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Re: Sharing My Kindle Highlights

Andrew Walkingshaw — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 14:26:17 -0000

You need to turn on "Public Notes" for each book. (Nice UX there, Amazon.)

https://kindle.amazon.com/y... lets you do that.

I've turned on notes for one book, and you can see the results here:
https://kindle.amazon.com/p...

(By the way, if you have even a passing interest in soccer or geopolitics - and more than any other sport, the two are basically the same thing - I really recommend that book.)

Re: SIMILE

Andrew Walkingshaw — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:57:20 -0000

David Hunyh is working, I believe, on Google Refine (which is pretty magic and clearly coming from many of the same places, but still...)

Re: Voices: News organizations must become hubs of trusted data in a market seeking (and valuing) trust

Andrew Walkingshaw — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:07:15 -0000

There's a number of interesting points here – many of which line up with the thinking behind some of our products at Timetric (eg http://timetric.com/product....

The key issue, as you point out, is the skills gap. Software engineers and data scientists have a different set of precepts and internalized skills to journalists, and vice versa, and one of the central challenges is finding a shared language to enable us to talk with each other. A lot of the innovation in news organizations/news platforms sometimes resembles technologists talking past journalists, or vice versa.

Re: Affect and effect

Andrew Walkingshaw — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:47:38 -0000

Really varies. The UK (and to be fair Ireland) are a little unusual in having a strong public service broadcaster which is more or less free of political interference.

RAI is very much the opposite, for instance – http://en.wikipedia.org/wik.... It's state-owned but hardly impartial.

Re: Affect and effect

Andrew Walkingshaw — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:07:38 -0000

Thinking about it, I think there's a big driving factor in the UK which I neglected, too: we've got a huge, impartial, basically unbiased news organisation with absolutely no commercial motives whatsoever. The BBC is squatting the "just-the-facts" space really hard. Given that, even if there were value in that space in the abstract, there isn't in the UK market.

Re: Fear and Loathing in Phoenix – My 48 Hour Binge Experience at NewsFoo

Andrew Walkingshaw — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:30:20 -0000

Thanks for the mention, and for keeping the discussion going - it's one which needs to happen.

(BTW, seriously not a big deal at all, but it's Walkingshaw, not Walkenshaw. My surname gets misspelt by *everyone*!)

Re: Some Thoughts On London On Our Way Home

Andrew Walkingshaw — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 07:18:50 -0000

Next time you're over, drop in at White Bear Yard (http://whitebearyard.com/) and TechHub (http://www.techhub.com/)!

Re: The phase-space of news

Andrew Walkingshaw — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:04:31 -0000

Thank doesn't mean we just throw up our hands and go 'morality is irrelevant, crime is profitable, fighting it is naïve.'

It means we focus, where we can, on harm reduction, because that actually works. Hand-wringing is attractive but useless.

Two things; current journalism hasn't been doing such a great job of speaking truth to power, and not all writing is done by journalists or paid for out of news-industry budgets, even if the writers are professionals. (See Andrew Marr here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/m.... Basically, not all professionals are journalists – some are scientists, some are lobbyists, some are practicing engineers or designers. What we're talking about here is ability to write, and that's by no means exclusively a journalistic skill. Pretending otherwise is sophistry.

I think there's a minimum cost for the production of good communicative material, whatever it is. However, I don't think that cost has to be, or indeed can sustainably be, borne by the current news industry. I think we will have a portfolio approach to media, where some people write as a - potentially unpaid - sideline.

Lifestyle, music and arts journalism is heavily monetizable in several ways, including through the means we have now (advertising and affiliate models). So let's dismiss that out of hand; it's a solved, or at the very least solvable, problem.

So, environment, science and technology. Being able to write well measurably increases the market value of a scientists, given that so many of the tasks a scientist needs to perform to succeed professionally, from public communication to teaching to fundraising, are based around communication skills. These guys have a huge incentive to blog and journal well, and that content is repurposable by professional curators. They're, collectively, already doing a much better, more detailed, and more rigourous job than any professional science journalist. Exactly the same is true in technology, except the paid speaking circuit is better, so if anything the dynamics work better there.

So, politics and public policy. Firstly, there are a lot of professional communicators who are already active in this space, particularly at the NGO and international level. They're not journalists, but they are writing and breaking news. Campaigning journalism is, like it or not, already an adjunct to politics now and will be funded as such – either explicitly by political organisations or at arms-length by foundations and charitie. Much editorial comes from the same wellspring. They're already colonized by lobbyists, so that'll hardly make things worse. In fact, the honesty will likely help in generating balance.

