N95 8GB
By Huw Leslie | August 21, 2008
I’m the proud owner of a new Nokia N95 8GB as an upgrade from 3. I wasn’t actually due for an upgrade, but received a letter from 3 telling me that they were changing the way they bill; specifically, they are now rounding up calls which last less than a minute to a whole minute for billing purposes. That didn’t bother me enormously, but I did remember reading that such a change would entitle me to cancel my contract.
Three were, for the most part, very helpful, apart from their bizarre attempts to downsell me. Usually anyone in telesales will try to persuade you that you need things which you don’t. In this case, two different operators separately tried to persuade me that I wouldn’t need the 8GB version, and that the original N95 was identical apart from the built-in memory of the 8GB model. That’s simply not true, but in any case you would have thought they would have been fighting to get me to spend the extra fiver a month the 8GB model will cost. On top of that, an operator tried to persuade me that I didn’t need the internet addon, again £5/month. I wasn’t wavering – I told him I needed it – and he proceeded to tell me why I didn’t. If 3 had had its own way, I would be paying them a total of £180 less over the course of the contract!
So far (all of about twelve hours) the phone’s been great. In particular, I’m loving the camera and the screen. I had a S60 phone before, the 6120 Classic, but the N95 is out of its league. More when I’ve had more time to get to know it.
Topics: Me, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Wait till you’re older
By Huw Leslie | August 1, 2008
Labour’s National Policy Forum voted this week to include a policy of votes for 16-year-olds in the manifesto at the next election.
On the one hand, I would have loved to have voted in the local elections this year, but am 17. This was unfair and illogical in many ways. I suspect I was far more passionate about the election and the outcome I desired than the vast majority of the voters. I was out in the pouring rain and late at night campaigning for Labour and Ken and loving (nearly) every minute of it. But I was six months away from being 18, and so the country didn’t judge my opinion worth listening to. It was deeply frustrating to be desperately attempting to convert ambivalent and apathetic friends to vote Labour, yet be unable to follow my own instruction.
However, Tom Harris, minister for Transport and superb blogger, has come out against the decision, and I have a lot of sympathy with his argument. Despite my deep-seated desire to vote, the closest I have come to the campaign for votes at sixteen is a badge and lanyard I was handed at a conference. A teenage suffragist campaign does not appear to be around the corner, and Harris is surely right to point out that if the vote were offered to 16 and 17 year olds, the vast majority would not use it. It is often heralded as the answer to low voter turnout, yet there is little evidence that the reason that voters over 18 have been voting in declining numbers is because they were unable to vote when they were 16. Indeed, I think it might even have the opposite effect: when a person turns 18, it is a big occasion. The new adult may well be more pleased that he can now enjoy a legal drink than with his new-found voting privileges, but I do think there must be a sense of novelty and achievement. If the voting age is 16, apathy as a result of ignorance is likely to be even higher, and there is a risk that the new right slips by unnoticed.
I really don’t know what I think about this. It may well be the wrong question to ask. My passion for politics is not typical of someone of my age, or indeed of someone of any age, and therein lies the problem. Political apathy in this country is the real reason for falling turnouts. Perhaps an examination of the way politicians, the media and the public communicate with each other is where the real answers lie, but that won’t be nearly as easy as simply passing a law.
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Freakonomics review
By Huw Leslie | July 31, 2008
I’ve just read Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, and thought I’d write a review (in general I’m intending to review more things on this blog).
That I read it at all is an achievement – not on my part, but on the authors’. I am ashamed to admit that it is the first book which I have read cover to cover in a long time (perhaps a year), with the exception of my A-Level English texts. Levitt and Dubner succeeded in that respect where countless others have failed. The achievement is only increased when one considers the subject of the book: economics. I mean, economics isn’t commonly regarded as a subject which lends itself well to a pageturner!
The book is so compelling because it is consistently interesting; the stated aim is to root out complacent conventional wisdom and replace it with evidence-based theory everywhere it is found. Perhaps the book would not have been so successful if this mission had been applied to analysis of the balance of trade, but the authors’ chosen subjects of education, sumo wrestling, the Klu Klux Klan and drug gangs to name but a few makes for a lively and innovative read.
I have a great deal of sympathy for the book’s aim; I do think we live in a society where evidence is often replaced by blind acceptance of statements, providing they come from the ‘right’ source, at face value. Take crime in the UK. The vast majority of people are certain that crime is on the rise, yet under the Labour Government crime has fallen signficantly if one looks at either reported crimes or, crucially, the British Crime Survey.
