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.

When Niels Bohr made the quip I use in the title, it’s unclear if he was intentionally or accidentally witty, or simply making an assertion about the weirdness of the quantum World.

Regardless, the Turing Lecture - an annual lecture given in London and Manchester - last night concerned itself with the future. Specifically, “The Meaning of the 21st Century”, as interpreted by Dr James Martin, a man of some considerable repute.

I absolutely hate being critical and scathing of anybody, but on this occasion I find I have no choice. If Dr Martin should find himself reading this one day, I’d ask that he note that I am not attacking him as a person, but purely his ideas and his execution of those ideas.

I attended the showing of his film before the talk, and discussions afterwards confirmed I was not the only person who considered walking out. In fact, my companion during the film decided he had better places to be rather than hang around for the talk.

The reasons for finding it so annoying are many. I actually stopped counting mistakes I found in the film after about half an hour (never mind the sound mixing being bodged and the long pauses at points), but it could be summarised as saying the tone was patronising and arrogant.

The thesis was heavily planted in the realms of Liberal Conservatism - two of the more prominent politicians interviewed were Chris Patten and John McCain with no counter-argument offered from anybody involved in “Leftist” politics. His answer to solving the problems of the World could effectively be described as US foreign policy for the last 60 years: export democracy and literacy and make foreigners realise they’re a bit thick - a policy which so far has led to where we are today.

Rather more disturbing for me was his attitude towards religion. Once in the film and once in the talk he talked about the “problems of Islam and religious fundamentalism”. He seems to think that the problems in the Middle East are purely rooted in Islamic fundamentalism and no blame can be apportioned to Christian fundamentalism driving a neo-Conservative agenda in the US, or that Israel has ever lifted a finger in anger or in error. He generalises a point about “all religions needing to learn the true values of their founders” but does not offer a method by which that can happen.

At one point in the film he makes a point after an Indian farmer has stated “God will help us” that “poor people need to be taught rational thought”. Sorry Jimmy, that’s just fundamentalism in another flavour.

I use this word carefully, but politically his arguments stray into what can only be described as a fascism, albeit a fascism he would want conducted by what Marx would have called “the proletariat”.

There is also something absurdly hypocritical about a film discussing the obscenity of the Californian lifestyle narrated by Michael Douglas, or the dangers of global warming being described by Martin appearing in a different city in a different country every 30 seconds. I stopped counting at 15 countries I think he visited to make the film, and in his talk he made a reference to “a few days ago I was in Cape Town” - it’s good to know he’s doing his bit for sorting out CO2 emissions!

So, onto the talk proper and I think the best way to rip this one to shreds is to go through the predictions he made. Many of you know that I think futurology is about as accurate as long-term weather forecasting, but with a difference: futurologists are exhibiting their hopes and fears. It’s hard to say whether he just collected predictions he considered credible for scientific reasons, or whether these form a good poll on his inner hopes and fears, but I’ll let you make your own mind up.

• Near-infinite bandwidth: in the future we will have bandwidth - “many thousands of a terabytes a second” - so fast that it may as well be considered infinite. Never mind history has always shown that we find a way to use nearly all of it almost immediately, there will be plenty to go around.
• Nanotechnology widespread: virtually everything manufactured in the 21st century will have nanotech in it somewhere. Some aspects of this I can see, but the extent he has predicted would be like suggesting in 1875 that every home in the World would have a steam engine in it by 1975.
• Ultra-intelligent computing but not human-like intelligence: this one confused me. He’s giving the Turing lecture. Turing described a successful AI as being one that passed “The Turing Test” - it would be indistinguishable from humans. He asserts that this is wrong, that intelligence will be “more alien”. Humans define intelligence, and therefore the only AI we will recognise as intelligent is one that which mimics our own. Even weirder though is how he thought this would combine with nanotech and by the end of the 21st century some humans would have millions of nanobots in their brain fluid using a “Brain Computer Interface” enhancing our mental function to “do the equivalent work of a PhD in 3 minutes” all communicating with each other via “wireless networks”.
• Automated evolution and genetic engineering: yes, I know evolution is already automated. What he means is that we will be able to kick-start it again for certain functions in plant, animal and human life. One prediction in the film is that 20 years from now people will be able to buy DIY gene modification kits for plants and they will design new forms of plant life.
• Use of quantum entanglement: cryptography moving to quantum? Well, yes. He doesn’t seem to have considered the true consequences of quantum computing though, specifically in the realms of breaking cryptography, or it’s use in science in a broader sense. His thoughts on “a friend who is a physicist” using quantum entanglement for more accurate brain scans were interesting though.
• Transhumanism: in effect, using technology to improve humanity in any way possible. Think rejuvenation technology currently being researched, the brain/computer interface, evolving ourselves, using stem cell research to “reset” our immune systems, and so on.
• Pebble bed nuclear reactors: I think he got confused at one point here because he suggested such a reactor could produce 180W of energy - enough to power three lightbulbs. I think he meant MW. Anyway, the idea is that this uses 10%-enriched uranium (which can’t be used for weapons) in a form that is impossible to extract, and using a design that makes it impossible to meltdown. The science looks interesting, and I’m prepared to go and research it but when he talks about pebble bed, it sounds like he might have shares in a company developing the technology. Apparently “there are Indians very interested in Thorium pebbles” - lovely.