Why is the trade of journalism as it stands so magical? It's not about journalism, it's about reporting and analysis. Those can, and will, come from a much broader range of sources.

And I haven't mentioned amateurs once.

Re: The phase-space of news

Andrew Walkingshaw — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 03:12:29 -0000

First up – you should understand that I'm speculating about what will happen, not what I'd like to happen, or what I believe to be morally best. It's not my "brave new world", it's everyone's. Oh, if I had that much power. You'd all be in so much trouble.

So EPIC 2015 is both inspirational and terrifying. Did you not notice the "Winston Smith" ID card? Here's the money quote for me:

At its best, EPIC is a summary of the world — deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before ... but at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational.

Your biases, and your assumption of my biases, mean that you maybe weren't looking for that reading, but that's where I am. What's more – we are there now. If you're good at driving Google Alerts, an RSS reader, Twitter, and you're good at pattern recognition, you can aggregate and absorb more and better information than anyone who's ever lived. There's a real, sustained advantage for an information elite there. There's also massive risk and pain for the have-nots.

First, let's dismiss the hand-wringing you're indulging in, because it's utterly self-indulgent. Up first: morality. Basically, it doesn't matter what we want. Whether "Home Taping is Killing Music" or not, people are going to tape. Whether drugs are illegal or not, whether they're immoral or not, people are going to do drugs. The war on drugs hasn't worked, the war on MP3 hasn't worked, the war on free news won't work. If you put in paywalls, they will be evaded.

I can't state this strongly enough: you will not and cannot win this through moral force. It doesn't matter how hard you wish. Your morality, or my morality - and I think you'd be surprised with how close we are on this - are irrelevant. What we want doesn't matter. What we can make profitable does matter, because that will survive. If news is going to be supported by commerce, then there is nothing else.

Next up: professionalism. Let's dismiss the word "professional". Why does "professional" mean "good"? I'd challenge that. By no serious metric are most novelists or musicians, even many great ones, "professional". The vast majority earn their living through other activities – teaching, side jobs, using their talents in other fields. Many local journalists are already semi-pro at most. The Broken Family Band never gave up the day jobs. The best semi-pro or amateur bloggers cover technology, music, and arts at least as well as the professionals.

So let's be honest here, we're not talking about criticism or "lifestyle" news: they monetize just fine through AdSense, affiliate marketing, and merchandise (ask Roger Ebert, or Television without Pity). Cookery monetizes fine, sports monetizes fine, travel monetizes very well, health stories monetize brilliantly. Even politics monetizes adequately - particularly when you consider vertical networks like MessageSpace. What you can't sell ads next to is hard news, particularly international hard news and war coverage, and that's what's most expensive to collect. Chris Dixon of Hunch at BusinessWeek:

Notice there aren’t any ads on the page. This is because ads for “afghanistan war” generate such low revenues per query that Google doesn’t think it’s worth hurting the user experience with a cluttered page. Google can afford to do this on news queries (along with many other categories of queries) because their real business is selling ads on queries where the user likely has purchasing intent. Big money-making categories include travel, consumer electronics and malpractice lawyers. News queries are loss leaders.

Newspapers have historically produced high quality hard news, particularly international news, either as a status symbol or, in times of war, as propaganda. It's been the mine's-bigger-than-yours of professional news. Not the reporters, but with very few exceptions (and those have been, in spirit if not in letter, charities), that's what the proprietors have been after. Now that's become explicit, people have realised just how scary it's been. So what are our alternatives? Either find some way to get hard news as a byproduct of something which makes money – which is what Reuters and Bloomberg do – or accept that "professional" hard news gathering will become entirely supported by taxation (the BBC), patronage (the hard-news Murdoch papers), or charitable donations (PBS), and will be produced by a small number of professionals supported by a torrent of crowd-sourced and semi-pro primary audio, video and reportage. There'll be more pool reporting, more use of YouTube and similar distributed broadcasting platforms, and, yes, more propaganda.

Yes, that's scary. The last hundred years has been a massive anomaly. The next hundred are going to be radically different. We can either deny it or engage with it and attempt to shape it to our morality, but we have to do that in a way which makes commercial sense. Anything else is just painfully, and parodically, naive.

Re: Timetric raises seed funding to help companies visualize, manage gobs of data

Andrew Walkingshaw — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:05:16 -0000

By the way, we're hiring! http://timetric.com/biz/jobs/

Re: Top artists’ concert revenues typically 2-3x their album sales

Andrew Walkingshaw — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:42:19 -0000

There's very little money in record sales fullstop any more. Based on some numbers I found, the Christmas No 1 was worth maybe £30k to Rage Against the Machine: http://withpretext.com/post... ...

