Net now reaches into nearly 50% of UK homes

According to the Office of National Statistics, 48% of British homes now have access to the Net.

Broadcasting vs. community

I have to give a talk soon about the changing world of the media, and so I’ve been re-reading Clay Shirky’s stuff, which is consistently brilliant and insightful. Here’s a quote from his essay comparing broadcast mentalities with community-focussed ones:

“#3. Participation matters more than quality.

The order of things in broadcast is “filter, then publish.” The order in communities is “publish, then filter.” If you go to a dinner party, you don’t submit your potential comments to the hosts, so that they can tell you which ones are good enough to air before the group, but this is how broadcast works every day. Writers submit their stories in advance, to be edited or rejected before the public ever sees them. Participants in a community, by contrast, say what they have to say, and the good is sorted from the mediocre after the fact.

Media people often criticize the content on the internet for being unedited, because everywhere one looks, there is low quality — bad writing, ugly images, poor design. What they fail to understand is that the internet is strongly edited, but the editorial judgment is applied at the edges, not the center, and it is applied after the fact, not in advance. Google edits web pages by aggregating user judgment about them, Slashdot edits posts by letting readers rate them, and of course users edit all the time, by choosing what (and who) to read.

Anyone who has ever subscribed to a high-volume mailing list knows there are people who are always worth reading, and people who are usually worth ignoring. This is a way of raising the quality of what gets read, without needing to control what gets written. Media outlets that try to set minimum standards of quality in community writing often end up squeezing the life out of the discussion, because they are so accustomed to filtering before publishing that they can’t imagine that filtering after the fact can be effective. “

Clay has also written insightfully about the differences between audiences and communities

The Rule of Links

… Or: One Major Difference between Blogging and Journalism. From an essay by Dave Winer:

“Jon Udell wrote about the Rule of Links the other day, though not by name. He noted that professional publications usually don’t link to the subject of their articles, where weblogs usually do. He noted this in relation to the furor over a security whitepaper that got one of the authors fired. The professional articles didn’t point to the whitepaper, thereby clearly breaking the Rule of Links. If you’re writing about something that’s on the web, at any length, the Rule of Links turns from should to must. It’s disrespectful to your readers not to link to the subject of your article so they can form their own opinions.

The New York Times, always controversial, says it’s their policy is not to link, that their pub is self-contained and complete. This is total bullshit. While I love the Times, and have been reading it my whole life, I know that they’re crazy over there.”

Chateau Naughton ’03

One of the unexpected side-effects of global warming is that I have become proprietor of a productive vineyard. Well, a productive vine anyway.

So I’ve been harvesting my crop in the time honoured manner…

Trouble is, I don’t know how to make wine, but that should not be a problem. After all, I’ve got Google…

(Later) Three million pages on Google under ‘how to make wine’, so I tried ‘making wine from fresh grapes’. Ah, here’s something promising — WineMakerMag.com. “Winemaking starts with inspecting the grapes”, it says. “Make sure they are ripe by squishing up a good double handful, straining the juice and measuring the sugar level with a hydrometer, a handy device you can buy at a winemaking supply shop. The sugar density should be around 22° Brix – this equals 1.0982 specific gravity or 11 percent potential alcohol – and the fruit should taste sweet, ripe and slightly tart….”. Ye Gods! Hydrometers, degrees Brix… (Who was M. Brix?) I will also apparently need an ‘acid titration kit’. Hmmm…. I can buy Crozes Hermitage in Waitrose for about £8 a bottle. If I cost my time at, say, £50 an hour, Chateau Naughton could easily come out at three grand a bottle. There is perhaps something to be said for specialisation after all.

Edward Said

There’s a lovely tribute by Steven Johnson on his Blog.

“I think it’s worth saying something here that I’ve said about Said for more than ten years now: on his best days, he was the most charismatic man I’ve ever met in my life — handsome, stylish, impossibly articulate, and surprisingly willing to take a joke at his own expense. (I used to tease him about his being indirectly responsible for unleashing [Judith] Butler on the world.) I remember vividly one early spring afternoon, sitting through a seminar he was teaching on public intellectuals, in a room overlooking the Columbia campus and the sun setting over Riverside Park, and thinking to myself: there’s literally nowhere else I’d rather be right now. I’m sure there are thousands of his students out there sifting through similar memories today.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to be remembered like that.

