Category Archives: Observer

Freedom from the Cloud?

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This morning’s Observer column.

“The novelties of one generation,” said George Bernard Shaw, “are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.” An excellent illustration is provided by the computing industry, which – despite its high-tech exterior – is as prone to fashion swings as the next business. Witness the current excitement about the news that, on 2 March, Apple is due to announce details of the new iPad, the latest incarnation of what the Register disrespectfully calls an “uber-popular fondleslab”. Yves Saint Laurent would have killed for that kind of excitement about a forthcoming collection.

To put the hysteria into some kind of context, however, consider how we got into this mess…

WikiLeaks: Big Business has wised up and it ain’t pretty

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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…

From ridiculous to essential: the history of Twitter

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My Observer piece about Twitter.

“When a true genius appears in the world”, wrote Jonathan Swift, “you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him”. Thus it was in July 2006 when Twitter appeared. It was a “microblogging” service that allowed one to broadcast one’s thoughts to the world, on one condition: that they should be expressible in not more than 140 characters.

I thought it was a work of genius the first moment I laid eyes on it.

But most normal people, and not a few of my friends, thought otherwise…

Understanding Steve

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This morning’s Observer column.

Watching Jobs in action, I've always had the feeling that there's something eerily familiar about him. But it wasn't until I read a new book, The Master Switch, by Columbia law professor Tim Wu, that the penny dropped. The book chronicles the history of the major communications industries of the 20th century and finds that pivotal moments in their evolution came when an entrepreneur arrived to offer consumers higher quality, production values and/or greater ease of use than were being delivered by the incumbents…

Wanted: more subversive innovation

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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.

Why the BBC’s old guard called time on the Wibbly Wobbly Web

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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.

What if the Winklevii had never heard of Zuckerberg?

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This morning’s Observer column.

If the exchanges in the courtroom are anything to go by, the Winklevii face an uphill task. One of the judges observed, for example, that the twins were sophisticated enough to understand the deal they had settled for. “The founders are pretty smart people themselves,” he observed. “They also had five lawyers from two firms sitting there with them. The twins also have a father from Wharton school, who is very bright. It wasn’t like an individual without help. If you have all of those people there to advise you, isn’t it a little difficult to say this is one of those things in which they were taken advantage of?” The twins' lawyer, Jerome Falk, appeared to concur with this. “I agree,” he said, “that my clients were not behind the barn door when brains were passed out.”

So my guess is that the Winklevii will have to be content with their 2008 settlement. But their case raises an intriguing question: what would have happened if they had never heard of Zuckerberg?

Keeping a record

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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.

Net neutrality and the Schleswig-Holstein question

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This morning’s Observer column.

Readers with long memories will recall the celebrated Schleswig-Holstein question. This referred to a bundle of thorny diplomatic and other issues arising from the relations of two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, to the Danish crown and to the German Confederation. It was the bane of diplomats' lives in the late 19th century, but we remember it nowadays mainly because of Lord Palmerston’s famous wisecrack about it. “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated,” he said, “that only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.”

The issue of "net neutrality" is the Schleswig-Holstein question de nos jours…

My colleague, Ray Corrigan, has a written a very informative review of what is probably the most scholarly book to have emerged so far on the question of Net Neutrality — Christopher Marsden’s Net Neutrality: Towards a Co-regulatory Solution

What’s a ‘book’ then?

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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…