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.

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.

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!

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.

It’s good for the middle east as well. I’m strongly in favour of the west opening discussions with Hamas, and I suspect that this is already secretly taking place. Of course Hamas needs to recognise Israel and renounce violence, but the west also needs to recognise that Hamas is the democratically elected party of government of Palestine, and appreciate why that has happened. With the appointment of TB as Middle East envoy for the Quartet and the release of Alan Johnston I’m hoping that we’ve reached a point where the peace process will be given renewed energy – it’s not like we’ve got any choice if we want a secure and just world in the future.

For an excellent account of the release, check out this post by Zoli Erdos.  If what he’s saying is true, then Kris’ lack of experience has been a major problem behind the release. It kinda pains me to write this given the immense respect I (and others on the Oratos team, incidentally) have for what Kris has achieved.

Where from here, then? It has become clear that the KT-TH partnership on Zooomr is no longer enough if it is to prosper. They have handled the community aspect mostly brilliantly (albeit with an occasional lack of sufficient information – see Zoli’s post). Things that haven’t been handled well have been engineering and monetisation. Both those point to needing VC or at least angel funding. Funding would provide the ability to hire a couple of experienced engineers and investors would provide the pressure to find a proper business model.

They should also build out a ‘community board’. Get famous people from the community like Scoble (who would love to do this), as well as some clever entrepreneurs from the valley, who might be less known but have better ideas, and finally some random Zooomr users who live locally to help in coming up with ideas and strategy, with monthly-or-so meetings. Zooomr gets great advice and coverage, and in return Zooomr leverages their community to generate lots of good will for everyone who helps them out, as they have done with those who lent them hardware this week. They shouldn’t pay the advisors.

That should solve the problem.

You can follow my Tumblr blog/lifestream here. I’m thinking about whether to switch from WordPress – I’m really not sure.

Review on GizBuzz coming up!

So, in an effort to be able to stay with DH, I’m measuring uptime this month using Pingdom’s free trial. At the moment, after about 48hrs monitoring, we’re on 100%, which is a pleasant surprise. Let’s see if they’ve got themselves sorted out.

PS: Sorry N. – analogy in next post!

My Dreamhost account expires in August, and I’ve decided not to renew it unless there’s literally 99% uptime before then. At the moment I’m looking at getting Media Temple’s GS product, but that’s unfortunately twice the price of DH. On the other hand, there’s no point paying for hosting if you’re site isn’t up a lot of the time.

Any other suggestions?