Now, let’s talk about “Lovelock city”, his predicted “city of the future”. If the temperature rises by 4C we will need to build new cities somewhere cooler in which to live. This is reasonable according to Martin because we have seen the building work in Dubai over the last seven years prove that such cities are possible. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to work out the CO2 impact of building a new city the size of Dubai in the Arctic circle.

• Hydroponics: given the predictions he’s made about the lack of water available to us in the future, he thought hydroponics was the answer. Most students will be familiar with hydroponics thanks to their use for growing crops with which they’re more familiar.
• Magnetic Levitation Trains: which will run at “440km/h” back to our normal cities. You can always spot a crackpot futurologist when they get excited by Maglev trains. They’re horrendously expensive, stupidly noisy, hard to maintain, potentially quite dangerous, difficult to build and there is only one commercial maglev train running anywhere in the World. Still, the World will be full of them soon enough.
• Grand Masked Balls: I’m not making this up. Apparently the winters will be so dark in Lovelock city we will all attend masked balls. No, I don’t know why either.

One of my biggest concerns was that Martin had ideas, but no sense of execution. Ideas are worthless without some plan to bring them about. A political idea without a policy to drive it is effectively useless. At the end of his talk, he suggested 12 “policies” that would fix the World. The issue here is how you would bring about these “policies”.

• Manage the ecology of the planet: given we don’t really understand the climate models, ecological models and water cycle properly I don’t see how he can develop policies around this. Just because this is “the age of management” it doesn’t mean we can manage unknowns. Even when they’re known, the one group of people who know how to screw things up are managers.
• Decline in population to 4 billion: the World has too many people, apparently. Specifically too many Chinese and Indian people. But no matter, Martin has found an answer: women who are taught to read have fewer children. I figured his slogan for this could be “Women who read don’t breed!” - what did I tell you about straying into fascism? Anyway, a falling population is a good thing according to Martin, but I wonder who is going to tell the World population that this would mean all in this generation have to work until we were in our 80s in order to produce enough food for everybody and it would be the end of the state pension until the population had normalised down to his “ideal” 4 billion?
• Save water and improve soil: do you know how you save water and improve soil? You don’t eat meat. You don’t, I don’t, nobody does. It’s sensible, sane advice at an ecological level, but how are you going to convert a global population they can’t eat meat any more?
• Ocean management: we also need to reduce the amount of fish we eat in order to get fish stocks back up. If you avoid fishing certain parts of the ocean for a decade or more, we can fix the current depletion levels. Seems reasonable, but again how do you bring this about? It requires international consensus which can’t even be achieved at the moment around whaling!
• Millennium goals refined annually: do you have any idea how long it took to get the original goals agreed? Evaluation of progress against an objective is one thing, but annual debate is just going to lead to a quagmire of international politics
• Build up food reserves: politicians call those “food mountains”. They’re not very popular.
• Closing down of shanty towns: and move the people where? Let’s take a “shanty town” in a modern Western country: England. In Salford, “experts” decided that back-to-back terrace housing was inappropriate. So families who have paid off their mortgages are finding themselves in a position of compulsory purchase orders for their £60,000 houses and are being told they need to move. Don’t worry though - the new houses will be much nicer, albeit at a cost of £120,000. For a retired couple, this is just untenable. They’re happy where they are. They like their house. They want more neighbours. They want their community. If it’s happening in Salford, I’ll guarantee it’ll happen in developing nations.
• Religious tolerance: see above. Good luck, but Martin’s current theological ideas seem to favour neo-Conservative Christian fundamentalism.
• Tight non-proliferation controls: what more can be done? We’ve seen the NPT abandoned because any game theorist will tell you that Prisoner’s dilemma applies.
• Control of enriched uranium: that’s working wonderfully right now isn’t it? Look how friendly relations are between the US and Iran. How about this instead: develop foreign policies that don’t provoke other nations into wanting to attack you. Ron Paul in the US has a cracking little foreign policy that would stop all threats against the US - get the US army bases around the globe shut down, and if Iran wants nukes well, that’s its right. It sounds dangerous, but why exactly would anybody attack the US if they no longer looked like imperial conquering aggressors? This is obviously too insane for Dr Martin, who prefers an option that hasn’t worked so far and never will.
• Elimination of nukes: again, prisoner’s dilemma applies.
• “Understanding of dangers”: in other words, listen to Dr Martin some more

