A friend sent me a link yesterday with the short description of “Intriguing…”

It was a link to Clay Shirky’s article Gin, Television, and Social Surplus and indeed it is an intriguing article where he sets out his initial thesis thus:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

It’s not a new theory, however I’m not entirely sure it’s completely accurate. Urban life is not a new invention: Rome at one point is reckoned to have had 1 million citizens, and Athens had 300,000 citizens before it. Whilst they both had their debauchery, nobody has ever suggested that Rome needed wine and orgies in order to function as a city.

His parallel starts to get more interesting however:

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

I’m not sure the “wheels would have come off”, but there is no doubt that even people on very poor incomes have more free time than people of similar economic standing would have had for many millenia - if ever.

He goes on to talk about this surplus of time as something useful, interesting and powerful. His first example however directly contradicts my thoughts around The Vision Thing:

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

Actually, it’s a change, but it’s not one we should embrace unless we say it’s the thin end of the wedge. That eventually something useful and interesting is going to happen and society starts working on interesting things. Clay goes on to talk about how if even one slither of that time of staring at the flashing box in the corner is used to do something productive, it means something interesting is going to happen.

Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

To an extent I agree. I don’t know what 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year is going to look like, but there is no doubt that something, somewhere is going to happen of interest.

But what are those 10,000 projects? Do we have the creative ability to do 10,000 useful things every year? Do we have the will to do something more interesting than throw sheep at each other or spending our entire time photoshopping memes? Time will tell.

Many years ago I did some freelance writing. Some of it was painfully dull (filler articles for free magazines), some of it bizarre and seedy (your suspicions about readers’ letters in porn mags are well-founded: they are sometimes written by paid writers), but the biggest lesson I got from it was that it’s hard to make a decent living with that as your main gig.

When you need to rely on artistic output to pay the rent, it doesn’t take you long to realise that unless you’re going to get picked up by a large publisher or music label, you’re going to need another job.

Recently I’ve been thinking about this problem and the related crisis in the music and film industries in some detail. At its simplest, the problem is this:

People want to consume entertainment, but they do not wish to pay for it.

Artists do not have the right to be paid whatever they feel they are worth, they must compete in a market and persuade people to hand over cash just like any other industry. Punitive measures such as taxing consumer products in order to force payment of artists is in my opinion pure idiocy. We need to think instead about encouraging people to pay for the entertainment they love. I think that requires a few things:

1. Consumers should not have to fork out more money than they feel comfortable spending
2. More of that money needs to land in the artist’s pockets rather than distributor’s, so that artists on the ‘long tail’ can make a living off a smaller fan base
3. Artists need to find new ways to grow and engage with their fan base

Thankfully, the Internet makes all of these much more practicable than ever before.

One solution to the first problem has recently been played out with mixed results by Radiohead, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we had some sort of “tip jar” system in place for all artists? You download something via P2P, like it, and you can make a donation - of whatever size you want - to the creator. Well somebody is working on that but the question is whether it will ever work.

One artist working with a non-digital medium (paintings) has given this a whirl and it seems to be working. Ali Spagnola will - when it’s your turn - paint a picture just for you based on a theme you suggest and then send it you free of charge anywhere in the World. It’s not a con. I know this, because I’m currently staring at this picture painted for me sometime last year. Payment is completely voluntary. I’m ashamed to admit I still haven’t got around to throwing some money into the tip jar, but I’ll rectify that mistake this week. The painting has grown on me. I would miss it if I lost it. Ali deserves to be able to eat for giving it to me.

Does Ali make money? Perhaps. Do Radiohead? Definitely. So, it’s a model with potential.

As for the distribution problem, well I think it’s clear now that the current relationship with artists and the distribution chain is going to die within a matter of years. A band or a writer can now distribute directly via their website, and even authors can publish books cost-effectively without the need to get men in suits and lawyers involved. There is an issue of how to manage all this and as Kevin Kelly discovered when researching this, being your own tour manager, promoter, lawyer and roadie can be a gruelling and unprofitable exercise.

And then we get to audience engagement. The Internet has blown that apart as well - artists can now have a direct conversation with their fan base via blogs, social networking websites and video sites. It doesn’t scale (how do you stay personal with fifty million fans in 150 countries?), but that would be as they say “a nice problem to have”. Most artists don’t know how to do this well - they’re musicians, writers and film directors, not PR specialists - which suggests there will exist a niche industry helping bands do this very cost effectively within a few years. The current promotion and PR industries are not a good fit for where the industry is heading, they need to change.

