Ryanair vs the world

Pic by Jayfresh.

Ryanair’s miserable, humiliating customer service (this grizzled 45 year-old seasoned traveller was reduced to tears by a nasty piece of work representing Ryanair at Cork Airport a few weeks ago) isn’t the problem. Offering O’Leary and his staff advice on how to improve it or how to respond better to bloggers and Twitterers is pointless. The crappy service is Ryanair’s USP (on Twitter the other day someone called it the airline’s Purple Cow).

Passengers make a conscious trade-off – deliberately swapping a pleasant journey for a cheaper flight – and, most of the time, it works (I’ve done it many times myself and only cried once). The trashy in-flight experience and the cheesy web site are deliberate and quite sophisticated marketing – they’re supposed to be like that. “Anything this crappy must be the cheapest” you think as you tuck into your prawn sandwich (itself a clever quotation from the retail geniuses at M&S in the eighties). If Ryanair started adding freebies or courtesies we’d get suspicious.

Ryanair has prospered in explicit defiance of emerging customer service norms. While the rest of the world has been investing in better customer service and more elaborate experiences – concierges at the bank, car hire firms who bring the car round to your house – Ryanair has cleaned up by going where no one else has the stomach to. Ryanair’s race to the bottom has been driven by O’Leary’s remarkable bargain basement imagination, something no one has been able to copy. I say this with some admiration. He just goes further: Cup-a-Soup, scratchcards, checking luggage, paying to use the toilet. And who’s to say, in the current climate, that he’s not right?

So the question is not when will Ryanair fall into line with the rest of the customer service world (never going to happen) but how long will it be before they’re catastrophically caught out? How many of these highly entertaining but essentially trivial social media storms can they weather before one of them actually does some damage. The increasingly belligerent and self-confident blogosphere has evidently met its match in Michael O’Leary and his uniquely low-rent operation but I can’t help thinking the stand-off can’t last forever. You can take on a few hundred bloggers but as your customers move online and become active users of social media (“idiot bloggers”), can you take on everyone?

Pic by Jayfresh. Thanks!

I don’t want a right to see my MP’s expenses

UPDATE April 2022: I wrote this in January 2009, right at the beginning of the expenses scandal and several months before the Telegraph began the week-by-week disclosure of hideous abuse of the system after hideous abuse of the system – duck houses and moats and multiple flipped second homes and families on the payroll etc. But still, the naivety!

I don’t agree with my MP about much, but I want to treat him as an adult. I’d like to extend to him approximately the level of trust I extend to my work colleagues and friends. I don’t want to probe and inspect him. I don’t want him to live in a climate of small-minded, invasive overscrutiny.

I expect there’s a reasonable chance he’ll turn out to be a bit cheeky with his lunch bills or even that he’s a giant scumbag and charges various indolent family members to the public purse, so I’d like there to be better rules about what it’s OK to charge back and what he has to pay for himself (the current rules are shoddy and inconsistent) and tougher automatic sanctions for rule-breaking.

But exposing MPs (and other public servants) to this kind of increasingly corrosive scrutiny is almost certainly a bad thing. Everyone knows that trust breeds trust – and that the inverse is true too. There’s no evidence that MPs are more or less bent than the population.

This doesn’t mean we should stick to the shady old secret model, though. We should be inventive and not just grumpy. MPs could be provided with simple tools to voluntarily publish itemised expenses, in a standardised, comparable format. Parliament.uk could host expenses pages and the media, I’m sure, would enjoy highlighting the most honest or interesting or apparently cooked up.

That’s the kind of initiative that could produce a snowball effect. We might find that publishing your expenses becomes the kind of public mark of honesty and transparency that MPs will embrace. Some will definitely go for it. Trusting our legislators might actually make things better.

A parable of sorts (about the music business, I feel obliged to point out)

Dolly the cloned Sheep

The year is 1823. Nathaniel Burrell, sheep farmer, has stumbled upon a method for duplicating sheep. To cut a long story short, after years of essentially random cross-breeding he now can produce new sheep on demand at no cost. A quick twist of the tail of one of his miraculous cross-bred sheep and you’ve got a brand new one, just the like the old one, just standing there, blinking.

Burrell keeps the news to himself and makes a handsome turn selling the newly-minted sheep at the local livestock market but pretty soon people notice the smart new horse and cart in the drive and start to wonder where all the extra sheep in his fields are coming from and then a lad spies the whole process from behind a hedge and soon enough everyone knows you can get free sheep up at Nathaniel’s place.

