Dead trees: dead media?

Thanks to Bill Thompson for this:

Smash Hits closed down this year. It was probably past saving but still sad. Is there room for a pop magazine to launch in 2007? Let’s do a little roleplay.

Publisher: Hey kids! Here’s a new magazine.
Kids: What’s a magazine?
Publisher: Well, it’s like a book…
Kids: Oh piss off.
Publisher: No wait! It’s in full colour, and you can read it on the bus on the way to school…
Kids: We read our text messages on the way to school.
Publisher: Okay – well we’ve mocked up a magazine to show you. Take a look at THIS!
Kids: Where are the videos?
Publisher: What?
Kids: Where’s the button to press play on the videos?
Publisher: Well, no, you see these are just photographs…
Kids: We’ve already downloaded all these photographs from the internet. How do we use this to talk to each other?
Publisher: Well, there’s a letters page…
Kids: How do we know when our friends are reading the same magazine?
Publisher: Well, you don’t…
Kids: Hang on, this still says that Ray might win X Factor…
Publisher: Well, you see we had to write this last week because it takes a long time to print onto paper…
Kids: But shouldn’t that have changed to say Leona by now?
Publisher: You can’t change it – it’s printed on paper!
Kids: So it doesn’t update?
Publisher: Well, no, but… Well anyway. How much would you pay for this magazine, do you think?
Kids: Pay? You have got to be ****ing joking.

Powerpoint Karaoke

Here’s a nice new game for tired executives — Powerpoint Karaoke. It’s simple: you stand up. They cue up a random presentation. You ad-lib it.

And — a neat twist invented by yours truly: as you do it, a ‘friend’ videos your performance and uploads it to YouTube.

Caution: do not try this at work.

Looking back, looking forward

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?’

Second life: cod statistics

Clay Shirky has written a terrific piece on media naivete about the Second Life phenomenon. Sample:

The prize bit of PReporting so far, though, has to be Elizabeth Corcoran’s piece for Forbes called A Walk on the Virtual Side, where she claimed that Second Life had recently passed “a million unique customers.”

This is three lies in four words. There isn’t one million of anything human inhabiting Second Life. There is no one-to-one correlation between Residents and users. And whatever Residents does measure, it has nothing to do with paying customers. The number of paid accounts is in the tens of thousands, not the millions (and remember, if you’re playing along at home, there can be more than one account per person. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, how many logged into St. Ides?)

Despite the credulity of the Fourth Estate (Classic Edition), there are enough questions being asked in the weblogs covering Second Life that the usefulness is going to drain out of the ‘Resident™ doesn’t mean resident’ trick over the next few months. We’re going to see three things happen as a result.

The first thing that’s going to happen, or rather not happen, is that the regular press isn’t going go back over this story looking for real figures. As much as they’ve written about the virtual economy and the next net, the press hasn’t really covered Second Life as business story or tech story so much as a trend story. The sine qua non of trend stories is that a trend is fast-growing. The Residents figure was never really part of the story, it just provided permission to write about about how crazy it is that all the kids these days are getting avatars. By the time any given writer was pitching that story to their editors, any skepticism about the basic proposition had already been smothered…

I wonder if Linden Labs (proprietors of Second Life) regard me as a ‘resident’ of their virtual land. I signed up for an account a while back (mainly because serious people like Bill Thompson and Charlie Nesson seemed to think it was interesting). But after signing up I examined the kinds of avatars available and rather lost the will to second live (as it were). I have my hands full living my first life; to add a second seems like a step too far.

Shirky’s piece is good on Second Life, but even better on the deficiencies of journalism.

The weakest link

From Technology Review

A few seconds of undersea quaking was all it took to cause massive telecommunications disruptions throughout tech-savvy Asia, where Internet services have been snapped or slowed, phone lines disabled and financial transactions crippled.

Analysts said the service disruption–caused by the rupture of two undersea data transmission cables in Tuesday’s earthquake in Taiwan–highlights how crucial the cable and Internet infrastructure has become to the modern world.

A decade ago, telephones and faxes were essential to businesses and governments. Now, telephone lines often take second place, piggybacking on networks set up for Internet or mobile communication.

”Governments now recognize these industries as fundamental infrastructure, equal to electricity, water, sewage, roads,” said Markus Buchhorn, an information technology expert at Australian National University. ”So if you do have a major breakdown, people will move heaven and earth to fix it.”

Telecom companies scrambled to reroute connections after the break in the undersea cables. A Taiwanese officials said nearly all of Asia’s Internet service and 80 percent of its phone service was to be restored by noon (0400 GMT) Thursday.

In Hong Kong, a government statement said Thursday it would take at least five days to partially repair the damage to two undersea cables. A Hong Kong telecommunications official said all seven major cables serving the Chinese territory were affected, some severely.

In the meantime, telecommunications remained slow–and in some areas nonexistent–in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Singapore and South Korea.In Seoul, banks reported a slowdown in foreign exchange trading. Hong Kong’s Internet data capacity was reduced by 50 percent.

Meanwhile, some customers in China completely lost Internet access. Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and the Philippines reported slowdowns or access difficulties, mainly to foreign Web sites, including search engines and some e-mail programs. Thailand reported a disruption in international phone service.”

I haven’t experienced anything like this before,” said Francis Lun, general manager at Fulbright Securities, one of many Hong Kong financial firms that were forced to conduct business by telephone on Wednesday.

