Accidentally in Code

Author: Cate

The Iranian Election is Trending
There’s a large Persian population in Ottawa, especially in Computer Science. So, a lot of my friends are from Iran and I follow the international news so I’ve been watching the election results with interest. One of my friends wasn’t going to vote, so the other day I was embroiled in an argument about that (it’s his responsibility to, don’t complain if you don’t vote) during which another (Iranian) friend declared that I should have his passport, which I found rather funny.

Anyway, living in the West where our media coverage is no doubt biased against Ahmadinejad (although comments like this speak for themselves) and all my Persian friends hate the guy with varying degrees of venom, I’m likely biased. None of them seem to buy the election results. The margin is unconvincing. I’m inclined to agree.

So, lets check the trending data. Note though – this is likely to be skewed in favor of Ahmadinejad because he’s the current President.

I’m going to start with Twitter this time. You can see the graph from Twist below:

This is interesting, because it’s actually Ahmadinejad that was more popular – I expected the opposite as Twitter likely has a more educated, liberal population. Although it looks like Mousavi has been more popular since the results came out – they’ve even been using Twitter to organize protests.

Blog Trends are below:

Not much to say here, but we can see the curves follow each other from around June 2nd, likely the election boost – but – Ahmadinejad is ahead of Mousavi.

Finally, Google Trends. This is more interesting, I think. Below is the graph:

Underneath the chart we can see where most of the traffic comes from, unsurprisingly it’s most from Iran (particuarly Tehran), in English and Persian.

So if we look just for Iran:

This is interesting – because it’s so close. It’s a shame that the graph just stops because it doesn’t show what’s the case right before the election but on the face of this it’s hard to beleive the announced result.

However, if we look at the breakdown:

Mousavi is only winning out in English, Ahmadinejad is doing better overall, in Tehran, and in Persian.

Given that Facebook was temporarily blocked in the run up to the election, I would love to see the trending data there.

So – hard to draw conclusions. At the end of this, I still don’t really beleive that Ahmadinejad won by that margin – although ahead in trending stats I don’t think more than would anyway be biased towards a sitting president. I’m not saying he couldn’t have won fairly (in which case, any perceived tampering can only be bad for him), but the margin is just huge. But the real tragedy is how may of the Iranian people don’t beleive that democracy has played it’s course. Can that ever have a good outcome?

Update: Mashable has a good article on how social media can help you track what’s going on with the Iranian election here.

Update: Protesting by crashing websites. http://www.pagereboot.com/ will let you put in a URL and auto-refresh it. Not advocating this, but if you wanted to participate some URLS are…
- http://www.ahmadinejad.ir/
- http://www.farsnews.com/
- http://www.leader.ir/
- http://www.moi.ir/
- http://www.shora-gc.ir/
- http://www.irna.ir/
Update: Website crashing is slowing all traffic in Iran, causing problems. People listing useful ways to help are Green Revolution and apparently also this one which has been taken down, hopefully will be up again later.
June 14, 2009
The Rise of the BNP, in Trend Data

I came across this yesterday. “Hope not Hate”, in response to the BNP getting two seats in the EU elections. I loathe the BNP, I do. They’re racist and offensive. But – this is a democracy, and even stupid and racist people get to vote. They exercised their right to vote in electing in the BNP, the people who we should, in my opinion, be angry at are those who did not vote.

It was interesting because the media and twitter (remember #thebnparetwats which was trending not so long ago?) got all excitable about how the BNP were looking set to do well (by which we define, getting a seat at all, anywhere) but the fact that UKIP beat Labour (the ruling party) into 3rd place in Europe, a stellar result for them, wasn’t so widely talked about.

Google released a paper not that long ago, called “Predicting the Present with Google Trends” where they talk about predicting some economic activity and travel to Hong Kong. So I wondered if the trends from various sources would show that UKIP were really doing better, or whether all this agitating about the BNP would have clouded that.

Below is the graph from Google Trends. The top graph shows search terms, and you can see that the BNP was more a popular search term than UKIP, had an early peak some time before the election on May 24th (the EU election in the UK took place on June 4th along with council elections, results were announced June 7th-8th). The general trend for both parties was that search term frequency increased over the period covered in the graph (the last 30 days). The lower graph shows news articles and we can see that there were far more stories about the BNP than UKIP, with peaks following the weekly news cycle. However since results have been announced (June 7th) the curves have converged. Would be interesting to see what’s the case in another week, the BNP may be inherently more news worthy than UKIP as they cause more trouble.

