David Lean had directed two stylistic epics before he turned his creative powers to a more modest original screenplay, perhaps based upon the novel Madame Bovary. In its' smaller scale human plot, it does present a wonderful and wisely observed story which only a great film director and team could give such gravity to. At the time however, the film failed to create such critical acclaim and public appeal on either side of the Atlantic, despite Robert Mitchum's prescence.
Cinemographic Theme and Contradictions
The opening scenes are very much shot from the perspective of a still photographer. Huge atlantic waves crash against the beautiful south western Irish coast, with the barren islands just of shore giving depth and interest to the otherwise endless sea. There is careful attention to making this place feel far removed from 1970, being almost medieval in the specially created stone village and narrow roads. This place is awe inspiring, yet remote and at the edge of human existance.
This grand scale of the scenery is captured in enigmatic 65mm wide perspective, using fairly wide angled lenses and long depth of field. However, the cinematic theme actually became a criticism of the film because the magnificence of the Irish coastline coupled to the long, slow "takes" demanded by Lean's characteristic screenplay, were interpreted as melodramatic in relation to the claustrophobic human story being played out against such an etherial backdrop.
To me the photography is stunning throughout most of the film and this contrast to the human level of village mentality, very enthralling: from grandoise nature of the coast and turbulent seas, to the petty jealousy and frustrations of living in a small, remote village under foreign power.
Cast and Characters
Sarah Miles gives most probably the very best performance of her career, in her excellent and often subtle and well observed portrayal of the rather spoiled daughter of the local publican, Ryan. Her tragedy is that she is always seeking romance and having married her idol, played by Robert Mitchum, she finds herself drawn to the traumatised British Major, played by a lesser american actor Christopher Jones. Her stunning beauty with reddish auburn hair in the film make for an encapturing "femme fatale" who owns the hearts of the three main male characters in the film: Her husband, the widowed school teacher; the major ; and the village priest who himself displays his affection for her by never condeming her actions beyond what is forgivable.
Miss Miles seems to really engage and breath life into the part as an overly romantic young woman, and it is clear that despite some sublte understatement in many scenes and naturalistic acting, she holds the core of the film as the title should of course demand. ( despite her billing on the final credits being below the main male actors, with Robert Michum leading) Of all the non irish actors, she is maybe the one who masters the SW irish accent the best.o
Mitchum manages to tone his usually heavy prescence down to play the well cultured, benevolent widower and teacher, mastering a role which otherwise could be seen as dreadful mis-casting. That he found it a battle with Lean in delivering his understated performance, is not lost upon us. In the resulting subtleness of his character, he had given a new perspective to his long career as an actor most known for thrillers, war films and westerns.
Picking up on the topic of dialect portrayals again, a quoted weakness of the film, most of the cast struggle and often flounder with the Irish accent. Leo Mckern gives an almost laughable accent in otherwise good portrayal of a central foil in the film, Ryan the publican and father to Rosy, belaying his Australian and west end theatrical roots.
Tim O'Leary is played by "Van der Valk", Barry Foster who's charisma on- and off- screen was sadly lost to us just a few years ago. With a shock of red, curly hair and a passable dialect, he brings a certain intensity as the IRA leader visiting the area to collect weapons. His "dashing hero" portrayal contrasts to the anti-hero we recognise in both the overly modest Shaugnessy and the traumatised Major Doryan.
Robert Mitchum actually does not a bad job with his appointed dialect, and the same can be said of the American actor Christopher jones who plays the British Major newly stationed to the province after losing a leg in WWI. Trevor Howard also adds some gravity to the film with a strong performance as the priest, although his accent fights between Irish, Scot's and even northern English upon occiasion. The priest is the one wise and true man who spans the story as a major weave in the fabric, so we must forgive him his geographically itinerant tongue.
The late Sir John Mills is spared a talking role as the "village idiot": a handicapped man, Michael, who is also a foil to the story. His naieve eyes and wanderings are part of the uncovering of the affair Ryan's daughter conducted with the British Major. Although much criticised later for being an un PC character, for those of us who have worked with mentally handicapped people, Sir John gives a credible interpretation to an important process in the story. Mentally handicapped people often have strong "crushes" on beautiful local women, and see things some would rather turn a blind eye to.
Historical Setting
The film plays out as as a romantic drama with a backdrop of the summer post 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. At the time of release in 1970, this would have been little palatable in the UK, with the "troubles" coming to a head in Ulster once again as a result of the activities of the Provisional IRA, and the use of British Troops to prevent a civil war between the incumbant "loyalist" and republican followers. ( In 1968, gunmen of the loyalist UVF took positiion on the coal yard at the Shankhill Road to snipe at will upon the largely republican Falls Road and west catholic areas in reprisal to IRA attacks, and this was one of many aggressive actions on both sides of the community which were suppressed by the English and Scottish regiments posted to Ulster)
The republic has enjoyed peace and national rule since the 1920s, and latterly with a by-in-large successful peace process in Ulster, the film can I hope now be seen in a historical context as a cinemographic epic. Perhaps the screenplay had been committed to before the "troubles" arose in Ulster because otherwise it would be obviously difficult for audiences in the UK. The film did take a turbulent, drawn out route in casting, perhaps explaining this, with Marlon Brando being asked to play a leading role. Lean and the producers had the US market clearly in their sights in casting a major US actor, at the risk of alienating audiences in both the UK and Republic of Ireland.
Screenplay
The screenplay involves much about betrayal and with the Ryan fanmily being flawed in both the father's and daughter's weaknesses.
At the centre of the story is Rosy Ryan, the daughter of the title, and her romanticising of love. Upon fulfilling her dream of marrying the obvious intellectual father-figure Shaugnessy the teacher, she loses her passion for him. She is a woman possessed with falling in love and not the reality of being in love.
Her affections soon fall upon a new romantic opportunity, the Major, as a hero-man-child who is in need of rescue from his tormented war experiences and injuries. Thereafter the film plays out the impossibilities presented by this affair in remaining secret and then being made public in an Irish Catholic and staunchly anti british village.
¨That McKern's character, Ryan, betrays the IRA has little credibility, apart from perhaps cowardice infront of the ruling law of English administration and his wish to perhaps redeem himself infront of the local constable. This does lead to an escallation to almost Greek tragedic proportions for the drama. His cowardice arises again later when he fails to incriminate himself for this betrayal and instead allows the mob to take their anger out on his daughter as the alleged traitor. It is a worthy twist in the story, if not fully believable in his motivations to betray both his countrymen and his own daughter.
One element which is still refreshing today is the portrayal of the sex scenes between repesctivley Mitchum, Jones and miss Miles' character, which have a sense of realism from the woman's perspective (I believe, writing as a man! ). Together with tender use of surroundings, the two scenes are made both personal and beautiful. Rosy Ryan both enjoys the fruit of her passions, but also is dissapointed in the consumation of her love in the simple physical act of sex. The simplicity and honesty of these scenes would reach a tender nerve in modern cinema audiences if the film was re-released and would be refreshing in the midst of holywood stereotypical "orgasmic" sex scenes we have had to endure since the 1980s.
Throughout its' long three hours, the film is kept lucent and coherent by Sarah Miles. Without her tenderness and attention to vulnerability in presenting a beautiful, gentle yet flawed character, even the originally cast Marlon Brando could not have carried the film so well to it's tortured conclusion.
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Cinematography and Atmosphere
Back to the overall feel of the film and a technical appraisal. The rapid changing weather is captured both with subtle exposure and often long depth of field, suggesting use of a split camera objetive to allow for both close and very distant scenes to be in focus.
The coastal scenes are the signature of the film with the moist Atlantic air giving a softness to the overall depth of field. Indoor scenes are shot with attention to capturing a realistic lighting, something Lean must have demanded of his camera men in all conditions.
The one scene which has been iconographic for the film, is the imaginary beach promenade infront of Robert Mithcum's eyes as he sees his wife and the Major in their finery on a romantic arm in arm tour to along the beautiful beach. The dreamy over-exposure and vivid colours are perfect for the scene.
The capturing of the atlantic storm in poor light is of particular technical noteworthyness and in terms of what must have been pure perciverance of the crew and cast.
One weak point in final packaging of the film is the brass and piano score which is very dated now and probably even a little inappropriate in 1970.
=========== ===================
Conclusion
Today this film makes a very watchable, if long excursion into David Lean's career and in some ways it has survived the passage of time and film reels better than the overly romaticised screenplays and acting of Mssr.s O'Toole and Shariff in "Dr.Shivago" and "Lawrence of Arabia".
"Ryan's Daughter" is an atmospheric and enchanting film with both a plot and acting which feel contempory, while having also a matchless, classic and etherial cinematographic splendour created by Lean's eye.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Facing the FaceBook
I look forward to seeing the film, "the social network" and I suppose it will be something to get clicky on Facebook about.
Not that I am a social network addict: okay I am a forum and blog addict which puts me in a minor league, with most likley just crawlers reading most of my hits. FB I can kind of take or leave and right now I am going through FB fatigue, although that is not as from any huge overdosing on it-. just boredom. I actually delete people from FB and keep my friends numbers to under 50. There are still a couple of people I would like to connect to, God excluded, and some I should maybe connect to, but I am pretty determined to keep to under 50, at least as my private profile goes. Maybe DF will develope his own profile, alter ego as he is.
(links to founders) The founders were, or have become, somewhat shy types who started the whole concept as a beauty rating project: very peri pubescent of them too. However, they soon saw the social value of a simple "face" on the internet with connections round Harvard and later of course, were lucky to ride the storm and catch the money wave.
As I wrote in my last ranting blogg, I am more interested in the beast than we fleas upon its' back. Or rather how we fleas feeding on the blood of the social network, organised to join up.
The beast itself holds some fascination for me, in its quintessential simplicity. It looks like any live content portal I would have worked on in y2000-2001: Conservative, text and thumbnail based. Simple, clear, familiar, and stable. The simplicity lies in "getting it" quickly,what it does for your wild social betworking imagination proposes to you, more on that soon. But the latter two are pretty important: it is familiar, like the php/cgi/cfm pages I'm thinking about. It has levels of permissions, like the extranets I designed a decade ago. You have to join to get in, and you have to be a good little boy once in.
So it is a familliar and therefore safe environment, and unlike many other predecessors, has no half-hidden agenda of fleecing you to make further progress in your sociableness. The stability is vital to this feeling of security. FB evolves very slowly and is currently no doubt have an internal security review after the spate of FB virus, spy-ware and spam "apps" which have plagued us like chain letters did in the 1970s.
Well, well. FB fatigue: I am a little bored, perhaps I got my personal branding wrong and don't have a little band of the cleveries with good reparte. I just find it a bit static, and fully expect a merger and take over YT-FB! Video with video replies, limited tweet wise to 4 Mb or the like.
So there it is, a totally unstructred, short rant for the evening. But what will become of FB, what is the next move? WIll there arise a new beast from the east or something else capture our imagination? What FB could do, in the mind of DF, will be the topic of a forthcoming rant.
Not that I am a social network addict: okay I am a forum and blog addict which puts me in a minor league, with most likley just crawlers reading most of my hits. FB I can kind of take or leave and right now I am going through FB fatigue, although that is not as from any huge overdosing on it-. just boredom. I actually delete people from FB and keep my friends numbers to under 50. There are still a couple of people I would like to connect to, God excluded, and some I should maybe connect to, but I am pretty determined to keep to under 50, at least as my private profile goes. Maybe DF will develope his own profile, alter ego as he is.
(links to founders) The founders were, or have become, somewhat shy types who started the whole concept as a beauty rating project: very peri pubescent of them too. However, they soon saw the social value of a simple "face" on the internet with connections round Harvard and later of course, were lucky to ride the storm and catch the money wave.
As I wrote in my last ranting blogg, I am more interested in the beast than we fleas upon its' back. Or rather how we fleas feeding on the blood of the social network, organised to join up.
The beast itself holds some fascination for me, in its quintessential simplicity. It looks like any live content portal I would have worked on in y2000-2001: Conservative, text and thumbnail based. Simple, clear, familiar, and stable. The simplicity lies in "getting it" quickly,what it does for your wild social betworking imagination proposes to you, more on that soon. But the latter two are pretty important: it is familiar, like the php/cgi/cfm pages I'm thinking about. It has levels of permissions, like the extranets I designed a decade ago. You have to join to get in, and you have to be a good little boy once in.
So it is a familliar and therefore safe environment, and unlike many other predecessors, has no half-hidden agenda of fleecing you to make further progress in your sociableness. The stability is vital to this feeling of security. FB evolves very slowly and is currently no doubt have an internal security review after the spate of FB virus, spy-ware and spam "apps" which have plagued us like chain letters did in the 1970s.
Well, well. FB fatigue: I am a little bored, perhaps I got my personal branding wrong and don't have a little band of the cleveries with good reparte. I just find it a bit static, and fully expect a merger and take over YT-FB! Video with video replies, limited tweet wise to 4 Mb or the like.
So there it is, a totally unstructred, short rant for the evening. But what will become of FB, what is the next move? WIll there arise a new beast from the east or something else capture our imagination? What FB could do, in the mind of DF, will be the topic of a forthcoming rant.
How to Howcast ?
Whatcasting?
This is a new take on YouTube: or rather a new look opportunity for commentators on the internet and marketing to look back at the Mp4 Mpeg explosion on the internet.
So what is the core offering of howcast..com to the consumer?
Basically web film makers (who are they?) put up MP4s video clips of "How To" do erm, "stuff" as the Yanks would say. So far, recipies and conversely, diets have been on the play list ticker-tape at the top of the page. ( Sorry, a side scrolling preview panel!) . Different to Youtube? yep, it is only for how to do stuff videos, and the etiquette for the format of content is to do things stepwise, both in the mpeg. Nothing really new ?
Perspective from The Ancient Archives of the Web
When we first heard about Mp4 a decade ago, what was exciting to me was the embedded database information, which meant that videos could be searched by keyword, and other data. This meant you could search a database of films or perhaps fast forward to the part you wanted, maybe the "money shot" eh?
A decade ago all the elements were well and truly in place for YouTube and there were various prototype social networking sites, recognisable as the blogs and Facebook of today. You could say the internet by-in-large is a social network. It would be interesting to see how much www traffic is free-time related: this would need a measure of Mb, page hits and interactions.
Why was there then such a lag until Facebook and YouTube came to the market?
Well they weren't first on the market by any means. More the market coincided with the two entities. People were bored with spam from googling and the sporadic special interest sites, or pay-for-connection social networks like "friends re-united". People wanted something trustworthy, simple, connected to both their friends and special interests and there with scalable. Most of all they wanted it to be free! When I say free, not only void of fees, but with advertising and spam at a low leve, and relevant to their interests.
In other words, people were looking for brands to match their percieved need for a social network, and a place with enough searchabel video content that they could rely on finding something interesting for their gnat like attention spans ( generation X and i- are not alone in this though- the old greys also have a pretty short patience for something playing on a 15" screen with bad sound and bumpy streaming!)
Now they have the two biggies in terms of bandwidth, consumer involvement and rich content.
Why Did FB and YT become so Big so Quick?
FB and YT were in the right place at the right time, and could grow by their very nature of connectivity, snowballing out as people first e-mailed links and invitations to each other and later tweeted, sms-ed or sent direct invites from FB in particular.
Also of course the two sites had the branding and the runway was clear for easy hits on Google and Yahoo ( hey where is Alta Vista these days? My favourite 1995-1998!)
Also an important perspective was that FB and YT came with their own ready baked early adopters and lead influencers: given FB started in Harvard, there was one social echelon which were both the early adpoters on insett, and also lead influencers. As "the face book" was released it spread through business student networks and into the parents of the Harvard crowd, the siblings, the non Ivy league pals and so on. Wider than the initial, and it must be said, established small social networks which were now connected, just about every company in the world had a little group of early adopters: IT and Web people. Then of course the media "luvvies" got into it and celebrities wanted to start getting scores on the doors. Big hit clips on YT and "n>400" friends on FB.
