Bowblog

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.

Odds that Conway was the only one: close to zero

Here’s a quick one. Let’s have a sweepstake. In the next couple of weeks, as the tips and leaks start to flow in, how many MPs will be busted for paying their relatives to do nothing? Nearest to the actual number wins… er… a slightly cleaner legislature.

Seriously, Conway got the boot (a much tougher sanction than any of the various donation monkeys received, remember) so we have a precedent. If it turns out that there are ten or twenty (fifty?) MPs currently employing invisible researchers and secretaries that’s a potential legislative apocalypse: Westminster could be on the brink of losing five percent of it elected representatives.

I think I now understand why it took Cameron a day to think about it. Dave’s thought process: “everybody knows that lots of MPs do this. Over 70 Tory MPs employ relatives. We could be in for a flood of bent MPs. I could lose dozens of loyal troops. Oh. My. God”.

Explaining the inexplicable

Tories, pop media and now Labour rebels want us to vote on a European Treaty that’s barely readable, largely incomprehensible and hardly consequential. Why?

UK Legislators have got the referendum bug again. Nothing wrong with that: asking your electorate to decide on really big questions has a long and noble history. This referendum, though, if it happens, will be a travesty of democracy. The problem is that no one in the electorate understands the treaty we’re asked to vote on (I blogged about this before).

The Lisbon Treaty is not wicked or dangerous. It won’t undermine our democracy and it won’t smear the States of old Europe into a single, continent-wide suburb of Brussels. It is a mess, though: it’s shabby, incoherent and compromised. The whole thing feels arbitrary and reeks of political contingency. People close to its drafting have even said that it’s been written in this awkward, occluded way deliberately because the lofty, Napoleonic terms of the constitution it replaces obviously stuck in the throats of quite a lot of ordinary Europeans.

And it’s on this compromised, difficult document that the Tories (and their new friends on the Labour back benches) want us to vote. They want us to absorb and understand the European Treaty which, in its amended form runs to over 330 pages. This, of course, is ridiculous. It’s worse: it’s anti-democratic. It says “screw democracy. We’re looking for some short-term electoral advantage.”

The Liberals, it pains me to say, have responded to this difficulty in a rather creative way. They say we shouldn’t be required to vote on the treaty itself but rather on the simpler (and obviously much larger) issue of whether we should stay in the EU at all.

So we have some options: the government’s approach, which is to rely on the mechanisms of representative democracy and shoo the thing through parliament in 12 days of debate; the Tories’ approach, which is to hold a meaningless referendum on a topic that’s essentially too complicated to understand or the Liberal approach, which is to sidestep the treaty and vote on Europe itself.

Or, it occurs to me, we could treat this is a genuine and quite exciting opportunity to produce some democratic engagement and explain the bloody treaty…

Gordon Brown Nein Danke

nuclear warning symbol Damn. Since I last posted here things have gone from bad to worse. Britain is now officially governed by what I think the kids call a ‘flake’. My early impression of Gordon Brown as Labour’s dreadnought, a politically impregnable battleship of prudence and good judgment, has all but evaporated. Who’s writing his script? Yesterday he called Hain’s donor gaffe ‘an incompetence.’

What’s the difference between ‘an incompetence’ and ‘incompetence’? No idea. Although I suspect it’s probably about a mile-and-a-half of choppy political water. Brown could bring himself neither to condemn Hain (‘he was incompetent. He’s history’) nor to get behind him (‘Shut up you bunch of ninnies: he’s done nothing wrong and he’s staying’) so we wound up with the miserable, indecisive non-phrase: ‘an incompetence’. I’m dumbfounded and more than a bit worried. And now a Northern Rock nationalisation: another epic opportunity for indecision. God save us.

Still, at least we’ve got a revival of nuclear power to look forward to. I’m actually in favour. I think that our objections (I was a long-time anti too) are all based on the first- and second-generation kit that’s currently rotting at various out-of-the-way coastal locations – and which, of course, we have to deal with whether or not we decide to build new plants.

Objectors have got a skewed picture of nuclear power’s risks. Even taking into account the half-a-dozen major incidents since the 1950s nuclear has killed hardly anyone. Add up the deaths directly attributable to emissions from even a modern coal-fired plant and you’ll see what I mean. Don’t get me wrong: meltdown and catastrophic contamination are not trivial risks but we must weigh them properly alongside the risks of pursuing existing high-carbon base load sources and of acting too slowly to fill the inevitable power supply gap.

