Sam's World Of No

Obviously, the makers of BBC iPlayer were initially distraught when I suggested, a couple of months ago, that their terrible product was re-defining the low bar when it came to beta software. The availability of programs was poor, the website was strange and required a seemingly-endless stream of passwords and identity checks, and the iPlayer software (read: DRM-enforcement SS Unit) was 6.64 megabytes of pure fail.

Clearly, the gauntlet was thrown down. I can visualise the events now as I had been there. And as if they had actually happened. First, the iPlayer team was excited about the blog post. Finally, they thought, the internet is taking notice of our betamax*-level technology. Then they read the post, remaking at the quick wit and the ever-thoughtful user comments, and were beside themselves. For nights, they lay sleepless. After a few days, they picked themselves out of their pit of despair and came up with a stunning idea, a spark of originality which would change the internet.

Hold on, cos this is complicated: They realised that what they should do, rather than making people download software that looks like it came from Astalavista and didn’t work, is stream the content straight from the website. That’s right. I couldn’t believe it either. As Steve would say, this is man-on-the-moon level invention. I can’t believe nobody ever thought of this before.

In all seriousness, the product that iPlayer has become is better and is actually worthy of being released to the real world. And of course it’s right that they released something early and waited for feedback, rather than keeping the product in development for years without working out what people want. And yes, they have responded quickly to the fact that they had produced a pup.

But you just think that they should have guessed that streaming online was the only way forward from the outset. It’s not like the path hadn’t been paved already. But, dear iPlayer engineer, here’s what you’ve been waiting for. “Well done”. Now get back to work - start by taking those stupid red boxes off the BBC News Homepage.

* And yes: I know that in some ways, Betamax was superior technology. But it still got sent to Failsville, which is where it sat, waiting to be joined by the initial iPlayer platform.

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Google and the like have lulled us into a false sense of security about the word ‘Beta’. It’s hardly worth listing examples so I’ll just remind you of one: Gmail is still in beta, three and a half years later. Everyone I know uses gmail. It’s like saying that television is still in beta.

But of course, ‘beta’ is very much part of Web 2.0 marketing and, on the other hand, pragmatism. Release early, learn quickly, and realise that users are - generally - the best judge of products. They’re certainly the best barometer of their success.

Unfortunately, when it comes to BBC iPlayer, beta means what it meant 10 years ago - ‘not finished. At all’. And to call it a public beta is ludicrous. You need support for an operating system other than XP? Go fish. How about you prefer not to use IE to access stuff? Go fish. How about you don’t really feel the love for Windows Media Player? Go fish. Or maybe you think that the days of broadcasting rights, where the money is in the advertising/product placement etc, rather than the content of the show, are over and that DRM is little more than a throwback to the now-antiquated idea that the money is in the copyright?

Yeh. Fishing time for you. ‘Public beta’ my foot.

I presume, although I cannot say as I have no information either way, that my biggest annoyance with iPlayer also stems from this ridiculous corporate obsession with DRM. This is when programmes, some weeks, are not available for no apparent reason. Pretty much all I want to watch is Later with Jools, Have I Got News For you, and Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Everything else is on at a convenient time so I watch them live. These three programmes, however, I had got into the habit of missing (even if I was around and near to a TV) on the basis that I could download them on iPlayer, as I had been doing for several weeks.

Therein lies the rub. These programmes and - judging from the message boards, others - are not always available. With no explanation, stuff just isn’t there. First I thought that maybe the search facility was broken, so I trawled through the annoying navigation to confirm that these shows were, indeed, not there.

No wonder iPlayer doesn’t allow you (as far as I can tell) to subscribe to a programme and have it download automatically every week. This would instantly break when, with no explanation, programmes disappeared.

So please, dear BBC, ditch your obsession with DRM and please tell us why stuff is disappearing. This will mean that you can keep people happy and move onto non-Microsoft products. Oh and dear reader, take a look at a different view of this subject. Tell me that programmes dissapearing isn’t a consequence of DRM and its underlying reasoning, and I’ll blame something else - next in line on the blame train is the stupid iPlayer interface, and in particular the context menu. Seriously guys, that menu belongs on a serial generator. I half expect to have homemade metal thrashing out of my speakers every time I open it.

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What I like about Zeldman is his can-do attitude. Earlier this year, a set of rants and comments about the demographic of people engaged in web design, and particularly the male/female debate, was marked by its lack of informed data. So Zeldman and various other happy cog people, through their A List Apart/An Event Apart vehicles, commissioned a full survey to try and plug the gap. It was published on the 24th of April this year, and open to responses for almost a month. There were 32,831 respondents, and the full report is available online, along with the data breakdowns.

I took the survey and have had a good old read of the report. I am sure that many of us will have something to say about this in the days to come. Here are some opening points after my first glance at the report; these are the ones I feel most strongly about or are, in my view, the most important findings in terms of the project’s scope and the wider web.

