loose wire blog

Into the Light

Part of my job is explaining the world of new/social media to old media veterans. It’s not easy, either because they’re very resistant to change, or because they tend to see the changes  being wrought on their industry as somehow different to the much bigger changes taking place.

It’s not a bunch of separate revolutions—it’s one revolution. For want of a better description, it’s not unlike the transition from the Dark Ages to the High Middle Ages. That’s perhaps overstating it, but compare, if you will, this small vignette.

I was chatting with a friend on Skype just now; he had returned to Canada to be with his ailing dad. I enquired more, and he told me his father had been at the Battle of Ortona, and still suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I know something of PTSD, but I was ignorant of Ortona, so I looked it up while we chatted. There’s a great Wikipedia page on it, so I quickly got a sense of what his father had been through, back in 1943.

Then my friend sent me links—to a book written about it, which I could thumb through on Amazon and search for his name.

I was able to quickly learn a bit about the battle, about my friend’s father, and about his wounds, both external and internal. Then my friend sent me another link, this time to a YouTube page that showcased a movie about the battle.

Within a few clicks I was much, much more knowledgeable about what this man had gone through, made more personal by my friend’s messages that dropped through Skype:

All of the officers he trained with were killed. He was the only one left.

He has one pal left who is still alive from those days.

It’s easy to dismiss this all as just bite-sized knowledge, without depth or perspective. But nevertheless what we have at our finger tips is so much more than was possible a few years ago—so much so that it’s no exaggeration to say that the Internet offers wisdom over darkness to those who came before it.

And for the media? Well, it’s not really about news anymore. It’s about wisdom. Information grabbed when needed to assemble an insight. The dividing line now is not between those who have access to information—everyone, more or less, has access—but between those who have the skill and interest to be able to know what they’re looking for and to find it. And then, of course, digest it.

That has huge implications for media because it transforms the market for information. It doesn’t remove it—it transforms it. We haven’t figured out how.

But we have already reached, without really making a big fuss about it, a great point of leveling, where we all can claw our way out of ignorance, topic by topic, surprisingly quickly. Whether we want to is something else entirely.

Image from SDCinematografica.it

Technorati Tags: socialmedia,newspapers,journalism,information

My Technology-free Lunch

At lunch today, it took me some time to realise what was different. It wasn't just that my four lunch partners were all quite a bit older than me--15 years, at least, and I'm not as young as you think I am. It was, I realised, that in more than two hours of eating not one of us had answered a phone--or even received a phone call, or text message, or furtively checked our email. I'm not sure any of us were packing a BlackBerry. Maybe my companions weren't even carrying cellphones. It was extraordinary.

I was going to ask, but I didn't want to ruin the moment. Here were five men sitting around a table talking about stuff for about 120 minutes, and not one single interruption by technology or modern communications. They weren't even in sight: Not one of us had put a phone on the table in the usual custom of staking out one's corner of the table. It felt like a flashback to the early 1990s. And it was great.

A recent survey in the UK highlights how mad we've become:

Our liking for modern technology may be disrupting our sleep - and even our relationships, claims a UK survey.

The poll, by The Sleep Council, found that many people admitted checking texts, surfing the internet, or playing games in bed.

It suggests one in four people now regularly sleeps in a different bed from their partner, and many often go to bed at different times.

God I miss the old days.

(And no, it wasn't a boozy lunch. No alcohol in sight.)

BBC NEWS | Health | Gadgets may cause lonely bedtimes

Technorati Tags: technology free, luddism, cellphones

Dark Age Messengers

Maybe I'm missing something, of I've been taken in by those TV ads of guys walking across stepping stones made out of frogmens' skulls, but I expect the big couriers to be somewhat snappier and higher-tech these days. Not based on today's experience:

• Call their hotline to get a guy in either Mexico or the Philippines (based on accent, and he wasn't saying) who scolded me for giving the second line of the address first, and then refused to accept the package as documents when I told him it was a book (it's actually a pile of edited pages, so I guess it could be either.) Stoopid that I am, I didn't realise the huge difference (commercial invoice in triplicate and duties for one, nothing for the other) and should have said "documents" when he asked me. So that session was a bust.
• My colleague, the recipient and courier account holder tried the other end, and we got somewhere, though both of us still had to give the details twice, including something called a "control number" (I've just been watching Terry Gilliams's Brazil so I'm on the lookout for things like this) to "smoothen things out".
• Of course when the guy came there were no documents, no smoothing things out, so we had to do everything by hand. All nine sections. Good luck to whoever has to decipher my atrocious handwriting. We'll be lucky if the package makes it before Christmas.

