Categories
Random

Phil Gyford's in the Guardian…

Much-loved weblogger, ex-colleague, dim-sum consuming, ultra-tall super-geek Phil Gyford got a well-deserved high-five today from the Guardian today in the online supplement (Man of the Moment). Much deserved, old chap! You are the r0X0r!

“It hadn’t really bothered me until it launched and everyone kept telling me what a big commitment it was,” he says. At the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference last year, Clay Shirky, the respected web expert, said that he realised weblogs had a future because of Gyford’s 10-year commitment to the Pepys site. He seems taken aback that others might look to him as a shining example as what is good about the internet, but his admirers are legion. “Phil’s one of the few people in this industry who produces much more than he promises; the complete opposite of the loud new media bullshitter,” says one friend. “He not only has the savvy to understand and build complex projects … but the motivation to see them through and keep them going for years.”

Categories
Net Culture

Graf report published…

The Graf report – the independent review of BBC Online – has just been published. Despite the fact that I’m basically on holiday today, I am now going to start reading it in earnest. I’ll probably knock out a summary of the key points later in the day, but in the meantime I’m going to keep the most pertinent quotes below. Be warned – this is likely to be a very long post, and only really of use if you want to get a quick sense of the material suggestions in the Graf report:

Ultimately, if BBC Online is to continue to operate in content areas that go beyond traditional programme support, the Board of Governors or whoever regulates this service will have to exercise some fine judgements. They must do so, and be seen to do so in a rigorous, open and fair minded way. (Page Six)

When asked how much they individually valued the BBC internet site, 18% of the sample said ‘very much’ or ‘quite a lot’. This grew to 36% of 16-34 year old internet users. Also, when respondents in our audience research were made aware of the amount of their licence fee invested in Online (approximately 3%), most respondents, including light and nonusers of BBC Online, felt that this sum was fairly insignificant. They considered that the opportunity presented by BBC Online, to access BBC resources in more depth and at their convenience, represented value for money. This was a similar finding to public responses at a Board of Governors Seminar in early 2003. (Page Six / Seven)

The remit and the strategic objectives, which guide BBC Online, should be more clearly defined around public purposes and/or programme-related content and should be clearly communicated to the public and the online marketplace. I recommend that:

  • The BBC considers aligning online services to the framework for online public purposes and strategic priorities, as outlined in chapters 8 and 9
  • BBC Online must actively seek to engage and communicate its purposes and strategic objectives to its audiences and the wider market
  • BBC Online continues to act as a home and guide to the internet for those who require it; it must however develop a more consistent and transparent approach to linking to all relevant sources (commercial and public) and ensure that its search tool prioritises user experience over BBC content
  • The remit and strategic objectives should be directly underpinned by a financial and performance measurement system, which clearly links the BBC’s remit and strategic objectives, through BBC-wide new media objectives down to divisional priorities. This improved clarity should work to encourage focus and further efficiencies

BBC Online should be clearly distinctive from commercial offerings. The quality of a particular service, however high, does not constitute distinctiveness per se. At times, it seems that BBCwide Online goals are not effectively transmitted to actual delivery – for example, goals of distinctiveness can lose out to the day-to-day realities of competitiveness and, in some cases, there seems little real difference between BBC Online and its commercial rivals, apart from advertising content. [particularly highlighted: What’s On / Linking Policies and Homepage design]

Given that search is becoming such a fundamental part of how the internet is used, it is worth keeping a publicly funded, UK competitor in the market place. The size of the BBC site means that it needs an internal search engine in any event; a condition of also providing a worldwide web search facility should, however, be that it is reorganised to provide a truly independent capability, i.e. not one that favours BBC sites. (Page Ten)

In future, therefore:

  • BBC Online should prioritise news, current affairs, information of value to the citizen, and education. Within these areas, it should prioritise innovative, rich, interactive content
  • I believe that it is legitimate for BBC Online to provide online Sport content. As a public service provider the BBC should, however, prioritise sports news, programme support, the major listed events, and the provision of material on minority sports, with an emphasis on encouraging participation. It should not be competing for other online rights, unless linked to broadcast ones
  • The BBC has a role as a home on the internet for those who wish to have a safe guide and introduction to the web. To fulfil this role properly, however, the BBC needs to rethink a number of areas within BBC Online, including the purpose and layout of its home page, its site navigation, its links policy, and its search engine

I, therefore, recommend that: The BBC sets a target of, at least, 25% for online content (excluding news) supplied by external and/or independent suppliers by the end of the current charter (Page Twelve)

The technical delivery of BBC Online is of a high standard. For example, BBC Radio Player, which enables users to access their favourite radio programmes or missed interviews within a two-week window has boosted radio listener numbers, and it has been met with broad consumer approval. If additional costs can be managed, the BBC might encourage more users to access rich, audio/visual content by the use of alternative streaming products, such as Windows Player and associated codec, or an open source alternative. (Page Twelve)

The BBC should continue to develop a ‘new relationship’ with users through more extensive engagement in community/user-generated content, which would further deploy the capacity of the medium to provide opportunities for interaction between users and producers. (Page Thirteen)

The present management structure of the BBC, however, can make it difficult for an outsider to engage constructively with the organisation. Its operational structure reflects the relationship of New Media to the BBC’s Television and Radio divisions, as well as to its central policy and strategy units. BBC Online’s resulting matrix management structure has encouraged ‘360’- commissioning, and more coherent internal budget and strategy setting processes. It can, however, also create a culture and organisation that, at best is confusing and, at worst, is a recipe for dodged responsibility when dealing with third parties. (Page Thirteen)

In practical terms, a precautionary approach means that, if there is a ‘close call’ between the public service benefits of a proposed BBC Online service and the costs of that service, the proposal should not be taken forward. If the governors take this approach, they will be wary of any proposals for new online services that are not accompanied by a reasoned judgement on market impact. (Page 14)

With respect to any positive market impact of BBC Online, although it is clear that BBC Online will have stimulated some internet take-up, the evidence that this has been (or will be) a significant impact is weak. (Page 15)

