Meme: The Death of the Free, part three already

Consumers who have grown up during the past 15 years are completely at home in a world where much of what they want to hear, see or read will cost them nothing. True, in the case of some films and TV shows, the practices involved may skirt around the law a bit. Generally speaking, though, culture has become a happy free-for-all. Now may be the time to pay the bill.

Chris Anderson, a leading American commentator on the web and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, puts the matter concisely: "Somehow an economy had emerged around 'free' before the economic model that could describe it." Anderson's next book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, will both celebrate and analyse the effect of all this giving-away.

The author of influential 2006 book The Long Tail, Anderson is to suggest that few of the conventional rules of commerce, such as "supply and demand" and "economies of scale", apply any longer. While some suppliers, such as Sky Sports, might still get away with charging their audience, they would have to be pretty sure they offered a unique product.

From The End of the Age of Free in today's Observer.


This is really interesting.


Doesn't this play out so that Competition Lawyers "go" for the BBC? Or am I missing out too many connections along the way?


Terry Heaton is on the case, as ever:

...Murdoch can throw up pay walls and make legal moves to end the “wild” distribution of his content, but he faces two enormous problems in so doing. One, he gives up journalistic relevancy, for without the organic “spread” of information in the “current days of the Internet,” an institution of journalism cannot expect to be player in the world of cultural power. Two, regardless of what media companies do to increase the “value” of their content, the disruptions in the world of advertising will continue unabated

More tomorrow.

The Tourist & France Gall

France Gall, a central image in Olen Steinhauer's great new spy-thriller, The Tourist.

Strangely ignored in the UK to date, The Tourist has been in the NYT best seller lists recently, and it is easy to understand why. Perhaps it is too sophisticated for our British times.

I've just put The Tourist down, on a second read (I read an early manuscript version last year) and I feel sure we have the start of something big. Imagine if The International had a plot, or if Three Days of the Condor had a global canvas, rather than merely a New York-ish backdrop, and you'd be getting close to the richness of the text. Family is never far away, even when identity is vague, obtuse or simply impossible to understand.

Olen leaves us hanging in a triangle of paternity but in the apparent certainty that anti-hero Milo Weaver (played by Clooney, perhaps, in the film: he's optioned it, anyway) will be back. Blurbs evoke Le Carré's world, but if this is true it is to the early Smiley Le Carré, not the tone-deaf romantic of recent times, that we find in Olen's terse, dialogue-driven, tale of murders-within-murders; networks within networks; and Homeland v. the CIA.

Lovely.

So is the "E-Reader" a way to charge for content?

...does the Kindle form part of Murdoch's digital content masterplan? Apparently not.

"I can assure you, we will not be sending our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle," he said. "We will control the prices for our content, and we will control the relationship with our customers."

So who is News Corp talking to about an ebook reader? There are a dozen or so products on the market. Kindle has been most successful in bringing newspaper publishers on board but its electronic paper competitors include the Sony Reader, the older iRex iLiad and Fujitsu's FELPia. The latter is colour too – a major advantage over its monochrome Amazon rival.

They would be looking at a subscription-based service on an existing reader or, though more unlikely, their own branded reader. That would be more costly and wouldn't make much sense for the consumer unless it could be opened to other content providers – and could we see News Corp setting itself up with an "open platform" publishing model, a la Facebook and Apple?

From The Guardian.


The battle of the e-readers is setting up to look like the online service wars of the mid nineties: CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, Minitel et al etc. What happened next: the web. So when Murdoch says: "The current days of the internet will soon be over," we should all wonder what's about to happen next.

Copyright and the future of research

I went to this British Library breakfast on Tuesday and began to worry about the future of academic research, unless proposals like this are implemented . The IP Minister, David Lammy, was present. The backdrop is this: the majority of C20th century books, papers, journals, video, film and radio are in copyright and are not available digitally to academic researchers.

