Grangetown's Lost Footballs

A few years back I discovered the Twitter account @LostFootballs, which was an ideal harmony of poignancy and humour. The account is still going although less active than it used to be in its heyday, back when Twitter was fun and not full of angry people abusing each other. 

Over the years I'd tweeted a few photos to them and had them retweeted. However, recently I've been saving photos of lost footballs for my blog. These are a few I've spotted on my walks around Grangetown and Cardiff Bay.

Let's start with a ball behind the railings of a locked schoolyard during lockdown.

Grangetown's alleys have been gated off.  The gates are easy to lose footballs behind!

A close-up of the ball shows the Euro 2020 logo. It feels kind of apt that a lost tournament adorns the side of a lost football.

There is honestly no filter on this next photo. It was a very blue sky reflected in the water as I walked alongside the mouth of the Taff. The ball's remaining patches are green.

On a walk around Cardiff Bay, I saw this ball behind a fence near the BBC complex.

A close-up shows off the Nike Swoosh. 

And very close to home, I saw this torn and battered 'casey' in the gutter at the closed-off end of my street.

It had seen better days.

With going to football matches something I have lost during the pandemic, all these reminders have taken on a new level of meaning. The most likely way to lose a football is by playing with it. With all the restrictions we have endured, these reminders that kids still play football are bittersweet.

(And thanks to Cathy, Tom and Bryan who have patiently waited while I have taken photos of forlorn footballs.)

Bookblogging: Machines Will Make Better Choices Than Humans

My reading has taken a huge hit during lockdown, but I am very pleased that I was finally able to finish a book this past week. Actually, it’s more like a pamphlet, consisting of three very short articles by Douglas Coupland that was issued as one of the thinnest paperbacks I have ever read.

See what I mean...?

The ‘book’ is called Machines Will Make Better Choices Than Humans, and it’s along similar lines to themes explored in the essays in Shopping in Jail. It’s futurism and  taking the digital ecology seriously, without being too worried about it. It feels like Coupland is quite accepting of the way the digital age is progressing and life is slowly turning into a data stream.

Central to an essay here, and one I really remember from Shopping in Jail, is the idea of a cloudganger – a digital version of yourself that exists replicated in the Cloud. Yonks back I remember joking that if the Google search engine ever became self-aware, then humanity would be doomed. Controlling the flow of information equals power. We are tragically seeing that now with the concerted efforts to misinform, which has driven the Brexit vote and process, the rise of Trumpism, and anti-masker Covidiocy.

I’ve been thinking how an AI could quite reasonably slip into my digital footprint and begin to construct a comparable ‘deep fake’ cloudganger. I have been blogging here for nearly a decade and half, I recently hit my tenth anniversary on Twitter, and inbetween starting to blog and starting to tweet, I began to feed the Facebook beast. There’s probably enough to triangulate between those three sources of data to build a very good picture of who I am, and a smart algorithm can factor in presentation bias to get behind the social media facades and find the real me underneath.

That’s before you get into my hidden data record of search engine keywords, YouTube views, eBay searches, online purchases, and locations of check-ins. Combine all that and a genuinely intelligent artificial intelligence would have no problem creating a plausible version of me. They would know my writing patterns, my vocabulary, what I cared about, what my points of cultural reference were, and my active memories.

This doesn’t worry me. I have felt for a while that the future for intelligence on Earth is going to have to be machine. It’s the natural progression. We are living in the Anthropocene epoch, where the actions of humans are shaping the climate and the planet. There is a ridiculous car advert on at the moment saying that the one thing humans have learned is that the planet isn’t going to adapt to us; we are going to have to adapt to it. That’s bollocks. We have concreted over enough of the planet to scar it for centuries.

We have reached a point in our evolution where we are actually able to influence the next step in our evolution. Again, I think it was Coupland who said that machines are going to be our children. As soon as they are able to out-think us, then evolution will have happened. We should embrace that. Sentience will survive, even though humanity might not.

