Joe's Jottings

Category: The Media

Obscene – selling useless bomb detectors to Iraq

Today is a bad day for anyone who likes the idea of integrity and common decency.   Take a look at this news story from the BBC about the ADE-651 bomb detector. This baby sells for up to $40,000 a pot and has been sold extensively to Iraq. So extensively, in fact, that the Iraqi authorities bought $85 million dollars worth of them. So, what do you get for your money? Some sort of hand-portable spectrometer that can detect explosives residues, perhaps something like the GSS 3000? Or maybe an EVD3200, particular noted for it’s ability to detect the ‘popular’ terrorist explosive TATP?

Not really. You get a gadget described here.  Basically something that supposedly works according to no widely accepted scientific principles from a company who were, at the time of writing, under official investigation.

The method by which these devices are supposed to work is akin to dowsing; now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen dowsing work and as a technique for certain things it can be pretty effective. But to be honest, this doesn’t appear to be one of them. that’s not just my viewpoint – whether the ‘new age’ science that is reportedly behind this box of tricks is effective or not I have no idea, but when they can’t detect a bag of fireworks a few feet away, then the detector certainly seems to have some major failings.

So….the Iraqi authorities pay $56,000 a shot for something that doesn’t work, that uses techniques that the FBI warned didn’t work a decade ago.   These gadgets are a widely used tool at roadside checkpoints in Iraq, and one has to wonder how many bombs they have let through. The buck for this sort of thing is a pretty enormous one; apart from the company selling the device, there are the people who’ve requisitioned it, the people who OK’d the purchase, right up the line. Is it possible that no one, anywhere, in this process actually got one of these gadgets out of it’s box and tested it by the simple expedient of having a couple of squaddies who’d been handling explosives walk past the sensor?

If that didn’t happen, then it’s an abysmal dereliction of duty. If these tests were done and the device passed, then we need to ask about the tests that were carried out; if the tests were apparently passed when other tests have not suggested that the device is effective then it looks like incompetence of an incredible level. If the tests were failed and the results ignored, then it’s gross negligence or fraud.

The problem is that people DIE when these gadgets don’t work. It’s believed that the vehicles involved in some of the recent car bombings in Iraq have gone through checkpoints that may have relied on these devices to check equipment. A non-working security device is the worst of all possible worlds; it doesn’t work but if it doesn’t indicate it’s not working then it gives false security. The reported failures of this gadget ‘in the field’ where many people know it’s as much use as a chocolate fireguard have been blamed on the operators – talk about adding insult to injury.

How many explosives sniffing dogs could be provided with this money? Or real explosives detectors? Somewhere along the way someone is making some serious money flogging something that couldn’t cost much more than a hundred quid a time to make for $56,000.

And I hope that if found, that someone rots in Hell.

January 22, 2010
The dumbing down of Twitter starts here?

I’ll admit it. Deep within me is a snob. As far as I’m concerned, the online world started heading down hill when you no longer had to know how to install a full TCP/IP stack to use the Internet. Most online discussion forums should, in my opinion, have an intelligence test before you’re allowed to post on them – basically the ability, for an English language website, to string together English sentences without text speech or foul language is a good starting point. OK…where was I….oh yes.

Seesmic, the company who produce the popular Twhirl Twitter application, are producing an application that they basically believe will bring Twitter to the masses of online users who are yet to Tweet. The software has been endorsed by Twitter and developed in collaboration with Microsoft, who may be planning on installing it as part of Windows. The program, called ‘Look’, is designed to be used by people who’re not currently tweeting and who may not feel that they have much to say – looking at it I’d say that it appears that twitter are starting to commoditise their platform – increase the numbers of users and volumes of traffic prior to some efforts towards monetisation of their network. In yestreday’s piece about BlippyI mentioned the ‘database of intentions’; perhaps Twitter are looking towards a massive increase in numbers of users to swell the flow of data that can be used to generate another part of this database. Twitter’s traffic / user levels have also been flat for a while – perhaps twitter see this move as a means of breaking through the current plateau and getting things moving again before the next new thing comes along.