Freakonomics is a thoroughly enjoyable book, but with a serious point, cogently demonstrated throughout. The fact that the book came free with a newpaper last week only made me doubly pleased with myself: not only had I managed to actually read a book all the way through, but I hadn’t had to pay for it!
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New gig at Virtual Worlds Forum
By Huw Leslie | July 10, 2008
It’s been a while since I last wrote on this blog, and for good reason: the small matter of A-Levels made me quite busy. They’re all over now, though, so I now have the opportunity to re-emerge from my hermit status.
I’m really excited to have started a new job, blogging and podcasting for the Virtual Worlds Forum website. The Virtual Worlds Forum is a wildly successful conference in London which debuted last year, and is coming back this year in October. I started on Tuesday this week, which couldn’t have been a bigger news day; Google finally got into the space with Lively, and I really welcome the opportunity to get really involved with a space that is clearly going to be of increasing importance in the future as advertisers go to new lengths to engage their audience.
I haven’t been doing proper, regular blogging for about a year now, and its a really nice feeling to be ‘back in the saddle’. I’m doing a handover period with my extremely helpful predeccessor at Virtual Worlds Forum blog, Stuart Dredge, for the next couple of weeks or so, and then I’ll be striking out on my own.
Topics: Blogging, Me | 60 Comments »
Why do we care about FriendFeed?
By Huw Leslie | February 26, 2008
FriendFeed announced that they had publicly launched and acquired funding to the tune of $5 million on Monday, and in the short 24 hours since then has apparently achieved phenomenal growth – they have suddenly gained a vast userbase and appear a long way along the road to being the next ‘hot startup’ beloved of the Web 2.0 community, in the same vein as a long line of well known products such as Twitter, Google Reader, Flickr, Del.icio.us.
The Web 2.0 crowd regularly chooses itself new shiny objects (not to necessarily belittle those choices), and so what has occurred with FriendFeed is not unprecedented in that sense. What I believe has been unique in this case is the speed at which this has happened; even Twitter, the most recent and perhaps also most relevant example, did not achieve popularity as fast as this. By the time of SXSW last year, seen as its tipping point, it had already rode a more modest growth curve for several months. FriendFeed, by contrast, has just emerged from a private beta which I suspect had much smaller usage than Twitter enjoyed in the weeks and months preceding its tipping point of the scale which
So why has this happened? Part of it is a testament to the product; it fulfils a clear need – the difficulty in following one’s friends’ activities around the web in a quick, simple way – and the fact that one of its co-founders was the first developer of Gmail at Google means that it is no surprise that the user experience is first rate. But that alone cannot account for the success. There are plenty of other great products, which solve a problem and are executed well, which are released but which haven’t achieved the instant traction of FriendFeed.
It’s not as though FriendFeed is the only startup to recieve comprehensive coverage from the tech blogosphere, either. TechCrunch, Mashable, Read/WriteWeb and VentureBeat have led the charge, and have certainly been joined by a throng of smaller sites, but that happens every day. The haul of coverage on TechMeme isn’t exactly earthshattering:
FriendFeed is a social network of sorts, and its biggest barrier to adoption was always going to be achieving the network effect, the classic example of this expressed by the question ‘who did the first PayPal member send money to?’ It is stating the obvious to argue that FriendFeed’s utility does not inherently lie with the product, but with its userbase.
And this key fact about FriendFeed’s model also goes the furthest to explaining why it has been able to become as popular as quickly as it has. The speed at which the ‘chicken and egg’ problem occurred meant that it wasn’t really a problem at all.
So how did FriendFeed achieve this? They built their product so that the inherent barrier to adoption (the network effect) was minimized to such an extent that launch-day momentum could carry them over it in one go. More specifically, they didn’t release too early. Even their invite-only private beta had a fairly comprehensive feature set and good user experience, and the product they launched today is well polished. That might be seeing as running contrary to the oft-repeated ‘release early, release often’ mantra, which certainly has some validity. If they had launched with only a semi-useful product, the difficulty in the network effect would have been compounded by poor levels of user activity. Having encouraged a user to sign up, it is essential that he invites his friends.
Further, by not releasing in drips and drabs (stealth, then super-private alpha with leaked screenshots to TechCrunch, then a few sparse invites, then more widely available invites – you get the picture), FriendFeed concentrated a significant proportion of their PR capital in a single day, creating a short burst which they gambled correctly would be sufficient to take them over the ‘bump’ of achieving the network effect.
All in all- clever strategic planning exhibited by a top rate team. They’ve been very intelligent in the way that they have designed their product as well, and the commentary here on their strategic decisions isn’t intended to take away from the fact that any web startup must start with a great product if it wants to have even a hope of success. I’ve sort of taken that for granted here.
