unfocused & unshaven

Earth from Above

nobody@vox.com(David Jennings) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 09:56:51 +0100

Incredible set of photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, courtesy of The Boston Globe/Boston.com.

Aiming to inspire people to think globally about sustainable living, Arthus-Bertrand has been photographing unique views of our planet, seen from the sky, since 1994.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

A sense of achievement

nobody@vox.com(David Jennings) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:09:52 +0100

I made myself my usual Saturday morning double espresso today, got my pencil and prepared to get stuck into David Allen's Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity, making notes as I went.

I got waylaid on my way to the kitchen and into the garden, and picked up K Foundation Burn a Million Quid. I intended just to flick through it, but it caught my attention, and absorbed my next hour and a bit. I never opened Getting Things Done. But, at the end, I felt a strong sense of achievement and satisfaction.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Reading list

nobody@vox.com(David Jennings) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:56:27 +0100

Here's a bunch of books I have bought in the last few weeks:

Bill Drummond -- The 17
Murray Bookchin -- Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm
Tim Etchells -- The Broken World
Dan & Chip Heath -- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck
Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini -- Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion
Guy Claxton & Bill Lucas -- The Creative Thinking Plan: How to Generate Ideas and Solve Problems in Your Work and Life
Guy Claxton -- Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less

I want to read them all immediately. Only one problem: I have a three-week-old son, and not a lot of spare time.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Music can stop warmongers and torturers after all

nobody@vox.com(David Jennings) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:05:41 +0100

...at least if the royalties they charge for use of their material are high enough to make torture uneconomic.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Notes on Cider

nobody@vox.com(David Jennings) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:21:11 +0100

Lucy and I had a holiday in the Cornwall and Devon at the end of last month and beginning of this one (photos). In the Truro Sainsbury's on the way down I opted to eschew the usual selection of bitter for what seemed like a good range of ciders. This became a mini-theme for the holiday, and here are my notes from it.

Henny's Dry Cider

6% Alcohol, made from 100% fresh pressed juice.
Made in Herefordshire, Frome Valley
No artificial sweeteners or colourings but it does have sulphites 'to preserve freshness'
http://www.henneys.co.uk

I'd say 'medium dry': actually It's a bit disappointing and undistinctive somehow. Like a slightly less fizzy Dry Blackthorn and no more.

Sainsbury's Organic West Country Cider

6% Alcohol
Made in Herefordshire
Contains sulphites as preservatives

Sounds familiar? Yes, and tastes familiar, too. One other thing: is Herefordshire really the West Country?

Stowford Press

On draught in Royal Standard, Flushing
Brewed by Westons, another Herefordshire cider
http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews132120.html

Light, not too fizzy. Subtle taste, verging on weak, but pleasantly dry.

Cidre de Récoltant, Duché de Longueville

Produced exclusively from pure pressed apple juice
Made with a minimum of 90% Gros Oeillet apples
Contains sulphites
http://www.emporiabrands.com

Well at least we're out of Hertfordshire (and into Nomandy). This is sweeter than anything else so far — though it still calls itself dry — but the sweetness is in the aftertaste. In this, and more generally, it reminds me strongly of Taunton Autumn Gold.

Strongbow

On draught in The Seven Stars, Flushing

This is like an average of all other dry ciders, or a common denominator. It's neither disappointing nor exciting. It's fizzy, but not oppressively so.I bet it has lots of sulphites.

Merrydown

Doesn't say where it's from, but made to "a unique Sussex recipe" since 1946, including "champagne yeast and selected eating apples"
7.5% alcohol
Contains sulphites
http://www.merrydown.co.uk

This was always my staple at university, especially at garden parties: it's summery, not too many people like it (so, more for me) and its incredibly alcoholic, almost as strong as wine. The taste is a little thinner than the others, but it's genuinely dry, and I still like it.

Scrumpy Willey, West Country Farm Cider

6% alcohol
Contains sulphites, sugar and sweeteners

I bought this in Falmouth to get something that was genuinely from the west country, and the address is from a Bristol postcode. I couldn't buy one of the flagons of sweet scrumpy, because they were too big. However, as you can tell from the title, it's not aimed at the sophisticated end of the market. I don't like it much; it's on the edge of being vinegary.

Drummer's Leg (?)

