Is this thing on?

I'm thrilled to announce the ReverbNation widget thing over there on the right now holds over 12 songs. 13, to be exact.

I know I missed a few days, but I was out in the country helping my father recover from a hernia-sticking-back-in operation and he doesn't have a piano, and even if he did, he has dial-up. I didn't even know they still made dial-up; he asked me if I could let him know when I'd finished checking my email so that he could make a phone call. Insane.

What else is there to say? I moved some stuff around here, got rid of the post labels (so all my blog is heterogeneous and unique) and the links, the destinations for most of which had expired anyway, and I'm thinking about changing the colour scheme again. Grey and maroon is a bit myeh.

The humility of Twitter

Now, I'm not a technology blogger. I know my SEO from my API, just, and I know that when you get my mobile phone wet the call cancel button stops working, but beyond that, it's all a blur of initialisms and wires to me. Which, I think, is what qualifies me for this post.

There's a quote doing the rounds at the moment, ascribed to Henry Ford, which goes something like: If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me 'A faster horse'.

I'll try and explain just how reckless a business philosophy that is, and why Ford really succeeded.

We live in an information society. Broadly, I think, looking through history you can see the evolution from prehistoric survival societies, to medieval power-based societies, including those built around religion, and the renaissance reason-based society. The latter leads us to the 21st century, where information is the cornerstone. Or, rather, the cornerstones.

Survival was an absolute, power and religion were absolutes. Information isn't. It's a multi-faceted thing: a class rather than a quality. Our society doesn't revolve around the same old god, or serve the same old king. It is based on constant adjustments, some small, some huge.

It's only natural, then, that we want access to information quickly and simply. It's the information itself, not the channel, which we care about. It was interesting to note the Drapergate scandal, regarding the planning of Conservative-targeted smear campaigns, surfaced in the blogosphere and was taken up by the national press. The physical newspaper is rightly seen as a vessel, run by fallible editors, that no longer lends weight automatically to a story by virtue of its being an institution. We're not about the institution, we're about the information.

So, what does all this have to do with Henry Ford?

Well, Myspace lost out to Facebook and Facebook is losing out to Twitter. The reason is humility.

They're all platforms. Myspace's saving grace is its music-playing functionality, but it has one of the worst user interfaces I've ever tried to navigate. Facebook became popular because it used a platform based on simplicity of interaction and easy dissemination of information. There were simple ways to send and receive sufficient information to and from your friends. 

Social networking wasn't a revolution, it's been around for millennia. Online social networking was, however, because there was, in Facebook, a platform which was simple and unobtrusive, which allowed information to be channelled in the way users wanted, to reflect how we already did it. It was a conduit, like a phonecall, like email.

A couple of redesigns later and Facebook is virtually unrecognisable. Profiles have been split across tabs, the main items you look for when logging in are no longer grouped, but spread across the home page, and a good proportion of the information you are presented with is spam by another name. It is no longer good for information, and thus no longer good for social networking.

Facebook became an entity in itself, which necessarily intruded on the user. It lost its humility.

Twitter, on the other hand, hasn't. Twitter is the epitome of the conduit platform. It is, save for a few buttons, a series of channels. There is virtually no Twitter-copyrighted content on the site. Twitter is humble.

What Twitter does is what Facebook did before. It is a series of well-designed, simple channels, through which the user can send out information, and select what kind of information to receive.

The Tweetdeck application makes a valuable contribution by allowing the user to split the information feed into smaller feeds, set up by the user themselves, into, say, news or friends or book reviews or celebrity content.

Twitter doesn't give you anything you don't ask for, which will be the key to its success.

Ford gave people something they didn't ask for, he gave them the mass-produced car. We'll set aside the fact that people would have been happy with the faster horse if he'd delivered that, and admit he did improve upon it with his invention. What he did was to effect a quantum shift in transportation, from biological to mechanical. It wasn't a new idea (Industrial Revolution, anyone?), but it was the right time for such a shift. Ford's business was lucky. It exploited a small niche in the market which expanded into gaping international demand. 

But how many companies can be said to have done that effectively? Ford's development spoke to the needs of his society, the need for faster transport, more efficiency. And it worked. 

The quote above doesn't suggest Ford ignored his customers, but that he gave them something they didn't even realise they needed.

He blazed a trail through the industry because he listened to their desires, not their demands.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg reportedly said something similar: The most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers.

Well, companies might not listen to their customers' demands, but you can be certain they listen to their desires. What the information society customer desires is the conduit version of Facebook. What the information society customer desires is Twitter.

Street View gives a clear picture of the residents of Broughton, Bucks.

This is shaping up to be my favourite news story of the year so far.

