DarrenBarefoot.com

Every so often, I see a video, usually from a research lab, that demonstrates some new technology. It’s typically kind of mundane, with banal camera work, titles from Windows Movie Maker and monotone, academic narration.

And yet it feels like I’m watching science fiction. I experience some combination of awe and creepiness, like I’m peeking into the future. I usually utter “holy crap” under my breath.

I’ve probably reacted this way to dozens of technology demo videos, but these are a few that stand out in my mind. The first one seems totally ordinary in 2012, but it blew my mind in 2006 when Sun Microsystems’ Johnathan Schwartz flipped over a desktop window (it’s at about 3:00–listen to the audience’s reaction). “What?” I thought. “Windows have backs?”

I expect that by now, we’ve all seen the footage of Boston Dynamic’s BigDog robot from 2008. It’s the first time that I ever saw a mobile robot that didn’t seem absurdly frail and delicate, as if it might tip over at any moment. In this video, a man actually shoves the robot with his foot, and the thing staggers but recovers.

The latest example of an awe-inspiring tech demo comes via Jeremiah Owyang on Google+. Touche demonstrates pretty fascinating new frontiers in touch interaction with objects. My favourite bit is when we see a guy changing songs and volume on his music player simply by making gestures with his hands and arms. It’s like we’re teaching objects sign language.

UPDATE: Here are the slightly revised slides  (PDF) I presented today, in PDF format.

This morning I gave a talk entitled “Trackbacked: A decade of social media” at the iMedia conference in Edmonton. I was intentional in choosing that title, as the term ‘trackback’ (replaced, I suppose, by the likes of ‘reblog’ and ‘repin’) has disappeared from common usage as quickly as it appeared.

The talk is a meandering look back at the last 10 years of social media, and some of the lessons I’ve learned there-in.

As I sometimes do, I created a mindmap to organize my initial ideas about the talk. I thought it might interest iMedia attendees to check it out. Click to embiggen:

These are just early notes, so I may not completely believe (or be willing to argue in favour of) everything in that image. The version above is just an image, so here are the links sprinkled around the diagram:

• http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/fark.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User’s_Guide_and_Catalog
• http://darrenbarefoot.com/flowers/
• http://www.penmachine.com/2011/05/the-last-post
• http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2012/03/blogmoredigital_4f706ae71e5af.jpeg
• http://maps.google.com/?t=8&utm_campaign=8bit
• https://vimeo.com/20465929
• http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/
• http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder/255838/
• http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/

A couple of weeks ago, Julie and I hopped on a train for the 45 minute ride to Montpellier. While we planned to stay over night and explore the charming old town, our main purpose was to visit L’Office Francais de l’Immigration et de L’Integration (OFII). A successful visit would mean that we were officially legal in the eyes of the French government, and were permitted to spend the year here.

The OFII represented the final step in a process that began in the fall of 2011, when we began assembling documents to apply for a long-term stay visa. As you’d expect, the application requirements were vigorous. We easily each had a stack of documents an inch high–everything from our verified banking records to proof of medical insurance. If you’d murdered us on the way to the French consulate in Vancouver and hidden our bodies, you could have assumed our identities with ease.

A multicultural clump of humanity was ushered into the OFII office the following afternoon. What followed was–and I  write this without sarcasm–French bureaucratic efficiency at its finest. In the space of an hour and 45 minutes, we each had four appointments. We met with:

1. A nurse who weighed and measured us, and completed a short interview regarding our medical history.
2. A nurse who x-rayed our chest cavity.
3. A doctor who reviewed the x-ray (pronouncing my chest “claire et normale”), took our blood pressure and listened to our breathing.
4. A functionary who completed the paperwork and attached the precious ‘vignette’–an official sticker–in our passport.

Just like that, we were official. We celebrated with Thai food, an ethnic food beyond the prowess of our village’s restaurants.

On a related topic, I was very impressed with Montpellier. It has a gorgeous, mostly-pedestrian centre that’s lively and full of bars and restaurants. The city’s spirit is no doubt buoyed by a reported student population of 60,000. And, though it was early in the season, there was a minimum of tourist tatt and related nonsense. I wonder if nearby Carcasonne draws most of the visitors, and so permits Montpellier to just go about its business?

For the average hockey fan, the days between the regular season and the playoffs are torture. There’s  very little news, as teams are more secretive than ever about line-ups, injuries and the like. All the media can do is sit around and make predictions. All fans can do is read and ruminate on those predictions.

I started a spreadsheet that shows all the media and hockey blogger predictions I could find. I’ve made it editable by anybody, so that should others discover predictions, they can add them to the document.

