James Tizard

I have a new computer, and I just love new computers. Of course the nice thing  about new computers is that the new one is always waaay better than the last on pretty much any measure.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, purchased around 1982 for about $300. It had 1 kilobyte of memory (yes, that's 1000 bytes), no keyboard, no operating system to speak of other than a BASIC interpreter and a very dodgy analogue tape storage interface. I still have it somewhere.

My new computer is a Lenovo X201 tiny notebook. Admittedly it cost, allowing for inflation, about twice as much as the ZX81. But it has 8 million times more memory and four processors, each running nearly 1000 times faster than the Sinclair's Z80; it has a huge hard disk, weighs less than 2 kilos and runs for hours and hours on battery. It's a little marvel, but I'm looking forward to the next one.

Incidentally, with the arrival of the Lenovo, I will retire the aging tower PC in my study, meaning that for the first time since the mid '80's we will no longer have a traditonal "IBM PC" in the house - just notebooks and macs. Is the PC Revolution truly over?

My short term memory is just awful - I am the most forgetful person I know. I could regale you with stories of mayhem caused by things failing to pass from my short term memory into non-volatile storage. In order to function at work I have always relied on a battery of paper lists, post-it notes, electronic task managers, bits of string, put-the-car-keys-in-the fridge etc etc. If I have to do something I write it down, or it doesn't happen. 
These days I rely almost entirely on Remember The Milk to keep my work and personal life on track. It is an online task manager that bills itself, with more accuracy than flair, as "The best way to manage your tasks".

Feature include:

• Organise tasks into lists
  
• Recurring tasks
  
• Define tasks and dates in natural language - "Call Fred next Wednesday", "Pay Vodafone bill every mointh" 
• Assign and share tasks with other RTM users
• Email and Twitter reminders
• iGoogle gadget
  
• iPhone, Blackberry and Android apps (Pro version required)
• De rigeur location awareness
• etc

I signed up for the pro version to get the Android app. I hardly every visit the RTM web site, working through my iGoogle homepage and Android almost exclusively. Perhaps we'll see more of this - fabulously useful niche services for which the web site is used mainly for sign up and as an access channel of last resort, and where the real work gets done via mobile apps and interfaces to the big social sites.

Highly recommended.

Android is frequently said to have poor music and podcast listening ability - especially when compared to the iPhone. This is not the case, but as with any linux computer, getting everything right on Android takes a bit of doing. When it's done however, the result justifies the effort.

Here's what I've learned after several weeks with my HTC Desire:

Syncing to iTunes
DoubleTwist is supposed to be the business here, but I couldn't been get it to work reliably, and didn't really follow how it does work. Why do I have to create a DoubleTwist account to sync my music with my device?  There's also Missing Sync which will apparently sync your Mac's music, photos, calendar, contacts etc but I didn't want to pay $39.95 for all that just to sync my music.  The answer is TuneSync, a free Mac/Android pairing that syncs selected iTunes playlists over a wifi network. Like all great software, it does what it claims to do predictably and reliably. Not having to sync over USB is a boon as well.

Music Player
My HTC Desire came with the Sense Music Player which is, I think, pretty similar to the standard Android item. It works well enough but is unremarkable. The great thing about an open platform however is that if you don't like the default and you think you can do better, then you can - and many people have. Browsing through the Android Market reveals several excellent music players, all of which will play the music and playlists (as created with TuneSync) stored in the same place on the SD card. I've settled on Meridian  for the time being for its the gesture control and its ability to scrobble to last.fm. I have also installed MixZing, which offers to tell me what I want to hear - presumably like iTunes Genius, and which I don't think I want.

Podcast Player
Unlike the iPhone, Android does not combine podcasts and music into one app, and nor does there seem to be a standard podcast player installed by default. Google has produced its own Listen app, which served me well enough at first. But again, someone as done better - in this case with DoggCatcher. Steve Jobs would surely never have approved an iPhone app with such a terrible name, but Android delivers more bang at the cost of a little style. You have to play with Doggcatcher for a while to discover all the things it can do. My favourite is its ability to stream podcasts rather than download them.  Being used to the typical download/listen/delete cycle of other players, it took me a while to figure out why you would want to do that, until I realised that it allows you to browse many podcasts, listening to the introduction and downloading only those that sound promising.

It's not easy and it's not obvious. Here's how.

If you're drawn to open standards and solutions and you follow social networking trends, then open microblogging is a natural path that, not surprisingly, many have followed. If you also have faith in the semantic web, then open semantic microblogging is also a natural concept - the idea being that the text of a microblog entry can be embellished by  semantic markup about what it is, where & where it came from, what can be done with it and so on. And because the platform is open, you have control over that semantic richness.

In A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging, Jeff Sayre develops a very nice hydrological metaphor whereby microblog posts in an open, semantic ecosystem comprise Drops of water that flow, swirl and coalesce into eddies, streams rivers and, inevitably, the MicroBlogOcean. I'd been toying with a pointillist metaphor, whereby tiny Dabs of information comprise a much larger picture - but water works much better.

Following Jeff's ideas, I've been thinking about the role of mobile devices. Specifically, smartphone as ... wait for it ... cloud, in the sense of a cloud being a lightweight thing that floats around and, when the conditions are right, releases drops of water. Perhaps that's taking the metaphor too far. But in an open semantic microblogging world where, as in Jeffs model, I own my own stream and have control over what happens to my content, I want my mobile phone to give me  Drop of semantic data whenever I

• make or receive an email, phone call, SMS, blog post etc etc
• write a note
• visit a web site
• use a web service
• book or attend a meeting
• take a photo
• run an application
• change application settings
• measure something
• move more than x metres from where I was
• appear to be in two places at once (stolen phone)
• do something else that uses my phone's OpenDrop (tm) API
• etc

Each Drop will contain all of the information relevant to the event that created it. If I take a note, the Drop contains the text of the note; if I change the settings on an application, the Drop records the changes; I take a photo, the Drop is the photo; visit a Web site, its the URL.

Thus, to the extent that my smartphone is central my (working) life, and increasingly it is, then my semantic Stream is a complete and private life-log. As I move around and do things, my phone releases a constant trickle of Drops; perhaps big Drops (containing video for instance) only fall when I'm in range of my home wireless network.

I will allow all that detailed personal information to be captured and released because I control what happens once all the Drops gets back to a fixed aggregator. My aggregator might be on my desktop (via XMPP) or a trusted cloud service (which I pay for with money, not personal information); it  can filter, store, forward and generally act upon Drops as I see fit.

• Perhaps I will have a smart filter that reasons which Drops can be made public and tweets them. Or not, as I choose.
• Perhaps I want to send all photos and notes taken when I'm out bush-walking and bird-watching in a national park to a Citizen Science initiative set up to record biodiversity in that park.
• Almost certainly I'd like to keep all my notes and a log of my emails and phone calls in a private message store.
• Maybe I want my family to know where I am. Especially if I'm one of my children...
• Just for fun I'd like to make a map of where I went, if only to appreciate what a tiny world I live in.

The natural technology for all this stuff is, of course, the RDF stack. Drops are RDF graphs. Drops are filtered and routed in response to SPARQL queries. OWL reasoners and SWRL rules devise new semantic attributes. Triple stores keep it all.

Android looks like the right platform to do all this. The pieces are in place.