Monthly Archives: July 2008
On this day…
… three years ago, the London tube bombers struck. Isabel Hilton wrote this striking piece…
It was a cruel contrast. On Wednesday, Londoners rejoiced at the news that the city had won its bid to host the Olympic games in 2012. Thursday’s front pages were given over to scenes of jubilation. But as those editions reached the newsstands, London was already a darker, grimmer place, as a series of coordinated explosions ripped through its transport network.
The victims are still being rescued. The dead and injured are still being counted. We can only imagine the terror experienced by the thousands who were close to the explosions, some trapped in the darkened tunnels, dazed by the shock of what had overtaken them in the course of a normal journey to work. Millions more suffered that fear that grips the heart until friends and family can be reached. The dread, the deaths, the injuries, the lives devastated – this was London’s story today, as it has been the story of many others in many places, from Baghdad to New York, Paris to Bali, Madrid to Istanbul.
London is a city of diversity and tolerance, a multicultural capital, open, crowded and dynamic. These are the qualities that give it its vitality. The transport system is an easy target. Today the city is at a standstill; emergency services struggle to reach the trapped and the wounded…
Alpha female
Interesting Economist profile of Diane Greene.
ALPHA male, flamboyant, brash, megalomaniacal. Profiles of leading high-tech bosses tend to be littered with these terms, signs of the traits that they seem to need to make it to the top of the computer industry and stay there. But none of them applies to Diane Greene, the chief executive of VMware. Her company, which sells software that makes data centres run more efficiently, has quietly become the world’s fourth-most-valuable publicly traded software company, with a stockmarket value of nearly $20 billion. Its public listing last August was a bit like the heady dotcom days. Since then, the old guard has started ganging up on the newcomer, which boasts quarterly sales of nearly $440m and expects to grow by 50% this year. Microsoft, in particular, has vowed to take on VMware. On June 26th the software giant released its first competing product—predictably, as a free add-on to its flagship Windows operating system. How will Ms Greene play in the rough and tumble of the big league?
Is blogging reaching a plateau?
This interesting graph (compiled from Technorati data) comes from a BusinessWeek piece. I came to it via this meditation on the phenomenon, which says,
Perhaps we’ve realized that blogging every day isn’t as fun as it sounds. A happened-upon red swirl of autumn leaves before a backdrop of unusually artful East Vancouver graffiti may very well be a blog-worthy topic. Life’s minor muses are perhaps what inspire the pleasure blogger to pick up a keyboard in the first place, but it actually takes work to develop new material on a regular basis. No, writing never becomes easy no matter how long you do it.
Some difficult truths have been brought to light by the personal blogging blitz of the last few years. One such revelation is that most of us aren’t as interesting as we think. Waking up every day and jotting down some deep thoughts about breakfast is a difficult way to sustain any kind of readership. A creative writing teacher once told me that everyone has lived one novel-worthy story. One being the operative word, I think.
It’s as if we’ve gone through a few generations of blogging natural selection. The ones left are the big alpha bloggers, well suited to the harsh — and fickle — web environment. Said alphas have learned how to make money from their wordslinging, transforming what was once a very grassroots medium into something much more commercial. The pleasure bloggers just didn’t have the genes, nor the capitalistic instincts, to survive.
The writer goes on to speculate that the energy which originally powered the growth of blogging may simply be dissipating into other media — microblogging (like Twitter, Jaiku), social networking (FaceBook updates), etc. He also reveals that Google has acquired Jaiku, which is something I had missed. Hmmm…
More on Viacom’s data-heist
Rory Cellan-Jones has an uneasy feeling.
The YouTube case seems to show that, despite those promises, we have no real control over our data once it is lodged on a corporate server. Every detail of my viewing activities over the years – the times I’ve watched videos in the office, the clips of colleagues making idiots of themselves, the unauthorised clip of goals from a Premier League game – is contained in those YouTube logs.
All to be handed over to Viacom’s lawyers on a few “over-the-shelf four-terabyte hard drives”, according to the New York judge who made the ruling. I may protest that I am a British citizen and that the judge has no business giving some foreign company a window on my world. No use – my data is in California, and it belongs to Google, not me.
The other troubling aspect about this case was that it was only the blogs that seemed to understand the significance of the ruling when it emerged on Wednesday night. Much of the mainstream media ignored it at first, seeming to regard it as a victory for Google, because the judge said the search firm didn’t have to reveal its source code.
“I’ve never worried too much about the threat to my privacy”, Rory continues.
