Twelve Days of Skype Christmas

I'm going to finish with a quick one — as you may be aware, Skype will be exhibiting at International CES, the global consumer electronics event, from Monday to Thursday. It's where the industry gathers to share ideas and show off what's new.

No doubt Skype will have a few goodies tucked up its sleeve, so watch this space…

Will 2008 be the year of net neutrality, or not? Will we finally see decent broadband connections in countries like Australia? Andy Abramson talks about the failure of monopoly regulators in the States to take advantage of their position — will 2008 be the year in which they do?

Regardless of the answers to any of these questions, it's clear that bandwidth demands will continue to rise, particularly in the mobile sphere. As mobile video becomes increasingly commonplace, and as apps like Skype make the move to mobile platforms, we'll be expecting our mobiles to cope with high data transfer rates and low latency. Will 2008 be the year of bandwidth? No, that'll be 2009, and 2010, and pretty much every year from now on. But it's clear that more is better in this case, so any increase in provision and decrease in cost will always be welcome

Update: GigaOM predicts that WiMAX might, maybe take off in 2008, but doesn’t hold out any great hopes.

Focusing on the men today, Professor Richard Wiseman has this to say:

Focus on creating goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-based (SMART).

For example, instead of thinking "I want to find a new job" focus on creating bite-sized, measurable goals for each week, such as rewriting your CV and then applying for one new job every two weeks.

Map out the step-by-step mini-goals that will slowly but surely take you to where you want to be, make a note of them in a diary, and stick to the plan.

Of course, some people reckon that New Year's resolutions are a bit, well, last year. The excellent 43 Folders blog has these suggestions for 'fresh starts and modest changes':

• Cancel something — satellite TV, magazine subscriptions, Blackberry: "you may feel obligated to consume them all to the point where acquiring, processing, and devouring them becomes like an inefficient part-time job"
• Replace one project — something you feel obliged to do (but have no real interest in ever doing); something that stalled long ago and could easily be removed; something that takes massive amounts of fuss for consistently annoying results…
• Learn the qualified 'yes' — "The good news is that there’s actually an even healthier middle path between “Sure. Anything you say” and “No way. Never.” I call it the qualified ‘yes’."

Today and tomorrow I'll be looking at some New Year's resolutions, particularly those focused on health.

It's interesting to compare the 43 Things pages for 'lose weight' and 'exercise regularly' — the former is very diet-focused, but the latter, thankfully, seems much more sane.

I won't bore you with the statistics on how many Britons will have joined a gym this week, and how many will have cancelled their memberships next week, but will bring you these two little nuggets of goodness:

Women: How to keep your resolutions

Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire brings these tips for women: (guys, you'll have to wait until tomorrow)

Women who keep their New Year's resolution to themselves make it too easy to forget. Instead, go public.

For example, write down your resolution on a large sheet of paper, sign it, and place it somewhere prominent in your house. Tell your friends, family and colleagues and ask them to provide you with helpful nudges to assist you in achieving your goal.

Be persistent. New habits take time to learn, and once in a while you will slip up. People on diets might suddenly give in to temptation, or those trying to exercise more might not find the time to go to the gym for a week.

Remember that everyone messes up from time to time. Don't blame yourself if you falter, or allow the experience to make you give up.

— Telegraph, 28th December 2007

Join a free green gym

Why spend hundreds of pounds a year sweating away in an air conditioned box when you could be outside and doing valuable community work? BTCV have set up 'green gyms' around the country to do just that

Getting your head around time zones is a perennial niggle for those of us who call internationally — but just be grateful we've moved on from the situation in the mid 19th century.

Until the advent of the railways, there was no such thing as universal time in the UK; GMT was determined much as it is now, but wasn't adhered to on a national basis. Towns and communities largely set their own time, which became slightly impractical when trying to draw up train timetables, and so GMT became widely adopted along railway lines at least, and in 1880, GMT became the national standard. For more, Joseph Myers has a detailed history on his website.

Other historic peculiarities in the British Isles include Dublin Standard Time (25 minutes behind GMT; used until 1916) and Sandringham Time (30 minutes ahead; created by Edward VII to allow for more hunting time in the winter, and abolished in 1936)

What does this have to do with maids and milking? Well, there have been occasional attempts over the years either to move the UK to CET (one hour ahead of the current time zone) in order to create lighter evenings. Organisations like RoSPA believe this will lead to fewer road accidents. On the other hand, lighter evenings mean darker mornings, which isn't much fun for the farmers…

Update: While we’re on the farming theme, don’t forget about Skype for Cows.

New Year's day might not seem like the most sensible time to take a dip in the sea, but it seems to be a popular activity across Europe — events include the Loony Dook at South Queensferry on the Forth, and the Blakeney Dip in Norfolk.

The Loony Dook — photo by hockadilly

Looks cheery, doesn't it? The BBC also has a set of photos of today's frolicking.