The blog trends from BlogPulse, below, are far less interesting. The curves follow the same pattern, peaking around the announcement of election results. But again, the BNP have a higher frequency than UKIP.

Finally, I graphed the Twitter Trends using Twist. You can barely see UKIP, as occurrance is mostly so flat. The BNP have been cropping up throughout the month, with big peaks around the election day and the day the results were announced, where we can see tiny UKIP peaks too.

It’s so hard to see UKIP on the graph above I’m including the trending graph of just UKIP on Twitter below.

So I think we can see from this, on the internet the BNP have been much, much more talked about than UKIP. And yet – UKIP got 2,498,226 votes to the BNP’s 943,598. Or 16.5% of the vote to 6.2%. 13 seats to 2 (source – BBC News). So UKIP got 2.65 times as many votes as the BNP, and has 6.5 times as many seats. Also note, that with an electorate of 45,315,669, only about 2% of the population entitled to vote supported the BNP. With turnout at just 34%… they managed to have an impact.

So perhaps this is a sign when trends didn’t predict the present, maybe due to the noise from the media getting so agitated about the BNP. But a more hopeful conclusion might be that trends are accurately measuring the level of interest in this party, and the BNP are making an impact, they’re hitting the news and people are talking about them and wondering who they are. And yet, only 2% of the voting population actively went and voted for them. We’ve seen this increase in nationalism all across Europe (and with certain protectionist measure in the US) as a result of the economic crisis. My hope is that this is a short term blip, exacerbated by poor voter turn out. Basically that we can conclude from this that whilst awareness of the BNP is high, the vast, vast majority of people have not opted to vote for them

And – I belive in democracy, whether or not it returns the results that I want. If the BNP are increasing in popularity lets just get out there and make the case for Europe and immigration which is probably in the macro rather than the micro economics. But above all, lets get out and vote.

June 9, 2009
The Indecision of Crowds

At the moment, I’m reading The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s a really interesting book, all about how crowds can organize themselves to achieve great things… and how sometimes they organize themselves in such a way that things go horrifyingly wrong. I picked this book to read next in part because of an experience I had with my “crowd” the other week. Trying to find a restaurant to eat at wasn’t as simple as it should be… I think what this conversation shows is that – our crowd has varying levels of information and interest, and needs more leadership. Or perhaps it just shows that making restaurant decisions by committee is pointless! But you can decide for yourself…

Cate

12 May at 16:06

So for this Friday I’m wondering if people are up for hot pot in China town?

Other suggestions welcome 🙂

D

12 May at 19:27

hmmmm thinking of ideas…..

S

12 May at 21:04

hmm. good idea but I am not sure if i am in town!

S

12 May at 23:25

There’s only one place to have Hot Pot in China Down. That’s Yantzee and I’ll be up for it..

S

12 May at 23:27

D, you know you want in for Hot Pot! It is good…

K

13 May at 07:34

I will probably be missing in action until at least next weekend. Pray for mojo

A

13 May at 14:53

Yeah, I’m up for Hot Pot

D

13 May at 20:25

Just and FYI for everyone I ran Yangtze in the food inspection reports. It was found NOT to be in compliance with the health regulations.Including:

Critical Issue:

-Food protected from potential contamination and adulteration
->Store food 15 cm off the floor to prevent contamination

And non-critical issues:

-Floors, walls, and ceilings clean and in good repair
->Ensure floors are kept clean and in good repair

-Mechanical ventilation operable where required
->Maintain ventilation system in manner not permitting health hazard

R

13 May at 20:28

aah D why would you do that, i always assumed no restaurant followed code ever

R

13 May at 20:29

i am not in town this weekend!

D

13 May at 20:30

There are plenty of places that pass inspections. 🙂

R

13 May at 20:31

why would one want to go there? gotta have some risque in life bratha

D

13 May at 20:33

Seriously man they failed “don’t store food on the floor”

R

13 May at 20:34

yaa that was the best part of the deal..i am surprised it didnt say store food in containers

Cate

13 May at 20:34

OK that’s a veto on Yangtze. New location, anyone?

D

13 May at 20:35

Well you can go have a meal there then.

