A post from me…

Have you been fooled by the social media hype?

It’s a point that has been bugging me for a while, but this week I finally found the time to look up the evidence:

The worst example of this is the often made comparison about how long different technologies took to get going. It features in the film but has also been for decades a staple of those excited about the future and about change.

Radio took 38 years to get to 50m users, the internet only four years, the iPod a mere three years and so on.

Except, take a look at the evidence more closely and this apparent speeding up of technological change isn’t anything like the headline figures.

… and a post from someone else

Cognitive biases in popular songs

I was at the gym the other day – this finely chiselled physique doesn’t come naturally – and Alexandra Burke came on the TV, singing “The bad boys are always catching my eye.”

Well of course they are. Bad boys hang around on street corners and in malls where you can see them. Good boys on the other hand are working or studying and so are in offices and libraries where they’ll not catch your eye.

This is a sampling bias. It’s an elementary cognitive error.

It’s also not the only error in popular songs. Oh no.

Read the full post from Stumbling and Mumbling here.

Spotted any other great posts this week that I may have missed? Let me know in the comments.

There’s a little problem, though.

In its enthusiasm to makes its case it makes some very dodgy arguments about how the rate of technological change is speeding up.

The bit about “Some universities have stopped distributing email accounts” should raise sceptical instincts. Is that 1, 10, 100, 1,000 or 10,000? Sorry, according to the film that doesn’t matter. Because “ooh, ahh, look how quickly the world is changing!”.

The worst example of this is the often made comparison about how long different technologies took to get going. It features in the film but has also been for decades a staple of those excited about the future and about change.

Radio took 38 years to get to 50m users, the internet only four years, the iPod a mere three years and so on.

Except jump off the hype-train for a moment and consider:

a) The world’s population was a heck of a lot smaller in radio’s early days than it is now. So 50m then was something far more than 50m now, and

b) The radio figure is, when it is sourced, for take-up in the US. The internet and iPod figures are for global take-up.

So let’s adjust the figures to make them a proper like-for-like comparison. At the time radio hit 50m listeners in the US the US population was around 132 million, making radio’s penetration 38%. Currently the world’s population if around 6.8 billion, so to hit a similar 38% figure the iPod would have had to have got to 2.6 billion users. Kind of makes the iPod’s current take-up levels look rather puny compared to what radio actually achieved.

Of course under all this there are some serious, robust points about how the world is changing and how – for example – new technologies now often get unleashed across many countries at the same time rather than staying within one or a handful of countries for a long time.

But the next time someone says how amazingly quick a change has been compared to the radio, chances are like-for-like figures make its take up look an awfully long way of hitting the heights radio got to. And if you really want to understand the world, mixing and matching incompatible numbers can make for fun, but it doesn’t make for understanding.

UPDATE: I’ve since expanded on this idea and used it in the Engine Strategy Battle of Big Thinking:

The contrast between the presence of these dominating firms and the apparent ease of entry for new challengers is the subject of a piece by Tim Wu in the Wall Street Journal:

The Internet has long been held up as a model for what the free market is supposed to look like—competition in its purest form. So why does it look increasingly like a Monopoly board? Most of the major sectors today are controlled by one dominant company or an oligopoly.

What has happened to a free market of easy access to throw up this pattern of dominance? Wu points out the network effects that start to benefit the big firms at the expense of others. Why use Facebook? Because your friends are already on it.

Similar patterns of ‘to the victors, the spoil’s apply across many areas of internet activity, sometimes obvious and sometimes more subtle – such as the way Amazon’s dominance produces more reviews on the site, and hence more fresh, relevant content and so in turn better performance in search engines which in turn means more people use it, so more reviews and so on…

As Wu writes:

Every time we follow the leader for ostensibly good reasons, the consequence is a narrowing of our choices. This is an important principle of information economics: Market power is rarely seized so much as it is surrendered up, and that surrender is born less of a deliberate decision than of going with the flow.

The apparently firmly dominant do not always stay so, as the film Blade Runner reminds us. Made in 1982, it was set in a 2019 where large electronic adverts appear all over the place. The firms chosen in 1982 as plausible candidates for still being around in 2019 included some wise choices, such as Coca-Cola and Budweiser, but also included many which soon disappeared, such as Pan-Am, Bell and Atari.

Does this matter? Wu thinks so:

Info-monopolies tend to be good-to-great in the short term and bad-to-terrible in the long term. For a time, firms deliver great conveniences, powerful efficiencies and dazzling innovations. That’s why a young monopoly is often linked to a medium’s golden age. Today, a single search engine has made virtually everyone’s life simpler and easier, just as a single phone network did 100 years ago. Monopolies also generate enormous profits that can be reinvested into expansion, research and even public projects: AT&T wired America and invented the transistor; Google is scanning the world’s libraries.

The downside shows up later, as the monopolist ages and the will to innovate is replaced by mere will to power. In the 1930s, AT&T took the strangely Luddite measure of suppressing its own invention of magnetic recording, for fear it would deter use of the telephone. The costs of the monopoly are mostly borne by entrepreneurs and innovators. Over the long run, the consequences afflict the public in more subtle ways, as what were once highly dynamic parts of the economy begin to stagnate.

As he says, vigilance is necessary and some of those growing internet monopolies may yet become the centre of political and regulatory reforms in the way the monopolies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were in their time.