At its heart, the panic over Google's Street View project is understandable. These ominous-looking black Corsas kitted out with 360º cameras driving round towns and cities taking pictures of everything in sight makes us feel like a multinational corporation with exceptionally deep pockets is gearing up for something. People can't immediately see the point of it. I can't immediately see how Google will recoup the massive investment they must have made in this project. In these days of heightened security fears, people are of course going to be concerned about a national 3D-mapping project which will make their street visible to anyone, anywhere in the world, however innocent its intentions. The fact that hundreds of thousands of similar streets are visible, and little marks one out from the group, is probably what will save you from burglars, terrorists or other undesirables -  but it doesn't tell us if it's, in principle, right to take those photos.

Well, I won't get into that - the principle of it - too much. There's no law against taking photos from a public street as far as I know, and I quite like being able to look at my house and car on the internet. It's also worth pointing out that it isn't like the images are live, the one of my road was taken last summer by the look of the trees - there are no date stamps to incriminate you.

Back to the story: A Street View car taking photos of a little village near Milton Keynes, surrounded by a group of villagers swearing at the obsequious driver and telling him to leave posthaste. A couple of pitchforks and some flaming torches would have been all that was needed to complete the picture. Now I know, I know, privacy and all, the Englishman's home is his castle (and his castle is open to paying visitors in the summer months), I'm aware. 

They stopped an activity on a public road in the name of protecting their privacy. And I'd applaud their quest to protect their interests if it weren't for just how staggeringly comprehensive the personal information they gave the numerous reporters they spoke to was. 

• The instigator of the revolt was Paul Jacobs, 43, a real estate executive, married to Karen, a nurse, also 43, of Broughton, Bucks., who exited his house (it's the place with the dead-end track running up the side of the garden, near the village green) to wag his finger at the photographer. There's a photo of both of them in the Mail article linked above.
• He was joined by Jon Holmes, an oil executive of Broughton, Bucks., who lives next to Jacobs. Holmes's house is the one with the wall surrounding it, around 9' high from his description. Oh, and there's a photo of him, too, if you want to know what he looks like.

Come unannounced and they'll batten down the hatches to keep you out; breathe the susurrous word 'celebrity' at their gate and they'll throw open the doors.

The Alternative Inauguration Speech

Right. Was going for a 'The Alternative Queen's Speech' kind of angle in the title there, but I'm not sure it worked. I was a bit bored by Obamania (Obamamania? It'd make more sense and be equally vapid) as it started. Actually, that's not true: it was when they came up with that name for it. I wouldn't usually ascribe the '-mania' suffix to, well, anything political in an optimistic way. Was anyone manic over the Irish Question? Maybe, but crucially not in a good way. Iraqmania... It sounds like a neon-coloured Nintendo DS game. Blairmania puts me in mind of an unhappy navel-gazing band from Scunthorpe whose drummers keep committing suicide. The thing is, if you're getting manic about something political, alarm bells should be ringing. 

Everyone will snap out of it before he does anything of interest (if he even does: first world domestic politics is pretty static, and his only international requirement is the absence of invasions). The person I feel most sorry for is dear old John McCain. First the Viet Cong, now this. And I'm all for Obama being half black, though on the other hand, it's not as if there are no African American people in Congress (Condoleeza Rice, anyone? And she was a woman), or constitutional bars to them becoming president. 

Yes, it's an iconic position, but I don't think Obama would be met with all the banners and parades and exclamation marks if he were succeeding from a decent, Democrat incumbent. People are only manic because George W Bush was so arse-achingly awful at everything (and Republican) (and white). It's no bad thing to embrace the change (fucking 'change') for the better-ish, but when you get over the sound and fury and realise he's just a bloke with a bit of mess to clean up, at the helm of a lumbering political system with enough checks and balances to ensure it doesn't go anywhere interesting, the 'mania' doesn't really seem to be grounded in anything at all.

So while I'm not deliberately not watching the inauguration, rather just... not watching it, and since nothing is actually happening in the world, here's what I found in my car when I cleared it out for the first time in three years:

• Christmas cards from 2005
• Pine needles from somewhere in Europe
• A coat hanger
• Mud
• 'Rescue' cream, Waspeze, and Alka Seltzer (purchased and lost in the recesses separately, I think. I hope)
• A lot of cassettes
• A Pez dispenser
• Pez
• Two AA batteries
• About a dozen petrol station receipts
• An unused, would've been surprisingly useful had I known I owned it, First Aid kit
• Air fresheners (three)
• Pens (four)
• Assorted Starbursts under the folding rear bench seat
• A visitors' guide for the monolithic church at Aubeterre, Charente, France
• A picture hook
• Moist screen wipes (dried)
• Power steering fluid, engine oil, tyre pump
• Two umbrellas
• A length of 2x4 wood with a metal bracket sticking out at the end

And, naturally, absolutely no change, which was mostly why I did it in the first place. Obama would be proud.

I haven't blogged for a while, since I've been mostly stockpiling cans of baked beans and hiding under my bed in case the Large Hardon Collider goes wrong. Which is ridiculous, since I don't even like baked beans.

The good news is that even in my absence my blog has received two visitors this week (and I'm fairly sure only one of those was me).

