Odds and Sods

This post is inspired by two things:

- Two chats at the 21st Global Summit, one over dinner last night about how one would model the impacts of giving a city a low cost high bandwidth service, and what other socio-economic things would change (settlement patterns, industries etc) and the other a talk today by Phil Pavitt, CIO of Transport for London about his thought that the transport infrastructure has to be integrated into the network architecture.
- Work I did some 15 years ago on the use of electronic highways rather than physical ones – sadly its not on the web, it was written up in Management Today in the pre Web 1990's.

This post is a thoughtpiece for comment / criticism etc, and thus is more a jotting down of thoughts rather than specific hard opinions.

Re modelling – it may be obvious to anyone looking at say Korea’s adoption of 100Mb bandwidth with an independent point of view that the impact is huge – new industries are possible, people consume new services, the cities attract and incubate old and new companies to provide these services. However, for change to happen you are typically up against vested interests, conflicting demand for budgets, a variety of resource gatekeepers who don’t give a f*ck about Korea, or new industries etc etc – you know the litany – as Machiavelli noted:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who would profit by the old order, only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new.

Hence modelling – being able to show in some trusted way that This Is a good Thing, and conversely, not doing this is a Very Dumb Thing. It also provides a capability for supporters to rally.

Secondly, megacities like London - some general observations re megacities:

(i) Megacities are expanding their populations, its one of the current “long wave” trends and for a variety of sociodemographic reasons its not going to stop anytime soon. (And despite dreams of the Internet providing electronic cottages and cybervillages, in reality the wired generation are by and large migrating to big cities)
(ii) There is no way that motorcars and roads are sustainable with these sorts of populations, regardless of square area of a city, population density etc – the network effects mean choke points. Taxing them in various ways without providing alternatives does not solve the problem, it just increases the cost for the average citizen.
(iii) The public transport alternatives are not sustainable – there is a limit to the amount of people a train/underground/bus system can affordably carry in any given physical area. Some cities/countries subsidise more than others so the curve to the limit differs, some have fewer bottlenecks (river bridges etc) so a greater natural capacity, but at some point it fills up in every city. This is again due to network effects – you can only send N buses down the main arterials at any one time

Now there are some things that can be done by just making some real life shifts in the journeys that need to be made – the most obvious are:

(i) Timeshift - get away from the rush hour, as it forces the provisioning of physical systems of far greater capacity than is required on average
(ii) Spaceshift - get away from centralised CBD workplaces, as that means fewer journeys compete for the limited central facilities.

Unfortunately, experience has shown that spaceshifting is hard - dispersing journeys from the centre is often more onerous as (i) most initial city networks are built to “get me to the centre” topologies, and you now add on an extra journey from the centre out to get to the new beltway locations, or (ii) there is total overconsumption of the (typically far thinner) point to point arterials across a city – so you wind up having to build urban freeways, beltways etc. Timeshifting seems to offer more benefits but requires significant changes to the Way we Live Now.

But, at some point you still come to the inevitable conclusion that there have to be fewer journeys (and you did even 15 years ago – it’s a testament in some ways to society’s inertia that despite the huge impact of the Internet in the interim, this issue is still a growing, not receding issue). Unfortunately megacities are growing with more people, more households (each with fewer people) so the number of journeys is actually increasing

Anyway, in the last 3 years we have achieved c 2/3 penetration of broadband internet – what can we do with this to reduce the number of journeys? The first thing is to find out what those journeys are, and in descending order these would appear to be (for London)

- Commuting to and from work
- School runs
- Shopping trips

The simple answer is to replace or timeshift as many of these as possible using modern technology – but this is easier said than done. Taking them in order:

Commuting to and from work

At first glance this would seem quite easy – give people a terminal at home, a fast connection, and bingo off you go – work from home, avoid the rush hour if you are going to the office, bingo. Except that:

(i) Many companies do not want to change their existing cultures, for various reasons – let others do it, not us, is the refrain
(ii) Some people have to work together with other people physically to get their “stuff” done
(iii) Some businesses have walk in customers and ave to have people there over certain hours

School Runs

Its less clear to me how the digital pipes can help here as the issues are (i) parents don't trust the safety of the streets and drive the kids to school (there being no Yellow Bus system in London as exists in New York, and (ii) Schools tend to start at the same time as rush hour.

