I’ve just tried unsuccessfully to read two or three posts on other people’s sites that are more than about three paragraphs long and my eyes just slid off them like they were made of Liquid Silk. And in the spirit of this revelation, I have decided to write one small, self-contained and easy-to-read post to offset all the other long tracts that you guys have to put up with when I decide to go off on one. So here it is. Enjoy.
So an election has come and gone and what a strange experience it was. This was the fourth election in which I’ve voted – in order my vote has gone to the Liberal Democrats when Paddy Ashdown was still in charge, and then for New Labour in 1997 and 2001. Each of these decisions was relatively simple. But this time everything was different. A couple of weeks ago I’d basically decided to vote Liberal – you can read about my thoughts in a post called Some election resources to help you make up your mind) – but a lot changed in the run up to polling day itself.
In particular the way the hysteria over the war built and built made me seriously consider the possibility that the country might abandon Labour entirely. The polls suggested that this wasn’t going to happen, but Labour supporters have been fooled by polls before. And the consequence of the Conservatives getting into power hardly bore thinking about. After all this was a party that had spent months peddling an anti-immigrant agenda that – while not necessarily in itself racist – was clearly designed to appeal to racist people. Not the kind of people that I’d want in charge.
So after much soul searching, I’d decided to vote Labour. But at the last minute, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I stood in the polling station with a pen and my ballot paper for nearly five minutes trying to work out what to do – making my decision at the very last minute. In the end, I voted for the party that argued for a higher level of debate, for the preservation of civil liberties, and for not defying the United Nations. I did not vote for the party whose liberal policies on gay rights I believe in, nor on the party that I think has the best grasp of social services and the economy. I did not vote for a party that I generally and genuinely believe in and think is fit to run the country because I felt that it was important to use my tiny voice to protest against the few things that they did that I felt were dishourable, uncivilised and – bluntly – dangerous.
As I left the polling station I felt scared. And if the Conservative party had got into power again, I don’t think I’d have been able to live with myself. But while the Conservative party has won some more seats, they won almost no more votes and Howard has said he’ll step down. Whether or not this means that they will again run away from the right and try and make some space in the centre ground is unclear to me. I thought they might do so after William Hague stood down and that didn’t really work out. So I guess we’ll see.
And in the end, everything has worked out pretty much perfectly. The country’s swing towards the LIberal Democrats was enormously significant, and should give the government a clear sign about where the centre of the debate has headed. If they want to operate effectively in this country – if they want to get in for a fourth term, then they’re going to have to step away from some of their more illiberal policies. The right people are in government, but they’ve been chastened. And I couldn’t be happier.
Addendum added Sunday May 8th: Perhaps I spoke too soon – I’ve just heard David Blunkett on television decry people who voted Liberal as being ‘self-indulgent and well-off’, clearly dismissive of any vote of principle. I hoped for a humbler party who would listen, and it looks like I’m getting an arrogant party who have been let down by their electorate. Great.
There was an article in the Guardian about a week ago about MySpace that quoted me and I completely forgot to point it out to everyone. If I don’t continue to point out what large national papers say about me then people will stop believing the hype! I find this unacceptable:
Social software expert Tom Coates says: “MySpace has demonstrated effectively that if you give people things to do with their friends online, then that is significantly [more] compelling than just having software that organises who your friends are. Teenagers and young people tend to use a lot more pop culture stuff to describe themselves, it’s a lot more important to their identity.”
It’s really nice to be called a Social Software expert again – particularly after slightly losing my identity inside the monstrous belly of the BBC. I have felt a bit disconnected from the social software community over the last year or so in that while I feel I still have as much to say, I never really get the chance to express it in public. And that makes you invisible and eventually redundant. I’m going to have to try and spend a little more time engaging in the debates of the day from now on, I think.
