Flying a Toy Plane 22 Miles
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Flying a Toy Plane 22 Miles

Byrichard

James May is interesting. People like me know him from Top Gear and Grand Tour with Clarkson and Hammond but his side projects are interesting. Instead of farming like Clarkson, or driving cars with his daughter Clarkson plays with grown up toys. When I say toys I don’t mean adult cars, planes and more. I mean actual toys. In the video below James May sets himself the project of building a model plane that can fly 22 miles.

The video shows footage of him as a child playing with a model plane, and then as an adult playing with a slightly bigger model plane, then a prototype and then the finished project. In the episode I watched he built and played with a model plane but in others he tries to build other things and succeeds.

What I like about Naked Science, produced by Pioneer TV, is that they produce proper documentaries, rather than breathless crap like so many others do. This is television production quality content, rather than youtube content. I recently noticed that youtube content creactors use the same sound effects, the same music, the same editing, the same chaotic jumble, that makes their content tiring to watch.

In contrast when you watch James May play with model airplanes you get a well produced, well edited, well paced documentary that is interesting to watch. This is a fifty three minute video where you don’t stare at your phone, or get distracted. You watch it from the start to the end without being distracted, or fatigued.

There was a time when I would watch every documentary in the morning, and then do something else on satellite TV. I don’t do this anymore. Too many programs are designed to distract people from adverts so they’re constantly repeating themselves.

I loved watching Mythbusters but that was the decline of Discovery Channel Documentary making.

What makes James May’s Naked Science shows stand out is that they are watchable by a “dinosaur” like me. When a documentary is well paced, and edited to be watched without commercial breaks it becomes engaging. YouTubers should strive to make content that is equal to television rather than scrape the barrel of throwaway culture.

And Finally

The premise of my post is simple. We live under the illusion that content has to be sensationalist to be worth watching, and we live under the illusion that youtube content needs to be sensationalist to stand out but that notion is wrong. Television quality content should be edited and produced to be shared on YouTube. In this day and age the notion that something has to be two minutes is wrong. The notion that something has to be in “YouTube style” to be noticed on YouTube is wrong. In my eyes we should produce long form content that is well produuced, for YouTube and social media.

YouTube is big enough for content that appeals to my generation and others to be produced and thrived. Algorithms should take this onboard. I want YouTube’s algorithms to provide me with content that is relevant to my age group and interests. I want more content recommendations such as the video above.

Hugo and Static Files

Hugo and Static Files

Byrichard

Yesterday I was experimenting with the Static folder in Hugo. Hugo and other static site generators has a folder where you can usually put content that you don’t want to have changed. You can add php, css, js and more. By making this an option it is possible to have your blog as markdown files that are updated and published every time you make changes while other files remain intact.

PHP Files

I spent time converting Roman civilisation content to PHP, as well as the geography section. Now that I have invested that time in learning to use PHP in production I don’t want to lose that content by adding it as markdown pages. With PHP and HTML pages I have full creative control on how content looks and behaves.

Legacy Content

Back in the 90s and the Zeros (2000s, but I like saying zeros), we would share photos of an event by creating a gallery and sharing that. These galleries are simple html with a page for each image, and plenty of pages to update and navigate between. These pages can be brought into the 21st century but by parking them in the static folder in Hugo we keep access to them, until we have written the json or other file type to display these photo galleries as a single page app.

Hugo’s Behaviour

There is an explanation of what Hugo does to Static files. When files and folders are added to the static folder they are added to the watch list, if Hugo is running. This means that static content will automatically be updated and available on the local instance.

Static Files and the Public Folder

When you add static files to a Hugo sight Hugo will track changes and show them via the web server but they are not added to the public folder. It is up to us, to make sure that the files that are static are updated and uploaded to the server if and when we make changes to them.

That static files are not added to the publish folder is useful. I was worried that by adding thousands of files to the static folder thousands of files would be uploaded every time I wrote a blog post and published it. This isn’t the case. I do not need to take a break from blogging with Hugo, whilst I experiment with the static part, and prepare a new folder architecture.

Looking Forward

To avoid confusion, as I experiment I put all the static files in a sub-folder. In so doing I avoid the risk of duplicate file names or file names with the same names, but different extensions, confusing Hugo. I aim to keep it clean, until I have decided on what I want to achieve with my experimentation.

