Techcrunch to explain.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
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.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
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.
Monday, February 16, 2009
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".
Monday, February 02, 2009
Story Time
VOICE OVER: My whole life is about the story. When I'm not workin', I like to work. And when I'm not doin' that, I like to kick back with a book and a dame, in that order. So when I heard that the Mad Genius was coming up with new-fangled ways of telling stories, I got the wiggles. His real name's David Kirkpatrick. I found him holed up in an old factory in Plymouth, Mass. His office was all decked out with inspirational quotes on the walls. J.D. Salinger… Joni Mitchell… and a New York Times headline from an article about him.
Reporter Sean Cole looks into MIT's plans to team up with a new movie studio in Massachusetts to create the storytelling technology of the future.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Twitter: searching for its future?
Twitter is just about to make the biggest shift in its short history by integrating its search functions into the home pages of users.
Until now if users wanted to search the outpouring of updates or "tweets", say for updates about a stock price or football team or a hotel, they had to go to a separate website – search.twitter.com – or use one of the many independent search applications that have sprung up on the web.
From the Times.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Here we go: opening up the White House blog
Transparency - President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise. The President's executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.
Participation - President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause. Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that. One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.
From Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Day Off: here's why
We must obey the great law of change.
It is the most powerful law of nature.
Edmund Burke
Monday, January 19, 2009
After newspapers, conferences...
The economic crisis has forced the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and the World Editors Forum (WEF) to postpone their annual conference.
The 62nd World Newspaper Congress and 16th World Editors Forum in Hyderbad, India will no longer take place as intended on March 22-25, it was announced today.
From Journalism.co.uk
Air Man on the wonders of Google Books
One thrilling thing about these Google Book resources is that you can now link directly to an individual page of a book that has potentially been out of print for centuries. We need to think a bit more about how to standardize these links, given multiple editions and multiple library sites that might have digital copies. But what you can see happening, slowly but surely, is the Memex and Xanadu and the Information Superhighway - all those inspiring dreams of information utopia - finally crossing crossing over into the vast universe of books. Slowly, over time, a page typeset in 1771 might start to get a whole new life, thanks to the growing authority we grant it through that elemental gesture of making a link.
Steven Johnson in Boing Boing.
The poetry of the newsroom
Found this via a nice Huff-po piece on poetry and journalism.
Self-Portrait
Born in a safe family
But a dangerous area, Iraq,
I heard guns at a young age, so young
They made a decision to raise us safe
So packed our things
And went far away.
Now, in the city of rain,
I try to forget my past,
But memories never fade.
This is my life,
It happened for a reason,
I happened for a reason.
From American Life in Poetry
Jane Dwyre Garton quotes from a Columbia University symposium:
"Increasingly, poets are writing documentary poems that 'report' on an event. Many journalists also turn to poetic prose in order to convey a perspective that cannot otherwise be presented."
An answer to Zittrain's fears?
...Zittrain makes the iPhone a poster child for the flashy but non-generative devices he fears will come to dominate the market. And it's easy to see the iPhone's advantages. Apple's widely-respected industrial design department created a beautiful product. Its software engineers created a truly revolutionary user interface. Apple and AT&T both have networks of retail stores with which to promote the iPhone, and Apple is spending millions of dollars airing television ads. On first glance, it looks like open technologies are on the ropes in the mobile marketplace.
But open technologies have a kind of secret weapon: the flexibility and power that comes from decentralization. The success of the iPhone is entirely dependent on Apple making good technical and business decisions, and building on top of proprietary platforms requires navigating complex licensing issues. In contrast, absolutely anyone can use and build on top of an open platform without asking anyone else for permission, and without worrying about legal problems down the line. That means that at any one time, you have a lot of different people trying a lot of different things on that open platform. In the long run, the creativity of millions of people will usually exceed that of a few hundred engineers at a single firm. As Mike says, opens systems adapt, change and grow at a much faster rate than closed ones.
From Freedom to Tinker, the blog of Princeton's Information Technology Policy unit, a research center devoted to the intersection of digital technologies and public life.
Found on Tumblr
Found Object on my Tumblr dashboard this morning.
From This Isn't Happiness.
It must be from somewhere else: but who knows?
