Bowblog

Comedy voicemail service prospers

Spinvox, the service that translates your voicemails into text messages, has raised a wheelbarrow-load of money from various top-drawer sources for international expansion. I like Spinvox and the company’s continued success shows that it’s clever to hang out where voice and data meet. Machine translation – especially in noisy environments like mobile – is hard so it’ll continue to produce opportunities. Until translation is an embedded function, until every operator offers it as a standard (and invisible) feature of voicemail, Spinvox will prosper.

The thing about Spinvox, though, is that I’m still pretty sure there aren’t any machines. People who’ve visited the firm will tell you that there’s a roomful of… well… people translating those messages. And any user will provide plenty of evidence from their own inbox of human fallibility in the call centre. I keep a small collection of genuinely hilarious Spinvox mistranslations.

From a work contact: “Hi Steve. Beats me in the arse. Please give me a call when you’re available”
From a BBC Manager I know vaguely (and whose name is not John Arthur): “Hi Steve. It’s John Arthur here. I do love you very much, though. Can you please give me a call”
From my wife: “Call ham Steve”
Also from my wife (whose name is Juliet): “Hi Chloey. This is Joey”.

If the heavy lifting at Spinvox really is still being done by people, why do they continue to talk about their awesome software? If the software is steadily taking over (which is the most likely explanation) where are these errors coming from: the software or the people? Speaking for myself, Spinvox’s comedy mistranslations are the main reason I continue to subscribe. Hope they don’t sort it out too soon.

Pledging allegiance

I like the pledge of allegiance idea. I know it’s a bit uncool and as a ‘liberal’ I should reject the idea as jingoistic or backward but I think Helena Kennedy and the rest of the snooty elite have got their response to this one wrong.

Kennedy on Today was shocking: it was as if the last seven or eight years hadn’t happened. The whole post-war social settlement in Britain was thrown in the air when those British kids blew up dozens of their fellow-citizens on 7/7 and the idea that we can carry on roughly as before is jaded and defeatist – Kennedy’s singing loudly with her fingers in her ears. We should really be ready to try almost anything to strengthen bonds within and between the people and institutions of this country.

The reason I like the pledge of allegiance is probably for the same reason it makes other liberals cringe. It’s an artificial event, an invented marker for accession to citizenship. That’s just what we need: something simple and deliberate that says ‘welcome to your nation’! A moment in time. An unembarrassed celebration with some real emotional content —and maybe a speech you have to learn—that kids can laugh and joke about afterwards but always remember as ‘the day they grew up’ or ‘joined the club’ or whatever.

There’s obviously a risk that such an event could become a laughing stock if it’s inauthentic or too cheesy but I think that’s probably a risk worth taking. I’d like to see a debate about this—and maybe some interesting contributions to the shape and content of the event too.

Buy my old records!

I thought it was easy to sell vintage records on eBay. Evidently no one wants a 1985 Run DMC 12″, a White Vinyl Dollar single or a 1982 Grandmaster Flash 12″. What’s going on?

iPlayer’s economics

iPlayer‘s a huge success. Ashley Highfield says so. The first ‘iPlayer hits’ are emerging (Dr Who, Top Gear). iPlayer audiences are typically 10% of the broadcast numbers, sometimes 500,000 in one day. Within a year we’ll see the first streaming blockbuster – a show whose iPlayer audience exceeds its TV audience.

The corporation used to worry about the cost of streaming – the download iPlayer was, in part, aimed at controlling the Beeb’s bandwidth costs by offloading file distribution to downloaders (some have been surprised to see upload traffic from their PCs while viewing a show).

Greg Dyke was on record (can’t find a reference) as saying he didn’t think it was possible to resolve the economics of a system where each new viewer brings an additional cost, even where that cost tends towards zero. The problem, of course, is that the unit cost doesn’t (can’t) actually reach zero but can only bump along asymptotically – and is likely, in fact, to rise each time a service enhancement comes along (better resolution for instance).

