Virtual Economics

The insufficiently long count

As an occasional amateur futurist I'd like to touch on a subject that you'll find coming up with increasing and wearying frequency between now and Dec 22nd, 2012. The ancient Mayan calendar or the "long count" - which, thanks mainly to the addled rantings of von Daniken is accorded some sort of mystical significance by the sort of people who are susceptible to such things - happens to come to an end on Dec 21st, 2012. Thus, goes the theory, the world will end that day. Of this, Laurie Pycroft writes

"The Mayans were primitive folk who didn't know what a star was, and it's absurd to think that they had any kind of special knowledge. I'm sure lots of interesting and impressive things are going to happen in 2012, but the end of the world is not one of them."

For my part I simply note that I took great delight, when I visited the Yucatan peninsula a few years ago, in snorkelling out beyond what the Mayans considered the end of the world - to whit, the horizon visible from the Atlantic coast. It felt...mildly intrepid. I think the fact that this feat is replicable by any able-bodied modern human with ten dollars worth of snorkelling gear tells you everything you need to know about the credibility of the ancient Mayan position vis-a-vis the imminence of armageddon.

What Twitter doesn't mean for the news

Much debate over the past couple of days on what it means for mainstream news (whatever that is now) that, as Jemima Kiss puts it, "rumour has it that Twitter 'beat' even the US Geological Survey in reporting the earthquakes in China".

Mathew initially suggested that Twitter may have become "the first draft of history" and then goes on, a day later, to clarify that this is a long, long way from saying Twitter is killing traditional media. Indeed.

I'd suggest thinking about the impact of Twitter on mainstream/traditional/whatever media in this way.

Q: what problems does a news company solve when it puts journalists into the field, sets up expensive international bureaux or otherwise goes about gathering the news from around the world?

A: it tells its readers/viewers/PSKATA what's going on; it tells them what it means; and it validates that the story is true. 

Twitter is yet another possible shortcut to the first of these solutions. Currently it has negligible impact on the second or third.

If something's going on in China, no-one needs to wait until the BBC or even the US Geological Survey finds out. The guys in China that it's happening to are going to tell us. Which means that...sure, we'd like a news source that we trust to confirm that any given news story is real (or the possibilities for Twitterers around the world to yank our collective chain become unmanageable). And we still need a guide as to what it means. But Twitter is another - even faster - way in which we don't necessarily need news reporters to just tell us that something's going on somewhere. By the time they know, we know.

Microhoodonald's

As the world's only famous corporate raider, Carl Icahn - the man on whom, urban legend never tires of claiming, the character of Gordon Gekko was based - enters the interminable Microhoo fray, I am reminded of my long-standing hope that next on his list of takeover targets will be the McDonalds corporation. Because then, you see, every newspaper will do a headline saying "Icahn has cheezburger?", and afterwards every newspaper will have to run yet another explanation of what a lolcat is (or by then was). And we can all laugh at them.   

News-source visualisation

Adrian Monck points today to News Spectrum, a news visualisation tool, and suggests we "go and have a play". From the Neoformix blog:

"It is a visualization of the words used for two topics in the latest results from Google News. One topic is coloured blue, the other red, and the associated words are coloured and positioned based on how highly they are associated with the two topics. Click on any word to see the related Google News results. This is a generalization of my recent Obama McCain News Spectrum that allows you to enter your own terms of interest."

I've been having a play. My very first thought was to see what happened if you enter not two news topics but two news sources. As it happens the results are...fascinating.

A step closer to an annotated world

Locative wikipedia entries are now on Google Maps. Here for example is Google Maps with Wikipedia annotations for my bit of London.

And so we move another step towards an annotated world, in which I simply point my phone at things - buildings, parks, streets - and ask "what's that?"

(The other big Google Maps news, currently limited to the US, is of course real estate search - which brings us down a different road altogether in which I point at buildings and ask "how much do you want for it?")
 

