Back in January, I was approached by Art Public and asked to build an application and website as part of their Bus-Tops project. This has just gone live over at http://bus-tops.com/shelters/, so it seems like a good time to talk about the project.

Bus-Tops is part of the Cultural Olympiad, and benefited from a grant from Artists Taking The Lead, a nationwide series of arts projects sponsored by the Arts Council and London 2012. In short, we’re putting screens on the top of bus stops across London, and we’re going to let people play with them.

One part of the first stage of the project has been choosing where to put these screens, so I designed and built the Shelters site at http://bus-tops.com/shelters/, which lets Londoners register and comment on all the (2-bay) stops in the capital, and pick a top 3 they’d like to see screens installed on. The visual design of the site has been significantly enhanced by Nicolas Myers and the rest of the Bus-Tops team.

I’m incredibly excited about this project, because it brings together so many of my interests, particularly in the possibilities of networked storytelling, and in the city itself. If, as many futures admit, the city will soon be infested with screens (see writings by Chris Heathcote and Adam Greenfield) then I think we’re in a wonderful position to get some out early and say to the public: you have a right to this space too. To talk about the city, the environment, about surveillance and social history—about a huge range of things, in unexpected and delightful ways.

Over the last few months of the project, my role has been slowly changing from a primarily technical one to something more creative. I’m now the Narrative Lead, an odd title which means I’m looking at ways to wrap all the aspects of this project into a single, coherent narrative, that both explains itself, and excites and guides the public into participating. I’m wary of the clichés of “public art”, which I haven’t been shy of attacking in the past, but I believe there are aspects of this project which enable us to overcome them. The other folk on the project are brilliant and uncompromising, and we’re all going to do our best to make it extraordinary.

There are 33 boroughs in London—I’ve lived here all my life and I didn’t realise that. There’s going to be at least one screen in every borough, a multi-headed networked beast emerging all over the city, outwith individual or governmental control. It’s going to be fun.

For me, technology, literature and sex are all bound up together, and this entanglement can be traced back to a single book: JC Herz’s Surfing on the Internet (Little, Brown; 1994). An exploration of the early net, a travelogue, an explicator of MUDs and MOOs, of chatrooms and founding memes; what was still, then, the Information Superhighway. I read the book in, I think, 1995. Within a month, I had a 28.8 modem and a Compuserve account. It’s probably impossible to underestimate the impact of this book on my life.

Surfing on the Internet was the first book I read to address sexuality in a way that I understood it: queer, fluid and exciting, and it pointed to a place where others could be found and it could be experienced: the internet. Yahoo Groups, in the form of the much missed #UKyoungandgaybutnotcamp2, in turn provided the venue for my coming out, as newly technologically enabled networks like it did and will continue to do for subsequent gay generations.

So, “Homo Computers”, an event at the Southbank Centre last week exploring gay geekdom and produced by the usually excellent House of Homosexual Culture, should have been spot on—but it rather missed the mark. Andrew Hodges, the primary biographer of Alan Turing, managed to dance around the subject, failing to illuminate Turing’s sexuality or usefully explicate his work. Likewise, David Baker, managing editor of Wired UK, assessed the impact of technology on gay lives without once speaking directly to sexuality. His points about the flexibility of modern working lives increasing opportunity made sense, but they seemed to apply to anyone (and if not to anyone, then, worse, only to metropolitan media gays). His final tale was, he admitted, apocryphal: that Turing’s suicide, with a cyanide-laced apple, was the inspiration for the technology company’s logo. A terrible and unworthy thought.

Gay lives are important; what gay people do is important—vitally important to other gay people in particular—and denying the impact of their sexuality is discriminatory, stupid and wrong-headed. To pretend that Turing’s sexuality had no impact on his work is ridiculous. It shaped his philosophical outlook following the early death of his first love, and it embedded him in the homosexual subculture of Cambridge in the 1930s. His oppression robbed Britain, and the world, of one of its finest minds. List-making of ‘gay’ heroes from Leonardo da Vinci to Oscar Wilde is less fashionable now that it once was, perhaps because its purpose—to support, validate and educate young, questioning gay people—has in large part been taken up and democratised by the internet. But it is no less necessary.

There’s a disconnect here, which Chris and I have been trying to unpick since. Confusion was a problem: the House of Homosexual Culture is usually about aspects of obviously queer culture, with a camp edge. This event was part of both the London Literature Festival and the Royal Society’s Festival of Science. And such a mixed heritage led it to both fall back on stereotypes (“gays don’t do maths and science”) and to shy away from the seedier aspects.