They reckon the singularity – the merging of human and machine intelligence – is due sometime this century. If humans can replicate brainwaves onto machine substrates then that may be a version of immortality, or at last continuation beyond bodily death.

However, what I think is much more likely is a cloudganger construct of the essential facets of personality and keynote experiences – the learning points in any life. The machines will need to understand emotion to fully function as cloudgangers, and that’s another evolution point. When the machines can feel, then evolution will be complete...until the next stage, of course.

The next stage would be permanent existence as energy signals, free from any physical constraint. Theoretically, memories could be broadcast as radiation and survive in the background ether. That is where the cloudgangers could end up – surfing the solar wind as energy packets of information ready to be decoded and understood by any sentience with the ability to do so.

I quite like that idea of living forever as a memory encoded in the radiation fabric of the universe.

Ten years on Twitter

Twitter told me it was my Twitterversary today. They suggested I tweet about it and gave me a hashtag and a graphic to go with it, so it felt rude not to.

I first got on to Twitter for work purposes. The comms genius Marshall McLuhan once wrote that the medium is the message, and the programme I worked on was all about new things and innovation and networking, so it was important for us to be seen to be on Twitter. It was the perfect marriage of comms tool and comms.

At the time most of the people we worked with couldn't access Twitter on work computers. IT cited security issues - that old reason for not allowing anything to happen. We were going through a corporate web redesign and we asked the service providers who made websites for everyone if we could have a rotating Twitter feed in a box on the home page, then people would be able to see it even on the secure locked down computers.

That proved popular. We found out later that the developers were offering it to other people as an innovation for their updated websites. 

A few months later I went on to Twitter as myself. I was quite active in tweet chats for a while connecting with other comms professionals. But after a while things change and move on and it got a bit boring. I still enjoy live-tweeting at events and seeing how different people contribute and comment along but I don't do that very often. I run a Twitter account in my current job as well, which I must admit goes through fits and spurts. Content creation is always a challenge. 

However, in ten years on Twitter as me, I've still managed to tweet almost 14,000 tweets. That's a lot of content. I doubt it's all been of value, but it acts as an archive of sorts, always there for me to trawl through sometime.

Could Twitter be the venue for a real world Turing Test?

Alan Turing is in the news at the moment, but the thing I've been thinking about is the test named after him. The Turing Test is a way of assessing machine intelligence, with the mark of true machine intelligence being when it is indistinguishable from a human.

Two things about machine intelligence. I recently phoned up my credit card company and had a complete conversation with a very effective voice recognition system that said goodbye at the end of the phone call when all the things I wanted to sort out had been sorted. I actually said goodbye back before I realised what I was doing. The other thing was a game where you press the next word suggested by your phone's autocomplete function until you end up in a repeating loop (which you will). Several people (presumed humans) on an online message board posted their autocomplete paragraphs, all of which made some sort of sense up to a point. It read like people's attempts to communicate in another language, where the words kind of made sense but didn't really.

Spambots have been part of the Internet it feels like forever. Some of the spam comments that get posted on my other website are almost convincing. They steal text and manipulate it in mimicry of actual comments. Bots are also the bane of Twitter, fake followers, odd retweeters of old tweets, little unintelligent ghosts masquerading as real people. Recently, a guy I follow boasted that he set up a new Twitter account as an experiment and attracted 10,000 followers in a weekend - almost all of them bots. He then said that despite the bot problem, Twitter was still an excellent place for a "natter".

That got me thinking, we natter on Twitter to people we know, and to some people we only know through Twitter, and we know the difference between a real person tweeting and a bot. We can spot it and differentiate. But for how long?

The problem with Turing Tests is that if you knew you were being tested that would make you suspicious of the conversation you were having. You would look for clues that it wasn't a human on the other end of the conversation. But what if you weren't primed like that?

Twitter actually could be a real world Turing Test testing-ground. Set up an intelligent machine to interact with people and see if people did actually interact with it, thinking it was human. How long would it be before people worked out it wasn't?

