Bowblog

Five reasons it might not be so bad to have Boris as Mayor after all

UPDATE April 2022. I’m leaving this up, although it’s obviously a bit embarrassing (and wrong – Johnson ultimately served two terms as Mayor).

1. The Mayor doesn’t have much to do anyway. He may have an £11B budget but it’s really only half a job. New Labour deliberately hobbled the Mayor’s office from the beginning by retaining control of everything important at the centre and providing no direct tax raising powers. The remarkable thing about Ken’s tenure has been how much impact he’s been able to have with control of public transport and bugger-all else.

2. He’s funny. He is funny isn’t he?

3. He’ll be a one-term Mayor. Nothing he’s proposed is achievable within budget. He’s backing away from the Routemaster idea (which has been authoritatively rubbished). Central Office cagily supported Boris but not his policies. With all the big reforms already firmly entrenched Boris will struggle to make an impact. As budgets rocket and policies evaporate disillusionment will set in.

4. Cameron will cut him loose. He may be better behaved now but you can’t innoculate a boob like Boris against gaffes. Can it be long before he alienates bus drivers or pensioners or people who live in Penge?

5. He’ll get bored. Boris evidently has the attention span of a nine year-old boy. As his concentration lapses he’ll drift off. Pretty soon he’ll forget where he works and after a year or two Londoners will be able to pick someone else.

Cheap, reusable and accessible IT for schools

Right. What’s the definition of a really good bit of primary school IT? Is it ambitious and over-arching, integrating dozens of systems, forcing new behaviours all over the place and generally rending the fabric of reality? Or is it something really simple and quick to build that benefits the whole school community, costs nothing and can be re-used indefinitely? Here’s an example: Matt Johnson, switched-on deputy head at Fair Field Junior in Radlett (where I’m a parent governor) has put together a page at the school web site that uses Twitter, some Javascript and MMS photos to track a school trip.

Year four have gone to an activity centre in Staffordshire and Mr Lock, one of the supervising teachers, is twittering and sending photos from his phone. Result: more engaged parents, a fascinating and permanent real-time record of the trip as it unfolds and a system that can be reused every time the school goes away. The page is here and you can follow the trip on Twitter at twitter.com/fairfieldtrip.

I wrote about one of Mr Johnson’s earlier Twitter projects—which is still running because the cost of maintaining it is essentially zero—here.

Why do I have such a bad feeling about Highfield’s move to Kangaroo?

What message does it send when you hire the country’s top new media manager to run a start-up business in an increasingly lean and competitive industry? What are you saying when you tap the Executive Board of the nation’s state broadcaster (and one of the most important media owners in the world) for your joint venture’s new MD? What does paying half a million pounds per year (my guess: his BBC salary is 350K) to the top man at your fledgling IP TV business say about your priorities?

Is it a statement of ambition and substance? An aggressive line in the sand for competitors and partners? A gesture of confidence in the business model and the medium?

Or is it a defeated acknowledgement of the status quo? Are you really saying “don’t worry everyone, we’ve had a good look at this IP TV thing and it’s going to be just like telly”. Does it scream “we haven’t got a name, a business model or an audience yet and already our HR costs are totally out-of-control”?

Frankly I’m worried. I’m worried that rushing out and securing the services of the best new media executive in the land is not the confident prelude to a smooth launch and rapid ascent to profitability and fame but rather the last thing you do before people start adding the prefix “troubled” to the things they say about you—as in “Kanagaroo, troubled web TV joint venture, today announced the appointment of Ashley Highfield…”

I think this role was really the perfect opportunity to ‘skip a generation’ and reach out to the dozens of smart managers one or two layers below Highfield at the Beeb and in the commercial sector. I think that opportunity has been missed because Kangaroo is already a disaster waiting to happen: an almost unmanageable Euro-pudding of a joint venture with no visible path to profitability and a business plan that’s in free-fall. Hiring the industry’s top man (and, thanks to iPlayer’s triumphant launch, its streaming TV talisman) looked like a large enough and decisive enough gesture to silence the doubters. Fat chance.

Or am I just being negative?

Speechification improved (again)!

I’ve been meaning to say for a while that we’ve improved Speechification again. New contributor James Bridle has cleverly embedded a player in every entry so you listen to shows with ease right there on the page. You’ll probably still want to subscribe to the podcast, which is getting pretty popular now. The other thing I’d like you to to do is make sure you let us know what you think of Speechification and suggest good speech radio programmes you think we should be featuring.

Why oh why oh why?

