Spinny blog
I just noticed that one of my ex-colleagues, ex-Interesource Creative Director Simon I’Anson has a blog. He had a number of nicknames, the best of which was ‘Spinny’ - not because of his penchant for the phrase ‘I’m spinning plates’ (which I am happy to report he is still using) but because he regularly cheated at table football with his silly spinny finger action. You’ve got to watch him like a hawk.
He too has noticed that the Telegraph/Interesource story is out
Despite the dreadful pun that is the blog title, I’m subscribed.
Telegraph, Interesource and the future
So Shane has blown the gaff on the situation with My Telegraph and Interesource. I was one of the ‘techies’ he mentions who spent the whole night moving the servers back to Telegraph Towers one Tuesday in December. I eventually got to bed at 7 am. Despite that, the community has been slagging me off, which is nice. I hope they feel suitably chastened now.
Telegraph’s network configuration is very different from the topology at Interesource, and most of our problems were with getting the network configured correctly so that all the boxes could see each other over the right ports. As Shane says, we found some stuff yesterday that was screwing with performance - hopefully things should now be much better.
Shane mentions in passing an exciting project that we’ll be working on - I can say no more except that we’ll try to be as transparent as we can. Hopefully we’ll be able to make a very big announcement next week.
The reaction to Shane’s post has been interesting and I’d heartily endorse One Man and His Blog who identifies the perils of external hosting. To that, I’d add the perils of proprietary software. I spent a long time trying to convince people at Interesource that we should open-source our platform, not just because we could potentially harness the power of the community, but also because it would protect our existing clients and make us more attractive to new ones. Global Beach certainly did not see the advantage of OSS - once the acquisition was complete there was no chance of it being open-sourced.
For the benefit of people negotiating with people to write you software and provide hosting, I strongly advise you to establish an escrow agreement whereby a copy of the latest source code and data is regularly deposited with a trusted third party in case the company goes bust. Make sure that when people write software for you that you have a licence in perpetuity to do whatever you like with the software. Make sure that all the code you need is deposited, even code that was not written for you. You need to plan for an eventuality where the company simply doesn’t exist any more. The licence to use the software is also critical. It’s no use have a copy of the code if you’re not licensed to use it. Naturally, open source software doesn’t come with these drawbacks.
Although Interesource had verbal agreements with customers (I know, because I outlined the agreement myself countless times) that they could have access to the source code at any time and could do whatever they wanted with it, except transfer the licence to another party, the contracts that Interesource produced did not actually include these terms in many cases. Therefore, it’s been very difficult for customers to get access to their code and data - and by difficult I mean expensive, in some cases prohibitively so. Simon Dixon guesses who this might have affected.
I was asked about escrow many times in pitches by prospective clients. I always answered truthfully - that we’d be willing to have an escrow agreement for both code and data. Not one customer took us up on this. So, it’s not good enough just to ask if an agency would be prepared to enter into an escrow deal - you need to make sure it actually happens from day one. If you get agencies during the first month or so, they’ll be falling over themselves to oblige - once the relationship has had a chance to develop, they will have more leverage over you and so may be less willing to do such a deal.
From the archive: Don’t ignore the crapness factor
[There are some blog items that I wrote in my spare time but published on the Interesource blog before it disappeared down the plug hole. I refer to these sometimes in conversation and in documents, but they are now no longer available on the web, so I'm re-publishing them here, thanks to Google's cache, so that they have a permalink that I can use to reference them. The first is about recommendation engines and was originally published on 11th October 2006.]
Norwich City fan, book afficionado, and all-round nice guy Shane Richmond has been blogging about the future of newspapers and how they might adapt to the ‘next web’. Tim Malbon responded in his blog [link no longer available] with an even more extreme vision of a world in which there’s so much data available about our preferences that we will end up with no real choices of our own, only those deemed to be of interest to us by Google or whoever. I think this latter vision is completely wrong.
Shane’s posts are well argued, as always, and are informed by his experience as the News Editor of the Telegraph.co.uk. Tim’s is compelling, but, I think, fundamentally flawed. Here’s the first part of why I think that: things are generally quite crap.
There are two oft-quoted exemplars of relevance on the Internet today: Google AdSense and Amazon. I have to say that I remain unimpressed with both of these, even though they represent the best there is at the moment. (I should say that my musical taste precludes me from using either last.fm or Pandora, so I can’t judge these.)
