Mama we're all writers now

Don't stop now a c-mon:

Our new forms of writing—blogs, Facebook, Twitter—all have precedents, analogue analogues: a notebook, a postcard, a jotting on the back of an envelope. They are exceedingly accessible. That it is easier to cultivate a wide audience for tossed off thoughts has meant a superfluity of mundane musings, to be sure. But it has also generated a democracy of ideas and quite a few rising stars, whose work we might never have been exposed to were we limited to conventional publishing channels.

Amateurs and experts share real estate on our screens. We scroll down to add our comments; we join the written fray. The rush of prose is intense, but also exhilirating. So many hats are in the ring.

From More Intelligent Life.

Better than Amazon recommendations?

Bookseer. Well, actually, it's Amazon Plus...

On building a new network

Just because you’ve started a network doesn’t mean everyone’s on the same page. “Networks are a new concept,” Van Slyke said. “You have to build those relationships. People still consider other organizations as competition for eyeballs or funds. You have to get over that into, ‘How do we work together for support of everyone?’”

Van Slyke said the Media Consortium members went through a long period of “dating” before they committed to making their collaboration official. Unlike the 30-plus investigative outlets who met at Pocantico last week and immediately inaugurated their network, the Media Consortium took several meetings to form, declaring its existence a year after their initial March 2005 meeting.

Tracy Van Slyke, who runs the Media Consortium. From an article in the Nieman Journalism lab.

Writing - it's going IM-y

Half (50%) of teens say they sometimes use informal writing styles in the writing they perform in school, 38% have used shortcuts from instant messaging or email, and 25% have used emoticons in their school writing. Overall, nearly two-thirds of teens (64%) incorporate some informal styles from their text-based communications into their writing at school.

From Pew.

The "new hard work" - attention span

A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who's "multi-tasking" all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption. It's time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we're living in, not our grandparents' age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention. Hard work is dead. Are you paying attention?

From Lifehacker There must be some good research on this - will go look.

Teenagers and Media, by Morgan Stanley

Teenagers are consuming more media, but in entirely different ways and are almost certainly not prepared to pay for it. They resent intrusive advertising on billboards, TV and the Internet. They are happy to chase content and music across platforms and devices (iPods, mobiles, streaming sites). Print media (newspapers, directories) are viewed as irrelevant but events (cinema, concerts etc.) remain popular and one of the few beneficiaries of payment. The convergence of gaming, TV, mobile and Internet is accelerating with huge implications for pay-TV.

Much more here @ Morgan Stanley.

The Atlantic on the evolution (or is it slow suicide?) of the "news weekly"

In the digital age, with its overabundance of information, the modern newsweekly is in a particularly poignant position. Designed nearly a century ago to be all things to all people, it Chaplin-esquely tries to straddle thousands of rapidly fragmenting micro-niches, a mainframe in an iTouch world. The audience it was created to serve—middlebrow; curious, but not too curious; engaged, but only to a point—no longer exists. Newsweeklies were intended to be counterprogramming to newspapers, back when we were drowning in newsprint and needed a digest to redact that vast inflow of dead-tree objectivity. Now, in response to accelerating news cycles, the newspapers have effectively become newsweekly-style digests themselves, resorting to muddy “news analysis” now that the actual news has hit us on multiple platforms before we even open our front door in the morning.

The thing is this: enough people knew that this would happen, what's amazing is how slow "legacy" media has been in responding. More here

$15 - the price of the mobile phone for all, from Venezuela

More here:

The Venezuelan phone is being championed as the world’s cheapest mobile phone. It is a bold effort to create an affordable mobile phone packed with features: a camera, WAP internet access (wireless application protocol), FM radio, and MP3 and MP4 players for music and videos.

The phone uses inexpensive parts from China and is assembled in Venezuela. A quarter of the cost of manufacturing the phone is subsidized by the government. Venezuela often uses the profits from its oil industry to subsidize social goals.

Twitter: how to use it as a news source

From Media Helping Media

Social network research is about getting to know the people who are in the know, rather than searching online for archived documents that may be out of date.