I don’t envy your jobbing weekly columnist much: you have to produce something eye-catching with metronomic regularity and you live or die by the feedback you get from your readers. Of course, in the networked age print journalism doesn’t get the feedback it once did (people don’t get the Remington out to fire off a missive so much these days). Blogs and forums attract the feedback now and mostly because the effort required to express an opinion is so minimal.

By the way, if you’re passing a newsagent inside the M25 this week, do pick up a copy of Time Out, flick to page 163 and read my wife’s funny and clever piece about Doctor Who and his new sidekick (she thinks Catherine Tate is the wrong kind of role model for the millions of young girls who watch Doctor Who). Then, once you’ve got over your anger/wonder/joy drop them an email at tv@timeout.com with some feedback (good or bad). Thank you.

Consensual spoofing in Club Penguin

Here’s another crazy observation from my kids’ use of Club Penguin. My kids (the older two – nine and eight – have Club Penguin accounts) swap logins with their friends so that they can go online and score in-world currency on their behalf! Oliver told me “Joseph logged in as me last night and earned me enough coins to buy a plasma for my igloo”.

First, isn’t that just kind of mind-blowing in its own right? Under-10s behaving altruistically? Playing for hours to score points for friends when they could be accumulating the coins for themselves? Shurely Shome Mishtake. Second, if this behaviour is widespread (and I’m pretty sure it is since my kids are not famously generous), how on earth do we accommodate this kind of consensual spoofing in our privacy and child protection regimes?

And the web moved on

Ted Nelson at the Oxford Internet Institute, 17 March 2008

Ted Nelson is a heretic and a maverick. Everybody knows that. A generalist and a reluctant computer-scientist. He invented hypertext but hates the web. He thinks the web is broken because it doesn’t handle links properly, doesn’t have an embedded citation system and doesn’t care about ownership or remuneration for creators. His Xanadu does all that stuff properly, of course. In fact it does everything because it’s essentially a superset of the web.

He spoke at the Oxford Internet Institute a couple of weeks ago and the whole thing was gripping. I mean not just the singing and the poetry and the B&W movies: all that was the Ted Nelson I’d been led to expect: eccentric, funny, clever, a bit big-headed. The lecture was interesting too, of course. What I found most interesting, though, was the audience. I guess it was an OII kind of audience. It was just very different from the kind of crowd you get at geek events. There were some geeks here, of course but they were different. They weren’t the busy, clean-cut, trendy geeks you get at web 2.0 events, this-camps and that-camps.

And there were none of the questions you’d expect of a geek crowd. No one mentioned the semantic web or Wikipedia or social media or information architecture or any of the stuff you’d have expected a man like Nelson to have an opinion about. So I found myself grilling him gently about the web. I asked him if Wikipedia was essentially Xanadu except it had shipped. I asked about blogs and wikis and collaborative media. Nelson had essentially one answer: “that’s in my system”. His frustration and annoyance were palpable. You could see it in his eyes: all these bastards with their shitty, half-baked, compromised systems out there in the unsupervised wild when what they should have done, the bastards, was just adopt Xanadu when I offered it to them. Bastards.

For Nelson, the whole messy ecosystem of the actual existing net and the web and those thousands of apps and millions of blogs and billions of users is just a big, ignorant snub to the totalising glory of Xanadu (which still isn’t finished). So, really, the whole thing was too sad. Xanadu and Nelson are perfect and unworldly. The web is imperfect and worldly. Xanadu can never ship because that would compromise its perfection and Nelson can never actually participate because that would endanger his precious apostasy. And the web doesn’t care so the world moves on and it’s heartbreaking really.

Doctors. Don’t talk to me about doctors

I’ve not been well. Two weeks laid low by a mystery virus. My doctor disagrees: I’m in perfect health, he says, refusing me medication. He’s pursuing some kind of Californian mind control strategy. I take him nasty symptoms and he denies they exist. The other day I told him I was feeling breathless. “Listen”, I said, wheezing. He countered with an oxygen saturation test – “100%” the little read-out blinked. “You’re in perfect health. You could join the fire brigade. In fact here’s their number. You’ll be up a ladder by tea time”. “No thanks” I said. “Coast Guard?”

The other day Russell was complaining about space film music and proposed Palestrina as an alternative to the usual orchestral stuff. I can see his point but I think I can hear something different, something muckier and a bit less heavenly out there in the void. So I made a Muxtape: my first go is a kind of fantasy space-noir movie soundtrack. Muxtape is really addictive fun and, incidentally, exactly the kind of thing the music biz should be embracing. Imagine millions of these things legally doing the rounds. Of course, what they’ll actually do is ignore it then complain about it and then probably shut it down (UPDATE April 2022 – you guessed it, that’s exactly what happened to Muxtape).

