Amazon, Google and Juvenal: Quis custodiet…

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Jeff Bezos’s mantra from the moment he founded Amazon was “get big quick”. We’re beginning to see just how big it’s getting.

Last week an investment analyst estimated that Amazon now ‘facilitates’ (and takes a cut from) a third of all e-commerce transactions in the US.

Then the gay and lesbian community discovered how powerful Amazon’s database can be when what the company later described as an “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” effectively banned 57,310 listings of so-called ‘adult’ books and DVDs by making them invisible. This saga was well covered on the Web. See, for example, Clay Shirky’s admirable apologia (for being seduced by righteousness), Bill Thompson’s BBC column and Rory Cellan-Jones’s early blog post on the subject.

Looming over all this, of course, is a Really Big Question. Companies like Amazon and Google have acquired enormous power. Both can effectively render significant chunks of our culture invisible at the click of a mouse. But they are public corporations, answerable only to their shareholders — if at all. (Actually, in Google’s case, the two-tier shareholding structure means that the company’s leaders are not accountable even to their shareholders.) So, as the Roman poet Juvenal famously observed: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards themselves?) To date, we’ve avoided the question, arguing that if companies step out of line then in a competitive market they will pay the penalty for messing us around. So, if Google was deliberately skewing search results (so the argument runs) then the market would detect that and people would go to other search engines. I suspect we’ve moved beyond that comforting point. So the question remains: who will keep these online behemoths honest?

A philosopher discovers Twitter

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Tom Morris via HuffPost.

There is communal thinking on Twitter on a level and in a form I’ve never seen before. Almost every day, a topic comes up that causes me, as a philosopher, to ponder a bit, and then share the results of that pondering in the 140 character increments that Twitter allows. Today, someone mentioned Susan Boyle, the lady who has made such a stir worldwide with her recent appearance on the television show Britain’s Got Talent. The You Tube video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY.

As I reflected and tweeted briefly on Susan and her lessons for the rest of us, people started retweeting, or passing along those short reflections to others. When I saw what touched people the most, and elicited the best responses, that in turn informed what I continued to think and tweet. While considering all the activity that these simple tweets generated, because of who Susan Boyle is and what she’s shown us, I decided to use an extra blog post today simply to share these tweets, or twitter reflections, to provide an example of the unlikely musing that is now flashing around the internet, and also to highlight Susan’s example for us in this forum as well…

Life After Newspapers — and spelling

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Just browsing this WashPost piece by Michael Kinsley when I came on this para.

It is tempting, but too easy, to say the problems of newspapers are their own fault. True enough, the industry missed a whole armada of boats. If newspapers had been smarter, or moved faster, they might have kept the classified ads. They might have invented social networking. But that’s all hindsight. I didn’t think of these things, nor did you. Judging from Tribune Co., for which I once worked, the typical newspaper executive is a bear of little brain. Until recently, little brain was needed. Even now, to say the newspaper industry has no problems that a busload of geniuses couldn’t solve is essentially saying that the industry’s problems are insoluable. Or at least insoluable without help.

Hmmm… Insoluable indeed. Maybe someone should donate a spell-checker to the poor impoverished Washington Post. But that reference to “a bear of little brain” comes from Winnie the Pooh, whose spelling — you will recall — was “good spelling but it wobbles”.

That aside, it’s a nice piece.

Wikipedia opts out of Phorm

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Here’s the text of the memo to the Phorm administrators:

The Wikimedia Foundation requests that our web sites including
Wikipedia.org and all related domains be excluded from scanning by the
Phorm / BT Webwise system, as we consider the scanning and profiling of
our visitors’ behavior by a third party to be an infringement on their
privacy.

Good stuff. This suggests a tactic for a flash-mob operation. If millions of domain owners emailed website-exclusion@webwise.com with demands that their domains be excluded it might have an interesting effect.

Interesting to see that Amazon has already opted out.

Interesting also to see that info about opting out is pretty deeply buried on the BT Webwise site. The relevant para says:

How can I remain opted-out of BT Webwise even if I delete cookies regularly?

We provide the facility to block cookies permanently from BT Webwise so if you want to opt out permanently you can do so through a one-time only activity, by setting your browser to block cookies from the domain webwise.net. When you block this domain, the service will not put a cookie on your machine and you will not be asked to opt in or out again.

Random thoughts over morning coffee…

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… is the heading on this lovely meditative post by Dave Winer. Here’s how it opens:

I’m writing this sitting in a cafe in Harvard Sq drinking coffee and enjoying the beginnning of the day. No newspaper to read, just my netbook, a net connection and my own thoughts.

Doc Searls likes to say that markets are conversations, but people are conversations too. I have no way of knowing for sure how it is for other people, but inside me is a constant back and forth chatter, with lots of different voices, each expressing opinions of minor and major events that take place all around us (i.e. me).

It’s all those different voices that come up with ideas, collaboratively — we’re like a 24 hour group brainstorming session…

Twitter twaddle

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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

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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?

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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.