And the seedy aspects are important, I believe. Chris has been writing about Grindr, and exploring its data, and investigating academic approaches to sexual and social networks. I’ve previously addressed aspects of this over at Bookkake in Sotadic and Other Zones (on Burton, Grindr and the sexual applications of mapping technologies), and Throwing a little fleshlight on the matter (on LoveHoney and OKCupid). There’s an absence of investigation into this, it seems, in part due to the inherently discreet and closed nature of these networks. AshleyMadison.com alone has over 6 million users. And nobody talks about Flickr.

Much of this work is being done by academics, and is extremely valuable, but to a technologist’s eye, much of it lacks technical understanding. As Chris says, “Facebook and Twitter don’t know how lucky they are to have people like danah boyd digging into why and how people are using such things, and importantly making this information accessible and understandable to wider audiences.” We should be doing more of this, on our own terms.

*

One of the odd things about Surfing on the Internet, now, is its long transcriptions of chatlogs and MUD explorations—but it shouldn’t feel odd. Surfing… is a book not about the internet itself, but about our experience of it, an experience that takes place in a torrent of information that we construct, all the time, into narrative. (Remind me to talk about walking and storytelling through Wikipedia some time.) I’ve lamented the absences of such narratives from literature for some time.

I would, however, highlight two recent books which have addressed this (yes, both are written by friends. It’s how it works.) Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun (Granta, 2010) delves into the strangely queer history of the British far right skinhead movements. It makes for frequently uncomfortable moments, and doesn’t shy away from seediness. In particular, it addresses the darker corners of online gay sexuality, of personal ads, no-strings sex, and fetishism, as something intricately connected to gay modes of living.

What is occurring here is the rejection in literature of the techno-deterministic assumptions currently being attacked in polemic by Clay Shirky:

“Techies were making the syllogism, if you put new technology into an existing situation, and new behaviour happens, then that technology caused the behaviour. But I’m saying if the new technology creates a new behaviour, it’s because it was allowing motivations that were previously locked out. These tools we now have allow for new behaviours – but they don’t cause them.”

In this case, as gay men are being increasingly enabled to activate latent desires, so literature is enabled to address new narrative experiences, the fragmented, always-on, holographically-distributed society of interests and attention we now inhabit.

The other work of importance here is Stewart Home’s Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (BookWorks, 2010), which I’ve written about previously. Home’s work takes the form of a narrative frequently and incessantly interrupted by spam-like texts: “The secret to a perfect climax. She wants to be penetrated and taken harder, longer and tighter. Define your masculine identity. Click now for great deals.” Words that are in this context shocking, yet, if all our reading is taken as one sheet, form a great part of our modern, daily literatures.

Even before Home’s wider theme—the misogyny, cliquishness and institutionalisation of the art world—is taken into account, what we’re seeing here is the most realist rendering possible of actual life. In an article in the Sunday Times (thankfully reproduced, without paywall, here), Tom McCarthy laments, or perhaps rages against, the increasingly current idea that the “realism” of novels is equated with self-expression and is only to be found in “this kind of vanity mirror where liberal culture can see itself reflected back”, or worse, in the rejection of fiction entirely as espoused by David Shields. If we are to understand ourselves we will do it through narrative. If we are engaged with technology, we should take up those tools too, as ways of understanding, without prejudice.

I should have mentioned this earlier, but I am joining the shadowy forces behind CoverSpyLondon for one week only.

If you have any tube book sightings, please follow @coverspylondon and send us a direct message.

I thank you.

Back in March, I launched a little site called Quietube, which is basically a little bookmarklet allowing you to watch YouTube videos without all the comments, ads and so on (original booktwo post is here).

Well, it turned out to be very popular, currently edging towards two million views, with a daily average of 10 to 20 thousand visits. These are not small numbers.

However, looking at the logs, it became clear that these visits were coming from unexpected sources. The vast majority of visits are from the Gulf region. A few weeks ago (a fairly typical week of 115,438 visits), 74,983 were from Saudi Arabia, 10,367 from Kuwait, 4,383 from the UAE, with Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and Egypt all in the top ten.