Page impressions are an industry standard (in the commercial sector), which describe, or at least give some indication of the pattern in consumer demand. The BBC News website’s page impressions have grown from 21.6 million page impressions per month in December 1998 to 187.6 million in December 2002. However, any assessment of the impact of BBC Online’s news and information services presents challenges, in so much as which metrics are capable of giving a fair and meaningful description. Whilst the only consistent year on year metrics for BBC Online are page impressions, they only provide a description of how many pages have been delivered to users rather than how many individual users (or ‘unique users’) the site has, or any sense of the ‘stickiness’ of the site in terms of time spent. (Page 19)

BBC Sport online has, as an example of the impact of these types of services, reported an increase in page impressions from 33.2m to 92.8m between December 2000 and December 2002, and it now reaches 17% of the UK internet universe. Factual evidence alone, however, cannot accurately illustrate this objective’s impact on audiences. The review’s audience research revealed users and non-users alike were surprised at the extent of information and features on topics that did not necessary align with BBC broadcast programming.

The BBC has also used a number of technological solutions to enable users to access programming relevant to their interests at any time, from across the networks. For example, the BBC’s Radio Player, which streams live and archived radio programming, has been a significant step in the BBC opening up its audio archives (now available within a seven day window). It should be noted that the provision of streaming services, such as the BBC Radio Player which provides live and archived material, is a relatively complex technical process and, as a consumer proposition, constitutes a new and innovative technology-based service. However, the BBC Radio Player primarily relies on users using a single streaming application, provided by Real. Such downloads can deter new or inexperienced internet users and, on the BBC site, users cannot in most instances choose to use an alternative steaming application such as Windows Media player, which is pre-installed on any computer with a Windows operating system.

The review’s audience research presented some reservations about the design and ease of navigation from the BBC Online home page. Users, other than the very inexperienced, tend to be goal orientated, seeking to find a specific service or information as quickly as possible, but members of the public found the BBC Online homepage too cluttered and that it did not adequately serve as a guide to the rest of BBC Online. They did however find that the navigation within specific genres such as News and Radio was generally effective, particularly when indexes were kept concise and sites used minimal graphics, which they felt could unnecessarily slow download times. (Page 25)

Applications developed by the BBC, such as DNA 26 have also enabled user-generated content to be more stimulating for the user and more efficiently managed. The current growth in web log usage also allows users to contribute richer content (e.g. to news stories) in the form of text, pictures, and audio and video clips.

MORI research, conducted for the BBC, found that 7% of UK users were encouraged to go online specifically by the BBC 30. However, more detailed research would need to be undertaken to establish whether the BBC had played a key role in developing skills or building confidence.

News, education, provision for minority communities, and developing users’ confidence and skills base in new technologies reveal themselves to be the service’s key priorities. (Page 31)

There would seem to be, at best, a lack of understanding of BBC Online’s core purposes by the wider market, and at worst, an unnecessary adverse impact on their investment priorities due to other providers loss of trust in BBC management’s intentions. Such lack of understanding and trust would not be surprising given that there is some evidence to suggest that even within the BBC, the online service’s limitations are not consistently well understood. Whilst pseudo mini ‘E-bay’ sites for the sale of junior football kit or downloadable mobile phone ‘Ring tones’ may be quickly withdrawn by central editorial policy, their very emergence would suggest that Online’s remit is so broad that it risks being at times mistaken for universal. (Page 31)

Reach is a key means to ensure that increasing numbers of licence fee payers can derive some value from the BBC’s online services. This strategic goal does, however, risk the BBC being perceived by commercial operators as an aggressive, and unfairly advantaged competitive force. Submitters to the review also argued that the BBC’s current inconsistent approach to linking, the prominence of BBC Online results in its search engine, and the low level of joint venture or externally commissioned projects have compounded this impression.

The review’s discussions with BBC staff made clear that, at a senior level, content divisions have an acute sense of their responsibility to make a ‘good’ judgement as to an appropriate balance between popular services and those that more obviously provide public service value. For example, whilst Sports feel they have a responsibility to provide up-to-date, impartial sports news, they also have an obligation to provide some entertainment and encourage participation in sports (for example, through Sports Academy). This strategy of case-by-case judgement has not, however, been actively articulated or discussed with the wider market, and the Board of Governors seek the public’s views on a particular service’s success in this regard on only an ad hoc basis. (Page 34)

BBC Online’s survey of users in early 2003 revealed that approximately 22% of users were from outside the UK 40. The BBC has developed geo-locators that can, with reasonable success (particularly for broadband content), re-direct overseas traffic to the BBC’s internationally facing site, which is funded by the World Service (and subsequently Grant-in-Aid rather than the licence fee). However, until such tools can guarantee 100% accuracy, and there is no risk of licence fee payers being blocked from reaching BBC content, more stringent measures have been deemed unworkable. Members of the public who took part in the review’s research were also not unduly concerned that non-licence fee payers were able to access the content and indeed, many felt proud that the UK had such a good advocate of the British nations on the internet. Some users were also appreciative of being able to access BBC content when abroad themselves, on holiday or on business. (Page 37)

Targets relating to ‘reach’ and consumption appear as priority targets throughout the period under review. The apparent prioritisation of reach as a target for BBC Online, particularly during the services rapid build has been interpreted by many competitors as evidence of the BBC’s fiercely competitive drive to gain audiences to the disadvantage of other commercial content providers. The BBC has argued that a reach target is essential to ensure public value is maximised. The BBC’s current reach target is based on users reached amongst the UK internet universe, rather than as a percentage of licence fee payers. (Page 38)

Submissions to the review made clear a sense of cynicism towards the Governors capacity to sufficiently challenge BBC management’s advice and strategic priorities for BBC Online. The dramatic growth in BBC Online’s budget, content genres and capabilities were cited as evidence of a service that been allowed to develop under a culture of ‘imperialism’, unfettered by careful consideration of the public value or market impact. (Page 39)

