Future History

For Christmas this year I got a great book called Lost London, published by English Heritage. It documents in photographs London in the years 1870 to 1940. The London that the combined might of planners, developers and the Luftwaffe swept away.

I have also spent quite a lot of time, for one reason or another in Streetview, looking around various locations. I even invented a game at home for my kids. I dump them somewhere in Streetview and they have to work out where they are (the best was the Isle of Mull - "Balamory!", the easiest "Grandma's house!")

So what technology has brought us is perfect recall. The tantalising and fragmentary glimpses we see of London 100 years ago or more give us an elliptical glance at the way life was, but the record is incomplete. Streetview allows us to stroll around towns cities and the countryside at will, observing every detail of architecture, town planning, fashion, advertising, automotive design, agriculture and even economic activity.

Which presents posterity with an amazing opportunity. If Google's slightly creepy Streetview vans take a snapshot of our country every 5 years, the legacy for future historians will be immense.

And it doesn't stop there. Mix in the petabytes of social media data generated around people and places that has all ben time-stamped, and future historians will have a field day. Imagine the young Charles Darwin was on Facebook while at Cambridge, or tweeting away his early cogitations. What insight we would have into his world and the way he came to think the way he did, and who might have influenced him. Stepping back into Streeview, Cambridge 1829, we'd be able to walk the streets as he saw them.

Which means, I guess, be careful what you write, wherever you write it. You never know how you might get entangled in future history.

Lowering The Price of Failure

Back in the 60s my mum was a secretary. She spoke a few languages and worked in some cool places, and she used a typewriter. When my sister was born, she gave up work and spent the 70s doing a fair imitation of the Good Life mixed with Abigails Party (think black forest gateau served with home-made wine…).

When we'd all decamped to college she wanted to go back to work, and picked up her typing again. Initially bamboozled by word processing, she was amazed with spellchecking and backspace. Make a typo - no problem: just lean on that left arrow button and hit "Del". No more tippex or white ribbons fed into clackety typewriters.

When Henri Cartier Bresson took photographs in the 30s, he would compose a shot, check the exposure, choose the moment, and press the shutter. Then he'd walk away - the shot done, the moment captured. I read on a blog yesterday about a guy who has an ambition to get 10,000 photos on his Flickr account by Christmas. And he's not even a photographer.

So the thing that has changed is that the price of failure has just dropped.

We're starting out on building a pretty ambitious bit of software. I've been agonising over features and what to include, but the great news is that we don't have one shot. For example, Flickr and Wordpress put out multiple versions of their sites every day. Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress) blogs about this here. If a new feature, or some "optimised" code doesn't work, they just revert back. The price of failure is low.

The price of building software and not iterating it can be very high.

Back to the Future

At our local park fair the other week I picked up Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. Written in 1995, I sort of never got round to reading it.

It deals with the "careers" of a bunch of Microsoft developers who go to Silicon Valley to make it big in a multimedia startup. Back in those days I had just started Armadillo, a multimedia startup in London, so the memories it brought back were acute. If any of these terms means anything to you, you need to find a copy:

- multimedia

- 3DO

- CDi

- BBS

- 9.6k dialup

- Broderbund

- Voyager

- Powerbook

- NeXT

- SGI Reality Engine

Throw in some Apple-envy and some evocative prose about the Microsoft Redmond campus and I spent a happy and nostalgic couple of hours with this book. At the same time I was clearing out our office and found some awards from 1994 for Best Interactive Multimedia (from the long-gone XYZ magazine), and a BIMA, as well as the Photoshop 1.0 installation disc (one 720K floppy). Then I started boring the guys in the office with old multimedia tales until they surreptitiously plugged their ipods back in...

What was fascinating though was the frustration in the book - trying to build complex experiences within the limitations of the technology (CDROM, slow as treacle dialup) and the money required to build anything. Fifteen years on, both these barriers have gone.

As well as capturing the zeitgeist, the book also presages the arrival of social media and blogging and many of the casual predictions have turned out to be eerily prescient. But then I saw the list of advisors, and with the likes of Kevin Kelley and John Battelle on board he had some good futurologists.

So then I started thinking about 15 years from now. There's a sort of feeling that we're "there"; that we have ubiquitous fast broadband, great developer platforms and loads of free content; that all we will now do is tweak what we have.

So will 2025 be as different to today as Coupland's story is?

The Practice of Work

37 signals are one of my favourite companies. We've used Basecamp for a while, and I like their products, but it's the way they run the company that has always resonated with me.

So this interview with their lead dev was fascinating and contains some business practices that I've adopted (either knowingly or unwittingly) over the years.

