Odds and Sods

The Meedja is constructing an Aporkalyptic scenario, predicting Global Hamageddon as Swine Flu metamorphoses into a virus more deadly than the planet has ever seen before, all of course in the interest of public information (and not to sell more meedja, nonono )

But we have noticed that the Swine Flu meme is virulently evolving into different strains far more rapidly on Twitter (and now on Facebook apparently), here are a small sample of those just in the last 24 hours:

Strine flue - Caught it in Australia

Spline flu is spreading quickly through university mathematics departments worldwide"
[I wonder how many variants there are, counting them could tie you up in knots ]

Shwine flu - Sean Connery with swine flu

Slime flu - use your imagination...........

Shrine flu - an affliction picked up in places of great spiritual significance

Sine flu - your temperature goes up and down and up and down

Stein flu - caught from drinking out of damp beer glasses

Sublime flu - possibly the best flu in the world. [Stein flu from Carlsberg....]

Supine Flu - not to be taken lying down

More scary, we are seeing consonantal shift in the meme's structure:

Prime Flu - only infects numbers of people in amounts divisible by 1 or the infected number itself.

Zwei flu - the second bout of flu you caught this year

Twine Flu: you've had a string of illnesses - but beware of......

Tine Flu - if you get it you are forked.

Brine flu - suffered by cross-channel swimmers

Pine flu - Flu caught in Nordic forests.

Rhyme Flu: symptoms include niggling irritation at ongoing and repeated Twitter memes.

Tyne flu. Prevalent around Newcastle.

Time Flu - likes arrows

Wine flu - caught in France

More scary still are those that have evolved to different vowels:

Sinew flu - caught by anagramists (and crossword fans?)

Quorn Flu - an acceptable vegetarian alternative

And then there are non flu variants too:

Swine flume - a water adventure park for piglets.

Swine flue = pig stuck up chimney.

Swine Flew - the bastard who got you up the duff flees the country

Swine floozy: putting lipstick on a pig. [Sarah be thy name...]

Update - News has just reached us that variants of Swine Flu have broken out in Germany - these are:

- Schwein flu

- Rhine flu (don't drink the water)

- Mein flu (what I got)

- Dein flu (what you've got)

- Klein flu (more of a schniffle, really)

For transmitting this viral outbreak you can blame @Jemimakiss, @Suw, @CTD, @CharlesArthur, @justin_williams, @GarethDEdwards, @adebradley, @joecassels, @Riff_Raff, @LucasBlack, @Ruskin147, @linker3000, @shanerichmond, @willmcinness, @christhall, @GPhire, @linker3000, @megpickard and of course modest input from Moi

If you get it, here is what to do

If you get it, are cured, and then get it again - well, thats Parmageddon.....

Sad news that JG Ballard died today. One of my personal favourite authors, especially for his dystopian Sci-Fi. May he rest in Vermilion Sands......

Just had to copy this, its too good - Eric Alt did this on HolyTaco (hat tip Jack Schofield).



Photo from Panoramio is Tim Severin's replica of Odysseus's ship when Tim et al recreated his possible voyage

The G20 circus has come to London town, along with the surrounding panjandrum of Press, PR, Pro Gals and of course the traditional Rent-a-Riot crowd (see picture above).

One benefit of it being in London is that the the Tin-cans and Strings of the Broadstuff Briefing System have being humming! We are picking up some very interesting rumours about an impending major change to the world financial system as big as Bretton Woods or the move off the gold standard. In short, it seems that Capitalism is History, and they are going to move from the Dollar standard to Social Capital.

Yes, they're going to change from Wonga to Whuffie.

(Whuffie, for the uninitiated, is digitally allocated social capital - see Wikipedia for an explanation)

Our sources are still feeding us confused snippets, and there are gaps and some contradictions, but it seems to be the following reasoning that is driving this change:

(i) The World Bank and IMF have calculated that the banks have actually counterfeited, gambled and lost more money than exists on the planet.

