Organic Data

I work in a corner of the software industry where business management applications have evolved from their rudimentary 1980's origins and where at the same time, the principles of how people should use those applications, particularly in the area of data disciplines, have also evolved.

For example, we learned quite early on that the pre-school data principle of preceeding zeroes was important because a record coding sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4 - 99999 doesn't sort well compared with a sequence like 0000001, 00000002, 00000003 and so on. And also early on, we devised methods for combining different coding analyses into single codes, like AS012003UK is really AS-01-2003-UK.

Things have moved on considerably since then, of course, but increasingly data appears to be playing a more important and prominent role in our everyday non-working lives. Like our mobile phone address books, do you use forename/ forename, surname / surname, forename or just non-intelligible anarchy? (fyi I'm 100% surname,forename apart from family members.)

What about our MP3 collections or the thousands of digital photgraphs that occupy our hard disks? - again fyi I use a 2003-10-20 format for photo subfolder names.

Being vaguely of a data persuasion, I've studiously codified my most of my personal digital stuff - but not all of it - to be accessible in as sensible a way as possible to me, to aid searching or just better organised archiving.

This is something that's not inherently easy to do in Windows as there's no inbuilt data management or indexing at an operating or filesystem level, so you have to devise your own coding structures if you want them, relying mostly upon sorting by filename and date to get you by. A future version of Windows is supposed to have a proper indexing filing system built in and that may help a little, but it's 3-4 years away it'll be a chargeable upgrade so this won't do anything to help us organise our digital stuff in the short term.

Is random, badly structured data actually a good thing in an organic, gritty sort of way or is the inexorable slide into immaculate uniformity an inevitable and necessary consequence of achieving a truly connected and digital life?

But in one sense, perfect and structured uniformity seems to be somewhat at odds with the organic like forms that can appear when you graphically represent things like interconnected FOAF profiles, for example but having said that, I suppose that the uniformity found in phenomena like the Fibonacci Sequence and the Mandelbrot Set can take on a lifelike form too.

Winter

We switched on our central heating system last night for the first time in months. I take this to mean that summer's over. I recall not so long ago, pinning my hopes on the arrival of this past summer and utterly depending on it to clear the pall that cast its shadow over the early part of this year. Like holding your breath underwater as you draw ever closer to the surface, knowing that relief is drawing nearer and that soon, you will be able to breathe again.

That was my summer and now my summer is going. I just hope I'm not going under again, deep into the cold, murky depths of a winter that returns with memories of profound love and hope and then of profound sorrow and despair.

Irony Age Corporation

Imagine a world where advertising and market segmentation don't exist.

Where the mention of product or brand names is taboo to the extent that the names get purposely covered over wherever they appear. Where all creativity and content is unfettered by the distorting influence of the advertiser and is allowed to run without commercial interruption. That world is the British Broadcasting Corporation. It was before it's time in 1927 and today it's continued resistance to advertiser funding runs against almost every other form of media today.

Sure it's not a free service and as a television licence payer I am required by law to contribute to its £2.4 Billion yearly income, but I'm happy to do so. Happy for continuously commercial free radio and television programming. Happy for its neutrality and the kind of output an advertiser wouldn't approve of. Content like the internationally respected The Planets, Walking With Dinosaurs and The Blue Planet - they cost many millions of pounds more than a commercial entity would have spent on them, but that's because commercial entities wouldn't have spent anything on them. They are scared to change from proven gameshow content designed to secure high audience figures to please the big bad advert man with his hyper-accurate (but not really) demographic reports and prime time viewing figures. Paying for the privilege of not being someone's demographic, how novel.

On the Web we are often heard to forecast the decline of advertising and mass marketing.

Perhaps the real contribution that the BBC has made isn't it's 75 years of world class broadcasting. Perhaps it really foretold of a world where the sequence of words we'll be right back after the break just doesn't exist, a world that has much more in common with the successful Web of the future than we realise.

All the more ironic that it has the words broadcasting and corporation in its title I suppose.


ps. I worded that to sound like an advert on purpose. Irony, look it up.