Google Suggests a pre-emptive text search July 16, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, video , 3commentsA short video to show how Google Suggest works and to imagine how this might change people’s behaviours if it gets deployed as the default search mode.
If I’m right and Google are seriously considering releasing this live then how big a change do you think it will mean and what are the implications for search engine results overall if Google Suggest slips into widespread use?
Foodie Greenwich to have no Kitsch in! January 4, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, London , add a commentBy the end of January there will be one less reason to visit Greenwich, one of London’s more interesting centres, since The Flying Duck is set to close after thirteen years of selling unusual tat, memorabilia, retro designs, kitsch furniture and fittings.
This comes after the closure of Essential Records and Godards Pie Shop, representing a further step in the gradual decline and homogeneity of what remained a relatively unique shopping area.
original photo by Jon
The owners say this is because they feel that Greenwich has lost some of its charm with more chain stores opening up at the expense of the independent trader. Not that they were competing directly with Woolworths, Marks and Spencer or W H Smiths but the niche market served by the curious little shop is probably better located in Brighton or Harrogate these days rather than south east London. There’ll still be plenty of Vietnamese noodle bars, Mexican burgers and posh fish and chips shops though.
The The Flying Duck online ecommerce site continues with a massive sale on all stock and I’m wondering if the rise and rise of Ebay, Amazon and Etsy as venues for buying and selling “long tail” collectibles may have a lot to do with it as well.
Couscous Recipe August 24, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : couscous recipe, internet, Long Tail , 2comments
During the month of August I’ve been undertaking an intensive online course about the commercial internet and web 2.0. This course is called the Thirty Day Challenge and it has covered aspects including the crucial importance of market research, methods for measuring potential traffic, immersive learning, ethical writing, targeted posting, and authentic voice authorship. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster with unexpected community side effects and suchlike but the learning opportunites have been enormous and the potential application in a wider context cannot be overlooked.
One of the exercises for example has been to write three articles every day about a chosen topic, with the topic having been chosen not because of any familiarity with the subject matter, but from a purely quantitative set of metrics. Many have found that extremely difficult or given up.
On day twenty three of the challenge it was suggested that rather than write to a preconceived formula it would be better simply to tell an authentic story. This is how the best copywriting is achieved apparently.
Anyway, I decided after a while that rather than use a pseudonym or pen name, I would continue to publish all of my own writing under my own real name.
So here, as per the topic title of this post, is a piece of gonzo journalist cookery writing, which I produced yesterday afternoon as a response to lesson 22. I’ve no idea whether it fulfils certain criteria or not, but I enjoyed writing it a lot more than some other stuff, and that’s probably a good sign.
Here’s the article: Couscous Recipe
If you enjoyed that you might like to add it to one of the social bookmarking sites liested below under “share this”. Whichever you normally use or comes naturally.
Oh yes, if you are actually looking for a practical couscous recipe then you might be better off going straight to couscous recipe page or else visit the couscous recipe bookshop at amazon UK.
**update**
There’s now an illustrated Rabbit in Mustard with couscous and Quinoa recipe page up on the couscous recipes blog as well.
Amazon UK couscous recipe bookshop
Lulu August 4, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Long Tail, web2.0, Wiki , 2commentsI’m very interested in Lulu, so even the slightest mention in one of the RSS feeds I read is worth noting:
Engineers without Fears: Open Publish (1): The Keynote Cops
Then there was Andrew Pate from Lulu. AP told us about Lulu - on-demand publishing and its role in the Long Tail. Lulu is an interesting service so hence AP’s talk was interesting. Two comments:* AP noted there is a growing interest in self-published material by book sellers whereas 5 years ago they wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
* From an audience of over 100, only 2 of us had bought anything off Lulu.
Music business models for internet artists July 15, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Flickr, Long Tail, Music , add a comment
Samantha Murphy asks on Facebook MyQuestions how can a musician earn a living in the digital age, in conjunction with having just decided that “Free is the way to go” and making all the tracks on her album available for free download.
