I don’t always find myself saying good things about TechCrunch, but Michael Arrington’s video interview with Twitter founder Evan Williams this week is unmissable.
The interview is ostensibly about Twitter’s acquisition of Summize. In the traditional business world, this sort of thing normally involves a cautiously worded press release; an awkward, lifeless photo call and press conference and some men in suits stifly shaking hands. Not here.
Instead it is made remarkable by the fabulous candour and openness with which Williams chats about Twitter’s past, present and future. He reveals just how much of Twitter’s future is up for grabs – not lacking direction so much as spoilt for choice. Summize happens in part down to Twitter’s ‘over-estimating’ of its own search functionality (there’s honesty for you), and in part down to another outsourcing deal with a major search partner seemingly not quite feeling right.
For some, this is uncomfortable territory – no pinned-down long term strategy, an environment in which a phone call with an old contact changes everything. But it makes me that anything is possible for Twitter. Williams and Twitter might just be reflecting what modern business increasingly feels like – open to new ideas, opportunistic, experimental. It’s thrilling stuff.
Spotted on a crowded platform at London Bridge on my way home tonight, my first sighting of the Japanese phenomenon of citing the search term rather than a website address. At the bottom left, the ad asks you to search for “I am”.
It’s a simple idea – rather than asking people to remember the URL, which becomes harder as memorable domain names becomes ever more elusive, using a search term instead. Always available, but at a price. I’d love to know just how much this cost Orange in search engine marketing. Interesting to see them picking up this idea here first (to my knowledge) – it’s something you are going to be seeing much more of in the near future.
Cabel Sasser wrote about it back in March in Japan: URL’s are totally out – and it didn’t take long to reach London. I like Cabel’s prediction in his piece about the Safari title bar – though I have to tell him, on the basis of some of the user testing we do, many people think that is the way browsers should work right now.
Seeing the Orange ad was almost as exciting as the screen which preceded it telling me that New Kids are reforming. That one’s for my youngest sister.
Some years ago, a journalist friend of mine told me a story about attending a post-match press conference at Ibrox. When Walter Smith, now as then the Rangers manager appeared, the journalists left it to their colleague, the legendary Alex ‘Candid’ Cameron to open the inquisition.
“Walter, your thoughts please…”
And so a hundred pens poised ready to take dictation. Investigate journalism it was not.
For most tasked with covering Scottish football, maintaining good, unchallenging, relations with Celtic and Rangers is a fact of life for compliant types required to promote the agendas of those behind the scenes in order to guarantee a few priceless exclusives and being viewed as ‘a man in the know’. Some journalist have an ‘in’ at Celtic, some at Rangers. With fans of the two clubs massively outnumbering the support of all the other clubs combined, this is understandable, but it’s not inevitable.
It’s for these reasons that Graham Spiers strikes me as an unusually courageous journalist. For some time now, in The Herald and now The Times, Spiers has fearlessly taken on the culture at Rangers and taken a great deal of criticism for doing so from those determined to see conspiracy in everything he writes.
In a recent piece, Spiers quotes Willie Waddell, Rangers manager in the early 70’s, addressing Rangers fans after they rioted in Barcelona following their Cup Winners Cup in 1972:
Rangers have undoubtedly made real efforts to change in recent years and deserve credit for doing so, however belated it might be and whatever the driving factors behind it. But the facts aren’t good: two European finals, two riots. That isn’t a coincidence, but a culture.
Celtic are far from angels, and there are a number of distinctly unpleasant characters in the stands there too, particularly at away games. However, there is a fundamental difference between Celtic and Rangers and it concerns what they are for.
The ‘Old Firm’ is a convenient but lazy label – there are sharply contrasting cultures at the two clubs. For me, part of this is that while Celtic appear to exist like Barcelona as més que un club (more than a club), an expression of a positive, of Glasgow’s large and distinctive Irish Catholic community. Rangers aren’t for anything, but instead primarily exist as a negative, an opposition to something, a protest, an anger. ‘We are the people’ isn’t a chant of celebration, but exclusion. ‘You’re not’, the clear implication of the Rangers fans.
Celtic continues, largely, to be a more open and inclusive place, where Rangers is more insular and closed. While significant numbers of Rangers fans turned to violence in the aftermath of the UEFA Cup final as they’ve done elsewhere in recent years, Celtic’s fans did no such thing after their own loss in the same competition five years ago and won an award for their behaviour.
Last night’s dramatic end to the Scottish Premier League showed it all over again to me in the way Celtic’s victory was celebrated. Celtic’s fans didn’t even invade the pitch at the end of a game that won them the title, never mind cause trouble. Instead the celebrations turned into a rather moving tribute uniting fans, players and management alike to one of their own, Tommy Burns, who died a week previously.