Having, admittedly, failed to think of anything goose-related today, I thought I'd point out that Skype is in active use on all six continents. While a search for people in Antarctica doesn't reveal a huge number of users, Jaanus blogged about Skype's use there a couple of years back and so I thought I'd share the photos again. You can see the full set over on Flickr.

As the end of 2007 approaches, take a few minutes to think about the five people you call most (or text, or whatever). I'd be surprised if your calling patterns didn't fall into a nice inverse square law relationship — the heart of Chris Anderson's Long Tail.

Take a look at your Skype call history now (you can arrange it by type to make things easier) — I'd be interested to hear if you see a difference with Skype when compared to, say, your mobile. That's certainly the case with me. On Skype, the distribution of calls and chats is much flatter than that for my mobile; while on both I obviously have more popular contacts, on Skype there's less of a bias towards a very small number of people.

Of course, this could be explained by the fact that I use Skype a lot at work, whereas my mobile's primarily for personal conversations — friends who are less close tend to receive emails rather than calls — but there's something about Skype (and other IM products, and MySpace, Facebook, etc.) which reduces the burden of communication in such a way to make talking to the people in what would otherwise be the long tail easier. Is it the fact that you can have largely asynchronous conversations? Or the fact that you can have conversations for free which would otherwise cost a lot? Thoughts?

It's always comforting to know that people feel at ease when making calls — a survey by the Post Office last year revealed that 40% of men make phone calls while naked, whereas only 27% of women do. The survey also suggests that most of us will happily watch TV while calling (62%) and one in ten of us will leave the other person talking to themselves while we go off and do something else.

It would have been interesting to see the breakdown of the other statistics by sex too, but I can't seem to track them down. I suppose the archetypal 'calling bird' is Prunella Scales' Sybil Fawlty, with her perennial chats with the mysterious Audrey, though in Sybil's case she's too engrossed in the phone calls to assist Basil with anything.

On a more serious note, it would be interesting to compare attention data from now with that from ten years ago — have Skype, email, IM and mobiles change the degree of respect with which we treat the people we're talking to? Or do they just allow us to do more? I can happily keep multiple Skype chats or other IM conversations going at once, for example, but would it be more efficient to call each person in turn? Quite often I find myself giving up on IM as it's too slow, and changing to voice.

In any case, for more on the calling birds, the BBC's h2g2 site has some suggestions…

Just a quick one today, with some handy hints about Christmas in France courtesy of the BBC:

• Send your presents early — in the north and northeast of France it's common for Father Christmas to bring presents on the 6th of December
• … or late — some adults will wait until New Year's Eve to open theirs
• The food's much the same — though seafood is commonly served as a starter, and they have a creamy Yule log rather than Christmas pudding

For all my efforts, though, I can't find any discernible difference between a French hen and a British one. Any thoughts?

Love is all around — or so says Bill Nighy’s character in Love Actually.

However, for those of you who’d always fancied a Skype girlfriend without the commitment, Mediamatic ran an interctive exhibition earlier this year called The Girlfriend Experience. Described as a ‘multi-player game with avatars of flesh and blood’, it allowed you to take control, using Skype, of a real life ‘avatar’.

A player tries to give instructions to one of the avatars of his choice. Photo: Guido van Nispen

The exhibition aimed to raise questions about how our virtual lives will affect our real ones:

The title of the project, The Girlfriend Experience, denotes the paradoxical character that online social interaction has. On one hand, the safe anonymity by using the avatar, on the other the intimate releases and projections that can spread easily. For Martin Butler is this the merging of two apparent extremes, anonymity and intimacy, which characterizes an important part of contemporary social traffic. The best paid prostitutes are the ones with whom the client feels as though he is with his girlfriend, or with whom he has a Girlfriend Experience.

You can see people playing with their Skype girlfriends in this video: (and more on YouTube)

Over the last year or so Skype’s done a lot to improve call quality, and it’s great when other people notice the difference too (and here too).

How does this relate to Christmas? Well, the first line of the traditional Christmas song, The Twelve Days of Christmas, certainly seems the least logical, but I suspect that it’s just a case of Chinese whispers.

‘Partridge’ in French is perdrix, pronounced ‘perdree’, and you can see that it wouldn’t take much to corrupt this to ‘pear tree’. There are other theories involving the ancient Greek king Perdrix, who with Athena had connections to the pear tree, but given that the ‘three calling birds’ who we’ll be visiting later almost certainly started out as ‘colley birds’ or blackbirds, so it’d be unsurprising if people had got the first line wrong too.

With the improvements made over the course of 2007 I hope your calls will have been crisper and clearer — but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped working. And while it’s great to see more and more people giving our call quality the thumbs-up, that doesn’t mean it can’t be even better. Please keep reporting any problems you encounter, and of course we won’t complain if you blog about things when they’re working well

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