This time last year — that’s March — I did something new. Annually, geeks of the web, film and music variety descend upon Austin, Texas for South By Southwest. 2007 was a blast; allowing me to meet a huge roster of new and wonderful people, whilst enjoying seven days in the sun and heat of Texas. It does wonders after a dreary British winter (I miss the days when we got snow). It’s replenishing, really.

Replenishment of the mind and soul, that is. The body, for its part in all this madness, will not be thankful. The combined effect of parties late into the night, every night whilst sustained only through a diet of 80% pure beef is not necessarily something doctors of NHS would endorse. This and the sleep depravation left me absolution shattered last year.

It figures I’d want to do it all again. ‘Spring Break for Geeks’ they call it. Taking years off the life of our planet to fly half way around the world for this over-indulgence is just half the battle; you don’t win at SXSW unless you take a proportional amount off your own lifespan too. In the interests of a high score, I’m staying on for SXSW Music too.

I have, as is traditional, failed to blog anything at all during the event so far. Interactive has in fact been and gone before this entry was finished, which puts me in a strange pre-present-past tense tangle. Regardless, it’s all been very good.

The boxes are all ticked: Wild parties, catching up with friends from all over the world, eating so much tex-mex it makes you ill? Pretty standard and successful trip so far.

I will attempt to do a better write up, of course, but in the mean time your best bet is to track me on Twitter. Better yet, now that SXSW Music has started, is to check the really, really cool Out-Of-5 tracker than Mike Stenhouse put together. It’s a really brilliantly simply tool to review stuff through Twitter and as well as passing judgement, provides a chronological listing of (mostly) everything I’ve seen in Austin. I highly recommend it.

More soon. Now, more music to see.

Lately I’ve somewhat failed at blogging. Not in a colloquial meme ‘FAIL’ manner, in an actual if-you-put-me-in-a-competition-and-judged-me way. The lack of activity in both redesign and writing would have this site reclassified as a holding page for some other Ben Ward who would later poach the domain name from my idle mitts.

The advantage to being about being 34,000ft above the Atlantic Ocean is that there’s crap all to do. I can listen to music, or I can poke Steve Marshall with a newspaper. Two hours into the flight the latter activity has been exhausted for excitement, and music (Radiohead’s magnificent ‘In Rainbows’, by the way) works in the background anyway.

So, MacBook open, and a blogging imbalance to redress. The absurdity of my silence to become abundantly clear in the next few paragraphs as I reveal that my life has been unusually lively of late.

Speaking

From March 2nd to March 4th, WebCamp and BlogTalk took place in Cork, Ireland. For the first time in a formal setting (by which I exclude free-for-all BarCamp unconferences) I’ve been invited to speak. Naturally it’s my specialist subject of microformats that’s behind the invitation, and I’m sitting on the Mashup’s & Microformats Panel during BlogTalk, whilst presenting an ad-hoc introduction to Decentralised Social Networking (using microformats, specifically) at WebCamp the day before.

It’s one of those life-bolt-upright events, I think. One of the moments where I cannot modestly hide from the fact that I’ve achieved something. I do that; excluding myself from general achievement or describing myself below the others around me. I’m pretty sure it irritates people, who in turn generally give me a frustrated look and insist I just concede that I’m good at what I do.

Standing alone by the gate at Heathrow Airport, sending text messages half way around the world to arrange liaisons in Cork, about to embark on an expenses-paid flight and stay in expenses-paid accommodation, I can’t hide from the achievement.

There’s pride, also anxiety. Going to Ireland separates me from the usual safety net of the London-centred web community. Leaving for a place with no trusted friends in the audience and no one to reassure me that whatever I do will be fine.

I digress with meta wankery. Going to Ireland has been a wonderful experience. My sessions seemed to go down very well, I got lots of very positive feedback and at least one of them was recorded and should be on the internet for me and everyone else to view shortly. WebCamp — a much more structured day than a BarCamp or last month’s SemanticCamp — went really well. Uldis and John did a great job organising it, there were lots of fascinating insights into microformats, FOAF and (most revelatory to me) XMPP. XMPP could change the world, seriously.

