A Beautiful Failure

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My post earlier this week about the days of makeup and SprayMount drew a couple of starry-eyed comments from fellow ancients who could remember the smell of galley being pasted down onto board, which was lovely. But a link I got from Nieman Labs yesterday night really made me stop and think about these things. Bear with me, this might just be relevant somehow, in some way.

Digital design agency Information Architects took part in a pitch to redesign Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and lost the pitch in what they describe, rightly IMHO, as a ‘beautiful failure’. They had applied ‘new world’ design thinking to a newspaper. And golly, what an interesting set of ideas they presented. Their piece on it is linked here and I do recommend a read.

Newspaper design has long been predicated on the need to control the readers’ eyes, big bold headlines scream important story, type is arranged to give the reader a progression through the page, elements are balanced so that readers’ eyes find information in a logical, flowing way. Typography is used to denote importance – a bold cap in white space draws attention, an italic caption under a picture is an element we recognise and expect. In fact, if the text floating immediately under a picture weren’t a caption, we’d be wrong-footed by the discontinuity.

But Information Architects did a brilliant thing. They designed their newspaper as a paper for a digital age reader, recognising the fact that our habits, our expectations of the format of content, have changed.

The first thing that really got me going was that they had put important text keywords in blue. I thought that was amazing. Although, obviously, paper doesn’t hyperlink, we now know what blue means – it means a keyword. Together with their decision to go for a big body text with big leading, this meant their proposed body copy didn’t look like a newspaper. But IA had already realised that: they took the conscious decision to throw out ‘conventional’ newspaper design – the idea that a newspaper should somehow follow rules that made it look like a newspaper.

They did a lot of other cool stuff, too – mixing column formats and using infographics, big pictures and left to right, top to bottom prioritisation of stories, much of which was informed by using a ‘web-centric’ approach to design. But it’s the blue keywords that would have been a ‘beautiful’ revolution.

While you obviously can’t click on the blue words in the paper, IA’s idea was that by scanning these keywords, you should be able to read the basic, core, news on the page in 10 seconds. The paper’s website would mirror these keywords with a link to a series of sub-links arranged chronologically. That’s a huge decision, meaning that the journalist, or in this unfair world the sub-editor, would have to pick out the keywords for the reader – a new skill in itself. And then the web team would have to work with those words to provide depth and context behind them (something you could see a technology like Zemanta taking a role in). It’s an exhilarating idea that links print to web and challenges the way that information is presented, managed and prioritised by the ‘traditional’ medium because it recognises the way we have changed in the way we browse, consume and identify information.

(Zemanta is a cool plug-in I use to provide me with contextual information related to blog posts - it selects copyright-free images for me to use and provides 'autolinks' for posts. I don't usually use the links but I did in this post both to 'blueify' it and also to show how a technology like Zemanta could be used to help automate the production of links for a project like Information Architects' newspaper. Okay, okay I'll be a good boy and get back to the snarky, goofy stuff next week, promise.)

Deoxyribonucleic Acid

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I have to confess, when I first saw the news that a group of police and forensics experts will meet today in Sharjah to discuss setting up a UAE national DNA database, my first reaction was of irritation. We've just been through the laborious process of having our finger, thumb and palm prints, our photographs and our other identity details taken, so if you wanted my DNA you could have had it then.

If you consider the disastrous roll-out of the national ID card system, one can only shudder at the potential in this new move. Commented on at length by many a blogger and even held out to dry by the dailies eventually, the conflicting announcements, lack of preparedness and ill-assembled systems deployed to manage the ID card process resulted in protracted, and comic, confusion on a huge scale. Imagine a repeat performance only accompanied by men in lab coats swabbing our cheeks and pecking little hunks of us off to be labelled and then mixed up.

But my irration passed as I read the story (once again, it was The National wot had the skinny) and saw what I can only describe as eminently sensible comments from the Chairman of the Emirates DNA Working Group, Dr. Ahmed Marzooki. He talked to The National about a possible 10-year programme, with initiatives to set up a legal framework to deal with issues of individual privacy and also to look at facilities, procedures, staffing and the like.

Marzooki also pointed out that the imperative to collect the data wasn't just criminal investigation (although that surely must be the most important driver) but also to be able to identify people in cases such as natural disaster and other tragedies - in fact, just back in August, a process was started by Dubai police to try and identify the relatives of eleven men who were killed in a fire villa in Dubai's Naif area. Storing the remains, contacting relatives, taking samples and shipping them must be a laborious and immensely expensive process - the database would mean an end to that type of investigation and speed positive identification for families and friends.