Now the only thing the two needed was enough banne-ad'-click -through revenue to support the server banks and international load balancing across their incoming land lines.
Why are there not More FBs and YTs?
Well that is answered in a self fulfilling spiral from the last point on economics. When consumer sites go big on the internet, they are massive. The nuclear chain reaction is fuelled by the social connectivity and user definable choice of content and sub channels ( groups, brands, likes, playlists and so on, the sub channels or internal clusters). The obvious snowballing in herent in FB meant that the chain-reaction was optimised once, as in the atom bomb, the material reached a critical mass. In fact, once started I think it would have been impossible to stop FB because if anyone had t4ied in say 2008, then someone else would have bought them out. It was just too good a concept and channel to stop. Being able to see friends-of-friends and either complete your current social circle on the net, grow it outwards or locate old friends, aquaintances or which ever celebrity you want to try ensured explosive growth once x% of internet users 14 to 40 years old were on. It would be interesting to know what x was! How much ure-cranium it too
The second of the two factors makes the brands "super sticky" for us: we find that we not only have immediate content we like or social contacts we know, but we can control what we see and explore areas we are interested in. It is not the channel which controls our viewingl. The channels are suprisingly passive, and well, that should not be so suprising.
Other sites like the temporary shooting star, "friends re-united", had annoying features and some lead to outright spamming as they sold out their members e-mail addresses and on site experience to the highest space bidder: either on the point of , or in fact the very cause of their implosion. Like a newspaper, we flick through things and choose what we browse for longer time, we do not appreciate restrictions on access or forced-view advertising content.
All the ingredients for FB were there from the very birth of the www, or even in the newsgroups of the older IP world on the internet. Groups, as discussed in an earlier blogs, by in large were absorbed into Google and Yahoo and became very stale: the problem was they remained special interest and not a portal to a wider yet also personal connectivity.
Portals and Channels
Twelve years ago in 1998, channels and portals were the next big thing on the internet, which did not get big , yet. Web rings were just dying out ( a little button which lead you to a "Jump station" indexing the sites on the ring, or to the next site on the chain, or to a random site within the ring) . Now everythign has come full circle: we go in social and interest rings and web sites want to connect us togetehr with a button to FB. Previously we sent links by e.mail and ICQd , now we micro blog in tweets and FB posts. Previously we toroturously sent round mpegs in e-posts, now we post links to YT on FB.
A decade ago "portals" started to go wrong because they were structure heavy and networking poor. Indexing was usually poor or actually not useable, even with good Atomz or google internal searches. The portals were push media devised by media owners from an earlier education and IT people from the six-levels-of-structural layers. They were push and not consumer-pull. The corporate, academic and quango portals in particular, grew navel-gazing side alleys and meaningless "intra.extranets" .
Channels became buttons which we soon grew bored of, because they were, ah-hem corporate portals. Stodgey and impersonal.
Everything was there for FB and YT and Twitter, but the WILL of those with cash to invest was not in tune with our WILL on the internet: a free and ever expanding source of knowledge, entertainment and social contact driven by our own curiousity and human wishes.
This is a new take on YouTube: or rather a new look opportunity for commentators on the internet and marketing to look back at the Mp4 Mpeg explosion on the internet.
So what is the core offering of howcast..com to the consumer?
Basically web film makers (who are they?) put up MP4s video clips of "How To" do erm, "stuff" as the Yanks would say. So far, recipies and conversely, diets have been on the play list ticker-tape at the top of the page. ( Sorry, a side scrolling preview panel!) . Different to Youtube? yep, it is only for how to do stuff videos, and the etiquette for the format of content is to do things stepwise, both in the mpeg. Nothing really new ?
Perspective from The Ancient Archives of the Web
When we first heard about Mp4 a decade ago, what was exciting to me was the embedded database information, which meant that videos could be searched by keyword, and other data. This meant you could search a database of films or perhaps fast forward to the part you wanted, maybe the "money shot" eh?
A decade ago all the elements were well and truly in place for YouTube and there were various prototype social networking sites, recognisable as the blogs and Facebook of today. You could say the internet by-in-large is a social network. It would be interesting to see how much www traffic is free-time related: this would need a measure of Mb, page hits and interactions.
Why was there then such a lag until Facebook and YouTube came to the market?
Well they weren't first on the market by any means. More the market coincided with the two entities. People were bored with spam from googling and the sporadic special interest sites, or pay-for-connection social networks like "friends re-united". People wanted something trustworthy, simple, connected to both their friends and special interests and there with scalable. Most of all they wanted it to be free! When I say free, not only void of fees, but with advertising and spam at a low leve, and relevant to their interests.
In other words, people were looking for brands to match their percieved need for a social network, and a place with enough searchabel video content that they could rely on finding something interesting for their gnat like attention spans ( generation X and i- are not alone in this though- the old greys also have a pretty short patience for something playing on a 15" screen with bad sound and bumpy streaming!)
Now they have the two biggies in terms of bandwidth, consumer involvement and rich content.
Why Did FB and YT become so Big so Quick?
FB and YT were in the right place at the right time, and could grow by their very nature of connectivity, snowballing out as people first e-mailed links and invitations to each other and later tweeted, sms-ed or sent direct invites from FB in particular.
Also of course the two sites had the branding and the runway was clear for easy hits on Google and Yahoo ( hey where is Alta Vista these days? My favourite 1995-1998!)
Also an important perspective was that FB and YT came with their own ready baked early adopters and lead influencers: given FB started in Harvard, there was one social echelon which were both the early adpoters on insett, and also lead influencers. As "the face book" was released it spread through business student networks and into the parents of the Harvard crowd, the siblings, the non Ivy league pals and so on. Wider than the initial, and it must be said, established small social networks which were now connected, just about every company in the world had a little group of early adopters: IT and Web people. Then of course the media "luvvies" got into it and celebrities wanted to start getting scores on the doors. Big hit clips on YT and "n>400" friends on FB.
Now the only thing the two needed was enough banne-ad'-click -through revenue to support the server banks and international load balancing across their incoming land lines.
Why are there not More FBs and YTs?
Well that is answered in a self fulfilling spiral from the last point on economics. When consumer sites go big on the internet, they are massive. The nuclear chain reaction is fuelled by the social connectivity and user definable choice of content and sub channels ( groups, brands, likes, playlists and so on, the sub channels or internal clusters). The obvious snowballing in herent in FB meant that the chain-reaction was optimised once, as in the atom bomb, the material reached a critical mass. In fact, once started I think it would have been impossible to stop FB because if anyone had t4ied in say 2008, then someone else would have bought them out. It was just too good a concept and channel to stop. Being able to see friends-of-friends and either complete your current social circle on the net, grow it outwards or locate old friends, aquaintances or which ever celebrity you want to try ensured explosive growth once x% of internet users 14 to 40 years old were on. It would be interesting to know what x was! How much ure-cranium it too
The second of the two factors makes the brands "super sticky" for us: we find that we not only have immediate content we like or social contacts we know, but we can control what we see and explore areas we are interested in. It is not the channel which controls our viewingl. The channels are suprisingly passive, and well, that should not be so suprising.
Other sites like the temporary shooting star, "friends re-united", had annoying features and some lead to outright spamming as they sold out their members e-mail addresses and on site experience to the highest space bidder: either on the point of , or in fact the very cause of their implosion. Like a newspaper, we flick through things and choose what we browse for longer time, we do not appreciate restrictions on access or forced-view advertising content.
All the ingredients for FB were there from the very birth of the www, or even in the newsgroups of the older IP world on the internet. Groups, as discussed in an earlier blogs, by in large were absorbed into Google and Yahoo and became very stale: the problem was they remained special interest and not a portal to a wider yet also personal connectivity.
Portals and Channels
Twelve years ago in 1998, channels and portals were the next big thing on the internet, which did not get big , yet. Web rings were just dying out ( a little button which lead you to a "Jump station" indexing the sites on the ring, or to the next site on the chain, or to a random site within the ring) . Now everythign has come full circle: we go in social and interest rings and web sites want to connect us togetehr with a button to FB. Previously we sent links by e.mail and ICQd , now we micro blog in tweets and FB posts. Previously we toroturously sent round mpegs in e-posts, now we post links to YT on FB.
A decade ago "portals" started to go wrong because they were structure heavy and networking poor. Indexing was usually poor or actually not useable, even with good Atomz or google internal searches. The portals were push media devised by media owners from an earlier education and IT people from the six-levels-of-structural layers. They were push and not consumer-pull. The corporate, academic and quango portals in particular, grew navel-gazing side alleys and meaningless "intra.extranets" .
Channels became buttons which we soon grew bored of, because they were, ah-hem corporate portals. Stodgey and impersonal.
Everything was there for FB and YT and Twitter, but the WILL of those with cash to invest was not in tune with our WILL on the internet: a free and ever expanding source of knowledge, entertainment and social contact driven by our own curiousity and human wishes.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
On Being an Entrepreneur
The first thing about taking the decision to become an entrepreneur is......making the decision to become an entrepreneur :
" I Will Start a Business........ .......from thin air"
The next thing is to learn to ignore all the people who say "No" and turn you away: if there are people who must be persuaded or you really, really want on board for money, legal permissions, expertise etc, then gather enough people to go with you who say "yes" and ambush them.
Have you the "Right Stuff"?
Well if you have come past the first two hurdles, you have developed the perceiverance and bloody-mindedness to get on in life. Sucking up never got people all that far.
Worried about having the right psychographic profile? As a pal of mine once said, "You can't drive round town in a personality profile" when told of his suitability for a sales job which only lacked a company car.......
In other words, forget the profile. I have met small and large business entrepreneurs and many of them are not really very nice, some of them are real charmers on the other hand, while some could be described as somewhat self centred and introverted.
Organise "Yes People" Around You
What they have in common is they are quite good at weeding out people who don't say" Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir" and keeping just a few advisers in the background to tell them things they might not like to hear.
Another thing they have is a vision of fulfilling something good for the customer: not necessarily unique! It could be a little cheaper, more amenable, understandable, trustable ....a lot of immaterial stuff as well as some kind of ability to pay everyone less for a long time while the business grows....not always the case but often, entrepreneurs pay less than the going rate when ever they can.
OPM
Other-people's-money
This is what the novacaine driven MBA set are really up to: getting the confidence of other people and then their money, to use in business and take a cut.
However the MBA crowd have had since the mid nineteen eighties to get it right in western countries, and come up with.......make it in China if it isn't military or healthcare, and if the latter two, grab your money from the tax payer by employing lobby firms to get more than the fair GM.
Now western economies are bored with the MBA crowd and are looking for masters-of-entrepreneurial studies and general those mad enough to "start a business from thin air". So as an entrepreneur you will be the one hunting OPM...and eventually MBA suckers to expand your business.
If you are smart, you will realise immediately than MBA guys are "No" people: in that "no, I know better" and furthermore, they will steal your concept or bail on you as soon as things get tough and their fees dry up.
Good news though, OPM wants you! Western economies need a higher business birth and expansion rate, and they need both the "facebooks" and "nikes" as well as the company which may never be more than a handful of employees.
OPM seeks young single, GSOH
Money has no shortage of 5% returns on investment, even in the current on going recession, er sorry, credit crunch. No it's a recession. What money always wants is a compound ROI of 19% per annum over 3 years. Money doesn't unfortunetly dare to go in too early, the little boat rowers are your first bet.
This is soft capital by many accounts if you are not self funding a start-up.
Now comes in my critique of the western system and the economic cycle: depsite the unpalatable nature of the Sub Prime Pyramid, it was just a symptom -probabky- of the end of a value cycle.
There are many economists who can explain this better than me, but basically all the chains of promises of delivtering growth and utilising investment run dry. In other words, companies do not make the profits they stated to "the street" and brokers sneeze, investors catch cold and eventually pneumonia if it gets worse.
Now the economies of the west need the new nippers who can be light on their feet around the dinosaurs from the 1980s and before. Nimble.
That is what you also need to be: hard nosed, but able to bail out or take a sudden new and better opportunity. Alternatively, able to react to change, "breath" as the company grows, cutting back when needed, and then expand quickly with initially termporary employees, premises and funding.
Like the soudn of it?
" I Will Start a Business........ .......from thin air"
The next thing is to learn to ignore all the people who say "No" and turn you away: if there are people who must be persuaded or you really, really want on board for money, legal permissions, expertise etc, then gather enough people to go with you who say "yes" and ambush them.
Have you the "Right Stuff"?
Well if you have come past the first two hurdles, you have developed the perceiverance and bloody-mindedness to get on in life. Sucking up never got people all that far.
Worried about having the right psychographic profile? As a pal of mine once said, "You can't drive round town in a personality profile" when told of his suitability for a sales job which only lacked a company car.......
In other words, forget the profile. I have met small and large business entrepreneurs and many of them are not really very nice, some of them are real charmers on the other hand, while some could be described as somewhat self centred and introverted.
Organise "Yes People" Around You
What they have in common is they are quite good at weeding out people who don't say" Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir" and keeping just a few advisers in the background to tell them things they might not like to hear.
Another thing they have is a vision of fulfilling something good for the customer: not necessarily unique! It could be a little cheaper, more amenable, understandable, trustable ....a lot of immaterial stuff as well as some kind of ability to pay everyone less for a long time while the business grows....not always the case but often, entrepreneurs pay less than the going rate when ever they can.
OPM
Other-people's-money
This is what the novacaine driven MBA set are really up to: getting the confidence of other people and then their money, to use in business and take a cut.
However the MBA crowd have had since the mid nineteen eighties to get it right in western countries, and come up with.......make it in China if it isn't military or healthcare, and if the latter two, grab your money from the tax payer by employing lobby firms to get more than the fair GM.
Now western economies are bored with the MBA crowd and are looking for masters-of-entrepreneurial studies and general those mad enough to "start a business from thin air". So as an entrepreneur you will be the one hunting OPM...and eventually MBA suckers to expand your business.
If you are smart, you will realise immediately than MBA guys are "No" people: in that "no, I know better" and furthermore, they will steal your concept or bail on you as soon as things get tough and their fees dry up.
Good news though, OPM wants you! Western economies need a higher business birth and expansion rate, and they need both the "facebooks" and "nikes" as well as the company which may never be more than a handful of employees.
OPM seeks young single, GSOH
Money has no shortage of 5% returns on investment, even in the current on going recession, er sorry, credit crunch. No it's a recession. What money always wants is a compound ROI of 19% per annum over 3 years. Money doesn't unfortunetly dare to go in too early, the little boat rowers are your first bet.
This is soft capital by many accounts if you are not self funding a start-up.
Now comes in my critique of the western system and the economic cycle: depsite the unpalatable nature of the Sub Prime Pyramid, it was just a symptom -probabky- of the end of a value cycle.
There are many economists who can explain this better than me, but basically all the chains of promises of delivtering growth and utilising investment run dry. In other words, companies do not make the profits they stated to "the street" and brokers sneeze, investors catch cold and eventually pneumonia if it gets worse.
Now the economies of the west need the new nippers who can be light on their feet around the dinosaurs from the 1980s and before. Nimble.
That is what you also need to be: hard nosed, but able to bail out or take a sudden new and better opportunity. Alternatively, able to react to change, "breath" as the company grows, cutting back when needed, and then expand quickly with initially termporary employees, premises and funding.
Like the soudn of it?
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Peronality Tests
I did a very strange thing the other day apparently without realising at the time how abberant my actions were.
I went through a statement -scale agreement response personality test and answered everything with complete honesty.
The situation was not directly position related and I had no one to impress. I had neither nervousness nor excitement.
Now before in life as a job candidate I had both nerves and excitement and a deal of performance angst. I felt often very driven to have come so long in an interview process as to have the DISC test applied to me.