And Finally

I have been struggling with Eleventy and Hugo whilst it’s easy to setup one stream of content, it is not easy to have two or more in parallel. For this reason using the Static folder allows me to keep the part that already works, separate from the part that I am still working on. It enables me to put my experiment into production sooner, and to stop going around in circles.

YouTube and Ad Blockers

YouTube and Ad Blockers

Byrichard

One of the pleasures we would enjoy many years ago was to browse YouTube, and eventually find something worth watching. This was possible for one key reason. There were no ads being loaded that would block us for thirty seconds or more. Today I read that YouTube test threatens to block viewers if they continue using ad blockers.


YouTube video surfing and channel surfing are the same thing. You hop from channel to channel, or from video to video, until you find something to watch. You watch a few seconds at a time before deciding that you prefer some other form of content. The issue with ads is that they slow you down. If you watch 3 or four videos and see 30 seconds of ads before watching five seconds of video then you spend all of your browsing time watching adverts, rather than content.


Pay For Premium, Get No Ads


That’s fantastic in theory, and in practice this is a good alternative to ad blockers. The issue that I have with this solution is that we’re paying to have clickbait pushed on us, rathre than actually browse YouTube. We’re facing the same problem as with ads. We’re still struggling to find worthwhile content.


Ads Encourage People to Leave


When I grew tired of seeing ads I left YouTube for days or even weeks at a time. It’s only because I used ad blockers that I came back, and I still felt that I was being conned. The first con is that the content is UGC, User Generated Content, or as I prefer to call it, User Generated Crap. A lot of the content that YouTube pushes on us is crap. You would never watch it on television.


The second problem is that the ads themselves are crap. For all of the data that Google has on me, their ads are completely off the mark. They market products that I have no interest in using. The ads are also of low quality. In some cases the ad is a music video, that is being played before you watch the content you wanted to watch.


YouTube Ads Don’t Need to be Video Ads


YouTube makes the mistake of playing video ads when there is no need to. Other types of ads would be just as effective, and would not detract people from watching the videos that they’re watching. Plently of videos on YouTube are product reviews. Given that this is the case those videos, can, in and of themselves be seen as adverts. If we watch a video about barefoot shoes then that content should be seen as an advert. That’s what it does. Imagine if advertisers paid content creators, when their videos are played, after someone searches for a specific product. The idea that you need to play an ad, for ad revenue, is obsolete at this moment in time.


Content as Advert


To elaborate on the idea, if I watch three videos about types of shoe then the brand that is being covered in the video should contribute financially to that video. I’m watching a promotional video, about a product. I don’t need a pre-roll add before watching a video about a specific product, or a specific lines of product.


YouTube said that they want people to either get premium, or see ads, to pay for content creators to create content. I think they’re missing the purpose of an entire segment of YouTube videos. Tutorials, hiking videos, cycling videos and more are already marketing products, without ever needing to show ads. In some cases the ads are paid for by being mentioned directly in the videos themselves. I tend to skip those ads, though.


Why Do We Skip Ads


One of the questions that YouTube and others should ask is “why do people skip ads?” Why do I force quit iOS games to avoid seeing ads. Why do I avoid seeing ads on YouTube. The short answer is “because I have seen manscaped adverts hundreds of times, because I have seen the iOS game adverts once per game play. If the adverts were updated, and if we had more ads to watch, then we wouldn’t skip them. The reality of the situation is that we’re skipping ads that we have already seen. In some cases I will see the same ad when playing iOS games, ten times, in ten puzzles solved or failed.


US Influence


People in the US have an extremely high tolerance for being bombarded with ads. American football has adds every few minutes. European Football has ads after fourty five minutes of game time. You’re watching the sport, and ads are put at reasonable intervals in Europe. If people use ad blockers, reduce the frequency of ads, and increase the rotation of ads, so that they see five to ten adverts, rather than one advert ten times.


Pre-Roll Ads Before We Have Even Committed


One of the things I hate most about YouTube and other video sharing websites is that they play 30 seconds of video before you watch the content. Sometimes it starts to play without you deciding to watch the content in the first place. More often than not, if I get a pre-roll ad, before I have watched the video I will not watch the video at all. Sometimes you’re about to watch a 45 second, or a 1 minute 30 second video, and you have 30 seconds, to a minute of advert.