...Chief Executive of the British Library Dame Lynne Brindley launched the Library's campaign to ensure that copyright issues of importance to the research and education sector are included in the ongoing public debate on copyright and are reflected in any subsequent legislation, rules or regulations resulting from recent Government initiatives. These suggestions include:

* Public Interest - Many contracts undermine the public interest exceptions in copyright law agreed by Parliament to foster education, learning and creativity. Addressing this issue is crucial so that existing and new exceptions are not over-ridden by contract law.
* Preserving our cultural heritage - Libraries must be able to make preservation of copies of the material they acquire, including web harvesting of the UK domain.
* Orphan works - 40% of the British Library's collections are Orphan Works (where the rightsholder can no longer be found or traced). A legislative solution to Orphan Works would help provide access to the UK's large historical collections over the internet.
*Fair Dealing - Researchers and libraries need to be able to make available "fair dealing copies" of anything in their collections, including sound and film recordings that Fair Dealing does not currently relate to.
*Technology Neutral - Computer based research techniques, such as scientific research, needs to be allowed by future copyright law, in the same way that in the analogue world research activity is protected through "fair dealing".

From the BL newsroom.


To give a good example: how does the historian creating a portrait of the late C20th do so without video, television, radio - and easy digital access to literature? All in one place.

One example that was provided was the film researcher in Edinburgh who must travel to London (and the British Film Institute) to access specific commercially unavailable film content. If she could have the film delivered digitally to her computer in Scotland she would save around £600 in travel grants - each time.

Legislating on future online content

I attended an ISPA Legal Forum at lawyers Clifford Chance yesterday at which Daniel Sanderson, a partner at Clifford Chance, Steve Rowan, Deputy Director, International Policy Directorate, IPO (Intellectual Property Office) and the Director of Legal & Regulatory at Orange, Simon Persoff, spoke in depth about the forthcoming Digital Britain report, and the likely issues that will surround a Digital Rights Agency. Fascinating stuff: in the ongoing attempts to curb "file sharing" it is currently the ISPs that are in the firing line. Many questions were raised: will the ISPs be deluged by Rights Holders' "robots" sending out "infringement violation" messages constantly? What will constitute a "serious consumer infringement"? Will the ISPs be disadvantaged in negotiations with Rights Holders when they attempt to build business deals that involve access and content? Also, how is P2P going to be defined? By my estimation there are at least 29 ways to file share, it is not simply a matter of BitTorrent. Who will pay the legal bills? And will we see 10 million people criminalized?

Trefor Davies, tech director at Timico, blogged:

As a footnote to yesterday’s posts from the ISPA Legal Forum one of the things to have stuck in my mind is that consumers are not being consulted in any part of the discussion surrounding P2P filesharing. Whilst the inter industry argument rages we are in danger of losing out on some basic human rights.

Check out Trefor's other notes on the Forum.


NB. Update: the lawyers Pinsent Mason reported yesterday that:

The Government plans a tenfold increase in the penalties for criminal breaches of intellectual property law. Infringement of IP laws will be punishable by fines of up to £50,000 rather than the current £5,000, according to Government plans.

The measures, though, do not involve increasing the possible jail sentences for online infringement as proposed by 2006's Gowers Review of Intellectual Property.

Link to consultation document: here.

All Over, End, Start Paying

There's a co-ordinated meme going on, no?

"The current days of the internet will soon be over."

Said Rupert Murdoch. He:

expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a "malfunctioning" business model.

From Andrew Clark in The Guardian.


Is it not true that Blackberry and iPhone users in the USA get the WSJ (which, as usual, is cited as the online role-model for this) free? Trying to find that out now.

Obit: fact checking

A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.

The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March.

It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers.

But is this true?


From the Irish Times.

It speaks, it pays

Matt Brittin, Google's UK director, said today the search engine giant has shared $5bn (£3.3bn) with publishers through its contextual ads program, AdSense, in the last year.

...

"In a world where everyone is a publisher what is needed more than ever is editing skills and brands that help people understand the quality of the content and help them to find the content that is useful. I think there is a big opportunity here," he told the audience of international magazine executives in London.

"The challenge is the model of monetisation online and figuring out how to make that economically viable in the same way as your print products are. Those models are lagging consumer behaviour and all of us are trying to keep up with the consumer."

From The Guardian.

Open Day: tread softly it's my business model

The research councils are looking at what more they can do to support open access to research results after an independent study found that their current policies were having a "limited impact"...They will have to tread carefully because open access threatens to undermine the business model of publishers and learned societies.

From the THES.

