Virtual Revolution - pt1

Not a hugely productive day today unfortunately, despite the initial intentions being there, I never really got round to doing any real work. I had hoped to make a decent start to my presentation today so that I could have 40% of that module done and dusted and out of the way within the next two weeks, leaving me more time for the other modules and my dissertation. Sadly, I only got as far as reading the first three pages of the paper I am presenting and I didn't really understand 70% of it. At least that is something to write about in the report, I just hope that it is badly written and not that I am stupid.

So the rest of the day has been flittered away playing computer games, and I appear to have lost the very little knack I had for the strategy games I'm playing which on one hand leaves me deflated and on the other hand makes me want to spend more time on them to get better at it. That second option is particularly worrying with the impending workload so I may be forced to uninstall and hide the discs until the summer! That may sound a little on the extreme side but this is my future I'm talking about.

There was a good end to the day however, and that came in the form of QIXL. I have stopped watching the episodes on Friday and now only watch the extended Saturday version which seems to be almost twice as funny as the shorter version. I can understand that if they show it before the watershed then they have to censor it somewhat but I much preferred it when they showed it post 9pm and kept all of the funniest bits in. This weeks episode was particularly funny because of the legendary Barry Humphreys as himself rather than his alter ego - who seems to be making far fewer appearances on our screens of late. I think the main reason why this episode was so much better was because the staleness that had started to arise when the regular panellists could see the inevitable traps coming and thus avoided them ruined the flow of the show somewhat. A new panellist who may not be so familiar with how it works can fall into the traps again and suddenly the flow is back because there is no pause inbetween the question and lack of answer, it almost becomes a lecture in that case, where Mr Fry simply tells us the answer.

The other programme that made an impact today was the Virtual Revolution which sparks a huge amount of debate online about the things raised in the show. I haven't yet seen a single negative comment about the series and I can see why. It is so well made that it would be hard to find fault with it, it manages to be informative to even the most non-technical people whilst not being patronising to the rest of the viewers. I can even cope with the presenters American accent, something that would normally put me off straight away.

Tonight's issue is was one that affects every single user of the internet, how we pay for the supposedly 'free' online services. We pay through advertising of course and the programme explained just how much personal information we actually give away. It is a really interesting programme to watch and is a real eye opener when you think about it for a while. I don't tend to think too much about adverts any more since I use adblock plus in firefox which hides all of the ads away from sight. They are still there however, they just don't render so I am still giving away as much information as the next person and when I saw the story of one woman being identified just from her internet searches, I was genuinely shocked. You take for granted a certain anonymity when you are using a search engine and never in a million years would you think that someone would be able to read your queries and link them to you. One of the reasons I am not really bothered about things like this is because my information is being dealt with by a machine. No people actually ever look at it, there is simply too much raw data to be analysed by hand. I would be far more worried if it was done by humans because they can make connections and assumptions that machines simply can't. They have the intelligence to see a queries about perhaps shopping for a hosepipe and carbon monoxide to link the two and think that perhaps there is something more going on. Whilst that data can only be used for targeted marketing, I really don't mind and am quite happy to 'pay' with that currency for the applications I use online. If I had to pay for email, twitter, google for instance, not only would I spend a fortune but I would use them significantly less, in fact I would probably stop this blog and twitter if they cost. Email and searching have become so ingrained into my life now that I would probably still pay for them although any CEOs of any email companies, don't go getting any ideas!

The other thing is though, who actually clicks on ads? I don't think I ever have done although watching my mum on google, she often clicks the yellow ad links at the top not realising that they are not part of her search. Case in point, this article from the Guardian a few days ago shows that my mum is not alone in this habit although I would hope she realised that facebook hadn't changed that much and she was in fact on a different site.

I think I will split the rest of this blog over another post so in tomorrow's entry, you can look forward to my views on recommendation engines. If don't know what they are and can't work it out by the name then go and watch the programme!