Careless talk costs jobs — especially if you’re rude about Microsoft

Here’s the story. A group of security experts produces a paper (aimed partly at a US Congressional audience) which argues that overreliance on Microsoft Windows threatens the security of the U.S. economy and critical infrastructure. Nothing unusual in that, you may say: it’s only stating the obvious — especially given that, although the study was independently financed and researched, it was distributed by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a Washington-based trade association largely made up of Microsoft’s rivals.

But then something interesting (though not entirely surprising) happened. Dan Geer, one of the authors of the report and a longtime computer security researcher, was Chief technical Officer at a Cambridge, Mass. outfit called @Stake which does a lot of business with Microsoft. And guess what? Just before news of the report broke, Dan found that he was no longer employed by @Stake. Apparently he had forgotten to obtain his employers’ approval for the study’s release. Tsk, tsk.

“Participation in and release of the report was not sanctioned by @Stake,” the security and consulting company said. “The values and opinions of the report are not in line with @Stake’s views.”

You bet. A Microsoft spokesman said the software maker had not pressured @Stake to make any decision on Geer’s status. “We had nothing to do with @Stake’s internal personnel decision,” the spokesman said. Of course they didn’t — there was no need to. Just to make sure there would not be any misunderstandings in Redmond, however, @Stake did call Microsoft late Tuesday night (after news of the report’s contents first broke) to say that Geer’s findings did not reflect the company’s opinions.

It’s a bit like a story from the Old Soviet bloc, really. Everyone in the industry knows that the world’s chronic dependence on Microsoft’s buggy, insecure products is one day going to cause catastrophe, yet many people who know about security are scared to speak out because they will be fired if they do so. The most powerful censorship is when people censor themselves.

Here’s the Washington Post report, which includes an account of how CIO magazine declined to distribute the report — just to reinforce the point about self-censorship.

Jimmy Carter on the Patriot Act

‘Carter, speaking Tuesday at the Carter Center in Atlanta, said the Patriot Act, profiling of Muslims and holding suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay run counter to the principles of democracy the United States preaches to the rest of the world. “They have been held in prison without access to their families, or a lawyer, or without knowing the charges against them,” Carter said. “We’ve got hundreds of people, some of them as young as 12, captured in Afghanistan, brought to Guantanomo Bay and kept in cages for what is going on two years.” Carter said it’s difficult for international aid workers to spread the message of human rights to places like Cuba, Africa and the Middle East when the U.S. government doesn’t practice fairness and equality.

“I have never been as concerned for our nation as I am now about the threat to our civil liberties,” Carter said.’

I always had a soft spot for Carter. Now I know why. [Full report of his speech]

Interview transcript

One thing I’ve learned from Dave Winer is that it’s always a good idea to put one’s own transcript of a media interview on the Web, just to make sure that one isn’t, er, misrepresented by Big Media. Not that the nice chap from Ireland’s Sunday Tribune would do such a thing, of course. Still, here’s the transcript:

Q: How did you come to be doing a blog?

A: I’ve been keeping a private online diary on my personal web-server for years (since about 1996 I think) — mainly because I needed a kind of working notebook where I could put notes on stuff I was reading and thinking about. In particular, I was afraid that I’d ‘lose’ or forget important stuff, so I put a search engine on my private online diary and that turned it into a terrific personal resource. But basically it was like a lab notebook. The one thing my private diary didn’t do very well was organised archiving, so in the end I decided to use Radio Userland to do it for me, and at the same time to make the diary public.

Q: I know many people have been blogging for years, but why do you think that blogs have become so ubiquitous in the past 18-24 months?

A: Two main reasons:

1. Software arrived to make it easy for non-techies — Blogger.com, Moveable Type, Userland Radio.

2. 9/11 in the US generated a huge desire for expression and discussion among Web users. Mainstream media were no good for that. And the old Internet newsgroup system was useless because it was too polluted by porn, spam and flaming. So weblogging grew to fill the gap.

Q: What can blogs do that traditional reporting cannot?

A: Offer views that are not mediated through the normal editorial (and therefore ideological) gatekeepers of ‘official’ journalism. But I think too much is made of the distinction between Blogging and journalism. Most Blogging is commentary, not reporting. In some areas (e.g. technically arcane), Bloggers are real subject experts and I would always prefer their judgment to that of amateurish reporters (no matter how well-intentioned or conscientious).

