Author: JP

Yeah Yeah We Speak Perfect English, Just Serve

….is the title of a bizarre short film from the Wholphin stable. Take a look at the clip sometime. It’s people playing cross-border volleyball across an international boundary fence. A different perspective, it lets you see just how ugly fences are.

More on rich veins: Not fooled by randomness

Have you really thought about how you listen to music on any given day? Do you tend to choose an artist, an album, a period? Or do you just press the shuffle button or its equivalent?

I’m currently using one of my favourite techniques:

  1. Sort out my iTunes library into Time order
  2. Scan through the library very quickly and choose an “opening” song
  3. Go with the flow and listen to whatever songs happen to have the same duration as the opening song
  4. Stop whenever I feel like

I’ve written about this before, but this time I thought I’d share the songs that popped out as a result:

I’m sharing them for a number of reasons, listed and annotated below:

One, an observation on our “social media” culture and the implied transparency

When I scanned the list I was very tempted to take out the Boney M song, but I didn’t. It felt like cheating. It felt like the equivalent of quietly kicking your golf ball out of the rough when no one’s watching. You don’t do that. It felt all wrong even though nobody was watching. So anyway I didn’t do it. And it made me ponder about the cultural and social implications of the renaissance of transparency that we’re all experiencing.

Two, an observation on Wikipedia

I had twenty-one terms to search for, and all but four were found. Every artist was found. At least one of the songs may have been listed as well, I just wasn’t sure whether the Bless You reference was the right one. And I was too lazy to check. But it’s not the point. The point is that I could find seventeen of the twenty-one. You know something? Wikipedia is just one big multipurpose adjective-adverb. Lets you describe everything, qualify everything. Maybe not everything, but it keeps getting better. Many people bitch about the lack of “expertise” in Wikipedia, but I think they’re missing the point.

What point? It’s a bit like the story about Churchill and the looks-challenged woman. As the story goes, this person went up to Winston and said “Sir, you’re drunk” and he replied “Lady, you’re ugly. And tomorrow I’ll be sober….”

Traditional encyclopediae are ugly. Wikipedia on the other hand may be drunk today, but tomorrow it will be sober. Because it can and will improve. Improve in a long-tail way that nothing else can. And talking about improving it, Iwas surprised by the hyphen between Spencer and Churchill in the Wikipedia listing for Winston Churchill. Should it really be there?

Three, just some random mutterings about the specific songs that got thrown up:

If you haven’t heard of them, do listen to Fotheringay. As far as I know, (and as far as Wikipedia knows, for that matter) they produced only one album. While critics may feel that the album was nothing more than a showcase for Sandy Denny’s talents, I think they’re wrong. I really like the whole album. Fotheringay’s treatment of Dylan’s Too Much of Nothing is a delight. Incidentally, the Wodehouse fan in me tends to pronounce the band “Fun-gee”. Anyone know any better?

I never realised that Simon and Garfunkel had just three Number 1s: The Sound of Silence, Mrs Robinson and Bridge Over Troubled Water. Similarly I never knew that Melanie’s The Nickel Song was released by her old label explicitly to compete with her newer releases, the net effect of which was to make her the first female artiste to have 3 songs in the Top 40 simultaneously.

Remembering how gaunt he looked, I used to think that Headlong was the last video that Freddie Mercury ever appeared in; listening to it gave me the impetus to check. And I was wrong, it was These Are The Days of My Life, which was played at the recent Concert for Diana.

If you’re high in the anorak stakes, you may be interested in this comment in Wikipedia’s article on Ruby Tuesday: All post-2002 reissues of “Ruby Tuesday” on CD (comprising all versions on the ABKCO remastered CDs) are missing a vocal overdub in the chorus. The reason for this change has never been officially addressed. Anyone know why?

I’d always thought that John Lennon changed his middle name by deed poll from Winston to Ono, just as Elton John did (from Kenneth to Hercules). So I was surprised to see the Wikipedia entry showing John Winston Ono Lennon.

