I’m going to be at the Reboot Britain conference in London on Monday.

Here’s the blurb:

It’s Time to Reboot Britain
An extraordinary one-day event which will take a totally different look at the challenges we face as a country and the new possibilities that – uniquely – this generation has to overcome them.

We face an unprecedented set of challenges: a decimated economy, ever increasing demands on our public services and trust in our political system at an all time low.

But instead of more pessimism, how can we begin to punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services?

Here’s my personalized schedule

Back to the Supply Chain Gang. I reread this Carbon Trust mini-white paper (Carbon footprints in the supply chain) this morning with a view to picking out the Open possibilities, as the term relates to supply chains.

Rather than a polluter pays approach the paper advocates an holistic view on the entire supply chain for two test cases, the Trinity Mirror produced Daily Mirror and three products Walkers Crisps produces. Let’s get some muck behind our ears and look at the spuds.

Walkers was encouraged to “own” the entire supply chain from start to finish. Broken into three stages this chain incorporates:

• Raw material
• Distribution, manufacturing and retailing steps
• Product use and disposal

Crucially using this methodology Walkers is to take responsibility for the carbon in parts of the supply chain that it traditionally doesn’t own, e.g. the production of the actual potatoes.

So:

For each of the products, the full product life-cycle was analyzed, considering emissions from fuel use in raw material production and distribution through manufacturing and product distribution to disposal and recycling…
Suppliers and other supply chain partners were engaged to provide energy data…
The data gathered was used to build a mass balance map of the flows of materials and energy through the supply chain and to build a footprint of the life-cycle emissions for each product. These results were then used to identify opportunities to reduce emissions by changing process flows and by changing the way the supply chain is structured.

The report goes on to list lots of expected insights. In the case of Walkers it presents this rather interesting finding:

A key opportunity relates to the water content of the potatoes. The overall supply chain can save up to 9,200 tonnes of CO2 and £1.2m per annum by changing the way that potatoes are traded; Walkers can reduce the emissions from the potato frying stage by up to 10%.
…By changing the way potatoes are purchased, savings can be made by both parties.

Here’s how:

The Problem for Farmers

• Spuds purchased by weight
• Spuds are stored in artificially humidified warehousing
• This increases water content (thus their weight and saleprice)
• Humidifiers use lots of energy. Energy = CO2

The Problem for Walkers

• Spuds are fried to drive off moisture once sliced
• Extra moisture in spuds increases frying time. Ergo more CO2 used in cooking

You’re seeing where this is going right.

The Solution

• Price spuds by water content. Reward farmers for extra dry spuds
• No commercial incentive for humidifying spuds means < CO2
• < water means < frying means < CO2 = WINWIN

Okay, so that’s a nice little standalone study. Join up the supply chains and look for efficiencies. Easy to do in this case, not so easy once we get exponentially bigger supply chains.
Imagine the pack of salt + vinegar crisps is part of a ready meal. The ready meal is served on a plane. And the flight is part of a package holiday to Lanzarote. How we begin to put all that together so that Thomas Cook can add everything together to find efficiencies. Something it probably hasn’t even countenanced doing yet.

We open up the chain. We expose the information to whoever can use it, or add to it. What next? Can we build a reward economy around creating new efficiencies? Can we introduce a self-learning algorithm to capture these efficiencies and migrate them to similar systems/chains? From a software engineering perspective the answer is undoubtedly yes. How about social engineering?

It strikes me that if some of this were to be done we’d be faced with a problem analogous to those Wikipedia and Flickr have answered so successfully. In Wikipedia’s case it’s giving ownership and trust to its team of non-paid admins, without which it couldn’t function. In Flickr’s case it’s allowing you, I or anybody add descriptive tags, metadata, to each and every photo.

So at last a planet saving use for the social surplus. But how do we engage. Why would a member of Clay Shirky’s gin-soaked masses want to “tag” an Open Supply Chain rather than edit a Wikipedia article or sort a Flicker archive? Figure that one out and we may have a business model here. So answers on a (creative commons attributed) postcard please.

I work for Setanta Sports. Setanta at times is is a company much like a pubescent teenager. Big irregular growth spurts, co-ordinating different limbs can be tough, and every once in a while we’ll go and lock ourselves in our room until fresh investment arrives.

I’ll leave the bigger analysis to our friends in Media Guardian and Enders. They’re getting more right than wrong right now without help from this website.  Just one point on consumer relationships, a point that is in no way uniquely applicable to Setanta.

Here’s a role that every organization that relies on business-to-consumer relationships should have:

With apolagies to my friends in marketing and PR who do a great job, this isn’t about you. This isn’t about “telling a story” or getting a message out. It’s about open ears and interfacing. Taking the message that’s out there and reacting. Read Frank Eliason’s full blog post for reasons why.

Right now there are thousands of conversations on Twitter, GetSatisfaction.com and DigitalSpy about every media brand under the sun. If as a brand we’re not listening, and even more importantly not empowering those we ask to listen, we simply cannont win. This is nothing to do with new technologies and everything to do with new respect for those who pay our wages, our customers.

Some photos from the BUNKER at The Centre of the Universe in Dalston last week.

Here’s a thought on the power of Google PowerMeter.
So far Google have partnered with eight utilities worldwide to provide end to end assistance in creating smart grids.

This gives Google an in to the electric grid and all appliances that sail on it.
Utilizing each appliance’s cyclic power signature Google can in theory tell who is using what appliance and in what state of repair each appliance is.

So imagine your toaster coil is wearing down. You don’t know it. Google does.
Google also knows your IP, your browsing habits, and when you’re likely to turn you laptop on for some smart grid research.

BAMMO!
Search Google for some smart grid action and there you have it, a brand new Kitchen Aid toasting device before you knew you even needed it.

Of course there are a whole slew of privacy issues here that Google aren’t silly enough to jump into, but you had better believe that PowerMeter doesn’t just mean Smart Grids, it means Sneaky, Nosey Grids too.

Over the past months Smart Meters and what I like to think of as the Semantic Smart Grid has been getting more and more press. A Twitter conversation this week has put me over the edge, it’s time to bring some thoughts together.

Electricity is, as most of us think of it, an abstraction. We’re thought to think of it as we would a flow of water. It’s got current, waves, flow, power. Really though, unless you’re unlucky enough to be electrocuted it’s pretty intangible.

The modern electricity grid is much like the contemporary newspaper industry. Fucked. It’s in big trouble unless it acts fast. It’s running on a century old business model of central manufacture of resource (electricity/news in power stations/newsrooms). It’s transmitting/broadcasting the product down one way pipes and crucially is neither listening to its consumers/audience nor is it aware of the conversation/usage its audience is engaged in.

*****
Interestingly it was not always so for Big Power. As Thomas Edison and the early electricity entrepreneurs electrified the big cities of East Coast USA there were power stations all over town. Maybe it’s time we looked again at this model, I’ve thought for some time that the best future use for the disused Battersea power station in London would be as a local, sustainable power station. But that’s a thought for another post.
*****

Smart Metering

Metering and visualization of energy consumption is vital.
We can’t manage change what we can’t measure. In this case what we want to change downwards is power consumption

Home energy visualization kits have been knocking around for the past few years and up until know have been largely the preserve of hackers . To introduce another analogy here let’s compare this activity to the use of Usenet in the early 90’s. Lots of smart people collaborating on important issues, but not getting widespread traction.

Balaji Natarajan on Earth2Tech conveniently continues the analogy in regard to management and communications tools for energy:

Simple HTML pages publicized the concept of the Internet to the common user back in the mid-1990s. A tool like this that offers a rich user experience can help in connecting the customer to the concept of the smart grid

Smart Meters will connect end-users to the Smart Grid in the way Mosaic and Netscape connected us to the internet. Again from Natarajan:

Extend the functionality of the smart grid into a variety of always-on lifestyle interfaces, including meters, panels, garages, vehicles, recharging stations and mobile devices. The Internet really took off within universities (and then everywhere else) because of the concept of the “browser.” From that point on, Internet access wasn’t tied to an IBM supercomputer or a Windows proprietary desktop. With that shift, the tantalizing possibilities of open access invited strong investment, and we continue to reap more benefits of such a model more than two decades later.

Bingo!

The Smart Grid

Which is one of the reasons these guys are jumping into the space

In their own words, Google’s launch partners

span the globe and are large and small utilities, rural and urban, privately held and municipally run and include one of the largest meter manufacturers. They all have one thing in common – a desire to serve their customers by providing access to detailed information that helps customers save energy and money.

The reality is that most global customers don’t have a lot of choice as to where they get their electricity, so the real benefactors here are the utility companies and of course Google, who just love collecting and organizing our data. And there are lots of reasons why Google would want this data.

Smart Grid + Demand Response

From WorldChanging.com:

Today our grids aren’t nimble enough to take advantage of renewables at large scale because of the intermittency problem, which requires huge amounts of electricity storage that is just not economically feasible today. Smart grids, however, help solve this problem in two ways.

First, by turning the grid into an internet, where it is read-write rather than a broadcast medium, we can take an excess of power being generated in one place (due to high winds or a sunny day) and route it a few hundred miles away where there’s more demand (due to night coming on, or cooler weather), then send power in the other direction an hour later when conditions have changed.

Secondly, as Amory Lovins has also mentioned, combining smart grids with large-scale adoption of electric vehicles would allow the EV’s [electric vehicles] to act as the massive storage capacity for the grid.

What a great idea. Using our cars as mobile batteries to help carry energy though the day. Then bring in Demand Response. From the same WorldChanging article:

[Tom Raftery] also mentioned demand response systems, which will be a huge new business market in the coming decades, with or without smart grids. Apparently the higher-resolution power meters these days are so good that you can tell the make and model of the appliances in a home just from their cyclic power signatures. You can even see when your fridge needs repair, by how it uses electricity differently. This raises privacy concerns, but also allows for intelligent upgrades of equipment for consumers. Connecting smart meters in your home (or factory or office) with smart grids, what if your power meter could poll all power generators to find out prices and carbon footprints for all generators online at the moment, and decide in real time what the cheapest and greenest power is to buy? (And remember that the greenest and cheapest will usually be the same.) Software-wise it’s not a hard problem; it’s like eBay with some scripting. But it requires a complete overhaul of the grid infrastructure to enable it. Raftery estimates that smart grids could save 2 gigatons of CO2 per year, so clearly this infrastructure is worth the investment.