Shopping Trips

We have modelled this a number of times - the amount of vehicle miles travelled by a "travelling salesman" pattern delivery truck from say Ocado, or the Royal Mail etc is far lower than all those customers driving to the supermarket and back to buy the goods (ring vs star topology). Thus any system that can increase online ordering and reduce journeys must be useful.


There is also the issue of dealing with the Digital Dispossessed – the 1/3rd of people who don’t use these electronic highways. These people present fairly interesting issues as they are typically (in non PC terms):

(i) Poorer – thus no one wants to serve them commercially, and there are also risks in giving them expensive IT equipment free - as they have been known (we are told) to sell it down the pub.
(ii) Less educated and/or less familiar with English and/or older – so many simply cannot use more complex internet based services – or at least the helpdesk / user service load is uneconomically high

In other words they are usually left to government agencies to deal with, or to subsidize companies to deal with.

I'll be the first to admit I don't have an answer here - in theory one would like to think that giving equal access is possible, but I'm not sure it is in reality. Perhaps there are options via mobile, or cable /digital TV, or gaming systems which has higher penetration. But if it isn't, do do you limit everyone else so that this segment has some form of equal access, or do you deliver a 2 tier service (the digital equivalent of red telephone boxes) until penetration is in the near full range.

Steve Rubel writes:

If it feels quiet here and even on my Twitter stream you are right. It has been. The reason is Friendfeed. I have become hopelessly addicted to the site. I am sharing a lot of links there that I don't pump into del.icio.us or Twitter, so I recommend picking up my aggregate lifestream feed here. However, if you just want my blog posts, no worries, that feed continues to syndicate.

As one of the commentators on his blog noted however, Steve wrote similarly in March 2007:

Steve, I don't mean to be a pest here but this reminds me of something that you wrote last year about Twitter:

"That brings me back to Twitter. Despite it's lack of management/search features, Twitter is downright addicting. I love it. It's brevity lets me blog more actively and at the same time engage in real-time conversations with my "followers" (as they call it). If things have seemed a little quieter over here, it's because I have been busier over there.

Based on a sample of 1, I can postulate therefore that the new media maven migration frequency is c 15 months (of the unpaid pundit that is.). This seems to roughly match the mean rate if you look at say Twitter buzz rampup vs FriendFeed.

The question is "why" - why bounce off to the New New Thing every 1 1/4 - 1 1/2 years or so. Is it truly because of continually seeking technology improvement, or is it because these people do have a need to constantly be seen to be doing the New New Thing?

If the latter, its an interesting game theory, is maven migration - jump too soon and you risk getting the "wrong" jump and look dumb. Jump too late and new people have jumped before and are the New New mavens and you're a has-been. The trick is to be a fast follower I suspect (the Scoble + 1 month strategy )

Now, a lot of people have jumped onto the (well funded) Friendfeed bandwagon - but I'm not sure its going to be the endemic winner. As many independently minded people have pointed out, it doesn't actually have any major unique value adds, differentiators or barriers to entry. I also suspect its not the one that is growing from real grassroots support - that seems to be something that new entrant Plurk is doing, however.

To be watched with interest.....

Update - Steve Rubel has followed up with a post saying Friendfeed will restructure Search and Online Advertising too. Is this the bury with praise gambit

Very interesting article on Techmeme about whether Google and all the other Internet tools are dumbing us down. It was sparked by an article by Nick Carr (that I've not been able to read so won't comment on that yet) - but the writer, Matt Asay's views are very interesting:

Speaking of Twitter, am I the only one who views it as further evidence of a soundbite culture that struggles even to think beyond 140-character blips?

We really don't want to think like Google. We don't want to speak like Twitter. We don't want to converse like e-mail. And yet we increasingly do, as the Internet reshapes the world in its image.....

....Which is why I'm returning to my books. I read a fair amount--the classics, mostly--but generally only when I'm traveling. As Carr points out, I, too, have difficulty reading when my computer beckons with instant gratification. I read each night to my kids before they go to bed, but Carr's article has me thinking that I need to return to doing the same.

