If you don’t pay attention, what started out as an elegant, simple application that perfectly solves a single problem, can quickly turn into a huge behemoth of an application that solves a ton of problems, but solves all of them poorly.

This, and some other tweet comments, got me thinking about the iPad (who isn’t?) and how I believe it’s a glimpse of the future for how we interact with personal computers.

In the 35 years since the arrival of the personal computer we’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory of feature enhancement and specification bloat. It’s not just the software, it’s infecting the very machines that we run the bloated software on.

More memory is always a good thing, but only because the applications we run are getting hungrier and hungrier for processing power. The files we create get larger so we need bigger and bigger hard drives. Applications can now perform loads of very different tasks in one endless, oversized, confusing interface. And so it has gone on.

Not once has any hardware manufacturer turned round and said “Stop”.

But I think Apple have just done that.

Apple have previously put their products where their beliefs are and mercilessly cut features. Remember the first iMac and the outrage at the absence of a floppy drive? The MacBook Air with no CD/DVD drive. I own an Air and have never once wanted, or indeed needed, to put an optical disc in it.

And now the iPad. What no USB slot? Where’s the camera? What about a fold out stand? Why the big bezel? But, but, but… where’s the thingamajig? They’ve gone even further this time. And, as they say themselves, created a totally new class of product.

As we know, and have learnt in the years since the release of the first iPod, Apple are much cleverer than simply marketing products on features. You won’t find a single product feature comparison checklist on their website. They realised a long time ago that the features race is completely futile, especially if you fight your battles in a different space – that of putting the user before the interests of the geek or software providers.

They understand that the majority of personal computer owners / users don’t need all the extra ’stuff’ that comes built in to a typical machine.

Let’s try and envisage an ‘average’ home user. She takes pictures from a digital camera and drops them onto her machine. Maybe even the odd digital video. She emails, books holidays and buys stuff (inc. music) online, writes the odd letter and does a bit of IM. Apart from maybe the photos and music, she probably creates about 20-30 documents/files a year. Most of her use is for consumption rather than creation. She doesn’t care about file structures. She has no interest in tweaking the preference files for a given application. She wants it to ‘just work’ right out of the box.

When she opens her writing app. she wants to see all the files that are associated with that application and not have to shuffle through an incomprehensible (to her) hierarchical file system. Hiding this file system from the user makes complete sense when, in reality, you never want or need to see it.

The personal computer should be about productivity and consumption. The problem with the ‘windows’ metaphor we use as an interface currently is that it has evolved over the years and has become bloated and overwhelming for the types of things most people do on computers. The very thing that should allow you unbound freedom to create or consume is often the thing that stands in the way of getting stuff done.

I was luke warm about the iPad from the keynote transcript. But watching where they have gone with the interface and the nuances of the touch screen gestures is utter brilliance. We may, at long last, have taken one step to subjecting the mouse / cursor interface to the same fate as the VHS cassette. As great as it once was, it’s overstayed its welcome.

Resizing a photo on the iPad is about direct hands-on (literally) manipulation of items on the screen. There’s no hunting through menu items or holding down the shift key whilst pointing, clicking and dragging with the mouse. It feels more natural. Yes, we may need to unlearn those things that we’ve come to understand over the years of using the current interaction metaphors. But that in my book is a fair price to pay for something that is, in reality, far more of a natural action for the human body to perform.

The other thing I found exciting from the iPad demo was the contextual popup menus in the iWork apps. They’re only there when you need them as opposed to floating palettes being a constant visual clutter on the screen. Every incremental release of Photoshop or Word adds more fluff into floating palettes. Their removal can allow me to get on with ‘creating’, unimpeded by visual distractions.

I did wonder about the 1024×768 size of the iPad screen. But in reality when you get rid of all the extraneous application clutter that’s as much screen real estate as you’ll ever need (I’ll be eating those words in a few years but you get my point).

