Category Archives: Media ecology

Murdoch discovers that he needs ‘parasite’ Google

Posted on by

From today’s Daily Telegraph.

News Corporation plans to reverse an earlier decision to stop articles from its quality papers, such as The Times and The Sunday Times, from featuring in Google’s listings. The effort to stop users from accessing content for free will be watered down, with Google featuring stories in search rankings from next month.

The move comes amid fears that the newspapers’ exclusion is limiting their influence and driving down advertising revenues. Sources claim the change was a “marketing exercise”.

Ah, yes: our old friend, the “marketing exercise”.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

The first thought to strike anyone stumbling upon the now-infamous Innocence of Muslims video on YouTube without knowing anything about it would probably be that it makes Monty Python’s The Life of Brian look like the work of Merchant Ivory. It’s daft, amateurish beyond belief and, well, totally weird. So the notion that such a fatuous production might provoke carnage in distant parts of the world seems preposterous.

And yet it did. In the process, the video created numerous headaches for a US administration struggling to deal with the most turbulent part of the world. But it also raised some tricky questions about the role that commercial companies play in regulating free speech in a networked world – questions that will remain long after Innocence of Muslims has been forgotten…

A renaissance of reading?

Posted on by

Hmmm… I’m not entirely surprised by this Guardian report. I’ve noticed that teenagers of my acquaintance who have Kindles are definitely reading more. An interesting way-point on the journey to a new ecosystem.

Underlining the speed of change in the publishing industry, Amazon said that two years after introducing the Kindle, customers are now buying more ebooks than all hardcovers and paperbacks combined. According to unaudited figures released by the company on Monday, since the start of 2012, for every 100 hardback and paperback book sold on its site, customers downloaded 114 ebooks. Amazon said the figures included sales of printed books which did not have Kindle editions, but excluded free ebooks.

In a surprise move in May, the company went into partnership with the UK’s largest bricks-and-mortar books retailer, Waterstones.

Much to the consternation of the publishing industry, Amazon has refused to release audited figures for its digital book sales, something it does for printed books. It told the Guardian that the company would not discuss future policy on the matter.

The company said its figures also showed that British Kindle users were buying four times as many books as they were prior to owning a Kindle, a trend it described as a renaissance of reading.

“As soon as we started selling Kindles it became our bestselling product on Amazon.co.uk so there was a very quick adoption … [And they] are buying four times more books prior to owning a Kindle,” an Amazon spokeswoman said. “Generally there seems to be … a love of a reading and a renaissance as a result of Kindle being launched.”

So much for “the end of the book” complaint.

We love your work… now show us your workings

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

The growth in computing power, networking and sensor technology now means that even routine scientific research requires practitioners to make sense of a torrent of data. Take, for example, what goes on in particle physics. Experiments in Cern’s Large Hadron Collider regularly produce 23 petabytes per second of data. Just to get that in context, a petabyte is a million gigabytes, which is the equivalent of 13.3 years of HDTV content. In molecular biology, a single DNA-sequencing machine can spew out 9,000 gigabytes of data annually, which a librarian friend of mine equates to 20 Libraries of Congress in a year.

In an increasing number of fields, research involves analysing these torrents of data, looking for patterns or unique events that may be significant. This kind of analysis lies way beyond the capacity of humans, so it has to be done by software, much of which has to be written by the researchers themselves. But when scientists in these fields come to publish their results, both the data and the programs on which they are based are generally hidden from view, which means that a fundamental principle of scientific research – that findings should be independently replicable – is being breached. If you can’t access the data and check the analytical software for bugs, how can you be sure that a particular result is valid?

“Legacy”: the use and abuse of a term

Posted on by

The word “legacy” crops up a lot in discussions about innovation in cyberspace, so it was good to find thoughtful essay about it by Stephen Page, current CEO of Faber & Faber, the eminent publishing house of which TS Eliot was famously a Director.

In any revolution, language matters. One powerful word in the digital revolution is “legacy”. There is a conscious attempt to employ the word pejoratively, to suggest that existing media businesses – publishers, in the case of books – are going to fail to make the leap to a new world.In common usage, the first meaning of legacy is an inheritance, or something handed down from the past. A second meaning, more specific and recent, denotes technological obsolescence, or dramatic business-model shift. These two meanings have been fused to imply inevitable irrelevance for those with history, especially in media. This is a sleight of hand that would be sloppy if it wasn’t so considered.

Let’s deal with technological obsolescence. Media businesses are not technology businesses, but they can be particularly affected by technology shifts. I run a so-called legacy publishing house, Faber & Faber. Most of our business is based on licensing copyrights from writers and pursuing every avenue to find readers and create value for those writers. We are agnostic about how we do this. For our first 80 years, we could only do it through print formats (books); now we can do it through books, ebooks, online learning (through our Academy courses), digital publishing (such as the Waste Land app) and the web. Technology shifts have tended to result in greater opportunity, not less.

Implicit, I suppose, in the pejorative use of the term legacy is that we at Faber, like other publishers, don’t get it – “it” being the new economy, the new rules. There is something in this, of course. It’s harder to transform an existing business into one with a new culture and cost structure than to start afresh. Any existing business, no matter what old-world strength it has, will fail if it is not bold enough to attack its own DNA where necessary. The ailing photography firm Eastman Kodak is widely cited as a recent example of this phenomenon. But this is business failure due to cultural stasis. There is nothing inevitable in failure for existing businesses, but they have particular issues to figure out: simply adhering to old business practices will lead to failure. Failure will not be because of technology, but through failure to react to technology. In fact, it could be regarded as squandering the opportunity of a beneficial legacy.

