My soup

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 06 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Passive Location Tracking Data for the Quantified Self with Placeme App

Thu, 03 May 2012 05:58:36 GMT

In my current quest to collect more personal data around my activities to draw knowledge and information with the aim of achieving a better quantified self I’ve kept a lookout for apps and devices to help me. We’re currently about to enter an amazing time whereby we’ll shift our attention from the vast knowledge of the world’s data we can access on the web to wanting to learn more about our own body’s data. There’s currently a many sensing devices available, and many new ones being created, to track our physical activity, sleep, weight, and other personal body metrics. These are going to continue to evolve and provide us with more data about ourselves and the next step will be to help us learn and improve our lives with that information.

We’re a couple years into using location based services and Foursquare has pretty much become the de-facto standard. The thing about Foursquare is that it was created and is primarily a social location app meaning that you actively use it to both share and view your friends locations. While this is a great feature with many benefits the way it operates requires you to pro-actively mark your location manually to use it. When it comes to personal data tracking you want the ability to set it and forget it. It’s easy to become forgetful and can become burdensome to manually track personal data.

Screenshots of the iOS version of the Placeme app (click for full size)

Location is an area where I’ve wanted to have a passive way to track my movements outside of having to manually do it by “checking in” on Foursquare. I recently became aware of a new app called Placeme (available for iOS & Android) which does just that. You simply run this app in the background and with your smartphone’s built in sensors (accelerometer, wifi, gps) it has the ability to mark your locations along your daily travels. It knows when you’re driving, walking, or staying still based on the phone’s sensors and with that data can accurately determine the locations you visit. It knows when you get there, and when you leave being able to track your duration at the location. It then builds a history where you can view locations you’ve visited by day in a calendar view, or you can view by location and see a log of all your visits. You can add notes for every visit logged to a location. You can also search your visited location history. The ability to track all of this data is a quantified selfer’s dream app for location as I haven’t found any other app that can do this passively.

The raw data stored by the location tracking aspects of the app are just the tip of the iceberg. We know that tracking personal data is just the first step towards analyzing it to find ways to improve our lives. Below is one of Robert Scoble’s patented long interviews that logs in at over 30 minutes with the the app’s creator Sam Liang. During the interview they discuss all of the possibilities that this app could provide through future functionality based on the location data. Robert discusses how the app crosses the “freaky line” because people that use the app are providing very private and sensitive information.

Most people have an aversion to apps that pass along this type of data but Sam points out in the video something that is key. If you can show a user significant value from providing the data, then you can get them to overcome that hurdle. An example of this could be that you frequent a gas station that is being tracked and Placeme could provide an alert letting you know that you could save money by pumping gas at a station 2 blocks away. In the video Robert eludes to the fact that the data stored by the app can be the basis for many other feature based apps. Watch the video to better understand all the things that could be possible. You can also visit this post that Robert made on Google Plus to see his take along with the 300+ comment discussion surrounding the app.

I’ve been using the app for almost a month and am very impressed. In fact I’ve found myself using Foursquare much less and only when I want to share my location with friends. However I love that I don’t have to do anything to have this running log of all my traveling that I can add to my other daily tracking data. I’m looking forward to updates to the app, primarily hoping there’s a way I can export the data at some point as in the near future I’m looking forward to aggregating all of my personal data by day within a single service. Several are going to come online soon and location data is a pertinent data point I’m looking forward to including.

Passive Location Tracking Data for the Quantified Self with Placeme App

Thu, 03 May 2012 05:58:36 GMT

Screenshots of the iOS version of the Placeme app (click for full size)

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

How to Preserve, Prepare, and Produce Your Digital Legacy

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 02:28:10 GMT

We’re all going to die. We all create digital content and most of us have no plan for archiving our data for future generations after we die. These are two harsh realities that smacked me over the head when I attended a panel at SXSW this year titled “Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death“. The panel covered one of the most critical aspects that face us today in this newly minted digital world. The panel was moderated by Evan Carroll who both co-wrote a book and contributes to a website on the subject of the digital afterlife. You can listen to a recording of the panel here, follow along with the slides here, and read a summary of the panel by Evan here.

I highly recommend you follow the links above to experience the diverse speakers covering several different topic areas related to this subject. This is a very important subject matter with many different layers to it. I remember leaving the room inspired to identify some of the themes that resonated during the talk for me and write about them. Many of the issues discussed have been on my mind ever since creating Lifestream Blog. While I originally covered the ability to aggregate our digital data across disparate services I quickly realized that much of what I was publishing may never be archived in a way so that my future ancestors could be able to view it. I’ve already written several posts on the topic of how death and the future may impact our digital diaries and most recently referenced Adam Ostrow’s TED talk who was on the panel in a post.