In the recent test, the most comprehensive I have had, I was relaxed and interested in exploring how extreme or non chalant my actual feeling based reactions would be.
I answered by in large also in the middle ground, "slightly agree" and the other side with only a very few what I would consider outlyers.
How I scored: well a hell of a lot more self centered and unstable than you would hear from any of my references and family. In fact I scored as down right antisocial, with no real need for much human contact in the work place, and recommended to take up laboratory work. Very far from the truth.
However, the extremes of the scale, are not actually that extreme and do not represent outlyers in the population.
Not Alone in Being a Psychographic A-Hole
Some years ago Scottish Enterprise decided that the country need to identify the "right stuff" which highly successful entrpreneurs had: people like Tom Farmer and Michelle Mone. Now they tested several successful, self made business people with some kind of "instrument", quite possibly like the NEO PI-R, and unfortuntely, Scottish Enterprise would have rather kept the results to themselves. What they uncovered, as was leaked later, was that many top Scottish ( and I presume no difference on an international basis) entrepreneurs were really quite unsavoury types: egocentric, aggressive, insecure, narcissitic....the leak went on but was PR dammage limited.
Basically they couldn't really go out and advetise for "WANTED Ruthless, self centred - control freaks to lead the Scottish Economic Revolution", which in all truth of the light of the profiles, may well have been the end result of being honest in marketing comms for a change!
The point being that these self made millionaires have nothing to lose in answering honestly. You see where I am going with this....
Understanding How Personality Tests Work
Even since times of the Greeks, personality traits have been grouped into four or five major categories, and the in ancient Athens people would be described by their predominant, expressed or percieed trait as one of four: Phlegmatic, Choleric, Sanguine or Melancholic.
Now in modern times psychologists have been able to organise "instruments" to measure the key personality trait categories: These have been by in large built from studying in detail a small group of diverse people to describe many aspects of their personality-. From these the "instrument" : a list of statements, questions or adjectives and measuring how they then answer to these. The tools are then condensed into less than 250 statements and later they have been compressed even lower to aroudn 60-70 as the key capture mechanism for job interview scenarios.
Often the original study group demonstrated strong traits or abnormal, even psychotic personality disorders. Hence the intial results were highly polar. Further candidates with a range of normal, definable personalities : most likely students and residents in the cities the Universities or institutions reside in.
Once the tools then were validated on this well characterised set of personalities, then it could be used to gather a normal distribution of answers from the population as a whole. Thus an average score within each of the categories coudl be produced, and therefore the original scores compared to this. The tool's wider validity could be estabished or fine tuned for results with averages which did not concur with normal or abnormal score-profiles.
What does this mean for me??
It means you are compared to how Mr Average responds : now in fact Mr Average does not respond in the middle scores to everything. Also if you take the profiling overall, there is not an average distribution of people between each of the five traits.
This also varies by nation, and probably region and of course sub culture especially religious groups. For national markets at least, a new normalised set of respondents must be taken through the test to produce the base lines.
How boring is Mr Average? The Problem with Self Projection
Well in fact Mr Average is quite a nice guy : according to him or miss average's self image.
There in lies the whole problem when you apply these tests to the whole population in a job seeking or even laborotory condition. The rose tinted mirror, the ideal self starts to poke out.
People lie. they fib about how nice or assertive or clever they are by choosing adjectives or interval-scale answers which they know will paint them in the light they would like to be seen in.
Two retorts I hear
1) >There are lie detectors in these tests
2) > The averaging out by sheer volume will mean the outliers are still easy to spot
To answer to one; yes, there are both lie detectors and measures for inconsistency leading to void profiles, but in general you will not activate these by just answering a little bitty rose tinted.
Averaging out by volume:
So if you are in a kind of laid back state of mind, beware: you may start to lie far enough away from Mr Average you may end up being on the verge of a neurotic unemployable: or worse, a reclusive psychopath.
People who read these are trained to look for deviation from mean and the pattern.
WHat is interesting to me is how the different patterns plot across the averages. This is a very shakey area of statistics because you cannot take an average of averages. You can though look at the conjoint analysis or adherence between different personality types and how categories of profiles behave around the different individual point averages.
My point to summarise is that it is easy to deviate from Mr Nice with his rose tinted windows, and your own truthful response will start to be an outlyer, beyond the usual response mean.
Hey! Be nice out there.
I went through a statement -scale agreement response personality test and answered everything with complete honesty.
The situation was not directly position related and I had no one to impress. I had neither nervousness nor excitement.
Now before in life as a job candidate I had both nerves and excitement and a deal of performance angst. I felt often very driven to have come so long in an interview process as to have the DISC test applied to me.
In the recent test, the most comprehensive I have had, I was relaxed and interested in exploring how extreme or non chalant my actual feeling based reactions would be.
I answered by in large also in the middle ground, "slightly agree" and the other side with only a very few what I would consider outlyers.
How I scored: well a hell of a lot more self centered and unstable than you would hear from any of my references and family. In fact I scored as down right antisocial, with no real need for much human contact in the work place, and recommended to take up laboratory work. Very far from the truth.
However, the extremes of the scale, are not actually that extreme and do not represent outlyers in the population.
Not Alone in Being a Psychographic A-Hole
Some years ago Scottish Enterprise decided that the country need to identify the "right stuff" which highly successful entrpreneurs had: people like Tom Farmer and Michelle Mone. Now they tested several successful, self made business people with some kind of "instrument", quite possibly like the NEO PI-R, and unfortuntely, Scottish Enterprise would have rather kept the results to themselves. What they uncovered, as was leaked later, was that many top Scottish ( and I presume no difference on an international basis) entrepreneurs were really quite unsavoury types: egocentric, aggressive, insecure, narcissitic....the leak went on but was PR dammage limited.
Basically they couldn't really go out and advetise for "WANTED Ruthless, self centred - control freaks to lead the Scottish Economic Revolution", which in all truth of the light of the profiles, may well have been the end result of being honest in marketing comms for a change!
The point being that these self made millionaires have nothing to lose in answering honestly. You see where I am going with this....
Understanding How Personality Tests Work
Even since times of the Greeks, personality traits have been grouped into four or five major categories, and the in ancient Athens people would be described by their predominant, expressed or percieed trait as one of four: Phlegmatic, Choleric, Sanguine or Melancholic.
Now in modern times psychologists have been able to organise "instruments" to measure the key personality trait categories: These have been by in large built from studying in detail a small group of diverse people to describe many aspects of their personality-. From these the "instrument" : a list of statements, questions or adjectives and measuring how they then answer to these. The tools are then condensed into less than 250 statements and later they have been compressed even lower to aroudn 60-70 as the key capture mechanism for job interview scenarios.
Often the original study group demonstrated strong traits or abnormal, even psychotic personality disorders. Hence the intial results were highly polar. Further candidates with a range of normal, definable personalities : most likely students and residents in the cities the Universities or institutions reside in.
Once the tools then were validated on this well characterised set of personalities, then it could be used to gather a normal distribution of answers from the population as a whole. Thus an average score within each of the categories coudl be produced, and therefore the original scores compared to this. The tool's wider validity could be estabished or fine tuned for results with averages which did not concur with normal or abnormal score-profiles.
What does this mean for me??
It means you are compared to how Mr Average responds : now in fact Mr Average does not respond in the middle scores to everything. Also if you take the profiling overall, there is not an average distribution of people between each of the five traits.
This also varies by nation, and probably region and of course sub culture especially religious groups. For national markets at least, a new normalised set of respondents must be taken through the test to produce the base lines.
How boring is Mr Average? The Problem with Self Projection
Well in fact Mr Average is quite a nice guy : according to him or miss average's self image.
There in lies the whole problem when you apply these tests to the whole population in a job seeking or even laborotory condition. The rose tinted mirror, the ideal self starts to poke out.
People lie. they fib about how nice or assertive or clever they are by choosing adjectives or interval-scale answers which they know will paint them in the light they would like to be seen in.
Two retorts I hear
1) >There are lie detectors in these tests
2) > The averaging out by sheer volume will mean the outliers are still easy to spot
To answer to one; yes, there are both lie detectors and measures for inconsistency leading to void profiles, but in general you will not activate these by just answering a little bitty rose tinted.
Averaging out by volume:
So if you are in a kind of laid back state of mind, beware: you may start to lie far enough away from Mr Average you may end up being on the verge of a neurotic unemployable: or worse, a reclusive psychopath.
People who read these are trained to look for deviation from mean and the pattern.
WHat is interesting to me is how the different patterns plot across the averages. This is a very shakey area of statistics because you cannot take an average of averages. You can though look at the conjoint analysis or adherence between different personality types and how categories of profiles behave around the different individual point averages.
My point to summarise is that it is easy to deviate from Mr Nice with his rose tinted windows, and your own truthful response will start to be an outlyer, beyond the usual response mean.
Hey! Be nice out there.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
1979 and 2009...Thatcher to Cameron
Introduction
There are some parallels to be drawn between the period 1978 to 1980, and 2008 to 2010 when looking at both the US and the UK political and economic environments. Both have seen changes in political direction, although possibly divergent as they stand today, but also and both are periods of serious economic crisis.
Comparisons between the two economies per se are some what meaningless. The UK could be geographically absorbed into most US states and the size of the economy has been compared to Florida and California. However it is more in parallell ideologies and international leadership in fiscal policy and public investment which are of noteworthy discussion.
Many economists ( ref.2,3,4) agree that in fact the Reagonomics and Thatcherite years did not, within their terms, achieve the fiscal and full ideological goals of balancing the budget and reducing both the PSBR and the state budget / GDP gearing.
However what both regimes were able to very firmly achieve was a change in attitudes, without which the "neo neoliberal liberals" namely Messrs Clinton and Blair, could not have enjoyed both sustained economic growth, balanced annual budgets and taxation effective policies. The main difference being that this lead to sustainable increases in public spending for the Democratic and Labour governments of the 1990s..
.......As the Actor Said to The Grocer's Daughter...
Thatcher and Reagan were both from relatively naive political backgrounds, which was in fact a help rather than a hindrance. Thatcher was brought up above a Grocers store in Lincolnshire, becoming a university educated Chemist and went on to view fiscal policy very much in terms of the whole country being run like a small business and policies being treated like hypothesis based on current scientific fact.
Ronald Reagan had been a would-be-star in Hollywood and even when rising to office as governor of California, showed often naive political judgement. (ref..)
This naivity was however, not at all at odds to a ground swell of economists who came to be known as the "liberal economists" and their immediate afterfolllowers, arguably, the neoliberals. They too agreed fundamentally that the books had to be balanced.
Furthermore the economists were very much of the view that the rate of inflation in public services had to be halted. There was in the 1970s an expectation in the populous and those working in public service, that public service provision would continue to grow, in order to enjoy incremental investment and operational budgets. Over allever better services would both contribute to, and match the better-expected-living standards based upon perceived need and not sustainabe budget.
The New Right's Legacy for the New Left
The Clinton and Blair governments inherited a political and fiscal environment where economic growth could be stimulated while public spending could both grow, and be paid for by near-time tax revenues, and not long term borrowing.
Gone also was the left wing's punative view on the rich. Instead the nouveau rich of the entrepreneurial classes and the entertainment and sports "industries" were welcomed by both Clinton and Blair in the new vision of meritocracy and righteous social democracy. No longer would the super rich and general self employed be taxed punitively, but rather tax revenues would be optimised by making it attractive to live, invest and run businesses in the UK and US.
First Terms With Backward Effects
The first terms for both Thatcher and Reagan were on the balance sheet, not good. The cuts in public spending in the general services area actually contributed to low growth as government employment was reduced and wage claims curtailed. Also liberlisation of corporate law made it easier for companies in the UK to disinvest or realise liquidation of their assets as the only growth in share holder investment. Privatisation also lead to job cuts in the short term.
The first term of Margaret Thatcher lead in fact to higher public spending and GDP gearing because of the large rise in unemployment ( benefits being payed by the state, and resulting loss in taxation) and the Falklands War. Reagan achieved little of the hoped for tax cuts and cuts in real terms to public spending, due to the same reasons perhaps:unemployment and defence.
What these two first terms did achieve was to releive the inertia of the slow, crisis filled and recessionary 1970s with respect to public spending as well as business investment, growth and birth-rate of new enterprises. Both governments foundered yet managed in political momentum to hold the electorate who continued to want a move away from the stagflation of the late 70s.
One alarming parallel to draw today to the conservative-libdem government in the UK and the potentially righ wing senate and congress swing in the US, is that cuts in public spending lead to slower growth.
Cuts in taxes were popular, but in the UK the "Tories" put in place a large rise in VAT in 1979-80, which in fact is a proportionately far higher tax on the poorest in society as it taxed all VATable items of food, clothing etc at 15% up from the base of 8%. If this had been enacted in a growing economy, it would have inevitably lead to inflationary pressures in both margin-fulcrum effects on traded items and wage demands due to the increased cost of living.
The Cold War Defrosts
In retrospect one area of puzzeling ideology both Reagan and Thatcher held to was a large defence budget, as a far higher proportion of GDP than most western economies ( this is however, weighted by the post WWII withstraints on the key German and Japanese economies).
Ideologically, they had the "Great Bear", the USSR and despite a fairly stable period of cold war post Vietnam, ageing nuclear weaponry and delivery systems meant the Russians had a possible advantage in having the SS20 mobile missile systems, making it virtually impossible to either react to strategic targets ( launch sites) or pre-emptively strike them.
One response was the multiwarhead, longer distance Trident Missile system. The other, which was not nearly as far fetched as the name it gained suggests, was an close-orbit defence satellite system which could identify launched ICBMs and destroy them in the upper atmosphere: Reagan's "star wars".
It took more than a decade for both these systems, Trident as a detterent in the UK and an effective "star wars" technology, to actually come to fruition: and of course by 1992 these systems were really obsolete or of little strategic importance due to the collapse of the USSR . However, star wars did precipitate the initial fall of the soviet ICBM dominance and the credibility of their economic investment in the military, possibly tipping the of the politbureaux into the folly of their brand of totalitarianism.
Boom and Bust
It was really the mid eighties liberisation of capital markets at "big bang" in the UK and following connectivity of capital markets by the use of IT which stimulated the huge investments in western economies, and possibly over investment and later crash of Asian capital markets. Further to this, consumer credit was liberilsed beyond inflationary sensible parameters in the UK ( ref need to support any such claim for the usa 1984-89)
I dare say that you could track the number of people reaching their credit limits and not being able to make payments with the decline in captial markets in the late 80s: this tipping effect from consumer spending and irresponsible debt has reared its' head again with the subprime market ( "white trash bring down all the great empires" )
Inflation headed back up into double figures, with interest rates matching suit and the finance markets crashed and did not fully recover after Black Monday, the first major "correction" to the newly liberalised capital markets.
House reposessions and personal bankruptcies ran high in the UK, although the tories were maybe quite right in their view point on the "nanny state" when it regarded personal investment, debt and home ownership. This would be the first "attitude correction" perhaps in the new right's view, in other words individuals should take and make responsible decisions over their budgets.
Certainly the boom and bust was remembered by voters after the lack lustre Bush I and Major governments failed to cure the ills, with multiple terms and larger influence for the left on both sides of the atlantic being the result at the ballot box.
The Neo-Neo Liberals Take the Helm: Enter Clinton and Blair
As with the implementation of strategic defence strategies, once again it took the Clinton administration of 1993-97 to actually put into place the balancing of government budgets which 12 years of Reagan and "George H" could not. Similarily in the UK, the PSBR and GDP/Spend gearing was only finally achieved under Blair. Both state leaders resided over the longest period of sustained economic growth since world war II. ( 4)
This however in many commentators view was not just the result of a fortuitous inheritence. The two governments were able to present cohesive internal party politics and secure broad support across a spectrum of govermental ( sivil service), public service ( like the NHS and many Quangos), trade unions and economic actors in both international government, capital finance and captains of industry.
