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January 29, 2007
Watching the detectors
Gary Marshall asks on his blog: X-ray cameras on lampposts, is this a wind-up or what? Sadly, I reckon it isn't. Today's story in the Currant Bun describes a Home Office plan - well a memo in which some civil servants think aloud what might be possible having watched Total Recall in a quest for ideas - to put 'X-ray cameras' on various bits of street furniture.
The reasoning is simple. If you can see through people's clothing you can see the weapons they might be carrying. Luckily, the UK government does not want to join other shadier groups in wanting to irradiate us with high-energy photons. The Home Office proposal looks like it is actually referring to terahertz waves rather than X-rays. Being a bit less energetic than infrared light, terahertz waves would merely give our bodies a gentle tickle rather than a good bludgeoning in the way that X-rays would. My guess is that The Sun's editors realised that X-rays would get the point across more quickly and simply than trying to explain terahertz waves.
The giveaway on terahertz is the idea that the images would look through clothing and reveal people - as opposed to people's bones. The technology has been tried in airports and, with some techniques in research at the moment, it will be possible to shrink the electronics needed down to about the size of a shoebox in a few years. So, that bit is almost certainly not a wind-up. Whether the policy behind it is a wind-up is another matter.
Posted by Chris at 8:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The great black hole of video
Robert Scoble has discovered several things about the media although I'm not sure he has consciously realised any of them. On Saturday, he was mightily annoyed that very few bloggers had linked to his 40-minute video of a visit to one of Intel's fabs in the wake of the chip giant's claim of a breakthrough in chipmaking.
He particularly railed against sites like Engadget ignoring him, saying that they were prepared to link to mass media but not bloggers and that it's all to do with snobbery. Several people beat me to the main reason: it probably has a lot to do with the video being 40 minutes long. Who, in the short-deadline world of gadget blogging, has the time to watch 40 minutes of video just to find out if anything interesting happens. It doesn't get much better if you start the video. You get the usual fab-tour stuff of "it's really clean", "it's bigger inside than I expected", "people wear bunny suits for real". Where's the news content? You'd have to dig for it.
Scoble's first problem is his chosen medium. With today's techniques, it's hard to dice up video in a way that makes sense for an Internet audience. You've really got to know that something worthwhile is in that block of bits to plough through it. To be fair, Scoble did do a post detailing where the key bits are. But, that only serves to highlight the deficiencies of most Internet video. Everybody is treating it like television. There is actually more innovation in respect of audio and video in financial webcasts than a lot of the podcasting stuff going on now. They, at least, provide links to segments of audio or video. They are extremely unfriendly to any browser that doesn't have the words "Internet" and "Explorer" in its name, but it beats trying to guess where the Q&A starts.
Right now, the videocasters on the Internet are desperately trying to create TV because they think it's sexy, not because it provides any value over alternate forms of communications. Text is fast. You can skim through it and find the bits you need really quickly. Ask people who do shorthand and take audio notes which they prefer to work from. Shorthand is harder to parse, but it's quicker overall when trying to write up a story in a hurry. Audio is for people with time on their hands.
Video is not even as accessible as text. With text, you can get translations into other languages and speech. You get to choose how. With video, it's you and a play button. And maybe a fast-forward and rewind if you're lucky and the connection doesn't crap out halfway through.
Video has its place. You can show people how to do something a lot quicker using moving pictures than with descriptions. But, in a fab, everything interesting is buried inside anonymous black-and-white boxes bathed in a sickly yellow light. Fabs don't allow cameras inside partly because of the dust inside them but mostly because they don't want knowledgeable outsiders knowing which particular anonymous boxes they are using. If you don't know what goes on in a fab, they are the dullest places on earth. Video is mostly redundant in these places even from a demonstration point of view.
Scoble's second problem is that he used to benefit from network effects. Now he is a victim of network effects. I can't help thinking that his video would have been noticed by a lot more bloggers if he still worked for Microsoft. People would track Scoble just to find out more about the workings of Microsoft. A lot fewer are bothered about the internal workings of Podtech. Fame. It's so fleeting.
Posted by Chris at 8:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 25, 2007
Bureaucracies aren't made, they just kind of appear
One thing struck me about Microsoft's wrangling with Wikipedia over the entry on its XML file formats. The procedure by which people try to change entries that involve them is surprisingly close to that used by traditional publishers, whether of newspapers or encyclopedias. That is, it would be if the publisher had a bureaucratic system based on China's.
Want a correction or clarification in a newspaper? You complain to an editor or ombudsman. There is some discussion that might lead to a correction, depending on how good the claim is. Or they tell you to go away.
According to Wikipedia supremo Jimmy Wales, if you want something about you or something you are directly involved with corrected on Wikipedia - which anybody can edit as long as they're not somebody - you complain on the talk page and an editor will do something about it. Or they tell you to go away. However, it's all a bit like dealing with local bureaucrats in rural China - each one does it differently, and attitudes can change dramatically in the space of days, although they will refer to the same rule book and come back with some obscure answer like: "WP:FOYC". In this case, the answer, apparently, was to go away and write a white paper. Next week? Fill in Form ZZ3BQXL in triplicate and have it countersigned by an accredited software developer.
