Seen in the college gardens this afternoon.
Quote of the day
So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
The iPad’s Killer App
Although — as I’ve observed earlier — the iPad has lots of annoyances (mostly connected with the absence of multi-tasking), it has one unimpeachable advantage over every other portable device: a 10-hour battery life. Which explains why I now tend to bring it with me whenever access to a power socket might be problematic. At the Royal Society’s Web Science event last week, for example, it was slightly comical to see several great minds clustering round the few available power sockets in the room, like thirsty lions drawn to a shrinking water-hole, while I was able to go for a long day on an overnight charge.
This explains, btw, why the iPad is so heavy (far too heavy for use as an eReader). Apple’s market research suggested that battery life was one of the features most prized by potential users. So they built the device with a whopping battery. My experience suggests that it was a good decision.
LATER: There were some prim comments on blogs which picked up on this post pointing out that good battery life is “not an App”. The moral: some jokes don’t work. Sigh.
‘The Social Network’: or why Sorkin is not de Tocqueville
Lovely, perceptive review by Larry Lessig of the Facebook movie. From ‘The New Republic’.
As with every one of his extraordinary works, Sorkin crafted dialogue for an as-yet-not-evolved species of humans—ordinary people, here students, who talk perpetually with the wit and brilliance of George Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell. (I’m a Harvard professor. Trust me: The students don’t speak this language.) With that script, and with a massive hand from the film’s director, David Fincher, he helped steer an intelligent, beautiful, and compelling film through to completion. You will see this movie, and you should. As a film, visually and rhythmically, and as a story, dramatically, the work earns its place in the history of the field.
But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed. As I watched the film, and considered what it missed, it struck me that there was more than a hint of self-congratulatory contempt in the motives behind how this story was told. Imagine a jester from King George III’s court, charged in 1790 with writing a comedy about the new American Republic. That comedy would show the new Republic through the eyes of the old. It would dress up the story with familiar figures—an aristocracy, or a wannabe aristocracy, with grand estates, but none remotely as grand as in England. The message would be, “Fear not, there’s no reason to go. The new world is silly at best, deeply degenerate, at worst.”
Not every account of a new world suffers like this. Alexis de Tocqueville showed the old world there was more here than there. But Sorkin is no Tocqueville. Indeed, he simply hasn’t a clue to the real secret sauce in the story he is trying to tell. And the ramifications of this misunderstanding go well beyond the multiplex…
And here’s the best bit:
But the most frustrating bit of The Social Network is not its obliviousness to the silliness of modern American law. It is its failure to even mention the real magic behind the Facebook story. In interviews given after making the film, Sorkin boasts about his ignorance of the Internet. That ignorance shows. This is like a film about the atomic bomb which never even introduces the idea that an explosion produced through atomic fission is importantly different from an explosion produced by dynamite. Instead, we’re just shown a big explosion ($25 billion in market capitalization—that’s a lot of dynamite!) and expected to grok (the word us geek-wannabes use to show you we know of what we speak) the world of difference this innovation in bombs entails.
What is important in Zuckerberg’s story is not that he’s a boy genius. He plainly is, but many are. It’s not that he’s a socially clumsy (relative to the Harvard elite) boy genius. Every one of them is. And it’s not that he invented an amazing product through hard work and insight that millions love. The history of American entrepreneurism is just that history, told with different technologies at different times and places.
Instead, what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone.
Yep.
Where the wedding parties go
There’s a spot above Killarney — Aghadoe Heights — where there’s a terrific view of the lakes.
Not surprisingly, it’s where the wedding parties go for the obligatory photoshoot.
Flickr version here.
Tilly
A Flickr of interest
This morning’s Observer column.
At a Royal Society symposium on web science this week, Tim Berners-Lee let slip an interesting observation. Many people, said the web's inventor, no longer make a distinction between Facebook and the web. My guess is that these people are mainly teenagers – those whose experience of cyberspace is coloured by the fact that the first thing they encountered online was social networking. They started with Bebo and MySpace and then graduated to Facebook. And there they have stayed.
So, for them, Facebook is where it's at. That explains why they no longer use email, for example, except – grudgingly – to collect official communications from school or college. Most of their electronic communications are routed either via text messaging or Facebook updates. Almost all teenage party invitations now come via Facebook, which has also become the logbook of their lives. When it was announced a couple of weeks ago that Flickr, the photo-hosting site, had hosted its five billionth picture, someone pointed out smugly that Facebook already has over three times that number…
The antisocial movie
Jeff Jarvis has been to see ‘The Social Network’. He didn’t like it. Here he explains why.
The Social Network is the anti-social movie. It distrusts and makes no effort to understand the phenomenon right in front of its nose. It disapproves—as media people, old and neonew, do—of rabblerous or drunk or drugged-up or oversexed masses doing what they do. Ah, but its fans will say, it’s really just a drama about a man. But that’s where it fails most. It can’t begin to explain this man because it doesn’t grok what he made—what he’s still making “We don’t even know what it is yet,” Zuckerberg says in the movie, “It’s never finished”.
The Social Network is the anti-geek movie. It is the story that those who resist the change society is undergoing want to see. It says the internet is not a revolution but only the creation of a few odd, machine-men, the boys we didn’t like in college. The Social Network is the revenge on the revenge of the nerds…
Bang on cue, here’s the WSJ [old media] piling in to make Jeff’s point. The paper just loves the movie. “The film’s substance”, it gushes,
lies mainly in its convoluted tale of vast ambition—an ambition oddly disconnected, in Mr. Zuckerberg’s case, from a desire to make money—spectacular success and bitter betrayal. Not since “Apollo 13” has a mainstream motion picture conveyed so much factual as well as dramatic information with such clarity and agility. First Mark moves beyond—or pilfers the intellectual property of—three upperclassmen who’d approached him for help on a website they called Harvard Connection. Later the newly-minted young magnate has a painful falling out with Facebook’s original business manager, Eduardo Saverin: he’s played with great subtlety and rueful charm by Andrew Garfield, who’ll be seen as Peter Parker in the next “Spider-Man.” While the movie’s prevailing mood is excitation—hardly a moment goes by when someone isn’t having a brilliant idea—its dominant mode is litigation, thanks to one suit on behalf of those Harvard upperclassmen, and another brought by Eduardo.
Dave Winer went to see the film. His typically sensible notes are here.
Taking the tablets
Now it’s BlackBerry’s turn. The New York Times report explains:
The introduction of a tablet computer will not end criticism from some analysts that R.I.M. is now playing catch-up with Apple. But in a bid to distinguish the PlayBook from Apple’s iPad, Michael Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive, said that the new tablet contained several features requested by corporate information technology departments.
In an address to conference attendees, Mr. Lazaridis called the PlayBook “the world’s first professional tablet” and repeatedly emphasized that it was fully compatible with the special servers that corporations and governments now used to control and monitor employees’ BlackBerry devices.
While the company offered some specifics about the new device, it left many questions unanswered, most notably the tablet’s price. The company was also vague about its release date, indicating only that it would be available early next year.
Among the PlayBook’s novel features are outlets that allow it to display material on computer monitors or television sets, but Mr. Lazaridis made no effort to use them during his presentation. As animations showing the device’s features appeared above him on a giant screen, he did little more with the PlayBook in his hand than switch it on.
“It’s a very real product,” said Charles S. Golvin, principal analyst with Forrester Research. “But obviously it’s very much a work in progress.”
Molten treacle?
No: just water swirling at the foot of a lovely waterfall. But it’s amazing the effect that light and movement can have.
Larger size here.