After the panel I started to think about the steps we need to take to preserve, prepare, and produce our digital legacy. I began to break down each of these 3 steps to try and provide methods and tools to achieve them before we die. Each of these steps are very broad and can have many different approaches and strategies to deploy them. Below I will break each of these down and provide some insight on how to tackle setting up plans for each of them.

Preserve Your Data

Before you can make plans regarding how future generations will be able to access your data, you need to ensure that you’re taking steps to preserve it. The tips here are to employ an archive and backup strategy. This includes both making sure that your personal physical storage data is backed up as well as the data you are creating and publishing to online services. For personal data on your hard drives you can find many good tips and articles online to help you do this. I recommend creating a 2 step backup plan. Create backups daily from your personal computer (multiple in your family if you have them) to an external storage device. I’d recommend using a RAID NAS (network attached storage) so that you can easily have multiple computers running backup software to save their data to this central location.

There are many people that employ the local backup strategy but then stop there. This isn’t good enough because in the event of a fire or burglary you risk losing everything. So besides simply doing local backups, you must also add a cloud backup strategy. These services will let you automate the process of backing up your data over the internet daily to remote servers. By taking this extra step you’ve ensured an important and extra critical measure to preserve your data.

Backing up your local data is a measure taken for all the content you create that is stored there. So documents, photos, videos and more. You should try to identify and backup as much personally created data as you can. Richard Banks who was on the panel that our sentimental objects aren’t necessarily secondary to our mundane ones, which will help others understand our lives from the day-to-day minutiae we now can preserve.

But what about content you create on the web? I”m referring to services that include Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs and more. In this case you need a way to get that source data into a format that can then be brought down and archived along with all of your local data. There are some unique services that do just this that need to be included as part of your backup strategy.

Some resource examples for this step:

Local Backup Strategies and Software articles

How to backup your computer – Lifehacker
What’s your backup plan – The 99 Percent
Set up an automated bulletproof file backup solution – Lifehacker

Cloud Backup Services

Backblaze, Carbonite, CrashPlan

Web Content Backup Services

Backupify, Social Folders

Prepare a Data Access Plan

Airdrie Miller, who is the widow of blogger Derek Miller who wrote a gut wrenching farewell post before he died, discussed many of the challenges she encountered after Derek died on the panel. She told of not being able to access systems because she didn’t have Derek’s passwords and told of another situation having to deal with renewing a domain she wasn’t aware of. I’ve heard of the process of preparing all of this information for later access as creating a “digital will”.

Start by creating a detailed document with instructions on how to access all the digital data that you’ve been so good about preserving. Then I highly recommend creating a master password repository both for personal data and online data. Some of those passwords may also be linked to online accounts that are tied to subscriptions services such as blogs and domain registrars that will also require renewals and upkeep. There are a few online services that provide this as well as software. It would also be smart to have a designated digital trustee which would almost act as a data godparent to provide technical support in the event it was necessary. Accessing your data backups and working through services may be challenging for some family members so training and designating a technically savvy friend to help out in the event they’re needed will be helpful.

Some resource examples for this step:

Detailed instructions document and digital trustee

Provide information for password services / software with the master password to access
Designate and train a digital trustee on accessing your data and passwords to help out
Provide information for all on-going subscriptions to services related to digital data

Password Services and Software

Lastpass, 1Password (password services
Legacy Locker, Entrustet (digital will services)
KeePass (software)

Produce a Way to Access the Digital Archive
So now that you have ensured the preservation of all your data you need to create a good way to access all of it. This step can take on many different forms and will no doubt evolve over time into better methods we can only dream of. You should start by determining both the tools that lend themselves best to displaying the data in a way that you want, along with some good tagging and search capabilities. You also need to decide whether you only want the data to be displayed on a local computer or over the web as well. You may not find just one piece of software or web service to provide a method that suits you, and may need to incorporate several to achieve what you want.

Bill Lefurgy from the Library of Congress was also a speaker on the panel. He discussed many aspects related to “digital preservation” telling us they’ve built a website at DigitalPreservation.gov where you can find many resources on organizing your digital data. I dug around a bit and found several useful things including a whole section on personal archiving as well as a PDF with details for archiving and organizing several different types of digital media.

