Weather Stations Vs Swarm Intelligence

It happens every weekend for me. I wake up, check the weather on my phone, dress appropriately, then find myself sweating or freezing to death outside when the real weather is often the complete opposite of the cute icons on my online weather service.

It always perplexes me how we can spend billions of dollars on satellites, weather stations, pressure sensors, tide monitors and weather balloons only to be so completely off the mark day-in, day-out.

Last weekend I was at Sydney's iconic Bondi Beach. The weather had been sunny, but was about to storm. I checked my phone to get some indication of how much sunshine I had left, but neither Yahoo, Weatherzone or the official government Bureau of Meterology had any reference to a storm occurring...

A panicked thought went through me: Could the internet be wrong?

Suddenly I had a thought:

If we got everyone on the beach to guess the temperature, and guess what the weather would do based on their own experiences, would we get a more truthful result than empirical scientific apparatus and algorithms?

Tie this in with a service that is geo-location specific, maybe current photos of the skyline, opinions and polls, and perhaps we use our collective, non-specialist predictions to provide a better weather service to humanity?

It would be both a beautiful experiment and a wonderful idea.

Salad With Ren & Stimpy

I achieved a boyish brush with fame today when I was able to visit Jim Ballantine at his Sydney-based Flying Bark studios.

For those of you wondering what I'm talking about, this is the guy who made Ren and Stimpy a reality and changed the course of my tweenage years (not to mention my definition of what "funny" is).

As we sat over salads and sparkling water I was interested to hear Jim speak of the early days of Ren and Stimpy, when the network only had six episodes. These episodes would be repeated on rotation for 18 months. Each week, more and more people began watching the show and the network finally twigged that more content was needed.

This was back in the early 90's, which although is nearly 20 years ago now is essentially an analogue version of how YouTube success can be created. I saw many similarities between this and the Beached Az content I've been involved in over at The Handsomity Institute.

Jim was quick to point out the cruel impact of the digital social world on this method of building an audience; "I don't think this model would work now," Jim says.

Nonetheless I am always captivated when my eyes are opened up to moments that show me online content isn't the new and scary territory many paint it out to be. It is merely an extension of what we've been doing since not only 20 years ago, but since the birth of communication itself...

Telling stories.