Chris Heathcote: anti-mega

peak web

Chris — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:59:40 GMT

(or)

This slightly spurious graph has been doing the rounds recently. I hacked the graph to pieces to try and see the real rates of change; my biggest problem is that people always perceive the near-past, present and near-future as having the most technological change, and the speed of decline of the old new media feels wrong.

I am, however, thinking that there’s something true in one reading of the graph: we may be at or past Peak Web. This really struck me when I saw this:

It’s a fast food place in Soho. It’s using Twitter and Facebook (although I can’t actually find them there) to promote its business – there isn’t a need to have a URL and a website any more. They’re harder for people to remember and find, harder to create and harder to keep up to date.

Restaurants are second only to architects for having Flash based monstrosities of websites, with a 3 year old PDF of a menu if you’re lucky (the biggest exception to this I’ve seen is St John, who religiously update their menus twice a day). Facebook and Twitter offer slight-push, allowing companies to talk about and promote quickly changing stuff, without much hassle. Even email is rarely used effectively – I get the daily specials from Cafe Soho emailed to me every morning, and several times it’s twisted my arm in their direction for lunch.

Many restaurants and cafes using Twitter and Facebook seem to just have one enthusiastic person, who’s been given the freedom to do what they want. Some of the best I’ve seen recently: SJRestaurant from St John, thegunmakers from The Gunmakers (who also have a Facebook beer group), HixOyster from Mark Hix, the Facebook Breadman competition from the Berwick Street bread stall. One non-food special mention: the Barbican Theatre facebook group, who regularly have special offers.

It hasn’t escaped me that those people and companies using Twitter and Facebook well tend to have good websites too – but maybe we’re past the need for a website, as you just go where the people go, and the flavours of the month are Twitter and Facebook.

a little bit of future goes a long way

Chris — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:44:35 GMT

As any commuter knows, on London transport, you make your own luck… and any dark knowledge of the mystic signs and routes help tremendously.

I drew something very similar to this 6 or so years ago: personal devices that help you understand and manipulate public transport. At the time, I imagined it would be local servers on the buses, and a web browser; this is an iPhone, an app, fixed data (collected in some undetermined way), GPS, and a few user choices. Same same but different.

Of course, in the meantime, TfL have deployed iBus onto the network (and ignored general public access to route, bus and travel data), we have iBus Emma announcing and displaying route numbers and next stops throughout the journey – ‘good enough’ information for some uses, if you’re now familiar with the previously little used bus stop names. But services like London Bus (app store link) let you plan on the fly, and feel confident on unfamiliar routes. Cracking the bus network is really the key to most cities, and we’re nearly at the point of directed bus serendipity. In London, at least.

BADEP: Soft City by Jonathan Raban

Chris — Wed, 13 May 2009 20:52:34 GMT

A while back I read Soft City by Jonathan Raban, a book about urban life and city living, written in 1974. I think the basic thesis is that it is the citiness itself that distinguishes life there from villages and towns; and those that are looking for a village feel will always be disappointed, and angry, with city life. Indeed, it is those that have spurned the supposed positives of village and town life who do well and can thrive in the brutal apathy of the city (I’d add that I think this scales up too – life in megacities is very different to those in cities, and again requires a different mindset and needs, and coping mechanisms).

So, some quotes – page numbers from the 2008 Picador paperback –

p16 – “It is the very success of the city as an economic unit which causes its downfall as a spiritual republic, and that paradox is the hardest of truths for Augustine to bear. The city of man ought to be a harmonious reflection of the coty of God; in actuality, it is vulgar, lazy and corrupt, a place so brutish that it lacks even the dignity of the Satanic. Better the beseiged city than the corpulent city, better poverty than wealth; for whatever nourishes the city chokes it too.”

p41 – “The western entry to London has astonishing feats of gothic whimsy, built in brick of inky scarlet, crowding beneath giant signboards on which airlines promise you that the earth is yours… Indeed, what better function for the late gothic style could be imagined, than to adorn the entrance to a dream… And if you come to London from the north, there is the heady baroque span of Archway Bridge on the scarpface of Highgate Hill and Hampstead Heath – the ‘northern heights’ as they were grandly known in the nineteenth century. The Archway has the best view of London as it drops down to the Thames, five miles south. It is also the best place to commit suicide; and nearly every week someone takes the plunge into the swirl of container trucks below, and Archway Road is noisy with klaxons of ambulances and fire engines – a macabre living theatre of urban promise, urban disillusion.”

