Twitter twaddle

Posted on by

The editor of Management Today, a magazine, seems to be having an off-day:

Like Black Lace reunions and charity wrist bands, Twitter is a tedious fad we would do well to pull the plug on. News editors at the national newspapers have been desperate to keep up with the Joneses, i.e their proper broadcast media rivals, in offering up-to-the-minute G20 news of the crusties and anti-capitalist protestors surging on the Bank of England, busting into branches of RBS, and trying to knock policemen’s helmets off. They’ve gone for Twitter because it’s The New Thing, and because they don’t have the resources in their depleted budgets to do it properly.

Quaint, don’t you think?

One tablet per geek

Posted on by

Michael Arrington wants to build a Web tablet Here’s his mock-up pic.

And this is what he says about it.

I’m tired of waiting – I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.

If all you are doing is running Firefox and Skype, you don’t need a lot of hardware horsepower, which will keep the cost way down.

The idea is to turn it on, bypass any desktop interface, and go directly to Firefox running in a modified Kiosk mode that effectively turns the browser into the operating system for the device. Add Gears for offline syncing of Google docs, email, etc., and Skype for communication and you have a machine that will be almost as useful as a desktop but cheaper and more portable than any laptop or tablet PC.

It will also include a custom default home page with large buttons for bookmarked services – news, Meebo/Ebuddy for IM, Google Docs/Zoho for Office, Email, social networks, photo sites, YouTube, etc. Everything that you use every day.

We’re working with a supply chain management company that says the basic machine we’re looking to build can be created for just a few hundred dollars. They need us to write the software modifications to Linux and Firefox (more on that below) and spec the hardware. Then they run with it and can have a few prototypes built within a month…

I don’t have the skills to help him build it. But I’d buy one if it were available. It’s the logical next step on from the NetBook. The experience of the One Laptop Per Child project, however, suggests that designing and building hardware is much more expensive and difficult than people think. I hope I’m wrong.

Twitter as a dress rehearsal — but for what?

Posted on by

Interesting observation by dave Winer.

In a way, as a user of Twitter, I have the same business model as the investors in Twitter. I don’t know what it is, but I have a feeling there’s something here. I look at it this way, if you tried to tell me what we’re doing on Twitter has nothing to do with what we’ll be doing with networks in the future, I’d be 100 percent sure you were wrong. There’s something here. The challenge is to figure out what it is.

However increasingly I’m sure that Twitter itself is not it.

Free speech? Only if you’re a charity.

Posted on by

Like many of my (ageing) contemporaries, I regularly get approached by conference organisers asking me to give ‘keynote’ addresses to their events. I’ve noticed a trend: the glossier and more upmarket the event, the less inclined the organisers are to offer a speaker’s fee. Guy Clapperton has noticed the same problem — and pointed me at this wonderful rant by Harlan Ellison.

My rule btw is that I will do stuff free for charities and non-profit educational or public-service events. Companies pay, preferably through the nose.

LATER: Bill Thompson pointed me at this. Same message. Eloquent in a different way.

How media evolve

Posted on by

One of the case studies I use in lectures about media ecology is how newspapers in the 1950s adapted to the emergence of television. But actually there’s an even better example — which is how newspapers adapted (or failed) to the challenge of radio. The WSJ has a lovely example of this in a piece by L. Gordon Crovitz prompted by a new biography of Barney Kilgore, the editor who transformed the Journal in the 1940s.

As the remaining city newspapers rethink themselves, editors and publishers might consult a road map for how newspapers can live alongside new media that was drawn up more than 50 years ago by Bernard Kilgore, outlined in a new biography by former Journal executive Richard Tofel, Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism.

Kilgore had remarkable judgment early about the journalistic issue of our day: how readers use old media, new media and both. When Kilgore became managing editor of the Journal in 1941, he inherited a business model that technology had undermined. Founded in 1889 to provide market news and stock prices to individual investors, the Journal lost half its circulation as this basic information became widely available.

Kilgore observed that then new media such as radio meant market news was available in real time. Some cities had a dozen newspapers that had gained the Journal's once-valuable ability to report share prices.

The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, “It doesn’t have to have happened yesterday to be news,” and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page “What’s News — ” column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant.

On the morning after Pearl Harbor, other newspapers recounted the facts already known to all the day before through radio. The Journal’s page-one story instead began, “War with Japan means industrial revolution in the United States.” It outlined the implications for the economy, industry and commodity and financial markets.

If you wanted an illustration of the mindset newspapers need to cope with the challenge of the Internet, then that Pearl Harbor story is it in a nutshell.

Email 101

Posted on by

From the Nicci French Blog.

Although email has the word ‘mail’ in it, it’s not like a letter and although it’s sent over a telephone line, it’s not like a telephone call. What it’s more like is the postcard you send from holiday that you send to someone in the office which they then pin up on the wall. You don’t free-associate on a postcard about kneecapping your enemies. You don’t spread vicious gossip about close friends on a postcard. There are more appropriate channels for such things.

My own rule about my own emails is this: if there is anything that embarrass me if it were printed out, put on a giant poster and pasted up in Piccadilly Cirucs, then I cut it out.

Yep.

Larry Summers & Harvard’s endowment (contd.)

Posted on by

Well, well. Dave Boyle pointed me to this story from the April 3 edition of Boston.com:

Back in 2002, a new employee of Harvard University’s endowment manager named Iris Mack wrote a letter to the school’s president, Lawrence Summers, that would ultimately get her fired.

In the letter, dated May 12 of that year, Mack told Summers that she was “deeply troubled and surprised” by things she had seen in her new job as a quantitative analyst at Harvard Management Co.

She would go on to say, in later e-mails and conversations, that she felt the endowment was taking on too much risk in derivatives investments, and that she suspected some of her colleagues were engaging in insider trading, according to a separate letter written by her lawyer that summarized the correspondence.

On July 2 Mack was fired. But six years later, the kinds of investments she allegedly warned about did blow up on Harvard. The endowment plunged 22 percent last summer, in part due to the collapse of the credit markets. As a result, the school is cutting costs and under criticism that it took on too much risk in its investment portfolio.

Mack, who holds a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard, had been with Harvard Management for just four months when she approached Summers. She asked him to keep her communications confidential, or risk making her life “a living hell.”

But on July 1, Mack was called into a meeting by her boss, Jack Meyer, then the chief of Harvard Management.

The next day Meyer fired her, according to the letter from her attorney, Jonathan Margolis, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe. Meyer told Mack that she was fired for making “baseless allegations against HMC to individuals outside of HMC,” according to the Margolis letter…

What’s going on in your browser window?

Posted on by

If you want a measure of how far we’ve moved from the days of simple HTML, then just install the NoScript add-on for Firefox. It detects every script that a site is running within the page and asks you to make a decision about whether to allow it or not. It’s an eye-opener. The image shows what happened when I opened a normal page from the Wall Street Journal.

The sad fact is that there’s so much AJAX-like stuff out there that running NoScript is a bit of a pain. The old adage about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance needs updating. The price of online security is endless hassle.

1,001 uses for Twitter

Posted on by

The New York Times discovers Twitter.”Taken collectively”, it says,

“the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it”.

Wow! You don’t say.