It is the nature and purpose of the BBC as a public-sector body (funded by the licence fee) to affect the mix of services consumed, and nature and conduct of other suppliers involved in the markets concerned. Thus, it might create economic changes or alleged ‘distortions’, or ‘crowd out’ private enterprise and investment. Such effects are inherent to public provision. (Page 41)

The KPMG report estimates that BBC Online may have reduced the total expenditure on UK online advertising by around ‘5 million per annum (out of an estimated total of the order of ‘200 million). However, while this figure has been the subject of significant dispute, its relationship to the public interest has not been established. We have not seen any reason why an online advertising market worth ‘X million per annum is any better or worse for the public interest than an online advertising market worth ‘Y million per annum. Some commercial operators have sought to demonstrate that BBC Online has an adverse market impact by showing that it diverts audiences and thereby revenues away from their own businesses. However, we found no reason why a consumer’s decision to use a BBC Online service rather than a commercial service should be considered in itself to be a factor operating against the public interest. (If BBC Online attracts audience in a way that has an adverse impact on competition this would be relevant to the assessment, as explained below.) (Page 43)

A common complaint about the BBC is that ‘the playing field is not level’. BBC Online has considerable competitive advantages derived from its access to licence fee revenues, and the cross-promotional and other resources that are connected to the BBC. If the BBC wants to provide certain online services it will almost certainly be able to do so, and does not need to receive any user revenues in order to justify its investment. However, genuine though they obviously are, and even though they might have adverse effects on competition as discussed below, these advantages do not preclude effective competition in the markets supplied by BBC Online. Effective competition does not need a level playing field. For instance, in the context of television the BBC competes against ITV1, Sky One and many others, and competition for audience appears generally effective despite the BBC’s funding advantages.

The development of the BBC’s online activities may also affect competition in other types of markets, such as those for technology. For example, the BBC’s principal choice of Real Networks’ proprietary audio and video encoding and streaming technologies means that consumers wishing to access the BBC’s online multimedia content will generally need to download and install RealPlayer on their computer. This feature could be considered to increase competition in markets for encoding software (on the grounds that other online providers can rely on the existence of a significant UK user base with access to RealPlayer, as well as to Windows Media Player which is pre-installed on the majority of computers), or to damage such competition (on the grounds that other/new encoding technologies are shut out from the market and cannot match either Microsoft’s or Real’s ability to establish a significant installed user base).

However, any potential adverse effect on competition arising from a requirement for Internet users to install RealPlayer in order to access BBC Online content would only exist if there was no alternative way for users to access substitutable content, which is to say in connection with a relevant content market in which BBC Online was in a dominant position. In these circumstances, competition law would place a special obligation on the BBC to avoid such a lessening of competition (as it would amount to an abuse of a dominant position).

For example, the existence (and editorial strength) of The BBC News website may have deterred newspaper publishers from introducing subscription charges on their online news websites, and thereby precluded investment in enhanced or specialised services on these sites, such as better archive searching tools and/or personalised news delivery services that would produce a genuinely customised online newspaper. At the current stage of market development we observe a mixture of free, registration-only, pay-per-view and pay-subscription models for online news content, which suggests that managerial decisions over appropriate business models could be a close call. For this reason, the impact of BBC Online, with a deep and wide supply of free news content, seems capable of having affected such decisions, and therefore of having affected the business models currently applied. In this way, BBC Online might have prevented ‘focused’ competition in these value-added and/or specialist services, and instead forced all UK mainstream news providers to compete with the BBC and with each other in broader online news markets. This outcome can be contrasted with professional business and financial news, where BBC Online does not operate and commercial providers compete in supplying a range of high-value-added subscription services. (Page 54)

Whilst these examples indicate that, in theory, BBC Online may have lessened competition in a range of online content markets, commercial stakeholders did not provide robust evidence (such as business plans or strategy papers) that could support these hypotheses. It has been put to us that the impact of BBC Online is so large that many investment ideas never get off the drawing board. This factor could reconcile the lack of evidence with the hypothesis that BBC Online has a significant deterrent effect.

Whilst this review did not uncover incontrovertible evidence that BBC Online has lessened competition in online and related markets, the level of concern among commercial operators and the inherent plausibility of the mechanism can be taken as an indication of the probability of future impacts of this nature. These impacts may be caused both by BBC Online’s supply of online content markets and by its supply of wholesale content markets. (Page 57)

Increased broadband and 3G access speeds and new compression technologies are already allowing a faster transfer of data to PCs and mobile handsets and this trend will accelerate over the next five years. Average broadband connection speeds will increase rapidly, permitting the reliable delivery of high resolution streaming and the rapid downloading of near-broadcast quality video. Mobile handsets will also become viable mainstream devices for downloading and consuming content, as hardware (including processor, storage, and display features) and software develop ‘ although such services are unlikely to become widely available at ‘massmarket’ prices for several years. These developments will make the Internet a genuine potential ‘third broadcasting medium’ for BBC content and services. BBC Online already provides live and archived (from the previous week) access to all of the BBC’s radio services, which can be consumed via a narrowband (at a tolerable sound quality) or broadband connection. Over the next two to three years, it will also become perfectly possible for many Internet users to stream or download full-length BBC television programmes (as opposed to just video clips); within the next five years, the majority of mobile devices will be capable of receiving and storing live and archived BBC radio (e.g. the ‘Chart Show’) and limited television (e.g. news bulletins; comedy clips) services. (Page 60)

The growing popularity of audio and video services over the Internet makes them a central component of future online service offerings, from a consumer point of view; as such, these services will be an area of core strategic importance for the BBC (and its competitors) in the coming years. As a publicly funded content provider, the BBC must strive for the optimal balance between distinctiveness, on the one hand, and audience reach on the other ‘ as well as the ability to influence the overall market. The provision of an appropriate level of audio and video services will be an important element in achieving this balance, and in preserving the attractiveness and relevance of BBC Online in the future. (Page 61)

More to come… (Sorry about the length – I’m really just pulling out the stuff I think is immediately pertinent and I know there’s a fair amount of it). I might filter it down a little later, or embolden the stuff that I think’s particularly interesting.