I’m relaxed about appearing on CCTV, happy enough for my data to be used for marketing purposes, as long as I’ve ticked a box, and have never really cared that Google knows about every search I’ve done for the last 18 months. But suddenly I’m feeling a little less confident. How about you?
Body language
On Friday evening last, Charles Arthur was invited to 11 Downing Street (where the Chancellor of the Exchequer lives). While there, he chanced to look out of the window down into the garden that runs behind Numbers 10 and 11 and saw Gordon Brown talking to an unidentified man. Below is a snippet from his account…
Brown listened intently. Once or twice he took a note, dragging a piece of paper from a jacket pocket. Once the other guy pulled out a single piece of A4, folded twice, blank on the back, and gestured at it as though it were a short list of things that weren’t quite right. Neither drank from the wine glasses while I was there. Brown sometimes leant forward, sometimes sat back. His body language was listening; then he began talking, and his hand movements were also shovelling, but they seemed like defensive shovelling: the palms turned outwards, as if trying to get something away from him. And then he too did the move-and-shovel routine. Take it from here, put it over there. Shovel, shovel, push and push.
There was something about the tableau that felt fragile. I could have taken a picture with my mobile, but it would have felt intrusive, rude -especially since we’d been asked not to take any pictures inside No.11. (Describing it here is different from a picture, which is just wrestled out of its context; here you have to imagine the scene yourself rather than have it presented.). It was a beautiful summer’s evening, the sun forcing through the trees wet with the heavy showers that had fallen earlier on. And two men discussed.. something, surely important…
There’s something fascinating about these details. Years ago when I was doing some consultancy work in Whitehall I went to a meeting in No 10 Downing Street. When you get into the hallway you are requested to leave your mobile phone on the hall table and given a post-it note on which to write your name. After my meeting I went to collect my phone and noticed that the Post-It on the Nokia next to it said “First Sea Lord”.
Show Them A Better Way
Charles Arthur pointed me to a really interesting idea. Here’s how BBC News describes it:
The UK government has launched a competition to find innovative ways of using the masses of data it collects.
It is hoping to find new uses for public information in the areas of criminal justice, health and education.
The Power of Information Taskforce – headed by cabinet office minister Tom Watson – is offering a £20,000 prize fund for the best ideas.
To help with the task, the government is opening up gigabytes of information from a variety of sources.
This includes mapping information from the Ordnance Survey, medical information from the NHS , neighbourhood statistics from the Office for National Statistics and a carbon calculator from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
None of the data will be personal information, the government is keen to stress. Ho!
Bill Thompson has a post about this.
iCasting as digital literacy
Thoughtful post by my colleague Martin Weller. He and I are members of the OU’s Broadcast Strategy Group, the deliberations of which have led to the university advertising for a Director of Multi-Platform Broadcasting. In his post Martin reflects on what he’s been doing last week. The list includes:
* Record a talking head piece for the launch of the OU’s YouTube channel
* Record and synch the audio and upload a slidecast of a talk I gave last week
* Upload an educational video I had created to YouTube and add annotations
* Write two blogs posts
* Finish off a Camtasia video for a project
Reflecting on this, he writes:
I was never much of a fan of the term ‘digital literacies’ – to me it seemed like an excuse to say people needed training and development in using new tools, rather than just encouraging them to use them, e.g. we needed to create courses on becoming digitally literate before we would let our students use them, and then we could tick a box saying this was covered, like basic numeracy. I still think encouraging people to play is the best approach, but my recent dabbling with making videos has made me appreciate that this may be approaching a digital literacy.
This is about more than technical or design skills, more significant is the mental shift to thinking of iCasting as the route for distributing ideas. We have so long been subject to the tyranny of paper, that to conceive of an output in any other form takes a real effort. In fact, we often mistake the production of a paper artefact for the actual output of a project. So my message to the incoming Director is this – help us become iCasters.
Higgs Boson, here we come!
YouTube: why no porn?
One of the most intriguing things about YouTube is that it isn’t over-run by porn. I’ve often wondered why — after all, every other unmoderated publishing opportunity on the Net seems to have succumbed. This thoughtful piece in the NYT explains that YouTube’s founders shrewdly anticipated the danger and installed sophisticated filtering software that spots and refuses porn — with interesting effects.
By keeping obscenity in check, YouTube teems with video of near infinite variety, stuff that thrives when pornography, which is hard to contain once it takes root, has been banished. YouTube risked losing millions of viewers when it made rules against pornography. But it has gained radical variety, the kind that defines the most robust ecosystems. YouTube’s dizzying diversity, in fact, now makes online porn sites that purport to cater to a broad range of tastes look only obsessive and redundant…