”We’ve become too dependent on these optic fibers–a few of them get damaged, and everything collapses. Many lost the opportunity to make fast money.”

The Wii workout

Well, well. The little Nintendo machine is having some strange side-effects — for example this experiment in which a chap is going to do 30 minutes’ Wiing a day and report the impact on his physique.

OK, so I was thinking one day after I played a good 1/2 hour of Wii Sports that I was getting a pretty heavy duty cardio workout. I decided to try out an experiment, where I would do everything I normally did, eat everything I normally ate and see if anything changes after playing 30 minutes of Wii Sports everyday for 6 weeks. If I miss a day, I’ll make a note of it and that weeks report…

Of course, he could go for a swim or a brisk walk every day!

Alt Predictions for 2007

I like these Alt Predictions for 2007, especially this:

President Bush finally manages to raise his approval ratings by recording a video of himself lip-syncing to “Barbie Girl” in makeup and a halter top with two oranges stuffed into the bust, and releasing the video onto the web. While his handling of the war in Iraq remains unpopular, his video is given four and a half stars and praised as “wicked funny,” “so dam hilarious” and “LOLOLOLOLOL.”

And this:

The consumer launch of Windows Vista does not go as well as planned. A cult forms within Microsoft, meeting secretly in the catacombs beneath the Redmond campus. The cult is devoted to a mysterious text message that declares Bill Gates the Once and Future CEO and prophesies that Gates will return in Microsoft’s time of greatest need, delivering stock options to the faithful, smiting the apostate, and possibly even coming up with a decent MP3 player.

A new interpretation of dreams

Hmmm… This is interesting.

Maybe it was just a Freudian slip. Or a case of hiding in plain sight.

Either way, Sigmund Freud, scribbling in the pages of a Swiss hotel register, appears to have left the answer to a question that has titillated scholars for much of the last century: Did he have an affair with his wife’s younger sister, Minna Bernays?

Rumors of a romantic liaison between Freud and his sister-in-law, who lived with the Freuds, have long persisted, despite staunch denials by Freud loyalists. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, Freud’s disciple and later his archrival, claimed that Miss Bernays had confessed to an affair to him. (The claim was dismissed by Freudians as malice on Jung’s part.) And some researchers have even theorized that she may have become pregnant by Freud and have had an abortion.

What was lacking was any proof. But a German sociologist now says he has found evidence that on Aug. 13, 1898, during a two-week vacation in the Swiss Alps, Freud, then 42, and Miss Bernays, then 33, put up at the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja, and registered as a married couple, a finding that may cause historians to re-evaluate their understanding of Freud’s own psychology.

A yellowing page of the leather-bound ledger shows that they occupied Room 11. Freud signed the book, in his distinctive Germanic scrawl, “Dr Sigm Freud u frau,” abbreviated German for “Dr. Sigmund Freud and wife.”

“By any reasonable standard of proof, Sigmund Freud and his wife’s sister, Minna Bernays, had a liaison,” wrote Franz Maciejewski, a sociologist formerly at the University of Heidelberg and a specialist in psychoanalysis, who tracked down the record in August.

Freud’s wife, Martha, knew about his trip with Miss Bernays, if not its nature. The same day Freud signed the hotel ledger, he sent his wife a postcard rhapsodizing about the glaciers, mountains and lakes the pair had seen. In the card, published in Freud’s collected correspondence, he described their lodgings as “humble,” although the hotel appears to have been the second-fanciest in town.

The evidence is persuasive enough for Peter Gay, the Freud biographer and longtime skeptic on what he called “the Minna matter,” to say that he is now inclined to revise his work accordingly.

“It makes it very possible that they slept together,” he said. “It doesn’t make him or psychoanalysis more or less correct.”

Quite so. But interesting nonetheless. Wonder what Woody Allen makes of it.

Thanks to Gerard for the link.

The Vista EULA

Very acute piece by Scott Granneman about the Vista licence agreement. No surprises for those of us who distrust Microsoft, but it ought to be sobering for anyone who does — or who doesn’t care what they are signing up to.

A long time ago, a high school kid who wasn’t that great of a student told the class, after a long discussion about governments and politics, “Well, here’s what I’ve learned: socialism is fair but doesn’t really work, while capitalism isn’t fair but does work mostly.” Not too bad for a 9th grader.

More recently, I had the adults in “Technology in Our Changing Society” read both the Windows XP EULA and the GNU General Public License. When I asked them what they thought, one woman said, “The EULA sounds like it was written by a team of lawyers who want to tell me what I can’t do, and the GPL sounds like it was written by a human being who wants me to know what I can do.” Nice

The next version of Windows is just around the corner, so the next time we discuss software licensing in my course, the EULA for Vista will be front and center. You can read the Microsoft Vista EULA yourself by going to the official Find License Terms for Software Licensed from Microsoft page and searching for Vista. I know many of you have never bothered to read the EULA – who really wants to, after all? – but take a few minutes and get yourself a copy and read it. I’ll wait.

Back? It’s bad, ain’t it? Real bad. I mean, previous EULAs weren’t anything great – either as reading material or in terms of rights granted to end users – but the Vista EULA is horrendous…

He’s right: it is. What’s particularly interesting to me is the way it precludes users from running the two cheapest versions of Vista with virtualisation software like Parallels Desktop.

Longish article. Worth reading in full.