Random reactions

Long time no see

New product launch 1 December. Many long hours between now and then. Little time for posting. Sorry to all.

Some write whilst others do not. In two weeks time Tim Worstall's first book will be coming out in the UK. It's an anthology of the best of British blogging over the past year. More details and descriptions are here (http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2005/09/this_upcoming_b.html ). Online it is only available from Amazon.co.uk, NOT from .com.

Tim and I are sometimes at odds on specific issues, but he's a good writer and an honest commentator. Bet money on this being a good book.

Machinima rules!

This one's just for fun. Hugh Hancock of The Strange Company in Edinburgh sends me a link to the trailer for his new movie Blood Spell. Here's the link:

http://www.bloodspell.com/index.php?id=3

The phenomenon is called machinima--I encountered it first in Italy. It's grown quite a lot over the past couple of years (maybe I don't even need to explain it to you). They even have a machinima film festival now.

Go see it. I wanna ticket.

New Market Research

Hello all,

I've decided to split my blogging time between Random Reactions and my new blog, New Market Research. I'll still do my weekend warrior stint here, but I'm actually going to try and write more frequently on the other one. It will be a lot more focused on what I do for a living.

The premise is that now that we have new markets, new tools for research, new media, we need a new view of market research. We'll see how it pans out.

The Once and Future King

I read Brad DeLong's weblog frequently, as I understand what he says about economics. Lately he has been writing about the threat to the dollar's dominance of the currency popularity charts--the dollar has been the world's reserve currency for a very long time.

What I don't understand is why, when evaluating which currency will supposedly replace the dollar, economists don't recognize how easy it is for banks, other countries and even individuals to evaluate the political risk of depending on other currencies. Would you really want your or your country's savings denominated in Euros, controlled by Brussels? Or yuan, where China is dealing with 300 protests a day?

America is not treating its fiscal policy with the attention it deserves, but it doesn't have to be faster than the bear--just faster than the others fleeing the bear.

In 2003, I wrote that the best possible candidate to back up, if not replace, the dollar could be quite a surprise--I nominated the UK pound sterling. The UK's position has since eroded due to Gordon Brown's borrowing and spending tactics, but if I had significant cash and was worried about the stability of the dollar, only the pound has sufficient size, weight and stability to offer an alternative.

Should sanity return to UK budgeting, I still believe that the pound could serve as a reserve currency. Evidently, Russian billionaires as well as Middle Eastern oil princes agree. I'm not quite sure economists follow behaviour as closely as they should when evaluating questions of this type.

If there are economists who read this (oh how coy I'm being--I fully intend to submit this to Britblog for their round-up of UK blog posts, and it's run by an economist), I hope they will correct my simplistic view of the situation.

Mash Up

My former employers (Kable, doing good works since 1990) sponsor a weblog called Ideal Government where they are promoting mash-ups. Mash ups are combinations of data from different sources, such as found at Up My Street or various new sites that display results using Google Maps tools.

I think that this has big time potential, and I hope to write about it much more in future. But I just voted for Foreign Policy / Prospect's list of top intellectuals--you can vote here if you want to play. And the people I voted for were cross-overs: People who trained in one discipline and made their greatest contribution in another. My top pick was Jared Diamond, who we can safely say has already changed history--at least as a field of study.

So of course I put the two together... that's the point, isn't it?

Human knowledge is getting to be a bit unwieldy--you need a lot of study to become well-versed in a topic. That study prevents you from seeing applicable ideas and ways of doing things that arise in different disciplines. Could be that we need a method of cross-training at a higher level than introductory exposure. Could be the next wave of innovation depends on it.

All change, please.

Bloggers will change UK policy--film at 10:30

As an American living in the UK, and a former resident of Italy, I am inclined to be more charitable towards Tony Blair's government than most of the UK blogs I visit. (political life is dire in both countries, believe me.)

However, one area where I agree with most bloggers, particularly Tim Worstall (without citing one particular post, I take it as a given from his Politics category) is that Labour does not know how to listen.

It strikes me that one area where the blogging community could actually make a difference in political conversation is by pushing for electronic consultation. Currently, when Labour asks for comment on policy or legislation, you have to send by post for a form to be returned by post, with both request and return needed within a short time window.