Friday, January 16, 2009
Changing Twitter
...I realised yesterday that I haven't looked at my RSS reader since Christmas or earlier, and that my number of delicious links has gone from maybe 10 a day to just a trickle. That's because I'm using twitter as a sort of human filtered RSS reader: most of the people I used to subscribe to I now follow and the people I follow tend to tweet about the best things they post or read. This means that, through twitter, I've probably increased the amount of discovery I do online - that is, stumbling across new sources of content rather than simply reading the same people saying the same things all the time.
From Robin Hamman.
What to say on Tuesday, taking over the big job
Yet there is something about inaugural addresses — perhaps it’s the siren call of immortality — that tempts presidents and their speechwriters into rhetorical ruin (and abominable abuses of alliteration). The anthology of American inaugural addresses is, but for a few bright spots, one long muddle of grandiosity, mundanity — and forgetability.
Who can remember — actually, who can bear to remember — Richard Nixon’s grasping of the “chalice of opportunity,” or Dwight Eisenhower’s nine (yes, nine) “rules of conduct” for the United States, or Jimmy Carter’s homage to “my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman,” or William McKinley’s summons, at the start of the 20th century, to ensure the “honest and faithful disbursement” of congressional appropriations?
Lots more thoughts, and William Safire, here.
Or, do it yourself.
In the Ring, working lives and the circus
Listen to the story of Svitlana Svystun, and this man.
From the "Working" section of NPR's Marketplace. (Sound by my man Sean Cole, pictures by me)
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Zeitgeist History, a long running publishing strategy
Mr. Bruni is the "new Napoleon".
Ok.
In a new book, called La Marche Consulaire (The Consular March), Alain Duhamel sets out the case for seeing Nicolas Sarkozy as a 21st Century incarnation of the most influential Frenchman of modern times - or as he puts it, "Bonaparte in a suit".
"Both men intend to leave behind them a France which is no longer what it was. They see themselves as the rescuers of a great but weakened nation," Mr Duhamel writes. He sees other similarities too.
From the BBC.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Press Baron....
....Is this a trustworthy story?
Speaking to MediaGuardian.co.uk on Wednesday, Lebedev said he had read the Evening Standard and other British newspapers when he was a young spy at the Soviet embassy in London in the late 1980s.
"I had to read every newspaper. I was there for that," he recalled. "I had to read the FT, the Guardian, Standard and the Daily Mail." The Standard was "a very good newspaper" with some "brilliant journalists," Lebedev said, adding that the Daily Mail was a "highly influential" title that closely reflected British public attitudes.
Exclusively from The Guardian.
This is perhaps the stand out sentence:
The purchase will be an astonishing moment in British press history – the first time a former member of a foreign intelligence service has owned a British title.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
So do video games exist, really?
From the economic point of view, this was the year video games overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share of the take is forecast to be £4.64 billion and £4.46 billion. (For purposes of comparison, UK book publishers’ total turnover in 2007 was £4.1 billion.) As a rule, economic shifts of this kind take a while to register on the cultural seismometer; and indeed, from the broader cultural point of view, video games barely exist. The newspapers cover the movies extensively, and while it isn’t necessary to feel that they do all that great a job of it, there’s no denying that they have a try. Video games by contrast are consigned to the nerdy margins of the papers, and are pretty much invisible in broadcast media. Video-game fans return the favour: they constitute the demographic group least likely to pay attention to newspapers and are increasingly uninterested in the ‘MSM’, or mainstream media.
John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.
Oh, the future
New Repubicans, like, talk.
"We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today," Duncan ventured.
"Let me just say that I have 4,000 friends on Facebook," contributed Blackwell, putting his hand on Dawson's and Anuzis's knees. "That's probably more than these two guys put together, but who's counting, you know?" Acknowledged Saltsman: "I'm not sure all of us combined Twitter as much as Saul."
Anuzis claimed he had "somewhere between 2- and 3,000" Facebook friends, which prompted Blackwell to remind the audience that he has 4,000 friends on the social networking site by waving four fingers behind Anuzis's head.
The candidates were significantly more comfortable when asked how many guns they own. Duncan claimed four handguns and two rifles, Anuzis boasted of two, and Blackwell replied: "Seven -- and I'm good."
"In my closet at home," replied Saltsman, "I've got two 12-gauges, a 20-gauge, three handguns and a .30-06. And I'll take you on anytime, Ken."