R

13 May at 20:35

ooh cmon cate

Cate

13 May at 21:39

They failed at don’t store food on the floor AND the floor was dirty! A refuses to eat there too and we all know that adorable creature though he is his standards are quite low. New location!

Y

13 May at 22:08

LOL – this conversation is hillarious

Cate

13 May at 22:19

NEW LOCATION!!!!!

S

13 May at 23:10

Okay, after that D no more Yantzee. Even my low standards are failed by that. How about Mongolian Hotpot? They’re by Bank/Billing Bridge area?

S

13 May at 23:30

Hey D, how did Maru do?

Cate

14 May at 07:42

Mongolian is ok but hard to get to?

D

14 May at 07:57

Maru has not be inspected since the new system was launched.As for Mongolian Hotpot it has been inspected 3 times in the last few weeks (they come back if there are major problems)

On April 28th they were cited for nine things (3 critical, 3 non critical):

-Separate raw foods from ready-to-eat foods during storage and handling

* Store raw foods separate and below cooked / ready-to-eat foods

(apparently they corrected this one during the inspection)

-Food protected from potential contamination and adulteration

* Cover all food in storage
* Store food 15 cm off the floor to prevent contamination
* Store foods in containers that can be readily cleaned and sanitized

-Toxic / poisonous substances (chemicals/pesticides) to be stored separately from food

* Store all toxic / poisonous substances below / separate from food

[and the non critical ones]

Food contact surfaces properly designed, constructed, installed and maintained

* Ensure equipment / utensil(s) / dishware are readily cleanable and in good repair

–Equipment, non-food contact surfaces and linen are maintained, designed, constructed, installed and accessible for cleaning

* Ensure all surfaces are clean and maintained in good repair

Food contact surfaces washed / rinsed / sanitized after each use and following any operations when contamination may have occurred

-Frequency of garbage removal adequate to maintain the premises in a sanitary condition

* Provide sufficient garbage containers of durable / leak proof / non-absorbent material
* Remove and store garbage as necessary to maintain sanitary conditions

-Floors, walls, and ceilings clean and in good repair

* Cleaning required around, under, and behind kitchen equipment, counters, and baseboards
* Ensure walls are kept clean and in good repair

-General housekeeping is satisfactory

* Maintain the premises in a clean and sanitary condition

[so the inspector came back the very next day!]

and found 2 criticals and 1 non-critical

Food protected from potential contamination and adulteration

* Cover all food in storage
* Store food 15 cm off the floor to prevent contamination
* Store foods in containers that can be readily cleaned and sanitized

Toxic / poisonous substances (chemicals/pesticides) to be stored separately from food

* Store all toxic / poisonous substances below / separate from food

[they corrected that during the inspection..]

[and the non critical]

Floors, walls, and ceilings clean and in good repair

* Cleaning required around, under, and behind kitchen equipment, counters, and baseboards
* Ensure walls are kept clean and in good repair

[and the inspector came back May 4th for another go at this mess]

This premise was found to be in compliance with the Ontario Food Premises Regulation.

Cate

14 May at 10:27

Ok veto. Jadeland in Chinatown?

D

14 May at 10:46

Jadeland is somewhat better…although it did not pass eitherCritical:

Separate raw foods from ready-to-eat foods during storage and handling

* Store raw foods separate and below cooked / ready-to-eat foods

(corrected during inspection)

Non-Critical:

Mechanical ventilation operable where required

* Ventilation system requires thorough cleaning

S

14 May at 11:12

where do you get these info?

D

14 May at 11:17

http://ottawa.ca/residents/health/inspections/index_en.html

D

14 May at 13:10

S just tried to hit me over the head with a conference phone box and then proceed to explain that me an Cate are going to be the first to die in a super bug outbreak.

S

14 May at 13:22

I did try to hit D. But I did not say Cater and D are going to die with the superbug. I just say that these places help boost your immune system and make you stronger in case of the Beef Flu.

Cate

14 May at 13:43

Boys, play nice!!D can you search for places that got good assessments?

Cate

14 May at 13:43

Btw does this service have an api?

R

14 May at 14:08

hahaa…aah what an optimistic bunch looking for a restaurant in china town that passes health inspection..

K

14 May at 14:11

Ha ha ha. I think we have the winner of the thread! :p

Cate

14 May at 14:13

How about just in Ottawa?

