High-level political debate:

A mate of mine — half of Redpoint, my ex-labelmates on Hidden — runs a tribute to John Peel, and his Festive Fifty, every year. He runs a straw poll of his music-geek friends (rules: ten songs, in order, must have been released in the calendar year), compiles the results, and puts it out there ten tracks at a time between Christmas and New Year. You should check it out.

But seeing as it’s list season at the moment, even where you mightn’t otherwise expect it, I thought I’d join in and post my ballot up here. Starting at the top, 2009:

1. Future of the Left, “Arming Eritrea”

2. Telefon Tel Aviv, “You Are The Worst Thing In The World”

3. The Mountain Goats “Ezekiel 7 And The Permanent Efficacy Of Grace”

4. The Horrors, “Primary Colours”

5. The Thermals, “Now We Can See”

6. F—- Buttons, “Olympians”

7. Gui Boratto, “Take My Breath Away”

8. Do Make Say Think, “Make”

9. The Broken Family Band, “Don’t Bury Us”

Couldn’t find these on YouTube or Spotify. (Post-rock from Toronto and Cambridge’s finest, even though they just split up — and yes, I am aware of Pink Floyd — respectively.)

10. The Hold Steady, “Atlantic City”

(A Springsteen cover for a charity record. Trust me, though.)

If this year had a soundtrack, though, it was literate north-American indie rock: The Hold Steady, the Mountain Goats, the Weakerthans, the National, Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver. I’m kicking myself I hadn’t got round to them before. And as a (former) curling skip, here’s one song which’d have made my ballot if it hadn’t come out in, um, 2007…

Rage Against The Machine Have The Christmas Number One

At least, that’s how it seems. The sales figures for the UK Christmas top twenty have been circulating, and here they are.

1	KILLING IN THE NAME	RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE	502672
2	THE CLIMB		JOE MCELDERRY			450838

Fantastic — everyone loves Cowell getting a kicking, assuming you could hear it over the hand-wringing over the money side of things.

But were we all lining our bete noire’s pockets? All of the RATM sales were digital; in general, 95% of singles sales are, but let’s assume 20% of Joe McElderry’s sales were at retail to allow a nice margin for stocking fillers. Let’s be generous on pricing too; I’m working on assumptions of £1.99 physical, 69p digital (and both singles were going for 29p on Amazon last week). VAT’s 15%; if retailers get a 30% markup, and 15% goes to the artist, mechanicals, songwriting, and so on, then here’s the numbers:

(Check my working here.)

So having both the number one and number two singles, on the highest sales week of the year, with the entire media acting as your hype wing, is only worth £375k to Sony — and only about £65k to the combatants!

If the record industry’s looked weird to you recently, then these numbers explain a lot. Radiohead made way more from In Rainbows than they made from any of their previous records, despite giving it away. Bands are signing 360-degree deals. All the money’s in merch and concerts, and now Ticketmaster and Live Nation are merging.

Bad day to be Guy Hands, then…

So, then. Why Internet economics and big data and cities? There’s a lot of credit — or blame! — to go round, but a little bit of it has to go to Russell Davies’s conference-planning.

That’s me on the right there. I hadn’t been to any conference quite like Interesting. Still haven’t. More or less every decent idea I’ve had since contains a dash of something I first encountered there.

Here’s Matt Jones, who finished off the day. You know that moment of giddy dislocation you get when one of those Magic Eye drawings kicks in? That’s how I was feeling, and this talk capped it off.

Matt Jones at Interesting2007 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

If that wasn’t enough, not long after Interesting, I took a trip to San Francisco. I wasn’t long out of my graduate studies, and I kept finding myself drifting back to thinking about, well, the kind of things I’m working on now. So that’s one of the ways this story begins.

I trained as a mineral scientist, not as a designer. So when I start to approach these ideas I use what I know, and two of the things mineral physicists think about are ordering and phase transitions. (My thesis even had “disorder” right there in the title.)

Phase transformations happen when symmetries are made and broken. Things melt and recrystallise. How are cities melting and recrystallising?

I can’t really talk about the design issues, but I’m betting that cash and computation will be at the heart of the physics of it. Here’s one thing which which connects the two. Flash memory’s getting seriously cheap very fast. So fast that you’re getting exponentially more storage for your money as time passes — hit the log-scale checkbox on the graph below to see.

Admittedly, cheap storage alone isn’t a story: hard discs are still cheaper per byte, after all. But flash memory has some advantages — it’s lower-power, more robust and smaller. The kicker, though, is that reading data in a random order off flash storage is way, way faster than reading it off a disc. Hard discs aren’t all that far evolved from vinyl records. There’s a motorised read head instead of a stylus, but it hovers over a spinning platter, reading the data off as it hurls past. So if your data doesn’t line up neatly — it’s not contiguous — you’ve got to winch the read head back and forward to read each piece of it in turn, and that’s really slow.

Databases, in particular, have had a lot of logic devoted to laying out data on disc just so. You don’t need to do that at all if you’re writing your data to flash. That lets you focus on different problems instead, like being able to insert data into your database really quickly.

If you’re going to put a sensor in everything, you need to be able to write a lot of data to a database really quickly.

Make faster databases and you can record and query data you couldn’t use before. What’s more, because they’re tiny and can take a beating, flash-backed databases can go wherever environmental sensors go. I’ve got a hunch that smart flash-based storage is the missing part of the whole ubiquitous-computation shtick: cheap flash gives you staging posts for the instrumented street’s data.

