Innovation in Software

When you first watch this, you think it’s some guy being videoed by people laughing at him for not dancing very well. Then another guy joins in and it’s two guys who are clearly drunk and probably on something. Then the third guy gets involved… and within a minute you start to laugh…

By the end I am asking myself the same question as the girl whose voice you hear asking “How did he do that?”. He understands his audience and gave them what they wanted right there and then, that’s all.

(via Seth whose blog should be in your RSS reader if it isn’t already).

Tim O’Reilly posted some extracts today from a New York Times piece on Jon Stewart, possibly one of the most famous faces of American comedy satire – and journalism – in the World.

What does this have to do with software innovation? Stay with me.

Here in the UK, his program is broadcast the day after it’s broadcast in the US on More4. I find myself twitching slightly if I’m not near a Freeview box around 8:30pm as a result. For a long time I’ve been trying to work out what this means to the future of journalism – thanks to my vested interest in such questions – but also how this translates into an era of Web editorial. What I’ve begun to realise is my fascination is with the disruptive innovation the Daily Show represents:

‘When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And a study this year from the center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that “ ‘The Daily Show’ is clearly impacting American dialogue” and “getting people to think critically about the public square.”’

A comedian who in his own words is “throwing spitballs” is the 4th most admired journalist in America? Here’s the real meat for me though:

“Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been “The Daily Show” that has tenaciously tracked big, “super depressing” issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.”

When Outfoxed came out I was angry about how news had become entertainment specifically because journalists were not dealing with the big issues and producers were allowing those with very strong political views help a political administration skip over troubling questions by suggesting it was the questioners who were at fault.

Yet here we are with somebody using news as a platform on which to build comedy, attacking the establishment. Do I like this more because I agree with his politics? Or because it’s funny rather than nasty? No, I like it more than Fox because he uses the technique to point out the lies rather than promote them as truth.

So, back to software innovation. For the last year I’ve had this mantra: it’s not about the idea, it’s about the execution. It’s about making sure you know exactly what your intended outcome is, testing your assumptions every step of the way, and aiming for that goal. If that goal isn’t something tangible (money in the bank, simpler processes, helping people see truth), you’re not going to get anywhere.

And just like Jon Stewart, every programmer and software entrepreneur has the opportunity to disrupt and make a hit potentially by looking at something they hate and despise and using the techniques of their “enemy” to promote values of a bygone era (in Stewart’s case journalistic, in our case scientific).

I’m starting to get a hint from programmers I know that they realise that during the last decade of dot.com boom and bust and “Web 2.0” hype, they’ve lost some rigour in the process. I’m just as guilty as any one. I think we’re going to see a scientific renaissance in the web industry and some smash hits will emerge as a result.

I also think Tim O’Reilly’s point that potentially we’re going to see bloggers adopt the same techniques to try and push the envelope a little further is intriguing. If they do, they’re going to need the tools to help them do that. Perhaps UK bloggers could try and take the lead and reverse the trend of poor success rates around commercial blogging here in the UK.

Let’s take a couple of ideas driving Innovation in the software arena right now:

• Work should be more like play
• 3D alternate Worlds are useful in some way
• People are finding it difficult to deal with the incoming flow of information

Each on their own can lead to ideas like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Second Life or better Bayesian filtering. In short, when you focus on an idea you can find ways of making software better. Some people ask themselves, wouldn’t it be great if you mixed some of them up? Say a 3D World where you work? Or handling information flows like a game?

What happens when you try and mix all three up? Well, I concur with TechCrunch when I say this example is just pure evil.

Yes, I can’t quite believe it myself. And I thought the ads in GMail would harm productivity in a mail application…

With all the current hoo-haa about DRM (Digital Rights Management), you’d think controlling who could listen to music, where and when was a modern phenomena. You might be forgiven for thinking that it’s only since the rise of (the illegal version of) Napster a few years back that “the Establisment” has had to deal with uppity teenagers who don’t understand “the rules”.

Think again.

From Wikipedia:

Miserere by Gregorio Allegri is a piece of a cappella religious music (a setting of Psalm 50/51) composed during the reign of Pope Urban VIII, probably during the 1630s, for use in the Sistine Chapel during matins on Wednesday and Friday of Holy Week. […] at some point, it became forbidden to transcribe the music and it was only allowed to be performed at those particular services, adding to the mystery surrounding it. Writing it down or performing it elsewhere was punisheable [sic] by excommunication.

