Justice?

Now the Ninja is not one to complain but....

 

In the technical and extreme yet unreal world of Formula 1, the rules of common sense rarely seem to apply and perhaps the sour grapes are due to an unwavering support for McLaren in all that they do, both on and off the track (more on that later) but surely the recent ruling on the Renault 'Crashgate' incident by the FIA is unfairly lenient.

 

Let's compare...

 

McLaren were fined $100 million and thrown out of the constructors' title in 2007 for receiving plans for competitor's cars from a disgruntled employee. They did not coerce the other team's employee to hand over the details nor did they conduct any spying of their own yet they were handed down a whopping fine and lost a chance at the title. They merely handled stolen goods.

 

Yet Renault, who contrived to have one car crash deliberately to change race strategy in favour of their other driver (who subsequently won the race) were recently given a paltry two year suspended ban from F1. All this despite putting the lives of their driver, other drivers, race officials and spectators at risk by deliberately causing a crash. No fine, nothing, and the ban only comes in to effect if they do something similar again in the next two years. Anyone would agree that this is highly unlikely...

 

Many Mac fans feel that the team is often treated unfairly and this recent incident seems only to confirm this feeling...

 

Anyway, racing resumes this weekend so the Ninja has little doubt it will all be quickly forgotten about....until the next time

 

The Impact of Latency

The Ninja recently has become fascinated by the powers of the modern connected world in addressing the issue of latency. Latency has traditionally been a term of concern limited to the IT professional’s world, in particular reference to the speed of a network and its capacity to provide a snappy service to the terminals connected to it.

 

Now, however, latency is increasingly used when talking of broader communication activities such as e-mail, text messaging, blogging etc…it's even creeping in to marketing-speak.

 

Take the delivery of news as an example – not too long ago, the main vehicle for the latest news was the letter and then the daily newspaper. This therefore saw news delivered when it was days old. The paper might have arrived every 24 hours but often the stories were older than that due to print deadlines etc. so there was always a delay.

 

The development of the Internet saw the speed of delivery of news increase rapidly to hours, if not minutes, negating the ‘first for news’ position of the newspapers. Information would be posted on the internet, the reader would then go find it at a website or blog and digest it that way.

 

This was taken further with the adoption of instant messaging such as sms, with networks of friends able to quickly pass on information through mobile devices, further shortening the delay in getting the word out.

 

Now with services such as Twitter and Facebook, news has been reduced to almost instantaneous levels of availability whereby the story (the vehicle used by the newspaper) has almost merged with the text messaging concept (sms). Latency here is milliseconds. However, the newsmakers and bloggers were often still controlling the story. They write, you read. Only recently have individuals begun to harness the capacity to contribute to the news. Old-style newsmakers were the first to see the potential but only now are we grabbing it ourselves.

 

However, the capacity of sites like Twitter allow us to go beyond this…with the recent example of the air collision over the Hudson River. With the search component of this service, the moment you heard about the crash, you could search for ‘Hudson’ on Twitter and undoubtedly find someone who had tweeted their seeing the crash, giving you immediate access to what interests you.

 

Indeed the recent flypast of the Airbus A380 over the UK allowed the Ninja to try this out first hand. A quick Twitter search for 'A380' pulled in hundreds of tweets from people posting information on what they had seen and heard of the big plane as it flew its tour of UK airspace. These links in turn led to TwitPics of groups of planespotters or shots of the plane in the sky etc. giving you immediate on-the-ground access to the 'news' as defined by your own search query. Very, very cool indeed...as long as you can find what you are looking for!

 

As a result, the minimisation of latency has empowered the reader with the capacity to craft their own news story, cutting the traditional media creators out of the loop entirely. Newspapers have known about the internet for about 15 years but most have been very slow to change their ways of working to adapt to this powerful technological threat.

 

Despite this, these developments will not suit everyone. People are used to having their entertainment served up to them with minimal hassle but the power of microblogging and its merger of traditional newsmaking, social interaction, internet immediacy and pure strength-in-numbers community grunt shows that it is undoubtedly the future of media and one that is still evolving for all concerned. Indeed many people talk of hyper micro blogging as the future as we link in to a variety of small very but 'personal to us' local networks.

 

There is no one clear path for this cutting edge concept but the user will certainly be the winner as it will undoubtedly provide a quicker, more immediate connected and pervasive service at a much lower price than existing media structures. The key for those on the other side is how to monetise it, if at all….no easy task.

 

Whatever happens, thanks to latency the future should be incredibly exciting…