As for growing your fan base, I agree with Robert Rich’s words in his message to Kevin Kelly:

Companies can use demographic models and track people’s search patterns to pander to their initial tastes and to strengthen those tastes, rather than broaden their horizons. This problem doesn’t lie within the technology of the internet, but within the realities of capitalism and human psychology.

There is a problem here with collaborative filtering - it’s locking us into tastes, not broadening them. However, it can also be the most powerful tool an artist can have working for them.

Four months ago I had never heard of The Courteeners and yet last Saturday was in the crowd at their sell-out gig at Manchester Academy having paid several times face value for the tickets off eBay. That only happened because last.fm algorithmically said “you should listen to these guys, because you like James”. So far The Courteeners and their label, promoters and distributors have directly received at least £30 off me they would never have got without that technology helping them. I expect they will get hundreds off me over the next decade providing they keep doing something I like.

However, I’d like to share that music. I’d like to say to my friends “look, listen to this, you’ll like it” and give them a copy. DRM and the law prevents me. It is working against them, because I know for a fact I could recruit at least another half dozen fans for their next tour and album release. They are working against me by insisting I do not put their album up on a website for anybody to download and listen to. I will happily work as their unpaid promoter and recruit whoever I can into giving them money, but that little circled “C” prevents me. They could have licensed it under a creative commons license, but they chose not to.

This one act alone has probably cost them a couple of thousand pounds in future lost revenue just through me. Scale it up to the 2,000 people who were at that gig the other night, they’re probably losing millions. Not millions in five years when they try and break America: millions of pounds right now, this week.

So, we need to find more new ways to openly and cheaply distribute art and leverage a fan base so as to be able to make a decent living - perhaps even an indecent living - for artists and fans alike. I have more ideas on how to make that happen, but I will share those with you tomorrow.

I bumped into somebody last night on the way home from the shop, and the conversation was an interesting one for me.

The person concerned - Ikem Nzeribe - did a presentation at BarCamp Leeds last year about mapping that blew me away. It was clear he’d thought through the problem he was trying to address and he’d come up with a social, interesting, useful solution. After the talk I handed him my business card, and suggested we sit down and talk at some point.

So we did. Between then and now we’ve regularly met up and discussed plans either directly or as part of a larger group Ikem pulled together from his networks.

I hadn’t spoken to Ikem since The Vision Thing got rolling, and he clearly hadn’t seen it. I basically summed it up like this:

“There’s a chance I’m going to quit the industry in the next six months”

Two things struck me about that sentence. First, that’s the first time I’ve been completely upfront about where I was heading when I wrote the original rant. His reaction was incredulous, he thought I was winding him up: “You? You are going to quit? YOU?”, etc.

Yeah, me. I’m now thinking the change might not be that dramatic because I can now see ideas forming that address my concerns about how screwed we are right now, but I’m leaving it that open until something more tangible forms.

The second thing that struck me was the word “industry” in there. Which industry did I mean? Web development? Consultancy? Internet business development? Open innovation? Kagtum? Writing blogs and the occasional article?

A very good first step to me trying to stay in the industry is to start saying “no” to proposals, invitations to events, opportunities to comment, and so on. I’m fortunate that so many people want to work with me right now, but it’s stopping me from servicing my current clients and working out how to build great applications that don’t ultimately get monetised through “raising brand awareness” for soulless multinationals who want 75% profit on every unit of sugarwater they sell.

Ikem understands. I hope other people do too. For the record if it’s not one of these or doesn’t directly help one of these, I’m not doing it any time in the next six months:

• Accounts software with Adaptavist (coming to a close soon)
• The “Florida project” (I’ll explain more later in the year).
• My local consultancy project around corporate social responsibility
• The “open innovation” thing with Guy Dickinson and Simon Wheatley
• Kagtum
• Blogging
• BarCamp Manchester
• The occasional co-working day

That’s more than enough for me right now. Please don’t feel offended if I say no to an invitation to get involved in your great idea.

Those of you who follow me via twitter (which synchs to my Facebook status unless I’m directly replying to somebody, so you might have seen me there too), will know that in recent days I’ve been rather annoyed with Carphone Warehouse.

All I can say is, I really can’t suggest you buy anything from them if you’re in a hurry. Their incompetence is worthy of superlatives I can’t come up with right now. I don’t normally do “bitch posts” here, but I know a lot of people reading this are UK-based and thinking about mobile broadband. Here’s the story of why you should deal directly with the network, or at the very least be careful as to which dealer you choose.

Certainly, it would seem, Carphone Warehouse’s online ordering system is pants, especially if you want to pick up in-store. It just quite clearly doesn’t work.

