Vacation Ontology

The BBC’s Tech Guru (and my colleague on the iSociety Advisory Board), Bill Thompson, has been on holiday in Venice and has been musing on the experience of being (largely) disconnected from the Net. He seems to find it untraumatic. “I use my mobile connection to send some e-mail”, he writes, “and I go into a cyber cafe to download the torrent of spam and occasional useful message. But apart from a brief glance at a couple of news sites to check that no major disasters have befallen the world – and the hottest day on record in London doesn’t count – I have hardly used the web at all.”

Bill goes on to mount one of his hobby horses — the pointlessness of Blogging. “In fact, I had stopped paying careful attention to the lists and the blogs even before I left the country. It seemed to me that the number of useless postings and blog entries was starting to increase and there was less and less there that was really of interest. This could be the sign of a worrying phenomenon. Perhaps the blogs, after a brief time when they were seen by some as a wholly new wave of internet development, are losing their appeal.

The earliest bloggers have been at it for two years now – how many days can someone keep on posting to their LiveJournal site, or visiting Blogger to add more details about their cat’s mysterious illness? “

Bill’s little rant is a good example of a venerable genre which I call ‘vacation ontology’. Hack goes on holiday, is temporarily disconnected from his frenetic life and is shocked into pondering The Meaning Of It All. (I know, because I’ve done it myself.) But it would be unwise to take these holiday musings too seriously.

For the record, my kids and I have had — courtesy of some generous friends — an idyllic week in Provence, in a villa with a wonderful view, a pool and no phone connection. My Bluetooth mobile worked up to a point (9600 bps), but basically we were cut off from the Net for a week. This deprivation, however, did not induce in me the same reaction as it did in Bill. Rather it made me realise how essential an always-on connection is for a civilised life. I missed the regular email traffic with friends, and — more intensely — being able to access the resources of the Web. Our hosts and I had lots of conversations which would have been enriched if we’d been able to access Google. Who wrote that? What year did Popper die? What’s the weather forecast for Provence for tomorrow? What was the title of that essay by…? Do you remember that review of X that was in the New Republic? Or was it Salon? How do you add music soundtracks in iMovie? And so on.

Before we went to Provence, I had asked our host if the house had an Internet connection. “No”, he replied. “If it had, why would I ever go home?” (He lives and works in Amsterdam).

At last: a proper weblog census

Thanks to Karlin Lillington for this — really useful for a piece I’m writing. “Jupiter Research has published some interesting figures on blogging. Somewhere between 2.4 and 2.9 million active blogs in existence, but they remain a tiny slice of web life. Only 2% of web users have created a blog, and only an estimated 4% read them (which is a good reminder to bloggers and media people to always explain the word weblog and blog and not assume your audience has any idea whatsoever of what you’re talking about :^) …). Blogging is split fairly evenly between genders, but more men than women read them (a 60/40 split). Nearly 3/4ths (73%) of blog readers have been online for 5 years or more, suggesting (to me) they are either fairly young or the more techie crowd that first jumped online.”

Karlin also publishes fascinating statistics about the languages in which Blogs are published. English predominates (as expected) but the next four are surprising (to me anyway): Portuguese, Polish, Farsi (yep!) and French.

The Wired story

Everyone in the tech business remembers the first time s/he saw Wired, Louis Rossetto’s hymn to technology. I used to buy it whenever I was feeling rich, but always fought shy of its astronomical subscription rates. Now Gary Wolf has written the story of how the dream imploded in Wired: a romance (Basic Books, NY). Here’s the NYT review by David Carr.

The case for downloading music

Lovely Salon essay by Jon and Ben Syyder.

The Geek Chorus

Wireless networking has become a sine qua non of a civilised environment for me. On Wednesday, I went to DEMOS to give a talk, and when I arrived was immediately offered access to their WiFi net, and was able to read my email and check references etc. before starting. But tech conferences are now going one stage further — and letting the audience use WiFi as a back-channel during presentations. There’s an interesting article in the NYT which describes an intriguing consequence of this. Quote:

“Some people who have experienced the phenomenon cite a speech given last year at a computer industry conference by Joe Nacchio, former chief executive of the telecommunications company Qwest. As he gave his presentation, two bloggers – Dan Gillmor, a columnist for The San Jose Mercury News, and Doc Searls, senior editor for The Linux Journal – were posting notes about him to their Weblogs, which were simultaneously being read by many people in the audience.

