How do you find what's going on in the world? Google? The BBC or CNN?

Why wait?

We don't need to wait for the human delays inherent in data gathering and redisribution; we have the ability to go to the source. We can listen to the world tweeting.

I found out about the Mumbai attacks last night by watching http://www.twitscoop.com/ . It's one of a number of tools you can use to monitor the most common terms on twitter, and therefore find out what a significant subset of the world is thinking about. (The Age has an interesting piece on this event).

Right now, on Thanksgiving, most of them appear to be thinking about desert. This is an amusing artifact of the US-centric nature of the web, but twitter can also extend worldwide, even into less developed countries where most users tend to use handheld devices (for which microblogging is well suited). It's also telling me that "Conservative immigration spokesman Damian Green, has been arrested". Admittedly, this I could have found from BBC news by now - if I knew to look for it.

Twitter provides a particularly fine-grained form of what's now being referred to as "Ambient Awareness"; small packets of information from your friends and from the world that come in numberous forms and from numerous sources. Nowadays, everything is, or can be known, and it's becoming known every more quickly.

This can be overwhelming; as mentioned in my recent FoWA report it's referred to as "drinking from the information firehose". There is ever more information coming in to our daily lives, and we spend ever more time trying to manage it. Ignorance may not be bliss, but at least it gives you a rest.

Science fiction novels, and earnest speculation on the future, tended to assume that some form of "intelligent agent" would manage this for you. So far, those have conspicously filed to appear; the best we have as yet is filtering on things like google alerts, but trying to teach this system "everything I'm interested in" is still completely impractical.

There are tools under development to try and tackle this; Friendfeed (as discussed at FoWA) has some interesting ideas on this on the basis of the interests of your friends and colleagues; essentially using the "hive mind" of this group, coupled with your previous patterns of usage.

Twitscoop, then, taps the hive mind of a selected proportion of the whole internet, in much the same way that Google's "Zeitgeist" and trends do. But twitscoop is much quicker; twitter is more communication than documentation and so happens "live".

Sometimes, that can give you a peculiar insight into a terrible event like the Mumbai attacks. Sometimes it can tap into the group mind at a different, intruiging level and you see a brighter side of humanity.

This I also found recently via tweet trends in the form of "Tweetsgiving". 357 Twitter users got together and collected $10,591 (and rising) in 48 hours to build a classroom in a Zambian school. Obviously, someone set this up, but 300-odd people did it because they could see other people doing it; it was a group act made possible by the internet and the immediacy of twitter.

The rate of technical change, and information overload, that we currently face can be overwhelming. Maybe our best option to handle it is to share the work via something like twitter.

The story so far:

- The commercially available postcode database for the UK doesn't acknowledge that my home exists.

- Certain views of it, such as the Royal Mail Website, don't even seem to believe that the building it's in exists.

- Other views of it seem to think the building exists but the flats (or some of the flats) inside it don't.

- The building and flats in question are probably all at least 25 years old.

- The road used to have (on this side) blocks of flats at numbers 10,12 and 14, with lawns (I presume) between.

- The owners apparently felt that lawns weren't profitable, so filled in the gaps in the above sequence with new blocks of flats.

- My flat used to be Flat 23, Number 12.

- The flat's front door used to be on the side of building 12. As the side of building 12 is now inside building 12A, my flat is now at number 12A.

- Therefore, my flat has moved to join flats 1-11, number 12A.

- This really confused the electricians, as can be seen by the speakerphone panel

- As Flat 23, 12A doesn't exist, companies that use the commercial postcode database tend to send things instead to Flat 23, 12. Which also doesn't exist, but the database says it does.

- I don't have a key to number 12, 'cos I don't live there. My electric meter's in number 12 though, so I can't read it.

- Mail sent to 23,12 tends to pile up; as no-one lives in a Flat 23, 12 to say "that person doesn't live here", it doesn't usually get passed on or returned.

- About every 6 months, someone gets bored enough to post it all to number 12A where I can pick it up, and enjoy seeing how many final demands and court summons I've received.

