Author: JP

It’s rare that you get such deliciously different synoptic views of the same event.

It’s even rarer to see the same organisation express itself with such distinctive variety across multiple channels.

And when the event is one of those truth-is-always-always-stranger-than-fiction candidates, it’s worth writing a post about it.

Something happened in the toilet-roll aisles at a Tesco in Musselburgh last Friday.

Here’s what was stated by the officials at Police Scotland:

“A 21-year-old man was arrested and charged in connection with an assault in Eskview Road, Musselburgh, on Friday 1 November.

“He was remanded in custody until Monday 4th November, where he appeared in court and pled guilty to the offence.”

All the usual officialese formality guff was in place….”charged in connection with an assault”, “remanded in custody”, “appeared in court”, “pled guilty to the offence”. Where else do people talk like that but in official police statements.

But wait a minute. Let’s see what the same organisation said about the same event, but this time via a tweet, on Twitter:

 

And here’s how I found out about it, in a story on the BBC news site:

 

You know something? I quite like the 140 character version. Perhaps we should be considering the use of such extreme character limits for all kinds of officialese, including those pesky Terms of Service.

Over the past few days, in occasional conversation with friend Brian Shaler, I’ve become aware of dogescript.

You take doge, a “language” that now serves as the monologue vehicle for Shibe, the dog pictured below:

Add doge to the continuing javascript explosion; soon you get doje.js and, not long after that, dogescript. Such browser so html5.

I love seeing how humour and satire and irony make their way into every form of communication, especially when the humour is manifested in an unexpected place. For some time now Amazon product reviews have been leaders in the genre, as people hijacked the space creatively and joyously.

Even Wikipedia has had its day when it comes to offbeat humour. Some years ago there was the unusual situation where the banter was between a solitary individual on one side and an entire crowd on the other. That’s what happened on 30 July 2009, when the Wikipedia article on Caroline of Brunswick came in for a prolonged burst of collective vandalism, with someone called William Avery bravely putting his finger in the dyke while edits sought to flood through. Just read this report of a day’s play (or more accurately a day’s rain) at Edgbaston; start from the bottom, you will catch my drift. Here’s how it looked on Wikipedia:

 

 

 

The hijack of the WaitroseReasons hashtag some months ago, while initially galling for the firm, probably gave it quite positive publicity by the end, when people could see how the company dealt with the issue.

Today, again, I learnt of levity in an unexpected place: customer care, and again on Twitter. Apparently Tesco Mobile is now manned by a person or people with something that purports to be a sense of humour:

 

 

 

You may not like the humour (I confess I found some of the tweets funny enough to smile). You can’t fault the sense of authenticity though, which is probably why some of the tweets have been RTed thousands of times.

Hat tip to PSFK for the original story on the Tesco Tweets.

I’ve written about them before. Solanaceae.

One family. Containing many of the genera I love, and some I still love but no longer partake of.

Solanum. The potato, the tomato and the eggplant.

Capsicum. The chili, the bell pepper.

Physalis. The tomatillo, the Cape gooseberry, the Chinese lantern.

Nicotiana. The tobacco plant.

The dhatura. The mandragora. And of course the original “deadly” nightshade, the atropa belladonna.

An incredible family, full of flavour, taste, adventure.

I was reminded about them while reading this in the New Yorker yesterday; thank you Lauren Collins, thank you New Yorker, for not hiding your light under a paywall bushel. [An aside: I am so hooked on capsaicin I probably get an endorphin rush just reading that article].

If you’re serious about chillies, you should read Amal Naj’s Peppers. It is the book on the subject; everything else is a jalapeno to his bhut jolokia.

And if you’re not serious about chillies, but like to dabble, here are ten tips:

