Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

PowerPoint Karaoke; or, the most fun you can have with a meeting room and a projector.

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A while ago, at the office, I skipped “beer o’clock” on a Friday afternoon to take a little disco nap before going to a party. This was before they got rid of the nap room — sob. Anyway, there I was, flaked out on a beanbag, when I was woken by peals of laughter. Unable to sleep, I went to see what was going on.

I found that my esteemed colleagues, after a few beers, had decided to play PowerPoint Karaoke.

Here are the rules:

1. You will need a projector or large computer monitor. Beer is optional, but recommended.
2. Open a browser and go to slideshare.net and thence to the tag list.
3. Person A (the victim) chooses a tag, such as physics, web2.0, or love.
4. Person B (anyone, for the first round) then chooses a specific slideshow from those available. The more horrific the design or random the subject matter, the better.
5. Person A must stand up and give the presentation. Person B gets to click forward from slide to slide, setting the pace.
6. When the presentation is finished, Person A becomes Person B, and gets to nominate a new Person A.

I strongly feel that this activity should be more widely appreciated. Go forth and enjoy!

My must-read blogs (non-tech edition)

The following are all highly recommended.

• A Dress A Day. Lexicographer Eric McKean, coiner of the term fauxlero, shows off her favourite dresses: mostly vintage, occasionally runway, but with a strong DIY sensibility.
• The Hathor Legacy. Regular skewering of film, TV, and advertising for their constant anti-feminist messages. Less ranty and more readable than you’d think.
• 101 cookbooks wins the prize for “food blog most likely to actually make me salivate”. Weird visual aside, I think Heidi’s tastebuds and mine may have been separated at birth. Mostly whole grains, fresh vegies, and an international flavour.
• Brooklyn Tweed. By far my favourite knitting blog. Jared’s photography is beautiful and I want to knit at least two out of every three projects he posts about.
• The Ethicurean is all about understanding the ethical implications of what we eat. Heavy on the US agricultural politics (especially during this year’s Farm Bill nonsense), but nonetheless vital reading.
• Yatima is my neighbour and fellow expat Rach’s journal of the good things in her life. Makes me smile every time I see there’s a new post in my reader.
• Oursin’s LJ saves me having to read the Guardian for myself. The regular haddock-slappings always get me nicely riled up.

(And people still have the temerity to ask, from time to time, “Where are all the women bloggers?” Hmph.)

Tall ships on a map

Freebase Parallax is rocking my world.

Do I really need to say any more? 243 tall ships; of those for which the home port is known, draw them on a map. If there’s a picture, use it.

David Gerard, UK Wikipedia guy, who is sitting on the sofa next to me, says that he’s highly impressed and that I should say so. I told him to blog about it himself, but he’s a slack bastard, so there you go.

Off to London

I’m off to London tonight, and will be there from Saturday 16th to Sunday 24th August. It’s my first time there — a bit of a colonial pilgrimage — so I’m really looking forward to it.

It’s part work and part play, which is to say that I’ll be working and enjoying myself simultaneously. They’re kicking us out of the office to work from home for a week while they remodel, so I saw no reason why I had to work from my own home or indeed my usual timezone. Hence I’ll be working while in London, but enjoying the scenery while I do it.

A few events worth mentioning:

• I’ll be at the Pembury on Sunday; I gather it’s quite the gathering for people of a certain sort. Will I see you there?
• Monday night there’s a London.pm emergency social at the Windsor Castle pub.
• Tuesday night, meeting the crabby old bats=.
• Wednesday night we’ll be having a Freebase meetup at the Yorkshire Grey in Holborn.

Plus, of course, a bunch of workish meetings during the days. It’s going to be a busy week, I think. If you’re in London and would like to catch up, please drop me a line.

Freebase, notability, and minority data

You know I went to work for Freebase, right? Well, this is a personal post about a work-related topic. Consider that a disclaimer; these are my views, not official company ones, though I trust and believe that there is significant overlap between the two.

Freebase is a free database of the world’s information. That’s something we say a lot around here but I just wanted to spend a few minutes unpacking it.

Free. Freebase data is licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY license, which means you can download it, re-use it, remix it, regurgitate it, and do whatever you want with it as long as you acknowledge you got it from us. Easy enough.

Database. Freebase is structured. Unlike most websites, which you’d need to crawl and parse to extract information, we provide an API which lets you ask for things like cloud classifications or CFOs of San Francisco companies with > $1m in revenue in a structured way.