Some resource examples for this step:

Digital Archiving

Picasa, ACDsee (photo management software)
Video Archiving tips

Digital Archiving Web Services

LiveOn, 1000Memories, Singly (software or service), ViewShare

If you question why we need to create a digital legacy I ask you to watch this great video created by the LiveOn service and also remember our lives aren’t just to chronicle what we do for ourselves, but it’s to provide a record for our future generations. I plan to create a dedicated “Digital Legacy” section on this site in the near future that I will maintain with updates over time as new software, services, and strategies become available for this process.

Update: Here’s another good video I discovered on this subject at another good site resource at DeathandDigitalLegacy.com

How to Preserve, Prepare, and Produce Your Digital Legacy

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 02:28:10 GMT

Preserve Your Data

Some resource examples for this step:

Local Backup Strategies and Software articles

How to backup your computer – Lifehacker
What’s your backup plan – The 99 Percent
Set up an automated bulletproof file backup solution – Lifehacker

Cloud Backup Services

Backblaze, Carbonite, CrashPlan

Web Content Backup Services

Backupify, Social Folders

Prepare a Data Access Plan

Some resource examples for this step:

Detailed instructions document and digital trustee

Provide information for password services / software with the master password to access
Designate and train a digital trustee on accessing your data and passwords to help out
Provide information for all on-going subscriptions to services related to digital data

Password Services and Software

Lastpass, 1Password (password services
Legacy Locker, Entrustet (digital will services)
KeePass (software)

Some resource examples for this step:

Digital Archiving

Picasa, ACDsee (photo management software)
Video Archiving tips

Digital Archiving Web Services

LiveOn, 1000Memories, Singly (software or service), ViewShare

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Beautiful night for a ball game

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 02:39:13 GMT

Beautiful night for a ball game

My Atari training certificate & when I met him. RIP Jack Tramiel.

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:02:52 GMT

My Atari training certificate & when I met him. RIP Jack Tramiel.

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

My toy shelf. You have one? Share it! #instameme

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 18:25:40 GMT

My toy shelf. You have one? Share it! #instameme

My Thoughts on DrupalCon 2012 and the Future of Drupal

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 02:28:28 GMT

I’ve recently returned from DrupalCon Denver 2012 and had some thoughts I wanted to share about the conference and the state of the Drupal Community. I’ve been a long-time fan of Drupal and became very acquainted with the system back in 2007 when I migrated the X PRIZE Foundation website from static html to Drupal 5 (version at the time). It wasn’t a very user friendly CMS and it took me quite some time to get the hang of it, but once I did it was clear how flexible and powerful the system was.

The Similarities between the WordPress and Drupal Communities

Before I began using Drupal I was a longtime WordPress user. I still use WordPress to power my personal websites (including this one). I love both of these open source projects and often get asked which one to use and the answer is still the same it was back in 2007. It depends on what your site is for. For most people who just need a blog or a very simple website I still often recommend WordPress. But if you need a website that requires deep permission levels, commerce, sophisticated caching, and more complex functionality, I recommend Drupal. This is just a high level recommendation and by gleaning more into a sites’ requirements it becomes easier to recommend one or the other.

The evolution of WordPress and Drupal have gone in somewhat similar directions. They both started as open source projects. The founders of both of these projects have created for profit company’s based on their open source software. Matt Mullenweg of WordPress created Automattic and Dries Buytaert founded Acquia. Both companies have also created free hosted versions, as well as fully managed business service versions of their software. Automattic created WordPress.com and Acquia created DrupalGardens. Both projects also host “Cons” and or “Camps” throughout the year were users gather together to share information and help further their respective projects. I just wanted to point out some of these similarities between both of these companies and how their for profit arms have also been instrumental in helping insure the health of their projects. Both Automattic and Acquia also do a great job of contributing back to their open source communities.

Acquia’s Mission and Roadmap Towards Improving Drupal

So back to DrupalCon. I went into this year’s DrupalCon focused on the ways that I can extend the platform to help enable people to more easily create and publish content across our websites. The areas that specifically have been challenging are setting up simple wysiwyg interfaces both for page creation and media asset management, publishing workflows for multiple members on a team, and the ability to publish content between staging and production environments. Our current methods for these have pain points and I was on a mission to find ways to improve them and look to what the future of Drupal had in store to address these issues. Beyond my needs in these areas, I also feel that they are obstacles for other people who are potential users of Drupal.