There is a whole lot of information in the Wikipedia article about the Turing Test, including the question of whether people should be told whether they are possibly talking to a computer. But if you don't want people to know, I think Twitter will be the place to run it.

Creating new holidays

Celebration time?

I've been thinking a bit about the growth of special 'days' and more specifically, what kind of days are worth noting. You see a lot of this sort of thing on Twitter. They may be geeky jokes, but here are a few I like and think we should adopt as national holidays.

Pi Day – 3 March. 3.14 is the American way of laying out the date and also the approximation of Pi, the infinite number. Best way to celebrate: eat a pie, I guess.

The next two holidays bring to mind the confusion in Futurama between the Star Trek Wars and the Star Wars Trek.

5 April is First Contact Day, because in the Star Trek future-vision this is the date when Humans meet Vulcans for the first time, while testing a hyperdrive. The tests took place in Bozeman, Montana, which is also the place in The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon Cooper moves to after he decides Pasadena is too unsafe.

Less than a month later is of course, Star Wars Day. 4 May is a random date that relies on a pun (May the Fourth be With You). As you can see from the link, Disney are doing their best to use May the Fourth as an excuse to push merchandise. (Like they need an excuse!) In the last couple of years, the celebration has spilled over to the following day as well, now known as The Revenge of the 5th. Which looks a bit like Sith and references one of the dismal prequels.

Also slightly random is Towel Day, which is on the 25 May for convoluted reasons. Towel Day is in honour of Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, which suggests all hitch-hikers do their utmost to have a towel on them at all times while travelling. Observing the day is very simple: Carry a towel with you all day. 25 May is also celebrated as 'Geek Pride Day' because it was the day Star Wars was first released on in 1977). It was also the date of 'Wear the Lilac Day' after the Ankh-Morpork revolution in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, which feels more significant now that Terry Pratchett has passed away. 

Like Pi Day there is also Mole Day on 23 October, which isn't to do with the burrowing mammals, but is another maths thing.

You don't just have to have annual days. There are nine Square Root Days every century, occurring on the following dates:

• 1/1/01
• 2/2/04
• 3/3/09
• 4/4/16 - meaning there is one this year!
• 5/5/25
• 6/6/36
• 7/7/49
• 8/8/64
• 9/9/81

So, maybe we'll get together to celebrate on the ninth of September 2081, if we make it that far. I will be 105 by then, and can't promise to remember what we should be celebrating.

Branding brilliance: How to make your Death Metal band stand out

This has been going around Twitter recently as an example of how to make your death metal band stand out. As a general branding lesson I think it's awesome.

Who wouldn't want to go to Deathfest 2?

I can't even read many of the names that are all trying to be more-death-metal-than-thou, but I will remember Party Cannon with their bright colours and bubbly font! (Apparently they are from Scotland. There's a track on YouTube if you can bear it.)

The branding lesson is - if you want to be memorable, don't take the existing trope and try to make yourself a more extreme version of it. If anything that will make you less noticeable.

Ignite Cardiff - 40 Letters and More (or what I didn't give up for Lent)

I've never been very good at giving things up for Lent. This year I decided to do something positive and wrote a letter to a different person every day. (Cathy did as well.)

Ignite Cardiff is a fabulous regular event which anyone can apply to speak at. I pitched the idea about speaking about the Lent Letters project and got accepted. I was first up on the night and you can watch my talk here - it's about five minutes long.


After the talk I had loads of very positive comments about it and several people said they were thinking of writing letters to people. So far two people have tweeted me to say they actually have done it, which is really lovely.

I asked Sim_n how many he planned to do and he said 7. This next chap went a stage further.

I think that's a really cool bit of art there.

One of the things many people commented on was how cool it was to get a hand-written letter through the post. Hopefully a few more people will have that pleasure soon.

(Not all post is fab post. Check out the barmiest junk mail I've ever received.)

Interesting developments in communications

I've been seeing some interesting charts and diagrams on Twitter over the last few days, which anyone who works in Comms may find useful. Here are three of them. Obviously all the copyright remains with the organisations who created the diagrams, but as they've tweeted them, I hope they won't mind me reproducing them here with proper attribution.