The world’s information. This is where it gets interesting. Unlike Wikipedia, Freebase doesn’t have strong standards of notability. On Freebase, if it’s interesting to you, it’s probably interesting to us. Our contribution guidelines actually say, any data that might be of interest to other people.

On Wikipedia — as in much of society, so please don’t think I’m harping on Wikipedia particularly here — there have been accusations of systemic gender bias. Similarly, topics of interest to any kind of minority will tend to be treated as non-notable by the majority, and excluded from the system. Freebase gives us the opportunity to redress this imbalance.

This week I launched a Freebase data mob on the subject of Ethnicity. Data mobs are short-term efforts to gather information on a given topic. The ethnicity data mob gives us an opportunity to ensure that people from all ethnic backgrounds are included in Freebase, and lets us make queries about ethnicity as it relates to other facets of life. The data on ethnicity is only just beginning to grow, so here’s an example using gender instead: Female CEOs of public companies in order of market cap. Soon, we’ll be able to ask for things like “ethnic breakdown of university faculties in the US” or “award-winning Native American authors”.

Ethnicity is only one part of the minority data world. We’re making enormous leaps in how we deal with geodata, and we are starting to be able to ask things like “show me schools and shopping malls within five miles of my home”. But with more minority data contributed by people who care about the subject, we could ask for childcare facilities near a conference centre, or the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic, or for data on toxic waste hazards in a given area.

Ethan Zuckerman spoke at ETech this year on The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism.

I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media - it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test - if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.

Freebase is full of porn, just like Wikipedia is (warning: link goes to Christian Newswire). Here, have some anal sex, nipple clamps, and foot fetishism. Now we’ve got the basics covered, I feel like Freebase is on the cusp of something bigger, and I’m hoping that we’re going to start seeing activism using Freebase data. The way we can draw connections between points is phenomenal, and is exactly the sort of free information that can really empower people do do amazing, maybe world-changing things.

But for now, please help us gather data on ethnicity. Consider it your good deed for the day. And subscribe to the Freebase blog if you want to keep up with what I’m doing over there.

Web2Expo: I believe a small rant is required

Yesterday I attended Web 2.0 Expo SF, an O’Reilly conference at the Moscone Center. In fact I was mostly there to chair a panel on Troll Whispering with three prominent women in the field of Web 2.0 community management: Christy Canida from Instructables, Teresa Nielsen Hayden from Boing Boing, and Amy Muller from Get Satisfaction.

The four of us arranged to meet downstairs in the foyer beforehand.

“I’m easy to spot,” I told them. “I’ve got bright red hair.”

“I’ll be wearing a fuzzy orange and leopard print coat,” said Christy.

“I’ve got a cane,” said Teresa.

“I’m the one with the baby,” said Amy.

I spotted Amy easily; she was, indeed, the one with the baby. Her daughter, Tesla, is 4 months old, and Amy’s been juggling her work as Chief Community Officer at Get Satisfaction with childcare. Her husband, Thor, is supportive and helps look after the kid when necessary; he’s the CEO of Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction, by the way, is one of the most clued in Web 2.0 companies around, and a bit of an O’Reilly favourite. They even help O’Reilly with their customer support.

Anyway, it’s a good thing Thor was there yesterday to mind the baby. It turns out that babes in arms are not permitted on the expo floor or in the conference area of Web2Expo. “Sorry ma’am, we can’t allow anyone under eighteen years of age,” is what the security guard told Amy.

Back in the first dotcom boom (and probably still today), company founders and executives were sometimes under 18. I’ve heard stories about them having to get special exemptions to attend or speak at conferences. So I guess I’m not surprised to hear that Web2Expo is an 18+ event. But I can’t find anything on the website that says so. Perhaps it’s in some kind of T&C that I didn’t read, but I don’t think so.

So, Amy Muller, co-founder and Chief Community Officer of a company that really gets the spirit of Web 2.0, and an invited speaker at the conference, had to ask her husband, co-founder and CEO of the company, to hold the baby and hang out down in the lobby while she attended her panel.

Could they have got a sitter instead? Probably, though I imagine it’s hard to find someone to look after a baby that little. And why should they have to? The baby’s well behaved, and so are the parents; they know that if the baby’s making a fuss, they need to take her outside til she chills out. That’s what Amy did at SXSW, including during her panels. And that would’ve been absolutely fine in an informal round-table session like the Troll Whispering one. I for one would’ve welcomed the little critter, and I’m not actually that into babies. (Does it show?)