BlogTalk is a two-day conference, but for my other commitments I could only attend the first day. Whilst WebCamp was down and dirty with technology (not least Dan Brickley’s beautiful MacBook Air), BlogTalk provided a much broader look at the industry of blogging in general. Pieces on content, trends and overview outnumbered the technical (although microformats seemed well grasped). It made for a good mix though, with my time in the audience spent appreciating more hits than misses.

On microformats and mashups

My panel on Mashups & Microformats also seemed well received, and I think I presented myself and the microformats community pretty well. I was able to reel off my piece trying to preserve the exclusive association of ‘microformat’ with microformats.org, and push the ever important point that ours is just one way of producing structured patterns in HTML. (Oh, I said ‘patterns’ not ‘POSH’. That derogatory nonsense acronym needs to go.)

Reviving the ‘Mastermind’ metaphor, the panel questions split nicely between a specialist subject of microformats and general knowledge round that gave reign to babble a little about mobile, as well as pull in a fair bit of Yahoo! for the mash-ups focused portions. It has to be said, Y” alt=”” border=”0” /> is a great place to work and get involved in all this stuff.

Clogging the Tubes

My solo slot from WebCamp was recorded by Stephanie Booth, who did a sterling job taking video from most sessions during the day, and in BlogTalk, too. I’m not sure at this point whether the panel was recorded or by who, but I’m hopeful.

I’ll link to that when it makes it online.

Cork

Without dragging on at too much length, I was really taken with Cork. Aral and I spent at least an hour wandering the old, pedestrianised streets around {{PLACE}}, soaking up the early evening atmosphere and being thoroughly indecisive about where to sit for dinner; a farcical number of eateries are intensely crammed into an inexplicably small area. I’ve no idea how Cork supports so many but as a tourist it’s excellent. I’m pretty certain that I’ll need to come back for a holiday sometime.

American Adventure

Back to a slightly turbulent 34,000ft. I’m en route to Austin, Texas (via Houston) for South By Southwest. It’s going to kill me. Not the plane (else you’ll never read this to know), but the twelve days. Steve and I decided that if we’re going to do this properly we should attend not only the SXSW Interactive conference, but also the music festival that follows. I was physically crushed after just interactive this year. I’m not sure how this year is going to work. I remain defiant in my youth, but there’s a twinge of doubt.

It’s also looking likely that I’ll be spending the Easter week in San Francisco before returning to the UK. I’m all set out for an excellent few weeks.

Once upon a time I wrote a dashboard widget called Twitgit. It lets you interact with Twitter from the Mac OSX Dashboard.

In the face of stiff competition from the Icon Factory’s magnificent Twitterific application, Twitgit has been rather neglected for over a year now. It’s hard to motivate yourself to write software that you don’t actually use.

One year and ten days since Twitgit 0.7 (it was released January 7th 2007), I’ve updated Twitgit again. A very kind gentleman named Thomas Roessler emailed me in December, having inspected my inexperienced and shoddy source code. He rightly pointed out that using the JavaScript eval() function to parse JSON was a really bad idea; especially in a widget running with local system privileges. I should, of course, have been using a proper JSON parser. Twitgit 0.8 is fixed and uses the JavaScript JSON parser from JSON.org and makes no more calls to eval(). Since I was writing an update, I’ve tidied up the functionality and added some new features too. Of course, because of this security fix (albeit conceptual and unexploited), Twitgit 0.8 is a vital update for anyone using it.

Download Twitgit 0.8

Since I was working on the code again — with some affection, I might add — I’ve added some other fixes and new features, too.