On draught at The Forest Inn, Hexworthy

This is the real thing, and it's a fairly unforgiving experience. A genuinely local Devon cider, which made me wince slightly on first taste, as it felt very close to the dividing line with vinegar. I enjoyed it a little more with more experience, but I think it would take a while to acquire the taste for drinking it regularly or in volume. I left a couple of centimetres in the bottom of my pint.

Aspalls Suffolk Cyder

On draught in the Dartmoor Halfway Inn, Bickington

Very nice this one — possibly closest to Merrydown.

Thatchers Dry Cider

On draught in the Sandy Park Inn, Dartmoor

A bit of a disappointment: anonymous, and not immediately distinguishable from the mainstream ciders, while not as pleasant as Stowford Press

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Denied an opportunity to moan

nobody@vox.com(David Jennings) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:59:53 +0100

So, I've been with with Vodafone for nine and a half years, and increasingly pissed off with how the deals they advertise to new customers are so much better than those available to loyal customers. The occasion of leaving them, then, offers an opportunity to savour in playing the part of "You've wronged me, you evil capitalist corporation, and now liddl'ol me's going to get my revenge by leaving you, and there's nothing you can do to stop me..." in response to their anticipated begging that "we'll be nice and friendly from now on, promise".

But I made a mistake. They asked me if there was any particular reason why I wanted to leave.

"Yes, there are two," I told them, winding up for my first salvo of complaints. "The first is that I quite fancy an iPhone..."

"Ah, well, say no more," came the interruption. "Don't blame you" (I'm not actually quoting directly, but it was words and sentiments to that effect).

And with that, Vodafone accepted defeat, and I lost the opportunity to do my longsuffering bleeding heart act. Damn.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Navigating the Micro Media Maze

nobody@vox.com(David Jennings) — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:55:32 +0100

Here are my rough notes from this interesting Chinwag Live event on Tuesday.

Steve Bowbrick

This is an industry driven by hyperbole, and change is always massive, and disruptive. At least micromedia sounds small!

Gerd Leonhard

Deal mostly with the issue of control: how can you make money from content if distribution is effectively free. Social networks are becoming the new broadcasters. In the future you'll be adding feeds for music, video as well as for web pages.Most companies are going to be 90% syndicated, as few can afford the investment to create a major brand. Traditional media says control = media. The new guys say attention or trust = money.

Google has this aura of openness, but their core, the algorithm is closed. Microsoft, which used to be closed, is now opening up. So it's not a matter of straight black/white comparisons.

Miles Lewis, Last.fm Europe

Have been at last.fm for 5 months, previously at Yahoo. Last.fm's homepage only has 3% of hits. Most traffic (40%) comes in from widgets, and none of those widgets have been written by Last.fm. We are about music and nothing but music. Taking that chaos of music has become a badge for our users. There was iPhone application within two hours of the iPhone reaching the market. No audio ads at the moment. How many users will bugger off if we add them? Don't know. Expect 50% of visits to be via widgets, some of which have 50,000 users, others have 3.

Mitch McAllister, Product Director, MySpace Europe

The whole genuinely is greater than the sum of the parts. When YouTube widgets first started popping up on profiles, we weren't sure what to make of it. We're expecting to see 50% of our traffic in the future on mobile or non-PC devices.

Neil McIntosh, Guardian Unlimited

Many of us are content creators as well as conduits to an audience. We are run by a trust. Meet audiences where they are. No one wants to be a channel. Issues for us: not just about our need to sell ads, also about context: what surrounds your content.

Umair Haque

I run the Havas Media Lab, a small media consultancy.Wrote a presentation called The Age of Plasticity. When we break things down and remix them, we get productivity gains. That's what micromedia is all about. Last.fm andMySpace have solved real problems, the music industry, which was incredibly shitty. We do ourselves a disservice by speaking of widgets as small and frivolous.I hate the 'monetization' word because you have to create some value before you can capture it. It's not just about shoving more shitty ads down people's throats. We in London think media is entertainment, but it's a hell of lot more.

MySpace should go to advertisers and brands and explore with them how they can reinvent their relationship with consumers; how to turn advertisting into listening.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Innovation not quite on the edge

nobody@vox.com(David Jennings) — Thu, 22 May 2008 02:29:08 +0100

Generally I felt Tuesday's Innovation Edge event played it a bit safe, but here are my notes of what I found to be the highlights. For once the 'star speakers' were truly stars.

Tim Berners-Lee interviewed by Jonathan Freedland

If you find these notes interesting, you can see the full video of the interview.