To begin with it’s just the local miscreants but fairly soon everyone’s up there, day and night, picking up free sheep and herding them back to their own fields or back yards or box rooms. Of course, it’s not long before people figure out that the duplicate sheep have the same ability: quick twist, new sheep. Blimey.

So now everyone’s got their own and they’re busy making more for their friends. Nathaniel is pissed off. As far as he can tell, these people are stealing his stuff. “These sheep are mine!” he yells as the vicar and his wife lead four fluffy new sheep down the lane. “What do you mean, they’re yours? They’re free aren’t they?” “Yes, but they’re mine! They’re my invention, my thing!” “Does it cost you anything when I make a new one?” asks the vicar. “Well, no, but they’re still mine. And besides, I make my living from selling these bloody sheep. Nobody’s buying them now are they? Not now they can just twist-and-go!”

“I see your point, friend, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. Sheep are free now. I think you’re just going to have to get used to it.”

There follows a period of disquiet, during which Nathaniel makes a spirited effort to persuade the world that these free sheep are all really his. There are ups and downs. He wins a few small victories – various slow-witted judges are persuaded that the duplicate sheep actually belong to farmer Burrell, some people are even punished, although transportation seems a bit rich for the theft of a sheep that even its legal owner doesn’t actually need and even wise judges sometimes changed their minds.

Farmer Burrell even invests a few hundred guineas in an elaborate and annoying system of padlocks and sticks, which he calls SRM (Sheep Rights Management) which is meant to protect his rights by stopping people from making copies of his sheep. But the system is awkward and some people can’t get it to work at all (and it hurts the sheep) so it’s soon abandoned. Nathaniel’s not really winning the argument and the whole time people are just making more and more copies of his precious sheep.

An economist friend comes round one afternoon: “the problem with your sheep is that they’re not rivalrous any more and they have precious little excludability. They’re basically a public good now.” His friend encourages him to give up on the law suits and the nasty letters and the increasingly desperate efforts to stop people from copying his sheep. He’s just banging his head against a wall. The world has changed.

In the meantime, of course, the price of an ordinary sheep, bought in a market or at the farm gate, has fallen to a fraction of its pre-Nathaniel value and a lot of people have decided there’s no point trying to sell them at all. They’re opening innovative lamb restaurants and sheep-based circuses and generally adding value to their essentially worthless livestock. Some are given away free with another recent invention: the newspaper, some are fluffed up and sold as ‘premium sheep’ for ‘sheep collectors’. Nathaniel is resigned.

After a few years, Nathaniel has given up on making money from selling his sheep and now specialises in a range of sheep-themed experiences: a theme park, a line of clothing, club nights. It’s a blast – and he’s even making some money. And since farmer Jackson came up with a way of copying cows and farmer Finch pigs, the whole space has got a lot more competitive and everyone’s more-or-less forgotten the days when you used to have to pay for your sheep. Pay for your sheep!

Pic by Notcub.

Michael Grade whistling to keep his spirits up

The inner workings of the BBC news operation are a mystery to me (although I did get a peep into the newsroom a while ago which was very exciting) so I find myself wondering about the orgins of this item on yesterday’s Today programme. The premise is that Saturday evening primetime TV in Britain is enjoying a renaissance thanks to big live and drama franchises like X-Factor and Doctor Who. Can’t really argue with that – Saturday night TV has been brilliant for several years now and the ratings reflect that – but is it strictly news? I mean, what’s the trigger? Did something happen? Was something announced? Or did someone in the ITV press office pitch an interview with Michael Grade to the Today editors who then sought a premise for the item?

The interview itself is interesting and Grade’s always good value, although his case, which is that this represents some kind of reprieve for broadcast TV, sounds a bit thin. Let’s face it, the Saturday evening revival is almost certainly a blip in the inexorable decline of broadcast-model media produced by a burst of creativity and investment from the BBC and ITV that probably can’t be sustained (especially not by ITV during the nastiest decline in ad spending in decades). Our collective realisation that broadcast TV has real and enduring strengths in live and ‘event’ programmes will not save the medium from ultimate irrelevance – although it might defer it.

So, back to my question, how does a story like this, connected only obliquely to current events, wind up on air in Today’s peak hour? What’s the process?

