Category Archives: Observer

Networked news

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This morning’s Observer column.

As newspapers fold, the hunt is on for a workable business model for online news. Lots of things are being tried, but none of them provides the revenue growth needed to offset the income siphoned off by changes in media consumption patterns and the diversion of advertising revenues to the web.

Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the “make the bastards pay” school of thought. Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce. And recently a few desperadoes have made the pilgrimage to Capitol Hill seeking legislative assistance and/or federal bailouts for newspapers.

It’s difficult to keep one's head when all about one people are losing theirs, but let us have a go…

Coincidentally, there have been (at least) two other pieces on this general theme this week — an uncharacteristically Daily Mail-type rant by Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times, and an excellent, balanced article in the Economist.

And I’ve been Slashdotted! In the old days, that would mean that the Observer’s servers would fall over.

Later: This is probably all due to Cory blogging the column in BoingBoing. And the biggest irony is that the piece didn’t appear in today’s paper edition of the Observer. No idea why, but I suspect a glitch in the paper’s content management system.

eBay and the Law of Unintended Consequences

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This morning’s Observer column.

In 1936, a Harvard sociologist called Robert K Merton published an article that has haunted politicians and corporate strategists ever since. It was entitled “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” and set out what has become known as the Law of Unintended Consequences (of which Murphy’s Law is a special case).

Merton’s Law says that any purposeful action will produce outcomes that its proponents did not anticipate…

The Two Cultures: fifty years on

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This morning’s Observer column.

…Over the years, Snow’s meme has been subjected to criticism and abuse, but the idea of mutually uncomprehending cultures still seems relevant to understanding why important segments of our society are struggling to come to terms with a networked world. In our case, the gap is not between the humanities and the sciences but those who are obsessed with lock-down and control, on the one hand, and those who celebrate openness and unfettered creativity on the other. The odd thing is that one finds arts and scientific types on both sides of this divide….

The iPhone and telephone-number profits

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This morning’s Observer column.

The significance of the iPhone – as regular readers know – lies in its operating system. It's really a powerful Unix computer that fits into the palm of your hand. That means it can run very sophisticated software – such as a browser that actually makes it feasible to read web pages and even books on a small screen. Add to this the fact that it is also permanently connected to the internet and you have what the rest of the industry is starting to recognise as a game changer.

Actually, the PC business is also beginning to wake up to the threat of the iPhone. How come? Well it turns out that iPhone users make less use of their laptops and desktop computers. The reason is obvious when you think about it: much of what we do on the net is pretty routine – checking email, accessing websites, Googling, accessing Facebook or Twitter. If you can do all that without booting up a computer, why bother?

The iPhone is also transforming the market for software…

Amazon: power – and responsibility

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This morning’s Observer column.

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, his single strategic goal was to “get big quick”. His hunch was that, in online retailing, size and scale would be the ultimate determinants of success. And his vision was never limited to books – they were the obvious starting point, because they are goods that people could buy without having to handle them. But Bezos had much more ambitious plans. He wanted to sell everything that could be sold online. He saw Amazon as potentially the Wal-Mart of the web.

Last week we saw two very different illustrations of how close he has come to achieving his goal…

The Met’s Rodney King moment

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This morning’s Observer column.

The police have two choices. Accept that digital technology will make them accountable for their actions or try to control the technology. In any normal society there would be no decision to be made. But since 9/11 the threat of global terrorism has given the state – and its security apparatus – carte blanche to take whatever measures it deems necessary. And it has imbued in every uniformed operative, from ‘Community Support’ officers and the bobby on the beat to the bored guy in the airport checking your toothpaste, the kind of arrogance we once associated only with authoritarian regimes.

You think I jest? Talk to any keen amateur photographer. As a group, photographers have been subjected to increasingly outrageous harassment by police and security operatives. (For a partial list of incidents see bit.ly/22VFRX). Try photographing a bridge, public building or a police car parked on a double-yellow line and you will have a goon demanding your camera, image card or film.

Better still, ask John Randall, a Tory MP who recently told the Commons how one of his Uxbridge constituents, a Mr Wusche, photographed properties he thought were in bad repair to pass on to the council…

Marina Hyde had a great column on the same subject in yesterday’s Guardian:

If there is anything to feel optimistic about today, perhaps it is the hope that we are witnessing the flowering of an effective inverse surveillance society. Inverse surveillance is a branch of sousveillance, the term coined by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, and it emphasises “watchful vigilance from underneath”, by citizens, of those who survey and control them.

Not that turning our cameras on those who train theirs on us is without risk. Indeed, one might judge it fairly miraculous that the man was not forcibly disarmed of his camera phone, given that it is now illegal to photograph police who may be engaged in activity connected to counterterrorism. And as we know, everything from escorting Beyoncé to parking on a double yellow while you nip in to Greggs for an iced bun can now be justified with that blight of a modern excuse – “security reasons”.

