iCapitalism

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Well, well. Nasty ol’ Steve Jobs rejected this iPhone App. Here’s what the FAQs say.

How do I play?

Click on the Play tab. Then click Increase Your Level. You will be presented with a list of level upgrades you can purchase with real money.

So there’s really no skill involved?

None at all! The person who pays us the most wins. The rest are displayed on a leaderboard in descending order.

Does my money get me anything besides a higher spot on the leaderboard?

When you increase your level you can enter a custom message. All other players can see this when you’re on leaderboard. The top payer player becomes the “Head Honcho,” and their (inevitably more important) message will be the first thing everyone sees when they boot the app.

WikiLeaks and the cowardice of American journalism

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I know the British press is nothing to write home about, but I’ve never understood why American journalists take themselves so seriously. They, after all, are the ‘professionals’ who missed Enron, the banking catastrophe and the Bush Administration’s ludicrous case for going to war in Iraq. Until recently, they were also the ‘professionals’ who were so impaled on the horns of the ‘balance as bias’ dilemma that many of them missed the global warming issue. So I’ve been cheering this fiery piece by Naomi Wolf about the slippery way US journalists have been willing to hang Julian Assange out to dry.

Here is what readers are not being told: We have ALL handled classified information if we are serious American journalists. I am waiting for more than a handful of other American reporters, editors and news organizations to have the courage — courage that is in abundance in Tahrir Square and on the pages of Al Jazeera, now that we no longer see it on the editorial page of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal — to stand up and confirm the obvious. For the assault on Assange to be credible, they would have to come arrest us all. Many of Bob Woodward's bestselling books, which have made him America's highest-paid reporter, are based on classified information — that's why he gets the big bucks. Where are the calls for Woodward's arrest? Indeed Dick Cheney and other highest-level officials in the Bush administration committed the same act as Bradley Manning in this case, when they illegally revealed the classified identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

So why do all these American reporters, who know quite well that they get praise and money for doing what Assange has done, stand in a silence that can only be called cowardly, while a fellow publisher faces threats of extradition, banning, prosecution for spying — which can incur the death penalty — and calls for his assassination?

One could say that the reason for the silence has to do with the sexual misconduct charges in Sweden. But any serious journalist in America knows perfectly well that the two issues must not be conflated. The First Amendment applies to rogues and scoundrels. You don't lose your First Amendment rights because of a sleazy personality, or even for having committed a crime. Felons in jail are protected by the First Amendment. Indeed the most famous First Amendment cases, the ones that are supposed to showcase America's strength and moral power, involve the protection of speech most decent people hate…

Bad language?

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Google has converted its wonderful web-based Google Translate into a native iOS app for iPhone, with voice input for 15 languages and support for speaking results in 23 languages.

So I downloaded and installed it on my phone. It invited me to speak, so I requested a translation of the following sentence: “I am wondering what you think of President Sarkozy”.

The phone thought for a moment, and then replied: Je me demandez ce que vous pensez de sucer president ####”.

Hmmm…

Bakunin with a MacBook

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Nice Prospect Magazine essay by Michael Weiss, who sees a striking similarity between Julian Assange and the 19th-century anarchist and failed Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin.

Born in 1814 and justifiably forgotten today for his lack of theoretical rigor or coherent platform, Bakunin, like Assange, fancied himself a principled anarchist. But it was his personal characteristics that came to define his reputation. To friend and foe alike, he was a chancer, a sponger and a delusional madcap. Bakunin said he wanted to release the “evil passions” of mankind through revolution. Out of a similarly blinding hubris, Assange deflects his colleagues’ criticism by saying, “I’m busy, there are two wars I have to end.”

Both men gloried in the secret society and coded message rather than above-ground operations. Like Assange, Bakunin flitted through Europe with police tails, disguises and an air of conspiracy. He commanded a cult-like following of friends. Edmund Wilson wrote of Bakunin that “he was able to catch people up by the spell of a personality part of whose power resided in the fact that it had the ingenuousness of a child… his conspiracies were always partly imaginary, and he never himself seems quite to have known the difference between actuality and the dream.” Assange is fond of skipping down city streets while journalists are discussing his materials. According to the New York Times, he believes that Stasi agents still control the German secret police archives, which they’re deleting from history.

AOL goes Huffing and Puffing

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AOL’s purchase of the Huffington Post has got everyone excited. Except me and the inimitable Om Malik. He reports that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong wants AOL home page to be the start page for information. But, says Malik, it ain’t going to happen. The world of today doesn’t work that way. People have their favorites and start their news day at random places.

AOL’s moves are much like the ending scene from Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Surrounded by the Bolivian Army, Dos Hombres have no choice to make a gallant dash to their horses, guns blazing, hoping against hope as thousand guns blaze around them. The ever-increasing web inventory is like the Bolivian Army firing on AOL and others who have not yet come to terms with the futility of chasing page views.

Despite what you might read in the newspapers and blogs, AOL is still in A-O-Hell. In the most recent quarter, the company saw its advertising revenues go down 29 percent, at a time when online advertising grew about 14 percent. According to eMarketer, its share of total online display advertising was down to 5.3 percent in 2010 from 6.8 percent in 2009.

