Virtual Economics

What I've been working on - Local People launches today

So, not a lot of blog posts this year, you may have noticed. That's cos I've been Busy - but today I get to talk about what I've been doing this year, because today we've launched our new Local People sites.

First things first - go and check out the Local People site for my beloved home town of Otley in Wharfedale, West Yorkshire - Otleypeople. If you're from Otley or know anyone from Otley do sign up or pass it on - the site is for anyone with an interest in what's going on in Otley to network, write the news, find out what's going on in town and create and join groups of like-minded local people.

We've got Community Publishers working in many of these locations and where Northcliffe is managing the site in NML regions Community Connectors with a slightly different remit - I'm currently the publisher for the Otley site so come and say hi.

Hold the Front Page has already written up the press briefing we gave this morning and there's not a lot I can add to that - just that we're all very excited by the new sites and that so far they all seem to be going splendidly. (Update: now written up here by BrandRepublic as well.)

There's 23 sites so far, mostly in the South-West, and we plan to have 50 by the end of Jult - for a list of the current Local People sites see here

Bedminster

Berkhamsted

Bideford

Bude

Chippenham

Christchurch

Clifton

Corsham

Dorchester

Exmouth

Falmouth

Finsbury Park

Keynsham

Kingswood

Nailsea

Newton Abbot

Otley

Portishead

Redland

Tiverton

Westbury On Trym

Weston Super Mare

Yate

Britain's search for a government...continues

I idly wonder how deliberate was the BBC's juxtaposition last night of the penultimate episode of The Apprentice with a Ten O'Clock News on the fall of Gordon Brown's government. Side by side, the two look of roughly equal gravity and magnitude; an arbitrary decision must be made by some people we know only from occasional appearances on the television as to who now gets an important-sounding job that pays extravagently well but we rather suspect will turn out to be the merest sinecure. If Margaret, Nick and the four interviewers from last night's episode were somehow announced this afternoon as the new Cabinet it would strike me as no more incongruous than whichever rabble are about to be catapulted in to temporarily replace those discredited in the expenses scandal. Alan Sugar's apparent ambition to become the next mayor of London complete the circle - indeed, I vaguely look forward to the seemingly imminent transformation of British politics into a contest to see who has appeared most recently on an almost-serious TV programme (and as an aside continue to wonder why Martin Sheen seemingly never realised he could have easily won the last US Presidential election simply by changing his legal name to Josiah Bartlett and claiming he'd already been running the country for most of the last decade).

Excercising the right not to walk

I'm grateful for my rights, truly. I appreciate that my forebears fought and in some cases died for some of them. I'm glad to have freedom of expression and I use it most days. Freedom of association I find a use for most days too. Freedom of assembly I find less regularly valuable but I'm glad it's there when I need it. Freedom of worship is of no practical benefit to an antitheist, but I'm still in favour of it being available to me. The right to a trial by a jury of my peers...well, I'm very happy to say I've never needed it, but again it's nice to know it's there. And the right to vote, of course, that's something I'm grateful for. If it should ever arise that one of the parties that might credibly be elected to office seems sufficiently different to all the others on an issue which matters to me, I'll vote for (or against) that party. It's important to have the right to keep any hypothetical Nazis out, just by turning up and voting for someone else. But I don't feel any pressing need to exercise my every right - however hard won it may once have been - every time there's the slightest opportunity to do so, and today is no exception. Today I have the right to vote for one of several parties all of which promise, if elected, to do what I consider to be identical things and I don't think it unappreciative or disrespectful of my rights to let matters rest there.  

M&S wastes our time, their money

Apparently M&S was selling 20 different product lines for a penny each yesterday to mark the company's 125th anniversary. Queues were out the door and down the street.

Well of course they were.

