virtualeconomics

Daylight

One of the basic tests of whether what you do is good or bad is whether you can imagine, having done it, going home and saying to your parent(s), partner(s), kids or friends "hey guys, guess what I did today?" Or as Louis Brandies most elegantly put it, "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Things are done furtively in the dark that no-one would be willing to own up to in the light of day.

On Friday Laurie Penny kicked off a debate about misogyny online when she pointed out that for airing her opinions she is regularly subject to threats, abuse and all sorts of hate from anonymous - presumably male - commentators. Many other women have since commented that they have been subject to similar abuse. The fact that women say things apparently drives some men into a violent fury, and many websites give them the option of venting that fury through anonymous trolling.

Rogue caption writer at the Globe and Mail

With thanks to @timhardford and @stevesilberman, just recording some of the work of the rogue caption writer at the Globe and Mail for posterity before they notice and take it down.

The full gallery is (was) here, and using a celeb gallery to raise awareness of Occupy Wall Street is funny. Hats off to the guy, who is presumably now looking for a new job.

All my money's invested in planning permission. And so is yours

In Britain at least, most people's biggest asset is their house. We are, we like to think, investors in bricks and mortar. Or even investors in land - they are not, the old trope goes, making any more of it. Bricks and mortar and land sound like such wonderfully safe things, such solid things, to imagine your money being invested in. And anyway you need to live somewhere, and you need somewhere to keep your stuff, so it's only sensible to put your money into bricks and mortar and land. We all do it.

This is, of course, not quite true.

Last time I bought a house it was valued at about £350k. For insurance purposes it was necessary to find out how much it would cost to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, and that was estimated at about £120k. For not very interesting reasons I looked into what it would cost to buy a bit of the garden next door and got back an estimate of a few tens of thousands, at most. This is, needless to say, a patch of land in central London which in every practical sense is big enough to build another house on. It just so happens that it's a bit of someone's back garden and there is no planning permission - so it's worth little more than the same size patch of land in Yorkshire or the Outer Hebrides.

Do the maths with me. The land qua land was actually worth say £20k. The bricks and mortar were worth £120k. The "house" was worth £35ok. Mostly what I was buying was planning permission. Something a bit short of a quarter of a million quid of it. For the privilege of being allowed to have a house worth £120k on a patch of land worth £20k.

Look at it another way and everything's fine. Anything is worth what the next guy will pay for it: I was willing to fork over £x and the next guy will fork over roughly £x too. Why worry?

I guess I worry because a society or an economy whose members generally hold the majority of their assets in the form of planning permission might not be in such good shape, even if few of them articulate it in quite that way. Bricks and mortar sounds nice and robust. Land sounds solid. The administrative whims of planning functionaries at the local council...not so much. 

(Photo from Woodleywonderworks on Flickr)

Competitive analysis in the social media age

Last week my team and I were looking at some new software. No reason for it to be a secret - we were looking at Vocus, a news/PR/social media monitoring tool. It was...pretty good. We liked it.

My next question is always - who are their competitors? Sure, we could buy this, but what else is out there? Is it any good? Is it better?

Having spent a few years selling software in the City, this question always fascinates me. When you're selling one of half a dozen systems into a small market, you know who your comeptitors are - you bump into them every day, your customers are forever thinking about replacing your system with one or another of theirs and there are competitive pitches going on all the time. But from the point of view of someone buying a system, it's surprisingly easy not to know that one or more of the half dozen options out there even exists. The sales guys at company X aren't going to tell them that company Y has a great piece of kit too; they might ask their competitors what they use but hey, they're competitors and who wants to look clueless in front of competitors?

Happy birthday to you

Copyright law is, of course, an ass - intended to incentivise and protect the creation of new ideas, it now merely disincentivises the creation of new ideas by protecting the old ones.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the distortion of the cultural record of the early C21st fostered by the copyright to "happy birthday". In real life, birthdays are accompanied by the singing of happy birthday. In film, they are not - the rights are expensive so other songs are substituted.

Does this distortion of the cultural record achieve anything? Of course not. No one makes any money from it. It just taunts future historians with the claim that no-one ever sang "happy birthday". But they did. We do. I was there.

How little newspapers matter

News today is that the world's second most popular English-language newspaper, the News of the World, is to close. Most likely it will simply be replaced by a Sunday edition of the Sun (the world's most popular English-language newspaper).

Not because, like so many newspapers in the early C21st, it loses money. The News of the World makes money hand over fist (not literally of course), so much so that its closure threatens its persistently loss-making quality stablemate the Times. Printing lies about celebrities is worth a fortune and the model is replicated thousands of times around the world. 

Communication breakdown

When Haringey Council voted to close four elderly people's drop-in centres, the users of the centres contacted the council to point out that they could save the centres if they simply stopped wasting public money on publishing the cat-basket liner "Haringey People".

Dropping through the door six times a year, this self-congratulatory pamphlet serves the same two slightly sinister purposes as all such local government "newspapers" - to present the council's squandering of public money in a positive light, and to crowd out such independent local journalism as might actually subject the council to proper scrutiny.

Amusingly, when put to the vote the coucil overwhelmingly supported the continued publication of their magazine and council leader Claire Kober told the Haringey Independent newspaper that "cutting Haringey People would seriously diminish our ability to communicate effectively with residents". Any communication problem would, of course, be better solved simply by paying a modicum of attention to what those residents want - which unsurpisingly appears to be an unambiguous call for services instead of propaganda. 

(The details of the story originally appeared in the print edition of Haringey Independent - I cannot find the same story on the website, presumably a failing on my part which I will remedy as soon as a link becomes available.)

Optimise what?

The web is shrinking, says Ben Elowitz. Strip out the growth of Facebook and the rest of the web, the "searchable web", shrank by 9% in the 12 months to March 2011.

This is game-changing for publishers, possibly the emergence of a whole new strategy cycle. If all you're doing is optimising pages of content for Google, well...

(1) you're part of a zero-sum game in which every publisher in your category uses the same publicly-available data to chase the same audience as they search on the same keywords;

(2) the stuff you write for Google isn't all that appealing to people so you'll get them through the door and watch them bounce out after they've seen one page; and

(3) that pie you're fighting for a share of is shrinking anyway (hee hee, mixed metaphors are funny).

Surprisingly easy to get children interested in newspapers

(My twins Adam - on the left - and Russell - on the right - playing with a newspaper. For those who might care it's a copy of the Telegraph. I'm sure they imply no disrespect to the Telegraph in particular.)

Don't get into a market where your customers want to hit you

According to a Mintel report quoted today in the Economist, "Britons are far more satisfied with the service they get from their supermarkets than from their banks". The Economist draws from this the lesson that Tesco should get deeper into retail banking, competing to offer current accounts.

Of course the opposite is the case.

It's not that supermarkets are good at customer service and retail banks are bad, so that for example Tesco will be able to magically do well something at which Barclays and HSBC are failing (in fact, HSBC's First Direct won a top award for customer service only last year). It's that dealing with a retail bank, like dealing with broadband providers, public transport or most branches of the government, is unavoidably infuriating for many customers.