And Finally


The question that YouTube, Google, Daily Motion and others should be asking is not “How can we force people to watch ads or pay for premium access to our content?” but “Why are people so aggressive about blocking ads?”. The reason is simple. Ads are invasive, ads are too frequent, ads are always the same. Facebook should be working to make ads appealing, rather than threatening to block users.

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Does the World Wide Web Dumb us Down too Much to Read

Byrichard

Does the World Wide Web dumb is down to much to read is an article exploring the idea that we have too many distractions and that as a result we are unable to focus. Yesterday I wrote about blogging rather than writing twitter threads and this article goes some way to exploring the same theme.


The first thing I would look at is the quality of writing and the quality of information. Are we reading articles that are clickbait, that have little content of substance and being little of value? Are we reading a guardian long read article that has been researched over days, weeks or months? Are we in the living room with family around providing us with distractions or are we in bed reading a book before sleep?


When I was at a conference there were four clusters of people. One group were outside talking, another were in the common room and then two of us were walking around and talking about nothing and everything at once. I bring it up because on the top bunk in one room I saw someone reading a book as we talked on the bottom bunk.


I also saw him reading in the lunch room and at least one other people. Rather than join in and enjoy the distractions of being at a conference he was in his own world reading a book.


I am in my own world as I write this blog post. I am sitting in my living room with the balcony door open so that fresh air can come in. I am writing this on my phone because the computer was updating its OS.


Reading and writing take courage. For a period of time you need to decide that you don’t want to read the constant streams from twitter and Facebook. You decide that you’re content in the moment. There are no external inputs.


When I lived in Weymouth I knew everyone that worked in bars, shops etc. I would spend hours a day out in the center trying to find people to spend time with. Paradoxically I also read a lot. I think this is when I read all but one of Kundera’s books. I also read quite a few thick books of fiction, including Lord Of The Rings.


For me the distraction of the World Wide Web has always been to find new technology and innovations but it has also been about finding friendships because, as an introvert socialising in person can be lonelier than solitude. The extroverts speak and we go into passive listening mode.


This is relevant because if we speak about the dumbing down of society we must also look at what we want to get from our distractions. In my case I want to meet new people and establish new friendships that would make a road, train or plane trip worthwhile. For years now I haven’t found this to work via social media so the “always distracted” occurrence is gone. It frees up time to work on projects such as this blog, to walk, to hike, to watch television series, to look for work, to volunteer at events and live in the moment and finally to watch YouTube content and tv series online.


We could say that we are becoming too stupid for the long form but look at the state of films. Back in the early 2000s I went to see a film every few days. After nine months of this I knew the film formulas so well that I lost interest. When I am alone I never watch films. When I am with female company I almost never finish the film.


It is not that I can’t focus for an hour and a half. It’s that the content is so mediocre. The films have no story and we feel no empathy for the characters so the allure of watching these films is gone.


We should also think about marketing when discussing the increasing idiocy of people. Marketing wants us to be gullible. Advertisers and public relations professionals want us to be interested in something only long enough to purchase the product. They don’t care about the environmental impact and social cost. For the first two years twitter and Facebook were excellent for networking and establishing new friendships. That’s why they were such compelling distractions back then.


We say that people are less focused than ever and that they are being dumbed down but then look at PVRs, Netflix, Amazon prime and more. We got so angry with all the adverts that we stopped watching over the air television because we no longer wanted to waste time being forced to see the same five to ten adverts every ten minutes. We are the ones reducing the distractions.


Related to this I would also look at binge watching culture. If you watch one or two episodes a night you’re going to be more focused than if you spend a day watching an entire season. When it’s television we call it bingeing. If we had a book we would call it “engrossing”. It wouldn’t be vilified.


The point is that if you’re reading a book you can’t check for tweets or scroll through Instagram because to stop looking at the page is to break the stream of consciousness. With TV series you can tweet, check e-mails and more. It’s vidzac or some other silly marketing term. It’s playing in the foreground until we get distracted and then it’s background noise.