I have not been following the American presidential campaigns, I really want to be surprised, either with another invasion or with slowly-creeping centrism.

I saw Van Morrison do a cover of Pink Floyd's 'Comfortably Numb'.

I still do not have a job, but instead have been whoring myself out in more internships and pretending I'm a good person in interviews, a person who can take or leave Facebook in the workplace, and, perhaps more importantly (perhaps), I have nearly finished the novel I've been working on for this summer. So it's been a busy few months, giving a few hours over each evening when back from an unpaid day at work to writing, and dealing with the crippling, chronic paucity concomitant with that. My flatmate has buggered off to America for 10 weeks.

As such, so very little happens between working, writing and scrabbling together a few coins for coffee, tobacco and alcohol, dependence on which seems to increase as financial security diminishes. The good news on that front is that it means I am forced to recycle old listening habits and came across this gem on the Nick Cave album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! which I know I've posted from before (send money), but I do think is worth a look, it being more accessible than some of his stuff, 'More News From Nowhere':

It goes on a bit. 

Generally, I try to abhor empty blog posts which apologise for there not being any blog posts with content, but at the moment this is all you're going to get. Check back soonish, something might happen.

Zeno - the worrier, pointless

I know I haven't posted anything in... I don't know how long. I've mostly been staring at blank walls trying to overcome Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise (look away... now): Achilles has a race with a tortoise. The tortoise starts 100ft ahead of Achilles. Bang, they start. In the time Achilles takes to reach the tortoise's starting point (point 1), the tortoise will have moved on a little (to point 2, you can probably picture it). From here, by the time Achilles reached point 2, the tortoise will have moved on a little bit more (to point 3). Essentially, it's logical that every time Achilles advances to the point where the tortoise is, the tortoise will have moved on a bit more, even a tiny, tinier, tinier bit more, and so Achilles can never pass the tortoise. 

Of course, we all 'know' he can and would pass the tortoise, but Zeno used this as a refutation of plurality, or as proof that everything is essentially one, motion is an illusion, things cannot be separate because you will end up with horrible paradoxes like the above. So even though it seems blindingly obvious Achilles does pass the tortoise, we might have witnessed an illusion (don't ask me how, I'm only here for the tortoises). 

At least he provides a decent proposal after confusing 2,500 years of humanity with such a horribly confusing problem, but some other paradoxes of his have been proved wrong and I wonder about this one. 

It is related to the Dichotomy, which has a cower-inducing capital letter. This one is just based on the premise that in order for X to reach somewhere, it must first reach the halfway point to that place. Sounds fair. If I'm going to the pub (I am), I have to get halfway there first. But when I reach that point, I then have another halfway point: the point halfway between the pub and the halfway point. So, I go 1/2 the way to the pub to reach halfway point 1, then a further 1/4 the whole distance to reach halfway point 2. Then 1/8 to reach halfway point 3. 1/16 to reach halfway point 4. While the distances keep getting smaller (halving each time), I must surely not be able to reach the end of my distance, since the smallest halfway distance is still half the one before it; or put another way, if I'm at the end point, I am a distance of 0 metres from it. But, 2x0 = 0. At some point I have to have halved the distance between me and the pub and come up with 0 to get there. It's impossible to halve something with the result 0. So logically, I can never reach the pub. Of course, I can (thankfully) reach the pub, Zeno isn't suggesting I can't, just that I didn't actually move to get there. Weirder still, I don't even slow down - as Aristotle pointed out (he didn't agree so much with Zeno though) each distance halves, so the time I take to traverse it halves too. I'm always going the same speed, it seems, but I never reach my destination. 

This hurts my head a lot, especially since there's all sorts of calculus involved in solving these things and that really is beyond me. And, I think I'm right in saying, that still no one has 'solved' the problem.

Something to chew on then, while you might watch and enjoy 'Prescilla' by Bat For Lashes:

I know the feeling, Natasha. I once let Andy Bruntel direct my life for a day, it was haunting. In a pedestrian kind of way. 

Feist / Sufjan Stevens mash-up

I stumbled across this a few minutes ago searching Google Image for Sufjan Stevens to see if he was attractive (vacant hairy arms, jury's out) while last.fm was crashing my Safari.

I have to take my hat off to Kevan Gilbert for this Feist/Stevens mash-up of her cover of 'Inside and Out' and his 'They are Night Zombies!! They are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From the Dead!! Ahhhh!' (I know). 

I still like Feist, a lot of people don't, after the iPod commercial and this Lacoste weirdness:

And while I'm not a huge aficionado of Sufjan, I liked the actual songs on Come on Feel the Illinoise! Both Feist and Stevens made it onto my iPod for the great big long walk I went on across France earlier in the year, and such a mash-up makes me very happy indeed.

You can listen to it on the music page of Kevan Gilbert Online (where I warn you it might start playing automatically), or he's kindly provided a download, here. Knock yourself out.