(ii) In other words, there is simply not enough money around to completely bail them out

(iii) Unfortunately, it has been calculated that even if all the post-crunch bankers bonuses were spent on PR, it is not possible to persuade all the population of the G20 to opt for voluntary peasantry

(iv)Sadly, most G20 countries are (demi-)democratic and will thus eventually throw out any regime that imposes free-to-serf policies, even if it came with a free HDTV set.

(v) Not only that, some analysts are calculating that the people, although revolting, may actually become bolshie and throw out the ruling class in a resurrection of (shudder) Socialism 2.0

Being thrown out is a scary prospect, as then the ruling classes wouldn't rule anymore, and as they know, come the revolution they would be shot against the wall.

In other words, something must be done to divert this wisdom of the crowds.... a bit of extraordinary delusion is required to take their attention off their plummeting pensions

Thus, goes the reasoning, the best idea is to abandon the dollar altogether and replace it with something less tangible and more shiny - something impossible to count and that can be manufactured for free.

Bank of England official Mylo Shylock has been working on the conversion, which is due to take place as soon as the summit ends:

"Basically, we will switch from dollars to whuffie at a 1:1,000 conversion rate, and other currencies at the rate of exchange at the time. When you wake up on Friday, the pound in your pocket will be gone, and will be replaced by the thousands of Whuffie points. "Nearly everyone will be a millionaire", he adds, and that moving to basing a currency on the gold-in-your-heart will bring in a new era of stability.

"The Swiss are a bit upset", he points out, as it will ruin their traditional industry of storing the fortunes of despots, crooks, drug lords and bankers "but they are coming round to the idea as their climate is ideal for the huge datacentres we will need"

Exactly how it impacts the global accounting systems are still being worked through, but apparently the help of the Zimbabwe ministry of finance has been invaluable. This is because one of the main benefits of the system is that governments no longer have to control the Whuffie supply. With people able to give it to each other will-he nill-he, they expect rampant inflation to be the norm in months. Given this, they believe, people will be spending again like there is no tomorrow. "

"If you are short of funds, just pimp your Facebook friends to vote you some more whuffie, and off you go again" says Shylock "it's just Awesome". Not only that, he points out, but if everything is constantly inflating then there is no incentive to save at all, and we will continue to spend our way to global growth.

Others see another benefit of this is that the Chinese and Arab sovereign trusts, who now hold all the dollars, will find that making them worthless and moving to a new currency with no visible means of support will reduce their influence.

But, the Chinese and Arab leaders, as well as OECD leaders, have endorsed the plan as they also understand that Whuffie is a virtual good that obeys Power Laws. In fact, it works better than anything they have so far achieved in wealth redistribution - its taken 40 years to get back to 1% of the population owning c 50% of the global financial wealth, but all the calculations show that the top 1% can get 80% of the virtual capital owing to the virtuous cycle that the digital rich get richer, faster - because most of the people online will drive themselves into long tailed serfdom by voluntarily handing over all their whuffie to those that already have, like they slavishly follow the slebs on Twitter.

As George Rosencrantz, undersecretary at the Treasury notes:

"Why bother with the hard slog of creating a two tier society in 40 years, when we can have user generated Digital Feudalism via virtual anilingus in 40 months?"

Another official, Bill Guildenstern, pointed out that benefit of a digital feudal society was that the long tail would no longer be able to wag the top dogs, and that the introduction of whuffienomics and its value accretion to the top of the curve would allow a return to traditional values, where most of the people lived their life under the boot of the lord of the demesne. "The Age of Reason was an aberration in history", he noted, and that that humanity is going back to traditional values of illiterate mysticism and needs a new structure to match "the rise of new age religion, creationism, fantasy literature and the worship of vapid celebrity is all a sign that people are yearning for the good old days of ignorance and subservience to their social betters" he points out.

But getting this transition wrong, suggest Rosenstern and Guildencrantz, may well lead to serious unrest and consequences, possibly even deaths.

