I read a post today about Zemanta on Techcrunch and I thought I would try it out. I’ve downloaded the Firefox extension and I’m curious to see just how good the recommendations will turn out to be. The in-text links seem to be limited to proper nouns, which is a pity as Wikipedia definitions would certainly be of real use. The related articles are easy to preview and select and the related images are very easy to use, but I’m not sure how relevant they will turn out to be (the Zemanta logo may turn out to be the exception).
I’ve tried to customise the selection with my own Flickr account and blog RSS feed but so far I’m not seeing anything recommended from these sourced – maybe because my session is half way through. So far, I must say, so good…
I’m a little late to the Battlestar Galactica craze having only in the past few weeks got around to getting series one of Battlestar Galactica Reimagined. And I must say we are all hooked. I love the way that the 70s series has been re-worked in the mid-noughties.
The ships and the space special effects are updated to appeal to an audience used to high-quality fabrication. But I love the way the essentials of the social fabric and the more mundane technology – writing implements, telephones, food and drink etc – have been frozen as they were imagined in the 70s. (The one thing that seems to have changed out of all recognition, for some inexplicable reason, is the playing cards.)
As a consequence they say as much about the 70s as they do about the future – more actually. So, smoking is a common pastime, drinks are served in glass and people are contacted by being called across to old-fashioned telephone handsets (mobile phones were nowhere to be seen in the 70s). And paper and pencils are still very much state of the art.
I was reminded of the presentation at d.construct this year by Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel which argued that design in Sci-Fi was absolutely conditioned by the norms of the time it was written. If they ever wanted proof of their theory – this is it.
A couple of weeks ago I changed my broadband provider to Virgin from BT, with whom I had been for the past 10 years. And I didn’t just switch broadband – I changed my landline and my TV package at the same time.
The catalyst for this move?
I’ve actually been quite happy with BT for quite a few years but a few months ago I noticed that the speed I was getting on my supposedly 8mb broadband line was very low – around 1.5mb quite often. I reported it (through BT’s very efficient Indian call centre). After a few days of tinkering around the speed did seem to improve. But then the line started dropping – sometimes four or five times a day, and the line was down for quite long periods of time.
I reported this and they looked into this problem too. Again, the Indian support centre looked into it. This time, though, they said they found the problem. The FUP (Fair Use Policy) had been invoked – apparently we had been using too much bandwidth so our connection had been artificially slowed down and that was causing the instability. I was told that if I contacted the FUP team they would lift the restriction as it was causing technical problems.
So I called. There was a very polite woman on the phone who explained that our usage was quite a bit above average and asked if there was anything particular we were doing with the connection. I explained there were five of us in the house using the connection, two of us playing online games, but nothing special. Then she asked if we had an Xbox. Yes, I said. That explained it, she said. Xbox Live uses a lot of bandwidth sending information back and forth.
So it seems, that if you have an Xbox you need another provider – BT wants the kind of users who use the internet for email and browsing – maybe so that the usage patterns don’t interfere with their plans for interactive BT Vision – interactive TV.
Anyway, I’m happy with my move and with my 50mb broadband – as are the hard-core gamers in my family.
Jarvis points to research done by German consults The Reach Group (TRG) which tried to quantify what impact the threatened withdrawal of 148 German publishers in the so-call Hamburg Declaration would have on Google. Their conclusion: barely any. Jarvis believes the same would be true for Murdoch.
It’s been about a week since I first started playing with the preview of Google Wave. The first problem you encounter when you receive your coveted email invitation is finding anyone else who’s got an account that you want to communicate with. In my case, I found that were quite a few of my colleagues with accounts and we quickly hooked up in an experimental wave.
The interface is reasonable, if a little complicated, until you get used to it, and the way it incorporates real-time chat into “email” is really impressive at first – until you realise that everyone in the wave can see your appalling typing and corrections as they happens. That can be painful.
The biggest problem, though, is maintaining the momentum. Most of our communication takes place in email or Twitter or Facebook (sometimes through Twitter) and the challenge Google will have to overcome – and it’s a big one – is inertia. How to get large swathes of people to transfer their time and attention to Wave when they already have to check email, Twitter, Yammer etc.
Obviously, it’s early days and very few people are allowed to use the system. The acid test will be when it is open to all. When Google launched Gmail the product took off very rapidly because it was a superior email client, and crucially because it was interoperable with what had gone before.
