Puffbox

Here’s something I’ve never understood. I was buying a sandwich in London’s cheap chain Benjy’s, and I couldn’t help noticing the international flavour of the Coca Cola offering. The cans of Coke on the shelves came from Russia, roughly 1,500 miles away. The cans of diet Coke looked to be French, but on closer inspection, turned out to be from Tunisia. The 500ml Coke bottles came, extraordinarily, from Georgia – the ex-Soviet one, sandwiched (ho ho) between Russia and Turkey. That’s a whopping 2,200 miles away. How can it possibly be cost-effective to import something like a crate of Coca Cola from the opposite end of Europe?

• Yahoo house price search
  Hadn’t seen this before… Yahoo now offering a nice postcode or Flash-based front-end to Land Registry data on house prices. Not 100% accurate (eg right price and date for our house, but it isn’t detached), but very nice implementation nonetheless.
  (tags: ephemeral.work localinformation)
• Ian’s Shoelace Site – Shoelace Knots – How To Tie Your Shoes
  For some reason I’ve had real trouble with the laces on one particular pair of new shoes (Skechers). This could be the answer.
  (tags: running)

T-Mobile UK have brought out a ROM upgrade for their MDA Pro PDA/smartphone (aka the HTC Universal). I installed it last night, and although things have been a bit temperamental today, it’s worth having for one simple reason – the restoration of Pocket MSN, including the mobile Hotmail and MSN Messenger clients, which T-M chose (for some reason) not to include in the first place. (I’ve spotted a few other tweaks too, but nothing worth mentioning here to be honest.)

I found details on the enthusiasts’ site XDA-Developers.com. Be warned – the discussion is geeky, but the download is valid. Just bear in mind that (a) it really will take about 20 minutes; and (b) it will wipe everything in your ‘main memory’. Be sure to back up your contacts and calendar, and be prepared to reinstall your favourite downloaded apps.

• If you press the wrong button on my page, it’s my fault, not yours.
• If it needs a help file, it’s too complicated.
• People are always more stupid than you think.

A meeting over coffee this morning started on the subject of IT consultancy, and somehow drifted into astrology. I still place myself in the camp which says ‘1 in 12 people can’t all have the same type of day’; but it made for intriguing conversation nonetheless.

One thing which really struck me was the notion of air, fire, water and earth (in that specific order). At the top of the management chain are the air people, who waft around from topic to topic. They call it strategy, vision, whatever. Everyone else calls it something quite different. The fire people sit one level down, taking the air people’s ideas and generating heat and passion around them. But they need water people to carry those ideas out to the earth people at ground level.

Looking back, a surprising amount of my career experience fits that formula. Most of my bosses have been ‘airheads’. 😉 And for my most successful projects, I can identify the ‘water’ person who helped my work flow down to the more earthy folks. (I can think of a few which failed due to the lack of such a person, too.)

None of which should be taken as a value judgment, in any way. Just as the ancients believed life was made up of those four elements, maybe we need all four elements – in that specific order – to make a successful project. Just a thought.

It’s well worth casting an eye over what The Guardian’s Simon Waldman told this week’s FT Media conference about RSS.

What currently goes under the label of RSS is going to lead to the most profound changes in the way that people engage with us and our content. It is scary. And it’s exciting. And it’s certainly too important to leave to the geeks.

Pretty much every solution I’m putting forward in my work these days has an RSS component to it. (And occasionally, RSS is the solution.) Sometimes I feel I’m getting carried away with the idea. Then I read something like this, and realise it isn’t just me after all.

My piece yesterday on Ricky Gervais’s podcast gave me my first first-hand experience of being ‘dugg’. (Yes, it’s a word.) OK, so it’s probably bad form to ‘digg’ your own story… but I was fascinated to see what sort of effect it would have on traffic to my humble blog.

The answer? It was instant, and it was big. Within seconds of submitting the story, I started seeing referrals from digg.com. Maybe I was lucky with my timing, or maybe people really have nothing to do but watch the new stories pop up. (The live Digg Spy view is fantastic, if you’ve never seen it.) A day and a bit later, and we’re well into three figures hitting that story alone. Nothing in A-list blogger terms, maybe, but pretty good in my book. I’m still seeing a few referrals, although mostly now from searches of the Digg archive.