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post.
On working hard to elevate distrust
"There's a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me and say, 'I don't want you to let me down again.' "—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000
Guess Who?
"Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness."—CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000
Here's who.
And goodbye.
Writing and the seductions online
The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from. Every now and again, when I see a new website, game, or service, I sense the tug of an attention black hole: a time-sink that is just waiting to fill my every discretionary moment with distraction. As a co-parenting new father who writes at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches, I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is.
Cory Doctorow on the internet and distraction in Locus Online.
It's music criticism, it's online
Animal Collective is an important band because they are one of the first ‘transcendent’ independent bands to gather most of their acclaim on the internet. While they probably had a few recordings before every one turned utilized the internet to find the newsest, alt-est music, you can’t really deny that they grew at a healthy rate in internet-acclaim-perception over the past couple of years. If you grow too fast, you will be discarded as inauthentic (The Black Kids). If you grow 2 slowly, no1 ever really identifies with ur brand and think that you are just a newsbit that has been around 2 long for no good reason. The internet is a difficult environment in which to grow because virality rates are difficult to control.
A long and rather good new world we're living in music review of Animal Collective. Headline: Animal Collective is a Band Created By/For/On the Internet
From Hipster Runoff.
Blog will Eat Itself.
BTW:
Carles is burning the Internet down from INSIDE THE INTERNET.
Says Alex Blagg.
Want to watch a sit com about the dying days of an independent magazine?
Or perhaps you are already living this experience?
BAD IDEA presents... Printomortis – Episode 1 from BAD IDEA magazine on Vimeo.
From Bad Idea magazine.
Broadband for all, Comprehension for some?
"Today we are way beyond the view that broadband is a niche product, it is an enabling and transformational service and therefore we have to look at how we can universalise it," he said. "We have to ensure that fairness and access for all is more than a soundbite in a manifesto."
As well as getting the technology into every part of the UK, he said the government must improve the population's media and digital literacy so the 40% who could get broadband, but choose not to, will be able to sign up.
Lord Carter today, getting us ready for his "Digital Britain" report, published soon. Just a thought but isn't literacy:
...the ability to read and write, or the ability to use language to read, write, listen, and speak. In modern contexts, the word refers to reading and writing at a level adequate for communication, or at a level that lets one understand and communicate ideas in a literate society, so as to take part in that society.
So will the "improvement" of digital literacy involve more than getting 40% of people to sign up for broadband; will it perhaps also be about the ideas that are promulgated digitally: the ability to question - then read, write, listen and speak about - the information sea that is out there? Isn't digital literacy less about rebooting the server, and more about making trust choices in content? Just a thought.
More Incisive post-Crash Media Analysis
Champions League in (mis)Trust
It is the stand-first this blog is always pursuing.
Global poll shows UK least likely to trust politicians, banks or markets
Asked to rate their trust in the government's management of the financial situation, British people award the government 4.5 out of 10, below the worldwide average of 5.2 and just ahead of Iceland on 4.4.
Only Germany and Japan are gloomier, scoring 4.0 and 3.0 respectively in the poll which was conducted before Christmas and published today.
From The Guardian.
On writing on Anna Wintour
I can't exactly say why but I think there's something very Under the Net and Iris Murdochy about Madame Arcati, even if the name is from Blithe Spirit and Noel Coward, and her tone is a little angrier. (No double Golden Globe winner playing Madame Arcati, methinks - not unless it's an "18"). Anyway, here's a flourish on the above:
I don't know why writers bother: why not just cut and paste other writers' cut-n-pastes and add a courtesy credit in brackets. It's as if the sheer gravitas of the subject cannot be appreciated without haystacking the auto-repeat adjectives and stories and pretending the piece is a self-contained first.
Madame Arcati.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Mick Imlah 1956-2009
Well, I had plenty to go on. My editor,
who’d used his club before the war, had warned me,
not disapprovingly, he could be cutting
and sarcastic: of his own wife, for instance,
as they left separately for a summer on Skye,
Hannah and the rest of the heavy baggage
will follow later; nor did he much enjoy
critical noises. But publicly he floated
on a cloud of pride, that bore him high and clear
like a balloon, whenever someone not
his equal – and surely few seemed otherwise –
appeared to him to be provoking him.