Hiding amongst the Penguins

At the weekend I watched my older two kids do something fascinating. They played hide-and-seek. They’re nine and eight so they play hide-and-seek all the time. This time, though, they were playing in Club Penguin, a slick, Disney-owned virtual world for kids. Hide-and-seek isn’t a game offered by Club Penguin, though. There are lots of other games but not hide-and-seek.

So my kids here in the house and another nine year-old friend in his own house five miles away improvised a game in the busy public spaces of Club Penguin. Of course, they didn’t think this to be in the least bit remarkable.

So, to get started, Billie stood in front of the computer in the kitchen, closed her eyes and counted to twenty while Oliver, at a laptop in the living room and Joseph in his house waddled off into other Club Penguin rooms to hide. Of course, Club Penguin would have allowed Billie to find both of her friends at the click of a mouse via her buddy list – so the kids invented a ‘no buddy list’ rule – and they stuck to it.

The seeker wandered from room to room, peering into the crowded spaces for her friend’s avatars. And since avatars in Club Penguin are all… well… penguins, this was definitely not easy: it was all down to accessories like scarves and hats. Billie eventually found both of her penguin friends and then it was somebody else’s turn. What should I conclude from this observation? I guess kids will treat these environments much as they do the real ones they play in every day and will adapt them to their needs just like the real ones.

Wikipedia’s self-awareness

UPDATE April 2022. A 14 year-old blog post, here to remind us that Wikipedia has been a big, useful and thoroughly mature institution for a long time.

Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. John Broughton (O’Reilly 2008).

John Broughton’s a Wikipedia editor. His new book’s about the hidden machinery of Wikipedia, the tools used by editors and contributors to add, improve and, when necessary, remove Wikipedia content. What emerges is a picture of Wikipedia as a busy, dynamic, pyramid-shaped hierarchy with all the hard work going on in the middle layer—where the editors live. The rules they apply and the tools they use are fascinating and much subtler than the pop media coverage of the project could ever allow.

Broughton’s not interested in defending or explaining Wikipedia (it just doesn’t come up). His book is a how-to (a ‘Missing Manual’). This is as it should be: Wikipedia’s part of the landscape now, not a libertarian fantasy or a half-baked geek experiment. Practical books like this always arrive after the first, experimental, phase and before the later, ubiquitous phase. They’re an important sign. They say: “this phenomenon is real and durable.”

So we learn that what’s coming together at Wikipedia is an important institution with deep roots, a sophisticated social model and a rigorous framework for knowledge. Tools of real scholarly and pedagogic value are growing behind Wikipedia’s facade and, of course, the extraordinary thing about this experiment is that there’s nothing to stop any of us participating. I’m profoundly impressed, for instance, by what I learn about the system’s ‘notability’ process.

Something like 1500 entries are deleted per day, mostly because they fail to meet the collective definition of ‘notable’ (important enough for an encyclopaedia entry). But these deletions is not arbitrary. Many are hotly disputed on the site’s talk pages and just as many are reversed by volunteers (they’re called ‘inclusionists’) who wade in to provide some extra notability for threatened entries: by adding citations, for instance. One of these inclusionists is cult novelist Nicholson Baker, as he explains in this lovely piece from a recent NYRB (also a review of Broughton’s book).

Of course, Wikipedia’s not the answer. It’s not our era’s final position on planetary-scale knowledge sharing. In fact it’s a bit of a mess at the moment and seems to be showing signs of early-onset decadence. But I think this is probably a good thing. The idea that the first large-scale collaborative effort to organise knowledge should be the only one or in some way definitive doesn’t seem right: we should probably have a few goes at this at least.

If Wikipedia were to collapse or even to disappear, like the great library of Alexandria in 48BC, it would pretty soon be replaced—and perhaps by something with an improved contribution model or better governance. We’d miss it (I’ll bet those Alexandrian scholars missed their library too) but, sooner or later, it would be a footnote in a successor work’s index.

What’s fascinating here is the way the institution (is that the right word?) is quite systematically bootstrapping its own authority, growing processes and rules that deliberately and incrementally improve the body of work (no matter what the founder gets up to). This counters the Sunday newspaper orthodoxy, promoted by people who haven’t troubled to look at the way the thing actually works, that Wikipedia has a kind of diminished authority and that it can’t acquire real authority because it’s the product of amateurs. Wikipedia improves because it is self-aware…

I’ve written a piece about Wikipedia for Mark Ellen at The Word which comes out on 8 April.