I’m currently up to around 450 individual picks from nearly 60 pundits. I don’t claim to be exhaustive, but it’s hopefully representative. Here are some early impressions:

• The longest series is predicted to be NSH/DET, with the shortest being NJD/FLO.
• There’s great consensus in the east, with at least 90% of the media agreeing on the outcome of all four series.
• There’s the most disagreement on the CHI/PHO series, with the media currently going 60%-40% in favour of the Blackhawks.
• Almost nobody picks 4-game series sweeps, which is odd because there’s usually at least one in the quarter-finals each year.
• Confidence in the Canucks is reasonably high, with more than 83% of the media picking them to pick the Kings, in an average of roughly 6 games.
• Hockey writers are almost all Caucasian men.

In completing this little exercise, I couldn’t help but think fondly of Maggie the macaque, who routinely outpicked the TSN staff in years past. This year, I’ll have to settle for a sea lion from Niagara Falls.

In a related note, I’ll be going on something of a social media cleanse in the coming weeks (and months, hopefully). As I’m living in France, I’ll be watching playoff games about 12 to 18 hours after they finish. So, I’ll need to avoid the likes of Twitter and Facebook in order to enjoy the games in a  prelapsarian state, if you will.

UPDATE: I thought I’d better store my first round picks here, which I tweeted the other day: NYR in 4, BOS in 7, NJD in 5, PIT in 7, VAN in 6, SJS in 7, CHI in 5, NSH in 7

For the past decade, I’ve been able to walk to my work. 10 years ago, that commute was a half-an-hour jaunt across the centre of Dublin. Since 2007, we’ve worked from home, and so my walk to work has been measured in seconds.

When I can walk to work, I find that most of my other needs fall within walking distance, too. Whether we’re living in Victoria, Malta or Victoria, BC, groceries, restaurants, medical services and the like have just been a stroll away. When we can, we plan our living circumstances around this proximity, and I’m the happier for it.

As I think about it, walking reminds me that I’m living my life at a healthy, sustainable pace. I don’t have to hop into a car to beat the traffic so that I can make it to the office on time, or get to a store before it closes.

I appreciate that this kind of lifestyle isn’t for everyone. Your average North American family lives in the suburbs, and so they can’t walk to school, work or the rest of their lives away from home. They routinely need cars to get where they’re going. My choice to walk is the privilege of a childless, middle-class knowledge worker. Of course, in many small towns around the world, walking is still the way of life for much of humanity.

Here in France, I walk every day. Usually it’s down to the local shops–the grocery store, la pâtisserie and la boucherie. I also walk up and down the Canal du Midi a lot. It’s very pleasant to follow the meandering path of the slow-moving canal, shaded by plane trees.

I recently learned about the Camino de Santiago, a Catholic pilgrimage in northern Spain, and one of many such pilgrimages throughout Europe. While I’m not Catholic, I do see the appeal in a moving ritual that lasts a month and leaves you alone with your thoughts and surroundings.

I’ve been a fan of Kickstarter since it launched back in 2009. I love its very 21st-century take on patronage. It’s also my favourite example of a particular kind of startup idea. Back in 2009, I wrote “it’s a terrific example of spotting something that people are doing in an ad hoc basis, and creating a site to formally organize and enable that behaviour.”

I’ve been delighted to watch it grow, and work its way into the mainstream. There are plenty of indicators of its success, but one is all of the Kickstarter imitators that have emerged.

Kickstarter now processes some serious coin. They’ve recently had several projects raise more than a million dollars, and in 2011 their projects collectively generated just under US $100 million That’s up from $27 million in 2010.

With all that money floating around, there must be an emergent demand for a professional marketer or fundraiser who can help Kickstarter projects achieve their goals. After all, Kickstarter (and its ilk) are simply a particular kind of fundraising, which is itself a popular profession.

Accidental consultants

I did some searches for ‘Kickstarter consultant’ and the like, but Google’s cupboards were surprisingly bare. I found this guy and this guy, both of whom more or less admit to accidentally becoming crowdfunding consultants. Interestingly, they’re both filmmakers who had their own successful Kickstarter projects. I’m always been a little leery of the “I did this, so you can too” approach, but I have no reason to doubt their capabilities. I was surprised not to find any professional marketers or fundraisers positioning themselves for this kind of work. Even searches for the more general ‘crowdfunding consultant’ (and some variations) didn’t produce as many convincing results as I would have expected.

The average Kickstarter project in 2011 only asked for about $8400. If you’re earning a few percentage points, there’s not a lot of money there. But many of the projects are worth tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most projects seem to be founded by artists, musicians, filmmakers and designers. These are, in my experience, people who, on average, aren’t great at marketing themselves and their projects. Most of the artists I know would prefer to make art.

On the other hand, it’s still early days for Kickstarter. So perhaps it’s a prerequisite for a successful project that the people behind it be savvy marketers? In essence, Kickstater filters out the creative people who are bad at crowdfunding?

Obviously, crowdfunding is becoming big business. And it’s about to become a lot bigger, thanks to a new bill that President Obama is soon expected to sign into law. I expect to meet more and more crowdfunding experts at conferences in the coming months.