Now, as you can gather from the title I have a few issues with what’s happening. To some people, the idea of ‘dumbing down’ Twitter may sound daft – after all, many folks think it’s pretty dumb already – so let me explain what I mean. Twitter is a platform that carries messages which users can filter and hence determine what they see. In principle, therefore, a large influx of new people shouldn’t necessarily change the culture too much; after all, people filter which Tweets they see. If Twitter does become a hotbed of text speech and obscenity (OK, even more than now! 🙂 ) then it shouldn’t affect most of us because we can filter out the noise. This is a different proposition to spam email or discussion Forums where the signal to noise ration – i.e. the amount of good stuff compared to the dross – does decline radically when larger numbers of users come on board.

However…all this new traffic will be using Twitter’s infrastructure, and unless the twitter infrastructure is improved I can see many more occurrences of the ‘Fail Whale’ in the months after the introduction of this new package.

As for the dumbing down; I am concerned; if Twitter are going in this direction to play the ‘numbers game’ then I can see good content becoming harder and harder to find. Twitter’s search facilities are pretty poor; using them to search through large amounts of juvenilia for the valuable nuggets of content is not going to be easy.

January 21, 2010
Blippy – how do you feel about sharing your purchases?

I recently commented on whether Web 2.0 had ‘jumped the shark’ in terms of strange applications, and also remarked on whether the biggest threat to online privacy was ourselves. However, I don’t think I was prepared for Blippy – a web site that allows you to share details of products and services that you’ve bought via different routes– Amazon, iTunes, Mastercard, Visa, etc. Now this I find very weird and, dare I say it, slightly compelling viewing. The system was on an invite only basis until late last year, but now seems to be open to all comers.

It’s sort of like the online version of being in the check out at the local Morrisons Supermarket and peering in to the basket of the person next in the queue. I took a look on the site and randomly selected a user. From 5 minutes looking at their recent transactions I was able to work out that they either lived in San Francisco and had recently traveled to New York (or vice versa), that they had a baby / toddler, that they’d done some DiY recently and various other aspects of their lives based on the purchasing records that they were willing to share.

Now, there’s nothing here that falls in to the ‘blackmail’ category, and I’m quite sure that people using Blippy would keep their ‘special’ purchases off of the system, but to be honest I do find it a rather strange thing for someone to want to do. Maybe I’m just old. It wasn’t long ago that people were protesting about the use of RFID tags in goods to track our shopping behaviour in shopping malls; now we seem to be falling over ourselves to give the information away for free, along with the amounts spent!

The Blippy owners said last December that they weren’t yet sure how to monetise the project. Well, I think they were being rather disingenuous because it appears that Blippy have joined forces with the people who bought you the (now scrubbed) Facebook Beacon project. And then there’s the very direct link between the data that Blippy collects and what has been called the ‘database of intentions’ – data that allows the prediction of buying activity based on past behaviours. You have a large collection of data on buying habits; you have an individual with a recent history of purchases; it’s a relatively trivial software process to take the individual’s list and use the collection of data to predict what other items might be of interest. You can then contact businesses in those market sectors with what is at least a warm prospect for a sale.

Blippy is again an interesting example of how people are willing to put lots of information in to this ‘database of intentions’. Their lack of concern about their own privacy impacts upon us all by making it easier to predict our behaviour even if we only ‘leak’ small amounts of data.

January 20, 2010
Social Media Bubble….here we come!

Are we heading for a ‘speculative bubble’ effect in the portions of the media and IT economy that are tied up with Social Media and Social networking? Regular readers will know that I’m something of a cynic about the importance of Social Media and Social Networking; whilst it’s clearly an important aspect of marketing for the future, I am rather concerned about the importance that the ‘industry’, if we can call it that, applies to itself.

Take the following article, from a Canadian newspaper, for example. Real world businesses are still doubting the importance and relevance of Social networking and Media to their ongoing business activity. Unsurprisingly, the practitioners are effectively saying ‘Ignore us and you’re doomed, doomed I tell you! Doomed!’ Now, some of us who were out of school in the late 1990s can probably remember the comments made by a number of folks with possible vested interests that anyone without a web presence would be out of business within 5 years. What actually happened was that within 5 years a lot of web companies were out of business, and many businesses with no web presence or strategy whatsoever were going along quite happily.

