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".

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.

Digital Britain

Has kept us quite busy. Normal service will resume Monday.

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.

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.

Day Off: here's why

We must obey the great law of change.
It is the most powerful law of nature.
Edmund Burke

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?

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)

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.

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.