Alex Schultz

Category: general comments

  • Mapping Every Time Team Dig: An AI Collaboration

    I’ve been a Time Team fan for as long as I can remember. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching Tony Robinson, Phil Harding and the gang rock up to a field somewhere in Somerset and spend three days finding Roman mosaics under someone’s back garden. The show ran for 20 series on Channel 4 from 1994 to 2014 and has been revived on YouTube since 2022 — that’s over 290 episodes and roughly 280 unique dig locations across 30 years.

    I’d always wanted a map of every dig site. The kind of thing where you’re driving through Gloucestershire and you can check your phone and go “oh, they dug a Roman villa half a mile from here.” So I decided to build one. But rather than spending weeks doing it manually, I did it with an AI assistant — specifically Claude, running as a persistent agent called Freddy Five that has access to tools, files, and the web.

    How we built it

    The process was genuinely interesting. I asked Freddy to find the location of every Time Team dig over the last 30 years. It started by pulling the Wikipedia episode list (which is surprisingly comprehensive) and then cross-referencing with individual series pages, the Time Team fan database, and the Time Team Digital YouTube channel. The Wikipedia data was particularly good because many of the individual series pages included actual GPS coordinates from the dig sites.

    The first pass produced 271 mapped locations with a CSV database, a KML file for Google Maps, and an interactive web-based map with Leaflet.js. Each location was colour-coded by era (Channel 4 in blue, specials in orange, YouTube revival in green) and you could search, filter, and click through to episode details. Pretty impressive for what was maybe 20 minutes of work.

    The critique

    Here’s where it gets interesting. I took the dataset and gave it to ChatGPT and asked it to critique the work. The feedback was thorough and honestly quite fair:

    1. A geocoding error — Aston Eyre in Shropshire had been placed at imprecise coordinates. Not in Italy as the critique suggested (it was actually still in Shropshire) but not as precise as it could be.

    2. Missing episodes — about 10 episodes had been missed, including some from Series 8, 12, 13, and 14 that weren’t on the main Wikipedia list page. Things like “The Leper Hospital” in Winchester, “Scotch Broch” at Applecross in the Scottish Highlands, and “The Abbey Habit” at Poulton in Cheshire.

    3. Coordinate precision — most coordinates were village-level centroids rather than actual dig site locations. Fair point for a research dataset, though for the purpose of “find nearby digs while driving” it’s more than adequate.

    4. No quality metadata — the dataset had no way to distinguish between a precisely known GPS coordinate and a rough village-level estimate.

    5. Naming inconsistency — titles were raw from Wikipedia rather than normalised to a consistent format.

    The fix

    So I fed ChatGPT’s critique back to Freddy and asked it to do a v5 quality pass. It fixed the Aston Eyre coordinates, added the 11 missing episodes (bringing the total to 291 rows), normalised all naming to a consistent pattern, added coordinate accuracy grades (A for site-level, B for village-level, C for broad centroid), and regenerated everything — the CSV, KML, and interactive map.

    The final dataset has 291 episodes, 281 mapped locations, coordinate accuracy grades, review flags, and a proper audit trail. One location — a 2025 Viking boat burial dig in Shetland — was deliberately left unmapped because no specific site coordinates have been published yet. I respect that kind of restraint in a dataset.

    The result

    Here’s the final map on Google My Maps — every Time Team dig from 1994 to 2025:

    View the Time Team Dig Locations Map

    Some things that jumped out once you see it all plotted:

    • Somerset is the most-dug county with about 16 sites. Makes sense — it’s basically one giant archaeological site.
    • London has around 14 digs, from Lambeth Palace to Vauxhall to Greenwich to Westminster Abbey.
    • They went international more than I’d remembered — Spain (twice), France (twice including D-Day), the Netherlands, Belgium, Nevis in the West Indies, and three trips to the USA.
    • The YouTube revival has been genuinely ambitious — Sutton Hoo, a Greek ancient city at Vlochos, and a Viking boat burial in Shetland.

    What I learned about working with AI

    The interesting bit isn’t really the map (though I’m quite pleased with it). It’s the workflow. The whole thing — research, data gathering, geocoding, map building, critique, quality pass — took a few hours of elapsed time and maybe 15 minutes of my actual attention. I asked a question, got a first cut, had another AI critique it, fed the critique back, and got a polished result.

