In response to: The Financial Reformation

This video is fantastic, it suggest peer-to-peer lending may be just the start, what will be next I wonder? What other financial services can social networking and social media offer? I think there will always be gatekeepers - those with the technical skills to maintain the system that facilitates contact between individuals, but I hope competition will be vibrant and that choice will not be limited to connection via Facebook or Twitter.

At the moment, Facebook and Twitter are great platforms to enable individuals to use a service, but my concern is that this gives too few too much power of access and to which services. However, in the UK, neither of the leading UK peer-to-peer lending services provide access via Facebook or Twitter, partly due to insufficient security for a financial service. Therein is an opportunity for a company to provide access to financial products in the way that Facebook Connect to does for so many other online services, or for Facebook and Twitter to create a massively enhanced country-specific security application approval system.

Such a service would give one company a lot of power, but would enable those with knowledge and funds for not much more than hosting with a secure server to establish an internet-based financial service and therefore would enable a much healthier and vibrant commerical environment allowing for much more competition and choice, and the review services that would follow.

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Zero Credit responded and in the comment included a link to the related Wall Street Journal article titled "In the Grip of the Internet Monopolists" to which my response is as follows:

People will always gravitate towards what is safest, it is the instinct for self-preservation. The more people that join something, the more resources and power that something has to make it safer than the rest. It is the same in nature from planetary objects to molecules, they all group together because of safety and strength in numbers. No doubt you have heard "united we stand, divided we fall" and "survival of the fittest".

There does however come a point when they can get too big to the point of having enough power, which to some individuals, results in corruption and consequently insecurity for the masses.

I believe the answer is to make the business of acquisitions and mergers much harder, to prevent forced takeovers, to stop ending services just so as to hire the developers skills.

Recently Facebook purchased drop.io which is the only service in the world with a free low-usage plan that enables people to upload files to a registered users account, Apple offers a similar thing with MobileMe, but there is no free option.

I found the drop.io service essential when an advice-giving organisation with internet access would not permit emailing service users, they used drop.io to upload a document for me rather than printing it saving the space and resources of printing and filing. Now thanks to the ease with which Facebook acquired drop.io, the service will end in a month and that will be it. Every similar service requires registration or payment, both of which a bureaucratic organisation are very unlikely to do.

The result of this acquisition is not just the loss of a useful service, it also means less choice in file management and storage.

In response to: Supermarket Sweep?

The people needing the retail jobs are some of the same people (but in the minority) of those demanding convenience in retail, which is what automated systems deliver. The cost however will only be realised when a smiling face at the checkout is noticed only through conspicuity or - in an age of 24 hour surveillance - the suspicion that results from a smile (as the video above implies).

If it comes to being herded like cattle by machines throughout supermarkets, will it be too late? There will be those protesting about the soul destroying lack of personality in the machines, though efforts will be made to humanise the machines through virtual people, all analysing in-store behaviour as well as tracking buying habits for for future advertising. However most people will predictably do nothing so long as their comfort and income or is lowered only slightly (relative to everyone else) for the good of the community.

When those protesting against the convenience that so many demanded, will the underfunded police take the side of the protesters or the highly profitable supermarkets? They will at least overrule private security firms.

The question that needs to be answered is this: what is the value of a real smile and in practice is it greater than the value of convenience?

Today I am commenting on "Are we too damn British for Foursquare?" by Mary Shivers.

My first reaction was not that we are too British, but that we are not American enough. American culture is very insular and gives little consideration to the needs or cultures outside America. In fact the whole of western culture is slowly being assimililated... (Americanised) by American culture, perhaps eventually it will be lost forever. For example, Facebook is available in three types of English:  English (US), English (pirate), and English (upside down) - what about British English? But that's another subject altogether.

I then read more of this post and Mary says British privacy concerns could be an excuse for avoiding change, a reason to justify pushing back against anything new. I'm not sure if that is right either but I think it is far closer to the answer. I believe the British media - said to be the most invasive (perhaps most sensationalist) in the world - have a lot to answer for, scaring many people into believing every other person on the internet is a scary monster of some kind, which itself is perhaps just reflecting British attiudes back at British people. So maybe Mary is right.

The only problem I've found with Foursquare, apart from the lack of local people, is that most people wanting to be friends with me live thousands of miles away. Why would I want to know where they are visiting (unless I know them well already)?!! They just want more followers to boost their ego, or to advertise something.

One game I am very much enjoying on my iPhone is the Google-maps based game called MyTown. Thanks to this game, I have found many places and small businesses literally around the corner from me but which I did not before know even existed. MyTown is a fantastic way to get to break the ice with local people that you don't know yet.

You may have noticed changes to this blog this past week, I thought I would take things in a slightly different direction. The design/theme of the blog has been changed to this cleaner minimalist theme and I created a header image. I was thinking I need some good photos for either side of the title. I have some good photos and want to use some I have taken, but I can't find any that I took that I am happy to put in a blog header. So for now, I have just put a couple of my photoshopped photos.

Now the aim of this blog. Sometimes I will write a comment in response to a blog post and it will be so long, that sometimes it is longer than the post itself! So I have been thinking, I will use it for whenever I write a long comment, I'll put it here. It will show I am still here(!)... sorry for not posting for four months, and I think it helps promote some great blogs and great writing and create new connections.

I would like to customise this page a little more one day, but Javascript is not yet permitted (I suspect for security reasons), which means functions from third party sites cannot easily be embedded. I'm still not happy with this, I would like better sharing/social functions.

For greater creative freedom, I recommend a self-hosted Wordpress blog, and for that reason my other regular random thoughts not on a particular topic can all be found at ianmayman.com, but while in develop I may just direct the address to load this site.

For now, Audioboos will also still show up here and on Facebook and Twitter.