Wondering what was going on, I took a look at the top ranked videos for that week:

• #1: http://quietube.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMkfTot5Q0w&feature=sub
• #2: http://quietube.com/v.php/http:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5dt-WREldg&feature=related
• #4: http://quietube.com/v.php/http:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT91-g9AE4g
• #6: http://quietube.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcciNlpvXTM
• #7: http://quietube.com/v.php/youtube.com/watch?v=3b0BixzZmVo
• #8: http://quietube.com/v.php/http:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z58Aplho6tY
• #10: http://quietube.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz0ogl5r9_8

Short version: they’re all in Arabic. (#3 and #5 were both: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZKZs0c2R5s – Make of that what you will. #9 is the Quietube homepage. )

Not knowing Arabic, I contacted a friend who does. Turns out they’re a range of religious and secular programmes from a range of channels – including a clip from Faraj al-Farj, the Saudi version of Candid Camera – all fairly standard stuff.

I was particularly interested that the vast, vast majority of identifiable inbound links seemed to originate from private email accounts – Hotmail, Yahoo and Google Mail in particular.

It also turns out that YouTube is quite heavily censored in the Middle East (observation from a range of news reports – I’d be interested in seeing a proper report on this), and people are using Quietube to get round this.

So it turns out, I think I accidentally created a YouTube proxy being used by tens of thousands of people in the Middle East. I’m not sure if I should be writing about it, but if it’s that easy to do, I’m sure others can do it too. It’s just a matter of embedding the video elsewhere, and it shows how extraordinarily flexible the digital systems we build are. Information does indeed want to be free.

The internet is a wondrous thing.

In case you don’t read Times Emit (which you obviously should), Apt just released a fun little literary app onto the web that I designed and built: The Book Seer. I wrote about it over at TE (and had a bit of a rant about book data):

It’s very simple. It’s just pulling suggestions from Amazon and LibraryThing – at the moment. I’d like to pull stuff from more places, but it’s not easy.

…

Book data is hard, but it shouldn’t be. It’s also valuable, and that’s why Amazon ranks higher than most publishers for their own books, and why monopolies like the OCLC exist and why things like OpenLibrary are A Good Thing (and I need to have a proper play with their API). Data should be free. Representations of that data can then be used by all, and the most successfull will Rise. That’s the idea, anyway: things like this should be easier to build.

Peter’s also written a follow-up post, The Long Tailed Book Seer:

Seeing as the Bookseer is about books, and data, and openness, I thought I would share some of the early stats with those of you who are interested in such things. This is all based on the first few days’ traffic up to June 13th. (Whilst launched before then, we announced in on June 9th.) As well as being fun, I think that the data is a mild demonstration of The Long Tail in action.

Read the whole thing at TE, and of course, go check out The Book Seer…

A little bookmarklet lets you easily and quickly generate a nice, clean page – and a short URL from any YouTube page. Check it out. If it all seems a bit confusing, here’s a quick tutorial:

[Original post at Times Emit]

It’s rare that I out-and-out praise a service, particularly here, but if you’re running any kind of customer-facing service on the web I can’t recommend Get Satisfaction highly enough. In fact, if you’re not using it, you’re doing it wrong: it’s up there in a select set of absolutely essential tools like Google Analytics, Feedburner and Campaign Monitor (or equivalents, but they’re my picks) that should be set up and running for your project / website / shop before they launch.

Get Satisfaction is “people-powered customer service” that provides a trackable single point of contact, organisation, reference, feedback and ongoing management of customers for your product. It does it in a properly 2.0 way too: it’s free, with email notifications, RSS feeds, transparency and good design.

I’ve been using it from the start for Bookkake (which hasn’t done much, but glad to have it) and more especially for bkkeepr, where it has proved invaluable, particularly as the service is fairly hands-off most of the time. I get notifications of issues before I’ve noticed them, technical advice on upgrades, and even great tips on how to improve the service, some of which I’ve actually implemented. And where I haven’t implemented them, I can explain why, and keep those ideas in an easy-accessible place. This kind of dialogue with your users is pretty much essential.

There are nice extras features too, like monitoring Twitter for you – which you can do with Twitter search as well, but essential for a product like bkkeepr, and a good idea for pretty much any web-based product these days (along with Google Alerts). And the new Feedback tab – which isn’t for everyone, but fits in really well on bkkeepr – is a truly excellent invention, a brilliant execution which keeps users on your site while they give you feedback, and has produced a very noticeable increase in useful contributions from users.