Can I look under the hood of your Kickstarter project?

On a personal note, I’ve always wanted to start my own Kickstarter project, but I’ve been reluctant. I wouldn’t be developing a game or making a movie, so I wouldn’t be asking for a substantive amount of money. It seems a little ingenuine, as a successful business grown-up, to crowdfund a creative project that I could manage to fund myself, doesn’t it?

Until I resolve that particular existential crisis, I’d be curious to chat with people who are launching Kickstarter projects. No promises, but if you’ve got a project that interests me, and I’ve got some time, I’d enjoy contributing to making it a success. The one I can probably help the most is through advice and, occasionally, a connection. I’m just curious about watching the Kickstarter crowdfunding process close up.

I try not to write these inward-looking, inside-baseball posts anymore, but I’ve been wondering about this one for a while. I know few people want to read blog posts about blogging, but throw me a bone.

Michael asks a question that I’ve been wondering about for a while: “should you close comments on older blog posts?”. This September, this blog will be ten years old (the site itself is a couple of years older). I’ve published roughly 5600 posts over that period. A handful of them remain–relative to the others–quite popular.

Why are they popular? Because they accidentally appear high in the results for related searches. For example, last year nearly 25,000 people searched for some variation of “worst baby name ever” and found this paltry post from 2005. It has 910 comments on it.

Lately, this longer piece about Freedom 55 Financial has attracted lots of comments. 5000 people visited it last year, and it’s up 286 comments, mostly of the highly incendiary variety. For search, the most popular post on my site remains this 2005 post about textual tattoos. Over its seven-year lifespan, nearly 750,000 people have viewed it, and 100 have commented.

Any site publisher or blogger has pages like this, where a long tail of visitors carries on and on and on. A page on Michael’s site, for example, has become host to a discussion of tax software. My favourite is probably this one where 101 commenters have shared their weird, creepy tales of sleep paralysis.

There’s over 40,000 comments in all. I wonder who has written more words on this site: me or all the commenters put together?

The deal I made with the Internet

When I started writing this site, what deal did I make with the Internet? When I say ‘the Internet’, I mean all the people who, in the ensuing decade, would visit and possibly comment on this site.

Did I, for example, guarantee that the information I published would remain timely and accurate? I hope not, because much of it is out of date and, in many cases, totally wrong. And some of the sites I linked to are gone. For very boring reasons, I’ve been revisiting some of the very oldest posts on this site. As part of that work, I’ve been sampling the links I’d published in 2002 and 2003. As of now, 48 of 74 old links are still live. Am I going to try to fix those other 26 links? Nope.

And what about the ad hoc communities that form around these unexpectedly evergreen blog posts? Advice is shared and debates rage without any input from me. Why wouldn’t I leave comments open?

The only reason might be comment spam. While Akismet does a fantastic job of killing 99% of spammy comments to this site. 99.93%, to be exact, which means that it’s handled about 2.2 million spammy comments since I installed it in 2006. That 0.07% still represents 10 or 15 spam comments that I have to manually remove every day. It’s less than five minutes of work, and not a burden at the moment.

Occasionally, a commenter thinks better of what they’ve written on this site, and emails and asks me to remove their messages. I’m usually happy to do this.

So, until I get busier or lazier, comments will remain open on all the blog posts on this site. Those ongoing discussions don’t particularly interest me, but nor do they feel like a burden.

I’m an animal lover. That surprises a lot of people, but it’s true. I grew up with pets and mother who loved birdwatching. I’ve often thought that, in another life, I’d run an animal refuge.

One of the unexpected joys of living in France, then, is that I’m surrounded by animals. Our neighbour and landlord has two cats, a dog and a tortoise (named, creatively, Tortoise). One of the cats, perhaps weary of our neighbour’s young children, has taken up residence in our house instead. This is him sleeping on my desk:

In addition to the local animals, there are horses, ponies and donkeys in the fields that flank the canal. I usually feed one lucky equine my apple core when I go for a walk before dinner. Apparently there is a peculiar local practice of feeding one’s old bread to the horses, too. I haven’t tried that yet.

The plane trees along the canal are full of birds, and I’ve seen several species of ducks and swans. At dusk, they’re joined by flapping, looping bats that hunt insects over the water. There’s apparently carp, eel, perch and all sorts of other less familiar fish in the muddy shallows of the canal.

The most unexpected creature I’ve seen thus far was near this bridge, where I’d paused on a bike ride. I saw a mammal in the water–it looked like a beaver with a weasel’s tale. Knowing that Europe has very few beavers, I assumed that it must be a muskrat, or a very fat otter. I asked around when I got home, and it turns out they’re coypu or ragondin in French. They’re native to South America, but were apparently introduced to Europe by fur traders.

There’s also both an Australian and an African game park nearby. I think I’ll skip those, as I always find zoos a bit sad.