Terrific lecture by Mark Blyth. Note, in particular, his opening gambit.
Get it right, spooks
I love this. A web designer was so appalled by the aesthetics of the PRISM PowerPoint deck that she redesigned it to show what a proper web-savvy designer would do with it.
Best thing since Peter Norvig re-cast Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation.
Google’s choice: between a rock and a very hard place
My Observer Comment piece about the dilemma facing Google and the other Internet giants: do they co-operate with the National Security State? Or look after their users’ (and their own commercial) interests?
The revelations of the past week explain why Schmidt was so preoccupied with the power of the state – especially of the national security state, which is what our democracies are morphing into. The apparent contradictions between, on the one hand, Google’s vehement insistence that it has “not joined any programme that would give the US government – or any other government – direct access to our servers” and, on the other, the assertions to the contrary in the leaked National Security Agency slide-deck that demonstrate the extent to which Google (and the other internet companies) are caught between a rock and a very hard place.
The rock is that the national security state, as embodied in the National Security Agency, GCHQ and kindred agencies, shows no sign of withering away. Au contraire. In the end, companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple will be compelled to obey the state’s orders. If they don’t, their executives will find themselves sharing jail cells with the likes of Bradley Manning.
The hard place is corporate terror that their users will become alienated by the realisation that personal communications cannot be safely entrusted to internet companies based in the US. Crunch time has arrived for Google & co, in other words. I look forward to the second, revised, edition of Schmidt’s book.
Memo to user: you’re not a customer
This morning’s Observer column.
A reader writes: “Dear John Naughton, As you write about the internet, I wondered if you knew how long it takes Yahoo to get back to people. I have an iPad, but went to the library to print a document (attached to an email). Yahoo knew I wasn’t on my iPad and asked me to name my favourite uncle. I replied, but Yahoo didn’t like my answer, so locked me out for 12 hours. I can’t get into my email account. Getting to the Help page is really difficult. Do you ever speak to anybody at Yahoo? I had to open another non-Yahoo email account, so I opened a Gmail account and it looks to have the same problem. Not easy to get in touch with anybody when things go wrong. I am sure I am not the only one who wants to discuss my problem with a human being. Yours sincerely…”
Dear Reader, I hear (and sympathise with) your pain, but we need to get something straight…
Technology’s echo chamber
Nick Bilton has nice piece in the New York Times about the echo-chamber effect one gets when too many people of the same mindset are gathered together in the same location. The peg for it is Twist, an App for folks who are tired of having to text one another about ETAs when rushing to make meetings. Bilton’s question: does anybody else other than frenetic Silicon Valley types need such a thing?
Is Twist a great idea, or are Mr. Belshe and Mr. Lee [Twist’s inventors] falling into a local propensity for creating a product for technophile friends rather than the public?
Sometimes, Hollywood screenwriters create scripts filled with inside jokes that only people in Hollywood could appreciate. Sometimes, New York media writers write about other New York media writers. And sometimes, tech entrepreneurs in San Francisco and Silicon Valley to the south create companies best appreciated by other people who live and breathe technology.
Twist is hardly the only start-up whose target audience does not seem to extend far from San Francisco Bay. Among many, there’s BlackJet, which offers “affordable private jet” solutions for people in the area. And there’s Swig, which connects people with local liquor stores that provide home deliveries.
“One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that we are guilty in the Valley of designing things for ourselves, and we are not the target market,” said Andy Smith, who is the co-author of “The Dragonfly Effect,” a book about marketing, technology and entrepreneurship.
Ken Robinson on the need to stop squeezing creativity out of kids
If you watch nothing else this week, watch this. Ten million people already have.
Voltaire and the autonomous car
This morning’s Observer column.
The best is the enemy of the good,” said Voltaire. It’s a maxim that has a particular resonance for tech designers, because it highlights the intrinsic tension between ambition and pragmatism that haunts them. Many perfectly viable products have never made it beyond the prototype stage because their designers felt they fell too far short of the ideals they had set for themselves. One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was so remarkable as a company boss is that he was the exception that proved Voltaire’s rule. He was a perfectionist for whom the good was the enemy of the best. Which is why working for him was such an exhausting business and also why Apple’s products became so distinctive.
As it happens, Voltaire’s maxim may also be useful in explaining what will happen in the field of autonomous vehicles, aka self-driving cars…
Has Facebook peaked?
As the guy noted in his copy of the Old Testament, “Important if true”. It’s from Mary Meeker’s latest ‘State of the Internet’ presentation.
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That spaghetti harvest
It’s amazing what’s on YouTube. At dinner I was talking to someone who hadn’t been born when the famous Panorama April 1 spoof went out. Suddenly occurred to me that it might be on YouTube. And — Lo! — it was, complete with time-code.
Analogue nostalgia ain’t what it used to be
This morning’s Observer column.
Instagram filters represent an interesting contemporary phenomenon – what one might call analogue nostalgia. Digital technology enables anyone to take photographs that are – technically – flawless, in the sense of being sharply focused and properly exposed. Some cameras even have features such as smile detectors so that they won’t shoot until they detect at least a rictus grin. They have elaborate systems for controlling or eliminating the “red eye” effect of direct flash photography. And, of course, if you don’t get a satisfactory picture first time you can keep going until you get something that looks acceptable on the camera’s LCD screen.
All of this would have seemed like attaining Nirvana to earlier generations of (analogue) photographers. And yet the popularity of things such as Instagram, Hipstamatic, Pixlr-o-matic and other apps for creatively mangling photographs suggests that the effortless perfection offered by digital technology has come to seem, well, boring. So just as painters abandoned realism once photography arrived, Instagrammers, Hipstamaticians et al now seek ways of creatively degrading their imagery so that it looks different, arty or just plain cool.