D

14 May at 14:22

I don’t know restaurants in Chinatown…But it is really easy to search *all* the restaurants in a particular city ward.

FYI there are a number around the uni such as father and sons, Royal Oak etc…that seem to pass.

Cate

14 May at 15:47

OK… not wild about pub food but if that’s all that’s safe to eat in town…

K

14 May at 15:52

And here my restaurant choices usually involve walking past a place and saying oh I’d like to try that. 😮

S

14 May at 17:36

Seriously… many of us has eaten at Chinatown for months/years now without contracting serious illness like food poisoning or herpes, it should be safe.

Cate

14 May at 18:01

Yep and I spent nearly 3 months in china and didn’t die. But I didn’t *know* what was going on!

S

14 May at 18:11

exactly, lets just do it.. what’s the worst? food poisoning or herpes..

Cate

14 May at 18:23

Tell ya what S, you can go if you like. I won’t be there! Who’s with me?

S

14 May at 18:30

I don’t want herpes so I won’t go. We’re with ya Cate. Just tell us where to go….

S

14 May at 18:30

and I’m with Cate…

S

14 May at 18:37

I’ll suggest Koreana, I’ve checked and nothing bad…

Cate

14 May at 18:47

OK!

G

14 May at 18:59

You guys are impressive!!!
I got tons of emails for a day, BUT seems got a place to eat at the end.
A suggestion: Don’t think and research much before you go a restuarant, especially Asian ones. This will hep you enjoy the food 🙂

D

14 May at 19:03

S how did you find that one in the registry…I can’t locate it

R

14 May at 19:11

i suggest sterling in hull or foundation in the market ! i am quite confident there shouldnt be a problem with inspection with either of these two

D

14 May at 19:28

Hull is annoying to get to and from and foundation is a bit pricey IMHO…this is why I was suggesting something a bit simpler and more conventional such as a pub or simple restaurant.

S

14 May at 20:19

Now I found the reason why I always feel sick for 2 days after I go to a restaurant in chinatown! lol

Cate

14 May at 20:30

hahahaha don’t you wish you didn’t know? 😉

Cate

14 May at 20:40

Right to resolve this situation I’m going to cook tomorrow night. You’re all welcome but please I need to know numbers and any dietary requirements. Food will not be gourmet but I can assure you that anything below 15 cms from the floor invariably goes in the bin.

Y

14 May at 20:56

Cate, you shouldn’t cook for all of us. I’m sure we can find a decent restaurant in Ottawa.

Cate

14 May at 21:17

No it’s fine I’ve decided. Dinner will be ready a bit after 7 but feel free to be early.If you feel really bad, I like tulips 🙂

D

14 May at 21:25

You know what…why don’t we just pick a pub?It is simple, easy, cheap, laid back, fun, and we might even be able to sit on a patio since it is a nice day tomorrow (depending on time as well).

Plus we don’t all feel guilty about Cate doing all the work.

S

14 May at 21:34

Cate: I’ll be there, and I feel bad now 🙁

S

14 May at 21:34

Cate: Tulips or Vitamin Water?

S

14 May at 21:38

Seriously Cate, we can find a resturant. Next time be dictatorial and say X is final!

D

14 May at 22:02

Father and Sons
The Royal Oak
The elephant and castle
The highlander
The Pour House
The Hard Rock Cafe
Darcy McGees
Cock and Lion

I can keep going….

Cate

14 May at 22:36

My place is final.Tulips and vitamin water are both fine. S, I expect both from you :-p hahaha

May 25, 2009
Tweeting Normally, Mr. Average

This week I’m at another conference, this one put on by FOSSLC. It’s an Open Source conference, which isn’t strictly related to what I’m doing but it’s good to get out there and meet people, and hear about what people in industry are saying.

I’ve had a few conversations about Twitter… of course. I’m really fascinated by how people use Twitter. I follow a little over 30 people myself, don’t actively look for people to follow, but if people follow me and I know them or they look interesting I follow them back. You can see my “twitter personality type” (and check out your own). Apparently my tweeting is now “tip-top”, how flattering! Finally an electronic device that doesn’t disparage me… my wii fit puts me down constantly. However until quite recently it was telling me that I needed more followers and I should try following people in order that they follow me back. I hate that tactic, and, by extension – things like TopFollowed and, this one even more horrifying TopLinked (do they know what LinkedIn is for? Really?!?). If that’s the future of social networking, I want to cancel my internet connection.