More here with an emphasis on Baku' and 'Azerbaijan.

Stephen Glover: Lurcher eats Red Setter

They Shoot Horses, don't they?
The E.F Benson of media journalism with a typical sleight of hand: how could the Guardian and the BBC do this, newspapers need fans not critics.

Naturally I do not condone newspapers listening into the private conversations of celebrities, though I would have no problem in the case of a minister who was on the fiddle or betraying his country. I do know that the national press is weaker than it has been for more than a century, with most titles losing money, and I regret that, at such a time, The Guardian and the BBC should use largely old information to weaken it further.

If Glover were of the modern world you'd think he was trying to get a large online response. So far (10.27 am) there is one at the Independent online:
Man oh man, talk about missing the point!. Given the precision of the comment perhaps further are unnecessary.

Stephen Fry & copyright

At the Roundhouse, Stephen Fry was preaching to the converted, the generation that has got used to seeking out music and movies on the internet, and isn't entirely sure why you would pay to download.

As reported by the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones.

Sure, those who downloaded on an industrial scale for profit should be prosecuted - but if the price of downloads came down to a "fair" level, most people were pretty moral and would be happy to pay. He went on to compare the music industry to "big tobacco".

Meanwhile, more sterling reportage from Glynn Moody's Open blog:

If you still doubted that intellectual monopolies are in part a neo-colonialist plot to ensure the continuing dominance of Western nations, you could read this utterly extraordinary post, which begins:

The fourteenth session of the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC), convened in Geneva from June 29, 2009 to July 3, 2009, collapsed at the 11th hour on Friday evening as the culmination of nine years of work over fourteen sessions resulted in the following language; “[t]he Committee did not reach a decision on this agenda item” on future work. The WIPO General Assembly (September 2009) will have to untangle the intractable Gordian knot regarding the future direction of the Committee.

Fred Wilson: giving up his data for a better set of recommendations

I like this: it goes to the core of the privacy/surveillance debate. And, as Fred Wilson says, it's not for everyone yet. However...

Imagine if you had a single data feed, fredsactivity.xml, that was hosted on the web and you could share with web services. I'd give it to Amazon to get better recommendations. I'd give it to Google Reader to find interesting blogs to read. I'd give it to Twitter to get better recommendations for people to follow. I'd give it to Netflix and Fandango to get better movie recommendations. I've give it to Goolge to get better search results.

I still believe this is going to happen. The burst of activity a few years ago may have stalled out, but I think that's a temporary pause, driven largely by the fact that the mainstream Internet user wasn't ready for this. Maybe they still aren't. But I am.

More here: Musings of a VC.

Wikileaks editorial: UK papers should have bugged more

The real scandal is not that some British papers used private investigators to find out what the public wants to know. It is that more did not. It is that the News' was extorted out of a million pounds because the relevant British legislation does not have an accessible public interest defense for the disclosure of telephone recordings. Until it does, despite the risks, journalists who take their fourth estate role seriously are obligated not to take the legislation seriously.

Journalism is a serious business. It starts wars and it topples kings. It does not care that Rupert Murdoch hired someone, who hired someone, who hired someone, who allegedly off their own bat, creatively went about their job of exposing Britain's pretenders by pressing 1234 into their voice mail.

The actions of major newspapers are "voted on" every day by their readers. Whatever their faults, popular newspapers remain the most visible and the most democratically accountable institutions in the country. Their mandate to inform the public vastly exceeds that granted to the unelected and the rarely elected at Westminister, who are nonetheless quick to grant themselves a blanket exemption from all censorship.

By Julian Assange, co-founder of Wikileaks. Full editorial here.

Radiohead Manager's new label - artists keep copyright

Interesting model:

Brian Message, manager of alternative rock band Radiohead, is helping to launch a new record label where digital distribution is the focus and artists retain the copyright of the music they create. The new label, called Polyphonic, will be a partnership between ATC, of which Brian Message is a partner, MAMA Group, and Vancouver-based artist management firm Nettwerk Music Group,

From ZeroPaid.