Tech Avant Garde Around When Avant Garde Launched: Kindle Users are Old

50% of the people who use Kindles are over 50 years old. Twenty-seven percent were over 60.

Since the Kindle qualifies as "new technology", it is supposed to find its initial market among the young and impressionable. The opposite appears to be true. People who should have fixed habits including reading physical books using reading glasses are buying an electronic book reader instead.

The Kindle is not cheap. With money being tight, it may be that older, affluent consumers are much more likely to spend $359 than the younger, unemployed people who will graduate from college this year.

From Time.

Meme: pay is the new free

In fact, as The Economist noted, the "Real" Freeconomic gig was to grab some VC money on the back of dubious promises about Ad revenue, persuade a whole lot of muppets to generate user generated content, code and karma for free and then sell the f*cker to some behemoth like Google or AOL before the non-free transaction costs killed it

How to make money the Old Fashioned Way is to charge people for things. This is, following the Semantic shift, Pay! is the New Free

Good stuff here at Broadstuff.

Another Credit Card Invitation, but what is the interest rate?

Manchester will this autumn become the first city where people can sign up for an ID card, Jacqui Smith says.
Anyone over 16 in the city who holds a UK passport will be able to apply for a card at a post office or pharmacy.
The home secretary's speech signals her determination to push ahead with the cards - expected to cost people between £30 and £60 each - despite opposition.

From the BBC.

Newspapers and the Bailout - its the politics, stupid!

Folks, a newspaper bailout is coming. Maybe not in time to save the Boston Globe, but certainly in time to save "systemically important" papers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and the LA Times

Joe Weisenthal in the Business Insider on why it's the politics not the economics that will save some of the biggest titles.

Context is at least Bishop

Columbia Tomorrow is a product of the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the Missouri School of Journalism. We wanted to serve residents of Columbia with a new type of news site — one that emphasizes not just the latest headlines, but how those headlines fit together into a larger story. To create this site, students and editors from the Missourian, KOMU and RJI spent months researching, reporting, storyboarding, writing, coding, shooting and producing all the content you see here.

Thanks to "News After Newspapers."


Columbia Tomorrow.

Don't furnish a room; don't pay the rent

We need to weigh the smashed hopes of creative writers against the financial needs of their tutors, who are themselves writers, and earning the kind of money that writing would never supply. A closed little dance: tutors teach students who in turn teach other students, like silversmiths in a medieval guild where a bangle is rarely bought though many are crafted, and everyone lives in a previous world.

Ian Jack on "writers". I met Marina Warner this morning, who said much the same.

Pay: the new business model

The Guardian Media Group chief executive, Carolyn McCall, said today that the Guardian could charge for more specialist parts of its website guardian.co.uk, such as MediaGuardian.co.uk.

"Charging for B2B is the way to go," McCall told delegates at this first session at the World Magazine Congress representing cross-media businesses.

McCall said that the econonmic environment meant publishers were rethinking their business models.

From the Guardian - which has always been a brave pioneer.

..."digital" carries with it a whole set of properties that can be readily understood and that go beyond media and into other areas of society. One key, defining principle of things that are "digital" is that they can be very easily copied, compressed and transmitted. In other words, "digital" and "free" (in every sense, not just the monetary sense) go together like Morecambe and Wise, fish and chips, or banks and bailout.

Also from a recent Guardian - which has always been an insightful observer of new media.

Lovers of the LRB Look Away Now...

...The 160 character review site has arrived. Handy for Me No Leica-style Parkerisms, and Douglas Adams: "awesome" Blippr claims that "good reviews come in small packages".


Er, not really.

Exec Tweets, thanks to my Twitter feed

Courtesy of Lucy Kellaway's tweet: her FT column: about this: executives' tweets. Never before have so many whispers led me to John Battelle.

In The New York Times last week Maureen Dowd made fans of Twitter very cross by suggesting that this craze, which has now afflicted 10m people, is a waste of time.

She may be right for most of us, but for business people, I don’t agree. I think it is potentially the best communication tool there is; the trouble is that most executives are making a complete hash of using it. Either they fill it with mundane personal detail, or they fill it with mundane professional detail – which is possibly worse. The first scores higher on embarrassment; the second on tedium.