The first keynote at DrupalCon by Dries spent time focusing on weaknesses in Drupal and specifically 3 things the community needs to focus on what he referred to as “A rudimentary authoring experience”. In a nutshell this referred to to several elements that require work to improve the usability of Drupal for content creators and site publishers. Some other key takeaways from the talk are that Symfony will be used for the framework in Drupal 8 and mobile needs to be addressed much better. This seems to already be in motion as there was no shortage of talks on responsive web design at DrupalCon. Dries’ keynote was the beginning of a pattern I saw emerge from many Acquia employees that spoke on panels at DrupalCon. They continued to echo and elaborate on Dries’ thoughts about what they need to work on to ensure the successful future of Drupal.

Click the slides below taken from the keynote

Acquia Employee Talks at Drupalcon

The first talk I saw along this theme was with Angie Byron and Chris Strahl titled “Five things we need to create an awesome experience for content creators” which focused on the following issues:

Authoring and editing for multiple (mobile) devices
Media management and content repositories
Content staging and publish / subscribe models
Page layouts and authoring tools

The talk covered how they had done research around usability among competing CMS platforms from a content creator standpoint. They showed how many of these features are handled on 4 competing systems including Squiz, Plone, CQ5, and Squarespace(v6 beta). They demo’d each of these 4 competing systems and showed where they excel over Drupal with the features and ease of site content creation and editing. In the end they plead their case to the development community to look at these systems and find ways to implement many of the usability improvements within Drupal in the near future as they ready Drupal 8 for release next year.

Another talk I attended was with Kieran Lal & Barry Jaspan. The approach of their talk was from a startup perspective on how Acquia was born and they provided many insights. They discussed the challenges encountered along with the multiple pivots from the original Acquia business model concept. They began by providing simple Drupal hosting solutions and evolved over time into a much more robust managed hosting platform for Drupal. What I liked about this talk is how Acquia has been nimble in learning what the needs of the customer base they’re trying to attract and how they’ve shifted their business model to accommodate them. Many nuggets of wisdom here for startup entrepreneurs can be gleaned from their talk. Acquia now has a very impressive list of clients that they can service much better.

Then I went to see Jay Batson do a talk that was similar with regards to the first one by Angie and Chris except it was done more as a first person view from the eyes of a site publisher. You can learn more about the profile of the “advanced content creator” role he describes here. He explains how the term “Web Engagement Management” is starting to trump CMS and is now being used to describe the overall feature-set associated with the users that fill these content production roles. These features are now essential to people who continually create and manage the content for websites. More and more it’s the marketing department that owns the responsibility of websites and are now the decision makers for web platforms. This is a switch from years ago when IT would own that decision making process. So the critical motive behind all of this is to make sure that the marketing and site content departments needs are met by Drupal moving forward.

The sum of all of these talks by Acquia left me very impressed. They are uncovering the major issues potential clients are stating as they try to sell Drupal and formulating a plan to solve them. By rallying the community around these issues, I feel that they are focused and have a plan to continue being competitive and mature based on the needs of today’s site publishers.

Other DrupalCon Highlights

The “How to build a scalable platform for today’s publishers” talk by Dick Olsson was another stellar talk I found to be extremely helpful with my goals of learning about better methods for content and site publishing. Dick provided a case study and recipe for the modules and methods he’s been using to build out sites for Al Jazeera. He needs to accommodate massive traffic and the ability to publish content quickly in a very intricate caching environment. You can watch his talk regarding those issues, but my focus was more on how he uses Workbench, Deploy, and Panels modules to effectively manage content workflow and publishing. It was a good talk that showed how these tools can all be used in conjunction very well. I also saw a talk on Panels showing some great new usability features coming soon.

I love watching case studies from the ground up where an agency covers every step of a web development project with a client. The folks at Treehouse Agency are excellent at telling these stories. I really enjoyed how they provided the under the hood details of their approach and tools used to rebuild the Zagat.com website. They also did a talk on their work to relaunch Energy.gov on Drupal which I didn’t see at DrupalCon but was able to see a more in depth Drupal implementation of the Energy.gov project at BadCamp last year. Here’s the slide deck from that presentation.

Well there you have it. I see nothing but clear blue skies ahead for Drupal.

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Sweet retro invite for @Lullabot #DrupalCon party

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 01:51:34 GMT

Sweet retro invite for @Lullabot #DrupalCon party

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Lifestream Blog Celebrates 5 Year Birthday Thanks to You

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 23:03:07 GMT

It was 5 years ago today that I created Lifestream Blog. It all stemmed from the fact that I became intrigued with the ability to find a way to aggregate content I created across social services into a single location. Furthermore, I wanted that content to appear in reverse chronological order. A digital social diary if you will. The original concept of “Lifestreaming” had been around but the application of using the web and social services as a method of implementation was very new. Back in 2007 there weren’t many ways that one could achieve this. I wrote a post detailing all of the research I had done to share with other people and thus Lifestream Blog was born.