Cross-posted from the MHP blog

‘Use open source’ is often deployed as a catch-all phrase which actually includes ‘use data standards’, ‘have open data’ and ‘stop reinventing the wheel’ along with ‘use open source programs’. Those first three considerations can be helped by open source but do not necessarily require it and are not automatically delivered even if open source is used.

For example, more widespread use of BS7666 (a standard for postal addresses) would help the public sector more efficiently and accurately share data across different systems – where such sharing is appropriate of course. It is BS7666, or another address format, that matters in this example – whether or not the systems using it are open source. An open source system could use data in a different format that does not work well with other systems. A closed source system could use BS7666 to perfection.

To take another example, many councils have paid for development of bespoke systems that do the same as other councils. There are significant opportunities to save money (and improve services) by avoiding duplication and having new work expand on rather than repeat previous work. These opportunities can be realised in different ways: pay for open source software developments which by definition are then open to everyone else to use, or pay for software development where the public sector ends up owning the copyright. Moreover, even if the open source route is taken, it won’t automatically mean people in the public sector break the habit of not looking round more closely to see what can be shared and how.

These questions cut across several of the sections in the policy consultation paper, so I look forward to getting stuck into them further as the policy working group progresses its work.

My email inbox today brought me the news that I’ve been appointed one of the members of the Policy Working Group, which is being chaired by Julian Huppert MP. (I don’t yet know who the other members of the group are.)

I’m really looking forward to this, especially as this is an area of policy neglected by the otherwise excellent Why Vote Liberal Democrat? book published earlier this year. As I wrote in my review of it:

Since 1997 the internet has grown hugely, influencing many of the areas talked about in the book and bringing great economic and social changes. Yet it barely gets a mention. Unfair extradition rules deserve condemnation, and it’s a minor coup to have got Gary Mckinnon’s mother to contribute a piece, but whilst we have a piece on extradition and nothing on the internet and the digital era it’s a book that feels unbalanced.

There is a consultation session on the party’s policy coming up on Saturday as part of the Liverpool conference. It is 10am – 12:30pm, Grace Suite 3, Liverpool Hilton. Hope to see you there.

Here’s the 2004 list:

US technology outfits
Adobe
Adobe Acrobat 10
Apple Computers
Apple – QuickTime
Blogger Google
Google Search
Hewlett-Packard Development Company
Intel Corporation
Macromedia
PHPBB Forum
Real Media

US bodies
Energy.gov
National Science Foundation

Other
World Wide Web Consortium

The fourteen sites on the list are dominated by technology and America. Now look at the current list of Pagerank 10 sites:

Technology
Adobe – Adobe Flash Player
Adobe – Adobe Reader Download
Google Search

Social networking
Facebook
Social Bookmarking Sharing Button Widget

News
CNN

US bodies
The White House
United States Department of Health and Human Services
US Government website

Other countries
Group of Eight (coalition of Australian universities)
Miibeian (Chinese government site)
National Portal of India

Other
World Wide Web Consortium

Of these thirteen sites, five are technology or social networking. Three other countries now feature and there is a broad spread of services: software, social networking, news and more.

Both lists courtesy of Search Engine Genie.

* Google’s Pagerank formula is what made it as a search engine company. Although Pagerank is now a less important part of how its search results are determined than in the early days, it is still the case that the more links and the higher the quality of them, the higher your Pagerank score. For more on how Pagerank works see this explanation over on Search Engine Land.

Cross-posted from the Mandate blog

Here’s the consultation paper that has just been published ready for the first of those consultation sessions:

Information Technology and Intellectual Property Consultation Paper

Although the published data from News International has been fairly limited so far, there is data that can be extracted from internet usage and how it has changed. Looking through this data, Katrine has unearthed this interesting point about the pay wall’s impact on the demographics of the website’s readership:

Interestingly, a more detailed review of UKOM’s audience data shows that The Times website has changed its audience composition towards a younger age group. In June, 5.6% of its readers fell into the 21-24 age group. In July this figure increased to 8.1%. At the other end of the age scale, the proportion of 50-64 year olds dropped to 25.7% from 30% in June.  Within this group, there is a noticeable drop in so-called “Affluent Greys” accounting for 7.8 % in July, down from 10 % in June.

You can read her piece over on the Engine blog.

However, there was a hint of a different perspective at the launch at Google UK on Tuesday of Nic Newman’s report for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism into the impact of the internet on the politics and the media during this year’s general election.

Given the institute’s focus on journalism, the report understandably focuses far more than many other reports on the impact on the media rather than on the impact on politics. In particular, it picks out the success of Andrew Sparrow’s live political blogging for The Guardian during the election. Although the paper had tried out live blogging for political news in various forms previously, it was the election that cemented the approach, developed the technology and saw a considerable audience secured:

The page received more than 100,000 page views in its early days, rising to 450,000 page views on the day of Bigotgate and 2 million page views and 335,000 unique users in the aftermath of the results themselves. As Sparrow points out, that is more people than buy the Guardian newspaper on an average day.

Since the election The Guardian has been testing out continuing with a live political blog that is regularly updated throughout the day. This prompts the thought – will the most important innovation of the 2010 election turn out to have been the move of newspapers into live rolling coverage of news, further changing them from their traditional publishing schedule into a rival for radio and newspapers with news through the day? And if you become a live news service that people follow regularly, does that open up new monetisation opportunities?

You can read the full report here:

Cross-posted from the Engine blog