Let’s go back to Google.

In theory, by connecting or even controlling the world’s smart grids Google could find itself in receipt of information on every. single. electrical. appliance. on . Earth. That’s some serious data. Will our fridges start displaying Google provided adwords for milk as our stocks run low? That would be some truly smart metering.

But right now, here’s an example of how we can bring all of this together.

Putting Smart Metering, Smart Grids and Demand Response all together you get something like this:
A trial in North Carolina integrating meters, smart grids and alternative energy sources.

The utility wants to use communication networks and software to power down certain energy-hogging actions during peak times (air conditioners) but at the same time keep customers happy and comfortable.

[The Trial] will include a utility-grade solar photovoltaic system attached to a substation, and a battery for energy storage (zinc bromide). The companies’ software will not only have to manage the energy data from the home devices but will examine how to use energy storage and solar to add more clean power but keep the grid load stable. While utilities and lawmakers are paying an increasing amount of attention to adding energy storage to the power grid as a way to address the variable availability of renewables (the sun shines and the wind blows only at certain times of the day), the Charlotte trial is groundbreaking in that it is examining how that can be managed alongside demand response.

Here’s an example of smart metering interfacing directly with appliances. See if you can spot the minor greenwash for GE. I mean, dude, you want to cut that electrics bill, get a smaller fridge.

We’re at an interesting juncture where I suspect many big utilities are waiting to see how Google’s initial work in this area progresses. We’re seeing increased consumer interest in opening up the electricity supply chain and as importantly wanting to supply energy, via small turbines and solar panels, back to the grid itself.

Whether consumers, Big Power, or the likes of Google or SAP fit neatly into roles (I’m thinking carrots, sticks and donkeys) remains to be seen. What is clear is that energy usage must come down and the proportion of renewables we use has to go up. Here’s the techonologies by which we can manage those transitions at a consumer and supplier level.

One area I haven’t had time to get into in detail here is the concept of a social semantic smart grid. Layering machine readable human information on top of the grid and using that to drive smart decisions. The grid as semantic web…

I may have said this before but that’s never stopped me. It’s time to stop abstracting our resource usage. Check this out.

From NicolasNova.

I spent Saturday at the first (and I hope) annual Africa Gathering conference, an orgy of ICT4D organized by the guys behind Geekyoto and held in Birkbeck College, London.

First up with a BIG statement was Tim Unwin, UNESCO ICT4D chair. His message was loud and clear.

It’s time to stop doing pilot projects and start doing things that are substantive and substantial.

Shades of Tim O’Reilly’s call for us to work on stuff that matters and I couldn’t agree more

The $100 laptop

ICT4D PhD candidate David Hollow had some insights into how the initial rollouts of $100 laptops in five Ethiopian schools. Using qualitative and quantitative research he painted a picture of laptops being enthusiastically received by students but ultimately alienating both teachers and parents. Students are learning how to use their new computers far quicker than their teachers and in many cases both teachers and parents have concluded that the laptops are good for nothing but games

There was a clear message that there simply isn’t enough meaningful content on these laptops. Until there are more textbooks and lesson modules uploaded as standard the laptops are going to continue to be used as glorified digital cameras and MP3 players. In other words it’s not enough to get these laptops into the field. They have to be supported with localized software and content. And it’s vital that parents and teachers are ahead of the training curve. So stick that in your USB drive Negroponte.

SMS on the Frontline

Frontline SMS setup. Super simple.

Ken Banks presented one of the standout presentations, how his SMS management tool, Frontline SMS has been utilized across the content. Frontline creates an SMS messaging hub by allowing a standard phone to be connected to a standard PC using a standard cable.  Why has he been so successful? Because Ken’s given the users the very basics and let them roll with it. He’s trusted them to follow some instructions, souce the gear, but the airtime even though this means the barriers to entry are slightly higher. When users do get everything working they feel massive ownership and become his best evangelists.

It takes big NGOs and government organizations months to build and deploy tech for similar usage, Frontline SMS allows end users such as field doctors and local media organizations bypass the tape and get on with connecting to their audience. And crucially it bypasses local authority structures, very important when monitoring Zimbabwaen elections for example.

Ultimately Ken makes a great point on the direction of technology in Africa. He’s distributing a small software package and letting people run it for themselves.

Mobiles in Africa: The Movie

Martin Konzett of ict4d.at presented this trailer of his current project. The full documentary is released next month. Great to see some humour in the mix.

Old School Networks: ColaLife

The most bizarrely innovative  story of the day was that of Simon Berry, the man behind ColaLife. This is a case of using social media tools here in the UK and around the world to push a cause in Africa. So far so standard, but it’s the cause itself that’s super-impressed me. Simon’s idea is real simple:

1. Lots of kids in Africa die from dehydration related illness.
2. Many can be saved if only hydration salts and medcines could be got to them.
3. Let’s use the existing distribution channels of Coke deliverers to spread the good stuff.

Here’s the video:

Could it be that using old-school distribution channels we’ll create new human collaborative networks? This simple idea has huge scaling potential and it’s something that companies like Coca-Cola should be jumping aboard way before Simon and ColaLife force them. We can apply this to all sorts of distribution channels and supply chains all around the world and the great thing is that the concept works without any hi-tech rocket science. Once the guys in the distribution centres are on board we have a winner.

And the rest…

A couple of interesting points from whiteafrican and Ushahidi co-founder Erik Hersman. In Africa it’s very hard for people to bounce ideas off each other. Here we do this with tools like Twitter, IRC, Facebook etc. Yet the speed of communication and thus the time it takes to disseminate ideas in Africa remains slower.

That said clearliy technologies, particularly of the open variety have leveled the global barrier to entry for developers everywhere. Technology allows Africans to overcome life’s inefficiencies,  whether that’s government, food or health.

And if there’s one technology holy grail right now is an open mobile payment structure that isn’t tied to any operator or even any country. Achieve this and then the playing field really does level off in a big way. If you’re to believe Erik and the majority of the attendees of AfricaGathering the phone operators have no incentive and are bringing no urgency to this issue. Having a worked with the European and US arms of many of these operators this comes as no surprise.

Finally,  just to show the day wasn’t all serious save-the-world ernestness, Juergen Eichholz gave a quick presentation on Afrigadget and the even better and funnier Afrifail.com. Check them out for some great upcycling action.

“

AfriFAIL [photo (c) flickr.com/photos/jennerm

-Edit

Here are some more blog pieces on the day which I’ve just lifted from Alasdair Munn’s piece on the day. Cheers Alasdair.

• My Take on AfricaGathering in London - Juergen Eichholz
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 1 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 2 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 3 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 4 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: panel discussion
• Karola Riegler’s Flickr Photoset on AfricaGathering

A month ago I was inspired to enter the Social Actions Change the Web Challenge. The closing date was mid April so unfortunately if the entered app, Battfone, was a horse it would be still out there running.

But let’s not worry about trivialities like that, changing the world is more important than winning coding competitions and collecting cash prizes. So with that in mind here’s an update to what I’m still trying to achieve with Battfone.

So what’s the big idea?

Here’s the detailed application overview used on the CTW site:

It’s Saturday afternoon and Josh has some downtime so he’s laying back on the couch watching some football. He’s not particularly interested in the result so he’s got his IM open on his laptop and he’s texting his friends planning his Saturday night entertainment.

Then the BattFone goes off. Adam receives a Twitter DM alerting him to a Social Action hot off the wires from Idealist.org. There’s an asylum seeker at the local welfare centre and they need a translator in a hurry. Just so happens Adam speaks “foreign” and so without much ado he’s down there spending less than an hour making someone’s life a lot easier.

Adam is the type of guy who’ll answer a call for help but he’s not always going to go out of his way to look for the needy. That’s where BattFone comes in.

***

We want BattFone to be considered the early warning alert system for the Social Actions. An APB for the API.

We aim to combine the Social Actions API with Twitter and eventually other networks  to create a multi-way Social Actions communications system. Using http://BattFone.me users will register to be alerted via Twitter, e-mail and other means when actions they’ve specified an interest in are created.

BattFone is a filter and alert system to get the right Social Actions to the right Social Actors at the right time.
The right time isn’t always quarter a after midnight during a surfing session. It can be whenever and wherever the Action is created.

BattFone is focused heavily on the end-user. It’s main purpose is to act as an instigator of real world action. We want to take relevant Social Actions off the social networks and put them into the hands of people who will answer the call for help.

We expect BattFone to be most useful in urban environments where rich sets of actions will be targeted at the most focused set of actors possible. As the Social Actions API develops we expect location awareness to play a key role. Right now however we’re working with what we can in this regard.

Great Idea, now go build it

Part of my day job at Setanta involves designing and managing the build of applications far more complex than the one above. So Battfone was going to be a piece of cake, even for a someone like myself who doesn’t usually get their hand covered with code feces. Wrong.

First up was designing a model. The concept is straightforward enough.

1. A user registers interest in receiving Battfone alerts
2. User provides Twitter ID and states what action types they want to help with along with their location
3. Battfone polls Social Actions’ API regulary
4. Battfone matches new Social Actions’ location and action_type with user location and action type.
5. If there’s a match we compose a tweet and dm the lucky user

After taking the app through some bigtime thought revisions the bones remain pretty much as is. The order of that if statement has changed but the result is the same.

So with a model sketched out in too-soft-for-my-liking-HB pencil it was on to the application stack itself. One given was that the app was going to be hosted by Joyent. I’ve had nothing but great customer support there over the past few years and already have a ton of small blogs (including this one) safely housed there.
Next up the stack itself. One of the great rules set down by the guys at Social Actions is that all the apps end up published with an Open Source license. Add to that that to kick off there’s only going to be one developer working on this and there goes a .NET stack.

