Do we need to rethink Good-Cheap-Fast?
This set of rules popped into my head today while grazing my Twitter:

For most things this is a no-brainer. To do sometime better takes time while costs more. Easy. But I’m wondering if social media tools, and the Internet culture that creates them, change this.
Back when Stef and I started Created in Birmingham one of the (many) things we wanted to show was how you could get a perfectly good website for next to nothing. At the time most civic-style websites were costing tens of thousands of pounds to deliver and a frightening number of them were, frankly, rubbish with short lifespans. We used Wordpress, which is free, and an off the shelf design, which was also free, and had it up and running in an afternoon. The only thing that cost money was the content which, we felt, was how it should be.
So in this situation it was good and cheap and fast. For what we wanted to do, anyway.
Sure, there’s still a huge market for bespoke web design and even with plugins and such platforms like Wordpress won’t always do exactly what you want them to do. I’m not suggesting the death of the website building industry by any stretch. But the fact is I can have a website up and running in minutes that is cheap, if not free, and very good indeed. Especially when compared to some of the bespoke rubbish the snake-oil salesmen sell for absurd sums. (And I’m not tarring everyone with the same brush. The same applies to the nascent social media industry, if not more so.)
“Good” is subjective so let’s assume free software like Wordpress is good and park that. It’s cheap because, well, it’s free software. So the thing that’s aparently been eradicated is fast. Since you can’t have something from nothing, where did fast go?
When you get something bespoke it generally means a handful of people have worked on it. If it takes 5 people a week to deliver then you’re looking at 200 hours of work which you’ll be billed for. But Open Source software is written by thousands of people over many years with no cost to the end user. Why this happens is a subject for another time but it boils down, I feel, to a culture of collaboration and sharing for mutual benefit.
So when you pay someone to develop a site run on Wordpress they’re not building it from scratch. They’re modifying something that has had hundreds of thousands of hours spent developing it. This speeds the process up no end.
I’ve scratched the surface here, mainly because I didn’t want to get into a long explanation of stuff like the Free Software movement, but also because I’m more interested in whether we can get to a place where you can get good and cheap and fast in the offline world. Can collaboration and sharing be applied to business in this way? Or is that just Socialism by another name?
Your thoughts would be appreciated.
Be Vocal and the mashing of local data
A few weeks ago I started Local Blogging Birmingham, a simple blog to track all the local blogs that exist in the city and in doing so figure out exactly what a “local blog” was. As a process it’s been useful for me but as a resource it’s not that great. It my defense it took me 5 minutes to set up so I’m not too worried but there are much better ways to display this information. Howabout a map?
M’good chum Nick Booth aka Podnosh is running a new blog, Be Vocal. It’s part of Digital Birmingham’s Open City project but specifically looks at how “the web is being used for what you might call civic good” and in particular mashups of local data.
The Brum Blogs map is a simple but effective example of that. It takes some basic data about local blogs (the name, location and web address) and automatically plots it on a Google map. Now we can navigate the the local blogosphere visually.
Another example is Twittermap which takes the location from people’s Twitter profiles and maps their tweets. Whereas other twitter mapping services look at the whole globe you can limit this one to a radius around a location - here’s the current Twitter activity within 10km of Birmingham. It’s actually very simple to do. They’re just taking this standard Twitter search and mapping it.
Here’s another example:
Like most police forces Leicestershire has a helicopter which frequently buzzes around annoying the hell out of people, especially at night. They’d probably be less annoyed if they knew what it was actually doing up there. This map takes the location data that they presumably produce in their reports, adds the level of information usually issued to the press and maps it. It doesn’t stop helicopters being annoying but it adds context and informs any discussion about the practice. (via Midge)
The reason maps are popular for mashups is people can immediately understand what’s going on. But that’s just scratching the surface of what can be done by combining data sources and delivering them in new ways. Quite often a mashup is is greater than the sum of its parts. and because we’re using computers the mashing up process is often automated from existing activity.
If this sort of thing interests you then keep tabs on Be Vocal, in particular if you have ideas for mashups but no idea how to go about doing them. One of the aims of the blog is to inspire new ideas that can then be helped into reality by Digital Birmingham.





