The Telegraphic

This year’s 24 ways was a blast, and one of the articles that stood out for me was Andy Clarke’s tutorial on writing a Killer Contract. I think it’ll be saving quite a few developers out there from getting burnt. For my own dark desires, I’ve created a Microsoft Word template, complete with a macro to autocomplete it. I offer it here, free to use and redistribute as Andy did. I offer it as-is, make sure you look at it carefully before allowing the macro to execute, of course.

Using this, it only takes a few seconds to make a custom contract between you and a client. It should also only take a few minutes to customise it to your own styles and formatting.  If you’re even crapper at Word than me, then you might want to read up about user forms, bookmarks and form fields. The word MVP site is a killer resource for all that jazz. A quick MS Word tip: use ALT+F9 to toggle field view, and turn bookmarks viewing on in tools > options > views. Finally: IANAL, so YMMV. Good luck and enjoy!

Download contract template (zipped)

I’ve only recently become aware of the concept of Hyperconnectivity: where everything that can be networked together, is. We are already seeing changes in the way we communicate: a lot of “Web 2.0″ apps are essentially hyperconnecting us (as human nodes) to each other. I am intrigued by the question: “How will we adapt?” Here’s a few links to some people’s thoughts on possible repurcussions:

• Hyperconnectivity Impact – David Martel. A quick look at why hyperconnectivity is inevitable.
• Journalism in a Hyperconnected World – Stilgherrian. “Hyperconnected” social networking sites send news faster than news sites – how will journalism adapt? A good read.
• Scary Stuff - Robert Ellis Smith. An eloquent and truly scary look at how privacy may fall by the wayside in a hyperconnected world.

I’ll be posting more on this sort of thing in the future. Stay tuned.

Something that’s causing a storm-in-a-teacup at the moment in my hometown is Nightkey – a new ID system that uses your fingerprint to create a biometric link between you and the ID you supply. It’s being sold as an “anti-antisocial behaviour” solution. I was outraged when I found out about it: I object because I feel that it’s treating your clientele like prisoners, and I believe this goes against the “innocent until proven guilty” philosophy our societal and legal paradigms are built up upon. Will it curb anti-social behaviour? Possibly. Is it treading the line between having privacy and living in a police-state? Most definitely.

I’m not going to discuss the huge body of privacy concerns in this post. What I would like to discuss is the possible extension of this machine into a marketing device, and the impacts that this would have upon going out, night-clubbing and society.

Welcome to the machine

Consider, if you will, the manager of a savvy club with Nightkey installed on the front doors. At the end of the night, she has a look at how many people came through the door: “Hmm. only 278 tonight, we’ll have to get some better bands next Saturday. And out of those 278, 178 were male – we need more females to keep the guys happy! I’ll contact my ad guy and get him to come up with some female-oriented ads. The problem is, it looks like girls under 25 spend on average $15 less than guys aged over 25. I’ll get my stats guy to find the ideal ratio and age for maximum profit.”

I hope the above monologue illustrates my point: something like the Nightkey system could easily turn you into a statistic. I’m not sure how much stat-crunching Nightkey can do out-of-the-box, but  even a little will give businesses a huge advantage in terms of clientele tracking. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? I’ll let you decide.

Fancy meeting you here

Here’s a simple mash-up one could do: linking your Nightkey details to your Facebook account. And here’s a way around the privacy laws: “Add our application to your facebook profile and we’ll give you a free beer and VIP entry!”. Very tempting. The devil is of course in the EULA. Almost instantly, you have complete demographic information about your punters. Then it’s just up to advertising. You can play god with your own club (and get that power trip that the bouncers get when they turn someone away). Not that club owner’s don’t try and do all this already.

What I’m trying to get at is that this type of  technology means that you could build communties through statistical analysis. Hyperconnectivity could soon mould our physical social interactions. We could be entering the next social paradigm shift, the next renaissance. A Brave New World. If we could steer this in the right direction: minority groups could prosper, culture would be fortified, people could be connected to their perfect matches. In the wrong hands: I won’t go there.

Today I was delighted to find out that one of my favorite photos from my 2005 Japan trip has been used to promote green building practices on Green By Design. I released it free for use on sxc.hu along with a few other photos I thought might be useful for stock photography. While some of the photos I uploaded have been used for more unusual designs, I’ve generally been amazed by the pieces people have managed to create. And amazed at who uses the site: my photos have been used by KLM airlines, Harper-Collins and the World Health Organisation. It’s great to see them being used – which they wouldn’t have been, if they weren’t free. Viva la freedom of information, I say. But don’t get me started on privacy.

For a while now I’ve been in love with Picasa, and the release of Picasa 3 comes with a nifty Lightbox-esque photo viewer. I’m not a huge fan of Google’s photo services; I prefer Flickr (by their underdog rivals Yahoo), myself. Also – I’ve been using Snapfish (by HP) for photo printing, ever since they suckered me in with their 30 free prints.

I’m excited because I just found the missing piece: a nifty add-on to Picasa to link it up to Flickr’s Upload tool – picasa2flickr. With this and Picasa’s inbuilt integration with Snapfish (I wonder how much HP paid for the endorsement …), Picasa is very good-in-the-mix. The next step is getting all this working on Linux…