Seen in a London club.
The uses and abuses of Skeuomorphism
This morning’s Observer column.
Or consider this, from Wired magazine, claiming that Apple’s iPhone app, Find My Friends, “includes astonishingly ugly, faux stitched leather that wastes screen space. On the new iCal for the Macintosh, things are odder yet: When you page forward, the sheet for the previous month rips off and floats away, an animation so artless you’d swear it was designed personally by Bill Gates.”
Ouch! What Apple’s designers are being accused of, it turns out, is the grave sin of skeuomorphism. Now there’s a conversation-stopper if ever I saw one. A skeuomorph is, according to the OED, a ‚”derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original”.
How to dismantle a magazine
Left turn ahead
Wishful thinking, given the current political scene.
GitHub and democracy
Interesting talk. First time I’ve ever heard GitHub discussed in this context.
Cloud computing’s environmental footprint
I was struck by James Glanz’s NYT article about the environmental footprint of cloud computing and so tried to summarise it in a small slide-deck. Hope it’s useful.
There’s a chapter on this in my new book.
Raspberry Pi: cautionary tale
From a Facebook post by Jon Crowcroft:
So raspberry Pi ships with a) sshd on b) root login on sshd on c) the same default password on every Pi – doh! Do not plug in your pi to a net before changing at least one of the above, or you will, like a famous professor in the computer lab last week, get hacked, and deserve to be:)
Noted! (I’ve just ordered a new Raspberry Pi to replace the one that died on me.)
Footnote: the victim was not Jon!
Facebook now bigger than India
The real significance of the phone-hacking scandal
Very interesting analysis of the Digger’s recent moves by Anatole Kaletsky.
Outside shareholders of News Corp have long dreamt of the company ridding itself of scarcely profitable newspaper businesses to become a pure TV and movie business. This move was considered impossible under Murdoch, because of his sentimental attachment to print. But that was almost certainly a misunderstanding. Murdoch did not build the world’s greatest media empire through sentimentality. The reason why he loved papers, even when they suffered big losses, was because they gave him political power. For News Corp shareholders, in turn, Murdoch’s power brought business benefits.
Murdoch’s political influence allowed News Corp to overcome regulatory and political obstacles that defeated other media companies. The obvious case was News Corp’s recent attempt to take full control of BSkyB, the British satellite broadcaster, but there were many other cases. In fact, Murdoch’s ability to overcome obstacles – whether erected by politicians, regulators, unions or business rivals – that thwarted other moguls has been the key to his success.
Kaletsky argues that even when the newspapers lost money, they were still useful.
Throughout Murdoch’s career, his bold personality and vision have been usefully supplemented by the political influence derived from newspaper ownership. This ingredient in the Murdoch formula has now been transformed.
Once the phone-hacking scandal sabotaged the BSkyB bid, the business calculation behind newspaper ownership completely reversed. The papers were suddenly transformed from an asset into an albatross – and the arguments for keeping a print business within News Corp vanished. In July, Murdoch duly conceded this, announcing that all his publishing businesses would be split off into a separate company.
Smart piece. It’ll be interesting to see who lines up to buy the Times.
Information wants to be fr…, er, shared
I’ve just bought the Kindle edition of Information Wants to Be Shared
Stewart Brand famously declared, “Information wants to be free.” Except he didn’t (not really). And it doesn’t. Information is much more complicated than that. What information really wants–what makes it more valuable, useful, and immediate, Joshua Gans argues–is to be shared. Using the tools and logic of information economics, Gans shows how sharing enhances most information’s value. He also shows how the business models of traditional media companies, gatekeepers who have relied on scarcity and control, have collapsed in the face of new technologies. Equally important, he argues that sharing can revive moribund, threatened industries even as he examines platforms that have, almost accidentally, thrived in this new environment. Provocative, intriguing, and useful, “Information Wants to Be Shared” will change the way you think about your ideas and the media you use to consume and produce them.