The lesson of The Octopus

Reading the ever-fascinating Grant McCracken recently, I discovered the following about Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen:

"Paul Allen, the Microsoft cofounder, has a yacht that is 416 feet long.  It cost something like a quarter of a billion dollars. It carries two helicopters. It's so large it cannot dock anywhere on the French Riviera. (That's why it needs those helicopters. They are the only way to get to port.)"

As I commented to Grant, think for a moment about what this means for Microsoft. Even in his leisure time, the company's co-founder has chosen to over-engineer something so cumbersome that it is incompatible with any existing user interface and requires a hugely expensive work-around to be of any use at all. Microsoft's problems are truly in the DNA.

If you build it...

It keeps coming true. Umair keeps saying it. Recently YCombinator's Paul Graham said it as well. Build something actually useful and worry about the business model later and - so long as it really is a useful something - you'll figure out a way to make money out of all those users in the end.

Google famously came up with a business model relatively late in life. Craigslist only implemented one at all to increase the listing costs for spammers and scams to prohibitive levels.

Now Mozilla reckons it can use its browser to collect better behavioural surfing data than the incumbent (Hitwise, comScore, Alexa) providers. There's a lot of money to be made of providing genuinely reliable market data for the web. Opt-in collection at the browser level ticks all the boxes - comfortable fit with the way the product is naturally used rather than a "monetising" add-on, genuinely useful, not evil.

Here's hoping they can make it work. The web needs accurate market data (it's laughable, really, that this most measurable medium really has worse data than TV and print). Mozilla deserves the money and - unlike Phorm, unlike Facebook, unlike even Google really - I trust them to do something good and useful with both the data and the money they stand to make from it. Ultimately, that's the position you need to be in to operate a service that relies on being trusted with millions of peoples' data*.

*A note perhaps not just for Google but for HMG

Antitheism

David Brooks writes in today's NYT (HT MR):

"In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism."

I'm not sure that quite takes it far enough. I think the real challenge to religion as a cultural artefact is going to come from people accepting the agnostic evidential position that the existence of the divine is fundamentally empirically insoluble, but go on from there to nonetheless reject theism, viz that even if god turns out to exist, "he" has no business passing judgement on humanity either individually or collectively. The antitheist who arrives - to his considerable and quite justified surprise - at his final judgement asks only of the judge "by what right?".

Atheism seems to me a needless acceptance of religion's framing of the debate. We don't know whether god is there, any more than we know Russells' teapot is there. So let's say just for the sake of argument the china teapot fans are right. The real argument then becomes "so what?", and one possible answer is "so nothing". Creation does not necessarily confer rights of judgement, especially on terms that happened to be written down in antiquity by - as Joseph Heller so memorably has Chaplain Tappman put it - "people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall".

Completely and utterly off-topic: foxes

Did I mention we have baby foxes in our garden? Well we do. They're lovely. (I fear I'll go all Tony Soprano when they grow up and run away. Still, at least they can't fly. Not that flying foxes wouldn't be pretty cool.)

A little quieter, please

An entertaining plea for less strident car ads from Giles Coren comes in today's Times. He suggests a future script for the things:

"Here's a car, it's much like all the others. If your own car is beyond repair this is one of the many essentially identical vehicles you might consider as a replacement."

Seconded - all future car ad script to take that form please.

(Admittedly any sort of enthusiasm for cars is utterly mysterious to me, from that alleged "sport" Formula Driving Round And Round In A Big Circle Until All But One Of Those Ludicrously Fragile Cars Has Crashed Or Broken Down Again, to what happens on Top Gear to the appeal of Jeremy Clarkson. Maybe car ads are exciting to people who care about cars. Then again, those people also seem to know about cars and will presumably therefore make informed buying decisions, so I'm back to square one as to what showing millions of hours of ads for dozens of utterly indistinguishable means of getting from A to B is really imagined to achieve. Perhaps simply no-one likes to buy a car they've never heard of.)