I hold my hands up and admit I’ve not updated this blog in a while.  There are good reasons however!  First of all, there’s the balance between micro-blogging through Twiter and a conventional blog – I’ve been avidly updating through Twitter and not taking the time to actually write full blog posts abotu many of the ideas and issues I’ve meant to.

Another great reason is the change in my job.  I’ve recently gone full-time freelance, which has already been a rollercoaster ride!  I foolishly though that starting out, I would have the time to turn this site into something more representative of who and what I am at the moment.  While I’ve been through many design iterations for my branding and design, I’ve yet to book time into my schedule for my own site.  I can’t complain about being busy though!

Shortly I’ll be taking the whole site down and slowly build up the new one in phases.  There’s a few interesting ideas I’d like to demo with it…

I’ve been booked to talk at the Web Developers Conference down in Bristol later in the year with the likes of Elliot Jay Stocks, Jon Hicks and Sarah Parmenter after last year being on a panel.  Really looking forward to it, especially in such illustrious company!

In the meantime, if you’d like to get in touch, please drop me a line at dan [at] hereinthehive.com  or follow me on Twitter as @hereinthehive

One of my (many) pet peeves about social networking is the way that relationships are modelled.  I actually went into this on my first presentation I’ve done, down at BarCampBrighton3: The Evolution of the Social Web.  We humans are complex entities; in many ways our relationships are so elastic and contextual that we can’t realistically model these in a simple social network.

In my eyes, social networking began when the communication between user’s profiles became the primary function of a site; obviously user profiles had existed for a long while before social networking became a used term.  Because of this evolution, most sites still use what I call the ‘flat-friends’ model, i.e. every connection is of the same type and depth.

My guess is that it wasn’t until MySpace became so huge and it began attracting the music/artist crowd that this became particularly noticeable.  On MySpace (and many others), your connections could be offline-friends, those you only know online, bands, companies, charities, etc with no sense of differentiation other than artist profiles have an embedded music player.

Facebook caught on because it circumvented the issues with the explosion in popularity of MySpace and the like by looking more at your actual identity.  You sign up as yourself, with no alias or screen name and are encouraged to find people you know.  For the most part, this has been my experience.  Later on, Facebook Pages were added to bring in some of the content MySpace had in terms of bands and brands but many of these already had an independent or sponsored Facebook Group, which I think clouded the issue and on the whole my guess is that Facebook Pages are perhaps less popular than MySpace profiles for non-personal content.

So back to ‘friends’…  My feeling has always been in my pop-social-psychology frame of mind is that this model isn’t sustainable.  Firstly separating the people from the other kinds of content and recognising the specific needs of a sector (such as the music industry) rather than generic profiles and secondly to look at our relationships with other people.

Facebook has great granular privacy settings and it also has lists but I’d say that for less technical users these aren’t used to their fullest and you still see loads of open profiles with no restrictions.  Part of this is education and the fact that repercussions of exposing your media output through your teenage years might not have materialised for many yet.  An issue aside from privacy is how you present yourself to different audiences.

What I’ve found is that however subtly, we most/all have a different was of acting and reacting as part of a different group of people, from extremes like friends you go out for a beer with to contacts or acquaintances through work.  Perhaps this is less true of more techie people, that often use their blog and everything else a cohesive online identity but I believe that even then we have our lives split into personas.

Each persona could have connections (rather than the term ‘friends’) shared, like a colleague at work you also go out for a beer with but this enables us to use a single profile/social network to present these faces to the world and arrange our relationships across them.  Plaxo have started this off by allowing a work/friends/family set of data to your profile, which isn’t a bad start but I’d like to see this idea through the social web.

I’m kind of scratching the surface of some thoughts here so I’ll try and follow this up with more concise observations!

A week after the one in Sheffield, I’m at Liverpool’s first BarCamp, this one sold out/released all 200 tickets they had available, held at the Novas Contemporary Urban Centre.  It’s a great venue, which is a quite recent addition although I’d lived in Liverpool for years had never really noticed the building – a massive old warehouse.

I think one of the things I love about these events is that you never know exactly what you’ll get.  There’s a loose structure and formula to them but because of the different set of people involved, each on has it’s own character.  I caught Andy Brown’s session about starting up a business, which kind of solidified a few thoughts I already had and showed ways on really breaking your idea down and facing the realities of getting something off the ground.  Phil’s session on how to do presentations was great BarCamp fodder; many people either won’t've done a presentation before or not since school/university so getting the benefit of his experience and training is really useful.

As I’ve found recently, that the discussion sessions can be so much more interesting (to me), I thought I’d go that route this time with one called ‘The Good, The Band and The Fugly‘; going over why so many band’s websites are bad, what they get right/wrong, people’s experiences with their favourite band’s online, etc.  It’s kind of research and because music and the web are areas I love being in and around.  There was a lot of great feedback, which I’ll try and remember and maybe blog in more detail about later.

There were a couple of iPhone development talks, which actually complemented each other from Dave Verwer and Phil Stringer.  Dave’s walked us through the process he went through designing/creating an app and actually getting it available in the App Store.  What he showed is that the process can be broken down into simple bits and that Apple give a lot of guidelines to follow to assist that, mostly due to the fact that they want to ensure consistent user experience.  It sounds like a pain to get your app accepted in the store but then also to realise that once you’re there, it isn’t a marketing tool, it’s just a delivery platform so you still need to do everything you would normally do to promote a product.

Phil’s session walked through his app Coffee Buzz, which isn’t yet in the App Store but explained about the development of the idea, what seems to work on these devices and pricing it.  We got a glimpse into using the iPhone SDK, which actually didn’t seem that bad and has a decent iPhone emulator, so I’ll be checking out doing some of that in the future.

I was pleased to hang around till the end of the sessions to catch Cristiano’s session on Facebook App development.  I’ve been starting to get my head around this and start the basic old ‘Hello World’ app but hearing someone explain the process they go through, the elements you need to consider in terms of when and where your app appears and the interaction with your server was invaluable.  It’s this kind of exchange of ideas and knowledge which I love about BarCamps; hearing his presentation and asking a few (sometimes stupid) questions just speeds up the process of getting into FB dev.

The evening party was sponsored by Microsoft, which is actually quite unusual as the guy representing them confessed.  There is a little, not exactly animosity, towards MS in the wider geek/web development community, which he recognised and it was a good move to get down to grass roots and get involved in a community event like this.  Hopefully we’ll see them do this more.  Although everyone has a preference for OS, coding languages or development platfoms/tools, we need to recognise MS’s involvement and give them the time we would to any other company in this field.  There were DVDs and marketing materials about Silverlight and the like available but that’s not what it was about and it was discrete.  Good on you Microsoft – from a new Mac user too ;)

I missed the party catching up with old friends but there were still a decent number of people around for the Sunday programme, which was great to see.  I unfortunately missed Rich Quick’s session about how to present yourself/get more work as an agency/freelancer, which sounded cool but I floated between sessions and had a natter with some people while making myself ill on too many sweets and fizzy drinks the sponsors had provided – mission accomplished there!  I had to opt out of playing Werewolf, which apparently raged on for hours.  It was good to see a few familiar faces and meet a few new ones, as always!

Liverpool has changed so much in the year or so since I left it and I admit that I miss it.  What had started to feel small and village like has become so much more, not only physically with Liverpool One but in the fact that with the Biennial and Capital of Culture, there’s some energy in the place.  I’ll be dropping back over more frequently ;)