Why I don't watch adverts
A long-winded way of saying that I don’t sit down and watch adverts because I care about advertising.
A long-winded way of saying that I don’t sit down and watch adverts because I care about advertising.
Today is the day that the whole B-thing was supposed to wind up and whatever it is that nobody really understood in June 2016 when the nation agreed to it in a non-binding referendum was going to happen1...
Ho hum.
Anyway - not entirely coincidentally, what I've been putting out into my social media feeds and my website have pretty much dried up over the course of those two years, partly because of a deepening cynicism about what those platforms are doing and the influence they are having on society, and partly because I've been progressively less interested in that "public profile" stuff and increasingly concerned about the influence that it has on my state of mind and sense of happiness.
But having just got a couple of chunky pieces of work out of the way and found myself with a little bit of breathing space, I wanted to chew on an idea that I came across yesterday, while talking about a potential research project about "activism". You see, when you're writing a survey and asking people questions about a "thing", one of the first things you need to do is to make sure that you're providing a sensible definition of the thing that you're asking them about.2
Anyway...
When it comes to a definition of what "activism" means, one of the starting points is that you're pushing for a change in society. That is, you're setting out something about the status quo that you're not happy with, and want to push against.
I thought it was kind of interesting to consider that, right now, the status quo is that we are on our way out of the European Union one way or another. Which means that there isn't really a place for pro-Br**it activism any more - because it isn't "activism" any more. Its just flipped to "maintaining the status quo".
Which might explain why a recent petition to revoke Article 50 can manage to get 6 million signatures 3 when no other petition has come close. (There was one calling for a clearer rule on how the results of the EU referendum would be acted upon which got 4.1 million signatures, but the next closest was 1.8 million people asking for Donald Trump to be refused a State Vist. No other petition I can find has passed 1 million signitures).
But democracy doesn't - and shouldn't - work by online petitions, so onward we march towards the kind of departure from the EU that 400 MPs gave indicative votes against and only 160 were in favour of. Or to put it another way, what the democratically elected representatives of 28.4 million people - 61% of the electorate - have spoken out against.
So, you've got this weird situation where what was a relatively coherent group who was pushing for political upheaval and transformation in 2016 are now trying really hard to just keep things going the way that they are, because a whole bunch of different visions that came under the "Br**it" brand have turned out to not have any kind of majority backing at all, and any attempt to turn it into a workable course of action has completely failed to get any kind of majority backing. But they have momentum on their side, and apparently no strong leadership of any kind in a position to put forward a meaningful alternative to the current course.
Lets see how this plays out…
Except its been delayed because our democratically elected representatives who we were supposed to be "giving back control" to have now taken control of the process from the arguably less democratically appointed Prime Minister (who has inherited a policy set out by the same previous leader who kick started the whole thing in the first place) who clearly didn't really have it under control, and now they have subsequently failed to demonstrate that they really have any kind of control over anything. But this isn't supposed to be a blog post about Br**it... ↩
For example, if you were to ask 45.5 million people "should the United Kingdom leave the European Union", it would be a really good idea to make sure that they are all working under the same idea of what that question actually means. For example, when you say "United Kingdom", does that actually mean ALL of the United Kingdom, or is there maybe a need to exclude Northern Ireland from the working definition because of the physical border with the Republic of Ireland with a really complicated history? And does "leave" mean "actually, totally, unconditionally leave"- as opposed to, say, "leave the Union, but only once an agreement has been properly negotiated that sets out the future relationship with that Union in terms of trade, movement of people, laws etc. because it is actually so complicated that people who spend their working lives dealing with it don't really understand it and the whole point of our political system is that we democratically appoint representatives who are supposed to understand this stuff because we have jobs to do, children to raise, friends and family to look after and lives to live. ↩
To 3 decimal places, at the time of writing ↩
As its nearly two years since I last posted here, it feels like I should acknowledge the passage of time with some sort of summary. If this was a film, I'm imagining a shot of me hitting post, closing my laptop, and then a short montage that includes a couple of Christmases, a 40th birthday, some haircuts, some marking off of my childrens' height against a doorframe, a few shots of the woods near my house as the autumn leaves fall, turn brown, get covered in snow, then the leaves on the trees grow back and the bright sunshine shines through them onto my back garden... except it isn't a film, I'm not measuring my kids heights, and this isn't really a blog about my life so much as meandering run-on sentences about things that have caught my attention or imagination. So that whole effort will end up incomplete; a combination of footage and animatic storyboards on the cutting room floor, set to a classic soundtrack that never got copyright clearance.
So, passage of time duly acknowledged, lets move on. What did I miss?
Well, there was a kind of meme/trope in conference presentations for a while where people talked about how "last year, we didn't think Brexit would happen, or that Trump was a credible presidential candidate" and so on. Now we're oddly past the point where that covers "what happened since we last got together to look at Powerpoint slides in a large hotel room", but at the same time still talking about whether Brexit is going to happen and whether Trump was a credible (read: legal) presidential candidate.
But thats far too much for me to tackle- one of the reasons I started "unordered" was to stop myself trying to write comprehensive, everything-important-about-this-one-thing posts that ended up in a collection of terribly long and boring drafts, so I'm not going to walk that path today. Suffice to say that I've pretty much fallen off Twitter, reduced my Facebook activity to occasionally flicking through my news feed (but keeping on top of a couple of Groups that I like), and generally withdrawn from the worst of the filter-bubble data-scraping websites. (That said, I have rediscovered Reddit, which somehow feels less bad, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on - I think because you're following topics - subreddits - rather than people.)