Categories
Random

Some dumb stuff I bought off iTunes…

Over the last two weeks I have bought 53 songs from the iTunes Music Store. I didn’t expect to buy any. I just get bored easily and then I’m there, mucking around, roaming around, desperately looking for some new exciting way to throw money away. And yes – it’s true that there’s a fairly limited selection of music on the store and that is a considerable problem (of the five hundred and fifty odd songs that my iTunes stash considers to be “Five Star”, only 135 are anywhere on the store that I can find (Music Store link: One Hundred Pounds of Plastic Perfection). But despite the limited selection, if you dig around it is more than possible to find some really good old classic stuff (The Slits: I Heard it Through the Grapevine) or stuff you’ve discovered from Audioscrobbler (Modest Mouse’s Float On) or really interesting cover versions (Ryan Adams’ Wonderwall or (for geeks) They Might be Giants’ Whe Does the Sun Shine). And then there’s all that stuff that you listened to when you were a teenager or a kid and realistically you can’t just go out and buy it because that would be really embarrassing, but you can just download it and – it’s not the same as buying it, OK. Which I think excuses some of the cheesier things that I’ve bought (cough – the shame). And then there’s the watching something on TV and just going, “Well I kind of like it, and it’s only 79p…” (Music from the OC How Good it Can Be). And the odds and sods of Classical Music that the store actually excels in providing… Like when I needed to listen to Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz about million times at work a couple of weeks back.

Okay – I admit it. The iTunes UK Music Store UK may have opened up a few really good songs for me, but it’s also almost forced me to download about a million really cheesy bits of crap. You guys have to save me. Have you found any hidden gems?

Categories
Random

London on a Saturday = Hell on bloody earth…

You go away for two days and all hell breaks loose. But then again, who cares – it’s someone else’s hell, right? Completely randomly and spontaneously on Wednesday I decided that I’d go up and visit my family for a couple of days to try and get some mental perspective. Two days with my brother and beautiful views and use of a car and some decent food and totally quiet sleeping environments. Terrifyingly calming. See if you can guess the common feature of the following photos:

That’s right! They don’t have any bloody fucking people in them! Arriving back in London on a Saturday afternoon in Midsummer was like being stuck in a bloody battery farm after being free range. I’m finding it harder and harder to deal with all .. the .. bloody .. morons .. milling around London at two miles an hour, holding hands while walking about three feet apart from each other, glancing in each other’s eyes longingly and casually swinging their pastel shopping bags around while behind them fifty or sixty people are stuck at their pedestrian snail’s pace – each and everyone thinking so loud it must be practically audible, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?! And would there be a jury in the land who would convict me if I pulled out a sword right now and ran you all through?!”

Categories
Academia

What you should know before starting a doctorate…

A few days ago an interesting article on Graduate schools circulated around the web. The article suggested that Graduate school has many of the features of a cult and that some people staying on to undertake postgraduate studies almost needed to be deprogrammed until they understood that there was value in life outside the Academy. Here (just in case you don’t have the stamina to read a short pithy well-written article) are the first two paragraphs:

Several years ago, the professional career counselor Margaret Newhouse wrote an essay for The Chronicle called “Deprogramming From the Academic Cult.” Newhouse argued that graduate school in the humanities indoctrinates its students into believing that they are failures if they do not remain inside the ivory tower, even if there are no suitable academic jobs for them. Career counselors, she argued, have to find ways to persuade unemployed Ph.D.’s to believe that the outside world is not evil and that they are not apostates if they do something besides teaching and research.

Although I am currently a tenure-track professor of English, I realize that nothing but luck distinguishes me from thousands of other highly-qualified Ph.D.’s in the humanities who will never have full-time academic jobs and, as a result, are symbolically dead to the academy. Even after several years, many former graduate students grapple with feelings of shame and failure that, to outsiders, seem completely irrational.

A little under seven years ago I left a doctorate in Classics that I’d been undertaking at Bristol University. I’d been working on my PhD for three years – time initially very well spent and which produed enormous amounts of reasonably good-quality work. Over the first two and a half years or so I produced around sixty thousand words on models of the mind, mythology, story-telling and identification; I’d taught various undergraduate classes on drama, mythology and Ancient Greek language and I’d produced two papers (on on anachronistic interpretation and one on The Bacchae) which I delivered at national conferences in Nottingham and New York. However, from the end of my second year I started experiencing a slow deterioration in my work, had a number of crises of motivation and started to feel that I was being overwhelmed by the material and sheer amount of commentary and opinion that I needed to get to grips with. I started to feel that I was never going to be able to produce work that I was going to be happy with – that I was never going to find the answers that I was looking for. Then followed a few months of highly self-destructive behaviour when I felt that I was starting to fail, followed by a few months of anti-depressants and then the final realisation that if I was going to complete my work it would take me years of penury and misery and that I was likely to have problems finding any kind of employment afterwards. And then the realisation that I no longer had faith that the work I was producing would have any kind of impact or be taken in any way seriously. And that’s when I decided to quit.

If you believe the narrative that I’ve just told you (and there’s no reason why you should simply swallow it whole – I’ve taken considerable license with it for speed and clarity) then you might well be asking yourself why I went from doing good work to leaving academia completely, and whether I regret it. I ask whether you believe it because I’m not sure that I believe it myself – I find the whole period difficult to interpret and difficult to feel confident about because of the sheer weight of the different interpretations, personal relationships, arguments, tensions and various senses of betrayals that I came – by the end – to associate fully with my time in doctoral work. And here’s where the article about the cultishness of Graduate School comes in again. Because whlie I don’t necessarily believe that it does have cultish tendencies, I do feel programmed by circumstance to forfeit my right to a public opinion about it. Any statement I make about academia – or my experience of academia – that isn’t entirely complimentary must necessarily be seen in the context of my own failure to complete the process. Because I’m not now Doctor Coates, any statement I make that puts any blame on anyone other than my own inadequacies can be dismissed as sour grapes or an inability to accept failure or inadequacy in one field or another.