Measuring the health of the open source economy

One of Michael Meeks' graphs from his fascinating analysis of the health of the OO.o project

Here’s a fascinating thing. A really detailed analysis of a single very important open source project, Open Office.org (OO.o). The author, Michael Meeks, a prominent Open Office hacker, has tabulated and analysed the application’s CVS logs (CVS is the system that stores and organises the code contributed to the project by its many developers). What we have here is a quite fine-grained set of direct, numerical indicators of the health of Open Office.org – in particular, of the engagement of the contributing developers (Meeks acknowledges in the post various weaknesses in the data). How many developers are involved, how much code is contributed and which organisations are most engaged. Meeks’ conclusion is that engagement is falling and that Open Office.org is sick. He thinks the project needs urgent remedial work to get it back on track.

The reason I find this so interesting is because it offers a preview of the way we’ll monitor the health of all sorts of projects in the future. Open source, as a way of working, is spreading to other areas of activity, some quite remote from software development. If it really catches on – in business, education and the media, for instance – we’ll presumably be able to analyse this kind of data for many different kinds of work. A university might select an open source physics course or a manufacturer an open source component design by comparing graphs like Meeks’ for competing projects. And Meeks’ hand-rolled analysis will inevitably mature into a measurement and presentation dashboard for the whole open source economy.

We’re also learning that data, once exposed, is quickly acquired, tabulated, visualised and compared. Open data is much more useful than the closed stuff. Can it be long before I can fly through a 3D virtual world of open source projects floating in space, coloured and shaped to represent their various critical attributes?

Filter it or lose it: free speech on the net depends on good filters.

Geeks and Internet industry types like to say that Andy Burnham, our Minister for Culture, doesn’t get the Internet. They’re wrong. He gets the Internet all right. He just doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like its pretensions to autonomy and ungovernability and in particular he doesn’t like its inability to protect kids from stuff they shouldn’t be exposed to.

How should the net respond to Burnham’s increasingly pointed attacks? Should we gleefully point out how ‘clueless’ he is? Should we celebrate his irrelevance or the inevitability of his eventual enlightenment by the unstoppable, unarguable net?

No. We should listen to him and recognise that he speaks for millions of people – parents in particular – for whom the net is a frightening thing: a place where it’s difficult to control your exposure to content and experience. A place that contrasts badly, for instance, with the parts of the media where you can exert control (selecting a movie to watch from an age-rated list, for instance). We should acknowledge that these concerns are real and can be addressed.

And why not? Control of our experience of content is vital – you might almost call it a right. Can we reasonably promote increased access to the earth’s ultimate information resource when we can’t offer users anything better than crude control over the experience? Should we really say “hey, here’s all of human knowledge, culture and experience. Some of it will freak you out but there’s nothing we can do about that. Get used to it.”

As a parent, I should be able to send my kids (ten, nine and five) onto the net in the reasonable expectation that they won’t be frightened or exploited or upset. It really is not enough to say that the only way to guarantee that is to sit at their shoulders as they go online, ready to jump in and curtail the experience if I think it’s going wrong (especially once they’re experiencing it from multiple connections at home, from an iPhone on the school bus or in the school’s ICT suite).

It’s possible to dismiss Burnham’s concerns as those of a nervous n00b or an instinctive authoritarian. We could just say “get over yourself: plunge in, you’ll love it! The good stuff always exceeds the bad and most of the time you’ll never see anything that upsets you” (which is roughly what I say to novices) but that’s not enough. It just fails to acknowledge the actual reality of a wide-open net governed not by historic scarcity but by rip-roaring plenty. The net’s structure: the structure we love and celebrate – distributed, flat, open and permissive – virtually guarantees that it will contain content that will upset many users.

The idea that we should just grin and bear it (or, for instance, require parents to ride shotgun at all times) is ridiculous. It’s especially ridiculous when you consider the sheer amount of time and energy we net professionals put into filtering and sorting and discriminating in our own net lives. We love the range and accessibility of the net but hate the unordered and unproductive soup of content that makes it hard to get things done and prioritise our lives. For a decade now, a significant proportion of start-up businesses have been in exactly this filtering business: providing tools to control the unmediated rush of content.

In fact many of us are excitedly contributing to a revision of the net’s early indiscriminate structure called the semantic web. We engage in (I’m going to give it a name) filter-seeking behaviour and we actively create filters every time we tag a blog post or a photo.