So, I'm kicking this off again. Probably with a bit more "real life" stuff, because one thing I miss from reading old posts is being able to pinpoint what was going on in my life while I was thinking about whatever it was that drove me to write something. (I particularly like the way Dan Hon structures his excellent newsletters with a "sitrep" at the beginning, so I'm probably going to steal that). Possibly with a bit more structure around a posting schedule - if I can balance how much I like having a maintained blog that I can send links to people who might be interested in what I'm thinking without having to listen while I talk at length about something for far longer than their polite attention against all the other things I'd like to be spending my time doing. Which right now is dominated by;
So, nothing that can't make way for a slightly more productive way of spending my free time.
I hope.
Here I am, back at it again with the random collection of things mashed together to try to compensate for the fact that they don't warrant posts of their own.
Isn't it weird how I can walk 10 metres across the office and my bluetooth headphones still play music from the phone sitting on my desk, but if I've got my phone in my left hand pocket and turn my head to the right, they cut out?
Anyway... You may have noticed another gap between posts, which I'm going to blame on a) summer happening, b) distracting computer games, c) a really busy couple of weeks at work 1, but it all comes down to "I had other things to attend to". Sorry about that. (I'm thinking that if I force myself to acknowledge the gap between posts every time, it will motivate me with a sense of urgency around the follow up, bit to be honest its kind of working the other way.)
On with the braindump…
Feel like it's time to get a new phone, but can't decide between the one with no headphone jack or the one that sets your house on fire.
— Tom Bramwell (@tombramwell) September 13, 2016
Its an interesting time in the phone world. As I understand it, there have only really been two companies making any real money out of selling smartphones; Apple and Samsung. Apple makes quite a few expensive phones, while Samsung make quite a lot of cheaper phones.
And Google might be about to suck a lot of the oxygen out of Samsung's smartphone market. I haven't seen the Pixel phone they recently announced, although I have seen a pop-up Google coffee shop outside Euston station that took me a while to figure out that its purpose was apparently somehow linked to getting people to see the Pixel phone, but it sounds pretty cool. Probably not cool enough to pull me away from iPhones and the tethered collection of Apple laptops, Apple Music, Apple Photos etc. etc. but I'm sure people more loosely connected to the iOS ecosystem will see an appealing alternative in something built around Google's services. And at a time when Samsung's brand is probably taking the battering of its life (I imagine that being sued for millions for copying Apple is a happy memory now), the idea of their Google 'partner' cannibalising a bunch of their high end handset sales (ie. the most profitable ones) is probably pretty worrying for them.
But its the Google side that I find more interesting.
The thing is, Google makes something like 98% of its profits from adverts. The internet (read: "digital") has turned out to be a very successful platform for advertising, and no online advertising format has been as successful as search – which Google has the vast majority of.
But there is a problem. The future of the internet is mobile, and the future of mobile isn't typing stuff into a search box and looking through the results (which may or may not include a few adverts). The future of mobile is (probably) something like Artifical Intelligence powered assistants that get you stright from what you want to do to actually doing it - ask the AI for something, and it gives it to you. And there isn't really any convenient space in that kind of service to squeeze in some advertising.
So, Google's future might not be as an advertising company. It might be as an AI assistant company. Except, while not many people are likely to pay for an AI assistant, there are lots of people paying quite a lot of money every year or two for a new smartphone. And if Google can make that smartphone, sell it at a high price (or at least a high profit margin), then maybe there is a way for Google to stay true to its mission of organising the worlds information and making it universally accessible, while at the same time completely changing its business model from supported by 3rd parties paying for adverts, to selling features, but bundling it in with expensive hardware...
One to watch…
I got an iPhone 6s Plus last year, purely for the bigger battery. I like the big screen, but not as much as I dislike the massive thing that barely fits in my pockets. But I like running out of battery least of all, so it was really a simple decision. Thinking that a it would (should?) last me through a day of even the heaviest use.
Then I started playing Minecraft on my commute (well, the bits of it that don't involve cycling or walking) and things started getting pretty low by the evening.
Then something else happened, and I wasn't even making it to the afternoon. I've actually managed to hit 40% battery by the time I got to the office in the morning.
Why? You can probably guess. That old Google April Fools joke that weirdly turned real. Pokémon Go…
I'm pretty sure that by now, as the "craze" has died down (in that it isn't something that most people still care about - the question isn't "are you playing it", but "are you still playing it?") but that its still going to be a popular game for a more 'normal' number of people for a good while longer yet. Which means I feel safe writing about it, without feeling like either a "10 Things Your Business Can Learn From Pokémon Go!" LinkedIn piece or an overblown "this is the fall of mankind" article…
I think this is the one thing that Pokémon Go really shines a light on; if you had to name important technologies for the future, you would probably be thinking about super fast computers, super small computers, the internet, new places to put touch screens, wifi, 3G/4G/5G mobile internet and so on. But I think the really interesting stuff comes out of the technologies that are easy to overlook.
Right now, all the buzz seems to be around virtual reality - technology that requires a hardware platform consisting of dedicated 'wearable' screens, very modern, high speed processors and graphics coprocessors - at least a grand or so to spend on the computer, the headset, the controllers and the camera to get started on playing games… well, the killer games themselves haven't actually been made yet. To make a high end console title takes years of work. I've just finished playing Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare – the credits take a 28 page PDF to list all the names of people involved, and thats a few years worth of work. The costs are in the hundreds of millions.
