when you publish the URL of your calendar feed and invite people and services subscribe to your feed at that URL.

Other examples include sending somebody a link to an article instead of a copy of the article, or uploading a file to DropBox and sharing the URL.

Why?

Nobody else cares about your data as much as you do. If other people and other systems source your data from a canonical URL that you advertise and control, then they will always get data that’s as timely and accurate as you care to make it.

Also, when you pass by reference you’re enabling reuse (see 7 below). The resources you publish can be recombined, by you and by others, with other resources published by you and by others.

Finally, a canonical URL helps you measure how the web reacts to your data. If the URL is cited elsewhere you can discover those citations, and you can evaluate the context that surrounds them.

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3. Know the difference between unstructured and structured data

When you create an events page on your website, and the calendar on that page is an HTML file or a PDF file, you’re posting unstructured data. This is information that people can read and print, and it’s fine for that purpose. But it’s not data that networked computers can process.

When you publish an iCalendar feed in addition to your HTML- or PDF-based calendar, you’re publishing data that machines can work with.

Perhaps the most familiar example is your blog, if you have one. Your blog publishing software creates an HTML page for people to read. But at the same time it creates an RSS or Atom feed that enables feedreaders, or blog aggregation services, to automatically collect your entries and merge them with entries from other blogs.

Why?

When you publish an iCalendar feed in addition to your HTML- or PDF-based calendar, you’re publishing data that machines can work with.

The web is a human/machine hybrid. If you contribute data in formats useful only to people, you sacrifice the network effects that the machines can promote. If you also contribute in formats the machines understand, they can share your stuff amongst themselves, convey it to more people than you can reach through word-of-mouth human networks, and enable hybrid human/machine intelligence to work with it.

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4. Create and adopt disciplined naming conventions

When people publish calendars into elmcity hubs, they can assign unique and meaningful URLs and/or tags to each event they publish. And they can collaborate with curators of hubs to use tag vocabularies that define virtual collections of events.

The same strategies work in all web contexts. Most familiar is the first order of business at every conference attended by web thinkers: “The tag for this conference is ______.” When people agree to use common names in shared data spaces, effects like aggregation, routing, and targeted search require no special software.

Why?

The web’s supply of unique names (e.g., URLs, tags) is infinite. The namespace that you can control, by choosing URLs and tags for the things you post, is smaller but still infinite. Web thinkers use thoughtful, rigorous naming conventions to manage their own personal information and, at the same time, to enable network effects in shared data spaces.

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Heds, deks, and ledes, The power of informal contracts, Permalinks and hashtags for city council agenda items, Scribbling in the margins of iCalendar

5. Push your data to the widest appropriate scope

When you speak in electronic spaces you can address audiences at varying scopes. An email message addresses one or several people; a blog post on a company intranet can address the whole company; a blog post on the public web can address the whole world. Web thinkers know that keystrokes invested to capture and transmit knowledge will pay the highest dividends when routed to the widest appropriate scope.

The elmcity example: a public calendar of events can be managed in what is notionally a personal calendar application, say, Google Calendar or Outlook, but one that can post data to a public URL.

For bloggers, this principle governs the choice to explain what you think, learn, and do on your public blog (when appropriate) rather than in private communication.

Why?

Unless confidentiality precludes the choice, web thinkers prefer shared data spaces to private ones because they enable directed or serendipitous discovery and ad-hoc collaboration.

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6. Participate in pub/sub networks as both a publisher and a subscriber

Our everyday calendar programs are, in blog parlance, both feed publishers and feed readers. Individuals and organizations can publish their own feeds to the web of calendar data while at the same time subscribing to others’ feeds. On a larger scale, an elmcity hub subscribes to a set of feeds, and in turn publishes a feed to which other individuals (or hubs) can subscribe.

Why?

The blog ecosystem is the best example of pub/sub syndication among heterogeneous endpoints through intermediary services. Similar effects can happen in social media, and they happen in ways that people find easier to understand, but they happen within silos: Facebook, Twitter. Web thinkers know that standard protocols and formats enable syndication that crosses silos and supports the most open kinds of collaboration.

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7. Reuse components and services

In the elmcity context, calendar programs are used in several complementary ways. They combine personal information management (e.g., keeping track of your own organization’s public calendar) with public information management (e.g., publishing the calendar).

In another sense they serve the needs of humans who read those calendars on the web while also supporting mechanical services (like elmcity) that subscribe to and syndicate the calendars.

In general, a reusable web resource is:

1. Effectively named
2. Properly structured
3. Densely interconnected (linked) both within and beyond itself
4. Appropriately scoped

Why?

The web’s “small pieces loosely joined” architecture echoes what in another era we called the Unix philosophy. Web thinkers design reusable parts, and also reuse such parts where possible, because they know that the web both embodies and rewards this strategy.

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How will the elmcity service scale? Like the web!, How to manage private and public calendars together

The master of online living and organisation speaks again. We would do well to listen and perhaps even adopt a point or two. It would make many things more streamlined.

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The first time the Irish tricolour was ever flown was in 1848, long before the war of independence, long before the Irish constitution and not many people know that. Further more, even fewer know that the flag was conceived by Thomas Francis Meagher and first unveiled in Waterford on March 7th 1848, at 33 The Mall – his lasting vision for the true colours of the flag was peace (white) between the unionists (orange) and republicans (green) who all wanted to share the one land of Ireland. At some point in history the flag was reversed to position green as the primary colour but the symbolism and meaning remains the same.

Now, how many Irish people could tell you that? How often have you ever seen people express pride in the flag outside of a sporting event? This March (5th-6th) an event to commemorate the message, and first raising, of our nation’s greatest symbol, will take place in Waterford. An international event with guests from France and the United States will take place, to acknowledge the history of our flag and create a little bit of pride and goodwill in these difficult and gloomy times. For more information check out http://www.1848tricolour.com and join in the festivities.

Disclosure: I am a member of the organising committee for the 1848 Tricolour Celebration.

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