Re: Shilling in the name

Andrew Walkingshaw — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:05:01 -0000

That 15% includes the publishing royalty. That might be a bit skinny — it could easily be closer to 20% for Rage — but we're really only talking about ballpark figures in any case.

Don't get me wrong, I think the whole RATM thing is hilarious. Sony come out furthest ahead financially, but even there are they really winners? They get the two biggest singles hits of the year and they make a bit under £400k. What that tells me is that there's no future in record sales at all.

Re: Embrace the medium

Andrew Walkingshaw — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:34:20 -0000

Another one is Eliss. The gameplay doesn't have much in common with either, but if you're into Rez or Fantavision on PS2 you'll probably love it.

Re: Wisdom of (this) crowd?

Andrew Walkingshaw — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:46:21 -0000

To put it bluntly: my bank and my phone company are the only two companies I (at least in principle!) trust to reliably confirm my identity and to make payments on my behalf. They should *own* single sign-on - the whole OpenID/OAuth space. I'm amazed they haven't yet - I should be "Andrew Walkingshaw at O2 UK", tied to a physical device I've always got with me.

(So as I said on Twitter, what's the difference for consumers? Not much!)

Re: Maps and legends and stacks of abstractions

Andrew Walkingshaw — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:57:28 -0000

I thought it would be, although there's a lot of the Speedbird archives I've not read. I haven't got round to Everyware yet either, I'm afraid, though it's on the list... Anyway, I'm really new to all of this, so no doubt that's showing. I'd be astounded if any of what I've written here is original. My apologies if I've inadvertently plagiarised you!

My background's in physical sciences, not design. Massaging data misleadingly still makes me feel like a turncoat. Now, I'd never accuse the Tube map of doing that; it does what it aims to. But a rainstorm, and a hole in my shoe, and a stressful day of meetings made me realise for myself how we could inadvertently perform these sins of omission. I thought that might be worth a blog post.

Re: Maps and legends and stacks of abstractions

Andrew Walkingshaw — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:46:53 -0000

The Tube map is intended for that, sure. But there's a problem here, I think. You can't entirely separate navigating the surface city and the Underground network, because you use the Underground to navigate the surface city. Where the stations are in relation to each other matters, and the Tube map sacrifices some of that. It's the psychology of it: anything which looks like it represents what you're trying to do, whether your conscious mind knows it or not, is going to subconsciously influence your decision making.

The Tube map's great, and hugely successful, and it fulfils its design goals, but it does have consequences. As we build out hundreds of these things, and dynamic ones which reconfigure themselves, I worry that we run the risk of making that kind of confusion much worse. I don't want that to become an excuse not to move forward!

Re: Only 17 venture capital firms raise money in Q3 — fewest in 15 years

Andrew Walkingshaw — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:06:11 -0000

Done that now. If you going by the Calibre One/BLN data for investments made, then the last two quarters are the first in quite a while where VC funds in North America have invested more money than they’ve taken in! (If you want to analyse the raw data yourselves, you can - it’s on Timetric at http://timetric.com/tags/th...

Re: Only 17 venture capital firms raise money in Q3 — fewest in 15 years

Andrew Walkingshaw — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:07:23 -0000

Following on from @marklittlewood: we've been tracking the latest European/American VC data at http://timetric.com/labs/ve.... We'll add this data to that ASAP - thank you!

Re: (With pretext.)

Andrew Walkingshaw — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:39:49 -0000

That's good to know, cheers! The RFH canteen looked pretty decent too,
actually. Lots of fresh fish if that's your thing.

I was down there for a meeting at the County Hall Marriot. Very plush
indeed. I could feel my credit card shuddering in horror as soon as I
got to the lobby...

Re: (With pretext.)

Andrew Walkingshaw — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:33:21 -0000

The photo came out a bit dark; it's much more impressive up close. You're the real engineer, though, so I'll take your word for it!

Re: (With pretext.)

Andrew Walkingshaw — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:58:37 -0000

Just testing. Isn't this exciting?

Re: “Sink Venice” by Ikara Colt (download MP3) My... - Vex Appeal

Andrew Walkingshaw — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:53:48 -0000

I found Ikara Colt through the Sonic Mook Experiment compilation. I was DJing and doing student radio then, and it felt like smart-arse punk art could take over the world. Then, of course, it didn't.

"Rudd" is still one of my favourite songs, though. Think I might listen to it again. I just sit and I watch and I wait now...

Thank you.