(At which he would lean back, hearing all this
quietly, only inflating slightly, as if to say,
“These” – quoting another – “are certainly some
of my characteristics, and I glory in them.”)
Extract from Rosebery by Mick Imlah who died yesterday.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Word Train - unplugged
“The proposal was to create a newsroom: a group of developers-slash-journalists, or journalists-slash-developers, who would work on long-term, medium-term, short-term journalism—everything from elections to NFL penalties to kind of the stuff you see in the Word Train.” This team would “cut across all the desks,” providing a corrective to the maddening old system, in which each innovation required months for permissions and design. The new system elevated coders into full-fledged members of the Times—deputized to collaborate with reporters and editors, not merely to serve their needs.
From the New York magazine.
Follow the money
Even now, it knows.
I believe that the financial and economic crisis is accelerating the change from the industrial to the information society. The magnitude of the change is likely to be on par with or greater than the transition from agricultural to industrial society (I am intentionally saying “society” instead of “economy” because the change affects all parts of how we live). This is scary if you are stuck in the old and exciting if you are helping invent the new.
Albert Wenger's Continuations.
And so we begin: Mandy Online
...the Labour party itself is now moving to the forefront of new media and online campaigning. I am glad to be a part of that, even if it is with my tongue in my virtual cheek.
I have blogged before, when I was a European Commissioner at the WTO Doha Ministerial meeting in Geneva last July, and I enjoyed it. But in this, my first UK political blog, I want to say something about how we get our message out in these modern times. Because the world has changed since 1997. Now, no-one has been more identified with message and campaigning discipline than myself, something that makes me rather proud, I have to say, because, during the 1980s, I saw the Labour party repeatedly let down its voters by failing to win the battle with the Tories and the media. Back then we were in hand-to-hand combat with an almost universally hostile press but sometimes we were our own worst enemy.
This must, of course, never happen again...
Peter Mandelson from LabourList.org
The Wall Street Journal Gets Randy
Galt: "You want me to be Economic Dictator?"
Mr. Thompson: "Yes!"
"And you'll obey any order I give?"
"Implicitly!"
"Then start by abolishing all income taxes."
"Oh no!" screamed Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. "We couldn't do that . . . How would we pay government employees?"
"Fire your government employees."
"Oh, no!"
---
Abolishing the income tax. Now that really would be a genuine economic stimulus. But Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Washington want to do the opposite: to raise the income tax "for purposes of fairness" as Barack Obama puts it.
Stephen Moore in the WSJ on Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand and interpretation.
Sontag would not be happy.
Muscular Technocracy's Main Man Goes French: "bricollage of comprehensions"
The opening is what news people used to call a "typo".
...I do think is reflects an issue with how we consume news and information on the web - we depend on summaries, aggregations, and pointers, we create our own bricollage of comprehension on the fly. Every so often, we go deep into a source we've decided to trust, often one that is far more conversational (like this site is) than a traditional news outlet. The traditional print hegemony - editors, publishers, executives in the newspaper and magazine business - seem unwilling or unable to respond to this new reality in a way that can save their businesses. But I think they can.
Cassandra spins in grave Shocker!
Open Source Natter
Discuss:
More and more twitterers have come to use Twitter as an increasingly central stream of information, sentiment, and context for whatever is happening in their many worlds.
From /Message.
There Goes Everyone
By 2012, Nokia predicts, one-fourth of entertainment will be produced and consumed within peer groups, and we’re not talking porn. Pay attention everybody, for today’s “amateur” blue videos are paying for the schooling of tomorrow’s so-called legitimate personal media gurus.
From Terry Heaton's blog.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Right by the hole-in-the-wall cellar, I look up to see a vision in yellow: a painting Frank sent to me after I sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with him on the 1993 “Duets” album. One from his own hand. A mad yellow canvas of violent concentric circles gyrating across a desert plain. Francis Albert Sinatra, painter, modernista.
From Bono's Guest op-ed in Sunday's New York Times.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Friday, January 09, 2009
The Here, There & Urban Everywhere of Information OverLoad
Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting - that's why Picasso left Paris - this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.
From Boston.com.
A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception - we are telling the mind what to pay attention to - takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.
