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Faster and cleverer or distracted and lazy?
As we head towards our first meeting with the BBC following the labs, I can’t wait to get stuck in. Funny thing is, I can’t wait for a lot of things (like Web Scene Meet-Up 4 which we have just arranged for 25 September!). I remember a time before the internet when people used to queue in shops and sit in traffic and wait for deliveries and things to arrive in the post, but thanks to the internet I think we have become a less patient society.
Having a huge wealth of information available on demand is fantastic, if I want to know what the weather forecast is going to be, I’ll just hop on the BBC website, I don’t need to wait and catch the forecast on the TV. Why waste my time queuing up at banks and shops when I can sit in the comfort of my own home and sort everything out online?
Our lives are faster due to the speed that we can now get hold of information and make plans. So does that mean that we’re now being more efficient? Does it mean we’re more organised and can manage our time better? Does it mean that we’re more knowledgeable?
In theory I think we probably are. We are now better at processing information in a fast and efficient manor, because we have to. Apparently the average working person in the UK will receive 40 emails per day! Whereas before email and the internet became common place you would receive your post in the morning which you dealt with, and then maybe one or two phone calls throughout the day. The normal office based working person is now constantly supplied with information and tasks throughout the day which need to be dealt with, so yes we should be more productive.
But are we also better at wasting time? 40 emails a day, that’s 40 times you’ll be interrupted by a little flashing icon in the bottom corner of your screen. And I wonder out of those 40 emails how many are relevant to you, how many have you been copied in on ‘for your information’, how many are your mates asking you if you want to go out on Friday or (in my case) your colleagues asking whose turn it is to make the tea? How much time do you spend pointlessly surfing the internet for rubbish, browsing Facebook, watching random videos on Youtube?
Are we also less sociable? Social Networking websites are very popular, but is social networking? Or even just being social? Why would you want to get dressed up and go out to catch up with your friends in the pub when you can sit in your pyjamas and write on their wall? Why make an effort to go out and meet people when you can just join dating sites, chat rooms and forums?
I think potentially the answer is ‘yes’ to all of the above and I guess the answer is all about striking a balance. But I wonder if the next step in popular web culture is sites such as Smynx (which is now in beta form for those of you that can’t wait for the official release) that span both online and offline activities and encourage users to get away from their screens and actually do something? I guess only time and trends will tell, and I can’t wait to find out!
*** Claire
Add comment June 24, 2008
Don’t drive to Cardiff on a Monday…
Our database of incidents has been growing over the last couple of weeks, since we started recording data from the BBC Travel feed.
The dataset size is still relatively small, for meaningful statistical analysis, but I just thought I’d perform some random mining of the data, for fun. (Yes, ‘fun’… I do need to get out more).
From initial results, it looks like Monday is the worst day for driving:
And, if you’re travelling along the M4, the city of Cardiff – although not the largest urban area along the length of the motorway – seems to suffer from the most incidents (clearly, it’s the large number of tourists flocking to our beautiful city).
More coming soon…
*** Dan
Add comment May 27, 2008
Updated Personalised Travel Feeds… Now in HTML!
Quick update to the personalised XML Travel feeds. I’ve added a little feature that converts (server side) the XML to another output format. For now I’ve just written the HTML converter; am hoping to add RSS and other formats quite quickly in the future.
The additional parameter for requesting any personalised feed in HTML is ‘/format/html’, for example:
http://feeds.boxuk.com/bbctravel/xmlfeed/place/cardiff/format/html
I’ve purposefully omitted any HTML header information; this just returns an HTML list, suitable for embedding in remote pages.
*** Dan
Add comment May 15, 2008
Personalised BBC Travel XML Feeds
OK, so I’ve updated my little experiment so that you can now request personalised travel XML data, which is taken and filtered from the original huge BBC travel XML feed.
The root URL for the feed is:
http://feeds.boxuk.com/bbctravel/xmlfeed/
You can use the following parameters to personalise the data:
- road (either a road number or name)
- place (this one’s a bit odd at the moment due to the original data, some cities work, some counties work)
- severity (either very severe, severe, medium or slight)
Multiple values can be separated with commas, and the parameters can be specified in any order. Example feeds are:
- http://feeds.boxuk.com/bbctravel/xmlfeed/road/A4
- http://feeds.boxuk.com/bbctravel/xmlfeed/place/bristol,newport
- http://feeds.boxuk.com/bbctravel/xmlfeed/road/m4/place/cardiff/severity/slight
I’m hoping to add in some longitude/latitude parameters soon, so that you can request a feed for just a particular geographic area.
If you have any ideas or comments, please add them to this post!
*** Dan
PS This is just a hack for the time being, with little in the way of caching or robustness… Please do not rely on these feeds!
UPDATE: Just added a little dynamic ’summary’ page too from the live/historic data too, which I’ll try to add some more graphs to…
Add comment May 14, 2008
Using the BBC Feeds: Whetting the Appetite
I spent a few hours yesterday setting up a script that periodically grabs the BBC Road Travel XML data, parses it into a database, then grabs the current weather conditions for any new incidents (for the local area), and stores that alongside each incident. Hopefully in a week-or-two there’ll be enough data to produce some interesting graphs, such as number of incidents vs. weather conditions, or number of incidents vs. time of day.