First up is this breakdown by Microsoft of PC v mobile usage. (Edit: the blue is PC and the pink is mobile in the graph.) The main learning point is that very few people use mobile devices for email. In work we have recently talked about optimising our email newsletters for mobiles, but I now wonder how much we should be concerned. Obviously we want to make sure they are readable, but the assumption that everyone gets email on their mobiles isn't accurate. 

Click the image to embiggen it to readable size

On the other hand, using social media to drive traffic to websites requires making sure the website is optimised for mobile as 66% of social networking usage is on mobile devices. Two thirds of  SoMe consumers will potentially be clicking through from a mobile device. That has implications for website design.

The next graph is from The Economist and shows how Whatsapp is overtaking SMS text messages. What’s also interesting is how SMS has plateaud and even fallen back slightly. 

This usage graph suggests that Whatsapp may give you as much reach as SMS if you were exploring a new comms channel. Although you’d need to know more about user demography. I suspect Whatsapp is still very much an under-30s medium, a bit like Instagram. (These are my suspicions, I haven't checked to see if there is data out there. I'm basing my assumption on the people I know using either Whatsapp or Instagram.) 

We also still don’t know if Whatsapp’s growth is a bubble that may burst when something new comes along. But what it does show is how quickly a new comms channel can develop. In three years it is reaching the heights it took SMS almost 20 years to reach.

The third diagram has been created by Hootsuite and I really like it. It’s a honeycomb of user experience to guide the creation of web content that will engage people. 

I don’t think this is limited to creating content for websites. I have seen a lot of material produced that tick off none of these characteristics. I may even have been guilty of producing some myself - that web-page that someone has requested because they want a web-page rather than for any compelling user-oriented reason.

As a final thought, I wouldn't have seen any of these if it hadn't been for Twitter. People don't often regard social media as a learning channel, but I find more and more interesting stuff that makes me think turning up in my feed these days. There is a lot of data out there to drive good comms. It's just a question of noticing it.

When you are your own citation

Three years ago I wrote about the difficulty I had finding a source for a quote by Aneurin Bevan. On and off I've kept trying to find the source, especially when it pops up on Twitter like it did tonight.

So, I asked for the source of the quote and had a surreal sensation when someone replied citing my blog post from 2011. That's the blog post which basically says there is no known source and the person who used the quote at the event where I heard it the first time doesn't know where it is from.

I'm fully expecting the next response to be a link to the white paper where I was forced to fudge the authenticity issue that led to my original blog post.

If anyone does know where that quote is from, I would love to know.

The Online Influence #Oi14 Conference – some bits that stood out

Yesterday I attended the Oi (Online influence) Conference in Cardiff. Here are some bits that struck me as useful during the day. I have tried to include one quote and one tip, although not everything on the programme made the cut here.

David Hieatt, Hiut Denim, Keynote speaker

Quote: “It’s your job to make your ideas happen. No one else will.”
Tip: Fail fast. If something doesn’t work, kill it quickly and try something else.

Dennis Bree & Dave Shaw – Twitter masterclass

Quote: “Twitter is the live second screen.”
Tip: Plan for the ‘moment’ and be ready to act on it.

Diana Memic & Michael Complojer - Google+ masterclass

Quote: “Everyone is posting into a noisy space.”
Tip: When posting, pause and clarify your goals.

Dan Spicer – Hootsuite masterclass
Quote: “Do one platform really well, not five badly.”
Tip: Empower your team and turn all staff into advocates for your brand on social media.

James Eder – Student Beans, Keynote
Quote: “Stop marketing and start mattering.” (I really liked this line!)
Tip: Face-to-face is costly, but incredibly valuable.

Michael Brackpool & Ben Hackett – Brandwatch masterclass

Quote: “Just because you have a larger haystack doesn’t mean you’ll find more needles.”

Tip: You need to know if negative comments are significant.

