Daily Archives: September 13, 2006

MySpace: News Corp begins to lose the plot

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Right on schedule. News Corp is starting to behave like,… well, like an old media company. See this from Good Morning Silicon Valley:

MySpace to change name to MineALLMINEspace

MySpace is “a place for friends” — as long as those friends aren’t Web 2.0 outfits living off the site’s traffic. That’s the growing sentiment at MySpace owner News Corp., and Tuesday company COO Peter Chernin told an investors conference that it may be planning to take some of those well known social sharing sites to the mat. “If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flicker (sic), whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace,” Chernin said. “There’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business. Given that most of their traffic comes from us, if we build adequate, if not superior, competitors, I think we ought to be able to match them, if not exceed them.”

There’s a delicious predictability about this.

How to admit a mistake

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I posted something a few days ago about how FaceBook had stepped over an unacceptable threshold in relation to their users’ privacy. Now here’s the response of faceBook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. It begins:

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now…

On the face of it, this is a really good example of how to handle a mistake. Admit it, apologise, fix it and move on.

The only problem is that Zuckerberg got it wrong first time — just like any other CEO!

9/11 as the catalyst for the blogging phenomenon

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Interesting Wired News piece on the impact of 9/11 on the blogosphere…

When the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, the web changed with it.

While phone networks and big news sites struggled to cope with heavy traffic, many survivors and spectators turned to online journals to share feelings, get information or detail their whereabouts. It was raw, emotional and new — and many commentators now remember it as a key moment in the birth of the blog.

When four planes were hijacked on a sunny fall morning, easy-to-use blogging services were still few and far between. Yet many who witnessed the horror of the attacks firsthand took to the keyboard to talk with the world.

Horrified Americans used e-mail, instant messages, any available communication tool. But weblogs meant large audiences, not just friends and family, could read those stories from the scene.

“I have a scrap of paper that flew onto my roof,” wrote New Yorker Anthony Hecht. “Typewritten and handwritten numbers in the millions. A symbol of our tragedy. It smells like fire.”

Many bloggers strayed from their normal writing beats to produce a rolling news service comprising links to materials and tidbits gathered by friends.

Dave Winer, author of one of the earliest and most popular weblogs, Scripting News, used his site to post one-line news flashes, New York webcam stills and links to witness accounts.

The chaos was “a galvanizing point for the blogging world,” said Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media.

“We had this explosion of personal, public testimony and some of it was quite powerful,” Gillmor said. “I remembered that old cliche that journalists write the first rough draft of history. Well now bloggers were writing the first draft.”

A lost world

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Lovely story on Harold Strong’s Blog…

I had the good fortune to spend two months on the smallest of the Aran Islands, Inisheer (Inis Oirr), in 1962. This was the year before I sat the Leaving Certificate examination, the final school examination in Ireland. At that time if you didn’t pass Irish you failed the examination and couldn’t go to University. So the idea was that I would improve my Irish. This worked and was a fantastic experience. One that has left me with a deep affection for the islanders, their way of life and the Irish language along with a small collection of photographs.

At that time I only had a basic 35mm camera and a few rolls of film. You couldn’t get more film on the island at that time and anyway I couldn’t afford it. When I came home after spending a month longer than originally agreed all I could do was develop the film but no prints! The negatives were kept among my personal stuff, put in a press [cupboard] and forgotten about.

Last year I was using my son’s scanner, remembered these negatives and discovered that they could be scanned. He then introduced me to Flickr and suggested I should put them up there which I did.

I moved on to other things and forgot about them until recently. An email arrived from the ‘Crashed’ music group asking if some of them could be used on the cover of a new CD. The result was that one was used as the outer cover of a CD and two more were used on the inlay.

They were of the wreck of the MV Plassey which went aground on an offshore rock during a severe storm on the night of 8th March 1960. The 11 crew were rescued by the local onshore rescue crew using a Breeches Buoy. It was later driven onto the island during another storm. It is on the rocks in the opening scene of the Channel 4 comedy series ‘Father Ted’…

I’ve just looked at the photographs and some of them (for example this one, of a funeral procession) are very evocative. It’s a lovely little archive portraying a vanished world.

Money for jam, Swedish style

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From yesterday’s Guardian Unlimited…

At least [Sven-Goren] Eriksson has the consolation of knowing he has sufficient money to cope with life as an unemployed manager. Having negotiated a lucrative settlement with the Football Association on formally leaving his post at the end of July he is earning £13,000 a day from his former employers under an arrangement scheduled to continue until next summer.

That’s £4,745,000 a year, if my calculator is telling the truth. Before tax, of course.

Through a curtain, darkly

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I gave a presentation in the Boardroom at OFCOM this morning. It’s a lovely room on the 11th floor with glass walls and a wonderful view of London. It also has some clever curtains, which let in the light but probably render it opaque to the outside world. After we’d finished I experimented with some shots through the curtain. This is a shot of the view looking towards Tower Bridge. It’s come out looking rather like a medieval etching*. Not a great success, but worth trying. Note the Moire patterns.

Just for comparison, here’s the (uncurtained) view of St Paul’s.

I was reminded, as I stood there, of the great photograph of Wren’s cathedral during the Blitz.

* An alert (and learned) reader emails to say (ever so politely) that the ‘medieval’ reference is baloney!

In memoriam

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Part of the American cemetery in Madingley, where thousands of US air force personnel who lost their lives in World War II are remembered. The long wall on the right is engraved with their names, and it makes sobering reading. The cemetery was built on land donated by the University of Cambridge and is a lovely, peaceful place, even if this part of it looks like a cut-down Taj Mahal. In my time, I’ve seen both Bill Clinton and Al Gore here on Memorial Day visits.