Reflection

It’s been an amazing journey. When I created the blog I truly felt that this concept was something that was going to be huge. Within months of launching the site there was an avalanche of startups launched that aimed to bring Lifestreaming to the masses. I reviewed many of them and over time was contacted by founders to provide feedback and advice. It was an amazing time where you could see the evolution of this concept in various unique implementations. Initially most services only provided aggregation of RSS feeds but as the evolution of the web continued with the proliferation of websites providing API access to their services, we continued to see Lifestreaming services innovate.

Lifestreaming Services Peak

At it’s peak from 2008-2009 we saw the largest number of pure Lifestreaming services emerge. Leading the pack in terms of users and features was FriendFeed. These former Googler’s had created an amazing team who iterated often and created many cutting edge features that led to the creation of a great community. But in the end the service just couldn’t distinguish itself in a way to attract mainstream users to Lifestreaming and the droves of those potential people continued to join Facebook. As FriendFeed continued their mission, you could see new features pop up on Facebook that were heavily borrowing things that were being done on FriendFeed. Eventually FriendFeed saw their userbase become stagnant and in August of 2009 they were acquired by Facebook. In the end it was more about the talent grab as most of the former team were integrated at Facebook. I saw 2009 as the end of the Lifestreaming service goldrush. FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor eventually became CTO at Facebook and I see their recent launch of Timelines as the culmination of many Lifestreaming concepts by the integrated team coming to fruition.

The Evolution

From 2010 to now I have focused on several other areas related to the data we create on social services. I became very interested in how we can glean insight from the data and how we can filter and prioritize the massive amounts generated by the firehose. I became very interested in the growth of social magazine apps which allow us to connect our social accounts and use logic to filter relevant content for us. I’ve also become much more interested in Lifelogging and the Quantified Self. There are an amazing number of devices coming to market to track personal data as it relates to exercise, sleep, nutrition, as well as blood and dna analysis. I feel we’re on the verge of a huge revolution in pro-active and preventative healthcare. The evolution of these devices and services to analyze the data over the next few years will be amazing.

The Future

So what’s next here at Lifestream Blog? Well, I’ll continue to focus on what I mentioned in the previous paragraph and continue to bring insights and tips regarding social services and data. I also just got back from SXSW and saw a panel titled “Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death“. I’ve written about the aspects of Lifestreaming and death before but the panel really inspired me to give this much more thought. I plan on creating a new section here on the site soon where I’ll provide tips on the preservation, preparation and archival of our digital lives. I also will continue to monitor advancements in this area and report what I find. I feel that providing a digital legacy of our lives for both our family and future generations is critically important.

Giving Thanks

So that’s my update folks. I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed sharing my thoughts and discoveries here with you. I truly appreciate all of the readers that have visited over the years. You’ve provided great feedback and in many cases friendships were born from here. I never realized what a powerful vehicle this blog would become. I urge any of you that have a passion in life to create a blog and share your thoughts and resources with others. It will truly bring you amazing things!

Lifestream Blog Celebrates 5 Year Birthday Thanks to You

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 23:03:07 GMT

Reflection

Lifestreaming Services Peak

The Evolution

The Future

Giving Thanks

Putting my ceramic dog to work

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:22:12 GMT

Putting my ceramic dog to work

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Loud & Proud

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 08:16:07 GMT

Loud & Proud

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Candid shot of my son Alex

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 22:42:19 GMT

Candid shot of my son Alex

My Experiences and Insight Heading Into SXSW 2012

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:30:51 GMT

March is almost upon us and as you monitor social sites you can feel the buzz that is “Spring break for geeks” start to build. I went to my first SXSW in 2009 and really soaked it in and chronicled the pilgrimage. I had a great time and it lived up to all the expectations I had read about it. Last year a backlash was born surrounding the conference and I posted my thoughts defending it.

While I still maintain my feelings from last year, I feel that logistics are now a major concern with SXSW that will be a tough one to overcome. The block of hotels reserved for this year were sold out months ahead. I had to book in January and let me tell you it was slim pickens. Beyond hotel accommodations, my experience last year was that panels have spread out considerably since my first attendance. They now cover fairly long distances that aren’t short walks (or quick shuttle rides due to congestion) and can be challenging to navigate in between panels. Also, if you do make it to your panel there’s a chance that it may have already reached capacity and you’ll have to wait outside with hopes of people vacating so you can enter. There’s no doubt that these issues will be even greater this year. In any case keep this in mind as you plan your schedule for the conference. If there’s a panel you really want to see, make sure that you’re there 20 minutes before it starts.