Anyway, I’m spending more time on the road now than I have in recent years. I need to stay connected online even outside of the range of WiFi, and I’ve been hearing good things about three’s USB modem. I only need about 1Gb/month on the road (all my heavier data transfers can wait until I’m home), so the £10/month is less than what I was spending on WiFi in coffee shops anyway, plus the coverage was wider, even in WiFi-saturated Manchester.

I’ve been a CPW customer now for about 8 years. Before that I dealt directly with the network, and before that with CPW again. They have very occasionally mucked me about, but it’s always been resolved with one phone call. I figured it would be smooth-sailing. Here’s what happened:

Day 1

Jumped on their website in the evening, found the package I wanted and ordered it.

I knew I was going to be on client sites the next day and Citylink (who CPW use) are notorious for turning up at random times of the day, and if you miss them you end up having to go to the depot in the middle of nowhere (unlike Parcelforce, say) with 87,236,538,475 form of ID, plus letters from all your family, friends, lovers (ex- and otherwise), dead grandparents, etc. to confirm you are who you say you are. Thoughtfully, CPW offered to deliver the modem to my nearest branch. Living in the city centre, that seemed reasonable, and they offered me the branch on Cross Street, 10 minutes walk away. Nice.

Day 2

I get a tracking ID sent after it’s been dispatched both via e-mail and to my O2 mobile. Fine.

Day 3

I notice it’s now been delivered at the store. I needed to go to a client site in the morning, but on the way back I’d swing around and pick it up.

On doing so, the guy in store had a problem closing the transaction. He picked up the phone. He tried putting the contract through a couple of times. He asked me to verify the company chip and pin card. Twice.

Eventually, he tells me I can leave the store with the modem, that “the eOrders guys didn’t set the transaction up right” but that it would be resolved that day.

“It will work within 24 hours”, he assures me.

That evening, I spend a fair bit of time just trying to get OS X to see the thing. The guides three give you border on the useless through mild contradiction in places. If I hadn’t worked in the ISP industry and therefore knew what PPP and setting up modem drivers was about, I honestly think I would have struggled to get that far.

Day 4

It gets to 4pm. Every time I try and connect, it sits there “authenticating” and then disconnecting complaining about being unable to establish a connection to the PPP server. I used to run PPP and Radius setups, so I know what this probably means: the modem hasn’t been activated.

I phone three’s USB modem tech support direct. They plug in the phone number, the IMEI, my name, my postcode, and there’s nothing there. They’ve never heard of me. “Phone CPW”, they say.

I go on hold over at CPW for 15 minutes. “You need to verify your chip and pin card”, they tell me. I explain I have already. They tell me it’s not gone through, I need to take the modem back and get it sorted.

Day 5

Back to the same store. Young girl looks a bit confused at the terminal for a bit, does the verification and tells me that in closing the transaction they’ve added insurance. Ah, the insurance. Actually, that’s almost useful - on my O2 phone I’ve had to do a claim and from losing my phone to getting a new handset in my hand for just a £30 excess, the process took 4 hours. I’d regret it if I didn’t take it and then needed it one day, but narked they’ve just “added it”.

She hands me everything back: “It’ll work in 24 hours”.

Day 6

It’s still not working. I phone up three. They still haven’t heard of me. I phone up CPW. “It takes 24 hours”, they say. “It’s now 26 hours”, I reply. They look at something. “Ah, it didn’t go through until very late last night. Try again in the morning”, they answer.

Day 7

Guess what? It’s still not working. I’m busy so I leave it until later in the evening.

I phone three. They still have no idea who I could be. I phone CPW. You’ll never guess what the suggestion is next.

“You need to go back to the store and then verify your chip and pin”. I point out I’ve done this a total of 3 times already. They go away and look at something and put me on hold for 20 minutes. They phone three.

“Your details still haven’t been sent over”, is the conclusion. I’d guessed that bit. “What we’re going to do to trigger it again is ask you to go back to the store, and we’ll do a refund and resale. Sorry about the inconvenience, but there’s nothing we can do”.

By now I’m thinking maybe it would be quicker if I just saved up my loose coppers and bought my own 3G phone license and network. I’ve certainly decided this is their last chance: if I don’t get a satisfactory result on this trip, I’m done with them.

Day 8

The same girl who served me on day 5 is there. She recognises me. She confirms she’s spoken to CPW and basically think they’re being odd. I tell her that they said there was some note on the account as to how she could fix it right now. She goes and looks.

Somebody is looking over her shoulder. “I’ll need to do a refund here”, she says. The onlooker mentions a credit note. “That’s it, there”. Looks like they’re learning something new.

After a few minutes, she actually cheers and raises her fist in the air. “Yeah, we’ve got it sorted. Give me one minute”. Her enthusiasm makes me smile - she does actually seem to care about the mess they’ve put me through.