So yesterday, I got talking to a guy about Twitter and he said he had 1000 followers and was following about that many people and of course I wanted to know how he managed it. Following 30 people, my feed is pretty busy (especially first thing in the morning, a lot of my friends and the people I follow are on UK time). He can’t possibly be reading the time-line! His strategy: he has a search for his username running and only saw those tweets directed at or referring to him. Twitter is useful when he wants to ask a question, he gets real-time answers. But clearly given how he uses Twitter he won’t be answering other people’s questions unless they are directed at him. Perhaps his followers don’t mind, and those that answer just enjoy being helpful. Perhaps they haven’t yet reached critical mass in their own following that they need a similar strategy, but eventually, if we all try to use Twitter the way he does no-one will be answering anyone’s questions, except when asked directly. But all this is speculation. Even if his strategy sounds a little free-loader-esque, it’s certainly not going to bring down Twitter any time soon.

I also met two other people who said they “didn’t get” twitter. One had abandoned it, the other was just passively following and wondering about business models.

There was also another guy (back to him later) who, like me, had been convinced to try Twitter by the NYTimes post, “Twitter? It’s What You Make It”. Not a very insightful statement on the basis of it – isn’t the same is true of any social network? I might use Facebook to keep in touch with my friends, just to passively stalk people I barely know, to vet prospective employees, or to try and pick up far younger and more attractive women. OK the last one would be hard – but a creepy guy did add me who was clearly doing just that, looking through his friend list it was just beautiful woman after beautiful woman… I blocked him, but I was flattered to be chosen! But I think Twitter is more versitile still, especially with the open API.

I’m a typical NetGenner I guess, I use Facebook to keep in touch with my friends. I use Twitter to keep in touch with my friends too, but also to get news stories from a specific area of the paper (technology) that interests me (via @guardiantech) – so I don’t get distracted by the front page. And I follow various others who link to interesting / useful articles. But… I want the majority of things that show up on my feed to be interesting. And I’d like to be able to read pretty much everything that shows up on it. Perhaps that’s weird. But I think the truth is – no-one’s weird. I was talking to my supervisor the other day about Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World because one of the things Tapscott says is that his daughter has over 700 friends on Facebook, and that’s normal. Not normal for my circle, and in fact overall on Facebook the average user has 120 friends. Of course you’d want to adjust that for age, which you don’t have the information to do. Anyway, so I said, I don’t think this is normal, and my supervisor said, but what is normal any more? Do we know?

Probably we don’t.

So now I’ll come back to the other guy, Mekki. Before, I wrote about Average Users, which was driven by a paper I wrote about Vista. So when I saw there was a presentation on the user’s perspective of switching between Microsoft Office and Open Office I was keen to see it. And so he started his presentation and he too was talking about Average Users, so a little way in, I asked if he’d ever Googled “average users”. And he said, no, what do you get. And I said – sod all. The only definition I could find was in Wikipedia. We talk about our average user a lot but we don’t know who they are, we don’t know what they want, and we don’t know what they do. And he’d come to a similar conclusion. More – Sun had realized this back in 2004 trying to promote OpenOffice. That’s a company trying to promote use of free and open source software, not the company charging hundreds of dollars a pop. Wow. You can find his presentation and thesis here.

So we don’t know what normal is. We don’t understand average anymore. But we’re trying and, even if it makes our lives as programmers a little more difficult… I think it makes our lives as people a little more exciting.

May 15, 2009
Personal Value and Social Value

Lately I’ve been reading Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It’s a really interesting book, and one that I would thoroughly recommend if you’re interested in this kind of thing. Something in Chapter 11 (Promise, Tool, Bargain) struck me because it resonated with an experience I had this week (emphasis added).

Single user tools, from word-processing software to Tetris, have a simple message for the potential user. If you use this, you will find it satisfying or effective or both. With social tools, the group is the user, so you need to convince individuals not just that they will find the group satisfying and effective but that others will find it so as well; no matter how appealing the promise, there’s no point being the only user of a social tool. As a result, users of social tools are making two related judgments: Will I like using this tool or participating in this group? Will enough other people feel as I do to make it take off.