What we should do in response to Burnham’s reflex rejection of the net’s openness and permissiveness is get on and provide the filters people need. The net’s made of computers after all. If we can build filters as powerful and useful as the DNS, Facebook, Google, del.icio.us, Twitter or RSS feeds (they’re all filters of one kind of another) why can’t we shield kids from scary or upsetting content flexibly, adaptively and automatically? If we can constantly improve the relevance and usefulness of search results why can’t we filter out nastiness and offense for our kids in an intelligent way?

If we as an industry can’t hook together metadata, algorithms, user experience and human editorial effort to provide genuinely useful filters for use by parents, schools and even consenting adults, we won’t long be able to resist the arguments of Burnham and others for restrictions on the supply-side: the content itself. We need to recognise the legitimacy of human filter-seeking behaviour and acknowledge that the continued existence of the wide-open net depends in large part on our ability to filter its experience for vulnerable users.

In defence of Twitter

Top debunker Andrew Orlowski put the boot into Twitter and to poor old Rory Cellan-Jones in a very entertaining way in the tech Private Eye The Register the other day. Orlowski’s kind of militant scepticism is useful. Everything new and especially fancy should be tested against an Orlowski figure (if you’ve got one handy).

And where an actual Orlowski isn’t available you should try to maintain a tiny internal Orlowski against which to test your more self-obsessed ideas (I have a tiny internal Julie Burchill who regularly comes to my aid if I drift off into hyperbole or solipsism. She’s been there since about 1979 and she usually tells me “that’s a load of wank isn’t it Steve?”).

But in this case Orlowski is actually wrong (my Burchill is quite often wrong too). Twitter is self-evidently home to a million Pooters: eager nobodies telling the world about their lovely sandwiches or their new sandals or their slight colds but they’re not important.

Twitter’s important because it at least suggests a genuinely new mode of communication and it has characteristics that are going to be important for all the other forms of communication so we should make sure we study it carefully before we trash it:

  • It’s cyberspace. Honestly, it is. I’ve written about this before but switching on Twitter in the morning is the closest to jacking in that I’ve yet seen. As you come online you become present to tens or hundreds of people (thousands if you’re super-popular) and the people you follow likewise become present to you. The minute-to-minute experiences, feelings, knowledge and opinions of all those people become available to you for the duration of your session but all those other people don’t press in on you or aggravate you (it’s not like The Matrix, there’s no actual risk to life). In fact, unless you’re paying attention you won’t know they’re there at all (and it’s a lot less painful than getting a jack-plug fitted).
  • It’s access to human knowledge. Regular Twitterers will confirm that Google is the best place to find out the name of Salman Rushdie’s new book but that Twitter is the best place to find out if it’s any good. Likewise, if you need to decide which laptop or what kind of birthday cake to buy or even what to do when your business can’t get a loan or your dog throws up, Twitter is the place. Fast access to willing minds. Every Twitterer will provide a dozen examples of last minute advice sought and got, tech tips and recipes dispensed. It’s an awesome repository of group knowledge.
  • It’s asynchronous (but not very). On the spectrum that’s got writing a letter at one end and sending an IM at the other, Twitter is close to IM but not right next to it. Responses are quick but not so quick as to make it a pain in the neck. Lots of users are now substituting Twitter (and especially Twitter direct messages which are seen only by the recipient) for email.
  • It’s low pressure. I’ve never got on with IM. Too much pressure: a message comes in and you’ve got to bloody reply to it right there and then. Twitter’s totally different. Messages flow by, addressed only approximately (to a group of followers) and replying is 100% optional. In fact, I’d say that Twitter is close to the optimal contemporary comms platform, shaped to fit modern life perfectly.
  • It’s entertaining. I follow two kinds of Twitterers: funny ones and interesting ones. I laugh out loud half a dozen times per day. I select Twitterers who amuse me and drop the ones who don’t. And people make an effort: being funny is a critical faculty.

Rory wrote his own blog entry about this here.

Brand and Ross are innocent

The Russell Brand show was outstanding radio and didn’t deserve censure.