Bandwidth, computational power and storage. When you get them in places you haven’t had them before, or when they get a lot faster or a lot cheaper, or when you can combine them in new ways, you break symmetries. That’s where I think the action is.

The last big thing I did in student radio (as a postgrad, I spent more time than my supervisors would have liked have in CUR1350’s basement studio) was putting together coverage of the last General Election. It was never going to be a classic; everyone was tired of Labour, but the opposition looked nothing like a government in waiting. It was all cued up for an as-you-were result.

Except in a few seats around the country, that is. Cambridge was one, Cardiff Central, Bristol West, Manchester Withington. All of them had something in common afterwards — new Liberal Democrat MPs — and something in common beforehand: Labour MPs in constituencies with a lot of students.

Students hated the Government in 2005. The Iraq war was the headline, but I reckon the real reason was at least as much student fees. Anne Campbell, the Cambridge incumbent, hadn’t so much swithered as pulled a handbrake turn on the subject; students vote their wallets just as much as anyone else. But there was no way a bunch of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, who’d become politically aware in the dying years of the Thatcher and Major governments, would even consider voting Tory in numbers.

Enter the Lib Dems.

The Lib Dems had a lock on the ‘05 student vote, and they knew it. And because they knew it, they could exploit their greatest resource. They’ve got the best street team in UK politics. No-one knocks on doors like a Lib Dem activist, and their by-election record proves it. Now, students are a tough audience to canvas. That alone normally gets them beyond the reach of election-day get-out-the-vote efforts, because they’re just not entered in the database.

But if you were a student in Cambridge, in 2005, if you voted then you were probably voting Lib Dem. So if you mobilised a house of six, it was probably three net votes. The Lib Dems could afford to knock on every student door regardless of whether they were certain there were supporters there or not, because they knew their audience and demographic so well that they could trust in the law of averages.

Their candidate, David Howarth, won on a 19% swing.

I’ve been writing a lot about Google this last couple of weeks, so this might seem a bit of a digression. It isn’t, though; Google’s platform strategy now is the Lib Dems’ strategy from 2005. Google know who makes them money — the kind of people who’d use smartphones or netbooks or turn-by-turn navigation. If they sell more of their product by grabbing more time in front of these lovely, high-disposable-income eyeballs, then even if we, of course, would never be influenced by advertising, on average they’re going to win big. Google owns a percentage of the people on the Internet demographic. Anything which mobilises that audience makes them money in the long term, even if it costs them in the short term to do it.

The thing was, I knew I’d seen the tactic before. I just hadn’t worked out where!

Some really sharp observations here about how Google just revalued another information market - this time, turn-by-turn navigation.

Google are so confident that they’re the Internet Inland Revenue that they’re even offering rebates…

Earlier today, through an article in the latest US Wired, I discovered Demand Media. It took me the rest of the afternoon to get my breath back. If you’ve not seen them before, they’re really something: maybe half a rung above something like Datapresser on the scale of evil. Driven by sophisticated algorithms which tell them which search terms are worth targetting, they’re generating huge link-farms of low-budget, low-quality articles and video. Bluntly, they’re overfishing the long tail of search queries.

It takes real guts to run such a sketchy business on such an industrial scale: they’ve raised over $300m in funding so far. A part of me almost admires them for it.

He points out that the focus is off: The rippling water is sharp while the kayaking instructor is slightly blurred. But the company he’s working for won’t care, he says, so why should he — especially for $20 a clip? Within a few hours, he has uploaded his work to Demand Media, his employer for the day. It isn’t Scorsese, but it’s fast, cheap, and good enough.

Thousands of other filmmakers and writers around the country are operating with the same loose standards, racing to produce the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishes every day. The company’s ambitions are so enormous as to be almost surreal: to predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results.

— “The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell”, by Daniel Roth, Wired US November 2009

Meanwhile, Google are picking up criticism, and prominent web developers are chucking venom at the SEO industry.

These people are a cancer and must be destroyed.

— “SEO Scumbags”, by Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

— “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists”, by Derek Powazek

Everyone ‘knows’ that Google used to be better. But how much can Google really do against turbo-charged content engines like Demand Media? It’s an arms-race. The Bayesian spam filter wars of 2002 are playing out all over again, only this time in Google’s index.

Even so, this might still give rise to an opportunity for someone. Just a thought experiment: what’s going to happen if, for some big high-value niches, Google gets either unpopular or ineffective? The demand’s still going to be there, after all. Who’ll fill it, and how?

After all, Google isn’t approaching smartphones like a normal business. It has made Android open source available freely to any handset maker to use and change at will. Google says its only reason is to expand the use of the Internet on cellphones because it believed this would allow more people to use its search engine and other products on which the company sells ads.

Microsoft, by contrast, charges manufacturers $15 to $25 per Windows Mobile phone sold, an attempt to duplicate the rich business model of Windows for the PC. Google’s a-rising-tide-raises-our-ship approach deeply perplexes Microsoft executives. “If you asked me to go to a venture capitalist and pitch the Android business model, I don’t think I could,” said Robert J. Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, at a meeting with reporters earlier this month.

Microsoft, Google and the Bear - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

I’ve heard it said — can’t remember where, I’m afraid! — that governments have absolutely the best way of making money from money funnelled into startups by things like R+D tax credits; don’t get involved, just tax the winners.

With what Google’s doing with Android and Chrome, they must think that AdSense/AdWords/DoubleClick add up to Internet Tax…

Headless NFL players (via cvrt)