I’m trying to synthesise this situation facing musical artists with the ideas from Jyri Engestrom back in June. He noticed a change in successful website businesses towards charging the publishers, not the spectators. Photos on Flickr for example, are consumed free of charge by a readership far wider than the photographers. The photographers themselves pay a small premium in order to be allowed to upload a larger number of pictures and organise them. Back to music, last.fm currently charges consumers for full access to their own personalised radio station but in some sense they are also publishing their playlists. The movement there is towards encouraging artists and labels to provide free downloads and then perhaps pay to gain higher exposure on the system. Applied to the digital music industry then, the model would appear to be to “charge the uploaders, not the downloaders”.
Vanity publishing
So life would appear to be tough for the artists. Perhaps there is a surfeit of aspiring musicians and it is audience attention which is in short supply? All a bit like the vanity publishing industry for amateur novel writers. Or is it?
Free Prince album
By coincidence, news has just broken that the artist now known again as Prince has struck a deal whereby his new album is given away with a newspaper. This is said to be an arrangement more lucrative than his previous album sold conventionally through the record shops. That doesn’t seem very repeatable, but it’s seen by the music publishing industry as a betrayal. They managed to convince most celebrity artists that defending intellectual property rights is the only way to ensure they can get paid for being creative. In truth, it’s the only way to ensure the intermediates get a disproportionate slice of it, and that is what’s being lamented.
Singer songwriter
Nearly all musical artists who work solo call themselves singer-songwriters these days, and nearly all bands perform their own material. This is probably a distortion caused by the writers royalties being a major factor when choosing material to perform. Probably there are a lot of great singers, many potential songwriters and a few who are great singer songwriters. There could be opportunities for musicians who have mastered the art of digital studio recording to offer to turn songwriters’ material into published tracks for them. Alternatively singers may commission writers to provide materal especially for their performance style. The opportunities for cross covers, remote collaboration, duets and derivative mixes are bursting out of the old model, and who knows where it may lead in the long tail of diverse taste and the needs of so many people to find an outlet for their creativity.
Quote
A spokesman for the singer told The Mail on Sunday: “Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those who want to hear it.
“Prince feels that charts are just music industry constructions and have little or no relevance to fans or even artists today.”
The demise of professional photographers May 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Flickr, Long Tail , add a commentMore casualties of the mass amateurisation of everything..
Andrew Brown: We all helped to speed the demise of professional photographers | Technology | Guardian Unlimited Technology
Just as film has been replaced by digital, professionals are being replaced by amateurs. The changes are partly technological and partly economic, but the final blow to his profession has come from Flickr and similar Web 2.0 sites.
Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One April 7, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Microjobs, Long Tail , 2commentspajamanation has been described amongst other things as a platform for enabling a type of ‘crowdsourcing’ in the jobs market. So what does crowdsourcing mean?
Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One
Crowdsourcing can be looked at as an application of the wisdom of crowds concept, in which the knowledge and talents of a group of people is leveraged to create content and solve problems. The official definition from the term’s originator, Jeff Howe, is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.”
Certainly the idea of splitting up one large job into smaller discrete components is present in the microjobs concept, but crowdsourcing seems to be more about getting lots of people to do the same thing, or similar parts of the same thing, and then averaging or otherwise analysing the outputs to create one new insight or product. Using a thousand eyeballs to search satellite photographs for a piece of floating ocean wreckage, each being allocated an adjacent few hundred square metres is a niche requirement that may be well suited to Amazon’s mechanical turk service, but microjobs are more suited to the long tail of requirements, where millions of niche tasks can be created, each one unique with its own short specification, terms and delivery style. There is some overlap in the concepts, but it would be worth explaining the differences at an early stage before the words are fully released into the wild to evolve and degenerate through popular usage into looser, woolier phrases with indistinct or inaccurate meanings.
Free Beer March 21, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail , add a commentRemember “Open Cola“? Well here’s Free Beer.
“And there’ll be free beer for all the workers,
free beer for all the workers.
Free beer for all the workers when the red revolution comes. ”
Free as in speech, not free as in beer.
Via The Future of Communities article about the Kettle crisps community.
