Strange to think that this poppy seed-pod contains enough seeds to sow hundreds — if not thousands — more of the same. And that the necessary DNA is encoded in each.
Flickr version here.
On becoming a news buyer
Benedict Evans is thinking of buying a daily newspaper. Here he explains the thinking behind this revolutionary act.
So how do I know what news to read? Google News (a bogeymen of newspaper proprietors even though hardly anyone actually uses it) indexes 4500 ‘English language news sources’ and tells me what they’re writing about. But Google’s algorithm thinks that ‘Wales Online’ is my first source for news on the UK budget – it knows what the stories are, but not where I should read them. I don’t need someone to tell me what stories are important, but rather where they are being written about with insight and judgment. For that Google is even counter-productive – the effect of SEO on editorial sites is to make them hard to read and harder to understand. This is why iPad apps, which can dispense with SEO, are easier to use than their associated websites, and it is why Apple launched ‘Reader’ in the new version of Safari.
What I want is something curated. After 15 years of gorging on news online, I would rather like to step back, slow down and outsource my news. I would like a sophisticated and intelligent person to choose what stories I ought to read today. I’d like coverage of major UK and international news by people who understand it and aren’t just rewriting wire content and press releases. In other words, I want a newspaper, not news.
I might even pay.
I have heard a great deal about how news is a commodity, and about how a newspaper that goes ‘pay’ is doomed because all the content is available for free elsewhere. I’m not sure that I agree. Google does indeed have 4,500 English language ‘news sources’, but how many of them will say anything worth reading about George Osborne’s emergency budget later this week? How may will cover the mayoral race in London? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel might (or might not) be a fine paper with admirable SEO, but it leads today on lobbying shenanigans in Wisconsin. On the news that matters to me there are surprisingly few good news sources…
Actually, his point about curation is spot on. It’s why people like me pay quite a lot for subscriptions to the Economist, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. And why I buy the Guardian (disclosure: I write for the Observer, which is owned by it). It’s because I’m busy and value the editorial sieve that these publications have.
Getting stuff done
Or why the mass media’s attention-deficit syndrome is so pathetic — and so damaging. Great post by Andrew Sullivan.
What are the odds that Obama's huge success yesterday in getting BP to pledge a cool $20 billion to recompense the "small people" in the Gulf will get the same attention as his allegedly dismal speech on Tuesday night? If you take Memeorandum as an indicator, it really is no contest. The speech is still being dissected by language experts, but the $20 billion that is the front page news in the NYT today? Barely anywhere on the blogs.
This is just a glimpse into the distortion inherent in our current political and media culture. It's way easier to comment on a speech – his hands were moving too much! – than to note the truly substantive victory, apparently personally nailed down by Obama, in the White House yesterday. If leftwing populism in America were anything like as potent as right-wing populism – Matt Bai has a superb analysis of this in the NYT today – there would be cheering in the streets. But there's nada, but more leftist utopianism and outrage on MSNBC. And since there's no end to this spill without relief wells, this is about as much as Obama can do, short of monitoring clean-up efforts, or rather ongoing management of the ecological nightmare of an unstopped and unstoppable wound in the ocean floor.
I sure understand why people feel powerless and angry about the vast forces that control our lives and over which we seem to have only fitful control – big government and big business. But it seems to me vital to keep our heads and remain focused on what substantively can be done to address real problems, and judge Obama on those terms. When you do, you realize that the left's "disgruntleist" faction needs to take a chill pill…
Creative commons (not)
Freedom glimpsed
What every student needs to see when revising for exams. Taken inside the English Faculty library.
Flickr version here.
The wisdom of ages
Today’s Observer has my “Everything you need to know…” piece which encapsulates some of the stuff in the book I’ve been working on. I particularly like one of the comments:
This article reads as if it is written by an 80 year old for other 80 year olds. Something to talk about at bingo.
LATER: Generous comment from Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing:
John Naughton’s feature in today’s Observer, “The internet: Everything you ever need to know,” is a fantastic read and a marvel of economy, managing to pack nine very big ideas into 15 minutes’ reading. This is the kind of primer you want to slide under your boss’s door.
Ulysses app causes Apple to blush
This morning’s Observer column.
Last Wednesday, 16 June, was Bloomsday, a day revered by admirers of James Joyce the world over. It's celebrated because 16 June 1904 is the day in which all the action in Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place. Readers follow the perambulations around Dublin of the book's endearing hero, a freelance advertisement-seller named Leopold Bloom, who is tactfully keeping out of the way while his wife is being unfaithful to him in the marital home at No 7 Eccles Street.
Bloomsday celebrations take many forms but usually involve readings from the novel, and often the consumption of food and drink (gorgonzola sandwiches and burgundy, for example, in honour of Bloom’s lunchtime fare). This year there was an added frisson to the festivities, for it transpired that Apple, a company not hitherto noted for its interest in modernist literature, had been paying close attention to the content of Joyce’s great work…
AOL offloads Bebo – for ‘exceptionally uninspiring number’
For anyone seeking perspective on the social-networking business, the news that AOL has sold Bebo for what sounds like a fire-sale price should be required reading.
AOL is set to reap an "exceptionally uninspiring" sum for Bebo, the moribund social networking site for which it paid $850m just two years ago.
The Wall Street Journal says a sale could be announced today, with the likely buyer Criterion Capital Partners LLC of Studio City California. This is an interesting location – a suburb of LA nowhere near Silicon Valley.
The deal was confirmed this afternoon, though no details of the price were revealed.
The buyer apparently specialises in turning around companies with revenues of $3m to $30m, which doesn't say too much for the state of Bebo.
Still, it's AOL that is taking a bath on the deal. The journal, ahead of the official announcement, quoted one source familiar with the negotiations who said AOL's price was "an exceptionally uninspiring number" with almost total "value destruction".
As the say in the small print, the value of investments may go down as well as up.
Go, England, Go!
Spotted in the entrance hall of Cambridge University Library. Who says eggheads aren’t interested in football!
Oops
From a blog post by Dan Ariely entitled “7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People”.