But, points out Neo-Marxist philosopher Otis Driftwood (we caught up with him enjoying a night at the opera in London), is that people will believe they are more equal by being feudal. "Its extraordinary, but people believe that digital social networks systems create equality even as they hand more and more power and influence up to the top". We feel better, he explains, if 99% of people have as little as ourselves and we ignore the 1% that have it all. Driftwood is, we must point out, a bit eccentric as he won't join any social network that accepts him as a member, but his point remains.

The bankers are delighted - Morgan Stanley, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, points out that if everyone has trillions of whuffiemarks, they won't notice that the bankers' bonuses have several noughts more. "It won't even cross their minds" she notes.

Not everyone is delighted though - a curious alliance of Greens and Freeconomists believe this is a bad move overall. The Greens argue that an economy based on digital feudalism is unsustainable and are calling for a return to a more rustic, traditional form feudalism. "We believe one pig in every pokey back yard is the new yardstick for global sustainability" says green activist Jonathan Porridge, and notes that "while a move to Whuffie and mass ignorance is to be welcomed as it reduces paper consumption" digital social networks as a means of wealth distribution rely too much on the massive emissions of datacentres. They are calling for the abolition of computers, cars, plastics and phones. "If we live for another millenium with the about same levels of energy consumption as our mediaeval forbears, then we have a small chance of reducing global warming" he notes. Of course religion will remain a key tenet of Green Manorialism, its just that we will have to watch TV by candlelight in future.

Freeconomists have a different objection, in that the mere existence of Whuffie threatens the concept that all shall be free in this free-est of societies. "Doc" Pangloss explains:

"The problem with Whuffie is that it raises an expectation among the Digital Sharecroppers that they actually get some real reward and benefit for their efforts - the whole Open Soyurce/User Generated Content system was built on working for nothing, and Whuffie was what you got to make you feel good. By basing an actual economy on Whuffie it means it now is transferable as a unit of wealth, and will bring the Freeconomy back into line with the real economy - which reduces the ability of honest, hard partying entrepreneurs to cash out on other people's work"

We await other developments today with eager anticipation.

Update - the picture I put in of the protest says it all - lone protester breaks window in RBS, a near-nationalised bank that we already own, with hordes of press, twitterers and bloggers getting off in ecstacy. This is not the way to scare a plutocrat into honesty, nor to get anything done to change The System.

Last night we held a roundup of all the conferences various people had been to recently - TED, SXSW, LIFT, ETech etc (see summary here) - "conference voyeurism" as one wag put it. As I'd been to both TED and SXSW I did a compare and contrast spiel, which was basically this:

Pricing:

TED is $6,000 for 3 1/2 days of packed programming, and SxSW is $450 for 5 more relaxed days - about the same amount of hours. At more than 10x the price (c $1 per minute) I felt more pressure at TED to Do Everything, and one literally felt one was p*ssing away money by going to the toilet

Attendance:

TED c 1200, SXSW c 9,000. In theory the TED audience is much more high quality, and there are big names - but there were also too many of those annoying "Startup CEO" types who interrupt the conversation you are having with Mr Famous to pimp their Thang and press a business card into said hands - this happened often at TED, hardly ever at SXSW. I did not pay $6000 for some rude little MBA sh*t to interrupt me in mid convo (at $1 a minute.... )

Content Range:

TED - huge, from Robotics to Jazz. SXSW less so, its a Techfest, but being part of the overall SXSW music & film festival means there is a lot going on in Austin at the same time

Talks:

- TED - very high quality of presentation, lower quantity (single stream) of talks. Good content quality overall, and even the poorer ones are bearable owing to the high presentation quality. Not much Q&A

- SXSW - some of the panels were dire, some (eg Steven Johnson) were TED quality - but the quantity is huge, and there is a quality in such quantity as if you didn't like one you moved. Not much Q&A in panels. However the discussion groups were very good, as typically the audience were informed