She takes my modem and puts it to one side and gives me a brand new modem. She prints out contracts - including the insurance - and I sign them. She puts everything in a bag.

“Let me guess”, I say with a slight grin on my face, “it’ll be working in about 24 hours?”

“Yes, should do”, she answers.

That was 3 hours ago. We’ll wait and see what happens tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath.

As most of you now know, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking recently. I’ve even been ranting a fair bit. I sound downbeat when I talk about it (as I did at GeekUp this week), but there are small shards of optimism I can extract from all of the discussion, and it’s those I’m going to focus on.

For several years now, an idea has been bugging me. It addresses hard problems, big social issues I care about, and I believe I can actually do something useful, innovative and entertaining in the space. I have called it Kagtum.

The article I found the most upbeat about my rant has actually make me think it’s worth dealing with this set of problems again from a fresh perspective and push the ideas forward into code.

In the years thinking about these problems I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to make it happen. I’d spoken to a lot of people. I’d sniffed around investors. I’d watched blogs by people in the same space and saw where they were heading and thought about where they might trip up. I’ve watched people trip up (90% of them by focusing on the wrong thing), and made mental notes.

Today, something clicked. I realised can actually make the beta happen, in my spare time quicker than I thought and not break a sweat whilst having fun. And, even better, I don’t need to drop any of my current commitments around vagueware, idea banks, other business ideas.

That sounds like a plan.

So, it’s time to kick things off. I’m trying to recruit a user base of people interested in news, current affairs and emerging technology against which to bounce ideas off. I’ve started that process by setting up a page on Facebook and CPC’ing people on FB interested in those topics. If you want to become a fan, please do so and you’ll be behind the wall on the first release.

The Vision Thing will continue. However, now I’m going to try and deal with the issues not by complaining, whining, ranting and criticising, but trying to find a way to be optimistic and beat a path. I will aim to show, not tell. Maybe I’ll mess up and people will laugh, maybe I won’t. Should be fun finding out, either way.

So, with just a couple of days of throwing ideas around, some interesting strands are coming together.

Firstly, those who are developers tend to agree with me: we’re a broken industry in need of a fix. Secondly, those who aren’t developers think I personally am broken and in need of a fix. Some think both are true.

With the private e-mail I was getting and IM chatter, I figured it would be better to produce a sandpit where anybody could get stuck in and post things up, link to articles, etc.

http://visionthing.vagueware.com is the current sandpit. We need to give this a better name and identity, but as you can see there is now a little momentum building.

You can also see that a few of us are playing with the idea of a Manifesto. It’s not enough to say what we’re angry about: we should be talking about what we want this industry to be, what we believe it is capable of, to lay a framework down to make sure we look after ourselves, our users and potentially our investors without breaking a fundamental philosophical barrier.

I think it might be worth just touching on a couple of the responses though, specifically those who suggest the problem is me.

OK, I’ll admit it, I’m tired. I need a break. I might not know what I really want out of life (who the heck does?), however those aren’t the problems we’re talking about.

The real problem is the abundance of froth in this industry right now, with no real substance and meaning to it. I am not condemning the entire industry - I just question the meaning of parts of it, and whether we can’t use our collective skills to do something better. This is ultimately a philosophical and political position to take, and it’s one many seem to share with me. We don’t know the details yet, but we know we want to try and hammer them out and at the end say “this is what we believe in”. I don’t expect everybody to agree with that position: a philosophy that has 100% belief isn’t a philosophy, it’s a law of nature.

We know we’re jaded and tired, but we’re jaded and tired for a reason.

As a group of geeks we hate spin, bullshit, lies, marketing speak and so on. We are an industry moving to a foundation built on those principles rather than the ones we admire: hard problems being solved with skill, and adding value to society. We want to help those with a financial interest satisfy their curiosity, but we want to encourage them to do it with the same sense of purpose that drives us to all-night hacking sessions.

I just had a niggle in my head the other day. Now we have the beginnings of a community prepared to work out how to make this industry better. We’re going to have detractors labeling one or all of as burned out as they look at that angry stare in our eyes when they explain their “social networking for lampshades” idea to us, but I feel all the better for knowing there are people who are thinking about this the way I am, and I hope they feel better too.

I have a problem with “the vision thing” in the industry at the moment. I don’t know where we’re going, or why. The technology - and our insight on how it can be applied - available to us has the ability to change the World, and instead we’re producing pointless crap and obsessing over details of page animations as if they alone will save the World.