He’s right about the two meanings. A legacy can be a source of mindless complacency — the kind of mindset one finds in the trust-fund Sloanes who hang out in Belgravia and Chelsea. But it can also be a source of strength — as in the case of Faber, who seem to me to be approaching the challenges of digital technology with imagination and vision. For example, the wonderful Waste Land App produced by my friend Max Whitby and his colleagues at TouchPress required access to the Eliot papers and rights held by Faber. So they used their ‘legacy’ to add value to a digital product in a distinctive and valuable way.

But others legatees in the publishing (and other content industries) have viewed their inheritances in different and less imaginative ways. Think, for example, of the way Stephen Joyce has relentlessly used his control of the Joyce estate to prevent imaginative uses of his grandfather’s works. (Mercifully, Ulysses is now finally out of copyright and therefore beyond Stephen’s baleful reach, which is what has enabled TouchPress to embark on an imaginative App based around a new translation that will come out later this year.). Or of the way some legatees have viewed their inheritances as guarantees that the digital revolution will never threaten their hold on a market.

Still, Mr Page is right: “legacy” is too often used as a term of patronising abuse by tech evangelists who think that they have “the future in their bones” (as C.P. Snow put it in his famous Rede Lecture all those years ago.)

So what exactly did Facebook buy for a billion dollars?

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

So Facebook has bought Instagram, a company with a single product – a photosharing app – for $1bn in cash and (FB) shares. Just to put that in context, Instagram has been in existence for 18 months, employs 13 people, has 30 million users and has had a grand total of $7m in investment funding. Oh, and it has precisely zero dollars in revenue.

Sound familiar?

There’s been lots of really interesting commentary about the Instagram deal. Writing in the FT, John Gapper made two interesting points:

  • The deal looks much more like the kind of thing companies do after they go public and start to run out of steam. The fact that Instagram was snapped up (if that is the right way to describe paying a billion dollars for something) is a measure of how scared Mark Zuckerberg has become of what might happen to facebook.
  • What’s he scared of? Well, says Gapper, scared of repeating the fate of many earlier Internet poster-children (like Bebo, for which AOL paid $850m in 2008 and flogged off in 2011 for $10m).

    • And Frederic Filloux, one of my favourite commentators, is also sceptical about the deal — and about facebook generally. “When I read the news of the Instagram acquisition”, he writes, “I wondered: Imagine Facebook already trading on the Nasdaq; how would the market react? Would analysts and pundits send the stock upward, praising Zuckerberg’s swiftness at securing FB’s position? Or, to the contrary, would someone loudly complain: What? Did Facebook just burn the entire 2011 free cash-flow to buy an app with no revenue in sight, and manned by a dozen of geeks? Is this a red-flag symptom of Zuckerberg’s mental state?”

    Other points Filloux makes:

  • Zuckerberg controls 57% of facebook shares, and therefore can do what he likes. This can be a mixed blessing.
  • Zuck is beginning to look like Bill Gates in the early years of Microsoft’s dominance — the years when he decided that Netscape had to be eliminated. Every challenge is seen as a potential threst. Only the paranoid survive, etc. etc. Facebook’s photo-sharing dominance was beginning to leak, and Instagram was one factor in that. So it had to be acquired or destroyed. “With this transaction”, writes Filloux, “the ultra-dominant social network acted like an elephant scared of a mice. Instagram has 35 million users? Fine. But how many are using the service more than occasionally? Half of it? How many are likely to switch overnight to a better app? Most likely many will. Especially since Instagram is not a community per se, but a gateway to larger ones such as Twitter and Facebook.”

    • LATER: Andy Baio has made an interesting attempt to work out an empirical rationale for the price Zuckerberg paid for his new toy.

    Turf wars and user-generated content

    Posted on by

    The New York Times has a feature by Elissa Gootman about American parents who encourage their children’s writing by self-publishing their books. She quotes a dismissive comment by Tom Robbins, a novelist of whom I had never heard but who, according to this profile, writes 500 words a day longhand:

    “What’s next?” asked the novelist Tom Robbins. “Kiddie architects, juvenile dentists, 11-year-old rocket scientists? Any parent who thinks that the crafting of engrossing, meaningful, publishable fiction requires less talent and experience than designing a house, extracting a wisdom tooth, or supervising a lunar probe is, frankly, delusional.”

    Writing in the Guardian, Dan Gillmor is (rightly) having none of this:

    Robbins’ annoyance was a classic of the genre and clever in its framing, but not terribly original as an idea. For years we’ve been treated to curmudgeon-isms from a variety of professionals who betray fear and/or contempt when the hoi polloi finds a way across the moats and into their castles. In a field to which I pay close attention – what has become known in the past decade as citizen journalism – angst from employed journalists has never fully abated. A few media organisations, including this newspaper, have embraced the long-obvious reality that the former audience can and should be integral to the journalism process. Some others have concluded that they can get their audiences to do some of the work for no compensation beyond a pat on the head; this is shabby but, sadly, in wide practice. And many others still fear, or even loathe, the very idea that the hallowed newsroom pros’ authority has been challenged at all.

    The term “citizen journalism” has led to all kinds of clever analogies, on which Robbins builds in his Times quote. One of my favourites is “citizen surgeon”, which I first heard many years ago. Of course, I don’t want anyone but a certified surgeon cutting into me if required. But humans have done all manner of “citizen medicine” through the aeons. When my mother sterilised a pin in a flame and poked around my finger to remove a splinter many decades ago, she was not performing surgery, but it was medical care.

    In today’s world of democratised technology, average people are playing roles they never dreamed of in the past. That is why we have legions of citizen astronomers, among armies of citizen scientists in a variety of disciplines, making discoveries every week. The need for well-trained scientists has not diminished, but the rest of us are contributing in new and immensely valuable ways.

    Spot on.