I’m not a sycophant, says Randall

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Jeff Randall, former Business Editor of the BBC (and a very good one he was too) is offended by our report. He thinks that members of the panel have no sense of humour and failed to spot his sophisticated use of irony and sarcasm.

During the interview, broadcast on Five Live on December 3 2006, Mr Randall, now the Daily Telegraph’s editor-at-large, asked Mr Murdoch a question about the future of new technology, such as high-definition television.

Mr Murdoch replied with a list of Sky’s achievements – prompting Mr Randall to congratulate him sarcastically on giving a great sales pitch for Sky and a free advert on the BBC.

We commented that “the interview with James Murdoch (December 3 2006) also appeared sycophantic when the presenter congratulated Mr Murdoch’s pronouncements about the future of his company as the best sales pitch he had heard.”

The Guardian reports Jeff’s astonishment that his comment had been taken seriously.

“That was a sarcastic comment. I can’t believe the listeners would have failed to spot it,” he hold MediaGuardian.co.uk.

“I was having a pop at an interviewee who failed to answer the question,” Mr Randall said.

Hmmm… I’m tempted to borrow Simon Hoggart’s crack about Gordon Brown and say that Jeff Randall — who is a great ornament to his profession but approaches it much as sportswriters approach Premiership football — does irony the way Alex Ferguson does self-doubt.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for spotting the story.

Facebook enters phase of exponential growth

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Watch out, MySpace. Facebook’s on the rise. Interesting Yahoo! News report about Facebook opening up to third-party developers as well as non-graduates.

After the site opened up registration to non-college students last September, it evolved into a major social networking destination to rival MySpace.com, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate News Corp.

Facebook now has more than 24 million users who have logged on in the past 30 days. Venture capital firms including Accel Partners have contributed more than $35 million.

Critics say Facebook — which is getting more than 100,000 new registrations per day — can’t maintain its scorching growth rate. Others worry that [founder Mark] Zuckerberg and the company’s other 20-something technophiles lack the experience and credibility to turn the site into a profitable, publicly traded company.

On Thursday in San Francisco, Zuckerberg — who sported a fleece jacket, baggy jeans and flip-flops — seemed well aware of the challenges ahead. Technical gaffes dogged his nearly hour-long speech, and he broke out in a visible sweat.

“We’re the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S. and we can’t seem to get our act together,” Zuckerberg joked as he fumbled to synchronize his presentation slides, which were in disarray.

After laughs from the crowd, he regained his composure and added, “We recently passed eBay in traffic and we’re working on passing Google, too.”

Economist: cyberwar reassessed

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Good piece pondering the implications of the assault on Estonia.

Even at their crudest, the assaults broke new ground. For the first time, a state faced a frontal, anonymous attack that swamped the websites of banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters; that hobbled Estonia’s efforts to make its case abroad. Previous bouts of cyberwarfare have been far more limited by comparison: probing another country’s internet defences, rather as a reconnaissance plane tests air defences.

At full tilt, the onslaught on Estonia was also of a sophistication not seen before, with tactics shifting as weaknesses emerged. “Particular ‘ports’ of particular mission-critical computers in, for example, the telephone exchanges were targeted. Packet ‘bombs’ of hundreds of megabytes in size would be sent first to one address, then another,” says Linnar Viik, Estonia’s top internet guru. Such efforts exceed the skills of individual activists or even organised crime; they require the co-operation of a state and a large telecoms firm, he says. The effects could have been life-threatening. The emergency number used to call ambulances and the fire service was out of action for more than an hour.

For many countries, the events of the past weeks have been a loud wake-up call. Estonia, one of the most wired nations in Europe, actually survived pretty well. Other countries would have fared worse, NATO specialists reckon…

IMHO, this is a really big deal. I can’t understand why governments appear to be paying so little attention to it. And I’m astonished that it has taken so long for an attack to materialise. Years ago I wrote that Saddam Hussein should stop wasting his efforts on WMD and hire some hackers instead. I guess he didn’t read the Observer. Just as well, maybe.

That generation gap I was talking about

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From Guardian Unlimited Technology…

A friend has two children aged 11 and 16. He explains: “The latest thing in Surrey right now is downloading high-pitched tones that only children can hear [the 17kHz “Mosquito”] on to their mobiles, Bluetoothing them around, and then starting up a cacophony in lessons – they can hear it and double up in agony, but their teacher can’t.” It’s a metaphor for the adult/child gap: the children can recognise what the grownups can’t.

Our changing media ecosystem

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An excerpt from Jenny Abramsky’s speech to the Radio Academy

Students of BBC job titles, and I am sure there are many in this room, may have noticed that last summer the BBC had a Director of Television and a Director of Radio … but no longer. There is now a Director of BBC Vision and my title is now Director of Audio & Music.