So, questions:

What happened to those handheld computers that couriers were using a few years ago to do all this? Wouldn't it be easier? Just type out the details or input them from Central Service -- the guy with the van already has my address, presumably, unless he just drove around knocking on everyone's doors, and as the recipient is the one being billed, presumably all they need is his account number for all those details to pop into the appropriate fields.

And then don't get me started on the whole "give-me-your-details-over-the-phone-and-can-you-spell-your-name-again-is-it-German-no-it's-not-it's-English-like-Shakespeare" (not that I have anything against German names) thing. Why can't we do this any better?

Off the top of my head, type "Fedex" or "UPS" into Skype and you're instantly connected to customer service where you can type your details in so they won't be misheard, and you don't have to sit on the line listening to "Rhinestone Cowboy" on a loop (actually it was worse; I think it was "Honey" by Bobby Goldsboro).

I'd be up for a USB dongle that the guy carries, and the customer slips into their computer (who doesn't have one sitting around these days?) and a little courier program pops up so the user can fill in the details from their laptop or desktop. He just plugs it into his handheld device and the data zips across and self-checks. Courier guys could carry round free branded ones and hand them out as promotional items and so customers can fill out the fields in advance.

Or if that's too complicated, going to the website and opening up a chat box with a customer representative. (I've just checked Fedex's customer support page and it involves filling out 14 different fields. And don't try to sidestep any:

Yeah, I'm going to fill all those in.

Maybe these courier firms are smarter in other parts of the world, but I didn't come away feeling impressed. I'm sure their package tracking systems are second to none -- i.e. once the atoms are in the system. But it seems that the burden is still being passed to the customer, when it could be so much less painful for both parties if it was electronic.

Technorati Tags: couriers, shipping, dhl, fedex, ups, tnt

Heathrow's Old Windows

Snapped this on my way to Gate 1 at Heathrow's Terminal 3. I know the London hub has its problems, but I didn't realise one of them was that its passenger information system -- or at least part of it -- was running on Windows 95, a 12-year old operating system that has not been supported by Microsoft since 2001.

Does it matter that flight information is being run on a system that Microsoft not only no longer sells, but it no longer supports?

I guess not, in some ways. Who cares, if it's still working? (Well, in the case above, where one screen is in permanent 'shutdown' mode, and the other seems to be in permanent 'boot' mode, leaving me waiting patiently in the hope of getting some flight information, I guess I do.)

But how about security? If a software manufacturer no longer supports a product, it doesn't just mean their helpdesk is no longer taking calls from baffled customers. It also means they're not pushing out updates to the software that solve problems like the one above, or security patches to cover holes bad guys have found in the software.

This bit is more worrying. If a bad guy knows that Heathrow is using Windows 95 for some of its operations (and I guess he does now) it should be pretty easy to find a way in. While not many people use the software anymore (I couldn't find any surveys on this, but anecdotally there don't seem to be many folk out there using it), new vulnerabilities are appearing that affect both newer and older versions of Windows. So while XP users might get a patch, Windows 95, 98 and Me users won't.

Anyway, I caught my flight OK. So maybe there's nothing to worry about. Apart from realising that an airport I entrust my life to a few times a year is relying on software that, when first launched, didn't even support Internet access.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, windows 95, win95, operating systems, OS, heathrow, airports

"It Says Take a Left Up This Impassable Mountain Track"

 
photo from Reuters

Apparently technology is making us so dumb we need signs to jolt us back to common sense. Reuters reports that Britain has started trials of special road signs warning "drivers about the dangers of trusting their satellite navigation devices (satnavs)":

Some have reported that software glitches have sent drivers down one-way streets or up impassable mountain tracks.

