[Source]. What’s interesting is that the “waste of time” brigade seems to be growing.
Category Archives: Media ecology
Google extends definition of ‘docs’ to include video
Hmmm… Just read this. Google’s encouraging me to upload my video files to Docs. Uploaded video files can be up to 1 GB.
These are the most common video formats that you can upload and play:
* WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
* .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files – (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
* .AVI (many cameras use this format – typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
* .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
* .WMV
* .FLV (Adobe – FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)
I can understand why people might want to use Docs for private videos, or ones to which they wish to restrict access to selected friends and family. But for public stuff, why not use YouTube — also a Google property?
10 Digital Music predictions for 2011
Interesting post by Luke Lewis.
Here are the ones that struck me:
Worth reading in full. The most controversial one is his conclusion that the Spotify business model isn’t sustainable. I’m not convinced.
Thanks to Caspar for the link.
LATER: Interesting email from a reader re my comment about Spotify:
Maybe Spotify and streaming is not the future. I’ve been a paid subscriber to Spotify for over a year and have just discovered that half of my playlists and downloaded tracks have been removed owing to ECM pulling out (Naxos are rumoured to be next to go). Ironic as well over a third of my CD and LP collection is ECM and the last three CDs I have bought (within the last three months) are all ECM.
Keeping a record
This morning’s Observer column.
A few months ago, I went to an intriguing talk given by Lorcan Dempsey, who is a leading authority on the role of libraries in the digital world. One of the slides in his presentation really made me sit up. The context was an account of how different academic libraries are going about the archiving of digital material. The slide in question focused on Emory University, a wealthy, private research university in Atlanta, Georgia. Like many such institutions, it has been buying up the papers of well-known writers and already has a fine collection of Irish scribblers in its archives. But it also has the papers of Salman Rushdie and this was the subject of the slide that startled me.
Why? Because it showed that Emory’s Rushdie archive included not only the writer’s papers, but also his old computers and hard drives. And there, on the slide, was the symbol for an old Apple Macintosh computer and in its directory listing was a folder entitled, simply, “My Money”. And at that moment, if you will forgive the pun, the penny dropped…
There are also some good (critical) comments by readers.
The ultimate dumbing-down tool: the unlinkable App
Steven Johnson has adapted his speech to the Web 2.0 Summit and turned it into an OpEd piece on FT.com. It’s basically a follow-on from his excellent Hearst Lecture, which is also about the dangers of the unlinkable App. Sample:
Of course, the overwhelming majority of apps do not contain much information that would benefit from being linked to other things on the internet. If we do not figure out a way to link directly to one level of the Angry Birds game, we will probably survive as a culture. But the danger lies in a region of the digital information landscape barely mentioned by Mr Anderson: books. Where links abound, a rich ecosystem of commentary, archiving, social sharing and scholarship usually develops because links make it far easier to build on and connect ideas from around the web. But right now, books exist outside this universe. There is no standardised way to link to a page of a digital book.
Books contain the most carefully crafted and edited text that we have – truly the richest source of information in the world – and yet all that information remains unlinkable. Google works as well as it does because people find interesting information on the web and link to it; Google then prioritises pages that attract a disproportionate number of inbound links. But if you find a fascinating passage in a novel or a book of history, there is no standardised way to link to it, which means that the rest of the web cannot benefit from your discovery.
Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists, one that merely involves a commitment to use technology that already exists. Call it the mirror web. If you create digital information in any form, make a parallel version of that information that lives on the web. A magazine publisher creating an iPad app should ensure that each article has clear links to a mirror version of each article on the web. Then, if anyone wants to cite, tweet, blog or e-mail a reference to that article, it is always one tap away. The web version can be behind a pay wall or some other kind of barrier if the publisher chooses; what matters is that there is an address you can point to.
What much of the discussion about Chris Anderson’s “death of the Web” meme overlooks is the long term implication of a publishing ecosystem dominated by unlinkable apps — namely the dumbing down of our culture. The wonderful thing about the open, hyperlinked Web is that it enables it to be greater than the sum of its parts. The unrestricted sharing of information and ideas endows it with an invaluable emergent property: that of collective intelligence. (And yes I know about Jaron Lanier’s stuff about the dangers of “hive mind”, “digital Maoism”, etc.) But the fact is that the reason humankind has become as accomplished as it has is because we found ways of sharing good ideas. The irony about the Apps-mania now gripping the publishing world is that, in an era when we were presented (courtesy of Tim Berners-Lee) with the most efficient method yet developed for sharing ideas, they want to cut off — or at least regulate — the rate at which ideas flow.