The evolution of Wikipedia from egalitarian vision to unpaid bureaucracy has been fascinating to watch. Its value as an accurate encyclopedia may be questionable but as social experiment it's wonderful. It has compressed social developments that took years in other industries into a matter of a few years - and demonstrated how bureaucracies self-organise.
It also acts as an argument against Wales's idea of having newspapers host wikis for news they otherwise can't touch. In his interview with Oliver Luft of Journalism.co.uk, as he talks grandly how doing it is all about people, he seems unaware that the model he proposes for tomorrow's newspaper looks, every day, more like the existing model. Except that people don't get paid. So, it's more like a British local newspaper then.
Posted by Chris at 8:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 23, 2007
Doctor doctor, tell me the news
Edelman got a market-research company to go out and ask people: "Who do you trust?" They seemed somewhat surprised to note that trust is in short supply, particularly in the UK. The recommendation? You could probably have guessed this one without even looking at the answers:
"If companies want to build trust in the UK, then this survey demonstrates that they must engage with their audiences more effectively than ever before, using a range of traditional and new media."
That's Stuart Smith, CEO of Edelman London. Whatever you were doing before, do more of it. OK, your trust rating has been going down for five years but, at some point, it might start working.
The interesting thing is Edelman's focus on peer-to-peer communications. That is, bloggers. In the bullet-point filled Social Media Press Release, David Brain, president and CEO of the PR company is a bit opaque about it:
"The growing trust in ‘people like me’ and average employees means that companies must design their communications as much on the horizontal or the peer-to-peer axis as on the vertical or top-down axis."
I see. I think. Maybe we should bung the idea in the mental microwave and see if the cat salutes it.
Notice the use of the phrase "people like me" in Brain's seemingly random collision of words. As soon as the results came out about the truth-defeating nature of spin, people were actively spinning the results. And it wasn't just Edelman. Bloggers came out of the survey particularly badly. They ended up with less trust than the year before - down from 10 per cent to 6 per cent. Frankly, and without knowing the composition of the sample, that could be little more than a combination of lack of awareness and statistical flukes. However, keen to come away with a positive message about media, they took the idea that people say they trust "people like me" and converted that phrase to mean bloggers, on the basis that anyone can set up a blog (which does not necessarily mean everyone sets up a blog).
They've read it all wrong. With a trust rating of close to 50 per cent, which is not bad compared with the others, companies should try to get doctors rather than CEOs, hacks, bloggers and PRs to get the message out: "Yes, Mrs Miggins, take two of these VasoFlaterTM tablets a day. And can I recommend CarpetCoke as a way of keeping your olfactory system up to snuff? Plus, there's a two-for-one on low-fat chicken parings at Iceland this week. Don't listen to what they say, they're really very good for you."
And it could be a winner for the pharma companies, as they get to defray the cost of expensive seminars on new wonder drugs by offering sponsorship packages to companies in need of an image makeover.
Actually, NGOs do quite well with almost as good a score as doctors and narcissists. "Hello, is that Oxfam? We've got a proposition for you..."
Posted by Chris at 7:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 22, 2007
"We must reinvent the press release. What's it meant to do again?"
"PR people nowadays just can't write for shit."
That's Jeremy Pepper writing on the undedifying spectacle of a bunch of people arguing about whether press releases should come pre-equipped with Del.icio.us tags. Yes, I know those people refer to it as the Social Media Press Release, but the former just seems a better explanation given that a group of PRs and non-PRs can't actually define what is meant to go into the new-format release without falling out.
After Jeremiah Owyang and Stowe Boyd - who you might regard as being at the happy-clappy end of the social-media revolution - wrote about how they could not understand why PRs were trying to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the resolutely Media 1.0 press release, the PRs rounded on them with rebuttals along the lines of: "You silly boys, you just don't understand how PR works." I've never been under impression they want to know how PR works - and a lot of people like it that way.
I think I'm going over old ground here, but the whole idea of the Social Media Press Release is pointless. It's solving a problem that doesn't exist without actually addressing problems that do. For the last few years, I've been saying to PRs that their contact with the press, particularly those in trade media, is going to go away. They need to go direct to the user. And the press release is a piss-poor way of selling things direct.
Why is that the case? Because the press release was never designed to be consumed unadulterated. It was, and still is, a relatively efficient way of getting an announcement to 10, 20 or more people. You don't have to call each of them up individually, you just send the release using the fastest means available. If they want to know more, they call you (or they call other people). Those people were, and are, journalists.
That "PR people can't write for shit" doesn't matter all that much in the traditional environment. The stuff will get translated - it better had or it will be ignored by the reader.