Just because you find something sexy and interesting doesn’t mean it’s important; passion is a wonderful thing to have but one also needs to be pragmatic along with it. In a recession, surely any business is likely to be most interested in keeping existing customers and is likely to be playing a ‘safe hand’ with it’s resources. It’s unlikely to want to adopt techniques that it’s customers may not actually be aware of or care about. There is absolutely no point in extensively using social media and social networking technologies if your customers are not aware of them! It’s rather like advertising in French when you have no one in France reading the ads!

The arrogance of Social Media zealots in assuming that real businesses are lagging behind is astonishing; surely Social Media / Networking is a support function for most companies, part of marketing and advertising. It’s not as disruptive a technology as the web itself is, and shouldn’t be treated like it is. Take a look at this definition of a bubble – the phrases that immediately struck me were “emerging social norms”, “positive feedback mechanisms”,”they create excess demand and production”. I think it’s fair to say that we’re seeing all these effects.

In addition, it’s difficult to value the Social networking / Media market place and individual services and companies within it. And then we have the other issues often associated with bubbles:

Moral Hazard– how much of the market place is supported by ‘other people’s money’ – if supported mainly by VC capital then companies may take risks that they wouldn’t take with their own money.

Herding– the more folks who say it’s good, the more the markets are likely to follow.

All in all….I think a ‘correction’ to the emergent Social Networking and Media sector is likely. And then we can get back to realistic use of this technology as part of an integrated marketing strategy for businesses.

January 18, 2010
Myleene Klass, ‘PC’ and PCs

This is a long story in celebrity terms…but stay with me. It’s one of those tales where we can’t tell who’s version of what happened is actually the right one – so many versions of what happened it’s like a Celebrity Rashomon! It starts some weeks ago when Myleene Klass commented that immigrants to the UK should actually learn to speak English in order to help them assimilate better. This is such a common sense suggestion that it actually beggars belief that it’s worth reporting on. Klass’s own family background suggests that this is a good move; her mother is from the Philippines and Klass herself has clearly managed to fit in to the UK. She also dared to make a few comments about issues that are frequently referred to as being ‘politically correct’ – and that’s probably the point at which she started showing on the liberal / media establishment radar as someone to keep a weather-eye on…

Time moves on – a few weeks later, 2 local teenagers trespassed on Klass’s property, apparently attempting to break in to her garden shed. She was alone in the house with her young child, and did what most of us would have done – told the little scrotes to go away, unfortunately for her whilst holding or waving a kitchen knife. From within her house, through the window.

Here’s where it gets interesting; the police who arrived allegedly gave her the telling off for waving the knife, which was referred to as an offensive weapon. The police later denied this, but the media storm was unleashed with folks coming down mainly on her side of the argument. The police behaviour was reported by Klass’s spokesman. Life now gets complicated; it appears from a report in The Guardian that Klass’s agent and Klass herself both called the Police, and that the only comment made by the police (according to the Police) was that Klass should have contacted them sooner.

If you take a look at the comments following the Guardian story, it’s pointed out how it’s rare for The Guardian to take the Police side of a story at face value. There were also a few comments from the Grauniad readers that, to be honest, were snobbish. Comments on the ‘classiness’ of someone’s name shouldn’t reflect on how the story is reported, after all. Complete with ‘Sun’ style photo mock-up of Ms Klass wielding a knife. hello? I assume this is ‘ironic’. It just appears to me that the Guardian writer was using the trespass issue to take a swipe at someone for daring to criticise political correctness, and that a lot of ‘liberal’ readers of the Gruadian found a useful ‘two minute hate’ topic for the day. Can we expect the same standard of reporting from the Ruardinag when one of it’s favourite (and oh so politically correct) luvvies hits the news like this?

No? Why am I not surprised. There seems to be a sequence of events here that indicates one of three things to me;total coincidence, incompetence in the way that the story has been handled by media, police and Ms Klass’s PR people, or a non-too subtle attempt by the current establishment to slap a celebrity for saying the wrong thing. A warning that although you’re a celeb, say the wrong thing and we can still swat you like a fly.

In other words, coincidence, cock-up or conspiracy. You choose.

