technogoggles

<75 years of metaBBC>

spies, originally uploaded by JamesB.

The BBC has opened up its catalogue going back to 1937. Well Done MattB and Tom. It's a wonderful thing.

I worked in TV as a researcher/AP for the BBC between 1999 and 2002 first on Timewatch [for  a lovely bloke called Tilman Remme] and then in Current Affairs [and much later a short stint at Newsnight]. It's great to be able to get the info. Though I don't remember getting contributions from Hitler, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt for this film - my favourite ;-) [methinks the 'contributors descriptor is a little generous as it covers production staff, historical figures and interviewees]. I had 3 glorious months at the National Archives in Kew researching this one, my first job for the beeb.   Uncovering the many great stories that came out of the IIWW.  The film couldn't do justice to the richness of what we found.   Of course there are bound to be issues with the cataloging - not least of which is that I don't get a credit here grr... Still, you got to love those librarians.  Working diligently, without any of the glamour that most people see as a perk of working at the beeb.  They're kinda machinic in the way they construct and adhere to strict data protocols.  I suppose in that sense they're very high level code really.  Respect!

So the BBC is plugging into the world.   It's all been said before but how great it is to be able to pull out and aggregate content by contributor, date, series, episode, channel etc and work that into bottom up data from other sources like wikipedia entries for shows, presenters, events. 

I see a useful application in this as a social documenting tool.  To be able to visualise the key 'memes' in broadcast by the BBC by year and see how that correlated with wider events.  Is the BBC a useful barometer for the zeitgeist?  Does it lead or follow?  Could be quite fascinating...

Classified

classified, originally uploaded by JamesB.

I've been using classified ads recently to try and get a variety of things including childminders.  For services like childminding physical classified ads just seem to be more appropriate... I only wanted people who lived in walking distance to where we live and I wanted people who were able were part of the 'community' that use the post office where I posted the ad - it gave me a sense of safety and trust, of an already filtered 'social', which the internet just couldn't seem to offer me. Do physical geographic contexts still provide something the internet is unable to?

I hasten to add that this image is of another window, a different community where 'kwiktan' operates; I didn't post here.

Time Stuff

I haven't been able to shit straight lately for work pressure and family life.  I'm a kinda of believer that you make your own time... you have the ability to slow down and speed up according to the activities you are undertaking.  Quite what that means practically I'm not too sure.  Quite how I convey that to my employers I'm even less sure.

Rather belatedly I've found use in David Allen's book Getting Things Done [so popular it seems to have coined it's own verb acronym - "to GTD"].  Which allows you to do what it says on the book cover.  Mr Allen has got a lot of cred from the blogger world - which makes me wonder to what extent most blogger types are not actually hopeless organisers and ENTP types [like me].  But David's book works.  If you can spare the time to read it then do.  If you can't then take note - the big things to remember are:

1. List all the jobs you have to do
2. For every job describe each task needed to complete that job
3. For each task see if there are any actions that you are unable to do for any reason or which require other resources to complete - list them.
4. When you've finished a task / action then tick it off.

By identifying and then writing down specific actions you put things in the "hard drive" of your memory [allen's metaphor not mine] and are better able to concentrate on the actions in the uncluttered RAM of your head.  Simple stuff with potentially profound implications for your whole work / life balance.  Unless you get complacent after week one and go back to the world of cramming everything into RAM and going into meltdown again.  The book should come with electro-shock treatment to condition you into following his process.

And whilst I'm on the topic of organisation and time management I've been trying out Backpack and Basecamp [and all that clever 37 signals stuff] lately.  These products and ones like them sell you the potential to organise your life.  But from my experience they can't deliver on it.  Only you can do that.. Basecamp merely helps you to move things around more efficiently - it doesn't help you with what you're  actually moving around, mores the pity. 

