It occurred to me that the phenomenon of the cheapskate company trying to get some professional work done on the cheap isn’t a new one:

First they came for the newspaper typesetters,
And I did not speak up because I wasn’t a newspaper typesetter

Then they came for the graphic designers,
And I did not speak up because I wasn’t a graphic designer

Then they came for the web developers,
And I did not speak up because I wasn’t a web developer

Then they came for the journalists,
And I did not speak up because I wasn’t a journalist

Then they came for the photographers,
And by that time there was nobody left to speak up.

“Cheques will be phased out by October 2018, but only if adequate alternatives are developed, the UK Payments Council – the body that oversees payments strategy – has said. The Council said there should be ‘no scenario’ for using cheques by 2018. The target date for the closure of the system that processes cheques has been set for 31 October 2018, after the board described the payment method as in ‘terminal decline’”.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a cheque; in fact, it’s so long ago that I can’t even remember when my last cheque book ran out of cheques and I didn’t get a new book because they stopped sending them out, and the process of ordering a new book had become so cumbersome that I couldn’t be bothered.

All the news coverage of the arguments from the banking institutions about why in nine years time there should be no more cheques has focussed on how in the modern era supermarkets stopped accepting cheques years ago, and anyway everybody is doing their shopping online with their cards anyway; there’s been a little discussion about the small trader (the plumber, the rooder, the small seller of handmade jewellery at a local craft fair) who currently doesn’t have the ability to accept payment by card, and that has been turned around into how the banking industry still has work to do to make it easy for those people to accept electronic payment.

Now it’s true that modern business needs to adapt to the modern world, even if the business you are in is the oldest business in the world.

But what is – as always in situations like this – being ignored is that it’s not just business which needs to hand over money from one party to another.

What about the scenario of the auntie who wants to give her nephew a hefty cash present for a significant birthday? She can hardly withdraw a hundred notes from the cash machine and put them in the envelope with the birthday card, can she? She admittedly could do a bank transfer, but (a) it’s not the same as receiving the actual token of cash, and (b) it’s more faff for her. Internet banking is an option for many, but even me - Digitally Engaged™ since 1982 – doesn’t bother with that because of the faff involved, and as more and more people take up mobile internet options as their primary if not sole internet connexion that option is so much faffier. Or the scenario of the mate who needs to borrow some money from another mate – again, it’s technically possible for an electronic funds transfer to take place from one account to another, but practically, it’s a major bother, when simply writing a cheque is the easiest option for them.

But then that’s the modern world, isn’t it? Stuff The Customer.

Or rather, it’s not that he’s no longer doing what he’s been doing for a living for the last couple of years to go and do something else, rather, that – cutting a long story short – he’s not going to be describing himself as such any more.

Those of us who’ve been doing this thing for ages (especially those of us who have been doing it since long before the term was coined) have never been particularly comfortable with the term ‘social media’, but we’ve grudgingly accepted it on the grounds that it doesn’t cause share prices to tumble on the stock market, nobody’s harmed by it, and the horses aren’t frightened by it. And nobody’s been able to think of anything better that’s caught on in a snappy way. Myself, I thought the term collaborative media might have legs (since that better describes what we do), but nobody else has nailed their colours to that mast.

Anyway, part of the point Pete makes is that whilst it was an OKish term for a while, it has now become polluted, as the PR people and the Marketeers and the all the other people have moved in thinking they need to have a ‘social media strategy’ for their organisation, fundamentally missing the point about what social media is. It’s media, that’s social – that’s collaborative, interactive, and conversational. You’re having a conversation with your audience, not making a speech to them – and in a conversation you listen and respond, not just talk. And the ‘professionals’ moving in singularly fail to realise this – they want to have a Twitter feed, but want to have every post to their Twitter feed signed off by a manager before it goes out!

Some time after Pete published his article, he posted to Twitter giving a real-world example of why he wrote his post:

Only a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon replace them. Twitter was supposed to kill blogs because it’s so much simpler to publish one sentence fragment at a time rather than whole thoughts bunched together into what is known in the trade as ‘paragraphs’.

