One of the nice things about living in a university town.
Flickr version here.
But of course we still need print
Yep. And, besides, how will I light the fire in the morning without the FT? (I find that broadsheets are much better than tabloids — or even Berliners — for that important purpose.)
The Net didn’t kill US newspapers: they committed suicide
Instructive little vignette from 247wallstreet:
Gannett (GCI) is part of the crumbling newspaper industry. It has not gotten its online properties to nearly match the revenue of its traditional print operations, so the firm is still shrinking and has no real answer to it troubles. Gannett’s stock is off 80% over the last five years, which is much greater that the shares of either The New York Times Company (NYT) or The Washington Post (WPO). Gannett’s revenue is likely to drop again in 2010.
But, Gannett CEO Craig Dubow made $4.7 million last year according to the Gannett proxy. That is up from $3.1 million in 2008. Senior executives at the paper company get the customary access to private cars and the firm’s jet.
Gannett has fired thousands of people over the last two years and asked others to take weeks without pay. The company has not come up with a single meaningful strategic plan to overcome the slide in its fortunes. Operations like Huffington Post , Politico, and The Daily Beast have flanked Gannett. It never had the intelligence to launch its own large internet-only products. Perhaps it feared that would cannibalize its print properties, but they are dying anyway.
Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for the link.
Only connect…
This morning’s Observer column:
My mother used to say that television had killed the art of conversation. One wonders what she would have made of Chatroulette, the current sensation du jour. It’s the implementation of a stunningly simple idea: live online chats with randomly chosen, complete strangers.
After logging in two frames appear on the left-hand side of the screen. The lower one shows you (or what your webcam is pointing at). The other is labelled “Partner”. Click “New Game” and you’re off. An image of someone or something appears in the upper frame.
“Connected,” says the status bar, “Feel free to talk now.” If you don’t like what you see, click the “Next” button and you’re instantly connected to someone else. And so it goes.
To anyone unused to raw, unmediated Net culture, Chatroulette will come as a shock…
The future of education
Future of Education
View more presentations from Martin Weller.
Lovely Slideshare presentation by one of my smartest colleagues.
It was a response to this invitation.
Which also elicited this:
Genius, pure genius
From the Guardian report:
Last night, Britain’s most prestigious design prize was awarded to a plug. At a ceremony at the Design Museum, the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year award was carried off by an unknown Korean who only graduated from the Royal College of Art last summer. Min-Kyu Choi was probably not the first person to notice the disparity between his Macbook Air laptop (thin enough to slide into a manila envelope) and the plug attached to it (so bulky you need a duffel bag). But he was certainly the first to sit down and redesign the plug so that it folds flat. This piece of electrical origami says all you need to know about the power of designers to transform our everyday world.
The company set up to produce the plug is here. As someone who also has a MacBook Air and is driven wild by the idiotic UK standard plug, I’d like to order one. Actually I’d like to order about ten. They would make terrific gifts for my geeky friends.
Irish cardinal apologises for priestly paedophilia.
Lovely cartoon by Steve Bell. Meanwhile the Pope is still dragging his feet over accepting the resignations of the bishops implicated in the scandal. What an outfit.
The gospel according to Orlowski
From Spiked-Online.
Google has two business strategies. One strategy is to ensure that the internet’s pipelines, both wired and wireless, can’t make money. It has lobbied for a ‘neutral’ internet, and sought to write the first technical regulations ever imposed on the internet – the first rulebook for operators. Robbing the retail networks (in the jargon, ‘access networks’, or ISPs) of the ability to generate value allows Google to concentrate the value instead in its vast data centres. It’s a peculiarly inefficient way of distributing bits, and precludes all kind of clever network innovation – but it’s the one that Google prefers. It’s where it has placed its bets.
The other strategy, more noticeable, helps ensure the destruction of the value of copyright. This permits Google to become, by default, the world’s royalty collection society, the only aggregator of digital value. As with internet advertising today, Google would set the royalty rates, weakening the ability of creators to negotiate collectively for better rates, as they do today. Newspapers, publishers and other media companies have only belatedly begun to come to terms with Google’s take-no-prisoners approach. For example, it took EMI Publishing six months to realise that Google had digitised its valuable sheet music collection, as part of its Google Books settlement, without asking. There are entire industries that don’t realise they’re in Google’s crossfire, until they’ve been shot, and the body carried from the battlefield.
Is Google Wave getting Buzzed?
That’s the question being asked by by Tom Krazit.
If Google Wave eventually fails to live up to the promise and hype that accompanied its launch at Google I/O in May 2009, consider its demise an inside job.
Arguably one of Google’s biggest announcements of last year, Google Wave appears to be an afterthought among the tech trendsetters after the launch of Google Buzz in early February. Privacy concerns mostly laid to rest, Google Buzz is actually doing much of what Google Wave promised: collaborative discussion, media sharing, and social networking within an e-mail-like framework.
So what are Google customers and users to do with two Web communication platforms? Is Google Buzz simply a stepping stone to Google Wave, as TechCrunch suggested at its launch? Or is it something more, something designed to bypass its more powerful yet complicated corporate sibling?
Don’t expect a direct answer from Google. In all fairness, that’s because it simply doesn’t know: with Wave and Buzz, Google is essentially willing to let the best idea win.
“At the end of the day, we’ll find out what users want,” said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for the Wave project. “If we required every product we launched not to have any overlapping functionality, that would dramatically slow down our innovation.”
So: we’ll find out in due course. Personally I’m not convinced that users have a need for either Wave or Buzz.
Google discovers that phones are hard-ware
From Good Morning Silicon Valley:
This morning, analytics outfit Flurry, which gets a good handle on handset use through app stats, delivered its estimate of Nexus One sales in the phone’s first 74 days, and the news was not good. The 74-day milestone was used because that’s how long it took the first model of Apple’s iPhone to sell one million units. Flurry’s calculation of Nexus One sales over a similar stretch — 135,000 units. The sorry showing has nothing to do with overall enthusiasm for Google’s Android mobile OS; in its first 74 days, Motorola’s Droid sales hit 1.05 million units, a tad better than the original iPhone. Because of assorted market variables, the numbers aren’t directly comparable, but they do provide a general sense of things. And what the numbers would seem to be telling Google is that without the marketing muscle and consumer convenience that come with selling a phone through a major carrier, even a technically impressive piece of hardware is going to have a rough go of it. Google will have to hope things turn around once the Nexus One becomes available on the Verizon network this spring.
And, to add insult to injury, Google’s discovered that its application to trademark ‘Nexus’ has been rejected. Someone else got there first. Google will appeal. Lots of lucrative work for m’learned friends ahead.