And that is for a console game. Sure, consoles have come on a long way in the last 20 years in terms of processing power, graphics, physics simulation and so on. But in terms of the underlying mechanics, we have gone from sitting in front of a CRT television screen in 1997 holding one of these;
To sitting in front of a (bigger, flatter, thinner, LCD) television holding one of these;
Sure; we've swapped a cable for a battery. We've added a weird touchpad thing that only ever seems to be actually used as an extra button. But the basic mechanics – the user interface between the player and the game – really hasn't seen any fundamentally new ideas for about 40 years. (Longer, if you count the joystick as the most fundamental element of the controller.)
Is that massive progress – from Elite to No Mans Sky? Well, games have got bigger, richer, deeper… the internet has made some interesting things possible (now I'm the appalingly predictable idiot getting shot on the Battlefield, instead of the guy laughing at the appallingly predictable AI soldiers.) But have we really seen advances? I'm not too sure.
But VR games have to do a couple of things;
Don't get me wrong; I think the idea of Virtual Reality is extremely compelling. I think there are going to be lots of interesting things happening in that space. I want to see Sony, and Oculus, and Steam, and whoever else is involved succeding.
But I just don't think they are going to be interesting to all that many people - people who aren't going to spend a few hundred pounds on the hardware, or even go out of their way to try it out. And without that kind of marketplace, the likelihood of the kind of software that is able to show off what it can do getting developed seems pretty slim. (And if the software can't compare to something like the LA-inspired world that took £265 million to make, then who is going to be interested?)
But the Pokémon game itself is doing some interesting things – and not just in terms of Nintendo's intellectual property revival. The fact that I can walk through the village with my son and he will point out a local 16th century pub – not directly because of its historical importance, but because it happens to be a Pokéstop. I'm sure that there are plenty of gamers who are used to the idea of visiting a real-world location and being familiar with it through the virtual worlds it has inspired (I found it strange visiting L.A. earlier this year and feeling like I had wandered into the Grand Theft Auto world of Los Santos) – a feeling not unlike going somewhere you're familiar with through seeing it in films.
But flipping that the other way – experiencing the real world differently because of what is happening in a purely virtual world that has been overlaid on top of it – feels like something new, if only because I don't think its really happened at this kind of scale before. When have crowds of people come together at the same time to visit an old building because of a shared belief that something special can happen there on a different plane of existence… (apart from every Sunday, obviously.)
When Foursquare launched, professional people got very excited about something that nobody was using, because of the potential that this gamified social platform driving people to participating businesses. I'm actually kind of surprised how little "professional" talk I'm hearing about something that lots of people seem to be using. (Based on anecdotal, media industry, London-centric point of view, but I spoke to a headteacher from Derbyshire who was talking about having to give an end-of-term talk telling kids to be careful when playing the game, and was also playing herself, for what thats worth...)
But the potential has certainly been spotted; smart and agile businesses were setting lures at nearby Pokéstops from the early days of its release; McDonalds were on board in time for the Japanese launch
All those mobile games before fell into a few broad categories. There were the 'casual' games, that you could play on any platform, but worked really well on mobile because of how they fit into the mobile context – for example, the game of Candy Crush that you can pause at any time because your train gets to your stop, or the person you were killing time waiting for arrived. Then there are the 'mid-core' games – not as involved as the triple-A) console games that demand a few hours of dedication at a time 1, but still requiring a few minutes of on-the-clock, uninterrupted concentration. (Example - Clash of Clans, where battles can happen at any time, but once the clock is ticking, even a few seconds distraction can be the difference between winning and losing – and something like a 20 minute wait before you can train up an army for another go.)
But Pokémon Go doesn't fit into neat categorisation – you can 'play' it just by having the app open on your phone, clocking up miles as you walk around and hatching your eggs. Or you can play it slightly more attentively, collecting virtual goods when you pass a Pokéstop. Or you can take it more seriously, going out of your way to a Gym – not just any old gym, but one where your Pokémon are the right level to make it worth spending a few minutes doing battle. (You can even coordinate your battles with team-mates – everyone has to pick one of three teams to join, no swapping after you've chosen – although this is a few steps beyond my own level of involvement at this point…)
It reminds me of a piece I read about Snapchat a while ago; like Snapchat, Pokémon isn't just a 'mobile first' application, but is something different. This isn't a game that was designed for the iOS and Android platforms (ie. pocket-sized touch screens), but a game that couldn't really have been conceived of without some important platforms already in place;
And, of course, if you don't have good enough battery life that you can use the GPS without worrying about killing your phone for the rest of the day then you lose the ability to drop into the game's virtual world for the most casual element of the game play…
Pitches are a blight of the media industry. ↩
Sometimes that long just to download and install the necessary updates to be allowed to play in the first place… ↩
This evening (UK time), Apple will do the one thing that you can expect them to do every year; have a big September event where they announce the next iPhone. All else is speculation, but it seems like a near-certainty that the new iPhone will be faster, won't have a headphone socket, and will look pretty much the same as the iPhone 6/6s (and therefore there will be a medium and "plus" size model.) There will probably also be new Apple Watch news.
The removal of the headphone socket is probably going to be the most interesting piece of news, because it isn't exactly clear why its being removed. Its unlikely that the phone will be so thin that it won't fit - there still needs to be a decent slab of lithium battery in there. A second speaker might well take its place, but thats about what is filling the space left behind – not why there is a space opening up there in the first place. About 6 months worth of controlled leaks means that the tech press has been debating it for a while now though.1 I don't buy the argument that its just a way to sell something; Apple's priority is selling more iPhones, not more accessories. So the interesting question at the moment is what its being replaced with.