Its quite interesting, as I'd noticed something similar - for the last 4 months I've had an assignment that meant 4 hours on the train commuting per day - and you just can't stare into a laptop screen for that long and all day at work, so I started reading - real books, books with hard facts - and found that they sparked off my mind on all sorts of tangents that I don't get from the snack sized posts on the web. This must be having an impact, of some sort, because a number of people have commented on this, and I've seen commenting and traffic go up on Broadstuff, and one kind person has even gone so far as calling me an Internet Philosopher (I am so going to keep that one - thanks Steve, cheque is in the post )

(Hmmm - maybe the best form of SEO is reading ?)

As to Twitter the soundbite, I think its largely just a chatroom with pictures, and all the research we've done over the last few years says chatrooms are very addictive. Too addictive. However, I find its increasingly taking over the role of my new news filter '/ serendipity switch as Techmeme gets more and more dominated by the big players and the product pimps.

Lastly Google - I still think search is a tool for supporting thinking (or not) - and if anything I have to be increasingly smart in working out how to ask stuff in a way that doesn't bring a first page of SEO dominated cr*p

But the other thought is this - in a previous generation, TV was supposed to dumb us down. I do think the 'Net is a smarter tool than TV, so insofar as the 'Net is taking away TV time that's a good thing. But I think what I'm hearing is that some people (I suspect who are not great TV watchers) are letting it eat into reading / thinking time.

(Update - Andrew Sullivan wrote in the (UK) Sunday Times today about how the tool changes the thought pattern:

Is this a new way of thinking? And will it affect the way we read and write? If blogging is corrosive, the same could be said for Grand Theft Auto, texting and Facebook messaging, on which a younger generation is currently being reared. But the answer is surely yes – and in ways we do not yet fully understand. What we may be losing is quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives.

)

Matt is going to re-insert an hours reading a day into his life.....maybe I will too - as soon as this blog post is finished. On the other hand, there's an RSS reader full......

Anyway, to round it all off, here is Moxy Fruvous doing My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors.....




...from YouTube. Smart song on dumb old Social Media....

Update - interesting response post from Improbulus over here

Read Write Web's turn to eulogise this time....

Generation Y is arguably the most socially conscious generation in existence. They're well aware of how social changes affect them and use the internet as a tool to keep them aware of what's going on. Gen Yers are making their stances well known on Facebook. In 2006, the top 10 advocacy groups on Facebook were:


1. Reduce the Drinking Age to 18! - 111,275

2. Legalize Same-Sex Marriage - 80,458

3. Americans for Alternative Energy - 69,465

4. Support a Woman's Right to Choose - 66,806

5. Support Stem Cell Research - 55,219

6. Abolish Abstinence Only Sex Education - 54,712

7. Government + Religion = Disaster - 47,949

8. AIDS / HIV research - 24,789

9. Equal Rights for Gays - 24,013

10. Pro-Life - 22,409

All very right-on stuff of course, saving the planet coming a reasonable third after sex n' booze (though Europeans may be nonplussed at not being allowed to drink at 18... )- but if they actually had to pay to put their opinion on the those Facebook groups, it would be a different story. Behavioural Economists differentiate between weak and strong signals of commitment, this is as weak as it gets, so building a thesis of generational caring is a pretty big stretch. And assuming that it will lead to something is also an ask - after all, look at the Flower Children of the 60's, who have turned into the most self absorbed generation the planet has known. Tom Lehrer satirised them perfectly in his song "Folk Song Army", and with this lead in:

You have to admire people who sing these songs. It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against ,like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.

Also, consider these two contradictory points from the same article:

1. Generation Y doesn't read books. Well, a lot of people aren't reading books these days. However, one should always factor in the following: technology is very important to Generation Y.

2. it is young adults who are the most likely to say they will use libraries in the future when they encounter problems: 40% of Gen Y said they would do that, compared with 20% of those above age 30 who say they would go to a library."

