Gnomes of Zurich stay home

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Wow! Fascinating Reuters report.

ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss private banks are banning their top executives from traveling abroad, even to France and Germany, because of fears they will be detained as part of a global crackdown on bank secrecy, the Financial Times reported.

The newspaper quoted an unnamed head of a leading private bank in Geneva as saying steps by countries like the United States and Germany to fight tax evasion meant banks felt they had to limit travel to protect employees.

It cited four unnamed sources in the Geneva private banking industry as saying some banks were introducing total travel bans for staff, even for neighboring European countries.

“Private bankers aren’t even traveling to France. The partners are not leaving Geneva at all,” the FT quoted one senior industry figure as saying.

Still, it gives them a chance to spend more time with their money.

Ghost twittering

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It just goes to show that nothing’s straightforward — not even Twitter.

The rapper 50 Cent is among the legion of stars who have recently embraced Twitter to reach fans who crave near-continuous access to their lives and thoughts. On March 1, he shared this insight with the more than 200,000 people who follow him: “My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.”

Those were 50 Cent’s words, but it was not exactly him tweeting. Rather, it was Chris Romero, known as Broadway, the director of the rapper’s Web empire, who typed in those words after reading them in an interview.

“He doesn’t actually use Twitter,” Mr. Romero said of 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, “but the energy of it is all him.”

In its short history, Twitter — a microblogging tool that uses 140 characters in bursts of text — has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal.

But someone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long…

Just for the record, I really wrote this post! Honest.

Graphing tools

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I hate the charts produced by programs like Excel, and so am intrigued by a new product from the Omni stable — the GraphSketch tool. The blurb claims that it:

helps you make elegant and precise graphs in seconds, simply by sketching what you want. Specifically designed for reports, presentations, and problem sets where you need to produce sharp-looking graphs on the fly, OmniGraphSketcher combines the data plotting power of charting applications with the ease of a basic drawing program.

I’ve just downloaded it and it works as advertised. Only runs on Macs, I’m afraid.

A new Internet Typology

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The Pew Internet and American Life project has come up with a new typology of technology users (and avoiders). Highlights:

  • Digital Collaborators: 8% of adults use information gadgets to collaborate with others and share their creativity with the world.
  • Ambivalent Networkers: 7% of adults heavily use mobile devices to connect with others and entertain themselves, but they don’t always like it when the cell phone rings.
  • Media Movers: 7% of adults use online access to seek out information nuggets, and these nuggets make their way through these users’ social networks via desktop and mobile access.
  • Roving Nodes: 9% of adults use their mobile devices to connect with others and share information with them.
  • Mobile Newbies: 8% of adults lack robust access to the internet, but they like their cell phones.
  • Desktop Veterans: 13% of adults are dedicated to wireline access to digital information, and like how it opens up the pipeline to information for them.
  • Drifting Surfers: 14% of adults are light users — despite having a lot of ICTs — and say they could do without modern gadgets and services.
  • Information Encumbered: 10% of adults feel overwhelmed by information and inadequate to troubleshoot modern ICTs.
  • The Tech Indifferent: 10% of adults are unenthusiastic about the internet and cell phone.
  • Off the Network: 14% of adults are neither cell phone users nor internet users.

    • Pew provide a quiz designed to help you assess where you fit in this classification system.

    (Footnote: I’m a ‘digital collaborator’, apparently.)

    Jeffrey Archer’s market valuation

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    One of my sons (Pete) spotted this in a well-known Cambridge second-hand bookshop. After an urgent phone call from his Dad, his brother went in and photographed it. Simply too good to miss.

    What I’m hoping for, of course, is that the bookseller becomes so desperate to get rid of it that he offers to pay people to take it away.

    Andrew Sullivan’s PoD cast

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    Print-on-Demand has just acquired a high-profile advocate. For years, readers of his blog have been emailing in photographs of the views from their windows.

    So, after nearly 3 years, and well over a thousand published, we’ve decided to compile all your best windows into a book. A photo book? In this economy? And didn’t you call the publishing industry “one of the shallowest, dumbest and most archaic in the U.S” – two years ago? You bet, now more than ever. That’s why we’ve decided to bypass the publishing houses altogether and experiment with print-on-demand. We’re going to try to publish the book independently, through no established publishing house, as an experiment in blog-based, print-on-demand publishing.

    Before you all rush to get in on the act, it’s worth noting that he demands that you surrender the rights. He gets to own your work. Smart, eh?

    The political applications of Art

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    Sometimes, things happen that restore one’s faith in humanity. Here’s a report of one such event.

    It seems that two unorthodox portraits of Brian Cowen, the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), suddenly appeared in two of Dublin’s leading galleries. One in the National Gallery showed the Taoiseach on the toilet, and another in the Royal Hibernian Gallery (above) showing him holding his Y-fronts. According to the report, the pictures

    appeared mysteriously in Dublin among paintings of the country’s other famous citizens in more decorous poses.

    The Irish media speculated that the prankster had created the artworks in an attempt to lift the nation’s spirits at a time of deep economic gloom. Judging by the chuckles of visitors and comments inundating the blogosphere, the stunt worked.

    “Biffo on the bog”, was one gleeful response, referring to the Taoiseach by his nickname, which stands for “Big Ignorant F***er from Offaly”.

    The artist reportedly walked calmly into the National Gallery carrying a shoulder bag. He then affixed a prepared caption for the picture to a free space among portraits of Michael Collins, William Butler Yeats and Bono, before hanging his canvas, undisturbed by security.