One ambulance driver with a faulty satnav drove hundreds of miles in the wrong direction while transferring a patient from one hospital in Ilford east of London to another just eight miles away.

At what point, I wonder, did the ambulance driver think that perhaps he wasn't taking the fastest route? The original story, according to The Times, involved the driver and his colleague driving

for eight hours before finally delivering the patient. After the equipment sent them north, they covered 215 miles in about four hours. The way back was only slightly shorter and took more than 3½ hours.

The device was reprogrammed, as were the two drivers. The Times comes up with a couple more examples:

Last month a woman dodged oncoming traffic for 14 miles after misreading her sat-nav system and driving the wrong way up a dual carriageway.Police said it was a miracle that no one was injured after the young woman joined the A3M, which links Portsmouth to London, on the southbound side — only to head north.

In September a taxi driver took two teenage girls 85 miles in the opposite direction after keying the wrong place name into his sat-nav. The girls asked to go to Lymington in the New Forest, Hampshire, but the driver tapped in Limington, Somerset.

I hear Somerset is very nice in September.

Technorati Tags: gps, satnav, disasters

What a CEO Would Really Write in His Blog

My fellow BBC World Service commentator, Lucy Kellaway, lays into Reuters CEO Tom Glocer as the worst case of vapid CEO blogging (via the BBC's Richard Sambrook). Harsh, because Glocer seems to be a cut above the rest of the old media but she has a point: Blogs are about being honest and authentic, and I've seen few CEOs manage to do this. Although the results would be entertaining, if they for once did try not to please but to vent (which is the real distinction between a faux blog and a real one). Here's an early draft of what a CEO like Mr. Glocer might have written if he could:

Had to fire half the news department today. Would have fired the other half too, had they actually been in the office. They weren't; as it was 3.30 in the afternoon they were mostly unwell in The Ink Stained Spike so I had to get Mrs. Marpool, the Chief Hot Refreshing Beverage Delivery Officer (formerly the tea lady), to pass on the news to them. Doubtless the old fools will be telling each other war stories and mocking my blogging style. The savvier ones will be pulling up my MySpace page on their 3.5G enabled, beer-splattered laptops and making rude remarks about my dog. Bottom feeders. They've probably never heard of Debussy. Pffft.

God I hate journalists. The ones who were in the office sat staring at their Grecian 2000 editing terminals as I broke the news to them, either patheticlaly hoping I'd notice their dedication and spare them, or else because they couldn't bear to look anywhere else. They've brought it on themselves. Ten years ago they could have bought a copy of Microsoft for Dummies from Dillons. But no. They thought they were all still safe, sacred cows in the face of the digital sandstorm (gosh, that's good that. Might save that for the final version.) Journalists. They're either gung ho foreign correspondents who can't stop filing stories no one will read, or burned out subs with faces like a rhino's armpit (gosh, that is good!) who take most of the afternoon to sub a palm oil report.

Anyway, good riddance to the lot of them. Nothing they could do that a floor full of eager Bangaloreans (Bangalorans? Bangalorii? Bangaloris? Bangalorish? Please check this before you post it on the blog, Edna) couldn't do at a tenth the price.

Anyway, unlikely to see a CEO rabbiting on like that, so we should stop dreaming. Anyway, I'm still upset with Lucy for suggesting in the same piece that signing off an email with 'best' is somehow unacceptable. I do it all the time, although I fear it's a throwback to my own hackish past, when we wrote our Reuters service messages (open wire emails, as it were, visible to all) in telegraphese, as if there was still a premium on word count. Hence "best regards" either became "brgds" or just good old "best". I still do it, and will continue to do so until Lucy tells me not to.

Best, Jeremy

 

Technorati tags: media, journalism, bbc, reuters, wire services, ceos, blogging

Crying Out for Clarity

Interesting post and thread at Signal vs Noise on the overuse of buzzwords, particularly on job applications. One thing caught my eye, though: the assumption that shorter, briefer is better. One commenter wrote: “I’ve always noticed that the shortest emails come from those with the most power in the organization.” That’s probably because they’re using a BlackBerry. Shorter isn’t necessarily better, although it might be. Clarity is better. Not always the same thing. (Having just read through a dozen award applications I see a crying need for clarity.)