The other problem, of course, lies out there at the network’s edge with the ISPs. Highfield is dismissive. iPlayer traffic is a ‘negligible’ proportion of overall traffic, he says. But, logically, it can’t stay negligible. ISPs are going to carry an increasing share of the burden of delivering the BBC’s streaming traffic to their customers. Tipping points will arrive, quality will suffer. A BBC insider told me the other day that the ISPs represent a huge potential problem for the corporation’s streaming plans. He used some graphic metaphors: cliffs, bullet trains approaching mountains without tunnels, that kind of thing. The $64K question is: can a national broadcaster switch a significant fraction of its content from a free transmission model to a costly per-stream network model without trashing its funding economics or the all-you-can-eat internet access model?

And, more to the point, is anyone at the Beeb thinking about this?

A new way to watch the telly

The experiment that produced Speechification – which is a sort of diagonal slice through the output of Radio 4 and various other speech radio stations delivered as a podcast – has brought forth Watchification!

At Watchification, Russell, Roo and myself, plus a small army of contributors (including my wife, who is, like, a real TV critic), are making regular selections from the BBC’s new streaming iPlayer. By the wonders of ’embedding’ you can watch the video right there at Watchification, without having to beetle off back to the Beeb.

This is a bit of a breakthrough, since it allows us to ‘curate’ the BBC’s broadcast content in a way that’s never been possible before – and certainly not with the non-streaming, Windows-only iPlayer that launched at Xmas. It’s like a ‘best of’ for your telly. What I find exciting about it is that we’re playing with proper, grown-up media and making a contribution that feels like it might be the beginning of something: a new kind of television ecology that’s more distributed and less monolothic.

So tune in daily, subscribe to the feed (when we switch it on), follow us on Twitter and tell your friends.

The organic backlash starts here

Delia’s on the money. Let’s dump the backward, unproductive organic bullshit and get back to growth and progress.

On daytime TV and down on the farm, the food and agriculture wars are getting interesting again. The extremes are being tested. Rapacious techno-capitalist agrobusiness has been shown to be predatory and short-sighted. Likewise, dreamy organic pastoralism has been shown to be superstitious and narrow-minded. Some kind of consensus may emerge. We need one. How are we going to feed billions under this most fragile curve of blue sky without some kind of agreement?

In the pop media the old school is mounting a quite entertaining backlash. Delia’s in the front-line (she’s channelling others of her era: the galloping gourmet and Fanny Craddock are coming through loud-and-clear). She’s putting into words a decade’s pent-up objections to those smug, wealthy food-bores with their herb gardens and their rare breeds and their bloody Magimixes. We may have seen high water for the foodies and their unbending authenticity. Crack open that tin of pineapple chunks, friend.

And now the Spring’s coming so the action’s moving back to the fields (it’s been a bit nippy for crop vandalism). The anti-GM crowd are pulling on their ‘funny’ bunny suits ready for action and they’ve apparently been perfecting their methods.

Why is it so dispiriting to contemplate the waves of well-meaning greens swarming over fences into the fields again? Shouldn’t we be glad these kids have got the balls and the energy to take on the evil agrobiz and the government? Not really. Because they’re doing all this in the name of that most timid and constipated of social policy inventions: the precautionary principle.

Over-use of the precautionary principle is the mark of a society that doubts its ability to transcend its conditions, make progress, break through. It’s a kind of constitutional paralysis. Boldness, experiment, risk: all out the window. We need to push back, get the foot back on the accelerator. If we don’t, the economies where the only principle at work is the principle of ‘fuck you’ are going to be in charge and then it won’t matter which principle we apply. We’ll be remembered as the crowd of fussy eaters who used to live on that little island in the North Atlantic.