So I came away impressed with this clear evidence of quality of thought and with the feeling that if Marzooki, the man who is Interpol's only Middle Eastern representative, is at the front of this one, we may just see the lessons of the ID card roll-out learned.

We may even see the data integrated with the ID card biometric data, albeit with access controls in place. We may...

Disintermediation Rules

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Phil was a typesetter and he used to typeset the books I edited and published. I’d send him my copy, marked up by hand (point size, leading, a wiggly line for italics, underline for bold) and he’d send me back galleys, long strips of single columns of type which the graphic artist would then ‘lay out’ onto boards, creating pages of book and magazine out of strips of type glued down with ‘SprayMount’, a highly egregious sprayable glue.

We’d size pictures manually, then attach them to the artwork (a box was drawn to give the printers a ‘keyline’ to place the image in) ready for sending to film.

Then along came Digital Research’s GUI, or graphical user interface, GEM and with it Ventura Publisher, a black and white piece of software that let you ‘lay out’ pages onscreen. I had a chat to Phil about the new software and how he had to invest in it so that he could run my pages.

‘Rubbish! That’ll never take off! You can’t match the quality of compositors’ work, proper typesetting, with that amateur junk!’ said Phil. 'My Linotronics cost £30,000 a piece - nobody can compete with stuff like that!'

Within the year he had gone bust and I had taken all my business to David, who I didn’t really like very much but who would ‘run out’ my pages from Ventura as one single layout, all ready for the printers once I’d just taped the pictures to copies of the proofs. I didn’t need a graphic artist anymore, either - I did my own layouts onscreen. They might not always have followed the rules of typography as they existed in Caxton’s day, but then we were redefining what you could do with type anyway – for a few halcyon years, drop caps and huge lettering ruled magazine layouts all over the UK.

Ever since then, I have heard people talking about quality as the reason why technology, the Internet in particular, won’t disintermediate them. But the amazing fact is that we don’t actually care about quality. Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are some of the crappiest pieces of filming. I play my music in my car, ripped from my ultra-high quality CDs and converted to lo-fi MP3s, using an iTrip radio transmitter thingy. The quality of what I am listening to is probably less than that of a Chrome cassette.

When technology improves access, quality becomes secondary. And quality is the last refuge of the about-to-be-disintermediated.

Social Media and Libel

Image by Felipe Bachomo via Flickr

I’ve talked quite a bit on the radio over the past few weeks about Internet libel. It’s an interesting area and one where I think we all are guilty of being perhaps not quite as careful as we should be - particularly on Twitter!

With the ruling by a UK high court judge that blogging is essentially ‘an act carried out in public’, we not only lose the right to anonymity (not that I’ve ever done any of this stuff anonymously), but also have a precedent that social media interactions are ‘acts carried out in public’. That means we are open to charges of libel and defamation where we make assertions regarding people and also companies over social media platforms. There are already cases lodged as a result of material posted on MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter in both the US and UK. Having said that, the world's legal systems are still struggling with the whole issue - so nothing is clear.

Which means that, fine, today’s consumer has a megaphone – but today’s consumer has also to be aware that they may be held answerable for their use of a medium that has the reach (and, let’s face it, potentially way beyond the reach) of a national daily newspaper.

Similarly, any company threatening suit against people for something they have said online has to think long and hard about the consequences to the company’s reputation in the long run. While we are now seeing an increasing number of precedents being established by litigation, they are by no means concrete and supported by a body of established law – certainly not in the US and UK, let alone somewhere like here in the UAE. And companies 'picking' on bloggers, FaceBook users and other social media users are risking disastrous loss of credibility and respect from consumers - who are enjoying the new found freedoms, increased information flow and empowerment that using the Internet is bringing them.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the removal or alteration of offensive material is often all that is required to mitigate any serious threat of legal action. So online commentary is particularly hard to legislate for in laws that depend on the presence of immutable, physical, media.

In other words, we need to perhaps take a little more care, but companies with brands to protect need to cut consumers a hell of a lot of slack and, by the way, the answer for companies feeling wronged by consumers is dialogue, not 'cease and desist'.

Billion Dollar Baby

It’s less than four years old, something like 40% of new sign-ups to it don’t last longer than a month before wandering away and it hasn’t generated a red cent in revenues. And yet last Friday, venture capitalists invested a reported $100 million into Twitter, effectively valuing the fledgeling company at $1bn – more than General Motors was worth when it went bust.