- In an exercise in futility attempt to remedy this I decided to contact the Royal Mail and see if I can get it fixed.

- The Royal Mail website appears to contain no useful information about changing this, although it does give both Residential and Business customer support phone numbers.

- Both these numbers lead into a maze of twisty voice menus, all carefully designed to speak recorded messages at you rather than channeling you to a human.

- Most of these messages consist of attempts to get you to hang up and look at the website.

- Their complaints dept, where you might vaguely expect to find a human, gives you a "too busy" recorded message and then hangs up.

- If however you do an online postcode lookup and then click the "Why is there a limit on searches?" link, you get the number for the Address Data Products Team (0845 6039038)

- Phoning that message yesterday gave me a recorded message of "Due to unforseen circumstances, we are unable to take any more calls today. Please call back tomorrow, Thursday 22nd October". And hangs up.

- Yesterday was Tuesday.

- As today is Wednesday 22nd October, I thought I'd bite the bullet and try the number again.

- This number leads to another small voice maze.

- Once I'd negotiated it, the very helpful lady on the other end of the call listened to a very brief version of the above, told me she couldn't help me, and gave me a number for what appears to be the Address Data Enquiries Team (08456 011110) and not, as might be expected, the Brantisvogan Civil Service.

- I called this number, negotiated another small voice maze, and spoke to another helpful lady, who told me that it was the local council that needed to make the appropriate changes, and informed me I should speak to the "Street Naming and Numbering Department".

- I had no idea such departments existed, suggested this was why the address data hadn't been fixed in 25 years, and suggested I might try and continue anyway to amuse the readers of my blog.

- Watch this space for further inciting exstallments.

A 30 minute podcast doesn't need a 5 minute into track.

A 10 minute cast really doesn't need a 2 minute intro and 2 minute out-tro. Especially when they're the same each week.

Guys, we listen to your podcasts for the content, not for a mix tape. Please keep focussed. 1 minute should be the upper limit for *any* intro or leadout track; 30 seconds is probably plenty.

Inspired by Apple and O2, but applicable to a range of occasions...

I must not hype
Hype is the product-killer
Hype is the hubris that brings total disappointment
I shall face the hype
I will permit it to pass over and through the internets
And when it has gone past the inner cynic shall point and laugh
When the hype is gone, only the reviews will remain

While Apple got a lot of things about Friday's launch of the 3G iPhone wrong, they also got a lot of things right with the version 2 firmware they released at the same time.

It might be argued, though, that releasing the firmware at the same time as all the new iPhones were accessing the validation servers was one of the wrong things. The firmware was release, by my reckoning, at about 8:10 am EST – pretty much the very moment at which the first US 3G iPhones would have been hitting the iTunes store servers for authentication. This was also many hours after 3G iPhones had been on sale around half the rest of the world, including after the UK Apple stores had been left unable to sell by the failure of O2's primary sales network. (Apparently O2 and Carphone Warehouse both switched over to use O2's back-up network, but no-one had thought to give Apple access to that).

As a result, the auth servers jammed solid for an hour or so, leaving any iPhone that had installed the firmware but not yet validated able only to make emergency calls.

So, yeah maximised failure by maximising peak/immediate load. Not smart, technically speaking. Same mistake O2 made earlier in the week that took their direct sales website offline.

So, net result for me; saved about £180, didn't get a 3G iPhone and got a firmware upgrade (I managed to download the v2 package just before they pulled it and had a brick for about an hour but it's working fine now).

Anyway, I was going to talk about what Apple did right. The first generation iPhone was a good start, but had some issues; no GPS, no third-party apps, and a very tricky onscreen keyboard that was a particular nightmare to type hidden passwords on.

GPS was addressed to some extent in the wireless location update a few months ago; network mapping is generally pretty good in cities although it's obviously not true GPS. Third-party apps are now allowed uniquely via the iTunes store, and seem to have no way of synching via the standard iPhone / iTunes sync (which is now much slower). However the fact that all apps and their updates can be found via a central location, and can be installed directly from the store to the phone, is a definite plus.