If I hear one more wannabe-startup tell me that they plan to change the World and get rich off the back of social networking I will scream. If I see one more aggressive pitch for a site that a teenager could put together in a weekend under the guise of it being “World leading” I will hurt somebody. If I’m asked just one more time to give a quote to develop a site “a bit like eBay but with a social graph” I’m going to quit and go and be a farmer or something.

When I first got into computing, it was because of the potential of what you could do with this technology. When I first got on the Internet in 1996 I genuinely believed we were on the cusp of changing everything. An anarchic communication system where ideas could flow easily, people connect and work together to have a positive impact on society? I’ll take one of those please! Except 12 years later I think we’ve used it for mostly plastic, soulless and philosophically bankrupt ideas because “that’s where the money is”. There are exceptions, but the fact they are by definition exceptional means I feel we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

I know I haven’t made any great personal contribution so am as guilty as anybody, but at least through efforts around BarCamp, Co-working and support of GeekUp I’m trying to get the conversation rolling. Maybe I’m just hacked off we’re moving so slowly. I know we have the collective talent so why are we all - me included - not getting on with it?

Over the next ten years we have the potential to fundamentally change the way the World works. Not just our World, but the Third World too. There are threats, opportunities, risks and rewards - not necessarily all financial - but for me the “vision thing” we should be working towards is about making people’s lives better not by trying to replace TV or other media, not by providing entertainment, but helping enhance people’s relationships - somehow providing meaning. And no, I don’t mean social networking, business networking or anything else where a friendship is defined as clicking on a “Confirm” button. I mean genuine enhancement of whatever it is we’re here to do.

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about whether I want to stay in this industry. Last week I was ready to serve out the 6-month contract I’m on at the moment and then go and do something else for a while. Over the long weekend something niggled me and I think I know what I’m going to do next. I’ll explain more in coming weeks/months, but right now I want to see if I’m alone in having the niggle.

Comments are still broken here, so maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, but I want to know what other people think of the “Big Picture”. Specifically I’m going to do one of those slightly annoying “tag things” where I point to the people whose opinions I’m genuinely interested in who will hopefully respond to this post with one of their own and then tag another five people and so on so we can try and get this conversation going. Tagging posts with “thevisionthing” with Technorati might help us keep track of where it ends up.

What the hell are we doing in this industry? Why do we spend so much time talking about Ajax and definitions of “Web 2.0” and virtually no time whatsoever trying to work out what people want? Is this just all an aspect of the industry being over-run by complete geeks, or is the industry lacking any sense of philosophy? Are we being over-run by ideas and concepts from the advertising industry and mass media generally, because they’re becoming more dominant in the industry? Should I turn my dev environment off and go and do something less boring instead? I just want to hear what people think.

I tag (in alphabetical order):

• Guy Dickinson
• Matt Lee
• Katie Lips
• Manoj Ranaweera
• Tom Smith

That said, if anybody else wants to respond to this - say, Hugh who sounds about as burned out right now as I feel, Seth Godin who was in the industry way before me, Guy Kawasaki who is simply on the ball constantly, or anybody shoving their feed into NorthPack - I’d love to hear about it. I have a horrible feeling this will fall flat on its face and people will simply suggest I take a holiday (probably a good point), but it’s worth a punt…

Update: we have a few responses in:

• Andy Mitchell makes my point better than I did
• Guy Dickinson broadly thinks I’m wrong
• Tom Smith feels the pain, but thinks I just need a holiday or to do something different

They all make valid points, but there is something here. Via e-mail Andy and Steve Ireland have continued the discussion a little more. I think there is something in trying to advance this a little. Stay tuned.

The way I understand it, there are two groups inside Microsoft right now: I shall refer to them (even if nobody else does) as the Old Guard and the New Guys.

The Old Guard are the guys who built Microsoft in the first place. They’re the ones that we might consider the Evil Empire. They thought about software as a means to make money in itself. IPR and tools like DRM were critical to their thinking about how software should work. They’re the ones the EU don’t like. They’re the ones we’re a bit tired of in the open source community. They want your money.

The New Kids have seen a little more of the World as it really is. They think that software is a tool to sell services, training, knowledge, and that things like IPR and DRM get in the way of incredible creative freedoms. To them being able to mix in with as many people as possible is more important than trying to make sure that Microsoft locks you in: they want to win by producing the best tools possible. They want your heart and soul, feeling your money will follow.

The Old Guard is, naturally, getting older. They’re retiring. The New Kids are getting more important. They’re rising through the ranks. They’re able to make decisions. They’re the future.

We’ve just seen another small move in the battle that the New Kids are winning.

Give them time. They’re getting it.

Whilst I’ve worked in data centres before - and am all too familiar with how hot, noisy, industrial and dangerous they can be - I sometimes forget how the software industry I now work in has an industrial footprint in those rooms. It’s easy to think of my business as being ‘clean’, because the dirt is so well hidden.