p88 – “The trade in purchasable identities absorbed Dickens in Our Mutual Friend; yet, by modern standards, the industry is primitive and circumscribed… the first question the Boffins apply themselves in their parlour is whether or not to ‘have a go-in for Fashion’. Set free into a dizzying world of total choice, they decide in the course of a single page how they will live, who they are going to be.”

p117 – “the consumer’s habitual form, in both art and life, is the epigram – that compressed, disconnected, transistorised circuit of language which transcends history and continuity by the exactitude with which it illuminates the instant. Buying a rubber alligator is an epigram: a rapid, oblique, witty gesture that transforms an object into an idea by the mere act of acquisition.”

p130 – “In London in the last few years such ideas have been sounded more frequently than any others over soup at the Veneerings’: the zoological model of human society as propounded by writers like Desmond Morris and Jane Goodall, the basic theory of Lévi-Strauss’s system of structural anthropology, and the most abstract and intellectually titivating aspects of ecology. They have a number of features in common. Each one lends itself to being stated in an epigrammatic form. Each reduces the world to a simple universal model. Each offers some kind of general explanation about the nature of human society. Each has its own occultly-scientific technical jargon… The fashionable philosophies of Herbert Marcuse, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky have proved themselves capable of being transmitted as slogans, often to the alarm of their originators. They have been turned into industrial objects – cheap, easily acquired things that have a brief popular currency and are the discarded.”

p199 – “‘form is a mere illusory manifestation of underlying causes.’ It is the same consoling message that the Situationists and the Hare Krishna people preach; believe it, and the city, with all its paradoxes, puzzles, and violent inequities, will float away before your eyes… The computer dating agency and the horoscope render a similar service: science (especially mystical mathematics) are closely allied – both promise to rip the veil from the troubling world at one sweep… The people who float on the tide of metaphysical junk – freaks of all kinds… into macrobiotics, yoga, astrology, illiterate mysticism, acid, terrible poetry by Leonard Cohen and tiny novels by Richard Brautigan – have managed, at a price. The new folk magic of the streets promises to have some unhappy poetical consequences but as a way of responding to the city it does reflect a truth about the nature of the place which we had better learn to confront.”

p247 – “A great deal of English poverty is borne amiably, with the air of long, tolerant habituation. No London slum has the raw, exposed, beaten appearance of these sinks of American urban poverty… I like cities on principle; but in America, my liking was rapidly turning sour, my enthusiasm was beginning to seem to me glib and blinkered.”

p255 – “By sheer force of will, Bostonians have made these ancient cartographers’ divisions real, mythologising them into actuality by a massive conspiracy of Cartesian concentration… To a European, these sudden abrupt transitions within the city are amazing; he can measure to the inch where poverty stops and starts… The ghettoes – or villages – are real because Boston, in common with the majority of American cities, feared the unmanageable bigness of New York or London.”

p286 – “Cities are scary and impersonal, and the best most of us can manage is a fragile hold on our route through the streets. We cling to friends and institutions, exaggerate the importance of belonging, fear being alone too much. The freedom of the city is enormous. Here one can choose and invent one’s society, and live more deliberately than anywhere else. Nothing is fixed, the possibilities of personal change and renewal are endless and open. But it is hard to learn to live as generously as real citizenship demands. I spot in others the same mouse-like caution which keeps me hugging the edge of the pavement, running from bolthole to bolthole, unequipped to embrace the spaciousness and privacy of city life which so often presents itself as mere emptiness and fog.”

p289 – “But on the far edge of each engagement there is always the unfathomed area of panic, when you know that you have to flop back again into the crowd. These moments of privacy and recognition and intense communicativeness are delicate bubbles, and in time they burst. You sustain your conversation, or the perfect angle of the cue ball on the black against the city. I keep most things going too long, am reluctant to leave.”

p292 – “Its discontinuities give one vertigo; few people who aren’t criminals or psychopaths will risk themselves on the rollercoaster ride of change and incongruity which the city offers. So much of city life is an elaborate process of building up defenses against the city – the self a fortified town raised against the stranger… It could perhaps be otherwise; but we shall need more daring, more cool understanding than we are displaying at the present. We live in cities badly; we have built them up in culpable innocence and now fret helplessly in a synthetic wilderness of our own construction.”

this is a Thing

Chris — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:48:51 GMT

…isn’t it?
(when it’s working)

It’s a bit privacy-crass, compared to Fire Eagle: a technical implementation of privacy rather than social, human etiquette.