The grim statistical truth is that even the real risk of an occasional major disaster will be dwarfed by the reduced long-term pressure on climate and on vulnerable coastal communities, for instance. Climate change really does change everything.

Current nuclear tech is streets ahead of the Heath Robinson plants of the first wave. Look at this marvelous self-contained, neighbourhood-sized unit from Toshiba (by the way, I love this site map). You could fit one in your garage and it would heat and light hundreds of homes for forty years. It also, according to the experts, presents vastly reduced risk of overheating. While we’ve been at a nuclear standstill the rest of the world has been moving the technology on. It’s time we caught up.

Speaking of climate change, I guess you’ll have seen this terrific risk assessment from Greg on YouTube. I’m no logician but his thesis looks sound to me. Right or wrong, though, I’m terrifically impressed by the video’s author, a high school science teacher, apparently. I think this is a great example of the top end of citizen media: confident, thought-provoking, authoritative. I do hope he’s got himself a proper movie deal or a substantial research grant by now.

A Speechification player you can embed

Hey. Look over there! In the right-hand nav. Yes, it’s a Speechification player. You can now listen to top speech radio picks from the Speechification crew right here at Bowblog.com. The player is a clever blend of RSS and Yahoo Pipes or something. We got the idea from Giles who did it first and Roo made ours. The player is a thing of beauty (that’s Yahoo’s handiwork) and you can just click on that little ‘Y’ icon and copy the code to paste into your own blog (you might need to adjust the width of the embed but that’s easy and the player is very forgiving: it’ll squeeze into really narrow places). Of course, you can also listen by subscribing to the podcast or just visit the web site.

Mapping the Obsolescence Space

Apple 40SC HDD

This weekend I threw away (I mean really threw away, like into a skip): three Apple inkjet printers (obsolete interface, Appletalk), an Apple 40MB (that’s MB, not GB) hard disk drive (obsolete interface, SCSI), five modems, from 9.6K to 56K (obsolete interface and totally obsolete, pre-broadband model of cyberspace, obviously).

Dozens of SCSI leads and terminators (see above), two old Apple keyboards (obsolete interface, ADB), dozens of ethernet drop leads (not obsolete I suppose, just not used in our house any more), a 100Mb Zip drive (obsolete hardware format), a 40Mb Syquest drive (obsolete on so many levels), five old Powerbook batteries, two old Powerbook power supplies (one from a 180c, the awesome colour Powerbook from 1993!)

I didn’t throw away: two Apple Newtons, one Apple eMate (which is actually a Newton in a clamshell case), Newton chargers, docks, modems, styli and a really dopey Newton keyboard, an Apple Imagewriter II dot matrix printer (obsolete interface, obsolete print method, just can’t bear to part with my first printer!)

I felt obliged to record this lot but I think what I really ought to do is put them onto a timeline or something, maybe a big floaty map thing. An ‘obsolescence map’, a visual way of tracking the arrival and the departure of media and computing technologies. Once adopted they feel so solid and permanent but they’re really so ephemeral and we’re losing them fast. Should we be preserving these second-order technologies? Peripherals, buses, storage, printing, input, output? Will we miss them in forty or fifty years time if we don’t?

I heart shopfronts

Got a little project going over at flickr. It’s called The Global Shopfront Library (grand, huh?). I love shopfronts, you see. Good ones are like vivid, friendly paintings. Walking down an interesting street with a real variety of shops on either side (current favourite: St Albans Road, Watford) is like watching a movie about the community you’re in.

Of course, that’s why you need the variety. A string of just-like-all-the-others chainstores is paralysingly boring (although the efforts made by chainstore managers to make their shopfronts stand out are often a treat in themselves).

So, what I want to do is build a huge kind of worldwide guidebook to the imagination and invention of shopkeepers everywhere. In fact, in my imagination it’s a kind of colourful flickbook of shopfronts. The Flickr group is here and I’ve put up a simple web page at shopfrontlibrary.com. You can also keep up with new additions by following the group on Twitter (imagine! shopfronts on your phone!).

So, obviously, I’d like you to add your own photos to the pool (you need to join the group first) and encourage others to do so. If you’re going to add pics, you could geotag them and then they’ll show up on the map, which already looks pretty cool and global. If you’d like to help (who wouldn’t?), drop me a line and you could be an admin for the group.

Welcome to the Darwinian Disco

I was down among the hairies and the smooths in Brighton today, at Ivan’s Widgety Goodness. I was test marketing my new catchphrase: ‘the Darwinian disco’. It went over large and I expect a book deal within the month. Anyway, a few people (well, two), asked for the words I read out, so here they are, more or less.