Ideal Government has a concept called WIBBI (Wouldn't It Be Better If...) that they use to collect a variety of posts on ways to improve UK government. This would be my first nomination for a wibbi that bloggers could actually push to the top for action.

So I propose to begin calls upon the current government to establish a website called Consultations.gov.uk. This website would hold all such calls for consultation, notify readers of upcoming consultations and list results of prior calls. It could easily be organised as a series of weblogs, with perhaps a home page shaped more like a conventional website that could serve as explanation and table of contents.

The advantages of electronic consultation include: First, low cost. Blogs are next to free, and the only recurring cost would be a blogmaster. Second, it can be introduced as a supplementary form of gathering citizen opinion. The government can still send out paper forms--they can even check to see if there are differences in opinion based on methodology of information collection. Third, the increased transparency of having consultations take place in a public forum might lead to better policy--it will surely be a response to accusations of kitchen cabinet government and policy wonks determining our future behind closed doors.

I intend to take this to my M.P. and see if I can start a movement. I also intend to submit the idea as a letter to the editor. Heck--I might even start it up as a proof of concept blog that can run as an alternative until they see the wisdom of doing it themselves.

I rather think the movement would be stronger if I had support. Any takers? Oh--I think we should give ourselves a time limit for effective action. Say one year?

Death by Google

I'm not going to go on a rant on how government could misuse Google or Google-type capabilities, although Jacque Chirac's proposal to create a government owned Google search engine makes me really, really happy I'm not French. (This blogger trashed the government, is selling stuff on eBay and isn't paying the VAT? How sweet the information leverage is...)

Instead I'm just going to point out that anybody who depends on a database for their living had better be making alternative retirement plans that include shopping carts and sleeping bags under bridges. Google ate your lunch. They have redefined what information can be collected. As soon as they figure out how to slice it and dice it and sell it, there's problems o'plenty for a lot of people, including just about every company I've ever worked at.

A longitudinal database that can follow individuals through a spectrum of activities is the holy grail of anybody who wants to sell something. It is also the holy grail of governments who wish to monitor and eventually control behaviour of citizens. Google's got it.

One hundred zeros are not enough. Be afraid.

What Google Knows

Google has introduce maps, mail, desktop searches and blog searches recently. The conventional wisdom is that they provide these free toys that are either fun or useful and show little ads and links with the delivery of these free services. Hugely successful, these ads make Google a lot of money, and everybody is happy.

The problem is, when you seach the web on Google, if you have your pc indexed by their proprietary tool, results from your own files are displayed along with the web search results.

Google knows what's on your pc and can get it if they want. But they probably don't want to, and probably don't need to. The commercial power of Google in future will be tracking your behaviour across the portfolio of Google services.

The commercial uses of the different types of information Google processes are staggering,  once they are combined. If Google knows what place you search for and the results of your subsequent search for transportation, they can show you an ad for a taxi service and a hotel at your destination. This is cool. They could make it all permission based and ask you to allow them to intuitively select ads for services related to your recent activity. Heck, I'd say yes and Google scares me.

My fear is that Google may not always be used for commercial purposes. More later.

The Power and the Peril

I'm pretty sure they didn't plan it this way from the beginning. Two kids from Stanford thought up a cool way to search the web, put it out there and watched it work, and a flood of people glommed onto them to help them make money out of it. And Google was born. I don't think there was a master strategy from the beginning. There may not be a master strategy now. But if there is...

Google has the power to eat the information universe. The service sector accounts for about 60% of developed economies, and any service-related company that does not think about Google is not taking the future seriously. More specific information about how individuals use their computers and the Internet passes through Google servers than any other place in the world, and they are eminently capable of connecting the information.

Google's motto is 'Do no Evil.' You and I had better hope they take that motto seriously.

More in next post.

Gettin' Googled

Back from long break. Glad to be back.

Okay bloggers, quick question: How many of you have changed the title of a post to get better placement on a search engine? Yeah, me too. After noticing that so many of my visitors showed up from an unrelated search on Yahoo or Google, I started thinking like a journalist and choosing my words.

I'm going to try a trick that I think Andrew Sullivan uses, breaking up an 'essay' (rich word for bathrobe and coffee thoughts, innit?) into several posts. Extended paragraph posts, you might say... Next one is about Google power and peril.