Now, the people behind the Social Media Press Release understand one thing - that the message is going direct, around the filtering process put in place by the traditional media. What they don't seem to understand is that a lot of people reading those releases are not much interested in 'remixing' the content or 'engaging in the conversation'. I have no interest in conversing with Reckitt Benckiser over their latest floor cleaner. I'd like to know what it does if I'm standing in a supermarket looking for floor cleaner - and in words I can understand without a barrelful of quotes from enthusiastic veeps of marketing and analysts. But I'm not subscribing to RSS feeds to find out about floor cleaners.
Maybe if I feel strongly enough as a consumer to start arguing the toss over the launch on a blog, I will start looking further. Clarins' launch of a cream that magically blocks 'artificial' electromagnetic waves (presumably allowing the natural ones through) would drive me to a comment or two, beyond what reporters such as Alok Jha have already written, but I don't think that was the sort of commentary the social-media PR brethren had in mind. However, a few Del.icio.us tags at the end is not going to make a difference to that. I'm even a little wary of using features that amount to putting a tracker signal on the material that companies send out. The core of the issue is the content of the release or whatever you want to call a corporate announcement, not its fancypants XML wrapping.
The tracker is the only thing that makes sense to me about the whole initiative in that it has an objective - it goes back to an earlier effort by PRs to standardise on a new-technology press release using XML a few years back. It had nothing to do with providing more succinct or readable information - it's sole feature was to track coverage assuming that hacks played ball and kept the tags in place through four or five editing processes. It didn't work then. It won't work now, not least because the end user is no more mindful of what PRs want than journalists are right now.
Posted by Chris at 8:50 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 10, 2007
Don't mention the Newton. I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it
I can't help thinking that the curse of the Newton lurks behind the Apple iPhone. During his keynote at Macworld, Apple CEO Steve Jobs went out of his way to put down the stylus as a way of getting things done on a handheld machine. That may be because everybody else working in this space is wrong - pudgy fingers are best after all - or Jobs was very keen to ensure that nobody ever turned round to him and asked: "Didn't you have a go at this before?"
If it was the case that the team was forbidden to make any mention of a stylus in the iPhone's development or - the horror - handwriting recognition because of Apple's legacy, then corporate vanity will have played a part in turning a promising, good-looking device into an expensive but dispensable toy. Image was more important than usability - the iPhone's vaunted selling point.
The iPod user interface works with just a couple of buttons - easily replicated on a touchscreen - because you never need to put anything into it. Nothing is more than a couple of clicks and scrolls away. It would be a total pain if I actually wanted to edit a track name or a few contact details.
If I'm typing, I like to be able to see what's actually going to appear. A touch-keyboard designed for fingers is going to consume most of the iPhone's screen, even just using the multipurpose numeric keys of a standard handset. Having most of the screen taken up by a virtual keyboard works for satellite-navigation systems as you only have to enter one or two lines of an address. It isn't going to fly for anything but the shortest text message or email.
As an iPod that can make calls and surf the web a bit, the iPhone design looks good. Very good. It at least cuts the number of bits of hardware you have to tout around. Then again, the 8Gbyte Nano is barely noticeable in a pocket. For the equivalent of £300 plus a lengthy mobile-phone contract, I'd be happier with something that was going to be usable for writing and emailing on the move.
I would certainly be happier if a handheld computer was based on a variant of Apple's OS X than the current offerings out there. For too long, the sales pitch has been on adding more and more features to handhelds at the expense of usability. Not only are the features hard to use, they rarely work as advertised.
I ended up ditching a Palm LifeDrive and replacing it with a Windows Mobile-based HP Ipaq because the Palm software was so, so bad. A web browser that is barely able to handle ordinary websites was just the beginning. Then there was a WiFi implementation so rubbish that the free network at MIT sent the device into a reboot panic. But the real pain was that Palm changed Graffiti, its handwriting system, to make life easier for new users. Anyone who had learned the old system found that not only were those gestures no longer worked but that the new system was slower and less reliable.
It is a testament to Microsoft's doggedness at plugging away at something until it finally begins to work that the Ipaq turns out to be a far better machine and, ironically, has a handwriting mode that works better for Graffiti users than Palm's replacement.
Even so, the Ipaq is hardly convenient to use. Just getting it to connect to a WiFi network initially seemed to involve an incredible number of settings, all in highly obscure places. Then there is the small matter of having to run the setup software under emulation on a Mac - a little reminder of how corporate vanity conspires against computer companies' desires to make money. However, the Ipaq's little foibles have nothing to do with its use of a stylus.
It is possible that the iPhone has types of gesture recognition that goes some way to avoiding the problems of using a big virtual keypad - we just haven't seen them yet - but the user interface is at odds with the positioning. In an ebook reader or an iPod that makes calls, that multi-fingered interface would be a real winner - but those would be much cheaper devices.
In short, don't expect the iPhone to be a runaway best-seller.
Posted by Chris at 8:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