From the FT via - well, I got there somehow.

A Platform for Collaborative Journalism: sunlight

Publish2 is announcing a new initiative to help newsrooms faced with declining resources continue to play the watchdog role that is so vital in this time of crisis. Digital Sunlight is our code name for a new feature set that will allow citizens to help journalists cover the stimulus act and the other big stories that affect our lives and our communities by submitting tips, leads, anecdotes, questions, etc. into a global searchable database.

From Publishing 2.0.

How Long Before This?

The world and his dog, it would seem, want Apple to make a netbook. Even that part of the world that has no idea what a netbook is wants Apple to make one.

Ideas of the - short? - term, from MacFormat.

On Twitter and Nicholas Carr

His [Carr] biggest worry is that we are "breaking experience and culture into its smallest possible bits and interrupting ourselves with it." He calls us "nibblers of information," and while he has two dormant Twitter accounts that he mostly uses for research, he’s turning it all off - as he often does with his blog - to focus on his next book.

I am still torn. Twitter, at first a curiosity, has turned into an annoying fad, a way for today's modern celebrity, hiding behind a ghost-tweeter, to seem normal while the untalented dress up their lives like carnival barkers (micro-celebrities, Carr calls them).

Twitter's benefits are drowned out by the trumpets of some revolution and the rising volume of its place as a status symbol, best summed up in Steven Colbert's response on The Today’s Show.

Its promise, I'm afraid, is more banal, more utilitarian. For one, it is re-inventing the fourth estate, rewarding creative and investigative journalism by forcing us to read beyond the spoon-fed news. Each day your own hand-selected group of insight spotters push you into the cracks and crevices of the world; each day you can monitor a new research topic, stumbling upon your wildest StumbleUpons. The sources may sometimes be specious, but that's all a glorious part of the discovery.

Fritz Nelson of Infomation Week on Nick Carr.


It's true. Twitter is my new news-needs feed. And it is a great research tool; once you know who knows what.

A content maker talks launch dates in the digital age

It's time for staggered releases to end. Every day they continue, more people, tired of seeing adverts and reviews of shows and movies they won't be able to buy legitimately for months or years, call up a techie friend and say "that torrenting thing, how do you do that?"

Every day these shows and movies aren't available to buy, worldwide, on the same day, for a reasonably equivalent price, more people are finding out how to get them for nothing. And once they're used to doing it that way, it's going to be harder than ever to get them back.

Naomi Alderman on film downloading in The Guardian.

SABIP and the Digital Consumer

Today, after an intense three month research phase, which might justify the spotty posts on Around Robin recently, we're going to present our findings to a closed workshop organised by SABIP, the Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property Policy, in the UK. We've looked at a lot of academic data, industry research; conducted interviews and gone and had a good look at the worlds of file sharing, downloading, copying and storage. Should be interesting. Our research will be published shortly.

New Capa, Taro & Chim

...the rolls turned out to be in remarkably good shape despite being almost untouched for 70 years. And so began a painstaking process of unfurling, scanning and trying to make sense of some 4,300 negatives taken by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour during the Spanish Civil War, groundbreaking work that was long thought to be lost but resurfaced several years ago in Mexico City

From the NYT

Opening His Heart

The new journalism will be more transparent, accountable, responsive, will have the humility to admit mistakes - and will be open source, showing workings, methods, sources and footnotes.


The Guardian reports on its own editor-in-chief.

"We are describing something that has a far greater joint authority that comes about through shared information and through a shared idea about what the community needs," he said.

"If this is a form of journalism of which people feel they are a part, which people trust, believe in and and feel involved with, then we are halfway there towards this question of a business model. It's a reason to be immensely cheerful amongst the gloom about our industry and if we can get over this question about our economic model - it's a big if - it's possible we are not going into an obituary for journalism but something like a golden age for journalism."

Alan Rusbridger at Queen Mary, the University of London

Writers vs Google (part 9)

I met some of the Internet Archive guys and girls in Oxford recently, and shared some beers and thoughts. Nice gang: based in SF. How ironic that it is paper that they are turning to in the prelims to the Google Book Settlement. Here for the motion online.


News here.


The battle begins.

So no one database...