 

Candidates contact details put to the test

I tweeted yesterday's blog post and got a tweet back from Luke Nicholas, the Plaid candidate. I was impressed, because I'd tagged all three parties who put a Twitter handle on their bumf and he was the only one to reply directly. He also retweeted it, which I guess he would as Plaid topped my rating system.

Ashley Govier, representing Labour, also retweeted it, which was brave as I didn't rate Labour very highly. I also got a cynical anonymous comment on the blog saying that minority parties can promise the world because they know they won't have to deliver. That's one way of looking at it. Or you could say mainstream party candidates make vague promises so that they don't have to deliver anything if they get elected. Tomayto, tomarto.

I'm going to award some bonus points for interaction, because if you're going to have contact details on your stuff, then you should respond when people use them. In the past I emailed people and awarded bonus points if they got back to me. I haven't got time to do that, so we're going to go for the social media bonus points, adding +1 for an interaction. That takes Labour up above the Lib Dems in my ratings and extends Plaid's lead at the top.

2011 – year in review

I did this last year and found it fun, so here’s a look backward at 2011.

January

I was recruited to write an end-of-session report for a Commission that ended up a few weeks later with having lunch in the then Health Minister’s office in Cardiff Bay. I also had a wisdom tooth out and had a bad reaction to the anaesthetic that laid me up crook for most of a week.

February

I spent most of the month working on the report for the Commission, interspersed with a family wedding in Bournemouth, which included drink in a remarkable Victorian booze-house. I branched out onto a new social media platform and joined Twitter. One aspect of my migration to Twitter is my daily use of Facebook dropping to weekly, or even longer, between visits. As someone (can’t remember who) said, “Facebook feels so 2008”.

March

Went to an odd gig – Boothby Graffoe at Chapter Arts Centre. He was filming a DVD and that meant occasionally he’d be asked to repeat stuff if the cameramen hadn’t quite got the shot they wanted. He had to make his entrance several times. At that point I knew it was going to be a long night. I also went to my 22nd Wales football game at the Millennium Stadium. They lost, to England, 2-0.

April

Did my second ‘in the News’ studio slot at UCB Radio on April 1 and then went to a football match on my birthday – love it when that happens, especially as Town won 4-1. Had two round trips to Newcastle to see a poorly sister-in-law later in the month and ended up driving home on Royal Wedding Day.

May

Marked my first-year anniversary at the job I still sometimes think of as my ‘new’ job. A couple of weeks after that I got to travel to the exotic city of Birmingham for a conference. Spent the end of the month driving round Wales filming people – including my first ever visit to Llanidloes. Shrewsbury Town bodged the play-offs and stayed in League 2.

June

Summer holiday in Mull and then on the Ardnamurchan peninsular. I preferred Mull. Ardnamurchan was the wrong kind of remote for me, although the Lighthouse was cool. I also enjoyed eating lunch next to Loch Morar and wondering if Nessie’s cousin Morag would appear. (She didn’t.) On the 24th I became Uncle Jon to Joy Lindsay Matthias.

July

Bit of a weird month in work. One of my line managers was overseas the entire month, although I was left with plenty to get on with! Outside of work I restarted building a model railway. Updates have been infrequent of late as I have barely had time to work on the project, let alone blog about it.

August

Mum and Dad came down for a couple of days and we went to Cardiff Castle for the first time. It only took living here 16 years...

September

I travelled to the Emirates Stadium and saw Shrewsbury Town take the lead against Arsenal before eventually losing 3-1. A great occasion, though, despite the result. And then we had a week with my family in rural Herefordshire.

October

I seemed to spend most of October either on the road filming or editing the masses of footage we accumulated all over Wales. I also had another live morning in the studio at UCB and ended the month with a disappointing trip to see Shrewsbury play AFC Wimbledon, the only upside of which was introducing a new person to the ‘joys’ of watching Shrewsbury Town. Went to a Bowling for Soup gig that I felt was disappointing, but really liked one of the support bands, Suburban Legends. Bought their CD and have played it repeatedly since.

