The IT Crowd: seen it before

I don’t know what to make of the first episode of Channel 4’s new sitcom, The IT Crowd. Granted, all sitcoms are meant to be a bit predictable. But if you made a list of all the stereotypical jokes about geeks or technology, you could have sat through the opening 20 minutes and ticked them off, one by one. Geeks smell – check. Geeks do pointlessly pedantic things – check. Geeks dress stupidly or scruffily – check, both. Geeks can’t handle talking to women – check.
There were a few positive signs, if you’re an optimist. The opening visual gag. The central character stretching the truth on her CV, and getting found out. The support call becoming a little confrontational. Plus a little mindless violence never does any harm. But we don’t need a running joke of ‘have you turned it off and on again?’. And Chris Morris – is he auditioning for the role of CJ in a remake of Reggie Perrin? Come on Chris, you didn’t get where you are today by shamelessly imitating classic sitcom characters.
Will I watch it? Yeah, probably. Maybe your first episode needs to play to the stereotypes, to win an audience. Maybe it’s not meant for those of us on the inside; we’ve already had Nathan Barley. But let’s put it this way, The IT Crowd will need to develop some serious depth if it’s to last a full series. Judge for yourself: episode two is online from tonight.

IE7: watch out, Bloglines and del.icio.us

I’ve been preaching the gospel of RSS for some time now, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting the first public release of Internet Explorer v7. Well, the beta has landed… and I think I can see where Microsoft is heading with this. Bloglines and del.icio.us, look out.
IE7 'favorites center' screenshot
True enough, the Firefox RSS icon has made its appearance. Subscribing to feeds is kept very simple; the icon lights up, you click on it, you see the feed in XSLT-styled form with a big link at the top – ‘subscribe to this feed’. Adding a feed is as simple as adding a bookmark, selecting a folder or creating a new one. And therein lies the key.
Microsoft is treating RSS feeds as part of the bookmark concept, but as a parallel track. When you call up the ‘favorites’ sidebar, you effectively have tabbed options at the top for what you might call ‘static’ favorites and ‘live’ feeds. So let’s click on ‘feeds’… and open a feed in the main content panel. Hold on… a left panel of folders and links? The feeds appearing in the web content window? No question, this is the Bloglines way of working. I suppose it makes sense to copy the market leader.
If you subscribe to any feeds using categories, such as any of BBC News’s offerings, you’ll be pleased to hear these are parsed properly, and displayed in a floating box on the right, indicating the number of items for each category. Yes, that’s right, very reminiscent of del.icio.us. Throw in a bit of social functionality, and we’re there.
And then the penny drops. The key to this is Windows Live Favorites. So far, this service only offers an online place to store your static bookmarks. If they were to include live backup of your feeds as well, you suddenly unite the functionality of two leading players in the whole Web 2.0 world: one which happens to belong to Ask Jeeves, the other to Yahoo. And with feed consumption being (very) similar to reading a web page, it’s easy to see a seamless experience between client and online. The best of both worlds?
This clearly isn’t being aimed at power users. Even terms like ‘podcast’, which have entered the public consciousness, have been dodged, in favour of ‘attachment’. But Microsoft looks poised to do it again – let others innovate, then bundle the best bits together and call it an integrated solution. And we all know what happens next.

Arctic Monkeys: the new Hear'Say

The Arctic Monkeys may or may not be 2006’s answer to The Strokes. But you can’t knock the fact that their ‘disruptive’ approach to promoting themselves and their music has worked.
Actually, that’s not strong enough. This doesn’t just prove that the ‘disruption’ model can be successful. Arguably, it proves that it works better than any other strategy has worked since the 1960s. According to an HMV spokesperson:

‘In terms of sheer impact, where a band has come from virtual obscurity to achieve huge, overnight success, we haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Beatles.’

Or rather, technically, since Hear’Say… and suddenly it doesn’t sound quite as sexy, does it. Time will tell if it merits its place as one of the five best British albums ever, ever, ever, as listed in this week’s NME.

An open mind to timewasting

I recently visited the new Shoreditch offices of a consultancy I’m currently working with. The more ‘presentable’ staff – account management, creative, editorial – were on the ground and first floors. The dev teams were kept safely away from actual clients, in the upper levels.
As we climbed the stairs, my host apologised in advance in case we caught them playing games. It comes with the territory, she explained; guys with a passion for that sort of thing were precisely the sort of people they wanted working for them. A certain amount of game-playing was tolerated, and almost encouraged.
Continue reading An open mind to timewasting

Famous for not being famous

I’m aware of the mild irony that, just as I’m noting a story on the rise of the ‘me too’ figure… non-celebrity Chantelle wins Celebrity Big Brother. This is taking the peer-to-peer thing one step too far.
I genuinely don’t know how to read this. Perhaps it’s the voting audience being deliberately perverse. Or maybe it’s the backlash against the cult of the celeb. The fact that a blonde PR bunny, the archetypal Essex girl is leading that charge? Now that, dear readers, really is irony.
We’ve had plenty of celebs who have been labelled as ‘famous for being famous’, and little else. With millions of viewers having cast their votes, we now have someone who is nationally famous for not being famous. Getting my head around that will take some time.

