Posted by Andrew Cooper on June 25, 2009
Here’s Charles Arthur in today’s Guardian noting that ‘the long tail of blogging is dying’ and explaining why.
My feeling is that blogs which serve a very specific purpose – like keeping relatives and friends in touch with an overseas trip – or reporting on a live event or TV programme will continue, not least because it’s much easier to integrate photos, sound and video that it is with Twitter. But both of those applications are time limited and targeted at a specific audience. Perhaps it’s the long-term ‘blog as a journal’ that will tend to die out, not least because – as Arthur points out – they need a lot of work.
Blogs and Twitter feed a basic human need to communicate, but those who can meet their needs with the least resources tend to win – in evolution, at least. It’s taken over 5 minutes to write this, find the links and post it. A ‘retweet’ of Arthur’s original Twitter post – which is how I learned about the article – took about 10 seconds, including adding (within my 140 characters) a note that most of the social media commentariat I’ve been following via Google Reader have drastically cut down on their number of blog posts.
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on June 23, 2009
Life is very hectic at present, but not so hectic that there isn’t time to look at this excellent collection of highly innovative business ‘cards’. I think this is my favourite:
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on May 22, 2009
Dear Sir Patrick,
In the summer of 1973, when I was seventeen years old, I attended a sixth form conference in Oxfordshire (at a school in Banbury, I think). I only remember two things from that event: dancing to a live band in the evening and listening to you talking to us about the future.
In general my memory of your talk is rather hazy, but I’m pretty sure that you spoke about the Apollo programme and the future of space exploration. The last humans to walk on the moon – indeed, the last humans to leave Earth orbit – had done so the previous December and we all knew you from the BBC’s coverage of Apollo.
One point you made stuck in my mind, however. You said that when we were your age – you were 50 at the time and I am now 53 – there would be computers “no larger than a packet of cigarettes” which would fit in our shirt pockets.
I wish I could remember what you thought these computers would be able to do. I expect we imagined that they would be like sophisticated calculators – one of my friends owned an early Hewlett Packard scientific calculator, which seemed pretty astonishing to us the time.
Now, thirty six years later, I know the answer. I have just been standing in our garden looking at the night sky with a shirt-pocket sized computer as my guide.
The computer in question can do many things. I can use it to read messages from friends and colleagues; it can read any of the billions of pages from something called the World Wide Web; it can take photographs and videos and transmit them to others. It can also, thanks to someting called “Google Sky Maps” guide me around the night sky. If I ‘point’ it at the sky it shows me the names of the stars and planets at which I’m looking – just now it picked out Saturn. It is really quite amazing – a pocket sized planetarium. I can even point it at the earth below me and it shows me what I could see if was standing on the other side of the planet.
My pocket sized computer also, incidentally, can be used to make telephone calls. Quite astonishing.
Very many thanks for talking to us, and inspiring us, way back then.
Best regards
Andrew Cooper
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on May 22, 2009
Here is Simon Jenkins suggesting in today’s Guardian that one explanation for the UK government’s current impersonation of a mammoth sinking into a tar pit is that ministers no longer take advice, at least on matters political, from permanent secretaries. Instead political advisers rule the roost leaving senior civil servants to manage and administrate.
‘Blair, like Thatcher over the poll tax, replaced Whitehall’s “scepticism first, loyalty afterwards” with loyalty first and then chaos. Brown as chancellor, who rarely consulted even his Treasury officials, endured one fiasco after another, as on tax credits and rail privatisation. At No 10 he conveys the image of a prime minister alone in his office, attended by a small and devoted cabal, unable to handle contradictory advice or exercise judgment based on it. A lost victim of circumstance, he seems to have no traction on the machinery of government.’
Jenkins predicts that Sir Humphrey will return. I’m not so sure: the Oxbridge classicists who once dominated the ranks of the senior civil service (Sir Humphrey was undoubtedly one himself) are no longer so sniffy about ‘commerce’ and are happy to head off to the private sector. Once a tradition has been broken, it’s broken.