Another way of looking at it would be to value every single tweet ever tweeted at $1 - Twitter recently went past the billion tweet barrier.

With something like 54 million visitors a month and a goal, according to documents leaked to TechCrunch, of netting a billion users by 2013, Twitter certainly captures a lot of eyeballs. That billion user figure isn't ridiculous, BTW - Twitter's already smashed its own growth targets. And it’s eyeballs that make all the difference in today’s Adword world – Google's annual revenues of $21bn-odd are made up in the vast majority of clicks – each netting a few cents. Those revenues, to put them into perspective, are worth something like a sixth of global annual television advertising revenue and are also equivalent to total US print advertising spending - the latter falling as fast as Internet advertising spend is rising.

With much speculation as to how Twitter is actually going to make any money, some form of advertising is top of most pundits’ agendas. The documents leaked to TechCrunch appear to show that Twitter isn’t really quite sure what to do with the goose it has found itself holding. And despite that goose never having laid an egg, some smart money is betting that when it does, it’ll be gold.

What makes Twitter neat is that its open APIs mean that lots of smart people are dreaming up new ways to use all those eyeballs – there’s a long list of things you can do with Twitter that don’t actually involve Tweeting at all. You can share files, music, pictures, video or links, even make payments - that last link is a service called TwitPay that lets you link your PayPal account with Twitter, which means you can now buy and sell stuff with a Tweet.

So Twitter is becoming a sort of central switch for people who are talking and sharing stuff, a way of flagging up the availability of news, information and content. And, in fact, that's how many of us are now using Twitter - to share information, links and stuff we find interesting.

The stuff itself isn't on Twitter - but Twitter is how we send the signal to go get it.

And that's where Google came out of absolutely nowhere to become a world-straddling colossus. Nothing we want is on Google - it's where we go to find it.

Which is why I think Twitter could be as big as Google and why I think the smart money is being, well, smart...

PS: I know, I know. To be honest, I'm not really a rabid Twitter evangelist. I just look and sound like one. It'll pass.

Windows 7 Barf

Image by Esparta via Flickr

I almost managed a week without posting, thanks to Phillipa, but now I'm blowing it.

Twitter has been a-tweet with disgusted tweets linking to a very odd thing on YouTube - Microsoft's 'Host a Windows 7 Party' video.

It's linked here. Watch it before you read on, I would. Get it over with. Content warning - it's very, very, very crap - so don't say I Rickrolled you or anything.

Done? Fine, get your breath back, there's no rush.

Now it might just be that this is a really smart, post-ironic teaser that's going to lead to a really hip Madison Avenue type 'We woz just leading you on' follow-up. If it does that, Microsoft has lost my custom, because I'm really not in the mood to be messed around with by smartarses using social media to prove they're cleverer than I am. Right now, I want brands to start behaving better because I've had enough of being fed bullshit by corporations and just want honesty, integrity and straightforward communication. You jerk me around, I'll invest time punishing you. That's the new deal, guys.

Alternatively, this could just be an unbelievably turgid dollop of woeful, mind-numbingly asinine and utterly inane idiocy of appalling proportions. It could be the most ill-conceived, zeitgeist-missing 'campaign' of all time. Comments have been disabled on YouTube, which is not a good thing as Microsoft would quickly have seen that this was the daftest idea since someone decided to design a car called 'Edsel' - whether it's a 'smart' teaser or a genuine, epically misguided, attempt to get Middle America to hold spontaneous 'fun' Tupperware party style events across the nation.

Hey! Coool! Softerware! Like Tupperware! Why didn't we think of that before? Awesome! Good jooob!

End result? I truly think Microsoft has lost the plot. Marketing was the only thing it did superlatively well.

Where do you want to go today, Google? It's your world, now...

PS: I hated Vista. I wanted to believe in Win7.0...

Guest Post - Phillipa Fioretti

Today, as a treat, you can have a guest post from Australian author Phillipa Fiorretti.

My morning routine, once I have settled and have my evil espresso next to me, is to go through my overnight emails from the Northern Hemisphere and cruise around my favourite blogs reading the latest posts. I’m always pleased to see a new post from Alexander on Fake Plastic Souks, because I know that usually I’ll have a bit of a giggle.

Alexander and I are writing pals, having ‘met’ on Authonomy last year. I helped to edit the manuscript of his book, Olives, and I have to say there is nothing more soothing after a tiresome day than to pour a drink, pick up a sharp pencil and savage his work. I’m cruel, brutal even, but I’m fair. I won’t stand for any nonsense with adverbs and deal ruthlessly with any signs of lazy expression. And I don’t smile while I do it.

