The sky over my house last evening.
The battle for control
Forceful piece in today’s International Herald Tribune by Carl Biltd, former Prime Minister of Sweden. Sample:
Beyond the headlines, a critically important battle for control of the Internet is being played out.
On the one side is the United States, which wants to retain supervision of the Internet and has managed to get the reluctant support of most of the global Internet community, which sees America as the least bad of the possible ultimate guardians of the system.
On the other side is a collection of states keen on getting as much as control as possible in order to curtail the Internet’s power to undermine their regimes. With the theocracy of Iran as the standard-bearer, this group brings together Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba and Venezuela. North Korea is probably keen to join in as well.
The European Union seems to be in the middle, wavering back and forth – and in its wavering it has recently come down with a position that has brought it enthusiastic applause from Tehran, Beijing and Havana.
Bildt thinks that the European Commission doesn’t know what it’s doing here, and I agree with him. In the end, the Americans will block this, and, for once, we may have reason to be grateful for their obduracy.
Thanks to Gerard for the link.
Hedgehogs and foxes
Freeman Dyson, writing about Richard Feynman in the current issue of the New York Review of Books opens with this paragraph:
Great scientists come in two varieties, which Isiah Berlin, quoting the seventh-century-BC poet Archilochus, called hedgehogs and foxes. Foxes know many tricks, hedgehogs only one. Hedgehogs are interested only in a few problems which they consider fundamental, and stick with the same problems for years or decades. Most of the great discoveries are made by hedgehogs, most of the little discoveries by foxes. Science needs both hedgehogs and foxes for its healthy growth, hedgehogs to dig deep into the nature of things, foxes to explore the complicated details of our marvelous universe. Albert Einstein was a hedgehog; Richard Feynman was a fox.
Well, I’m not a scientist, but I’m definitely a fox.
Signs of the Google times
Email from Pete…
Just typed in ‘to be or not to be’ in the Google search box, looking for the Hamlet speech – and guess what the first entry to appear is? Hot or Not?. Imagining some poor sod, on the verge of suicide, deciding to take counsel from the great Bard, and instead confronted with one of the outposts of 21st century voyeurism and vanity…Ye gods.
Settled!
Why home printing is a racket
From today’s New York Times…
It does not take an advanced business degree for those consumers to see how printer manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard and Canon make their money. They use the “razor blade” business model. It is named from the marketing innovation of King C. Gillette, who in the early years of the last century sold razors for a low price but made all his money on the high-margin disposable razor blades. Printer manufacturers also use this tied-product strategy.
Printers return relatively low profit margins. But the ink, ounce for ounce, is four times the cost of Krug Clos du Mesnil Champagne, which sells for around $425 a bottle. Ink is about the same price as Joy perfume, considered to be one of the more pricey fragrances, at $158 for a 2.5-ounce bottle.
Kodak’s bid to own your pictures
You couldn’t make this up. But I’ll let Dan Bricklin (a keen digital photographer) tell the story…
The idea of a “Wi-Fi” camera seems exciting but in trying to understand it I found that it comes with a big boat anchor — the photos are uploaded to Kodak’s site. But you don’t really own the pictures. If you ask they will sell your photos to you and deliver them to you on a CD (no downloads!) which contains your entire collection of pictures! According to their site you can’t even specify which photos — you have to pay according to how many photos are in your account!
Since the site and rules may change there’s what KodakGallery (formerly Ofoto) currently says: “When you order an Archive CD, your entire photo collection will be preserved on CD. Photos are saved as full-sized JPEGs in their original resolution. Archive CDs are priced according to the total number of photos in your account.”
While the idea of having your photos automatically moved from your camera to the Internet sounds wonderful, you lose ownership of your own pictures. Or maybe you shouldn’t think of them as yours — they effectively belong to Kodak and you get only controlled access. As much as Kodak seems to want to leave their silver-halide heritage behind they seem to be stuck in the old business model of making money when you process the picture, when you print the picture and whenever you want to print it again. It’s another example of how hard it is for a company to change its basic nature.
This is part of the larger trend that is fighting to keep control. The record industry doesn’t want to let you have any control over the bits you buy and Tellywood wants to wrap everything in a very tight DRM straightjacket. These are a business premised on control and they seem unable to change their basic nature. For them it makes a lot of sense to fight the future as long as they can. They have no better option and if they are smart they are taking cash out so when their business evaporates they can retire.
What if VisiCalc had been patented…
One of my proudest possessions is a copy of the original version of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program which Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston wrote for the Apple II (and which was the reason that machine began to sell like hot cakes: people wanted the software and, when told they needed an Apple machine to run it, bought one of those too). If you look at Excel (and, before that, Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft’s first effort at a spreadsheet, Multiplan) you’ll see that each was essentially just an attempt to do a better VisiCalc. And of course they were able to do it because VisiCalc wasn’t patented. Dan Bricklin has been musing about this on his Blog.
Daily life in Iraq
From Slate…
One contractor bid $70,000 to fill a few potholes. Maj. Benjamin Busch of College Park, Md., working with the Civil Affairs Group in Ramadi, estimated that the work should cost $5,000. The contractor protested that he had to buy his own cement trucks because no one was willing to rent to him if it meant entering Ramadi. He then had to hire guards who insisted on driving their own vehicles. He paid local officials for “licenses,” he paid the sheik in charge of the local tribe where he was to work. He then had to persuade the insurgents on each street where he was working to accept a payment in exchange for leaving him alone. And his work crew and guards insisted on driving back and forth from Baghdad each day, resulting in about three hours of actual work per day. Busch told him to forget it, but he agreed that such a maze of payoffs and arrangements was typical. It was almost impossible for an outside contractor to work in the city, and local contractors spent more time negotiating with the complex power structure than doing actual work. Hence, $70,000 for a $5,000 job.
Determined to complete at least one job on the streets, Busch brought in two tanks to guard a work detail. Insurgents (without guns) walked around the tanks, gathered the workers together, and told them they had one hour to get out of town. The workers left.
The blogging revolution
Well, well. A Guardian/ICM poll brings some unexpected news…
The extent of the personal publishing revolution has been revealed by a Guardian/ICM poll showing that a third of all young people online have launched their own blog or website. Millions of young people who have grown up with the internet and mobile phones are no longer content with the one-way traffic of traditional media and are publishing and aggregating their own content, according to the exclusive survey of those aged between 14 and 21…
The Guardian has a leader on the implications of this phenomenon.
Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley claims that 27% of US internet users read Blogs.
CNET is claiming that there are “more than 14 million” blogs in existence and another 80,000 being created each day. It has now compiled the usual fatuous list of the ‘Top 100’ Blogs. Sigh.
More: From a report of a presentation by Dave Sifri of Technorati…
Technorati is tracking 18.9 million weblogs, and seeing a doubling in these numbers every five months.
70,000 new weblogs are created every day; about one every second. 55% of those bloggers appear to still be active 3 months later. About 8% of those blogs are spam.
Looking at use, Technorati are seeing over 1,000,000 blog posts every day, with clear spikes around newsworthy events.
High profile blogs like Boing Boing and Gizmodo have similar levels of attention to mainstream media sites such as Reuters and the BBC. Traditional media companies are now beginning to integrate blog content into their offerings, with the Washington Post and others announcing their entry into this space today.
The use of tagging in blog posts is increasing, with almost a third of posts today including at least one tag.
En passant… it’s funny how these numbers never quite match up. CNET has “more than 14 million” Blogs, with 80,000 being created every day, while Technorati is monitoring “18.9 million” and seeing a mere 70,000 new ones a day. Hmmm….