Don’t go in Blind. Have Your Comprehensive Schedule Ready!

Speaking of planning, this year I’ve setup and tested 3 different web services to do just that. There’s the official SXSW site that offers you the ability to create your own schedule and also has an accompanying mobile app for iOS or Android. I’ve also setup Sched.org which I’ve happily used in previous years. A newcomer I’m trying out this year is Lanyrd. Both Sched.org and Lanyrd have a nice social component where you can connect it to your Twitter account and it will then show you the panels your friends are attending within the service. This can serve two purposes. Both giving you the ability to identify some panels you may not have considered which they’ve shown interest in, as well as a chance to find a location where you can ~~stalk~~ connect with them. So using both services is a good way to let your friends know where you’ll be. Another good reason to use all 3 is that I’ve seen panels, parties, and events that are unique to each of them appearing. So between the 3 you should have the best overall picture. Oh, and I forgot to mention I’m also using Plancast just in case.

When using the above scheduling services I highly recommend that you select at least 2 if not 3 panels per each session during the conference. The first year some of the panels were hit or miss. In later years I got smarter by planning ahead and giving a panel 5-10 minutes to determine if it was worth remaining or whether I should find another one. By having 2 or 3 selections you have backups in case of a bad panel, congestion, or logistics issues. By having these selections readily available on your mobile device you’ll be ready to act quickly in the event of a bail. Speaking of mobile for a second, make sure you’re more than ready to supply juice to your device to make it through rigorous usage. I bought a Mophie Juice Pack last year for my iPhone which more than provided enough power for me to make it through every day. You don’t want to lose your bloodline to navigate the conference so make sure you’re prepared.

Great All Day Lounges at the Convention Center

There are several areas within the convention center that have on-going activities which make for a great place to network with like-minded folks. I highly recommend the Blogger Lounge which I’ve been attending since my first SXSW. This is a great place to pop in and out of in between sessions or during breaks while at the convention center. You are bound to meet some great folks there. If your work or interests are in the non-profit / philanthropy space then you should head over to the Beacon which similarly will have a dedicated space for the duration of the conference with a schedule of events and ability to network with lots of good folks.

Don’t Do it Wrong

Most of the mystique that revolves around SXSW is based on the surrounding events and parties that occur outside of the convention and panel schedule. Once again your best bet to find these are using the services I’ve already mentioned. But how do you know which one of them are worth going to? Well prior to the conference you’ll see people and friends that have shown interest on those services. But the real proof in the pudding is in people’s actions. Here is where having the right tools to monitor real-time streams becomes invaluable. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of larger than life parties but I have found that many of the big ones aren’t worth attending. There’s long lines, once you get in they are super crowded, and my biggest pet peeve is that the music is blaring and you can’t hold a conversation with anyone. I do make some exceptions here but my goal is always to connect and communicate with great people. My strategy on parties is similar to panels. There’s tons of them going on concurrently so if you’re not getting anything by connecting with people at the one you’re at within 10 minutes it’s time to plant your head back into your phone to find where to head to next.

There are several things I recommend doing. Make sure prior to heading out that you have befriended people who will be attending on Foursquare. One year I realized that I had many friends on Twitter that I hadn’t connected with on Foursquare. That was a mistake. It has become the defacto standard for location at this point and will help you determine where the people you want to hang out with will be. Speaking of Twitter you should also create a list of attendees you want to connect with and have that list at the ready on your mobile device. Every year there seems to be an app category that gets hype leading up to the conference. Strangely enough and in a meta sort of way, it’s one that you can utilize at the conference. Twitter and Foursquare were born at SXSW and last year it was group messaging / texting that were hot. I successfully used these last year to get a hotel room which I was without upon the plane landing in Austin last year.