But when I arrive at his blog I’m off duty and care not if he uses three adjectives in a row. I read all the posts, although I tend to skim the technology ones unless there is an interesting angle – like the Etisalat patch for Blackberries, or the intricacies of using SatNav devices. The ones I really like are usually about the new train service, taxis, and commentary on daily life in Dubai.

I live in Australia and geographically the closest I’ve ever been to Dubai would be Kashmir. Most of us here, unless we know a friend or relative living in Dubai or have business connections there, think of money, expats, finance, money, sex on the beach and Emirates Airlines. As a kid, the constant references, (as in news stories), to the Middle East really bothered me. I was on the east coast of Australia and the Far East looked pretty close to where I was, so why was it Far, and what was the East in the Middle of?

Maps of the world, in Australia, show this continent in the centre of the Southern Hemisphere. Thus the Middle East is actually the North West and the Far East is the North. America is the Far East really, according to my junior map reading skills. So had someone made a mistake and the rest of the world just went a long with it? I began to ask questions and demand some answers.

But long and involved parental explanations were lost on me and it wasn’t until I started reading history books for my own pleasure, as opposed for school history teachers, did I get it. Two of my favourite writers on the region are Edward Said and Tim Mackintosh-Smith.

But while books like these humanise countries and explain the historical intricacies, they don’t give the immediate, daily minutiae that really brings it alive in one’s imagination. Posts such as Hard Times on Mr G. the taxi driver, NufNuf coping with the Abu Dhabi traffic, Sharjah’s Number 14 bus, the Etisalat saga and the strange creature called Modhesh.

I’m sure there are other blogs about Dubai written for the visitor or armchair traveller, but Fake Plastic Souks isn’t speaking to them and that’s what makes it so fascinating to me. I see the dust and the traffic and the air conditioned towers and all of the stories a travel writer would leave out.

And there is never an overload of adverbs to jolt me out of my reverie, cause me to sigh and shake my head, or make me want to slice away the excess words.

Phillipa's most excellent blog, which mixes her respective fascinations for art and writing quite neatly, can be found here. Her first novel, The Book of Love, is to be published by Hachette Australia next year.

US Public 'No Confidence' In Media Shock Horror

Image source: Pew Research Center

A poll carried out in the USA and published this week has shown that the US public have no faith in the credibility of media. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll found that some 71% of respondents did not feel that media got the facts straight in news reports, 63% felt that information from the media was ‘often off base’. Only 26% of people surveyed believed that the press took care to avoid bias.

71% of people depended on TV as their primary news source. But, this figure really fascinated me, 42% depend on the Internet (people could pick more than one medium, so you’re not going to add up to 100). And only 33% on newspapers. That Web figure compares to the 6% that relied on the Web ten years ago, incidentally.

This all takes place in a year when Google’s Q1 revenues equated to total US print advertising spending – and where newspaper ad sales dropped by some 29% in the first half of 2009. Did the Internet drop ‘em or the recession drop ‘em? It’s academic – Internet revenues went up so, whatever you slice it, print (and, incidentally, television and radio) is being eclipsed by the Internet.

It’s been a slow erosion of confidence, not an overnight one. Back in 1985, 55% of Americans believed their media generally got things right – this year, that’s down to 29%. The report shows a general consensus emerging regardless of political belief, but also highlights an average increase of 16% in people who do not believe the press is professional.

70% of those surveyed believed that news organisations ‘try to cover up their mistakes’. 74% of people believed that the press was biased in favour of big business and powerful people.

So we have a broad and growing distrust of mainstream media that you would have to consider to be close to fundamental and a clear movement to increased reliance on online media. That’s not rocket science, but these is numbers.

It’s always nice to be able to back your beliefs with numbers.

If My Car Were Windows Vista

If my car were Windows Vista, it wouldn’t unlock without asking me if I’m really sure I want to unlock it. The door would only open once I had confirmed that yes, I do want to open the door and no, I don’t want to play with the little purple dinosaur. Once I confirmed I wanted to open the door, it would then make the sound of a door opening but not actually unlock the door until I had confirmed that opening the door is what I really, really want to do.

It would take 60 seconds to actually unlock. At least.

I would then have to go through the same routine to start it. Every time I select a gear, it would ask if I’m sure that’s the gear I wanted. If I put it into automatic, it would play calming music and its windscreen would display a lovely blue/green iridescence. It would then ask me what gear I wanted. The tiptronic gears would have a delay of between one and ten seconds, while a display would flash a moving gear symbol at me along with the text, ‘Changing gear’.

For no apparent reason and without notice, my car would not move beyond second gear for long periods of time, forcing me to crawl along the hard shoulder. Then it would announce it had finished updating itself and fixing its file system and suddenly take off at great speed.

It would occasionally switch off the engine and, when I had coasted to a halt, ask me if I wanted help to fix the problem I had with the engine. I would have to answer yes, then it would restart and tell me how much it had enjoyed helping me to find a fix. Occasionally it would break down completely and parts would fall off. It would then ask if I wanted to find a solution. When I answered in the affirmative, it would tell me which parts had fallen off. When major parts fall off, it would ask me if I wanted to tell Microsoft about the problem I had caused.

If my car were Windows Vista, it wouldn’t start on cold mornings, hot mornings or mornings when I was in a rush. It would sit in my driveway flashing ‘Not Responding’ on its windscreen. If I took out the battery and reconnected it, then it would start first time every time. Occasionally, calling someone called Task Manager would help, but by no means always and it would take a huge amount of time for him to answer the phone. It would be safer just to disconnect the battery first thing.

When I tried to sound the horn, it would go online to find the right Codec for my horn and then fail to find it. Three hours later, it would go 'parp' for no apparent reason. Refilling it with petrol would be a challenge because there isn't a petrol cap release lever. I would have to sit at the petrol pump until, finally, it would ask me if I wanted to open the petrol cap. It would then play me a 30-minute video in Malay of why petrol is dangerous and only open the cap if I had clicked YES to agree that I understood the risks of using petrol. The fuel meter and reality would be completely disassociated.

Every time I took it for a service, the service manager would tut a lot and talk about critical updates, then keep it in the shop for two weeks for what he calls a ‘service pack’. When it came back, random bits would stop working. I would get messages telling me that the indicator wasn’t working, would I like to have the window opened so I could put my hand out to indicate my direction? If I said no, it would report me to the police for unsafe driving. If I said yes, it would tell me that it had fixed my Optimum Advanced Traffic Directional Warning System and ask if I would like to fix it again next time automatically? If I said yes, next time I tried to use the indicator, it would ask if I wanted to have the window opened so I could put my hand out to indicate my direction.

If my car were Windows Vista, it would have SatNav. Every time I programmed a route, the system would tell Microsoft where I was going and why. It would only work in Xhosa and a little known dialect of deepest Mongolia unless I agreed to have a Windows Live account, in which case it would work in the language of my choice for precisely fifteen minutes or four roundabouts, after which it would default to Xhosa until I accessed my Hotmail account and agreed to play with the purple dinosaur and accept MS into my life.

If my car were Windows Vista, I’d be highly likely to upgrade to Car 7.0 out of sheer desperation. But I sure as hell am thoroughly road testing the new car this time around. Because if I’d truly appreciated how bad this car was going to be, I’d have stayed with Car XP at any cost...

A glass to Keith Floyd

Image by Katiya Rhode-Singh via Flickr

I'm raising a glass (A Fat Expat Martini as you ask) as we speak, in memory of Keith Floyd. His cookery programs inspired many a would-be cook to give it a go, making light of disaster (courting it, in fact, with his ever-present glass in hand) and bringing a casual, light-hearted and generally devil-may-care approach to cookery that was in delightful counterpoint to the stuffy and rule-bound types that preceded him.

Floyd was an early influence for me as a cooker of things - and I loved him all the more for having provided space for a young Hugh Cornwell to play guitar at his restaurant, the reason why Floyd's programs intro'd to The Stranglers' music: he was a fan.

Floyd made food fun, made it an adventure and was eccentric, slapdash and earnest in equal measure. He cared about food, but in a way that made cookery fun to try, accessible and an adventure. I suppose he must be part of the reason why we have Jamie Olivers and Nigel Slaters, presenters and writers who are free to let people just have a go rather than get all Cordon Bleu about food. And I always think of him as being a little bit similar to Rick Stein, a man for whom I have enormous regard as a cookery writer and presenter.

But Floyd was there before them all, apparently making all the wrong business decisions and creating financial disaster around him. But inspiring me and tens of thousands of others to have a go at stuff, try stuff out and not be afraid to make an awful mess of it.

I'm sad he's gone, but raising a glass seemed the right way to say 'bye...