Wave however is not interoperable with email. Can Google change the habits of the populace at large? I’m not so sure.
I returned to my computer this afternoon and noticed Google Wave saying “you’re offline – connect now” – which I couldn’t as clicking the button did nothing. What I did next is likely to become my natural next step in situations like this – I searched Twitter for “Google Wave Offline” and it seems the problem is widespread. Mystery solved.
This is the “real time web” in action – and as has often been noted this is a very significant development. The new web is mobile, people-powered and instant.
It’s that time of year again when the faithful make the pilgrimage to Brighton to the dConstruct conference. This year there were a fewer people attending and sponsorship seemed a bit thinner on the ground, but otherwise the event was as thought-provoking and enjoyable as ever. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, and not all the talks hit the right notes all of the time, but taken as a group I thought the conference was a great success.
The theme was designing for tomorrow and there was plenty to think about, even if a lot was quite abstract and had a distinctly US flavour.
I’m not going to give a blow by blow account (you can check out the Flickr stream which will give you an impressionistic sense of the event….
…or the Twitter stream if you want the real-time experience as see through the eyes of some of the participants (obviously in sound-bites of varying literary quality).
Here, though, are a few random take-aways from the talks.
Everything gets networked, including physical things and that leads to a new trend: from ownership to services – early examples are here already in Spotify (subscription, on-demand music) and Streetcar (pay as you go cars). More will follow. Is this the beginning of post-capitalism?
Visualisation is a very powerful way of exploring very large and dynamic data set. Some of the examples given were the Digg swarm (visualising interest as it builds), crime maps (great controls – particularly “commute” and “day and night” as more useful time filters), and live hurricane activity for MSNBC (great time-based interface). Think about the elegant design to help answer questions people actually want to pose.
Context is key. Design the best possible experience and degrade gracefully, making the best experience possible of each device. Maybe, we’ll now start with designing for the mobile and migrate to the desktop, not the other way round (or not at all!). Example: Tweetie – starts on the iPhone and migrates to the Mac.
Sci-fi borrows from interfaces already invented (Buck Rogers and the video phone which tunes in like a television) and real life borrows from sci-fi – the StarTAC phone which looks like a communicator from early Star Trek.
In may ways the most difficult talk as the central notion of “juiciness” was a bit too Californian for the sceptical British audience. However, in many ways I thought the idea of designing in “magic” into the interface to create the kind of emotional connection which games designers seek is a really powerful learning for web design. Why shouldn’t b2b website have some of that magic? The power of the Mac and particularly the iPhone comes from the magic of the interface. If we could design some of that into our b2b web sites the results might be amazing – and commercially rewarding.
Moving past digital infatuation and analogue nostalgia: “From representing the world on the web to embedding the web in the world”. He gives the example of printing newspapers of curated blog content. “There are magnificent bits of infrastructure just lying around” – underused printing presses, a postal system, DVD and CD production facilities and so on. Why not use them to add a dimension to the things that started out on the web? And the best quote of the conference with reference to the newspaper industry: “We’ve broken your business, now give us your machines”.
So, that’s it. Some thoughts about the day – not very coherent but hopefully of some use/interest.
The continuing – and ever-more raucous – debate on paid content online got me thinking about what I pay for and why. Here’s the list:
MobileMe – not sure why I pay for this, except that I was caught up in the hype and haven’t got round to doing anything about it. There are probably better services like Dropbox, but there you are…
Flickr – I’ve been a Pro user for a long time, inspired to pay extra to remove the monthly upload limits.
Remember the Milk – I upgraded to paid status in order to sync this excellent to do list program with my iPhone
MindMeister – an online mind mapping tool which is really superb. I upgraded to remove the cap on charts which I could create and share.
Evernote – a brilliant note application . I was managing fine with the free account until it became really useful and I found myself dangerously near my monthly limit. I was happy to upgrade
Wall Street Journal – just because….I have subscribed for a long time. Would I miss it if my subscription lapsed? A bit I suspect…
What’s interesting about this list is that with the one exception on the end of the list what I pay for is functionality rather than straight content. In all those cases the services offered have many competitors but I was tempted to eventually pay be trying the service out, often for a long time, and really getting used to the value it provided.