• 1. Stay fresh. Most of the flavour I really enjoy is to be found in fresh chillies.
• 2. If you can’t stay fresh, stay close to fresh. Freshly crushed dried red chillies can be amazing. But only when freshly crushed. Within a week the magic’s gone.
• 3. If you can’t stay close to fresh, go whole. Dried whole chillies are a whole different ball game. Very versatile, you can put them in anything. Cook them in dry dishes and wet. Use them as garnish. Drop them into drinks like fresh buttermilk. Have them all by themselves.
• 4. If you must go powdered and can’t go fresh, go Japanese. Look for the right togarashi.
• 5. Quality, not quantity. Infinitesimal slivers of a “big” habanero or a high-end Scotch bonnet can release more oomph than you think. Practise cutting rings as thin as you can make it. Collect the seeds separately. Use them to make fresh powders.
• 6. Catalyse and enhance. Learn about using ginger, garlic, cumin, coriander, turmeric as accents on the chillies. My anchor spice is the chillie, and I build flavour around it.
• 7. Work on the secret stuff. Introduce asafoetida and tamarind, especially when you can get them fresh. Make a concentrated solution, literally a few thimbles full. And then use them to announce the chillies.
• 8. Know your limits and those of your guests. Study the Scoville index. Make sure you understand it’s a log scale. Most people who “like” chillies are those who have graduated from bell pepper to jalapeno. They don’t know about ear-popping. Some may have meadered a little further up the scale, perhaps all the way to birdseye. But that means nothing in heat terms. Most people bail out at the high end of habanero or Scotch bonnet. This is serious stuff, and you need to be careful with it. For most things I stop there, and don’t bother serving anything hotter to my friends. Even if they insist they can have hotter stuff. Leave the Nagas, the Bhuts and the Scorpions to the specialists. If you need gloves to handle the chillies, you probably don’t want to put them inside you. Not unless you’re seasoned, really seasoned.
• 9. Use vegetable oils to help bring out the flavour. If you don’t want to use oil, use soy sauce. Something liquid that frees the flavour up as you cook. Even for stir-fry.
• 10. Give people an escape route. Keep some plain dal and some dahi, maybe in raita form, on the side. Both dal and dahi can have chillies, so if you mean to give people an escape then keep both varieties, with chillies and without.

More later. I’m hungry and have a plane to catch.

You may have noticed that I travel quite a bit. Which probably gives someone in at least two organisations a mild headache. Only one of those two organisations is Google.

Every time I travel, I have reason to smile. Often. I’ve come to the conclusion that a sense of humour is one of the most important things you need if you’re a frequent traveller. I’ve tried everything else: staring quietly while smoke comes out of your ears; pretending that the only language you speak is an offshoot of Finno-Ugric; practising hyperselective deafness and blindness; following instructions to the letter. It doesn’t matter, somewhere between entering one airport and exiting another, your patience will be tried. Extensively.

So I have learnt to detach myself from myself as I go through the shenanigans of air travel, concentrating on observing everything around me as dispassionately as possible. What Bruce Schneier called “security theatre” I try and segment into Comedies, Tragedies and Histories; I have reserved the term Romances for now.

I try and spot Six Impossible Things before Check-in. I know, that’s cheating. It used to be hard when all you could do was queue at a counter. Now, with the web and the phone and the kiosk, even the impossible is commonplace, so much to observe, so much to smile at. How many times will I be asked the same question? How many ways can I get to “It is not possible to check you in at this time. Please take your documents with you and leave forthwith”.

When I’m the other side of the Comedies, I concentrate on other puzzles. For example, I analyse all the different ways I could get from my erstwhile location to the place I need to be at. Then I rank them in terms of the quality of the obstacle course so presented. Will they make me go downstairs so that they can make me go back upstairs somewhere else? Will they lull me into complacency by giving me a gate a stone’s throw away, only to bring forward boarding by forty minutes because we were going to be bused to the aircraft? That in turn makes me check the weather. If there’s blue sky visible and no hint of rain whatsoever, I discount the likelihood of buses. After all, what’s the point of sending passengers on to buses if you can’t watch them do their drowned-rat-with-gangantuan-hand-luggage act? Buses go with rain.

Once I get on the plane, I can play more sophisticated games. In how many ways can I be interrupted while trying to do something where interruption is not particularly enjoyable?

Which reminds me. The democratisation of the dev. Ah yes.

One of the things I do when I’m travelling is to observe and understand the DNA of the communications that take place. The terms and jargon that are the making of air travel. Take airport codes for example. IATA codes dating back to the 1930s are still in common use, paying no attention to political and geographical shifts in the eight decades that have passed since. So Mumbai is BOM, Chennai is MAA and Kolkata CCU. [Calcutta is where I was born, where I grew up. Kolkata is where I go when I visit].

I smile when I see them. I smile when I land in Beijing and see PEK. I smile broadly when I land in St Petersburg and see LED; I haven’t been to Nizhny Novgorod, but if I had I would have smiled at GOJ. All this gave me the incentive to look into the history of the codes. Last week I flew to and from EWR. Why EWR for Newark? Because the Navy reserved everything starting with N and the FCC wanted W and K to be similarly protected, poor Newark had nowhere else to go but EWR. And when I learnt that the mayhem actually had rules (like “the first and second letter or the second and third letter of an airport may not be duplicated with less than 200 nautical miles separation”).

