Monthly Archives: March 2009

Beware Obama bumper stickers!

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Someone accidentally sent this to me by email yesterday..

A LETTER FROM THE BOSS…..

As the VP of this organization, I have resigned myself to the fact that Barrack Obama is our President, and that our taxes, and government fees will increase in a BIG way. To compensate for these increases, our prices would have to increase by about 10%.

Since we cannot increase our prices right now due to the dismal state of the economy, we will have to lay off six of our employees instead. This has really been bothering me, since I believe we are family here and I didn’t know how to choose who would have to go.

So, this is what I did. I walked through our parking lot and found six ‘Obama’ bumper stickers on our employees’ cars and have decided these folks will be the ones to let go. I can’t think of a more fair way to approach this problem. They voted for change; I gave it to them.
I will see the rest of you at the annual company picnic.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable?

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Super smart blog from Clay Shirky on why the newspaper industry (which I’ve worked in, briefly at EMAP through the early 90s recession, before leaving to help set up a current affairs magazine Red Pepper) doesn’t get the internet.

Ah, it’s all about advertising. Now the secondary effect of the big recession is causing huge job cuts in the newspaper industry. Who knows what the future holds, but I like Clay’s emphasis on the value of experimentation. What I would say is that fortunately and in hindsight logically I did my experimentation while times were good, so I can take a good job now and enjoy it. It’s tough to start experimenting when times are bad.

What the newspaper industry kind of did was experiment while times were good too, but in a defensive way. Those newspapers that tried more positive work though when times were good, the fruits of which are probably in the heads of staff who’ve not had a voice until now, stand the best chance to reap the benefits I would have thought.

Yes, CEOs Should Facebook And Twitter, says Forbes

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Nice piece yesterday in Forbes arguing in this current climate why traditionally conservative CEOs may need to think again about web 2.0.

So to a list of reasons why, in no particular order:

1. Because competiitors are already using it to drive up profits.

2. Because it’s cheaper than traditional media.

3. Because you can create lasting relationship with your most precious ‘commodity’, customers.

4. Because you can learn about what your customers want, rather than telling them what you think they need.

5. Because you’ll end up using web 2.0 in a  defensive way if you don’t proactively learn to use the tools positively.

6. Because it’s a great way to establish your reputation as an organisation, and in thought leadership within your industry.

7. Because you want to hear what your employees have to say.

8. Because you want to feedback to employees on what’s happening with their suggestions for improvement and products.

9. Because your peers are already online and it’s time to join the party.

10. Because in 5 years time you’ll be ahead of your competitors in the web 2.0 use of tools for marketing, customer relationship management, and PR if you start now.

Q: Any more? Maybe to help prepare the ground before seeking VC funding?

Time to walk the walk

Leicester Beer Festival 2009; here we come..

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Like the look of this..Leicester Beer Festival started today. And I’m not there, yet!

Blogs Are Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere

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Interesting post by Scoble, Dennis’s mate, on blogs vs Twtter/Facebook. Or as he calls it the ‘Statusphere’ (“the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates”), which is a great bit of jargon. Still loving folksonomy though on the web 2.0 jargon front!

The Humans Who Will Kill the Google Machine?

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A mild-mannered British physicist is trying to render Google irrelevant. Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, a grandiosely ambitious piece of software, has come up with Wolfram Alpha, a grandiosely ambitious engine of knowledge.

Grandiosely ambitious, and grandiosely inexplicable. Put simply, Wolfram Alpha, due to launch in May, will “compute” answers to questions, where Google and other search engines merely trawl the Web for pages which might hold the answer.

To do this, Wolfram has had a small army of researchers working on systematically analyzing and structuring the corpus of human knowledge so that a computer might be able to answer questions with concrete answers, such as, “How far will the Earth be from the Sun tomorrow?”, a question Google completely fails to answer.

Er, this human-centred extract from Valleywag reminds me of a quote from Wolfram ‘A New Kind of Science’ from 2002 which I used in a short paper I wrote on the fight against terrorism:

“For our everyday experience has led us to expect that an object that looks complicated must have been constructed in a complicated way…(but) at least sometimes such an assumption can be completely wrong…unlike engineering nature operates under no such constraint.”

Hence humans (complex) vs computer algorithms (complicated) alright? The joke is I actually met some guy at Jane’s Information Group and tried to convince him of the power of complexity; I’m not sure he was that impressed but it was good of him to hear me out;-)

PS: C1E8844DA8344058820E1B0044CB5042

German fairy tales on HMRC Employer CD-Rom

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I have to file my P35 and P14. I reach for for HMRC Employer CD-ROM for 2008-09. It appears to be malfunctioning, with a series of audio tracks and no data. So I call the Online Services Helpdesk and report the issue. The response? That a very small number of the CD-ROMs were incorrectly loaded with German fairy tales. There you go, check your CD-ROM.

Full story on The Register.

Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong?

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Key points as to why Facebook’s attempt to copy Twitter won’t work:

As anyone who has worked in real time systems knows, when you increase the velocity you have to decrease the volume of the content.

The other thing we suspect is that they haven’t architected their network for real time comms – it nearly broke Twitter with c 1.2m people, so we watch with bated breath to see how Facebook’s architecture will cope with 120m people.

Update – quite a few people have pointed out that the Facebook model is more similar to Friendfeed than Twitter – good point, and thats what I meant by “getting it wrong still” in that I think Friendfeed has suffered from two issues I noted above:

- Too much information on the real time feed
- Not letting a user community define/design the service systems

As the Guardian points out this is a part of yet another re-design which appears to make the site more complex (er, I think the words is ‘complicated’ as complex is the flip-side of simple, I thank you;-)

PS: Note Twitter itself has had a refresh, with integrated Trends and Search functionality.

Social search IS the new semantic web?

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Cool article about value of social search:

Using  links as votes is a large part of most search engines’ algorithms. Google has wisely started gathering user information by allowing users to personalize these search results. One of the next steps is being able to search through the “most discussed” results of a query, not just the one with more links.  Sites like TweetMeme are already sorting out links that are forwarded the most. Other sites return search results across multiple social networks. Being able to search these results, a database of socially screened resources, presents some cool opportunties.

Any search engine that is not paying attention to the potential and growth of searching within social networks will begin to lose their value.

Note my comment about how the heck does this all fit in with the grand plan of the semantic web. Perhaps, suggests Jakrose’s reply, social search IS the new semantic web?

The other way of lookign at social search is a search engine which enables sharing. Take a look at Microsoft Research’s U Rank prototype as an example.

Wanted, a young genius to be the next Charles Darwin?

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Stimulating article in the Daily Telegraph yesterday by Leicester’s very own David Attenborough on who and how the next Darwin might ‘emerge’ (to use an evolutionary term).

My comment didn’t pass the moderator’s test, but I’ll cheat and publish it here:

“Sorry David but the next scientific revolution will not be televised. By the nature of where contemporary science is at, and where the internet is at, means the next Darwin is most likely to be found right now on Facebook or Twitter experimenting with their science and sharing their failures & breakthroughs.”

Actually I’ve taken the opportunity to add the last bit about experimenting & sharing. and this co-incidental pic from 2007…

Emerge emerge emergePhoto by Stuart Glendinning Hall