2008 has been a remarkable year. Quite unsettling in the amount that has changed, really.

A year ago, I sat in my flat in London, somewhat settled, surrounded by wonderful friends. Sometime over the past twenty-four hours I had got monumentally drunk at Barden’s Boudoir and dancedflailed wildly happily to Soulwax remixes of Klaxons. At some point I would be handed a half-full bottle of vodka by a barman and pour drinks for twenty people in my immediate vicinity and be cheered on like I’d brought home the World Cup.

Life was, mostly, peachy.

Also around that time I had an intriguing conversation across the Atlantic. ‘Have you ever considered working in the States?’ is the executive summary. ‘Nope… but tell me more’ is my abridge response.

It’s difficult to write a retrospective of 2008 because although I didn’t move to the US until August, doing so eclipsed everything else that happened this year. In scale and impact, I mean, not necessarily in importance.

2008 is the year I moved to America. Got offered the chance, knew I couldn’t refuse, took a deep breath, took a lot of risks, and did it.

Moving, especially when it’s at least partially spontaneous, is a rush. So much happens at once that I lost track. So many decisions to make, so many major jobs to do one after another without a break. A new job with new people, new friends to be made.

In a great many ways, I did what I always do, which is to land on my feet and do really well for myself. I don’t like to assume that’s how things will always work out, but it’s become such a recurrence that I should start documenting it more scientifically. That said, at the pace of change, and under the huge rush of emotions and disorientation that comes with moving, I did plenty of things wrong too. My Christmas break came after 139 days in America, and actually, to fly home to England and take stock is exactly what I needed.

The out of control rush had to end, the Yahoo layoffs experience and resultant rush to find new employment did nothing to lower my pulse and so the time away came as a really welcome break.

I’ve come out of it calmer and more stable. I fly back to the US in a few hours, and I think I’m in a good state of mind for starting a new job, and tying up the last few loose ends of 2008.

I ordinarily dismiss the idea of new years resolutions, but the way my experiences have fallen this year I start 2009 feeling unusually resolute.

Some things are both predictable and rather cliché, but also very necessary. Having an operation for appendicitis in April got my weight down to where it should be (note: not a recommendation form of weight loss, plus you can only do it once). Moving to the States has seen me put it all back on, and exercise less. That has to change, else I’ll be a grotesque lardbucket by the time I write the 2009 review.

Elsewhere, the new job is going to let me keep a better work-life balance, since I’ll be commuting from Sunnyvale daily. As such, I want to see my personal projects go live. I have lots to do at microformats.org, I have various wiki-related pieces of work in progress and needing to go live, as well as 33FortyFive, which I’ve been working the concept for for ages now.

I need to track my life better. This year has shown how one really big event can throw off my knowledge of the rest of the year. So starting January first, I’m keeping a retrospective for all my social appointments, so I get a better overview of where my time goes. Maybe I’ll make that public, or anonymized somehow, if it proves interesting.

There’s all manner of small things, and longer term, niggling tasks that I have to get done. Really, it all falls under a renewed determination I’m feeling. It all starts when I land in SFO on Saturday evening.

Let’s see how this works out…

When I moved to the US in August, I came at it with an open mind. I’d never planned to move to San Francisco; the opportunity just came up and was irresistible. It was going to be an adventure. I wasn’t to be sure how long it would last, how long I’d be drawn to staying in the US, or how long Yahoo! would keep running the Brickhouse program. I wasn’t really ready for how short it turned out to be.

Brickhouse was a wonderful thing, and I fear its brilliance and inner creativity was not understand as it should have been. Unfortunately, whatever the cause of judgement, on December 10th Yahoo elected to close our group and approach the challenges of building new products in different ways.

It’s was crushing for those of us working there on a number of levels. We loved our co-workers, we loved our product (Fire Eagle) and we loved the premise of Brickhouse; an inspiring work environment of ideas and creativity. For the preceding three weeks I’d worked late into the night so that on Tuesday we could launch Friends on Fire. I’m glad to have got it out, rather than it be discarded on an SVN server somewhere.

For me, mourning the intellectual loss of a dream job wasn’t really a priority. My working in the US was entirely tied to working at Yahoo. For me, unemployment would mean prompt deportation, and moving to a new company required a willingness to sponsor a new visa, and would still leave my location and life in limbo for most of 2009.

The reaction from outside is difficult or me describe. Genuinely, a slack jawed gasp provides as good a summary as any. I witnessed colleagues across the world band together to promote my name and those of my friends also departing the Brickhouse. The quantity of direct contact I received through Twitter and email was astounding. The power of the meritorious society that has developed around the web is huge. People trust one another’s recommendations because unlike industries of old, there is no old boys network here. The great people we associate with are people we thrive from. We support and work off one another not because we’re friends, but because we do better in proximately to those who are also talented.