[…]

Although there were a handful of supposed transcriptions in various royal courts in Europe, none of them succeeded in capturing the beauty of the Miserere as performed annually in the Sistine Chapel. According to the popular story (backed up by family letters), the fourteen-year-old Mozart was visiting Rome, when he first heard the piece during the Wednesday service. Later that day, he wrote it down entirely from memory, returning to the Chapel that Friday to make minor corrections. Some time during his travels, he met the British historian Dr. Charles Burney, who obtained the piece from him and took it to London, where it was published in 1771. Once it was published, the ban was lifted, and Allegri’s Miserere has since been one of the most popular a cappella choral works now performed.

[…]

Mozart was summoned to Rome by the Pope, only instead of excommunicating the boy the Pope showered praises on him for his feat of musical genius.

Thanks to the advent of technology, we’re all Mozart now…

Tony Wilson died early yesterday evening at Christie’s Hospital. Everybody in Manchester knew it was going to happen soon, but it doesn’t make the sadness of those who loved him and his work any less sharp.

Whilst this is a blog about innovation in software, the under current has always been about innovation in Manchester as well – and there are few people who can be described as an innovator in this city as much as Wilson can.

The tributes have started, and I’m sure I won’t be the only person to talk about encounters with him. Last time I met him was when he was having a meeting with my then-boss. It was about 11am and he was quite clearly off his tits – and said so – which made for a less than intelligent discussion. Many encounters you’ll hear first-hand about Tony seem to involve eccentricity, drugs, and occasionally a shade of darkness creeps in. Those stories rarely break out into public accounts of him. In a way, that’s a good thing: his work was never mediocre, never banal, and that’s a rarity these days in media.

The next few weeks of mourning are going to be the climax of this City’s obsession with a man who helped shape Mancunian identity over the last two decades. It will culminate in a collective prayer of “RIP” and then….

One of the barriers we have as a city in some ways, is that the only thing people outside the city have to talk about when the topic of Manchester comes up in conversation is the bands from Factory, the Hacienda and occasionally football.

I don’t think he’d be happy with that. He got involved in the political scene over the last few years and was an ardent campaigner of a regional assembly (notwithstanding the fact that for various reasons it was a flawed idea), and got very bothered about the future of the North West as a whole.

His ego aside (he was a self-confessed ego-maniac), I’m pretty sure that the last thing Wilson would have wanted is for the future of Manchester to be entirely about what *he* did here. I can already feel a pull in that direction – it’s been subtly happening for years, the Northern Quarter being a good example – but it’s the wrong way to decide a direction.

Yes, a cultural renaissance did happen here – one that impacted the entire globe – and one of the important sparks was Factory and Hacienda. Their spirit, like the spirit of Wilson himself, shouldn’t and won’t be forgotten. Whilst physically no longer with us, the memory of their achievements will colour our city’s culture for a long time to come, but they are not in themselves what the future is about.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is, we should collectively pay tribute to Wilson the way he paid tribute to Manchester: ask ourselves “what’s next?” and then give it a go.

Well, I laughed:

The horrible truth is, we’ve become so obsessed with our own jargon, we’re no longer interested in how people really want to behave online.

Or is just that traditional shopping was always broken? :-)

via confused of calcutta

We should do something to fix this you know…

One of the most fascinating parts of looking at web server log files, has always been what search terms people type in to discover content on the site. There are few things that get you closer to staring into the eyeball of all humanity than seeing what they ask Google for.

I use the usual tools, but in recent weeks I’ve been trying out 103bees which, as well as providing all sorts of things similar to Google Analytics, throws you an e-mail every week with the search queries people have been using.

It took me a while to remember why it might be relevant to this site for somebody to type in “organised pigeon hunting”. It would appear I am not alone in finding some of my search traffic quite odd.

In the past I have always avoided being tagged by various blogging memes. However, it would seem my head is just slightly too far above the parapet for Will and so I find myself tagged with the ‘5 things you don’t know about me’ meme.

To be honest, when it comes to working out what you might not know about me, not only does it matter how long you’ve known me, but at what point you knew me best. Even people who have known me a long time will not know about large swathes of my life, because I have had several distinct periods in my life that don’t quite join up easily. If I ever get married, my stag do is going to be weird.