I’m excited by the fact that a company has finally made a big step to try and affect some change in the way we interact with our computers. For those of us that build computer- or internet-based products and services, we have machines that allow us to ‘get under the hood’ with almost infinite variables and customisation.

Is the natural conclusion, though, that we will be using iPad-like devices on which to create iPad software? If it is, it’s some way off yet. And not without the protestations from the geek quarter who like their toys.

But in the mean time, for the rest of us, the future’s already here and it’s iPad shaped.

I’m a fully paid up member of the Apple devices fanboy club. I carry an iPhone and a 5th generation iPod with me wherever I go (even the largest capacity iPhone is nowhere near enough to store even a third of my music collection), I have a MacBook Air for holidays and overseas trips, a 17″ MacBook Pro for work and a huge cheese grater Mac Pro at home for media storage and its raw computing horsepower.

I love all of these devices for different reasons, but one thing I don’t love is the difficulty of keeping them all up to date with the latest versions of my data.

I use a bewildering array of technologies to keep all of these devices in sync, including the awesome Dropbox, the not so awesome MobileMe (formerly .Mac), CalDAV and good old iTunes syncing for my music and podcasts. But all of these technologies only allow me to sync data to and from apps that Apple already knows about, like calendars, photos and music. What about other kinds of data, like todo items, game high-scores and unlock states, and so forth?

The story here is not so great. Until fairly recently I used the excellent Things on the desktop and on my iPhone to manage todo lists. Both applications are beautifully designed, winning the developers an Apple Design Award. That the syncing experience is poor is not the fault of the developers; they did the best job they could given the locked-down state of the iPhone OS.

To sync Things on the iPhone, you need to be on the same wifi network as the machine with the desktop version. The desktop software must be running, and you must launch Things on the iPhone to initiate the sync. The first time you sync, you must pair the iPhone version of Things with the desktop machine, and it can only be paired with one device. The desktop software does not offer syncing to other desktop machines except with hacks that are likely to go wrong. It was this syncing nightmare that made me revert to good old fashioned paper and pen for task management.

I have other apps on my phone that I want to sync (for example the excellent 1Password). 1Password has a similar sync system to Things, although I would argue that Things does it better between the phone and the desktop. In 1Password’s favour, it has a special file format that allows syncing to work between desktop machines using Dropbox. Even though the process is very similar, it’s still different enough to confuse me, and this is part of the problem: non-technical users find this kind of thing very difficult to use in the first place, but throw multiple versions of the same process at them and they despair.

This syncing problem is only going to get worse when armies of iPhone users buy iPads and expect this kind of thing to Just Work™. They’re going to be pissed off when their favourite game doesn’t have the difficult levels unlocked on their iPad when it does on their phone, or that their favourite tube stations in Tube Deluxe are not the same on both devices.

Apple is targeting a new kind of user with this device – that seems clear – and they are the kinds of users who find PCs and even Macs to be difficult to use. They don’t get pleasure out of figuring things out or messing about with configurations like, say, Linux users do; that sort of thing fills them with horror and a frustrating sense of powerlessness. I think alpha-geeks just don’t understand how the wealth of options that they find so empowering achieves exactly the opposite with less skilled users. In order to win these ‘normal’ users over, Apple and third party developers need to think in a new way. Apple has done this with the hardware and the built-in apps, but they haven’t yet given third-party developers the tools they need to provide a seamless experience for the user.

I can’t help thinking that Apple needs to do better here, and quickly.

The good news is that they already have the components of a solution in place. MobileMe already has a good syncing API that desktop apps like Transmit support out of the box. As a result, my FTP sites list and credentials are shared automatically over all of my Macs without me needing to do a thing.

But on the iPhone there is no synchronisation API. Marcus Zarra has created the open source ZSync project that makes syncing between iPhone apps and their companion apps on the desktop easier. It’s a step in the right direction, but it can’t solve the fundamental problem, which is that the user needs to get involved in the syncing themselves, and that the experience is fundamentally different for each app.

