Warning for sensitive souls: contains rude words.
It prompted me to download the 8mm home movie app for the iPhone. Another lovely example of using sophisticated computing to produce primitive retro effects. No wonder normal people think that geeks are nuts!
Thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.
I guess the LSE must be wishing YouTube had never been invented.
I’m just waiting for the remixes.
This morning’s Observer column.
What’s instructive about the Julius Baer case is how clueless the bank and its agents were about the net. They looked like blind men poking a tiger with a stick. It was amusing at the time, but it was too good to last. It was inevitable that the corporate world would wise up and in the past few weeks we’ve begun to see some of the results of that re-education process. And it ain’t pretty.
What’s driving things now is the conjecture that the next big WikiLeaks exposé concerns Bank of America. And deep in the lush undergrowth of corporate America, security, consulting and PR companies have perceived lucrative business opportunities in helping putative WikiLeaks targets get their retaliation in first.
We got a glimpse of this twilight world when the activist group Anonymous hacked into the servers of an internet security firm…
As usual, Dave Winer nails it.
I watched the Thursday night video feed of the Columbia panel on Wikileaks instead of going there in person. After trying to listen to Keller [Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times] on Fresh Air and giving up half-way through, in disgust — I just couldn’t imagine sitting through his schpiel about the social behavior problems (he perceives) of Julian Assange. I don’t care, and frankly I think it’s irresponsible of a person in Keller’s position to take the focus off the substance, which is so interesting and vital.
Yep. One of things that really struck me as a small-time bit player in coverage of the WikiLeaks story was how difficult it is to counteract a wrong-headed media narrative once it gets going. (We saw that earlier in the coverage of the BP oil-drilling catastrophe, btw.) On the day when I was interviewed by the BBC and other networks I was trying to say that Assange wasn’t the story — the big story was what WikeLeaks meant for governments everywhere. But even as I was being interviewed, Assange was heading for a British Court, and it was impossible to get any interviewer’s attention for the bigger picture. And it’s still going on: all this emphasis on Assange’s peculiarities. The Egyptian protestors are lucky that they haven’t thrown up a charismatic individual ‘leader’: if they had, we’d hear correspondingly less about what was actually going on.
But back to Dave:
He [Keller] also said he had never met Assange.
Amazing he has so much insight into the flaws of a man he had never met!
Maybe amazing isn’t the word…
Emily Bell, the interviewer, kept the discussion away from Assange’s socks, and got some very interesting things on the record from the panel. For the purposes of this story though, I’m only going to look at one new bit of info. Both the Times and the Guardian are thinking about replacing the technology of WikiLeaks with their own. Instead, imho they should be thinking about creating their own Twitters, platforms for their news people to congregate in realtime and mix with the members of their communities. Both organizations should be doing much more to cultivate community. And Twitter is much more of a threat to them than WikiLeaks.
[…]
It was so revealing when Keller said that his audience had moved to the Internet. Yes, but.. His sources have too. And there are so many more sources today than there were when we were growing up. It may be the biggest single change in the way news works.
Understanding the social aspect of news, and leading us with great information and gestalts — that’s what the Times and Guardian do best. It’s less important how the leaks make their way to their desks. News is now an environment, not a publication. It lives and breathes. That’s what the news orgs still haven’t been willing to embrace.
Spot on.
This morning’s Observer column.
For hardcore geeks, the WikiLeaks saga should serve as a stimulant to a new wave of innovation which will lead to a new generation of distributed, secure technologies (like the TOR networking system used by WikiLeaks) which will enable people to support movements and campaigns that are deemed subversive by authoritarian powers. A really good example of this kind of technological innovation was provided last week by Google engineers, who in a few days built a system that enabled protesters in Egypt to send tweets even though the internet in their country had been shut down. “Like many people”, they blogged, “we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we can do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.”
They worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow (a company Google recently acquired) to build the system. It provides three international phone numbers and anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail. The tweets appear on twitter.com/speak2tweet.
What’s exciting about this kind of development is that it harnesses the same kind of irrepressible, irreverent, geeky originality that characterised the early years of the internet, before the web arrived and big corporations started to get a grip on it. Events in Egypt make one realise how badly this kind of innovation is needed.
LATER: Useful post about how to ensure that your domain names aren’t snaffled by the Feds.
The Daily Digger costs a modest 99c a week, which looks like a fairly cheap way to get a daily newspaper. The only problem is that you have to buy an iPad in order to read it. This chart comes from a lovely blog post by Bryan McComb in which he calculates how long it would take before a Daily Digger subscriber would be better off buying the iPad version rather than purchasing Murdoch’s New York tabloid from a newsagent. The breakeven point comes in November 2014.
(And, yeah, I know that iPad owners don’t buy the device just to read the Digger. But still, the calculation illustrates how cheerfully we early adopters write off substantial expenditure.)