Further to this, when both leaders took over in the 1990s they were able to plan for optimised tax efficiency, meaning that both the private economy could enjoy growth driven by tax, legislative and fiscal environments. Public spending could once again grow with the aim of delivering enhanced and more efficient services, which also fuelled economic growth.
Low inflation, and in post war terms, super low inflation of below 3% became the fiscal goal of governments and this was driven by increased competition in the ever more enterprising economies. How two left wing governments, despite having moved to right of centre on monetary policy, managed to achieve such low inflation and interest rates is a mystery to the writer here.
The balancing act of low interest rates from central banks to encourage investment in the real economy could, and later into the 00s indeed did, lead to increased inflation. Lower bank interest rates released working capital through cost effective loans for both small and larger businesses while also making investing in governmental bonds and just savings accounts, far less attractive for private investors. Capital markets would need to also secure higher ROI from the real economy and deriviatives markets, where in both cases, value multiplicaiton could be acheived at a far better ROI than those investments linked to base interest rate.
A Bleak Future for the Neo-neo Liberal Right
The new right face a bleak future once they come to power with their proposed raft of tax cuts.
Why?
Western economies were already failing to deliver ROI when the internet bubble burst in 2000/ 2001. There after higher ROI was sought in what I call the "funny money" markets: deriviatives and investment mechanisms geared around at the base, consumer debt. It is somewhat Ironic that the speculators chose to focus their efforts in maximising ROI on what in the USA was in fact a US governmental subsidised initiative for poorer families to buy their homes: The sub prime market was invented, and the whole house-of-cards built around this con trick has lead to the near total collapse of the capitalist investment system.
Fundamentally, an economy must multiply value at several levels: private business must add value from raw materials and peopl'es manhours in rendering these higher value or providing services at a profit. SInce the internet bubble burst, and the far east finance crisis became a long lasting syndrome, westernised economies havve failed to add fundamental value and have instead imported from China.; but bluntly, the chinese are the ones taking the fundamental value multiplication.
Intellectual property is the mantra of the west: we do the clever stuff, and the Chinese will make it. However add the costs of intellectualism to the costs of the supply chain and then divide by increased competition and a low cost base for actual production of something which does not need you patented widget to work as well, and you start to disappoint "the street" on your ROI and profit warnings.
The service economy is of little help in saving this situation of low growth and reduced margins in the product economy. The service economy is in my opinion, fully dependent on two factors: value multiplication in the product economy and consumer spending power from the employees in the public sector. Take the pre 2010 medicare situation in the USA: it is completely dependent on the US police, sivil service and other employees to be able to survive financially. Why choose healthcare, that is just for sick people right? Health care is a large proportion of GDP in western countries with the new sicknesses which take longer to kill us than the old. Smoking, bad diet, lack of exercise and stress mainly from trying to get ROI for your stake holders.
Summary
What Blair and Clinton enjoyed economically and politically will be looked back upon as a golden time for both businesses and the public sector. In these years prudent fiscal management and revenue effectvie structuring of personal and corporate taxation meant that the public sector could further boost growth in the economy while intending to support a higher standard of living delivered to the electorate.
What the legacy of this vision of continual improvement of public services, and the freedom allowed the capital markets has lead to is the largest crisis since the 1930s. The gamblers on Wall Street were not the only boys in the casino in the mid 2000s: that governments continued to service wars in areas of little political gain, and had expanding public services now needing PSBR, has well and truly dumped the next rack of right wingers who will promise to do what Reagan and Thatcher did in 1979, and probably end up doing as badly as their well known predecessors.
References
(1) - (3) TBC
There are some parallels to be drawn between the period 1978 to 1980, and 2008 to 2010 when looking at both the US and the UK political and economic environments. Both have seen changes in political direction, although possibly divergent as they stand today, but also and both are periods of serious economic crisis.
Comparisons between the two economies per se are some what meaningless. The UK could be geographically absorbed into most US states and the size of the economy has been compared to Florida and California. However it is more in parallell ideologies and international leadership in fiscal policy and public investment which are of noteworthy discussion.
Many economists ( ref.2,3,4) agree that in fact the Reagonomics and Thatcherite years did not, within their terms, achieve the fiscal and full ideological goals of balancing the budget and reducing both the PSBR and the state budget / GDP gearing.
However what both regimes were able to very firmly achieve was a change in attitudes, without which the "neo neoliberal liberals" namely Messrs Clinton and Blair, could not have enjoyed both sustained economic growth, balanced annual budgets and taxation effective policies. The main difference being that this lead to sustainable increases in public spending for the Democratic and Labour governments of the 1990s..
.......As the Actor Said to The Grocer's Daughter...
Thatcher and Reagan were both from relatively naive political backgrounds, which was in fact a help rather than a hindrance. Thatcher was brought up above a Grocers store in Lincolnshire, becoming a university educated Chemist and went on to view fiscal policy very much in terms of the whole country being run like a small business and policies being treated like hypothesis based on current scientific fact.
Ronald Reagan had been a would-be-star in Hollywood and even when rising to office as governor of California, showed often naive political judgement. (ref..)
This naivity was however, not at all at odds to a ground swell of economists who came to be known as the "liberal economists" and their immediate afterfolllowers, arguably, the neoliberals. They too agreed fundamentally that the books had to be balanced.
Furthermore the economists were very much of the view that the rate of inflation in public services had to be halted. There was in the 1970s an expectation in the populous and those working in public service, that public service provision would continue to grow, in order to enjoy incremental investment and operational budgets. Over allever better services would both contribute to, and match the better-expected-living standards based upon perceived need and not sustainabe budget.
The New Right's Legacy for the New Left
The Clinton and Blair governments inherited a political and fiscal environment where economic growth could be stimulated while public spending could both grow, and be paid for by near-time tax revenues, and not long term borrowing.
Gone also was the left wing's punative view on the rich. Instead the nouveau rich of the entrepreneurial classes and the entertainment and sports "industries" were welcomed by both Clinton and Blair in the new vision of meritocracy and righteous social democracy. No longer would the super rich and general self employed be taxed punitively, but rather tax revenues would be optimised by making it attractive to live, invest and run businesses in the UK and US.
First Terms With Backward Effects
The first terms for both Thatcher and Reagan were on the balance sheet, not good. The cuts in public spending in the general services area actually contributed to low growth as government employment was reduced and wage claims curtailed. Also liberlisation of corporate law made it easier for companies in the UK to disinvest or realise liquidation of their assets as the only growth in share holder investment. Privatisation also lead to job cuts in the short term.
The first term of Margaret Thatcher lead in fact to higher public spending and GDP gearing because of the large rise in unemployment ( benefits being payed by the state, and resulting loss in taxation) and the Falklands War. Reagan achieved little of the hoped for tax cuts and cuts in real terms to public spending, due to the same reasons perhaps:unemployment and defence.
What these two first terms did achieve was to releive the inertia of the slow, crisis filled and recessionary 1970s with respect to public spending as well as business investment, growth and birth-rate of new enterprises. Both governments foundered yet managed in political momentum to hold the electorate who continued to want a move away from the stagflation of the late 70s.
One alarming parallel to draw today to the conservative-libdem government in the UK and the potentially righ wing senate and congress swing in the US, is that cuts in public spending lead to slower growth.
Cuts in taxes were popular, but in the UK the "Tories" put in place a large rise in VAT in 1979-80, which in fact is a proportionately far higher tax on the poorest in society as it taxed all VATable items of food, clothing etc at 15% up from the base of 8%. If this had been enacted in a growing economy, it would have inevitably lead to inflationary pressures in both margin-fulcrum effects on traded items and wage demands due to the increased cost of living.
The Cold War Defrosts
In retrospect one area of puzzeling ideology both Reagan and Thatcher held to was a large defence budget, as a far higher proportion of GDP than most western economies ( this is however, weighted by the post WWII withstraints on the key German and Japanese economies).
Ideologically, they had the "Great Bear", the USSR and despite a fairly stable period of cold war post Vietnam, ageing nuclear weaponry and delivery systems meant the Russians had a possible advantage in having the SS20 mobile missile systems, making it virtually impossible to either react to strategic targets ( launch sites) or pre-emptively strike them.
One response was the multiwarhead, longer distance Trident Missile system. The other, which was not nearly as far fetched as the name it gained suggests, was an close-orbit defence satellite system which could identify launched ICBMs and destroy them in the upper atmosphere: Reagan's "star wars".
It took more than a decade for both these systems, Trident as a detterent in the UK and an effective "star wars" technology, to actually come to fruition: and of course by 1992 these systems were really obsolete or of little strategic importance due to the collapse of the USSR . However, star wars did precipitate the initial fall of the soviet ICBM dominance and the credibility of their economic investment in the military, possibly tipping the of the politbureaux into the folly of their brand of totalitarianism.
Boom and Bust
It was really the mid eighties liberisation of capital markets at "big bang" in the UK and following connectivity of capital markets by the use of IT which stimulated the huge investments in western economies, and possibly over investment and later crash of Asian capital markets. Further to this, consumer credit was liberilsed beyond inflationary sensible parameters in the UK ( ref need to support any such claim for the usa 1984-89)
I dare say that you could track the number of people reaching their credit limits and not being able to make payments with the decline in captial markets in the late 80s: this tipping effect from consumer spending and irresponsible debt has reared its' head again with the subprime market ( "white trash bring down all the great empires" )
Inflation headed back up into double figures, with interest rates matching suit and the finance markets crashed and did not fully recover after Black Monday, the first major "correction" to the newly liberalised capital markets.
House reposessions and personal bankruptcies ran high in the UK, although the tories were maybe quite right in their view point on the "nanny state" when it regarded personal investment, debt and home ownership. This would be the first "attitude correction" perhaps in the new right's view, in other words individuals should take and make responsible decisions over their budgets.
Certainly the boom and bust was remembered by voters after the lack lustre Bush I and Major governments failed to cure the ills, with multiple terms and larger influence for the left on both sides of the atlantic being the result at the ballot box.
The Neo-Neo Liberals Take the Helm: Enter Clinton and Blair
As with the implementation of strategic defence strategies, once again it took the Clinton administration of 1993-97 to actually put into place the balancing of government budgets which 12 years of Reagan and "George H" could not. Similarily in the UK, the PSBR and GDP/Spend gearing was only finally achieved under Blair. Both state leaders resided over the longest period of sustained economic growth since world war II. ( 4)
This however in many commentators view was not just the result of a fortuitous inheritence. The two governments were able to present cohesive internal party politics and secure broad support across a spectrum of govermental ( sivil service), public service ( like the NHS and many Quangos), trade unions and economic actors in both international government, capital finance and captains of industry.
Further to this, when both leaders took over in the 1990s they were able to plan for optimised tax efficiency, meaning that both the private economy could enjoy growth driven by tax, legislative and fiscal environments. Public spending could once again grow with the aim of delivering enhanced and more efficient services, which also fuelled economic growth.
Low inflation, and in post war terms, super low inflation of below 3% became the fiscal goal of governments and this was driven by increased competition in the ever more enterprising economies. How two left wing governments, despite having moved to right of centre on monetary policy, managed to achieve such low inflation and interest rates is a mystery to the writer here.
The balancing act of low interest rates from central banks to encourage investment in the real economy could, and later into the 00s indeed did, lead to increased inflation. Lower bank interest rates released working capital through cost effective loans for both small and larger businesses while also making investing in governmental bonds and just savings accounts, far less attractive for private investors. Capital markets would need to also secure higher ROI from the real economy and deriviatives markets, where in both cases, value multiplicaiton could be acheived at a far better ROI than those investments linked to base interest rate.
A Bleak Future for the Neo-neo Liberal Right
The new right face a bleak future once they come to power with their proposed raft of tax cuts.
Why?
Western economies were already failing to deliver ROI when the internet bubble burst in 2000/ 2001. There after higher ROI was sought in what I call the "funny money" markets: deriviatives and investment mechanisms geared around at the base, consumer debt. It is somewhat Ironic that the speculators chose to focus their efforts in maximising ROI on what in the USA was in fact a US governmental subsidised initiative for poorer families to buy their homes: The sub prime market was invented, and the whole house-of-cards built around this con trick has lead to the near total collapse of the capitalist investment system.
Fundamentally, an economy must multiply value at several levels: private business must add value from raw materials and peopl'es manhours in rendering these higher value or providing services at a profit. SInce the internet bubble burst, and the far east finance crisis became a long lasting syndrome, westernised economies havve failed to add fundamental value and have instead imported from China.; but bluntly, the chinese are the ones taking the fundamental value multiplication.
Intellectual property is the mantra of the west: we do the clever stuff, and the Chinese will make it. However add the costs of intellectualism to the costs of the supply chain and then divide by increased competition and a low cost base for actual production of something which does not need you patented widget to work as well, and you start to disappoint "the street" on your ROI and profit warnings.
The service economy is of little help in saving this situation of low growth and reduced margins in the product economy. The service economy is in my opinion, fully dependent on two factors: value multiplication in the product economy and consumer spending power from the employees in the public sector. Take the pre 2010 medicare situation in the USA: it is completely dependent on the US police, sivil service and other employees to be able to survive financially. Why choose healthcare, that is just for sick people right? Health care is a large proportion of GDP in western countries with the new sicknesses which take longer to kill us than the old. Smoking, bad diet, lack of exercise and stress mainly from trying to get ROI for your stake holders.
Summary
What Blair and Clinton enjoyed economically and politically will be looked back upon as a golden time for both businesses and the public sector. In these years prudent fiscal management and revenue effectvie structuring of personal and corporate taxation meant that the public sector could further boost growth in the economy while intending to support a higher standard of living delivered to the electorate.
What the legacy of this vision of continual improvement of public services, and the freedom allowed the capital markets has lead to is the largest crisis since the 1930s. The gamblers on Wall Street were not the only boys in the casino in the mid 2000s: that governments continued to service wars in areas of little political gain, and had expanding public services now needing PSBR, has well and truly dumped the next rack of right wingers who will promise to do what Reagan and Thatcher did in 1979, and probably end up doing as badly as their well known predecessors.
References
(1) - (3) TBC
(4) Fiscal policy convergence from Reagan to Blair: the left veers right
Av Ravi K. Roy,Arthur DenzauThursday, September 30, 2010
Like an iPod, only Paddier
By the time Apple launched their tablet product, just about the only surprises were the name..... and the lack of USB ports.
Mr.Jobs closed the circuit in two respects here- firstly the pundits were betting on iSlate or iTab(let) as front runners, amongst a couple of other names: you can run the stats month by month on google advanced. However the second closed circuit I refer to was the channel and platform. What are the implications of a channel ( iStore) oriented web-book running a low-performance operating system?
Hype for an Underpowered Netbook?
Now we are getting a lot of hype about the iPad here in Norway, with its launch only a few weeks away to the local retailers. However, an astonishing 30, 000 have winged their way here already: mainly bought abroad by iPhone addicts, apple employees, app-developers and the largest group perhaps are journalists. That number is astonishing because it is nearly 1 % of the population BEFORE marketing actually have an iPad here.
Why are Journalists so Interested?
The traditional news media and publishing houses, finally see a controllable channel which will provide them with closed loop marketing and little copyright infringement: no more cut-n paste, no more hollow promises of XML, RSS feeds and syndicated news based on evapourating and thin ad' revenues. Apple hope to make a good take from the media houses and publishers through the iStore. At last, they have a socially acceptable and a corporate-brand-able channel button: the iPad "App" as a closed-circuit media delivery environment.
I hear the whining cry of superiority from the nerds in Linux, C++ and java land: it isn't as good, lacks the power, lacks the potential for developers, lacks the freedom.....well people trust those f##¤%ing litte app buttons on their iPhone to do something reliable and good for them...they will even pay a little for something that maybe could otherwise be free......if they can trust it.....that my whiny little geeko, is branding.
