Joe's Jottings

There’s an old joke about politics – politicians are people who think that:

• Ethics is a county in the south of England
• Morals are paintings on plaster
• Scruples is the Russian currency

Unfortunately it seems that this joke is rapidly becoming a reality – within 48 hours we’ve had two Chief Secretaries to the Treasury who’ve had, shall we say,  slight incongruities in their financial backgrounds.  Ignoring the red-herrings that have been tossed around about David Laws’ sexuality, the bottom line of this is that it appears that the Liberal Democrats didn’t audit the financial backgrounds of their senior members – something that both Labour and the Tories did in the aftermath of the expenses scandal.  It shouldn’t have been rocket science for the Lib Dems to do this; indeed, I would have thought that it should have been pretty easy and straight forward to achieve; after all, there were not as many LD MPs as Tory or Labour MPs, and over the years we’ve often been regaled by the Liberals with how they represent honesty and integrity against the perfidy and entrenched privilege of the other two major parties.

Well, a quick exposure to power has revealed the the LD MPs have as many financial ‘D’OH’ moments to deal with as their blue and red colleagues.

Perhaps Nick Clegg honestly never believed his MPs would play fast and loose, perhaps they genuinely didn’t think they’d done anything wrong.  Perhaps they never expected to gain power and so come under public scrutiny – but the Lib Dems are now under the same sort of withering fire from the media as Labour and Tory MPs were at the start of the expenses row.  I’ve already suggested in a previous post that Laws has bought the Coalition in to disrepute and has carried over the issues surrounding the integrity and financial probity of MPs from the last parliament in to this one.  Now that Danny Alexander appears to have dropped the ball as well, it does begin to look like there is a systemic problem at the heart of the Liberal Party which needs sorting out if they’re to retain the moral high ground they’ve previously had.

I’ve found it interesting this evening to briefly debate the issue with Liberal Democrat apologists on Twitter, whose main argument has been to try and sidestep the allegations Alexander’s financial irregularities by trying to focus attention on the tax status of the Barclay Brothers who own the Daily Telegraph, who’re publishing the Alexander information.  The difference is that the Barclay Brothers did not get elected to Government on the back of people’s despair over MP’s expenses.  Neither do they run the country.

To all members of the Liberal Democrat Party.  Fix this mess.  Audit your people, come clean, accept that some of your folks have issues that need addressing and address them.  Don’t try and bullshit us with claims of homophobia (for Laws) or feeble attempts to blame the messenger (for Alexander).  I hope that the Alexander issue IS something out of nothing, and that the situation is satisfactorily explained to us over the next day or so.

But let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.  In the meantime, how many Liberal Democrat MPs are left who can take the job on?

A little history.

One of the reasons why there has been radical political change in the UK in the last year is that the British people have finally started getting truly fed up with MPs on the ‘gravy train’ who seem to prosper whilst the rest of the country goes down the plughole.  Until 2006, it was legitimate for MPs to pay expenses / rents / fees etc. to their partners or family members.  A change in the rules then stated that you could no longer do that.

David Laws fell foul of this by virtue of the fact that between 2004 and 2009 Mr Laws claimed money back from the State - that is, us - to pay rent to his partner a total of around £40,000.  I think it’s safe to say that had this been a story involving a couple of jobless folks claiming benefits there wouldn’t be an issue of paying the money back right now – it would be more likely to be an issue of someone spending a year at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

At first glance, Laws appears to have either been incompetent with money (never good for someone tasked with the job of implementing Government cuts) or dishonest (equally a bit of a downer for someone in that job…)   And then it gets complicated – apparently the actual reason for the…misunderstanding….involving the expenses was that laws was actually gay, and he was trying to keep this quiet for respect of his and his partner’s privacy.

To date I’ve been impressed with the Coalition – both their politics and the way they’ve been implementing them. But the Coalition has come to power with a whole host of ‘issues’ around it – there are folks in both parties who don’t want it to work,  Labour are waiting for errors to exploit and people are expecting a lot from the new Government.  What folks are not wanting is a return to parliamentary expenses problems – especially when it features someone who’re responsible for implementing serious, albeit necessary, cuts.