Anyway, enough about me. The article itself – about MySpace – mostly talks about how impressive the take-up of MySpace has been. It’s worth balancing that enormous take-up with how little the service has been talked about in geek circles. I don’t know whether it’s because it’s not particularly innovative, but this huge behemoth service has seemingly sprung from nowhere and yet it’s almost invisible to the social software crowd. I guess there’s a lesson here about how you don’t get rich by just following the geek next-big-thing. MySpace is now enormously larger than Friendster and more successful – it’s one of the most trafficked sites on the web in fact. It’s done well by subtly altering the parameters of a previous idea and aiming it at the right market. It’s kind of the same approach that Microsoft have taken with their Spaces project – and it’s all aimed at people completely distinct from the community in which we operate. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that there’s money in the recently-cool – that’s the space that most industries make their money in. (Danah’s also recently been thinking about MySpace a bit).
So this is nice – via my boss I’m directed to a brief piece by David Weinberger on some of the work going on around the BBC at the moment and featuring some of the stuff we’ve been doing in BBC Radio and Music Interactive:
“My goodness but the BBC is up to lots of interesting things! I don’t even know where to start. Every episode of every program is getting its own URL and will be intensely metadated. An experiment lets you phone in to bookmark songs you hear on the radio. They’re putting RSS all over the place. They’re handing out video cameras to people who can’t afford them and posting the results. The BBC is showing us what mainstream media might be like if its mandate were simply to make our lives better.”
I’ve written quite a lot around the edges of the work we’ve done on making a page and identifier for every episode of every programme – New Radio 3 Site Launches, Developing a URL structure for broadcast radio sites, In which my mind starts to settle after ETech 2005 and The Age of Point-at-Things are all good places to start if you’re interested in that stuff. My personal opinion is that it’s pretty integral to the future media landscape and that although it doesn’t seem like a terribly interesting project, the stuff that falls out from having it implemented is absolutely enormous.
The project to do with tagging and bookmarking songs you hear on the radio came directly out of the R&D team that Matt Webb and I ran until he ponced off and abandoned me (working with the irrepressible Gavin Bell who I also worked with on the PIPs stuff above). We learned a hell of a lot of interesting things during that piece of work about some of the potential uses for fauxonomic tagging which I fully intend to drag out into the open as quickly as possible. On the subject of tagging, there’s a new weblog on the subject featuring Peter Merholz and David Weinberger which looks like it could be interesting.
At the moment the best representations on the web of the work that we’ve been doing in both of these areas are the two papers that we delivered at ETech: Reinventing Radio: Supplemented One-to-Many with Many-to-Many and On Programme Information Pages. Which brings me to another thing that’s slowly started to dawn on me – when I do a paper at a conference I expect the industry repercussions and the interest in the work we are doing to escalate enormously. But what I’ve recently begun to notice is that the stuff that captures people’s attention isn’t at the conferences at all – it’s the weblog posts that create linkable pages that people can talk and converse around that get people interested. Without something written in the medium of the industry, the work might as well not have happened at all. With this in mind, expect to see transcribed versions of the various papers appearing online either in a complete form or broken up into more digestible chunks over the next few days/weeks. It’s all in the public domain now anyway so I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t talk about it.
I’m watching Michael Portillo on This Week today and he makes a really interesting point about turn-out at the election. He suggests that people tend to vote less when they think they know what the outcome is going to be. It’s only when they’re unsure about the outcome that a large proportion are motivated to go out to the ballot box. Which brings up an interesting possibility – that not voting is based on a tacit accord, that it’s a mechanism of not-voting exchange that operates on assumption of balance. Maybe it’s not a cynical move that indicates people’s disillusionment with politics – maybe instead it’s like Arthur Dent in the beginning of The Hitchhiker’s Guide (book not film) who manages to abandon his place in front of a bulldozer to go down the pub. And how? By rationalising that the foreman was resigned to a wasted day anyway and therefore his moist be-mudded presence was really no longer necessary… This has changed my perspective completely from thinking of non-voters as indolent to thinking that they’re tactical, even-handed and pragmatic. The consequence being, of course, that whenever any one party tries to get their followers out to vote, the cosmic balance makes their corresponding numbers nervy enough to go out in response. Ah. The big wheel keeps on turning. On a simple line. Day by day…
A new operating system and a Bank Holiday on the same weekend. It’s like fate. And it means that all around the country there are geeks fiddling and installing and reinstalling and losing serial numbers and going “oooh” pretty much in synchrony. I’ve been playing my role too! Exploring all the little nooks and crannies of my brand new shiny computer.
