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.

Net neutrality and the Schleswig-Holstein question

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?

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…

Old Europe takes on Google

The news that the EU has decided to investigate whether Google is abusing its dominance of the market for internet searches naturally led your columnist to type "Google abuses market dominance" into, well, Google. In 0.19 seconds it reported 4.4 million results.

The same query typed into Bing, Microsoft's search engine, produced only 362,000 hits. On the other hand, typing "Microsoft abuses market dominance" into Bing produced only 218,000 results, whereas the same query produced 665,000 results in Google. From which we can draw two conclusions. The first is that the algorithmic machinations of search engines, like the Peace of God, passeth all understanding. The second is that the EU is about to spend a few years, and several million euros, coming to the same conclusion…

This morning’s Observer column.

Why the Establishment hates the Net

This morning’s Observer column.

Two disconnected events last week showed how far we still have to go in understanding our new communications environment. In one, an Anglican bishop was suspended for some remarks he made on his Facebook page about the forthcoming wedding of two graduates of St Andrews University. In the other, a 27-year-old accountant had his appeal against a conviction for posting a joke message on Twitter dismissed.

First, the bishop…

Facebook, Google and the battle for the inbox

This morning’s Observer column.

The trouble with email, as the parent of every teenager knows, is that it’s so, well … yesterday. I mean to say, you have to think of a “subject” and whether you’re going to start the message with “Dear” or “Hi!” or “Yo!”. And then there’s the problem of what you put at the end: “See you!” or “xxx” or “Gotta go…” And don’t even mention the issue of the ‘signature’ at the end of the message – you know, “Sent from my iPhone” and all that. And on top of that, there’s the fact that email isn’t synchronous. You could send a message and the other person might not see it for, well, at least five minutes.

Hopeless.

This is the context in which Facebook’s latest ‘messages’ initiative needs to be seen…

Richard Harper — whose new book I am enjoying — also has a nice piece about communications overload in the paper this morning. His conclusion:

Zuckerberg’s announcement has hit a nerve – but not because of the number of messages we now receive. It’s because his announcement is asking us to think about who we want to be and how we convey that through our communications. These are human questions, not technical ones, and all the more important because of it.

What’s the point of The Social Network?

This morning’s Observer column.

Lessig’s point is that it’s the open internet that should be the real hero of the story. “What’s important here,” he writes, “is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without – and here is the critical bit – asking the permission of anyone.” That’s true, but I think Lessig is too harsh. The message he wants the film to communicate is there in the screenplay if you look hard enough. It lies in the film’s portrayal of the contrast between what happens to unauthorised innovation on a closed, tightly controlled system and what’s possible with the open, uncontrolled architecture of the internet.

The Mac Apps store: a harbinger of … what?

This morning’s Observer column.

A couple of weeks ago, Apple announced some new products, including a fancy new lightweight laptop and the latest version of the OS X operating system. In the midst of all the techno-porn, however, Steve Jobs dropped a little bombshell: Apple is opening an online store to sell Mac apps, ie small programs akin to those sold for the iPhone and iPad.

So what? you say. And you may be right. But since Apple is now one of the biggest companies in the world (by market value), nothing that it announces will go unexamined. In the blogosphere, there has been much speculation about what the Mac app store portends.

Opinions vary from the bored to the apocalyptic…

The £500m question

This morning’s Observer column.

The news that, according to the national security review at least, cyber attack comes second only to terrorism as the gravest security threat facing the nation will have come as a great surprise to most citizens. We are conscious of the annoyances of malware, viruses, worms, spam and phishing, but for most these are just minor irritations, not threats to the nation's survival.

Yet the other day we had the foreign secretary gravely intoning why, in the midst of the most savage spending cuts in living memory, it is suddenly necessary to give an extra £500m to GCHQ to protect us against nemesis in cyberspace. At the same time, in America, we see the Pentagon setting up a whole new cyber command, USCybercom, with all the usual paraphernalia and awash with funding.

What, you might ask, is going on?

There seem to be two broad answers to the question…

Reading the pulse

This morning’s Observer column.

One of the few comical aspects of the spending review is the frantic attempts by all concerned to predict how the victims of Osborne's axe will respond. The major newspaper groups and the Tory party will of course be deploying the usual – expensive – steam-age tools: opinion polls and focus groups. The cash-strapped Labour and Liberal Democrat parties may have to resort to cheaper techniques – inspecting the entrails of slaughtered goats, perhaps. In the interests of levelling the playing field, therefore, this column offers them a better idea: intelligent data-mining on Twitter.

It’s taken a while for the penny to drop, but finally the world is waking up to the fact that the phenomenon of social networking might actually tell us useful things about what's happening out there in the world beyond the Washington Beltway and the Westminster village. Not only that, but the resulting data might even be useful for predicting what’s likely to happen…