    The most useful part was the critique step. Having ChatGPT audit Claude’s work (and vice versa) is genuinely powerful. They catch different things. It’s not unlike having two analysts review each other’s work — a practice I’ve advocated for years at Meta. The machines are getting good enough that peer review between them produces meaningfully better outputs.

    If you’re a Time Team fan, grab the map and use it next time you’re on a road trip. And if you’re interested in AI workflows, the key takeaway is: don’t treat AI outputs as final. Run them through a second model, or at least a second pass. The compounding quality improvement is real.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to plan a Somerset road trip.

  • Making good on a (small) promise and hopes for 2015

    This year has been truly incredible for me. I hit 7years at Facebook, I helped the team get transgenders available on facebook, I was lucky enough to teach at startup school with an amazing list of other presenters, I got featured in the top 100 LGBT (I think British) business execs in the FT, made VP at Facebook and finally started to do something about charity work (very very limited) by teaching a few classes at Prince’s Trust for their young people. One promise I made as part of that last post was to link to anyone who asked me for a link. Only two people followed up. The first was Bhavin, his site is http://www.zenhypnosis.co.uk/. The second is http://www.bighair.co.uk/ from Melissa. Meeting Melissa in the valley on a tour with the trust inspired me to get involved in the group because I love their mission of helping young people help themselves. Too many times we try and solve things too late in the valley, we try and drive equality by getting folks way after they’ve been turned off from a career in tech. We need to fix things earlier. A big part of that I believe is allowing kids to see role models like themselves AND, importantly, role models unlike themselves. When I was a kid there were very few LGBT role models out there to look up to and none in business I was aware of. I hope that the OUTStanding team’s work on the top 100 list and that of Lord Browne with Glass Closet will help change that. Another group I feel are doing good work are http://www.diversityrolemodels.org/ who are trying to take LGBT role models into schools so kids see successful LGBT people, they believe when they do this it’s correlated with a decline in homophobic bullying.

    Either way a big hope for me in 2015 is to take all the luck I’ve had last year and convert it into something positive esp. focused on education, young people and LGBT folks feeling they have a chance to get to the top of any profession. Posting here will hopefully keep me honest on that.

  • Openness and, by extension, understanding

    The fundamental reason I am still at Facebook after 6years and for the foreseeable future is that I believe facebook has a big impact on the world and I can influence that impact (I am not a total saint, it’s not the only reason: I get paid well, have a great role, have a great team and colleagues, I’m learning a lot and it’s a sexy company to work at too but feeling connected to a bigger purpose does matter a lot to me). Specifically I believe that making the world more open and connected breeds tolerance and understanding. If you are connected to someone a little different than yourself, if they openly share that they are different and if you see what’s going on in their life day to day you simply cannot normalize hatred against that person or group of people. I believe facebook helps make that a little more true across nations, races, religions, sexualities and more. We have a great sub site: Peace on Facebook that shares some of this and always inspires me.

    On that front today was a pretty great day. Facebook launched support for transgender people to express themselves on the site. This is a project I’ve been involved with for a while and played a role in the background in getting it staffed, reviewed etc… at Facebook (there was a bigger team that drove it to launch with more impactful folks on that team than me for sure).

    One part of this is I typically hate doing press and have avoided it but as I have been promoted it’s been harder and harder to avoid it and I’ve had to practice more and do more. The press around this has been the biggest I’ve ever been involved with and my first broadcast interview (with the AP). The following picture is a screen shot of a TV in Moscow that a travelling friend shared with me and it’s amazing to see the story has gone around the world even to places with low tolerance for LGBT rights like Russia. That makes me feel really glad I got out of my comfort zone and did the press (thanks to a friend called Slater who pushed me to do it).

    Down the years at Facebook I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to take part in our it gets better video. I can really see how (as a young nerd) I would have sought out this video had it existed and watched it and it would have made me feel better and less alone. I also got to be involved in getting same sex marriage launched on the site globally and more over time.

    I guess the bottom line of what I want to say is: it’s great to be part of a really tolerant and accepting company that wants to create a product where everyone can express their authentic self, build a more open and connected world and hopefully, by extension, a more tolerant and understanding one. We are, of course, not perfect and (in the words of Benjamin Zander in his amazing TED video I HIGHLY recommend watching this, gets me every time) we’d make ourselves wrong by holding ourselves to a standard of perfection but it is a possibility to live into and I am so lucky to be part of this journey and this amazing company & launch. I hope you all can be inspired to take the time to do things like this where the opportunities exist in your jobs (because I am sure they do). 🙂

  • This disgusts me or maybe it just makes me sad

    I am always looking for new ways to monetize my sites. I have 0.5MM users visiting monthly (give or take) but only make $10k’s a year. Not really a great ratio (according to my friends). As such I was interested to see what the following company was doing by buying adsense on my site.