It’s funny how stuff gets laid down in corporate DNA and is then impossible to shift. AOL started out as the ultimate ‘walled garden’: it thought it would be able to keep its subscribers corralled inside rather than venturing out onto the Wild West Web. The fantasy about becoming the start page for today’s Web is a reflection of the same mindset.

Wallflowers at the Revolution

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Nice rant by Frank Rich in the NYT.

Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.

Three days after riot police first used tear gas and water hoses to chase away crowds in Tahrir Square, CNN’s new prime-time headliner, Piers Morgan, declared that “the use of social media” was “the most fascinating aspect of this whole revolution.” On MSNBC that same night, Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed a teacher who had spent a year at the American school in Cairo. “They are all on Facebook,” she said of her former fifth-grade students. The fact that a sampling of fifth graders in the American school might be unrepresentative of, and wholly irrelevant to, the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo never entered the equation.

The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.”

En passant: it’s been interesting to hear the frustration of intelligent US citizens about the non-availability of Al Jazeera on American cable channels and networks. It’s the old story: “600 channels and nothing on TV”.

Joe Stiglitz on Tunisia: Democracy’s great but…

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Sobering piece by a Nobel laureate

Virtuous though democracy is – and as Tunisia has shown, it is far better than the alternative – we should remember the failures of those who claim its mantle, and that there is more to true democracy than periodic elections, even when they are conducted fairly. Democracy in the US, for example, has been accompanied by increasing inequality, so much so that the upper 1% now receives about a quarter of national income – with wealth being even more inequitably distributed.

Most Americans today are worse off than they were a decade ago, with almost all the gains from economic growth going to the very top of the income and wealth distribution. And corruption American-style can result in trillion-dollar gifts to pharmaceutical companies, the purchase of elections with massive campaign contributions and tax cuts for millionaires as medical care for the poor is cut.

NoteSlate: a low-tech alternative to paper?

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NoteSlate is low cost tablet device with true one colour display, real paper look design, long life battery (180h !), together with very handy usage and very simple and helpful interface for pen and paper. This easy, compact and portable gadget is used anywhere you want to make any notes, drafts, sketches, any ideas for future reference. Paper for everyone! Write a note and check it later, save it, or delete it. Maybe send it after. Just one colour is enough to express the basics. Keep your life simple. You will love it. For $99.

Interesting blurb. Supposedly coming to market in June at a price of $99.

What news organisations still don’t ‘get’ about the new media ecosystem

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As usual, Dave Winer nails it.

I watched the Thursday night video feed of the Columbia panel on Wikileaks instead of going there in person. After trying to listen to Keller [Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times] on Fresh Air and giving up half-way through, in disgust — I just couldn’t imagine sitting through his schpiel about the social behavior problems (he perceives) of Julian Assange. I don’t care, and frankly I think it’s irresponsible of a person in Keller’s position to take the focus off the substance, which is so interesting and vital.

Yep. One of things that really struck me as a small-time bit player in coverage of the WikiLeaks story was how difficult it is to counteract a wrong-headed media narrative once it gets going. (We saw that earlier in the coverage of the BP oil-drilling catastrophe, btw.) On the day when I was interviewed by the BBC and other networks I was trying to say that Assange wasn’t the story — the big story was what WikeLeaks meant for governments everywhere. But even as I was being interviewed, Assange was heading for a British Court, and it was impossible to get any interviewer’s attention for the bigger picture. And it’s still going on: all this emphasis on Assange’s peculiarities. The Egyptian protestors are lucky that they haven’t thrown up a charismatic individual ‘leader’: if they had, we’d hear correspondingly less about what was actually going on.

But back to Dave:

He [Keller] also said he had never met Assange.

Amazing he has so much insight into the flaws of a man he had never met!

Maybe amazing isn’t the word…

Emily Bell, the interviewer, kept the discussion away from Assange’s socks, and got some very interesting things on the record from the panel. For the purposes of this story though, I’m only going to look at one new bit of info. Both the Times and the Guardian are thinking about replacing the technology of WikiLeaks with their own. Instead, imho they should be thinking about creating their own Twitters, platforms for their news people to congregate in realtime and mix with the members of their communities. Both organizations should be doing much more to cultivate community. And Twitter is much more of a threat to them than WikiLeaks.

[…]

It was so revealing when Keller said that his audience had moved to the Internet. Yes, but.. His sources have too. And there are so many more sources today than there were when we were growing up. It may be the biggest single change in the way news works.

Understanding the social aspect of news, and leading us with great information and gestalts — that’s what the Times and Guardian do best. It’s less important how the leaks make their way to their desks. News is now an environment, not a publication. It lives and breathes. That’s what the news orgs still haven’t been willing to embrace.

Spot on.

Economics of the music business

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This graphic is a snapshot of a section of Ben Johncock’s ingenious and sobering visualisation of the sales in various formats a solo artist would need to achieve to earn the US minimum wage.

Ben’s point is that from the point of view of the artist the worst option of all is Spotify. But I was also struck by the asymmetry of the label vs. artist proportions (white vs purple numbers in right-hand column) on iTunes.

CORRECTION: Many thanks to all the readers who emailed to point out that the dazzling visualisation is the work of the incomparable David McCandless. The link to his graphic is here. The link was also at the bottom of Neb Johncock’s original post, but I missed it. Mea culpa, as we say in Ireland.