“Twitter is like SMS is for old people.”

From a Tweet by BBHLabs citing an overheard remark by a 13-year-old.

From today’s Guardian.

The owner of the O2 arena could face an insurance liability of up to £300m after the death of Michael Jackson, who had been scheduled to play a series of sell-out gigs starting in the summer.

AEG Live, which persuaded Jackson to stage the 50-date run at the former Millenium Dome, admitted earlier this year that it was finding it difficult to insure the This Is It performances after the initial schedule of 10 concerts grew.

Doubts over whether Jackson would be fit enough both mentally and physically to complete the extended run of gigs increased the potential insurance bill to £300m, according to a report by Reinsurance magazine in March.

Insurers were reluctant to take on such a liability and instead, the AEG chief executive Randy Phillips was reported at the time as saying that the company would be willing to “self-insure” to get the shows to go ahead.

“It’s a risk we’re willing to take to bring the King of Pop to his fans,” he said.

Admirable sentiment. But bad business decision, if true.

And how about this from ArsTechnica on the wider impact on the Net?

The news of pop icon Michael Jackson’s collapse and subsequent death sent ripples across the Web on Thursday afternoon, affecting numerous services and sparking yet another spam campaign. Twitter, Google, Facebook, various news sites, and even iTunes were practically crushed under the weight of the sudden spike in Internet traffic. The phenomenon may not be new on an individual level, but combined across services, it was truly one of the most significant in recent memory.

When news first broke that the Jackson had collapsed in his home, Twitter was immediately abuzz. There were several points when the Ars staff observed between 6,000 and 13,000 new tweets per minute mentioning Michael Jackson before Twitter began to melt down—all before anyone other than TMZ.com was reporting his death. Of course, most of us are intimately familiar with the famed Fail Whale at this point, though Twitter’s meltdown was mostly reflected in a major slowing of the service and the inability to send new tweets.

In fact, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone told the L.A. Times that the news of Jackson’s passing caused the biggest spike in tweets per second since the US Presidential Election. (Similarly, Facebook—also known as Wannabe Twitter—saw a spike in status updates that was apparently three times more than average for the site, though a spokesperson said the site remained free of performance issues.)

Google, on the other hand, began receiving so many searches for news about Jackson that it caused the search engine to believe it was under attack. The site went into self-protection mode, throwing up CAPTCHAs and malware alerts to users trying to find news. A Google spokesperson described the incident as “volcanic” compared to other major news events, confirming that there was a service slowdown for some time.

On the other hand, Rory Cellan-Jones has this:

But did the internet actually buckle? Well, there was some strain – but it seems to have come through well.

In the United States, a company called Keynote, which monitors internet performance, says popular news sites showed marked slowdowns for three hours from about 2230 BST: “The average speed for downloading news items doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds,” said Shawn White from Keynote. “During the same period, the average availability of sites dropped from almost 100% to 86%.”

But guess what: in Europe overnight, there was no spike in internet traffic. Interoute, which operates Europe’s largest fibre optic voice and data network, sent me graphs (see below) showing traffic through the three key internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London. At all three exchanges, traffic was either around the same as normal overnight, or, in London’s case, actually a little lower.

… in 1963, JFK visited West Berlin and made his famous declaration: “Ich bin ein Berliner”.

I’ve been in a lot of discussions recently about the ‘death’ of (print) newspapers. What strikes me most about the print perspective is its almost childish impatience for immediate results. Faced with the reality of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the future emerges more slowly than the past dissolves, print journalists decry the online future as a revenue-free chimera. Because online news doesn’t make money at the moment, they think it’s a hopeless prospect. (Another problem is that they are obsessed with the continuation of a particular output format — the newspaper — rather than the function that it performs, which is journalism. But that’s another story.)

I can understand their angst as a treasured way of working becomes unviable, but the idea that we could instantly switch from an industry built on, and shaped by, 19th-century technology into one based on networked technology is historically naive. In my Oxford seminar I used the example of what happened when broadcast radio arrived in the US in the 1920s. Entrepreneurs were as puzzled by how to make money from radio then as newspapers owners are by the Web. It took at least a decade to figure out to figure out a business model that would work for broadcast radio — and the solution was eventually found by a detergent manufacturer, Proctor and Gamble — which is how we got the soap opera. But in that decade lots of companies went bust trying to make money from the new medium. Yet, in the end, radio was the medium that changed the world, because it created the modern mass market. For the first time, people across the continental United States could have the same media experience at the same time — and advertisers could address a mass market.

Much the same is happening now. Nobody yet has a clear idea of a business model that will support journalism in a networked age. But I have absolutely no doubt that models will be found — in time. That’s the lesson of history.