Networking:

Better at SXSW - more time, more space, and people seem more amenable to it. In theory the quality of networking at TED is higher, but I'd say at SXSW there were a similar number (say c 1,000) of high profile people, and a larger number of ordinary oiks - of whom many were very interesting. TED has a wider range of people, however, and the big hitters are very big. SXSW is more T/M/T focussed and has more Tech hitters, but fewer big name VCs and certainly no movie stars (to my knowledge, anyway). Someone said that TED is where you go to meet yesterdays' heroes, SXSW is where you go to meet tomorrows'. A bit cruel, but you know of what they speak.

Parties / Apres Talks:

TED is more structured to facilitate meeting people, at least until c 10pm when the formal stuff typically closes. SXSW has more "party" parties - free beer, some grub, lots of people milling around in brownian motion. After c 10pm its much the same though, groups of people chatting over drinks in bars/hotels/whatever. SXSW has an "In crowd" party scene, but its more about A-lister pecking order, as the parties themselves are much of a muchness.

Here endeth the lecture.....

Its Ada Lovelace Day, and the purpose of this is to celebrate women in technology.

But, rather than celebrating one particular person, we'd like to flag the women who are not A list entrepreneurs with their names in lights, or the current startup darlings, or even the "glam-side" PR gals that are names by dint of position.

We'd like to celebrate the women who actually get things done, sans thanks (and recognition) in many cases.

These are the coders, testers, system administrators, pre and post sales support, helpdesk operators, team managers, office administrators - those that are critical to any technology based enterprise but are not the "public face" who you see in the press and glam parties.

So here's my thought - over the years I've worked with, and managed, many such women. In general they've been more competent than their male colleagues - they have to be due to the background, ambient (and usually unconscious) discrimination in the structure of technology companies.

But, to them I would say there is one thing that I always felt would help their cause hugely - and that is to be more forthcoming. Speak up, let your opinions be known, say your piece, stand your ground etc etc.

The good news is that the way work is becoming structured, it plays to natural female skills of collaboration and communication. Add chutzpah to the above, and the balls will truly be in your court

So, 4 days out of 5 in and I think its time to reflect on how to get the most out of SXSW - this is what works:

Firstly, most of the panels I've attended are fairly mundane - in my experience the panellists either won't, or can't, say much that is new in this instant feedback world. The frustration with this is part of what I think drove the Britpack to do 2 impromptu UnConference sessions, and twice I've seen audiences start to question/heckle. All is not lost, however - the tricks are:

- Listen to the smart questioners (not the ones who get up to pimp their companies or deliver a rambling diatribe) and either chat over Twitter or even better chat over coffee - people who ask smart questions know whats going on

- go to the Discussion groups instead - you get a lot out of these as there the people with the smarts start to contribute, the gasbags are shut up fast and you get some amazing conversations afterwards.

- there are a number of special interest group breakfasts etc that are not too hard to get onto (the VRM one in my case), for example

- If you think they are a**holes on the panel, Twitter it - you can get good conversations zipping along off the backchannels

Secondly, the Evening Parties - it seemed to me that there was an entire self-promo crowd at SXSW who never went to any talks but camped out in the blogger's lounge writing about the stuff they weren't attending by reading the Twitterstream (or if attending, it was for but a few minutes so they could twitter they were attending such and such an AWESOME talk by some Web-Sleb), and then in the evenings spent the whole time trying to find and then Twitter about the AWESOME party they are at.

The truth is that all the parties are much of a muchness, the trick is to get enough space/time to talk to the really smart people who are doing interesting stuff - and the best way to do this is to grab lunch or dinner or a drink in one of the quieter bars.

What you are trying to do is get enough time to actually really talk to people about the Real Stuff (assuming, of course, that you are here to learn). Its hard to get to the A listers through their coteries of acolytes, but if you do they are surprisingly genuine - if they know their subject and are not just mediahogs. I'm sure you can identify which are likely to be which.

