From Guardian Unlimited Technology…
A friend has two children aged 11 and 16. He explains: “The latest thing in Surrey right now is downloading high-pitched tones that only children can hear [the 17kHz “Mosquito”] on to their mobiles, Bluetoothing them around, and then starting up a cacophony in lessons – they can hear it and double up in agony, but their teacher can’t.” It’s a metaphor for the adult/child gap: the children can recognise what the grownups can’t.
This is just beautiful — an animation of flight patterns over the US.
Thanks to Jon Crowcroft for the link.
An excerpt from Jenny Abramsky’s speech to the Radio Academy
Students of BBC job titles, and I am sure there are many in this room, may have noticed that last summer the BBC had a Director of Television and a Director of Radio … but no longer. There is now a Director of BBC Vision and my title is now Director of Audio & Music.
Why the change? Not because we think radio doesn’t still exist, but because there’s a whole world of audio out there now, not just radio.
The fact is that all newspapers are going into audio online with their own podcasts and audio programmes. The Sunday Times offers a Music Show. The Guardian – a round up of European football action. The Observer – a weekly Film Review. Gillian’s own newspaper, the Telegraph, regards itself as multimedia, not simply print.
Individual artists like Ricky Gervais are going direct to audiences with their own podcast content. This is a world of audio where radio is just a part. There’s a new video world – of Google News and Microsoft – where television is just a part.
If the BBC is going to thrive in this 21st century global media market, it has to recognise the broadcasting world has changed and make the investment that’s needed in new ways of reaching audiences and delivering high quality content, even when it has a tight licence fee settlement.
It also has to make the case for its continued existence in a world that’s increasingly dominated by huge global players like Google and Apple…
Marvellous columnGoogle is an amazing entrepreneurial petri dish. Yet at the same time, it is doomed to disappoint nearly every entrepreneurial type who works there. This is key: Google is sowing the seeds of its own eventual destruction. It can’t help doing so.
For those who don’t know these details or have forgotten them, here’s the simple background: Google has made a huge effort to hire the best technical people it can find. Thousands of PhDs are now working in various Google labs, and many of these people were hired from other successful businesses. Google has also acquired a number of smaller companies, many of them for either their technology or their technical talent, and these companies bring yet more entrepreneurial DNA into the mix. The company has created a potent combination of straight-from-university geniuses, straight-from-start-up geniuses, and straight-from-Microsoft/IBM/Yahoo/wherever geniuses. These bright folks work individually and in teams and 20 percent of their time is supposed to be devoted to pursuing new technical ideas of their own. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are sure (and for good reason) that their crew will generate in this 20 percent time thousands of ideas and technologies that the company can commercialize for decades to come.
It is a brilliant strategy and one that would appear to be almost foolproof. Alas, that’s not so, for Google’s strategy for business immortality is fatally flawed and will ultimately kill the company….
Read on: it’s great.
Roy Greenslade has a lovely dissection of a letter from the LA Times Editor to staff announcing their redundancies.
Did LA Times editor have help with redundancy letter?
It has been decided that 57 editorial staff are to leave the Los Angeles Times after a call for redundancies. I was particularly struck by the euphemistic corporate goobledegook employed by the editor, Jim O’Shea, in his explanatory letter to staff. I couldn’t really believe a journalist had written such guff. Then I realised that other people must have been at O’Shea’s shoulder as he wrote…
He began by referring to “a voluntary and involuntary employee separation programme” and pointed out that among those departing are “a very small number of involuntary departures… All will receive a generous separation package that includes salary continuation and outplacement assistance.” Straight from the human resources department handbook.
“We are also examining our polling operation to determine if reorganisation could increase revenues while achieving further savings. We expect to complete this examination in the next couple of months.”
Worth reading in full.
Hmmm… The world is even odder than I had supposed. I’ve just been looking at what Google calls ‘hot trends’. Here’s how the company explains the list:
It’s a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What’s on our collective mind as we search for information? What’s interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a glance, you’ll see the huge variety of topics capturing our attention, from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. Hot Trends is updated throughout the day, so check back often.
For each Hot Trend, you will see results from Google News, Google Blog Search and web search, which help explain why the search is hot. For example, the #7 item on Thursday, May 17th was the cryptic phrase [creed thoughts]. The associated news stories and blog results show that this odd term is the name of a fake website mentioned on the season finale of The Office. Mystery solved. Of course, some searches are not as easily explained. Visit the Hot Trends group to read the explanations of others and offer your own.
If you want to look further back, you can also see what queries were hot on a particular day. On Wednesday, May 16th, [melinda doolittle], [halo 3 beta], and [ge dishwasher recall] were on the Hot Trends list. If you don’t know why, maybe you’ll learn something.
Hot Trends aren’t the search terms people look for most often — those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.
My problem is that even with the aid of this explanatory technology, I am still puzzled by many of the search terms.
.. was published today. The BBC Trust (whose predecessor commissioned the inquiry) says
The BBC Trust has published today (25 May 2007) the Independent Panel report into the impartiality of BBC coverage of business.
The panel, chaired by Sir Alan Budd, does not believe the BBC has a systematic bias against business. Its overall conclusion is that “most of the BBC’s business output meets the required standards of impartiality”. But the panel also says it “has seen a number of individual lapses and identified some trends which lead to repeated breaches of the BBC’s standards”.
In October last year the Trust’s predecessor, the BBC’s Board of Governors, commissioned the panel:
“to assess the impartiality of BBC news and factual coverage of business with particular regard to accuracy, context, independence and bias, actual or perceived; to assess whether the BBC portrays a fair and balanced picture of the world of business and of its impact on society more generally; to focus primarily on business coverage in mainstream output though specialist business programming should also be considered; and to make recommendations to the BBC Trust for improvements where necessary.”
The Trust discussed the panel’s report at its meeting on Wednesday 23 May.
Text and appendices available here.
Interesting thought on Stowe Boyd’s blog
JP Rangaswami has adopted an unusual approach to email.
JP has set up a stringent approach to filtering his email. He throws all email where he is CC’d directly into the trash. Basically, he only reads email directed to him, alone. Of course, for this to have any influence on people’s behavior, he has to loudly and regularly let others know that he is doing this.
More interestingly, he has opened access to his email to his staff. By treating his email as an open forum, he has found that his associates are more involved in his interactions with others. He has found that they can use this — particularly his sent mail — is a great learning opportunity.
My university email has become positively dysfunctional — partly because of the “cc” culture. Wonder if this approach would work for me.