We Are All Made Of Stars

I've binned the little gold stars that sat next to about twenty names on the blogroll. I started this in 2002 after meeting a fellow blogger for the first time because it was, back then, quite remarkable in a proto-artificial-social-network kinda way. Then a few more were added and, until I removed them this morning, more than half the people on my blogroll had little stars next to their names.

But this innocent little social networking protocol doesn't work any more for a number of reasons :

Relationships are considerably more complex than a little star denoting 'I have met this person in real life' can possibly communicate. Some people I've barely met, others I've met many times and are now proper friends. Besides, proper Artificial Social Networks such as Orkut cannot even achieve the degree of resolution required to properly articulate the complexities of social networks, so I suppose my little star system operated on an ameobic level of ASN evolutionary sophistication in comparison with Flickr or Orkut, both of which have probably now evolved to the equivalent state of proto-amphibians having tiny little eyes and stunted fins, to further abuse the evolution metaphor.

Whilst excusable during the initial blog wonderment phase, it now probably looks quite weird in a stalker-ish, name-checky, social tourism, A-list sucker-upper way.

I don't really need to declare a personal attachment, by whichever means, to the great and the good of the blogging world as if to build my own credibility. Whilst not the purpose of affixing star icons in the first place, I suspect that over time this factor may have subconciously played a role in my not deleteing the little star graphics sooner.

Life Servers & Digital Life Insurance

I've been taking the welcome but altogether foreshortened opportunity of some free time before returning to work tomorrow, to finish the cleaning up and organisation of all our digital photos and MP3's.

Thus far I've gathered together and neatly archived and ID3 tagged over 4,000 or 20GB's worth of MP3s into iTunes, and about a further 6,000 or 10GB's worth of digital photos into iPhoto and I'm quickly coming to realise that what I need is some form of life server rather than a boring old trad file server clogged with lots of extraneous clag and cruft which builds up over time and does a fine job of getting in the path of your everyday digital lifestlyer.

For example, I picked up my first digital camera at the back end of 1999 and upgraded it to a Canon EOS 300D a year ago, this baby pumps out 6.3 megapixel shots at around 3-4MB a click. In the last year I've snapped just under 3,000 photographs (excluding hundreds of additional cameraphone shots) with the Canon, largely thanks to the capacious 4GB microdrive card I exhumed from a willing MP3 player donor last summer.

But at this rate, over the course of the next four years my photo collection will grow to about 20,000 images (equating to around 40GB) which is an insane number for a family photo collection compared with 10 or 20 years ago when most average family hard copy photo collections would have run to a few hundred at the very most. And I haven't even begun to think about what to do with about 20 or so, 60 minute Mini-DV video camcorder recordings laying around the place. Perhaps I should DivX archive them all to keep the space down.

All of which makes redundant the whole concept of printing photographs. Because even if you didn't need to remortgage your house four times to pay for the inkjet consumables, not to mention incurring the worlds worst case of R.S.I. what with all the scissor work that would be required, you wouldn't have the physical space to store 10,000 photographs let alone casually browse through them with a cup of coffee on a wet Sunday afternooon. Practically speaking, hard copy photographs only work in small quantities. Actually its worse than that; hard copy photo collections are dead.

I'm actually quite perturbed that I only just worked that out. So, iPhoto and Picasa and the like aren't just snazzy ways of brightening up your photo storage problems, they are in fact the photograph albums of tomorrow, leaving hard copy print work for the sideboards and mantelpieces of our homes and offices. In fact, they'll eventually be replaced with digital frames too.

So, a wireless 500GB network RAID hard disk is what I need to secrete somewhere under our floorboards at some point in the future connected to about 20 wirelsss digital photoframes which also moonlight as MP3 players / speakers too.

But this predicament of mine is not unusual and whilst I'm tech smart enough to think about disciplines like backing up and storage so on, I'd bet that most new digital lifestylers are dangerously disorganised and therefore exposed. In many ways this is a replay of commercial IT usage patterns 20 years ago when among smaller and less tech savvy businesses, scant regard was given to data storage and security, often with painful and catastrophic results.

This is a big area which as far as I can see, is largely being ignored by the major vendors who could do much more to educate and protect their users' personal libraries instead of leaving them to bake their home own home-made solutions to this problem, if at all.

Digitally archived collections such as mine and yours should form part of our family legacies for, in theory, hundreds of years to come. As such it is vitally important that we don't just focus on the front-end creative aspects like foolproof point-and-click design and extreme portability etc., because as unglamorous and boring robust and secure back-end storage is, it is in fact just as important as the stuff that makes it onto the billboards and spec-sheets, if not moreso.

There are approximately 4m commercial entities in the UK and the total UK population is around 60 million, many of whom are enjoying ever increasing amounts of leisure time and disposable income. Which do you think will be the bigger technology services market in 10 years?

Vegetarian Meat-Space

OK, this is a gross, ill-considered generalisation but, it occurred to me that it was ironic / odd that geeks who are not generally known for their outgoing social behaviour, indeed, they're generally known as being more introverted than 'normal' - flock to ASN's like Friendster & Orkut.

ASN's are like vegetarian sausages in that they both attempt to mimic the real thing and both leave you feeling unfulfilled and with a strange taste in the mouth.