In the meantime, just out of interest, I’ve quickly grabbed the BBC 7 Day Listings data, and grep’ed it for some different genres of output that the BBC is pushing to its audience in the next week. As a committed atheist with a scientific background, it’s a bit dis-heartening to see this kind of balance of output from the BBC:
With about half of British people now having no religious beliefs, and I expect a slightly higher percentage having some belief in Science, I wonder how long this situation can last before the public demands a more even balance.
*** Dan
Add comment May 14, 2008
BBC Labs Day 4 – Onwards and upwards
As the sun sets over the sleepy hills of Powys and day four of the Wales and West Midlands BBC Innovation Labs 2008 draws to a close, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there was peace and tranquility at the Lake Country House in Llanmmarch Wells… but you would be wrong. Listen a little bit closer and you will hear the rumbling of keyboards and the almost inaudible buzz of stress, frustration and yes, mild panic… that right folks, it’s pitch day tomorrow.
As luck (or fate) would have it, we are pitching first tomorrow morning and despite the minor curve ball thrown our way yesterday, which resulted in us ripping up our original idea and starting almost from scratch at 11am this morning, we think we’ve done OK. But there’s nothing like adrenaline to help you pack two months work and preparation into 22 hours!
Today mainly saw us left alone to push on with our pitches and the Box UK corner was a hive of activity (well almost) as we worked on our new idea, but has it been enough…?
I suspect the real reason for putting us in such a remote location is not that the distant bleating of lambs and twittering of birds will calm your nerves, but probably more to the fact that no-one can hear you scream. Despite all of our research, one thing that didn’t expect is the lack of spare time you have once you’re here. Every day this week we have worked from 9am through to 7pm and then had homework. It would be fair to say it has been a bit of a slog, but we have met some great people and learnt a lot in a short space of time.
So all that leaves me to say, before I *attempt* to get some sleep, is thanks to the BBC for a fun, challenging week and good luck to all the great teams that have worked so hard over the last couple of days.
I hope you’ll join me tomorrow for the next exciting installment…
*** Claire
Add comment May 1, 2008
Telescope? Periscope? No: Textyscope!
We’ve always been aware that our labs idea has partly already been done before. Luckily, these previous incarnations are – without exception – very poorly executed, with question usability. And, as we’ve argued for years, the execution of an idea accounts for at least 50% of it’s success.
Even so, given that we’ll need to excite the BBC commissioners on that fateful last Friday of the labs, and having read the blog posts describing the evolution of others’ ideas during the labs, we’re keen to extend the scope of our basic premise.
We’re comfortable sticking with the ‘regional’ aspect of the idea (after all, we’ll be pitching to the ‘Nations and Regions’ commissioner), and with the ‘mobile’ means of delivery. But we still feel there are at least three different routes we could take to expand the reach of the project, and deliver greater benefit to the user.
1. Delivery Channels
You’d think that by choosing ‘mobile’ as a platform, there’s not much that we could do to expand the scope through delivery channels. As we’ve seen in the last 12-18 months, though, the mobile platform has quickly evolved into a rich environment, offering a huge number of possibilities.
SMS will still be our core focus, as we’re still keen to produce a service which offers valuable, timely information using a ‘push’ format. After all this time, SMS still feels like an under-utilised communications channel (by services, not consumers), and we believe that we can not only offer a highly-desirable SMS service, but that we can develop it as a ‘best practice’ example.
Voice is our second opportunity. Asterisk, a massively under-rated open PBX system, offers us a huge number of features to take advantage of. To start with, we’ll be looking at features like text-to-speech and speech-to-text, as a more ‘on-demand’ means of defining your route and receiving relevant information in return.
The mobile web is our third opportunity. With the latest Opera Mobile and iPhone Safari browsers now becoming commonplace, a far richer, more user-focussed experience can be delievered through mobile handsets.
And, fourth on our list, but possibly the most exciting, mobile operating systems Android and iPhone OS offer us a means for delivering tightly-integrated services, that can take advantage of geo-location, text, voice, the mobile web, and advanced means of user input (such as the iPhone multi-touch interface).
2. My Journeys
We could consider widening the breadth of our idea, so that it doesn’t just cover ‘changes to my journey’, but is a generic application for managing all aspects of the journeys you make; this could include the integration of some user-generated content, finding the cheapest en-route petrol prices, automatically arranging car-pooling, and much more.
3. Expect the Unexpected
Similarly, we could broaden the topic of the service in a different direction; rather than just ‘changes to my journey’, it could cover generic ‘changes to my routine(s)’, which could also include unexpected changes in weather, cancelled local events, and more.
Well, that’s it for now. Claire will be writing our next entry (we’re taking it in turns), so keep an eye out for her next post, where she’ll probably use an even more obscure word than ‘nomophobia’.