Plans for Google’s new data centre in Dalles, as the blueprints published by Harper’s shows, should remind us just how industrial our business really is.

Combined with the annotation by Ginger Strand, we get a picture of how big this data centre is. Three buildings of over 68,000 square foot each and electricity consumption equivalent to that needed to power 82,000 homes, a third of which will be used just to keep the building temperature at a reasonable level.

Thanks to its location much of the energy used every day will be supplied via hydroelectric power, however its very existence has caused other technology firms to up their data centre spending, and it’s unlikely all of that capacity will be run on renewable power. And besides, every watt of clean energy powering a server is a watt not powering a domestic home.

It’s also worth remembering this isn’t “the” Google data centre. It’s “a” Google data centre.

For years now they have been pushing racks into peering sites and DCs around the globe as well as smaller facilities of their own - an estimated million servers are out there running Google sites, and there are more data centres planned by Google and their competitors over the next four years. Already data centres consume more power in the United States than the army of some 100-million-plus American monster-sized televisions. As the magazine itself says, the Web “is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.”

Better virtualisation of servers is going to help, but there’s a limit to how much you can virtualise. Is the time now right for us to get smarter again about how we use clock cycles? Is the efficiency-first stance of programming we’ve consigned to the era of the 8-bit machine now going to become fashionable again?

Maybe though, we could do a little to educate the public to make use of this vast industry a little more efficiently. Does the quest for the top 100 current hot trends at Google really suggest that we’re using this power wisely?

Via RoughType

I have a running battle with Yahoo! in terms of their “foreign markets policies”, but not with their core design and tech teams. I think then, the news that comes to me via Information Aesthetics that they’ve shut down their entire design innovation team is utter lunacy.

Yahoo! is struggling to keep up. Innovation and creativity is how you leap-frog and out-Google Google. It would seem they’re no longer that keen on doing that.

As such I have to say if you’re holding onto Yahoo! stock, consider selling: I think this is the first step to them going bust about four or five years from now. They’d best just hope that Microsoft still want them.

Last week I was asked to comment for Crain’s article this morning on Yuuguu. I had to offer up a disclaimer, as I do now, that I have done a little bit of work for Yuuguu and I’m under NDA on what I know about the specifics of the internals of their technology.

Typically when asked to quote I give the journalist way more than they need in the knowledge they’ll pick out the one sentence that fits the story they want to tell. On this occasion what I said in full was:

“Yuuguu is interesting because they’ve executed a plan quite wisely. Rather than get overly clever about technology as many start-ups in the web sector do, they’ve used a suite of established technologies, understood user expectations and then combined them expertly. You don’t know how hard it is to do that right until you try.

They’re also very different to the other IM services out there - they’ve skirted around the problems people have with VoIP in a way that gives them a solid, proven business model.

They’ve taken on multiple markets at once in a way established players in those sectors are going to have a problem responding to quickly.

Even better, they haven’t spent years trying to come up with proprietary protocols and re-inventing the wheel, but instead cleverly blended together the best of what works and extended it to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

They’re in a tough area and they’re competing on multiple fronts, but I think they’re in a strong position. The IM sector is not engaging with the audience Yuuguu is and uses technology that would scare most IT admins away from deploying it anyway, the web conferencing sector still don’t “get” the modern Web in my opinion, and the companies selling shared desktop solutions have just had Yuuguu chop their business model out from under them - but many have yet to realise it yet, so aren’t responding.

The only real threat might come from better SIP services threatening their revenue model and customers communicating on voice outside of the Yuuguu system. Having spoken to the guys at Yuuguu though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t already have an answer to that.”

I think Yuuguu are a clever outfit that are doing something quite unique. They aren’t innovating in the madcap “let’s reinvent the wheel way”, nor are they jumping on a bandwagon and trying to use the words “social networking” in their business plan. They’ve looked at what does and doesn’t work, found a way to make something that works better and then established a set of technologies based on best industry practice to make those ideas happen. And all the while, the business model is sat right at the core of what they’re doing.

I hope Yuuguu does take off, and does make considerable profits in the long-term. It would be great to see a local tech start-up fly.

One of the advantages of being almost 30 is that people less than a decade younger than you tend to think of you as being “wise”. Some of the staff in my local bar will ask me about everything from US politics, the Renaissance, Alan Turing, 1980s TV commercials and arcane facts about the early forms of Parliament. Cultured bunch, the staff in my local.

