Oblomovka

2008-08-22»

So I remember when my friend and deputy-nemesis Ian Betteridge and I were arguing about the difference between “proper” journalism and blogging. In the end, I rather liked one of his definitions: “Journalism is when you pick up the phone”. That’s to say, journalism requires some actual original research, rather than just randomly googling or getting emailed something and writing it up as news.

I like it, because it’s not platform-specific. There’s a great deal of blogging with original research, and very large quadrant of mainstream media “journalism” that really doesn’t fall under that banner: at it’s best it’s analysis, at its worse it’s anti-journalism: taking readily available facts or rumour and divesting them of the context that would allow you to accurately judge their accuracy or provenance.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of doing some non-journalism of my own. If you’re interested in what UK ISPs are telling analysts about the future, Carphone Warehouse’s company presentations page, and in particular this Analyst’s Day from April 15 of this year is worth a look. Skip the stuff about phones and go to their discussions of broadband and their plans for their network. It’s full of interesting statistics about P2P usage (before and after they introduced traffic shaping), the effect of iPlayer, and the costs of network and customer retention.

My broad summary would be: yeah, bandwidth usage is an issue, but it’s not like we expected it to go down, and the sensible thing to do is to upgrade our network so our costs per bit drop 80%, something we can do with an investment of tens of millions of pounds, not hundreds.

Stuff that’s interestingly unspoken: upstream rates and their growth, a characteristic obsession with “streaming” (see last post), and which ass they pulled out the estimate the consumer IP traffic will quadruple in 4 years (see the graph with “Web 3.0 in 2011” on it).

But it’s late on a Friday, and I suspect some of you are better at pulling out interesting facts from this than I am, so go right ahead…

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We went to Ada’s school’s — well, I forget the correct word for it; my subconscious tells me it’s “indoctrination”, but that can’t be right. Maybe something in Spanish? Everything was in Spanish. Her teachers explained (via an interpreter) that they don’t speak English when the kids are around, so that they learn to convey their intentions in the second language. This got weird when the tallest most anglo blonde woman from Lake Tahoe introduced herself in I think a Chilean accent. Then you realise that kindergarten teachers all speak the International Language of Caring Emphasis, and it was pretty easy thereafter.

I’m fascinated to see how this plays out. I am terrible at languages. Fortunately, Ada has made me swear that I not learn Spanish with her, so she can have a secret language of her own that I can’t understand. Currently she is fairly confident she can speak Spanish fluently anyway, although she really just spouts nonsense that if you don’t know Spanish is actually rather convincing. (She can also hold down a whole conversation in fake Tagalog). I do hope the teachers can spot this kind of thing. Maybe Ada will be all like “Well, I’ll pretend I don’t know you can speak English, if you’ll pretend you don’t know I can’t speak Spanish”

Orientation! Orientación! That was the word. Seriously, the school seems lovely, and we all learnt a song about soy pizza. Or maybe it was “I am pizza”. I now know the spanish for “pepperoni”.

Seth points out that I got the gender of “kindergarten” wrong in the last post. I am so doomed.

I walked home over Great Big Hill (like Edmund Hilary, because it was there, and unlike him, because I couldn’t work out how to get around it). I accidentally phoned Merlin. There’s a guy out here recording us both for a documentary about Life Hacks and slowly becoming more disillusioned about how unmotivating we are. I was calling to flake on today’s appointment, and found I’d written down the wrong number. Yes, terrifying self-motivating organizing machine, me.

Merlin and I haven’t really spoken much since the book fell through, (both of us on long aboriginal treks to rediscover our mojo I think) — and it was awesome to hear him again. We failed to work out how to meet up soon, created about fifteen hanging “open loops”, and giggled far too much.

Went home and looked up URLs. Somebody had come up to me at the end of the orientation with a gleam of geek recognition in her eye and said conspiratorially, “I’ve started a blog and a mailing list for our class!” Like a spy confirming the secret passphrase, I replied “But what about the wiki?” The spanish-speaking teacher looked at us as though she had caught us speaking fake English. She’s probably right.

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