One assumes all those older than Gen Y are not using the library because they are still reading their tarot cards - or could it be the oldies have discovered the Internet

Last year we deviated from the ICT content of the blog for one post on the Greenscam (ie the desire of companies to use Green issues to flog overpriced stuff or make guilt sales). This has shown no sign of abating, and so, having been pinged by Improbulus on a Green meme-web, we decided to re-visit in true Broadstuff style. Hence the diagram below:



Firstly, to recap on the impact, this is from the first article last year:

Total Manmade % of Global Emissions - c 5% - or 0.1% if you include natural water vapour as the main contributor to the greenhouse effect
Total UK proportion of that 0.1% - c 2% (The US is about 25%, China 15% etc etc)

Of the UK's proportion, the bit the consumer is responsible for (directly plus indirectly) is about 180 M tons out of about 550 for the UK overall - i.e. c 33% (being very generous, this is direct plus indirect after all) - so where is HMGov putting its weight today - right...that 33% who can't hire lawyers, lobbyists etc to escape - i.e YOU. And the "£$%^ Media comes out with supporting stuff like this.. When there is an obvious 80/20, clearly a focus on the 20 is the key!

Why? Because, that 20% is vigorously promoted by commercial concerns who pay for advertising etc etc of course.

And so the stage was set between the well promoted, easy to do, at best harmless but usually useless stuff the greenscammers want the punter to buy, and the far less sexy but far harder (or downright unpleasant) stuff that actually works.

So, lets go through the boxes on the 2x2.

Start at the bottom right, as a public service - if you are buying a Pious (Toyota Prius) to be Green, think again - ANY new car, even an environmental one, costs considerably more to make (mining metals, engine casting, bashing the body into shape, moulding (oil based) plastics etc etc) than any difference in fuel costs between it and a standard car over a standard lifetime. Buying second hand is best, a classic even better as they hold value and are also greener as - by and large - they have stood the test of time and reliability. The Pious is in fact probably more expensive in Green terms than a Hummer or other SUV, because of the highly specialised and in some cases toxic materials used. You have to look at the end to end costs

Far harder is to do expensive stuff that makes a real difference - such as reconfiguring your house for passive heating and energy. Its hard, expensive, and unsightly. And there is no payback, either economically (ROI on Green Conversion is measured in decades) or in status. Now you would think, if HM Government, our Greener than Thou Oil companies, or our Energy Providers were genuinely concerned about all this, they would offer grants to speed conversion up - but no, HM Govt would far rather build Nuclear Reactors than the far cheaper and faster subsidy of house conversion. Mr Brown professes to be on "our" side, but by their deeds shall ye know them (and whose lobbyists have their short and curlies).

(An aside - the one thing any country should try to do in a world of increasing energy tension is reduce its dependence on foreign fuel supplies, and a way that does that - and helps reduce overall energy emmissions - is reducing energy usage from inefficient centrally generated electricity - so why is the UK currently going in the opposite direction one wonders?)

So, anticlockwise again to low cost stuff we can do thats useful, and that is quite easy - stop buying stuff with long and expensive supply chains and packaging. Stop buying food that has flown halfway across the world and/or that is out of season. Drink water out of a tap. Wear an extra sweater indoors in winter and turn the heating down a notch. Use the train, not the car. Walk a few miles instead of driving to the fancy gym. Don't use peat on your lawn or concrete it over. Don't buy a massive, energy burning HDTV set. Don't buy that second home in Tuscany and fly there twice a year.... As you can see, these things, although useful and in theory quite easy to do, are totally unthinkable to the average chattering classer.

Which leaves us at bottom left - given that the useful "green things" to do are unpalatable, the market rushes us expensive guilt based alternatives - boutique, home delivered organic vegetables rather than walking round to the local greengrocer, cute "eco-ethnically sourced" tat for the home made by cheap craftsmen in poor countries and sent halfway around the world, overpriced marginally more efficient lightbulbs that are actually more costly to run....you get the picture. Easy, maybe worthy, able to grab the green mantle - but largely useless in terms of being "Green".

And being specifically British, as we are a British blog after all - we use a fraction of the energy per capita as our US cousins (2% of global output compared to their 25%), so spending all our spare time hectoring them to reduce energy by 10% would be more effective than reducing ours by 100%, thus relieving us of the need for any nasty compromises

Thus, I am changing my green strategy from all that hard self denial stuff to badgering our American readers to go Green For Me - a tree in every US readers yard - you know it makes sense

I shall have to think about who to ping in turn, so will return - if I'm still alive..... I know many people who will wish to attack me with pieces of (organic) vegetable matter....