In loo of a proper post the other things of late that have been stored in my off-site memory to come back to later are:

1. Time, again.  A discussion on Radio 4 the other day on short-termism got me wondering whether we could plan for generational change.  One comment about the way Daoism and its generational, long-term view has helped to culturally move some Asian economies to think about improving things for their children's children was quite profound.  Or I thought it was.  Could we do that?  Could we sacrifice our relative affluence and luxury knowing we were building the foundations for a better society?  I think it's unlikely but part of me believes that we can be sold the idea of hard work to make things better in this country and to move away from a privatised, individualised nation.  But it's a vision that lasts longer than a government term of office so it would require the political will which is quite another matter.  Some brands have managed to create a long term plan by clinging to a vision - perhaps politics and nationhood can learn from them?

2. A mish-mash [with apologies to Things mag].  Peta getting a lot of viral attention for their milk ad which had me really weirded out [i can think of no  English equivalent to sum my feelings up] / Business 2.0 talking about how Google will never conquer local search because small businesses need to be sold to, but I think this ignores the fact that readers are migrating away from bigs books in droves so local companies will have to adapt /  Awards - with Saatchi and Saatchi annoucing their world changing innovation awards - which were actually pretty cool - and Yahoo! annoucing their not as cool best websites award - which seems so lame now, so 90s - why not let users decide? / And I guess I'm also kind of miffed because Etsy didn't get into either award - I think they're quite brilliant - not least because they've cracked the problem of ordering handmade goods online: if you can't guarantee what you want is what you'll get from handmade goods - then package it and conceptualise it as magic - Alchemy. Surprise! Genius.   

Sad Search

Link: WSJ.com - TiVo Users Soon Can Search for Ads.

Like, why would you search for TV ads to download?  Tivo is developing an application to allow people to search for content via keyword which will then be downloaded to view when you want:

Advertisers, in turn, will be able to select the keywords and categories with which they wish to be associated for their ads. TiVo is in discussions with advertising agencies about the best way to price such advertising, but one option is to let advertisers bid on keywords as they do when buying ads on Internet search engines.

"The Google model is something we're reviewing," says Davina Kent, TiVo's vice president for national advertising sales.

Let's think of some use cases. 

1. you need more information on say, BMW cars.  You think you may be in the market for one and want to get more info.  The model works in online of course but are TV ads sufficiently informative to satiate our needs around a particular product or issue?  Would we wait for the ad to be broadcast?

2. you like the Nike ads and want to see more of them.  Fair enough.  You're sad.

3. a friend /maven character has told you about a new product and you want to see what the fuss is about.  Presuming they have a TV campaign, then yep you'd hit that need square on.

But really, there either has to be a shift in the type of advertising broadcast [and that's unlikely unless you get a lot of people using this app - and then you get a chicken and egg situation about not generating revenue and take-up without suitable ads] or consumers have to become sad or maven like en masse [hmm, that's just not go there] or there has to be another model that Tivo have that I've missed here.  Surely iptv will allow people to search and grab ads whenevr they want anyway?  I mean you can get most TV ads online via any one of the gazillion video search engines should you really be the saddo in use case 2.   

Home Economics Just Got Interesting

Link: Etsy - Your place to buy and sell all things handmade.

I've been toying with the idea for a while now of developing a means through which people can sell what they make.  And ask for things for other, experts, to make for them.  A kind of eBay for products that are handmade.  It taps into lots of things I'm currently researching around the rise of craft based practices and community based politics and interest groups and the DIY movement generally.  And it harks back to markets and the vibrancy and fun of market stalls that I grew up with [a story for another time].

But I've just seen Etsy. [via wonderland] And it's right royally pissed in my pint.  It's fabulous and it serves fantastically well the growing abundance of people producing things in their own home, with their own fair hands and marries this enterprise with cutting edge navigation - location, materials, seller name, product name etc. which makes it really gratifying to browse around and shop 'in'.

