Putting you on Holde

Late to this, but still fun.

Strategy 101

John McCain’s convention gambit is a culture war strategy. It depends for its execution on conflict with journalists, and with bloggers (the “angry left,” Bush called them) along with confusion between and among the press, the blogosphere, and the Democratic party. It revives cultural memory: the resentment narrative after Chicago ‘68 but with the angry left more distributed. It dispenses with issues and seeks a trial of personalities. It bets big time on backlash.

At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be fought to scale, as it were.

From Pressthink at NYU.

Sometimes we need the Economist

That point is the extraordinary myopia of a line much-written by the European press in recent days: that the European Union has ended up in charge of the Georgia crisis, because the United States is so "distracted" by the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and by the weakness of a lame-duck administration.

From the often useful Certain Ideas of Europe blog tucked inside The Economist site somewhere.

A weakened, distracted America has just promised a billion dollars (€700m) in aid for Georgia with about half of that earmarked for "fast-track" delivery, sent two warships to Georgia bearing humanitarian relief supplies, and is about to send the USS Mount Whitney, flagship of the 6th Fleet, into the Black Sea. It has also sent the vice president, as mentioned above.

Even more here.

Who needs The Economist?

“Sarah’s smile is sincere, which I never felt from Hillary, who has anger and resentment in her eyes,” said Ann Schmuecker, a delegate from Mountain Home, Arkansas, where she met the Clintons decades ago.

Friends of Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, say she is the Obama campaign’s greatest weapon in pointing out Democrats’ differences with Ms. Palin and Mr. McCain.

From the NYT.

Surely the literary quote of the year?

Much of the zest in English fiction comes from rogue individualists looking for new ways to lose money by leaving orphaned books for future scavengers to discover and promote.

Iain Sinclair in the Guardian while writing about a man called Roland Camberton, "the great invisible of English fiction" - it seems.

Tom and Now

Thanks Google.


Makes it all much easier. Betwixt continues, and will be back regularly soon.

The Future of Polling

Since betting real money keeps people honest (to reduce their loses), markets with real money are considered a much better indicator of opinion than a mere poll — which has no “penalty” for being less than honest. But real money prediction markets are (stupidly) illegal in the US. So token markets like Long Bets and Bet2Give are devised to innovate around the law.

Kevin Kelly.

Get Happy!

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, where people were asked about their sense of wellbeing, the researchers were able to draw up a map of happiness down to district level across England, Scotland and Wales.

After adding in factors such as employment, health and educational qualifications, the team found that the area of Brecknock, Montgomery and Radnor in Powys was the happiest place.

It's Wales.

Unmapped: good for driving

"Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history - not to mention Britain's remarkable geography - at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day.

"We're in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique, giving us a feel for a place even if we've never been there."

The president of the British cartography society on new maps.

Even if this is fiction it is worrying...

...and the author is a novelist.


Live from the Obama afterparty (ft. Oprah).

"Nice to meet you, Congresswoman," our driver said a few minutes later as we exited and Friend Two led us purposefully toward a black town car that miraculously sat idling next to the bus we were planning to jump on.

I smiled magnanimously. What can I say? A dozen years of Catholic school might be a black mark on my record, but it made me a good liar and an even better politician.

From radar online.

Dogg eat dogg 1

"It is analysis that strikes me as having born no resemblance to the speech you and I just watched. None whatsoever. And for it to be distributed by the lone national news organization in terms of wire copy to newspapers around the country and web sites is a remarkable failure of that news organization.

"Charles Babington, find a new line of work."

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann gets angry after the Obama analysis.

Spot the Difference?

If I want to explain my job as founder of Spot.Us in one sentence, I'll just say "I'm fundraising for independent journalists to do local investigations."

Obviously it's much more involved than that, but depending on how much energy I have, it works.

An interesting move in local/community journalism.


And community building.

Different take on Denver

When I finished choking on my wine, I immediately sidled up to him, cursing myself for failing to change into flats. He is about five-feet tall, and in heels, I am nearly six-feet. He didn't seem bothered and we began to exchange the requisite political pleasantries: He's "really good friends" with Hillary Clinton, but then liked Barack Obama and ended up voting for him in the primary; oh, and the only thing he didn't like about Hillary's speech last night was her orange pantsuit, describing it as "not the most flattering choice." Which is fair!

Then, out of the blue, I blurted out: "Is the song 'Gasolina' really about chicks who do a lot of coke?"

I immediately regretted my question. Couldn't I have transitioned a little more subtly? He opened his mouth and I thought he was going to admonish me or walk away or call his publicist/guard dog to escort me, red-faced, out the door. Instead he told me, in his smooth, one-note, slightly garbled voice, that it wasn't wise, when you're throwing a party, to start drinking vodka too early in the evening, otherwise, "When three o'clock in the morning rolls around, you're standing on top of a building with your shirt off screaming 'I'm a Golden God,' and you come back downstairs and there are Eastern European mafia people doing cocaine off your coffee table." He added for emphasis, "One's judgment is seriously impaired by drinking straight vodka very early."

