Apocalypse soon?

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This chilling video is all over the Net. I’ve been watching the slow-motion car crash that is Western governments’ response to the economic downturn and thinking that it meets all the criteria for (ancient) Greek tragedy — in that one can see it’s going to be a disaster and nobody can do anything to prevent it. But I hadn’t seen anyone laying out as brutally as this.

Then some doubts set in. Is this guy a successful trader, as he implies? Here’s Deborah Orr in the Guardian:

Rastani isn’t a predator. He’s merely a would-be predator, operating freelance from his girlfriend’s semi in Bexleyheath, and regretful that he did not, in fact, make “a fortune” out of the crash. Actually, the guy is the most honest broker ever to hit the telly. No wonder he’s broke.

But here’s the funny thing. The BBC is in trouble because it let Rastani on to the television without vetting him properly first. He presented himself as a successful trader, when there is no sign that he is.

Quite so: according to the Telegraph, he lives in a pebbledashed suburban house that he doesn’t even own:

“They approached me,” he told The Telegraph. “I’m an attention seeker. That is the main reason I speak. That is the reason I agreed to go on the BBC. Trading is a like a hobby. It is not a business. I am a talker. I talk a lot. I love the whole idea of public speaking.”

So he’s more of a talker than a trader. A man who doesn’t own the house he lives in, but can sum up the financial crisis in just three minutes – a knack that escapes many financial commentators.

“I agreed to go on because I’m attention seeker,” he said on Tuesday. “But I meant every word I said.”

The trouble is that some of what he says is plausible. Goldman Sachs may not actually rule the world, but governments behave as if it did.

Thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.

Why the Web might be a transient

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As I observed the other day, one of the things that drove me to write From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg was exasperation at the number of people who thought the Web is the Internet. In lecturing about this I developed a provocative trope in which I said that, although the Web is huge, in 50 years time we may see it as just a blip in the evolution of the Net. This generally produced an incredulous reaction.

So it’s interesting to see Joe Hewitt arguing along parallel lines. Unlike me, he suggests a process by which the Web might be sidelined. “The arrogance of Web evangelists is staggering”, he writes.

They take for granted that the Web will always be popular regardless of whether it is technologically competitive with other platforms. They place ideology above relevance. Haven’t they noticed that the world of software is ablaze with new ideas and a growing number of those ideas are flat out impossible to build on the Web? I can easily see a world in which Web usage falls to insignificant levels compared to Android, iOS, and Windows, and becomes a footnote in history. That thing we used to use in the early days of the Internet.

My prediction is that, unless the leadership vacuum is filled, the Web is going to retreat back to its origins as a network of hyperlinked documents. The Web will be just another app that you use when you want to find some information, like Wikipedia, but it will no longer be your primary window. The Web will no longer be the place for social networks, games, forums, photo sharing, music players, video players, word processors, calendaring, or anything interactive. Newspapers and blogs will be replaced by Facebook and Twitter and you will access them only through native apps. HTTP will live on as the data backbone used by native applications, but it will no longer serve those applications through HTML. Freedom of information may be restricted to whatever our information overlords see fit to feature on their App Market Stores.

I hope he’s wrong and given that he’s a serious and successful Apps developer he has an axe to grind. But his blog makes one think…

Shelves for what … books?

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From an interesting piece in The Economist.

TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.

Having started rather late, books are swiftly following music and newspapers into the digital world. Publishers believe their journey will be different, and that they will not suffer the fate of those industries by going into slow decline. Publishers’ experience will, indeed, be different—but not necessarily better…

FT’s HTML5 app more popular than app sold in Apple store

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Well, well. Isn’t this interesting.

(Reuters) – More than 700,000 people use the Financial Times’ Web-based mobile application to access news and other content, making it more popular than the version sold in Apple’s App Store.

The business newspaper, which is part of British publishing group Pearson Plc, made a gamble in June when it prepared to ditch the App Store with the introduction of its Web-based app.

The FT was one of the first major publishers to reduce its dependence on Apple Inc and go out with an HTML5-based mobile application that can be read by any browser, thus bypassing the App Store.

FT.com Managing Director Rob Grimshaw told Reuters that the new Web-based app was drawing more traffic than the version that was sold through the App Store.

“People who are using the app are spending much more time with the content,” he said. “They are consuming about three times as many pages through the app as they are through the desktop in an average visit.”

Facebook and its digital sharecroppers

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Terrific Guardian piece by Adrian Short. Excerpt:

When you use a free web service you’re the underclass. At best you’re a guest. At worst you’re a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It’s a cliché but worth repeating: if you’re not paying for it, you’re aren’t the customer, you’re the product. Your individual account is probably worth very little to the service provider, so they’ll have no qualms whatsoever with tinkering with the service or even making radical changes in their interests rather than yours. If you don’t like it you’re welcome to leave. You may well not be able to take your content and data with you, and even if you can, all your URLs will be broken.

The conclusion here should be obvious: if you really care about your site you need to run it on your own domain. You need to own your URLs. You’ll have total control and no-one can take it away from you. You don’t need anyone else. If you put the effort in up front it’ll pay off in the long run.

But it’s no longer that simple…

Why an increasing number of people think that Facebook is the Internet

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Chapter Two of my forthcoming book is entitled “The Web is not the Net”. It’s there because I was alarmed by the number of people who thought that the Web and the Internet were synonomous. When I mentioned this to Tim Berners-Lee at a Royal Society symposium he said that the situation was even worse than that: millions of people now think that Facebook is the Internet. This chart (via Peter Kafka) from a report by Citigroup Analyst Mark Mahaney illustrates the extent of the problem.

Quis custodiet…?

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Nice quote from Krugman.

Catherine Rampell comments skeptically on Peter Orszag’s call for delegating more policy to panels of nonpolitical experts. I’d add that this is an odd time to make such a proposal. Yes, the political world is deeply dysfunctional — but what’s equally remarkable is just how terrible the judgment of the supposed experts has been. It’s not just the complete failure to foresee this crisis. Fancy international organizations have been persistently offering disastrous advice, counseling austerity and interest rate hikes just as the recovery, such as it is, stumbles. Politicians say dumb things about monetary policy — but so does the ECB.

The point is that what we need are the right ideas, not the right sort of people. Madmen in authority come in all forms, and the dignified men in suits are often no better than the rabble-rousers.

P***words

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My Observer column about passwords has prompted some witty conversations and emails. Many of the latter pointed to this lovely xkcd cartoon. The punch line:

“Through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess”.

Amen.