Virtual Economics

Post Rapture Pet Care

If you haven't seen Post Rapture Pets, or their competitors Post Rapture Pet Care, you really should. If everyone in this newly-found market really believes what they purport to believe, these guys should be raking it in - and it seems to be a big enough market to warrant at least two players, and there are apparently unaffiliated ads on Craigslist too.

(PS isn't it amazing that an apocalypse cult can struggle on for more than two thousand years and still, even now, be claiming that the apocalypse is just around the corner? Got to admire that sort of tenacity.)

More Local People sites launched today

Another day, another nine Local People sites rolled out - that brings us up to a total of 32 sites including my own beloved Otley site and now nine more across London and the South West. As before, if you're from any of these places or have friends there do pop along and say "hi"...

Marlborough, Wilts

Dalston, London

Wimborne, Dorset

Okehampton, Devon

Devonport, Plymouth

Quedgeley, Glos

Tavistock, Cornwall

Hedge End, Southampton

Lock's Heath, Southampton

 

Mencius on Wolfram Alpha

Since most mediatech people don't, I assume, read the uncategorisable but definitely fringey political musings of Mencius Moldbug over at Unqualified Reservations you probably won't spot when he comes up with an interesting point about mainstream consumer technology. But today he does. Here's Mencius on Wolfram Alpha:

"every decade since the '80s, billions of dollars and gazillions of man-hours have been invested in this fundamental error, to end routinely in disaster. It's as though the automotive industry had a large ongoing research program searching for the perpetual-motion engine.

The error is that control interfaces must not be intelligent. Briefly, intelligent user interfaces should be limited to applications in which the user does not expect to control the behavior of the product. If the product is used as a tool, its interface should be as unintelligent as possible. Stupid is predictable; predictable is learnable; learnable is usable.

I was reminded of this lesson by a brief perusal of Wolfram Alpha, the hype machine's latest gift. Briefly: there is actually a useful tool inside Wolfram Alpha, which hopefully will be exposed someday. Unfortunately, this would require Stephen Wolfram to amputate what he thinks is the beautiful part of the system, and leave what he thinks is the boring part.

WA is two things: a set of specialized, hand-built databases and data visualization apps, each of which would be cool, the set of which almost deserves the hype; and an intelligent UI, which translates an unstructured natural-language query into a call to one of these tools. The apps are useful and fine and good. The natural-language UI is a monstrous encumbrance, which needs to be taken out back and shot. It won't be."

(Oh, is he actually right? Partly. The big trick with Google isn't that the search technology is especially smart - although is is - but that it has been positioned as a source of definitive knowledge. Google is no such thing - it is a probabilistic system. At best it is only probably right. But humans aren't wired to trust probabilistic systems, so pitching Google as a source of definitive knowledge is way, way smarter than merely programming the thing to - probably - be right all the time. Wolfram isn't pitched as anything of the sort. It looks and feels and most crucially is described and therefore thought of as something that's pretty smart. "Pretty smart" is a nice parlour trick for a computer to pull off. But that's about all you can say for it.)

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.