We shouldn’t discount the lowest common denominator when speaking about intelligence and attention. Tenk.fr and curiositystream are documentary video networks. YouTube has plenty of intellectual content for those that are looking for it. The content with the most views is the content that algorithms are pushing on us but this does not mean that is the content that people wanted to view. The trap of the lowest common denominator is that it over-represents distractions whilst making intelligent content invisible.


If we went back to chronological timelines twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social networks would paint a different image of the society we live in. Emotion would be replaced by intellect and with this intellect conviviality and intelligent discourse would re-emerge. We would see that intelligence is not declining.

Forcing people to be active daily with Stories
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Forcing people to be active daily with Stories

Byrichard

Facebook and Instagram both have “Stories”. Stories are temporary vertical pictures and video that are only available for a limited amount of time before they are backed up and saved for retrieval once you request your data.


In theory, they are a fantastic way of sharing life as it happens without worrying about something embarrassing being available for an extended period of time. In practise, they are a way for Facebook and Instagram to force users to be active every day if they do not want to miss out on what their friends are sharing.


I never use Stories because I’m over 30 so I’m less of an early adopter than I used to be. ;-). On a more serious note, I don’t use Stories because it encourages people to produce kitsch rather than the content of value. It also forces you to look at an image or video just once for a few seconds. The only way to pause this content is to touch the screen to see content long enough.


Content, in Stories, is so fleeting that if you blink you’ll miss it. It’s also a way for FB to force you to be attentive. With ordinary FB timelines you can stay on content until you scroll past it. This means that you can have a conversation or do something else at the same time. It also means that it’s easier to skip adverts. With Stories they know that you have seen the advert.


Some content and images shared via Stories are worth more than 3-5 seconds. They’re worth an interaction. In Stories the only interaction is a direct message. In Stories the only way to save content you like is to either screen record or screengrab.


Another drawback is that we’ve gone from having one timeline with friend activities to two. We now have to spend time scrolling down one stream, and when that’s done we theoretically have to scroll across.


People who use Stories, rather than the primary timeline become invisible. Their content is so well hidden that I miss it. Their content is so well hidden that they might as well start a blog.


When I finished writing I couldn’t think of a conclusion. The conclusion is that ordinary people social media is a lonely and invisible place. We write thoughts, share pictures and then within seconds they’re far down in a timeline never to be seen. In light of this making them fleeting, as they are in Stories only makes our content that much easier to ignore. By writing a blog post it may go unseen for years, but it’s there, and if someone decides to read every post, as I have sometimes done, then a blog is a good time capsule, a good way of keeping people entertained. Blogs, after all, do get published as books, sometimes.

Finding time for Long-Form Writing and Other Pursuits.
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Finding time for Long-Form Writing and Other Pursuits.

Byrichard

Finding time for Long Form Writing

This morning I read twenty percent of a book whilst sitting in the car waiting for shops to open. In the process I occasionally looked up to see private jets and airlines fly over me. A few years ago in the same situation I would have been staring at my phone. I would have been refreshing twitter and Facebook looking for conversations. These days social media marketers and others are using social media as if they were Really Simple Syndication feeds, RSS. The problem with RSS feeds is that there a low signal to noise ratio. You need to skip hundreds of pieces of content for one or two worthwhile posts.

Highest Return on Investment for Social Media

When I finished university in London I had an extremely high return on investment for the time spent with twitter, Facebook and social networks. I was invited to events, to alpha projects and establishing friendships that last to this day. When I left London Facebook and twitter were still sticky because I was able to keep in contact with friends in a diversity of geographic locations. We’re the easyjet generation after all.

Flooded with content rather than Conversation

For several months now I have been spending less and less time with social media, not because my desire to socialise has gone down but because the success rate has suffered. News organisations, celebrities, personalities and brands are flooding social media with content rather than conversation. Facebook and Twitter have algorithms to make sure that brand and paid for content is seen a dozen times. A consequence is that we don’t see conversations. Not seeing conversations negates the purpose of social media.

Back to Passive pass-times.

Without conversations on social media we can go back to reading books, playing computer games, watching television series, blogging and more. The reason we came to social media was to socialise. The reason we cut down on social media is that like the bars, pubs and playgrounds of our childhood people have moved on. Some are in their marriage bubble, others are focused on their career and yet more are enjoying sports.

This year I will try to finish at least one book every two weeks. I will try to go on multi-day hikes every single weekend and more. We can also go back to reading and writing blog posts.

