Category Archives: Observer

1984: a bit delayed, but we’re getting there

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This morning’s Observer column.

The future, as the novelist William Gibson observed, ‘is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed’. One place where it might be found is Mount Holly, Berkeley County, South Carolina. I’ve just flown over it (courtesy of Google Earth), and you’d never think it was a place where our destiny lies. The terrain is flat and wooded and includes some magnolia plantations. There’s a highway and what looks like a railway line (the image resolution isn’t great). The nearest town is Goose Creek, a settlement of 30,000 souls.

So why is this obscure spot a pivot of the universe?

Digital Restrictions Management

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This morning’s Observer column…

DRM was in the news because of EMI’s unexpected announcement that, starting next month, it will sell its stuff on iTunes in two flavours: one is the standard, DRM-crippled variety; the other a premium version with higher audio quality and without DRM.

The announcement came as a bolt from the blue, though I suppose that if anyone had spotted Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, going through Heathrow they might have suspected that something big was afoot. Mr Jobs does not normally descend to earth for anything as mundane as another company’s press conferences. But there he was on the platform, alongside EMI’s chief executive, Eric Nicoli. Selling digital music DRM-free is the right step forward for the music industry, intoned Steve. EMI has been a great partner for iTunes and is once again leading the industry as the first major music company to offer its entire digital catalogue DRM-free…

The very model of a modern creative society? I don’t think so

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This morning’s Observer column…

[Tom] Lehrer is famous for many things, but chief among them is his famous observation that ‘satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize’. The song of his that I like most is ‘The Elements Song’, in which he recites the names of all the elements of the periodic table at high speed and without fudging a syllable, while at the same time playing a stirring piano accompaniment of what he described as ‘a barely recognisable tune’. It’s an astonishing performance and it resides happily on my iPod.

The other day, I chanced on a link to a lovely piece of Flash animation (see it for yourself here), in which a chap named Mike Stanfill took the Lehrer soundtrack and visually added the names of the elements in a witty – and technically very demanding – way. My first reaction was pure pleasure. My second thought was that this provides a good object lesson for understanding the current debate about intellectual property in a digital age…

Later… Adam Hodgkin pointed out a lovely Lehrer song about the virtues of plagiarism!

Viacom, YouTube and Joost

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This morning’s Observer column…

Think of it as mud-wrestling, but at a higher level. Viacom is suing Google for a billion dollars because YouTube (which Google purchased a while back for $1.6bn) continues to host clips of Viacom’s video properties. The documents launching the suit express moral outrage wrapped in three coats of prime legal verbiage. The gist, however, is clear: nasty bully Google is getting rich on the back of poor little artists and the companies that support them…

Digital sharecropping

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This morning’s Observer column — about user-generated content…

The London bombings of 7 July 2005 marked the first time we had seen such content impact on traditional news media in Britain. On that terrible day there was far too much going on, in too many locations, and movement was so restricted after the initial shock, that networks found themselves unable to cope and were desperate for any footage and imagery that became available. It flooded in from the cameraphones and digital cameras of observers on (and under) the ground; a lot of it was striking, moving and informative; some was tasteless, even ghoulish. But whatever its characteristics, it was greedily accepted by the networks. Mainstream media suddenly began to understand what user-generated content meant…

Dell and the value of crapware

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This morning’s Observer column…

Of late, however, Dell has hit a bad patch. Senior executives have been fired, opted to spend more time with their families or departed to take up promising new careers in the fast-food industry. Michael Dell, the company’s flamboyant founder, has returned to take command of the listing ship. And as part of his attempts to revitalise the company, Mr Dell and his team had a Big Idea: why not ask customers for their ideas about what should be done?

Thus was born IdeaStorm, Dell’s effort to harness the collective intelligence of its actual and potential customers. It was launched on 16 February and has turned out to be very popular. Hordes of people signed up to volunteer their ideas. And that, of course, is where the trouble started…

What is Google really up to?

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This morning’s Observer column…

So we have two curious facts: Google has acquired fabulous amounts of bandwidth capacity, for which it has no obvious use; and it’s putting local data centres all over the place. Why would it be doing this? What’s the factor that links these two observations?

The answer is…

Read on.

TechBubble 2.0

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This morning’s Observer column…

Colossally inflated valuations are an infallible indicator of a bubble. In the late 1990s, dotcom start-ups with 50 employees and zero profits were briefly valued at more than the market cap of Fortune 500 companies. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch paid $649m for MySpace and eBay paid $2.6bn for Skype, a VoIP [internet telephony] company. Last year, Google forked out $1.65bn for YouTube. Such valuations provide terrific incentives for ambitious geeks because the new web services require less upfront investment than the original dotcoms. What is YouTube, after all, other than some smart software for converting every uploaded video clip into a Flash movie, plus server capacity and bandwidth? Skype adds 150,000 subscribers a day and buys almost no hardware because it uses its subscribers’ computers to do the heavy lifting…

Paradigm shifting

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This morning’s Observer column…

It’s interesting how phrases take on a life of their own. Take, for example, ‘paradigm shift’ – originally coined in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, to describe the transition of a scientific community from one theoretical framework to another. The phrase was quickly recognised as a Big Idea by people in all walks of life because they could use it as a metaphor for describing traumatic or difficult transitions in worldviews and mindsets.

As a result, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – in which Kuhn first sketched out the concept – has never been out of print and is among the 10 most cited books of all time. A quick search on Google for ‘paradigm shift’ brings up 1,240,000 hits. And an investigation using Amazon’s useful ‘search inside’ facility reveals that ‘paradigm shift’ occurs in over 23,000 books on Amazon’s virtual shelves, from all over the disciplinary spectrum. Truly, Kuhn’s phrase has entered our collective unconscious…

Politicians and technology: oil and water

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This morning’s Observer column…

When New Labour came to power it was terribly gung-ho about IT, which it equated with modernity, and there was a lot of pious vapouring about e-business and making Britain ‘the best place in the world’ in which to do it. Much of this rhetoric was emitted by one Anthony Blair, who spoke about these matters with the sublime ignorance with which teenage boys lecture one another on sexual technique. But then it emerged one day that the Prime Minister had tried to order flowers for Cherie over the internet and had made a hash of it. There was much sniggering in Daily Telegraph circles when this became public. So in best New Labour spin-doctoring style, it was decided to turn the gaffe into an opportunity, and Blair enrolled for an ‘IT for beginners’ course, accompanied by the usual horde of minders and TV crews…