So far the most useful app I've found is probably the free “remote” one, which lets an iPhone or iPod Touch control (with due authorisation) any copy of iTunes on the network, including browsing the whole library. It's one of those “just works” things that Apple usually do so well.

On the flipside, the Shazam music-identifying app is pretty smart too. Plus, now that SplashID's ported to the iPhone, I can finally keep my passwords in it again. Most of the ther useful apps are links to Twitter, Pownce and so on, and look like a good step in making these microblogging / location-sensitive apps far more usable. As an aside, it's slightly bemusing how many little apps “want to use your location”, according to the dialogue box.

To address my final point above, the keyboard hasn't actually changed, but the hidden password fields now have the sensible feature of displaying the last typed character while active, which makes password entry far more reliable.

So yeah; the iPhone; it works, whether original or 3G. On this basis, I really can't recommend people pay to upgrade to the new one unless GPS, 3G or more storage is utterly critical. But I'm impressed so far with the firmware upgrade and very pleased that Apple made it available to older phones. I strongly suspect it'll change the way I use the phone.

Webcowgirl, while trying to take notes for a review of Wayne McGregor's "Random Dance", noted, with mild frustration, that she "couldn't find the words". As such, I've been deputised to attempt to review a dance performance, something of a first for this journal.

Indeed I suspect it would have been impossible to find the words in this piece; it's defined purely by numbers. It is, I suspect, somewhat rare in having as its ideal audience mathematicians with an appreciation for beauty.

The piece was mathematical, energetic, powerful, captivating, and frequently humorous. Some of the jokes are of extreme subtlety and there are small riddles and references scattered throughout the piece, some so subtle that, in a suitably Heisenbergian twist, they would probably vanish if studied too closely.

The piece starts with an early zootrope-style movie of a running dog; one of the first technical experiments to scientifically study the mathematical properties of animal movement. It's a clever reference, and a gentle introduction into what's to be expected later on.

The stage is framed by what appear to be airfoil-shaped screens on crane-like mounts; these simple levers are used to great effect throughout the piece as projection screens for abstract mathematics, probablities, the human form and the flight of birds. When they rise later in the piece they cast a knowing glance at the Angel of the North, one of the most acclaimed (not to mention both vast and controversial) pieces of industrial art in the UK. The music is varied, powerful; intially baroque and thumping electronic later as it evolves. The lighting is stunning and beautifully designed.

Of course I've not yet mentioned the dancers, and this is intentional. They are a part, the focus, of the piece, but they are far from being its entirety. They are, it must be said, of extreme skill and incredible physique and imagination. They are dressed extremly simply in close white vests and black briefs which allows them to strip down (wordplay intended) to their raw and efficient forms. They dance mathematically; not rigidly, but with the full flexibility of numbers at play, of geometric curves and the algorithms that determine the flight of birds (the sudden on-screen metamorphosis of a string of differential equations into a flock of birds later in the piece is a humorous confirmation of this analysis).

There is, it has to be said, a robotic aspect to the dance, but it is not so much the sharp angular movement of a pre-programmed machine so much as the tenative, reversing movements of a learning intelligent system, reminiscent of cybernetic experiments in which robots teach themselves to walk (and here, perhaps, to dance). The smoothness of the movements increases through the piece to a point of particular monchromatic humour, but the mathmatical or engineer's eye will spot patterns in the energy and action of each small dance action or entanglement, and there's a temptation to try and work out the numeric rules which seem to lurk just below the surface.

These rules later take centre stage when classic geometric figures are projected onto the floor, becoming part of the performance; the dancers move within them, interact with them, are covered in them, following for example the sequence of the Golden Spiral. The effect of a dancer writhing within the squaring-the circle problem, shading lines flowing across his body, is frankly mesmerising. And there's a definite erotic tone in there too; McGregor (and the dancers) are clearly not shy of near-sexual interactions between male dancers, transferring incredible energies.

A few more words can round out this report; but they are hard to place in grammatical context. It is abstract, theoretical, organic, mesmering; certainly collosally demanding of the dancers, but ultimately it is a unique, intense and numeric experience.