• Laws – this is why I am bloody angry with you.  I find it VERY difficult to believe that you:
• Didn’t appreciate that your private life was going to be public at some point in the last year or so. 
• Chanced your arm by carrying on claiming after the rule change.
• Were hard-up enough to need to claim the rent back at all.
• Didn’t realise that it would all come out if you became a frontbench Minister, especially in the Treasury.

It’s inevitable that whoever implements the Coalition’s Treasury policy needs to be pretty much whiter than white – or at least as white as any politician can be these days -for whatever reasons Laws didn’t meet this criterion. 

Whether he thought he was working within the rules or not, he wasn’t.  He’s now given an open-goal to opposition to the Coalition within the Tory Party, the Liberals and New Labour.  Personal hubris has yet again laid waste a political career, but with potentially bad implications for the country.

And that’s why I’m so fucking angry with Laws – he’s managed to drag the bad issues of the last Parliament through in to this one, distracting people away from the really major issues of getting the UK back on it’s feet after a decade of mis-rule.

Back in January 2009, there was a little article in The Guardian referring to thefunding of a film by Chris Morris by FilmFour, the film production arm of Channel 4.   The film, “4 Lions”, has now been produced and released to mixed reviews, some of which will have undeniably been influenced by the subject matter of the film – a comedy about Islamic extremist suicide bombers planning a bomb attack on the London Marathon.

The film was described as  showing the “the Dad’s Army side to terrorism”, as four incompetent jihadists plan an attack.  For some reason the description of the film reminded me of the description of the spoof musical ‘Springtime for Hitler’ as ‘ A Gay Romp WithEva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden’ in the movie ‘The Producers’.  Interestingly enough, given the calls from relations of people involved in the 2005 bombings for the film to be not distributed or screened, ‘The producers’ had some difficulties at the start of it’s life with problems with getting it made or shown.  Eventually it was released as an ‘art house’ film and then got big ‘word of mouth’ takeup.

Now, I love ’the Producers’, but I’m rather less enamoured with Morris’s film, and it set me thinking about what makes some ’bad taste’ films acceptable and others unacceptable.

I guess the first thing is the timing.  When ‘The Producers’ was made in 1968, WW2 was 23 years in the past; whilst easily within living memory, it wasn’t raw.  Less than 5 years have elapsed between the July 2005 London bombings and the release of this film.  Probably too close for comfort – and releasing the film around the time of the 2010 London Marathon was probably a brilliant wheeze  from a marketing point of view but a little ‘naff’ for those taking part in the Marathon or remembering those killed in 2005.

Then there’s the closeness to real life.  Let’s stick with ‘The Producers’ as our control here.  They made one of the two most evil men of the 20thCentury look like a buffoon, and had a series of song and dance routines that were so far over the top – and intended to be so – that there was no real link to reality.  “4 Lions’ has a group of four would-be bombers – complete with Yorkshire accents – coming down from the North to London to do the attack.  Sound familiar?  Just a little too close.

Then there’s the delicate issue of who makes the film.  ‘The Producers’ – bad taste comedy about the Nazis made by a Jewish producer, with Russian and German Jewish parents, and who also served in combat in WW2.  4 Lions is the brainchild of a comedian / comedy writer who’s best known for sketches and set-up pieces that often involve unsuspecting people who believe that they’re taking part in something ‘straight’ and are actually the butts of the humour.  4 Lions could well have been more acceptable had it been made by another comedian or had the involvement of someone directly involved.

Basically, as far as ’4 Lions’ is concerned it’s badly timed, too close to home and made by a team who appear to be unsympathetic to the issues involved.  Morris and the film makers apparently did a great deal of research in to the whole mindset and culture of extremists to make the film.  Perhaps they should have researched whether it’s just too soon.  Or whether it’s a good idea at all to laugh about people being blown up less than 5 years ago.

For a senior politician to be filmed ‘meeting the people’ is a feat of great courage that is fraught on all sides with danger.  The voter may hate your guts, may egg you, may tell you things you don’t want to hear.  And you know what?  If you’re a smart politician you smile, listen, say your platitudes, maybe even argue in a civilised and sensible, statesmanlike manner.

You then walk away, talk to someone else, smile alot and maybe kiss a baby.

A piece of free advice for all politicians in the UK….what you don’t do is, whilst still on a live mike, call the person who you were filmed being nice to a bigot.  Especially if the person concerned is a female old age pensioner who’s only saying what lots of folks in the UK may feel.