It beggars belief how anybody writing for what’s supposed to be a respectable technology blog could possibly think that.

To think that Twitter might have killed blogging because it’s easier to publish a sentence than it is to publish a collection of paragraphs is like saying that crisps might kill tartiflette because it’s easier to get a packet of Walkers than it is to get hold of Reblochon cheese. If I post to Twitter, it’s not because it’s ‘easier’, it’s because it’s frankly silly of me to log into WordPress and faff about trying to come up with at least 200 hundred words for a narrative just to say that the water level of the canal by the NIA is quite high.

Admittedly, myself and my friends have often commented to each other how we all seem to be blogging less since we’ve been using Twitter more – but that’s not in the sense of microblogging killing fullblogging, it’s in the sense of a combination of the way we’ve repurposed our use of Twitter itself, and also that we send the appropriate communication to the appropriate channels. When I write an article here, I’m writing for the world and aware that some of my friends will be reading. When I write a post to Twitter, I’m writing for my friends and aware that some of the world will be reading. It’s as simple as that, and it’s not a competition.

So there.

(Pete’s article also raised a couple of other interesting resonances for me which I may well write about in a future post)

“It all began with a tin of cat food, an empty coffee tin and a hairdryer. When air was forced between the two tins, the ensemble began to float on its own little cushion of air. Thus, through a combination of eccentricity and genius, Sir Christopher Cockerell invented the hovercraft, in a shed, in a boatyard, in Norfolk”.

The hovercraft, whilst as a passenger carrying vehicle was superseded by the channel tunnel, is very much a British success story.

Development was largely funded under the aegis of the National Research and Development Corporation, a government body set up in 1948 expressly to help British inventors develop and commercialise their work. As well as the hovercraft, other British inventions which benefited from NRDC assistance include:

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Interferon
• Continually Variable Transmission, &
• Disposable daily contact lenses

The NRDC was privatised in 1992 after being renamed British Technology Group, and thus public funding of research and development ended. BTG itself scaled its operation right down in 2005 to concentrate only on medical research. Of course, private enterprise hasn’t been entirely unsuccessful in bringing brand new products to market, as Clive Sinclair, Eric Laithwaite, James Dyson, and Trevor Baylis proved (though the first two clearly could have benefitted from better help in making their inventions commercially successful), but in an era where enterprise is supposed to be key to Getting Us Out Of The Recession(tm), what real help is government offering to British inventors? Indeed, what real help has government offered for enterprise in the last 25 years?

It’s sufficiently general that it works as good advice for any organisation thinking about how to modernise its public relations activity; indeed, it serves as excellent advice on how news organisations and magazines themselves might adapt to the reality of the modern world.

What’s not mentioned in the BBC News article linked, but was described as what the proposal actually is on the Today programme this morning was that The Government^tm are going to ‘force’ social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to give them access to the friends lists of users. Not actually see what messages pass between them, just the lists of friends.

Needless to say, there has been an immediate outcry about how terrible this is, what a total disregard for our liberties, totalitarian state etc this is. You might expect me to be joining that outcry.

But woooaaaaaahhh there.

Erm, Facebook already allows any logged in user to see the list of friends of any user. As does Twitter. In fact, Twitter even lets anybody see what people are saying to each other – it’s the whole point of it!

So, much as I’d like to join in with the gubnint-kicking on this, I’m afraid there’s no story there.

As I was busy elsewhere whilst things have been unfolding I was too late to add my own comment, but Andrew Lewin has written about as balanced and informative a piece as possible – link above.

In the olden days, it was an online axiom that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”; when an entire country can now be blocked off from certain pages on certain sites, or certain sites as a whole, simply by diktat by a government department or non-governmental organisation, that axiom is clearly no longer true.