Last night however, it was my turn to learn. One of them had asked me last week about the phrase “Jumping the Shark” and where it had come from. Last night she told me the very next day after I’d explained it to her, she watched an episode of Scooby Doo (OK, maybe they’re not that cultured) where Scooby jumps a shark and that it had made more sense to her knowing what it was a reference to - it is one of the classic insider jokes within TV comedy. I then had to re-explain it all to the other people assembled. The conversation that followed was… interesting:

It went on in a similar vein for a few more minutes. More examples of the futility of the network, the silliness of the apps. Admittedly, none of them had left Facebook yet, but that might be that it’s rather hard to leave, as GeekUp and Co-working day regular Alan Burlison found out

These are people the social networks need. In their early 20s. University students. Bright, intelligent, aspirational. I have no doubt that within a decade most of them will be in the upper 25% of earners in the UK. Malcolm Gladwell would call them “sneezers” or something - they spread their likes and dislikes around their friends quickly. They set trends.

And in the last couple of months they have come to hate Facebook and MySpace.

Specifically, they hate that these networks have been opened up to people engaging in what is effectively a developed and sophisticated form of spam. They hate that they are being hassled via the social graph into doing “fun” things that are actually about as fun as receiving a hoax virus e-mail. They understand that their time and attention is important and its being wasted by sites that don’t respect that.

I have ideas for applications that will actually add value to the social graph and be of use to people in this group, but by the time I get to roll them out it could be too late - the people that make the platform interesting to me as a recruitment base for customers may have moved onto something else.

Facebook are adding features to improve the user experience as they learn how developers are gaming the system. They might win the battle in time, but ultimately they might have to give more control to users to block invites from apps that are not even remotely in their realm of interest.

This isn’t over yet. 2008 could easily be the year the social networks died.

There is a very high percentage of the development community that is atheist.

Percentage wise, we give the general population a run for their money - it is made of perhaps the most pro-secular and anti-theist people out there in one industry with the possible exception of the biochemistry sector.

The reasons behind that stance don’t really interest me (or rather they do, but I won’t be addressing them here right now), but I know if it wasn’t for my Catholic upbringing - specifically observation of Lent - I’d not be writing this article right now. In fact I wouldn’t even be in the computer industry period: I’d probably be a lawyer.

Thank goodness for my own sanity - and the freedom of ‘my clients’ currently incarcerated in a parallel universe - that I manged to learn to code. I thought that as today is Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day, if you wish), and tomorrow marks the start of Lent, I’d explain how it happened, because it’s driving me to get involved in community programmes over the next few years.

When I was 11 years old, I was attending a small Catholic school in Buxton. These days they even have a homepage and are helping to develop vocational science and mathematics skills, but back then in the Spring of 1990 the only IT kit in the whole school was a room of BBC Micros with a couple of Archimedes machines.

I loved those machines.

They were old even then, and it was already getting difficult to find a supply of decent 5.25” floppy disks for the BBCs and the Archimedes were really picky about the brands of modern 3.5” disks they would take. The only real software we had available for them was the built-in BBC BASIC and a small collection of education software used in lessons.

One day I discovered a book in the small school library. It was about how to program BBC BASIC. My Father was by this point a systems analyst and I’d seen programs before and always thought it might be interesting to learn.

This wasn’t some heavy tome similar to modern programming books like the wall of 400+ page back-busters I have behind me right now. It was perhaps 90 pages, cartoon illustrated with robots pretending to be FOR loops and was about as basic as BASIC could be. It was designed for young budding programmers from a stance of “we know you don’t want to do this, but we’ll help you make it fun”. The fact I did want to learn made it even more fun.

Over the course of Lent, the computing teacher at the time offered to open up the computer room - a space which is now inhabited by secretaries in a reception area I believe - during lunch hour. You would have to forgo your lunch hour and realistically most or all of your lunch, and pay up at least 40p to the CAFOD box. This would give you use of the room to work on your own projects, and each lunchtime lots of guys (it was always guys, a problem we still have in the industry) from every year group would pile in and quite frankly, geek out on BASIC programs.

Those weeks running up to Easter were quite an extraordinary time now I look back at it. I was perhaps a little hungry from lack of food, but my appetite for these strange incantations was more than fulfilled - I was writing real, working software.

My fascination for software grew. Every time I got to work on code, I did. We couldn’t afford much hardware at home, so I’d go back to the ancient method dating back to the era of Kilburn of writing up programs on paper with a pencil or pen, and then typing them up when I could.

Much of my work from that time is lost, but what remains is remarkably precocious: expert systems and basic AI seems to have been one of my interests, an area I’d struggle to get to grips with today without a few weeks of reading up, and I’d never even begin to try and write it up in BASIC.