I mentioned my encounter with a real Sir Humphrey here, incidentally.
Posted in government, yes minister | 2 Comments »
Posted by Andrew Cooper on May 17, 2009
John Locke
As John Locke pointed out, democracy relies on electors allowing a small group of individuals to have power over the rest of us. We give them our consent to let them govern us. Here in the UK the general mood of the public suggests that we have – mentally at least – withdrawn it.
The expenses scandal which is currently, to put it mildly, fuelling much debate here and has led to this state of affairs is pretty small beer compared with the kind of outright corruption I’ve come across in many of the countries I’ve visited (e.g. Ireland). However it has seriously undermined the public’s trust in those we have put in positions of power.
Writing in today’s Observer newspaper, Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, suggests a range of ideas aimed at restoring that trust. He argues for proportional representation (something that the Libdems have wanted for many years) and the development of a “short constitution setting out what rights people enjoy and making clear the subservience of Parliament to the people” which would be drawn up by “A constitutional convention, overseen by 100 randomly selected voters”.
I’ve blogged before about the idea of involving randomly selected members of the public in governing the country. I have never previously thought that the idea would fly – apart from it’s general wackiness, there are far too many vested interests in and around Westminster to allow it to happen. The 21st century’s version of the establishment – big business – depends on its ability to lobby and exert pressure via networks (all those senior ex-ministers and permanent secretaries who end up on the boards of banks, for example) and they just wouldn’t allow it to happen.
It’s a nice thought, though. When I’ve mentioned the idea of the self-immolating ‘Systems Party’ (as soon as it it gains power, it introduces legislation replacing voting as a means of selecting members of parliament with random selection) to others, one of the principle objections is that they wouldn’t want most of the people who one sees wandering up and down our local high street to be given power over anything. I disagree with that view: I think most people, when given actual responsibility, treated like adults and shown the arguments for and against a particular idea or policy are perfectly capable of thinking things through and making good decisions. The fact that the popular press, for example, treats most of the public as if they were idiots doesn’t mean that they actually are.
Clegg says in the Oberserver item that we need a system of government that’s fit for the 21st Century. I think that there’s a strong link here to another recurrent theme in this blog – Clay Shirky’s idea of ‘cognitive surplus’. As you’ll recall (see link to my review of his book in the right hand side bar) Shirky argues that we only needed pyramid shaped, hyerarchical organisations in the past because there was no other way of organising. However, the ’social media’ alongside a carefully constituted jury-like system, so that as many people as possible could play an active part in politics, might just work.
Not on this planet, though.
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on May 3, 2009
If, like me, you are a bit short of time to read the three books that Will Hutton reviews here, the review itself is worth a look. We’ve all seen the re-runs of Gordon Brown’s remarkably un-precsient Mansion House speech in 2007, during which he praised the assembled investment bankers for, in what Hutton describes as “language so purple it would make a cardinal blush” creating “an era that history will record as a new golden age for the City of London.” Perhaps all new Prime Minister’s should be required, by law, to watch a video that speech. Every day. Before breakfast.
Here’s about as much of it as you’;
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on April 30, 2009
Fellow fans of the West Wing – or anyone who has seen any Hollywood representation of the White House’s situation room – will know what it’s supposed to be like. Dimly lit, packed with technology, huge screens dominating the walls, most of the participants in meetings wearing enough gold braid to sink a medium sized battle ship. And so on.
The real thing – courtesy of the White House’ Flickr stream (photographer one Pete Souzas) is distinctly disappointing.
The only technology I can see is the single coffee flask at the rear of the room. There are some blotters and a bunch of middle aged men (and one woman) reading paper documents. Paper documents! That’s it. Come on guys, where’s your sense of theatre?
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on March 15, 2009
I’m blogging from Tanzania here while I’m away on my current trip. It’s mainly for the benefit of friends and family, but if you’d like to find out what it’s like in downtown Dar es Salaam you’ve very welcome to visit. Back in the UK on 9th April.