So thanks to all the wonderful bkkeepr users who have contributed via Get Satisfaction. Sorry I haven’t implemented all the ideas, but the feedback has been invaluable, and all ideas are considered. If you have a similar site, or anywhere where users spend more time interacting your site than you do – which is pretty much everyone – you should be using it too.

I’m very pleased to announce that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a collaboration between my employer Apt and The Institute for the Future of the Book, is now live.

Several months ago we heard that the Institute was setting up in the UK, and we approached Chris Meade with a view to working with if:book London on a joint project. The result of this was the realisation of a long-cherished idea from Bob Stein, the founder of the Institute. Bob had recently reread Doris Lessing’s classic novel The Golden Notebook, and wanted to bring it to a new audience by creating a public reading group, composed of younger readers.

With Lessing the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, it seemed an appropriate time. We approached HarperCollins, Lessing’s publisher, and persuaded them to allow us to use the full text of the novel online, in the most accessible format we could. We built a website which allows the text to be read, bookmarked and commented on, page by page; a blog for the readers; and a forum where the public could discuss the novel, and the reading of it – all built on free, open-source software.

This Monday, November 10th, the reading begins. Seven readers, invited by the institute and including novelists, screenwriters, critics, and journalists, will read and comment on the book, and everyone is invited to join in. We’re very proud to be a part of this collaboration, and hope it’s a great success.

I’m pleased to tell you that bkkeepr, my project to create a Last.fm-alike for reading (and more besides) now has an API.

An Application Programming Interface (API) is essentially a machine-readable version of an application, and more specifically, the data in contains. bkkeepr is first and foremost an application that does stuff with data, and bkkeepr.com is the human-readable version of that application. What an API does is allow third parties to build small applications, widgets and so on that utilise that data in new and different ways. (This is another post, but I pretty much believe that everything should have an API. And not just everything on the web. E.G.)

bkkeepr is itself built on Twitter‘s API, and uses data from a wide variety of other web services, including LibraryThing, Google, Amazon and others, via their APIs. So opening up bkkeepr’s data in turn is something I’ve intended to do from the beginning.

The bkkeepr API is very basic at the moment, allowing you to do two things: get all of a particular reader’s reading data, and get all the reading data about a particular book. There’s more information about it here.

The most important function of the API, to my mind, is that it gives users control over their own data. It’s not locked up in a database over which they have no control, and they can pull it out and store it elsewhere any time they like. I’ll say that again: it’s their data, not mine, and they should have control.

It also gives people the opportunity to build cool things. Here are some examples, some dull, some fun, that I’ve been thinking about:

• bkkeepr ‘bestsellers’ – hot books, favourite books, the most read. Charts, and suchlike.
• Find a friend – who’s reading similar things? I like this particularly as it would allow you to branch back to Twitter – or any other service – and find new people with similar interests there.
• Better widgets (because frankly, the current bkkeepr badge is pretty basic).
• Reading speed – silly, because I don’t think the speed at which you read means anything, as long as you read at all, but, like Dopplr’s personal velocity, it’s a neat data toy, and could be implemented fairly easily with book page numbers from Amazon’s Associates API.
• Pretty stuff with covers and calendars (in the spirit of the awesome LastGraph).
• I’d love to see booksites implement a ‘who’s reading this now?’ widget, but realistically I think bkkeepr needs a few more users to see that happen…

There are a tonne of possibilities, and I’d love to see people do interesting stuff. bkkeepr currently has just over 500 users – not many, but I’m hoping adding features like the API and its results will draw more in. To those who say that an API is just a way to outsource the development of an application to those with more time on their hands, I say: yes. Yes, it is. Have fun.

Just a quick note to say that, after a long hiatus, one of my favourite pieces of data visualisation is back*: LibraryThing’s Tag Mirror.

The Tag Mirror shows what everyone on LT thinks about your books. And what lovely runs of expression! “drama drugs dystopia economics elephants”. “postmodern programming prostitution psychiatry”. Oh my!

The data crunching involved makes my head hurt, but as someone who doesn’t bother to tag my own books, it’s a wonderful sight to behold, and a great start for reading explorations. Cheers Tim!

* Actually, it looks like it’s been back for a couple of months. But I only just noticed. Still.

Back in February, I sketched out this idea on the back of an envelope. I’m pleased to say it is now a reality.

Bkkeepr allows you to track your reading and make bookmarks via text message and the web. It uses Twitter as it’s source, generating a timeline of everyone’s reading, as well as pages for people, and pages for books. Once added, users can add their books to the LibraryThing account, check library availability, and much more. There are also all the RSS feeds and widgets you’d expect.