PR's Me2 Revolution: Edelman endorses blog culture

PR agency chief Richard Edelman preaches the gospel of the blogosphere in his company’s influential annual Trust Barometer survey. In a posting on his often challenging blog, he writes:

The employee is the new credible source for information about a company, giving insight from the front lines. Smart companies must reinvent their communications thinking, moving from a sole reliance on top-down messages delivered through mass advertising. This is the Me2 revolution.

His company’s study has tracked the recent growth of the ‘someone like me’ figure as a company’s most influential spokesperson. His data charts the corresponding decline of ‘establishment’ figures in people’s estimations. This is all properly researched, and can be traced back. He can’t be accused of jumping on the ‘whatever 2.0’ bandwagon here.
His conclusions range from recognising the importance of internal communications, to embracing new channels like blogs and podcasts. It’s nothing new to those of us already engaged in this space. But when it comes from the mouth of Richard Edelman, you can expect the mainstream to take notice. This is an important endorsement.

Criminal misinformation

I’m delighted to see that media representatives are to be included on Charles Clarke’s panel considering how the UK’s national crime statistics are put together and communicated, as reported by the BBC. Government’s failure to provide a set of figures which make sense to the public – or more specifically, the electorate – has been an embarrassment.
Not long ago, I was working for National Statistics, and lobbying hard for the general public to be recognised as a key audience, if not the key audience, for stats like these. Invariably, I lost out in an argument over mathematics and/or philosophy. Terms like ‘dumbing down’ were often thrown around. The result is that people across the country have totally mixed-up views of what is actually happening around them: crime is down, fear of crime is up. Let’s hope the media can represent the public’s interest.
The figures need to be clearly expressed – regardless of the complexity of the calculation process, or the statistical technicalities involved. And they need to be made widely accessible, at local geography level. We still need a single government website where ordinary people can type in their postcodes, and find out all the hard facts about what’s happening in their local area. Neighbourhood Statistics could have been that website; but a brief glance at the jargon-laden language shows where its focus lies.

Hughes, Galloway and the 'Big Brother' society

Today’s papers are dominated by two surprising stories of political naivete.
I have no ‘inside track’; I’m just an ordinary guy who reads the newspapers. I thought the question of Simon Hughes’s sexuality was common knowledge. Like Charles Kennedy’s drink problem, there were plenty of nudges and winks about it in the Westminster sketch columns. I found it really odd when he came out (pardon the pun) with such a categoric denial in last week’s papers. Today comes the U-turn.
I genuinely don’t care if he’s gay or not. (Incidentally, I have yet to see the words ‘I am gay’ appearing between inverted commas.) But I do feel uneasy about him fibbing – or maybe even worse, playing with semantics – in the Independent last week, saying: ‘The answer is no, as it happens. But if it was the case, which it isn’t, I hope that would not become an issue.’ Of course he was going to get caught out. In a ‘Big Brother’ world of search engines and cameraphones, you have to assume that everything you do or say will be captured and can be easily retrieved. And rightly or wrongly, politics does not forgive those who U-turn.
I suspect George Galloway gets this concept, but took it a step too far. I can understand why he went on Big Brother: round-the-clock filming, live streaming, and unlimited opportunity to describe his political philosophy. He’s a lone voice among 646 MPs; he needs ‘the oxygen of publicity’. But if he thought Channel 4 was ever going to give large amounts of peak airtime to his considered opinions, he was very much mistaken. Miaow.

Stormhoek Shiraz disappoints

I didn’t mean this blog to become a wine review site, but following my Pinot Grigio taste test earlier this week, I spotted a bottle of Stormhoek Shiraz in Sainsbury’s last night, and – once again, calling it work-related – I decided to give it a try, on behalf of the blogosphere.
The initial smell when I unscrewed the cap was most promising: certainly the best wine I’ve sniffed this year (so far). I was expecting a really weighty red, just how I like it. Sadly, it didn’t follow through. Not a bad wine; in fact, perfectly respectable – but not exceptional. After the very impressive Pinot Grigio, it was a bit of a let-down.