Wait up though: now the cat is well and truly out of the bag, with quite imodest goals! World media dominance no less?? Replacing the paper cover price with pay-to-read internet. News will no longer be free. Windows 7 / IE users will be teased over to the platform : "read the full story on your iPad". But can Apple repeat the iTunes success now with written media?
iTunes kind of crept up on us all: there were many sources for MP3 sales on the internet and the whole Napster thing: but iTunes brought branding for the music sector firmly back on the internet: a trusted source of qaulity product at a reasonable price, if you exclude the over priced iPod range itself! Perhaps the competition never got the critical mass they needed to be a serious threat to iTunes, but let's face it, when Spotify and maybe a major US player go on line in north America with on demand streaming, then were will iTunes stand?
Back from the tangent on music: the traditional print media are queing up - allegedly - to get in on this channel, direct to the shiny new pad on your lap. iStore will deliver closed loop apps But so will other channel players who will want to access millions already on mobile and windows devices. I think we will see more developed closed loop, non copyable user interfaces to pay-for published material running on a new type of browser and only exisitng in the clouds at MS and google.
Tablet, shortbread, palm oil?
But what about convergence mobile to data? Will HTC bring out something half way to a tablet: I mean their HD2 is huge, almost palm pilot size.
I mention good old Bill Gates and his almost fully functioning OS's. Perhaps android running on a linux background will threaten MS enough in the explosive tablet sector that Mr Gates will really pull out the stops and make a scaleable compact windows 7 or CE v8.0.
Missed Opportunities for Apple
Personally I think Apple should have gone for a hand held. Bigger than the iPod Touch but still pocket sized, or at least handbag or laptop side pocket sized. Remember the Apple Newton anyone? Not a bad product, ahead of its time, not at all profitable.
I guess we may see such a 2010s product from Apple but more serious contenders to the Pad GUI in palm size will be appearing at a hastened rate now: Android is going where microsoft CE failed, but I dare say Mr Gates will be pushing small and mid platform perfection for mobile telecoms and palm type machines.
2011 will be the year of the tablet, hand-and-lap-sized, and I can see why: touch screen has become normalised with you and I. Virtual keyboards are even PREFFERED by many punters
Missed Photo Opportunity
Where Apple have missed a trick is in providing a serious workhorse for Photoshop and their own image manipulation software. There are mobile versions of PS now, and an iPhone app but let us see this on a tablet! Why? well it will revolutionise how we handle pictures to becoming a far more immediate and tactile user controlled experience, leveraging Apples qualities as an image platform.
The iPad is not really powerful enough for running full PS, Corel or Gimp: it is less able than the average netbook. That is a major criticism of the product: you get a big iPod touch, only paddier.
Mr.Jobs closed the circuit in two respects here- firstly the pundits were betting on iSlate or iTab(let) as front runners, amongst a couple of other names: you can run the stats month by month on google advanced. However the second closed circuit I refer to was the channel and platform. What are the implications of a channel ( iStore) oriented web-book running a low-performance operating system?
Hype for an Underpowered Netbook?
Now we are getting a lot of hype about the iPad here in Norway, with its launch only a few weeks away to the local retailers. However, an astonishing 30, 000 have winged their way here already: mainly bought abroad by iPhone addicts, apple employees, app-developers and the largest group perhaps are journalists. That number is astonishing because it is nearly 1 % of the population BEFORE marketing actually have an iPad here.
Why are Journalists so Interested?
The traditional news media and publishing houses, finally see a controllable channel which will provide them with closed loop marketing and little copyright infringement: no more cut-n paste, no more hollow promises of XML, RSS feeds and syndicated news based on evapourating and thin ad' revenues. Apple hope to make a good take from the media houses and publishers through the iStore. At last, they have a socially acceptable and a corporate-brand-able channel button: the iPad "App" as a closed-circuit media delivery environment.
I hear the whining cry of superiority from the nerds in Linux, C++ and java land: it isn't as good, lacks the power, lacks the potential for developers, lacks the freedom.....well people trust those f##¤%ing litte app buttons on their iPhone to do something reliable and good for them...they will even pay a little for something that maybe could otherwise be free......if they can trust it.....that my whiny little geeko, is branding.
Wait up though: now the cat is well and truly out of the bag, with quite imodest goals! World media dominance no less?? Replacing the paper cover price with pay-to-read internet. News will no longer be free. Windows 7 / IE users will be teased over to the platform : "read the full story on your iPad". But can Apple repeat the iTunes success now with written media?
Jobs and Murdoch: Bid for World Dominance of the Written Word?
iTunes kind of crept up on us all: there were many sources for MP3 sales on the internet and the whole Napster thing: but iTunes brought branding for the music sector firmly back on the internet: a trusted source of qaulity product at a reasonable price, if you exclude the over priced iPod range itself! Perhaps the competition never got the critical mass they needed to be a serious threat to iTunes, but let's face it, when Spotify and maybe a major US player go on line in north America with on demand streaming, then were will iTunes stand?
Back from the tangent on music: the traditional print media are queing up - allegedly - to get in on this channel, direct to the shiny new pad on your lap. iStore will deliver closed loop apps But so will other channel players who will want to access millions already on mobile and windows devices. I think we will see more developed closed loop, non copyable user interfaces to pay-for published material running on a new type of browser and only exisitng in the clouds at MS and google.
Tablet, shortbread, palm oil?
But what about convergence mobile to data? Will HTC bring out something half way to a tablet: I mean their HD2 is huge, almost palm pilot size.
I mention good old Bill Gates and his almost fully functioning OS's. Perhaps android running on a linux background will threaten MS enough in the explosive tablet sector that Mr Gates will really pull out the stops and make a scaleable compact windows 7 or CE v8.0.
Missed Opportunities for Apple
Personally I think Apple should have gone for a hand held. Bigger than the iPod Touch but still pocket sized, or at least handbag or laptop side pocket sized. Remember the Apple Newton anyone? Not a bad product, ahead of its time, not at all profitable.
I guess we may see such a 2010s product from Apple but more serious contenders to the Pad GUI in palm size will be appearing at a hastened rate now: Android is going where microsoft CE failed, but I dare say Mr Gates will be pushing small and mid platform perfection for mobile telecoms and palm type machines.
2011 will be the year of the tablet, hand-and-lap-sized, and I can see why: touch screen has become normalised with you and I. Virtual keyboards are even PREFFERED by many punters
Missed Photo Opportunity
Where Apple have missed a trick is in providing a serious workhorse for Photoshop and their own image manipulation software. There are mobile versions of PS now, and an iPhone app but let us see this on a tablet! Why? well it will revolutionise how we handle pictures to becoming a far more immediate and tactile user controlled experience, leveraging Apples qualities as an image platform.
The iPad is not really powerful enough for running full PS, Corel or Gimp: it is less able than the average netbook. That is a major criticism of the product: you get a big iPod touch, only paddier.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
A Short History of Consumer-Generated-Media
Definitions?
Social Media, aka Consumer Generated Media: the latter is preferable to the author in context of marketing.
Social - people being erm, sociable, erm.... people communicating in an unofficial atmosphere
Media - The king of Medes and his Persian enemies predate even the use of the word in latin to describe the written capture surface, the network and the nodes there upon. In his case the papyrus letters, the couriers and the writers and recipients of politcal information and commands.
Social Media is definable by to necessary conditions : distrubtion via a network and dialogue.
In other words, if a blogger bloggs and no one reads it, did they ever really write it?
A Brief History of Social Media
When was the first network available for dialogue? Depends what you see as a network: when was the first electronic network available to enable social media to happen?
According to some commentators, you can trace social media back to the early days of interlopers on the phone network and modem based systems: the phone phreaks and the hackers.
However, if you think about it the very first illicit social media e-comms go way back before then: to the first telegraph operators and Marconni's transatlantic preambles. The official version will be the press release and "only for serious communications" but you can bet these guys along the "railroads" tapped out " hey , how are the wife and kids doing?" in 1845.
There are of course some more alley ways and oddities, like ICQ and messenger, which relate to tweeting today and you can read more on great blogs like this link. Here I give a pretty personal account, your honour, of my honest experiences with Social Media and monitoring there of.
Growing Up WIth Social Media
I can actually say that I have matured alongside social media: back as far as doing a bit of phone phreaking myself in 1986, and seeing my first green-screen e-mail in 1988.
The first sign for me that social media had arrived was when I worked in an early University internet department, mainly dealing with the intranet as it was even called back then. Newsgroups by then were well established, and had predated the www and even internet protocol per se.
Newsgroups were a special area accessible by early e-mail clients like GOPHER and the early Netscape. Despite their unglamerous text based appearance, they were really the most interesting area available through the new browsers to many like me: they were REAL people expressing opinions from around the globe.
For me, these newsgroups encompass all that we would recognise as social media today: discussion, micro blog alerts ( the twitter "glue spots" as I call them), closed or open social contact networks and blogging.
Newsgroups quickly went http/www and became franchised into yahoo who maybe even dominated a while, some other independent http and POP mail providers and then google groups which is maybe the most active today with perhaps the longest living newsgroups surviving in this media.
Bulletins and Jumpers
With http, and it's predecessors from dial up modem days ( one at a time user postings and readings), another type of media surface appeared; the bulletin board and a closely related species, the jump station. The subtle difference from newsgroups was maybe anonymity or lack of e-mail alerts : bulletins were organised like web pages or even forums of today, and gave useful updates or just chatter. Jump stations gave firstly address and telefon numbers to other "communities" and then later www. links. In a way they were like search engines and today you can compare jump stations to Twitter and people posting links in FaceBook.
Newsgroups evolved fully into the forum with threaded and embedded discussion, just as newsgroups had in 1992. Also they mostly still retain e-mail alerts which was ther back in 1995 at least.
The Birth of Social Media Monitoring
Certainly by the time I was working with web sites in all earnest, we had started to pay good attention to forums. I would have at a guess that the FBI were pretty interested in Phone Phreaks. Probably the CIA and KGB were looking into the quirky little communications programmers on the early military and governmental networks made: maybe even tolerating them in order to give themselves some more work to do, or even placing double agents in the loops.
In 1998 I was required to look into a forum and newsgroup the company I worked for had just taken over the DNS address for and advertising revenue. We took pretty good care to walk the legal line then; don't get caught interfering with social media as a host! As soon as you started policing the forums, you took a responsibility to continue doing this. Legal precedents were still in their early days, some lawyers would argue no doubt that this is still and inconclusive area steered by purely case law and libel. Forum rules were to be self policed as has been the standard means of keeping ISPs and hosting companies out of jail ever since.
Anyway, we monitored the forum and reported back to our clients, the advertisers and some other trad' media ones on what people were saying about them. This was done purely on a verbal basis as far as I was concerned.
We also had an internal use only, atomz search engine IIRC, and I guess we could well have started doing stats on brand name hits, certainly we did manual sentiment rating on threads and brands! By 2000 we were delivering crisis management reports and closing forums if anything went out of hand. Redevelopment or loss of original data were the publicised excuses for pulling contentious and libelous issues.
So really there is nothing all that new in social media or spying on SM, it by in large has been done before.
Social Media, aka Consumer Generated Media: the latter is preferable to the author in context of marketing.
Social - people being erm, sociable, erm.... people communicating in an unofficial atmosphere
Media - The king of Medes and his Persian enemies predate even the use of the word in latin to describe the written capture surface, the network and the nodes there upon. In his case the papyrus letters, the couriers and the writers and recipients of politcal information and commands.
Social Media is definable by to necessary conditions : distrubtion via a network and dialogue.
In other words, if a blogger bloggs and no one reads it, did they ever really write it?
A Brief History of Social Media
When was the first network available for dialogue? Depends what you see as a network: when was the first electronic network available to enable social media to happen?
According to some commentators, you can trace social media back to the early days of interlopers on the phone network and modem based systems: the phone phreaks and the hackers.
However, if you think about it the very first illicit social media e-comms go way back before then: to the first telegraph operators and Marconni's transatlantic preambles. The official version will be the press release and "only for serious communications" but you can bet these guys along the "railroads" tapped out " hey , how are the wife and kids doing?" in 1845.
There are of course some more alley ways and oddities, like ICQ and messenger, which relate to tweeting today and you can read more on great blogs like this link. Here I give a pretty personal account, your honour, of my honest experiences with Social Media and monitoring there of.
Growing Up WIth Social Media
I can actually say that I have matured alongside social media: back as far as doing a bit of phone phreaking myself in 1986, and seeing my first green-screen e-mail in 1988.
The first sign for me that social media had arrived was when I worked in an early University internet department, mainly dealing with the intranet as it was even called back then. Newsgroups by then were well established, and had predated the www and even internet protocol per se.
Newsgroups were a special area accessible by early e-mail clients like GOPHER and the early Netscape. Despite their unglamerous text based appearance, they were really the most interesting area available through the new browsers to many like me: they were REAL people expressing opinions from around the globe.
For me, these newsgroups encompass all that we would recognise as social media today: discussion, micro blog alerts ( the twitter "glue spots" as I call them), closed or open social contact networks and blogging.
Newsgroups quickly went http/www and became franchised into yahoo who maybe even dominated a while, some other independent http and POP mail providers and then google groups which is maybe the most active today with perhaps the longest living newsgroups surviving in this media.
Bulletins and Jumpers
With http, and it's predecessors from dial up modem days ( one at a time user postings and readings), another type of media surface appeared; the bulletin board and a closely related species, the jump station. The subtle difference from newsgroups was maybe anonymity or lack of e-mail alerts : bulletins were organised like web pages or even forums of today, and gave useful updates or just chatter. Jump stations gave firstly address and telefon numbers to other "communities" and then later www. links. In a way they were like search engines and today you can compare jump stations to Twitter and people posting links in FaceBook.
Newsgroups evolved fully into the forum with threaded and embedded discussion, just as newsgroups had in 1992. Also they mostly still retain e-mail alerts which was ther back in 1995 at least.
The Birth of Social Media Monitoring
Certainly by the time I was working with web sites in all earnest, we had started to pay good attention to forums. I would have at a guess that the FBI were pretty interested in Phone Phreaks. Probably the CIA and KGB were looking into the quirky little communications programmers on the early military and governmental networks made: maybe even tolerating them in order to give themselves some more work to do, or even placing double agents in the loops.
In 1998 I was required to look into a forum and newsgroup the company I worked for had just taken over the DNS address for and advertising revenue. We took pretty good care to walk the legal line then; don't get caught interfering with social media as a host! As soon as you started policing the forums, you took a responsibility to continue doing this. Legal precedents were still in their early days, some lawyers would argue no doubt that this is still and inconclusive area steered by purely case law and libel. Forum rules were to be self policed as has been the standard means of keeping ISPs and hosting companies out of jail ever since.
Anyway, we monitored the forum and reported back to our clients, the advertisers and some other trad' media ones on what people were saying about them. This was done purely on a verbal basis as far as I was concerned.
We also had an internal use only, atomz search engine IIRC, and I guess we could well have started doing stats on brand name hits, certainly we did manual sentiment rating on threads and brands! By 2000 we were delivering crisis management reports and closing forums if anything went out of hand. Redevelopment or loss of original data were the publicised excuses for pulling contentious and libelous issues.
So really there is nothing all that new in social media or spying on SM, it by in large has been done before.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Social Media Watchers
I was reminded on the danger of over-analytics when I visited a forum myself recently.
My favourite camera manufacturer is going to focus, punnily enough, on smaller cameras and put a hold on new R&D in their older, larger lens system. This has resulted in a hole shit storm of over reaction in forums. They are just shifting focus according to their management.
For consumer electronics, forums are still the place to gain detailed insight into consumer opinion. Facebook is often left wanting for involvement with the groups, as they just never seem to get a critical mass for even large consumer gadget pages. Twitter and the other web SMSs can help with gaining a barometer view of consumer opinion and help firefight crisises. Perhaps the annonymity of forums (most use a handel with a similarily obscure hot- or G-mail address apparently) leads consumers to speak more candidly.