I’m not going to fight this assumption – I feel comfortable in admitting that whatever else may have led to my ungracious departure from academia, I clearly did not have the necessarily discipline to carry through the work I’d started to its conclusion. I failed. But I’ve seen a lot of other people fall hard off the back of the academic lorry as well, and a good number of them I believe have done so not because they’ve failed the system but because the system has failed them. And they feel similarly confused and conflicted – unable to determine where the failure was their own. Even many of the people I know who have completed their doctorates have experienced the burn of tarmac on their departure from the academy. These people were intellectually able, self-disciplined and strong and fought through the academy with all the discipline and strength they could muster and were still brought low by it. And worse still, these people feel the same anxiety that I do about talking about it – any rejection is in itself an admission of failure. Here’s where the academy’s cultishness emerges most strongly – because it’s an institution where you can only fail yourself and your leaders. They can never fail you.

I want to talk a little about the reality of post-graduate work for people who are considering it because I think you should know what you’re letting yourself in for. Courses which are mostly taught are almost always achievable. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’d recommend a Masters course to almost anyone. On the other hand, Universities often encourage their pupils to stay with them at their University because they get money for students. I would advise you to never do this. It can be very difficult for undergraduate students to adjust to the new roles and status that undertaking a Masters should afford you. It’s particularly difficult if you’re doing those role-changes with people you have been used to being highly deferential towards. And why would you want to work more with them anyway? Unless they really are the world-leading experts in their fields, you should be looking elsewhere for different perspectives, different expertises and different lessons to learn. You’ll learn much more from a new teacher than from the one who has already articulated much of their approach and beliefs and ways of seeing the world through your undergraduate work with them.

Masters aside then, what of the research degree? Here I’m going to be blunt. First things first, please believe that academic departments get money for postgraduate students and that more money means more and (and more stable) jobs for the staff. You must never forget that while all academics have altruistic motives, they also have a vested interest in encouraging you to stay with them. Again consider why they’re suggesting you continue your work, and think particularly hard if they’re advocating you staying with them.

Next think about your skills and expertises and whether or not you actually want to be an academic after you’ve tried to complete your course. Now think about whether or not you’re going to be the person who actually gets the really hard to come by academic job afterwards (this is particularly true in the Humanities). If you don’t want to be a History lecturer and do academic research for the rest of your life, then don’t do a doctorate. If you’re not sure, then get sure before you sign on the dotted line. Academic jobs are not easy to get and they’ll all be looking for certain skills and expertises that are relevant to the teaching of your discipline. If you want to spend years doing research into an incredibly obscure branch of history, then bear in mind that no one may wish to teach courses in that particular obscure branch of history. If you’re going to be revolutionarily cross-disciplinary, then consider – are there any departments in the world who could hire you when you were done? And if not, then don’t do it!

Doctorates don’t count for much outside academia – and in fact they may count against you. If you can’t find a directly relevant area for subsequent professional work, then many employers are likely to look at a 25-30 year old person with three-six years of post-graduate work as being a strange and slightly worrying employment prospect – they’re going to be too smart for their own good, too ivory-towerish, too specialist, out of touch with the way that the “real world” works. If you’re working in an area where there’s a lot of commercial interest (say the way in which people use technology) then you may very well find enormous career opportunities open up before you. This is not likely to happen if you’ve spent six years writing on gender roles in Baudelaire – no matter how ground-breaking the work.

And here’s the other lesson – doctoral work is professional training. You have to think about it like that – you’re being made into a lecturer / professor / teacher / researcher. The aim of doctoral work is not – no matter what anyone tells you – to think up good stuff and write great works and reveal your genius to the world. The aim is to make professional people who can teach undergraduates, deliver papers and – yes – also (subsequently) push the discipline further in one direction or another. You have to approach your post-graduate work in this way. The most successful doctoral students in my experience are the ones that are thorough and careful and take on relatively unambitious projects which don’t stretch the assumptions or structures of the discipline too much. They’re the ones that finish their doctoral work and go on to useful teaching positions (and then may or may not start exploring more widely). It’s definitely not the best and the brightest, the most imaginative thinkers or the people with the great ideas that get through. If they get through it’s because they’re thorough and they’re careful and they’re professional and treat it as it should be treated – as a job of work rather than a calling or an exploration.

Which brings me to drop-out rates. Another thing you won’t be told is how many people don’t complete their doctorates. I’ve heard various figures mentioned, but I believe that around 50% of people who start doctorates don’t get a PhD out of it. This may be humanities only or it may be throughout the academy. An enormous proportion of people simply never finish the things because it’s not quite what they were expecting when they started. And many of these people will feel like failures, will come into the job market late and will find it harder to get ahead in their new chosen career. It’s not clear to me whether it’s harder to get a job with a completed irrelevant doctorate or an incomplete one. It’s not easy with with either.

And then there’s the day-to-day atmosphere of it. When you’re doing research, you work almost exclusively alone – for three to five years. You should spend large periods of that time in a library – ideally (again taking into account that this is a training course and a career) you should use the working hours that you might expect from a job – eight hours a day. You will get paid either nothing or a barely livable wage to do this work (again – more true for humanities students). This is not a glamourous occupation, by any means. And as I’ve said before, there is no glamour in the work itself, a restricted chance that you’ll get a career in academia and a very real possibility that by undertaking this work you’re going to make yourself less employable. The “positive” aspects of the lifestyle (apart from your gradual progress towards getting your doctorate) are limited, but you do get relative freedom to think and explore ideas, you are forced to be self-motivating and self-determined and – when things are going well – you will get self-respect and the respect of some other people (who in my opinion are rather easily impressed). These freedoms, and the self-respect and the respect of others that you get from undertaking a doctorate will stay with you (to an extent) if you go into the badly paid field of academia. If you do not, they will swiftly evaporate.

