Category Archives: Media ecology

Why Germans get their Flickrs in a twist over ‘censorship’

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This morning’s Observer column…

The Flickr firestorm is just the latest refutation of the enduring myth that the internet is uncontrollable. While technologically adept users can usually find anything they’re looking for, the vast majority of the internet’s 1.1 billion users are at the mercy of local laws, ordinances and customs.

Flickr users in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea are finding themselves at the sharp end of this, because Yahoo needs to conform to local laws if it is to continue to trade in those jurisdictions. The same forces explain why Google provides only a restricted search service to its Chinese users. Libertarianism is all very well when you’re a hacker. But business is business.

The Magnatune revolution

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Fascinating openDemocracy article by John Buckman about Magnatune.

Four years ago, inspired by the open-source movement, I launched Magnatune – an internet-based record label based on a model I called “open music”. At the time, the major-label music industry was on a self-destructive rampage, destroying companies that attempted new business models and trying to create an all-pervasive “permission society”. Their customers hated them, and “piracy”, far from being seen as anti-social behaviour, was viewed as a strike against injustice: copying music illegally as facilitating the demise of a malevolent system.

Against this backdrop, I use the slogan “we are not evil” for Magnatune, to encompass everything I wanted the music business to be. This is stronger than Google’s “don’t be evil”, which is a recommendation, a goal, but not a rule. “We are not evil” means that we won’t ever do anything evil, but it also insinuates that someone else in the music industry is evil. It also means – and with interesting results – that Magnatune can’t get involved in certain parts of the music business (for example, physical CD distribution) because those areas demand its participants to be evil or they don’t have a chance of surviving…

Read on. It’s a good story of an ingenious idea which is already enjoying modest success.

John Buckman is the founder/owner of the record label Magnatune, and organiser of the peer-to-peer book exchange BookMooch (which is also very ingenious). He is a member of the board of directors at Creative Commons and the advisory board of the Open Rights Group

Buy radio advertising slots on eBay

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From yesterday’s Radio Time to Join List of eBay Items Up for Auction – New York Times…

SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 — The auction giant eBay said it would begin selling radio airtime to advertisers starting Wednesday, expanding into a business that Google entered last year

EBay, through a partnership with Bid4Spots, a 2-year-old company in Encino, Calif., will offer advertisers a way to buy unsold radio inventory from 2,300 radio stations in the top 300 media markets in the United States

Advertisers can go shopping for airtime on the eBay Media Marketplace, originally a forum for cable television ads which began in March. EBay was hired to create the service by a consortium of major advertisers like Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Home Depot.

But the eBay ad exchange has had little success so far. Broadcasters have vocally protested that they were not adequately consulted on its development and that it goes too far in removing people from the process. Only Oxygen, the cable network, currently sells some of its ad time on eBay’s service…

Caught in the grip of geekvision

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This morning’s Observer column…

I’m watching a video stream from downtown San Francisco. It’s 1am there. The video is shot from inside a car. An idiotic music channel is pumping audiopap through the vehicle’s stereo system. The driver has recently pulled into a fast food outlet and ordered a chocolate milkshake and a steakburger. Now we’re back on the road. I’ve no idea where the car is headed. The driver has a companion, with whom he exchanges genial but low-key wisecracks…

Facebook enters phase of exponential growth

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Watch out, MySpace. Facebook’s on the rise. Interesting Yahoo! News report about Facebook opening up to third-party developers as well as non-graduates.

After the site opened up registration to non-college students last September, it evolved into a major social networking destination to rival MySpace.com, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate News Corp.

Facebook now has more than 24 million users who have logged on in the past 30 days. Venture capital firms including Accel Partners have contributed more than $35 million.

Critics say Facebook — which is getting more than 100,000 new registrations per day — can’t maintain its scorching growth rate. Others worry that [founder Mark] Zuckerberg and the company’s other 20-something technophiles lack the experience and credibility to turn the site into a profitable, publicly traded company.

On Thursday in San Francisco, Zuckerberg — who sported a fleece jacket, baggy jeans and flip-flops — seemed well aware of the challenges ahead. Technical gaffes dogged his nearly hour-long speech, and he broke out in a visible sweat.

“We’re the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S. and we can’t seem to get our act together,” Zuckerberg joked as he fumbled to synchronize his presentation slides, which were in disarray.

After laughs from the crowd, he regained his composure and added, “We recently passed eBay in traffic and we’re working on passing Google, too.”

Our changing media ecosystem

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An excerpt from Jenny Abramsky’s speech to the Radio Academy

Students of BBC job titles, and I am sure there are many in this room, may have noticed that last summer the BBC had a Director of Television and a Director of Radio … but no longer. There is now a Director of BBC Vision and my title is now Director of Audio & Music.

Why the change? Not because we think radio doesn’t still exist, but because there’s a whole world of audio out there now, not just radio.

The fact is that all newspapers are going into audio online with their own podcasts and audio programmes. The Sunday Times offers a Music Show. The Guardian – a round up of European football action. The Observer – a weekly Film Review. Gillian’s own newspaper, the Telegraph, regards itself as multimedia, not simply print.

Individual artists like Ricky Gervais are going direct to audiences with their own podcast content. This is a world of audio where radio is just a part. There’s a new video world – of Google News and Microsoft – where television is just a part.

If the BBC is going to thrive in this 21st century global media market, it has to recognise the broadcasting world has changed and make the investment that’s needed in new ways of reaching audiences and delivering high quality content, even when it has a tight licence fee settlement.

It also has to make the case for its continued existence in a world that’s increasingly dominated by huge global players like Google and Apple…

How blogging changes the journalistic interview

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Jeff Jarvis had a thoughtful piece about the impact of blogging on journalistic interviewing. Excerpt:

Scott Rosenberg, founder of Salon.com, responded on his blog: “But mostly, it’s because reporters hope to use the conversational environment as a space in which to prod, wheedle, cajole and possibly trip up their interviewee. Any reporter who doesn’t admit this is lying, either to his listener or to himself.” Rosenberg extends his conspiracy theory to argue that phoners “have the additional advantage of (usually) leaving no record, giving journalism’s more malicious practitioners a chance to distort without exposure, and its lazier representatives an opportunity to goof without fear.”

Well, I say there’s a better way. The asynchronous email interview allows the subject to actually think through an answer – and, again, if information is the goal, what’s the harm in that? If the reporter has time to edit the words to be more accurate and articulate, why shouldn’t the source? Putting the exchange in writing also puts it on the record so no one can claim misquotation. Of course, quotes may still be taken out of context, but the solution to that is the link: why shouldn’t any quote in a story link to its place in the fuller interview? There’s the context.

I spent an hour yesterday doing an email interview and found it much more satisfactory than the conventional audio or TV version.

Indians don’t blog, apparently

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So Foreign Policy magazine claims:

India is known for its vibrant public discourse on everything from politics to Bollywood. But in this nation of 42 million Internet users, those conversations aren’t happening online. Recent research suggests India has just 1.2 million bloggers. By comparison, China has around 30 million. One northern India-based blog-hosting company, Ibibo, has even resorted to offering cash prizes to entice people to blog regularly. Indians’ tendency to be bashful about blogging appears to stem in part from a problem of perception. “The perception [is] that blogging is for people possessing superior writing skills,” says Ibibo executive Rahul Razdan. In a country where nearly 40 percent of people are illiterate, that perception spells trouble. Before blogs can burgeon, Indians may need to learn their ABCs.