It just turned up.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Missed this the first time...
"If I covered only the newspaper industry, first of all I would have been fired a long time ago; secondly, I would have had to kill myself."
Goldman Sachs equity analyst Peter Appert talks to Reuters
I found the quote on Corante. In a piece by Vin Crosbie about the death of the American newspaper business. The death causes?
The major one is simply that American newspaper companies have violated the Principle of Supply & Demand by failing to adapt their core product to a radical change in consumers' supply of news and information during the past 15 years.
Vin promises more on Friday in Part Two.
Dull Demographics as ever..
...the rise of the "Hillary Harridan" is a disturbing development. It unearths a creepy literary type that harms women a lot more than it helps them. The suggestion that irrational, emotional, self-referential women are swinging the election is not a theme any woman should endorse.
From Slate: is the UK similar?
Probably.
39 Elevators?
Hannay is back: the BBC Christmas will include a new version of the 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan.
...the spy thriller later turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, "reimagined" for the Jason Bourne generation.
The Man Who Fell to Earth?
Is heavy metal making us stupid?
Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" was one of the biggest summer hits this year on the dancefloor, with remixes by Andrew Sullivan, John Battelle, and Bryan Appleyard amongst others.
But who or what does Nicholas Carr trust? In auteur theory a movie maker's worst film is said to often reveal much. Here is Carr writing on the album-a-year-meme choices of Amazon's chief technology officer, Werner Vogels.
...you bet your ass I'd entrust my mission-critical data and apps to this guy. I mean, he even ranks Made in Japan, that ridiculous double-record Deep Purple live album with the 20-minute version of Space Truckin', as the best LP of '72.
Here are some of Vogels' picks.
1969: Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed
1970: The Who, Live at Leads
1971: Marvin Gaye, What's going on
1972: Deep Purple, Made in Japan
1973: Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
1974: Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
1975: Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
1976: Eagles, Hotel California
1977: The Stranglers, Rattus Norvegicus
1978: Herman Brood and his Wild Romance, Shpritsz
1979: The Clash, London Calling
Full list from 1958 onwards here.
And some of Nicholas Carr's choices:
1977: The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols
1978: Wire, Pink Flag
1979: The Undertones, The Undertones
1980: X, Los Angeles
1981: Squeeze, East Side Story
1982: Richard and Linda Thompson, Shoot Out the Lights
1983: REM, Murmur
1984: The Replacements, Let It Be
1985: Husker Du, New Day Rising
1986: Elvis Costello, King of America
Full list here.
Another question: Is Wikipedia making us reinvent our pasts?
The new Rosetta Stone
"We're standing now on the last generation of the majority of tribal languages in the world," said Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation, noting that an estimated 50 to 90 percent of the world's languages are expected to disappear within this century. "We're losing them so fast."
Only this one is a Disk.
Over eight years in development, the Disk is a physical, microscopic library of information on over 1,500 human languages. 14,000 text and image pages are etched into the surface of a 3” diameter nickel disk, which can be read with approximately 750x (optical) magnification.
The nickel disk has a high resistance to corrosion, and can withstand temperatures of up to 300 oC with little to no change in legibility of the text. Kept in its protective sphere to avoid scratches, it could easily last and be read 2,000 years into the future!
From the San Francisco Chronicle and the Long Now Foundation.
More on the Rosetta project.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Facelook.com & Trust
Human beings are social animals, and our first instinct is to trust others. Con men, of course, have long known this - their craft consists largely of playing on this predilection, and turning it to their advantage.
But recently, behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape our sense of someone's reliability.
From the Boston Globe.
"Underground" Google?
On Tuesday, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of search giant Google, announced it would try to help spur companies to reach underground to produce clean electricity. It is investing a total of $10 million in a geothermal energy company called AltaRock Energy
From Forbes.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Trusty News Perhaps
All the world's credible news, in one place
Launched today Newscred ranks news according to its "credibility." A Newscred spokesperson told Ars Technica:
"Our algorithms analyze this data, and unlike other social news sites, we use the data to present the news based on quality, not popularity..."
This is who is behind Newscred:
Iraj is a serial entrepreneur from Sweden having worked on multiple technology startups. He was ranked #3 in "Sweden's Top 25 Entrepreneurs 2006" by IT-magazine Internetworld. He's one of the lucky few who found his life's calling at the age of 14 - building beautiful web apps that kick ass. When he's not obsessing about the hottest open-source technologies he loves watching FC Barcelona draw triangles on a football pitch.
Shafqat went the mainstream route. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering and B.A. in Economics and was a VP of technology on Wall Street. He soon realized that titles were meaningless because you could neither eat them, nor trade them in for cash. So he decided to follow his life's passion and dive head-first into the entrepreneureal world.
Both of them are avid news readers and are passionate about new media and the changing face of journalism.
I'm emailing them right now.
The BBC's take by Rory Cellan-Jones.
Film and Story 1
And then there are "pure" films - films that are so essentially of their medium that questions of good, bad or ugliness can be dispensed with. These are films that don't have a trace of the novel, the stage musical or the TV drama about them. They exist in the bliss of the edit, the rhythm of their shots. Eisenstein made pure film, as did Buster Keaton and Alfred Hitchcock. Jean-Luc Godard sporadically made pure film.