Twitter for those iconic fashion statements/quotations

I'm open to everything. When you start to criticize the times you live in, your time is over.

See who said that here. And check out how many people KL is following.

"Fair Use" an interesting dilemma

From Techdirt:

...how come Greg Gillis - better known as Girl Talk, the popular mashup musician - hasn't been sued yet. Especially since his Feed the Animals CD came out, generating a ton of publicity and popular press coverage (and sampled from hundreds of songs), pretty much everyone has been waiting for him to get sued. Friedman tosses out a suggestion that makes a lot of sense: the recording industry is scared to death that a court will rule in Girl Talk's favor and return "fair use" to music:

BTW it's MusicHackDay @ the Guardian.

"Fair Use" an online tool

The Fair Use Evaluator is an online tool that can help users understand how to determine if the use of a protected work is a “fair use.” It helps users collect, organize, and document the information they may need to support a fair use claim, and provides a time-stamped PDF document for the users’ records.

From the American Libraries Association Washington Office, District Despatch.
Here's the Evaluator.

A new music chart - what's being listened to online

From The Guardian

Once music magazines and DJs helped shaped what we listened to, but today it's music bloggers who are dictating what's hot and what's not. Well, that's the theory anyway. This site trawls through blogs, forums and social networks to work out the 99 most popular tracks based on what's being listened to, talked about and linked to online. The results bare little relation to the traditional top 40 (La Roux being the exception), in that most of the music here is unreleased or album tracks,

We are Hunted.
Techcrunch with the details.

The service monitors the most popular songs on iLike, BitTorrent, Last.fm, MySpace Music, and other Web music services, as well as discussions on Twitter, blogs, and press sites. A collaboration between Australian news aggregation site WotNews and digital music marketers Native Digital, We Are Hunted uses a whole bunch of sentiment and semantic analysis, along with clustering algorithms to come up with the top 99 songs of the day. It then presents these in a 3 X 3 grid of album art for each song, which can be played in its entirety on the site. (The songs are streamed from YouTube or the artists’ sites).

BBC's Digital Revolution - open source series making

We don't want this to be one medium reflecting on another from a safe distance. We want to bridge the gap. So we have decided to adopt a radical, open-source approach to the production process. We don't just want to observe bloggers from on high; we want to blog ourselves and get feedback and comment on our ideas.

And we have already taken the first step. Our presenter, the Guardian journalist and academic Aleks Krotoski, has just posted her first manifesto - about who holds power on the web - on our blog at bbc.co.uk/digitalrevolution. This is a clarion call to web users all over the globe to tell us whether they think the web is the utopia it once promised to be - a sharing, open, level playing field - or whether, as Aleks argues, the hierarchy and inequality endemic in human society have spread to the web of today, populated by cliques and big brands.

The blog will be updated regularly with posts from Aleks and a number of guest bloggers, including Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales and musician and performing rights campaigner Feargal Sharkey. The online crowd now have an opportunity to tell us what they really think - and have a unique opportunity to influence the team's thinking.

From Producer Russell Barnes.
At the launch web-founder Tim Berners-Lee commented:

"When you use the internet it is important that the medium should not be set up with constraints," he said. The internet, said Sir Tim, should be like a blank piece of paper. Just as governments and companies cannot police what people write or draw on that sheet of paper so they should not be restricted from putting the web to their own uses."The canvas should be blank," he saidWhile governments do need some powers to police unacceptable uses of the web; limits should be placed on these powers, he said.

More here.

The Cost of Admission: mashable

The rules have changed. Whatever happened to the interview?

Want to work at Mashable as a full time writer or editor? We'd love for you to join us!

Please note, however, that our applications process has a number of key requirements: you must have prior experience writing for a Technorati Top 100 blog and you must be a regular Twitter user with 500 followers or more.

If you do not meet these requirements, please visit our guest writer page to see whether you may be accepted as a guest writer: http://mashable.com/writers/

Hiring here - you know the rules.