I particularly like the bookmarking feature which allows me to remember not only my favourite thoughts and phrases from books, but to see what everyone else thought too. A step towards real social bookmarking, and a help to blogging all dog-eared pages.

Bkkeepr came about initially because I was always forgetting to add my books to LibraryThing, mostly because I wasn’t in front of my computer when I was reading. I can now text bkkeepr when I start and finish a book, and add to LT at my leisure. But the idea behind bkkeepr is something more than this: it is an attempt to provide an API for the physical book, to enable the creation of services around the enjoyment of literature; a Last.fm for books.

Like Last.fm, it is meant to be as simple and unobtrusive as possible, and as open as possible. I intend Bkkeepr to be as much a platform as a website, to enable interesting things with books on the web. As Last.fm has resulted in a range of mashups and services, so I’d like to see Bkkeepr generate charts and graphs of literary opinion and activity, to create a window on the lit zeitgeist. Despite the proliferation of book-related material on the web, the act of reading itself, because of its inherent disconnectedness, has remained almost invisible on the web, leading to a perception of its decline. I hope bkkeepr does something to change this.

For the geeks, there’s a lot more about bkkeepr on this development blog (which I’ll continue to update). I learned PHP to build it, it’s entirely built with open-source components, including the CodeIgniter framework, and uses freely-exchanged data from Amazon Web Services, LibraryThing, WorldCat and others. I’ve learned more about ISBNs than I ever wanted to know, and I hope it holds up.

Bkkeepr is currently ‘sponsored’ by Little, Brown, who I owe a debt of gratitude for taking a gamble on the site. I’m not much of a fan of advertising, but the ongoing hosting and bandwidth of the site need support, a publisher is the right partner, and I hope to continue to find sponsors who are sympathetic to its aims.

Finally, I built bkkeepr because it was a good idea (I think) that needed doing. It didn’t take long, it wasn’t the hardest thing ever, and it didn’t cost anything. I frequently detail on this site the troubles that publishers and the book industry in general are having figuring out what they should be doing on the web. I think that this sort of thing is one area where their energies could be focussed: not trying to compete with Amazon et al on sales or metadata, but providing meaningful services and experiences for book-lovers in the same way they’ve been doing through their content for years.

HarperCollins have just launched their online slushpile site, authonomy.com, in private beta. Authonomy allows budding authors to upload chapters of their work for the rest of the community to read and comment on.

There’s been a lot of speculation about how this would be implemented, and at first sight it looks pretty good – HC haven’t overreached themselves, they’ve simply created a site for people to join, upload their work, and read that of others’. Sounds simple, but many similar projects have failed thanks to scope creep.

Every user gets a profile where they can create a virtual bookshelf showing which other writers’ works they’re supporting – authors get the chance to create their own “cover” for a work too, a pointless but satisfying little feature which is sure to go down very well indeed.

The real challenge, of course, is to persuade wannabe writers to post their work at all – in my own personal experience, unpublished writers are terrified of their work being ‘stolen’, enough to be suspicious of publishers themselves, let alone your average web surfer. The Front List, a previous attempt at a “YouTube for books”/”crowdsourcing the slushfile”-type site, solved this by hiding everything from non-members; one approach certainly, but not one likely to bring in the crowds.

Authonomy’s FAQs wisely address many of these concerns, and they haven’t done too much to break the site in the implementation, short of disabling right-clicking on book text. As they put it, “if someone really wants to pass off your efforts as their own they’ll probably find a way” (Hint: turn off javascript). Their real attitude to the problem is more sensible: “here at authonomy, we believe that your talent is better displayed than kept hidden – and that the chances of good things happening are more likely the more hands your manuscript passes through, and the more people you enlist in your support.”

On the technical side, users upload books by chapter (as few or as many as they like) in Word or RTF formats, which are then displayed as is – imagine hitting ‘Output as web page’ in Word, if you’ve ever done such a thing. It doesn’t result in the prettiest pages, but it does mean the book appears on the site as the author made it, which is, quietly, quite a thing.

Authonomy has been a long time in the making, and in the wake of the disastrous relaunch of HarperCollins.co.uk, we feared the worst. But Authonomy (still very much in Beta, which HC.co.uk can’t claim to be) looks like a very good little set-up which is bound to get plenty of attention and users. Nice one, HC.