January 16, 2010
When Twitter gets like TV – lots of repeats!

As some of you may know, I’m a newbie at Twitter. indeed, my first efforts were not impressive, I stopped, then re-joined with better results. My saga and comments are briefly recorded in these two blogposts, here and here. I’m now getting in to an almost regular Tweeting habit, though I’m still a consumer rather than producer of Tweets, and perhaps it’s my own way of using Twitter that gave rise to this post.

The other day I was browsing my Tweets (I use Twhirl most of the time, btw – not bad at all, though I’m also looking at Tweetdeck) and I saw a Tweet that made me do a double take, as I was convinced that I’d seen the same Tweet, even down to the wording used, sometime previously that day. It was a link to an article somewhere, and I remembered it because I’d read the linked article. I did what I always do in these circumstances, assume that either Twitter or Twhirl had had some sort of brainstorm. But no – the timestamp on the Tweet was a few minutes old, and other new tweets were coming in thick and fast.

And then it struck me – the same tweets were being sent a couple of hours apart by the same user – sort of like the rolling news on Sky or CNN. Sky promise all the news in 15 minutes, every 15 minutes, and some people are obviously doing something similar on Twitter.

Now don’t get me wrong – there is a time and a place (and a frequency) for repeat Tweets. I’ve seen it used most effectively when advertising events, seeking urgent help, etc. After all, the very ephemeral nature of Twitter means that on a moderately active Tweetstream a post will soon ‘fall off’ the bottom, so to say, and unless the user is monitoring reasonably actively the content will be missed. But what works for ‘time critical’ stuff like up and coming events, urgent requests for help, etc. doesn’t really work for uplifting quotes, re-tweets of news items, etc. It strikes me as being a bit like the approach taken by children when they want to get adult attention of repeating their request for sweets, biscuits, new toy, whatever every few minutes until the relevant adult either gives in or gives them a thick ear.

And so it is that I’m seriously thinking of giving a few folks I follow the Twitter equivalent of a ‘thick ear’ by stopping following them. I honestly don’t see the point of Twitter content such as aphorisms being repeated every couple of hours. To take the TV analogy further, as well as being like rolling news it’s also like the ‘+1’ channels that transmit the same content as another channel, just 1 hour behind.

In many ways, Twitter is like radio or TV broadcasting; unlike most digital content it is ephemeral and dynamic, and moves along a timeline – just like broadcast radio and television. Maybe we ‘content providers’ for this new media need to bear this in mind and lay off the un-necessary repeats.

January 13, 2010
The pleasure of the period-piece detective

I think my interest in what might be called ‘period piece detectives’ started many years ago, when I watched the big screen version of ‘Death on the Nile’ featuring the wonderful Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. I stunned my wife (and myself) by actually solving the murder pretty early on. Since then, I’ve been rather a sucker for TV series such as Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Miss Marple, Inspector Alleyn – those wonderful amateur sleuths (OK…Alleyn was a policeman but very much one of this crowd!) who seemed to outfox what Holmes would call ‘the official constabulary’ whilst inhabiting their particular period of history.

And that’s where part of the attraction lies for me – the settings as much as the detection work. If we leave Holmes out for this article – after all, the fellow is such a phenomenon that he deserves his own blog item at the very least – these detectives all work in the late 20s through to the early 50s. In his excellent essay ‘Boy’s Weeklies’, in which he discussed the popular boy’s comics of his day, George Orwell wrote about the atmosphere used for some of the ‘School Stories’ in these magazines:

“…There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound….Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever. That approximately is the atmosphere.”

And that’s how it often feels to me in the worlds of Marple, Poirot and Alleyn. Murder most foul may be committed, but there’s almost always the return to status quo pro-ante– the situation that we started with. Poirot, supported by Hastings, will use his little grey cells to apprehend the killer and deliver him in to the arms of Inspector Japp. Miss Marple will intuit her way around the crime; Alleyn and Fox rely on good old fashioned detective work. Murders have motives – no matter how strange they may appear to be. Even in Poirot’s ‘The ABC Murders’ or ‘Curtain’, where it appears that there is a random serial killer on the loose, the murders are not what they seem. Apart from the victims meeting their grisly end, violence is not common. There’s no soul-searching, alcoholic detectives with deep emotional crises that will impede the investigation, very few shoot-outs. The denouement delivers the criminal in to the arms of justice, and justice, not law, is seen to be served.