"Cognitive cost" of spending...anything, even micro payments

Anderson borrows a term from George Washington economist Nick Szabo, labeling this flag the “mental transaction cost.” Laziness has made us all want to avoid making any decision, no matter how inconsequential. Even if something is financially affordable, once we begin to question if it’s “worth it,” we’ve already spent cognitive energy considering the decision, and will most likely choose not to spend the money, even if it’s just a penny. Anderson says micropayments “are destined to fail, Szabo concluded, because although they minimize the economic costs of choices, they still have all the cognitive costs…many potential customers would be put off by the payment and decision process.”

From Jessica Roy's review of Free for the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Copycats? Wait 24 hours and then it is yours?

Insanity, surely, at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, by columnist Connie Schultz .

Schultz says that David Marburger, an alleged First Amendment attorney for her paper, and his economics-professor brother, Daniel, have concocted their own dangerous thinking, proposing the copyright law be changed to insist that a newspaper’s story should appear only on its own web site for the first 24 hours before it can be aggregated or retold.

From Buzz Machine

Friday Project Founder on the UK and E-Readers

Q: eReaders. We can’t do a Q&A without asking about them. Love or hate? Or both?

A: Love them, in all their forms. At present the Kindle isn’t available over here and Amazon doesn’t seem to be in any great rush to change that. To be fair, I think it is down to the fact that they will need to have an option for the whole of the EU, not just the UK, before they go live. That means that the Sony Reader has a genuine foothold here. But there are still issues over pricing, availability and content for eBooks that need to be resolved before they will really take off. They are part of the future and we need to adapt to that.

Scott Pack, Publisher at Harper Collins UK. More here.


Friday Project.

The People versus Frank Luntz

Sample sizes; always sample sizes. Of course the demographic composition may be less than generalized...but are said to be politically "central".

Yesterday’s Mindtracker for PMQs was very interesting datawise for political geeks, over a thousand people (1,150 people between 4 p.m. and 10 p.m.) twiddled their knobs online, so the poll is statistically valid. In comparison Frank Luntz typically has only 30 people polled in a room. Watch the video above to see how people responded in realtime.

Here at Guido Fawkes - who continues to use the web in the most creative ways.



The Mindtracker explained by Guido Fawkes.

No it's not: The Story is Back

Not exactly Flat Earth News - the phone hack.

The news "story" is dead

'Journalism' and 'the news' – founded, as I say, almost
entirely on 'the story' – is not a fixed point in the universe. It's not a
force of nature. It doesn't have to be how we journalists have made
it.

The web has unbundled the bundle we used to sell
audiences as a paper or a bulletin; it's erased the distinction we
journalists used to make between 'news' – what we said it was –
and information, stuff, the whole of the rest of the world.
The web is enabling our former audiences to come to their
news in their ways at their times. Our old image of gripping them
with our ‘stories’ is no more.

Kevin Marsh in The future of journalism.

Expressing ourselves: the new folk culture

From an interesting pamphlet by Demos:

Our will to seek out information and our innate sense of the individual have driven society to devise new ways of experiencing things and new ways in which to focus on our specific interests. The public interest, of course, comprises the multiple opinions, beliefs and attitudes that we all hold, either collectively or as individuals. In many ways, this recalls the folk culture of the past, in which art forms expressed values and provided touchpoints for belief, a precursor to more commodified forms of culture in which a price was put on engagement and access to creative and cultural forms. The result is that when we come to bring these to bear on culture and creativity today, orthodoxy is challenged. Our individualism also creates different expectations of culture. Knowledge and expertise remain in place, but their role is to illuminate more than to improve. Together, they function to enable and communicate the expression of our different values.

Expressive Lives. What and why.
Demos.

Warren Buffett would "pay" for YouTube, perhaps

Every year, nearly 300 powerful media executives gather here [Sun Valley, Idaho] at the secretive Allen & Co. summit, to which the press is not invited. Perennial attendees include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller. As the definition of media has expanded to include the Internet, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Evan Williams have been added to the guest list.

