The Web becomes the stream

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From a blog post by Glen Hiemstra.

As we move beyond Web 2.0 into an ever more interactive network, in which users send as much material as they consume, via social nets and video sites, and so on, it becomes obvious that we are progressing from the Internet through the Web to the Stream. It is the constant flow of information that matters. (When Sonia Sotomayor is nominated to the Supreme Court, within about 90 seconds her bio on Wikipedia has been updated.) No static website or traditional media company can keep pace.

Interesting that point about the Supreme Court nomination.

Obama’s Cairo speech…

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… was by all accounts terrific. Here’s Robert Kaplan’s report in The Atlantic, for example:

(June 4, 2009).

One can take apart President Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world delivered at Cairo University today, and subject its sentences to all manner of criticism and analysis, but its overall effect was magnificent. It employed the forward-looking optimism of the American Dream in the service of the hopes and frustrations of youth throughout the Islamic cultural continuum. It also restored the kind of public relations magic that America possessed overseas in the years immediately after World War II. Obama is no doubt more popular among Muslim youth than many of their own leaders.

The President spoke of a “new beginning,” about not being “prisoners of the past,” about how the “enduring faith of a billion should not be hostage to a few extremists.” He spoke about religious freedom, not only for Muslims, but for the Christian minorities in their midst – like the Copts in Egypt and the Maronites in Lebanon. He spoke about women’s rights, and how “education and innovation,” as practiced by Muslim states like Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, are the “currencies of the 21st century.” He didn’t defend the forcible implementation of democracy, but he did defend good government and civil society in all countries. Thus, he spoke of democracy in philosophical terms rather than in legalistic ones. And he consistently addressed the hopes of his audiences rather than their fears.

Quote of the day

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“I think Twitter’s a success for us when people stop talking about it, when we stop doing these panels and people just use it as a utility, use it like electricity. It fades into the background, something that’s just a part of communication. We put it on the same level as any communication device. So, e-mail, SMS, phone. That’s where we want to be.”

Twitter co-founder Joe Dorsey, speaking at a conference.

The gift that keeps on taking

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Reagan did it. That’s the headline on Paul Krugmans’s NYTimes column.

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Interesting column. The US media’s failure to detect the Savings and Loans catastrophe in the 1980s was a dry run for their failure to spot Enron and, later still, our current financial meltdown.

Google Wave: the gist

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Here’s a useful outline of the main features of Google Wave. In essence it’s “a real-time communication platform” which “combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client”.

Main features:

  • Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.
  • Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.
  • Applications and Extensions: Just like a FacebookFacebook reviewsFacebook reviews application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.
  • Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.
  • Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.
  • Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.
  • Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.
  • Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

    While these are only a few of the many features of Google Wave, it’s easy to see why people are extremely excited.

    • The Homburg Factor redux

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    Whenever politicians start talking about their ‘vision’ for the country, it is time to start counting the spoons. I remember thinking that when Gordon Brown bottled out of calling an election in the first Autumn of his premiership and went on TV saying that he just wanted time to spell out his ‘vision’ for Britain. I was surprised at the time that so many commentators were willing to take him at face value. But it seems that even the Guardian has finally had enough. Here’s its Leader today:

    The truth is that there is no vision from him, no plan, no argument for the future and no support. The public see it. His party sees it. The cabinet must see it too, although they are not yet bold enough to say so. The prime minister demands loyalty, but that has become too much to ask of a party, and a country, that was never given the chance to vote for him. Had there been a contest for the leadership in 2007 – and had Mr Brown called a general election – he would probably have won. He decided not to do these things. And he has largely failed since.

    I always thought Brown would make a terrible Prime Minister. He’s secretive, indecisive, obsessive and a control freak. That combination might work in the Treasury. But it would never have worked in Number Ten. And I always had the feeling that Tony Blair had similar thoughts about Brown’s suitability for the highest office — hence my original Homburg Factor post of long ago. Which leads to another thought. Remember the famous ‘Granola Deal’ in which Brown and Blair allegedly decided that Blair would run for the leadership following the death of John Smith? New Labour’s great stroke of luck was that Blair became Leader. If it had been Brown, Labour would have won the 1997 election — for the simple reason that a “dog with a mallet up its arse” (to use a colourful Irish phrase) would have beaten the Tories in 1997 (just as a similarly-equipped mongrel will beat Labour in 2010). But I doubt that Labour would have won a second term with Brown in charge.

    For a control freak, the disintegration of his government must be a galling experience. But I’ll be very surprised if he goes voluntarily. Meanwhile, his MPs have nobody to blame but themselves. They, after all, lacked the cojones to have a leadership election after Blair stepped down.

    And Enoch Powell was right: all political careers end in failure.

    Looking for the mouse (contd.)

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    Following my post about Tom Steinberg and 4IP (in which I quoted the story about a kid looking for a mouse behind the TV), Karl-Martin Skontorp pointed me at this essay by Clay Shirky, in which he tells a similar story:

    I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

    Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

    The Great Experiment

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    Hooray! We’re moving closer to a planned experiment that will tell us if — and how much — people are prepared to pay for online content. The Guardian report says:

    The Sunday Times is set to launch a standalone website – and is considering charging readers for its content.

    Plans have not been finalised, but executives at Sunday Times publisher News International are considering the charges to fall in line with the publicly stated desire of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of parent company News Corporation, for his newspapers around the world to follow the lead of the Wall Street Journal by charging for content.

    Sunday Times content is currently published online alongside its daily sister title the Times under the umbrella Times Online website brand.

    One source familiar with the situation said the new Sunday Times website could launch within three months. Another said it would be later in the year and that many crucial decisions about the site had not been finalised.

    MediaGuardian.co.uk understands that a final decision on how to charge readers to look at content – whether via subscriptions or micropayments – has not been made…