I can say with confidence that the scenes wouldn’t have been the same had Rangers taken the league at Pittodrie. The police surrounding the travelling support there told the same story.
On the opening day of the Giro d’Italia, not one of the UK’s major broadsheets had any meaningful coverage of a cycling event that ranks second only to the Tour de France. I mention this because this isn’t a sport that Britain struggles in. Quite the opposite in fact. We’re disproportionately good at it, given the lack of publicity and investment the sport receives here.
From Bradley Wiggins and Victoria Pendleton to Giro participants David Millar and Mark Cavendish, Britain is experiencing a real cycling renaissance. And it isn’t as if cycling doesn’t have a fan base here either: approximately 4 million people are thought to have attended the opening weekend of Tour de France when it visited London last summer.
So far this year, the Giro has rated a mention on the following morning’s sport news, but no more than that, when Mark Cavendish, Britain’s emerging star, sprinted to victory on Stage 4. David Millar, a Scot and therefore the man I follow most, came agonisingly close the following day, only for his chain to spectacularly break inside the final kilometre. It didn’t rate a mention.
To follow cycling here is to be taken back to an older, gentler world where sporting events overseas took on an unreal, distant quality. I’m reminded of my father’s story about staying up all night as a boy to listen to the crackling radio coverage of Cassius Clay shaking up the world (Sonny Liston included) and waking up the following day wondering if he’d imagined the whole thing. I now know how he felt.
We’re so accustomed to a depth and immediacy of sporting coverage these days that there is something almost (and I stress almost) quaint about the lack of serious coverage we get here, save for the brave efforts of the cycling press and some persevering broadsheet journalists.
Yahoo! Eurosport provides what is probably the best of the available live coverage, but as is often the way of sports portal, it manages to be comprehensive yet distant, and lacks character and insight. As a feat of sheer, mechanical information processing, it is undoubtedly impressive, but it doesn’t feel edited and you don’t actively want to read it.
Thank goodness then for Slipstream Sports / Chipotle and their blog – it is probably the best sporting example of social media I’ve yet seen. The US team, which includes David Millar amongst its riders, gets the concept and potential of blogs to an extent that you all too rarely see.
Rather than an administrative chore left to some poor office junior, the blog is written by the team, giving you an amazing insight into the experience of racing in the Giro and its ups and down. The result is that Slipstream are creating the sort of direct relationship with their fans – and yes, their blog has made me one – that makes you feel like you are there, not watching from the sidelines, but on the team bus, sharing the triumphs and the (near) disaster. Far, far closer than any television or print coverage could take you.
For example, take this piece from David Millar about that incident with the chain:
This is when my chain starts to skip a little. I think nothing of it. It’s been raining and it must have some dirt in it, but I’m now having trouble holding it in one gear. I’m so focused I don’t let it stress me. I know what I have to do and jumping gears aren’t going to stop me. And then the next guy goes…I go after him… Then we slow again, the chain is still jumping. I change it into the middle of the block so it’s straight and in a big gear so I won’t have to change it again until the final sprint.
It’s not going to stop me…
We’re spitting distance from the kilometre to go banner, and the big final attack I was waiting for comes. Bruit goes and I look at the others and see this is it, the last 202 km and five hours have been prologue to this moment. I’m going to win. I’ve got this…
And BANG.
It turns out that Millar isn’t just a great rider, he’s a rather impressive writer too.
When you see an enemy lying on the ground, what’s your first reaction? To help him to his feet. In road racing, you kick him to death.
It took twenty five long years for Dutch masterpiece The Rider (De Renner) to be translated into English. Better known on these shores for The Vanishing, Krabbé‘s amazing novel tells the story of the fictitious Tour de Mont Aigoual, narrated by one of its riders, called – like the author – Tim Krabbé.
It’s telling that the title of the book isn’t The Race but rather The Rider, because this is very much a book that explores the psychology of the road racer than the event itself and takes you deep into the struggle between body and mind as both are tested to the full over the course of a draining one day race.
This isn’t a book of chapters, but of kilometers as Krabbé fights his way up and down brutal climbs and frightening descents. As befits a book about a cyclist, its style is economical and purposeful, by turns witty, dream-like and matter of fact, filled with doubt and certainty in equal measure. It explores something I cannot as a humble cycling commuter really comprehend: how cyclists find themselves in the pain, confront weakness – in themselves and in others – and the complex relationship between cyclists as opponents and co-operators.
It’s without a doubt one of the finest, most memorable books I’ve ever read.
More about The Rider:
- Matt Seaton’s review for Rapha
- Suffering appeals to me Matt Seaton interviews the man himself
- The Rider on Amazon