From the WSJ.. And the result - the press were not present, but a little leaked:

“No one had any answers” about making money on the Internet, said [Ken] Auletta, who moderated the panel.

Also WSJ.

Malone said he didn’t think that an advertising model made sense on Twitter, but there was some hope for a subscription model. “Sooner or later people will be willing to pay for these services,” he said. Warren Buffett privately told him that he would pay $5 a month for YouTube, he added.

Build Your Own World - make it matter

The 2010 01SJ Biennial has issued a challenge to Build Your Own World, claiming that the future is not about what’s next; it’s about what we can build to ensure that what’s next matters. Fundamental to the conjuring of such worlds is the way in which the artistic imagination can use the tools at hand to provide access to ideas, methods for exchanging new interpretations, and markers that allow people to navigate between mixed reality and hard imagination.

Details of the competition here

The "M" manifesto

Stirring stuff out of Harvard business blog:

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today's markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

Find out what the "M" stands for here.

The Tablet Cometh

From Softpedia:

Noted analyst Gene Munster (of Piper Jaffray) predicts that Apple has a gap to fill between the iPod touch and the MacBook, that gap evidently being the yet-non-confirmed Mac tablet. The device would be priced between the $500-700 range, but wouldn't see the light of day until FY 2010, due to the complexity of the OS it would require.

Er, anyone launched a new open source OS recently?

Free is free - google/scribd

Free is free
And here on SCRIBD

Epistemologically louche: the NYT

...highlighting a word or passage on the Times website calls up a question mark that users can click for a definition and other reference material. (Though the feature was recently improved, it remains a mild annoyance for myself and many others who nervously click and highlight text on webpages.) Anyway, it turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature, and yesterday, deputy news editor Philip Corbett, who oversees the Times style manual, offered reporters a fascinating glimpse into the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009.

Check out the most frequently looked-up worlds here.

One of ten facts about Twitter

English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.

For the other nine...

Beyond journalism: libraries

The one thing that we should do in the face of the erosion of commercial journalism is invest heavily in libraries. That means we should publicly support the human capital, technological tools, and collections of public, school and university libraries.

The problem is not journalism per se. It’s the health of the public sphere, of which quality journalism is a major part. So if we accept that the landscape we have grown accustomed to over the past 50 years is ebbing rather quickly, we should do the following. We should invest in and support an environment that will enable experimentation and the emergence of new models and voices.

From Creative-I. This was Siva Vaidhyanathan; for others follow the link.

Blur: journalist or influencer? Everyone is everything to PR

Instead, she decides that she will “whisper in the ears” of Silicon Valley’s Who’s Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech’s hottest start-ups, including Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

Notably, none are journalists.

This is the new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, where the lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper.

Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs. Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.

From the NYT Business.


The PR is for Wordnik - is this the wiki of words?

Yelvington lays down the law on free - some people have learnt it; others have forgotten

Consumers will actually make content purchases when they are confronted with many free options. Over the last 15 years, this assumption has been demonstrated to be false in digital paid-content experiments by newspapers all over the world. The numbers of consumers so inclined aren't great enough to sustain a business of significant scale. This idea persists primarily because so many newspaper people are deeply ignorant of what's been going on in their own companies, and because digital people generally lose power struggles with print people. Almost everyone I know who ran a paid-content online media experiment no longer works for the company where they tried it. Those companies are now largely ignorant of their own histories.

From Yelvington.

So is the Kindle the "one" - or lingerie

From the Huff-Po.

In the emerging world of e-Books, Kindle-Amazon will increasingly occupy a position similar to the iPod while Google (a collector and purveyor of e-Books) together with its partner Sony (a manufacturer of e-Readers) will forever be positioned at the lower end of the e-Book market along with several other manufacturers. This too, resembles the structure of the digitized music industries.