The truly sad part of all this is that in 2005 he gave $100 million to Oxford University to create The James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford. How many schools could he have built in Africa with that money? How many pebble bed reactors could he have built? How many alternative energy sources could he have invested in?

Yet he spent the money establishing a school named after himself, so that he could talk about his flawed ideas with some sense of credibility. His ideas aren’t just silly: they’re dangerous.

I expect Manchester University will ask him to invest in a center here, and given their uncritical view of his ideas he might accept.

If he turns up in Manchester again, I’m now prepared for an argument.

Organising BarCamp Manchester has allowed me to get to know some of the people over at the Manchester Evening News a little better, thanks to them hosting us on March 1st. In the course of events I suggested maybe a few blog articles about the local technology and geek scene would be a good idea on their blogs area.

Naturally, this resulted in me committing to producing said articles myself.

And so I have started contributing to “Manchester is Online”, which used to be called “The Mancunian Way” the blog that changed name and then back again to “The Mancunian Way”, (I didn’t get the memo :-) ) - one of the most widely read blogs in the region.

I should stress at this point that there are strict editorial guidelines on what I can publish there, so please hold back your press releases. No “advertising copy” is permitted whatsoever.

I’m just going to geek out there in a way that helps “normal people” relate to what it is the rest of us do. It’s a much more general audience over there, so it’s going to be interesting to try and work out how to relate to them.

No matter where it happens, if somebody out there is coming up with crazy ideas in software, I get to hear about it eventually. It’s just rare I get time to write it up.

This evening I caught on to Breach Candy Group’s idea for what they call AML or ‘Aesthetics Markup Language’ and decided to talk about it pretty much straight away. This article is under the “Philosophy” category for a reason. If you’re not in for some deep thinking, move along.

Their idea is to be able to define the aesthetics of a piece of film or art in a standardised markup language so that systems may be able to perhaps generate new content of a similar aesthetic style. For example, as they say:

“Let’s start with images. We could start off with the following variables:

• movement (speed of movement = speed of change in pixels?) This could be later used to analyze some rhythm of change.

• brightness and contrast (how would this be tracked = the relationship or average of pixels in any given location on the video?)

This could also later be use to analyze things such as harmony of composition, direction of lines in the mise en scene, etc. We would have to come up with a set of principles from art history and composition and see how these could be determined in the screen etc?

• color range (this would probably have to be RGB values in the image itself). This would probably move us into the realm of things such as monochromatic color schemes, bright colors, harmonious colors, contrasting / oppositional color … ie to use some notion of color theory to provide patterns in certain styles of video etc. I’ve studied this in high school so will be fun to revisit some principles of classical painting.

So I suspect what we need to do is set up a very simple experiment / structure in place that can be developed and extended depending on need. In other words, we need to develop … AML (Aesthetics Meta Language) … a basic language structure that would describe what the variables are within any analyzed video. This language, I suspect, could be then developed into the interface between the language of aesthetics and the computer.

Something like this:

//AML: “DEBBIE DOES DALLAS”

134 12 58 22

It’s a nice idea, but they’re missing a trick. The thinking that got them to this point to me seems much more interesting.

They argue that most of the complexity we witness in the World is a repetition of simple things that go on to form complexity. This theory exists behind cellular automata, fractals and more.