However, it's not perfect - it doesn't actually enable you to request something that suppliers could bid to provide - which i think is something that would work incredibly well for the home suppliers [don't try and second guess your market - just make want they ask for!] because of the dynamics of the market they'll able to do this - they'll as flexible and JIT and responsive as any supplier could hope to be.   Individual producers don't scale well and that's why the service is great - you're getting something quite unique at often less than high street prices.  The Long Tail rocks doesn't it?

 

Google takes the P.. rint with online model for offline advertising

Link: Google takes ad sales to print | CNET News.com.

via Gary Stein

I've been a bit slow on the uptake about this one and hadn't realised the potential of Google's move into offline activity in terms of revenue generation.  As Stein says:

Satellite maps are cool and all, but this is where you should pay attention, when thinking about Google. This is development around the way they make all their money.

Google makes 99% of its revenue from online advertising - $3billion last year [2004].  So what's the deal?  Even though online ad revenue is growing at a phenomenal rate it still only accounts for around 10% of all advertising.  So Google is moving into print, trying to eek some of the huge potential revenue open to it and in the process pushing out the media agencies/buyers that make a living from deciding on appropriate advertising and planning ad campaigns. 

How is it moving into print?  One experiment with PC World saw it buy a page of advertising and then cut this up and in effect sub-let it to others:

The issue has a full page of Google-facilitated ads with the URL of an online version of the page at the top. Fine text also appears at the top saying "Ads by Google," and "Google advertisers offer these products and services" at the bottom. However, there is no Google logo.

So Google  is leveraging the fact that product search online is key to advertising.  People want to check out a product, compare it and get the best price online, yet awareness is often gained offline through the myriad of niche [and mainstream] publications.  Why is this so important?  Because people using the URL in the print advert can be measured - the "offline" URLs are redirected through Google servers.  This is important.  It allows Google to take their online business model into the offline world of brand advertising a move which is upsetting traditional media buyers.

The result is that publishing partners such as PC World would only get paid according to how many people "clicked through" no matter what "brand value" the advert had in raising awareness.  It's a model which is high in risk especially for publishing partners who would lose some of the ability to plan around revenue streams - as spots are often booked up 3-6+ months in advance.  It could also change the nature of creative work to more product focused rather than brand focused benefits and values.

It's potentially a major shake-up for the ad industry and marketing in general.

All Strategy is Local

Link: tompeters! management consulting leadership training development project management

The Harvard Business Review had an article on Strategy being local which as Tom Peters states "is brilliant but counter-intuitive" and he goes on "it reinforces my longstanding bias that beyond a certain point Big ceases to be beautiful."

Here are some of Tom's selected quotes from the HBR:

"Sustainable domination is more likely in markets of restricted size. It is paradoxical but true that economies of scale are subject to scale limitations themselves. ... When a market gets too big, diseconomies of coordination can prevail over economies of scale."
—Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/"All Strategy Is Local"/HBR09.05

"Some observers have argued that Wal*Mart owes its superior returns to its enormous size and, as a consequence, its purchasing power. [But] if the purchasing power that comes with size were responsible for the company's success, then Wal*Mart's profitability should have increased as the company grew. Yet its operating margins have not increased since hitting their high watermark in the mid-1980s. ... As Wal*Mart has grown, its profit margins have suffered in comparison with those of more geographically concentrated competitors, such as Target. ... Sam's Club appears to be no more profitable than Costco and BJ's Wholesale Club. The fact that Sam's Club is the least geographically concentrated of the three competitors appears to have offset any advantages derived from Wal*Mart's efficiency. ... Wal*Mart's experience overseas tends to confirm the limited impact of the retailer's operating advantage. Overseas returns are less than half its domestic margins."—Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/"All Strategy Is Local"/HBR09.05

"In media, broadly defined, actual experience has been even more strikingly at odds with prevailing strategic wisdom, which has proclaimed that successful media companies would be those that integrate content and distribution, are global in reach and embrace and master new technologies. ... None of the leading media companies [Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, News Corp] has equaled the performance of the S&P 500 over the last 15 years." (Also way below traditional newspaper companies.)—Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/"All Strategy Is Local"/HBR09.05