The term ‘widget’ stands for the output of the industrial-era manufacturing economy. It’s about uniformity and flawless repetition: Ford and Sloan and mass production. It comes in any colour so long as it’s black.

‘Widget’ in the networked era stands for something different.

I’m going to characterise the first wave of the web – the first ten years or so – as the Newtonian period. Let’s call it the ‘Newtonian Nexus’. An era of massive software entities: web sites and applications, floating in a space uniform in all directions, doing their predictable gravitational thing.

Widgets usher in a new era and a new kind of web. It’s not Newtonian: it’s Darwinian. Let’s call the post-widget web the ‘Darwinian Disco’, a more chaotic, less predictable environment: more like a forest ecology than the vacuum of space. Hot, not cold. Lumpy, not uniform. Frenetic, not static (look: it’s a long time since I went to a disco, OK?).

Web sites (those Newtonian objects) are pretty easy to understand because they usually reproduce the structures and processes of their parents: the businesses that built them. Home pages map neatly onto brands and business units: tabs to departments, pages to products.

Widgets are harder to interpret. They don’t helpfully duplicate the businesses that built them. They’re creatures of the undergrowth and the canopy. Species of widget will probably bloom (like bacteria or algae) and then crash spectacularly.

At the Darwinian Disco (catchy isn’t it?), we’ll see clouds of these things, dumped into the environment like chaff: shiny and temporary. Helpful or playful. We’ll see some businesses whose only visible expression is an shimmering mesh of widgets.

Widgets will be optimised to return value to their owners from wherever they run. They’re just code, after all, so if you can think it, you can build it and it will find its home at the Darwinian Disco.

Also, here’s a story I wrote for Marketing Week back in the Summer on a similar topic: a bit more about the contrast between the industrial-era and network-era definitions of ‘widget’.

Is Gordon Brown depressed?

I think he’s depressed. I suspect he’s been depressed for his whole adult life, mind you. But he’s just moved to a big new job and that’s triggered a crisis. Everything about his behaviour shouts depression. He’s turned in on himself. His instinct when things get tough has always been to retreat – hide out, pull the duvet over his head. He hates the aggro and the nasty, rude attention he gets from the opposition and the media.

He doesn’t rise to it. There’s no fight in him. It must be frustrating to work with him when he’s like this. All around him people must be urging him to get a grip, kick some ass, get out into the world and make a difference. But still, nothing.

Where is he this morning, for instance? Has he varied his schedule to sort out the funding mess? Doesn’t look like it. As usual he’s hiding behind a compliant phalanx of cabinet members. He’s in doors, wringing his hands when he ought to be striding the public stage, dishing out the presbyterian tongue-lashings, roasting Humphrys on Today, firing everyone within half a mile of the scandal, reshuffling, rewriting the rules, bringing forward legislation, hosting meetings, taking control!

Why is there still anyone at all at work in the party’s fund-raising bunker? Why aren’t they all licking their wounds in Starbucks, thinking about a change of career? Where’s the evidence that Brown takes this diabolical shambles seriously, either morally or politically? The Blair instinct – to turn a political nightmare into an opportunity to shine as a man, as a leader – is cruelly absent. Brown’s in a funk.

Here’s my conclusion. He fooled us all (well, me anyway). I saw tough, dour, implacable, unruffled. I missed terrified, lost, out-of-his-depth, passive, ineffective. This is a very scary time for Labour and for Britain and the man in charge has lost his grip, his marbles and his balls. Go on Gordon, prove me wrong.

Cynical? Moi?

Parties to the Middle East talks in Annapolis fall into two groups: those who frankly don’t care if the ‘Palestine problem’ is resolved and those whose lives and livelihoods depend on it. Unfortunately the former group includes all the nations with the power to do anything about it and the latter only the utterly powerless.

Of course, I’m being rhetorical. Everybody cares about the miserable Israel/Palestine impasse. It’s just that nobody has any political skin in the game. In fact the most powerful party and the only one with enough real world clout to alter conditions on the ground – The USA – would really be happy if things carried on as they are.

The political cost to the Bush Administration of Palestine’s continued suffering is close to zero and only increases when Hamas and Hizbollah and the other unhelpful nihilists on the Arab side start lobbing missiles and dispatching suicide bombers.

Even then, with lives being lost on both sides, the political dividend from another all-too-predictable outburst of Palestinian violence cancels the cost: “look! They’re out of control! How can we negotiate with these madmen?” For the Americans, Israel/Palestine is a miserable win-win.

Nothing can change until a more principled American regime commits some resource and some political capital.