John Popham's Dustbin (of thoughts)

What would you pay for this?

I had an idea today.

Huddersfield has quite an extensive second hand market which runs every Saturday in the Open Market place. I try to get there most Saturdays when I am around, mainly to poke around to see if I can pick up some cheap parts for my tech gadgets. I am not often successful, but, just occasionally, I can bag a bargain.

I also find myself thinking, a lot of the time, why are these people doing this in the modern age, when they could probably make much more for what they are selling on ebay? Selling on the market offers them only a very limited audience, and a lot of the stuff there can be quite specialist. I’ve seen lots of items which have sat on the same stall for months, with no takers.

So, I wondered whether you could combine an offline and online market experience. What might happen if I was to tweet pictures of some particularly fine pieces on the market, and ask my followers what they might pay for them? Should I get a response which turns out to be more than what the stallholder is asking for them, then both myself and the stallholder would be a winner. Providing, of course, that I could work out a system for ensuring that I get the payment, and that, at least postage costs could be covered.

What do you think? Is this a viable idea?

I’m puzzling over how the free messaging system recently introduced on iOS (Apple) devices works. Recently I went to text someone who I regularly text. A message came back saying “Who is this?”. It turned out that my phone had worked out the other person also had an iPhone and routed the message via the free message system rather than SMS. I didn’t ask it to do that, it just did it. But, why should it randomly start doing that when it had previously sent the messages via text, and, even more puzzling, why should it display a different phone number to the person at the other end? I am wondering (I don’t know) if the number displayed to the recipient is the number my phone had when I bought it, before my old number was ported across to it.

Yesterday I was stopped from filming at Leeds Railway Station by a member of staff. I was told I could not film for “security reasons”, but that I might be able to apply for a permit to do so in future. The video above is as far as I got, and you can hear the staff member asking what I was doing at the end of it.

This seems to me another example of over officious security. I’ve filmed at Leeds station before because I actually think it looks really attractive when lit up in different colours at night, as you can see from an earlier video I shot.

It seems I’ll have to keep my thoughts about it to myself in future.

Creating Strategic Value: Examples of Branded Utility

“We’ve got to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in!” – Axel Chaldecott, JWT”

It always amuses me when I see people being rude (or worse) about family, friends, work colleagues or bosses on twitter. I assume, in as much as any of this is thought out, that they do this apparently safe in the knowledge that the brunt of their ire or distaste is not on twitter, and so will never find out.

I’d be more careful if I were you. Those of us who use twitter regularly know it is a conversational medium, and we can’t really see the point of not engaging in dialogue. But, not everyone is like that. I come across people all the time who join twitter purely to follow celebrities and read their (usually banal) utterings. And there are others who sign up simply to keep tabs on family and friends. These people have twitter accounts, but hardly ever use them to say anything. And, there are still others who are not on twitter at all, but have bookmarked the unprotected tweets of people they want to monitor and regularly read their updates.

Think about this before you tweet….. 

I came across this video of Steve Jobs speaking in 1995, and found it summed up so much of my own thinking. As Steve says, we are brought up to believe the world is as it is and the best we can do is hope to find our own place within in it. The reality is, that everything that surrounds us, and everything we have to fit in with, is created by people who are no smarter than us. We can all create something, and do our own bit to change and shape the world to meet our own needs.

Woman’s Hour is a strange dichotomy, isn’t it? Item on prominent women in science, finished off with “Ultimately, hers was a sad life as she never married and had children”

ITV “Sport”

I still haven’t recovered from the trauma of being forced to play rugby union at school, and it’s a sport I hate with a passion. But, have spotted people in my twitter timeline this morning complaining about the poor quality of ITV’s coverage of the World Cup Final in that sport, I am moved to reflect on the fact that ITV’s sports coverage is always poor. And it’s no point complaining about it while it’s being shown, the authorities of all sport need to be made aware that they are showing their product off in a poor light if they take ITV’s money.

Let’s do a “secret” Twitter thing

What proportion of the UK population is on Twitter? It’s growing all the time, but it’s still a small minority.

What if we organised something that was only mentioned on Twitter, and could not, and was not, mentioned anywhere else? Could it be done? Could we have groups of Twitterati gathered in town centres all over the country, doing something at the same time, and no one else knowing what we were up to?

Wouldn’t that be fun?

Tabloid Newspapers

It’s good that so many people have finally woken up to how damaging tabloid newspapers are. It’s just a pity it took this latest heinous incident to make them realise. UK tabloid newspapers are a very important component in the system that reinforces social divides in Britain, dampens down social aspiration, and undermines the education system. Now you know…..