You might vaguely remember that about a week ago I was on the BBC Radio 4 series Broadcasting House. Well thanks to the miracle of computers, if you want to you can hear the whole feature on corporate weblogging over here. It also features a variety of other comments by people like Heather Armstrong, if that’s your kind of thing. And now – I’m off to explore the wilds of Hayes Valley, find Cal Henderson and have a drink before I fall over and go to sleep.
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A month has passed with no news…
Almost exactly a month ago today I sent off a form to an organisation called Traceline to ask them to help me find my father. Three days later I wrote a little post about my uncertainty about what would happen next. Two and a half weeks later, I briefly alluded to the fact that I’d not heard anything yet. A week further on, and we’re back to today, and is there any news? Unfortunately, no.
Of course, I honestly don’t know what to expect. This process could take a month, it could take two months, it could take six. I think I assumed I’d have heard something by now because the expedited process (where you know their date of birth) is supposed to only take a week. But time just keeps passing with very little to show for it. At the moment I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re not just torturing me, but give it another month or so and I might rename them in slightly more colourful language.
So how have I been dealing with it? Difficult question. Thanks for asking. I guess the most honest answer would probably that I’m kind of confused about the whole thing. About two weeks ago, in the middle of a particularly stressful time at work, I was in a meeting and my phone rang. The caller’s number was withheld. I couldn’t answer the phone in the room. I hung up on them. They rang again, so I turned my phone off. They didn’t leave a message. After the meeting I started asking all the people I thought who might have called me, but none of them had done. And gradually I started to wonder to myself – who could have been at the other end of the line? Who had I hung up on? What did it mean? What had I done? Had I just lost my chance forever? These thoughts stayed with me for days.
In retrospect, what this situation means is simply that this whole process clearly means an awful lot to me – much much more than I had been expecting. This was probably not a pivotal moment – in fact it was almost certainly a trivial moment – no more or less nerve-wracking that the rest of the month has been. I just momentarily had something in particular I could focus on. Or at least so I tell myself. Patience, Tom. Be patient.
One development that has happened is that I decided to talk to my mother about the whole thing. For some reason, I had decided originally that I was going to do this completely on my own without getting the rest of my family involved. I don’t think I can explain why particularly except to say that there are things in the world that I find hard to look at directly and family don’t tend to let you keep things in your peripheral vision. There’s probably some other stuff going on too – I’ve wanted independence from my family and from restrictive encompassing structures like families for years as well. This could have been another attempt to assert that. But that’s a whole other industrial-sized can of worms that I think I should probably avoid opening right now.
Anyway, I don’t think my mother realises how strange and difficult this whole absent father thing is for me, or how much bluster and brashness I’ve had to cultivate to be even vaguely able to approach it head on. So when I said that I had something that I wanted to tell her (and when I obviously had trouble getting it out), my liberal mother (with so much faith in me, evidently) immediately assumed that I had contracted some fatal gay disease. When I explained instead that I’d decided to look for my father, she seemed totally cool about the whole thing, almost a little surprised that I found the whole thing so emotionally charged. Typically she was also terribly – aggravatingly – efficient about it too. She kept trying to tell me what I should be doing next, even though I repeatedly pointed out that it had taken me twenty odd years to get to this stage and that maybe I wasn’t quite ready to treat the whole thing like a crusade quite yet.
I think I finally got through to her when I talked about my biggest concern – that I would find my father only for him to be repulsed by me because I’m gay. I’m not ashamed of being gay – in fact I’m proud of myself for having the nerve to be publically gay and not hiding it. And normally, I’m not terribly interested whether other people have issues with me being gay or not. But with your own father… I don’t know… I think I’m looking for him in part to help me understand where I came from and why I am the way I am. He seems to be the closest in the family to sharing my passions and interests. I kind of want him to be proud of what i’ve accomplished – i don’t want to be a let-down or an embarrassment. I certainly don’t want to be ahborent to him. I don’t want him to find me disgusting. And I have to face the possibility that he might. He’s in his sixties. There’s no guarantee that he’s of a liberal mindset, no way of knowing what his reaction might be at all. It’s a concern. It’s a big concern.