Cellular automata are incredibly important in our understanding of how complexity is created out of the simplest building blocks within the Universe. Take for example the image to the left of this text. It might look like something taken from a microscope, but it’s an image created in software using a CA routine that was less than 100 lines of code, simulating “dictyostelium slime mold”. You can find out more about exactly how it was constructed at the site I got the image from.

This idea of complexity emerging from simple rules is particularly important in the field of Artificial Intelligence for reasons described in a philosophically entertaining manner in the AML article:

“Here the key question is that what algorithms could be used to model the way humans think and thus be used to guide machines to perform complex tasks. The philosophical implications of this are even more profound than getting a robot to recognize faces or clean a non-linear toilet bowl. That is, if human intelligence is, in fact, highly programmable, what then defines humans from machines? This goes two ways: machines-as-humans and humans-as-machines. In other words, AI defines rationality a certain way with certain presupposition of what logic, thinking and consciousness are and how they can be pragmatically simulated in computers. But as importantly, if we look at the concept of rationality and how it has been historically constructed, this has always presupposes a certain “image of thought” that has excluded all that would not fit into the sphere of rationality (intuitions, insanity, madness, illogic, spontaneity, absurdity ….). So how would we then understand the blurred boundaries of man and computer (as intelligent forms, which neither technically speaking are) and the human-computer assemblage that is making the old notions of rationality/humanity perhaps increasingly difficult to defend? Humans as (programmed?) repetitions: computers as programmed repetitions: natural intelligence: artificial intelligence: natural stupidity: artificial stupidity …”

Think about that for a moment. The point is not to be “correct” in the sense of making an algorithm “smart”, but make it mimic so it has the ability to be just as insane, dumb and mad as humanity. If you understand the Turing Test correctly, we will have produced an algorithm capable of passing it correctly, when we produce an AI capable of insanity, melancholy and psychopathic behaviours. Asimov’s 3 rules of robotics can not exist in a machine capable of passing a Turing Test, in other words.

This is a good development of an argument on the part of the Breach Candy Group, partly because it’s intuitively correct but also because it follows the science we have to hand quite nicely. It’s a shame then that in itself it probably undermines the need for AML on which they built on these foundations.

AML is about how a computer would process very specific values - contrast ratios, line measurements, etc. - yet they accept themselves that what they need to do is instead mimic the way a human would describe the aesthetic. No film director would talk about precise values of contrast settings or line movement, but instead would find a way to talk about colour, tone, depth, warmth, speed and so on in a much more abstract way.

In other words, to achieve what they’re hoping for they need to develop an algorithm which is able to mimic the human way of parsing film aesthetics, train it by making it “watch” films and then ask it to produce something “like” a subset of them. They’re trying to find a way through by producing a way of retaining knowledge about an aesthetic in a standard form, but as anybody who has read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” can tell you, there is much more to an aesthetic quality than how you describe it mechanically.

In fact, the point about a distinctive aesthetic quality is that whilst we know it when we see it, we all see something different and would all describe it differently. Let me try and make my point by using an image that has probably had its aesthetic qualities dissected, written about and analysed more than any other in the history of aesthetics.

The Wikipedia article on the painting has quite a detailed summary of some of the aesthetic judgements made. There are two groups these arguments can be placed: those that are algorithmic and those that are subjective.

It might be reasonable to produce in AML those that are algorithmic. They can be measured precisely - golden ratios, pyramid composition. However how exactly do you describe something as subjective as “the composition of the figure evokes an ambiguous effect: we are attracted to this mysterious woman but have to stay at a distance as if she were a divine creature” in a markup language?

I don’t have answers, only questions on this one. Interesting thoughts though. And if they can be resolved, we’d be a major step forward to understanding AI - and ourselves - much better.

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.

Have you ever been shown a ‘database’ by somebody who doesn’t really know what a database is? You know it’s going to go badly when showing it, they double-click on an Excel file and you are confronted with a grid with ‘Name’, ‘Address1’, ‘City’, etc. across the top and a huge number of rows below.

Given that most people use spreadsheets like databases in that way, it was only a matter of time before one of the big online spreadsheet applications promoted it as a feature. And so it came to pass.

Seth thinks this is great but I’m not so sure. In a sense, it allows for gathering of data for analysis at a quantitative level, but at the same time it breaks the line between polling, database work and spreadsheet crunching in a way that might confuse more people than it will help.

