Monthly Archives: December 2007

What’s really killing newspapers

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Interesting interview with Craig Newmark, of ‘Craigslist’ fame. Includes the following exchange:

Q. There have been ongoing concerns and criticisms from the newspaper industry that free online ad sites like Craigslist are eating them alive and drastically reducing their revenues. What’s your reaction?

A. No one in the newspaper industry seriously says that. I’ve spoken to a lot of publishers, editors and industry analysts. They say that our site does have a small but measurable effect on classified revenues. But they say the bigger problems are those niche-classified sites which go after the more profitable classified categories, specifically cars and jobs. There’s Autotrader.com and Monster.com. Newspapers have much bigger problems. Newspapers are going after 10% to 30% profit margins for their businesses and that hurts them more than anything. A lot of things are happening on the Internet that never happened before because the Internet is a vehicle for everyone. The mass media is no longer only for the powerful, and that’s a huge change for the entire newspaper and news industry.

He’s right about that. The old newspaper value chain linked (i) an expensive and unprofitable activity (journalism) which was necessary to attract readers with (ii) profitable classified and display advertising. The Web dissolved the value chain by siphoning off the classified advertising — for the simple reason that it did it better. Why would you prefer to wade through hundreds of classified ads in the ‘Cars for sale’ columns when you could search directly for what you wanted on an online advertising site? The other problem is that newspaper owners had unrealistic expectations of profit: in the old days they were accustomed to margins of anywhere between ten and 30 per cent, simply because there was no alternative medium to what they owned. Like most established businesses (e.g. the record industry) they thought that their cosy business model had a God-given right to exist — which is they still whinge about the Net.

The political invisibility of IT

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Ed Felten has been musing about John McCain’s recent remark that the minor issues he might delegate to a vice-president include “information technology, which is the future of this nation’s economy.”

“If information technology really is so important”, asks Ed, “then why doesn’t it register as a larger blip on the national political radar?”

One reason, he thinks, is that

many of the most important tech policy questions turn on factual, rather than normative, grounds. There is surprisingly wide and surprisingly persistent reluctance to acknowledge, for example, how insecure voting machines actually are, but few would argue with the claim that extremely insecure voting machines ought not to be used in elections.

On net neutrality, to take another case, those who favor intervention tend to think that a bad outcome (with network balkanization and a drag on innovators) will occur under a laissez-faire regime. Those who oppose intervention see a different but similarly negative set of consequences occurring if regulators do intervene. The debate at its most basic level isn’t about the goodness or badness of various possible outcomes, but is instead about the relative probabilities that those outcomes will happen. And assessing those probabilities is, at least arguably, a task best entrusted to experts rather than to the citizenry at large.

Full aperture

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I’ve decided that Quentin was right about Aperture as a tool for managing large numbers of images. What finally tipped me over the edge was finding that it was the best way of handling RAW images. It’s also very good for dealing with the archiving of large filesets. And the Loupe tool (shown above) provides a useful way of checking the detail of an image without having to zoom it.

Psst…

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This morning’s Observer column…

Visitors to ThinkSecret.com, a well-known site which publishes rumours and gossip about forthcoming Apple products, found an intriguing notice on the front page last Thursday.

‘Apple and ThinkSecret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides,’ it announced. ‘As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and ThinkSecret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, ThinkSecret’s publisher, said: “I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits.”‘

Let’s unpack that…

The laws of the tailback

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Hmmm… Interesting paper by G. Orosz and G. Stépán in the September 08, 2006 issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A on “Subcritical Hopf bifurcations in a car-following model with reaction-time delay” which purports to show how major delays occur on motorways with no apparent cause.

Important stuff this, and no mistake. I mean to say, how many times have you been baffled when you finally reach the end of a tail-back only to find no visible cause for the delay? Now, a team of mathematicians has developed a mathematical model to show the impact of unexpected events such as a lorry pulling out of its lane on a dual carriageway. Their model reveals that, by slowing down below a critical speed when reacting to such an event, a driver would force the car behind to slow down further and the next car back to reduce its speed further still. The result of this is that several miles back, cars would finally grind to a halt, with drivers oblivious to the reason for their delay. The model predicts that this is a very typical scenario on a busy highway (above 10–15 vehicles per km). The jam moves backwards through the traffic creating a so-called ‘backward travelling wave’, which drivers may encounter many miles upstream, several minutes after it was triggered.

Quite so. I thought you’d like a peek at the model which produces these interesting findings.

Obvious, when you think about it.

Money can’t buy you love but…

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… it can buy you a yacht.

This is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s boat, trying to dock at Antibes. I first heard about it on Stephen Heppell’s phone blog, and followed the link to the pdf brochure. It’s called Octopus and is allegedly the world’s largest privately-owned yacht. It cost Allen over US$200 million and has a permanent crew of 60, including several former Navy Seals.

The vessel has two helicopters, seven boats, a 10 man submarine and a remote controlled vehicle for crawling on the Ocean floor. The submarine has the capacity to sleep eight for up to two weeks underwater. (Er, why would anyone want to sleep for eight weeks underwater?)

According to the brochure, on average, owners must spend a minimum of 10 percent of the purchase price every year to keep these yachts in good working condition and cover crew salaries. Therefore “Octopus” requires a US$20 million annual budget.

I’m sure that all those dedicated Windows users will be delighted to see that their license fees are being so well spent. Here, for example, is the ‘Starboard Bar and Spa’.

So tasteful, don’t you think? And how thoughtful to include a hot tub.