If you sell something that's worth a fiver for a penny, the back of the queue for it will be populated by people who value the time they expect to spend queuing at £4.98, gaining almost nothing. (Only the imperfect dissemination of information and travel costs prevent this from happening instantly.) It is of merely academic curiosity whether you'll run out of cut-price items before society runs out of people who value their time at such a low rate as to make it sensible for them to join the back of the queue - yesterday, M&S happened to run out first.

There is though, one clear PR benefit to the exercise. When Ikea tries the same promotional tactic, a violent mob normally form at the front doors. With its customers forming orderly queues even when offered goods for a penny M&S has at least confirmed its reputation as the most genteel of British retailers.

News Corp (finally!) taps the newsgathering potential of MySpace

If you were a news company and you bought one of the biggest social networks in the world, you'd probably start thinking about synergies between news and social networking and exploring ways of tying them together. Oddly, though, News Corp's first attempt to combine MySpace with news was just a news aggregator, launched a couple of years ago and then (as far as I know) never mentioned again. In fact, it's taken them a staggeringly long time to realise that tens of millions of people talking every day about the things they've seen might just produce the odd bit of news themselves - but they finally got there, adding uReport to the network so that users can submit photo and video to Fox News. 

The show must go on (and on, and on)

Ricky Gervais today became the latest in a long line of performers to rail in fury against the elementary workings of supply and demand. From his blog:

"Tickets for my Edinburgh show are changing hands for £200. Please don't buy them. The people selling them are scum...I have tried to stop this happening but I can’t. I’ve tried holding tickets back for sale on the night. I've tried putting gigs on sale at the last minute so people don't have time to put them on eBay, but nothing works."

And, indeed, nothing will, short of playing more nights so that the supply of performances matches the demand for them at whatever price Ricky imagines fair. Want the after-sale ticket price to fall below £200? Put on more shows. You'll know you're doing enough shows when the price on eBay falls to the face value.

At the intersection of Twitter and print journalism

There's something slightly unsettling about watching Ben Goldacre decide what topic to cover in his next Bad Science column for the Guardian newspaper by asking people who happen to follow him on Twitter what he should write about. But I can't quite put my finger on why it seems odd that the contents of a future newspaper article should get decided this way. 

"We, errr, bought things pretty much at random. Now we need to sell them"

First eBay, now Yahoo - it seems two of the biggest online businesses in the world are finally rationalising their portfolios by, well, flogging off all the random things they bought over the past ten years and never really found any use for. eBay has already given StumbleUpon back to its founders and proposed an IPO for Skype; now Yahoo is apparently looking to offload Hotjobs and will put other divisions up for sale when it reports later today. Not long ago ITV announced it would try to sell Friendsreunited. My guess for the next few sales of social media toys acquired at random by big companies who thought they needed something that sounded a bit web2.0-ey? More Yahoo bolt-ons, especially Delicious; AOL's Bebo, which it has never been able to do much with (except watch Facebook eat their lunch); and maybe it's even time for Google to admit that

(a) it doesn't really have a commercial plan for YouTube and

(b) one isn't going to drop out of the sky like it did for search. 

Amazon and Phorm

Q1: is Amazon going to let Phorm farm its pages for valuable user-behaviour data without paying anything for it?
A: of course not!
Q2: is Amazon going to pretend this is a privacy issue rather than the opening move in a negotiation to secure the appropriate valuation from Phorm for that data?
A: remains to be seen. They're not spooning up the free publicity they could get by claiming that's the issue yet, though.

Censoring facts

Apparently Courage cannot advertise that drinking beer increases confidence. Indeed, no alcohol manufacturer can advertise that alcohol affects a drinker's mood. Even though it's a basic chemical fact that alcohol, a depressant, affects a drinker's mood. I'm with the ever-excellent Daily Mash on this one: "the ASA said the advert for Courage beer was unacceptable because it implied that drinking alcohol could enhance self-confidence in a way that anyone who has ever drunk alcohol is completely aware of". Requiring advertisers to lie is not a positive development for the ASA's work.