Category Archives: Observer

Wikipedia, you are the strongest link

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That’s the headline some clever Observer sub-editor put on this morning’s column…

There are two kinds of people in the world – those who think Wikipedia is amazing, wonderful, or inspiring; and those who simply cannot understand how a reference work compiled by thousands of ‘amateurs’ (and capable of being edited by any Tom, Dick or Harry) should be taken seriously. Brisk, vigorous and enjoyable arguments rage between these two camps, and provide useful diversion on long winter evenings.

What’s more interesting is the way Wikipedia entries have risen in Google’s page-ranking system so that the results of many searches now include a Wikipedia page in the first few hits…

Jams tomorrow

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This morning’s Observer column.

Coincidentally, in another part of the forest, entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the guys who founded Kazaa and later Skype (which they sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6bn) announced their particular variation on IPTV. The service is to be called Joost and combines aspects of file-sharing software and regular broadcast television. Like Skype, Joost requires users to download and install a free ‘client’ program which enables them to browse the internet for channels and clips they’re interested in.

The Joost website is deliciously opaque, riddled with PR-speak about how the new service is, apparently, ‘powered by a secure, efficient, piracy-proof internet platform that enables premium interactive video experiences while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators’.

In the ordinary course of events, one would be inclined to dismiss this as hype, were it not for the fact that Zennstrom and Friis have a track record of unleashing not one but two disruptive innovations on an unsuspecting world. So let’s suppose for a moment that Joost is for real. What then?

One implication is that if it spreads like Skype (putting on 150,000 new users a day), Joost could eventually strangle the net. Or, more realistically, it would provoke dramatic action from the world’s ISPs to fend off that outcome…

The iPhone: reality calling

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This morning’s Observer column…

Let us now brandish a clove of garlic and dispel the Reality Distortion Field for a moment. The iPhone looks like a cute gadget, but it does raise awkward questions. Will its screen scratch as easily as the iPod Nano’s does? Will it be as unreliable as the iPod range appears to be? (I speak from bitter experience.) Why does it have a built-in battery, just like the iPods? Will users have to send their phones back to Apple when the batteries give up the ghost? How robust is the mobile version of OS X – the phone’s operating system? Why is the mobile connectivity not 3G? And how did Apple come to overlook the awkward fact that the ‘iPhone’ name belongs to Cisco?

Answers, please – engraved on the back of a dead iPod – to Steven P Jobs, Apple Inc, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014, USA.

The Old Person’s ICT Curriculum

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Due to some mysterious glitch, this morning’s Observer column appeared in the paper edition but not on the Web. So here’s a pdf version. Sample:

The QCA is a fascinating organisation, staffed by responsible adults in suits. It produces tons of earnest documents, all of them possessing a single common property, namely that of reducing their readers’ will to live. Put such an organisation in charge of designing a curriculum on ICT, and you can predict the result: An Old Person’s Guide to ICT.

The Old Person’s ICT Curriculum (OPIC) has three ‘themes’: ‘using ICT systems’; ‘finding and exchanging information’; and ‘developing and presenting information’. The first involves learning a Key Skill — that of ‘interacting with ICT for a purpose’. Pupils should be taught important things like ‘take a turn playing a screen-based game, using a mouse, selecting options and keying in information’. Teachers should ensure that pupils are able to ‘choose between option buttons displayed on a cashpoint screen’, ‘follow instructions when using interactive TV’ and ‘receive a text message to make arrangements, e.g. where to meet a friend’.

Now I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. You think I am making this up. In that case, can I refer you to the QCA’s draft ‘ICT Skill for Life Curriculum Document’ released in September 2005 and available online from www.qca.org.uk?

There’s a surreal quality to the QCA’s ICT curriculum. It conjures up images of kids up and down the country trudging into ICT classes and being taught how to use a mouse and click on hyperlinks; receiving solemn instructions in the creation of documents using Microsoft Word and of spreadsheets using Excel; being taught how to create a toy database using Access and a cod PowerPoint presentation; and generally being bored out of their minds.

And then the same kids go home and log onto Bebo or MySpace to update their profiles, run half a dozen simultaneous Instant Messaging conversations, use Skype to make free phone calls, rip music from CDs they’ve borrowed from friends, twiddle their thumbs to send incomprehensible text messages, view silly videos on YouTube and use BitTorrent to download episodes of ‘Lost’.

And when you ask them what they did at school today they grimace and say ‘We made a PowerPoint presentation, Dad. Yuck!’

Looking back, looking forward

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This morning’s Observer column…

This year was also the one in which old-media companies came out of denial about what they had hitherto regarded as an oxymoron, ‘user-generated content’ – text, audio, imagery and video created and published by mere amateurs. (Think of blogging, Flickr and YouTube.) Having awoken from their slumbers, the Time-Warners of the world reasoned thus: how can we exploit this garbage? After all, there’s a serious financial opportunity here.

If you’re an old-media outfit, creating ‘content’ is an expensive business: you have to hire producers, directors, studios, actors, writers and a host of other low-life types, pay them good money up front and wait until they produce the goods. Only then can you start to make money from it. But the explosion of user-generated content suggests that there are millions of schmucks out there who are willing to do all this for free! So the question for the old-media world was: ‘how do we cash in on this racket?’

The bubble reputation

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This morning’s Observer column — on the eBay ‘reputation’ system…

It has become the linchpin of the eBay phenomenon. But as the importance of having a good reputation has increased, so has the temptation to manipulate the system. Fraudsters have been fooling the rating system by conducting transactions with friends or even themselves, using alternate user names to give themselves high satisfaction ratings – and luring unsuspecting customers to buy from them.

It’s difficult to know how widespread this scam is, and eBay is fanatically tight-lipped about it. Policing the billions of transactions that take place every year in its online auctions is a Sisyphian task. And reputation-faking rings have been difficult to spot, especially since there are lots of close-knit groups on eBay (for example, porcelain collectors) who trade intensively – and innocently – with one another…

The Gowers Report

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This morning’s Observer column…

So far, IP lawmaking has been an evidence-free area. In virtually every other area of public policy, lawmakers seek evidence from interested parties before legislating and try to assess where the public interest lies. But IP law has traditionally been made simply by conceding the demands of content owners for ever-greater extensions of their rights, leading to the absurd duration of copyright protection. Every time Mickey Mouse is about to run out of copyright, Disney & Co go to Congress and get an extension – ‘infinity on the instalment plan’, as one wag dubs it. Europe follows suit, and the world marches to the beat of the Disney drum.

Given this background, Tuesday’s publication of the Gowers Report on Intellectual Property is a truly memorable event. Andrew Gowers – the former FT editor I quoted earlier – was asked by Gordon Brown to conduct ‘an independent review into the UK Intellectual Property Framework’, and he has done better than most of us expected. It’s available online and should be a set text for legislators…

The economics of abundance

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This morning’s Observer column…

MIPS is to computer geeks what BHP (brake horse-power) is to Jeremy Clarkson. It is an acronym for ‘Millions of Instructions Per Second’, a measure of the speed of a central processing unit (CPU). Mips measures raw CPU performance, but not overall system performance, which is determined by lots of factors (such as disk speed and data in and out of Ram) so it would be foolish to use it as the only measure of how powerful your computer is. But Mips is an interesting indicator none the less….