Second contributing factor was the APIs that were going to be integrated; Twitter and Social Actions. Twitter in particular has a ton of libraries and documented code snippets already built for it. Social Actions is getting there. To utilize these my choices were down to Python, PHP, Java and Ruby. I played around with Python for a while but eventually settled on Ruby. With Rails I could scaffold a working database model (I thought at the time) quickly, not worry about the front end design until way later, and concentrate my efforts on the app brains of matching social_actions with users.

I’d like to have investigated Django a little more. I really like what the guys there are building but there’s simply a lot more Rails examples and tutorial out there right now and if I was going to build this, or at least a proof of concept, on my own I was going to need to tap into the crowd wisdom already on the net.

What’s taking you so long?

I’m going to save an actual code overview for another time. Some big problems I’ve faced so far aren’t issues with my conceptual problems, but simply knowledge gaps associated with using any stack for the first time, in my case Rails. It took the best part of a week of evening to get MySQL’s local paths sorted on my dev environment. Twitter has been turning OAuth on and off for the last month meaning that testing any Twitter functionality has been hit or miss. It’s still out and I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle to re-engineer Battfone to handle password logins that are soon the be deprecated anyway.

Right now I’m at the stage where I have just about every individual class working independently.  I have a scaffolded app running with a few bugs and I’m trying to add in the classes and functionality one by one. I’ve no front end work done but that’s the fun part so I’ll sail through that in a couple of nights.

If there has been one hold back on the API side though it’s been with the location attributes of each social_action coming through the Social Actions API itself. For the vast majority of actions the location attribute is not set at all. This makes sense in many cases, why should a petition for example need a real world location set for it. However in the case where locations are set they are not always easy to parse and match up with a user. I know this issue is still under development on the API side and it hasn’t stopped John Brennan building his fantastic Google Maps mashup at http://www.imdoingmypart.org/community/map.

imdoingmypart.org

I can only commend Joe and Peter from Social Actions who have been super encouraging during the whole process. One of their aims with the competition has been to incubate a developer community around the API and that’s certainly happened.

So onwards!

There’s alot more to come on the onwards applications of Battfone, I’m hoping to have a working version online in the next couple of weeks. You can follow the test Twitter account @battfone to get a good idea of the state of play. And of course if you have any feedback, ideas, offers of free coders and so on please shout.

Copey and company bow down to the Greatest Briton (image cc Lloyd Davis)

I’ve just come across this personal account of the April 1st G20 protests from none other than Julian Cope, Liverpool post punk leftover, Krautrock boffin and the original Megalithic European.

Sorry I’m a day late with this Drudion, but I was in London yesterday at the G20 anti-Kapitalist protests that focused on the Bank of England. Unfortunately, I totally fucked up my plans through sheer yokel paranoia and came away empty handed. Intending to meet up with my dear friends, the writer Gyrus and U-Know editor Merrick, at Liverpool Street Station, at 10.30am, I left our W. Country home at 6am and was in central London just before nine. Nervous that there would be thousands of people milling about, I arrived on foot at Liverpool Street a full hour early, to be confronted by hundreds of police already in place. Of course, I was dressed extremely dodgily, with my hair up in a black wig and dressed in the kind of all-purpose rural chic that couldn’t have been further from my regular Rock God image (!). The police, however, were so fucking paranoid that they conducted a Stop & Search on me at the top of the escalators at 10.20; a full 40 minutes before the march had even started. Of course, I declined to give my name and address and, having no ID or cards on me, they detained me and wrote down a description. Unfortunately, when the main cop read on the report that I was wearing a stab vest, he came over personally and demanded to look at it. I just about managed to take the thing off without disturbing my wig, but the cop told me he believed the vest was part of a stolen consignment of police uniforms and gear, and that I’d taken off the labels to hide this fact. Kiddies, I’ve had this stab vest at least two years and wear it any time I’m in the city, but the cops just used this as an excuse to do a full body search and they soon confiscated my burka, a pair of women’s tights and all of my (expensive) police body armour. All of this occurred in full view of the general public and was clearly done just to make a show of me. When I still didn’t give my name, they sat me in a van to think about it for hours and the fucking protest went off with me detained. In the meantime, dammit, an exultant Merrick was texting me from Bishopsgate telling me the Climate Camp have taken over, while Gyrus had been penned in at the Bank of England. With hindsight, I’ll admit I looked extremely dodgy. But what got me most was how the police discovered all of my gear but still didn’t realize I was wearing a 99p black eBay wig! On the Stop & Search report I’m even described as having ‘Hair: black, short.’ I can’t show you my face on the self-portrait I took as I plan to use this disguise again in the future, but Holy McGrail referred to it as Scargill Chic and pointed out that there are clearly blonde tufts visible from underneath the rug. If McGrail could suss it from the crappy mobile phone photo (shown above), then so much for the West’s so-called War on Terror. What the fuck!

That one of England’s true rock (and I mean ‘rock’ in all senses of the word) heroes was detained at the Met’s pleasure for hours on end is galling enough but that he was recognized by none of his captors is truly an indictment on the state of policing in Britain today.

Because I don’t have enough to do with my time right now I am thinking about entering the Social Actions Change the Web Challenge. Closing date is Friday 3rd April so it’s all hands on deck right now.

Needless to say the app I’ve got in mind right now will integrate with the SocialActions API along with the Twitter API and I’m also hoping to add in some magic web 2.0 ingredient, time’s the big issue though. It’s been a while since I waded knee deep into code torrents this rough.

Social Actions are attempting to become the world’s clearing house for actions run by charitable and philanthropic organziations. By the looks of things they’re going about it the right way, building a central API that can communicate with a whole ton of online bodies in the charitable space. Through the Change the Web Challenge they are also incubating an interesting Developers Network here. More power to them.

That’s right, change the web, change the world. Now, back to the code.

Here’s some photos of the past week in Austin.

More to come…

We find patterns where we look for them in life. Right now I’m thinking an awful lot about trust, and how we emulate real world trust relationships online. So it’s not altogether surprising that trust emerged for me as the biggest theme on Saturday at SXSW.

Nobody nailed this better than Laurence Lessig in his talk entitled Change V2. Lessig claims he’s giving up the copyright war he’s been waging these past ten years in favour of a a bigger fight. Political campaign finance reform. Without the total overhaul of how politicians are funding their campaigns he claims. The thesis is pretty simple:

Dependencies weaken trust

Money /= False

BUT

Money breeds contempt

How does this apply to government? Lobbyists pay politicians, ostensibly for access rather than favours. The electorate knows this and assumes the worst. So the US is now in a situation where less than 20% of the population thinks that congress is doing a good job.

Lessig gave examples from the past 200 years of the Republic and stated his view that we are living in a less corrupt democracy than at any time in history. So this is Good Souls corruption in Lessig’s view. But perceived conflicts of interest are providing the contests that create doubt and these doubts breed the deadly meme.

The same situation exists within the world of medicine. Think MMR inoculations. GPs are perceived by their patients to be on the end of a  payola stick by big medicine. So no record number of parents  are forgoing jabs for their kids.

So with all that in mind Lessig says we need to removed the dependencies of K street and issue a Declaration FOR Independence. How: Citizens funding only of political campaigns.

In Google we trust

Charlene Li came back to the issue of trust in her talk on the Future of Social Networks. The first half of the talk I wondered why I’d made the mistake of sitting in. Inane observations that anybody in the audience could have made isn’t the reason I’m here. But Li did bust out a couple of nuggets near the end.

She argued that we’re on the brink of really stepping up our use of implicit social data to fill in gaps of closeness. Essentially one social network talking and communicating to others in order to know who are friends are and importantly, in what context they’re our friend.This makes sense. But here’s the rub. To do this Li claims we need a central trust fund. And who’s this going to be. Google.

I’m not so sure about this. Why will we suddenly start trusting Google, will it be implicit trust, or explicit. In other words will we trust them by default because they simply host more of our digital life than anyone else, or will we grab on to them as an OpenID supplier( or whatever trust ecosystem eventually emerges, I’m not so sure OpenID will be the one). Follow the money said our host and she gave the example of our banks, our government services, our stores are all starting to move onto the social web.

But let’s go back to Lessig. Money is not equal to false, but money breeds contempt. Will the migration of financial transactions and dependancies onto the social web breed the same DIStrust that exists in real life? Big question.

A follow up thought of my own from this goes something along these lines:

Online philanthropy is a booming business right now. From events like Twestival to startups like DonorsChoose and Kiva, there’s never been a better time to give, and to give online. But are there real dangers here that we miss the trust hooks when we’re setting up these new paradigms.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos (was it me or was this talk a geek infomercial) talked (super nervously) about happiness. Ho hum. But one interesting point on trust didn’t pass me my. Zappos are all about company culture and happiness in the workplace. In order to achieve this they place a super amount of trust in their entire workforce from warehouse floor to callcenter to finance department. And if you were to believe Hsieh it works.

Finally, the OpenSocial Stack, which I saw at both geek (code) and non-geek (IRL ideas) talks. Four of the five levels on the stack here have implications for trust. Think about it. Google already are.

Opensocial Stack

Photo (cc) Maia C

The future of the medium, a digital strategy to implement now.

Radio isn’t sexy. Radio has never had a point release number added onto it. No such thing as Radio 2.0. When was the last time you heard a new radio station get VC funding. Actually, when was the last time you heard of a new radio station starting up at all. But radio is a remarkable medium having survived pretty much intact and on the same model for the past 50 years. Despite the hype of Last.fm and pandora, of podcasts and RSS, of satellite in the US and DAB in the UK, radio still exists and plays an important part in communities world wide.
But seismic change is enveloping the entire mediascape right now, not least of all because of massive advertising budget cuts. Here’s my take on why and how radio will have to adapt to changes in technology and more importantly its audience.

Before looking at radio exclusively in the digital space, I’m going to take a helicopter view on the situation right now.

To look at what’s happening to radio now let’s first take a look at radio as it emerged in the sixties the loser of a two decade battle with television. This was how Marshall McLuhan saw it in the Understanding Media, 1964.

One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous informations system. News bulletins, time signals, traffic data, and, above all, weather reports now serve to enhance the native power of radio to involve people in one another. Weather is that medium that involves all people equally. It is the top item on radio, showering us with fountains of auditory space or lebensraum.

[And]

Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. The resonating dimension of radio is unheeded by the script writers, with few exceptions. The famous Orson Welles broadcast about the invasion from Mars was a simple demonstration of the all-inclusive, completely involving scope of the auditory image of radio. It was Hitler who gave radio the Orson Welles treatment for real.

The antithetic electric power of instant information that reverses social explosion into implosion, private enterprise into organization man, and expanding empires into common markets, has obtained as little recognition as the written word. The power of radio to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has gone unnoticed, So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions.

[Here comes the payoff:]

Centralism of organization is based on the continuous, visual, lineal structuring that arises from phonetic literacy. At first therefore, electric media merely followed the established patterns of literate structures. Radio was released from these centralist network pressures by TV. TV then took up the burden of centralism, from which it may be released by Telstar [25 years before Sky launched this was a good guess, but really it was the internet that is doing this job - Cian]. With TV accepting the central network burden derived from our centralized industrial organization,  radio was free to diversify, and to begin a regional and local community service that it had not known, even in the earliest days of the radio hams.

Since TV, radio has turned to the individual needs of people at different times of the day, a fact that goes with the multiplicity of receiving sets in bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, cars, and now in pockets. Different programs are provided for those engaged in diverse activities. Radio, once a form of group listening that emptied churches, has reverted to private and individual uses since TV. The teenager withdraws from the TV group to his private radio.

This natural bias of radio to a close tie-in with diversified community groups is best manifested in the DJ cults, and in radio’s use of the telephone in a glorified form of the old trunk-line wiretapping. Plato, who had old-fashioned tribal ideas of political structure, said that the proper size of a city was indicated by the number of people who could hear the voice of a public speaker. Even the printed book, let alone radio, renders the political assumptions of Plato quite irrelevant for practical purposes. Yet radio, because of its ease of decentralized intimate relation with both private and small communities, could easily implement the Platonic political dream on a world scale.

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I’m not going to have to labour the point here that you have merely to replace ‘TV’ and ‘radio’ with ‘internet’ and ’social networks/platforms’ at various junctures above to see we have transitioned into a new media age again. Neither am I going to labour the point that it’s TV that has lost more and has more to lose whilst radio continues to serve well the masters McLuhan writes of.

There’s another point arising from the above worth considering. TV took the responsibility and “radio was free to diversify”. Whether or not this diversification has continued apace over the 45 years since McLuhan wrote this is irrelevant. We’re now at an end of history juncture in media evolution where all media is being forced to evolve, or die. Audience migration to other media, general falling advertising revenues and stale formats all play a part here. But let’s not dwell overly long on the past.

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Current radio landscape
Okay, so we know where we’ve come from. Let’s take a look at the current radio landscape and

Radio does an awesome job of building relationships between listener and presenter. In the listener’s view this comes down the mainline. One to one. And great relationships are always built on the same thing; trust.

To see just how important this trust is lets take an example of trust failure. The Sachs / Ross /  Brand incident. I’ll leave for now the fact that the original airing didn’t produce a single letter of complaint and it was only after other media outlets picked up the story it snowballed.  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/27/russell-brand-jonathan-ross-andrew-sachs-calls]
No, the interesting angle is that Ross and Brand pulled their prank on on radio. Would it have produced the same reaction on TV? I suggest that on TV we would have seen the footage aired back to back for a news cycle or two. And then? Then the news editors become interested in something else. But the relationship, the trust we have with our radio hosts, is very different. We invite them in to our space, one on one, and nobody wants that space violated in this way. It wasn’t just Ross and Brand leaving voice mails, we were all collaborators and we didn’t like how that made us feel ultimately.

[As an aside it's interesting to note that during the his enforced sabbatical Ross became one of the planet's most followed Twitterer. More on this some other time.]

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If this were a full on research piece I’d be forced to bring more examples to the table, it’s not and I don’t have time right now. So onwards.

Let’s take the step into tomorrow’s world. With us we’re taking a (pseudo) one-to-one relationship between the radio and the audience. Singular. So let’s survey the new digital world we’re entering. A few notes and buzzwords if you’ll permit me.

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Facets of future radio

• First of all it’s distributed – it’s anywhere you like
• It’s post-scarcity – the means of receiving content/information/communication/media is not limited by atoms (Like it was when we pressed music onto plastic discs), or even airwaves.
• It’s always on – ditto
• It’s hot in here – because it’s really really crowded. With content creators and content users and it’s hard to tell these guys apart.
• It’s noisy in here too – ditto
• It’s remix ready – Somebody younger and smarter than you is going to take your media and pass it on to someone else in ways you never imagined. You may as well make it as easy as possible.
• It’s a bit like a cult – Yep, everybody just wants to say hello. And we don’t care if you have

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The future of news organizations.
Adapt or die. Emily Bell recently described ITV as belonging to a “Sunset industry”. It is unlikely the broadcaster can survive the current recession without significant change, and it is questionable whether they can implement that change quickly enough.

Whereas the BBC, for all it’s “scandals” and “-gates” has managed to do something revolutionary. It has, though the wildly successful I-Player, turned itself into a platform. Yes it still produces world class content, but it now has an end to end distribution solution for all of this content too. The value of that can’t be valued.

Commentators such as Jeff Jarvis have been long telling all old media outlets to drop the commodity content and focus on the differentiators. For newspapers this means this means letting go of glamours foreign bureau and putting more resources on the local beat. Big media has started to listen; the New York Times last month announced a hyper local initiative with bloggers and reporters stationed throughout the cities five boroughs and in surrounding states. Over the past couple of years Guardian News and Media (GNM) has been slowing acquiring and partnering with leading blogs in order to bring specialist content and expertise under the Guardian.

And this week GNM took the brave step of opening up ALL it’s databases: news; demographics; statistics etc. to any potential third party application developers. They have an unproved advertising revenue model backing this up which may or may not bring in serious cash, either way it’s a revolutionary move. Whether it pays or not GNM have reacted quickly and boldly to the changing outputs (distribution, audience etc.) that the IT revolution has brought us.

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Audience
Let’s bring this back to audience.
Radio’s job is to engage audience, engender trust thus keeping the listener tuned in and  bringing the audience back regularly. A radio station is that familiar comfort zone a listener can go to.
What can a radio do in the digital space to back this mission up. Can it offer the same services, the same comfort zone? Where the answer to these questions is no, can it drive audiences to places where

Up until now a radio producer has dealt with easy one way flows of information.
The talent speaks down from on high and the listeners have two choices and the second one is turn the dial. Sure phone-ins and texts, emails and letters have their place. But in all of these the producer or talent act as gatekeeper. They control the flow both ways.
All of this has changed.
Using realtime tools like Twitter and Facebook status, listeners can now self organize. They can take the conversation

If radio stations don’t tap into this information ecosystem the talent is reduced to the role of conversation starter. The answer? I can’t tell you, but it will involve both the talent and the station becoming part of their listeners’ social graphs. They will be deeply integrated into this new ecosystem. And a conversation in this space doesn’t end at 7pm when the drivetime slot turns into the SportsNight. The conversation is 24/7. Or at least 7-23. Are radio stations ready to play under these rules. They’d want to be. Can they take part in an audience relationship that’s listener-to-listener and not talent-to-listener.

The big paradigm shift producers are going to have to deal with is two way communication. you have to talk back to stoke the trust engine

There are some facts we should keep in mind. Content. The great reliables in life; taxes and death. These are still the subjects “listeners” will engage in. They’ll simply engage wherever the barrier to entry is lowest. There’s room, and a distribution platform for niche, but the big issues remain just that, big
And let’s also remember that not everybody out there wants to be involved in a global discussion. There is still an appetite for expert opinion presented professionally. In fact as the hum of the crowd (in places like Twitter) grows, the need for the professional content, clearly identifiable as such, grows. So give the people what they want.

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Filters
On the subject information overload, of modern media which is cheap, globally distributed and always on, Clay Shirkey suggests we don’t have a problem with too much media, merely difficulty filtering it. Our traditional filters were newspaper editors and radio producers.
As we bypass these forms of media we lose an important buffer. Many of us are now utterly swamped. I have hundreds of songs lined up in iTunes and Last.fm I’ve never listened too and never will. I have podcasts downloaded that will never be synced to my mp3 player. I’ve got 15,000 articles in my RSS feed reader that presents me with a chronological impossibility.

Linear radio offers a wonderful reprieve from this constant barrage. When I turn on the Today programme in the morning I’m trusting that the Oxbridge educated editors and researchers have programmed a breakfast’s worth of topical and insightful content for my consumption. It’s the only time of the day many of us are now letting these decisions be made by others.

There are a number of example of automated filtering services online that are based on recommendation and database “intelligence”. Last.fm/pandora for music [automated]. Digg taps the wisdom of the (mostly tech) crowd [human].

I would argue that the radio producer is already one of the media ecology’s best filters. From Jimmy Saville to John Kelly, the DJ too is an original filter and filterer. There is a natural role here for radios to play in being society’s live content filterer.

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Remix culture - beyond the airwaves
It has never been easier to take existing cultural artifacts, songs, images, video, and combine them to create new culture. Dangermouse’s Grey Album (the worlds of Jay Z, the music of the Beatles) is the oft-name-checked pinnacle of this remix culture. It could be argued that 2008 was the year of the remix presidential campaign; Obama Girl could never have been created by a campaign themselves, but when mixed and remixed by amateurs.

The same remixing culture has taken hold on websites and databases all over the internet. Flickerverse.com was a personal favorite. It took photos uploaded on Flicker, peeks at their geo-tags and maps them in realtime on a Google Map of the world, sadly it is no more. Twitterverse does the same for tweets against geographical location.

Can we mash-up real radio stations. What would that look like?
Radio stations touch local communities. Police forces and media outlets all over the world are starting to produce Google Maps mashups of crime data against city maps. Does a news and talk based radio format have a job to do here. Can it in fact own this data (ownership in the curatorial sense).

Visualize, Visualize Visualize.
This may sound counter intuitive for a radio station. But open source data and the open APIs of visualization tools have led to a new wave of online services. Here’s a map of Chicago crime data. Surely this is something local radio should be all over.
(Check this map of Twitter conversations about the Superbowl out). And remember, these services aren’t necessarily there for on-air talent to direct.

Questions:

• Can a radio station OWN some of these services within its “broadcast area”?
• Radio is part of the fourth estate. The four estate’s job is in part to keep an eye on the third estate?
• Is there a job to do to aggregate politicians’s expenses, blogs, twitter accounts. Keep an eye on them all?

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So some practical suggestions if you reached this far

All I wanted was some website advice?
I haven’t  spent much time thinking why someone would want to go to a radio website. I love radio. I never go to radio websites unless it’s to listen live or on demand.
Ten years ago we would have stuck a picture of DJ BigShot on the front page and had another page devoted to him. And nobody who ever visited it would ever go back. And most galling of all a design and build agency would have walked away with a decent sum of money for their brochure-ware.

Can we do something smarter that that around the talent? Instead of using the website as a shop window let’s use it as a set of open doors. Let’s figure a way to start the relationship. Or rekindle the relationship.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this in recent times is Stephen Fry’s ClubFry page. This isn’t his homepage. And it’s a lot more than a shop window. Fry has flung the doors open and is asking people to come inside. He’s opening himself up in as many ways possible, with twitter, with replies, with email newsletters, with podcasts, with photostreams. And he’s done this using existing networks that his audience are already on.

Another interesting campaign recently is Skittles. The crunchy chewy confectionary ditched their website entirely and instead pointed the URL skittles.com at various web 2.0 sites. These included a Twitter search page on the phrase “skittles” to the newly created Facebook Group page on Facebook itself. This was Skittle telling their customers, we dwell amongst you, not on an artificial construct you have no interest in visiting. The online equivalent of running a radio show from Bewleys café perhaps.

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Conclusions
This piece is long enough as it is. Drawing up practical applications to the ideas discussed here will take up twice the space.

• Radio CEOs and owners can’t hide from a digital strategy of some sort. The format, audience demographics and geography are going to dictate the size and scope of this to some extent. Taking wallpaper But there are some clear directions imo.
• Radios can become content filters. Their websites can play important roles in telling people where the best, most important content is.
• Visualizations and mashups of crime and of happiness indexes.
• Listening to our audience. How can we aggregate their discussion better. I’m thinking of the like of Seesmic etc. here.
• Google. How are users finding the radio station. The content. can google drive this.
  Or live twitter search. Live search is being billed by people like Batelle as key. And it ties really well into radio.
  Interesting idea here. Radio stations can have twitter feeds that are meant ONLY to capture search, not friends for ego-following’s sake.
• Radio website should aggregate the personalities, not brochure-ware them. Like stephen Fry’s twitter page.
• Radio’s don’ need websites to communicate with their audience. They need digital strategies and friend feed / skittles type things

Future of Radio: We assume relationships and communication between radio and audience. My big question to the radio industry is what is your role in the relationship between your audience and your audience.

This just in via Matt Jones‘ Twitter Stream. Mixed zoned land greening Philadelphia. Brilliant. And brilliantly executed by Front Studio and bldgblog.blogspot.com.

Farmadelphia Skyline

[Image: Front Studio. Philadelphia's "urban voids interwoven with agricultural patchwork" via bldgblog.blogspot.com ].

[Images: Front Studio.  Chickens hang out amidst lettuce via bldgblog.blogspot.com].

Long time readers will know I have a thing for Philly. So this makes so much sense.

One non-flippant  note on this. I’ve heard two very serious people talk about land use in the last 30 hours. The first was James Lovelock at yesterday’s Nature debate. Lovelock made very clear his view that improving land use was the single biggest thing we could do right now to tackle climate change.

The second was Alex Steffen during the course of his address to ETech earlier today:

Design and density is the single best investment we can make re sustainability. It dematerializes trips.

Image: some rights reserved by Dom Dada

Nature magazine continued their Darwin season of talks in London tonight with a panel discussion entitled What Price Biodiverstity?.

The top caliber speakers were Professor James Lovelock, independent scientist, author of “Revenge of Gaia”. Michael Meacher, MP (Labour) & former Minister of State for the Environment and Sir Crispin Tickell, Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University. Not a joker amongst them. I’d also add the the quality of questioning from the floor was second to none, quite refreshing at these sorts of things where one can usually expect some variety of rogue element to attempt a hijacking of proceedings.

I only found out only this morning about the talk via @zzgavin on Twitter, and have time but for some brief notes here before getting on with the rest of my evening. The entire discussion took place in the context of one larger and one (debatable) less significant event. Climate change and the recession. But doesn’t (shouldn’t?) every conversation right now take place in that light.

So in no particular order:

Tiskell on the state of the biodiversity conversation: Talking about climate change is [relatively] easy, about biodiversity is much harder. We don’t even have the value system to measure it and the common man on the street simply can’t understand it. They won’t understand what we are losing until there is a cataclismic biodiversity event.

There was general agreement that the global conversation on protecting biodiversity was at least five years behind that of climate change. An example of this, in the UK we have the Stern Report on Climate Change and even a Climate Change Office. We have nothing similar to start combating the threat to biodiversity.

Meacher on our current value systems: These current systems have led to a belief that “only nature that can be made profitable should be preserved”. That’s the dangerous result of putting economic value on biodiversity

Lovelock on carbon trading schemes: Totally disastrous. As a result of carbon trading, less efficient coal stations in east Germany are producing MORE co2. These permits have been either given away of sold too cheap. Why didn’t we charge polluters, not give them credits. Carrots instead of sticks.

Tickell on industry: [they] wants to do the right thing and they will if they are given clear limits in which to operate in. Heads of industry aren’t oblivious, they know there are serious problems in the world but they want to know where they stand. [Political] leadership has to show the way here and TRUST that they can do it and we wasn’t this change.

Tickell on biodiversity in agriculture: Agriculture shouldn’t be a market activity. The market is set up to measure short term gain. It does that but does not record the long term damage industrial agriculture in particular does to land resource. Agreculture should be a community activity, enriching all around it.

Meacher on the subject of biodiversity value: even if we can come up with a bio-diversity index instead of GDP to give us a quantitive measurement of human activity, how do we make this measurement operative. How do we make companies change their business plans to fit this. How do we tie it into government budgets.

He mentioned in fact a sustainability index he had presided over in the Department of the Environment that never got anywhere because nobody had any . Meacher verged between accute peceimism and optimism at times, which struck me as sounding odd coming from a career politician. He was convincing when explaining his belief that we are now on the brink of a new world economic, environmental and cultural order.

Lovelock being the oldest and at times sounding the wisest got to round off the evening. He did so clearly, directly and without hesitation when asked if it were possible for a biodiverse Earth to survive.

Time, he said, is the biggest barrier to halting biodiversity decline and climate change. We are so far down the path that the goals of 2040 and 2050 that our institutions have set will be far too little too late.

There’s a trust deficit in society. Technology can play and is playing a huge role in rectifying this.

I’ve just read Causewired by Tom Watson. The book is Watson’s attempt to summarize the current state of play in the world of online philanthropy, social causes and network based social action organization. Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World as the tag line suggests.

I’ve a lot more to come about the subjects Watson tackles but right now I’m going to take on the subject of trust, particularly in light of the last two posts on this site concerned as they are with Digital Britain and Modern Liberty. There’s a gaping trust void in society right now. Our government clearly don’t trust us and in the midst of a  recession the likes of which none of us have know before there’s a danger that society fragments and turns away from the most needy, and from the most grave causes.

The central thesis of Watson’s book is this:

New Technology and the human urge to communicate will create the basis for a golden age of activism and involvement, increasing the reach of philanthropy and improving the openness of politics, democratic government and our major social institutions.
[BUT, working against this is the current global recession. Governments are running into budget shortfall and cutting spending in all social areas.]

So, just as our governments are failing us by cutting back on spending that increase social cohesion, we are coming up the the technology and the ideas to bind ourselves together in social economies without our governments’ help. I’m going to have to leave my reaction to government responses here to another post, needless to say it’s a big issue.

Whether our governments get it right with initiatives like Digital Britain, Watson’s point is that there’s a whole ton of people in the doing-something-that-matters space that aren’t waiting for their government. And why should they. Private (and open source) enterprise has given an historically unprecedented number of people the tools and inspiration to take action in a whole host of fields.

For now I want to take a look at some of studies in Causewired and see how they are tackling matter of trust.

What technology is allowing us do

A quick overview of what this technology is allowing us to do is in order. Watson’s beat is online philanthropy. That means free giving. And by free I mean free as in speech, not beer. Giving of one’s own volition. So who’s giving and who’s getting? Watson hones in on some prime time examples: DonorsChoose, Fundable, Kiva and Facebook Causes.

Each a very different application or platform but some bigtime shared attributes and functions, not least of which in my view is the way trust is leveraged, certainly in the case of the first three if not quite so strongly with Causes. For those not familiar with these companies it’s worth clicking the above links and checking their about pages real quick. In all of these examples Watson is showing us that the abstraction between the giver and receiver in a philanthropic situation is being removed. If I use DonorsChoose to donate textbooks to classrooms I know what text books and what school is involved. If I loan money with Kiva to a person or project in a developing world country chances are I have a photo and story behind the whole deal. The personalization and directness strengthens the sense of empathy with in turn cranks up the trust motor.

How is this being achieved

Watson highlights the transition from anonymity to real identity on the social web as key.
From Charles Leadbeader in We Think: Freedom is a slippery idea, but I believe that the web will be good for freedom of expression in four respects.

• The freedom to think what we like, to form and express ideas independently
• The freedom to shape our identities, to be who we want to be
• The freedom as consumers to choose and buy what we want
• The freedom to express ourselves through creating things that matter to us.

It isn’t a big leap of logic to suppose that for freedom to exist within a social space the atmosphere of that space must be made up of a large dose of trust. Example: I am only free if I trust my cohabitants to obey the rules of the social space and  thus not impinge upon my freedom. The future threat of the curtailment of freedom may in itself act as that very curtailment.

But freedom within an environment is not enough within itself. After all, if a user can have a trust based relationship only within a closed space how can a movement or cause grow. The trust relationship must expand. That may mean the expansion of the [closed] environment or it may mean the migration of the users and their attached trust outside the environment.

From an interview with Causes’ Sean Parker Watson tells us turning users into propagators is key.

“Deliberate viral engineering, how you turn your users into propagators through careful optimization was very important “

This is illustrated in another case study,  Kiva, the developing world online loan agency. By allowing users to help many causes and many users to help each cause there’s a natural urge for donors to tell more people to donate to their cause and see their cause succeed. Watson likens this to a child collecting baseball cards.

Watson isn’t afraid to be a little cynical in illustrating his point when he mentions the black tie ball philanthropy that continues to pull in big money in New York. Being seen at the ball is a big part of the play.

Causes do not spread just because they are good, they spread because people spread them. This seems simple and rather obvious but it is the secret sauce behind the rise of all the online social networks. In short, people like being asked nicely by other people they know to do things for them; that request validates the relationship.

Bringing all this back to trust

One of the most important observations Watson brings to the table in Causewired is this:

Optimism is inherent in people. Consumers will switch brands for causes, particularly young consumers.

Exampe: Every summer Coke and Pepsi go head to head with youth orientated promotions. Collect 20 bottle tops and get a free iTunes voucher. How about if these were led by social causes instead of iTunes giveaways.

83% of Americans say that companies have a responsibility to help support causes and 87% would switch from one brand to another if the other brand is associated with a good cause.

That’s a lot of brand loyalty simply migrating because of people’s innate desire to “do the right thing”. This highlights a couple of glaring facts:

1. The online social philanthropy space is potentially huge
2. Our governments need to be in there getting a piece of the action

Let’s bring this back to trust again. It’s natural to wonder why governments don’t take on this job of turning users into propagators of key services. The private sector is now shining some big fat arc lights down this road, it shouldn’t be hard for our public services to start taking some big steps here. It’s also natural to wonder what we can do to reduce the trust deficit that exists between the government and the rest of us (as outlined here). It our governments aren’t going to trust us on some big issues right away, the least that can be done is the services and applications be put in place so we can trust each other. Then let us do the hard work.

Conclusions

Whilst researching this article I came across this piece by Tom Watson.

…on one hand, people are ever more conscious of philanthropy and its role in commerce and society; on the other, these people are talking to each other more so than ever before.

If you keep talking you can change the world right? And now talk is cheap, easy and global. In theory the more we talk, the more we get to know each other and empathize, the more we trust. In the UK right now the government, through Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, is attempting to map out the digital future. It believes at the end of this future there is a Digital Dividend, the spoils of which will greatly benefit all of society. Lord Carter could do worse than spend a few hours reading Causewired and learning how that dividend is already being created.

There’s two massively important movements taking place right now in Britain, here are some important connections between them. I’ve already written a little about the Digital Britain interim report but more importantly Charles Leadbeater has written a lot and put it all together in a handy portable pdf. Download it here.

The original report either isn’t aware of, or Lord Carter, it’s author, didn’t have the balls to ask some big questions. Leadbeater does. There’s far to many to list here, go read the document, however I will highlight one important conclusion.

It strikes me, as it has done Leadbeater, that the government on the one hand is proposing what they think is an ambitious drive to take the UK’s new media industry and infrastruture forward into the next quarter century. Yet they don’t want to involve us, the public. Moreover, they patently don’t trust us.

Reading Digital Britain one cannot help but feel the government finds the opportunities for people to self-organise through the web all too unsettling for its more technocratic, controlling tendencies. Digital Britain conveys none of the excitement that many young people feel about the world of semi-structured free association that mutual media is creating. This interim report, written behind closed doors in an era of open communications, is little more than piece of space filling to persuade us the government has a vision for the future when in reality it seems to have none, at least not yet. (A model of what can be done, even in government, is the parallel The Power of Information report, which is fully of exciting recommendations for how government can open up its information for citizens to use in novel ways. )

The government say that the UK must be allowed compete with the most advanced nations on Earth and to do this we must have an advanced IT infrastructure. But to use an advanced infrastructure, to create an advanced infrastructure, we must have entrepreneurs, thinkers, dreamers and digital literates. And they must be given tools and those tools imparted with trust.

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This basic mistrust of us the people is the reason the Convention on Modern Liberty not only happend this weekend, but was much needed. What could have been another umbrella demo by the SWP and their ilk has the potential to be a real political movement. Here’s why.

Henry Porter quotes David Cameron in today’s Observer. Scarily I agree with him:

“When academics look back on Labour’s time in power,” he said, “the erosion of our historic liberties will surely be one of its most defining, and damning, aspects. Things we have long thought were part of the fabric of liberty in this country – such as trial by jury, habeas corpus with strict limits on the time that people can be held without charge, the protection of parliament against intrusion by the executive – have been whittled away.”

And Nick Clegg from the same article is a little less dramatic but a little more on point:

“We are the most spied-upon country in the developed world, with a million innocent people’s DNA on a criminal database, more surveillance cameras than anywhere in the world, parents snooped on by council officials checking up on where children spend the night, and ceaseless attempts by government to limit our freedom of expression. That’s why the work of the Convention on Modern Liberty is so important in highlighting the liberties we have lost and inspiring a new alliance in Britain to take our freedoms back.”

Both of these quotes go back to the trust issue. Nobody highlighted this issue better than Philip Pullman in his address to the convention. If Clegg highlighted the problems above, Pullman took the higher road and asked us what sort of society we WANT to live in. For if we don’t know the answer to that what have we got to complain about and what have we to aim at.
Courage, virtue, intellectual curiousity, modesty and honour are five big optimistic virtues that are pulled out and analyzed. You won’t find me arguing.

Just imagine for a moment a nation with the courage, with the modesty, with a simple wakeful clarity of mind that are so
near at hand, so easy to find, if only we knew. Imagine a government that trusted the people who elected it. Imagine agencies of the state that regarded the people’s privacy as something it was the state’s duty to guard, rather like the value of their money and the historic individuality of their town centres and their freedom to speak and write as they like. Imagine a nation that cherished these things as a kind of natural blessing, something obviously good that needed no justification, something like sunshine or kindness or clean water. Or honour.

Now what have these things to do with freedom and the threats to freedom we have been hearing about today? What has the virtue of delight to do with virtue of liberty. Everything. A nation whose laws express fear and suspicion cannot sustain delight for very long; joy does not flourish in the garden of anxiety. The society these laws seem to be designed to bring about is one of institutionalised paranoia of furtive hatred and low-level panic, every scrap of delight and gladness we can find is a blow against that fear; every instance of civility and kindness we come across is a clean wind dispersing a foul vapour. Every example we cherish of imaginative play, of the energy of creation and of the enchantment of art and the wonder of science is a weapon in the arsenal and I say weapon, advisedly: we have a fight on
our hands. “I will not cease from mental fight”, said William Blake, and this is the fight he meant. The fight to defend, to restore, and to sustain the virtue which is not now but could so easily be, the natural behaviour of the state.

We are a better people than our government believes we are; we are a better nation.

That really is a big concept yet one that you won’t find on the manisfesto for government of any of the major parties. At least not yet you won’t. That could change.

I was at the NESTA hosted Digital Britain debate this morning. The format was unimaginative; Jonathan Kestenbaum – NESTA CEO – gave the intros and moderated, Lord Carter – Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting – had the floor to himself for 15 minutes and then Neil Berkett, Virgin Media CEO and Peter Bazalgette, former Endemol big man, joined in and took some audience responses. And a single twitter question.
The full podcast of the event is here so feel free to make up your own mind on proceedings.

Just a couple of thoughts to round out the day.
Carter and Berkett both took a standard government/regulator line and private sector line respectively. Bazelgette took a more thoughtful approach and added some genuine insight, particularly in the area of content. More of this please Peter.

Both Nico MacDonald and Charlie Leadbeater sought to bring from the floor end-users into the debate but didn’t get very far. That was a real shame as it’s a glaring omission from the interim report. Hopefully one that will be rectified by the time the final missive is assembled.

Burkett’s 100Mbps Virgin deal will continue to be nothing but a fat pipe dream to millions, so let’s not get distracted by ISPs’ continued fluffy marketing claims.

The concept of a digital dividend was raised and alluded to at length. This struck me as a dangerous concept. A divided is a payout on shares when times for a company are good. A means by which to reward the shareholders. In this context it sounds like Carter and company are suggesting that by merely building infrastructure and bringing in human capital we’ll reap rewards. This is patently ridiculous. We still need the original content, the services and the entrepreneurial activity to sit on top of the infrastructure to turn investment into reward. A Digital Britain is not an end in itself. There’s no easy dividend coming out of any of these initatives and this language to my mind is going to do nobody any good.

Other interesting bits and bytes: the BBC to become an open platform in ten years, 50Mbps broadband for all within the several and a what-if there was government funding for local public micro-content creators. If that happens we’ll all be reaping the Digital dividend.

Anyway, go watch the video. Or even better, download and read the report. And of course check out the twitter back channel that took place during the discussion.

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I’m reminded by this post from @anomymoustom that a robust look at privacy is a huge omission from the interim report. But then it’s been a huge omission from any legislation the the current UK government have been responsible for over the past 12 years. So no surprises there.

The super-cool people behind last year’s Geekyoto event in London are planning a tech/Africa/development conference April 25th. I’m going. Here’s why, though my reasoning is slightly inverted. The tech I get, I want to work on how we apply it to issues in developing regions. From Edward Scotcher:

I’ve had a few people get in touch over the last few days asking if they should come to Africa Gathering or not – mainly because Africa Gathering’s basis is a tech/Africa event and potential attendees may not be focusing on technology. My attitude is quite simple – technology is part of out lives whether we like it or not and we are only growing more reliant on it. Whatever your organisation does, remember that the reasons this event is a ‘gathering’ is that it’s a chance for everyone to come and meet each other. Small businesses and charities need to be connected to technologists and entrepreneurs to help them build effective services and geeks needs ideas and inspiration in order to help push the boundaries of innovation. We all have something to offer each other – we just don’t know it yet.

and

Aid has always puzzled me, because many people are sitting around in ‘the west’ coming up with ideas to help people in developing countries. I commend them, but do we ask the guys in the countries that are receiving that aid what they want? What they need? I think we’d be better to ask them, and then use our skills and experience to help them work towards solutions to their problems – the only issue is: are we willing to help without wanting fame or fortune?

Africa Gathering will be a collection of those people. People who have been and asked what people in developing countries need. People who have used their time and energy trying something out, to see if it’d work using new technology or working with new concepts using technology. After all, collaboration is just educating each other – and education is the key to actually being able to do something useful that makes a difference.

Still a few tickets left. Come.

I saw this van in a motorway lay-by last weekend -Have whatever pastry you like, so long as it’s from the back of our mega-truck.

The latest episode of TrashBlanc TV is up on TrashBlanc.com covering the current salt crisis in Britain. Some shocking findings.

I could have put this into the last post but I felt it was worth giving it some breathing space. Bud Ward, the well known climate change communicator, has put together a short book on closing the gap between science and media.

Here’s the table of contents:

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Revisiting ‘A Discernible Human Influence,’ Benjamin D. Santer

2. BACKGROUND AND NATURE OF THE WORKSHOPS
Science to Media: Catch-Up to, But Don’t Get Ahead of, the Science, Anthony Broccoli

3. SCIENCE FOR JOURNALISTS
Scientific Education of Climate Science Writers through Pedagogical Use of Artful Sound Bites, Jerry Mahlman

4. JOURNALISM FOR SCIENTISTS
‘Mediarology’ – The Role of Climate Scientists in Debunking Climate Change Myths, Stephen H. Schneider
Hot Words, Andrew C. Revkin

5. WHAT JOURNALISTS CAN DO
The Local Story on Climate Change is a Critical One, Bruce Lieberman
Why We Don’t Get It, Peter Dykstra
Climate Scientists and Climate ‘Skeptics’: Deciding Whom to Trust, Richard C. J. Somerville

6. WHAT SCIENTISTS CAN DO
Airing Someone’s Video? Probably Airing Their Soundbites, Too? Not So Fast, Jeff Burnside
Science in a Postoperative Newsroom, Jeffery DelViscio

7. WHAT INSTITUTIONS CAN DO
What are Children Being Taught in School about Anthropogenic Climate Change? Kim Kastens and Margaret Turrin
Credentialing for Reporters Covering Complex Issues? Jim Detjen
Shared Values of Science and Journalism: Opportunities for Improvement, Anthony D. Socci

8. NEWS EXECUTIVES MEET WITH SCIENTISTS

CJR.org does a better job of reviewing this pamphlet than I ever will so check it the review and then go download the entire pamphlet from the Metcalf Institute for Marine & Environmental Reporting.

from the NY Times

Two related pieces in the Columbia Journalism Review over the past week on energy, climate change and the press’s role in covering the issue. And in my mind it is one issue, not two. This is a great example of what makes CJR such a great resource.
They have the ability to step back and look at the media landscape as it pertains many subjects in politics and finance asking the questions of journalists and bloggers that we don’t ask ourselves enough.

Curtis Brainard pulls apart pieces from the Pew Research Center, the NY Times, the LA Times and PBS. His thesis, that it may now makes sense for journalists to pull back from making planet saving proclamations in support of climate change action and instead frame the discourse around helping keep the pennies in the pocket of Joe the Plumber and other downstream media consumers.
Brainard pulls through some useful looking data from Revkin in the NY Times illustrating this. The fact of the matter is that people have bigger financial worries all of a sudden. In Brainard’s words:

A poll released last week by the Pew Research Center found that addressing the nation’s energy problems ranks sixth among a list of twenty voter concerns, with sixty percent of those polled agreeing that it should be a “top priority” for government. On the other hand, concern for protecting the environment and dealing with global warming has declined precipitously in the last few years, with those issues ranking seventeenth and dead last, respectively. The takeaway message for journalists is that those “stewardship” frames will not be sufficient in terms of galvanizing support for clean energy. In the pursuit of public engagement, the press would be better advised to link sustainability issues to economic growth and “green” jobs.

There’s plenty of other good shout-outs in the piece but here’s the real take-away:

The economics of sustainability is clearly a frame that is of particular interest to readers and audiences these days. Nova spends relatively little time discussing the impacts of global warming, which are presented only as contextual background. Though there remain many points of climate science that the media can and should explore, this seems a positive development because it implies that the press has accepted the basic threat of warming and is now prepared to address the cost and feasibility of various solutions

So far so good (perhaps). Brainard returns to a similar theme a few days later on CJR.org. Now here’s the really interesting part from my perspective.

One of the things that history will remember about the coverage of climate change is that, not unlike the Iraq War, the press itself became an important part of the story, largely due to faulty reporting at its outset….But, as CJR contributing editor Cristine Russell pointed out in a recent feature story, the fine points of science and technology must now be communicated to the political and business reporters who have been assigned to the coverage of climate solutions.

There’s no arguing that our business reporters need to know these points inside out. In fact, more importantly, the men and women inside the Treasury making the decisions these reporters report on need to know the facts. But all that doesn’t hide a big question that arises from the above thesis. Should be we be allowing the business pages abstract the world’s climate change problems into a more palatable, or certainly more applicable, problem for our media consumers. In other words should we concentrate on a set of self-centered reasons and try change human behaviour by appealing to people’s financial interests?

Many would argue that the end justifies the means, and in the case of climate change the situation is so dire and so urgent that we can dismiss only a very few options. But the media  has a role to tell it like it is. To inform us that our actions and in action are having a direct and catastrophic impact on the world. If an Obama stimulus promotes green jobs and clean tech all the better, but let’s keep the climate change horse running in front of the economic cart.

I don’t work for the government (they work for me). But if I did I’d have been at UK Government barcamp at the weekend. My good friend Faheyr was there though and his overview is must-read material if you, like me, are all about open government, killing abstraction and simple transparency. Go check it out now.

I meant to put link these up last week. Photos from FLAGS. 39 Flags by 41 artists curated by Lewis Ronald, Adam Gibbons and Jesper List Thomsen.

If I take the trouble to write up some basic thoughts on Wikipedia and Britannica you know only one thing can happen. Yeah, within a week they both announce they’re changing their knowledge models. Kind of.

The great Brit is turning wiki (again, kind of) and Jimmy Wales has proposed building some editorial decision gates into Wikipedia.

IT World carries this:

A version of this policy, called Flagged Revisions, is in place at the German-language Wikipedia.

The decision to test Flagged Revisions on the flagship English-language Wikipedia was prompted by changes to the entries of U.S. senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd that incorrectly stated the men had died.

“This nonsense would have been 100 percent prevented by Flagged Revisions,” wrote Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in his “user talk” page.

A poll of Wikipedia users showed that 60 percent support applying Flagged Revisions to certain entries, according to Wales. Contributions would be held for approval at most for one week, but ideally “a lot less,” he wrote, adding that Flagged Revisions will be tried out “for a time-limited test.”

My take: Great move by EB. They add some small amount of user contribution/suggestion and an old brand is suddenly brought bang up to date (in its own eyes). For WP though it’s a little more uncertain. Is Wales acting like the father of a teenager who has come to realise  his progeny has a mild case of ADD and is searching for some meds to calm things down? Looks like it, he better make sure those pills have been FDA approved.

Missed this on Friday. Tom Raftery at Greenmonk posted this overview talk by Doug Neal (Research Fellow at the Leading Edge Forum – Executive Programme and is responsible for research into Innovating through Technology). Doug was talking at the 2008 it@cork Green IT conference.

Tom covers the big points on Greenmonk so I’m going to mention just one area that’s super-interesting for me. At 18 minutes Doug talks about leveraging social pressure, some would call would call it CO2-guilt, through social networks. It’s not a hugely original idea, but, in this case one we can pump an awful lot of creativity into. I’m not talking about the Dopplrs of the world, great though they in particular are. But rather burrowing into people’s social graphs on their already existing networks and laying the problem/solution right there right then.

I know The Carbon Account tried this with their Facebook App. Who else is in this space? What can we do to push it on? Too late in the night for answers right now I’m afraid.

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Really what we’re talking about here is connecting the social graph to the grid. With smarts. Who’s doing it? Who’s up for it?

As you’ll see if you take a look over on TrashBlanc.com right now I was up early this morning visiting what I believe is London’s only annual Potato Fair. I was with four longtime patrons of the event who provided plenty of advice, but the most important piece was “get there early”. They weren’t wrong, by 10.30am I was in a bustling school féte scene straight out of the Archers.

I could write for hours about the great varieties on display, from the bog standard Golden Wonder to the brilliantly named Skerry Blue and my own personal favourite the Sharpe’s Express, but it was the sheer fact that this was taking place in the middle of London that impressed me most. George Monbiot wrote a lighthearted piece recently about his love forapple varieties. Well and good I thought at the time. But attending something like the Potato Fair and seeing the variety of potatoes alone we have in our soil is simply amazing. And it’s also terribly depressing. 95% of these varieties will never hit the shops. Tesco, Lidl and Aldi have no interest in small lots with smaller margins and the vast majority of the population don’t know what they’re missing. Shame.

Here are some photos from my Flickr account.

Sweeping away the old (by flashbak)

Nine times out of ten if I was asked to pick between an parliamentary and presidential democracy as an ideal way to govern a country I’d chose the former. From what I can see it establishes a closer bond between the electorate/community and the parliamentarian who represents them. It allows for a more representative government and cabinet. And the party in power acts as a natural ego check for the prime minister. In theory.

But yesterday was a great example of how a presidential style system can and should work. Out with the old and in with the new. The breath and breadth of fresh air rolling down the Mall was absolutely tangible. In one fell swoop America gets the clean start it is crying out for. And so does the world.

Looking at the parliamentary systems in the UK and Ireland leaves me with little hope for a clean out or clean up. Labour lose the next election and we get the Tories. Hardly something that will bring the spring clean fresh smell to Westminster and the country. And there’s no hope now I think of reviving New Labour, with or without Brown.

And in Ireland the situation is even more depressing. The Fine Gael as the main opposition offer no alternative vision for the country. Fintan O’Toole in yesterday’s Irish Times suggests they simply merge and get on with it leaving Labour as a proper opposition.

On the anniversary of the first Dáil, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, who share an analysis of the crisis, need to form a unified government, leaving Labour, which does not share that analysis, to lead a coherent opposition.

