Category Archives: Media ecology

Why Did Google Buy Jaiku?

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According to Technology Review, it’s all about mobile phones.

The terms of the deal haven’t been announced, but regardless of Jaiku’s price tag, the purchase could be a significant one. Google has long been rumored to be working on a mobile phone, or “gPhone”; Jaiku was originally developed as software for cell phones, and one of the company’s cofounders, Jyri Engeström, was a product manager at Nokia.

While Google has refused to comment directly on whether it’s developing mobile-phone products, its activities over the past few months indicate that it is. Google has announced its intention to bid on a large swath of spectrum in early 2008; it has acquired a mobile-phone software startup, Android, based in Palo Alto, CA; and in a handful of public statements, representatives of the company have alluded to trying to make the mobile experience better. When asked for comment, Google referred to its public statement about the purchase: “Although we don’t have definite plans to announce at this time, we’re excited about helping to drive the next round of developments in Web and mobile technology.”

Hmmm… Pure speculation, of course.

Freakonomics and Radiohead

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Interesting comment by Simon Goodley:

From this week, those wanting to listen to the boys’ next LP, In Rainbows, can pay as much or as little as they like for the album, which will be available to download on the band’s website.

It is a classic honour system, most famously described by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their bestseller Freakonomics (which inspired this stunt, some eggheads insist).

Because the Radiohead sale is being conducted online (where customers register) the whole thing could end up telling us quite a lot about Radiohead fans.

Similarly, in Levitt and Dubner’s work, an entrepreneur who delivers bagels to companies decides that, rather than hanging around and waiting for each customer to pay him in turn, he will simply leave behind a cash box and a note asking them to leave what they owe.

Amazingly, the sharks in America’s offices didn’t bankrupt him after a week and payment rates consistently hovered around 90pc. Meanwhile, his accounts unearthed some fascinating trends…

Wiki wars

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From the Telegraph…

Submission of new articles is slowing to a trickle where in previous years it was flood, and the discussion pages are increasingly filled with arguments and cryptic references to policy documents. The rise of the deletionists is threatening the hitherto peaceful growth of the world’s most popular information source.

Even though anyone can edit all but the most controversial pages, the English-language Wikipedia is governed by a group of a little over 1,000 administrators drawn from the ranks of enthusiastic editors. Only they have the power to finally delete an article or bring it back from the dead.

The group is forming itself into two factions: inclusionists and deletionists…

Decline of the record industry, contd.

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From TechCrunch…

Since reporting Monday that Nine Inch Nails had dumped its record label and was to offer future albums direct to the public, Oasis and Jamiroquai have also joined the move away from the record industry, but the biggest announcement of all is news today that Madonna has dumped the record industry.

According to reports, Madonna has signed a $120million deal with L.A. based concert promotion firm Live Nation to distribute three studio albums, promote concert tours, sell merchandise and license Madonna’s name.

Whilst the deal differs from Nine Inch Nails in that Madonna is not offering direct-to-public albums, Live Nation isn’t a record company. The deal shows that even for a world famous act, a record company is no longer required in the days of digital downloads and P2P music sharing.

The only real question now is how fast will the music industry model come tumbling down. When Radiohead led the way in offering their music directly to fans many predicted that the move was the beginning of the end; Madonna may well be the tipping point from where we will now see a flood of recording artists dumping record labels and where todays model will shortly become a footnote in Wikipedia.

A message from our (newly rich) founders

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On Jaiku’s front page this morning.

Wonderful Jaiku users,

Exciting news, Jaiku is joining Google!

While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.

But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.

Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders

Note the formulation: “Jaiku is joining Google”. Touching, isn’t it.

There’s some surprise in the Blogosphere that Google went for Jaiku rather than the market leader, Twitter. Tim O’Reilly, however, isn’t surprised.

The implications of infinite storage

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Interesting post by Ed Felten…

Last week I spoke on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage”, at the “Pop [Music] and Policy” conference at McGill University in Montreal. The panel’s title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we’ll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds all of the music ever recorded by humanity.

This is a simple consequence of Moore’s Law which, in one of its variants, holds that the amount of data storage available at a fixed size and price roughly doubles every eighteen months. Extrapolate that trend and, depending on your precise assumptions, you’ll find the magic date falls somewhere between 2011 and 2019. From then on, storage capacity might as well be infinite, at least as far as music is concerned.

This has at least two important consequences. First, it strains even further the economics of the traditional music business. The gap between the number of songs you might want to listen to, and the number you’re willing and able to pay a dollar each to buy, is growing ever wider. In a world of infinite storage you’ll be able to keep around a huge amount of music that is potentially interesting but not worth a dollar (or even a dime) to you yet. So why not pay a flat fee to buy access to everything?

Second, infinite storage will enable new ways of building filesharing technologies, which will be much harder for copyright owners to fight. For example, today’s filesharing systems typically have users search for a desired song by contacting strangers who might have the song, or who might have information about where the song can be found. Copyright owners’ technical attacks against filesharing often target this search feature, trying to disrupt it or to exploit the fact that it involves communication with strangers.

But in a world of infinite storage, no searching is needed…

Berkeley puts courses videos on YouTube

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Yep — according to TechCrunch…

The University of California Berkeley has started uploading video recordings of course lectures on to YouTube.

The initial round of lectures covers 300 hours of video on subjects including Chemistry, Physics and Non-Violence, with more content to come. The move by Berkeley is claimed to be a first by some, however some of the videos have been previously available elsewhere, including iTunes and Google Video; perhaps it’s a first for YouTube…

Here’s Sergey Brin’s lecture on search engines.

Later: Tony Hirst’s built a neat little search engine for the Berkeley shows.

All the news that’s fit to Digg

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This is really interesting — a summary by the Pew Research Center of a survey conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people?

If a new crop of user-news sites — and measures of user activity on mainstream news sites — are any indication, the news agenda will be more diverse, more transitory, and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources, according to a new study. The report, released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compares the news agenda of the mainstream media for one week with the news agenda found on a host of user-news sites for the same period.

In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites — Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us — were more focused on stories like the release of Apple’s new iphone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth. The report also found subtle differences in three other forms of user-driven content within one site: Yahoo News’ Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed…

The full report is available here.

This is useful in redressing the balance in the debate about the relationship of user-driven media to mainstream journalism. There’s an assumption that almost anything would be better than the skewed news agendas of mainstream media — that the Jeffersonian ‘marketplace in ideas’ will lead, inevitably, to closer approximations to the truth. This survey, sketchy and inadequate though it is, and Cass Sunstein’s new book, Infotopia: how many minds produce knowledge, (which I’ve been reading) cast some doubts on that comfortable assumption.

Which is a bit distressing, to say the least. It’s always uncomfortable having one’s cherished illusions undermined.

Nick Carr is not in the least distressed by all this, btw. Itr probably confirms what he’s suspected all along.

Rory Cellan-Jones’s report on the survey is here.

150 years of the Irish Times to go online

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Wow! This could be very useful to some of us who hail from that part of the world…

The Irish Times has created an online archive of nearly 150 years of content from the newspaper.

The digital catalogue contains every issue of the newspaper, from its first on March 29, 1859, to the present day and can be accessed through the paper’s website.

To create the archive, which will be officially launched in early October, the Irish Times digitised over 1,100 reels of microfilm – with each reel containing 700 page images.

Access to the reproduction newspaper pages, which are keyword searchable, will costs users from €10 for a 24-hour pass – though schools and libraries will have free access to the service…

Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.