The Sony reader is less imaginative than the Kindle. It's cheaper, uglier, less functional, less popular, and its ecosystem is not as fully developed. While it is true that other applications spread Googles' inventory onto mobile devices, notice the vagueness of the term 'mobile device' itself. The Stanza, eReader and 'iKindle' applications are all add-ons for existing machines that have small screens and are mainly valued for other functions: phoning, messaging or mobile Internet connectivity. While electronics manufacturers constantly dream of designing, building and selling an all-in-one personal electronic doodad to 6 billion people, still no Swiss Army Knife will never replace a good corkscrew, a good screwdriver or a good pair of scissors.

Or to look at this another way...

The Kindle, on the other hand, is what you keep at home or take with you on vacation to relax into. It is for the book-lover who might occasionally buy a first, a signed or a special edition. It is lingerie.

Lingerie?

Free: the "takedown" debate, and more future of news....

It's all here today in the NYT.

Free is also the subject of new book by Wired editor Chris Anderson, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which got its first big review this week, by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, a media moment that’s provided much entertainment to observers.

“It’s always fun when one popular idea popularizer goes after another popular idea popularizer,” says Paul Kredosky.

At the Awl, Chorie Sicha said, “It’s like War of the Speaker’s Bureaus.” To which Tom Socca replied: “MOTHRA V. MOTHRA.”

What many liked about Gladwell’s review was that it was a “takedown” of Anderson’s book, and in these troubled times, such things are need to put a little vim back in the vigor of old media enthusiasts.

And there's a good take on this from Fred Wilson too.

...the Internet allows an entrrepreneur to enter a market with a free offering because the costs of doing so are not astronomical. And most entrpreneurs who take this approach will maintain an attractive free offering of their basic service forever. But that doesn't mean that everything they offer will be free. That's the whole point of freemium. Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid. But if you don't start with free on the Internet, most companies will never get paid.

Groupthink: journalists are boring, discuss

Groupthink rules. No editor or producer wants her media outlet to be the only one that ignores the Michael Jackson story for even a day. If a reporter's story in next edition differs significantly from everyone else's, he feels stupid and worries about his job security. (A call from his editor likely reinforces this fear.) What once was a badge of honour - idiosyncrasy - is now highly suspect. ("That guy from the Press-Gazette, he thinks he's Woodstein or something. He actually interviewed every single person on the train platform in Kelowna yesterday. No wonder his piece today says the candidate is more popular than the press says. Guy's nuts.")

Much more fun here from David Olive.

It Felt Like something

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Charlie Brooker on Adam Curtis and It Felt Like a Kiss

So what's it about? In a roundabout way, it's about you. But it's also about the golden age of pop, when the US rose to supreme power. It encompasses everything from Rock Hudson, Lou Reed, Saddam Hussein, a chimp and Lee Harvey Oswald. It's a heady brew.

"I think it's a fascinating period," says Curtis.

"I wanted to do a film about what it actually felt like to live through that time ... Where you could see the roots of the uncertainties we feel today, the things they did out on the dark fringes of the world that they didn't really notice at the time, which would then come back to haunt us."

It's a common theme in Curtis's work: he's not interested in conspiracy theories, but rather with the unforeseen consequences of ideas throughout history, and their impact on a deeply personal level. "The way power works in the world is: they tell you stories that make sense of the world. That's what America did after the second world war. It told you wonderful dreamlike stories about the world ... And at that same time, you were encouraged to rise up and 'become an individual', which also made the whole idea of America attractive to the rest of the world. But then this very individualism began to corrode it. The uncertainties began in people's minds. Uncertainty about 'what is the point of being an individual?'"

Charlie Brooker.

I'm thinking Edward Bernays Meets Mad Men. When I've experienced it I'll review.

Consult on News, ideas for the future

"Sustainable independent and impartial news; in the Nations, locally and in the regions" is a 12 week public consultation document published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport that "seeks views on the proposal for a contained, contestable element to be introduced to the next licence fee settlement."

Contribute here.

Another cloud over google?

American authorities are conducting a formal investigation into whether Google's $125m deal with the US book industry is anti-competitive.

The Department of Justice has confirmed that it is looking into the internet giant's agreement with authors' groups to pay for the right to digitise and sell millions of books.