The Home Office will... ask communications companies - from internet service providers to mobile phone networks - to extend the range of information they currently hold on their subscribers and organise it so that it can be better used by the police, MI5 and other public bodies investigating crime and terrorism.

"What we are talking about is who is at one end [of a communication] and who is at the other - and how they are communicating."


Jacqui Smith on new plans for monitoring the Internet, because doing nothing is 'not an option'.

Announcing a consultation on a new strategy for communications data and its use in law enforcement, Jacqui Smith said there would be no single government-run database.

From the BBC.

Les Mis 2009

Like it's 1977

After following the demonstrations yesterday on a palette of applications someone said to me: "I think I'm going to be an anarchist...again." Hard not in this Red Riding, Labour isn't Working, time not to juggle youth and middle age. Rory Cellan-Jones seems to be thinking the same, only with a hard news hat on.

I particularly liked this message from one frustrated Twitterer trying to get the word out from the Bank of England:

"Mobile coverage v bad prob due to number of anarchists also using iPhones".

Just a minute - anarchists using iPhones? Or Twitter? Does that really compute? One is a mobile phone that you might think was more of a yuppie toy than a revolutionary tool - the other is a social network used principally by an older, more establishment crowd than, say, Facebook. Or maybe those are just my preconceptions?

As I find myself London (re) Calling courtesy of the ripped CDs, it's not hard to also remember what punk begat for 18 years.

Dot Life, & Rory Cellan-Jones.

Birth

Eighteen months down the road to mainstream Twitterdom, it's far less alarming when photographer Christian Payne, or Documentally, is describing the birth of his son. It's not a one-way exchange but a conversation...

From the Guardian

A Few Months Ago...

...I watched a presentation on the realities of the 'google generation' - that's all of us btw - and how they search, read and source the web. Striking stuff. Afterwards a man from the Encyclopedia Britannica asked: "Ok, so what shall I do?"

“Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency; critics argue that Wikipedia’s open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear. Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project’s utility and status as an encyclopedia.”

Then look at Britannica.com. A search for Encarta in the free portion of the Britannica site turns up nothing. And a search for Wikipedia provides one paragraph plus a pop-up window telling you you are trying to access premium content

wiki on wiki.


From the Christian Science Monitor on the death of Encarta.

No Relation Gets Worried About Democracy

Banker or Journalist? Now there's a game to play.

According to Bloomberg journalist Albert R. Hunt, people should be as concerned about the fall of newspapers as they are the fall of the banks. He says that society without a tough media is not democracy. He even mentions the French government's proposition to subsidise newspapers and the dangers it might bring. He cites a Harvard researcher who estimates that "about 85 percent of the news people get is initially generated by newspapers" and that most scandals are revealed by professional hacks who have the time and the means to investigate.

From The Observers.

Best of Breed eats Best of Breed

AKA posh dog eats posh dog.

I told Arthur that I had not yet fully read the story. “Well, I’m getting out of the business,” he said. Startled, I gazed through the window at the cars and people shouldering through the cold rain, the headline already forming in my mind: publishing scion resigns! “Wait, Arthur,” I said. “Is this a major scoop? Or are you just saying that you aren’t talking to writers anymore?” He laughed his high-pitched, zany laugh. “The latter,” he said.

AKA: Vanity Fair on the New York Times.

The Daily Philanthropist

If it ain't broke - but it is - don't fix it. Investigative reporting: the comeback?

Investigative journalism, one of the casualties of shrinking newsroom budgets, is getting some help from an unlikely source: The Huffington Post, an internet darling known for links and commentary, not in-depth reporting. The HuffPo, along with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other unnamed donors, is launching a $1.75 million fund to support the work of up to 10 investigative reporters. Their work will run on HuffingtonPost.com but will also be made available for free to any publication that wants to print or post it, according to an Associated Press report.

From the Washington Post.

Hiatus Status: twitter et al

“ Twitter did not just kill my blog though, it also killed my golf game. I have not played a round of golf since my birthday in September and as passionate as I have been about golf since my early teens, I barely miss it. Tiger Woods wounded my golf game because no matter how much I played or practiced and no matter how much technology I threw in my bag, I could NEVER hit the shots he could hit. Twitter finished it off for now because it replaces the social part of the game that I craved. The course was where I ‘closed’ business.

