AS THE SNOW HEADS IN..

 

 

I LIKE TO EXCEL!

  
In a single transaction yesterday I downloaded 5,364,510 cells of data on what people do for a living and where they do it in the whole of England, Wales and Scotland.

That's a lot of cells. It breaks Microsoft Excel so you have to build it into an Access database, or preferably SQL, or whatever.

The official data agency that keeps this data for download and analysis couldn't cope with my demands (they place a 1m limit on the downloading of data) so I had to perform the request in 7 chunks. Why the limit? It doesn't take a brain surgeon to split the request and then re-build it at the other end, but it is mighty annoying to have to do so.

But now that I've got my hands on the data I can do amazing things with it when I blend it into my mapping software (there's the SQL bit) and output that to Crystal Reports!  Things that, to my knowledge, no other private sector economist in the country has yet done. Which is good. And keeps Polko a very busy boy.

The problem though is that this data is not good enough.

This is the problem with a lot of UK data to be honest. As one of the leading lights (?) of European economies we should have a great data collection, drilling down into all sorts of very specific areas and allowing a really deep analysis of what is happening at any one time.

The data I have is dated 2008.  The 'new' 2009 data is set to be released some time during December and I will again draw the whole of it into my web.  But, come on.  It shouldn't take 12 months after data is collected to collate it, check it, set it in the correct format for people to download, etc.  Not in the 21st Century.  I'd like to bet if the government were to outsource this data collection to a private company - and they are already out there - it would be 'on the shelves' and ready to use within half that time.  Maybe less.

In fact, in a conversation I had with the Office for National Statistics last week I was told 'there are issues' with the release data and they hinted at it being late..

The data I have details where people work, what type of business they work in, male or female and whether full or part time pretty well. But why can I not then get data that shows me how old they are? A simple addition but it might be useful?

Like I said, outsource this stuff. 

There are companies out there that colllect millions of credit card transactions and banking transactions on a daily basis and I can buy summaries for any area of how much people are spending, on what, where and their age and even type of house they live in.  This data is updated on a monthly basis and I can have it for September right now if I want it.

Think about it: This guy's salary is your tax.

 

A tired 12 month old dataset that a group of civil servants have been using for a pillow in a darkened basement room in Whitehall is just not good enough.

 

THE GREAT AMAZON ASSOCIATES SWINDLE

  

Today I received an email telling me that various parts of my agreement between Amazon and myself have changed.

I have a few links on websites to books that I have read and think others might like. Just makes for a slightly better, more interactive experience etc

For this I would receive a small (and it really is small) % of the selling price of the book. This works well. I've probably made about £50-£100 in total since 1998 when I first used this system. It's not a business empire!

But today's slight amendments to their operating agreement include this little gem hidden away in the legal speak and small type..

"If you have not earned any advertising fees in the 3 years prior to any given calendar month, then on the first day of that calendar month we may charge you an account maintenance fee that will be deducted from your unpaid accrued advertising fees. That account maintenance fee will be (i) £10 if your advertising fees were earned from Qualifying Purchases occurring on the Amazon UK Site or €10 if your advertising fees were earned from Qualifying Purchases occurring on each of the Amazon DE Site, Amazon FR Site or Amazon IT Site; and (ii) the amount of unpaid accrued advertising fees in your account. We may also in this case close your account and terminate this agreement."

What?!

So, if your account isn't used for a while and you decide to go back in and help Amazon make more sales you'd better make sure you have earned something from the referral system in the past 3 years.

If not, the way I read it, your referral income better be more than £25 in total (they hold fees until they reach this limit to pay direct your bank). If it falls under £25 and you have not earned any fees on your account for 3 years then they will charge you £10 off your fees earned (the text in green) PLUS take all your fees earned to date (the sky blue text).  Then they say they 'may' - presumably if they are feeling particularly miserly that day -close your account and terminate the agreement.

Nice one Amazon.

I've been sat here thinking I'm doing you a favour all the time and now you're about to kick me in the face and chuck me off the programme.

Not before I've terminated 'my' agreement with you you're not.

Suffice to say, my websites won't feature book recommendations with links to Amazon on them any longer. Amazon should remember one thing. There are other booksellers on the web. And some of the household web names of today didn't exist only a few years ago.

Good business strategy Amazon.

 

ONE GIANT LEAP?

  
Today has been a day of waiting.  Waiting for my hearing to come back - which it didn't.  Waiting for the postman - who decided to turn up at the completely inconvenient hour of 2:30 given he had a cheque I wanted to bank today.  Waiting for a new BIG announcement from facebook. Which they delivered at around 18:30 our time.

The latter is probably about as important as life today gets.. so I'll just re-gurgitate from a site I've just read it on.

----

Facebook announced a new e-mail service today called "Messages," though they're insisting that it's not e-mail.

We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they're on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.

The service will also be organized around your friends, putting their e-mail, or messages or whatever, into one inbox, and everything else into another. A different version of Google's "priority inbox" they introduced recently. Facebook is also saying they will store all your messages, forever, from whatever source, be it SMS, chat or e-mail.

I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight."

They're going to be rolling out the service over the next few months, you have to wait for an invite, and then you'll be able to invite your friends. Now we get to see who Facebook thinks is important.

I'm waiting on my invite then. Come on FB!!