So…here’s where ‘Wee Gordon’ embarasses himself in front of the whole TV watching population of the UK.

I genuinely feel sorry for Gordon Brown on a personal level – I hate to see anyone drop themselves in the shit.  He’s not the guy for this sort of ‘one on one’ interview with the voter, particularly when it’s not at all certain what the voter concerned is going to say.  But on a political level – come on, people, this is Political Campaigning 101.  Whatever you may think in private, you don’t say it in public.

I’m gobsmacked at some of the nonsense and bollocks I’ve heard uttered by people from the Labour Party today – apparently Mrs Duffy is a plant, the whole thing’s a Murdoch Media setup, it’s a conspiracy to embarrass the PM, it was Nick Clegg’s fault, etc.  The facts are quite simple:

• Mrs Duffy made some comments about immigration to the UK that didn’t fit the NuLab policy sheet.
• Mr Brown debated the point slightly, and walked away in a dignified manner.  All good, clean, politics.
• Mr Brown neglects to take the mike from Sky News off.
• He then shows clear annoyance at whoever it was in his entourage who set up the conversation.
• And finally calls Mrs Duffy a bigot.
• And realising what he’s done apologises profusely to Mrs Duffy and the Labour Party.

Now…to all the NuLab people I know who I’ve annoyed this evening – and who probably aren’t reading this anyway… – Mrs Duffy’s comments seemed totally fair, Brown’s ‘on camera’ reaction reasoned and sensible, his off camera reaction totally out of order and poorly judged, reinforcing the numerous stories we keep hearing about the Prime Minister’s intolerance.

It was his press officer’s job to keep an eye on the mike and media presence.  It was Brown’s job to keep his mouth shut until he knew he was ‘off air’.  Unless the press officer was working for Murdoch, the Tories or the Lib Dems, and the Prime Minister was brainwashed to open mouth before engaging brain, the only people here to blame are the Press Officer and the PM.  The reporter was doing his job.  Sky was doing it’s job – they played hardball and took advantage of the situation to get a ‘scoop’, but that’s what the media does.  the media are no-one’s friends but their own.

Labour were made to look hypocritical incompetents – get used to it, folks, and stop whining like spoilt children.

So, in the broader picture, what does this debacle tell us about Labour and their leadership?

1. They don’t like hearing what the voters say when the voter doesn’t toe the party line.  Sounds familiar?  It should do.  Those of us who’ve been in debates with New Labour over recent years have come to know that NuLab is tolerant whilst you toe the line.  There is a strong hint of dishonesty and hypocrisy here.
2. The Prime Minister really misjudged the situation here- there was a camera crew around when the comment was made, let alone a live lapel mike.  The PM made an error, but this is not a politician on his first election; this is an experienced political leader who wishes to be Prime Minister of the UK.  He also exhibited petulance and bad temper – and not for the first time.  I would expect better judgement from Mr Brown and also greater competence from those around him.
3. There was clear contempt for the voter concerned – and by extension all of us.  This current election is by no means an open and shut ‘shoe-in’ for any party.  It’s there to be lost by the parties, and in the last week the leaders of all three major parties have worked hard to put their foot in it in one way or another.  But this must be the biggest cock up yet. 

The media is very much the fourth major party in the 2010 general election; it’s loyalties are split across the parties, as they always are, but this time around everything that happens gets Tweeted and blogged as quickly as it happens.  Our political leaders seem to be having difficulties dealing with this – and the winner will be the one who screws up least.

Maybe I’m just old, or maybe I just don’t get some aspects of modern business – or are some people online purporting to be business experts just arrogant and opinionated folks with insufficient experience and a habit of stating the bleedin’ obvious as if they’d just discovered a Unified Field Theory?

And what triggered this off?  As frequently happens these days, I came across something on Twitter that just bugged the Hell out of me.  And it was the following:

“Book publishers. Stop talking about cannibalisation. Create and invest in businesses and services which destroy today’s model.”

I guess the reason why this statement annoyed me is that I’ve had books and magazine articles published, starting in the early 1980s, and I suppose I have an emotional attachment to the whole paper based ‘traditional’ publishing business.  One of the aspects of that business I like even now is that there was an element of quality control involved that the current ‘anything goes’ online world lacks.  Those nasty gatekeepers called ‘editors’ used to brass all of us off, but they at least ensured that what was published fitted the style of the magazine, was reasonably well written and was believed to be good enough for other people to spend money on.