Both included a link forwarded by a reader in Florida to a stock filing report indicating that Mr. Nacchio had recently made millions of dollars from selling his company’s stock, although he complained in his speech about the tough economy. “No sympathy here,” Mr. Gillmor wrote.

“When Dan blogged that, the tenor of the room changed,” Mr. Doctorow said. Mr. Nacchio, he said, “stopped getting softball questions and he started getting hardball questions.”

You can see why some conference presenter are getting a bit jumpy about this.

Missing the point, Gartner style

The Gartner Group does ‘market research’ in the computing marketplace. It is thus a leading contributor to what Manuel Castells describes as ‘informed bewilderment’. In a recent foray, it has latched onto the propaganda backlash against the Munich decision to go for Open Source software for its municipal IT systems. According to The Register:

“Gartner does not say outright that it thinks the Munich switch will turn out to be a costly failure, but it seems to question the move in terms both of cost and methodology. The migration, it says, will cost around o30 million, whereas an upgrade to Windows would have cost o27 million, excluding the extra discounts from Microsoft which Munich spurned. Alongside this, Gartner claims that “many applications will not migrate to Linux” but will be run either as thin client systems or “using virtual machine software, such as VMware.”

Why does this miss the point? because cost was not the issue in the decision. What was clearly uppermost in the minds of German policymakers (not just in Munich BTW: same sentiments can be found among senior politicians in the Bundestag) is preserving freedom of manoeuvre in the longer term. Sometimes, the short-term costs of avoiding lock-out may be greater than the cost of continuing to acquiesce in accepting supply from a monopoly.

Tipping Point, 1914

This was the day in 1914 when Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia following the killing of Archduke Francis Ferdinand by a Serb assassin in Sarajevo.

Groundhog… er, Creepy-Crawlie Day

By strange coincidence, two of Britain’s most prominent creepy-crawlies have today been given licence to crawl out from under their stones. Peter Mandelson, the disgraced former Cabinet minister is all over the media saying the things about the Kelly affair that Downing Street cannot utter at present. And Jeffrey Archer, the so-called ‘writer’, has been released from gaol. Will nobody save us from these pests?

Governor Dean, the Internet and the forthcoming presidential election

Something very interesting is going on in the US, as yet apparently unnoticed by the mainstream media. Vermont Governor Howard Dean, a sane and decent human being — a GP in fact — is running for president. He has little money, no big backers and the Democratic Party regards him as a no-hoper pinko leftie. In conventional American political wisdom he is a Dead Duck.

And yet Governor Dean is making astonishing progress. For example, everywhere he goes he is greeted by thousands of people — the kind of numbers that in the old days would have required a massive organisation and lots of forward scouts. How is this possible? Answer: because Howard Dean is making really shrewd use of the Net. For example, he’s using Meetup.com to enable supporters to find one another and get together. He’s using the web to raise funds — very effectively. Larry Lessig gave him a guest slot last week on his Weblog. And the Dean campaign even has its own weblog. The strangest thing about Howard Dean is that he is the only major US politician who seems connected to external reality — at least to European ears. Most of the others seem to be inhabiting a parallel universe.

This is all lost, of course, on the mainstream media, locked as they are in their Washington/Republican mindwarp. Insofar as they think of Dean at all, they think of him as the continuation of George McGovern by other means — and everyone knows what happened to George. They cannot imagine an unknown candidate from a minor state actually making it into the big time. And no liberal has ever made it to the White House. As the evidence of Bush’s dishonesty, mendacity and incompetence seeps out, however, they may discover that the public rather likes Governor Dean. Just as they once found they rather liked a hick peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter.

On this day…

… in 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. I vividly remember watching the video footage in a crowded, hushed room in the University Centre (aka the GradPad).