Daily Archives: April 17, 2009

Tesco: every little helps, er, Tesco

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Guess how much Tesco paid for the rights to Rosie Cosie?

Then check your estimate here.

(Prediction: the next step will be a letter from Tesco lawyers accusing Julie Williams for using the image of Tesco Cosy Bunny without permission.)

UPDATE: The link to her blog no longer works. Ms Williams has taken her post offline. She explains:

A quiet thank you

I had no idea that things would escalate to such proportions when I wrote about my egg cosy problems earlier today. I need to sleep on the whole matter and consider some of the very valid points that have been raised. This is a matter for me and one that only affects me and my very little business. To see things snowballing from a small and personal matter is a little disconcerting, and the reason I’ve taken my post off-line for now.

Wonder what happened?

Amazon, Google and Juvenal: Quis custodiet…

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Jeff Bezos’s mantra from the moment he founded Amazon was “get big quick”. We’re beginning to see just how big it’s getting.

Last week an investment analyst estimated that Amazon now ‘facilitates’ (and takes a cut from) a third of all e-commerce transactions in the US.

Then the gay and lesbian community discovered how powerful Amazon’s database can be when what the company later described as an “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” effectively banned 57,310 listings of so-called ‘adult’ books and DVDs by making them invisible. This saga was well covered on the Web. See, for example, Clay Shirky’s admirable apologia (for being seduced by righteousness), Bill Thompson’s BBC column and Rory Cellan-Jones’s early blog post on the subject.

Looming over all this, of course, is a Really Big Question. Companies like Amazon and Google have acquired enormous power. Both can effectively render significant chunks of our culture invisible at the click of a mouse. But they are public corporations, answerable only to their shareholders — if at all. (Actually, in Google’s case, the two-tier shareholding structure means that the company’s leaders are not accountable even to their shareholders.) So, as the Roman poet Juvenal famously observed: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards themselves?) To date, we’ve avoided the question, arguing that if companies step out of line then in a competitive market they will pay the penalty for messing us around. So, if Google was deliberately skewing search results (so the argument runs) then the market would detect that and people would go to other search engines. I suspect we’ve moved beyond that comforting point. So the question remains: who will keep these online behemoths honest?

A philosopher discovers Twitter

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Tom Morris via HuffPost.

There is communal thinking on Twitter on a level and in a form I’ve never seen before. Almost every day, a topic comes up that causes me, as a philosopher, to ponder a bit, and then share the results of that pondering in the 140 character increments that Twitter allows. Today, someone mentioned Susan Boyle, the lady who has made such a stir worldwide with her recent appearance on the television show Britain’s Got Talent. The You Tube video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY.

As I reflected and tweeted briefly on Susan and her lessons for the rest of us, people started retweeting, or passing along those short reflections to others. When I saw what touched people the most, and elicited the best responses, that in turn informed what I continued to think and tweet. While considering all the activity that these simple tweets generated, because of who Susan Boyle is and what she’s shown us, I decided to use an extra blog post today simply to share these tweets, or twitter reflections, to provide an example of the unlikely musing that is now flashing around the internet, and also to highlight Susan’s example for us in this forum as well…

Life After Newspapers — and spelling

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Just browsing this WashPost piece by Michael Kinsley when I came on this para.

It is tempting, but too easy, to say the problems of newspapers are their own fault. True enough, the industry missed a whole armada of boats. If newspapers had been smarter, or moved faster, they might have kept the classified ads. They might have invented social networking. But that’s all hindsight. I didn’t think of these things, nor did you. Judging from Tribune Co., for which I once worked, the typical newspaper executive is a bear of little brain. Until recently, little brain was needed. Even now, to say the newspaper industry has no problems that a busload of geniuses couldn’t solve is essentially saying that the industry’s problems are insoluable. Or at least insoluable without help.

Hmmm… Insoluable indeed. Maybe someone should donate a spell-checker to the poor impoverished Washington Post. But that reference to “a bear of little brain” comes from Winnie the Pooh, whose spelling — you will recall — was “good spelling but it wobbles”.

That aside, it’s a nice piece.

Wikipedia opts out of Phorm

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Here’s the text of the memo to the Phorm administrators:

The Wikimedia Foundation requests that our web sites including
Wikipedia.org and all related domains be excluded from scanning by the
Phorm / BT Webwise system, as we consider the scanning and profiling of
our visitors’ behavior by a third party to be an infringement on their
privacy.

Good stuff. This suggests a tactic for a flash-mob operation. If millions of domain owners emailed website-exclusion@webwise.com with demands that their domains be excluded it might have an interesting effect.

Interesting to see that Amazon has already opted out.

Interesting also to see that info about opting out is pretty deeply buried on the BT Webwise site. The relevant para says:

How can I remain opted-out of BT Webwise even if I delete cookies regularly?

We provide the facility to block cookies permanently from BT Webwise so if you want to opt out permanently you can do so through a one-time only activity, by setting your browser to block cookies from the domain webwise.net. When you block this domain, the service will not put a cookie on your machine and you will not be asked to opt in or out again.