It’s not Marcus’s fault that ZSync doesn’t solve the problem. As with the developers of Things, he can’t do better because only Apple can provide the infrastructure to do so given that the iPhone and the iPad are both locked-down environments where only Apple can install system-level services like this.

Here are the changes we need from Apple in order to provide a first-rate syncing experience for all iPhone and iPad users:

1. The first change I’d like to see would be automatic over-the-air syncing from the iPhone or iPad to iTunes when you’re on the same wifi network as the computer you normally sync your phone with. I don’t want to have to plug my phone into my computer to initiate a sync. The phone and the tablet know which computer they sync with, and iTunes knows which devices are synced with it.
2. Second, iPhone developers should be able to write small plugins that act as sync agents when an iPhone sync is initiated. They would run inside of iTunes and be vetted as part of the App Store approval process. They would be responsible for taking the raw data from the phone and doing something useful with it. If the user doesn’t have the desktop version of the iPhone app installed, the iTunes plugin would just do nothing.
3. Some of the built-in Apple apps, like Contacts, support over-the-air sync even on the 3G network, and I believe that should also be an option for third-party apps. In other words, if an app wants to, it could implement MobileMe syncing on the desktop and on the phone as an alternative to the iTunes syncing mechanism.
4. The iTunes sync mechanism could use the same APIs as the MobileMe syncing option, meaning that developers would not need to implement two sets of code. This would provide a genuine selling point for MobileMe that it currently lacks and start to justify its rather steep price tag. This would mean that whether you choose MobileMe or iTunes syncing, the user would only need to set up syncing once for the device and never worry about it ever again.
5. It should be possible to configure a default sync frequency, with a sensible default like once per day. That way I can choose my own tradeoff between data accuracy and battery life. The frequency could even be tuned by using a heuristic like detecting how many changes there are queued up for an application. That way, the phone could work out that it doesn’t need to sync very often while I’m asleep, but more regularly while I’m at work.

Apple already provides the ability to provide an excellent syncing experience on the desktop with Mac OS X Sync Services. Although developers complain about how complicated it is to get syncing over MobileMe right, it’s still not a problem that is beyond us to solve, as Things and 1Password among others show. But third-party app developers don’t have the ability to provide the solution unless Apple provides the infrastructure.

Only if Apple solves these problems will the iPhone OS devices truly become the reinvention of mobile computing that John Gruber predicts and that I hope for.

Big news, little doggies…

Flights have been booked, passports renewed, and Tim’s brought his ten-gallon out of mothballs. Yes, that’s right — Made by Many, the entire company, is going to South by Southwest!

South by what, now?

South by Southwest is a series of three festivals and conferences that take place in Austin, Texas, in March. There’s a music and media conference, a film conference and festival, and an interactive festival — this is the one we’re headed to.

SXSW Interactive is pretty much Mecca for anyone who does anything digital. It’s a five-day info binge that covers just about every aspect of interactive technology, communication and the business of digital and social media.

According to the people who put it together, SXSW Interactive is where

“the world’s most creative web developers, designers, bloggers, wireless innovators, content producers, programmers, widget inventors and new media entrepreneurs… [take part in] provocative panel sessions, hands-on training, and big-picture analysis of the future of this industry.”

So yeah, Mecca it is.

Everything’s bigger in Texas… including logistical challenges

The conference manages to squash hundreds of sessions — non-representative sample: Revenge of Kick-Ass Mash-Ups With Punk Rock APIs; Do Cool Kids Leave When the Suits Arrive?; Chris Brogan’s I Don’t Trust You One Stinking Bit — into five of your  common-or-garden variety, 24-hour days. On top of these, there are all manner of chats, demos, meet ‘n’ greets and barbecues (please, it’s Texas — there’ll be at least one a day).

The MxM folks who attended last year’s festivities have warned this year’s first-timers that the biggest challenge is fitting it all in… and this brings us to an important question: how do we make SXSW work for us?