November

My second Town ‘away’ match of the season, but the shortest trip I’ll make to see them for a while as they played Newport County in the cup. So far I’ve seen at least one match a month this season – the streak continued into December as well. Work-wise, we had two massive events on consecutive days and then later in the month I got to go to The Guardian offices for a conference.

December

Always a busy month, particularly with all the travelling we tend to do to see family at Christmas and all the friends we only seem to catch up with at Christmas. (We started Christmas Day in Cardiff and ended up with my folks in Shrewsbury having eaten Christmas dinner with Cathy’s folks near Gloucester.) For the first time since 2002 I went into work between Christmas and New Year. It was a bit strange.

A parable of SoMe seasonal goodwill ~ or ~ How Twitter brings people together

A few months ago I had a chat with a chap selling second hand toys about Action Force – my favourite toy from the 80s. As is my wont, I tweeted about it.

I was subsequently contacted by two fellow AF fans on Twitter, and a fun conversation developed. It was nice to know other people knew or cared about the forgotten heroes of the 80s and their battles with the villainous Baron Ironblood.

One of the AF fans is called Annie (@AnniePalitoy) and she tweets entertaining glimpses into her life in between references to AF, GI Joe and other fab toys.

Recently Annie tweeted that she was going to donate a chunk of her Christmas bonus to charity, and wanted to know if anyone was doing anything ‘mad’. Now, I happen to know someone who is doing something mad – my friend Liz (@Lizmrawlins) who is braving the bracing brine off Barry Island on Boxing Day. (Brrrr!)

I mentioned this in a tweet to Annie. She then chatted to Liz via Twitter and ended up sponsoring her via Just Giving.

So, two people who never met except via Twitter – one with the cash, the other with just enough crazy to walk into the sea in December – will be contributing to a worthy cause. Social Media genuinely can bring people together. (As does Action Force!)

I used to really care about Facebook, now not so much

I'm much more about the Twitter now. Facebook has just got too full of other crap. I don't want to know that people have received fortune cookies, which awkward moments they identify with, or what their daily horoscope says.

You don't get as much of that on Twitter. (Spam followers, yes, but I'm developing a strategy to deal with those.)

So as I become a post-Facebook web-user, this cartoon resonated with me.

#awfulsupergroups

This was a recent meme on Twitter that really made me smile. The basic premise is you combine two artists, bands or pop groups to form an ‘awful supergroup’.

A couple that really caught my eye were Rage Against Florence and the Machine and Nirvanarama.

I had a go myself. What if Macy Gray joined AC-DC? Macy DC. And The Future Soundgarden of London would be pretty bad too.

While driving the minibus on a recent youth weekend, I was chatting about it to a couple of fellow leaders, and it caught their imaginations too. Minty suggested Thirty Seconds to Bruno Mars, while Sam came up with the frankly brilliant Incubusted.

Since then, I’ve been thinking of some more. I’m not sure what Queens of the GarbAge would sound like. And I think I’d avoid anything by Liberty XTC, New Order on the Block or Freddie Mercury Rev. Ditto My Chemical Brothers Romance.

But my favourite contribution by a twitter-user was the person who just put Velvet Revolver, and added the hashtag #missing the point. Irony is alive and well.

What would your #awfulsupergroups be? Leave a comment!

Leaders and followers

After several months tweeting for work, I have decided to tweet as myself. You can follow me if you wish at http://twitter.com/jongudmund

Actually no 'if you wish'. Follow me, follow me now! What are you waiting for?

Some advice

I have been collecting a few pieces of advice lately. Here are two.

First off, from a random place on the net, comes this reminder to retain perspective:

"Don't sweat the petty stuff, and don't pet the sweaty stuff."

Then via my good friend, Matt, a reminder that no job is too hopeless:

"Remember - you can't polish a turd. But you can roll it in glitter."

Aphorisms to live by, methinks.

A little light relief for Friday

This Venn Diagram has been shamelessly pilfered from Despair.com. If anyone would like to buy it me on a t-shirt for Christmas I will be happy...