Didn't see the 'vague but exciting' comment until his boss died. Both men (Tim & boss) knew they had no remit to work on this, so boss didn't say yes, because he couldn't, but didn't exactly say no either.

Should employees be allowed to potter? 10-20% time is a good idea, but generally putting employees on a long leash to tackle problems. Don't expect people to tell you what solutions they're going to come up with before you give the support.

Apocryphal quote from Einstein 'If we knew what we were doing, we couldn't call it research'.

If the web is still in its infancy, what are your hopes for its adolescence and adulthood? Perhaps it's already a teenager, but I hope it will be responsible member of society We need to experiment with new ways of doing science and running society. I hope the web will support both of those.

Blogs are one of the things I call social machines. They're invented. That creates a large-scale phenomenon. A large number of wikis are created, and one of them happens to have grand ambitions. Blogs are what happens when people get into the blogosphere. People are behaving like adolescents and testing things out here, getting hurt sometimes, and hopefully maturing a lot.

The Web Science Research Initiative (Southampton University and MIT, part supported by NESTA). The really interesting things fell between stools of, say, psychology and economics. There are more web pages out there than are neurons in your brain. The web is big and complex, and we don't know what its properties are. How does the blogosphere interact with the press? Does it keep it honest? What if it flips, and hatred and rumour spreads faster than love and truth?

Would the web lose its spontaneity if you were try to pin it down? The key to understanding the web isn't pinning it down. Example of eBay as interaction between micro-level individual interactions and macro-level system that results,

Is the web more fragile than we realise? It's more subtle than that: will it be stable? Will it be a force for good? There are some reputable sources of medical information on the web. That's the good bit. Drug companies also produce some information that looks similar and may also be useful, but tends to conclude with a list of drugs. Will the web get pulled towards the latter? Email worked very well for a long time, and then commercial email became acceptable use, and there was a tipping point that you couldn't predict from the specs: thus spam.

Is innovation from now on going to be a collective rather than an individual endeavour? [Some not very articulate stuff about new ideas and words that people take on and spread] You can't ask people how they thought stuff up and expect an accurate answer. My goal for the web would be to enable that stitching of ideas when they are in different heads on different sides of the world.

Bob Geldof

Here's the full video. Great entrance.

Bono is short and fat, and I'm not. The power of unreasonable people (George Bernard Shaw), who find themselves uncomfortable in the world and persist in trying to change it. Thus is necessity the mother of invention, and desperation is the father of necessity.

The future will have terrible wars, terrible economic problems. History has shown that people are unteachable. In 01908, they had no inkling of the War, that flu would wipe out more than the War, or of the 01929 crash.

We turn to innovation because we're forced to in a period of change.

Business finds a way to make progress pay. But progress towards what? We can't have more of everything. We have to rearrange things. Everything is running out: air, water, time.

Social entrepreneurs are the people GBS was talking about. Examples of microloans in Bangladesh.

I'm Irish:I came here because Britain had that entrepreneurial culture. Ireland had this crouching deference to the UK. In the last quarter of the last century, the UK dominated in culture.

Tim B-L fits the British mandate, and you love him more because he didn't make any money out of his invention.

Daily Mail makes its living from contemptuous sneer at those who try and fail. I was just desperate, and a rock band is a classic cooperative entrepreneurial venture. NHS and Open University were created out of desperation. Can those institutions survive as they are: what kind of review and revision do they need.

Britain defines itself in opposition to almost everyone/anyone else.

You can't encourage the young to be entrepreneurial.Born not made.

Existential problems are looming in front of us. We are desperate. The political body doesn't give us solutions any more. The notion of leadership comes to your self.

I was innovating in charity. In the UK, you can't say 'charity' without saying 'chaaridee' or 'love' without 'lurve'. We are embarrassed about using these words without irony. Innovation may come from society not from the top: if enough people give to a charity, government policy has to adapt. And now organisations need talented people more than talented people need organisations, so the organisations have to change to attract them.

Helen Alexander: you have to worried all the time that the entrepreneurial spirit is fading. You have to keep an eye on it. But also allow for the fact that people can be successful without being entrepreneurs.

Are social networks the new cities?

Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council

Quick answer: no. Virtual world is an adjunct not a substitute for real world. Core of an innovative city is its innovative people: have to create space for them to be creative. Government has to know when to get out of the way and when not to. Organic processes + institutional processes to ensure that creative ideas come to something. Question of survival. Facilitate networks within the city: bringing people together in a physical space.