There’s no doubt that the conference is a huge opportunity for us to pick up skills, make connections and just generally become better at what we do. But pulling it off in a way that benefits us as a business and as individuals, and serves both present and future clients, is going to take some doing.

To get the most out of combined SXSW experience, we’re going to need to share our individual experiences. But how we do this is a bit tricky. It’s impractical to schedule in extended nightly catch-ups, and impossible to prepare take-home reports on everything we do — after all, we have work to do before, during and after the conference.

A little idea we’re quite excited about

Our website is designed around our blog, which offers a manageable way to read and share anything between one and five posts a day. However, at SXSW we won’t just be blogging. There will be 18 people tweeting, taking photos, live blogging and filming interviews. And that’s a completely different level of need — our current set-up just won’t do it justice.

So over the next few weeks we’ll be working on a way to bring all this new information together into one place, and make it manageable and meaningful. We’ll use our existing site, some tools already out there, and a new presentation layer to create something that will bring what we do, as it happens, to you.

We’ll provide updates on this project as we go, so if you’re curious, keep an eye out.

The event was organised by our friend Jeremy at Transatlanticism, a New York-based organisation we’ve gotten to know through our work on Metrotwin.

Metrotwin is about creating connections, through people and places, between New York and London. This morning’s chat delivered hugely on that premise, so much so that I thought I would introduce some new additions to my transatlantic universe.

Urban Junkies — met the very stylish Taryn; love the site… both the London and Barcelona versions.

Hint Magazine — Lee Carter’s baby is one of the original online fashion magazines.

Gadling is one of AOL’s travel sites and is stacked with great content about New York, London and beyond. Contributor Annie was on hand this morning.

The Brooklyn Nomad — author Andrew is a lifelong New Yorker and seems to encounter his share of unruly characters. Entertaining.

Matador Network is a motive-driven travel site that has me thinking more about why I travel; author Sarah, just in from Mexico, has me thinking I need some sun.

Refinery29 — met Associate Editor Connie; cruised through the fashion/lifestyle site ‘just for a minute’; am now hopelessly addicted.

It’s called Sleep Cycle and it purports to analyse and track your sleep patterns and then wake you at the optimum time in the morning (ie at the lightest sleep phase. You can check it out here (or purchase directly from iTunes for £0.59).

You set it up by placing your iPhone on the mattress (next to the pillow but not covered by it), and then the app uses the accelerometer to measure tiny movements in the mattress as you toss, turn and generally shift around.

Here’s my sleep snapshot from 3 nights ago:

I woke up feeling pretty awful, certain that it had been a bad night’s sleep, and yes, the Sleep Cycle confirmed this. Things got better the next two nights as you can see below. Although I am certainly still conscious and slightly uncomfortable about it quietly monitoring me all night .. and plugged into power :(.

I was suspicious of it’s accuracy, but… the app does indeed seem to work as promised. The wake up feature is quite nifty too. You set your alarm for the latest time you can wake up, and then the app chooses the most appropriate time in the 30 minutes leading up to this time – that is, when you’re sleeping lightly – to set off the alarm. And you can choose from a range of quite soothing options. The first two nights my alarm went off at the latest possible time however this morning it did wake me up a little early which was great because I was probably gearing up to dive back into deep sleep.

What’s missing from this app is a half-decent design (though the UX is very solid) to provide a little more personality and character. The potential to combine this with some more interactive and beautiful data visualisations is huge. And then, of more substance, is the need for customised analysis of your sleep pattern along with remedies and suggestions for better sleep. One hopes that’s on the way.

The fascination people have for this app when I tell them is quite something (every iPhone owner I have told about it has bought it on my idle recommendation). I think that people get so excited because of the mystery of sleep and dreaming and the to-date invisibility of sleep patterns. It is such an unknown and intriguing realm for most of us

Although having seen some sleep patterns of my colleagues, I am starting to feel much better about my own quality of sleep! (C’mon guys, feel free to insert yours at the end of the post).