With the former, the one forum, dpreview, has over 29 million posts, but once you get granular on brands or sub forums, and look at recent posts, then you realise that analytic tools can be misleading. Looking at fluxes in consumer hits on brand keywords can be somewhat misleading, when there is a strong undercurrent of discontent or potential for NPI ears to listen.
It is in other words, often better to identify the key forums and just have a junior marketeer keep an eye for trouble and summarise threads rather than go employ a company to show you some key word hit counts and what happened long before you needed to know it happened!
With Twitter too, so far the tools are pretty useless and manual labour to identify keywords, tweet structire, retweet rate and then sentiment are so far a better bet. Very soon though there will be good sentiment analytics, but they will need continual manual tweaking to catch sentiment in the abbreviated tweetspeak world.
The value of analytics has to be balanced with the value of just reading the stuff and tracking the lead influencers manually, especially in "issue management" as fire-fighting is often called in the ePR world now. Over time, brand tracking and sentiment rating is of value, but must be seen in context of the development of the media itself and always related in relative terms to competing brands and some other benchmark brand arena.
My favourite camera manufacturer is going to focus, punnily enough, on smaller cameras and put a hold on new R&D in their older, larger lens system. This has resulted in a hole shit storm of over reaction in forums. They are just shifting focus according to their management.
For consumer electronics, forums are still the place to gain detailed insight into consumer opinion. Facebook is often left wanting for involvement with the groups, as they just never seem to get a critical mass for even large consumer gadget pages. Twitter and the other web SMSs can help with gaining a barometer view of consumer opinion and help firefight crisises. Perhaps the annonymity of forums (most use a handel with a similarily obscure hot- or G-mail address apparently) leads consumers to speak more candidly.
With the former, the one forum, dpreview, has over 29 million posts, but once you get granular on brands or sub forums, and look at recent posts, then you realise that analytic tools can be misleading. Looking at fluxes in consumer hits on brand keywords can be somewhat misleading, when there is a strong undercurrent of discontent or potential for NPI ears to listen.
It is in other words, often better to identify the key forums and just have a junior marketeer keep an eye for trouble and summarise threads rather than go employ a company to show you some key word hit counts and what happened long before you needed to know it happened!
With Twitter too, so far the tools are pretty useless and manual labour to identify keywords, tweet structire, retweet rate and then sentiment are so far a better bet. Very soon though there will be good sentiment analytics, but they will need continual manual tweaking to catch sentiment in the abbreviated tweetspeak world.
The value of analytics has to be balanced with the value of just reading the stuff and tracking the lead influencers manually, especially in "issue management" as fire-fighting is often called in the ePR world now. Over time, brand tracking and sentiment rating is of value, but must be seen in context of the development of the media itself and always related in relative terms to competing brands and some other benchmark brand arena.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Photo Time: Simulated Depth of Field, blurred in GIMP
Simulating Shortened Depth of Field : Making a mask and applying it to layers to blur the background.
In the old days, most quality cameras could produce nice portraits with the background brlurred. These days the smaller digital cameras create a vert deep depth of field because of the short distance to the sensor chip from the lens, so the background is often very sharp. On dSLRs too, some lenses don't «stop up» enough to give an open enough aperture to «throw the background» either.
However help is at hand because t you can make up for this in PS or GIMP etc, by drawing out a mask and using it with layers to paste a blurred background onto your original sharp foreground. In the image above you can get the idea!
I had a go at the GIMP GURU's excellent tutorial, but found for GIMP v2.6 that there were a couple of functions that either differed, or were desirable to use.WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO DO: Work-in-porgress Images are at the bottom of the blog: you are going to make a couple of copies of the original, and then on one make a "mask" which will be the area the original, sharp background will shine through, so to speak. You will blurr the edges of the white mask so it merges to the soon to be fuzzy background, and then invert the colour to black. This mask is then laid ontop of the other copy which is first blurred in the software options. Finally you merge the mask to the blurred layer using " apply mask" and then stack this ontop of the original so the person or object appears sharp on a blurred background.
HARD STUFF:
Small errors in the Layers Dialogue box can cost all: you have to take care to do things in the right order, with the correct settings for the "apply mask" and remember to stack them in the right order so the mask is on top. : worth saving WIP copies as you go as xcf files.
"toggeling" between selected area after cutting and background on the mask build, then both in order to go through "cutting" the mast needs to be done fully awake!
It can also be difficult in cutting the mask and then blurring it's edges to get a natural fade into the background, with no halo and no sharp, unnatural edge or vignetted outline areas. Also, getting the right amount of blurring on the background
WORK FLOW
> Copy Original > Lasso Select Sharp Object e.g. person!
> Blacken bacground with paint can fill
> Work up mask in white with an underlying orig' image as guide in BW >
> Blur the edges very slightly to 4 or 5 on gausian, invert to black on white [SAVE A COPY!!! ]
> Open a copy of the original image and blur it to more than '20' on gausian
> [Add Layer Mask] to the blurred image ; NB as ['white opaque']> paste on the mask to this layer in layer's dialogue box
> Open the original as a layer in the window> move it down the stack order in the dialogue box
> merge down the stack to end with. [SAVE as jpeg]
In Detail: On GIMP v2.6
Open image File, then CTRL D to make a duplicate GIMP window as a jhandy back up / reference
Make a new layer as follows: [Pull Down]Layer>new from visible> duplicate this layer with CTRL D while in the layers dialogue box > rename the duplicate "Mask"
Use the lasso to clip out the foreground or objects to be sharp. Go to a black and white view or a colour channel ( [Decompose], see GIMP GURU) if you need a clearer outline to work on ie more contrast between subject and background making it easier to lasso correctly
Once the area is drawn around, double click/click on the lasso in tool bar. The area should now be selected inside a hatched line. Press [CTRL-I] to select background.
Select FILL tool ( paint can) on black and fill the background
Save a copy once you are here as an xcf file
Now we want to try to force the outline of the subject to white. Right-click in the image and choose (Image/Colors/Threshold). Drag the middle pointer on the 0-255 scale left to extend white over the white areas
If you have the image (copy from start) open as a layer, then make it grayscale: otherwise make a new layer and paste ALL of the original image onto it, anchoring the floating layer with the little anchor icon in the Layers dialogue window. Choose this new layer and reduce opacity to about 50 -60% such that you can see a ghostly effect : now you can check the mask fits and captures the area you want sharp. Once done, delete the mask guide layer by right clicking and selecting delete layer.
Now apply a gausian blur to the mask layerAT ONLY 4 to 6 pixels: this blurs the edges of the mask such that it will run into the to-be-blurred background and avoids obvious lines. Once computed, choose COLOUR>INVERT to now make the image Black on White as the actual mask. Save this and save an xcf or jpeg copy.
In the Layers dialog, select the original image in the drop down box if you have it or paste and anchor from the other original open. Then click the Duplicate Layer buttonDouble-click on the name of the top layer. In the Edit Layer Attributes dialog, rename the new layer “Blurred”.
I (Filters/Blur/Gaussian Blur )). Experiment to find a value that works well for your desired “depth of field”. Generally you won’t want to go too crazy with this or the look will be all wrong.Try 25 for a partial blur and over 40 for quite unsharp.
SAVE A COPY of the WIP at this stage such that you can rework the blur if you feel it is not blurred enough or vice versa
Go back to the Layers dialog and right-click on the “Blurred” layer; select “Add Layer Mask”.NB: At this point the next radio button selection is vital ! In the Add Mask Options dialog make sure White (Full Opacity) is selected. Then go to the black mask and select all and paste onto the blurred layer ONTO IT IN THE DIALOGUE BOX. Anchor it and deselect the eye on the mask itself
You should see that there is a mask marked out in grey checker pattern over the area you want sharp and a nicely blurred background. Work back with CTRL Z if it is not to your burry liking!
Open the original as a new layer. Move the orignal down on the list in the dialogue box so it is under the mask-blurred, and therefore will appear as the layer beneath on the final image. This shouuld now fill the masked area but be written over outside by the nice blurr you have created ! Jobs a gud'n.
(delete the «mask»). Select the top layer, Blurred with mask, and then Choose Layers: Merge down save the image as a jpeg.
TIPS! When practising, reduce the image size and resolution to a web snap shot: this will make all the rendering and saving of your trial and errors a lot faster while you learn, and then you have a web ready series of shots!
TIPS! Be careful with the lower edge in portrait shots. When "cutting" ie outling the area to be the mask, check there is no foreground object to be blurred: short depth of field means it is just a slice into the distance which is in focus.
TIPS! It can be wise to give a margin to the figure for the edge blur: but if say it is a close up of a head with some diminishing depth of field on the person being good, then you can cut to the edge. This will vary with images : for instance, I find those with shadow from flash on one side need more there so that the shadow is softened. Trial and error will show you what works best, but it is difficult to extend a mask once «cut out».
TIPS! In GIMP 2.6 at least, when you have outlined the mask, and chosen to invert to background [CTRL I ] if the paintcan fill does not fill with black totally, then you can select a huge brush size and just go over it all in black: the foreground selected object will not be painted on as if it was "waxed". To fill in the mask itself, reverse with CTRL - I and then use white of course to remove any small specs or detail.
TIPS ! With similar images and a good contrast / edge to the background you do not really have to bother with an underlying black and white "ghost" to guide your fine working of the edges of the mask.
Footnote: Following on from that last tip:: According to GIMP GURU though " The best contrast between items can often be found in the green channel. It’s a good place to start looking, in any case. So the first thing we will do is decompose to individual RGB channels." as follows:
"Right-click in the image and choose (Image/Mode/Decompose). In the Decompose dialog box, choose RGB and click OK, Examine each channel to find which has the best contrast for isolating the subject. In this case the green channel image was the best. Close the other two images that you aren’t going to use. With a little work this green channel image will become our mask."
ISSUE HERE IS THAT I DO NOT SEE MULTIPLE COLOUR CHANNELS; ONLY ONE AND THIS DOES NOT EDIT:
Images
Too sharp
: too much detail in background to make the people stand out. The father is a little lost because the eye/brain places him more with the sharp sofa in the background
NB I have also been careful to exlcude foreground objects from the people so the foreground is also blurred, and been careful with the table edge and books: a lower edge should be checked for this in head-shoulders shots.
Voila!!! 
The eye now picks out the girls much quicker as being that to spend time on looking at, and the father is then pulled out more from the background detal.
The more you look at this shot, the more your eye-brain brings out the people from the background it now considers uninteresting!
I have put on an info dot to track any missuse of this photo. Pleas PM me before you copy this image for use.
Final with Crop
I like to crop! Here I could have used GIMP to "clone" out the light cabel/switch into to the beige wall in order to have a really clean image.
Note also: the fine detail on the LHS girls hair is not actually cut to a very fine mask detail: the eye/brain make the detail stand out more from the background now the rest is blurred but if when this is enlarged, the rough work shows in the hair and on a slight halo round the man's head.
Original cropped for comparison
All images (c) 2010 author. All text not quoted from GIMP GURU is original (c)2010 author
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Hard Work! Repeat ! Work Hard"
Now I note that it is time for a new intake of masters students to the 2011 MSc Marketing course.
Firstly congratulations on landing a place on a course which will give you a head start in your career in marketing or business otherwise, in providing you with knowledge, skills and not the least attitudes to suceed.
In terms of your career, marketing is not for the faint hearted. It requires a lot of percieverance just to get a career started, even to get interviews or work experience to get half way up to the first rung on the ladder. You have to be very tough or very lucky to get on and in my experience all too many Msc graduates have vaguely wandered into marketing because it sounds interesting, without knowing that it is very, very hard to get into once you finish.
The freddy blog seems to have been read a lot by previous graduates and I will stress again upon the new students, that marketing is a very, very, propostorously competitive profession to get into and then progress within. Please read back over my previous blogs on job hunting and how to get on: your job hunt preparation begins now and will start in earnest in October if you want to make the best possible head way against the larger brand companies.
Marketing is so extremely tough to get into because so many people want to work in it, not just qualified marketeers. Many of those general business graduates want in, many sales people want to move in(degree or no degree) and then you also have all and sundry BA, BSc, for example many psychology graduates, wanting a piece of the action. Then of course, there is the whole oxbridge bunch of medieval historians or theoretical economics who seem to be able to slide into plumb jobs. They have a head start because so many previous brand managers came from the UK's own "ivy league" and follow the "model for success" by recruting back from Oxbridge, Durham and so on.
You will need your luck, but the harder you try in your studies, job hunt and network building, the luckier you will get.. My career languised until one day I took a call and it was the golden opportunity to get a real start. I seized it, although it was pretty mediocre pay, and worked darn hard to learn the practical aspects of marketing on the shop floor of a "through the line" ad agency. After two years, the world so to speak was actually my oyster because the big agencies had stopped training new graduates and prefered experienced people from even much smaller agencies. I moved on to a decent wage and company car and later had the option to move "client side" for fewer working hours.
Read back through my advice and take it as highly opinionated, personal stuff, but remember it is based on the realities of job hunting and building a career. I have worked for 15 years with internet marketing for example, so new technology does not take over from the human hum-drum of pressing flesh and getting yourself a job these days.
Firstly congratulations on landing a place on a course which will give you a head start in your career in marketing or business otherwise, in providing you with knowledge, skills and not the least attitudes to suceed.
In terms of your career, marketing is not for the faint hearted. It requires a lot of percieverance just to get a career started, even to get interviews or work experience to get half way up to the first rung on the ladder. You have to be very tough or very lucky to get on and in my experience all too many Msc graduates have vaguely wandered into marketing because it sounds interesting, without knowing that it is very, very hard to get into once you finish.
The freddy blog seems to have been read a lot by previous graduates and I will stress again upon the new students, that marketing is a very, very, propostorously competitive profession to get into and then progress within. Please read back over my previous blogs on job hunting and how to get on: your job hunt preparation begins now and will start in earnest in October if you want to make the best possible head way against the larger brand companies.
Marketing is so extremely tough to get into because so many people want to work in it, not just qualified marketeers. Many of those general business graduates want in, many sales people want to move in(degree or no degree) and then you also have all and sundry BA, BSc, for example many psychology graduates, wanting a piece of the action. Then of course, there is the whole oxbridge bunch of medieval historians or theoretical economics who seem to be able to slide into plumb jobs. They have a head start because so many previous brand managers came from the UK's own "ivy league" and follow the "model for success" by recruting back from Oxbridge, Durham and so on.
You will need your luck, but the harder you try in your studies, job hunt and network building, the luckier you will get.. My career languised until one day I took a call and it was the golden opportunity to get a real start. I seized it, although it was pretty mediocre pay, and worked darn hard to learn the practical aspects of marketing on the shop floor of a "through the line" ad agency. After two years, the world so to speak was actually my oyster because the big agencies had stopped training new graduates and prefered experienced people from even much smaller agencies. I moved on to a decent wage and company car and later had the option to move "client side" for fewer working hours.
Read back through my advice and take it as highly opinionated, personal stuff, but remember it is based on the realities of job hunting and building a career. I have worked for 15 years with internet marketing for example, so new technology does not take over from the human hum-drum of pressing flesh and getting yourself a job these days.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Get Some Ink
Ink is fast becoming a thing of the past: even my local book handlers have a range of computer peripherals, GPSs, digital charts, software and interactive CD/DVD ROMs...and I live in the back end of the sticks.
However there will always be a market for books, magazines and stuff to hang on your wall without any power supply!
In the olden days, photo print qaulity was determined by ISO and resulting grain of the image, with even some 200 ASA transparancies being good enough for enlargements of several feet on photographic paper. If you didn't like the grain, then like being in the Louvre, take a step back and be impressed.