"For all their talk of the global convergence of consumer demand, separate local environments are still characterized, in both obvious and subtle ways, by different tastes, different government rules, different business practices and different cultural norms. ... The more local a company's strategies are, the better the execution tends to be. Localism promotes decentralization—and since the days of Alfred Sloan, decentralized management has consistently served as a superior structure for concentrating management attention."—Bruce Greenwald & Judd Kahn/"All Strategy Is Local"/HBR09.05

The key is the last point I think.  Decentralized management - allowing people to make decisions quickly and respond to changes in the market far faster than bigger behemoths like WalMart - it would seem is more effective than centralised, spoke and wheel-type management models.

I did a study around six years ago looking at the global strategies of legal and financial institutions for the Economic and Social Research Council which reflects a lot of what the HBR report says.   One of the key things I picked out from the research I conducted [amongst over 100 senior managers] was the transferability of knowledge and, perhaps more importantly, 'know-how'.  From this I started to think that the local is the global.  Networks are inherently local and only gain any global strength through their relational interdependence - and in this sense they are only as strong as their weakest link.   

There was a marked distinction in the success of legal and financial organisations strategies.

Only a few of the law firms  managed to become successful global entities due to different legal systems requiring very different staff with relevant languages, interpretive frameworks and knowledge of regional and national legal practice.  The other key thing in legal firms was that lawyers become managers, through their rise to senior partners.  Lawyers don't always make good managers of people or resources. Law firms were being pulled into becoming global because local companies wanted to deal with them as they themselves expanded into foreign markets. It did not come easy to them but many succeeded despite these difficulties, often partnering with local firms. 

Banks and other financial institutions on-the-other-hand were able to benefit in their global networking from greater standardisation of practice.  There may be subtleties in the regulatory environment but there were sufficient standards around language [not the case in Law] and practices such as trading, to enable banks to move staff around relatively easily and to expand into new markets.  Yet, perversely, banks found it harder to establish a strong presence in many of their new markets and gain any form of competitive advantage *because* they did not take heed of subtle differences in the marketplace and in the local culture and this was, I believe, because they were less dependent upon it and embedded in it.  Their strategy was global whereas the law firms strategies were more obviously local and because of that and despite the difficulties they faced law firms often performed very well.

 

Yahoo!: more like human activity and less like software

I've been thinking about open systems, the Long Tail and branding a lot lately and Jeremy Zawodny's talk at OpenTech2005 and some comments he made over lunch made me think that Yahoo! is a great example of a company where the brand is created through the customer, information and their filter [in this case their algorithm]. 

You hear about Yahoo! being a great company now, that the company follows a strategy of an open system from its technical innovation.  I was sceptical that such a large company could be driven by it's development teams.  But it is.  Jeremy Zawodny said that the technology team really does 'lead' the company's strategic direction - they approached the senior management with what they wanted to do and the management were enthusiastic - they wanted to employ an open strategy but didn't know how and were grateful for the development team to give them a solution. Now Yahoo! look to see how they can create 'open' systems from everything they produce.  The different departments from around the world create products and [for now..] the team in California role it out in the developer network.

Why? Well, this seems quite straightforward.  They want to get people innovating around their products to see what they can themselves produce, to see where the market can go, to get the early developers, the people at the 'edges' doing stuff which could potentially be mainstream - because the people at the edges are are usually those ahead of the crowd.  And while many of the things at the edges will remain there we know that niche, Long Tail products are incredibly valuable, especially to a company like Yahoo!

There is a clear marketing and revenue model here.  The marketing model is the blogosphere.  Let developers in the Yahoo! network make products and generate a buzz about them which will reflect well on Yahoo!  This innovative buzz seeps through into mainstream journalism and eventually the NASDAQ...