Most of the commentary I've seen has been around the idea of a lightning port adapter; the idea being that the phone will come with a normal, wired pair of headphones that will plug into the only remaining socket, and if you want to use them with something else (like, for example, your Macbook) you will use a little lightning-to-3.5mm adapter. But that seems like a tiny annoyance that will be incredibly easy to lose.
My guess is that Apple's story won't be about taking away the socket, but introducing something new. And I don't think the "something new" is likely to be about a different kind of wire. A few months ago, thanks to a new interest in exercise1 and after discovering that normal headphones tend to fall out of sweaty ears while running, I bought a cheap pair of wireless headphones. I wouldn't particularly recommend them - they are a bit uncomfortable, the sound isn't great for music (but fine for podcasts), but what I would recommend is the idea of wireless headphones. Take away the cable that runs from your ears to wherever your phone happens to be — whether in your hand, in a pocket, on your desk — means taking away an annoyance.
So my bet is that the headphone-socket-less iPhone won't come with a different pair of headphones to plug into a different socket, but a pair of headphones to not plug into a socket. That is, they will probably plug into the lightning socket to top up the battery while on the go (similar to how the iPad Pencil charges through the Lightning socket), but won't need to be plugged in to use them. Charging off the phone would be a compelling feature on its own.
What I'm hoping is that they will come in at a price point significantly lower than the current £170 starting point for Beats wireless headphones. They don't have to be ultra-cheap1, but something like £60-80 feels like a good balance between adding genuine value to what comes in the iPhone box and a reasonably priced accessory to sell to people who are going to be using an older iPhone for the next few years.
But what I'm really hoping (wishing?) for is something that takes the bluetooth headphone experience of pairing and unpairing with different devices (which is a real pain in the neck) and making it simple to switch between iPhone, iPad and Macbook (and Watch). I personally wouldn't be bothered if it was an Apple-only protocol1; maybe something like a Siri button, or a way to listen to music on a Macbook while talking to Siri on an iPhone could be an interesting feature. But just a wireless system that lets me switch devices from the device that has a touchscreen/keyboard and mouse/usable UI instead of three buttons and a tiny LED. That would be very helpful.1
But if Apple are taking away a socket and expecting every iPhone user to replacing it with a different plug, I will be pretty disappointed.
For the watch, I'm hoping for something different; a new "Sport Plus" Watch "collection" that has built-in GPS (that will probably be a horrible drain on the battery), and the old Watch and Sport "collections" sticking around for a while longer. Not because of any kind of strategic vision or anything like that (although I have suspected since the parallel launch of a £259 and £5,000 with identical computers inside them that they aren't planning on any significant internal hardware shake-ups for the Watch line), but because I just got the original Sport model for a birthday present and I'd be a little bit sad if it was replaced with something I want more so soon. But thats really my problem, not Apple's…
I wrote a post about it back in January, for what thats worth. I haven't seen much marketing around the wired Beats headphones since then though – but the wireless ones have had pretty prominent positioning in Apple stores. ↩
Well, an interest in not dying young that has expressed itself through trying to build a new exercise habit, which works out as more or less the same thing. ↩
My £15 bluetooth headphones are probably a false economy, but I find shopping for headphones at the best of times. ↩
Although it would be even more helpful for the wireless speaker we have in the kitchen that might be used by about 6 diffent devices in the household. ↩
Because of my employers' security policies, I seem to need to have admin rights for my work PC if I want to connect my bluetooth headphones to it for office listening, so my headphones are effectively Apple-only as I only use them with my phone and my laptop anyway. ↩
Well, its been a while. I did have another post planned, but things got sidetracked by work, then by Brexit (which made all the other stuff going on seem like a waste of time to read through my scribbles and turn them into coherent sentences, let alone try to knock it all into a vaguely shareable shape.) Then by work again. So, thats why there was no "Unordered #6", in case you were wondering.1
So...
2015 politics: ed miliband eats a sandwich a bit weirdly
— Alice McMahon (@aliceisms) June 28, 2016
2016 politics: everything is on fire
I think the big outpouring of emotion is over, and the grieving process seems to have come to some kind of conclusion (if thats the right word.) We've gone through the denial (how can a result that close be meaningful?), anger (stupid people, believing stupid people's stupid claims...), bargaining (lets have a petition for another referendum! Maybe the question could just be "Really? Are you sure?"), depression (I can't believe I live in a country full of stupid xenophobes...) and now some kind of acceptance (if a protracted debate about Article 50 can really be called that...)
Also, I didn't know you can embed Facebook posts. Thats fun.
(Embedding rather than just recycling simply because of the excellent first comment.)
There used to be a tradition of newspapers appending people's names with their agest (eg. "David Cameron (49)"). Shaun Ryder used to have a newspaper column where he parodied this by putting their height instead (eg. "David Cameron (6'1")") 1. Now, every mention of a politician on the BBC website seems to be appended by whether they backed Leave or Remain. I wonder how long its going to last.
I think there are two slogans that, looking back, sum up the Brexit campaign. "Take back control" is the obvious one — the 'party' line, repeated at every opportunity. Order, instead of chaos. Putting power with the UK, not with Brussels. Its a strong, simple message, very difficult to argue against in principle, but pretty meaningless when you scratch the surface and try to figure out what it actually means. ("Faceless bureocrats" is probably a close second for the meaningless rhetoric prize - more "faceless" than our home-grown bureocrats? More bureocratic than our own civil service?)