This Year’s Breakout App Category

This year’s app category that I”ve gleaned having the most hype around are what I would call passive or ambient location apps. These apps will track your location and then passively push alerts to your mobile device based on your proximity with other people near you. The trigger for the alerts are based on factors that could include one degree of separation friendships (A person that’s a friend of a friend on Facebook) or common interests (Also based on Facebook likes). So the point here is that instead of explicitly checking in or monitoring your friends checkins you can be somewhere and have a very serendipitous encounter with an existing friend or someone new you may want to meet. Before you go all crazy with privacy or stalking concerns you both have to be using the app and opt-in for this magical human collision to transpire. Robert Scoble who’s always on the pulse of top apps at SXSW wrote a good post on the two top contenders in this space called Highlight and Glancee. I’m trying both of those as I’m curious to see the results. You can find other recommended apps Scoble recommends to use at SXSW over on Google+ here.

I can go on and on and this post has already gone on for too long and an area I didn’t cover much of (besides being prepared to torture your mobile device) is other “survival guide” tactics. There are plenty of them out there if you just Google them but I came across this pretty cool one this year which even has an innovative design based on this year’s social darling Pinterest. Well there you have it, my ramblings trying to provide some experience to help you out. I hope that SXSW is as magical for me this year as it has been in the past. I’m worried about logistics and am curious how we shall all fare regarding that once we’re there.

Hope to see you there and here’s a guide to what I recommend and where I’ll be:

My SXSW App Essentials

My Sched.org
My Lanyrd
My Official SXSW schedule
My Plancast

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 12:00:00 GMT

The iOS Address Book Fiasco Continues

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:25:39 GMT

The iOS address book fiasco that originally broke last week has gotten several new legs over the last few days. I originally covered the issue with a slightly different angle in my post on how Path’s misstep may hurt their upcoming health data features. Path quickly responded and apologized in a blog post but the story hasn’t ended there.

Path’s apology has been received in a mixed way. Many have applauded them on the quick and swift action, while others felt it was disingenuous and only resulted because they got caught. The truth of the matter is that apparently this was a standard practice that was being used by many more apps besides Path as Jennifer Van Grove covered on Venture Beat today.

But this story has taken another turn as well. It has spurred a volley of blog posts that attack tech blogging in general and have me likening the situation to something of a cross between conspiracy theories and a comedy roast. Ben Parr has done a good job curating these posts and trying to put some perspective behind the rhetoric which while in some cases has been amusing, has made my head spin a bit. Interestingly enough, Jennifer’s post illustrates everything that’s right about tech blogging.

This situation that has unfolded sparked me to create this.

Neither of the fires behind these two stories are flaming out just yet. While Address Book (gate?) continues to burn, I think there’s still more fuel that will be sprayed on the tech blogging credibility argument. This will be interesting to continue to watch.

*gets popcorn*

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:00:00 GMT

My girls...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:55:21 GMT

My girls...

Path’s Trust Misstep May Hurt Upcoming Health Data Features

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:18:32 GMT

image courtesy of Arun Thampi

Today’s news uncovered by Arun Thampi that Path has been uploading users entire address book to their servers does not bode well for them. You can read coverage around this issue on ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, and Venture Beat. But none of that coverage discussed the future implications as Path has already announced future support for health tracking devices.

I’ve become a big fan of Path over the last few months. It provides a beautiful mobile Lifestreaming app and offers some nice syndication features to boot. But I became even more excited as I heard about the possible future integration with the Jawbone Up. Having a single app to use for Lifestreaming as well as tracking health activity is a very interesting development. Then just a few weeks ago I learned of the newly announced Nike Fuelband which is a new health tracking device that Path announced it will support. So it’s now clear that Path is definitely going to integrate health tracking devices and data into their app.

It’s one thing to compromise users trust when it comes to status updates and other social data, but health data takes that to a new level. It’s a shame that this unnecessary data exposure will no doubt make users take notice and perhaps dissuade them from using the app as they move into their next phase of integrating health data. I hope the Path team can reconcile this issue and provide a means for ensuring it doesn’t happen again in the future. It’s such an elegant app with a bright future that will delve into an area (Lifestreaming + Lifelogging) that nobody else has entered yet. Hopefully they’ve learned from this and will provide a clear on-boarding method for the addition of their health devices support later this year.

Path’s Trust Misstep May Hurt Upcoming Health Data Features

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:18:32 GMT

image courtesy of Arun Thampi

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Health and Fitness Gadget Announcements from CES 2012

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:49:15 GMT

The gadgets and services for Lifelogging and practitioners of the Quantified Self continues to grow and evolve at a very fast pace. I made a trip to CES this year which was unique in that it provided a situation for my personal and work lives to collide. As manager of web production for the X PRIZE Foundation I was attending CES to help work our booth in support of our launch announcement for the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE. On a personal level I also was very curious about all the new health and fitness gadgets and services that would be announced.

