I’m an enthusiastic defender of the blogosphere as a space where there is more collective intelligence than is available in mainstream media, but sometimes one wonders…
These charts are from the Pew Excellence in Journalism project.
Global Muslim Population
From the Pew Research Center.
A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23% of an estimated 2009 world population of 6.8 billion.
While Muslims are found on all five inhabited continents, more than 60% of the global Muslim population is in Asia and about 20% is in the Middle East and North Africa. However, the Middle East-North Africa region has the highest percentage of Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, more than half of the 20 countries and territories1 in that region have populations that are approximately 95% Muslim or greater.
Judge Tells Google to Revise Its Book Pact by Nov. 9
From today’s NYTimes.
On Wednesday morning, Judge Denny Chin set Nov. 9 as the date by which Google and its partners must submit a revised settlement for the court’s preliminary approval.
The original agreement was negotiated between Google and representatives of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, who had sued the company, claiming copyright infringement, after Google began scanning books from university libraries. After the settlement was announced last October, it faced hundreds of objections from authors, academics, librarians, public interest groups and would-be rivals. Last month, the Justice Department recommended that the court reject the settlement as it stood.
The Justice Department, which submitted a 32-page filing to the court on Sept. 18, said it was concerned the agreement could violate antitrust law by giving Google “de facto exclusive rights for the digital distribution of orphan works.” Orphan works are books whose authors are unknown or cannot be found. The Justice Department also said it wanted the settlement to comply with procedures for class-action lawsuits.
The Generation Game
Perceptive FT column by Luke Johnson.
We have entered the Digital Age, but most of those in control in business, and indeed politics, are not digital natives. By the time they get to be the definitive boss, leaders are generally in their 50s. At that point in their life, they are unlikely to be ready to reinvent what they and their company do. “The Establishment” is just that – by nature, they are not dramatic reformers.
So, in sectors such as the music industry, they cling to old-fashioned products like CDs, even when it is obvious the technology has passed its sell-by date. Believe me, I know: I owned a retailer selling CDs – and like-for-like revenues have been plunging – perhaps partly disguised by unit price cuts to maintain volumes. The same applies to film and DVDs; within a few years the format will be history. They all need to devise ways to make downloading pay, and halt the avalanche of piracy and file-sharing.
Unfortunately, a chief executive only a few years from retirement is hardly motivated to sack loyal colleagues to bring on board lots of teenagers to turn their company upside down. Psychologically, we are congenitally opposed to tearing down what we have helped create in order to build anew. Hence the status quo prevails, even if it is the demoralising task of managing decline with no salvation in sight. And so all efforts are applied to preservation in spite of a realisation that the economic model is broken – because no one is forcing the company in a new direction.
AT&T finally gets the message. Now for European telcos…
From Good Morning Silicon Valley.
There now, that wasn’t so hard. In a change of heart, AT&T said Tuesday it would allow iPhone owners to use Internet voice applications like Skype across its 3G network, and all it took was the clamoring of customers, the threat of tougher competition and the specter of government intervention. The system works!
Concerned about losing revenue and adding to its traffic load, AT&T had initially imposed restrictions that limited the use of iPhone VoIP apps to Wi-Fi connections, even though it let some Windows Mobile phones use such apps across its network. The reversal, the company said, was not the result of a sudden epiphany, but the result of a “regular review of device features and capabilities.” “Today’s decision was made after evaluating our customers’ expectations and use of the device compared to dozens of others we offer,” said Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T’s mobility and consumer markets division. Yep, just an ordinary review that began back in August, right after the FCC sent a letter to the major carriers asking them to explain their policies on Internet telephony apps. With the FCC’s embrace of Net neutrality principles and now a Google-Verizon alliance making openness a key selling point, AT&T must have figured it was a bad time to look like an obstructionist.
Funny how things happen when the FCC takes an interest. OFCOM, are you listening?
e-readers, e-readers, e-readers…
Yup. They are the Craze du Jour. What’s worrying everyone, of course, is that Apple is getting ready to do to the Amazon Kindle what it’s done to Nokia smartphones. GMSV has a nice round-up.