Anyway some horrible buzzwords that crop up in the comments or my head:

• anything with 2.0 in it
• ‘space’ meaning market
• ‘interface’ as a verb
• stakeholder
• grow as a transitive verb
• more buzzwords here.

At The End of The Day, It's All About Clichés

We journalists are a boring, predictable lot. Whether we’re in the UK, US or Australia we all use the same clichés. Well, cliché, actually: ‘at the end of the day’. Knowing I was a sucker for monitoring the Internet cliché Factiva (co-owned by Dow Jones, who owns WSJ, the paper I write for) sent me their findings, based on their text mining technology, on clichés in the media for the first six months of this year. Their findings: “at the end of the day” (uttered both by writers and presumably the people they quote) dominates all English-speaking zones.

The phrase was used more than 10,500 times in the U.S. media, more than double the next most used cliche (“in the black”). In Australia it was used 2,183 times, more than three times the next cliche (“in the red”, intriguingly, at 679 times) while the New Zealand media used it proportionally more than either of them, 639 times against 147 times for “in the red”. (Clearly Aussie and Kiwi companies not doing so well this half.)

UK media was in love with “at the end of the day” too, at 3,347 times, but that less than double “in the red” (1,877 times) and only around double “in the black” (1,628 times).

Here are the clichés monitored:

a laugh a minute
a question mark hangs over
about face
all in due time
all the way to the bank
at the end of the day
bated breath
bend over backwards
better late than never
blazing inferno
braindump
brutal reminder
burn the midnight oil
business at hand
call it a day
carnival atmosphere
chew the fat
clean bill of health concerned residents
dead cat bounce
dog eat dog
eat your own dog food
firing on all cylinders
fly by night
freak accident
full-scale search
gang busters
horror smash
hot pursuit
in the black
in the nick of time
in the red
last-ditch effort
leave no stone unturned
left at the altar
level playing field low hanging fruit
nose to the grindstone
outpouring of support
rushed to the scene
shrouded in mystery
split second
survival of the fittest
tense standoff
the eleventh hour
think outside the box
time after time
time and again
time heals all wounds
time is money
time is running out
unsung heroes
up the ante
wealth of experience
wipe the slate clean

Seems like a pretty good list to avoid. You’ve been warned!

The Consultant Scam

This is nothing to do with technology but it’s something close to my heart: the waste of money that are many aid projects. British charity organisation ActionAid UK has issued a report which reveals the high cost of consultants:

Aid provided by rich governments needs to target poverty. Instead, one quarter of their aid – $20bn a year – funds expensive and often ineffective western consultants, research and training.

This is no truer than in Indonesia and East Timor, where huge amounts of money are spent on projects that go on for years. All these are led by foreigners. The East Timorese government recently collapsed in an orgy of violence, effectively taking the country back to when it first liberated itself from Indonesia in 1999. How much money had been spent in the interim on building up those institutions, and how much of that money went to foreign consultants? As the report says:

A typical cost of an expatriate consultant will be in the region of $200,000 a year. According to the OECD, in typical cases more than one third of this is spent on school fees and child allowances – spending which would not be needed if local consultants were used.

Findings show that in Cambodia, consultants’ fees were $17,000 a month while government salaries were only $40. In Ghana, even relatively inexperienced consultants earned per day what government officials earned in a month. In Sierra Leone, according to one former UK-funded consultant, daily take-home pay was the same as the Auditor General’s monthly salary.

It’s not as if all these consultants actually help:

In Tanzania, Japanese consultants on an irrigation project introduced the use of diesel pumps that have become too expensive for local farmers. A massive increase in fuel costs have made them three times more expensive than other alternatives. The pumps now lie idle and farmers are worse off than before.

This is not a one off. I’ve heard dozens of these kinds of stories.