Ok, let's throw in wi-fi, mobiles, IPods, PSPs, cameras....
Who says the city narrative isn't changing?
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Now Adult Publishing Wants a Slice of Bailout
That's not a title, btw.
[Larry] Flynt and Joe Francis, best known for persuading college grads to take their tops off in Girls Gone Wild, are the latest to line up for a Washington handout. They claim that their business is battling competition from readily available online porn. Worse still, in these times of economic turmoil, it's suffering from a depressed American libido.
From The Times.
Pay by the hit: didn't someone come up with this before?
But what healthy news organizations should really be offering this new breed of capable writers is a sort of insurance against unsuccessful articles consisting of an up-front payment for any piece of writing. The rest of the writer’s income should come from performance earnouts — another formula that is yet to be mastered. Keeping it to those basics would be a radical change from the wage-based compensation model of print, along with its sprawling hierarchy of editors and publishers, costly offices, expense reports and support staff. When that world meets the internet’s stripped-down operating model, there may well be money for good journalism again.
Nick Negroponte used to say this in 1994. Ahead of his time, I guess - and he didn't mention the "up-front payment".
Chris Morrison in Venture Beat responds to End Times in The Atlantic.
Here's a bit of that:
Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: “Fitch believes more newspapers and news paper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.”
There is almost too much of this stuff now: journalism finally unmasked as a business! How much paper has been used to write about the death of newspapers? Is it just part of our self-flagellating times? The smart operators are somewhere else already: and that is called thinking.
Google: we 'could' buy newspapers, but we'd rather not
Fortune magazine asking the questions, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt giving the replies:
How about just buying them?
The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don't think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question we're in this uncomfortable conversation.
I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I've been using is 'merge without merging.' The Web allows you to do that, where you can get the Web systems of both organizations fairly well integrated, and you don't have to do it on exclusive basis.
If not buy, how about just pump some cash into them, the way Microsoft famously once did with Apple?
There are no current plans to do that. The necessary criteria to get us to make that decision are not currently in place.
Enter the Book
First Inkheart, now...Victor Hugo's Les Misérables...
...at long last the classic French novel is coming to PC in Chris Tolworthy's Les Misérables: The Game of the Book.
An independent production begun by Tolworthy ten years ago, Les Misérables marks the first interactive novel in a planned series called Enter the Story. Though the developer refers to it as "more like a book than a game", it most closely resembles a "classic 'point and click' adventure game, with some refinements. Gameplay is simple: you explore, you listen, or you suggest." With its unique minimalist art style and faithful adaptation of the original story, Les Misérables invites players into the world of 19th century Paris, focusing largely on ex-convict Jean Valjean as he seeks redemption from his past.
More here.
Moving the Library to the Mobile
We increasingly have a ‘mesh’ of entry points: PC and phone, of course, but also DVRs, cameras, navigation systems, and consoles. We increasingly use a range of shared network level ‘cloud’ services: for search, for social networking, for content and information, for communication. Providing service in this environment is very different than in one where the model assumes a personal desktop or laptop as the place where resources are accessed and used and the institutional Web site as the place where they are delivered.
A couple of thoughts from a long and thoughtful piece by Lorcan Dempsey that sets out some of the issues for the library of the future.
As a growing proportion of library use is network–based, the library becomes visible and usable through the network services provided. On the network, there are only services. So, the perception of quality of reference or of the value of particular collections, for example, will depend for many people on the quality of the network services which make them visible, and the extent to which they can be integrated into personal learning environments. Increasingly, this requires us to emphasize the network as an integral design principle in library service development, rather than thinking of it as an add–on. The provision of RSS feeds is a case in point. Thinking about how something might appear on a mobile device is another.
From First Monday.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
After 50 years on the beat...a veteran signs off from the Village Voice
Around the country, a lot of reporters are being excessed, and print newspapers may soon become collectors' items. But over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: "He never lost his sense of rage."
By Nat Hentoff
Tuesday, January 6th 2009 at 4:34pm...[and at age 83 and a half].
On one of his rare nights off, Duke looked very beat, and I presumptuously said: "You don't have to keep going through this. With the standards you've written, you could retire on your ASCAP income."
Duke looked at me as if I'd lost all my marbles.
"Retire!" he crescendoed. "Retire to what?!"
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