I’d heard before about Boney M’s massive African following, and been bemused by it. Seemed a bit like Norman Wisdom and his Albanian fan club. Now that I know that Ma Baker was based on a Tunisian tune, it all becomes clear.

Though I’ve known that Chevy Chase has musical talent, I didn’t know he’d actually played with Becker and Fagen prior to their forming Steely Dan.

I’ve never been able to understand any of the reasons why The White Album is meant to have been such a dark influence on Charles Manson. I still can’t figure it out.

Hitting a rich vein

It happens every now and then; my ten-books-at-a-time reading habit throws up a really good bunch, driven both by recommendation as well as randomness:

An odd collection, yes. Pure serendipity. And very pleasant indeed. Incidentally, I  tend not to write too many book reviews, on the basis that I read a great deal and therefore would not be providing any real filtering service. Recommendations, on the other had, may be of value to some of  you. If readers would like me to comment or review the books I read, then please let me know by writing to [email protected] or commenting on this post.

From care to caring: when Web 2.0 meets customer service

Yesterday while posting about something else, I commented (as an aside) about not being able to load something into my VodPod, and about the error message I received. All I said was the following:

[….For some reason I couldn’t load it into my VodPod; the error messages generated were ante-Web, a meaningless five digit error number, so I chose not to proceed.]

The post was timed at 11.36am local time. At 4.39pm the same day, a Saturday (!), I received a message from Mark Hall at VodPod. He’d read my blog, noted the comments, explained in detail the situation with the video I’d tried loading, gave me a workaround, and even apologised for the “lame” error message. Mark then went on to describe my post as a spur to action on such things. I was flabbergasted, pleasantly so,  to see service like this, and replied to his e-mail immediately. In passing I asked him what techniques he used to scan the blogosphere. And, no surprise, he replied quite quickly.

I think that what I describe above is the shape of things to come, as we move from “customer care” to “caring for the customer”. My thanks to all at VodPod.

Why is this happening, and why is it different? What has changed? First, let’s take a look at VodPod. A product that’s about nine months old, from a company (Remixation) that’s about a year old. A product with over 50,000 members already, aggregating video from over a thousand sites. A company that seems to have no more than 3 people working for it. A company that bothers to see what others have to say about its products and services and then proactively gets in touch with the commenters.

Now that’s caring. Even more amazing when you consider I pay them nothing. Incidentally, they have some very interesting advisors: Philip Rosedale from Linden Lab and Toni Schneider from WordPress, two of my favourite companies. I’ve met Philip at a Supernova event some years ago, and I use WordPress exclusively for my blogging; I’m a big fan of what people like Matt Mullenweg have accomplished. Matt was one of the first people I saw who did this kind of thing, scanning the blogosphere and responding to comments and events.

What we see happening here is something really important. When you look into many Web 2.0 companies, what you find is that people who work in those companies care passionately about what others think of their products and services. Passionately. They have a sensible work-life balance (yes most of them do have a First Life) yet they care.

And that care shows through in what they do. How customers perceive them. Maybe all of us who work at large companies need to understand something about all this. Find the people who care, and make sure they connect with customers.

Strange days

I went to see the latest Harry Potter film with my two older children this evening; one of the ads had as its theme “When Johnny Comes Marching Home“. And it took me back years. All the way back to Class 2C at St Xavier’s Collegiate School in 1966, “Small School” as I knew it.

It brought to mind some of the other songs I was taught that year, songs I still remember verbatim:

What a strange collection. A song from a 1950s Hitchcock film. A Harry Belafonte children’s song. An original postwar German song. A Stephen Foster “gold rush” song. Another from the American Civil War. An Irish anthem. And a Bing Crosby popularised  ballad.

All this in Calcutta, in the mid-sixties, in a Jesuit school.  Strange world. I wonder what they sing in Small School now. [Incidentally, I hadn’t realised that Park Street had become Mother Teresa Sarani. Or that the school year had been changed from January-December to April-March].