And you can find me on FriendFeed here.
Topics: Startups | No Comments »
Mainstream media’s going nowhere
By Huw Leslie | January 27, 2008
An idea which persists despite my deep irritation at it is that somehow the world of new media, meaning the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook – whatever the startup du jour happens to be, will replace traditional media. Just as town criers (did they exist anywhere apart from the UK) were rendered useless by newspapers, the newspaper industry will be replaced by blogs. Nothing quite like a list, so here goes:
1. It’s the brand, stupid
Media is all about the brands; brands are what attract audiences and advertisers alike. They engender trust – the BBC or the Wall Street Journal brands are good examples of this. Without even looking at a piece of content, the audience already expects it to be good. They create loyalty – if I enjoyed BBC’s news yesterday, I’ll probably watch them today. Powerful brands are not the preserve of traditional media (just look at TechCrunch or Engadget), but large-scale media, with its massive audience, is in a unique position to create and maintain such brands. And that keeps audiences and advertisers queuing up.
2. Size matters
The massive scope of traditional media operations provides them with a guaranteed spot in the market. The Prime Minister is always going to chose to be interviewed by Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, over Huw Leslie, blogger at For Crying Out Loud, for obvious reasons. Likewise, I’m not going to be reporting on the wars in Iraq or Afganistan for this blog any time soon either. That’s not to say that blogging can’t provide insight on such conflicts; on the contrary, there’s a vast amount of blogging happening, particularly in Iraq, by those who are affected. But there is a valuable perspective that new media just can’t bring because of its scale.
3. Money
Although Google ad revenue in the UK now exceeds that of ITV1, the business model for traditional media remains stronger than that of new media (even including newspaper websites). Part of that is caused by some advertisers’ wariness of online advertising, which will inevitably wear off, but there are aspects of short head ad economics which are more favourable than those of the long tail. First, traditional media, whether online or offline, is likely to have more powerful brands, or at least more reliably strong brands, which advertisers would like to associate themselves with. Second, economies of scale mean that media buyers would rather make a big buy than a small buy, which favours content with a greater audience. Third, user generated content is sometimes undesirable for advertisers to have their brand next to – MySpace has found this a major problem. That means that some significant proportion of advertising dollars will stay with mainstream media.
4. Lost down the tail
Long tail content discovery (the process of finding good content that doesn’t have a big audience) has a long way to go. There’s some great efforts, like Digg and Blog Friends, that are immensely valuable in very different ways, but they don’t solve the problem fully. It still isn’t worth me writing a fascinating blog post that is only interesting to plumbers, even though it might be life-changingly interesting, because it will be so difficult for them to find unless they know that they are looking for it. Inevitably this will improve over time, but it is a major problem that simply isn’t going to go away any time soon and is the major stumbling block to the long tail as it applies to media (and indeed in other contexts as well).
5. OMG!! TMI! (Oh my God, too much information)
Information overload is another problem, in many ways closely linked with content discovery, that is (at least at the moment) inherent to the long tail. I had a quick look at my Google Reader stats; I’m subscribed to 99 feeds, and it looks like I read about 30-40% of all items that come in (I can’t work it out exactly because GReader doesn’t tell me and won’t let me export the data). Of those I guess that I find 50% interesting. Assuming that I enjoy 20% of incoming pieces of content on GReader, that means that 80% shouldn’t have been shown to me, and I have wasted significant amounts of time in disregarding it. I have to spend that time to spend any chance of finding the good stuff – that is an inherent problem with the long tail. Having a quick glance at the Guardian’s homepage or flicking through a magazine when I want some content suddenly seems a lot more appealing.
Caveats
Mainstream media’s survival is, of course, predicated on intelligent leadership. I am merely arguing that it is entirely within their power to stay around. I am not, however, suggesting it will be easy. There will be a squeeze in audience and advertising as both shift ‘down the tail’, and changes will have to be made (and are already being made successfully by some). Neither am I suggesting that newspapers in their current physical form necessarily have a long-term future; whilst they’ve probably got a while yet, it seems highly likely that they will go entirely or substantially digital in the future. Hopefully I have demonstrated that there is a future for the short head, of high-audience, wide-appeal content as well as long tail content; with any luck the years to come will be rosy for both.
Topics: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Blogging Limbo
By Huw Leslie | January 26, 2008
I’ve just ‘redesigned’ this blog by deciding to switch templates yet again. I think I’m going to stick with this one for a while – it just has that cool factor, I think.