I was taken aback by the response and far from sulk in my situation, I’ve spend the last ten days following up. I think I replied to everyone, but given how bloated my inbox was after just a few hours, I think I should say ‘sorry’ to anyone who hasn’t heard back from me, but mostly ‘*thank you*’. Thank you for your support through this. Whether who knew me and knew my skills, or just wanted to talk with me to see if something could be worked out, every query and message has helped sustain me through this.

The Lay Off

Being laid off in America is strange on all manner of levels. It’s just like in films. You get told what’s happening, and handed a box. You clear your desk then and there, hand over your computer and security pass. Security guards lurk around at the door, purportedly to protect the ones who still have jobs from being attacked by the vengeful disgruntled unemployed. It’s a harsh, blunt, heartless process. It’s offensive on so many levels, disrespectful to you as a person, disrespectful of the work you care about and that, despite the situation, you might care to have properly passed on to a co-worker. Instead, projects are dropped where they stand, no knowledge transfer takes place, weeks maybe months of work is just discarded.

Apparently it’s normal like this in the US. In England you get given an end date, you work up until it, you pass on your work to someone else. You show some respect to your coworkers. Here that doesn’t exist even if you want it to.

I’ve only lost a job once before. Working at Yobject ended suddenly when their finances ran out. I didn’t get paid on time, and I only found out when my debit card started to be rejected… whilst I was on holiday at SXSW. Being strategically laid off is rather different.

Needless to say, no-one from Brickhouse started any fights with security. Instead we went to Hotel Utah at 4th & Brannan in San Francisco. Owen Thomas of Valleywag lied that he phoned in to buy everyone shots. He actually purchased six. I guess times are hard in the gutter too. The wonderful Hotel Utah barstaff donated around ten more to make up the difference. The staff are wonderful at Hotel Utah. When you’re there, ask them to add bacon to their (magnificent) Mac & Cheese, it’s stella.

Warming

Saturday 13th, three days after being laid off, was my housewarming in San Francisco. A more bittersweet timing you could not have engineered. Sitting in a home I’ve grown very fond of, surrounded by the furniture I picked out for myself and bought, pondering whether I’d still be living here in two months time, or whether it would all have been offloaded in my enforced absence.

I lamented over this briefly, and then countered by getting drunk and playing Rock Band all night. I’m enjoying throwing parties. The support of so many wonderful friends in a time of stress cannot be understated.

No stopping

To stay in the country I needed to put aside the bitter and upset emotions induced by Wednesday and push for a new role at Yahoo. Every contact I have there, and plenty more I made in the process, was contacted in the hope they find an open position within the next few weeks. Get a new role, the visa stays valid and (in some words) ‘it’s as if I were never laid off at all’.

I spent my remaining pre-Christmas days in San Francisco keeping up in a scrum of simultaneous conversation with every company who would listen who might sponsor a visa, and harranging everyone I know still inside Yahoo. Getting back into Yahoo! is the option that provides me stability. No leaving the country for any length of time, continuity of home, relationships and friendships. Longer term I can settle and get myself into a less precarious position, but the priority at every step in this horrific process is do not ruin my life.

A few people suggested to me that returning to Yahoo was non-obvious. I concede that Yahoo is a little airborne at present (remember, we don’t even have a full-time CEO), and post-layoffs and post–Brickhouse-closure we are still waiting to see a lot of the 2009 plan revealed. Fact is, I make a distinction between the company and the team. There’s nothing unreasonable in saying that every single engineer at Yahoo is expecting a lot from the Yahoo board over the next six months, to put itself on the straight and narrow again and offer a vision. But even whilst pending that progress, the teams within these walls make up of some of the most talented engineers I know and if I could get the opportunity to work with them again it would be a great thing, no matter what the circumstances.

With some delight, I can report that I did get that opportunity.

Some time in the new year I’ll be switching over into the Yahoo Developer Network, and hopefully doing awesome things to help people inside and outside Yahoo work with new platforms like YAP YQL and and so forth. I’ve been pretty passionate about development community infrastructure since I started working with microformats.org, so it’s great have that overlap with my day job more.

It will be a shame to lose working from San Francisco all the time, but I’ll adapt to the Sunnyvale commute soon enough.

To everyone who helped me out, sent me offers, enquiries and advice over the past two weeks: Thank you.

Along with an extremely turbulent week at work, I’ve also been putting together an article on bringing Fire Eagle to the client side for 24ways. Have a read of Geotag everywhere with Fire Eagle for a quick introduction to location based app building, and a guide through building a bookmarklet to bring your location into every web app you use today. It’s something I think I’m going to carry on as a project, since the ideas I mention in the final paragraph are hopefully quite useful. We’ll see how that goes over Christmas.