Below is a video of Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs speaking at the CES keynote. If you forward to minute 58 you will see him bring Dr. Eric Topol onto the stage who then demonstrates several new health monitoring gadgets that are already available or coming soon. You can also see X PRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis announce and provide details about the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE at the 1 hour, 8 minute mark.

This years’ CES showcased many new technologies that will appeal to both the Lifeloggers and increasingly the mainstream public as well. Unfortunately I didn’t get to walk the show floor very much but I have been monitoring all of the news coverage that has been coming out since the show. The competition for health and fitness tracking devices is really heating up. Early devices like the Fitbit and Bodymedia Fit saw some new players enter the market with the recent Jawbone Up as well as the Motorola MotoACTV device announced at CES. Then just 3 days ago right after the dust was settling at CES Nike announced the Fuelband which is similar to the Jawbone Up in that it is a device you wear on your wrist. In fact Digital Trends went ahead and wrote a post to compare the two similar devices. Then Mashable stated that “Nike also announced partnerships with Foursquare and Path.” I find this information very interesting since Path had hinted at offering the ability to integrate with the Jawbone Up in the future and now the Nike Fuelband announcement pretty much solidifies that, but also shows that they’re considering support for multiple devices. The integration of Lifestreaming and personal tracking devices is very exciting and Path will be a first mover in this area distinguishing their app from anything currently out there.

Even though I didn’t get to walk the show floor I was lucky to be working the Qualcomm booth next to Bodymedia’s Chris Knorr. I learned about updates to their service that will analyze the activity data to help provide recommendations and adjustments. They’re also releasing disposable patches in addition to the armband. I asked Chris what health related devices or services he had seen that were impressive at CES. The first thing he mentioned was the Macaw App which is aimed as a prevention plan based health app available for both iOS and Android. It’s supposed to provide the ability to be paired and synced with multiple wireless health devices and then import all the data in one place to provide a health profile. I downloaded the app but don’t yet see the ability to add 3rd party devices and didn’t find any details on their website about device support. Perhaps it was just announced and coming in the near future. On the surface it sounded somewhat like the health aggregation service I wrote about last May which I’m sure we’ll start to see several startups attacking very soon.

The other device and service that Chris told me about was Striiv. This device and service puts an emphasis on gamificaton to motivate people towards staying fit. Striiv does this by providing a pedometer device that has a built in display that ties in your activity to generate resources which you can use in a simulation game called MyLand. The other nice aspect is that you can also donate your activity to help various causes via GlobalGiving. The LA Times review called it “Sim City meets Wii Fit” which seems like an appropriate comparison. If you visit the link you can see a video demo of the unit.

Yesterday I read Dean Takahashi’s post stating that “Quantifying our lives will be a top trend in 2012″. It’s a great summary of some highlights of personal tracking devices at CES with his thoughts on the near future. I obviously couldn’t agree more with Dean and think these devices will continue to get better, cheaper, and continue to improve by analyzing the data to help improve our lives. This is going to be a great year for the health and fitness technology space and I’m really looking forward to it.

Health and Fitness Gadget Announcements from CES 2012

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:49:15 GMT

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Passive Sharing of Your Lifestream on Facebook Timeline is Here

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:46:20 GMT

Today Facebook officially announced 60+ apps and web services that will now utilize their new open graph protocol to passively share information while you use them to your Timeline. Last year when Timeline was first launched to developers there were a few apps that were immediately available. This included Spotify and Rdio to share the music you were listening to in real-time to your newsfeed, Timeline, and Ticker.

Now a whole slew of ways to share have become available that cover travel, food, shopping, fashion, fitness, entertainment, causes and several others including some fairly unique ones shared over at AllThingsD. You can get a complete breakdown over at The Next Web. If you want to get in on the action and start your sharing right away just visit this page and start adding apps.

What are you waiting for? Go add some apps!

Look for a deluge of passive updates starting to appear on people’s timelines over the next few weeks. Even though Facebook has taken extra precautions with regards to privacy there will surely still be some snafu’s we’ll hear about. It’s unclear how the reception to this onslaught of information to an audience that is already fatigued will play out but hopefully as users we’ll see some value from the wealth of new data we will willingly share. I’m hoping that more tailored recommendations and other patterns will help surface more useful and interesting information. I know, wishful thinking but we’ll have to wait and see.

Passive Sharing of Your Lifestream on Facebook Timeline is Here

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:46:20 GMT

What are you waiting for? Go add some apps!

Top 5 artists this week

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:00:00 GMT