Rumours of the investigation had been circulating for several months, but the Department of Justice revealed on Thursday that it was running a formal inquiry in a letter to the New York judge who is also reviewing the terms of the deal.

From the Guardian.

Mandating School Libraries: but what will they look like?

A high-profile group of children's authors, publishers, teachers and librarians is calling on the government to make school libraries statutory. Signatories to a petition to Number 10 include Philip Pullman, Horrid Henry creator Francesca Simon and former children's laureate Michael Rosen, as well as the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers Christine Blower, Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, top children's publishers and the directors of a raft of youth library associations.

This is, of course, a logical idea - but what should a library - any library - look like in the future? Is there, for example, another petition from the same type of high-profile group demanding a radical rethink about the way that "digital literacy" is taught.

The petition itself – which calls on the government "to accept in principle that it will make school libraries, run by properly qualified staff, statutory" – will run until December, but by the end of the summer school term Gibbons hopes to have consolidated the support of the book world and to have started soliciting support from community figures, faith groups and celebrities within the wider community.

Properly qualified staff meaning someone who can find a book on Google Book Search? Who can explain issues of trust and verification when using, say, Wikipedia? Someone versed in the narrative genius of many computer games? Someone who is, at least, thinking about Kindles and E-Readers; about marketing the case for reading printed texts over the competing stories found online? Someone who knows where textual resources reside in the digital domain. I'm sure the "celebrities within the wider community" will be able to help here. From the Guardian.

CUNY project for news business models

We do not believe that any single savior– foundation, government, device, or massive public contribution — will rescue an existing news organization as it operates today from the crush of the market. But we do believe that publicly supported journalism — that is, from individuals, foundations, and perhaps companies — can play a role in this model city’s news ecosystem. This could take the form of a local Pro Publica or of crowdsourced funding through a platform such as Spot.US or of an expansion of public broadcasting’s role. The key question we will answer is what level of support will likely be available — projecting from current efforts locally — and what those resources could provide.

New business models?

It felt like a kiss: Bunting on Curtis

Now Bunting is describing a theatrical performance. Launches tomorrow in Manchester as part of the festival. Can't wait.

His [Curtis'] analysis is that power uses stories which shape our understanding of the world and of who we are, and how we make sense and order experience. Powerful, grand narratives legitimise power, win our allegiance and frame our private understandings of how to measure value and create meaning. They also structure time – they fit the present into a continuum of how the past will become the future. This is what all the grand narratives of communism, socialism, even neoliberalism and fascism offered; as did the grand narratives of religion. Now, all have foundered and fragmented into a mosaic of millions of personal stories. It is a Tower of Babel in which we have lost the capacity to generate the common narratives – of idealism, morality and hope such as Sandel talks about – that might bring about civic renewal and a reinvigorated political purpose.

Curtis argues that we are still enchanted by the possibilities of our personal narratives although they leave us isolated, disconnected, and at their worst, they are simply solipsistic performances desperate for an audience. But we are in a bizarre hiatus because the economic systems that sustained and amplified this model of individualism have collapsed. It was cheap credit and a housing boom that made possible the private pursuit of experience, self-expression and self-gratification as the content of a good life. As this disintegrates and youth unemployment soars, this good life will be a cruel myth.

But is it true? It Felt Like a Kiss.

e-book prices - a meme begins stickily

It appears that Amazon.com's pricing model for electronic books - just under $10 - is on its way to becoming the norm. Barnes & Noble, on its eReader site, is now offering digital versions of New York Times bestsellers for $9.95, just a hair cheaper than Amazon's standard $9.99 for such books. The downward pressure on e-book pricing has rattled many book publishers.

As Fast Company wrote recently, Amazon with e-books is following the strategy of Apple with digital music, creating a "sticky price in consumers' minds" that, once established, is difficult to dislodge - and gives Amazon more leverage in negotiations with publishers.

From Techflash.

The cloud over google book search

Starting today, you'll find a cloud of "Common Terms and Phrases" on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.

From the google book search blog. Above: a cloud for Benkler's The Wealth of Networks.