Because the traditional publishing business did something that most modern online publishing isn’t managing to do – make money based on quality, focused product.  Why buy content when the Internet is full of it?  Getting people to buy text content is increasingly difficult and I’ve seen more than one magazine that I used to buy regularly go to the wall because of the free availability of published material on the Internet.  So what’s the problem?  The problem is that whilst there might be items of high standard on the Net (I hope I produce a few myself) what is lacking is the focus and selection that went in to a magazine – in one pace you had a series of relevant articles, of high quality.  Over the years we’ve kept getting the promise of ‘The Daily You’ online – a one stop web site which you will be able to configure in such a way as to get material that interests you.  That promise has never delivered.  Whilst there are a number of issues that I have with the concept in general (not going to go in to them here – that’s for another day) the basic problem is that whatever ways have been used to try and put something together that gives us relevant and quality content, like RSS feeds, it’s never quite worked.

To be told by someone ‘go and destroy today’s models’ sounds like iconoclasm of the worst sort.  Destruction of what doesn’t work is one thing;  destruction of a market place and set of products that does work is quite sad, especially when the new products and services coming to replace what is going has elements of ‘The Emporers New Clothes’ about them.  And a lot of ‘new media’ stuff does start with cannibalisation – when you aren’t paying for content, you start by linking to it, re-hashing it, etc.  Whilst there are markets for new, paid for content on the Internet it’s frequently poorly paid and provides little stimulus for authors to spend time in developing engaging content when they’re going to see very little recompense for it.

The freetard mentality is again coming through with so many of these Business 2.0 zealots – I have news for you.  Free doesn’t survive hard times.  It’s not enough to say ‘the content is out there, just find it’.  People like to pay for organised and focused material because it saves them time.  Destroying today’s models before there is anything to replace them is simply the business plan of the would-be market dictator – those who would come to lead a mediocre market with mediocre products because the good stuff has already gone to the wall.

Back in 1984, Apple had Ridley Scott direct a very imaginative advert to launch the Macintosh computer.  It ran twice – once on a small TV station late at night to get it in the running for some awards, and the second time at half time in the Superbowl American Football game on 22nd January 1984.  And it never ran again.  The message from Apple was that their new machine would shatter the conformity that people like IBM (and by extension Microosft) were putting on the computer market, by making computing available to the masses.

The advertisement ends with the line:

 ”On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984″. ”

The problem was that the Macintosh was so expensive that few people could afford it.  It was a pain in the rear to write software for – so relatively few folks wrote software for it, especially as the market was small compared to that offered by the PC.  As it turned out, 1984 wasn’t at all like 1984, but no thanks to the Macintosh which even today, in all it’s forms, occupies only 10% of the computer operating system market space, even if you include iPhones.

From day one, there was always something ‘control freak’ about Macintosh, all of it’s successors, the iPhone and now the iPad.  As I mentioned above, the original Macintoshes were not easy to write software for, and Apple didn’t make life easy for developers.  the situation persists today; to write software for an iPhone, iPod or iPad, you have to run the emulator kit on a Macintosh of some sort.  Let’s do a quick comparison – if I want to develop an application for my Blackberry, I download teh tools from the Blackberry website and get it running on my PC running Windows.  For free.  If I want to write an application for an iPod or iPhone….I first of all have to join the Developer Program at $100 a year.   Then I can download the SDK.  To run the SDK I need a machine running Mac OSX.  Oh look…only Mac’s can legally run Mac OSX…very much a closed garden.

Early Macintoshes came with no network connection; obviously this is no longer the case but it should have given us the hint that Macs were not really designed to talk with the rest of the world.  Fortunately for Apple, some of the people involved saw sense and gradually the more open Macintosh that people use today in it’s numerous forms came in to being.  And gadgets like iPhone, iPod and iPad emerged in to the market, able to interact with the Internet and other media.

But let’s look at what this actually means.  First of all, aaccess to applications and media for these latter machines is very much controlled by Apple in terms of:

• Control of the means of production – make sure non-Macintosh / Apple users cannot easily develop applications.
• Control of the means of distribution – iTunes store, various recent high profile cases of applications being banned from the iTunes store makes it difficult to get applications in to the world.
• Control of the means of communication – these devices lack the ability to easily handle ‘standard’ add ons such as USB or cheap memory cards, like SD.  iPhones have also frequently been tethered to particular telephone companies. 
• The fact that  iPad comes without Flash, for example, suggests that Apple are adopting a policy of attempting to control content that is usable on their kit.