Here are some:

- work from home on Friday. I take my kids to school, have a coffee with my wife and then dive in to my emails. 37 Signals go further. In the summer the office closes on Fridays.

- small is beautiful. A friend of mine started a web agency and, for some reason, he thought employing 60 people would be good. So he did. Then it went badly wrong, and 60 people lost their jobs. More people also means more personnel issues, bigger overheads and more management tiers.

- niche thyself (borrowed from Guy Kawasaki). If you're going to be small, find a niche and become the best. As a generalist you have very little ground to defend in any competitive situation.

- enjoy your work. I blogged on this before, but if you don't feel what you do matters, you won't do it well.

- employ smart people. When 37 Signals didn't like the available tools for building websites, they wrote their own. That's now Ruby on Rails. We had no code to convert conventional 3D models to XAML, so we wrote some convertors and built Turning the Pages.

- get code out the door. Then iterate.

- trust your employees. The 18 employees at 37 Signals are spread over 3 countries. The management (such as it is) trusts the people - they're in it together.

If you work for someone else, you might be sighing wistfully and bemoaning the culture you've inherited. If you control the culture however, then you can change it.

Anything's possible when yo' in the Library!

There was a day when not much was possible in the library. Falling asleep was very possible, and, I recall a certain amount of surreptitious eying of female students back at college. Off-curricular study was my specialty though. I remember wading through shelves of books on architecture, fashion, parapsychology and history. My degree was business admin, so none of those contributed much to my grades...

One of the challenges librarians face is assessing the validity of the library as a physical space - not just a collection of data. Hey, why come to the library, when you can kick back in your dorm with your ipod on, your friends dropping by and a can of beer right there?

I've blogged before on the concept that we are different people in different spaces, and we're surely different in a library from our lounge.

So I loved this video on why you should get to the library.

In October we're launching a complete reinvention of the library space with the BL. We're doing the software, but it's the re-imagination of the physical space that will really blow people away. More when it goes live, but there's some stuff here.

Thanks to umjanedoan for the photo licensed under creative commons.

The Perils of Certainty

We all like to feel secure, so people who act and speak with certainty about the future are compelling. Doctors who say with conviction that we will live longer if we eat more beetroot. That bananas can stave off Alzheimers (if we eat 20 a day). That spinach is a cancer-beating superfood. Or was it lettuce...

The UK property market was the same. Prices in 2009 would continue to fall said the experts. Except they went up.

I was researching some stuff about trends for the iPad and came up with an article called "The Apple iPhone Doomed to Failure" written just as the iPhone was launching. My favourite quote is the pithy signoff "Apple iPhone. Enjoy the limelight because it won't last long." Being wrong is OK, but the hubris here is on an impressive scale.

So what are we to make of the bullish statements around Flash, HTML5, iPads and slates in general, mobile form factors, app stores, WiMax and so on. Everyone seems so sure.

In the heritage sector we have to take a long view, and we have to do so knowing that every penny has been hard fought for and has to account for itself. So that increasingly means portability, open standards and interoperability. Want to reskin the app - no problem. Expose your data to some other museum with a bigger website - yup. Share the code or build on someone else's work - absolutely. Agility is a word I use a lot nowadays.

Don't be taken in by certainty.

Luttrell Psalter - the Movie

So the kind people at WAG Screen sent me through a copy of their film of the Luttrell Psalter in response to me blogging about it a few weeks ago.

I suppose I was expecting the standard documentary-style piece, with voiceover, pieces to camera, intercut with a couple of re-creations of medieval life. That's certainly a film they could have made, but instead they've made a deceptively simple 20 minute film recreating scenes from the Luttrell Psalter in an effort to transport us back 600 years. No plot, no narration, not many words at all.

As a result, if you just view the film, it's a very impressionistic experience. Oxen, breath steaming in the cold Lincolnshire air, haul a crude but familiar-looking plough across a field. A young boy vaults up a tree to steal some cherries, narrowly escaping a wrathful farmer. Chickens scratch around a farmyard. A wronged wife belabours her penitent husband with a stick. We're left to have our own opinions on how like these people we are and how unlike. How hard life must have been and how rewarding.

The film took 2 years to make, on a budget that wouldn't normally cover the costumes, and the makers traveled to the North West to film red squirrels, to Wales to find a medieval village, and to London to find a scriptorium. This truly was a labour of love, and it shows on the screen.

For those unfamiliar with the book, the interview with the ever-watchable Michelle Brown is required viewing, and helps relate the book to the film.

So as a piece of film-making, experimental archaeology, pedagogy and indeed art, the film is an unlikely success. I hope the team put a copy online soon and it gets the wider audience it deserves.