So what now? I’m in the States. I’m going to conferences. I’m keeping myself busy and thinking about wider and more disparate material. When I get home in a week’s time, if there’s still no word from Traceline, then I guess I have to ring them up. I need to know what’s been happening. I need to know what progress has been made. And in the meantime, I have to hope that if we ever do meet that he’s prepared to be non-judgemental and engage with me in some way. What more can I hope for? What more can I do?
Ok, so I’m holed up at Lance Arthur‘s pad for a couple of hours and I’m taking the opportunity to plough through some of the stuff that I can’t get written in London. First up, a post about FeedBurner and Blogger and specifically about a post called Ciao, Feedburner over on the official FeedBurner weblog.
For those of you who don’t know, FeedBurner is a profoundly useful service for webloggers that grabs your RSS/Atom feeds and enhances them in various ways. The assumption of the service is that these feeds are generally machine-produced and that the vast majority of people are not super-alpha-geek users capable of hacking them around. So instead of learning Atom’s intricacies, you tell FeedBurner where your current feed is, FeedBurner then chews it all up, splices in stuff from del.icio.us or Flickr or whatever, makes the whole thing compatible with more standards than you were aware existed, puts a shiny style-sheeted face on the whole thing and then spits it out at a new location. The Feedburner feed for plasticbag.org (for example) is here: FeedBurner feed for plasticbag.org.
Of course FeedBurner does many more things that I’ve just mentioned. It also tracks your user stats more effectively than anything else I’ve seen. It can replace embedded Amazon links with ones that include your money-making Amazon Associates ID. And most impressively of all, FeedBurner can turn absolutely normal posts in them into fully working Podcasts. So, if you’re currently overwhelmed with the complexity of Podcasting, there’s an easy way of getting yourself started.
So generally, it’s a pretty impressive service and one which you might want to use. But when I came to it originally, I was quite sceptical. Why? Because it seemed like a one-way path – once I’d got people using my FeedBurner feed, how could I ever make them transition to a new service? What happened if I changed my mind? If I had previously changed the location of my feeds on my personal site, I could use some weird .htaccess rewrite rule to send people to the new place. It was geeky, but it was possible. But I can’t do that on someone else’s service. The whole situation looked like a weird kind of lock-in where if I was to swap to a new service I’d lose half of my subscribers. And that kind of lock-in can only make you sceptical of joining a service in the first place, and make you resent it in time.
But not any more! As of a few days ago FeedBurner added a new service that completely fixed this problem. If you decide to leave them now, you can tell the service the address of your new feed and it will reorganise itself accordingly:
Day 1-10: Any requests for the FeedBurner feed are sent an HTTP 301 “Permanent Redirect” response back to your source feed. This will cause most feed readers to forget the FeedBurner URL and use the new URL from that point on. Your subscribers don’t feel a thing.
Day 11-20: If your FeedBurner feed is still getting requests at this point, it probably means that your feed reader is treating that “Permanent Redirect” as a “Temporary Redirect”. That’s actually pretty common, so now we enter “Phase 2”. Now, any requests for your FeedBurner feed will receive a “redirect document”. What is a redirect document? Dave Winer displayed foresight by anticipating this need back in 2002 and provided this specification so that a publisher could keep control of their feed location. We strongly encourage more feed readers to support this specification, and we are going to be widely campaigning for this capability.
Day 21-30: You’re still here? Well, at this point we return a valid feed that contains a single item that says “This feed has moved to (feed URL here)”. So even though all of the transparent mechanisms to redirect the subscription have failed, there’s still a trail for your subscribers to follow.
The consequence? I now feel much less likely to leave! This simple exit path has made me feel enormously more comfortable with their service and much more comfortable recommending it to friends. As an organisation they’re stating publically that they respect their users and their opinions. Moreover, they’re stating that they’re not interested exploiting people’s inertia or in trapping them. These are all powerful and positive messages – messages that make the organisation enormously more trustworthy.