The great thing about blogging is that every now and then, someone picks up on something you write, and sends you some juicy follow-up. Some very interesting information has fallen into my lap regarding the world’s number one podcast, The Ricky Gervais Show, which casts a slightly distasteful shadow over it all. All I can say is, it comes from a very well-placed source.

From the very beginning, the project’s key word, in many senses, was ‘free’. Creative freedom for Gervais and co; free podcast downloads for the punters; and, from what I hear, free hosting.

I have it on very good authority that Positive Internet – who said they expected 30,000 downloads per week, but eventually found themselves supporting more than eight times that figure – weren’t paid in cash to host the podcast. Instead, they got free publicity: every episode closed with a namecheck, often accompanied by a glowing personal endorsement. ‘Great guys… brilliant guys… experts in the (hosting) field, and that’s why I like them… genius input and good work…’ – not bad.

Barter arrangements like these aren’t uncommon, especially in a small business or start-up context. But it’s easy to understand how bad feelings might arise when Ricky justifies the decision to start charging for the podcasts by saying: ‘We have got to charge a little bit for it, because it does cost money to host.’

So, with the series heading for its final episode, someone at Audible recognises a business opportunity, and cuts a deal with them. Then, suddenly, episode 12 opens with the news that ‘we may be carrying on’. In fact, Stephen Merchant lets a bit more slip at the end: despite all Ricky’s earlier talk of ‘we’re not sure’, he says ‘there’s also a free taster’ – which seems a very specific promise, if it’s all so vague.

(Once you’ve punched in your credit card number, of course, we get a little more candid. ‘I’ll tell you what’s new about (the new series): this time you have to pay for it,’ he cackles at the start of the second ‘season’ opener.)

I don’t think anyone could justifiably condemn him for moving from ‘free’ to ‘fee’. It’s nothing to be ashamed of: I mean, we all have to put food on the table. If your 12-week freebie commitment expires, and you reckon you can make a bit of cash by doing a few more, good on you. But please Ricky, why not just be straight about it?

Otherwise, you can understand why people might take matters into their own hands, and post dodgy copies for download on their own sites and blogs. It took me precisely one web search to find a cracked version: even more helpfully, someone had tagged it ‘piracy’.

UPDATE: Just for completeness… I’ve been able to confirm that Ricky initially brought the idea to Guardian Unlimited, who paid him ‘minimal artist rates and a part of the production costs’ to do the series of 12. Channel 4 did pay Ricky, not the Guardian, for its advertising slots.

• On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect — Dijksterhuis et al. 311 (5763): 1005 — Science
  I did notice this when it first emerged about a fortnight ago… but today, as I’m staring at an intimidating information architecture problem, it makes sense. But not good news for someone who’s paid on a day-rate.
  (tags: ephemeral.work)

For those wondering when we’ll get a community-edited site for general news… today might be it. Newsvine bills itself as a ‘collective… a place where anyone can read, write and influence the news.’ In practice, that means tagging like del.icio.us, editorial-by-voting like Digg, users’ columns like a blogging platform… and a steady supply of ‘professional’ content to keep it all ticking over. And as of today, it’s open to the public.

I was lucky enough to get in on the closed beta launch earlier in the year. I was excited by what I saw, but not entirely won over. Looking again though, I’m a little more impressed, and a little more convinced. Their UK homepage is still a bit too US-driven and AP-dominated for my liking, but it’s good to see the user participation starting to happen.

A brief look at the company blog, or the CEO’s own musings, and it’s clear these guys know what they’re trying to do. They could succeed… although I’m beginning to feel a US-hosted service won’t be able to crack the UK market.

So who’s going to bring this to the UK? I can only think of a handful of candidates, with access to the base content, and the open-mindedness to let users run their own show. I’m looking to Simon Waldman at the Guardian; or Lloyd Shepherd, now returning to Yahoo. You could make a case for Sky or MSN doing something, but I just don’t see it.

UPDATE: I think Mike Arrington is getting just a little carried away when he says it’s perfect.