It’s all about the tail

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was one of our mantras during the early stages of iCan. When we were talking with people from News and other involved divisions in the BBC, we used to use the power-law curve so beloved of the blogosphere to give an analogy of the connection between the 6/7 major national or global stories that feature on the 30-minute evening news programme and the 100s or 1000s of personal, local issues that people could feel empowered to act on.

3 or 4 times a year at least, one of those personal, local issues will propel itself up the power-law curve to become a national or even global story. For instance, the fuel protests in the UK of a few years ago. iCan was about trying to increase that number, by recognising and supporting the continuum that exists between the tail and the top.

Even if not every story, issue or aspiration for change makes it to the top, the community and resources of the tail will provide support, information and inspiration for each new inhabitant of the tail.

The Stephen-Gould-esque aspiration then is reach some kind of self-sustaining equilibrium of activism and achievement there, with plenty of punctuation into the wider public consciousness that the top of the power-law curve represents. Whilst upward-mobility of stories or campaigns until they get onto the ‘broadcast-radar’ is desirable for the BBC as a news-gathering aid, it’s not the primary purpose of the iCan service – which is to create positive outcomes for people in their local civic environment – in the tail.

As Kevin Marks* rightly points out – it’s about low barriers to entry, and as we said, it’s all about the tail.

Phew…

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iCan is live (in beta-be-gentle-with-it-form). It’s been a tough 14 months, but hopefully it will be of real use to people with real problems or plans for their locality.

It’s a little empty right now, as the punters have yet to populate it, but it’s going to grow and get better. We had the design work for perhaps the next couple of revisions already done before I left, and the ethnographic research we did at the top of the project, coupled with user-testing and research that the new design lead Helen Day is going to be doing should see some rapid iterations up-ahead.

It remains to say well done to all who made it possible. Helen, Julie, Priya, Ki, Andy, Thomas, Dharmesh, Stokes, Nico, James, Anno and Tom particularly. Danny has a nice little appraisal.

Preorder-2-Peer-2-Peer

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Half-formed thought [© Philip Tabor]: If I’m anything to go by as an example, then I would think that a lot of people who download episodes of their favourite TV shows using p2p networks then go on to buy DVD or VHS box-sets of those same shows when they are released a year-or-so later.

Often, due to demand from fanbases, these box-sets have place-holder pages on Amazon where it’s possible to pre-order them.

Why not legitimise p2p downloads though this pre-order method? Buy the box-set upfront, a bit of Amazon web-services magic dust, have the bits now, get the atoms later.

Does this seem fair? A good idea? How would this work?

Nano(pop)tech

moleitau

Joho reports from PopTech on a talk by Christine Peterson:

“Nanotech, she says, has not been overhyped. It can change our relationship to matter. Nano, she says, is about changing the structure not just of nanos but for objects of any size…

…Christine suggests a possible future: You have one object in your house and it changes into the various objects you need.”

Forget what Nick Hornby did – that’s really going to screw-up Desert Island Discs.

The post also points to the wonderfully-named Utility Fog.

Tuna on your pizza?

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39GI0172.jpg
Went to get a pizza on my way home, and sat in the booby chair in pizza restaurants where you wait alone for your take-out pizza, while all around you laugh with their loved ones.

I surrended to the in-restaurant sound system, took out my earphones, ritually-wrapped them around my iPod and put it down on the table in front of me.

The secret sign had been deployed.
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