Let’s ignore the stupidities around making devices reliant on rechargeable batteries in which the battery can only be changed by returning it to the manufacturer. 

The natural progression for Apple would be to continue growing as a media and services company, rather than as a hardware house.  By an iPad, and rely on Apple for much of your available content and software.  And Apple can also ensure that you don’t leave the ‘walled garden’ of Apple acceptable content by making sure that the inbuilt iPad browser doesn’t handle some common media formats like Flash.  How will they fund all this?  Easy – you’ll pay.  Apple have already stated that they are rolling out an advertising model for iPad / iPod / iPhone applications in which the application provider would be able to get 60% of advertisng revenue generated via their application – the other 40% going…well….you know where.

Control of content, hardware and communication.  2014 could very much be like 1984 if Apple gets it’s way.

Today Guy Kewney died of cancer.  He’d been ill with Liver and bowel cancer for a year.  For those of us who got involved in personal and home computing ‘at the start’ Guy was effectively ‘Mr Personal Computer World’.  He didn’t own it, but his column was often the one we all read first.  One of Kewney’s claims to fame was that he invited the ‘Uncle Clive’ persona for Clive Sinclair – true or not I guess we’ll never know, but it did wonders for Sinclair and his machines. Kewney also had a massive amount of influence in terms of how he got a lot of folks interested in writing for the magazines – even those of us who never wrote an article for Kewney felt motivated by him.  There’s a nice piece here by Jon Honeyball, which sums up Kewney pretty well.  The sad thing is that for many people he’ll be remembered not for his journalism, but because the BBC ended up interviewing a taxi driver called Guy Goma instead of Guy Kewney a couple of years ago.  Typical BBC….

I had a certain sympathy with Kewney because he wrote the ‘NewsPrint’ section of PCW which gave industry news- I did a similar job for a few months for a small technology newsletter, and the job almost killed me.  Guy, thanks for the articles and the inspiration.

Over the years I’ve been saddened on a number of occasions by writers that I first encountered in my childhood or teens.  Back in 2008 I commented on the passing of Sir Arthur C Clarke, and a few weeks ago I learnt that a radio amateur called Norman Fitch, who for 21 years had written a column about VHF radio communications for the UK Amateur Radio movement’s ‘house magazine ‘Radio Communications’ had died.  Way back in 1989, I remember reading about the death of a chap called MG Scroggie, who’d written one of the books that got me interested in amateur radio in the first place. 

When Johnny Cash died I was saddened – another part of my childhood passed away.  I guess that when people that we grew up knowing, or those that are our contemporaries, die, it’s a constant reminder of our own mortality.

And oddly enough, whilst I’ve been writing this piece, I heard that Malcolm McLaren, one time manager of the Sex pistols and arguably the creator of much of the UK Punk Scene – and very much a figure from my own teens – has also died today at the age of 64.

And so the new incarnation of Dr Who has his first adventure on BBC One, with 27 year old Matt Smith as the latest actor to portray the eponymous Time Lord.  The one thing about Doctors these days is that if you don’t like the current one, there’ll probably be another one along in a couple of years….

As well as teh Doctor, we have his new assistant, Amy Pond, played by Karen Gillan, who encounters the Doctor whilst dressed as a Kissogram Policewoman and agrees to travel with him.  She does, however, insist that she comes back before the following morning, as she has ‘stuff’ to do.  What we know, but what she doesn’t tell the Doctor, is that the stuff is her Wedding Day.

Hold on a minute…picking up a new assistant at the time of her Wedding…haven’t we been there before with the dreadful Donna Noble, who turns up in the TARDIS actually in her Wedding Dress on the day of her Wedding?  Come on folks – that is laziness of the highest order.  There are lots of ways in which assistants have been introduced to the Doctor, but to have two of them introduced in what has to be an unusual way like this is really lazy writing and serious imagination failure.

