Er, seen in Waitrose! Yes, Waitrose, purveyors of Prince Charles’s own organic produce to the middle classes. Perhaps it’s to offset bourgeois droop, as the effects of too much Chateau Lynch-Bages are doubtless known.
Also explains why Lloyd George was known as an “old goat”.
Steven Johnson has adapted his speech to the Web 2.0 Summit and turned it into an OpEd piece on FT.com. It’s basically a follow-on from his excellent Hearst Lecture, which is also about the dangers of the unlinkable App. Sample:
Of course, the overwhelming majority of apps do not contain much information that would benefit from being linked to other things on the internet. If we do not figure out a way to link directly to one level of the Angry Birds game, we will probably survive as a culture. But the danger lies in a region of the digital information landscape barely mentioned by Mr Anderson: books. Where links abound, a rich ecosystem of commentary, archiving, social sharing and scholarship usually develops because links make it far easier to build on and connect ideas from around the web. But right now, books exist outside this universe. There is no standardised way to link to a page of a digital book.
Books contain the most carefully crafted and edited text that we have – truly the richest source of information in the world – and yet all that information remains unlinkable. Google works as well as it does because people find interesting information on the web and link to it; Google then prioritises pages that attract a disproportionate number of inbound links. But if you find a fascinating passage in a novel or a book of history, there is no standardised way to link to it, which means that the rest of the web cannot benefit from your discovery.
Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists, one that merely involves a commitment to use technology that already exists. Call it the mirror web. If you create digital information in any form, make a parallel version of that information that lives on the web. A magazine publisher creating an iPad app should ensure that each article has clear links to a mirror version of each article on the web. Then, if anyone wants to cite, tweet, blog or e-mail a reference to that article, it is always one tap away. The web version can be behind a pay wall or some other kind of barrier if the publisher chooses; what matters is that there is an address you can point to.
What much of the discussion about Chris Anderson’s “death of the Web” meme overlooks is the long term implication of a publishing ecosystem dominated by unlinkable apps — namely the dumbing down of our culture. The wonderful thing about the open, hyperlinked Web is that it enables it to be greater than the sum of its parts. The unrestricted sharing of information and ideas endows it with an invaluable emergent property: that of collective intelligence. (And yes I know about Jaron Lanier’s stuff about the dangers of “hive mind”, “digital Maoism”, etc.) But the fact is that the reason humankind has become as accomplished as it has is because we found ways of sharing good ideas. The irony about the Apps-mania now gripping the publishing world is that, in an era when we were presented (courtesy of Tim Berners-Lee) with the most efficient method yet developed for sharing ideas, they want to cut off — or at least regulate — the rate at which ideas flow.
Apps are wonderful in their way; but they can be tools for dumbing us down.
UPDATE: To which Bill Thompson (whom God Preserve) adds a comment:
“Steven (and you) both make good points, and it is indeed the case that ‘in an era when we were presented (courtesy of Tim Berners-Lee) with the most efficient method yet developed for sharing ideas, [publishers] want to cut off — or at least regulate — the rate at which ideas flow’ – but why are we surprised? Publishers were the bottleneck in the flow of ideas for 300 years – the abundance of the digital age has removed their control, and they want it back. The App and the ebook are the digital equivalent of a licence to operate a printing press.”
Dave Winer thinks he knows. And my guess is that he’s right.
Here’s how he tells it.
Today I got a promotional email from Kay Kinton, Senior Public Relations Manager for Amazon Web Services, entitled “Amazon Web Services Year in Review.” It contained a paragraph, quoted below, that explains how their government business grew in 2010.
“Government adoption of AWS [Amazon Wb Services] grew significantly in 2010. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board became the first government-wide agency to migrate to a cloud-based environment when it moved Recovery.gov to AWS in March 2010. Today we have nearly 20 government agencies leveraging AWS, and the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments. The U.S. General Services Administration awarded AWS the ability to provide government agencies with cloud services through the government's cloud storefront, Apps.gov. Additional AWS customers include Treasury.gov, the Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives, the openEI.org project at DoE’s National Renewable Energy Lab, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. The current AWS compliance framework covers FISMA, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, SAS70 type II, and HIPAA, and we continue to seek certifications and accreditations that make it easier for government agencies to benefit from AWS. To learn more about how AWS works with the federal government, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/federal/.”