So if you want a device+application+service that covers your sleep performance, and which is also shareable via email and Facebook (clever), then Sleep Cycle is a very fun experiment. In a nod to the agency obsession of hyping ideas as the next big thing in digital, I am happy to label this type of app as the “Nike+ of sleep”.

‘Ergonomically speaking, it’s just too much hard work’ is the usual response. There’s a lot of supposition and conjecture there though, mostly based on the received wisdom that less work is better. It seems obvious that they require more work to control, but I’m not aware of any long-term study into the ergonomic effects of haptic interfaces in everyday use or indeed that they are even hard work to use on a daily basis. I’m certainly one of those people that look at this kind of interface and thinks “It just looks like a lot of hard work”.

In recent years, the coal-face of sedentary computer terminal work has been reduced to mere mouse clicks scattered with a few little rapid tapperings on a keyboard. Our heads don’t move, only our eyes dart from pixel to pixel. Lots of typing and lots of clicking. Maybe even a little bit of dribble. I can imagine one day that our muscles might atrophy completely and leave us existing in a jellied heap still clicking our only STRONG FINGER, eyeballs recessed, still darting.

If you’re in a relatively quiet office with lots of people in right now, listen to the mouse clicks and the keyboard taps. It’s enough to make you go insane.

The fine hand movements involved in mouse clicking and typing tend to be very concentrated and very repetitive. When you think about the more haptic approach of the iPad, you’re putting a lot more work in, agreed, but is that a bad thing? Couldn’t we all do with a little more physical work in our life? Providing it doesn’t actually cause more RSI, I for one would relish the opportunity to get a little more hands-on with my work.

Of course, the iPad is intended to help people consume content as opposed to making content (for now, that is). But as a reasonably-priced control surface it’s massively versatile and we might see as much innovation on the iPad as we did on the iPhone. New musical instruments for example. And, if it becomes popular and loved, you know for a fact that the next generations of iPads are going to be 21″ dual display i.e with a hinge, so you can use two massive surfaces at the same time.

Feedback is for wimps

Feedback is when you click something and it responds. It’s a little bit of reassurance that your command has been received. There can be different types of feedback, mechanical, audible, visual. Most controllers such as mouses and keyboards give mechanical feedback. Feedback has always felt to me a little bit self-conscious and unassertive. Why do we need the thing to tell us it’s accepted our instructions? It feels like the kind of design principle that has stuck around simply because it has stuck around.

It stands to reason that as we become more and more comfortable with computers, the interactions should become more and more subtle. After all, when typing, we get a very subtle but obvious feedback from the screen when we see the words that we’re typing actually appear. Lack of feedback is something that you get over very quickly but doesn’t test well when it’s a novelty for participants in test environments. The iPhone has no form of mechanical feedback to speak of. The BlackBerry Storm attempted to combine feedback with touchscreen typing by allowing the entire screen to ‘click’ slightly when pressed, which ended up being gimmicky, pointless and unnatural.

When you see anyone using an iPad, it just looks like fun. It’s elegant, like those amazing sand drawings – try doing THAT with a magic mouse. It reminds me of the way a conductor might control an orchestra or, even better, a wizard might do whatever it is that wizards do. It’s exaggerated, and it’s fun. It’s like you’re commanding a tiny universe. Wizards are ace.

But most importantly, it’s futuristic. We’re pretending to be in the future we’ve longed for for so long. what’s not to like?

Even Jonathan Ive likened it to magic, I didn’t really imagine that he was speaking literally.

Photo credits: laruth, jostiq, seattlemunicipalarchives

By the way, if you’re looking for something to delight you on any given day, head over to Maria Popova’s site of wonder Brain Pickings (or follow her on twitter), which is where I stumbled across this little gem.

It used to be fags and booze that people gave up as a New Year resolution. 2010 was the first year I heard lots of people claiming they wanted to give up social networking. Fragile idiots.

Between Christmas and New Year I saw quite a few tweets from people quietly waving goodbye for a while (the correct social media terminology here is a “Twitter hiatus“).