Thirdly, make your own SXSW - want to know about X, go and find people and talk to them.

Also, go with the flow - some of the most interesting conversations have been totally serendipitous - in a taxi, at a table while typing stuff - there are a lot of smart people doing interesting things here.

To an extent one can say "and how does this differ from any other conference" but I think the less structured nature of the talks is a strength if one can make it work for you. The BritPack unconference is an extreme example, but many smaller scale sessions are do-able. Also, its is more fully immersive than any other conferences I've been at except maybe TED.

So, apparently there is Twitter Saturation and Text Constipation and so on at SxSW. On Saturation, CNet claims:

At a conference with scores of panels and seemingly just as many parties, being able to determine what's worthwhile is crucial for people trying to get the most out of their time here.

Crucial, I tell ye - its life and death out here if you don't know the coolest party 30 seconds before anyone else

This year because of the conference's impressive growth and Twitter's broader mainstream appeal, it has become almost impossible to find the same value as in the past. I did a search for the "#sxsw" tag on Saturday afternoon and found that there had been 392 tweets with the term in just the previous 10 minutes. That number mushroomed to more than 1,500 in the previous hour.

So - do you make a plan, follow your friends, search with something as well as #SxSW in the search stream? Problem solved, you would think. Oh no, its a Crisis, a Catastrophe of Epic Proportions - so you Blog, Twitter and Text the angst:

but many people using Twitter at SXSW do so on mobile phones. And being the cutting edge of the digerati set, the most common device in evidence here is the iPhone. But Kadavy said he hadn't found a way to do the kind of filtered search he wanted, and as a result, seemed hard-pressed to accomplish what he'd need to while on the go.

See above comment about adding words to search streams. Yup, its rocket science I know, but hey these are clever people after all.....

On another matter, it would seem that mobile telephony is causing untold chaos and devastation as well:

many people are frustrated with the lousy mobile service AT&T (T) is providing. (Our $100/month iPhone has "no service" in the press room, for instance.)

It is, clearly, the End of Civilisation as we know it. In other news today, a small conference of some 9,000 people, hundreds of panels and thousands of conversations is being held in parallel...and the WiFi works without missing a beat. Beat that....

I trotted down to the Blogger's lounge yesterday, there were Journos and Bloggers ( wannabe and ex journos) everywhere (there's free beer there, you see.....) and the press of bodies made a London Tube in rush hour look like a quiet country pub. Foetid atmosphere, noisy braying people everywhere, can't move for the press of bodies, flickering screens of all types. You get the scene - its a geek orgy.

Meh. Piece of advice - get out the moshpit and stop sweating the Netz with the small stuff - go to some panels and listen rather than twittering constantly for self reassurance that you do exist, and talk to some real people for longer than it takes to twt a soundbite.

Now - which of you Journos will buy me a beer for such good advice

PS: Trolling - I don't even know the word............

Yes, I'm off to SXSW this week, because:

- I've never been before, always been busy but this year I'm not (assignment delay).
- I like Austin but have never had the time to spend a few days there, its usually been short Biz trips
- SXSW is putting up a video I made on "The Limits to FreeConomics" and so I get a free pass and some bragging rights
- There's a UK Digital Mission coming over, so why not ?

So, anyone in the US who reads the blog do come along and say hi - I'm @freecloud on Twitter, so that's probably the best way to contact me there. We're also planning on doing a "Tuttle @ Texas" sort of session (ie laid back social networking over coffee) so that will also be a good way to meet up.

I've had a few people say that they think SXSW has jumped the shark, and I admit that is a risk (even if Mainstram eMedia calls it the best Web conference in the world) - but for me it'll be useful to actually meet some of the US old hands I've been conversing with over the years, plus I'm very interested in seeing the early shoots of the next things people are doing. Also, I am sure the "shadow of the crunch" will be visible and give some hints of how it will change things.