Yet it will by now have dawned on even the most dimwitted Met officer that it is increasingly impossible for them to control the flow of information about their activities – to kettle it, if you will – no matter how big their army of press officers putting out misleading information in the immediate aftermath of any event may be.

Did the Met genuinely think they could prevent the emergence of a far more joined-up picture of Tomlinson’s passage through the City of London that afternoon, much as they thought they could suppress the details about Jean Charles de Menezes’s tragic final journey? If so, their naivety is staggering…

Some people have emailed to say that they find the closing prediction of my column (that police from now on will start confiscating cameras) implausible. Well, they clearly haven’t read Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act, which came into force on 16 February. That makes it an offence to photograph any police officer or member of the armed services in ways that could aid terrorism. As Roger Graef (one of the wisest people I know in this field) pointed out yesterday much — if not most — policing of demonstrations these days is ‘justified’ not just under the Public Order acts, but anti-terror legislation which gives anyone in uniform authority to do or ban almost anything.

In fact, one of the great ironies of the Bob Quick case is that the photographer who took the picture could have been prosecuted under Section 76. And probably would have been if he hadn’t got the picture out quickly.

The bigger picture is that Osama bin Laden has won, hands-down. He provoked Western democracies into an obsession with security that justifies any degree of trampling on liberty. He stimulated the introduction of legislation (like the Patriot Act in the US) and the Counter-Terrorism Act in the UK which enables the State to treat ANY activity, including legitimate democratic activity (like protesting against the looting of the banking system, the launching of a war under false pretences, the banning of fox-hunting or airport expansion) not as a nuisance to the normal business of a city but as a threat to the State itself.

The Wikipedia ‘debate’: time to move on

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This morning’s Observer column.

Unwillingness to entertain the notion that Wikipedia might fly is a symptom of what the legal scholar James Boyle calls ‘cultural agoraphobia’ – our prevailing fear of openness. Like all phobias it’s irrational, so is immune to evidence. I’m tired of listening to brain-dead dinner-party complaints about how ‘inaccurate’ Wikipedia is. I’m bored to death by endless accounts of slurs or libels suffered by a few famous individuals at the hands of Wikipedia vandals. And if anyone ever claims again that all the entries in Wikipedia are written by clueless amateurs, I will hit them over the head with a list of experts who curate material in their specialisms. And remind them of Professor Peter Murray-Rust’s comment to a conference in Oxford: “The bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct.”

Of course Wikipedia has flaws, of course it has errors: show me something that doesn’t. Of course it suffers from vandalism and nutters who contribute stuff to it. But instead of complaining about errors, academics ought to be in there fixing them. Wikipedia is one of the greatest inventions we have. Isn’t it time we accepted it? Microsoft has.

New Labour’s dream: the national surveillance state

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This morning’s Observer column.

There’s a delicious moment in Alastair Beaton’s satirical film, The Trial of Tony Blair, in which the former prime minister is finally arrested for war crimes on a warrant from the international criminal court. One scene shows the standard police procedure as Blair is inducted by the desk sergeant in a London station. Towards the end of the rigmarole, the policeman moves to take a saliva swab from him.

Blair is aghast, asks him what he is doing and – after the policeman has explained that he’s taking a DNA sample – asks who brought in such a stupid law. “You did, sir,” is the response…

Tweetie pie

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This morning’s Observer column.

Twitter’s been around for ages, but it’s now gone ‘mainstream’ – ie, been taken up by the brain-dead media, possibly because they’ve discovered that celebs have Twitter accounts. Jonathan Ross (@wossy in Twitterspeak) used it to send dispatches to his admirers during his banishment from the airwaves. I’ve just checked and he has 156,092 followers. But this horde is dwarfed by Stephen Fry’s (@stephenfry) 321,578.

This gives Mr Fry a certain amount of clout. A few months ago he pronounced on the BlackBerry Storm, a new phone being touted by Vodafone. “Shockingly bad,” he tweeted. “I mean embarrassingly awful. Such a disappointment. Rushed out unfinished. What a pity.” Given that many Twitterers are, like Mr Fry, gadget freaks, his tweets effectively shut down that corner of the market.

Suddenly companies are beginning to think that having a lot of Twitter followers might be a good idea…

LATER: Jason Calcanis’s stunt generated an inspired spoof about Twitter “premium accounts”.

Rash predictions and cloud computing

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This morning’s Observer column.

So what about [Tom] Watson’s prediction of the world market for [five] computers? Once again, there’s no convincing evidence he ever said it. According to Wikipedia, the earliest known citation is in the email signature of a Usenet member in 1986, which simply says “remark attributed to Thomas J Watson (chairman of the board of International Business Machines), 1943” – not exactly an impeccable source.

Nevertheless, Watson was on many people’s minds this week, after a talk given in San Francisco by Rick Rashid, the computer scientist who now heads Microsoft’s formidable research division. According to the Financial Times reporter who broke the story, Rashid said that “around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies – he named Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon”.

If true, that’s an amazing statistic, and one that suggests we are well on the way to the kind of world supposedly envisaged by Watson.