I found it hard to believe that these codes were set in stone in the 1930s and left unchanged. So I looked into it, and I wasn’t surprised to see that there had been attempts to modernise the codes. I went and read up on the four-character ICAO codes and realised that there was a treasure trove of comedy there, to be saved for a rainy day when I would be taken by bus to the plane and off it. A part of me is still trying to figure out how ICAO told the Scots and the Welsh that their airports had the prefix EG (for England). O frabjous day! Callooh callay!

Poor Edinburgh. Someone thought that EDI wasn’t clear enough so it needed to be called EGPH. Uggh.

Why do these things happen? Because people need a common language, common labels, to be able to communicate with each other, to know when and how they mean the same thing or different things. You say tomahto and I say tomayto.

Take something as trivial as train timetables. I’m led to believe that there was no concept of global standard time until train timetables came along. Time was something that was local. The sun rose. The sun set. Stuff happened in between. Stuff happened betwixt. And that’s all she wrote.

Then people wanted to know what time the Stockton train was to arrive in Darlington. And they realised that this needed Stockton and Darlington to have a common view of time, a common frame of reference.

Time is a label. Which is why you should never be able to patent or copyright Tuesday. [Otherwise there will be a whole new meaning to Cat Stevens’ wonderful Tuesday’s Dead]. [If you really want to laugh, take a look at the conspiracy theorist conversations analysing the lyrics here].

Location is also a label. When and where are questions one should be able to answer outside copyright. [Which is why a part of me curls up and dies when I see monopolies in geographical information].

Life is full of labels. Labels that don’t just tell you when and where, but what as well. Part numbers. Chemical element names. Compound names. Generic drug names. The classifications of flora and fauna. SKUs.

Labels.

There’s one label more important than all the others.

Who. Yes, identity.

As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. Conversations that take place because of the relationships that exist. Conversations that may, and often do, lead to transactions.

Relationship before conversation before transaction.

If conversations are what make markets happen, then they need to be understood consistently by participants. You say tomahto….

I live in hope for a world where many of these conversations have most of their frictions and latencies taken away from them, so I can devote myself to growing chillies while printing new books and restoring old ones, and spending time with anyone who wants to discover the joy of reading.

For this world to exist, a number of things that are closely held today will have to be held more openly tomorrow:

• time, date and place labels
• identity information
• labels like part numbers and skus and bus names and hospital names and disease names and plant names and generic medicine names and doctor’s surgery addresses and primary care trust locations
• combinations of these that plot frequency, so people can inspect the incidence of a plant (or a disease) in a neighbourhood (or primary care trust)

Note I never mentioned detailed individual transaction-level information. That’s a different class of information, and something I will speak about some other time.

A lot of this is created using public funds. Some of it may be privately held, but is nevertheless likely to be regulated at industry level. Years ago, in a discussion between Doc Searls and Don Marti over at the Linux Journal, I remember them talking about information wanting to be $5.99. Not free, but close enough to free for someone to be able to recoup justifiable costs.

When I hear the term Open Data, this is what I think of. That one day soon, much of this will be available to the newly democratised devs, allowing them to perform magic. They have access to low-cost compute and storage and bandwidth already; the barriers to design and code expertise are reducing, as they move into the streams and filters and drains world; new barriers can and will emerge, such is the nature of the beast. But.

If the names and labels and frames of reference get freed up as well, time to value will shorten at a rate of knots. And adoption will grow as people see the value flow to them. And God will be in His Heaven and All will be Well with the World.

Utopia? Of course. Always. Particularly when the future’s here.

In this context, read what Nigel Shadbolt had to say today, both in the Times as well as on his ODI Blog. Go attend the ODI Summit taking place this week. [Sadly I can’t, I am committed to be at the Web Summit in Dublin, another don’t miss event]. Read the coverage on “smart disclosure” in Mashable earlier today.

One way or the other,  inform yourself as to what is happening in the open data space. Public open data. Private open data. Smart disclosure. Whatever.

Inform yourself. Because that data is the DNA that makes the dev even more democratised today. Big data is big. But. Big data is not that big if it has no frame of reference. A frame of reference that comes from open.