Or…could it be another piece of social engineering on behalf of the Dr Who / Torchwood writing ‘establishment’?  OK – I know that may seem a little extreme but I’ve muttered on numerous occasions in the past about the rather ‘heavy handed’ PC attitudes that have permeated some of the episodes of both Doctor Who and Torchwood – to the degree that some of the dialogue grates.  Several of the characters have frequently seemed to fit a set of PC stereotypes, and I’m afraid that this introduction of a second assistant at a point in which she is basically committing herself to a traditional lifestyle again grates. 

Just think about it – a Doctor who appears to be getting increasingly younger with each incarnation, in looks and behaviour.  An occasional character in the form of Jack Harkness who cannot die and is forever young.  A young woman running away from what some folks would label the ‘humdrum’ of normal life.  Just seems a little bit ‘Lost Boys’ here – reflecting a lifestyle and belief structure in which people are unwilling to grow up.

My guilty secret for today – I love ‘Columbo’.  No, not Colombo, capital city of Sri Lanka, but Columbo, dishevelled Los Angeles murder squad detective in the 1970s TV detective series of the same name.  I’ve just watched an episode this afternoon – it’s sort of comfort TV for me, I have to admit.  No matter how smart the villain, how heinous the crime, you know that Columbo will eventually get his man (or woman) – you even get to see, in the first 15 minutes or so, the murder take place, who did it and how he did it.  The trick for Columbo, and the entertainment for the viewers, is trying to work out what tiny error the villain of the piece has made that will eventually be spotted by our scruffy and (at first glance) slow-witted hero and that will lead to their downfall.

Yes, it’s a derivative and predictable formula – and I think that that’s what makes it such wonderful ‘comfort TV’ – you know roughly what you’re going to get, how it’ll be paced, etc.  Classic ‘cliche’ Westerns were known as ‘horse operas’ - they had the same predictability of structure as did theatrical operas.  The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of the ‘space opera’ in science fiction – similarly stylised stories based on mainstream adventures, and of course we’re all aware of the soap opera – the less said about that particular genre, the better!

Columbo is undeniably ‘crime opera’ – it grew out of a series called ‘Mystery Movie’ that used to run on Tuesday or Wednesday evenings on, I think, ITV in the 1970s – it featured a number of different crime investigation based series – Macmillan and Wife and Banacek were two others I particularly remember.  They were staples of TV consumption in the Pritchard household in my adolescence, and I have particular memories of them being on TV whilst I was doing homework or dashing in and out of the garden!  Just like an opera which, by tradition, isn’t over until the fat lady has sung, an episode of Columbo isn’t anywhere near over until he’s turned to teh murderer when leaving a room, asked ‘Sir…just one more thing?’ and then asked the question that will eventually break the case. 

One of the things I love about Columbo – and I think a lot of the actors who took part also loved it – is that you get the chance to see a lot of stars play murderers or  victims.  Two of my personal favourites are Johnny Cash – playing a murderous musician – and Patrick McGoohan.  McGoohan turns up a couple of times as a murderer - in one episode he plays the commander of a military academy, and in a second episode he’s the campaign manager for a politician.  I doubt that this sort of casting would be possible today, and it’s a shame.

The ongoing ‘in jokes’ in Columbo – his rather elderly Peugeot car, his habit of getting mistaken for a delivery man or (worse still) tramp due to his dress, his apparent forgetfulness and rambling anecdotes – all contribute to the charm of the show.  And it IS a charming show – it’s gentle, mannered and definitely reflects a different age of TV entertainment as far as TV cop shows are concerned.  For me it provides happy memories of a time when my life was certainly simpler, and a reflection back on a world that seems much further away in history than 30 years.  And the stories and writing – there’s no post modernism, no ‘knowing nods’ to the audience.  It takes itself, on the whole, seriously and it works.

Now…how on Earth would he get on with Gene Hunt?

I’m a big user of search engines.  Despite my grumblings and pontifications on here about Google, I still use them the most because they’re still the best out there.  I hope that Bing – despite the daft name – will one day come to challenge Google, but until then, I just Google.  It’s been interesting recently to see Tweets start appearing in search results, and I’ve commented in this blog on the topic.  The most recent work being done by Google that they feel will improve the search experience for us all is explored in this piece from the BBC, and I’m particularly interested in the comments made about ‘Social Search’.

First of all, what is Social Search? 

