Monthly Archives: March 2007

Remind me — what are ‘storage’ costs?

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From Technology Review…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — In another reminder of technology’s quantum leaps, Yahoo Inc.’s free e-mail service will provide unlimited storage space to its nearly 250 million users worldwide — a concept that seemed unfathomable just a few years ago.

With the move, Yahoo will trump its two largest rivals in free e-mail, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc., which currently provide 2 gigabytes and 2.8 gigabytes of free storage, respectively.

Yahoo’s e-mail users currently get 1 gigabyte of storage. Yahoo plans to gradually lift all space constraints in May, but it will take several months before all of Yahoo’s e-mail users have infinite storage space.

Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, the fourth largest e-mail provider, began offering unlimited storage for free last summer…

Note the misuse of ‘quantum leap’. It’s almost as prevalent as misuse of ‘decimate’. Sigh.

Battersea Power Station

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It’s one of London’s iconic buildings, and a magnet for photographers (like my son, Brian, whose photograph this is), but there are rumours of a new attempt to replace it with a glass-walled monstrosity. Brian writes:

Yesterday, the Guardian reported that the new owners of the £400m prime 36+ acre riverside site, Treasury Holdings, had scrapped development plans approved by Wandsworth Council in November last year and speculated whether London might be about to lose the four iconic chimneys altogether to yet another bland, luxury, residential development if the Power Station is allowed to further deteriorate beyond the realms of renovation.

Wandsworth Council and previous owners, Parkview, refused to even consider an alternative report by a team of three companies of concrete experts brought together by the World Monuments Fund & Twentieth Century Society, who have revealed that the chimneys can be repaired for half the cost of demolition and rebuilding.

The independent report also revealed there is no sign of structural distress in the chimneys. When Parkview bought the site thirteen years ago, they promised to restore it, but instead sat on it and did nothing, merely hanging onto it as property speculators. They pushed through planning permission to demolish the chimneys, full of promises to restore the building, but instead immediately flogged it for a £240m profit, since the value of the site had increased hugely as a result of planning permission to demolish the chimneys. Profit not renovation was evidently their aim.’

There is a Number 10 e-petition that UK citizens can sign to put pressure on the developers to honour their agreement.

I’ve signed the petition. It reads:

‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to prevent the proposed demolition of the chimneys of Battersea Power Station and to legally oblige the current owners to renovate the site, rather than sit on it and speculate as the previous owners did.’

Quote of the day

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Zadie Smith, quoted by William Gibson…

“But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, ‘I should sit here and I should be entertained.’ And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.”

Sticky ideas

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Hmmm… Interesting idea. More info here. On the drive home yesterday I listened to a Harvard Business School podcast in which one of the authors was interviewed. The official blurb reads:

Mark Twain once observed, “ A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas—businessmen, educators, politicians, journalists, and others—struggle to make their ideas “stick.”

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that “stick” and explain sure-fire methods for making ideas stickier, such as violating schemas, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating “curiosity gaps.” Made to Stick describes the traits that link sticky ideas of all kinds, from urban legends to corporate mission statements to advertisements to proverbs.

At last! Someone who is as sceptical about Twitter as I am

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Nice post — Is Twitter TOO good? — by Kathy Sierra. In her concluding para of a long and thoughtful post, she writes:

I am not in the target audience for Twitter–I am by nature a loner. I don’t want to be that connected. And I also have a huge appreciation for the art of keeping the mystery alive. I don’t want to know that much about so many people, and I sure don’t want people to know that much about me… mundane or otherwise. So, that puts me in the minority, and my Twitter fears are probably based solely on my own–quirky and less common–personality traits.

Lots more like you, Kathy.

Update… Disturbing news — Kathy has had death threats, and is understandably freaked by them. She pulled out of ETech (where she was due to give a presentation) as a result.

Edward Tufte’s new book…

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… is Envisioning Information. Kevin Kelly, never given to understatement, says of it:

“Keep this book with the few others that you’ll pass on to the next generation. It is a passionate, elegant revelation of how to render the 3 dimensions of experience into the 2 dimensions of paper and screen. As in his other books, Tufte is promoting a new standard of visual literacy. Immaculately printed in 23 colors, this book is a lyrical primer of design strategies for reading and creating messages in ‘flatland.’ No other book has been so highly recommended to us by so many different varieties of professionals — architects, teachers, technicians, hackers, and artists.”

Blogging and journalism

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Nice post by Dave Winer on the symbiotic relationship between blogging and mainstream journalism.

By now it should be obvious that bloggers are part of the landscape of investigative journalism. If you doubt this, do a little investigation yourself into how the story about Alberto Gonzalez and the US Attorneys is being managed. You’ll find that this time it’s a group of bloggers playing the role of Woodward and Bernstein — the Talking Point Memo people, doing really kickass work. I’ve been reading Josh Marshall every day as the scandal has been developing. And he’s getting credit from some of the professional reporters I respect. Paul Kiel from TPM was a guest on this week’s On The Media, and Josh was a guest on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

I was proud of the Powerline guys when they brought down Dan Rather, not because I agree with their politics (I don’t!) or because I dislike Rather (ditto!) but because the pros had gotten sloppy and careless, and they need the help we bloggers get from the communities we’re part of, they need someone watching over their shoulders asking how they know this or that, or if maybe this reporter has a conflict of some sort. They often do.