I have started to notice increasingly how people tend to assume that everyone tends to be like them – I’m no different. Down our street there is a substantial minority of people using Ocado – probably two or three a day, and they’re who we use as well. When we aren’t using them we use Sainsbury’s Online. But our neighborhood is totally atypical of the UK at large.

According to this article Ocado only gets 8,000 orders a week from across the whole UK and is therefore much smaller than Tesco’s home delivery which gets > 110,000 orders a week. If I had to guess I would have supposed as many as ten percent of people in the UK get groceries delivered online, and a quarter of those got them through Ocado. In reality it’s very roughly 1% of people ordering groceries online and 1% of those ordering via Ocado.

When I “posted earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_online_media.html#000877 about The New Standard I forgot to mention another interesting example of alternative media different both from the IndyMedia and The New Standard styles. OhMyNews, a newspaper from South Korea, has thousands of “citizen reporters”. These get paid and go through the conventional editorial process but the pay is less than for conventional journalism and no credentials are necessary. This would seem to allow for the kind of “native reporting” (reporting by “ordinary people” and those directly involved in news events) that Chris Atton and others find a particularly appealling function of the new alternative media while preserving some of the quality standards that ensure good material is read and bad material hidden or discarded.

Significantly, OhMyNews seems to be successful as a business and a social phenomenon, though this may be in part simply because South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world.

(Bajra the Peacock Boat)

I just came back from the “Mayor’s Thames Festival”:http://www.thamesfestival.org/ and had a great time. It’s a good example of how cities have the scale to produce public goods which tens of thousands can enjoy. Tonight’s event was a two-hour-long parade of groups of varying age and ethnicity joining peacefully simply to have fun themselves and entertain others.

Oh, and I also love the fact that this is an entirely synthetic festival – set up six years ago just for entertainment, with no commercial hook (though of course it is probably good for the tourist trade)…

It’s slightly melancholy, however. as it is about the last of a string of large-scale public free events throughout the summer, and it is notably both colder and darker at this time of the evening than I remembered earlier.

After a long drought, a whole bunch of demos came out at once, though in the end they were all pretty disappointing. “Chrome”:http://www.chromethegame.com/ is a FPS with an emphasis on stealth and a “gimmick” – implants that give your character super-powers but only for a limited time. Unfortunately, while it is undeniably pretty the demo was extremely repetitious (power up, go through door, shoot bad guys, repeat) and you got no chance to play with the vehicles promised.

“Silent Storm”:http://www.nival.com/eng/s2_info.html was even worse. It seemed promising – a Jagged Alliance-style turn-based squad combat game set in WWII, but it was totally unrealistic (your people could be peppered with bullets and still stagger around) and you could only see the terrain from limited camera angles which often made it difficult to judge where you were running to (for example).

“Warlords 4”:http://warlords4.ubi.com/index.php was the demo I probably spent the longest time playing but only through a stubborn desire to get through it. It is another turn-based game – this one set in the usual D & D style fantasy universe, but it too began to be tedious as the tactical combat system is really primitive (a common problem with turn-based games where a lot of combats are resolved automatically).

Command and Conquer: Generals may be a good game, but the 400Mb (!) demo doesn’t really give you much insight into it. It contains just three very short missions and no multiplayer or skirmish mode.

Lastly, I haven’t had much time to play “Medal of Honour Allied Assault Breakthrough”:http://www.eagames.com/official/moh_alliedassault/breakthrough_editorial.jsp?src=mohbtdownloads&src=11hmer2g1000gnonenone (EA has to come up with some shorter names!) but without a manual it is hard to get started on, and I have to ask – what kind of first person shooter these days doesn’t let you lie down?

“Indymedia”:http://www.indymedia.org/ and similar sites – created by unpaid, largely un-edited reporters – are one way in which the Internet is enabling alternative voices to be heard more widely, but this publishing model has its weaknesses. Because participants are unprofessional and unpaid, there tends to be more opinion venting and comments on existing coverage than original research. Also, the lack of editing means contributions can be ungrammatical, unreadable or even occaisionally “anti-semitic or racist rantings”:http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=44851. While many Indymedia sites have now started to hide or remove such postings, the problem is still bad enough that it is hindering the acceptance of Indymedia sites by the mainstream media and even “search engines”:http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/09/1639862_comment.php.

The New Standard wants to be a different kind of alternative media entity- one a lot closer to traditional news sources. It intends to pay its contributors to do real investigative research not just produce opinion pieces, and it will “charge its readers”:http://newstandardnews.net/promo/membership.cfm $4 to $10 a month when it launches in December.
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As I “mentioned earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_weblogs.html#000766, the people behind Moveable Type (and many of the other competitors to Blogger) are failing to offer real choice to the low-end weblogger because they lack a free hosted option. Now Blogger has upped the ante by dropping the remaining fees that were charged to Blogger Pro users and making those features available to all Blogger users. I’m guessing it’s gearing up to face the competition from “AOL”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_weblogs.html#000813.

It must be said that the “additional features”:http://new.blogger.com/feature_giveaway/announcement.pyra offered in Blogger Pro are nothing to write home about and MT (which powers this weblog) still leaves Blogger well behind in the features race…

The “Internet Archive”:http://www.archive.org/ which has an index of 11bn web pages – snapshots of the web at various stages of its development – now has a “search engine”:http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=8569 covering at least part of the archive. So you don’t need to know the precise address of the web page you had given up for lost (though that function still works). And you can see how the web saw things over time – you can see when a topic became “hot” for example – it provides supplementary graphs.

Thanks to “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106280030381534395 for the link

Now here’s a gadget worth saving for – for a mere $5,000 you can have a go-anywhere heads-up display (320 by 240 pixels) so you can read email without even getting out your phone or PDA. Order now from MicroOptical (or wait until this tech gets a little cheaper!)

Even the Economist has finally to pay attention to America’s rising inequality – if only because it seems likely (at last!) to become an election issue. It is entertaining to see the hoops The Economist has to go through attempting to justify the fact that, “The wage incomes of the bottom 20% of households have barely grown in real terms since the mid-1970s”.

* “The proportion of Americans in poverty now stands at 12%; in Mr Krugman’s supposedly golden 1950s, it reached 22%.” This “good news” depends heavily on how you define poverty.
* “The combination of technology and globalisation has put many more erstwhile luxuries within the grasp of poorer Americans.” True for goods but not true for services. And anyway, advancing technology creates new needs and even new necessities – like Internet access, for example.
* “50-80% of the unfortunates in America’s bottom quintile push themselves into a higher quintile after 10 years” (well if you look at it the other way 20-50% of the bottom quintile are still stuck there after ten years).
* “America’s poorest are (in real purchasing-power terms) only a tiny bit worse-off than their peers in Sweden, Finland and Denmark”. It’s hard to read the chart I reproduce below but it looks as if Britain and Australia are the *only* countries among the 12 others surveyed whose poorest 10% were poorer than America’s 10%.

The “Economic Policy Institute”:http://www.epinet.org/ provided the figures for the chart and has other interesting statistical and policy information.

Haven’t you always wondered where IKEA gets the names for its stuff? This link gives you general categories – you’ll have to go “here”:http://www.freedict.com/onldict/ to find a Swedish-English dictionary to get specific item names.

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