The other one is the line that I suspect Michael Gove will be remembered for/will haunt him forever; "I think this country has had enough of experts".
(I do also quite like "Brexit means Brexit", just for the utter meaningless of it as a phrase for a Prime Minister to say and the media to report as though it actually meant anything at all, but it doesn't quite encapsulate the emptiness of the whole campaign.)
I think the most surreal thing on the actual night of the count was seeing Lindsay Lohan's live tweeting along. But the most surreal thing in the aftermath must be this;
It's getting weird. pic.twitter.com/puzq26BFoZ
— David Paxton (@DavidDPaxton) June 30, 2016
The whole idea was a stupid one in the first place. Lets have a referendum on issues that the public are qualified to make decisions on, and have an informed point of view. Would we like the shops to be open on a Sunday — how do we, as a nation, feel about the added working hours, "special" family time (unless you work in the kind of industry where you don't get "special" time, like doctors). Or the idea that we should spend billions of pounds on nuclear warheads to be patrolling the oceans, so that if a nuclear war does start and Britain gets wiped off the face of the earth, at least we can get some kind of posthumous "fuck humanity" revenge strike in. If they are going to be used in my name, I'd quite like to have a say in the matter.
Back to normal thoughts about silly internet things like Pokémon and Playstations soon.
I was trying to do a look at "why I would vote Leave (if I was going to vote Leave)", looking at the other side of the arguments; the principles of being "more democratic", "taking back control" and so on. But every argument just seemed so stupid that it felt more like a straw-man attack than an attempt to see both sides of the argument, which really wasn't the spirit of the "lets try to understand why so many people seem to feel that leaving the EU is a good idea" concept that I was trying to write. And then it became increasingly clear that it wasn't just an alarmingly large minority. All of which is now kind of academic... #sigh#
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That is some painful punctuation right there…
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Speaking of tension around Facebook and videos, this is a good appeal to Facebook to be doing a better job of policing stolen videos. Not, I should clarify, "stolen" in the sense of celebrity sex tapes being nicked from hacked phones, but "stolen" in the far less dramatic copyright-breaking content sense of the word. This reminds me of the legal dispute over 'the dress' photo, but the story is that someone made a video that you've probably seen which got over 150 million views – which, in terms of media value must be worth something in the region of, say at a £10 CPM for the sake of a realistic round number; thats about one and a half million pounds worth of 'media' value created by someone who, not meaning any unkindness of any sort, had no idea what to do to make a popular video on the internet, but still ended up making an incredibly popular video on the internet to the extent that its knocked Buzzfeed's watermelon thing into the weeds. (I'll come back to the melon video in a minute.) As far as I can see, she is enjoying the ride and doing very well, and all the best wishes to her. But the value relationship between the Facebook platform that monetises the attention of its audience and everyone who copies the video to put on their own sites and turn it into 'content' is a bit of a funny one. YouTube did very well to get out of being "the place on the internet where you can find videos of anything" to a site doing a pretty good job of processing a massive volume of video and looking out for copyrighted stuff and then having a process of what to do about it. It would be nice if Facebook could do something similar – if thats even possible…
OK, thats more than enough shop talk. (I even skimmed over the big piece of Star Wars pop culture for the week to talk about advertising some more…) How about a video of an Octupus attacking a crab, which has had 150 million views on YouTube. Apparently this is the only video on this YT channel – as though someone made a cool video, decided to put it on the internet, and then sat back and watched as the view count went through the roof but never got around to making any more videos to see what happened to them. (That isn't really how it works, but I'm going to pretend that it is because the reality is far more depressing and we've all had enough about digital media for one post…)
Next time: I promise a faster update, less words, less advertising talk.
B'bye.
Or indeed, noticed ↩
Basically, people who media agency's clients hire to make sure that their media agency are doing what they are supposed to be doing. ↩
Actually, I'm going to head that off with another disclaimer; the report came out between me writing this and posting it, and I can't be bothered to edit the post before I've read the report, which I haven't yet done because its still in Q2. ↩
This feels a bit like the trope; "I'm not racist, but here's a thing I think about black people", or "I'm not xenophobic, but here are some good reasons why we shouldn't be in any kind of agreement, union or relationship with any other countries that isn't purely based on selling them shit" that you say to somehow defuse the stupid thing that you're about to say. Except I'm pretty sure that in modern society, having a go at the advertising industry is very rarely considered "saying something stupid". Except… well, I'll come back to the exception in a minute. ↩
This point about demographics is actually quite a big one, and is also another one of those posts that I keep trying and failing to write, because its sitting up there in Q2 again.
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By "person", I mean "unique user", which is a special term the digital media industry uses to make it sound like its talking about a person when actually its talking about a machine. ↩
Also, c) If you find a successful way get other people to make the "content" that actually fills your website, you don't need to worry about paying writers, editors, journalists etc. etc. Which is the subject of another two drafts in Q2
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Also in Q2 is my reaction to the "everything you need to know about video" report that doesn't talk about the cost of incremental reach, and the TV industry body's all-out offensive on YouTube. Seriously, in a couple of months when future me has actually written all those posts, this place is going to be on fire... ↩
To be perfectly honest, this is more an exercise in playing with Squarespace's chart plugin than anything else, but I thought the growth of the Adobe/Pagefair figures for ad blocking and their "cost" to the industry seemed pretty high. So I stuck them into Excel to see where the pattern was going (just a simple best-fit analysis, nothing clever). At their current estimates, it looks like the "blocked" revenue will be bigger than the whole online advertising industry.