A missed opportunity.

When I was in London and we were living the golden age of social media I almost started to believe that social media adoption rates were increasing so much that they would be a great way to meet people who lived within walking or driving distance. For a moment being an online introvert was fruitious. over time of course engagement decayed and social media stopped being a practical place for introverts to meet up. Commercialism turned social media into the same competition as the Physical world.

 

 

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Why Audiovisual Content That’s Not On-Demand is Dead to Me

Byrichard

I’m online from 10-15hrs  a day on average and as a result I’m used to having everything available within a short amount of time. I also had access to a PVR with a hard disk upgrade for quite a long time. As a result of both these developments anything that is not available to me when I want to watch it goes unnoticed. That’s because “It’s an on-demand world” as was concluded in one edit I worked on for a client about the future of broadcasting.


From a young age I had quite a choice of channels. Some were French, some were Italian and others were German. That’s because it’s Geneva and you get the French tv channels as well as the Swiss national channels. That’s access to about 7 channels over the air in analog form. With Sky digital the number of channels increased from 10-30 and finally to several thousand. Recently Sky started to broadcast a greater range of international content.


The next move was the PVR. The ability to record up to three hundred hours of program content to disk from two receivers at once. If you allow for a backlog to develop then you’ve got a fake video on demand on service. That’s great. It means that when you know which programs you want to watch the machine will take care of it.


A cheap version of this is available online through platforms such as Itunes where it’s powered by RSS feeds. At the beginning you’ve got very little content as you learn more about the technology but over time you end up with over four hundred podcasts in the back catalog. That’s quite a bit of choice.


Youtube, Revver, Myspace, Dailymotion are true video-on-demand services in browser form. Each of these websites allows you to download and watch thousands of short video clips without a dedicated time. That’s great. A housemate wanted to watch some comedy so we went to youtube, downloaded, and watched a selection of programs on demand.


Of course, the next step is Joost like platforms. It’s like a television channel but you can select when it’s convenient to watch the program rather than setting your life around the program.


There are two reasons for this. The first is an increase in capacity. The second is progress in technology.  We went from having four channels to 10 times that number with Freeview and with satellite broadcasting we’ve gone from 20 channels to several thousand. We’ve also gone from one user interface, the television set with five channels to the computer, and unlimited choice. That’s why media content that is not on-demand is almost dead to me.

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Why I am happy that youtube is being sued

Byrichard

I am happy that youtube is being sued because out of the hundreds of video sharing websites out there it is the most devious. It has taken hundreds of hours of content produced at great expense by teams of professionals and offered them in poor quality for nothing on their site. To make it worse it’s made them billions of dollars.

How can the mega corporations, through the intermediary of the RIAA give so much trouble to those who share music let allow youtube to thrive. It doesn’t make sense.

What about all those video sharing websites that went about making content and distributing it the right way? What about those who decided that they would provide a service at no cost to themselves. I’m speaking of those guilty of unlawful distribution of video material.

It’s a website about deception, look at lonelygirl, look at the coke and mentos adverts. Look at the ball in groin laughter. It’s all a form of sadistic pleasure. Why would you want to be manipulated in such a way.

On the positive side it was fun to see the world cup celebrations and I uploaded some video of my own in response to other people’s content.

When it’s used as a video version of flickr it’s an excellent website because it’s an audiovisual window onto the world where a vast wealth of video content may be accessed. Good snowboarding, post it, good party, post it, personal work you’re proud of, post it.

Everyone of us is a content producer and distributor and everyone of us is challenging himself to create something that other people will enjoy. Geocities was about websies, the original sixdegrees was inspired by the film to show that everyone is related throough less than six people to everyone else. Blogging allowed people to reount their lives to anonymous audiences, flickr allowed the sharing of instants and video sharing websites allowed for the sharing of moments.

Is it voyeuristic to look at online videos and photographs made by friends and random strangers and is it exhibitionist of them to show that content? Is it wrong to look at it?

I would participate in this more actively were it not for the droit d’image. I don’t want others posting pictures of me without my consent and I won’t post pictures of others without their consent.

Doesn’t mean I won’t keep looking. It’s fun to constantly refresh the most recent pictures on flickr and see all the events that have been taking place around the world.