Boots the chemist or Jessops aside, there was also a certain directness when dealing with "ink" printers and the whole colour process: I came into advertising at the very end of the era of direct lithographic printing, "analogue" if you like, where each stage of printing had a different print prep or finishing company. Plates were produced one place often to get the best quality to a price, and the proofs, the large negatives of each colour litho process, were kept by us in a most guarded way! You felt a certain tactile and direct connection to what you could hold in your hand when compared to the mouse jockey world of photoshop which came in soon after.
HOW MANY PIXELS DID YOU SAY ??????????????
Today though, what quality can you expect and what should you deliver for home use?
Take my own Olympus DSLR: 10 Megapixel camera
===========
Largest Image = 3648 x 2736 pixels
===========
::
This is actually 9.8 mpx and is a ratio of 1.33 height to width: four thirds !
large size : fine means best jpeg compression on the display.
If we have a very high quality black and white print at 330dpi then we can utilise all those pixels to give a size in inches thus:
11 x 8 1/4 inches at 330dpi: in other words an A4 side! 210x270mm
We would then want to print this on a 600dpi home or shop printer to get the absolute best tonal range and depth in B/W for a delivered 330 ppi (pixels per inch). Alternatively, if it was a once-in-a-life time photo, you could either get it printed to silver-chemistry ie photographic paper at 1000-2000 dpi or if you wanted to sell it, go to a photo lithographers and get it done on a plate of maybe 660 dpi or higher.
To have an absolutely best qaulity print in colour though, the size would be one quarter this, because each dot on older printers can only have one colour in "dots per inch" so three or four dots are needed to reproduce each pixel to a degree of highly accurate hue (tonal / colour range) and tonal depth (brightness/saturation).
However, printer technology cheats: the high quality 330 dpi - 600 dpi home printer is available to reproduce large PPI quite well to an acceptable quality. The printer driver compiles the pixels into a best colour match for it's hue, saturationand tonal depth and recreates this as points composed of many dots, utilising a best compression and half tone ink saturation to process the image to a best appearance.
The Practice of Relativity
Relative Size:
An A4 sheet is 210 by 280 mm, that will say 21cm by 28cm or 8.25 x 11inches by
A HD screen for now, has 1920 x 1080 pixels, so most digital cameras now can fill at least twice that size with an image without any "pixelation" ie a very good image!
A good quality print can be achieved at relatively low dpi, as to be seen at http://www.smugmug.com/help/print-quality. Here an image is printed out to a large size to convince photographers that the eye actually does not percieve more than 80 dpi as poor, quite the opposite. PC screens are 72dpi, while macs used to be at least, 100dpi or lines equivalent. Another reason MACs were better for graphic work.
The image shown, a racing car, lends itself to an easy reproduction though: it has good contrast, sharp details but no very thin lines or patterns, a thrown background and bright colours. It is printed at 80dpi on a large format just to show how good you can get from precieved lower than usual print quality.
So for a colour print you may expect to be able to get a perceptably high quality at 200 PPI priting out at max resolution for the printer 300 dpi or so. This means that :
18.25 x 13.66 inches
When we say high quality in this instance it means for print material seen from a normal reading distance, not under special scrutiny.
For a potrait to be hung on a wall and viewed from a greater distance then a far lower DPI may be acceptable: even 72ppi or normal screen resolution may be practical for printing:
Thus:
50 x 38 inches @72dpi
Professional Printing
________________________
Printers use either lithographic plates or screen print by in large : ink jet printing is still not cost effective enough for publishing and laser -toner printers are not there yet either.
Lithographic means the process of chemical etching the colour separations from the original negative : in the old days when I worked with printers, these were best achieved from wide format camera negatives or positive transparencies (slide film) using a series of different filters to create the plate for each colour ink.
Chemicals were used to mask and etch from exposing the plate to light,
and plates for say A4 book printing at 4 sides a plate plus "bleed area" were between £300 and £1000 per set.
The print plates are then loaded up on the press and in use, coated with ink and pressed to the paper which is moved very accurately through the different parts of the print line. Hence the registration is very good as time is taken to ensure problems are eliminated by good preparation or stopping the press asap.
A usual "screen" or lines per inch equated to 330dpi and images in photoshop were handled at that level of ppi, with some leewaywith a "positional" associated to the quark express file such that the printer could use their expertise in preparing : often delivered up to 20% larger than needed to a quality printer image before and during the production of colour separations.
Litho' as it was affectionately called, was at one time too expensive for reproducing ordinary print. Books as late as the 1970s when I was a nipper, often had sections of colour "plates" bound in at convenient points in the book : these were often a pain to refer to from the story or reference as the convenience was only for the printer to sew in the better quality paper such that each insert spanned four pages.
You can still see this today in many biographies in paper back, where images of exploits in the SAS or whatever are collected in the centre or at two points in the book. Paperbacks, like newpapers and most large catalogues are screen printed.
Screen print works by having a mesh screen over a drum with ink being rolled on continuosly and another drum compressing the paper roll onto the print area. The paper like a gigantic toilet roll. Thus it is continuous for huge quantities of thin and therefore cheaper paper than could be used in plate presses.
Originally screen was just in black and white with maybe an extra colour, red most often, for the banner line being used. This is where "half tone" and other screen adjustments came into use to produce reasonable quality black and white photo reproduction by creating a better tonal depth and contrast in a print image than the dpi or Lpi as they call it, would permit. However colour separations came into use in the 1980s: some seem to use RGB for colour areas with a usual black screen being used in both images and text, others CYMK.
The great advantage of screen printing is the huge volume of paper that can be printed in a short time: however it is limited in dpi and also is prone to poor registration: the fuzzy or double images you often see in colour images or graphics. It is very expensive to reset a whole print run if this arises or even to scrap a minutes production, so these are sent out anyway for sale at newsagents etc. Usually you would need to travel to another newsagent chain or even town to get part of the run which was okay!
To save on costs and reduce issues with registration in colour screen printing, many catalogues are printed in three colours : black and two special corporate or style pan tone matched inks. Even some high qaulity art books and magazines use just one colour in addition to black : this can be very dramatic in landscapes with say only the blue or green being there on top of the grey tones.
Today, I would say that all plates on litho and screen is done with laser etching : the image is either purely digital in jpeg format or scanned from a negative or transparency by coloured lasers : the separations are then produced in digital format directly from the latter and by computation from jpegs. The famous "heidelberg" machine for A4 x 4 print plate laser-etching fits nicely in half a squash court with room to walk around it!
Even in 1999 when I was up for moving back to the Ad' industry in Scotland, I went to a printer who still used the grand daddy of them all: type set printing which has it's roots in the wood cut presses used to produce the first printed paper money, and the Lutherin bible in German and English.
The university printers a decade before still used these presses and the prepared litho plates for BW logos, drawing or other images. These lacked any real grey tones!
To cut you data nuts down to size in a little Luddite fashion, the term "upper case" refers to the case containing capital lead letters the type setter would reach into when required in assembling scentences onto the type face for printing!!
COLOURs
The CYMK was industry standard but by the mid nineties all printers I knew could have atleast a fith colour or technical process, like a UV spot filter or spot varnish. K was used for black : to do with not being confused with
"Blue" which was used before cyan was the colour chosen.
The trouble with CYMK is that it does not produce all colours equally well, eg orange, and where printers used to mix specific inks to match hues in a book say on birds by James Bond with colour plates in the 1950s, that art is no longer seen as cost effective. Blue skies often have a purpely appearance with notable red dots and this is due to the clash between the cyan and the magenta fighting to make a blue which is near cyan but not near enough.
Orange is never well reproduced as it is a mix of yellow and red: magenta is not red enough and some cyan comes in the litho process or digital separation: thus orange on any CYMK standard pallette if you like, is a mucky brownish orange.
Correspondingly, Orange telecom in the UK were the first company I heard of who stipulated a fifth colour process with of course, the proper corporate pan tone orange for their block logo and fonts.
The extra processes, colour or treatment, use the same basic component parts of the four colour process; a machine unit which very accurately places the paper from the last print onto the next plate. Thus software skills, investment and pure physical factory area are the external limiting factors, while there are limits to how much ink a paper will take.
Even in CYMK, when printing black areas with photos supposed to be frameless, mysterious "chinese window frames" would appear where a positional frame around the image became "super saturated" and shiny with layers or ink.
Many of the top printers for corporate material went over to seven colour process print lines for litho printing, which may seem a bit like "being the last to make buggy whips: darn good buggy whips" while everyone goes new media.
Colour; future:
On the topic of new media, jpeg is in RGB which suits of course LCD monitors very well. However now four colour TV Flat screens are available with a yellow which gives a more pleasing and realistic colour than RGB. Although this may take some time to come to the general market for computers, the technical challenge of "re-separating" an RGB signal to a fourth colour is now practical for better reproduction!
Technically RGB in an LED screen should be perfect colour reproduction as the transmitted, addative colours are bright enough to give hue, saturation and BW tonal depth is better due to the "black ness" of the LEDs which are not transmitting.
A pixel contains a given value for both the hue and the tonal depth: the shade if you like. The LAB set up is actually far better at handling images for print and absolute quality (even when considering CYMK as final out put) but because RGB is the standard for monitors then this is the prefered handling.
I would expect , or wishfully think, a move over to image production using the LAB system where the BW is it's own separation: red green and blue yellow are the other two separations so the fourth colour would be a yellow, making probably for better judgements from eye to screen in what is a good colour adjustment in the "ring" of images shown in most software packages.
I would look to Mr. Jobs' job when that frickin iPaddy makes the stock fall and they move back to their home land of graphic arts.
Picture Content
The requirement to produce a better quality image nearing the ppi x 4 required is driven in part by the content of the image.
Obviously if the subject of the image contains a lot of fine detail or pattern which the eye is lead to, then a high dpi will produce the best results.
Conversely, lack of detail and contrast can require experimentation for best print outs.
Both high light and low light images have subtle tonal differences in BW alone, and any noise from the CYMK compression / conversion detracts from the qaulity: Also the tonal depth will need to be enhanced due to this subtle changes over areas of the picture such that they don't appear "posterised" with harder changes between areas appearing as bands or lines not present in the original.
Hence you need to have four colours per pixel to make an acceptable print quality and thus on a 330 dpi printer you need to divide your megapixel size by 1320 to get how many inches would be absolute best.
Best Fit ; ppi: dpi and image scaling
Practically it would be quicker to use some trial and error, by first printing out a small scale size at 330dpi in colour, or lower quality like 100dpi to see the areas which may be problematic in percieved image qaulity.
Then take a crop of these potentially troublesome areas and vary the size of the image output, writing a text comment with their details so you can keep track of them after printing : view then from a distance and determine which size is acceptable. Calculate out your total size achievable: it will probably be bigger than your printer's width and height!
A picture with less tonal depth and more primary colour composition, more contrast and stronger colours in other words, would maybe be a direct conversion to 330 ppi to dpi or lower upon some scrutiny.
At this stage it would be far easier to move away from using ppi and the whole pixel thing, and use PS's, or light room or Corel's etc etc, image scaling function which gives you dpi and actual inches size or metric E-Qs.
==========================================================================
Notes on sizes
For printing:
YSF YF YN YB
X (Middle)
3200 x 2400
2560 x 1920 XSF XF XN XB
1600 x 1200
W (Small)
1280 x 960
WSF WF WN WB
1024 x 768
For
small-sized
prints and use
on a web site
640 x 480
However there will always be a market for books, magazines and stuff to hang on your wall without any power supply!
In the olden days, photo print qaulity was determined by ISO and resulting grain of the image, with even some 200 ASA transparancies being good enough for enlargements of several feet on photographic paper. If you didn't like the grain, then like being in the Louvre, take a step back and be impressed.
Boots the chemist or Jessops aside, there was also a certain directness when dealing with "ink" printers and the whole colour process: I came into advertising at the very end of the era of direct lithographic printing, "analogue" if you like, where each stage of printing had a different print prep or finishing company. Plates were produced one place often to get the best quality to a price, and the proofs, the large negatives of each colour litho process, were kept by us in a most guarded way! You felt a certain tactile and direct connection to what you could hold in your hand when compared to the mouse jockey world of photoshop which came in soon after.
HOW MANY PIXELS DID YOU SAY ??????????????
Today though, what quality can you expect and what should you deliver for home use?
Take my own Olympus DSLR: 10 Megapixel camera
===========
Largest Image = 3648 x 2736 pixels
===========
::
This is actually 9.8 mpx and is a ratio of 1.33 height to width: four thirds !
large size : fine means best jpeg compression on the display.
If we have a very high quality black and white print at 330dpi then we can utilise all those pixels to give a size in inches thus:
11 x 8 1/4 inches at 330dpi: in other words an A4 side! 210x270mm
We would then want to print this on a 600dpi home or shop printer to get the absolute best tonal range and depth in B/W for a delivered 330 ppi (pixels per inch). Alternatively, if it was a once-in-a-life time photo, you could either get it printed to silver-chemistry ie photographic paper at 1000-2000 dpi or if you wanted to sell it, go to a photo lithographers and get it done on a plate of maybe 660 dpi or higher.
To have an absolutely best qaulity print in colour though, the size would be one quarter this, because each dot on older printers can only have one colour in "dots per inch" so three or four dots are needed to reproduce each pixel to a degree of highly accurate hue (tonal / colour range) and tonal depth (brightness/saturation).
However, printer technology cheats: the high quality 330 dpi - 600 dpi home printer is available to reproduce large PPI quite well to an acceptable quality. The printer driver compiles the pixels into a best colour match for it's hue, saturationand tonal depth and recreates this as points composed of many dots, utilising a best compression and half tone ink saturation to process the image to a best appearance.
The Practice of Relativity
Relative Size:
An A4 sheet is 210 by 280 mm, that will say 21cm by 28cm or 8.25 x 11inches by
A HD screen for now, has 1920 x 1080 pixels, so most digital cameras now can fill at least twice that size with an image without any "pixelation" ie a very good image!
A good quality print can be achieved at relatively low dpi, as to be seen at http://www.smugmug.com/help/print-quality. Here an image is printed out to a large size to convince photographers that the eye actually does not percieve more than 80 dpi as poor, quite the opposite. PC screens are 72dpi, while macs used to be at least, 100dpi or lines equivalent. Another reason MACs were better for graphic work.
The image shown, a racing car, lends itself to an easy reproduction though: it has good contrast, sharp details but no very thin lines or patterns, a thrown background and bright colours. It is printed at 80dpi on a large format just to show how good you can get from precieved lower than usual print quality.
So for a colour print you may expect to be able to get a perceptably high quality at 200 PPI priting out at max resolution for the printer 300 dpi or so. This means that :
18.25 x 13.66 inches
When we say high quality in this instance it means for print material seen from a normal reading distance, not under special scrutiny.
For a potrait to be hung on a wall and viewed from a greater distance then a far lower DPI may be acceptable: even 72ppi or normal screen resolution may be practical for printing:
Thus:
50 x 38 inches @72dpi
Professional Printing
________________________
Printers use either lithographic plates or screen print by in large : ink jet printing is still not cost effective enough for publishing and laser -toner printers are not there yet either.
Lithographic means the process of chemical etching the colour separations from the original negative : in the old days when I worked with printers, these were best achieved from wide format camera negatives or positive transparencies (slide film) using a series of different filters to create the plate for each colour ink.
Chemicals were used to mask and etch from exposing the plate to light,
and plates for say A4 book printing at 4 sides a plate plus "bleed area" were between £300 and £1000 per set.
The print plates are then loaded up on the press and in use, coated with ink and pressed to the paper which is moved very accurately through the different parts of the print line. Hence the registration is very good as time is taken to ensure problems are eliminated by good preparation or stopping the press asap.
A usual "screen" or lines per inch equated to 330dpi and images in photoshop were handled at that level of ppi, with some leewaywith a "positional" associated to the quark express file such that the printer could use their expertise in preparing : often delivered up to 20% larger than needed to a quality printer image before and during the production of colour separations.