The guys behind Flickr have a similar philosophy, which I have always loved. They want people to feel that they can trust Ludicorp with incredibly personal pictures of their loved ones and their life. As such they’ve made it relatively easy for people to pull their photos out of Flickr at whatever point they want. There’s no attempt to hold the users to ransom. These are good things. They’re good enough to almost constitute a rule: Give people clear and easy ways to transition out from your service with no loss of data. They will like you for it, and will be less likely to leave you.
But sometimes, it’s not enough just to give people an easy exit from your service. Sometimes you can still hold people to ransom by not giving them an easy enough way to come back. I often think of Blogger when I think around this stuff – I was with Blogger for years as a user. I loved their service enormously. And when Movable Type came along I considered moving but decided against it. It was a long time later that I started to consider that it might be a better fit for my needs. And so I looked into how you could transition across between the services concerned and discovered that it was relatively easy. You simply provided Blogger with a different kind of template that MT could read as data and then clicked an ‘import’ button. Nice and simple – well done Blogger for giving me an escape route.
But where MT had a facility to import entries, Blogger did not. If I decided to try a different platform, then there would be no easy going back. If I left Blogger I would be leaving forever. After much trepidation, I made the leap to MT and for a while I ran the two sites in parallel. MT had its problems running on Pair servers, but I stuck with it and in the end I left Blogger behind. But it was a wrench and a leap of faith, and in the process I’d come to resent Blogger for putting me in such an awkward position – for acting like the parent who says, ‘if you get in that car, don’t bother coming back’. Because of course I never could go back…
What I learned from the situation with Blogger – and which I’m delighted to see that FeedBurner knew as well – is that it’s as important to give people the ability to rejoin your service as it is to help them leave. But really, there’s a higher level lesson here as well: it pays to be honourable when you’re building software and services. It pays – as Google says – to do no evil. It pays a financial reward, it pays a reward of user respect and loyalty, and – I think most importantly – it pays a personal creative reward of knowing that you’ve made a service that people actively want to stay with.
It seems obvious, but users seem to want to try things without risk, without a hard sell, and then settle on the platform or service that makes most sense to them. You should want that too. You should want your users to be happy, to be content, to not be railing against your control, to not resent your service. To restrict that freedom (to leave and to come back) seems to me to be a profound statement that you have no faith in what you’ve created, that you’re not sure that it can stand on its own merits, and that you’re prepared to screw over your customers to meet your immediate needs. No company can sustain such a relationship forever. All it can do is alienate. So well done Flickr and FeedBurner and – to an extent – Blogger. And may (many) other companies learn from your examples…
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Links for 2005-06-20
- Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech I haven’t listened to this yet, but by all accounts it’s pretty inspiring.
- Tom Cruise engaged to Katie Holmes Godsmackingly weird – I mean what the hell is she doing? I mean, someone’s clearly doing this for publicity of one kind or another. How come it feels like everyone is in on the joke?
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A message from Heathrow Airport…
Heathrow Airport. How I love thee. With thy little tax-free shops that are still too expensive, and the hidden power points by the columns that took me hours to find the first time I flew from here. I commend thy expensive wifi! I celebrate thy Bagel shop! But soon I must leave thee for San Francisco…
Ah, San Francisco – my spiritual home. Geeks as far as the eye can see in every direction – all my peers from the time of my first creative tinkerings online. I love going to San Francisco. It really cheers me up. And all that time stuck in a plane when you’re allowed to potter around and think about things and write stuff up. I’m almost looking forward to going headblind from lack of net access, because I think I might actually be able to catch-up on some writing I’ve been meaning to do. Dead time in the Interzone is good.