The Venture Capitalist, Fred Wilson, writing today about - I guess - time. I too have cause to wonder how to find the time to juggle two blogs, a tumblog, twitter, facebook, and two email accounts. Life in eight tabs isn't easy. In the absence of Around Robin newspapers have got into worse shape, (Chicago Tribune, holy hell!) and Jon Stewart has gone for the financial press.

I've been looking hard at download culture, and the results will be published soon: it's a free-fall world out there if the figures are anything close to accurate. And I've just signed to write a book about the future of the book. There is life after post-modernism, and Budapest. And the Kindle works on the iPhone...the e-reader is coming!

Facebook & Twitter: marriage or make-overs?

This is from Sarah Lacey in Business Week.

Sure, Facebook investor and board member Peter Thiel can try to damp enthusiasm for Twitter by saying Facebook is eyeing lots of acquisitions. But there's a reason Facebook was hungry enough for Twitter that it offered $500 million in stock and cash to a company with a small staff and no revenue—in the middle of a recession.

And there's a reason Twitter didn't take it. Twitter knows it's just getting started, and it is the closest thing to an eventual threat. It would have been like Facebook taking Viacom up on its $750 million offer or accepting $1 billion from Yahoo! back in 2006.

When I last spoke to Twitter founder and CEO Evan Williams, he coyly told me he was nowhere near done building out Twitter as a service or a business and that he has a clear vision for both. He's not going into a lot of detail, but I can tell you it has a lot to do with the real-time news feed that Twitter has become; there's also a lot of potential in the way Twitter lets you search for information on the Web in real time—not at some fixed point in the Web's recent past.

How to sort out the Google Book Settlement: print

So while there is a large direct-mail effort, a dedicated Web site about the settlement in 36 languages (googlebooksettlement.com/r/home) and an online strategy of the kind you would expect from Google, the bulk of the legal notice spending — about $7 million of a total of $8 million — is going to newspapers, magazines, even poetry journals, with at least one ad in each country. These efforts make this among the largest print legal-notice campaigns in history.

That Google is in the position of paying for so many print ads “is hilarious — it is the ultimate irony,” said Robert Klonoff, dean of Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., and the author of a recent law review article titled “Making Class Actions Work: The Untapped Potential of the Internet.”

From the NYT.

What will the book P2P torrent be called? Treasure Island?

Of course.

Amazon.com Inc. plans to release a program Wednesday for reading electronic books on Apple Inc.'s iPhone, extending Amazon's sales of digital books to devices beyond its Kindle e-book reader.

Amazon's software application, which can be downloaded free of charge, allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to read books or periodicals purchased on the Web or through their dedicated Kindle device, usually for $9.99. Using a service that Amazon calls whispersync, the program keeps track of a readers' latest page in any given book across both a Kindle and iPhone.

"There are times when you're going to be in a place where you happen to have your iPhone but not your Kindle," said Ian Freed, an Amazon vice president. "If I get stuck in line at the grocery store, I can pick up where I was reading with my iPhone."

From the WSJ.

Google and newspapers

...with Google dropping its newspaper ad sales effort, it seems to be going to the other extreme: it finally started putting advertisements on Google News. For years, whenever angry newspaper insiders would complain about how Google News was somehow "profiting" off of their hard work, people would respond that Google didn't even put any advertisements on its news search engine. However, now that this has changed, pretty much everyone is expecting lawsuits to follow.

Techdirt

Spotify: some numbers and what they might mean

Spotify is go.

Let’s generously assume that only 95% of the 800,000 are free: compared to those users being 9.99 paid subscribers, that’s a shortfall of just under 100 million euros annual subscription revenue that needs to be made up in advertising. I admit the comparison is a bit disingenuous given the explicit tactic of deploying a free tier to promote the service. But Spotify must be careful not to expect to convert the majority of those to paid subscriptions. They’ve cast their net among free music fans and they’ve reeled in a nice catch of freeloaders who love their music but predominately won’t pay to stream it. Charging for must-have added functionality, such as mobile, might be an avenue, but Last.FM, Pandora, imeem etc have all set the standard of mobile support being free. So charging for mobile would arguably be as damaging to their growth potential as if they’d only launched with a premium offering.