Which brings me (briefly) to my final point. Do not believe there is no worthwhile life outside academia! It’s difficult sometimes, when you’ve been in the education system for getting on for twenty years to remember that there’s an enormous panoply of jobs outside academia and not all of them are sullied by the feeble crust of crass commercialism. It is more than possible to find enjoyable, ethically-sound, world-improving work outside academia – in fact it’s probably no harder than it is to find similar work inside the Academy. The stereotype (and the assumption of many potential postgraduate students) that study for the sake of study and the stretching and mental gymnastics of intellectual work are somehow naturally superior and elite practices would hold more water with me if such warming-up regularly translated into actual attempts to build or refigure the world in positive ways. If such goals are your intent – consider carefully what effect you are actually likely to have. Is the respect of a narrow and dishevelled set of peers (and a steady stream of undergraduate neophytes) enough to get you through the night? If not, consider that there is good work to be done outside University and that some of it pays rather better and is equally interesting.

If you’re considering a longer research-based degree, please consider carefully what you’re letting yourself in for. Remember the key facts: only fifty percent of people come out of the other end of this process with a doctorate and even then they have to look towards finding (mostly pretty badly-paid) work. Many of them won’t that work despite having proved their discipline, committment and intelligence. Do yourself a favour and make sure that you go in with your eyes open – that you know how unpleasant the work can be, that you know what a risk you’re taking with your time and with your life, that you’re strong enough to deal with the self-doubt and the humiliation and the shame and the anxiety that the work can cause and that you’re totally sure of the career path that you are choosing for yourself, before you agree to continue with your studies. If you don’t do this, then you may very well find yourself in a cult that genuinely believes that everyone else is basically wasting their lives and from which there is no easy or elegant way to escape.

Note added 25th September 2004: Thanks to Phil Young for sending in this link which I hope might be useful to people who enjoyed this article: Beyond the Ivory Tower.

Categories
Technology

First impressions of Tiger…

A few first impressions of Apple’s upcoming Operating System: Tiger:

  • Spotlight – basically an Apple native verstion of Launchbar with a few self-evidently nice features (searching Mail). After using Launchbar for a while I can state without question that it feels like part of the OS after a while, so if the Apple version has the similar ability to run it without using the mouse, then I’ll be pretty happy. I doubt Objective Development will be, of course…
  • iChat AV – the new version allows you to conference call ten people and video chat with loads of people too. That’s pretty cool. I’m pretty bloody impressed by that. It’s going to be pretty awesome and totally what I’ve been hoping they’d do. It fits in really well with some other thinking I’ve been doing…
  • Safari RSS – sites with RSS feeds are marked when you go to them, which is cool, and then you can subscribe to them directly through the interface. I’m not convinced by their interaction design here – I suspect I’ll keep using NetNewsWire for the time being – but it’s certainly a positive step that can’t help but make RSS penetration…
  • Dashboard – basically this one is a fucking rip off of Konfabulator and I’m pretty pissed off about it. I’m not a particular fan of the paradigm, but I don’t think that’s pertinent – unlike RSS feeds and the Launchbar knock-off there doesn’t seem to me to be really any reason for building this into the OS, it’s not particularly interesting or powerful and it really does seem just like nicking someone else’s ideas and lobbing them into your Operating System because you can. Harsh, Steve. Harsh…
  • Automator – as far as I can tell this is a GUI for AppleScript, allowing people like me who get scared by even the simplest of scripting languages to automate tasks quickly and easily without ending up dribbling into a cup. My personal jury is out on how useful it’ll actually be on a day-to-day basis but that doesn’t mean that I’m not impressed. AppleScript for the rest of us?
  • VoiceOver – a spoken interface for the Mac. I’m not really qualified to comment on the technology, but certainly the aspiration is good and important and I don’t doubt it’ll serve Apple well in cracking governmental markets. My only quibble – I’m not so impressed by the little white man they made in Illustrator to put in the logo. He looks a bit lame and … bendy …
  • .Mac sync – a revised version of iSync with a simpler UI and apparently some developer hooks. It still pisses me off that you have to have a .Mac account to do any syncing across the internet. I can’t quite believe that function is worth the $60 a year, nor do I think it’s even vaguely conceivable that you couldn’t explain to someone how to set up a server to handle that stuff themselves… Seems like a slightly shitty attempt to drill money out of you in an entirely random way…
  • Better Unix – neat! I think!
  • XCode 2.0 – wish I understood it!
  • System Wide Metadata Indexing – this is seriously cool and API’d up the wazoo so hopefully it will start to lay the foundations of the Finder technologies of the future…

All in all the big news for the operating system is the integration of search and metadata technologies into the heart of the Operating System. The Safari RSS and iChat AV stuff is pretty cool too and everything else looks like tweaks, gimmicks or outright rip-offs. I wonder when it’s out?

Categories
Design Net Culture Radio & Music

Developing a URL structure for broadcast radio sites…

One of the most common questions I’ve had about the Radio 3 redesign work that we’ve been doing has been about the URL structures that we have used to identify individual episodes of individual programmes. I’m really keen to address these questions with a full and maniacally over-detailed post because I think the issue of how we map broadcast programming to web URLs is a really interesting one, and because I think we’ve done some good work here that other people might find useful or interesting. Drew McLellan writes:

I see URLs like /radio3/showname/pip/randomcode which, as I understand it, would require a user to locate a particular show through the site’s navigational system. It looks like there’s no way of guessing a URL. Is that right? What’s ‘pip’? That makes no sense to me. My preference for date-based material is a path with the date in it – like /radio3/showname/2004/06/27/ Is there a reason why a URL format similar to this wasn’t chosen?

So the first thing to explain is that Radio 3’s new site is particularly interesting and ground-breaking because it doesn’t just have a page for every broadcast, it has a page for every episode. This is way cooler than having a page for every broadcast, but the full implications of it aren’t immediately easy to digest. Basically it means that there would only be one page for any documentary no matter how many times that documentary is repeated. That one specific page then becomes the definitive home for that episode of that documentary on the BBC and all subsequent information or supplementary material that is relevant to that episode can be stuck onto that page at any point in time. Imagine it as being a bit like having an entry in IMDB for that particular radio episode. It’s like creating the basis for an ever growing encyclopaedia of Radio 3 programming, and it should make it really easy to search for information about a programme without getting overwhelmed by dozens of versions of the same page, each containing little odds and sods of information, none of which are aware that they’re all talking about the same thing.

Having said all that, lots of programmes don’t ever get repeated on Radio 3. Let us take as an example, “Morning on 3”. This is basically the equivalent of the DJ-led shows that we’re all familiar with and which are common to radio networks the world over. These things are just broadcast live. That’s the whole point! It wouldn’t make any sense for it to be repeated. Some of the music on it will clearly be repeated – just like any popular music radio show, but the programme itself will not. For programmes like “Morning on 3” Drew’s URL structure (which is familiar to all of us who run weblogs) would work perfectly. You can imagine very easily getting to today’s episode of Morning on 3 via the URL bbc.co.uk/radio3/morningon3/2004/06/27/. That would be the perfect weblog-like kind of programme, where every individual entry/episode could only be connected to one moment in time.

But if wouldn’t work if they programme ever got repeated. By definition a programme that gets repeated has been broadcast on multiple occasions in time. Imagine a programme that was originally broadcast on June 27th 1985 and which is then repeated the following evening and then again nineteen years later (tonight). What would be the date-based URL for a programme like that? Well one approach would be to go for the date on which it was first broadcast. But what’s the experience of that for a user? They’ve gone to a schedule page for today (say) and they’ve clicked on the link to a programme that’s on this evening and found themselves with a URL from 1985. A plausible reaction would be to think that you’d got lost somewhere along the line and were on the wrong page. How did I end up here?. This situation gets worse when you consider that since we started capturing programmes on the 4th of June, any programme that was originally broadcast before that date would be assigned a URL based on a fairly meaningless broadcast date…

So, a date-based URL structure would work fine for programmes that never get repeated, but wouldn’t work very well for any programme that did get repeated. Immediately, we’ve got a problem then, because even though 99.9% of the time we know that “Morning on 3” won’t get repeated, we can’t exactly guarantee it. Just recently on the BBC we’ve had an unedited re-broadcasting of the live coverage of the 1979 General Election and the daily re-broadcasting in real-time of the Home Service’s commentary on the D-Day landings. So even those topical programmes we’ve talked about could quite easily be repeated.

But let’s pretend for a moment that isn’t too much of a problem. Let’s also pretend that we can easily distinguish between those programmes that almost certainly won’t get repeated on the one hand (and say they might work with a date-based URL structure) and those that very easily could or will get repeated on the other (say anything that’s pre-recorded before it goes out on air). What kind of URL structure should we use for the latter?

One obvious and simple answer is that we should use episode numbers. The Radio 3 show Composer of the Week is broadcast each weekday around lunchtime and then is repeated the following week at midnight. This means that there are two episodes broadcast on each day (another place where date-based URLs might get confusing or seem broken). If we used episode numbers, however, that wouldn’t be so much of a problem. So you can imagine the URL being something more like bbc.co.uk/radio3/cotw/episode/2345. This would allow you to predict sequence and order and would make the URL structure nice and hackable by users. Except then you have to think about what you should base that episode number on. Should you base it on the definitive numbers for that episode – ie. the ones that the makers of Composer of the Week use? How should you source that number? Do you trust that numbering scheme to be consistent and reliable? On the other hand should you start with an arbitrary number? And what happens if your system for determining repeats isn’t fool-proof and you accidentally assign the wrong number to an episode at some point? The worst eventuality would be that you end up with episode numbering schemes that start to wander out of sync with one another because someone pulls and episode or a schedule changes. And then you get gaps in your URL structure, or programmes out of order. Imagine a circumstance where after six months of perfect running you accidentally pick something up as being a repeat when it isn’t… Suddenly that episode has to be reinserted into the scheme somewhere by hand, or you have to change the URLs for any episodes that have been made into pages before you realised. The URLs break or what they point to change, and that whole part of the site stops being human hackable or readable and starts becoming institutionally and forever broken.

Or you could do it by subject for some of the URLs. Again – Composer of the Week is broken into five part weekly chunks. You could have a URL structure for programmes like this which highlighted those divisions: bbc.co.uk/radio3/mozart/part/4 or bbc.co.uk/radio3/mozart/4. Here the problems are potential URL length and namespace issues. And while they might remain human-readable, they’re not machine predictable in any way. So even this kind of URL structure has its problems.

I want to make something clear at this point – each one of these URL schemes could have worked very nicely for that particular kind of programming. But in the end that’s not enough. Because fundamentally as soon as you’ve decided to use different URL structures for different kinds of programming you’re immediately in trouble – because radio programming isn’t a static thing, it changes and evolves – an individual programme brand (say Choral Evensong) might change format, change frequency or be cancelled. Another programme might be created with the same name ten years later. And each week there will be a number of specials and one-offs and schedule fillers (this week on Radio 3 there were around seven one-offs, including tonights zeroPoints) as well as regular short-series or new brands. Suddenly there’s a time-consuming and fairly-skilled job that has to be undertaken every day – which URL structure should this new programme use… And you’re never going to be one hundred percent correct. And so pages are going to be moved and URLs break and all hell will break loose…

Which brings us to the URL structure that we went with in the end and the rationale for it. Our first principle was that in order to stop URLs breaking and to stop the possibilities of human error in assigning URL structures to brands incorrectly (and to deal with the possibility of random repeats et al) the URLs should all follow exactly the same structure. Fundamentally, this meant that date-based URLs had to go out of the window straight away because they weren’t suitable for every episode of every brand. The only URL structure that we could identify that didn’t actually break in any circumstances is one that’s based on an episode number or identifier of some kind. After careful consideration we decided that we didn’t want to give the impression of human readability or order or structure where that structure was inevitably likely to be broken or flawed or mismatched with other identifiers. And we decided that whatever additions to the URL that we made had to be short – it had to be able to be appended onto the end of a brand name without sprawling out of control. More importantly still, we decided that it shouldn’t break any naming conventions already used around the site or make the site harder to maintain.

Which is where ‘pip’ comes in. We’d already decided that we didn’t want to have the episodes sitting in the top directory of the brand. We’re in this for the long-term, and we wanted to make sure that we could guarantee that whatever future changes were made to the content management of the site, however many new things or features were added to it, we’d never have collisions between these features and the episode pages. We decided to place all episode pages into a subdirectory, and after much discussion of what that should be called (episodes – too long, not always an obvious term for a news programme / eps – too likely to already be used and too close to the name of a file format for us to be sure that it wouldn’t overwrite anything at any time in the future etc) we eventually decided to stake our claim on the directory name /pip/ meaning (if you really want to know) nothing more than ‘programme information page’. [PS. In a few weeks time, this directory should contain a list of all the episodes for each brand, meaning that you can hack back the directories and keep going up a level in the site heirarchy from individual episode to all episodes to brand to network to broadcaster.]

With the final part of the URL – the episode number itself – having taken into account all the problems that we might have with sourcing and guaranteeing the integrity of the ‘definitive’ numbers for any given series of programmes, and having considered the problems associated with any and all possible bugs that might emerge (what if two random programmes started to be considered as repeats of each other and had to be broken apart – what URLs to give them? What if the programmes were broadcast out of sequence oor we started running the site halfway through the broadcasting of a run and had to move around the episode numbers later etc) we came to the conclusion that the actual episode number should be a non-human readable short code. After much deliberation we came to the conclusion that a five-character alphanumeric hash would be short enough to not break URLs in e-mail and long enough to give us up to 60 million different identifiers. And of course we’ve kept it as a directory level URL to future proof the URLs against changes in the technology that we’ve used to build the site. (You’ll notice some index.shtml’s around the place, but we’re going to clear that up).

The alphanumeric short code that we’ve got now also opens up a whole range of new possibilities. Because these identifiers are unique across all of Radio 3, we suddenly have a way to point to (and potentially manipulate) every episode that’s broadcast on the network. We’re still looking into the various affordances that this identifier might provide us with and we’ll let you know what we come up with.

So – in summary – we have a URL structure that is eminently suitable for dealing with the breadth and wealth of programming that could come out of a radio network – a URL that will shortly be totally hackable to the extent that each and every level of the directory structure will contain content appropriate to its place in the site’s structural heirarchy ( broadcaster / network / programme brand / episode list / individual episode), and which is human readable as far down its length as is practical. Drew’s quite right – in order to guess the URL for an entry you do need to use the site’s inbuilt navigational systems. However, it’s almost impossible to be able to build URLs for radio programming that are completely human guessable and as reliable and stable as we’re determined to make them.

We’re thinking five to twenty-five years in advance here, making sure that the URLs of pages about radio programmes on Radio 3 could conceivably last as long as the web does. We’re in this for the long-haul…

Categories
Design Radio & Music

The new Radio 3 site launches!

Ladies and Gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to direct your attention towards the new Radio 3 website, which I (along with a great number of other people from every discipline and from all across the BBC) have been working on for the last few months. The teams that created the site have been among the best I’ve ever worked with and if started naming names I’d be here all week.

But what’s so special about it, I hear you ask? Quite apart from the sterling design work from Paul Finn, we’ve been working with Radio 3’s team to make the site one of the most genuinely web-native sites I’ve ever seen – designed to effectively reflect the station’s programming online in a way that’ll be better for the site’s current users, for search engines and for anyone who would want to link to the site – including (but certainly not limited to) webloggers. Specifically the new site includes:

  • A web page with a stable long-term URL for each and every episode of each and every programme that is broadcast on Radio 3 – a page that will always have basic information upon it, but can also be supplemented with more content by the production teams that actually make the programmes. (Lebrecht.live, World Routes’ “Cairo Nights” etc.)
  • New schedule pages that are persistent and will remain on the site in perpetuity, each item upon which linking through to the specific episode page for that programme – allowing you to navigate to any episode of any show by the date and time it was broadcast upon (particularly useful for helping you to find out what was playing yesterday when you were listening to the radio in the car).
  • Better navigational aids, including the ability to easily see when the next (and last) episodes of your favourite programmes are on, the ability to navigate between episodes of a programme by date, and a full daily schedule on the front page of the site, linking through to every episode.
  • Improved URL structures, easily spiderable pages and nice content-related title tags that should make each page easier to bookmark and find through the BBC’s search engines and search engines across the web.

I could go on – I’m terribly proud of the work that everyone has done on the site and it’s only going to get better over the next few weeks. But good work be damned! The most important thing is that I think it’s going to serve the site’s users better – both existing, and (perhaps) people who’ve never listened to Radio 3 before and can now be exposed to its wealth of programming over the web more effectively than ever before.

PS. Hello to Leigh, Justin, Andrew, Gregory from Radio 3, Paul and Sarah from the Technology and Design team and everyone else who worked on the project: Zillah, Rija, Tim, Mike, Matt B, Paul C, Manjit, Ian, Jason, Tony, Clare, Dan, Webb, Chris K, Simon N and anyone else I might have forgotten about. And a special personal wave to Margaret Hanley and Gavin Bell for being the best creative partners and co-conspirators a boy could wish for. You all rock!

Categories
Random

Two questions about stress and work…

Weird day. Really good bits. Really tiring bits. Feel slightly washed out and exhausted. Can’t tell if I’m a big drama queen or not. Met the new Director General of the BBC today. Launched a site and stuff. More on the important bits tomorrow. Question of the moment: Should you be stressed in stressful situations or should you be calm through them? Personal theory – stress gives you power and if corralled and put into your service is fairly useful. Not sure I’m correct. If I’m wrong, I’m going to have to restructure my belief system a lot. Other question: What do people do when they’re not working?

Categories
Random

So very near…

Guess what! Light at the end of the tunnel! Give me a few more days… Just a few more days… Then I can do stuff again! Like write things on my weblog, look after my community, take days off, have a haircut, clean up my flat, organise a holiday! Just had my first weekend in about two months where I don’t feel under pressure or stressed, and it’s practically over and I don’t feel anywhere near calm or relaxed, but I feel a hell of a lot better than I did this time last week and I’m thinking that maybe it’s the beginning of a less frantic period. I’m looking forward to being part of the world again.