And what to do while I’m in San Francisco? Well, obviously I’ll be eating and lounging around a bit, but I also want to spend some time drinking from the nerdy wellstream and reinvigorating myself. And that means, big discussions and new perspectives and stuff. So if you’re interested in any of the following, feel free to e-mail me ( at tom {at} the name of this website) and maybe we’ll be able to find some time to chat. Things I’m interested in at the moment:
- Supplementing and enhancing broadcast with social software (or social software in general)
- Programme information, distribution and future post-broadcast media consumption
- Social Software for Set-Top boxes and assorted other connected home entertainment systems things
- The Age of Point-at-Things and identifiers / URLs (see also Matt Biddulph’s ‘Application of Weblike Design to Data
- Weblogs and Mass-amateurisation and all that general palaver
Other nerdy wellspring opportunities to catch up with me: I’ll probably be at Supernova on Tuesday and Wednesday, hanging out with the O’Reilly crew and trying to push myself to think in unexpected non-work-related directions. I may also be wandering up to PARC to see a few social media types, and I’m hoping to get to see much-missed friend Cal Henderson‘s impromptu one-day workshop on Building Flickr. So if you’re going to be at any of those, look out for me. I guess this probably doesn’t sound like much of a holiday to some people, but I’m really looking forward to it. Probably because beyond all that stuff – lurking in the shadows, with their faces lit up by screenlight – are all the people I don’t get to see enough.
Anyway, my plane’s probably boarding about now, so I should probably close the laptop and get myself ready. See you on the other side…
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Links for 2005-06-18
- Flickr Album – an elegant bit of Flash using their API You have to grab the corner with your mouse and literally turn the page over for it to work. Nice implementation though.
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On 'Batman Begins' and St. Pancras Station…
Last night – thanks to the intervention of my good friend Katy Lindemann – I was lucky enough to see a media screening of Batman Begins. I used to go to media screenings of things quite a lot when I was writing film reviews for the BBC and working at Time Out, but it’s been a while and I’d forgotten quite how lovely they are. The screens are always a good size, the film is never covered in scratches and you get little nibbly bits beforehand (mmm houmous). But most importantly, the seats are astonishingly comfortable. Sometimes you’re particularly lucky and you get dedicated armchairs to sit in. I wasn’t quite that lucky this time, but they were still more than ample – clearly designed for super-rich, super-powerful and amply-buttocked executives like Harvey Weinstein. I have this image of escalating arms races in screening room technology to persuade ever higher-powered people to think kindly on your production – “And this one is built as a floatation and isolation tank complete with martini tube and foot massager”…
Cough. Well that’s enough about the food and the seats, I suppose. So here’s the surprising bit. The film itself was bloody good fun. It’s a film that plays more to the motivations and personal development of the man who comes to wear the bat suit and it’s all the better for it – this is absolutely not a film made by people who fundamentally believe that comic books are fundamentally laughable. This is a film by people who respect the source material, who are prepared to engage with the fundamentals of the enterprise – strip it all back down to the essence of the story and rebuild again from scratch. This is a Batman movie with genuinely scary bits: a Scarecrow who actually freaks you out, savage fighting in prisons, crazed killers on the streets and a major villain who is so focused and clear that he seems more like a religious fundamentalist than a cape-wearing weirdo. The script and actors really hold up to scrutiny as well: Bale is solid (even if his accent isn’t), Katie Holmes plays a bit of a whiny cow, but at least she’s a tough, smart, idealistic whiny cow (which is a step up from being a generic off the shelf swooning dame, I guess), Gary Oldman’s Gordon is believable and Ra’s Al Ghul pretty much rocks. And in the background, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman steal every scene they’re in.
The only problem with the whole film for me (other than the microwave whatsit, which I’m pretty sure would cook all the people nearby) is the standard problem with superhero films – Batman still looks pretty dumb in the batsuit. Thankfully they’ve figured out that you keep Batman scary by respecting his methods – it’s designed to be scary in the dark – so (for the most part) that’s where they keep him. And certainly, the minor quibble is far from enough to stop me recommending that you all go and see it immediately.
Oh and there’s something else and it’s pretty damn awesome. Last year I sneaked into the ruins of the great St Pancras train station with a few other Map Club types like Rod, Phil, Webb and Hill. Inside the epic pseudo-gothic structure were some beautifully over-the-top features from its time as a hotel at the beginning of the century. Particularly impressive was the great staircase that runs up the wall on the British Library side of the building, up to a fully restored deep blue-green and gold hall at the top of the building:
Now imagine that space full of conflict and battle, filled with shadows and with the lunatic flurrying of ten thousand bats and SWAT teams and with Batman – arms outstretched – launching himself down from the top floor through the shaft of the staircase to land like a god in the middle of some vision of hell. Imagine that all happening around that ornate gothic staircase. Well, I don’t have to imagine. I’ve seen it! And it’s one hell of a moment, on one hell of a location shoot in the heart of London. Bloody brilliant.