Litho' as it was affectionately called, was at one time too expensive for reproducing ordinary print. Books as late as the 1970s when I was a nipper, often had sections of colour "plates" bound in at convenient points in the book : these were often a pain to refer to from the story or reference as the convenience was only for the printer to sew in the better quality paper such that each insert spanned four pages.
You can still see this today in many biographies in paper back, where images of exploits in the SAS or whatever are collected in the centre or at two points in the book. Paperbacks, like newpapers and most large catalogues are screen printed.
Screen print works by having a mesh screen over a drum with ink being rolled on continuosly and another drum compressing the paper roll onto the print area. The paper like a gigantic toilet roll. Thus it is continuous for huge quantities of thin and therefore cheaper paper than could be used in plate presses.
Originally screen was just in black and white with maybe an extra colour, red most often, for the banner line being used. This is where "half tone" and other screen adjustments came into use to produce reasonable quality black and white photo reproduction by creating a better tonal depth and contrast in a print image than the dpi or Lpi as they call it, would permit. However colour separations came into use in the 1980s: some seem to use RGB for colour areas with a usual black screen being used in both images and text, others CYMK.
The great advantage of screen printing is the huge volume of paper that can be printed in a short time: however it is limited in dpi and also is prone to poor registration: the fuzzy or double images you often see in colour images or graphics. It is very expensive to reset a whole print run if this arises or even to scrap a minutes production, so these are sent out anyway for sale at newsagents etc. Usually you would need to travel to another newsagent chain or even town to get part of the run which was okay!
To save on costs and reduce issues with registration in colour screen printing, many catalogues are printed in three colours : black and two special corporate or style pan tone matched inks. Even some high qaulity art books and magazines use just one colour in addition to black : this can be very dramatic in landscapes with say only the blue or green being there on top of the grey tones.
Today, I would say that all plates on litho and screen is done with laser etching : the image is either purely digital in jpeg format or scanned from a negative or transparency by coloured lasers : the separations are then produced in digital format directly from the latter and by computation from jpegs. The famous "heidelberg" machine for A4 x 4 print plate laser-etching fits nicely in half a squash court with room to walk around it!
Even in 1999 when I was up for moving back to the Ad' industry in Scotland, I went to a printer who still used the grand daddy of them all: type set printing which has it's roots in the wood cut presses used to produce the first printed paper money, and the Lutherin bible in German and English.
The university printers a decade before still used these presses and the prepared litho plates for BW logos, drawing or other images. These lacked any real grey tones!
To cut you data nuts down to size in a little Luddite fashion, the term "upper case" refers to the case containing capital lead letters the type setter would reach into when required in assembling scentences onto the type face for printing!!
COLOURs
The CYMK was industry standard but by the mid nineties all printers I knew could have atleast a fith colour or technical process, like a UV spot filter or spot varnish. K was used for black : to do with not being confused with
"Blue" which was used before cyan was the colour chosen.
The trouble with CYMK is that it does not produce all colours equally well, eg orange, and where printers used to mix specific inks to match hues in a book say on birds by James Bond with colour plates in the 1950s, that art is no longer seen as cost effective. Blue skies often have a purpely appearance with notable red dots and this is due to the clash between the cyan and the magenta fighting to make a blue which is near cyan but not near enough.
Orange is never well reproduced as it is a mix of yellow and red: magenta is not red enough and some cyan comes in the litho process or digital separation: thus orange on any CYMK standard pallette if you like, is a mucky brownish orange.
Correspondingly, Orange telecom in the UK were the first company I heard of who stipulated a fifth colour process with of course, the proper corporate pan tone orange for their block logo and fonts.
The extra processes, colour or treatment, use the same basic component parts of the four colour process; a machine unit which very accurately places the paper from the last print onto the next plate. Thus software skills, investment and pure physical factory area are the external limiting factors, while there are limits to how much ink a paper will take.
Even in CYMK, when printing black areas with photos supposed to be frameless, mysterious "chinese window frames" would appear where a positional frame around the image became "super saturated" and shiny with layers or ink.
Many of the top printers for corporate material went over to seven colour process print lines for litho printing, which may seem a bit like "being the last to make buggy whips: darn good buggy whips" while everyone goes new media.
Colour; future:
On the topic of new media, jpeg is in RGB which suits of course LCD monitors very well. However now four colour TV Flat screens are available with a yellow which gives a more pleasing and realistic colour than RGB. Although this may take some time to come to the general market for computers, the technical challenge of "re-separating" an RGB signal to a fourth colour is now practical for better reproduction!
Technically RGB in an LED screen should be perfect colour reproduction as the transmitted, addative colours are bright enough to give hue, saturation and BW tonal depth is better due to the "black ness" of the LEDs which are not transmitting.
A pixel contains a given value for both the hue and the tonal depth: the shade if you like. The LAB set up is actually far better at handling images for print and absolute quality (even when considering CYMK as final out put) but because RGB is the standard for monitors then this is the prefered handling.
I would expect , or wishfully think, a move over to image production using the LAB system where the BW is it's own separation: red green and blue yellow are the other two separations so the fourth colour would be a yellow, making probably for better judgements from eye to screen in what is a good colour adjustment in the "ring" of images shown in most software packages.
I would look to Mr. Jobs' job when that frickin iPaddy makes the stock fall and they move back to their home land of graphic arts.
Picture Content
The requirement to produce a better quality image nearing the ppi x 4 required is driven in part by the content of the image.
Obviously if the subject of the image contains a lot of fine detail or pattern which the eye is lead to, then a high dpi will produce the best results.
Conversely, lack of detail and contrast can require experimentation for best print outs.
Both high light and low light images have subtle tonal differences in BW alone, and any noise from the CYMK compression / conversion detracts from the qaulity: Also the tonal depth will need to be enhanced due to this subtle changes over areas of the picture such that they don't appear "posterised" with harder changes between areas appearing as bands or lines not present in the original.
Hence you need to have four colours per pixel to make an acceptable print quality and thus on a 330 dpi printer you need to divide your megapixel size by 1320 to get how many inches would be absolute best.
Best Fit ; ppi: dpi and image scaling
Practically it would be quicker to use some trial and error, by first printing out a small scale size at 330dpi in colour, or lower quality like 100dpi to see the areas which may be problematic in percieved image qaulity.
Then take a crop of these potentially troublesome areas and vary the size of the image output, writing a text comment with their details so you can keep track of them after printing : view then from a distance and determine which size is acceptable. Calculate out your total size achievable: it will probably be bigger than your printer's width and height!
A picture with less tonal depth and more primary colour composition, more contrast and stronger colours in other words, would maybe be a direct conversion to 330 ppi to dpi or lower upon some scrutiny.
At this stage it would be far easier to move away from using ppi and the whole pixel thing, and use PS's, or light room or Corel's etc etc, image scaling function which gives you dpi and actual inches size or metric E-Qs.
==========================================================================
Notes on sizes
For printing:
YSF YF YN YB
X (Middle)
3200 x 2400
2560 x 1920 XSF XF XN XB
1600 x 1200
W (Small)
1280 x 960
WSF WF WN WB
1024 x 768
For
small-sized
prints and use
on a web site
640 x 480
Monday, July 26, 2010
Social Media Monitoring Goes Bust
A Brief History
To start with a brief history of social media: from cloudy beginings in nerd talk and security services personal info boards, social media came to the public internet in the late eighties and early nineties as the newsgroup: a simple text based repository for messages and early blogs, with circulation by e-mail subscription or internet boards.....and these were indeed monitored then, mainly by police in connection with the pædo rings and other unsavoury comms.
Newsgroups quickly went HTML on the World Wide Web and evolved into the forum, which is still the best repository for accessible, high value and trackable information on the web. This is where most consumer involvement with products and brands takes place. Although the micro blogging / glue services like Twitter are rapidly becoming a larger, faster resource they are still less useful for examining consumer attittudes over months of time or in detail.
Little Brother is Watching You
Now there are a host of agencies offering "social media monitoring" and these currently run the risk of creating a bubble soft and venture capital will feel the implosion of. Currently the most advanced indexing tools are not much better than stringing together several specialist hot shop functions, a core data depository and crawler and monitor and "deck" resourcest which are free on the internet. The larger agencies, like Meltwater are able to attract the larger brands while the major players of Trad' market research are still testing the water and holding off on acquisitions.
Why is Social Media Monitoring Going Bust?
The whole market for social media analytics, is in peril of undervaluing it's core pricing. Put simply, the barriers to entry are rather low given that comp'sci' students are often given crawler-indexer or deck meta data projects in undergrad years. Most of the new emerging agencies are student shops: comp sci and MBAers slung together to play at business. Problem being that they want to set experience before value and are cutting each others throats by going into brand names on "loss leaders".
Another key issue is the propagation of free services: "amsterdam hooker windows" as one software engineer called them in another area. The problem here is that you can begin to string together enough free services to make a picture of your brands' position in SM and then just go into the key forums and twitter yourself with your short-suffering marketing interns. The initial "Brand X status in CGM" is devalued as are tha later tracker reports: the key value for agencies is in presenting the statistics and sentiment mapping, but this is so relative and subject to the media surface changing itself that you really have to question the value of it for brands with less than 2000 hits per month in SM.
Scalability ....lack of it.
Although a few of the new starts may have strong crawler-indexer technology, one major problem is that the technology has to monitor a diverse range of sources out there on the internet, and those sources are not always too keen on being crawled. Programmer time is used in not just attaining sources, but retaining them. Also indexing for relevance and speed takes programmer time,and unfortunetly a new arena for a new brand may not be as fast or inclusive/exhaustive as the last indexing which had been optmised.
Put on top of this the awful costs of account management and new business development in acquiring and maintaining brand name clients and the issue of scalability just in this one area, is the one which will kill off most of the new starts.
Lumpy Custard
This economics of SM monitor agencies is actually nothing new: most small 1970s-80s advertising agencies failed because they tried to scale and could not make the leap from the core owner-manager team to an expanding, system driven agency.
Most of all in marketing services, it is horrible risky business with huge over reliance on a small number of customers ( clients in agency land) . "lumpy custard" as I used to describe it. In the 1980s the expression "lose a client, lose your job" was the mantra of account directors, while today it is more likely to be "lose a client, lose your VC funding".
To give some detail on this, when a new project is taken on then it inevitably comes with new sources or indexing demands. Also it comes with a new set of expectatons and because Market Research is still cinderella to the communications side of on line marketing, then new demands of the clients are usually out of line with charging the baseline 85€ per man hour to even break even in business services.
Winners and Losers
The largest, most comprehensive indexers will probably win over and then get the third level funding or even IPO / alternative exchange floatations. I'd expect these technology and brand become acquisition hungry and buy up the hot shops with key expertise in delivering more from fewer man hours. They in turn will want to either exit from VC or the stock exchange, by being eaten by the MB/TNC or Frosts of the world.
This would be the current exit model for the numerous university spawned start ups in SMM.
However, another huge issue they have is in defending their IPR: outside the US very litte will be patentable and a copyright can either be worked around or be somewhat irrelevant in a David-Goliath situation. So rounds of acquisition will come down to " can we get there cheaper ourselves? Do we head hunt out the key techies? What value do they really add ? How will they integrate technically and cutlurally to us?" for the potential bigger fish.
Acquisitions rounds will become window shopping with all the above questions firmly in mind once they get a look behind the scenes. Small companies would be wise to limit their exposure in terms of their "black box" code and indeed the identities of their staff.
These days you are open to headhunting through facebook and linked-in, so Social Media monitors may be eaten up by their own poison.
To start with a brief history of social media: from cloudy beginings in nerd talk and security services personal info boards, social media came to the public internet in the late eighties and early nineties as the newsgroup: a simple text based repository for messages and early blogs, with circulation by e-mail subscription or internet boards.....and these were indeed monitored then, mainly by police in connection with the pædo rings and other unsavoury comms.
Newsgroups quickly went HTML on the World Wide Web and evolved into the forum, which is still the best repository for accessible, high value and trackable information on the web. This is where most consumer involvement with products and brands takes place. Although the micro blogging / glue services like Twitter are rapidly becoming a larger, faster resource they are still less useful for examining consumer attittudes over months of time or in detail.
Little Brother is Watching You
Now there are a host of agencies offering "social media monitoring" and these currently run the risk of creating a bubble soft and venture capital will feel the implosion of. Currently the most advanced indexing tools are not much better than stringing together several specialist hot shop functions, a core data depository and crawler and monitor and "deck" resourcest which are free on the internet. The larger agencies, like Meltwater are able to attract the larger brands while the major players of Trad' market research are still testing the water and holding off on acquisitions.
Why is Social Media Monitoring Going Bust?
The whole market for social media analytics, is in peril of undervaluing it's core pricing. Put simply, the barriers to entry are rather low given that comp'sci' students are often given crawler-indexer or deck meta data projects in undergrad years. Most of the new emerging agencies are student shops: comp sci and MBAers slung together to play at business. Problem being that they want to set experience before value and are cutting each others throats by going into brand names on "loss leaders".
Another key issue is the propagation of free services: "amsterdam hooker windows" as one software engineer called them in another area. The problem here is that you can begin to string together enough free services to make a picture of your brands' position in SM and then just go into the key forums and twitter yourself with your short-suffering marketing interns. The initial "Brand X status in CGM" is devalued as are tha later tracker reports: the key value for agencies is in presenting the statistics and sentiment mapping, but this is so relative and subject to the media surface changing itself that you really have to question the value of it for brands with less than 2000 hits per month in SM.
Scalability ....lack of it.
Although a few of the new starts may have strong crawler-indexer technology, one major problem is that the technology has to monitor a diverse range of sources out there on the internet, and those sources are not always too keen on being crawled. Programmer time is used in not just attaining sources, but retaining them. Also indexing for relevance and speed takes programmer time,and unfortunetly a new arena for a new brand may not be as fast or inclusive/exhaustive as the last indexing which had been optmised.
Put on top of this the awful costs of account management and new business development in acquiring and maintaining brand name clients and the issue of scalability just in this one area, is the one which will kill off most of the new starts.
Lumpy Custard
This economics of SM monitor agencies is actually nothing new: most small 1970s-80s advertising agencies failed because they tried to scale and could not make the leap from the core owner-manager team to an expanding, system driven agency.
Most of all in marketing services, it is horrible risky business with huge over reliance on a small number of customers ( clients in agency land) . "lumpy custard" as I used to describe it. In the 1980s the expression "lose a client, lose your job" was the mantra of account directors, while today it is more likely to be "lose a client, lose your VC funding".
To give some detail on this, when a new project is taken on then it inevitably comes with new sources or indexing demands. Also it comes with a new set of expectatons and because Market Research is still cinderella to the communications side of on line marketing, then new demands of the clients are usually out of line with charging the baseline 85€ per man hour to even break even in business services.
Winners and Losers
The largest, most comprehensive indexers will probably win over and then get the third level funding or even IPO / alternative exchange floatations. I'd expect these technology and brand become acquisition hungry and buy up the hot shops with key expertise in delivering more from fewer man hours. They in turn will want to either exit from VC or the stock exchange, by being eaten by the MB/TNC or Frosts of the world.
This would be the current exit model for the numerous university spawned start ups in SMM.
However, another huge issue they have is in defending their IPR: outside the US very litte will be patentable and a copyright can either be worked around or be somewhat irrelevant in a David-Goliath situation. So rounds of acquisition will come down to " can we get there cheaper ourselves? Do we head hunt out the key techies? What value do they really add ? How will they integrate technically and cutlurally to us?" for the potential bigger fish.
Acquisitions rounds will become window shopping with all the above questions firmly in mind once they get a look behind the scenes. Small companies would be wise to limit their exposure in terms of their "black box" code and indeed the identities of their staff.
These days you are open to headhunting through facebook and linked-in, so Social Media monitors may be eaten up by their own poison.
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