Jon Gisby, Channel 4

Collectively we're watching trillions of hours of TV, and that's not going away.Two big changes: 1) Rise of on-demand. 2) New expectations of an audience that can participate.

Michael Birch, Bebo

Moved to San Francisco because my wife is from there, and it happened to have a thriving IT community. The users were critical to the growth. We modelled Bebo on a city. Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City are not great, so we tried to avoid being too contrived.At the start, there's no one there so it doesn't matter how good the code is.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

So, this means exactly the opposite of what it says

nobody@vox.com(David Jennings) — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:40:46 +0100

When I was about 10 I had a teacher who liked to point out that when people said "a certain number of...", what they actually meant was "an uncertain number...". If they knew what the number was, they'd have given it, but they cover up their ignorance with this false certainty.

Every other blog post I read these days begins "So..." What does this "So" accomplish? In conversation it's an indicator that what is about to be said is in some way consequential, based on what has just been said. So why do blog posts start with "So"? Precisely because what follows has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what anyone else was saying before. It's a way of interrupting the wider conversation with a jump-cut while trying to conceal the lack of consequentiality.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Matt Mason, The Pirate's Dilemma

nobody@vox.com(David Jennings) — Sat, 10 May 2008 01:01:05 +0100

Yesterday Matt Mason spoke at the ippr about his book, The Pirate's Dilemma: How Hackers, Punk Capitalists, Graffiti Millionaires and Other Youth Movements Are Remixing Our Culture and Changing Our World. I liked him as a speaker: he did not come across like he was full of himself, or full of sh*t. Which is a good start.

Kay Withers, Research Fellow

We at ippr have done some research on IP regime and how it can adapt - but it's fair to say that we don't know the answers yet.

Matt Mason

We are all copying machines, copying and imitating each other. The internet is the greatest copying machine.The average US citizen does $millions of copyright infringements daily, unwittingly (irrespective of knowingly sharing music files).

Had to get involved in pirate radio at an early age. Spent most of weekends at the top of tower blocks. Despite what they say, the police and DTI were surprisingly lenient. Major labels used to collaborate.So it's recognised that pirate stations add value to the music scene. The most popular pirates tend to be the ones that innovate and experiment the most.Radio 1 is a copy of the pirate Radio London.

Pirates have even founded whole nations.Piracy was involved in the creation of the USA: the only reason that the country was able to industrialise so quickly was by explicitly flouting copyrights. The etymology of 'Yankee' goes back to the Dutch 'Janke', meaning pirate.

Hollywood was located on the West coast to keep out of reach of Edison's patents. Pirate radio spotted the opportunity for ad-supported free music.

How do pirates do this innovation?

pirates look for gaps outside the market: see an opportunity to make money and go for it
if they're doing something that adds value, they broadcast a message to society since the medium is the message
they're also able to harness the power of the audience, and at the point there is no way you can fight them.

We need IP laws. If pirates are adding no value, we should absolutely fight them (e.g. counterfeiting of Colgate toothpaste).

But if they are adding value, what are they doing and what does that tell us? The record business was historically very good at co-opting youth culture, but failed to do this with file-sharing. 95% of young people today are pirating music in one way or another. The business is not just the little plastic discs.

Steve Jobs: compete with pirates. Nike also realised that Japanese pirate of their sneakers was onto something, and started to appropriate some of his adaptations and buy shares in his company.

If a remix is adding value to the original, it causes sales of the original to increase.

The right to hack and remix computer games is a right of passage. Castle Smurfenstein was remix of Castle Wolfensteing on Apple II. The hackers become leaders of the video game industry.Created a pool of amateur modders -- essentially free labour.

Some unforeseen things happen. Machinima creating films with games by using the settings as locations. MTV has a show called Video Mods. A whole subgenre of film.

Hollywood now in the business of selling experiences, not movies i.e the social experience of watching in a cinema. Pirates have started to complain of piracy of their DVDs.

Companies and governments need to learn to copy pirates -- if they are adding value -- not fight them. Other alternative is to compete with them. That's the dilemma.

Q&A

Whose dilemma is it?
Not us and them any more. We are all pirates.

Is success just commercial? What about aesthetics?
Culturally we do benefit.

Whenever pirates invade a space, they create a kind of chaos where the value of products/services is up for grabs. And then it gets institutionalised.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend