By Ian, on October 29th, 2008 
From the Merriam Webster entry: Main Entry: re·cid·i·vist
Pronunciation: –vist
Function: noun
Etymology: French récidiviste, from récidiver to relapse, from Middle French, from Medieval Latin recidivare, from Latin recidivus recurring, from recidere to fall back, from re– + cadere to fall Earlier this evening, I made what some might describe as an immoderate comment on Twitter. To whit, when my friend and colleague Mike Butcher said he’d finally been listed on Techmeme, I twitted: techmeme is a useless clusterfuck. full stop. I say this with my work hat OFF.
I later elaborated, in response to a request for a better alternative from Mike: @mbites yep — the grdn and times’ media pages. NMA, brandrepublic and (I hope) NMK. Real money; real business; real issues. Fuck that shit
Some other people asked me to explain. So what I meant was ‘fuck that shit’. And when I say ‘fuck that shit’, I mean this. I am taking a random sample of techmeme versus two regular IT titles — the first two that popped into my head — that I don’t care about one way or another. These are screen grabs at the time of writing: 
Compared to this: 
or even this: 
Top stories: (a) Proctor and Gamble signing with SAP (computing) (b) Exclusive interview about UK security leaks (register) © Google possibly maybe interested in OpenID (techmeme) Here’s a quiz: - Which of those stories will have most impact on the UK’s economy, and its ability to employ people? (hint: not c) - Which of these stories is of the greatest interest and importance to UK citizens (hint: not c) - Which of these stories is based on PR-spin from the company that originated it, and doesn’t actually contain any facts (hint: it’s c) QED That’s hardly an exhaustive analysis. But that’s the state of affairs as I write this and almost anytime I look at those three sites. Oh, I forget, the reason I made the comment in the first place was in response to Mike’s comment that he’d hit Techmeme for the first time. Mike writes the best tech startup blog in the UK. He has done since April 2007 — and has been writing about digital in the UK since forever. But not ‘important’ enough for techmeme, evidently. Also, the reason for my expression ‘clusterfuck’. Look at this advice from arch-self-promoter Jason Calacanis: 1. Blog intelligently. Think about your post for a day before you hit publish. Do research–do primary research in the real work. Write something with insight, and include links to other folks ideas. 2. Go to 2–3 events or conferences a week. 3. Get a great domain name that is easy to remember and spell (i.e. buzzmachine.com). 4. Go to TechMeme and write an insightful piece daily about one of the top stories. 5. Start emailing other bloggers with feedback on their stories. (don’t beg for links) 6. Be smart. 7. Don’t be an idiot. That’s it… you’re now A-List.
That’s very good advice, it seems. Write about what everyone else is writing about. Forget about your own identity. Except the way it works out is that any idiot can be an A-lister (as far as techmeme is concerned) by hanging on as many coat-tails as you need to. Algorithms can only go so far, eh. By Ian, on October 18th, 2008 Twitter has been going mad today on the subject of Qwitter (There’s also Twitter Karma, much the same thing, but I became aware of it earlier than Qwitter thanks to @ssethi). The basic function of these sites is to show people you follow (receive updates from) who aren’t receiving your own updates. So what’s the point of that, you ask? Well, like a lot of social networks, on Twitter: (a) the number and quality of followers you have is an indication of status in this rather insular social media world. (Let’s forget about the recent arrival of the UK’s current Stately Homo Stephen Fry onto the scene). (b) following someone is an indication of like and respect. I care enough to hear what you’re up to. So if you follow someone, and they don’t follow you back (you get sent an email to say X is following you), then it appears, sort of, that they don’t like or respect you very much. You could do this quite easily before by clicking on the ‘followers’ link on your twitter home page, but these new sites make that information a lot easier to take in. A bit like in sites such as Facebook — you can see if someone hasn’t responded to your friendship request. But the thing is that Twitter itself has — historically — never shown any of that information in a way people could really take in and analyse. So it might come as a bit of a shock to some people that prominent twitizens (oh, yes) aren’t hanging on their every word. People might get upset when they discover they are following people they thought had become friends (and probably are) but that those ‘friends’ are not following them. However, there are a few other possibilities: - they are already following 200 other people and the noise from that is enough, thank you very much.
- Dunbar’s Number — more than 150 people is more people than they can maintain stable relationships with. There are already 150 or more people they are paying attention to. It’s a psychological impossibility to take on someone else, no matter who.
- they like you very much, but going in and following you and dropping someone else is too much trouble.
- they auto-delete ‘new follower’ emails. A strong temptation if you get more than one a day.
- they forgot.
- they don’t care nearly as much about Twitter as you.
- they have already linked to you on Linked-In, friended you on Facebook and subscribed to your RSS. That is enough.
- they have a million far more important things to do that affect their ability to carry on working.
Elsewhere: Paul Walsh on the damaging effect of this and Charles Arthur on (slightly disputed) best practice. By Ian, on October 16th, 2008 
I could not dig, I dared not rob,
And so I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue,
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale will serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young? Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) (I reserve the write *cough* right to do poems when I am feeling lazy, busy, uninspired or crap). By Ian, on October 15th, 2008  Just watched Be Kind Rewind on PirateCity. In the interests of research, I tested an illegal video service that streams movies for free. The quality is fairly poor — somewhere between YouTube and Vimeo. And not ideally, I watched this widescreen movie in 4:3. Jack Black seems a lot slimmer nowadays.
As I am sure you know, the plot is that the videotapes at the store run by Mike (Mos Def) and friend Jerry (Black) are accidentally wiped. They decide to remake the movies themselves in order to avoid getting in trouble with the store’s owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Baker). Surprisingly, the neighbourhood takes kindly to these homemade remakes, thanks to their authenticity, and… but that would spoil it. The remakes are retitled as ‘sweded’- hence the title of this post. The movie is fun and has some memorable moments: well worth 100 minutes of your life. It’s a sentimental story, though, and, frankly, I don’t think that it could happen in real life. In real life, raising the initial funding would be really easy but gaining community support would be a massive challenge. Almost the opposite of the film’s premise. Community, home-grown video projects are typically created because there’s funding available from agencies like RDAs (Regional Development Agencies). They do some stuff. No-one outside the project cares, the project leaders only care because of the funding, and once the funding money is spent, they generally die away. They are supply-driven. Some bright spark in Whitehall or somewhere comes up with the idea of a community creative project and throws a couple of million at it. They haven’t bothered to survey the landscape and so it stumbles at the first hurdle, getting anyone interested. Agencies leap at the chance of delivering to this non-existent demand, and come up with all kinds of reasons why yes, it really is out there on the street because that couple of million sounds pretty sweet. They have probably failed to deliver on a couple of projects like this before, but they do know how to write a tender document. The creative industries are rife with this shit. As we all know, successful projects are driven by demand. And so, is there a demand for sweded video community or even a sweded commercial project? The geek demand I know about. The star wars pixellated remake (link) and sweded Doctor Who are out there, but I don’t know about mainstream stuff. Is there sweded Desperate Housewives? [SPOILER] In the movie, the protagonists are eventually slammed by copyright lawyers and have to come up with their own material. I am not a lawyer and so I am not sure of the legality of that. I believe pastiche and parody allows some protection. By Ian, on October 10th, 2008 
As you may know, I launched the newsstand magazine What Laptop & Handheld PC (as it was originally called) back in the day — 1999, to be exact. And I have grave misgivings about the whole affair. One of the most popular marketing messages that advertisers were pushing then about mobile technology, and they still are now, was ‘maximising your downtime’. This meant — in their examples — your senior exec is travelling somewhere to meet a prospective client. If they were equipped with a laptop or a PDA, they could still be doing other stuff. Because, of course, employees are machines that can churn out 40 hours of work a week. If they are not at their desk, hard at it, then they can do it somewhere else with a laptop. Total bullshit from the start, then. If you have ever been in these situations, you’ll know that meetings require a lot of preparation. Undoubtedly, more preparation than you have allowed, unless you’ve done the same thing a million times. Your train ride is spent bricking it and preparing, one way or another. In 2001, or thereabouts, mobile communications got thrown into this. “Out of Touch - I don’t think so! with Communicotron 2001″. This was about the point that Blackberries started to appear on commuter trains. Nokia had their 9000 series and Palm and Microsoft were waking up to the idea of smartphones. More bullshit. A Blackberry is poison. I have had two on extended (6-month) press arrangements. They have made me more responsive to emails, sure. But also more worried, less creative and less productive. What’s your priority? In 2003, the first Centrino processors meant laptops could run on battery power for — meh — in my experience 3–4 hours, but in the marketing parlance ‘all-day’. They’ve got a little better since then, and 6 hours isn’t quite such a stretch to the imagination. Cool — I can actually ignore the conference and do emails instead. Thanks for the £700 or thereabouts spent on my presence, but I learned nothing, because I wasn’t paying attention or thinking about the topic under discussion. In 2006, the first ‘all you can eat’ data packages started to appear, meaning that, yes, if you had coverage, you could do normal things on the Internet while you were out and about, and not worry too much about the charges. I don’t want to even start on why this is not going to make you do more work. It isn’t, OK? There is no way on earth that people are going to do more work. Stop it. In 2008, none of that extra productivity and connectivity seems to matter a stuff. What were all these executives up to with their high-powered communications gadgets? Certainly not bringing home the bacon or making sensible decisions. If the credit crisis does anything, I hope it explodes this myth. Mobile technology is great — it lets you put in your four hours a day of real work — proper, excited, creative, wonderful stuff, from anywhere. But don’t expect extra anything. As anyone who knows me will attest, I am an enormous fan of downtime: skiving-off, fucking-about, pissed-up afternoons and all the rest of it. Extra productivity is an evil myth designed to make us buy more stuff because we’re continually so guilty about having achieved a normal amount of work. Having been given (or — the real kicker, bought ourselves) these toys to improve productivity, it gets even worse. But get real. There is no extra productivity. People (even me) like work — we like having a purpose and getting down to the real nitty gritty. But I reckon there’s about 20–40 hours a week* of that in all of us, depending on how creative, clever and original you are supposed to be. You are naturally programmed to create a certain amount of real work. After that, you do busy work, “research”, find work for other people, do pointless admin shit and piss about. AND, this is why downtime is so important: stay in the pub, wander off to the other department, go to networking events in work time: that’s when you make new relationships, connect different things together, come up with the new approach. Fucking hell. Downtime is gold. No links or proof in this post. Sorry. But true. Here’s to the value of downtime — see you in the pub. (* Many clever, creative people put in 80+ hours a week according to the time clocks. But creative, clever, real hours…?) By Ian, on October 7th, 2008 
I’ve been thinking about the future of newspapers a fair bit over the last few weeks, because we’ve been preparing a panel event on just that topic. It’s involved a range of reading and on-record and off-record conversations with a load of people involved with newspapers — readers, editors, pundits and the man on the Clapham Omnibus. Newspapers, particularly quality papers, look screwed at first view. Only the Sun and the free-sheets did remotely well in the latest ABCs. [ABC — the Audit Bureau of Circulation creates readership ‘charts’ for newspapers and magazines. Its sister operation ABCe’s work in the online world, but their cost means they’re only used by a minority of online publications, such as newspapers. While they provide a reliable measure of an individual site’s readership, the lack of competitor data might be perceived as a weakness. National newspapers all subscribe to the ABCe scheme, though.] While online figures continue to soar for the quality papers, those figures are not, sadly, indicative of revenues. Internet advertising costs less than print advertising, by a long way. In other terms, a drop of 5000 on the printed publication might require a hike upwards of 500,000 readers online to make up the same amount of contribution. And those online readers aren’t especially useful, sometimes. If you have a UK advertising campaign, then the 75% of your readers who come from outside the UK, in the case of many Nationals’ websites, are not contributing. Their ‘hits’ on those websites aren’t helping to fulfil any advertising deals — they’re simply a ‘hit’ on the paper’s resources. Most advertising agencies don’t have any international briefs, just for UK people, so when they buy a million impressions, they don’t mean any old million, they mean a million UK users. I talk to digital professionals, and all they use is Google and RSS — they haven’t bought newspapers in years, except when they take a flight or a train ride with no wireless. They’re also the most likely people to bring up points about newspapers’ effect on the environment (short version: v.bad; but maybe not as bad as you think). All doom and gloom, so far. But then I talk to my step-mother, and she’s not having it. She doesn’t want to read a frickin’ screen. I talk to my sister and she says the same thing. I ask my mum, and it turns out she still gets a daily delivery. Once you look outside this digital world of RSS and Google, the demand for mainstream, normal stuff is actually pretty high. I’m pretty fond of papers myself, and if I, as a digital media person and every member of my family I asked, want newspapers (as newspapers), then surely that means a future. I like to think about the many predictions that have been made over the years about the death of cinema. Televisions, VHS videos, DVDs, wide-screen televisions and now Blu-Ray have all allegedly spelled the end of the cinema age. Yet, surprise, box-office takings were at an all-time high in 2007. Media don’t die upon the arrival of a new alternative: they adapt and survive. The arrival of urban freesheets in the past few years is evidence of that in the newspaper space. They may not be the model that we’d necessarily hope for as journalists or news consumers, but they’re certainly evidence of innovation and adaptation. Let’s hope that examples more conducive to quality reporting also bear fruit. The appearance of ShortList this year, offering decent-quality content at a freesheet price may be one indication. What I hope comes out of our debate on the 28th October is not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the future of newspapers, but some ideas about the type and extent of change and adaptation that is likely to be needed to ensure the future existence of quality journalism and, dare I say it, quality newspapers. Do join us. 
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