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…

The power of Art

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Here’s something I ought to have known, but didn’t until I heard an art critic on Radio 4 talking about it this morning. This report dates from February 2003.

In an act with extraordinary historical resonance, United Nations officials covered up a tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war mural “Guernica” during US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5 presentation of the American case for war against Iraq.

Picasso’s painting commemorates a small Basque village bombed by German forces in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The painter, in desolate black, white and grey, depicts a nightmarish scene of men, women, children and animals under bombardment. The twisted, writhing forms include images of a screaming mother holding a dead child, a corpse with wide-open eyes and a gored horse. Art historian Herbert Read described the work as “a cry of outrage and horror amplified by a great genius.”

The reproduction has hung outside the Security Council chamber at UN headquarters in New York since its donation by the estate of Nelson A. Rockefeller in 1985. As the council gathered to hear Powell on Wednesday, workers placed a blue curtain and flags of the council’s member countries in front of the tapestry.

UN officials claimed that the cover-up was simply a matter of creating a more effective backdrop for the television cameras. “When we do have large crowds we put the flags up and the UN logo in front of the tapestry,” asserted Stephane Dujarric. New York Newsday, however, reported that “Diplomats at the United Nations, speaking on condition they not be named, have been quoted in recent days telling journalists that they believe the United States leaned on UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other US diplomats argued for war on Iraq.”

This is an extraordinary story. It reminds me of the anecdote (possibly apocryphal?) of a German diplomat looking intently at the painting and then turning to Picasso. “Did you do this?” he asked. “No”, replied the painter, “you did”. As the Italians say, if it’s not true tehn it ought to be.

Digital = ‘free’ (to all intents and purposes)

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Very perceptive column by Emily Bell.

In the struggle to find new terminology that accurately describes concepts we don’t fully understand, sometimes language fails us. ‘New media’ is one such term that fails to describe seismic structural change, and insultingly foists the moniker of ‘old media’ on to vibrant formats such as broadcast television and newspapers. What we mean when we say ‘new media’ is most often ‘digital’.

This is much more helpful, as ‘digital’ carries with it a whole set of properties that can be readily understood and that go beyond media and into other areas of society. One key, defining principle of things that are ‘digital’ is that they can be very easily copied, compressed and transmitted. In other words, ‘digital’ and ‘free’; (in every sense, not just the monetary sense) go together like Morecambe and Wise, fish and chips, or banks and bailout.

This is something that the media, their ruling institutions, governments and regulators are all currently coming to terms with: once something is digitised, the ability over time to control it, charge for it, regulate it or contain it exponentially decreases…