Apps are wonderful in their way; but they can be tools for dumbing us down.
UPDATE: To which Bill Thompson (whom God Preserve) adds a comment:
“Steven (and you) both make good points, and it is indeed the case that ‘in an era when we were presented (courtesy of Tim Berners-Lee) with the most efficient method yet developed for sharing ideas, [publishers] want to cut off — or at least regulate — the rate at which ideas flow’ – but why are we surprised? Publishers were the bottleneck in the flow of ideas for 300 years – the abundance of the digital age has removed their control, and they want it back. The App and the ebook are the digital equivalent of a licence to operate a printing press.”
What’s a ‘book’ then?
This morning’s Observer column.
These two developments – the Economist’s app and Eagleman’s ‘book’ – ought to serve as a wake-up call for the print publishing industry. The success of Amazon’s Kindle has, I think, lulled print publishers into a false sense of security. After all, they’re thinking, the stuff that goes on the Kindle is just text. It may not be created by squeezing dyes on to processed wood-pulp, but it’s still text. And that’s something we’re good at. So no need to panic. Amazon may be a pain to deal with, but the Kindle and its ilk will see us through.
If that’s really what publishers are thinking, then they’re in for some nasty surprises. The concept of a ‘book’ will change under the pressure of iPad-type devices, just as concepts of what constitutes a magazine or a newspaper are already changing…
WikiLeaks: RAP news
Wonder if there’s a WikiLeaks Downfall meme?
WikiLeaks and the Innovator’s Dilemma
Very thoughtful essay by David Rieff in The New Republic. He sees WikiLeaks as a disruptive innovation in the sense that Clayton Christensen used it to describe “business innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, usually either by lowering the price or redesigning for a different market or a different set of consumers”. At first glance, Rieff writes,
Wikileaks would seem to be far from this world of business innovation. And yet it isn’t. To the contrary, what Wikileaks does is exactly what a disruptive product does: As with nanotechnology, it supersedes the way information is made available to the general public; and, as with open source software, it challenges the idea of what the public can know and how it can know it.
In the former case, Wikileaks breaks the established transmission network of office holders and diplomats leaking some information to trusted journalists and pundits, who then transmit it to the public. And, in the latter, it insists that there is simply no such thing as proprietary information, which in the context of diplomacy means it does not acknowledge the state’s right to keep secrets. Here, the state is like Microsoft, with its closed-source technology, while Wikileaks is the open-source alternative.
And, again as with open-source software, there is no going back. Julian Assange may go to prison in Sweden, or even be extradited to the United States, and, though it is far less likely, Wikileaks itself may be shut down. But, for better or worse, the Wikileaks model is here to stay. For, as it turns out, the web is not just a place for shopping, or searching for pornographic images, or finding virtual communities of like-minded people, it is the new bloody crossroads of our politics.
This is another example of the thoughtful writing that has emerged as the implications of Cablegate begin to sink in. We really have passed an inflection point. When the history of this period comes to be written, my guess is that the last few weeks will be seen as the point where the established order finally wike up to the fact that it has a serious challenge on its hands.
Quote of the week
“In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.”
WikiLeaks: five expert opinions
The New York Times has a thoughtful set of contributions from various experts on the significance of the WikiLeaks disclosures.
Evgeny Morozov, a Stanford scholar who has a book about the “dark side of Internet freedom” coming out in January, ponders the likelihood that WikiLeaks can be duplicated, and finds it unlikely.
A thousand other Web sites dedicated to leaking are unlikely to have the same effect as WikiLeaks: it would take a lot of time and effort to cultivate similar relationships with the media. Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats.
One possible future for WikiLeaks is to morph into a gigantic media intermediary — perhaps, even something of a clearing house for investigative reporting — where even low-level leaks would be matched with the appropriate journalists to pursue and report on them and, perhaps, even with appropriate N.G.O.’s to advocate on their causes. Under this model, WikiLeaks staffers would act as idea salesmen relying on one very impressive digital Rolodex.