Mark Ravenhill on pure cinema and the "new" Batman.
Esthesis 5: smaller worlds
TEHRAN - Mohammadreza Honarmand is directing the TV series “Wind and Vent” based on an adaptation from “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo.
“The story of ‘Wind and Vent’ begins in 1940’s and continues until the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Most of the foreign adaptations of the novel are loyal to the theme but we changed it into an Iranian style, which was not an easy task, though,” he explained.
The Age of Television
Young people are catnip for advertisers, but they mostly shun TV, and especially news broadcasts. A biannual news consumption study released Monday by the Pew Research Center found that only a third of news consumers younger than 25 watch TV news on an average day. That’s still twice as many as the 15 percent who read a newspaper on an average day.
The gray-haired audiences for television news seem to confirm the statistics. According to Nielsen Media Research, the median age of the top-rated Fox News audience is 63.9 years old, nearly four years older than that of the second-highest-rated news channel, CNN, and eight years older than for the third-place channel, MSNBC.
The median age for the three evening newscasts is 60.5.
From the New York Times, on how:
With polls showing a surge in primary-season ballots cast by voters under 30, media outlets are out to convert the newly energized voters into viewers.
In Response to Nicholas Carr
Wired's turn:
On the contrary: The explosion of knowledge represented by the Internet and abetted by all sorts of digital technologies makes us more productive and gives us the opportunity to become smarter, not dumber. Think of Wikipedia and its emergent spinoffs, like Wiktionary. Imperfect as they may be, the collective brainpower contained within these kinds of sites — and the hunger for learning and accurate information they represent — is something human history has never known before.
Ways of Seeing
All of which provides an effective blueprint for us to follow circa 2012. First up, the opening ceremony, in which a volcano rises from the Thames, spewing flaming Olympic rings into the night sky while Big Ben - or rather, a genetically enhanced version of Big Ben, one with straighter teeth and bigger tits - pirouettes in the background, miming to the Kaiser Chiefs' latest single. This goes on for 15 hours or until the nearest superpower threatens to bomb us. Then the events themselves begin. None of them takes place in the Olympic stadium because there is no Olympic stadium. We've not bothered building one. Instead, we've got a host of exciting made-up CGI sports. Moon Snooker! Unicorn Wrestling! Quantum Deathball! Dissenter Beheading! Pac-Man with Guns! Naturally, none of the other countries has been allowed to practice any of these games, whereas we've had four solid years to develop and perfect them. So we're guaranteed, ooh, at least three bronze medals. We'll thrash Paraguay, that's for damn sure.
Charlie Brooker in the Guardian. How long? How long?
Monday, August 18, 2008
News - TV still on Top
Politics and Media 101
Can anyone become President of the United States without the patronage of Google? It was once a ridiculous question, but not any more. The fastest growing company in history is also arguably the most powerful. It has the potential to reach into every corner of our lives, from the way we get news, watch entertainment and do our jobs to the way we communicate, seek information and comprehend the world. Its clean white homepage and breezy colourful logo have become so embedded in our psyches that we 'google' without thinking (and use 'google' as a verb). I think, therefore I google.
The Guardian
Square the Circle
Self-promotion should make you slightly uncomfortable. The best journalists know the absolute necessity of humility; when accomplishments lead to hubris, that's when trouble arrives. (I suppose this is true of every walk of life.) That's why self-promotion should never be motivated by pure ego, or resort to the kinds of slippery tactics that journalists love to expose in other fields.
Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication.
This from the MediaShift Idea Lab
Friday, August 15, 2008
Martin Parr, Revolutionary Photographer
You have to disguise things as entertainment, but still leave a message and some poignancy.
Martin Parr: Why Photojournalism Must Get Modern
Angry syntax, core values...
It's Summertime...
"the least curious and intellectual generation in national history."
and the living ain't easy at Forbes.
Politics and Place
Because representative democracy is based on geography, content created by citizens must be identified by place instead of simply organized by issue. Content, from a news story to an online comment to a picture or video, needs to automatically be assigned (or “tagged”) with a geographic place. In addition, content bounded by a state or region or identified as global will be essential.
Sidewalks for Democracy Online
by Steven L. Clift
Download the PDF
Thursday, August 14, 2008
British Libel Laws
The United Nations committee on human rights is interesting on British Libel Laws
the British libel laws have "served to discourage critical media reporting on matters of serious public interest, adversely affecting the ability of scholars and journalists to publish their work, including through the phenomenon known as libel tourism".
New Media, New Money
From the American Political Science Association
Democratic politicians receive a 40% increase in contributions in the 30 days after appearing on the comedy cable show The Colbert Report. In contrast, their Republican counterparts essentially gain nothing. These findings appear to validate anecdotal evidence regarding the political impact of the program, such as the assertions by host Stephen Colbert that appearing on his program provides candidates with a “Colbert bump” or a rise in support for their election campaigns.
Read the research in PDF
Esthesis 4 - Kindle on fire?