Whatever your views about the specific image in question, one paragraph of Andrew’s article bears specific attention:

“The Government probably thinks it can get away with it as long as it doesn’t look as though politicians’ fingerprints are anywhere too close, but the IWF will respond to government edicts about what’s right and proper with alacrity. We’ve already heard Hazel Blears attack political blogs as ‘a dangerous corrosion in our political culture’ so how long before the IWF decrees those to be against the law or corrupting our morals and do a blanket ban of any such blogs? Sounds like a perfectly proper, moral argument being presented to do just that, after all. Which could be any blog disagreeing with the party of the day … Now is it starting to sound just a little bit like China?”

And as Andrew concludes:

“So I ask you: think of the number one thing you would hate to lose online. And now realise, there’s a very good chance that it can and will be taken away because of the situation we’re sleepwalking into.

Want to wait till it happens? Or do something about it now?”

But of course, “it can’t happen here”.

Here is all the live comment and pictures, via Twitter and Flickr:

Read the rest of the Hello Digital twitter stream on Twemes.

Hello Digital Flickr stream.

Unfortunately, not only was the internet connectivity – both wifi and 3G – in the conference room so poor that my live twittering plan was foiled, but in fact the wifi was so poor that the session presenters themselves were completely unable to demonstrate Second Life; rather they presented a lot of crashing screens, a lot of wifi connexion dialogue boxes, and when we were connected, a lot of shots of the reception area in the virtual Birmingham.

The presenter was continually making apologies for this, explaining that it worked perfectly earlier and was only now not working, and that it must be a bandwidth problem with the internet connexion.

Which, as it happens, tends to be the experience most people I knowhave of using Second Life! Vaguely fine if you’ve got a dual core refridgerated Pentium X with a super accelerated 3D graphics card with half a gig of ram just on the graphics card itself, and Virgin cable’s 8meg internet connexion, but if you’re a normal person with a normal computer using a normal internet connexion, you’ve got no chance.

And that’s even before we get to the consideration of what the point of this thing is anyway.

The presenter was telling us how the user can wander around the Virtual Birmingham, call into the library, look at the Digital Handsworth exhibition, check what’s on tonight on the Birmingham free information zone etc, and how good that was. But the obvious question is, “why?”. Given that it’s much easier – and infinitely quicker – to go to all the ordinary websites for these things without having the faff of having to get the buggy, slow Second Life client software logged in and then walk to the locations, why bother?

One possible ray of hope was demonstrated, though. We were told how some of the people in the Technology Innovation Centre at Millennium Point had built themselves an accurate 3D model of the building within Second Life, enabling them to model such as risk assessments and get-ins for events before doing it for real. The possibilities were raised of planners modelling new developments such as the new New Street Station, or the new Library of Birmingham so citizens can get a much better feel for what they are going to be like, especially when it comes to public consultations on such projects. This can only be a good thing – assuming the planners actually do go through all the hassle of creating the models in the first place.

But as for ‘real opportunities’? The notion of people actually doing real business in a virtual birmingham, or having real social interactions? Sadly for the people who might be betting the farm on the gig, I suspect real online business and social interaction will be done using such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook for a long time to come.

As the blurb about it says, this is a fundamental new approach to writing web browser software which takes into account the modern way people use the web; increasingly websites are not just glorified sales brochures, and indeed web 2.0 is much more than just blogs and social networking – on the modern web, people are actually doing stuff; many websites now are full-featured applications, computer programmes, which traditionally would have been stand-alone software sitting on the user’s own computer rather than on a remote server on the other side of the world. As Google explains, by fundamentally starting again from scratch in the way the browser is coded they hope to avoid many of the problems of stability and memory leak which besets complex web applications on current browsers.

On cursory glances, especially bearing in mind it has only just entered public beta and is labelled as version 0.2, it seems to be fine so far – it’s not crashed on me, all the sites I use are rendering fine, and I’ve not yet experienced the serious memory leak problem I usually have with Firefox.

Unfortunately, somebody has spotted something rather dodgy in the terms and conditions attached to downloading it and using it:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

(my emphasis)

Which in a nutshell says, any content you post to a forum, blog, photosharing website, or whatever, you are granting Google a license to also re-use that content for its own purposes of saying how ace the Chrome product is.

As they say on the modern intertubes – Ts&Cs EPIC FAIL.