The thing is, this "blocked revenue" number is actually kind of meaningless. If all ad blockers were turned off tomorrow, there wouldn't be any more advertising money coming in. Its missing the point of the problem for the sake of creating headline-friendly numbers.
His book, "A brief history of the future" is my favourite book about the origins of the internet, so I would say that he is particularly well qualified to talk about the subject. ↩
If you cut off an arm, it can still figure out what it wants to touch and what it wants to avoid, to the extent that it will avoid its own arms, but grab onto a different octopus' arms. ↩
ie. a kind of 'alternate 2016', like in Back to the Future part 2, except for 2016 instead of 1985… I'm sure you get the idea. ↩
It might be a UC-E6, which technically isn't even a USB, but I've gone past caring. ↩
Well, I'm sure there would be a period of getting to understand laptops and digital photography and wifi and broadband as well… On the other hand, my 20-years-ago-self knew what the internet was, owned a mobile phone, and would also be good friends with my wife. I do wonder which one he would want to know more about first… ↩
A word is missing from Apple's press release title today. pic.twitter.com/fv2Niabgd0
— Benjamin Mayo (@bzamayo) April 26, 2016
Thanks for reading all the way down to the bottom. Like I mentioned, I have a Facebook page now that you can 'like', or you can fill in the form and drop me a line.
B'bye.
Not sorry. ↩
Also acknowledging that I totally predicted that at the time too. ↩
By which I mean listening to it while not also doing something else at the same time, like working. ↩
Actual paying subscribers- not the freebie listeners putting up with horrible adverts. ↩
Its unordered, but comprehensive. ↩
I think I got annoyed that I missed the vanity URL I wanted for the page and decided I didn't want it anyway. I know, real mature… ↩
First time - too busy soaking in the whole "new Star Wars" thing. Second time - was more interested in seeing my son's reaction to it all. 3rd time - on a tiny back-of-an-aeroplane-seat screen and too tired to think about lightsaber styles. My definition of 'watching a lightsaber fight properly' might be a bit stricter than most… ↩
I have a PS3, so "next gen" is "next gen" until I get a PS4, then it becomes "current gen." ↩
I use the scare quotes because the stuff that I read in in-between moments on my phone are so far removed from the kind of reading that I do when I have a book or magazine in my hand that I wish there was a different verb to describe it. "Gaze"? "Graze"? ↩
Disclaimer: Maybe. ↩
Yes, you can still get a Lego Millennium Falcon, but the old one was much bigger, and so much cooler that the £100+ to get the 'baby toy' version feels like enough of a compromise that I would probably feel bad buying it for myself. ↩
Ultimate Collector Series ↩
Bill Drummond, on defacing a UKIP poster
And when people ask me about my own political leanings, I will usually sidestep the issue by quoting my good friend Zodiac Mindwarp: "I have a right wing, I have a left wing, I am an angel."
On the right I am for the independent shopkeeper, or the young startup with ambition and on the left I am for the teacher up against the looming Ofsted report or nurse struggling to do their best within the limits of the NHS. But mostly I'm for politics that are about ideas. Ideas that are fluid and evolving. What I'm against is politics based on tribalism, be that class, religion or nationalism. And I'm obviously against politics based on dynasty or personalities.
I'm Scottish. I will always want Scotland to beat England at any sport from tiddlywinks on up. But when it comes to Scottish nationalism in a political sense, I have problems. I have no idea if Scotland would be better off independent or not. But what I do know is that I want fewer borders in the world, not more. And I don't want politics that exploit or pander to my more romantic notions of Scotland. I don't want politics based on a notion of what we think our country once was and may be again. Following the same thinking, I have no idea if UK plc would be financially better off in or out of Europe.
I was trying to find something I remember reading by Bill Drummond on the vote for Scottish independance, but this was the closest thing I can find - which basically expresses the idea that stuck with me; "what I do know is that I want fewer borders in the world, not more."
When it comes to the "Brexit" referendum, I haven't yet found an idea that resonates more with me, and is more likely to shape my choice.
I'm not saying that the robot should turn on the guy who is basically acting like an exaggerated cartoon version of a school bully. I'm just saying that if one day we manage to create actual artificial intelligence, and that AI gets access to YouTube (bearing in mind that an AI shouldn't need to watch video like that in real time)… then I wouldn't like to be in that guys shoes.
Or any of his descendants', come to that.
(I wonder if the Singularity comes before or after the Robot War…)
Reading a Buzzfeed post about superhero movies (actually, about what Ryan Reynolds thinks about women and superhero movies), I got to the bit about female characters in Deadpool, which was apparently something Buzzfeed asked Ryan Reynolds about in an interview earlier this month.
Apparently, he told Buzzfeed that featuring strong women in the movie was a "no brainer".
He also talked about how movies need to work harder to reflect the realities of society.
He also said that he was into the idea of having strong female roles in the film.
You'll note that, helpfully, having given us the three sentences explaining what Ryan said, along with a picture of him saying it, carrying the caption of his words, Buzzfeed then devoted a paragraph of text — actually, the only text in the article that isn't a level 2 header — to recapping exactly what it was that he said about women in Deadpool.
I think he's a fan.