I’d like to see a counter-movement (perhaps wearing ‘funny’ tweedy caps or something), a pro-science, pro-progress group ready to get out into the weedy, under-nourished plots of the organic establishment and start digging up their crops. I’d like to see piles of pointlessly expensive organic veg liberated and dumped on the steps of Number 10 – with some kind of clever PR twist to get it in the papers, obviously. Maybe we could even mount a programme of stealth weed killer application – not a lot, just enough to completely freak out Farmer Giles when he brings in the gang only to find there’s no weeds to weed.

Symmetry violated

Saw this book yesterday. Struck me straight away that the positioning of those three characters is odd. The spacing, I mean. I’m going to make a small bet that the first version of the cover spaced Bin-Laden, Bush and Blair evenly across the top of the pocket but that everyone at the meeting objected to it. I can imagine the discomfort it would have produced in the studio.

People wouldn’t have been able to place it to begin with but they’d all have felt the relief once that little gap was opened up. Even spacing may have been neater but it suggested equivalence. Grouping Bush and Blair together does enough to defuse that and neutralise the queasy feeling I’m sure the original produced. The message now is: “they’re all bad but one of them is really bad”.

Thinking about the public domain

So what I want to do is put up a blog celebrating the public domain. Not public domain in the narrow, literal sense – stuff that’s not protected by copyright – but in a broader sense. ‘Public domain’ may actually be the wrong phrase here, since people will probably just think: “Ah, free stuff!”. There are other phrases: ‘public realm’, ‘culture’, ‘society’. None of them reallly does it for me though. The public domain is the shared space where societies and cultures make meaning. But that’s a bit of a mouthful isn’t it? I wrote an essay a while ago for the BBC Trust (here’s a PDF).

I think it sits between disciplines: there’s some economics (production and distribution methods, economic models), some sociology (how groups create shared meaning), some history etc. etc. In the essay I touch down (in a not-at-all systematic way) in ancient Greece, Tin Pan Alley and Renaissance Florence: moments when the public domain was robust and productive. I want the blog to record moments like these: to catalogue the conditions that produce a healthy public domain. Read it if you get a minute. Let me know what you think.

And by the way, I need a name for the blog. Got any ideas?

Tories reassuringly stupid and short-sighted

Aldenham Conservatives

I just wanted to share this piece of elemental stupidity with you. I live in the outer suburbs of London, in a green belt stronghold of the Tories called Radlett. The cutting comes from one of their leaflets. I suppose I could provide some kind of commentary or I could just leave you to treasure the nastiness and pointlessness of this little announcement on your own. I’m practically speechless.

So I’m going to leave it to you to figure out where the evicted kids are meant to go instead of the park, what kind of alternative provision the Tories are making for their amusement and what plans they’ve made to prevent antisocial behaviour in the future.

Get me my agent!

I was talking about this the other day with Alison Hall. Alison’s a top flight head hunter-type who’s got a consultancy called Seven Arts. She disagrees. She reckons agents are sleazy and that clients wouldn’t use them. The thing is, I have my talents (honestly) and they are various. I’ve also got decades of life experience and loads of very specific skills. I’m multi-faceted you see. Unless we’ve had cause to work together, though, you have no idea what I can do.

For instance, I can state the total cost of a job during a pitch without laughing, proofread a Powerpoint presentation on a moving escalator, get a smile from the snootiest Venture Capital receptionist in Mayfair and divine the secret purpose of a digital strategy using only instant coffee and a pencil. I’m like a God! So all I need is an agent.

The conventional recruitment/placement process blocks most of the important information. It’s staggeringly inefficient. Even LinkedIn, Facebook and the rest are weak: they apply powerful network effects but essentially commoditise me, reduce me to a profile, a node (don’t forget to friend me though, will you: Facebook, LinkedIn). If there was a culture of ‘representation’ in this business (as there is in the arts and in sport), I could just go out and hire an agent who could get on the phone and tell the world about my remarkable mix of charm and perspicacity; devastating analysis and sparkling creativity. But where are the agents for digital types like me? There are none.