It has to be said that some projects are excellent and the consultants doing great work. To attract these people so they are willing to commit to a career in this field the rewards need to be attractive; it’s OK to do some voluntary work for a year or two, but not many are going to dedicate a life to it. But too often the money is silly money, and much of it is wasted on mediocre work. And the priorities are skewed: Usually the consultant’s goal primarily to extend the contract, or use his or her final report to argue for extending or furthering the project (which of course means the further hiring of that consultant or his/her organisation.) Rarely does one see a consultant arguing for less projects, less money spent, or simply acknowledgement that their work is not cost-effective and should be canned.

Guerrilla Marketing Via Lederhosen

I’m getting a bit cheesed off with all the advertising/sponsorship shenanigans at the World Cup, and I’m not even there. The idea that you can only buy tickets using the sponsor’s credit card, that food like McDonalds and drink like Coke can somehow be an official partner of a sport, all seem to indicate a world gone mad, but all that is eclipsed by the fact that you can’t enter a stadium wearing a rival sponsor’s attire: Hundreds of — one report suggested more than 1,000 — Dutch fans had to watch the Ivory Coast game in their underwear after stewards ordered them to remove their orange lederhosen.

The story, as far as I can work out, goes like this. The idea is the brainchild of a Dutch brewery called  Grossbrauerei, which produce a beer called Bavaria. The brand marketing manager is one Peer Swinkels (“Bavaria is beer with guts, for men with guts”), who has launched several elaborate ploys to market the beer. One involves, er, sponsoring a motor racing event, along with a “Burning Rubber” Gala Night. (Event organiser: “We assure you that the name of this gala night is not a joke”). Another involved relaunching the career of Albert West, a slightly over the hill Dutch singer in towns with the word “West” in its name — Amsterdam West, Rotterdam West, Utrecht West, Leiden West, Hengelo West, etc: (“This sort of subtle humour is always combined with down-to-earth realism in the Bavaria-campaign. Albert liked the idea. He can laugh at himself. That is what makes Albert such a nice guy.”)

You had to be there, I guess.

Anyway, the lederhosen. This is an inspired idea and goes to the heart of some already controversial sponsorship over the most important item at the Cup: the beer.  The lederhosen, you see, sported the name of Dutch brewery Bavaria, which is not the official beer of the World Cup. (Anheuser Busch's Budweiser is the official beer.) The lederhosen are orange, carry the regulation braces, as well as a tail. They come free with a 12–pack of Bavaria, and have become something of a cult item among Dutch fans, who wear orange from birth, although there are reports that they are just being handed out for free too:

Briliiant. You get your product into the stadium and onto the world’s television without having to pay a dime. As a marketing ploy they are somewhat less subtle than the use of an aging Dutch rock star but they do deserve some credit: taking the mickey out of those German beerfests, selling a beer called Bavaria, right in the heart of Germany. And, to boot, embarrassing the U.S. beer partner Budweiser, who like other sponsors paid between $45 and $50 million for the privilege of having only their brand on display. In fact, Bavaria has already been making trouble: Heineken, the official sponsor of the Dutch national team, ordered fans to leave their lederhosen outside the ground at a friendly game against Cameroon. (A Dutch court has since ruled that fans should be allowed to wear the trousers, apparently, although this won’t wash in Germany.)

This explains why stewards are ordering fans to strip. FIFA spokesman Markus Siegler: “Of course, FIFA has no right to tell an individual fan what to wear at a match, but if thousands of people all turn up wearing the same thing to market a product and to be seen on TV screens then of course we would stop it.” The issue might be particularly sensitive because Anheuser Busch has its own problems, being forced by longstanding trademark issues to settle for merely Bud brand (not the full Budweiser brand, which is in dispute in Germany) in return for allowing local brewer Bitburger to sell its beer in unbranded cups outside the grounds.

Peer, of course, sounds suitably outraged but must be loving it. Officially, this kind of activity is appalling and the offline equivalent of subdomain spam, but so much more imaginative. At the same time it raises lots of interesting dinner party discussions about the rights of the individual against the rights of a sponsor (if I chose to wear those pants and wasn't paid to do so, then does it constitute advertising, and should I not be allowed to wear what I choose so long as it does not appear to be a deliberate effort to advertise?); what constitutes a group, whether orange is an acceptable colour for a national soccer team, and whether people should even be allowed to wear lederhosen. T