It’s hard to believe that there are wars and depressions happening, fascism is on the rise, then the onset of the cold war at the end of this period. But that’s fine – I’m after a detective story to keep me engaged for an hour or two. I have the real world with all these issues to come back to, after all!

In TV detective series that are set more recently, the closest is probably the popular ‘Midsommer Murders’, followed by ‘Inspector Morse’, although these both feature professional detectives rather than the gentleman (or lady) amateur. But the ‘feel’ is the same – and long may these series continue to take me away from the modern, day-to-day world.

January 12, 2010
Online Exhibitionists affect privacy for us all…

I came up with the title for this piece after reading this article on the BBC Website about people who the authors of a paper called ‘online exhibitionists. The idea is that much privacy legislation is based around the idea of what levels of privacy someone can reasonably expect to have when out and about in public. So, if we live in a world where people are relatively circumspect, photography and publication in public places is rare, then we can expect to have some right to privacy based on a reasonable expectation that you won’t be photographed. If you’re a celebrity, then your expectation can be less because you might reasonably expect to have people taking pictures and hassling you because the nature of your work has put you in the public eye. Right or wrong, that’s the way it’s tended to run over recent years.

Of course, with the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, everyone has effectively become a ZZ List Celebrity within their own group of friends or the town in which they live in. In fact, it might be said that by the very act of registering an account with something like Facebook, we’re actually turning our backs on our right to privacy – and that’s wrong. I recently covered this sort of ground in my post ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’.

In my original plan for this piece, I was going to elaborate on this issue – but then a Tweet made me aware of a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook – “The Age of Privacy is Over”. Here it is. He states that were Facebook being set up now he’d default all our privacy settings to Public. Now, I quite like Facebook and have taken my privacy settings to a level with which I’m happy – but I can see Facebook losing users if they start regarding our lives as ‘entertainment feed’ for the real time Web.

Well, given that Zukerberg’s company rely on us letting go of a bit of privacy to communicate with each other, I can see that, in the words of Christine Keeler, ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’

But what has scared the bejabers out of me this morning is to see comments from some digital media folks along the lines that they feel it might be rewarding for us to ‘hide less’. I’m sorry? I can only imagine that those who say such things have never been on the receiving end of online stalking, have never been harassed for their sexuality expressed online, have never suffered a rock through their window from thugs because of their politics or race.

It may appear to be ‘hiding less’ for people in the business but it can be a matter of staying alive for some. Even when these people do not have online profiles, their privacy can be breached accidentally or deliberately by others who do.

Maybe the world of Big Brother has come 25 years late and is being self-inflicted. Just how many people out there right now are echoing in their attitudes the final chilling words of ‘1984’:

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

January 10, 2010
Web 2.0 Jumps the Shark

There is a wonderful phrase in film and TV script writing – ‘to jump the shark’. It’s that point in the history of a TV series where the scripts veer off in to the surreal or when characters suddenly change their behaviour. It’s reputedly named after an episode of the popular 1970s sitcom ‘Happy Days’ when the hero ‘The Fonz’ ends up jumping over a shark on water skies. Plausible, huh?

It struck me the yesterday, after seeing a site that had been bought to my attention via Twitter, that Web 2.0 may very well be at the point of jumping the e-shark.

Now, Web 2.0 has revolutionised the way we put web applications together. Before we go much further, Web 2.0 is like pornography; we know what it is when we see it but we’d be hard pressed to formally define it. So, here’s what I mean by Web 2.0. It’s a piece of jargon that is used to loosely define web sites and technologies that facilitate interactivity, inter-operability between web sites, sharing of user information and user driven content, whether text, image or multimedia content like video and animation. Web 2.0 sites are typically those where the content displayed to you and other site users can be easily modified and configured by the user. Facebook is a Web 2.0 ‘poster boy’; my Internet Banking site is good old fashioned ‘Web 1.0’.