My definition of a true Social Search tool is one that would give weight to a number of different aspects when searching.  These would include:

• The normal search criteria as entered in to any search engine that you care to use.
• Your location, intelligently applied to any searches that might be expected to have a geographical aspect to them.
• A weighting applied to favour the results based upon material that meets the criteria you’re searching on that may have been placed on the Internet by people or organisations within your personal or professional network.

To give an example – you do a search for restaurants.  The search engine makes a guess about your location based on previous searches, geocoding based on your IP address or, coming real soon, tagging provided with the search request specifying your location based on a GPS in the device that you’re using for the search.  The search engine then determines whether your ‘friends’ have done similar searches, whether they’ve done any reviews or blog posts about restaurants in the area, posted photos to Flickr, or are actually Tweeting FROM a restaurant as you search, whatever.  The results are then returned for you – and ideally would be tailored to your particular situation as understood by the search engine.

And this is roughly what the Google Social Search folks are looking at.

“….returns information posted by friends such as photos, blog posts and status updates on social networking sites.

It is currently only available in the US and will be coming to the rest of the world soon.

Maureen Heymans, technical lead at Google, said this kind of search means the information offered is personal to the user.

“When I’m looking for a restaurant, I’ll probably find a bunch of reviews from experts and it’s really useful information.

“But getting a review from a friend can be even better because I trust them and I know their tastes. Also I can contact them and ask for more information,” she said.

In future users’ social circles could provide them with the answers they seek, as long as individuals are prepared to make those connections public.”

Of course, the million (or multi-billion) dollar question is how far are people to go in terms of making their networks available to search engine companies in such a way that results can be cross referenced in this way.  Once upon a time I’d have said that folks wouldn’t, as they value their privacy, but today I’m not so sure.  Given that we have seen sites where people share details about credit card purchases, I’m not convinced that people value their privacy enough to not allow this sort of application to take off, at least amongst the ‘digital elites’.

Of course, hopefully it will be up to us whether we participate in using Social Search – I guess all of us who blog or Tweet will find our musings being used as ‘search fodder’ unless we opt out of making our contributions searchable.  Will I use Social Search?  If it’s at all possible to opt out, No.  And here’s why.

Because I doubt the results will be as relevant to me as Google and all the other potential providers of SOcial Search think they will be.  Let’s face it – these companies will not be doing it for nothing – some where along the way the ‘database of intentions’ will be being supplemented and modified based upon the searches carried out, and such information is a goldmine to marketers and advertisers.

But the relevance to me?  I’m yet to be convinced – and here’s why.

If I really want the opinions of my friends, family and occasional business contacts on what I eat, wear, watch or listen to then I’ll ask them directly.  Just because I know someone doesn’t mean that I share any similarity in viewpoint or preferences at all.  I have friends with very different interests – Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Agnostics  and Atheists, people from the political left and right, party animals and stay at homes…the differentiation goes on.  This is because I pick my friends based on what they’re like as people – not necessarily because they share interests or beliefs.  As it happens, I’m occasionally quietly offended by what some of my online friends say – but that’s life.  We don’t always have to agree or share the same beliefs.  

Therefore, the idea of biasing my search results based on what people I know search for, prefer or comment on is potentially useless.  If I wish to know what my friends think or say – I’ll talk to them, email them or read their tweets / blogs / whatever directly. 

I feel there’s also a serious risk of ’crystalisation’ of beliefs – a sort of friendship groupthink emerging.  Think of what it was like when you were 13 years old and spotty.  For many teenagers it matters to be ‘in with the in-crowd’; Social Search could contribute to the return of that sort of belief structure amongst peer groups.  By it’s nature, the people who will be ‘opinion leaders’ in your Social Search universe will be those friends who are most online and who share the most.  Their activities will hence bias the results returned in Social Search.  It might not be such a problem for them, though – people who have a high Social Search presence will undoubtedly come to the attention of advertisers and opinion formers who might wish to make use of that ‘reputation’.

One of the great advantages of good, old-fashioned, non-social search is taht you will occasionally be bowled a googly (pitched a curve ball for my transatlantic friends!) that might lead you off in to whole new areas of knowledge.  You may be prompted to try something new that NONE of your friends or colleagues have heard of.  Whilst these results will still be in the results, if they’re on the second page, how many of us will bother going there?  We’ll become fat and lazy and contented searchers.

So….I think I want to stay as an individual.  For now, I’ll happily turn my back on Social Search!