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on March 4, 2009
A very hectic week here at Mindworks Towers as my departure for Tanzania on Saturday approaches rapidly, so very little time for blogging. But I couldn’t resist linking to this story which jumped out at me from the BBC news home page. Onwards and upwards.
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on February 28, 2009
That’s the first sentence of this article, which has nothing to do with Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension, but is the only explanation I can think of for why this banker is behaving as he is. No doubt if we could interrogate the rats they’d say, shortly before they expired, ’you really can’t get enough of this stuff’. When he was working and receiving bonuses he earned more in a year than most of the population would need for a lifetime of reasonably comfortable living. He really doesn’t need the money. It’s easy to think that his behaviour is driven by greed, but perhaps he – like the lab rats – is suffering from an addiction and is in need of help and understanding rather than pure approbation. Just a second – no, it is just greed.
According to BBC Radio 4’s Money Programme today, if HBOS had failed – ie if it hadn’t been bailed out – Fred would have received £28,000 a year instead of the £695,000 to which, he maintains, he’s entitled.
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on February 26, 2009
I expect that you’re wondering, reader, what happend to the project in Tanzania which I started way back in October ‘08 and was which due to restart after a 3 week break. Well I’ve just booked my flights – some four months later – and am looking forward to updating the Habari Tanzania blog I started here. I’ll be arriving in Dar es Salaam on 7th March, in the meantime there’s a lot to do.
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on February 16, 2009
OK, chaps – and they are all chaps, aren’t they? – we’ve got the message. It’s going to be really bad. But talk about laying it on with a trowel. Seems to me that every time I check the news headlines someone or other has come out with saying something like ‘ it’s going to be much worst than everyone says it’s going to be’. Statements of this kind have, to my knowledge, been made twice in the last 48 hours. First the CBI said it’s going to be much worse than everyone thinks and now, unbelievably, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England is saying that the economy is ‘likely to perform much worse than the Bank of England expects’. That’s right. Charles Bean (I’ll avoid the obvious bean counter joke) is, according to the Guardian, saing that the economy is going to be in a worse state than the organisation of which he is deputy governor says it’s going to be.
Extrapolating from the ‘even worse than we thought it was going to be’ announcements made over the last week, I think we can be confident that by the end of February the outlook is going to be the worst it has been since people stopped swapping sharks teeth for goods and services rendered and started using money (which, based on a quick Google was in Mesoptamia – aka Iraq – some 5,000 years ago).
I propose that we all notify the assembled pundits, gurus, economists and bankers that we have got the message that things are worse than we can possibly imagine and that, until they inform us that the needle is nudging in the other direction, they can save their breath.
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on February 12, 2009
I think I can safely predict that this website is going to cost the UK economy some billions of pounds today – the rate at which it’s spreading across the various web feeds I follow is astonishing. Here’s my attempt:
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on February 10, 2009
Way back in mid-January I posted about the distinction that sports psychologists make between outcome goals and process goals. In a nutshell, focusing on winning a race (an outcome goal) can be counterproductive because everyone else has the same goal and simply wanting to win clearly doesn’t guarantee that you will. It’s much better, they argue, to focus on the things you need to do to maximise performance (process goals).
Here’s the excellent Oliver Burkeman making similar points with better examples in his Guardian column last Saturday.
Posted in management, planning, psychology | Tagged: consultancy, management consultants, personal development, planning, psychology | 2 Comments »
Posted by Andrew Cooper on February 10, 2009
Earlier this morning I commented on the blog post here which is about a subject that interests me.
Over the past three or four years there has been a lot of talk about re-engaging people in politics, much of it prompted by the idea that technology can help this happen. But terms like ‘engagement’ and ‘involvement’ are often used without serious consideration of what they would actually mean in practice. Our systems of government are deeply engrained, based in long established institutions, legal frameworks and, perhaps most importantly, customs and practice. Just because current information technology enables broader involvement doesn’t mean that it will happen.