I’m in a bit of a blogging limbo at the moment. I don’t want to stop writing, but after the collapse of Blognation, I’ve not been sure where to write. I thought about restarting GizBuzz, but then doubted my ability and willingness to give sufficient time to it to make a renewed effort worthwhile. I’ve thought about trying to do some casual writing for bigger sites, but haven’t got round to getting in touch with people to arrange it. But frankly, that isn’t the problem.
Pompous as it sounds, I’ve got ‘bloggers block’, because lets face it, I could have been writing here. The very fact that the first post I have written in a while is on my bloggers block shows the desperation of my situation.
Joel is onto something at YouMakeMedia when he states “I don’t believe in writer’s block”, instead attributing it to a mere “deficit of motivation and a surplus of good old fashioned laziness”. Realistically, although I am ridiculously busy at the moment with school work, I do actually have some spare time that I should/could be using to write. I have a reason to write, to improve my skills for a career in journalism that I’m getting keener to pursue every day. Further, I continue to have the ability to write: I’m producing several thousand words a week in essays. And that’s the problem.
It’s a mindshare issue. I am doing so much ’stuff’ that I lose the impetus to do things that I should really be doing, but which have less critical time scales or less direct benefits.
So I’m setting myself a challenge. Next week I am going to post every day on here. I haven’t racked up a load of posts; I’m just going to find something to write about and sit down and actually do it.
Fingers crossed!
Topics: Blogging, Me | 2 Comments »
Blognation’s Demise
By Huw Leslie | December 13, 2007
I don’t think I have anything to add to the blognation fiasco – it has already been extensively written about by some. It does now look as though blognation as it exists at the moment has completely imploded, and that Sam Sethi will have no further involvement as efforts are made to turn what is a great brand and potentially good concept into a valuable company.
I find my optimism on joining blognation about six months ago deeply irritating now. I don’t think it has been an entirely wasted period for me personally however; beyond the obvious “don’t lie to people you do business with”, which I would hope I could have worked out for myself anyway, I do think I have learnt some good lessons, and have come into contact with great people.
So where from here? I haven’t decided yet. In the short term I’ll probably do a bit more blogging here. In the long term, I will certainly continue to blog, although I am not sure what form that will take.
In the meantime, I find this 401 authorisation on Vecosys (Sam Sethi’s domain) deeply disturbing. It says ‘restricted access pre-launch’. The idea of Sam launching something else already seems an incredibly bad one to me.
Topics: Blogging, Me | 2 Comments »
Christmas Concert
By Huw Leslie | December 2, 2007
On the off chance any readers of this blog live in Greenwich, South London, there is a Christmas concert there on the 21st December which I am in. It is a small consort group of young singers. Last year was the first time we did it, and it went really well. The programme for this year is looking fantastic, with some well known numbers, like a great arrangement of Silent Night, Warlock’s Bethlehem Down, and some less well-known, but equally brilliant pieces like Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium. And it wouldn’t be Christmas without a rendition of Jingle Bells!
Unlike most concerts I’m in, there isn’t a ‘promoter’ for this (be it a school, a charity, a venue etc) beyond the Consort itself, so we all have to work particularly hard in persuading to come. It’s a big church, and it we will look silly if no-one comes!
So, here comes the second purpose of this post- are there any ways you can think of to use the internet to advertise an event to non-tech people? If I wanted to run a tech conference I’d know where to start with online promotion, but a classical concert is a different ballgame- all suggestions gratefully received!
Topics: Me | 1 Comment »
No election
By Huw Leslie | October 11, 2007
I’m really relieved that Gordon Brown won’t be calling an election this autumn, for a couple of reasons.
The big one: I want to vote as soon as possible, and won’t be eighteen until October 2008. So there musn’t be an election before then. Any point after October 2008 is absolutely fine. Had there been an election in November, there would be no compulsion upon the resulting government to go to the country until November 2013.
The smaller one: I don’t want a hung parliament, which was a risk had there been an election. Neither Conservative or Labour have a defining vision at the moment to unite the country behind them to any meaningful extent, as Margaret Thatcher did in 1979 (rescue Britain from the misery of the Winter of Discontent by wrestling control back from the unions) and Tony Blair did in 1997 (socialism that doesn’t damage the economy). This means that the poll results are more unstable, and voters more fickle. We can see that by the massive effect that the relatively insignificant Tory announcement of an increase in the threshold for income tax had on the polls. This instability could, possibly, have led to a hung parliament, which would have been bad for Britain, since we wouldn’t be able to go in any particular forward direction with a coalition.
So Gordon Brown ultimately made the right strategic decision, with the added bonus of letting me vote more quickly after I turn eighteen.
Topics: Politics | No Comments »