Christy, our co-panelist, went and kicked some ass and found out what was what. O’Reilly people directed her to Moscone customer service, who told her that it was an insurance thing. Really? Really? Does the presence of a baby in a conference centre raise the premiums that much? Does this also apply to hotels, sporting venues, and airports? They’re all private property, technically, and can exclude whoever the hell they like, but in my experience they don’t tend to exclude babies or their mothers. They’d get hell for it if they did.

I’d love to see technical conferences providing childcare. Chances of that are slim, I realise, but in the meantime it’d be nice to see a little helpfulness and sympathy around the issues that women attending such a conference might face. Would it have killed them to put something on the website saying, “Sorry, Moscone insist that they won’t allow children in the venue, but here are some links to reputable nearby childcare providers.”

I was going to write some kind of sanctimonious conclusion, but I couldn’t get it to come out right. Luckily the Yarn Harlot just posted something that more or less expresses my feelings on the matter (except that I like babies a whole lot less than she does).

There might even be an unhappy kid who was predicted to do well and doesn’t, and instead uses the time to finely hone their impression of demon spawn, and those kids are going to be a pain in the arse….Just like some other people we are all going to meet in our day (I am keeping a list) that are a pain in the arse that we don’t have the right to get rid of either.

Yeah. If given a choice between a crying kid who can be taken outside and out of the way, let alone a well behaved kid, and that bearded guy in the second row who’s always interrupting speakers to ask tangential, rambling questions (which, in fact, are actually statements), I know who I’d rather have at my tech conference.

Tags fixed

The tags on this blog have been broken for a really long time. I’ve just fixed them. Thanks and sorry to all those people who told me about it.

What I’ve been up to lately

It’s been ages since I posted, and that’s kind of bad. I just wanted to draw your attention to some work-related stuff that’s pretty cool.

• Freebase, where I work, have just released full data dumps. This is important stuff, people! Freebase has long been licensed under Creative Commons (CC-BY, specifically) but although there’s been an API to get data out, there’s still been a risk that if Freebase goes away, the data will be lost. This helps alleviate that risk.
• Any of you who have Freebase accounts will probably have got an email on Monday announcing various new things. If you missed it, then you missed my screencasting debut. Three and a half minutes of yours truly’s Australian accent. My roomie, the Librarian Avenger, says I sound “all professional and shit”. Check it out.
• I should probably just point you to the Freebase blog. If you’re reading Infotropism for technical content, you’ll see what I’m up to over there. Go subscribe.

I’ve also got some conferences coming up. I’ve been asked to help moderate a panel on Troll Whispering at Web2Open here in SF. I’m particularly excited about that one because I get to meet Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Making Light and elsewhere. And then at OSCON I’ll be joining long-time partner in crime Schwern and a bunch of others to present a panel-style tutorial on People for Geeks, a look at the various ways geeks interact and fail to interact as human beings. I suppose I should crosspost those to Geek Etiquette in fact.

Settling in

Well, I’m here in San Francisco and starting to settle in nicely. Lots of social stuff going on, fun work that doesn’t feel like work, and I found a place to live really quickly and easily.

This photo’s by the lovely yarnivore who took it last weekend at a Rock Band extravaganza where we (I say “we”, though I didn’t do much of it) played right through the full 58-song set list. It took about eight hours.

But the real reason I’m posting today is to assist anyone stalking me. I assume you’re already following my photos on Flickr but you might also like to check out my work blog where I’m, well, posting about work things: Freebase, open data, mashups, that sort of stuff. And if you’re going to be around these parts on Feb 6th, be sure to swing by the Freebase user group meeting for pizza, beer, and of course lots of technical presentations.

Here comes another one, just like the other one

Labor Senator Stephen Conroy’s new Internet censorship policy:

Federal Labor will improve existing government programs in this area by:

Providing a mandatory ‘clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children, so that ISPs will filter out content identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The ACMA ‘blacklist’ will also be made more comprehensive to ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material.

(emphasis mine)

The difference between this load of steaming horse shit and the rather similar load that got dumped on us in 1999 is that this time the mainstream media actually know what’s going on:

• The Australian
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Courier Mail

When a Queensland newspaper’s headline reads “Nanny Rudd censors the internet”, you know the times are a-changin’. So, I have some hope that this idiotic proposal will either get ditched entirely, watered down to pointlessness (as 1999’s was), or worked around to a significant degree. I won’t be here for it, but good luck with that.