Find out who it is here.

After Marxism, Relativism

Found a copy of Lesley Chamberlain's "Motherland, A Philosophical History of Russia" today. It was published in 2004. Just read this in the preface:

"...Russian thought has spent much of its time and energy defining a specific Russian way of seeing and doing things. To the extent that there is Russian philosophy it has asked and continues to ask not 'What is the truth?' but 'what is the Russian truth?'..."

---

The Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, claimed today the Caucasus crisis was started by the Americans as an election campaign ploy.

As Russia found itself increasingly isolated internationally because of its invasion of Georgia and its decision to recognise two breakaway regions of Georgia as independent states, Putin suggested the Georgia war had been cooked up in Washington to create a neo-cold war climate that would strengthen John McCain's bid for the White House and wreck the prospects of Barack Obama.

From The Guardian.




Am motoring though Motherland in search of more quotes, obviously.

Another way of telling the story

Czechoslovakia, August 1968. Josef Koudelka positioned a passerby to show the exact time that Soviet troops invaded Prague.


Photograph: Josef Koudelka/Magnum

When I meet him today, in the back room of his new apartment in Prague, Koudelka unfolds a battered map of the world he has just found in one of the many boxes stacked along a wall. It is covered in spidery ink trails that trace his wanderings through Europe and beyond, his handwriting providing a runic commentary of the festivals and gatherings he attended along the way. The map dates from the Seventies and looks like a strange work of art, which, in a way, it is. The real art, though, lies in the photographs Koudelka produced when he began chronicling his restlessness - and rootlessness - as well as his newfound sense of freedom. His first major work, published in 1975, was called simply Gypsies, his second, from 1988, Exiles. Their titles alone tell you much about Koudelka's own life as well as the lives of his subjects.

Lovely Sean O'Hagan Observer piece on the photographer Josef Koudelka.

Karma on Control

Some 66% of those participating in this survey agreed with the statement: "A global internet Bill of Rights should be adopted." Only 6% disagreed.

Some key planks of the Bill of Rights would be: freedom of information, freedom of expression, and the right of people to have affordable access. Some 76% of respondents supported freedom of information as a core ethic of online life and 75% agreed that such a policy ensuring freedom of expression on the internet should be adopted.

On the other side of the issue, 62% of respondents said they believe content controls weaken the internet. And by a 59%-28% margin, they disagreed with the statement, "My country should have the right to approve the internet content available to the people of my country." Even more disagreed (63%) that a commercial internet service provider should have the right to control content.

From Pew on the Future of the Internet.


Full report as pdf here.

Social Bling

I am all for social karma (or "swarmth") building up in the innards of social tools, but directly tying actions to specific economic inducements, instead of an algorithmic authority or reputation is a terrible way to go.

/Message on SocialU - which is, they claim, 'all about you.'



Enough already.

Gaming as Life?

"I see social gaming as a new form of communication that is more interesting than e-mail and AIM [AOL Instant Messenger] in terms of connecting people together," he says. "It drives what we're doing and informs our decisions. We don't want to just stick our finger in the air. We want to create a new category."

Playfish Chief Operating Officer, Sebastien de Halleux.

From Forbes on Facebook's greatest hits.

Ways of Seeing #1

Rather than vision just being 'what we experience', it is, in fact, a collection of specific eye-behaviour links ('visuomotor functions') of which our conscious perception of the world is only an evolutionary-recent addition.

Thanks to Mind Hacks for recommending Goodale, M. & Milner, D. (2004). Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Here's a story for Newscred

Propaganda? News Management? Counter-terrorism? True?

The document also shows that Whitehall counter-terrorism experts intend to exploit new media websites and outlets with a proposal to "channel messages through volunteers in internet forums" as part of their campaign.

The strategy is being conducted by the research, information and communication unit, [RICU] which was set up last year by the then home secretary, John Reid, to counter al-Qaida propaganda at home and overseas. It is staffed by officials from several government departments.

From The Guardian.

Trust, Gender and the Usual Unsurprising Paradox

So women score better on honesty, are - as it were - more trusted. And below is how that quality is rewarded in leadership terms.


All from Pew's latest study, "Men and Women: Who's the Better Leader?". Full details here.

Vin Crosbie and a Great Series about American newspapers

I've heard many experts say that the evolution in access to media during the past three decades has been the greatest since Gutenberg time. Yet the reality is that it's much, much greater. The effects this radical increase in the supply of news and information that is readily available to people will have on civilization, nonetheless any one industry, will be much, much larger than anything the invention of the printing press ever wrought.