Another lesson of history that grief-stricken print journalists ignore is that the modern print newspaper did not spring, ready-made, from its cradle. In fact it took a long time to evolve. This was the point made in an admirable post by Howard Owens on his blog.

For more than a decade, we expected to build online news organizations that could support a super structure of the modern newspaper newsroom — with the all the reporters and editors and big story packages (look at all the emphasis we put on big Flash multimedia productions) and that we could keep doing journalism just the way we always did it.

While we bemoaned shovelware (taking the same exact print story and repurposing it for the Web), we took little time to really examine what might might be different about online publishing that should change the way news is gathered and presented.

That’s why we were slow to embrace blogging, slow to recognize the power of social networking, and why, even today, most newspapers treat reader interaction (re: comments on stories) as a nuisance rather than an essential part of the business.

The Big Worry of the print culture is that in the networked world nobody will do Real Journalism — all that laudable, high-end, socially-responsible, investigative, speaking-truth-to-power stuff which makes journalists feel good about themselves and their role in society. Howard Owens reminds us that the celebrated pioneers of American newspaper culture didn’t do too much of that high-minded stuff. Au contraire.

The early giants of journalism got much wrong and got much right, but little that they did would resemble journalism of the past 60 or 70 years.

They didn’t, for example, do much in the way of investigative journalism. Nelly Bly worked for the New York World, but even her greatest public service reporting — locking herself in an insane asylum — isn’t what many of today’s newsroom pundits mean by high-cost investigative journalism. it was a stunt, just like her most expensive adventure, going around the world in 80 days. That really brought down a president, didn’t it?

Most of the other muckrakers who set the stage for investigative journalism didn’t even work for newspapers. They wrote for magazines and published books.

It took a long time for newspapers to build the cash flow to afford big time, expensive investigative journalism, and for publishers to recognize its value (and some of them still aren’t convinced) in helping to retain readers.

So if it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?

Exactly. So the moral of the story is: patience. Journalism will continue even if print newspapers decline or even die. The world doesn’t end here.

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I am baffled by the power-structure in Iran — all those councils of ‘experts’ and ‘guardians’ and the so-called ‘supreme leader’ (the title Private Eye shrewdly assigned to Gordon Brown, incidentally). “What I need”, I said to an Iranian friend, “is a diagram” (for I am but an humble engineer and long words trouble me). She immediately emailed a link to this helpful clickable BBC chart.

Looks clear, doesn’t it? But then you find that the Guardian Council, which appears to be way down the pecking order, is apparently

the most influential body in Iran and is currently controlled by conservatives. It consists of six theologians appointed by the leader and six jurists nominated by the judiciary and approved by parliament. The council has to approve all bills passed by parliament and make sure they conform to the constitution and Islamic law. The council also has the power to veto candidates in elections to parliament, local councils, the presidency and the Assembly of Experts. President Khatami is attempting to remove this power.

The Assembly of Experts, for its part, is

made up of 96 clerics, is comparable to the College of Cardinals which chooses the Pope. The assembly is elected directly by the electorate every eight years. Its functions are to appoint, oversee and if necessary dismiss the Supreme Leader. It meets twice a year to review the performance of the Supreme Leader.

“The current assembly”, the BBC chart helpfully reveals, “was elected in 1998 for an eight-year term”. Er, 1998 plus 8 equals 2006. It is now 2009. Well, it is here in the Junior Satanic Kingdom of Britain anyway. In the governing circles in Iran it’s probably about 1456.

On the other hand… Just think if the College of Cardinals met twice-yearly to review the performance of the Pope. That’d soften the old boy’s cough, as my mother used to say. Keep him up to the mark.

After my post about Tim O’Reilly’s use of Pascal’s wager, Brian sent me a link to this. Nice exposition (although I dislike the stuff about “the most terrifying video…”). And a reminder of how powerful YouTube is — millions of views already.

LATER: Just thinking about it, while I understand why he’s made the most pessimistic assumptions about the False/Yes cell on the grid — i.e. nothing but added costs and a global economic depression brought on my them — in practice I think Tim O’Reilly is right: what will happen is that we will invent who new industries based on green technology.

From Good Morning Silicon Valley.

Last year, Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture of the two European giants, sold Iran a big telecommunications package that included a “monitoring center” installed at a choke-point of the government-controlled network. The equipment was described in a company brochure as allowing “the monitoring and interception of all types of voice and data communication on all networks,” but according to spokesman Ben Roome, it was built for “lawful intercept” related to combating terrorism, child pornography, drug trafficking and the like. The equipment was part of a system that enabled “deep packet inspection,” the real-time examination of the contents of electronic communications (technology that has also attracted interest in some “non-repressive” governments as well).