The larger the number of users required, the harder the group is to get going, because the potential users will (rightly) be more skeptical that enough users will join to make it worth their while. (An empty restaurant has the same catch-22 in attracting diners.) There are several strategies for handling this problem. The most obvious one is to make joining easy, in order to make the promise seem within reach. Kate Hanni’s Flyers Rights group made the basic action (signing the petition) quite simple and reserved more complicated actions (like calling Congress or talking to the media) for more committed members. Other strategies include creating personal value for the individual users, allowing the social value to manifest only later. Joshua Schachter’s service for bookmarking and tagging webpages, called del.icio.us, serves as a persona archive of webpages; the value that accrues from aggregating the group’s view of the Web is optional for any given user, but enough people have taken advantage of that value to cause the service to grow dramatically.

I was at the MCETECH conference at Carleton this week (I hate going to Carleton, so remote, other than that the conference was really good though) and there was a workshop on Zotero. The workshop was so good that during it, I switched browsers to Firefox (my but I’m going to miss Safari), downloaded the plug-in, and got started.

Now I should probably mention at this point that I’ve been needing to get something to organize my references for a while. I’m reading a lot at the moment and although better than index cards (I hope) half a dozen spreadsheets and a word document is not the best way to go. Last week, I went to a day of talks for graduate students (of varying usefulness) and one of the talks was on RefWorks. RefWorks also looks pretty good, but it’s proprietary. So whilst it’s free over the course of my time at university, once I leave I face loosing all my references, paying for it, or solving the same problem again. Zotero also makes it easy to cite webpages and news articles, and for those that it doesn’t accept already I can write my own “translator” so it seems more versatile and extensible. I’ve also tried EndNote, which was OK but the big pain there is getting in all the information for the paper or whatever it is you’re citing, so if there’s something that makes that easier… I want it. (I was then using the desktop version, I understand there’s now a Web version but I haven’t tried it).

So Zotero, is free, open source, extensible, easy to use, and does everything I want it to do. Sold. That’s what I’ll be using. And I’m twittering about @Zotero, and #mcetech (incidentally, I hate it that Twitter doesn’t actually delete posts you delete – it just removes them from your profile, typos grr), of course. I’m a twitter junkie – that’s what I do now.

And… I get an @kittenthebad tweet from someone who’s suggesting I use Mendeley. Which I’d heard of before but had just written off as *yawn* yet another social network. Nice idea, but ultimately just a procrastination tool, so being ever-diplomatic, I say: “Looked at mendeley ages ago but thought it just for procrastinating. Like @zotero ‘cos social stuff byproduct of great+useful ap.“. And the guy responds, “I’d recommend you have a better look. There have been many updates. And it’s absolutely not for procrastination hehe 🙂“. K, fine. And I do. And perhaps it could do everything that I want but the big thing they’re selling is this social aspect. Which is nice, an’ all, but not enough to convince me to go to the effort of putting in a load of data and giving it a go. Zotero are bringing in a lot of social stuff (next couple of weeks, I was told) so when I was telling supervisor about the talk (he hadn’t been able to make it) I was telling him how he will be able to create a group for the course he teaches etc, and that’s awesome. But first and foremost? It’s a great and versatile reference tool which – get this – will even work with your Google doc (maybe you’re not impressed, but I thought that was pretty awesome). Most of the social aspect I need is that I can make my library visible and my supervisor can see what I’m reading (you can see it too, if you like, it’s here)

Finally we come back to the text highlighted in bold way back up there. Because both Mendeley and Zotero will eventually have similar products that do similar things and have a social / sharing aspect on top of that. But at this point in time, Zotero’s product definitely creates that personal value for me. And if the social value manefests later, well that’s great. If it doesn’t, well that’s OK too – I can do everything I want already. It would be wonderful if it came up with recommendations for me (as it should very soon), but would I bother logging everything I read just to get those recommendations? No.

On a side note, Zotero is funded by the Centre for History and New Media. They will soon charge for storage (so you can back up the stuff you’ve been reading online), but the cost will be nominal. Mendeley is a business with funding and will eventually need to turn a profit. I’m not going to speculate as to what that means for your data (on their website FAQ they promise that what’s currently free will remain so) but it is a consideration – for me at least.

May 9, 2009
Why Not Fix Your Broken Business Model?
Been reading a lot about how the music industry and the TV and movie industry are falling down, and they all blame “pirates” (great article on how stupid and offensive a label that is given the Somali pirates here). I also recently finished reading Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World and one of the things he talks about is that people of my generation (the “Net Generation”) don’t see “piracy” as stealing.