Dave writes that “It makes perfect sense that the US government is a big customer of Amazon’s web services. It also makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that business. There might not have even been a phone call, it might not have been necessary.”
This strikes me as being spot on. Amazon’s original reasons for dropping WikiLeaks always seemed feeble — and indeed unlikely to stand up in court. But the company’s decision has been useful in drawing attention to the underlying issue. Political discourse is increasingly conducted via cloud services like Amazon’s. That means that it’s moved into a space that is essentially private. As someone observed at the beginning of the WikiLeaks affair, it’s as if our political discourse had moved from the parks and streets and into shopping malls. And that means that important aspects of free speech will henceforth exist at the mercy of corporate whim. This is bad news for democracy.
Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit.
Translation: Whatever you may dream, fate has other plans in store.
Thomas à Kempis, quoted by Simon Winchester in the New York Times.
Seen on a woodland walk this afternoon.
This morning’s Observer column.
Readers with long memories will recall the celebrated Schleswig-Holstein question. This referred to a bundle of thorny diplomatic and other issues arising from the relations of two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, to the Danish crown and to the German Confederation. It was the bane of diplomats' lives in the late 19th century, but we remember it nowadays mainly because of Lord Palmerston’s famous wisecrack about it. “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated,” he said, “that only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.”
The issue of "net neutrality" is the Schleswig-Holstein question de nos jours…
My colleague, Ray Corrigan, has a written a very informative review of what is probably the most scholarly book to have emerged so far on the question of Net Neutrality — Christopher Marsden’s Net Neutrality: Towards a Co-regulatory Solution
Fascinating TorrentFreak interview with Benn Jordan, one of the first musicians to release his stuff on BitTorrent. Excerpt:
TF: What are your thoughts on the big labels. Are they good or bad for the majority of artists?
Jordan: I have to be honest. Big labels that aren’t being innovative are little more than delusional laughing stocks at this point. Their numbers get worse and worse, and they push the artists to do dumber and dumber stunts to try and stay on top of things.
The shows and festivals they book are sponsored by 8 different alcoholic beverages and 10 different energy drinks, and they just punish their customers while validating their own demise. I’m not worried about them and neither should you. Its a dozen senior citizens trying to stop a stampede of fresh culture. Good luck boys.
TF: And what about Apple?
Jordan: Apple, love or hate their products, is fucking scary. On one hand, hats off. They’re business and marketing geniuses. On the other hand, they might single handedly be the worst thing that has happened to entertainment media in the last 3 years. The major record industry collapsing should also mean that artists are more free to do what they want.
For example, iTunes completely screwed up the track listing of my last album Arboreal. Their network is so influential that over half of the people who have bought the CD from my label now have botched track titles on their mp3 players. Apple doesn’t have ANY accessible artist support to deal with things like this.
They reject my cover art if I don’t have my name and the title in bold. If I want to sell a 30 minute long track (Louisiana Mourning, for example), they require me to split it up into a bunch of separate tracks. Their distribution system is so unorganized that artists have to pay business like Tunecore upwards of $40 per album (and annual fees) to do Apple’s job for them.
Again, its genius on the business side. But they’ve wedged themselves in so well that now, if I don’t have an album on iTunes (under their insane rules and lack of support), a large portion of my listeners simply won’t know how to put my music on their iPods/iPhones.
I know I sound preachy, but think about it, how is that any better than what existed 15 years ago? I still maintain that I’d rather have my stuff “illegally” downloaded than have to go down that path.
TF: What advise do you have for artists who consider giving away their music?
Jordan: That being a “consideration” is always funny to me. You either release it knowing it will be distributed for free or you keep it locked up on your hard drive. If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that no amount of bitching, threatening, lobbying, suing, or file protecting is going to stop information from being spread to those who want it.