That’s as sensible a suggestion as any other I suppose but not like likely to happen leaving voters in the British Isles with no hope of Obama-like change being led by our politicians. We’ll just have to implement the change we need without them.

Of late I’ve been having on-going discussions with @Lewisronald on the merits and failings of Wikipedia. It’s an old debate that’s been thrashed through by more knowing people than ourselves. But in coming across this wonderfully titled essay by Jaron Lanier, Digital Maoism, I’ve realised that neither myself nor Lewis Ronald are wrong.

Some big points:

A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don’t. Often we don’t live long enough to find out.

In other words there is wisdom in crowds but they get an awful lot wrong too.

Most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use.

Tim Berners Lee is famous for inventing hypertext, not copy and paste. So why are people duplicating information when they should be linking shit up.

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.

Yes, yes, yes. Sure I can see and roll back revisions in Wikipedia, but for the most part these people are anonymous. Would the information be more valuable if there was a real name and real face attached? Quite possibly. The difference between trust quotients on Facebook and MySpace may provide a clue here but I have no hard studies to base this theory on.

And now on to Lanier’s feelings on the wiki/collectivism approach adopted by society at large. And remember this was written in 2006.

It’s not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual.

Mortgage meltdown, credit crunch, general financial crisis. Certainly in the world of mortgages the populations of western democracies can be accused of mass collectivist dellusions. Yeah, I’m talking about you Ireland and the US. But maybe that’s just a easy to make cheap shot.

In summing up:

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

And:

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.

The last point I agree 110% with. But in a sense this goes some way to refuting some of Lanier’s claims. I feel, despite making valid points, he is not giving the crowd enough credit. The crowd is not an anonymous cloud. It’s made up of sentient individuals. As I state above, Wikipedia needs to introduce a better trust system but this takes only a little away from some of hugely valuable work it contains.

Right now what is the alternative to Wikipedia, a five pound per month subscription to a walled in Encyclopaedia Britannica? Fine if you want (debatably) more reliable information, admittedly important for research but hardly a practical solution for the billions of internet users unable to afford such a luxury.

For further reading check out some of the responses to the original essay from some top dollar internet brains.

As a follow up to my X=Mass mix special I thought I’d post up a link to ED DMX’s blog which has the makings of a brilliant podcast series. Ed’s clearly got too much time on his hands right now but don’t feel bad, it’s a win-win situation for us.

Ed’s been around to his Mum’s house and grabbed a handful of his favourite 80’s and 90’s techno and electro records from the attic. And they’re bangers. Highlights include Joey Beltram, 808 State and be sure to check out Freeez’s IOU, the Arthur Baker produced ‘83 gem which comes up second on the third show.

The tunes are broken up by Ed’s monotone telling us just how much pocket money he had to save for each 12″. It really is super stuff and is exactly why these sort of Podcasts will always have a future. Tightly produced, well packaged media with a personnal slant is a winner every time. Especially if the songs are this good.

And thanks to @shitsock for the link.

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What am I thinking, content will always be king right?

2008: The Bombay Badboy Mix

Here’s my 2008 Christmas CD. The rules of engagement state:

• Each CD shall contain no more than 60 minutes of primetime sounds.
• Each CD shall feature at least one artist no longer with us and at least one artist with a fully intact mortal coil. Bonus points for an obit song or two from someone recently deceased.
• Each CD will contain at least one song released in 2008 CE.
• Each CD shall come with at least five square inches (or 300×300px) of original cover art.
• Each CD shall contain the work of an artist seen performing live by the compiler within the last 365 days.

This year I’m providing some liner notes.

1. Holy Thursday – David Axelrod
David Axelrod is the guy who got Barack Obama into the White House. He is also the guy who did the gospel/jazz/funk version of Handel’s Messiah. So take that down to Fishamble Street. I was tempted to open with the Hallelujah Chorus but I imagine everyone has had enough of that by now.

2. Moon River – Kid Koala
Part of the deal with this mix is the inclusion of a Christmas cracker. Here it is, the number one single in the UK on December 25th 1961. This isn’t the Danny Williams version but I did see Kid Koala perfom it at the Vincent Gallo ATP a few years ago. Live with four decks, pretty impressive.

3. Bridges – Utah Phillips
Utah Phillips, RIP

4. URA Fever – The Kills
Stupid name, good song.

5. Nite Flights – Fatima Mansions
Back when Ireland was a dark spit of rock on the edge of the Atlantic, it produced angry young men who formed angry young bands. Like the Fatima Mansions. Here they are doing a Scott Walker cover. Scott Walker produced and arranged one of the gigs of the year in the Royal Festival Hall. Not that I know, I wasn’t there. Anyways, if this is anything to go by here’s to Ireland returning to that dark spit of rock state.

6. Converging in the Quiet – Crystal Slits
If the Teardrop Explodes were to form again in Brooklyn in the year 2009 CE they’d sound like the Crystal Slits. As it is the Crystal Slits sound kind of like them. Or maybe just another psyche-tinged Wooden Shjips rip-off.

7. Touched – Japancakes
Japnacakes could be plying the worst form of Phil Collins-esque MOR and I’d still have bought the Touched/Soon 7″. Why? Because their name, like Japanther, is amazing. Japan+Noun-beginning-with-pan = great band name. Every time. BTW: This one is also here because My Bloody Valentine were better than could be expected upon their revival and iwasthere.

8. Reykjavik Promises – Baltic Fleet.
First off the inclusion of this track keeps the nu-gazing theme going for another couple of minutes. Second, one of the most heinous things the British government has done all year is use the anti-terrorism act to freeze a huge amount of Icelandic assets. Plunging that small Island into even more hot water than it already finds itself in. Come on Gordon, you’ve more important thinks to be worrying about.

9. Drop out – Time New Viking
I saw these guys in March, got the album, played it once and thought it was rubbish. I was wrong it’s not.

10. I’m in love with a German Film Star – Sam Taylor-Wood + The Pet Shop Boys
The Pet Shop Boys are great. According to the tabloids, STW has been spending a lot of time with an ex-husband of Madonna. That’s good enough to go in my Christmas record.

11. Waitin’ for the Rain – The Philly Sound.
So many reasons for this song being on this mix. I don’t often enjoy being outside in the rain, but in October in Philly it was about as good as it gets. It got even better when the rain cleared about 10pm and the Phillies had game 3 of the World Series in the bag by 1.30am.
The song itself is also pretty good. In the era of Motown, Philly suffered as Detroit’s poor relation despite having Bunny Siegler and The Sound of Philadelphia label going at it hammer and tongs. As Motown morphed into Disco via New York City, Philadelphia was again left out. Not to worry. This classic is regarded by everyone-who-knows as a Disco tipping point, and by many as the first every fully fledged Disco floor filler. With good reason. If you listen to nothing else on the mix skip to this.
Lazy magazine hacks who rely on creating labels and trends where only serendipity exists have claimed 08-09 London is in the midst of a full blown disco revival. Maybe they’re right (in that case thanks to Discobloodbath, Todd Hart and Matthew Stone). And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Though how nu-Disco is going to cut it in the ‘09 in light of these austere post neo-liberal economic times remains to be seen. Suck it up while you can is my only advice.

Errors and ommissions.
No room for Lyrics Born. Actually I simply forgot him. He put on what was my show of the year in Austin. Top man. Also should have had an obit tip o’ the cap to Ronnie Drew and Arthur C. Clarke. Not a musician, obviously, but a little bit of Strauss in honour would have been nice. Finally, there’s nothing on there from Portishead who released in The Rip the best song I heard all year and in Third one of the best albums. But this isn’t a best of list so go out and get the record if you’ve been remiss to leave it ’til now. I hear Zavvi are having a good sale…

I attended a NESTA related screening of Us Now,  last week. Despite featuring George Osbourne and Ed Milliband it presented a pretty optimistic vision of a future-present in terms of “the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet”.

Here’s the feedback, collated by hand on paper handouts. Kind of old school for a documentary about collaborative networks. Mine’s on slide 10 I think.

There are lots of clips from the really well shot film available here.

And just to get all 2.0, here’s my immediate reaction:

twitter feed of UsNow conversation

As you can see the TrashBlanc team are back in action. Likewise big international food crises have kicked navel gazing Irish finance reporters off the front pages of Ireland’s finest journals. It may be fun and games in the TB kitchen but right now a half billion Euro pork industry is going down the shithole in Ireland. And the industry in question has only itself to blame.

The irishtimes.com has a good chronology of events here.

The basic problem: bad chemicals that have found their way into some feed that has come through an agri/bio recycler. The feed of course is centralized and has distributed the contaminated contents to farms throughout Ireland. Any good journalist would ask what else is in the feed? What is being recycled? But maybe the public isn’t quite ready to hear how their sausages are bred and fed right now. Though one can only ask if not now, then when?

It’s time the entire European Union started questioning a system that can turn one incident at one feed/recycling/rendering plant into a continent wide hunt for contaminated Irish Pork.

When one link in the production chain can effect every other downstream link in an entire industry, there’s deep deep problems.

Even if we ignore the gross environmental and sustainability issues at play here, there’s a simple economic argument. Farmers and agri-business throughout the EU and the US are massively subsidized through grants, tax breaks and artificially inflated food prices. This subsidization is directly responsible for the upkeep of agricultural poverty cycles in developing countries. And even with all that in play our farmers have still managed to waste those grants on a system that has utterly failed.

The economies of scale that big-farming claim necessitate centralized feeding and distribution have been been proved utterly false once again. The big supermarkets, Tesco, Carrefour and Asda/Walmart are equally guilty. But it’s our finance and agriculture ministers who we elect us to save us from ourselves and ourthirst for low prices. It’s time they started doing just that.

We covered the appalling Irish Pork Crises on TrashBlanc.com TV on Sunday. Here’s the video and the link.

All your Broc are belong to us

What if your food was made by tiny little people with peasant hats and industrial aprons. Who were forced to work 18 hour days in horrible environments. Would your food be as tasty?

Thanks to Inhabitant.com for the link to Matthew Carden’s 350degrees.com. Check it out.

Yes.