Stephen Fry announced he was having a rest – in order to get some real work done. And then there was the Web 2.0 suicide machine. Oh – and a rash of articles and blog posts about social media being various shades of addictive, boring and deadly (some of which we’ve talked about here). At times it looked like the long-awaited backlash might finally break… the dwindling skeptical rump of luddites *soooo* want this to happen – but it hasn’t. A similar thing happened last year, and probably the year before that.

On the other hand – I noticed that lots of other people resolved to look after their blog, or tweet, more/better rather than less in 2010.

I guess you know something has really arrived when people start giving it up because they’re enjoying it too much.

I also predict that they’ll be back – just like the smokers and boozers – with their tails between their legs. Losers.

1. Star Wars Action Figures Doing What They Do Best: At Made by Many, some of us have a bit of an obsession with Star Wars, and that includes someone like me who isn’t a great fan of the movie series but is immensely amused by the entertainment that comes from objects based on them, like the Lego Death Star (only £274.99) and this website.

2. Unhappy Hipsters: Why do people look so sad in Dwell magazines? This is one of the most creative things I’ve seen lately! So much for picture-perfect homes. We live in the REAL world, people!

3. This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post: You know what they’re like – they end with sentences that do this:

Excerpt:

This sentence invites readers to respond freely and without constraint as long as those responses fall within certain parameters. This sentence consists of an Internet in-joke that doesn’t quite fit the topic.

4. MagCloud: Publish your own printed magazine. Can this help to revive the dying art of print journalism?

5. LG Unveils Flexible Electronic Newspaper: It’s a newspaper. It’s electronic. And it bends!

6. Simply Noise: Some people NEED noise. For reasons like enhancing privacy, going to sleep, blocking distractions, masking tinnitus, configuring audio equipment, and soothing migraines, among others. No, I didn’t make those up myself.

7. Where Does My Money Go?: You’re a taxpayer. (If you aren’t, kindly proceed to the next item in this list as this will not be of use to you). Don’t you want to know where your money goes, in an understandable way? For the layman (i.e anyone who isn’t a chartered accountant who wants to entertain himself by digging into the details where they are likely to find worms), this data visualization is a rather useful glance at what’s happening to their hard-earned bits-of-paper-with-Queen-Elizabeth’s-head-printed-on-them.

8. Inbox Zero: Merlin Mann is writing a book about ‘how to reclaim your email, your attention, and your life’, and these photos are related to that. I think.

9. The Nerd Venn Diagram: Are you a geek, dork or dweeb? (via Laughing Squid). I always liked Venn diagrams in school.

10. Microsoft Office, Version Bland.0: A designer re-imagines the Microsoft Office logos. Worth a quick look, for some design entertainment.

11. Next Nature: Because this is a beautiful-looking blog that has an ambitious task. What exactly does it mean, I hear you ask:

Next nature is the nature caused by human culture. That may sound like a contradiction, but really, it isn’t. Our technological world has become so intricate and uncontrollable that it has become a nature of its own. This means we have to re-investigate our notion of nature.

12. Sleep Talkin’ Man: Because it is HILARIOUS. And we like laughing here at Made by Many. It increases our life span.

13. Amanda Wachob Tattoo: If you’re considering a tattoo, you may want to look at her work. (We’re a bit rad like that).

14. The Feltron Annual Report: Most of you have probably seen this already, but for those who haven’t, I’m sure you’ll find the intricate details of Nicholas Feltron’s life interesting. OK I’m kidding – it’s visualized in a very detailed way as well.

15. Slam Ball: Words cannot describe this new sport that seems to have been created by combining basketball with the trampoline.

That’s all for now, folks!