Q: Blogs reflect a wider diversity of opinions and views than traditional reporting and media products do. They also operate under fewer quality and accuracy checks and balances. What is your view of that balance between a multiplicity of voices and an impression of less reliability?

A: I’m not unduly impressed by traditional media standards, nor should you be. I see no evidence of a concern for accuracy in the Sun, Daily/Sunday mail, daily/Sunday Indo, Fox News, etc. When was the last time you noticed an accuracy check in the Sun? And even BBC reporters (so we find from Hutton) don’t keep shorthand notes, or check stories against second independent sources!) Blogs vary in quality and objectivity. But mostly they are commentary of one kind or another, not reporting, so the quality/reliability issue doesn’t arise.

Q: What, in the blogging world, has most impressed you in the last 6 months?

A: The most impressive development is the widespread use of RSS feeds to enable Blogs to link up, and the evolution of software like NetNewsWire which enables Blogging to become more than the sum of its parts. I’m also watching closely the way the Berkman Center at Harvard has taken on Blogging as a way of enriching academic and public discourse. And of course there is Governor Dean’s Campaign, which is making inspired use of the Net — and includes Blogging. See Deanspace.

Q: What, if any, blogging tricks is the mainstream adapting and adopting for its own uses?

A: Mainstream media shows no signs yet of understanding what’s going on. In part that’s because Blogging is way outside the big media paradigm.

Q: Many of the very early WWW sites, back in the mid 1990s, were basically online journals, detailing a person’s life or interests or hobbies. Is there a fundamental difference separating blogs from these early sites?

A: Yes. Those early ‘weblogs’ were really just collections of links to ‘cool new stuff’ appearing on the burgeoning infant Web. Contemporary Blogs are more personalised, less technical and often just introspective.

Q: Why is blogging so important? What role does it now play in the wider social context?

A: It creates a space for public discussion which had been closed up by the dominance and control of Big Media. It re-enables what Jurgen Habermas called the ‘public sphere’. Healthy democracies need such spaces.

Q: What is a bad blog?

A: What’s a bad diary?

Q: What is the Irish blogging scene like? Is it having any real effect on Irish public/political life?

A: Don’t know — the person to ask is Irish Times journalist Karlin Lillington, who has a lovely Blog called techno/culture

Q: Why do you blog?

A: To express ideas that matter to me, and to let a few friends know what I’m thinking about.

Q: Is doing a blog not just a modern form of ego-fuelled vanity publishing?

A: That’s Big Media’s prejudiced view. Partly reflects a contempt for ‘ordinary’ people (i.e. “what could Joe Public possibly have to say about anything?”) and cynicism (“why would anybody write for nothing?”) Misses the point entirely.

Hugo Young

Hugo Young, the wisest political commentator of our times, is dead. Magisterial, lofty (in reality as well as in temperament) and incorruptible, he often expressed what I felt about Thatcher, Major and Blair. But unlike me, he was not choked by moral indignation, so his writing cut through cant and controversy like a scalpel. I had no idea he was dying (from cancer), so it’s nice that I picked up here on the last column he wrote — about how Blair’s decision unquestioningly to support the US constituted an effective surrender of British sovereignty. I always turned first to his column in the Guardian — just as I had turned to him decades ago when he wrote for the Sunday Times. And, like many other liberals, I will miss his voice. He was an example of how good — and how important — journalism can be.

Next Microsoft worm arrives

This evening, a funny message headed “From Microsoft Security Department” arrived in my (Mac!) inbox. It had lots of Microsoft-type graphics, plus helpful text. “This is the latest version of security update, the September 2003 Cumulative Update”, it read, “which resolves all known security vulnerabilities affecting MS Internet Explorer, MS Outlook and MS Outlook Express… Install now to maintain the security of your computer from these vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could allow an [sic] malicious user to run executable on your system…”. Etc. etc. At the end, of course, is the executable file that does the damage.

It’s the Swen or Gibe worm. According to the BBC, the worm switches off any anti-virus or firewall software and mails itself to addresses it finds on the victim’s computer. It also installs various files to make sure that it is run every time the computer boots up. “According to e-mail filtering firm, MessageLabs, the first copies originated from Slovakia on 14 September, with some later coming from the Netherlands.”

Two questions: (1) Who would be taken in by this (especially when you see that the actual message source is “grahggimbgmve_ynpekspq@updates_msn.net”? (2) Why can’t the virus writers take the trouble to get their grammar right?