1. Exactly what is “Web Design”? I am certain that a lot of thought was put into the name of this survey, but I am not sure that “Design” is the right angle. Happy Cog and Zeldman are, primarily, a front-end/look and feel shop, so I can see why they chose it. For people like myself, who work full time on the web, create interfaces, build systems and create architectures, but would never consider themselves to be a ‘designer’, it’s just an inappropriate title. But then again, all the other terms are loaded too. The only one that isn’t, “Web Worker”, doesn’t sound like anything you would be introducing yourself as any time soon.
2. There is blogging well and there is blogging badly. The survey finds that roughly three quarters of all web professionals keep a blog or personal site. This proportion stands, broadly speaking, for all salary groupings, job title groupings and age groupings. The title of this section of the report states that “Ownership of a personal website has little or no bearing on success”, which is true. Unfortunately, no account was taken of the amount of traffic/popularity/PR/”importance” or other value factors related to these sites. It would have been interesting to see what proportions of these sites are regularly updated, which are regularly read, and which are ranked as ‘important’ by search engines and social bookmarking systems. I think that it is fair to say that the people who earn more and are higher on the career ladder would also have more popular blogs; some data about this effect and its causality would have been good. As it is, it’s a little bit like saying everyone who works on the web has a website. It’s a bit like getting data that says that racing drivers have cars.
3. There is no widespread practical education for web development. We have this rant at least once a week at work, where we wish we could employ more people (we employ people as fast as they can apply), and more people who had been academically educated in the field. Computer Science is a great degree but courses rarely provide practical, real-world training on the web, and certainly doesn’t formally educate in the soft skills that web development shops need. With marketing, it’s even worse. We long for people who have been formally trained in product management for the web, and wouldn’t need teaching even the most basic information about syntax, how to write for the web and how to manage product and brand identity. I guess this skill is not admired by very small e-commerce ventures, is mostly covered by senior management or customer service in medium ventures, and is utilised by highly-corporate executives and leading marketing experts in larger ventures. So it is not surprising to find that most web professionals did not take a degree which they themselves do not consider to be relevant to their current work. Whether this takes into account soft skills (for me, problem-solving, communication and analytical skills were large and relevant parts of an education in history), cannot be determined. Interestingly, people like project managers, whom I would have thought would be those who are specifically trained in ‘management’ are amongst those who see their education as the least relevant. Perhaps abstract management training just doesn’t provide them with the technical skills they need. Or perhaps technical training didn’t provide them with the management skills they need.
4. “Increased educational attainment generally appears to correspond to increased earning in our sample”. Yes, and in every other survey ever completed. Across the board. But…
5. …“As income level increases, the percentages of respondents for whom their college studies were relevant decreases”. This one is interesting. As is pointed out, salary tends to increase with age, and the time since graduating tends to increase with age, and the relevancy of education decreases over time. Most web development professionals will move into a more managerial role as they progress through their career; this will necessarily involve more people skills and fewer technical skills. In addition, it seems to be that the industry is still, broadly speaking, biased against people with specialist technology degrees. I argue again that this is because these degrees do not have enough web focus to make their applicants suitable for this kind of work. Perhaps this because other types of programming jobs pay more, I don’t know.
6. The proportion of women is just low. Sometimes there really are statistical realities, and the women argument appears to be one. 1 in 10 workers in this profession are women. This is interesting because it addresses the debate that sparked the survey in the first place. They occupy the mid-salary ranges, not the high-salary ranges that high profile people would be expected to occupy, and they generally are happy with their salaries. I hate to say it, but it looks like there really aren’t that many women to do things like speak at conferences and write books. The problem that needs addressing is that there aren’t enough women, not that they don’t get invited to conferences because we are scared of them. I mean, we are scared of them, but we’d get over it if they were around.
7. Nobody wants to be a webmaster. It’s not a cool title, it’s not the sort of title that a dedicated and going-places web shop would use. Frankly, I think it’s pejorative. And in terms of job satisfaction, the people that hold this title are the least satisfied. Of course, the different between their satisfaction and that of the most satisfied category, “Project Manager” is only 10 and a bit percent, but still. Let’s get rid of this title once for all and give the sometimes extremely talented people that hold something decent to put on their business cards. While we’re at it, let’s get them some business cards. We’ve been promising them for ages. The design guys were supposed to be sorting it. I don’t know.
8. We need to learn to write. Possibly so that we can communicate better, possibly so we can improve the amount of success a blog gives you (see point 2), or possibly because of all the under-rated web skills, writing is still the largest. Almost 50% of respondents thought this was a major skill gap for them; I predict that this number will, slowly, change as the importance of the word on the web is finally drilled into skulls everywhere.
9. Let’s all go on holiday. Or a vacation. Just exactly where are we going? It isn’t mentioned in the report (that I could see), but the questions about ‘holiday’ vs. ‘vacation’ were nonsensical to non-US English speakers. I’m a British English speaker, and I barely understood the distinction. Europe has ‘public holidays’ and ‘bank holidays’, guys. Make this distinction clearer next time and you’ll get some meaningful data.
10. Where is the section that tells us who earns more? Finding out your friends’ or co-workers’ salaries is not always a fun game - kind of like when an inappropriate animal documentary comes on when you’re visiting your grandparents - but it would be nice to know which professions are making the money. This is such a glaring omission that I’m sure I must have missed it. Granted, I could correlate the data myself as it has been provided, but why would a couple of stats experts miss this obvious point?