• Restored relative ‘5 minutes ago…’ timestamps as they were removed from the Twitter API.
• Added user icons to tweet display
• Added automatic creation of links to users referenced with ‘@username’
• Swapped the tweet input for a slimline text input box, and the chunky ‘Twitter’ button is gone for something more discrete, too.
• Changed the tweet length limit to 140 characters, as per Twitter’s now well established convention

So, for those of you who prefer Twitter in Dashboard than on the desktop, I hope Twitgit remains useful to you. Having been working with the code again, I have a few more fixes planned for the near future. I hope they’ll materialise.

2008 begins as an undesirably blank canvas. The natural reaction when faced with such a clean slate at the new year might be to contrive a grand set of resolutions, over-ambitiously clawing at physical, social and professional achievement to replace whatever it is that’s missing.

But resolutions never stick. They’re too fickle a motivator. Reeling off a list of new or old activities that should be done. Because they should. Maybe it’s good for the health, or maybe it’s ‘needed’, or maybe someone has just been nagging. It’s never going to happen without actually wanting to do it. Sitting down and writing a list of resolutions is all an exercise in ‘should’ and not ‘want’; setting chores to get annoyed about later. Get annoyed about doing them, and get annoyed about skipping them. Really, new year resolutions are just a tedious exercise in catch 22.

Life has ways of filling its own blanks, inevitably quicker than is preferable. A set of frail resolutions to keep artificially busy from January 1st onward is only going frustrate matters.

On that basis, better to pass on the whole stupid routine.

The weeks roll by and those of us in the UK are slowly but inevitably discovering that everybody in the country is actually in possession of everybody else’s confidential information; all of which was accidentally printed onto the inside of seventy-five million packets of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. I’m more aware than ever of the technological generation gap. It’s growing rapidly and the haves and have-nots in technical competence are heading for a clash.

It’s not just the fact that information isn’t really as secure or competently handled as we pretend it is. Social networking is encouraging people to share vast quantities of information about themselves that no-one would ever have had access too before. Facebook especially has successfully given people a sense of security through granularity in the amount of information they share with their different networks of friends.

The problem is the reaction of the establishment to this casual whoring of personal details. Insurance companies, banks and Credit Card issuers are stepping out to tell us that we’re doing it wrong. Prematurely middle-aged men sternly tell us that sharing so much information on the internets leaves us vulnerable to so called ‘identity theft’. Identity theft is obviously awful; especially at Christmas time. No-one realises the horrible reality until they wake up in the body of their next door neighbour’s cat, paralysed by shock, fear and a severe flea infestation. Meanwhile the real Puss has collapsed against a back alley wall of Pets At Home, wasted on a binge cocktail of Whiskers, Felix, Pro Plus and your soul itself. All paid for in your name.

But such short-sighted advice is not going to get us anywhere. The horse has bolted and modern culture is already open. As it spreads through the technophile community, it will become normal. Like everything else published on the internet, telling people not to do something after the fact is ineffective. It didn’t work for the music industry and I can’t see it working for anything else.

Services — banks, governments and so forth — are supposed to fit the people who make up the society in which they operate. When society goes through a change in attitudes, those services should adapt to reflect the people that they exist for.

It’s that which makes this situation backward. The servant is telling us off, trying to scare us into compliance with RSPCA enraging horror stories of feline identity splicing. Nation-wide poster campaigns of bunnies with shotguns and Daily Mail leaders of guinea pigs funding international terrorism (and stealing the jobs of hard-working, white, British terrorist backers) cannot be far behind.

But that message is wrong and should be resisted. If my identity is impersonated because someone pieces together a profile of me from information on the internet, then the safeguards of the organisations who validate my identity are broken. If it is the case that society has decided to share their keys, then it is up to the banks, governments and insurance companies to change their locks. It is for them to fix their broken models, not for us to hold back or regress an evolving society to accommodate bad servants.

If that means logging into an online banking service takes a little longer, then so be it. The inconvenience of additional validation to protect identity is moot when compared to the detriment of preventing an entire generation of people from interacting with each other as freely as they wish.