Election season is upon us in the US. As an alien, it’s a fascinating and at times alarming experience to observe the campaigns in action. Coming from England, my naturally liberal attitudes don’t make me overly compatible with being an independent over here, but my ineligibility to vote does.

I studied the politics of the United States back in 2000–2001 for an A-Level course. It was just a twelve month study, but it provided an insight into the comparison with the politics back home in the UK. In the US, the cultural aversion to third parties and absolutes of a two party system make for quite blunt presentation. The impression painted is of a severely divided nation.

Red republicans vs. blue democrats. Entire states — entire countries by European scales — grouped into supporting one single party or candidate.

It’s a side affect of the allocation of electoral college votes; a system whereby the citizens of each state vote for the president, and the winning candidate in each state receives a number of votes based on population. It’s biased toward smaller states to try and protect them from being trampled by the larger ones. It deliberately distorts the popular vote to maintain a stronger union.

So, for example, California has 55 electoral college votes, Texas 34, but comparatively tiny states like North Dakota still get 3.

The electoral college itself is not a huge problem. The problem is with presentation. Consider this electoral map, which you can find as part of MSNBC’s excellent Election Dashboard.

The political leaning of each state is represented in terms of absolute victory. Not in terms of margin of victory. Solid blocks of colour show Democrat coasts, and red Republican centre. It shows a nation torn apart. It shows divide.

Maps like this are terrifying. They represents an unreconcilable division of political parties who are, frankly, not ideologically far apart. They encourage casual observer to write off the detailed viewpoints of ‘blue states’ or ‘red states’, simply because they don’t affect the vote.

Really, these maps are a gross misrepresentation of the viewpoints of Americans. At an emotionally heated election time, when Republican political rallies become tinged by violence toward their countrymen, it strikes me that perhaps the incessant reinforcement of this map undermines the foundations of the American nationality, not just statistics.

To get to my point. These maps exist to represent the allocation of electoral college votes. Electoral votes are allocated all or nothing — except for Maine and Nebraska, which uses a more proportionally representative Congressional District method. In response to the all-or-nothing allocation, solid blocks of blue represent safe Democrat seats, solid blocks of red safe Republican seats. It implies solid majority support, when really ‘safety’ only means a majority of at least 10 points.

Take Maine. The magnificent FiveThirtyEight gives a hugely comprehensive breakdown of polling. Maine is a ‘safe’ Democrat state. But really, it’s just a 55 to 43 split in favour of Barack Obama. And that’s with a ±5% margin of error.

Summarising today’s FiveThirtyEight projections, the divide between Democrat and Republican voters are far less pronounced that the maps across the internet and television make out.

FiveThirtyEight’s table is an image, bizarrely, so I’ve only copied out some of the stats. Hopefully enough to illustrate my point.

Presidential vote projections by State

State	Dem	Rep	Margin	Resprentation
AK	41.7	57.1	15.4	Safe GOP
AL	38.5	60.3	21.7	Safe GOP
AR	45.5	52.9	7.4	Likely GOP
AZ	43.1	55.4	12.3	Safe GOP
CA	57.5	40.6	17	Safe DEM
CO	52.1	46.5	5.5	Likely DEM
CT	57.5	40.3	17.2	Safe DEM
DE	58.7	40	18.7	Safe DEM
FL	50.7	48.0	2.6	Leaning Dem
GA	46.3	52.4	6.1	Likely GOP
HI	64.8	34	30.7	Safe DEM
IA	55.6	42.7	12.9	Safe Dem
ID	36.8	62	25.2	Safe GOP
IL	58.7	39.6	19	Safe DEM
IN	48.2	49.8	1.6	Lean GOP

The impression that the coasts are so dominated by democrats or that the centre states are dominated by republicans is false. A 30 percent minority is far too large to be dismissed, and yet that is what the disproportional maps show.

I’d like to redraw that map in different ways. Redraw colour intensity by actually percentages, rather than safety. Redraw each state showing both red and blue. I think it would provide a reassuring view of America. One of integrated political, rather than division. The perception of division appears widespread, and it is a falsehood.

At the core of this? Huge numbers of American voters are disregarded both by the electoral system and the media presentation of the election.

As a liberal minded type, is Texas write off of right-wing politics? No. In fact, 42% of the biggest red blog on the map poll for Democrats, and yet the small majority makes a massive impression on the perception of America’s make-up. The reverse is true in Calfornia. That huge hunk of blue that suggests the entire West Coats is a liberal haven? Also 40% Republican. Even Alaska, a state dismissed as neo-conservative due to its Sarah Palin connection in fact polls 41% Democrat. Those people are lost in these maps.

