Getting stuff done

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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…

The wisdom of ages

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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

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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’

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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.

Cape Cod is tweeting

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Interesting glimpse of what you can do with a combination of sensors and Twitter. From Tech Review.

If you want to know whether or not the tides are high enough to get your sloop out of Ockway Bay in Cape Cod, you could consult NOAA's tide tables. Trouble is, less'n you're a pipe-smoking old-timer who's handy with the lobster cages and a sextant, they're as likely to get you stuck going in and out of the bay as they are to tell you, with sufficient accuracy, whether the already-shallow draft below your boat is enough to let you safely navigate the muddy shoals of your home port.

That's where the internet comes in, and not the kind that's stuck behind a desk, twiddling with an iPad – we're talking about the Internet of Things. Using an ultrasonic level sensor to bounce sound waves off the sea surface in order to determine its height, an XBee radio to send that data to a receiver on shore, and most importantly, an ioBridge IO-204 to relay that information to servers in the cloud, Cape Cod resident and ioBridge hobbyist Robert Mawrey is able to broadcast to his entire community near real-time data on actual sea level.

Actually, in this particular case, the Americans are just catching up. See, for example, the stuff that Andy Stanford-Clark has been doing with south coast ferries.

Tony Blair, technophile (for a fee)

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This morning’s Observer column.

“Blair to join venture firm as adviser on technology” said the headline in the New York Times. Eh? The first thing that came to mind is the celebrated story of the emperor Caligula and his attempts to have his horse, Incitatus, appointed as a consul. Anyone familiar with our former prime minister’s encounters with technology one thinks, for example, of the time he tried to order flowers for Cherie over the web will have been puzzled by this development. Tony has many talents, but the one thing he doesn't do is technology.

So who’s playing Caligula in this particular farce? Answer: Vinod Khosla, an Indian-American venture capitalist with impeccable academic and technology credentials, who now runs a $1bn fund that invests in ‘green’ technology aka cleantech and IT…