I used Napster, back in the day, but since it shut down I stopped and I don’t “pirate” music anymore. I also buy far fewer CDs. Connected? I think so, I don’t hear as much random music as I used to, when if I downloaded a song and loved it I’d go out and buy the CD. So I wasn’t at all surprised to read this – pirates buy more music, what a shocker. As my friend Dig pointed out, when I linked him to this article (got to love Twitter) “Yes, more importantly though they go to more gigs, buy more merchandise and tell more friends – and the labels are bypassed.”

And now the TV and Film industry are appealing for government help. And I find it frustrating to read this stuff because it’s like – get with the program. Finally, I’m reading in the news the things that my friends and I have said for years.

Suing your customers is not a business model – it’s at best a short term fix and invariably a PR disaster.

In Grown Up Digital he talks about the way “our” generation consumes media, and whilst I don’t agree with everything he says on this – I think he’s right on.
1. We want to watch what we want to watch when we want to watch it: i.e. we don’t want our schedule dictated by the TV listings. I remember people saying stuff like, “Oh I can’t go out on Thursdays <insert TV show here> is on”. But why do we need to live like that now?
2. We ignore adverts: This has two parts. Firstly, we don’t trust advertising and tend to buy things on the basis of recommendations from friends. And, what’s more, because we tend to multitask whilst watching TV, when the ads are on we’re probably on Facebook.
So obviously this is driving us to the internet. If you’ve tried to watch TV in the US it’s something like 50% adverts. Which is kinda nuts. But the internet is lower quality. I was streaming Sex and the City online, and I liked it enough and got fed up enough not being able to find episodes and the fuzzy quality I bought the box set. Because here’s the thing, and I think the “pirates buy more music” thing illustrates this, it’s not that we want to watch TV shows and movies illegally, or download music illegally – most of us at least would sooner watch or listen to the proper, higher quality, properly labelled versions. There’s just some questions that need to be answered first.
1. Why is it harder to watch movies legally? If I’m under 18 and don’t have a credit card… what are my options exactly?
2. Why do I have to pay for the song before I listen to it. What if I don’t like it? No, a 30 second clip is not enough to make that decision.
3. Why is it just as expensive to rent a movie, or buy a song, on iTunes as it is to buy it on physical media? Storage and distribution costs have been dramatically reduced, but why is none of that passed on to me the customer?
4. And having paid for a movie or a TV show or an mp3… why is it packed full of DRM?
There’s this graph in economics. For most things (normal goods), as price goes down demand goes up. If the cost is zero, of course demand goes sky high. But the cost of illegal downloading isn’t quite zero because of other “costs” – it’s a hassle, legally questionable, and you don’t always know what you’re getting. Streaming a movie only for it to cut out near the end ‘cos you don’t have a subscription to the site hosting it or whatever is annoying.

However because the monetary cost of downloading is zero, it’s not realistic to say that because 90% of downloads are illegal if people were paying for that you’d be making 10x as much money. If there was no illegal downloading, some of those downloads would be paid for but some would just never happen, no matter how cheap the download was because of the transaction overhead (the act of deciding whether something is worth paying anything for, period. Clay Shirky has some good articles about that regarding micropayments).

In fact I don’t know why I’ve written this because I have very little to add to the argument. What it comes down to is pretty much what Shirky said when Napster was taken down and sadly it doesn’t seem like anything much has changed since then.

It’s very hard to explain to businesses that have for years been able to charge high margins for distributing intellectual property in a physical format that the digital world is different, but that doesn’t make it any less true. If the record labels really want to keep their customers from going completely AWOL, they will use this ruling to negotiate a deal with Napster on their own terms.

In all likelihood, though, the record executives will believe what so many others used to believe: The Internet may have disrupted other business models, but we are uniquely capable of holding back the tide. As Rocky the Flying Squirrel put it so eloquently, “That trick never works.”
April 23, 2009
If You Can’t Find It, You Can’t Buy It

Recently, I tried to pay my Rogers (Canada) bill online. Considering that you’re trying to give them money they really make it very difficult for you. Eventually I managed to set up an e-billing account for my banking. Linking this to Rogers for some reason necessitated downloading Firefox, as it does not support Safari (this makes me hopping mad; I have Flock on my mini, but don’t see the need to have two browsers on my Air). Anyway, having set all this up I discovered it’s only helpful from next month. I could scream. The problem of what to do this month is on-going.