This is not really about whether the electoral system is fair, it’s the negative social effect of representing it this way. American politics can do without any more negative social effects.

Something that ‘people in San Francisco’ seem to do, that no-one back home in London was doing (or if they were, they kept quiet about it) is maintain a personal wiki. I’ve avoided it for ages, mostly because I figured that if I have this much trouble maintaining a blog, surely a wiki will just make my cluster of unmaintained pages even larger.

The previous entry on microblogging was the start of a realisation. Realising that Pownce is useful in its capacity as a microblogging platform rather than as an alternative to Twitter, I think that my personal publishing breaks down cleanly into tiers, based on the depth of the content. And a wiki is perhaps the most natural part of that as anything.

Blogging, as in a site like this, is really only well suited to a certain style of publishing. I want to publish content of a consistent style on this blog. I want there to be a certain amount of depth to each entry, and I don’t want some detailed attempt all about the philosophy of personal publishing to be punctuated by a single line piece stating that ‘I could really murder a chip butty right now’.

The way I see this breaking down, and this is starting to feel quite natural, is as follows:

• Pownce is for short things. Thoughts, spontaneous musings, links that you think are remarkable (which contrasts with Delicious, which is a store of links I think are useful in some way). It suits short, sharp content. No room for depth. That’s microblogging.
• This blog contains longer, more considered content. I feel reasonably sure that the things I write here are somehow valuable, either as information or as an expression of my self. They have some depth. Comments are on. I should track responses on other blogs, too. Whilst communicating via separate blogs is a lamentably lost ideal of the original, pre-comments design of blogging, it’s a concept I like. In aiming to write content of substance, I’d want to support it.

The critical thing with a blog though, and something that should be embraced, is time sensitivity. What I write here is timestamped and could, upon further reflection in a month or a year prove to be dismissible rambling bullshit. But the timestamp validates that. The moment you read this you know that it’s old and that gives you the context to consume it. You can write safe in the knowledge that time will let your obsolete content fade away. Timeless, accidental masterpieces will look after themselves.

Which leads to wikis. A wiki will contain detailed content. Thoughts, projects, entire subjects documented through the eyes of an author. Wikis have long been complemented for being very close to the original ideals of the read/write web that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned (back before no-one had bothered to implemented the necessary HTTP verbs to do it). It’s back to a world of writing standalone pages. And in standalone, I mean to imply timeless. So, my ‘about me’ page isn’t a blog entry, it’s a page, and wiki is a superior publishing medium to maintain that kind of content. Similarly, documenting my ‘thoughts on personal publishing’, and my ‘current publishing practices’ is a standalone, timeless (and constantly updated) piece of information. Here I blog about how I publish, or rather, how I’m considering doing it. It’s driven by a desire for discussion. However, to publish my current publishing behaviour, a wiki is a superior platform. That one URL (let’s say, perhaps, http://ben-ward.co.uk/content/Publishing) will always represent current information and is far preferable over regular blog entries every time I change something. ‘Publishing Patterns, August 2008’, ‘Publishing Patterns, November 2008’… a blog is less suitable for versioned content.

So, Twitter is a slight oddball

I regard it as publishing ‘fragments’ of my day. By my reckoning it fits into the tier below (smaller than) ‘microblogging’. But it grew out from encouraging people to just publish their status and into its own social network. So as well as containing the little snippets of my day, it also contains pieces of social interaction. Twitter is great, but it’s a less pure publishing platform.

Combination. The lifestream.

The thing about blogging — an issue that produced some background resistance in me to the personal wiki concept — is that whilst you can better maintain content, you’re unable to push it to people. A blog has a feed and people consume that feed and therefore people read what you have to say. Sound vain? Get over that and accept that in some capacity we all want people to read what we write and we don’t want our output buried somewhere it’ll never be found.

If I were to produce a nicely combined life stream (which I will), Pownce, Twitter and the blog are chronological and so slot in neatly. Twitter gets filtered to avoid publishing those ‘social interaction’ posts, but otherwise fits in. But since wiki content is not time sensitive, it is not the content itself but the edits of that content which should be streamed. That in itself is a bit problematic. New pages are probably noteworthy, major edits are probably noteworthy; minor edits not so much.

The scenario I’m trying to support is this: Rather than someone come to this site and subscribe to just the blog feed, they would subscribe to the whole lifestream. But, the lifestream would be built such that the content is relevant enough they don’t get irritated by its content. Not an easy balance. Configuration seems like a grossly over-complex solution, but perhaps offering two predefined options would be manageable; substantial content containing blog entries, major wiki edits, and longer Pownce posts could be available separately from the whole life stream.

I suppose I should build it.