But, it’s a Thing.

Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will Bring Us Victory

Chris — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:37:39 GMT

Today I resigned from Nokia. My last day will be the 1st June, 2009. I started on the 1st June, 2004 – 5 years, in various divisions, jobs, and even countries. I’ve decided it’s time to try something different… I’m not exactly sure what, yet, but I have the following 5 words

which separately, and together, lead to interesting things, I think, both for myself, and others. More on the initial plans, schemes and output in time…

jtv

Chris — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:17:45 GMT

When travelling, I spend a bit too much time just watching the TV – I love seeing all the different programmes, formats and adverts, even if I can’t understand them. As well as the cavalcade of youtube clips, you can watch some stations online – there’s an app called Livestation that has quite high quality feeds (including the Aizu Wakamatsu train station webcam), but often not enough users to sustain the p2p network, and best of all, KeyHoleTV, broadcasting many channels of Japanese TV live.

Of course, there’s the timezone issues, and finding understandable schedules is currently impossible. Luckily, my esteemed colleague Yumiko Tanaka has a few suggestions for this weekend – all times in JST (thanks, Yumiko!) –

爆笑レッドカーペットまさかの土7昇格SP!!
2009/04/18 19:00〜20:54 フジテレビ
I am planning to wake up earlier to watch this on this on Saturday morning (11am) GMT! It’s a special version of a comedy competition show, which I regularly watched on YouTube. The title means ‘burst into laughter read carpet’. Yep, nonsense.

チューボーですよ!
2009/04/18 23:30〜24:00 TBS
Cooking program. Non-chef celebrities cook and learn by looking at master chefs at the same time.

サザエさん
2009/04/19 18:30〜19:00 フジテレビ
Sazae-san. Popular cartoon since 1969! Sunday evening with supper thing for me. (their title songs are very good too)

行列のできる法律相談所
2009/04/19 21:00〜21:54 日本テレビ
This week, they will decide the best B-class gourmet, which is cheap and casual street food.

Magazines

Chris — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:28:16 GMT

Wired UK, May 2009:

advertising:content = 0.4

Monocle, Issue 22:

advertising:content = 0.4

Economist, April 4th-10th 2009:

advertising:content = 0.45

web design à la mode: full-width banners

Chris — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:47:42 GMT

I’ve noticed a few sites using full-width banners for important messages – the BBC for their webpage grandfathering:

and C4 for a parental warning:

There’s only one trouble. You just don’t see the banners. They’re in a position often occupied by adverts, and the extreme aspect ratio is similar to banner ads. There’s also something about the uniform height grid in the BBC example that really pushes the eye down the page over the banner.

I guess it’s a double-edged sword: you could use this specifically for large warnings that you have to include, but don’t want the user to pay attention to.

And a free bonus banner from Twitter:

You do see this one, as it transitions in from the top of the page, but it’s the most useless banner, as it prevents you from clicking on any of the top navigation until it’s gone.

Sambrook's Brewery

Chris — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:21:13 GMT

Sambrook’s is a new brewery based in London – actually, 15 minutes walk from me, just on the other side of Clapham Junction. They had an open day on Saturday, and provided a few pints of their beer – Wandle Bitter. It’s a tasty beer, sweet and malty with a dry finish, and has quite a depth of flavour for a beer coming in at just 3.8%. This is the kind of lower alcohol beer the Government should be supporting.

A few interesting tidbits:- they can brew 5,500 pints at a time, and hope to increase that to 30,000 with more fermentation tanks. A new summer brew will be coming, if they can get it done in time. The beer’s made with floor-malted barley from (what used to be) the original Guinness maltings in Warminster. They use 2 kinds of aroma hops (Fuggles and Goldings), but the bitter hops they use are Boadicea, rather than the more usual Challenger, as Challenger is proving less disease resistant, and harder to grow. The yeast was originally from one of the Brakspear-owned breweries.

They’ll sell you a cask, polypin or minipin, or even a case of their new bottle conditioned version, if you email them to arrange a time to pick up.

and then

Chris — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:23:04 GMT

I became an uncle.