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On Beethoven at the BBC…
This is really more just an exercise in quoting than anything else. You’ll remember a week or so ago I mentioned that the BBC was putting up every Beethoven symphony to download as an MP3 – well now the BBC has reported on how successful the whole enterprise was: Beethoven downloads receive more than 600,000 requests . Here are some samples from the press release:
“Roger Wright, Controller of Radio 3, said: “The response has been incredible and much bigger that we expected. “The success shows Beethoven’s enduring appeal and we hope this will encourage new audiences to explore online classical music.”
“Simon Nelson, Controller of BBC Radio & Music Interactive, said: “This trial was all about gauging listeners’ appetite for downloads and the results are astonishing. We are hopeful that we have attracted people who wouldn’t previously have explored much classical music, as well as inspiring others to embrace digital technology.”
“Gianandrea Noseda added: “I’m thrilled that our performances have reached such a large, new audience and hope this trial will encourage more people to experience and enjoy orchestral music live in concert.”
There’s more reaction from my boss, Dan Hill over on his personal site:
I can’t tell you the amount of buzz this is generating right across the BBC. Lots of extremely interesting questions continue to be raised by the success of our trials – from distribution to commercial policy, from music strategies to on-demand radio, from marketing to navigation and so on – and we’re feeding a lot of the learning and creative ideas right into the heart of the various bits of strategic and tactical BBC work going on at the moment. It’s profoundly interesting for us, and I hope for some of you. [ Over 600,000 mp3 downloads of BBC Radio 3’s Beethoven programmes ]
The first set of symphonies have now been taken down, but the second half of the whole enterprise goes up in about ten days at the Beethoven download page.
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On my upcoming trip to San Francisco…
So here’s the plan – I’m flying to San Francisco on Saturday and I’ll be hanging around until the 26th with all my geek hipster friends. But don’t take that to mean that I’m busy all the time – I’m keen as ever to see (and meet) as many neat people as possible. When I go to San Francisco, I normally try and set up some kind of drunken evening at the Tonga Room – because the rain and the thunder and the tiki stylings and the lounge act are all so cool. But I am also aware that the cocktails are terrible and that maybe I’ve milked the experience as much as I can. So, guys, does anyone have any better ideas?
While I’m at it, I might as well put out another call – are there any glorious geek events, any particularly cool exhibitions or bars that I’d regret not going to? It’s not every day I get a full week in my spiritual homeland to reconnect with the mothership. So what should I be doing?
Of course, no trip comes without its inconveniences, and this one is particularly poignant – while I’m on the flight to SFO I’ll be missing the big reveal in the final episode of Doctor Who. This is doubly galling since I’m currently enduring hundreds of lunatic comments on my Doctor Who and Bad Wolf post. Regular visitors to the site may be getting bored of hearing about this, but things are way out of control – the post has received seven hundred comments as of now, and sometimes they come in at the rate of one or two a minute. The whole thing’s starting to remind me of Kottke’s famous Matrix meltdown. All of which is a roundabout way of saying don’t spoil it for me until I’ve got my hands on a copy.
Anyway, as of this evening, I’m either in pre-flight limbo or stuck in some terminal interzone, and I’m hoping to take the opportunity to catch up with all the notes and writing I’ve been doing recently but haven’t had a chance to post to my site. So more later…
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Links for 2005-06-16
- The Futurama Taglines Flash Slideshow includes every tagline from every episode in seasons one to four… You can’t really go far wrong with Futurama. Except the taglines. Which were rarely funny. Better here than on TV.
- The Helvetica Meditations from Typographi.com Some beautiful and oddly poignant pictures containing Helvetica. #24 is kind of darkly entertaining I suppose as well…