Eventually, the school’s IT systems got a little more modern. Mostly Archimedes, but at least one Apple (which to be fair, I hated - it’s only since OS X that I managed to get on with them) and a single PC used for careers service work.

Here’s a photo of me and some classmates in my GCSE computing class, by which point the computing classroom had moved to a larger space. Many of you who know me today will be surprised to note I really did have hair once:

Within a few years of that photo being taken I was making money in my spare time with the skills I had developed, and preparing to study Software Engineering at UMIST. Those skills ultimately led to a career that involved building out ISP infrastructure, working on R&D projects at GCHQ, traveling to the Falklands on contract, working within a University and ultimately (at least to date) setting up my own small software consultancy and development company.

With the exception of some bar work whilst at University (and the infamous year as professional gambler), every penny I have ever earned has been because of the skills I started to pick up that Spring.

Each year then, despite the fact I am now more agnostic than I am Catholic, I remember and observe Lent. I fast. I go hungry and develop an appetite for something else.

This year I’m going without alcohol and fast food, which most programmers I know would find hard to imagine doing for six weeks. Those of you who know me from GeekUp will find the abstinence from alcohol particularly amusing.

Normally I find it helps me remember how little my family and I had, and I remember that it was through my enthusiasm - and my teachers’ encouragement - for mucking about with machines with bright orange function keys that I managed to gain so much.

The fact I was able to be enthused by something so big, philosophical, creative and vocational at a young age has really stuck. Last week I had a meeting with MDDA about trying to get more kids involved in this industry.

It followed on from a meeting at the Co-working day where some of us established we had learned as kids how to program and that we’re worried that’s not happening any more. Twenty years from now, we might be the only people around who can write code and be excited by it. I want to help fix that, but right now don’t know how. As I work it out, I’ll keep you all in the loop.

If you’re giving up something for Lent, good luck and remember Sundays are optional. If not, at least enjoy your pancakes this evening.

I read Joel’s article on Undergraduate CS classes with interest. I’m one of those people who genuinely think the next generation of software is going to suck, because the current generation of teaching is absolutely awful.

Right now people are seeing software development as something akin to mechanical engineering that you should study not one day before the age of 18 when you arrive on campus. Even then, we teach software development the way we would teach applied physics in a civil engineering class: teachers who haven’t worked on a commercial project in their entire lives are convinced that the books they contain - the books full of answers - are accurate.

They have no idea that software development - like any other sizable discipline that is ultimately rooted in aesthetics and philosophical understanding - is about questions, not about answers.

The quality of graduates right now makes me angry. My blood pressure goes through the roof whenever I see prospectuses offering to take somebody without a shred of programming experience into a qualified developer able to manage a team of other developers in just four years.

If we got it right, we could start teaching other subjects - from art, music, philosophy, through to physics and maths - through the discipline of software development as a tool from as early as 11 years of age. We don’t though, nor will we ever. It doesn’t matter that modern civilisation runs on software, our educators don’t understand that and therefore assume the children they teach won’t need to either.

I have ideas on how to fix this, but they’re flaky and need substance. The only concrete detail is that real practitioners out in the industry need to take the lead on this one.

On the back of my business cards I have 10 quotes which on discovering them the first time, I found to be something that resonated with me, and that I hope might resonate with potential clients, business partners and friends.

The first of those is a famous quote by E.W. Dijkstra that for me sums up the reason I got into the industry in the first place:

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”

I also recall Ted Nelson’s talk about Transliterature at OpenTech 2005, where he also summed up why computers fascinated me as an 11-year old learning to program the first time:

“I studied Computer Science to help change the World, not to automate trivial crap”

There is something bigger here in our industry we refuse to acknowledge. There is something deeper beneath the surface that all the talk of social networks, long tails and user-generated content doesn’t get anywhere near.

This ember of a notion has been inside me for a while now, and it’s starting to turn into a small fire. I don’t know where it’s going, but what I do know is that I’m now getting more and more passionate for “big picture” stuff. The kind of things that need investment and great people.

I’m rather pleased then, with all this “big picture stuff” going on in my head, that this year’s Turing Lecture is being held again at Manchester University and that it has just been announced as being given by James Martin, producer of the film Target Earth - note, not the 1950s B-Movie, alas! However, it’s big in its approach, and I’m looking forward to watching it just before Dr Martin gives his talk.

I still haven’t decided what 2008 is going to be about for me professionally, but I do know it’s going to be less about me and finding ways to reconnect to that Dijkstra quote in my work. The Turing lecture will be a timely reminder of some of the issues facing us - and maybe sometime this year those of us in Manchester can start thinking about how to work out some of the solutions. Maybe.

I’ve just decided “Maybe” is my new favourite word.

Happy New Year.