From Mark Mulligan's Music Industry blog.

Endowment mortgages for newspapers?

Another of the end of newspapers pieces, but interesting.

As long as internet neutrality, what I call internet liberty, isn't crushed, the demise of the traditional newspaper holds out the possibility of a press that more closely reflects the interests of the ordinary people, instead of the urban business classes.

So the endowment model is in my view actually much less likely to make the reporters beholden to special interests. Once the money is in the endowment, the donor's leverage is much reduced. Of course, if you were actively trying to increase the endowment, you might be tempted not to make waves . . . But presumably that would not be the normal state of affairs for all endowed journalists. It should be a 501 c 4 endowment rather than c3, i.e., the kind that allows partisan political activity.

The main problem with the endowment model is that an endowment has to be just enormous to generate enough money to accomplish anything.

From Informed Comment

Video games and the apocalypse: the truth, finally

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

Average Face

... an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden’s ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.

From the Economist.

...Or not twitter, because it infantilises our brains (were we young)

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.

The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues, such as the psychological impact on children.

The Guardian.


Mary Harrington on the Daily Mail's take on the same story:

Social media are probably only comparable to Thatcherism in espousing a kind of commonality through radical individualism (albeit, on the social media side, a California-flavoured one born in ’60s Palo Alto). So this is only really a thought experiment. But still: thirty years from now, what will the consequences of digitally-mediated social life be on the fabric of real-world society? Will we all be bloated screen-bound bovines as seen in Wall-E, or will we have hit some extraordinary techno-infrastructural Black Swan and been deprived of our networks altogether? If we raise a generation of kids unable to interact un-networked, how might we cope in the face of digital Armageddon? It’s paradoxical to sit writing something like this in a blog, I know; but it’s not surprising that, now that social media are maturing and going mainstream, we’re beginning to see debates as to whether the Web really is the great leap forward that it’s sometimes trumpeted as, or whether it represents a sociocultural or even evolutionary cul-de-sac.

More here.

Down - let's twitter

It is inevitable that this will happen from time to time. What it does prove is that the more data we entrust to the cloud, the more important it is that we have reliable backups in place.

A similar crisis occurred when Amazon Web Services went down almost exactly a year ago; thousands of web-based businesses rely on Amazon for their storage services and after two hours of downtime, users were observing that cloud computing can't become mainstream, certainly for businesses, until it becomes almost infallible.

Within minutes of the Gmail downtime unfolding, I was sent a very pertinent message on Twitter speculating on the cost of the problem:

"Let's count the cost: 25m users, 33% affected; average of $50 per hour lost productivity = $415m per hour economic cost..."

Jemima Kiss via Twitter.

Facebook charting

Techcrunch to explain.

Post Facebook Posting Furore

One of the basic truths of the web is that you give up data to websites so you can use their services. This is true in particular of social networking sites like Facebook where the point is to share - ie to spread content. Once you let it go - you no longer have full control over your content online. The internet is interactive and other people are going to get involved.

People should realise that in this context, online privacy is a contradiction in terms. If you want to keep something truly private, don't post it online - that is the only basic rule to follow.

Thanks to Mike Harvey in The Times.

Director of Digital Engagement, UK: a job posting

The successful applicant will:

• Develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government

• Work with communication, policy and delivery officials in Government departments to embed digital engagement in the day to day working of Government

• Work with Directors of Communication to ensure that digital media are included in the reporting of reaction to Government policy and initiatives

• Work closely with web teams to ensure that digital communications are making the most effective and efficient use of hardware and software

• Act as head of profession for civil servants working on digital engagement

• Ensure that digital engagement is always a leading part of Government consultation

• Introduce new techniques and software for digital engagement, such as ‘jams’ into Government

• Convene an expert advisory group made up of the leading experts on digital engagement to provide advice to Ministers and act as a sounding-board for the Government’s digital engagement strategy

• Work closely with the Ministerial Group on Digital Engagement, delivering the work agreed at Cabinet on digital engagement

Salary? £81,600 - 160,000


Apply here.


Tell the successful applicant what to do here.

Wikipedia: trust comes via someone else, it's called social transparency

Good luck.

