My Observer column about the strange phenomenon of digital photography is on the Web.

The conflict between freedom and efficiency

In an editorial about the suggestion that ID cards would be introduced for UK subjects. the Economist of July 6 2002 puts the issue starkly (but accurately):

“The reason the government is computerising all this information is not because it is bent on attacking personal freedoms, but because it wants to make its systems work more efficiently. This is something every taxpayer also wants….

Yet there is a trade-off between efficiency and liberty. An inefficient state can never repress its people as effectively as an efficient one. What, then, is the citizen supposed to hope for? A government with effective, and therefore potentially dangerous, machinery, or government that doesn’t work very well?”

This is a great statement of the problem. But the paper then loses it in the next para.

“The only way of reconciling efficiency with liberty is to balance the government’s new powers with new rights. Let the databases grow. Let the computers talk to each other. Let the ID cards be issued. But give citizens the right to see any informtion the state holds about them.”

What a cop-out. Fancy imagining that a state which is acquiring this kind of surveillance power would give people access to what it knows about them. And even if it would, what difference would that make? The Economist could do better than that if it really tried.

MP attacks Microsoft for extortionate pricing of school software licences

Eastern Daily News report on MP Bob Blizzard’s Parliamentary Question to an Education minister about why schools apparently pay more than colleges and universities.

Good Salon article about Palladium

Will online customer service quickly become an automated activity?

John Robb thinks it can. “Check out the incarnations of the Alice Bot (the engine can be downloaded in multiple forms).  Then check out the animated 2D pictures available via the Pulse Veeper.   Now check out the quality of Loquendo’s text to speech engine.  The art of the interaction would be to create a set of responses that cover all classes of customer service inquiries (suprising easy I would suspect given the time I spent doing something similar at my last job), enable access to customer account and inventory data, and combine the three different programs detailed above for an integrated experience. 

After this is done, provide data-driven flash animations of actions taken by the automated customer service rep.  For example: 1) making a credit to an account, 2) transfer of funds, 3) selection of an item for purchase, 4) instructions on how to assemble a product, and 5) instructions on how to send back an item.   Visual animated display of complex actions or info is extremely important for retention. 

In thinking about this, customer service may not be the appropriate place to apply this technology.    E-learning may be a better application.  A free form, seemingling intelligent Q&A bot that incorporates prerecorded bits of audio/animation to walk you through modules of instruction would be very cool.  Add voice to text so you can verbally interrupt a presentation to ask a question and it gets eerie.  Given that home schooling is a large market that is growing by 15% a year, and the basic modules of instruction are well understood, this could be extremely profitable at a low cost of development.

It could also be done in an app that runs on your desktop.”

It could also be useful in my TSCP project. Hmmmm….

Lovely, lyrical meditation about Napster (RIP) by Tom Matrullo.

The trouble with (modern) journalism

Extremely thoughtful New York Review of Books review by Russell Baker of five books on the parlous state of modern journalism — especially the way it has been perverted by corporate needs. “The history of journalism is quite clear about what makes the difference between great and mediocre papers: it is the quality of their ownership. Reporters and editors may disagree, but no matter how splendid the quality of an editorial staff, a publisher too timid, too indifferent, or too chintzy to support it will produce a timid, indifferent, and, at best, second-rate paper.”

James Fallows on the Internet bubble and the Enron/WorldCom business
The Atlantic exchange.

“But everything has changed because of the corporate collapses too. It is remarkable how rapidly a number of public assumptions have shifted. It was not even a year ago that The Industry Standard magazine went under. One year before that, the Standard (which covered the Internet industries, and for which I wrote a column), had sold more ad pages in a single year than any other magazine in history. To people outside the “new economy,” the Standard’s boom and bust was a symbol of the hubris and delusion of the Internet bubble years. Yes, America as a whole might suffer as the failure of dot-com firms drove the NASDAQ down. But last summer, the prevailing reaction from people in the “normal” economy was: hah hah hah! You phonies have been brought back to earth!…”

My Observer column about how to keep search engines honest is on the Web.

Music labels planning to go after individual file-sharers
MSNBC story.

“Major music companies are preparing to mount a broad new attack on unauthorized online song-swapping. The campaign would include suits against individuals who are offering the largest troves of songs on peer-to-peer services….”