You often hear people bandy around an “80/20 rule” (see Pareto principle) where in a social environment, 20% of people will contribute 80% of the content, be it through forum or blog posts, new topics, videos etc. It’s horribly over-simplistic but it’s a tidy rule of thumb. It’s a good way to remember that you will only ever get a small number of folk actually contributing anything to a community. The theory being that if you can get the 20% then the 80% might follow. It’s been around for a long time and you can see patterns of this in anything that exhibits long tail behaviour. It’s supported by Forrester’s highly useful Social Technographics® ladder of behaviors, which is worth grokking if you have the time.

The most recent version of the ladder below adds ‘conversationalists’, mostly because of the craze for status updates a la Twitter and Facebook.

What I like about this approach is that these aren’t segments or personas, they are mindsets which people move in and out of. One person might exhibit varying degrees of these behaviours at different times. You can move up and down the ladder and you can appear on different rungs of the ladder in different parts of the day. For example, if you’re a well-respected ’creator’ of new theories and discoveries regarding Micronesian swamp bats, it doesn’t mean you’re a ‘creator’ of content relating to beard trimmers or crop rotation in the 18th century. It feels a lot more like how meatspace really works. It isn’t rigid and dogmatic.

Though, I would really like to see ‘collectors’ broken out further by ‘accumulators’ and ‘curators’.

Accumulator behaviour is more akin to hoarding. I find myself doing this a lot – tagging, bookmarking and setting things aside to ‘read later’ using tools like Delicious. Incidentally, I never actually ‘read later’, I just have this feeling when I come across something really good that I don’t have time for, I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING WITH THIS CONTENT, okay I’ll tag it and store it for a quiet news day. There might only be a small occurrence of this in the general public but I think it’s important to differentiate it from ‘curators’, who are very different. Curation is very outward-focused. It’s a fairly creative activity in itself. It’s a way of providing value to other people as a filter. People and brands are able to provide tells about the type of person or brand they are while providing value, that value being a bit of clear signal in the hazy noise of the web. In fact, we’re very excited about a new project we’re working on that does this for parents of children aged between 6 and 9. More of that later though.

Here are a few examples of very awesome (and responsible) curators.

Curation isn’t for everyone, there’s a great deal of work in hunting through the dross to find the shizzle, ensuring it’s ‘on brand’ and that others haven’t already shared it to death. It’s not something that you would be likely to build a business around, people value this stuff but they’re not going to pay for it. It’s more about creating and enriching a brand.

And as curation grows, there’s more and more need to develop a social contract and mutual agreement around applying credit where credit is due. Take for example, Meg Pickard’s recent experience with a photograph she took which was posted without credit. Great photo, which is worth sharing. Her experience has been that people rarely credit her and one photographer even went as far as to pass it off as his own.

A good pal of mine Emily Webber has had some of her excellent photographs of London’s Shop Fronts used without credit.

Her hobby of taking pictures of London’s shop fronts is in itself curatorial. She’s even been shouted at by people asking why she’s taking pictures of their shops. But Emily couldn’t credit the shop any more than she already does. It’s a picture of a place where they sell stuff, after all. She even geo tags the location of the shops. Clearly, the job of asking the permission of each shop owner is an onerous one.Her own work is licensed Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike, meaning that newspapers shouldn’t be reproducing her work without crediting her and they certainly shouldn’t be making money out of them i.e. by printing them in a newspapers which they sell.

Most responsible curators cite sources. Both Tumblr and Posterous try to foster this behaviour by encouraging people to cite where they found the content using a ‘via’ link.

Credit needs to be given where credit is due. And creators must have the freedom of choice to apply the license they want, not simply have a blanket and generic copyright applied. Copyright has served us well for a long time but it’s now totally outdated, impractical and misleading. It doesn’t serve the array of different feelings people have about how they want their own creations to be shared and curated.

I’ve heard arguments about how there’s too much curation around and not enough new stuff, particularly in relation to the state of the newspaper industry. Not enough new news and original content people say. But there’s as much original content and news as there is new things happening in the world and as much new stuff people create in the world. Of course we have curators of curators of curators but that’s just sharing behaviour and we’re going to need a whole lot more of that kind of behaviour as we become more and more connected through complex networks.