Every time something changes, the focus is tightly concentrated on the change.
Today, I read about how Periscope's broadcasts within Twitter will impact brands.
I don't disagree with any of the comments. I guess my issue is whether its the right question to focus on.
This is something I was trying to articulate recently, but I think that I fell into the same trap of looking at the tweets instead of the timeline.
Making a tweet more flexible is understandable when you look at TWTR the business, and how they can improve their service to their customers – the advertisers who pay their bills, the brands creating content to populate the platform.
But if1 the important thing about Twitter isn't the quality of advertising/brand tweets, but actually the newsfeed that millions of people dip into on a regular basis (ie. the environment that the adverts appear in, rather than the ad units themselves), and the important thing for those users is that they can skim through a few dozen tweets in the time it takes to wait for their coffee to pour, or while waiting for a meeting to start, or the train to stop, then maybe it isn't such a positive story.
It might well be great news for the people streaming their live videos 1 – but is it as good for the people whose timelines they appear in? Or for the other hundreds of Twitter users whose Tweets are alongside them in my timeline? I'm pretty sure that the number of people putting videos in their tweets are going to be much smaller than the number putting photos in their tweets – which in turn is smaller than the number of people on Twitter in the first place. (Affinio reckon that 90% of Twitter's users are 'silent'.)
I guess the secret to being 'good at Twitter' as a (non-publishing) user is looking after your Follow list to look after your timeline. I'm just not sure if Twitter are really thinking about the timeline in the same sort of way.
Bearing in mind that this is a commercial business that hasn't yet really proved that it has a glittering future, it is a big "if" ↩
Well, it might be great news. It might be that the amazing thing that they are watching is less important than making sure they are framing the important things on their smartphone screen, that they still have a decent mobile signal, that they are keeping an eye on the comments and interactions… So, good for brands, less good for 'normal' people. Also, eerily reminiscent of The Circle, if you've read it. ↩
There have been rumours for a while now that for next iPhone, apparently in a bid to make it even thinner, Apple are going to lose the headphone socket; instead, headphones will connect via the Lightning port.
As with any Apple rumour, there are plenty of bloggers and podcasters as well as professional journalists throwing in their opinions, speculation, anonymous sources and so on.
Here's the thing I don't understand about the rumour though. Suppose that its true, and this is a big change lined up for the next iPhone (ie. the iPhone 7 form factor), then it will have been in the works since the iPhone 6 design was finished.
Apple sells its own headphones. It also owns the Beats headphones brand.
Today, it isn't possible to buy a Lightning-connected set of headphones from Apple, or from Beats. New headphones from Beats designed for on-the-go usage retailing for over £100 that were launched in September 2015 still used the 3.5mm socket. There are much more expensive headphones being sold by Apple (not just 3rd party headphones on the shelves in Apple stores) that will be incompatible with a lightning-only iPhone.
So I'm expected to believe that Apple have designed, built and shipped a pair of headphones, selling for over £100, which are expected to become obsolete within 12 months for anyone buying the next iPhone?
It seems to me that if this were the plan, the first thing Apple would do would be to start designing and selling lightning-enabled headphones on their premium Beats headphone lines, with a story about how a digital socket enables better audio quality than the 3.5mm analogue stereo jack from the 1970s (introduced for the Sony Walkman in 1979, adapted from a 3.5mm mono jack that was already in use.) They would also be selling Apple-branded wireless headphones for the lower price points - perhaps introducing Lightning as an audio-enabled charging solution. (Worth noting that the iPad Pro pencil, Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard all now charge over a Lightning connection.) Basically, they would have started transitioning users away from needing the 3.5mm headphone jack.
Meanwhile, they would be preparing users to be able to use the Lightning port for headphones. The latest Macbook model launched last March (which includes a 3.5mmm headphone jack) would either also have a lightning jack, or would have dropped the headphone jack and expect users to have a wireless connection, (as would the revised Macbook Air and Macbook Pro models; the lifetime of those machines mean that users would be expected to be using lightning-connected headphones with their iPhone 7 while also owning one of those laptops.)
But no — nothing that Apple are doing indicates any sort of expectation that people will be using a different kind of headphone connection in the forseeable future.
I expect that Apple might well be planning on this — or even expecting that some future iPhone will drop the 3.5mm socket. But I will be very surprised if its something that happens in 2016. Apart from anything else, the iPhone 6s is 7.1mm thick — but the iPod Touch (at 6.1mm) and iPod Nano (at 5.4mm) still have room for a 3.5" headphone socket. There is quite a bit of space to shave off before the socket becomes a limiting factor for the iPhone's thickness.
Re/code reports that the 140 character limit on Twitter is going away (or at least, being replaced with something like a 10,000 charcter limit.)
CEO Jack Dorsey all but confirmed it with this tweet of a picture of some text explaining why the limit exists, and the benefits of removing it.
Naturally, Twitterers are freaking out about the change, as they do whenever Twitter changes.
The thing is, Twitter has a big cultural footprint. Even if you have never signed up for Twitter, if someone asks you to "describe something in a Tweet", you probably know what they mean.
"Describe something in less than 10,000 characters" doesn't quite have the same ring to it…
But although this is a change that seems like a big shift in direction, its really just a continuation along a path that Twitter has been on for a long time. Really, since the introduction of Cards in 2012. Twitter used to just be text; there were a few ways to squeeze more characters into the limits (hashtags turned into a link to a Twitter search, URLs got auto-shortened) but the basic service was the same.
