It stands for "my domain is shorter than your domain"

There’s an interesting Economist story about the Chinese phenomenon of ‘team buying’. It is an activity whereby a group of people interested in buying, say, electronics meets up at a specified time, goes to a shop and uses the volume of the mob to negotiate a good deal. You know, in the non-violent way.

The reminded me of an earlier musing about the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon. It’s pretty clear that the exciting thing about the new development is the increasing role of the user community in providing content. After all, last.fm is just a database with smart cross-lookups. What makes it revolutionary is the fact that users fill the database with huge volumes of information.

Volume is important. Web 2.0 works because it views the bulk of data, and the unmanageability thereof, as an asset. Tagging might have come about because people are too lazy to use taxonomy and semantic metadata, or because the sheer amount of information made it unrealistic for complicated metadata to be added. The free-form nature of tags means that you’re not guaranteed to find everything relevant to your search. But if there’s enough to choose from, it does not actually matter if you can’t find everything. You just need to find enough.

When you buy a newspaper, you pay for the physical item and the information, but also for the service. This service is that of the newspaper deciding what’s important and preselecting a number of news items that form a mix of topics characteristic for that paper. Similarly, any time you buy something, you also pay the retailer for a service. This is the service of acquiring a set of products, making them available to you in small quantities, and making you aware of them. The retailer’s markup is his price for providing the service.

The "post-information society" changes the status quo. The responsibility of selecting and analysing information is already moving from newspaper editors to a mixture of bloggers, Wikinews-like services, and technology such as RSS feeds. In the same way, team buying makes the traditional retailer redundant. By organising themselves and by using their numbers as an asset, buying teams no longer need to pay to the retailer for finding buyers for his products.

This is what all services in the "post-information society" have in common. It’s the users of the services that provide the meat. But because of that, the number of people using the service must reach some critical mass before the service can be usable. This is in contrast with how the Web used go be. Before, you could run a special interest website for a small group of people. Suddenly, social applications require a larger userbase before they can be useful. Examples exist even in the old Web: eBay works because it’s so huge. There’s always someone who is selling whatever you happen to need.

It remains to be seen how the size requirement affects the range of applications available. Is the future of the Web in a few huge companies?

The main benefit of studying computer science for five years in "one of the most prestigious British academic institution[s]" is that you feel slightly superior to a middle-aged sales guy who attended a half-day, Microsoft-sponsored training course at a plush hotel.

A week ago I bought a super-cheap Samsung S600 digital camera from the Surrey Quays branch of Currys.digital, the new high-street name for Dixons. The camera turned out to have a host of problems, so I decided to return it after fighting with it for about a week. It was in perfect condition, clean of any fingerprints, with original batteries intact in box, so I figured I should be able to return it even without a reason.

When I got to Currys, I was directed to a slightly more managerial-looking guy in (I’m guessing) his late thirties. After explaining the three problems I had found in the camera, he decided to focus on one – USB connection problems – and reasoned that if he can get the camera to work on one of their laptops, then obviously there cannot be interconnection problems with any other computers. He wasn’t really convinced that the other two problems (misaligned lens element so that in one corner was hopelessly soft, and infrequent firmware lockups) really mattered.

We had a lively 15-minute discussion during which I tried to avoid having to explain such things as USB interface timing issues while he questioned my academic credentials. Then, one of his alternate personalities suddenly kicked in. He calmly walked to a terminal, checked something in the store database, and then decided that I can, after all, return the item. My guess is he realised they are running low on this bestselling model and wanted to offload my lemon to someone else. The refund process took about a minute, and I walked home with the cautious hope that eventually I might see the refund appear on my card.

High street stores really can’t afford to do this to their customers. The only reason someone would go to a bricks-and-mortar store is that you get good, knowledgeable service. In Currys you’ll be served by a high-school dropout who probably joined the company because the name sounded delicious. This, of course, is a problem with most retailers. As long as sales staff are paid badly, you can’t expect expertise from any store.

But at least most other chains have sensible returns policies. I know Jessops has a fourteen-day no-quibbles returns policy. I’m guessing all DSG group stores (Currys, Dixons, PC World, The Link) have the same "we-know-it’s-shit-and-we-don’t-care" policy. Interestingly, if I had ordered the same camera on the Currys website, I could have gotten free delivery and the right to return the product to my nearest store.

I don’t see myself shopping in Currys in the near future, and I think the store manager at Surrey Quays is happy to hear that.

According to the Wikipedia article, St Thomas’s hospital “was described as ancient in 1215 and was named after Thomas Becket – which suggests it may have been founded after 1173 when Becket was canonised. However, it is possible it was only renamed in 1173 and that it was founded when St Mary Overie Priory was refounded in 1100 in Southwark.”

The hospital I’m due to visit next week, Guy’s, was founded “in 1721 as a place to treat ‘incurables’ discharged from St Thomas’.” Nice.

Tesco is the largest retailer in Britain, with about 30% market share in UK grocieries. Why is it, then, that Tesco is absolutely hopeless in managing its supply chain. Observe what the bread shelf looks like on a typical Saturday afternoon at a large, 24h supermarket in Surrey Quays, London:

I know several people who have switched supermarkets, even though Tesco is the closest one. I would, if I had a car.