Thanks to Jack Schofield for the link.
Daily Archives: August 9, 2009
Narrate Your Work
For as long as I’ve been blogging, Dave Winer has been one of the most interesting people around. (It was his UserLand software that I used when I decided that my blog should go public.) He’s thoughtful, perceptive, opinionated and very bright. This post about what he calls ‘narrating your work’ is a typical example. Excerpt:
I wouldn’t waste your time with all this theory unless I could show you how all this fits in with Rebooted News and the News System of the Future. Here’s a recital of what happened.
1. As you may know, at roughly noon Eastern time yesterday a plane crashed into a helicopter over the Hudson River in NY, killing all nine people aboard both.
2. I was away from my computer when it happened, didn’t check in until about an hour later, and on Twitter there was a mess of conflicting stories, and lots of individuals “breaking” the news even though it happened over an hour ago.
3. I clicked on the page of NYT editorial people on Twitter that I keep and I saw something very different, and this is the point of this story. I saw a news organization at work. Careful to say what they do and don’t know. Informing each other on experience with similar stories in the past. Whether they were all reading all of the others’ posts, I don’t know. They were reading and passing on reports from other Twitter users, even those that didn’t work at the Times. They were coordinating the work of a larger community than just people who work at the Times.
4. I took a snapshot of the page at that time so we could all look at this.
Now why do I think this is so important? Because it’s a big part of the future Rebooted News system, imho. Today’s reporters don’t think the public wants to see inside their process, but they are wrong about that…
Worth reading in full.
Apocalypse Then
Astonishing story, if true.
President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”
This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”
After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to “turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,” and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”
In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report.
Hmmm… Maybe he was pulling Chirac’s leg?
En passant At a dinner party a couple of years ago, a retired (very) senior British civil servant (who had served in Downing Street during the Blair years), told me about Chirac’s visit to Number Ten before the decision to go to war in Iraq. On his way out Chirac said to Blair something along the lines of: “Tony, you’ve never seen warfare or military action. I have; and it’s not something you ever embark upon except as a last resort”. After the President’s entourage had departed, Blair turned to my fellow-diner and said: “Poor old Jacques. He just doesn’t get it, does he?”
When will the lights go out?
This is the scariest chart I’ve seen all week. It’s from this week’s Economist, which has a sobering piece about the prospect of brown-outs in Britain in the not-so-distant future — like 2012, depending on what Vladimir Putin’s mood is like at the time.
IN THE frigid opening days of 2009, Britain’s electricity demand peaked at 59 gigawatts (GW). Just over 45% of that came from power plants fuelled by gas from the North Sea. A further 35% or so came from coal, less than 15% from nuclear power and the rest from a hotch-potch of other sources. By 2015, assuming that modest economic growth resumes, a reasonable guess is that Britain will need around 64GW to cope with similar conditions. Where will that come from?
North Sea gas has served Britain well, but supply peaked in 1999. Since then the flow has fallen by half; by 2015 it will have dropped by two-thirds. By 2015 four of Britain’s ten nuclear stations will have shut and no new ones could be ready for years after that. As for coal, it is fiendishly dirty: Britain will be breaking just about every green promise it has ever made if it is using anything like as much as it does today. Renewable energy sources will help, but even if the wind and waves can be harnessed (and Britain has plenty of both), these on-off forces cannot easily replace more predictable gas, nuclear and coal power. There will be a shortfall—perhaps of as much as 20GW—which, if nothing radical is done, will have to be met from imported gas. A large chunk of it may come from Vladimir Putin’s deeply unreliable and corrupt Russia…
Something will have to give. My hunch is that it’ll be the UK’s carbon emission targets.
Quote of the day
“We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives.”
Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired Marine and the former head of the US Central Command.
[Source]
Hooray! A big media boss who understands (and believes in) the link economy
Great blog post by Chris Ahearn, President, Media at Thomson Reuters.
To start, yes the global economy is fairly grim and the cyclical aspects of our business are biting extremely hard in the face of the structural changes. But the Internet isn’t killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven’t been keeping up. Many leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting “resources” (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing and vertically curated views need to be meshed with horizontal read-around ones.
Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.
A better approach is to have a general agreement among community members to treat others’ content, business and ideas with the same respect you would want them to treat yours…
Spot on.It’s funny to see how companies that were powerful in the old information ecology think that they have an automatic right to be powerful in the new — without changing their mindsets or business models.
The strange case of Apple, AT&T and Google Voice
This morning’s Observer column.
The Google Voice team also developed a free App ie, application to run on the Apple iPhone. This would enable all US iPhone users to access the cool services above. The team submitted the App to Apple for approval in the usual way, only to have it rejected. Then Apple went even further: it deleted from the App Store two similar programs, GV Mobile and VoiceCentral, which had been there for months.
The VoiceCentral author got a call from an Apple functionary, who said, "I'm calling to let you know that VoiceCentral has been removed from the App Store because it duplicates features of the iPhone" – and absolutely refused to discuss the matter further.
At the moment, nobody really knows what lies behind Apple's intransigence. But conspiracy theories abound…
LATER: Jason Calcanis has published a terrific essay: “The Case Against Apple–in Five Parts”. Great stuff.