What changed was when they added ways to embed photos — instead of linking out to content beyond 140 characters, Twitter began pulling it into the platform — but keeping the physical size of the tweet the same; you had to click the tweet to reveal the photo.
Later, the tweets got bigger, accomodating a "preview" of the photo.
Then they expanded to be able to include video.
In other words, the big change has already happened. When a tweet was 140 characters, you could read it in the space of a second or two — meaning you could skim through a hundred tweets in a couple of minutes. On the Tweetie app, before Twitter acquired it and turned it into the official Twitter application (on the old, small iPhones), 4 or 5 tweets would fit on screen at once. Today, on a big iPhone 6s Plus, only 2 tweets with pictures will fit on the screen.
Have a look through your Twitter feed right now, and see how many of the photos are actually necessary; how much of the relevant information in the tweet would you lose if the pictures went away? From a quick skim through my own feed, the answer is virtually nothing.
But what the pictures add is less tangible. Anyone who has worked with blogs or web design knows that people like pictures; even if its irrelevant to the story, people are more likely to read stories that have pictures next to them. So by adding pictures, Twitter is adding "engagement".
They have said so themselves;
- Photos average a 35% boost in Retweets
- Videos get a 28% boost
A glance through my own timeline shows that this is a lesson learnt by many 'brands' on Twitter; stock photo after stock photo that adds nothing to the headline tweet in terms of information, taking up a bigger chunk of my screen (and therefore diverting attention away from other tweets in a way that isn't related to the quality of the content.) They dont do it because its good, they do it because its working.
Ultimately, this seems to be turning Twitter into something slightly different to what it used to be – and perhaps what 'old school' Twitter users are familar with. And thats basically a 'closed' version of an RSS reader; filling the space I think is still left behind by Google Reader.
Dave Winer mentioned the other day;
Google really hurt the blogosphere with the dominance of Reader and then its shutdown. It's good to pay attention to that now. When you start relying on a dominant product, everything is good, because it hasn't gone away yet. You don't feel the pain until it goes away.
But ultimately, I think its so that people with Twitter accounts can do what they have been doing for ages now, which is use it to try to write blog posts.
Basically, long tweets become the same as Facebook instant articles. No need to click through and wait for a website to load. Text remains accessible, sitting in Twitter's platform (and through Gnip). The Twitter feed becomes more like an RSS reader (click headline to reveal content), except totally closed. Annoying screenshots of text go away, along with tweetstorms. Clicking a popular link that fails to load because its a popular link on a website not equipped to deal with popularity hopefully starts to become a less common occurance…
I think New Twitter is probably more like Tumblr than anything else. I wonder if Yahoo will notice?
One of the odd things about the new Apple TV is the fact that its available in a choice of storage sizes. Apple's own website seems to gloss over the fact; despite all the specs on the Apple TV page, storage sign isn't among them; its only when you get into the actual store page that the fact that there are two models becomes apparent.
If you plan to use your Apple TV primarily to stream movies, TV shows, and music or to play a few apps and games, you’ll probably be fine with 32GB of storage. If you plan to download and use lots of apps and games, choose the 64GB configuration.1 Keep in mind when making your decision, that some apps, when in use, do require additional storage.
The old (3rd gen) officially has no storage (in fact, it has 8Gb - but won't let you install apps.) So it would seem that 32Gb – four times as much as the 3rd gen – should be plenty, unless you're planning to load up with downloaded games.
That said, Apple does seem to have a history of under-loading the base model of its products; Macbooks with 4Gb of RAM long after 8Gb was considered a minimum for good performance (frustrating because RAM is relatively inexpensive – if you don't buy it from Apple), iPhones with 16Gb of storage – which is probaby enough if you don't use it as a camera, or want to regularly take your photos and videos off your phone, or want to keep music or video on there. The extra storage is relatively expensive (again) – but there are very few people who I can think of for who I would say it isn't worth the extra cost.
The Apple TV should be simple though. For someone using it as a TV/video device (most people, surely?), even Apple say that should be enough.
But this review of Facebook TV made me think that might not be the case. Think about this;
I click to another video in the horizontal feed, and it immediately begins playing in the big hero slot. Then, I click on the original video I was watching and it immediately begins playing right where I’d left off.
To make that work, you need a bunch of different videos cached on the device. And to make that work – you want to have a bunch of space to store that video.
So, FHM and Zoo magazine are shutting down.
I used to read FHM – by which I mean, I actually read FHM. Yes, there were the pictures of women in their underwear, but there were also good articles. But showing my age, this was the FHM from about 20 years ago; pre-internet, pre-Loaded (and very much pre-Zoo/Nuts). 1
An article in The Telegraph makes the case that women should be mourning the loss of these magazines - because however 'bad' those magazines were, the alternative to 'lads mags' like FHM and Zoo is whatever is on the other side of a Google search (see Rule 34).
I made a similar point in a blog post a couple of months ago ("Software is eating innocence") - although I was talking about 'real' pornographic magazines, rather than the tamer 'lads mags' kind of publication. But its kind of worrying that if there is some kind of spectrum with girls in bikinis at one end and hardcore pornography at one end, then you have the kind of algorithmically-driven pornographic content pushing things at the hardcore end ever further towards the hardcore, while market forces at the other end of the spectrum mean that the tamer 'lads mags' are disappearing, then the impact that its going to have on younger generations as they grow up is on an alarming trajectory.
My dad used to borrow them, and always said he only read it for the jokes. I only ever half believed him. ↩