So, here goes, these are the top five “I bet you don’t know at least four of these, however you know me” items on my list.

1. As a young child, I was haunted by a family. Yeah, I’d laugh like you are right now too if somebody had just told me that. I can remember some of the conversations with reasonable clarity, and I even know why they were hanging out with me – a reason incomprehensible to a 4-year old, but seems perfectly sensible to me now, if you’re willing to take a certain view of the World (which I have serious problems with). I also remember the last conversation I had with them where they told me they weren’t coming back and I had to get on with my life. Then they were gone and I never saw them again. Yes, I know, I don’t believe in ghosts either. I’m just telling you what I remember.

2. When asked what I would have done for a living if computers didn’t exist, nearly everybody in my family would answer ‘doctor’ or ‘lawyer’ because I have a pretty analytical mind, and I expressed interest in both careers when young. However, when I was making decisions about these things as a teenager, for me the choice was nothing like that. It was either to make a career in IT, or to attempt to gain a commission as an officer in the armed forces. The main factor pushing me into IT was because I was so overweight at the time, I would never have passed a medical.

3. My father is a naturalised US citizen. He was born in Stockport (as I was), but after splitting with my Mother married Sheilagh and moved to the Bay Area (with my two step-brothers and step-sister) to program AS/400s in a little-known language called Synon. When I visited California as a teenager, I spent time in his office reading AS/400 manuals, and have a soft spot for IBM kit as a result. I also have a soft spot for the San Francisco 49ers and the SF Giants, even though my Dad now lives several hundred miles South of SF in Orange County. I nearly always watch American sports on five unless I have a meeting the next morning.

4. Christie O’Connor Junior – the relatively famous golfer – is my Mother’s cousin. I only recall meeting him once as a very small child, but met his father Arnold (my Great-Uncle) on several occasions before his death some years ago. The last time I saw a picture of Christie that I hadn’t sought out to say to somebody “yeah, he’s the famous one in our family”, it was by chance as I noticed him on the front page of The Times a few years back. He was playing golf with Bill Clinton.

5. Although I’ve managed to get rid of the the most problematic ones, I still have a whole bunch of Asperger Syndrome style behaviours. It’s self-diagnosed and as a syndrome there is no real science to it so it’s true that it could all be in my head. When somebody pointed out maybe I should look into AS, I realised that the weird obsessive-compulsive “looping” behaviour I sometimes had could be used against itself to train myself out of those behaviours if I wanted. You’ll have to work out for yourself what remains, but the most obvious remaining external behaviour is that it is unlikely you’ll have ever seen me with my shirt sleeves rolled down, and I flinch and feel nauseous around velcro. Oh, and look at what I do with my watch when I’m slightly nervous. Yeah, I know, mental, etc., etc.

Who to tag? Well, that’s a tough one, as few of my friends seem to have blogs. Either that, or they really wouldn’t appreciate a bunch of coders and developers pouring over their blog.

I will therefore choose a mixture of people. I will choose Andy Stothard because in the last week gave me a timely present for no reason other than because he’s a good mate. I’ll tag William Tozier because he was kind enough to cheer on my utter madness in recent blog posts here, and I had an interesting conversation with him via e-mail. I’ll tag Austin Kleon because I found his blog quite recently, and his work makes me smile. And for my last two I’ll tag people who don’t have blogs, but should know better, get their fingers out of their arses and get on with it. Carl Drinkwater, Andy Threlfall, consider yourselves chastised.

UPDATE – It seems one of the things I didn’t know about Carl Drinkwater was that he actually does have a blog. Serves me right for not doing my research properly. Again.

This is perhaps the oddest promo video I have ever seen. It’s worth every minute, despite being from the evil empire themselves down at Microsoft.

And it is really worth sticking with it until 7 minutes in. At that point it gets even weirder.

With all the production values of a porn film, the standing ovation at the end for a bit of copy’n’paste plagiarism and the closing shot suggesting Microsoft sales guys sleep with their clients, it’s one to file in the “how not to sell your product” category.

Either that, or the shots of 5.25” disks, audio cassettes and the “when we get OS/2, I’ll be ahead of the learning curve” references have just made me feel a bit ill.