All these services offered rich functionality, but there was a restriction which would only become an inconvenience if I was getting a lot of value (and use) out of the service – but not until (that is the important point). Those services which tried to get my money by crippling the service until I paid, didn’t convince me to become a customer as I never got beyond the (irritated) experimentation stage.
I’m more and more convinced that this kind of model is the one with the most legs on the web right now, and I expect we will see a lot more currently free services offering this kind of “freemium” model, described so well in Chris Anderson’s recent book . This is the model that, in the content world, the FT is trying with its article limit.
An interesting Observer today (for a change) which has prompted some thoughts on the Murdoch/BBC and Google Books debates.
First up, Murdoch. The Observer gave continuing coverage to the reaction following on from James Murdoch’s speech in its story about a dinner row between Robert Peston and Murdoch(!) Murdoch’s argument, in case you missed it, is that the BBC is “state-sponsored” media and because of the “hypothecated tax” of the licence fee can ride rough-shod over the interests of commercial broadcasters.
A comment piece by Will Hutton arguing that Murdoch’s arguments at the Edinburgh Television Festival were “specious and out of date” puts the counter position very nicely; Murdoch is hardly without an axe to grind and if we want to look to examples of market distortion then we have his own company, Sky’s own past practices to study.
It was the voracious bidding for sports rights – cross subsidised by the vast Murdoch media empire – which set up Sky for its own meteroric rise to (pay TV) market dominance. The complaints about the BBC from Murdoch, and other parts of the media, look more like a hurt industry looking around for someone to blame as ad markets go south. Google is the other target, as well as, more generally, “the internet”.
In fact, the traditional media industry has seen steady declines for years. The biggest problem is not the BBC or the internet but the industry’s own lack of foresight in building out multiple revenue streams.
All businesses need a mix of models if they are not to suffer disproportionately in the downturn (even as they capitalise disproportionately in the upturn). The healthiest have a blend of cyclical and counter-cyclical models and a spread of markets and sectors.
The very characteristic of the BBC that Murdoch is complaining of – the fact that it is too big and is into everything – will probably turn out to be its achilles heel. It is very unlikely that the BBC will enjoy above-inflation increases in the licence fee in the future – in fact, if the Tory’s win the next election a cut is probably on the cards. This means that its self-proclaimed need to cover the widest possible remit will see it stretching its resources more and more.
This in turn means that those in the niches will beat the BBC in their particular parts of the market. Already, the BBC is not best for sport, and it shouldn’t be the best for hyper-local services, either, once those really get going. My own company, Reed Business Information, is in 17 business-to-business markets in the UK and in none of them are we beaten by the BBC – or for that matter Google. We have simply more resources relative to our niches.
Does the same argument then apply to Google. Well, yes and no. In its feature on the project by Google to digitise all the world’s books – and more particularly the out of court settlement in the US which gives it protection from copyright suits – the Observer sets out the benefits and the pitfalls of Google’s adventure into books.
It is undoubtedly a good thing that all the worlds books be available to everyone – just think what that could do for education in the developing world, for example. But there are clearly dangers if Google, as a commercial enterprise, has exclusive rights to those books.
Google argues that it is motivated by philanthropy – we have only their word for that, and circumstances can change. There are parallels here with Sky and sports rights. Sky was able to outbid the incumbents and therefore won a major advantage in the market place. Google, by virtue of their exceptionally deep pockets and technical skills has been able to accomplish something in the book field that many thought impossible.
If competition is to reign then there either needs to be a second digital library of all the world’s books (who would want Microsoft, for instance, as one of the few companies with deep enough pockets, as an alternative?) or some other plan needs to be considered.
How about an international equivalent of the British Library, perhaps as a branch of the United Nations, mandated with digitising every book and making them available at a nominal (or no) cost to anyone who wants to build a service on top of the basic library? A sort of digital Library of Alexandria? There would be a lot of detail to be worked out, but nobody said this transition to a better digital world wouldn’t be complicated!
The comment piece arguing that Google needed to be policed so that its power in the digital space isn’t monopolised is I think well argued; clearly there have been huge benefits from Google’s efforts to digitise the world’s information (the digital map space wouldn’t exist in its current excellent form had it not been for Google’s determination and ingenuity. However, beware the unintended consequences.
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