Not an I-Pod, not yet.
It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.
NYT
"Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world," Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney wrote in a note to clients. He kept a "buy" rating on the share.
Reuters
My contrarian view is that just as most digital cameras are now smart phones, most ebook readers are also smart phones. People have been reading books on tiny screens since the days of the Psion and Compaq's iPaq, and it's common on Windows Mobile and similar phones.
So, while the Kindle might be Amazon's iPod, I reckon the iPhone is more likely to be Apple's Kindle - at least until e-newspapers take off.
The Guardian
Evaluating e-books nationwide - the JISC national e-books observatory project
Esthesis 3 - gender and the semantic web
Corinna Bath is currently research fellow at the "Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society" in Graz, Austria.
She investigates gender and technology in the context of the semantic web.
In my thesis I propose methodological concepts to evoke a de-gendering of IT on the basis of a close analysis of gendering processes. My research identifies practices in technology design, which often lead to “gendered” artefacts. One of these mechanisms is the so-called “I-methodology”, i.e. the implicit assumption made by computer scientists and software developers that users of the technologies they design would share their own interests, preferences, competencies and abilities.
More at Read Write Web
Such as:
There are no shortage of ways to describe documents, events, people or concepts. The roster of people who will participate in the creation of a standard way to describe them will become increasingly important as machine learning becomes more important in our every day lives. Failing to take this seriously, Bath argues, could lead to the silencing of "minority views, quieter voices, and allows the dominant voice to speak for everyone, which seems highly problematic".
Esthesis 2
Books are such an echo chamber.
Jeff Jarvis and the new new.
When we talk about the Google age, then, we do talk about a new society and the rules I explore in my book are the rules of that society, built on connections, links, transparency, openness, publicness, listening, trust, wisdom, generosity, efficiency, markets, niches, platforms, networks, speed, and abundance.
Is 2008 a return to the heady days of 1994?
Esthesis - an unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation
The scholarly monograph has been compared to the Hapsburg monarchy in that it seems to have been in decline forever! Many publishers, university administrators and academic researchers are still largely wedded to historical and Balkanized Web 1.0 monograph settings.
Colin Steele
Scholarly Monograph Publishing in the 21st Century: The Future More Than Ever Should Be an Open Book
---
Newspaper publishers are facing a perfect storm thanks to three megatrends: rising inflation, America's growing green conscience and disruptive technology. To succeed in this era of great change, they need to think about how to make lemonade out of these perceived lemons. Unfortunately, so far, they haven't. Here's my advice.
RISING INFLATION: As gas prices rise sharply, so do distribution costs. To compensate, many newspapers have announced they are significantly increasing their hard-copy newsstand prices. However, that's a 20th-century reaction to what is a complex, 21st-century problem.
What they should be doing instead is using this as an opportunity to put a hard date on when they will abandon print altogether, close down plants and migrate completely to a digital paradigm. They need to have faith that their brands and quality editorial product will encourage readers who haven't already migrated to do so.
Steve Rubel
How Newspapers Can Turn Problems into Profit
---
If I have any real problem with Creative Writing courses, it’s that so many of them are run by and for people who see nothing inherently alarming about the phrase, “a dense and difficult but ultimately rewarding book”. Homer, Chaucer, Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Graham Greene, the Brontes, Patricia Highsmith and countless others would have been alarmed by that phrase, Joyce, Woolf and Rushdie wouldn’t - take your pick.
Kevin Wignal
Disruptive Writing Courses
---
AMID a flurry of diplomatic activity over the conflict in Georgia, European officials are questioning whether they could have prevented the crisis and gloomily comparing the tensions to those seen ahead of the second world war. Some have recalled Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in the 1930s.
The Economist, Certain Ideas of Europe
Shuddering at memories of the 1930s
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Reading and "Viewing"
A group of researchers the U.S. and the Netherlands peered into people's brains using fMRI machines while those people were doing a series of three tasks: reading about something disgusting, watching images of something disgusting, and actually tasting something disgusting. Turns out the same regions in their brains activated consistently regardless of whether they were imagining, watching, or tasting disgusting things.
More here.
Monday, August 11, 2008
What did happen to that $100 computer?
The great, the good, the rich and the technocrats nodded in solemn approval.
And then some of them tried to kill it.
Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times magazine.
Friday, August 01, 2008
Stupid - or what?
What the Internet is doing to our brains according to The Atlantic
By NICHOLAS CARR
Here's his great blog
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
So is Google making us stupid?
John Naughton good as ever
The combination of powerful search facilities with the web's facilitation of associative linking is what is eroding Carr's powers of concentration. It implicitly assigns an ever-decreasing priority to the ability to remember things in favour of the ability to search efficiently. And Carr is not the first to bemoan this development. In 1994, for example, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies with the subtitle The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, a passionate defence of reading and print culture and an attack on electronic media, including the internet. 'What is the place of reading, and of the reading sensibility, in our culture as it has become?' he asked. His answer, in a word, was 'shrinking' due to the penetration of electronic media into every level and moment of our lives.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Monday, April 09, 2007
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Monday, February 05, 2007
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)