As I suggested in an comment on the same blog, portable networked computers been around for many years – I sent my first email from a laptop device over 20 years ago. For most of those two decades pundits predicted that teleworking would revolutionise our working habits and travel patterns. It still hasn’t happened – those of us who telework are at the margins, most people still travel to their place of work and the airlines still rely on business travel for much of their income. The reasons we don’t telework (or tele-educate, for that matter) have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with how we best interact with one another in groups.
Posted in cognitive surplus, democracy, government | Tagged: government, innovation, psychology | 2 Comments »
Posted by Andrew Cooper on February 7, 2009
I’ve been very unfair to economists here, once or twice suggesting the fact that very few of them appeared to notice the looming Global Economic Meltdown reflected badly on their profession.
This, however, is an economist who is worth listening to. I’ve felt for some time that adversarial party politics simply can’t cope with the depth of our current economic crisis. Krugman feels the same way, I think. For example:
‘Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.
It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.’
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on February 3, 2009
According to this a £7 laptop is being developed by a ‘UK-Indian consortium’. Makes the $100 laptop seem probitively expensive. £7? Surely that would only cover the postage and packaging? More information needed, I think.
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on January 29, 2009
In my review of Here Comes Everybody I pointed out that I was surprised that Clay Shirky didn’t have more to say about the connection between cognitive organisation and the business of government. The premise of the book is that the social media enable us to ‘organise without having organisations’. Government is, of course, all about organisation: agreeing rules, deciding how to implement and fund them, allocating responsibilities, raising funding and so on.
Yesterday I posted a comment on the article here, at Emma Mulqueeny’s blog, on this topic. She’s one of a number of people working in/with government organisations in the UK to help them make better use of social media: blogs, wikis, discussion forums, Twitter and so on. To cut a not very long story shorter, I think that the main reason the exploitation of these technologies – and of the internet/web in general – hasn’t been quite as exciting as it might has little to do with the technology itself and everything to do with our system of government here in the UK. Although we like to think of ourselves as having one of the world’s oldest democracies the influence and involvement of the general public, as opposed to pressure groups, business and other vested interests – has always been rather low.
It needn’t be like that. The nature of the engagement isn’t about technology, though. Here’s a good example of engagement. Here’s a bad example which includes the nice phrase ‘fake listening’ which neatly sums up the very worst kind of engagement. To use one of my least favourite words, this is all about ‘empowerment’ and on the whole politicians aren’t in the business of empowering. All that carefully collected political capital buys them – and the interest groups closest to them – power. They aren’t about to hand it back to us any time soon. They need to remember that fake listening is by far the worst kind of listening: most people would rather not be listened to at all.
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Posted by Andrew Cooper on January 29, 2009
After hearing yesterday’s IMF forecast for the UK’s economy I wondered what they were saying this time last year.
According to this, they were suggesting that the economy would grow 2.4% in 2009. By April they had revised this to 1.6% in both 08 and 09. As late as July of 08 they’d revised the forecast for 09 to 1.7% and for 08 to 1.8%.
Their latest guess is that the UK economy will actually shrink by 2.8% this year. What’s that line about past performance being no guide to future performance?
I haven’t read the actual report so I don’t know whether the IMF’s economists are hedging their bets (‘the UK economy might shrink by 2.8% this year but, quite frankly, we haven’t got the faintest idea’). Such is the level of gloom at present I guess that anything is possible. One thing’s for sure, though: behaviour will determine what actually happens – the behaviour of politicians, investors and everyone else and how we will actually behave is impossible to predict with any certainty.
Talking of fingers in the wind, here’s how things looked in 2006 when US house prices had started falling but either probably would/or probably wouldn’t lead to a recession. You can see how easily cognitive dissonance would ensure that readers only saw the ‘probably wouldn’t’.
Posted in Confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, economists | Tagged: economics, psychology | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Andrew Cooper on January 28, 2009
This is well worth a look. Use the on screen controls, double click or your scroll wheel to zoom. This explains how he made the picture: it’s based on 220 high resolution photos stitched together. You can’t see the expressions on all 2,000,000 faces, but it’s the next best thing.
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