This morning’s Observer column.
Last weeks announcement by Apple that the UK launch of the iPad will be delayed by a month was the headline news for consumers, but for geeks a more significant development came on Thursday with some changes in the 21,000-word ‘agreement’ that you have to sign if you are going to develop applications for Apple’s iDevices…
Nice post on Tom Watson’s blog.
Nick Clegg’s success in the TV debates on Thursday has already had a positive effect in West Bromwich East. People are now talking about the election, and it’s wonderful.
In the last 48 hours I’ve taken phone calls and emails from people wanting to know about my detailed stance on dozens of policy positions – from child care and schools to international aid, tax, euthanasia, drugs, immigration, crime, litter and trains.
And if we can get this election re-calibrated, to end silly media and advertising stunts and talk about policy then all the better.
I’ve been on a journey these last nine years, so a debate about how we can build a progressive future is to be welcomed.
There are still issues on which Labour and the Lib Dems profoundly disagree. No doubt they’ll come out in the next few weeks. There’s no point in being churlish though. Nick Clegg has opened up this election.
Tom Watson is one of the best labour MPs. Hope he gets re-elected.
Well, well. Sanity begins to dawn. This from ArsTechnica.
We’ve all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rightsholders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement. A couple years ago, we thoroughly debunked that figure. For years, Business Software Alliance reports on software piracy assumed that each illicit copy was a lost sale. And the MPAA’s own commissioned study on movie piracy turned out to overstate collegiate downloading by a factor of three.
Can we trust any of these claims about piracy?
The US doesn’t think so. In a new report out yesterday, the government’s own internal watchdog took a close look at “efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods.” After examining all the data and consulting with numerous experts inside and outside of government, the Government Accountability Office concluded that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts.”
Yep. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t losses due to piracy, just that the numbers produced by industry lobbyists to scare legislators on both sides of the Atlantic are, well, mostly hogwash. If we had had evidence-based policymaking in relation to the Digital Economy Bill, then Parliament would have commissioned the same kind of critical report as the one produced by the US GAO. Instead, MPs were moved by the bleatings of Cliff Richard & Co.
GAO Report (pdf) can be downloaded from here. It makes for interesting reading.
Hmmm… I’ve been wondering about this, ever since noticing that many of the publicity pics for the iPad (see above, from the back cover of the current New Yorker) feature the NYT. But Dan Gillmor nails it, as usual.
It’s been more than a week since I asked a number of news organizations, chiefly the New York Times, to answer a few questions about their relationships with Apple. Specifically, I asked the Times to discuss what has become at least the appearance of a conflict of interest: Apple’s incessant promotion of the newspaper in pictures of its new iPad and highlighting of the Times’ plans to make the iPad a key platform for the news organization’s journalism, combined with the paper’s relentlessly positive coverage of the device in news columns.
In addition, I asked the Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today — following up on a February posting when I asked why news organizations were running into the arms of a control-freakish company — to respond to a simple question: Can Apple unilaterally disable their iPad apps if Apple decides, for any reason, that it doesn’t like the content they’re distributing? Apple has done this with many other companies’ apps and holds absolute power over what appears and doesn’t appear via its app system.
Who responded? No one. Not even a “No comment.” This is disappointing if (sadly) unsurprising, but in light of other news this week it’s downright wrong.
“Facts do not cease to exist simply because they are ignored.”
Aldous Huxley
It’s funny how often terms like ‘open source’ and ‘crowdsourcing’ find their way into everyday discourse, where they are used casually to mean anything that involves lots of people. This diagram comes from a thoughtful post by Chris Grams. It begins:
It finally hit me the other day just why the open source way seems so much more elegantly designed (and less wasteful) to me than what I’ll call “the crowdsourcing way”.
1. Typical projects run the open source way have many contributors and many beneficiaries.
2. Typical projects run the crowdsourcing way have many contributors and few beneficiaries.
Worth reading in full. Thanks to Glyn Moody for spotting it.
From The Register.
This week, a California political cartoonist was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Last December, Apple’s App Store police barred his work from its hallowed online halls.
As reported Thursday by Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Mark Fiore submitted his cartoon app NewsToons to the App Store Police, only to have it rejected.
Fiore’s sin: violation of the sacred section 3.3.14 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, which reads:
Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgment may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.
We’ll gloss over that risible ‘reasonable judgement’ bit and instead pose a simple question: Keeping in mind that Fiore is a political cartoonist, might that “offensive or defamatory” judgment be solely in the eyes of the beholder?
Meaning, are the App Store police censoring commentary based upon their own tastes? Well, of course they are.
LATER: It seems that the ban has been rescinded. Amazing what a firestorm of bad publicity can achieve.
I’m not surprised. Here’s the TechCrunch report.
One month after long-time Ning CEO Gina Bianchini was replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal, the company is making some major changes: It has just announced that it is killing off its free product, forcing existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere. Rosenthal has also just announced that the company has cut nearly 70 people — over 40% of its staff.
The only thing more depressing than the actual TV ‘debate’ between Clegg, Brown and Cameron is the brain-dead mainstream media ‘follow-up’ this morning. (You know the pattern: get a few randomly-selected ‘ordinary’ people and ask them what they thought about the debate. Zzzz…) So it was encouraging to find that one of my OU colleagues, Simon Buckingham-Shum (who has done a lot of work on visualising discourse and reasoning using tools like Compendium) had done a cognitive mapping of last night’s discussion. You can find his interactive map here. He also has a blog post about it. Great stuff.
LATER: The Google Blog has an interesting post about what Brits searched for during the debate. Includes this chart:
Lorcan Dempsey pointed me to an interesting essay by Evan Schnittman about different kinds of reading. Evan distinguishes between extractive reading (as in consulting reference works), immersive (“the exercise of deep reading that is dominated by narrative prose and requires a significant investment of time and concentration”) and pedagogic (“designed to train, not immerse. It is designed to move a reader through a series of deeper understandings of a topic, by building on a fairly specific sequence of learning objectives”).
To this, Lorcan has added a fourth type: interstitial reading (“reading in the interstices of our lives. The bathroom comes to mind, but I am in particular thinking about reading and travel.”)
The iPad seems an ideal device for interstitial reading, supporting social networking, immersive reading, extractive interaction with the web, and so on. However, it does not have the portability of the magazine, newspaper or paperback. For this reason, rumours about the smaller iPad seem to make a lot of sense. The Kindle on the other hand is eminently portable, and, importantly, can be held with one hand. But it is less well able to support the full variety of interstitial reading and network interactions. For this reason, it is not surprising to see it open up as a platform to other apps, although one imagines its niche will continue to be the immersive reader, albeit one that fits such reading into the various interstices of his or her daily routine.
This echoes my own recent experience. I have an iPod Touch and was initially sceptical about eBook software for the device. But then I started to use Stanza and Eucalyptus and have become totally converted — especially by the latter, which hooks directly to Project Gutenberg. So downloaded onto my iPod is a nice little library of books that I love re-reading (like Joyce’s Ulysses), or have wanted to read for ages.
Because I do a lot of ferrying of teenage kids around, I’m often waiting for people to turn up. In the old days, if I didn’t have a newspaper with me, that was dead time (I rarely remembered to bring a physical book in the car). Now, this ‘dead time’ is often a delight. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve read two E.M. Forster novels. And large chinks of Mr Bloom’s adventures.