Freemium - one up from free, one down from paying for it all

...but Anderson argues that the real decision is free versus “freemium.” It’s not about whether to charge but choosing carefully which specialised content people will pay for and developing additional premium services. Of course, many newspapers look to the Wall Street Journal‘s model. The Journal offers most of their popular content and many exclusives for free, but they keep their specialized, niche content behind a paywall for subscribers. Referring to his theories behind the long tail, he suggested that newspapers should give away the “head and charge for the tail”.

From Paid content....

What's next for the book - travel

And yet - there's something about the painting that makes it seem familiar, even when it isn't. A person could see The Travelling Companions for the first time, and feel that somehow they knew it already. It has a strange recognisability.

From Tom Lubbock in the Independent, 2007.

What's next for the book - The Wire on Gatsby

Speaks for itself...

He frontin' with all those books

Fox News: bring it on so we can get some security?

Just watch and listen:



Glenn Beck and Michael Scheuer are missing Jack Bauer.

David Lammy and Google...

It's like a literary clue from the summer marketing of the next Dan Brown novel. Like many of Brown's clues this one could be very easy, or rather arcane, to solve. Here's the IP Minister's tweet from Wednesday afternoon:

DavidLammyMP: Great to see Google again today in their London office. Internet services are changing the copyright game, important conversations to be had

What kind of conversations? Google Book Search conversations? Google search for "hide my IP address"? conversations? Download free music? conversations? Fascinating.

blogs are out of beta...

...the blog is at a critical stage in its evolution. Blogs are out of beta. Blogs are the new normal. Everything is a blog. So what's next? Well, the format will indeed evolve into something new. I believe it will be the stream.

From the Steve Rubel lifestream.... And some tips from Problogger, here's one:

Don’t be Precious about your ‘Blog’ and be open to change - there’s no one ‘right’ way to blog. Blogs can have comments or not have comments, have full RSS feeds or partial ones, look like a traditional blog or act and look more like a lifestream or portal. The key is to know what you want to achieve and let that shape what you do with your blog.

Libraries are changing...

From the BL's twitter feed:

britishlibrary: Good knees-up in Piazza, much enjoyed by the bare-chested historical bibliographers

YouTube goes Journalism School

DIY tips for citizen journalists. And here's the man who brought us Deep Throat and Bush at War.

google works! books are back

... in a recent essay assignment for a Columbia University classics class, 70 percent of the undergraduates had cited a book published in 1900, even though it had not been on any reading list and had long been overlooked in the world of classics scholarship. Why so many of the students had suddenly discovered a 109-year-old work and dragged it out of obscurity in preference to the excellent modern works on their reading lists is simple: The full text of the 1900 work is online, available on Google Book Search; the modern works are not.

And the lesson: "If it's not online, it's invisible." From The Chronicle.

Trust and all that

I don't even know what the conference is, but a man named Weinburger is burning up Twitter. Here's Clay Shirky:

cshirky "Facts used to nail down arguments. Now they start them. We are in the middle of the great unnailing." D.Weinberger #pdf09

Ok, it is the Personal Democracy Forum.
And Adah Ellis tweeted: #pdf09 the only conference where it's rude not to use your cell phone while someone else is talking to you. LOL

Free, free stuff - lots of it...

From the first UK review I've seen of Chris Anderson's Free. I wonder if it will have the impact of the Long Tail? Anyway, here's a bit of the Observer review from the Deputy Editor of The Economist.

Free observes an interesting phenomenon, but doesn't take the reader far beyond the notion that there's a lot of free stuff about. It pulls together information about current trends and is dotted with abstruse bits of learning - divergent views of competition among 18th-century French mathematicians, for instance - which seem to be there more to lend the book intellectual heft than to strengthen its arguments. But it doesn't have the weight of a fully worked-through idea. It ends not with a discussion of where this trend is leading but with "50 business models built on free", presumably addressed to the businessmen who may be attending Anderson's speeches on the subject.

More once read, of course. Free at Amazon.