Category Archives: Media ecology

End of the road for H.264?

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This clipping from GMSV’s coverage of the Google Developers’ conference is interesting.

The announcement with the biggest implications down the road was the unveiling of WebM, an open-source, royalty-free video codec based on VP8. It’s being positioned as the standard for video in HTML5 rather than the proprietary H.264 or the royalty-free but problematic Theora. Yep, you with the glazing eyes: Adoption of H.264 could mean fees imposed on content distributors and providers, though so far the license holders have waived collection. Those license holders include Microsoft and Apple — and Apple is the notable abstainer in the chorus of support for VP8. Could get interesting.

Yep. And the most interesting thing about it is that it’s open source.

Gravitational pull

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This morning’s Observer column.

So, here we were in this small room. On the table, lying open on a cushion, was Isaac Newton's copy of the first edition of his Principia Mathematica or, to give it its full title, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the book in which he sets out his laws of motion (the basis of classical mechanics), as well as the law of universal gravitation, his derivation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion and much else besides. It was the keystone of the scientific revolution and was written at Trinity College, just down the road.

On closer inspection, it became clear that the book had been in the wars. It had at some stage, for example, been rescued from a fire. Some of the pages were singed round the edges, but the miracle of its survival paled into insignificance as one turned the pages, because Newton had clearly been dissatisfied with the first edition of his magnum opus. On page after page he had written corrections and added entire paragraphs in his immaculate, tiny handwriting.

What we were looking at was not the creation of this amazing work but, in a way, its recreation…

The BBC’s Ship of Fools

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Watching the BBC’s election night coverage one wondered if the Corporation’s executives had been gripped with a death wish. If ever there was a way of illustrating the Murdoch ratpack’s caricature of the BBC as an overmighty, taxpayer-featherbedded Quango, then the idea of chartering (for £30k, I understand) a Thames party barge and loading it up with drunken celebs, most of whom know zilch about politics, was a pretty good way of doing it. And the election studio, a cross between the bridge of a starship and a design-student’s diploma portfolio submission, seemingly required so much processing power that it couldn’t keep up with a simple RSS feed. All hat and no cattle, as LBJ might have said. These and other points were nicely made by Neil Midgley in his Telegraph review. Sample:

Unlike her exemplary [leaders’] debate production, Auntie did not shine on election night. Yes, it was a lovely big studio with the potential for lots of sweeping long shots, and far nicer – despite all the computer enhancement ITV could muster – than the ITN basement in Grays Inn Road. But a big chunk of the BBC’s graphics wall failed within the first five minutes, leading to a hurried close-up of Dimbleby that was no whizzier than ITV’s presentation of Alastair Stewart.

As they promised, ITV seemed faster with the results than either the BBC or Sky. Detail matters: unlike the BBC, ITV’s on-screen presentation of each constituency’s result gave us the crucial fact – the swing – from the get-go.

ITV made much better use of social media and citizen reporting, with Phil Reay-Smith getting genuine insight from bloggers Guido Fawkes and Will Straw. (Meanwhile, the BBC was on the boat with Bruce Forsyth.) As stories of voting irregularities started to dominate proceedings in the absence of concrete results, ITV had YouTube footage of frustrated voting queues in Manchester. (Meanwhile, the BBC was on the boat with Joan Collins.)

Downfall lives!

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Amazing stuff from Brandon Hardesty. Now let’s see how the IP lawyers will address this challenge. Infringement of the scriptwriter’s copyright, perhaps?

It’s had over 93,000 views already.

Are “Digital Journalists” really “scabs”?

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Sylvia Paull has an angry post headed “The new scabs: digital journalists”.

ABC announced a layoff of hundreds of journalists this week and said it would work instead mostly with “digital journalists,” people who can do a variety of tasks, such as blog, tweet, and take digital photos. This is the first time I’ve heard the term “digital journalist,” and I’m not sure what distinguishes such a journalist from every other journalist who now must use the Web to report and communicate except that they are certainly much cheaper to hire.

A digital journalist probably doesn’t accrue vacation time, sick leave, or a pension. A digital journalist probably works on a contract basis and like many of the freelance journalists I know who once worked for a news organization, they write for several media rather than just one.

I wonder whether graduate schools of journalism now produce journalists or digital journalists. And can someone go from being a journalist to being a digital journalist, or does the journalist have to downgrade his or her reporting and communications skills first?

I can understand her anger/irritation, but the mindset implicit in her terminology is revealing. Mass-media print publication was a mass-production culture: and it prompted the rise of trade unions to provide protection from employees employed to work on what were effectively production lines. The term ‘scab’ (i.e. strikebreaker) comes from the early history of campaigning by unions who used withdrawal of labour as a weapon.