Part Two here.
Part One here.

Esthesis: 6 touch screens

...the success of the iPhone has encouraged other companies to explore multitouch screens. It might follow that if people like using their fingers on the screen of a cellphone, they would like it even better on the bigger displays of computers. That’s the hope of N-trig (pronounced “intrigue”), an eight-year-old Israeli company that makes a multitouch screen that can be used with a pen as well a finger.

From the NYT on the rise and re-rise of touch screens.

Why I am not Olen Steinhauer

Above is a "wordle" of the first chapter of Victory Square, the latest novel from my friend Olen Steinhauer.

To see a larger version click here.

Here is my first unpublished novel

And the bigger version.

I particularly like the "just...well..stuff..."

All thanks to Wordle.

Serial Will Eat Itself

The producers of Web serials — including the name-brand ones like “Afterworld,” “lonelygirl15” and “quarterlife” — seem forever anxious about their audience numbers, and they crunch and recrunch them. The producers of “lonelygirl15,” a thriller about a teenager stuck in a cult, claim that they have attracted 100 million views over more than 550 episodes. Marshall Herskovitz, the creator of “quarterlife,” a repertory drama about artsy 20-somethings, counters that his show has drawn 10 million views over 36 episodes — 50 percent more, on average, than “lonelygirl15.” This is possible, since the unit of success is the flimsy “view,” meaning virtually any click on any part of a series, anywhere on the Web. But it’s clear that we’re not talking about numbers advertisers can remotely trust. Are there really any hit Web serials?

The NYT romps through the "numerati" take on web serials.

Dissolution of the Monopolies?

Mr Fincham, who resigned from the BBC last year in the wake of false claims that the Queen had been filmed storming out of a photo shoot, warned that British television could split "like a medieval church", with the BBC and Channel 4, "chastened by public money", being separated from the rest of the industry. He complained of favouritism, saying that "organisations dependent on the public purse... are clasped more warmly to politicians' bosoms than those who say, 'Don't worry, we'd rather look after ourselves'."

Too much Tudors, mate. Easy with the religious metaphors.


Full lecture on pdf here.

The Daily Telegraph on Television and Trust

According to a poll by the consultancy Deloitte, three in four British people don't trust television. Channel executives must be dismayed. Not simply because of the poll's findings, but because they didn't think of running the poll themselves, as a money-spinning premium-rate phone vote.

More from Michael Deacon.

The Data Crunching Elite

A very interesting experiment in the future of book promotion? I think so. From The Numerati website created by Stephen Baker. This is the strategy of an online campaign to promote the book version...like this a lot. And the site itself.

Here's the idea. The Numerati is about tracking and predicting people by their data. So why not use a domain of that very science--behavioral advertising--to spread the word to the most likely readers?

That's what we're going to do. In the coming weeks, my publisher, Houghton Mifflin, will be running an advertising campaign for The Numerati on the vast network of sites affiliated with Platform A/Tacoda, a division of AOL. We'll be studying the patterns of the people who click on Numerati ads. Which web sites do they come from? What types of profiles do they have? Do some profiles click more on one type of ad than another?

Stephen is reassuringly honest about the possible outcome:

For starters, we'll be looking at two types of people, the datamining types who resemble The Numerati and the arty-literature type crowd that might page through an article about The Numerati in a magazine like The New Yorker. I may have quibbles about those choices. Maybe you do too. But the process has to start somewhere.

We'll make adjustments, and I'll describe the process, step by step, on this blog. I'll also be sounding out readers on the conclusions we reach and the advertisements we distribute. Maybe you can steer us along a more reasonable path. Or perhaps the data will lead us along a path that appears to defy all logic--but still works.

I think we have to read this book, and find out how the campaign worked.

I keep forgetting this when I check my Facebook

Reed's law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

The reason for this is that the number of possible sub-groups of network participants is , 2N - N - 1 where N is the number of participants.



This grows much more rapidly than either the number of participants, N
or the number of possible pair connections, (which follows Metcalfe's law)



so that even if the utility of groups available to be joined is very small on a peer-group basis, eventually the network effect of potential group membership can dominate the overall economics of the system.

From Wikipedia, via a David Cushman post.

...our group-forming nature, finds ways around control and mediation of all forms.

Mini Cooper goes hybrid in Beijing

It just turned up.

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.

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.

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?

News - TV still on Top

...an increasing shift toward online news consumption, but...there is now a sizable group of a more engaged, sophisticated and well-off people that use both traditional and online sources to get their news.

From Wired via Pew

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

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

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

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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

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.

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.

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.

So Long

"It was the only way to finish," he said. "End of story."

After Wembley

and an easy game with the USA