Perhaps on the other hand it’ll help stop us thinking about applications and more about data. We are moving towards an era where we care about who and what more than the how and detail of collecting the data.

No, not Common Gateway Interface (although that is a powerful and mighty beast that created a new economy), I mean Computer Generated Imagery. Specifically, the tricks a creative person can get up to with a few days in Normandy, a camera, some friends, and a truck load of software.

Watch:

See? Clever, no?

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.

I’ve been keeping a distant eye on Evan Williams for a while all stalker-like because he’s just so damned inventive. He created Blogger, Twitter and I’m sure there’s more in the pipeline. It’s interesting to see a great article about him at The Economist

Accidental innovation is fascinating at all sorts of levels to me. History is filled with stories of people stumbling into an idea, or taking things away and using radical constraints to improve creative thinking.

I built vagueware entirely by accident. I was filling shoe boxes with index cards of ideas for the things I really wanted to build and realised I should start putting them out there on the web, and I needed a tool to do it. Oddly, I’ve still not got around to putting the ideas online - they’re still on index cards waiting to be released.

Vagueware is not my only gig. My other Directorship is very low-key, doesn’t take much time, and is where I and my business partner experiment with various marketing revenue models. It’s primarily been a learning experience, and the frustration we’ve had over the last two years in getting various complex projects rolled out has meant we’ve been looking at partnering with technology companies and focusing on the marketing and customer communications side.

Our latest venture is quite a departure for us. Excuse me whilst I shill for a couple of paragraphs:

Whilst cash back websites are not brand new, we’re hoping that with a really solid technology platform underneath us, we’re going to be able to do something special in the way of helping people make shopping a little more fun - and save cash too. I do however, need some eyes and ears because I’ve had no control over technology roll-out, so I’m interested to hear of problems people might have.

As you can see, the concept is really simple. You sign up, we give you a fiver. You shop online, we give you a percentage of what you spend. You refer friends, we give them a fiver, and we give you a fiver as well once they qualify for payout. We’ll point you in the direction of freebies that pay you money as well. We’ll be launching a blog to highlight particularly good offers. Occasionally e-mails with super secret codes will land in your inbox and you will consider yourself a wise old bean for signing up with us. It makes things cheaper if you’re doing a lot of Christmas shopping online, although for various reasons we’re late to the party for that one, so our strategy is a little more long-term.

End of shill

I mention it here, because I’m interested in problems an educated audience (that’s you, dear reader), might see. We know for example that the back end systems are rock-solid and everything is nice and secure, but are there ‘quirks’ we’ve yet to spot that only a geek can spot? Maybe you just think the business model is odd, or we haven’t explained it very well. Either way, I wanted people whose opinions I respect to take a look before the big marketing push over the next 12 months, and see where we can make improvements.

I’ve spent the last few weeks re-appraising my business plan in advance for 2008. Next year my business will pass its second birthday and I want to change the focus in a few places. I also want to bring other people on-board either as equity partners in specific products/services or as staff, and that all needs planning in detail.

The problem is, most business plans are dull to write and dull to read. I always felt that the inherent wordiness of them made them difficult to deal with, and they only made sense if you were looking for investment - you wrote them for people who didn’t know your business. I started thinking about what might be useful to write for people inside the business (i.e. me), and how it could help me make sure I was on track and doing well.

This morning my RSS reader threw up (via a Technorati sub to ‘business innovation’ a post called The Canonball Business Plan over at Seeds of Growth

The idea is quite simple. There really is a Canonball run (raced illegally), in the spirit of the film. The participants are attempting to break the record for a coast-to-coast drive, and produce a Driveplan that highlights key milestones en-route, fuel stops, timings, major risks from weather to what the ‘safe’ limit is to breaking the speed limits without ending up in jail in each jurisdiction.

What if we had something like that for a business plan internally? What if those of us who need to get a bit of focus sat down and thought about key milestones over a period, the risks and hazards, and the eventual goals. What if we updated it with real data as it comes in to see how we are faring against our guesses and predictions? On one screen we immediately see what we need to see.

It’s an interesting idea, and the only reason I can see anybody having to object against it is that it is inspired indirectly from a pretty cheesy film about bootlegging booze. The core idea seems sound enough though.