But the era of mass-production print is drawing to a close, and with it most of its associated baggage, including large bodies of unionised workers. It’s difficult at present to see what will replace the print system, but you can bet that it won’t be the licence to print money represented by ownership of printing presses and distribution networks in the analog age. A new business model for journalism will, I’m sure, eventually emerge, but it won’t be one that generates the vast profits enjoyed until recently by many traditional publishers. It’ll be leaner, more innovative, less stable and more competitive. So when leaders of the print culture portray the Net as the great destroyer of journalism, what they’re really complaining about is that it’s a destroyer of their cosy old local monopolies. For them, the undermining of journalism is just collateral damage.

None of this is meant to imply any enthusiasm on my part for what ABC has done, btw. The big danger in all this is that a new set of monopolists (Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) will turn everyone into sharecroppers.

Paxman’s nemesis

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For me, the most memorable moment of the election campaign so far was not Gordon Brown’s “Bigotgate” but Jeremy Paxman’s humiliation at the hands of the economics spokesman for the Welsh Nationalist party. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a great admirer of Paxo, whom I knew slightly (and liked a lot) when I was the Observer‘s TV critic. He’s one of the ornaments of the UK journalistic scene, and a great adversarial interviewer. His Newsnight interview with Michael Howard is one of the classics of the genre. He’s also — unusually for a TV professional — quite a good writer.

But he met his match the other night. At first, the interview appeared to be following the standard script. The Welsh Nats are a joke in metropolitan circles, of which Newsnight is the epicentre, and Paxo’s approach embodies this contempt. The question implied by his body language is “Who is this provincial hick and why are we bothering with him? Oh well, let’s get it over with.” And note the elegant sarcasm implicit in the reference to the “august position” of the interviewee, who is chairman of the Principality Building Society. I ask you — a building society!.

But then… Well, see for yourself.

The most revealing bit is Paxman’s exasperation at being asked to consult pages of tedious statistics, and his pique at being accused of not doing his homework. His interviewee is daring to hold him — Jeremy Paxman — to account. But imagine how his inquisitorial indignation would be stoked if a politician sighed impatiently when asked to examine a page of statistical evidence containing what Paxo regarded as clinching evidence of malfeasance.

Memo to future Paxman interviewees: master the detail and stick to it. Challenge him on statistics — the more detailed the better. Remember that grandees like Paxman don’t do detail. It’s below their pay-grade. And make sure the result goes straight onto YouTube — in case the BBC pulls it from iPlayer.

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid

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This morning’s Observer column.

Sadly, there is no cure for megalomania. But venture capitalists ought to start funding the search for a cure, because it’s costing many of them a lot of money, and is likely to cost even more in the future.

Here’s how it works. A smart entrepreneur – a Harvard dropout, say, or some guy who made a lot of money by selling off his last venture to some clueless multinational – starts up a web business which grows like crazy by attracting millions of subscribers who use its services for free. Pretty soon, it's got 400 million of them and everyone is saying: “Wow! 400 million users! That must be good for something.”

Then several things happen. Firstly, the proprietor of the sensation du jour starts drinking the Kool-Aid and contracts the aforementioned megalomania. He begins to fantasise that he could own the whole internet. Secondly, thousands of other entrepreneurs think “Wow! He could own the whole internet. We need to make sure our stuff has hooks into his stuff. Otherwise, we’re toast.” And then the mainstream media, whose insights into this could be written in 96-point Helvetica bold on the back of a postage stamp, are going around saying, “Jeez, this stuff is the real deal. How do we get onside?”

Facebook claims that 50k sites have already adopted ‘Like’ buttons

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From TechCrunch.

Facebook has just given us an idea of how quickly these widgets are being adopted: a week after f8, 50,000 websites now feature the Like button and the other new plugins.

75 of those websites were Facebook’s launch partners, which included sites like CNN and the New York Times — everyone else handled the integration on their own, which Facebook has made very straightforward (it generally just involves copy-and-pasting a few lines of code). This growth is important, because as more sites integrate these social widgets, Facebook will increasingly own social interaction across the web.

We’ve also confirmed that Facebook met and surpassed Mark Zuckerberg’s prediction that Facebook users would hit see the ‘Like’ button 1 billion times in its first 24 hours of existence. Not a bad start. Update: A Facebook spokesman has clarified that Zuckerberg was referring to the number of impressions the Like button had, not how many times people clicked the Like button.

Aside from the Like Button, Facebook’s other social plugins include an activity feed that displays your friends’ activity, a widget with recommended articles, and the Facepile, which shows you photos of your friends who also use the site you’re browsing.