A flock of geese March 17, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Bird Flu, Long Tail, online facilitation, blogs and community, politics , 6comments
Stephen Downes argues that the following statement is invalid:
“The flock of geese decided to land”
What in fact happened is that each individual goose decided to land. We observed this and interpreted it as the flock deciding to land.
photo under CC licence by glennharvey06
What a wonderfully clear example the flock of geese idea gives us to try and think about this clash of perspectives which has been rumbling along about individuals and groups, blog networks compared to listserves, the illusion of flat hierarchies, left right, north south, hive mind or cooercion and so on. It might just be me, but the geese question seems to point at something which may turn out to be a central and fundamental issue, like the difference between the naturalistic worldview and idealism.
So I will argue that the flock of geese did decide to land. {{ducks}}
Maybe one goose made the first move towards landing, or maybe the trajectory emerged from out of whatever was going on between the flock beforehand, but what happened next is a process which I would call ‘arriving at a group decision’. One or more individual geese began to move towards landing in such a way that the intention to land began to be communicated through the flock. Each individual goose then took a decision to follow the leaders, or ignore them. I’ve observed occasions when this results in a cleaving of the flock, with one part landing and another group splitting away to circle around and land in the next field, for example. Now, some individuals may be motivated by the desire to land, and others by a preference to stay with the group who are landing, that doesn’t matter. Nobody said it has to be one goose one vote in a secret ballot. The decision can be swayed by acts of leadership, by an averaging of cumulative actions, or by random events but a decision is what is arrived at by the flock in just the same way as the various parts of my own brain somehow come to a conclusion as to which shirt I will put on in the morning.
The reason why all of this is important, is because sometimes groups can do things which sums of individuals cannot, like negotiating decent pay and conditions through collective bargaining for example. In that case, the individuals within the syndicate need to be willing to subject themselves to a group discipline in order to take effect action without splitting. There has to be a mechanism to take a group decision which is binding on individuals in order for the individuals involved to benefit from collective action.
That’s why the emphasis on individual networks rather than groups disturbs me, it’s all too reminiscent of Mrs Thatchers’ “There is no such thing as society, there are individuals and there are families”. Networks seem to have the effect of exaggerating inequality as already stronger nodes attract new connections faster than weaker ones. Is that the effect we wish to take an active decision to cultivate or should we make positive choices to nurture alternative patterns with greater long term sustainability?
Well Stephen is a skillful and knowledgable philosopher so I expect he will tear my proposition apart if he ever reads it, but if anything remains it can only help to clarify somebody’s thinking, somewhere - like mine perhaps.
What is on TV tonight February 28, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, UK , add a commentHow many times do you ask yourself - Is there anything on the telly? And no, the answer isn’t “a penguin”
Frankie Roberto has launched a “micro service” called “On TV tonight” which isn’t another listings site, it’s a highly individual review of one or two programmes - or none - which are on TV tonight, delivered by RSS at 4.00am each morning. Obviously it’s aimed at the UK only and you may be wondering “why should I take any notice of what this Roberto person thinks is worth watching?”
So all I can say is to try it. Don’t spend hardly any time on it, just subscribe to the RSS and let the daily post pop up in your reader along with everything else. Then after a week or two, see if it might just have been useful on occasion.
frankie roberto blog - Introducing… ‘on TV tonight’
On ‘Micropublishing’:
Another reason I’ve done this is as an experiment into a concept I’ve been thinking about which I’ve called ‘micropublishing’. The idea is to focus on publishing concentrated amounts of highly relevant content which fills a specific need of a time-poor audience. By being rich but small, the content can be aggregated and transferred across platforms to be consumed in any way that’s useful.
You may also be interrested in the page on Microformats.
Frankie himself told me :
I built a really lightweight website over the holidays, which I’m asking for feedback on. It’s basically a low-maintenance blog where I write short comments about what I think is worth watching on tv each night. If nothing’s on it will just say “nothing on tv tonight”. I can queue up entries in advance, and then it’s published each morning via RSS and on the site. My personal aim was to a) see if I can write valuable, well-written content on a regular basis and b) produce another small Ruby on Rails website.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