Now, reports the Wall Street Journal, after playing around with the system for a few months, Iran has been spurred by internal unrest to tighten the screws, and the result, according to tech experts, is a level of intrusion and control that makes China’s Great Firewall look like freeware. “We didn’t know they could do this much,” a network engineer in Tehran told the Journal. “Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network.” Iran is “now drilling into what the population is trying to say,” said Bradley Anstis of California security firm Marshal8e6. “This looks like a step beyond what any other country is doing, including China.”

As noted earlier, Siemens is the outfit that provides all the BBC’s IT services.

At a party a few weeks ago I ran into a climate-change denier and was struck by how impermeable he seemed to any kind of cautionary reasoning. He was especially hostile to any case based on scientific ‘consensus’. Afterwards, I wondered if there was an argumentative strategy that might be more effective. So I wonder if this post by Tim O’Reilly might provide a way forward. “In my talks”, Tim writes,

I’ve argued that climate change provides us with a modern version of Pascal’s wager: if catastrophic global warming turns out not to happen, the steps we’d take to address it are still worthwhile. Given that there’s even a reasonable risk of disruptive climate change, any sensible person should decide to act. It’s insurance. The risk of your house burning down is small, yet you carry homeowner’s insurance; you don’t expect to total your car, but you know that the risk is there, and again, most people carry insurance; you don’t expect catastrophic illness to strike you down, but again, you invest in insurance.

We don’t need to be 100% sure that the worst fears of climate scientists are correct in order to act. All we need to think about are the consequences of being wrong.

Let’s assume for a moment that there is no human-caused climate change, or that the consequences are not dire, and we’ve made big investments to avert it. What’s the worst that happens? In order to deal with climate change:

1. We’ve made major investments in renewable energy. This is an urgent issue even in the absence of global warming, as the IEA has now revised the date of ‘peak oil’ to 2020, only 11 years from now.

2. We’ve invested in a potent new source of jobs. This is a far better source of stimulus than some of the ideas that have been proposed.

3. We’ve improved our national security by reducing our dependence on oil from hostile or unstable regions.

4. We’ve mitigated the enormous “off the books” economic losses from pollution. (China recently estimated these losses as 10% of GDP.) We currently subsidize fossil fuels in dozens of ways, by allowing power companies, auto companies, and others to keep environmental costs “off the books,” by funding the infrastructure for autos at public expense while demanding that railroads build their own infrastructure, and so on.

5. We’ve renewed our industrial base, investing in new industries rather than propping up old ones. Climate critics like Bjorn Lomborg like to cite the cost of dealing with global warming. But the costs are similar to the “costs” incurred by record companies in the switch to digital music distribution, or the costs to newspapers implicit in the rise of the web. That is, they are costs to existing industries, but ignore the opportunities for new industries that exploit the new technology. I have yet to see a convincing case made that the costs of dealing with climate change aren’t principally the costs of protecting old industries.

By contrast, let’s assume that the climate skeptics are wrong. We face the displacement of millions of people, droughts, floods and other extreme weather, species loss, and economic harm that will make us long for the good old days of the current financial industry meltdown.

It really is like Pascal’s wager. On one side, the worst outcome is that we’ve built a more robust economy. On the other side, the worst outcome really is hell. In short, we do better if we believe in climate change and act on that belief, even if we turned out to be wrong.

In an earlier post, I contrasted Barcelona FC’s sponsorship of UNESCO with Manchester United’s sponsorship by AIG, the well-known imploding insurance giant (now bailed out by the US taxpayer). Now comes a fascinating account in The Atlantic of how Man U found some new letters to embroider on its shirts.

When two executives of Chicago’s Aon Corp. went through their mail one day last fall, they each found a large package with a leather-encased box, containing, of all things, a soccer shirt with the company’s own logo emblazoned across the chest. The shirts appeared to be bonafide red home jerseys of Manchester United, arguably the most famous sports team in the world—or at least in the world outside the soccer-suspicious United States.

They had the red and yellow team logo and the Nike swoosh, and were obviously high quality, but they were just mockups. Aon, which is Gaelic for “Oneness,” had no relationship with the team. It doesn’t even have anything to do with its own hometown teams, the Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Bulls, or Bears.

That overture led, eight months later, to a sponsorship and marketing deal in which AON paid a reported $130 million in exchange for having its logo on the jersey. The story of how this deal came about, and the benefits each party derives from it, offers an instructive look at the world of international commerce, where in the quest for global success, companies sometimes find themselves venturing into unexpected but auspicious pairings.

Footnote: ‘aon’ is Irish for ‘one’, not oneness (whatever that is).

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for spotting the piece.