Some first impressions – Spotlight is pretty awesome and a positive move in desktop search. The fact that it usurps most of the functionality of Launchbar without being quite as focused on launching apps is a bit annoying, but not unpredictable. There’s a lot of the Flickr aesthetic (steal from the best!) in this release.
It took me a while to get my head around the new version of Mail, but I’m getting more and more quietly impressed. The smart folders angle (and the spotlight searching) makes the whole thing much more useful – I love the idea that I can keep all my mail in the same big dustbin and have query-focused folders to find my way through it. My long-standing problem with the app remains though – why the crap isn’t there an option to reply to an e-mail with the e-mail address it was originally sent to? I would have thought that was bloody obvious functionality to have, and yet almost no bloody mail app I’ve used in years has had it. The behaviour of this version appears to be closer to my ideal than the previous version, but not by much… If you’re outside the Inbox, then things start getting screwy…
Elsewhere, there are all kinds of neat things lying around in Quartz Composer, but I’ve not had much time to play with that yet. I have had time to play with Dashboard though and I’ve got a few thoughts. Firstly, it’s obviously kind of fluff, but I don’t care. It’s neat and it’s pretty and I like it. Secondly, there may be lots of little widgets available, but most of them are pretty useless so far. I’ve only found two fun ones (other than the weather and clock things it comes with): a Transmit drop-file widget and the Delicious Library shelf. And they’re kind of bunk. Fun though. Thirdly – and most importantly – building widgets is fun! I’ve been playing around with Mr Biddulph and it’s all been highly enjoyable. I’m fully expecting to be involved in making several of these little things over the next few weeks.
(A quick sideline – the more I’ve been playing with Dashboard the more I’ve started to think of it as an interesting prototyping area for simple network enabled real-world appliances and ambient computing stuff. That may sound over the top, but think about it – each widget is supposed to support simple interactions only, they’re often designed to look and feel like real-world objects and they’re also mostly designed to be useful when you’re online – pulling in information in the background. Those simple ambient pieces of technology – like the orb that reflects the state of the stock market – would feel right at home in this environment. I’ve not been paying much attention to the Konfabulator widget market, but I imagine they’ve been pushing along quite nicely in these directions already.)
Another fun area for me has been Automator. I’ve not got very far with it yet, but it only took me two minutes to knock up a little workflow that downloaded every MP3 linked to from a page, saved it to my desktop and slapped it into my iTunes library. It’s the perfect way to quickly grab fun previews of tracks from the Marseille Figs album.
What else is there? I’ve not really played too much with Safari RSS because I still like NetNewsWire more. The new iChat has a sweet / disturbing little feature that picks up on what iChatStatus did and incorporates it (again) into the OS. So now you can choose to have your latest iTunes track displayed as your status line. But that’s not the good/creepy bit – what’s cool is that other people can not only see what you’re looking at, but can click on the song to look it up on iTunes Music Store. If that was more open – if you could choose where to look up the song – then I’d probably like it more. I’m not thrilled by the idea of my operating system trying to sell me things all the time.
Other than that, everything’s pretty smooth and classy. A few irritants get in the way of a pure fun experience of course – Quicktime 7 no longer remembers that I went pro – apparently the money I spent on that isn’t good enough any more. Thank god for VLC. And there are the things that I’ve done that are dumb – like neglect to note down my serial numbers for Acquisition and BBEdit 8.2. But they’re my own fault, I guess. Otherwise, a pretty entertaining and solid release! Big hugs all round…