    There’s been the most ludicrous over-reaction by the government to this — as reported by, e.g. the Irish Times. RTE, the national TV station, cravenly apologised for reporting the incident after a complaint from the government’s Press Secretary (who happens to be a namesake of mine). What it shows, of course, is the power of ridicule. The moral authority of the Catholic church in Ireland never recovered from the revelation that the Bishop of Kerry had not only been screwing a handsome dame (and fathering a child) but that he had been doing it in the back of a Lancia saloon! This led to a wonderful explosion in Bishop Casey jokes (e.g. Q. “What’s the correct form of address for the Bishop of Kerry?” A. “Dad.”) Cowen was already looking ridiculous as a result of the implosion of the Irish banking system. Now he’s a real laughing stock.

    What’s the point of technology, really?

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    Mark Anderson in thoughtful mood.

    What is the fascination with technology today? Who needs another megahertz of this, or to shrink that a bit more, or to cut another ten percent off the production cost? Why would anyone care?

    Oh, but this screen does this, and that drive is a little faster, and this flash chip is cheaper this year, and IBM is said to be monopolizing mainframes while Rackspace commoditizes servers. Really?

    Without application to human needs, the thrill quickly wears off. Yes, when it can do something really meaningful, like provide food to a village, or health care, or clean water, then technology really is magic. But, after all the stories of this kind, how often does this really happen? Like the short-queens of the hedge fund crowd, aren’t we really, ultimately, just mostly messing with each other, on someone else’s nickel? Is it a game? And, if so, is it a game with a hidden cost as large as the hedge queens’?

    What can we do to make technology, or anything, meaningful ? Maybe we need to re-allocate our teams, and put more emphasis on revolution, on real science, and less on evolution, or incremental change. Will technology be the answer to the world’s energy problems? Or will we discover that Clean Coal is really nothing but a PR ploy? How many of us are working on real problems, and how many on improving the next MP3 player? Can we tell the difference?

    A sobering question for those of us who gambol delightedly in fields of gadgetry. Also I wonder what the gender dimension of this is: although there are some very distinguished women in this space (I think, for example, of Karlin Lillington and Laura James and the late, great Karen Sparck-Jones) it seems a predominately male playground. And I’m reminded of a lovely story Dave Barry told years ago when the Humvee was first released in civilian form and he was given one for a day. He relates how he proudly took his wife for a drive.

    “So what can it do?” she asked.
    “Lots of cool stuff” replied Dave.
    “Like what?”
    “Well”, said Dave, “I can inflate or deflate the tyres while we’re driving along.
    “Why?” asked his wife.

    He had no answer. I suspect that lots of us are really in that position. The stuff is endlessly fascinating, sure. But does it really matter? Isn’t much of it just leading-edge uselessness?

    Joined-up government, not

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    Fascinating post surveying the linking policies of UK public sector websites. I particularly liked the London Fire Brigade site which operates one of the most restrictive linking policies in existence, banning deep-linking and threatening “further action” for “breach” of this “legal restriction” if you’ve not informed LFB you’ve linked to their site:

    ATTENTION: LINKING TO THIS WEBSITE INDICATES THAT YOU ACCEPT THESE TERMS OF USE AND LEGAL RESTRICTIONS AND THAT YOU WILL ABIDE BY THE GUIDELINES SET OUT BELOW. IF YOU DO NOT ACCEPT THESE TERMS OF USE OR YOU DO NOT AGREE TO ABIDE BY THESE GUIDELINES, DO NOT LINK TO THIS WEBSITE

    If you provide hyperlinks to this Website, you agree that you…

    * shall not link to an internal page of this Website that is located one or several levels down from the home page or bring up or present Content of this Website on another website without our prior written permission; shall not link to a website that is not owned by you;

    * shall inform us in writing of the link; and

    * shall immediately discontinue the link if instructed to do so by us.

    We expressly reserve the right to revoke the right granted in this section for any breach of these Terms of Use and to take any further action it deems appropriate in respect of such breach.

    Something for Tom Watson, I think.

    Thanks to Tony Hirst for the original link.

    Premature obituaries

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    From the Editor of The Buffalo News…

    Maybe this is what Mark Twain had in mind when he quipped, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

    The former Buffalo newspaper editor must have understood what it’s like to be alive and well, even as the public wipes away a quiet tear at your demise.

    That’s what life is like these days for many of us who work at The Buffalo News. People seem to think we’re at death’s door.

    It’s far from true. There’s no question that American newspapers are going through difficult times. Large, well-established papers in major cities are going bankrupt or, in a couple of cases, closing altogether.

    Here at The News, we’re more fortunate— although certainly not unaffected by the difficult trends.

    How are we more fortunate?

    1. We’re making a profit. The decline in advertising revenue is significant—and likely to get worse— but we’re still in the black and planning to stay that way.

    2. We have none of the crippling debt that many newspaper owners are carrying. Many of those debt-heavy papers would be making money if it weren’t for their debt load.

    3. We have extraordinarily high acceptance among local residents. The News, as a print newspaper, has the highest “market penetration” among the 50 or so largest metropolitan dailies in the United States.

    4. Our Web site is the leading local media Web site, by far, in Western New York. When you combine the Web site and the newspaper, we’re reaching 80 percent of Western New Yorkers on a regular basis…