Ron Deibert from the University of Toronto thinks that the “venomous furor” surrounding WikiLeaks, including charges of “terrorism” and calls for the assassination of Julian Assange, has to rank as “one of the biggest temper tantrums in recent years”.
Many lament the loss of individual privacy as we leave digital traces that are then harvested and collated by large organizations with ever-increasing precision. But if individuals are subject to this new ecosystem, what would make anyone think governments or organizations are immune? Blaming WikiLeaks for this state of affairs is like blaming a tremor for tectonic plate shifts.
Certainly a portion of that anger could be mitigated by the conduct of WikiLeaks itself. The cult of personality around Assange, his photoshopped image now pasted across the WikiLeaks Web site, only plays into this animosity. So do vigilante cyberattacks carried out by supporters of WikiLeaks that contribute to a climate of lawlessness and vengeance seeking. If everyone can blast Web sites and services with which they disagree into oblivion — be it WikiLeaks or MasterCard — a total information war will ensue to the detriment of the public sphere.
An organization like WikiLeaks should professionalize and depersonalize itself as much as possible. It should hold itself to the highest possible ethical standards. It should act with the utmost discretion in releasing into the public domain otherwise classified information that comes its way only on the basis of an obvious transgression of law or morality. This has not happened.
Ross Anderson, who is Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge and the author of the standard textbook
Your medical records should be kept in the hospital where you get treated; your bank statements should only be available in the branch you use; and while an intelligence analyst dealing with Iraq might have access to cables on Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, he should have no routine access to information on Korea or Zimbabwe or Brazil. But this is in conflict with managers’ drive for ever broader control and for economies of scale.
The U.S. government has been unable to manage this trade-off, leading to regular upsets and reversals of policy. Twenty years ago, Aldrich Ames betrayed all the C.I.A.’s Russian agents; intelligence data were then carefully compartmentalized for a while. Then after 9/11, when it turned out that several of the hijackers were already known to parts of the intelligence community, data sharing was commanded. Security engineers old enough to remember Ames expected trouble, and we got it.
What’s next? Will risk aversion drive another wild swing of the pendulum, or might we get some clearer thinking about the nature and limits of power?
James Bamford, a writer and documentary producer specializing in intelligence and national security issues, thinks that the WikiLeaks disclosures are useful in forcing governments to confess.
A generation ago, government employees with Communist sympathies worried security officials. Today, after years of torture reports, black sites, Abu Ghraib, and a war founded on deception, it is the possibility that more employees might act out from a sense of moral outrage that concerns officials.
There may be more employees out there willing to leak, they fear, and how do you weed them out? Spies at least had the courtesy to keep the secrets to themselves, rather than distribute them to the world’s media giants. In a sense, WikiLeaks is forcing the U.S. government into the confessional, with the door wide open. And confession, though difficult and embarrassing, can sometimes cleanse the soul.
Fred Alford is Professor of Government at the University of Maryland and thinks that neither the Web operation WikiLeaks, nor its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, is a whistle-blower.
Whistle-blowers are people who observe what they believe to be unethical or illegal conduct in the places where they work and report it to the media. In so doing, they put their jobs at risk.
The whistle-blower in this case is Bradley Manning, an United States Army intelligence analyst who downloaded a huge amount of government classified information, which was made public by WikiLeaks. Whether or not Manning’s act serves the greater public interest is a contentious issue, but he has been arrested and charged with unlawful disclosure of classified data.
Some have compared the role of WikiLeaks to that of The New York Times in the publication of the Pentagon Papers several decades ago. WikiLeaks is the publishing platform that leverages the vast and instantaneous distribution capacity of the Internet.
The WikiLeaks data dump challenges a long held belief by many of us who study whistle-blowing — that it is important that the whistle-blower have a name and face so that the disclosures are not considered just anonymous griping, or possibly unethical activity. The public needs to see the human face of someone who stands up and does the right thing when none of his or her colleagues dare.
But he also thinks that “for better and worse, this changes whistle-blowing as we’ve known it.”