A lot of the technology that has been developed to make Web 2.0 possible has found it’s way in to all sorts of Web sites – things like Google Apps, for example, are a perfect example of the serious application of Web 2.0 technologies.

But for all the value, have we finally hit a point where many sites and applications being delivered as part of the Web 2.0 revolution are trivial, absurd and effectively worthless to the vast majority of Web users, effectively showing themselves to be ‘portfolios’ for developers or sites of interest only to the digerati being passed off as the next ‘big thing’?

Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these directions, provided that we appreciate it and that we don’t get ourselves so tied up in having the joy of having a Web 2.0 site that we miss the point of what the site is supposed to be doing.

And so on to http://omegle.com/ . To save you the job of visiting, it’s a chat site that allows you to talk to….total strangers anonymously. Yes, a technology that trumpets the fact that it facilitates communications between individuals the world over now allows stranger to speak unto stranger. Maybe I’m a bit hard on this site, but to me it encapsulates so much of what is wrong with some of the more over-hyped Web 2.0 applications. It’s no doubt regarded as ‘cool’ and ‘clever’ by some; it’s essentially pointless, does little that can’t be done elsewhere. It’s almost ‘out of character’ for the original aim of Web 2.0 – to facilitate communication and interactivity. After all, anonymous communications are not that useful for most things. And you have to admit that talking to randomly selected anonymous people is pretty surreal. Assuming that the people on the other end are real people and not just ‘bot’ programs….

So…are we heading for Web 2.0 shark jumping in 2010? And why is it important?

Well, shark jumping almost always precedes the demise of the TV show. And it would be a shame if the good stuff that the interactive web has bought us were to be drowned under a wave of over-hyped nonsense.

January 9, 2010
Too soon for Social Media Experts?

The Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi; we have consultants. A recent comment on Twitter suggested that the Apocalypse would be heralded by everyone on Twitter being a ‘Social Media Expert’ – sometimes this is how Twitter feels, with everyone who starts following me appearing to be the online equivalent of those guys who clean your car windows when you stop at junctions…

It set me thinking – is the whole Social Media field (that part of the media / Internet that deals with interactive and group based applications and developments, like Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, etc.) too young to have real experts?

Years ago I worked with a guy who hated the word ‘expert’. His take was that an ‘ex’ was a has been and a ‘spurt’ was a drip under pressure. Which sort of summed it up… A more widely heard belief in IT is that an expert is someone who’s read 3 pages further in the manual than you have….

Whilst I wouldn’t go that far, I think that at this stage in the social media game it’s too soon to tell what is true expertise and what isn’t. It’s similar to the many people who thought they were successful property developers during the UK housing boom; the market added value; they did nothing, and when the market slipped the dilettantes got whacked.

At this stage in the game I believe the best policy to be to encourage the client to adopt the generally stated ‘best practice’. This may be a conservative approach, but it allows the client to develop their social media expertise organically and as part of their normal marketing strategy. Having said that, a recent discussion with a practitioner in the field suggested that we may not yet even have the maturity needed for ‘best practice’ to have evolved, so that approach may not yet be of value.

So, what is the answer? Perhaps it’s time to stop going on about Social media as a separate discipline and start looking at the technologies and techniques it encapsulates as being just different aspects of existing business practices. For example, a company may use Facebook to establish brand awareness and communicate with customers. OK – that’s a new approach for both Marketing and Customer Care to learn. Someone else may be using a blog; that Public Relations / the Press Office. Twittering to announce special offers? Sales, anyone?

The technology is new, and there will be a steep learning curve, but the business processes being supported are the same as we have seen in businesses for the last 60 years. Any technology or technique applied to a business must surely have one objective; to ultimately increases the value of the company or organisation to it’s stakeholders. We’re just using new methods, which means that we’re going to have to learn them. Most of these technologies are so cheap to implement (and are usually pretty straight forward to set up in the first instance) that perhaps we just need to try a few different approaches out and take note of what works for us, and then implement what works, rather than expect ‘expert’ guidance to solve all our problems.

In the classic comedy series, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ the only guidance offered to cultures that hadn’t yet mastered the new technology of fire was ‘Keep banging the rocks together’.

Good advice.

January 7, 2010