We are pleased to announce the release of our first research prototype of a social dynamic analysis tool for Wikipedia called WikiDashboard.

The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

Check this out.

Facebook: funnily enough this post generated some heat

...anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later.* Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

From the Consumerist. Read here for some updates.

There go books, take the quiz

Take the quiz here, and watch the next peer-to-peer revolution begin.
It's called publishing.

New Internet? Old Gated Communities

Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.

“Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet,” says Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer involved in building a new Internet, “we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.”

From the NYT.

Pirate Bay Trial, a question

Spectrial is also the primary hashtag on Twitter. Twitter user sippantheswede asked:

Is #spectrial the world's first virally marketed court case?


From the Guardian.


How to follow the trial here.

Provisional text: two

Leaving aside for a moment that the Kindle’s very name is weirdly evocative of book burning, consider that for everything we gain with a Kindle—convenience, selection, immediacy—we’re losing something too. The printed word—physically printed, on paper, in a book—might be heavy, clumsy or out of date, but it also provides a level of permanence and privacy that no digital device will ever be able to match.

In the past, restrictive governments had to ban whole books whose content was deemed too controversial, inflammatory or seditious for the masses. But then at least you knew which books were being banned, and, if you could get your hands on them, see why. Censorship in the age of the Kindle will be more subtle, and much more dangerous.

From Urbzen.

Provisional text: another way of saying doubt democratized...

One of the things that happens when books and other writings start to be distributed digitally through web-connected devices like the Kindle is that their text becomes provisional.

The truth is out there. And changing.


From Nick Carr.

Labour's Listing List?

But I have found something sickly compelling about the way Labourlist has unfolded into a tragi-comedy that reveals more than it should about the troubled relationship the Labour Party has with the internet.

Jack Thurston goes long on that LabourList thing.

This one is a no brainer

Google said on Thursday it aimed to build a data centre at an old paper mill in southeastern Finland that it bought from Stora Enso for 40 million euros ($51.7 million).

"We are currently considering to build a data centre at this site," said Google spokesman Kay Oberbeck.

Google has dozens of data centres, or server farms, which consume significant amounts of energy, around the world.

In early 2008 Stora Enso closed down the loss-making Summa mill, which consumed 1,000 gigawatt hours of electricity per year, after nearly 53 years in operation.

From Reuters. Who are still in news.

Micro payments and newspapers, part 57

Smart man writes for Time, feels like he's been asked to:

There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.

The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.

Walter Isaacson in Time.


Smarter man replies:

Walter Isaacson, the former editor of TIME magazine and current President of the Aspen Institute, wrote a column last week arguing that newspapers should squeeze revenue out of their web sites through "micropayments." It's an idea with a long, but not very successful, history: Isaacson himself points out that Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, imagined micropayments for written content back in the early 1960s.

Small payments, on the order of a dollar, work well for some kinds of highly valued, contextualized content, like a book to your Kindle or a song to your iPod. But "micro" payments on the order of a nickel—the figure Isaacson mentions for a hypothetical news story—have never taken off. Transaction costs, caused by things like credit card processing, are usually cited as the reason, but I've never found that view persuasive: It's not hard to set up a system in which micro transactions are aggregated into parcels of at least a few dollars before being channeled through our existing credit card infrastructure.

David Robinson at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.

Speech to Kindle 2.0

One update, however, is wholly new: Amazon has added a "Text to Speech" function that reads the e-book aloud through the use of special software.

This presents a significant challenge to the publishing industry. Audiobooks surpassed $1 billion in sales in 2007; e-book sales are just a small fraction of that. While the audio quality of the Kindle 2, judging from Amazon's promotional materials, is best described as serviceable, it's far better than the text-to-speech audio of just a few years ago. We expect this software to improve rapidly.

From the Author's guild. Read on, it's interesting about copyright too.

WEF vs TED

Davos is all about the year ahead and hence in the public sessions at least almost the entire focus was on the economic situation with the occasional diversion into the crisis in Gaza. My sense was that no-one could paint a clear picture of what is likely to happen in the coming months and an awful lot of time seemed to be spent on trying to figure out who was to blame for not spotting the encroaching crisis. This didn’t seem productive to me.

Tim Brown on the Big Boys 'awaydays".