OK - have thought about who to ping further, based on the simple rule of them being the last 4 UK bloggers I was in conversation with (in various medii ) today - Will McInnes, James Cooper, Leisa Reichelt and GiaGia

You're supposed to write about the ways in which you're consciously "green", and also the things you know you should do in a more ecologically friendly way but don't.

Interesting article from Fortune magazine re where the latest crops of MBA's are going:

Last year, Google hired hundreds of new MBAs, though thousands applied. MBAs are attracted to Google because they "really get a lot of responsibility right at the outset," said Yvonne Agyei, Google's director of global university programs. "MBAs are looking for the opportunity to make an impact."

In second and third places are management consultant McKinsey & Co., appearing on 15.84% of students' wish lists, and investment bank Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), selected by 14.98%.

The last time ambitious MBA's were more keen on technology than consulting or banking was in the latter days of the dotcom boom - another sign today of the Crash 2.0 zeitgeist?

It's interesting how a zeitgeist emerges...no sooner have we heard that Social Media is not all its cracked up to be, then up pops the FT to note that Web 2.0 companies have produced very little revenue so far:

The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.

“There is going to be a shake-out here in the next year or two” as many Web 2.0 companies disappear, said Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures.

“These are challenging macro-economic conditions,” said Shawn Hardin, chief executive of Flock, a browser maker that raised $15m in venture capital last week.

Yet that has not stopped a continuing round of venture capital fundraising and acquisition activity at high valuations as investors and corporate acquirers hunt for businesses capable of rising above a crowded field.

“If you look at some of the valuations, you wonder what fantasy of revenues they’re based on,” said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Hummer Winblad.

Bubble 2.0 is running on similar tracks to Bubble 1.0 then, complete with pumping hype up to the clouds till the end-of-days, despite the storm warnngs. But of course, just as after Bubble 1.0 in the dotcom crash, many thought the Web was dead, it just kept on going. As the FT notes, the same pattern is probably happening in Bubble 2.0:

Despite the slow start to money-making by Web 2.0 companies, the trend towards more social online behaviour that it embodies is widely claimed by insiders to be of lasting significance.

“The capabilities that are coming with Web 2.0 are very profound,” said Devin Wenig, head of the markets division of Thomson Reuters. “The Valley is usually right, and it’s usually early.”

Just remember that in 6 months when we are in the middle of Crash 2.0

We would be failing in our duty if we didn't present this analysis of Rick Rolling:



Hat tip to blogger and chanteuse Lobelia for this slide - check out her music on the site as well, its rather good.

We've been asked to circulate this, and what better way than blogging it. Besides, the amount of benefit we have had from the British Library while starting Broadsight over the last few years has been enormous, so delighted to return the karma.

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(Did y'all see the bit about a Prize, and the no-spam guarantee... )

Yesterday Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK organised a Mash-Mob at the Festival Hall (arrives like a Flash Mob, but hangs around for a long time just chattin') - of course getting an outdoor venue in sunshine, by the river with WiFi and Cold Booze is a good idea .

Got to talk to lots of people I didn't know - or, as turned out in many cases, did "Virtually know" as I had either read their blogs or chatted over Twitter. There is something about sitting in the warm sun with a cold beer, watching the river go by and discussing the merits of fuzzy logic vs genetic algorithms vs numerical method algorithms for distinguishing emotion in visual images, or finding fellow mechanical engineers to talk about robotics with.....

Anyway, the chart below shows - on yesterday's evidence anyway - the broader social networks at work in London's New Tech Arena:



There is quite a solid London scene of bloggers in our space, who come from all these areas, but what did interest me was the sheer number of people on Twitter - in fact I suggest from now on its easier if everyone just wears a badge with their Twitter name on (or writes it on their forehead) because that way far more people will know you. Also, of the "artist" class The sheer number of musicians I met outnumbered all other forms of art (I class Podcasters and Seesmic-ers and Qik-ers as Mediaheads here). I guess social media in all its forms has been a great channel for them for longer than others (and their industry is under more pressure?)