Of course, what will be most interesting about this will be the charting of data over time. Without patterns, controls and averaging, we can’t see what’s actually going on and we can’t spot blips. I would also like to know the average time of year for pay rises and job changes - does the timing of the survey make a big difference?

That said, it’s a terrific start and good on people for getting it done and laying important foundations. Now lets build on them, and get the diversity of our industry up to a respectable level. Because it will help us all in the long run. Seriously.

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My television habits are distinctly modern; I very rarely sit down at the tv praying that it will entertain me. Homer Simpson’s “Come on television, give me some of that sweet sweet pap” I am not. Like a lot of people, I now download the shows I like, either in the “illegal but who cares because it still makes us money” Bittorrent sense, or via dedicated sites such as Mr Twig for South Park. A lot of BBC programmes are available on the iPlayer, another great idea crippled by executives who fall in love with acronyms like DRM and the other usual suspects, and I know that Channel 4 have some stuff available online too.

So for me, my PC is my TV. One of my secret pleasures however, and I don’t think I’m alone in this either, used to be the stupid quiz programmes they had on late night channels. Hilarious questions, desperate presenters trying and failing to “make it” in TV, terrible effects and shoddy production - it was a winning combination. But its legality was always a bit suspect, but at that time in the morning after a couple of pints, who cares.

Strangely, they were not the biggest culprit in the recent “television self-destructing” fiasco. Nor were they the most amusing - the story of Blue Peter, the ever lovable children’s programme, faking a poll to name a cat was just awesome. It’s the story of the whole thing; frankly, it’s the story of the year.

But it’s over, we’ve had our fun and Jeremy Paxman had the chance to give one of the most memorable MacTaggart lectures of all time. Heads have rolled where necessary and television had the wake-up call it needed. Unfortunately, it’s still news, because a lot of media outlets have missed a crucial point of Paxman’s speech - that television is, by its very nature, not real. The people you see aren’t living in a box in your living room. Most of it isn’t live. Supposedly ad-hoc dialogue is scripted, stuff is filmed in a different order from which it is shown, and generally the editing process is necessarily subjective in order to meet the aesthetic necessity, time concerns and narrative effectiveness.

Top Gear is a fine example. It’s of the very few programmes I make an effort to watch at the time of original broadcast, and at the start of the new series last Sunday, after a summer off the air whilst all this “fake” commotion had started up, they opened with a joke about how the whole thing was real. By way of a punchline, Richard Hammond, noted for being short, stood on a box that was out of shot, making him look taller than the gargantuan Clarkson.

I cringed. Top Gear is one of the most heavily faked and edited programs in current production.

Now of course it is all real; the races are real, the timing is real, the interviews are real. But the bits where they are in a car talking to you, and then they come over voice over doing part of a conversation, or an introduction to a comment that they will then make “live”, are all deceit to make an effective narrative. This is good; it works well at creating a cohesive story for the viewer.

Top Gear’s news section is filmed like it’s at the pub and the banter is flowing randomly, but of course it’s all scripted. Or at least, the topics are discussed in a pre-determined order. This helps with crucial issues like the right background pictures, or graphics of the news item they are discussing, appearing on the screen in the background.

The filming of the large events is not real at all - the shots of the cars driving are done after the time, especially in the races. There are chase cars and planes that you never see; these are a normal part of filming. In the Bugatti Veyron vs Cessna race, May even had an instructor in the plane with him as he hadn’t passed his flying tests; this is never mentioned.

I know all of this because Top Gear make their production notes available. Imagine if all of these small deceits were removed - the program would be just awful. It wouldn’t fit together; it wouldn’t entertain. So we have to accept some lies, because it is what makes television believable.

So maybe we shouldn’t have too much heavy editing on news programmes, but we really shouldn’t care if the judge’s “houses” on X-Factor aren’t their own. Frankly, the people that need this much explaining to them should stick to children’s television, and the fact that this story got onto the BBC News front page for most of today is just depressing. Television has had its wakeup call. It heard the alarm, it didn’t hit snooze, it didn’t fall back asleep. It had a shower, it went to work. Now can’t we just let it enjoy a hard-earned beer at the end of a long day?

That is all. I’m going to now enjoy my own hard-earned beer.

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