    For those of you who can’t see the text says “I accept the Terms & Conditions for $9.99/mo billed to my cell until I cancel for Access to How To Guides” and is clearly placed in a very hard to read font over an orange background. This sucks. They also do a really good job of retargeting you back to the article you were interested in if you close the browser and navigate to their homepage. The form too is super well optimized (in my opinion). Whoever does this is very good at what they do. Interestingly it seems the Google search index considers them spam, they are barely in it at all:

    I can totally see how (were I to do this on paper airplanes and cocktail recipes how I could get rich quick. There is no question I could game this to get a few % conversion and even if everyone cancelled after one month I’d make 10ks a month. I just feel it’s pretty immoral and now I am making money off this and my users are getting deceived through adsense. This isn’t adsense’s fault, how are they supposed to police this and even then it’s borderline whether this is illegal/in violation of their terms or not.

    Last year I deselected all deceptive ads from adsense and I recently ran the numbers on those. I think I cost myself $20k in the last 12months . That being said even with the following settings I couldn’t block the above ad:

    I have now made “howtotutorials.net” a blocked site for my ads and I don’t blame adsense at all. To be clear it’s the recurring billing and minimized terms I dislike. I think it’s ok to say “pay me XX through your cell to view your content”, that’s a pay wall and raising one of those is your decision as a webmaster. I just feel sad that so much of advertising on the internet is like this. We should be better. I need a new business model.

  • Facebook could eat the web – the Steve Rubel lifestream

    Steve Rubel from Edelman made an interesting prediction that Facebook could essentially eat the web. His argument is that as more content gets shared and consumed within Facebook, the traditional web becomes less important. While I think this is an overstatement, there’s definitely truth to the idea that Facebook is becoming the default way many people experience the internet. The lifestream concept – where all your online activity flows through a single platform – is becoming reality for many users.

  • Conan O’Brien gathers Facebook army for huge TV comeback

    Conan O’Brien’s use of Facebook to rally support after leaving NBC was masterful. He built an enormous Facebook following and used it to drive awareness for his new show. This is a great example of how social media can be used to build and mobilize an audience. The speed at which his Facebook page grew was remarkable and it translated into real viewership numbers for his TBS show.

  • Earthquakes on Facebook

    The Haiti earthquake generated an incredible response on Facebook. People were sharing information, organizing relief efforts, and donating money at an unprecedented scale. It was one of the first major natural disasters where social media played such a central role in the response. The speed at which information and aid coordination happened through Facebook was remarkable.

  • Google: we’ll serve scam ads but won’t put our logo on them

    Here are two ads served consecutively on my site by Google adsense both are graphical ads. Google branding is very clear on the second ad but not the first.

    Google scam ads comparison

  • Cocktail season is upon us – thanksgiving and Halloween traffic comparisons for UK and US cocktails

    This Friday I saw a nice spike in my Friday traffic to cocktailmaking.co.uk, the highest since Halloween and beyond that best since the summer cocktail period. I am excited the holiday cocktail season has begun.

    I have included the traffic graph for my US traffic over the last two months. One really fascinating thing for me is that Halloween is now a really big cocktail period and the fun co-incides with the weekend due to the holiday. You can also see that Thanksgiving is great for cocktails, there is a really clear midweek spike for thanksgiving which doesn’t fit the normal periodicity of my traffic (saturday and sunday high, mid-week low).

    When you compare that to the UK traffic you can clearly see no double spike around thanksgiving but everything else looking really similar (halloween is a little less pronounced).

    I love looking at different countries and seeing how they vary and more importantly how similar they are. Much of my career I have talked to people who expound the differences between markets but so often with internet marketing countries are more similar than different.

  • Social gaming taking off everywhere

    Playstation Store hits 650,000,000 downloads and Facebook Connect goes live on PS3.

    Zynga crosses 100 million users and expands beyond Facebook games.

    There were of course a lot of articles about the sale of playfish to EA which makes me for one really excited about the idea of getting all those great EA games (e.g. Risk) onto my favorite social networks.

    And finally Xbox announced 2MM users connecting via Facebook already in just days.

    People want to play games with their friends (I for one love farmville and would really like to see Risk on the Facebook platform and would pay to play).