My modem (provided by Rogers), when properly secured, is also incompatible with my iTouch and Wii. I would call them, but I’ve already lost the will to live. Maybe tomorrow.

In classes on Usability and E-commerce, we learn about this principle that if people can’t find something they can’t buy it. Usability is not just good practise for E-commerce – it’s essential to support the business model.

However apparently it’s not essential for banks or bill payment. When they cut off your phone I doubt “but I couldn’t find my bill” will be considered a legitimate excuse. By this point, you’ve committed to the service and you can bank at a branch or an ATM, and pay your bill at the post office or by credit card (admittedly both these options are harder when the busses are on strike and your credit card is British). So it seems the usability of the site doesn’t matter so much.

I really disagree. I’ve banked online using 2 British banks, 1 Canadian, and 1 US. They are, with the exception of HSBC UK, some of the worst company sites I’ve had the misfortune to come across. HSBC is no paragon, mind. They have a slightly bizarre security system where attempting to log-on twice in the same browser (so without “quitting” Safari – closing the window and then, later opening another one is inadequate) locks you out. Fair enough, perhaps, but to discover this you have to phone them – which is just a pain.

And all this is so stupid. Encouraging your customers to pay their bills online and transfer money directly has got to be cheaper. Every time they have to call if costs the customer in time (and possibly money), the company, in money and also the intangible costs associated with annoying the hell out of your customer. We’re in the midst of a recession, if there was ever a time to try and reduce overhead it’s now. Ironically that might just be by shelling out the cash to conduct a thorough usability evaluation and redesign of these websites.

Will it happen though? I’m sceptical. It’s hard to switch banks, and I would be with an alternative phone company, only they had the even bigger drawback – despite two attempts and numerous phone calls they never got as far as connecting my phone.

April 18, 2009
Average Users

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “average user”. Who are they? What do they use their computer for? What do they know? And – I think this is the most interesting question: How much do they care about the things we [programmers] spend all our time on?

I recently wrote a paper about Microsoft’s latest Vista operating system. Why did people hate it so much? Why was take-up so low? How much of this was due to usability? I found there were usability issues, but there were also improvements in usability. By the end of the three months I spent intermittently reading and writing about this, I’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t so much a usability issue; more of an absence of a great leap forward.

When I presented this paper in class, we talked a lot about the average user. Do they know what the operating system does? Crucially – do they care? We think of the operating system as many things, but the most important thing to us is probably the kernel. Our average user is probably more concerned with the graphical user interface and file organization. Our perception is so dramatically different… it will take a lot of work to bridge the gap.

During my undergraduate degree, a guy in my class once held up MySpace as a reason why regular people shouldn’t be allowed to design webpages. I disagree with this. No doubt there are horrendous looking web pages out there, but the internet is a meritocracy. Badly designed pages with poor content will get few hits. The most popular designed web pages are well designed and functional. Even Facebook. Isn’t this the power of web 2.0? The computer is now not just a communication tool but an interaction tool. Maybe that’s why our average user loves it.

I don’t think the computer revolution is over, but it will take progressively more to impress users. Their expectations are higher, but they are not programmers; they do not have any understanding of what goes into the applications they now spend an ever-increasing amount of their time using. If we are artists, they do not understand our artistic process. If we are engineers, we may need to accept that people expect a working system as a minimum, and are not tolerant of failure. Whatever, we need to know who our average user is. Perhaps that is where Microsoft went wrong with Vista.

April 17, 2009
Greetings, World 2.0

So, I was talking to my supervisor the other day about what I’m reading for my research, and he told me that I should be focusing on academic papers, because blogs, newspapers, and books aren’t as reliable a source. And he’s right, I can’t just cite The Economist, and The Guardian and the Bloggers Blog and have that be my thesis.

However… as a Computer Scientist I have to say – it’s really cool to read about the kind of things I’m working on in these places. If I told you what I did for my undergraduate thesis, even if you’re in CS too… your eyes would likely glaze over. And that’s OK – mine did too at times. But to be working on something current, something now… working on the things that everyone I know interacts with every day? That’s really pretty exciting to me.

I’m looking at Web 2.0, Usability and other fun things. At the moment, my focus is on Twitter. More soon!

April 17, 2009