But so far that's just paper money.  Real revenue is harder to come by.  Jeremy sees SMEs as providing the core market for new products - licensing services to this group could be very profitable but that needs to be done in a way that caters for their niche requirements at the same time as keeping the costs of personalising those requirements down.  So they are speaking to and canvassing opinion from a number of smaller companies about their needs.  Identifying generic core features, functions around a service and working our how that can be delivered to these SME's. 

Good ,yeah?  yeah.   But Yahoo! have, according to Jeremy*, recently added terms to their licence which will allow them to copy your prototype without you suing them.  Of course that doesn't mean they would but they can.  So all those niche services and products being created by intelligent and industrious bedroom developers all over the world could become the potential products for the Yahoo! SME shop.

The Yahoo! model sits with the marketing model put forward by Chris Anderson.  Yahoo! are a media company at the cutting edge of the industry.  Their brand is their information, their service and much of that is provided by other small developers in the long tail, to the niche.  Cumulatively these developers and invaluable marketing buzz... tipping the perception of Yahoo! from second rate internet company to leading edge innovative media giant.. it helps that their products match the hype.  People live their products everday and they're great. 

How are Yahoo! looking to leverage their 'brand'.  Well, obviously through the service, through the information.  And what is the information consist of?  Data, metadata about the way things are described and used.  Jeremy Zawodny's talked a lot about how to utilise data in his OpenTech presentation.  The data provided by others will, essentially, for the basis upon which they will build new services. Services such as:

• playlists
• movie / tv ratings
• im networks and conversations
• blogrolls

The majority of this data is implicitly trust worthy.  They are the result of recommendations.  But the recommendations may be private or retained within a community of users.  Yahoo! and others have the potential to create shared social library's.  In other words the experience of using the internet becomes "more like human activity and less like software".

This makes a lot of sense - your activity becomes the social network.  The community is the internet!   
There are a lot of issues with attaining such a model - not least the unique identifiers of each asset [music track, artist, tv show, actor, etc] which Brendan Quinn mentioned in the Q&A with Jeremy at OpenTech and the standardisation around how they are themselves 'identified'.  Taking all that as a given :-o the main issue will then be around trust.  Who do you trust to provide this information? How do you 'know' the data is itself trustworthy?  You don't.  You have to go with the filter you use - and the 'brand values' of 'trust'.  Who do you trust?  Yahoo!? Google? the BBC?  And to what extent?

* This must be treated with care as I couldn't find specific evidence of this in the Yahoo! terms of use though this paragraph did allude to it:

and you grant to Yahoo! all rights to use and incorporate such contents in the Yahoo! APIs or any other Yahoo! product or service without compensation to you and without further recourse by you

Spatial formations

 My usual fascination with all things spatial has been satiated for today.  Just seen the BBC Streets of Cardiff project which has a  nice Google map type app, though it's somewhat counterintuitive in its navigation.  It weaves in some good naratives from users - though it takes you to a flat page for the content rather than have it to hand on the same interface as the map.  Such user-generated content should perhaps be drawn in dynamically - it would feel much fresher.  Gripes over - it's good stuff.

Secondly, and a more tangetially is the work by the Office for Subversive Architecture who aim to change  our experience of 'the urban', disorietating our ingrained sensibilities of what it means to live the city.  Through the lens of a periscope in a submarine in Bristol, a small house on top of a roof in East London that you can't access and a more blatant kind of PR stunt to promote Hoegarden in London and Manchester. 

Craftwork

  Wool 
  Originally uploaded by JamesB.

I have a thing about haberdashery, partly related to the last post.  John Lewis is just about the only place left that does it well.  And it does it well but you can't shop for it online.  I think they figure, quite rightly - that you need to feel and touch the stuff - it's a very visceral, sensory experience.

The colours are incredible.

A ddendum: just found the craft manifesto by HobbyPrincess which seems to resonate with my thoughts on corporeality, physicality and general making stuff.  I think this is also related to ideas of play.. the sense of doing something that leads somewhere, hopefully to somewhere satisfying.