Let’s take Amazon. I buy broadly three kinds of books. First, books that I want to read myself for pleasure. These are generally so-called ‘literary’ novels. Then, I buy computer books for work. Finally, I buy presents for other people, things I would never buy for myself. Amazon doesn’t know why I’m buying these things, and unless I tell it, which I can’t really be bothered to do, it doesn’t know what I thought of them. Maybe there are people whoi obsessively keep their Amazon perferences up to date, but I have other things to do that are more exciting.
I recently bought and read all of the Booker Prize shortlisted books, most of them from Amazon. Once I’d bought them my recommendations were updated - to include the Booker shortlisted books that I hadn’t bought, plus one book from each author if they had a back catalogue (there was one first novel on the list this year). Clever, you’re thinking? Not so clever, if you ask me. This is the most basic possible recommendation. It’s a bit like buying the number one single and then being asked ‘have you thought about buying the rest of the top ten?’
In fact, the only time Amazon recommendations are useful to me is when I buy books so obscure that only a few other people have ever bought them there. Then, they very often uncover some completely unexpected ‘related’ books, related for no other reason that some other Amazon user has an eclectic taste that is similar to mine. This is the ‘long tail’, which is why Amazon is succesful, or at least why it is useful to me (other than the obvious pricing reasons).
The Guardian Review on saturday and the Observer Review on sunday are miles better at identifying books I may be interested in than Amazon are. Why? Because there’s an editorial policy (in the case of the Observer, a former editor at Faber, Robert McCrum) in place and it is broadly in line with my tastes. At Amazon there’s no editorial policy, just a load of people buying stuff and then some assumptions about their relatedness. Plus, Amazon are trying to sell me stuff, so I can’t trust their editorial judgement anyway. Newspapers, at the moment, can be trusted to slate stuff they think is rubbish.
One final Amazon example. I once bought Abbado’s most recent recording of Mahler’s 7th Symphony and Don Box’s Essential .NET, Volume 1. I can’t think of a single link between those two items, other than that I happened to buy them at the same time. But guess what showed up as a related item to the Mahler Symphony? Even someone who had little or no knowledge of classical music or computing can see that there’s no relationship between these things.
All these things are instances of the crapness I’m talking about.
I can’t see how this problem can ever be solved, unless computers have a way of knowing why I buy things and not just what I buy. Shane’s argument (as does Tim’s perhaps to an even greater extent) rests on someone solving this fundamental problem.
Next time I’ll look at human factors in the software business that may retard our march towards an automated society.
Nairnski Online
My ex-colleague Nairn Robertson, the man responsible for one of the funniest nights out in recent history, now has a blog. If you’re working on any sort of interactive project, especially one involving video, you should hire him immediately.
An enforced change
This is weird - my own blog after 4 years of writing one hosted by the company I used to work for, Interesource. Last week, Interesource was placed into administration just 40 days or so after being acquired by Global Beach. That came as a massive shock to all concerned, presumably apart from the directors, and so suddenly I find myself without a job for the first time in my career (since 1991 if you can believe it). Many of my colleagues have been severely hit by this turn of events, particularly those with mortgages or kids. I would like to record my public thanks to Clive Jackson, CEO of Global Beach, for the humane way that he handled this process - he went way beyond what he was obliged to do, and that meant a lot to me and to everyone else concerned. There were some very talented people at Interesource, and I know that they’ll be in great demand now that they’re on the market.
During my time at Interesource, I developed a Content Management System called IrPublish that powered a large number of sites. Two stand out as particularly good examples of the work that we did, work that I’m very proud of - DoggySnaps and My Telegraph.
I have now been asked to help the Telegraph to secure the work we did for them so that My Telegraph can continue its life without Interesource. Everyone who worked on it is disappointed with the way things have turned out, but there are exciting ideas that are just waiting to be implemented. I really hope that we get a chance to do that. If you’d like to know more about My Telegraph, I’ll be at the Political Bloggers’ Evening at the Telegraph tomorrow evening, but probably no one will see this post before then, even with the miracle of blog search engines.
I’m going to take a little bit of time to get used to the idea of blogging as an individual rather than as the representative of a company. Hopefully I will carry on writing about issues that are relevant to C# developers, particularly those writing ASP.NET apps. I have some interesting experiences with memcached to talk about in the coming weeks.