I've just watched Doctor Who - Victory of the Daleks, and I am wondering what inspired the BBC to create this scene obviously reminiscent of Raising The Flag on Iwo Jima. It's not to commerate a World War II anniverary, so how come, perhaps to keep the memory alive? The story was set in a time that would mean this would have happened at the same time as the American flag being raised. Perhaps of relevance is the fact that today as I write this, almost a week after the programme was broadcast in the UK, it is England's national day, St. George's Day.

I think the iconic photograph, shown below and which was taken in 1945 no longer represents victory for America as I believe it once did, it now simply represents victory, and that is perhaps why it was shown. What do you think?

Following the volanic eruption in Iceland, the news media appears to be focusing entirely on people not being able to travel. Every business trading internationally must have their distribution massively affected. When New York airspace shut down temporarily in September 2001, some businesses shutdown causing a loss of jobs.

Everyday food is flown to the UK airports bound for supermarkets within hours of being picked. Most planted food for the UK is not grown in the UK, it must come by plane from wherever the optimal growing conditions are at the time, all to ensure it is fresh when on the shelves. It is the only way to have fresh food in the UK all year round. I wonder why has nobody reported on the fact there may be a shortage of some food? Am I missing something? Add to this cost of delays with postage and you have potentially a bureaucratic nightmare.

Now the strange thing is the fact that commercial flight is almost completely ignored by the media and there have been no notices of delivery problems which will have a backlog of a several weeks costing European economies millions more and the loss of a lot of jobs, plus knock on effects for other economies. The big courier companies are at least aware of the problem, so why isn't the media? The closest I have seen in the news about the commercial effects are that it is costing £100m per day in the UK, and that was only mentioned once.

Why do you think this is? Are we not being told the full story? I am in London, apparently right under the heart of the ash cloud and I have not once seen any sign of ash at all, in fact the sky is the clearest I have seen it in a long time, perhaps because there are no vapour trails.

ADDENDUM: A couple of days ago I was out for a walk, the day before airlines were officially reported as landing in the UK and half a day after the rest of Europe. Now perhaps it, was a test flight but on that short walk I saw a what I think was a 747 airliner.

This cartoon was published in the paper today and it reminded me of Kim who calls her children "tadpoles".

More cartoons like this can be found at www.stripshowcartoons.com.

I thought I would write about one of my favourite podcasts, it is Earth Touch, a nature video show and the highest quality video podcast I know. The standard is only matched by the subject matter - truly wild wildlife in their natural environment. It may not be the most exciting podcast, but the animals are not there to entertain us, there is often not a thrilling chase for the kill. It is only humans that kill and consume more than we need, other animals just chill out when they have eaten.

I have seen nature programmes by Sir David Attenborough many times but nothing captures the feel of authenticity that this podcast offers. In mainstream TV programming everything just looks staged, perhaps because it is as much as possible so as to get the best shot, as recent programming has shown.

Mainstream nature programs are like a documentary whereas Earth Touch I would describe as an "observation". Earth Touch doesn't complicate things with animals facts that nobody remembers!

Earth Touch videos are also produced on a tiny budget and with a tiny film crew, and I have found lately that they seem to talk more over the video. That is fine because there is also the opportunity to subscribe to videos without any commentary, I found those quite relaxing, particularly the marine videos.

The above video is a good example of the excellent work of the Earth Touch team. Many of the videos come from the plains of the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Another Earth Touch video (shown below), tells a brilliant story set far in the future, a story of our possible future. This video went viral and now is approaching 350,000 views.

Website: http://www.earth-touch.com/

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/earthtouch

I recommend watching these videos, if you can, in a room with lighting at a similar level to the video, or dark or if it is a marine video, and use headphones. Then you really get a feel of what it must be like to be there, just without the heat, water, or bugs!

I love mashups, especially those I get through the mashuptown.com podcast, however it is not often that I find one really great. This song "Imagine One Day" is one such song. It's not my favourite mashup but it definitely gets top marks for the high production quality.

The mashup mixes:
Matisyahu – One Day (Acapella)
Matisyahu feat. Akon – One Day (Instrumental)
John Lennon – Imagine (Acapella)
Blink 182 – All the Small Things (Acapella)
Bob Marley – No Woman, No Cry (Acapella)
Gentleman – Dem Gone (Live at Cologne)

I think there are perhaps two reasons why we aren't talking more about this kind of thing. The record companies don't promote it because there money is better spent promoting songs they want to sell and they don't condemn it because mashups also promote the song they want to sell. The other reason is because it is not American, anything not American doesn't get talked about nearly as much online as things that are American, regardless of how good it is, that is how it seems anyway.

Mashuptown and most mashups seem to come out of Germany, or should I say Deutschland (I think so), and they centre around Berlin where the mashup parties are often held. They are in my opinion the modern equivalent of the Amiga Demoscene that we had in the 90's, well the closest thing to it.

Take a look and subscribe as well if you like at http://www.mashuptown.com/

If not Mashups, then perhaps clubbing is the Amiga Demoscene gone mainstream? One guy I've tweeted about a lot Armin Van Buuren, he is from another cool place in Europe called Utrecht in the Netherlands which is a beautiful country from what i recall of studing it, maybe I'll vist one day and Utrecht is a place I would visit. A priest who put that place on the map (well my mental map!) is Father Roderick Vonhogen, I listened to him a lot when he was podcasting, not sure if he still is.

This is was a popular Amiga demo, I still have this somewhere and let me just make clear, this ran easily and smoothly on a computer with ONE MEGABYTE and no hard drive, from Spaceballs it was quite simply "State of the Art":

Now, here's a little modern European culture (technically Dutch but it's popular across Europe) from Armin Van Buuren for you...