I just left a comment on this post of Hugh Macleod’s:

I think you have to remember that a lot of people are still working Facebook out. We didn’t witness people learning the web for the first time, but with FB we kind of have to. I think it’ll go like this:

1. For a while people will entertain themselves with zombie stuff

2. Then they’ll start looking for more interesting uses of the social graph and a few apps (think sharing useful data with friends, dating, etc.) will start to get traction

3. There on out, app developers will stop cutting their teeth on toy apps and start innovating

It’s going to be painful to get there, but it will happen, and it won’t just be Facebook: it’ll be cross-site so you might be in FB whilst I’m in MySpace or whatever (thanks to the open API efforts of several players, that FB will have to sign up to eventually).

Think back to how bad the web was in the early days. Think how it matured and we started getting useful things out of it eventually.

We’re very early on in the arch of developing social networking applications, but it won’t take 1/10th the time it took for the web to mature.

I think many people who have seen the web develop since the mid-1990’s will understand this and ‘get it’. We’re able to see it from a bigger picture, the arch that the web has taken over the last decade.

Many people new to the web are seeing it (from our point of view) almost at a macro level: they can’t imagine a World before blogs, before wikis, before UGC. I’m not saying Hugh is one of these macro-viewers who doesn’t get the big picture - heck, he gets things most people hadn’t even begun to think about, and he certainly understands the web - but I think he’s wrong on this one.

About a year ago, if you got mentioned on Techcrunch, it was the first step to getting 20,000 users. Basically every reader would sign up for an account and give things a work out. It was the case that many drifted away, but if you were able to keep their attention, it could make you another darling on the Web 2.0 scene.

The impact so far today for edocr appears to be a little less dramatic, but Manoj was still pleased to be shown some love by the guys at TC. I’m pleased that I know somebody who finally made it onto Techcrunch - those of us outside of the valley and London tend to struggle.

It’s just a shame really that they didn’t really quite get what it is he’s trying to do with it, which he discussed at tonight’s mashup* event. It’s not just about sharing documents, but about building data around them and helping people understand businesses and services better together in a collaborative way.

I’ll write up tonight’s event properly in the morning - I’m a bit dead on my feet right now - but it was definitely worth attending for me, and I’ve met some really interesting people tonight.

We sometimes take for granted the knowledge we have of how the Internet works. We know that an image in a search result might be linked to a site that has nothing to do with the image. We know that just because a reader of a blog comments on a post and links to a picture, it doesn’t mean the blog owner has endorsed or in any way taken ‘control’ of that picture.

We know this.

Some people though, aren’t quite as smart as us. They think that you have more control over how Google sees you than you do. They think that if you link to a picture you are ‘trying to take it over’. They don’t understand hypertext, they don’t understand indexing algorithms and they certainly don’t understand how this all applies in terms of copyright. Don’t believe me?

TechCrunch is currently dealing with perhaps the most technically inept man on Earth representing a photographer in an argument over online copyright and image distribution.

The problem is that he has a little knowledge - pictures can drive traffic, and that drives revenue - but not enough knowledge to understand what TechCrunch’s role is in this instance.

Even worse, he’s decided to act in a way I would consider unethical by phoning advertisers and threatening to name them in a lawsuit explaining he “just wanted to let [them] know”, in that I’m-doing-you-a-favour-don’t-look-at-me-like-I’m-a-leech kind of way.

This makes me come to the following conclusions:

1. If I ever need to hire a photographer, I’m never going to hire Beth Boldt as she clearly hires idiots to represent her legally (although he doesn’t appear to be a lawyer), and I really don’t want to deal with idiots working on her behalf
2. If you’re ever going to threaten to sue somebody, maybe you shouldn’t threaten Mike Arrington who is, you know, a lawyer, and knows what he’s doing… (top tip Mike learned at law school: use spell check before hitting ‘send’).
3. All of us have a responsibility to make sure the people acting on our behalf - personally, or within our companies - understand the issues as they really are.

If you’re working in a corporate environment in the UK, you should make sure at least some of your directors or somebody over at legal checks out Out-Law.com once in a while, and if you’re freelancing or a SME, its RSS feed should be part of your morning coffee ritual.

I’ve only just got around to finding Ed French’s blog - pssst! He has money for start-ups he wants to spend - and so it’s only now that I’ve noticed his story that local IM startup Yuuguu made it to demo.com. Below is the video of their walk-through which pretty succinctly points out the main features.

[Disclaimer: I’ve done a little bit of consultancy for Yuuguu in the past.]