*** Dan
Add comment April 9, 2008
A Problematic Journey
I mentioned in a previous post that journeys were particularly complex datasets; how so?
If we begin by looking at a (relatively) simple definition of the term: a journey is a directional route between two geographic locations, at a particular time, via a particular mode of transport.
This, in itself, is a bit of a mouthful, with a number of variables already rearing their ugly heads. However, if we now think about how we may want to compare a ‘journey’ to other sets of data – as a case in point, travel warnings – we can uncover even more complexity:
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There could be multiple sub-journeys (e.g. by different modes of transport: walk, then car, then train, then tube, then bus).
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Defining a route between two points does not necessarily provide all the necessary information, e.g. which bus or train is being used.
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There are no standard conventions for identifying ‘parts’ of a road (the primary type of ‘route’ for walking, car, bus and bike), with the exception of motorways.
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A journey might not just be concerned with getting from A to B in the shortest time/distance, but also with a number of intermediate locations (e.g. for a preferred route through a park, via a coffee shop, or to pick-up a friend).
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The ‘directional’ aspect of journeys is particularly important; roadworks on a southbound section of road may not be of any interest – for the sake of ‘comparing’ the data – if you are traveling northbound.
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With the specific case of travel warnings, an incident at a particular point can affect routes/journeys ‘further up/down the line’, and not just at the specific location.
So, in the case of an application that compares user-defined journey data with other data sets, we can summarise the above as two fundamentally difficult problems to overcome:
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A journey may be inherently complex (the route(s) and mode(s) within it), but much of this must be hidden from the user, so that they may quickly, easily and accurately define their routes – without frustration. The end-user benefit of the application must greatly outweigh the investment needed to use it.
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The data-sets may be difficult to compare accurately (e.g. roadworks at a specific location, without knowing whether it affects north or south-bound traffic, or how a delayed train may affect a journey which includes part of that train’s route within it).
What potential solutions might there be to these fundamental problems?
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In reality, most users may not care about every detail of their journey. Instead, they may focus on an individual part of their journey, probably that which occupies the majority of their time, e.g. a single train journey, or a commute along the motorway, without being concerned about how they get to/from the train/motorway.
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With regards to the lack-of a systematic identification system for parts of roads, data-sets may be compared purely on their geo-spatial attributes (long/lat), assuming they are available in both sets (although the geo-spatial width/area of the road/incident will need some thought, to see if there is ‘overlap’ in regions).
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Google Maps already has a sophisticated, intuitive system for defining ‘waypoints’ for a journey – we could use the API.
We’ll be thinking more about these (and other) problems/solutions over the coming pre-lab weeks. In my next post, I’ll talk a little about the scope of the project.
*** Dan
Add comment March 31, 2008
To text or not to text: when just enough becomes too much
I’m quite pleased that I have kicked (or at least cut down on) one of my more annoying and very unsociable habits. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that everyone is entitled to their vices but I was getting fed up of the looks that I was getting from my friends when we were on a night out, so I decided it was time to cut back…
I am of course referring to my addiction to text messaging!
Wikipedia tells me that a study at Queensland University in Australia found that text messaging is the most addictive digital service on mobile or internet (although I’m not sure if that is still the case, thanks to Facebook), and is equivalent in addictiveness to cigarette smoking.
However, there is a difference between receiving text messages from your mates, and receiving them from a company or service that you have subscribed to.
When I was buying a house I subscribed to text alerts from an estate agent, thinking that it would be helpful. But before long I was being bombarded with information on houses that just weren’t suitable, so after a while I started ignoring the texts.
I’m now quite wary of signing up to ‘SMS alerts’ through fear that my inbox will become full of mindless sales rubbish (rather than the mindless general rubbish that my friends send me!). So what would it take for me to sign up to a service again?
As our BBC project relies heavily on users subscribing to the alerts in the first place, and then actually paying attention to them – critical questions that we need to work out the answers to are ‘how do we persuade people that this is a service that they really need?’ and ‘how many text messages is too many’?
***Claire
Add comment March 27, 2008
Simplicity is a complex business
I’m back from my trip, which went more-or-less to plan (excluding the customer service, which the French must think is an oxymoron – but that’s a different story).
It did, however, give me time to start gently probing our idea for it’s most obvious weaknesses, with the intention that we can begin to solve them before the intense scrutiny of next month’s labs.
One of the critical datasets for our application is notoriously complicated: routes between geographical places. A key challenge for us, therefore, is to layer a smooth interface on top of these ugly datasets, so that end-users can quickly and simply define their precise routes, with as few barriers as possible.
Simplicity is not easy, however. It is becoming increasingly apparent that simplicity is a pivotal factor for mass-adoption of a product, but one that few organisations consistently get right. Apple and Nintendo are two obvious examples of companies that both understand this importance, and deliver appropriately: few would argue that the iPod or Nintendo DS are ‘technically superior’ to their competitors, yet their simple interfaces have seen them quickly dominate their respective markets.
I’ll cover more specific details of why defining our routes will be particularly complex in a follow-up post, so that I can keep this post as simple as possible!
*** Dan
Add comment March 25, 2008