Amazon knows that competition in the developing e-reader market is going to get considerably stiffer in the near future, so it’s doing what it can to grab share while the grabbing’s good. Today the company announced it was lopping another $40 off the price of its Kindle, bringing it down to $259 in the U.S. The geographic distinction is needed because Amazon also announced it would start selling an international version of the gadget, equipped to use the global network of AT&T and its roaming partners, in more than 100 countries (though still not Canada) at a price of $279.
International customers, however, will have to factor in some additional expenses. Different countries will impose various duty charges and value-added taxes on the hardware for starters. Downloading books and periodicals in the U.S. comes for free via Whispernet across Sprint’s EVDO network, but will cost $1.99 abroad. Taking delivery of periodical subscriptions will cost an extra $4.99 a week internationally. And users overseas will pay 99 cents a megabyte to transfer personal documents to their Kindle. Still, the expansion should give a nice boost to the Kindle’s sales figures (whatever they may be; Amazon will say only that the Kindle is its “most wished for, most gifted, and No. 1 bestselling product”).
L’affaire Polanski
If, like me, you are puzzled by the ludicrous protestations of the movie world about the arrest of Roman Polanski, then this excellent piece by Nick Cohen should provide a useful antidote.
Poor France. What is there left to say about that unfortunate country? It destroys the feudal order in the Revolution only to replace an aristocracy of nobles with an aristocracy of celebrities. The notion that Polanski – an artist! – could be arrested for molesting 13-year old Samantha Gailey turned the brain of its foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, as soft as Camembert.
“It’s a bit sinister, this business,” he said, as he contemplated the lese-majesty. “A man of such talent recognised throughout the world… All this is not nice.” A host of auteurs, led by Constantin Costa-Gavras, director of the Cinémathèque Française, implied that the Zurich Film Festival was the equivalent of a medieval cathedral or United Nations General Assembly, a privileged space where the law&’s writ did not run.
“It seems inadmissible that an international cultural evening, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary film-makers, is used by police to apprehend him,” the directors said as they decried the sacrilege.
Kouchner was right on one point: the scandal from 1977 is “not nice”. Gailey told a grand jury how Polanksi groomed her by saying he could get her into Vogue. He offered her champagne and Quaalude, a sedative which induces trances, raped and sodomised her. She kept saying she wanted to go home, and at one point feigned an asthma attack to get away from him. Asked why she did not struggle further, she replied: “Because I was afraid of him.” Polanski’s parting words were: “Don’t tell your mother about this and don’t tell your boyfriend either. This is our secret.”
He cut a deal, and pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a child. Then he fled to Europe to escape sentence, where he promptly began walking out with Nastassja Kinski, then aged 15. In an interview with Martin Amis, he said if he was a murderer the press and police wouldn’t be so obsessed by him. “But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls – everyone wants to fuck young girls!”
What’s astonishing is that the French protected Polanski for so long from getting his just deserts in the US courts. But it isn’t only French foreign ministers who have a warped sense of their moral duty. Nick goes on to chronicle the compliance of an English libel judge in allowing Polanski to testify to a London court without making the trip to Britain (where he would properly have been arrested and extradited to the US). Hopefully the Swiss will now quickly hand him over and we can see justice done — finally.
NYT discovers Tablet PC
Yep. Here’s the evidence.
SAN FRANCISCO — The high-tech industry has been working itself into paroxysms of excitement lately over an idea that is not exactly new: tablet computers.
Quietly, several high-tech companies are lining up to deliver versions of these keyboard-free, touch-screen portable machines in the next few months. Industry watchers have their eye on Apple in particular to sell such a device by early next year.
Tablets have been around in various forms for two decades, thus far delivering little other than memorable failure. Nonetheless, the new batch of devices has gripped the imagination of tech executives, bloggers and gadget hounds, who are projecting their wildest dreams onto these literal blank slates.
In these visions, tablets will save the newspaper and book publishing industries, present another way to watch television and movies, play video games, and offer a visually rich way to enjoy the Web and the expanding world of mobile applications.
“Desktops, laptops — we already know how those work,” said Brian Lam, editorial director of the popular gadget site Gizmodo, which reports and hypothesizes almost daily about these devices. Tablets, he said, “are one of the last few mysteries left.”
What’s wrong with email (and Google wave?)
Robert Scoble returns to the fray. I don’t know about Google Wave (my invite hasn’t arrived yet) but he’s spot on about email.
Unfinished business
So…. how exactly do we get in touch?