I’m just going to come out and say this because I have a feeling you might not agree with me (at least not if you’re over about 35). The Russell Brand show—the one with Andrew Sachs’ answerphone—was absolutely brilliant. Offensive and childish (clever Howard Jacobson in The Independent calls it ‘front bottom babyishness’) but also genuinely exciting. I imagine you’ll think me shallow now, or worse, collusive in cruelty to elderly actors, but I’ve listened to the whole show and it’s very funny—in that hands-over-your-ears, can’t-bear-to-listen kind of way that edgy comedy ought to be.

Brand is a charismatic radio performer. Jacobson says “when he winks at you, you stay winked.” His schtick is an adrenaline-rush of allusion and filth: some clever, some bewildering and some just plain dumb but all of it genuinely electrifying. I don’t want to overdo this but I won’t be the first to say that he’s got a lot of the Lenny Bruce or the young Mick Jagger about him, a lot of that edge-of-your-seat, anything-could-happen amphetamine tension that raises the heartrate and makes your palms sweat. It’s thrill-a-minute stuff.

The show in question, of course, also features Jonathan Ross and right from the beginning it’s clear that Ross is in the driving seat. Practically everything lewd and insulting comes from his mouth and the whole tone of the show is set by Ross. He’s a big presence at the BBC and a big presence in the show too, an overbearing figure in fact: forcing the pace and driving Brand to go further and further. Listen to some of Brand’s other shows and you’ll get plenty of ‘dick sacks’ and orgasms and libidinous chit-chat but nothing as aggressive or insulting as you do on this occasion. If there’s a villain in this affair, it’s definitely Ross.

But the thing is, there’s no villain. There’s nothing wrong with the show. It’s really hardcore, really edgy stuff but not a sacking offence and definitely not cause for the tearing down of the licence fee or the demolition of the BBC or even the initiation of a ‘national debate’ or a ‘period of introspection’ as the Corporation’s enemies would have you believe. The show went out after the watershed on a Saturday night with a prominent warning about strong language. Brand’s been on the air for a long time too, plenty of time for any potential listener to understand where he’s coming from. This, of course, explains why the show got two complaints on transmission: an entirely proportionate number for a show of this kind.

And there’s more. Andrew Sachs, the innocent victim, had been booked to come on the show to promote a TV programme he’s presenting appearing in. ITV’s press office His publicist or his manager presumably hustled to get him on the show in the first place. Calls were made, producers cajoled, lunches promised. Sachs knew what to expect. I think this explains Sachs’ diffidence about the furore: he knew he was no victim. He was doing his marketing duty and he’d cocked it up by being out when Brand called. Earlier in the show, Dennis Norden—even more elderly, even more revered—navigated the Ross/Brand experience with aplomb. He too was on the air to promote something. If he’d got an earful of filth it might not have been nice but it would have been the price of entry and probably just as funny.

What went wrong here, of course, was all in the management of the fall-out from the Mail on Sunday’s hatchet job, in Radio 2’s disastrous executive inertia and in the naivety of allowing Ross and Brand’s implacable enemies at The Mail to control the story for days. But I’ve written about all that over at Common Platform. Have I got this wrong? Should the BBC really have caved in so cravenly? Could Thompson not have come back from his holiday with a robust defense in his briefcase and told The Mail where to get off? Listen to the show yourself, and tell me what you think.

Magazine masterclass

Right, I’ve been very busy with my new thing: I’m blogger in residence at the BBC. Honestly. It’s really cool. Follow my comings- and-goings at the special blog I’ve set up for the purpose at commonplatform.co.uk (the feed’s here). More about the whole thing here later…

In the meantime, I just want to share with you a small masterclass in how to run a web site and talk to your customers if you’re a magazine publisher. Mark Ellen and his team over at Word Magazine are in a tough market up against some pretty big-and-ugly competitors and their web site is full of lessons on how to make that work to your advantage.

Check out this brilliant forum thread about subscription prices, in which senior staff, including publisher David Hepworth, make funny and honest contributions that must have influenced the opinions of the complainers who started the thread and probably even sold a few subs. It’s the kind of thing that would almost certainly have been supressed or ignored by an EMAP or a NatMags but which the tiny, independent Word turns to its advantage. Perfect. 10 out of 10. Go to the top of the class.

I also really like the very simple video promo for the current issue that’s on the home page at the moment. One take, no edits, shot in the office, hosted on YouTube—brilliant. (declaration: I write the odd bit for Word, including this piece about memory and the Internet and an earlier one about Wikipedia and I’ve got a piece about why futurology’s rubbish in the current issue—so I’m probably a bit partial).