You have to admire Murdoch. He never gives up. Today he launched The Daily, the first iPad-only newspaper. Annoyingly, it’s not yet available from the UK iTunes store. But I look forward to trying it when it is.
The Guardian has a review of the first edition.
LATER: Rory Cellan-Jones was at a conference I attended today, and we nattered about it. Needless to say, he’d been able to get it on his iPad (something about a friend with a US iTunes account). His blog post about it is here.
Once you’ve managed to install what is a fairly chunky download, you find a very slick product. You arrive at a carousel, where you can swing through sections which start with news, followed rapidly by gossip, opinion, arts and life, apps and games and sports.
There is hard news – The Daily has a reporter in Cairo who has delivered the first edition’s lead story about Egypt, and there are some stunning photographs from the protests there, coupled with a pithy summary of how the country got to this state. It is though, The Daily, not the Hourly, or Minutely, so what you get is yesterday’s news – the Egypt story already looked way out of date.
But hard news is not what this paper is about, it’s more of a magazine. The overall impression is of middle-market frothy fun with plenty of multi-media twists, from the video clips that accompany movie reviews to Sudoku that allows you to compete with others online.
I had a quick look. It’s neat and clean and well-designed. But the content didn’t grab me — a bit Daily Mailish. I can see a lot of people taking the two-week free trial and then forgetting all about it.
I’ve always thought that people will pay for content — provided it’s really distinctive content. That’s why I cheerfully stump up for the New Yorker and the Economist and the London Review of Books. But it’s also why I can’t be bothered to pay for the Times. It’s not distinctive enough. I suspect the same might be true for The Daily Digger.
This morning’s Observer column.
So the BBC is slimming down, in response to government pressure. The World Service is to lose five of its foreign-language services, and a quarter of its staff. And BBC Online’s budget will be cut by a quarter to £103m and the unit will lose 360 staff, at the same time as it embarks upon a radical “redesign” of the website and its navigation. Introducing these developments, the corporation’s director general explained that the hatchet-work was part of a broader strategy to do “fewer things better”. The changes to BBC Online would, he maintained, make the corporation’s web services “more focused and more valuable”.
What links these two victims of corporate surgery? Answer: they’re not television. And that’s highly significant. What the cuts to BBC Online signify is that the internal battle within the corporation between the few who understood that push media represent the past, and the many who think that the Wibbly Wobbly Web (as Terry Wogan used to call Tim Berners-Lee’s invention) is really just the newest way to convey visual stimuli to couch potatoes, is over. And the past has won.
The annoying thing about Boris Johnson, the so-called ‘mayor’ of London, is not that he is annoying (though he is) but that he is such a good and amusing columnist. Even by his own high standards, however, today’s Telegraph column about Internet commenters is terrific.
There used to be a time when filing these comment page pieces was a lonely sort of business. It was like putting your money into a chocolate bar dispenser on a station platform, or practising your tennis serve. Nothing came back. It was fire and forget, hit and run, drive-by opinionising. OK, so if you said something particularly outrageous, a handful of letters would eventually turn up, depending on the mails. If you really put your foot in it and did something that no reader could forgive – such as confusing a yellow labrador with a golden retriever – a few people might be moved to ring the Telegraph switchboard.
But when any of us write something these days, it is like tiptoeing to a cage with a hunk of meat, and nervously prodding it through the bars. Sometimes the blogosphere will seem happy with the offering and the beast will briefly growl approval; and sometimes there is such a yowling and clamouring that we feel like Clarice Starling as she sets off down the corridor of mental patients, in search of Hannibal the Cannibal.
It’s lovely stuff, from which he draws the right conclusion, damn him.
And now, at last, the journalists are getting something like the same treatment; and of course, as a politician who loves writing, I must tremble before the wrath of pheasantplucker [one of the commenters who had said rude things about Johnson], but I also rejoice at the change that has taken place. A broadcast has been turned into a dialogue. When we write our pieces, thousands of eyes are scanning them for errors of fact and taste – and now our critics cannot only harrumph and curse us. They can tell the world – in seconds – where they think we have gone wrong. We are not just writing columns, we are writing wiki-columns, and if we sometimes get beaten up, we also have the satisfaction of gaining the odd grunt of agreement.
Politicians are being held to account by journalists; journalists are being held to account by their readers – and it cannot be long, the internet being what it is, before the wind of popular scrutiny blows through all the bourgeois professions. What are we going to do about the lawyers?
Best speech he’s given — better even than the Philadelphia speech. It’s long (over 33 mins) but worth watching in full. Echoes of Martin Luther King and JFK, but marvellously controlled.
It’s interesting also to see how little of this came over in conventional news media reporting of the speech. Just a couple of soundbytes topped and tailed by the perfunctory analysis of tired and cynical reporters. Long live YouTube.