Why the change? Not because we think radio doesn’t still exist, but because there’s a whole world of audio out there now, not just radio.

The fact is that all newspapers are going into audio online with their own podcasts and audio programmes. The Sunday Times offers a Music Show. The Guardian – a round up of European football action. The Observer – a weekly Film Review. Gillian’s own newspaper, the Telegraph, regards itself as multimedia, not simply print.

Individual artists like Ricky Gervais are going direct to audiences with their own podcast content. This is a world of audio where radio is just a part. There’s a new video world – of Google News and Microsoft – where television is just a part.

If the BBC is going to thrive in this 21st century global media market, it has to recognise the broadcasting world has changed and make the investment that’s needed in new ways of reaching audiences and delivering high quality content, even when it has a tight licence fee settlement.

It also has to make the case for its continued existence in a world that’s increasingly dominated by huge global players like Google and Apple…

The Final Days of Google

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Marvellous columnGoogle is an amazing entrepreneurial petri dish. Yet at the same time, it is doomed to disappoint nearly every entrepreneurial type who works there. This is key: Google is sowing the seeds of its own eventual destruction. It can’t help doing so.

For those who don’t know these details or have forgotten them, here’s the simple background: Google has made a huge effort to hire the best technical people it can find. Thousands of PhDs are now working in various Google labs, and many of these people were hired from other successful businesses. Google has also acquired a number of smaller companies, many of them for either their technology or their technical talent, and these companies bring yet more entrepreneurial DNA into the mix. The company has created a potent combination of straight-from-university geniuses, straight-from-start-up geniuses, and straight-from-Microsoft/IBM/Yahoo/wherever geniuses. These bright folks work individually and in teams and 20 percent of their time is supposed to be devoted to pursuing new technical ideas of their own. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are sure (and for good reason) that their crew will generate in this 20 percent time thousands of ideas and technologies that the company can commercialize for decades to come.

It is a brilliant strategy and one that would appear to be almost foolproof. Alas, that’s not so, for Google’s strategy for business immortality is fatally flawed and will ultimately kill the company….

Read on: it’s great.

Corpospeak analysed

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Roy Greenslade has a lovely dissection of a letter from the LA Times Editor to staff announcing their redundancies.

Did LA Times editor have help with redundancy letter?

It has been decided that 57 editorial staff are to leave the Los Angeles Times after a call for redundancies. I was particularly struck by the euphemistic corporate goobledegook employed by the editor, Jim O’Shea, in his explanatory letter to staff. I couldn’t really believe a journalist had written such guff. Then I realised that other people must have been at O’Shea’s shoulder as he wrote…

He began by referring to “a voluntary and involuntary employee separation programme” and pointed out that among those departing are “a very small number of involuntary departures… All will receive a generous separation package that includes salary continuation and outplacement assistance.” Straight from the human resources department handbook.

“We are also examining our polling operation to determine if reorganisation could increase revenues while achieving further savings. We expect to complete this examination in the next couple of months.”

Worth reading in full.

Google Trends

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Hmmm… The world is even odder than I had supposed. I’ve just been looking at what Google calls ‘hot trends’. Here’s how the company explains the list:

It’s a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What’s on our collective mind as we search for information? What’s interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a glance, you’ll see the huge variety of topics capturing our attention, from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. Hot Trends is updated throughout the day, so check back often.

For each Hot Trend, you will see results from Google News, Google Blog Search and web search, which help explain why the search is hot. For example, the #7 item on Thursday, May 17th was the cryptic phrase [creed thoughts]. The associated news stories and blog results show that this odd term is the name of a fake website mentioned on the season finale of The Office. Mystery solved. Of course, some searches are not as easily explained. Visit the Hot Trends group to read the explanations of others and offer your own.

If you want to look further back, you can also see what queries were hot on a particular day. On Wednesday, May 16th, [melinda doolittle], [halo 3 beta], and [ge dishwasher recall] were on the Hot Trends list. If you don’t know why, maybe you’ll learn something.

Hot Trends aren’t the search terms people look for most often — those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

My problem is that even with the aid of this explanatory technology, I am still puzzled by many of the search terms.

Our BBC report…

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.. was published today. The BBC Trust (whose predecessor commissioned the inquiry) says

The BBC Trust has published today (25 May 2007) the Independent Panel report into the impartiality of BBC coverage of business.

The panel, chaired by Sir Alan Budd, does not believe the BBC has a systematic bias against business. Its overall conclusion is that “most of the BBC’s business output meets the required standards of impartiality”. But the panel also says it “has seen a number of individual lapses and identified some trends which lead to repeated breaches of the BBC’s standards”.

In October last year the Trust’s predecessor, the BBC’s Board of Governors, commissioned the panel:

“to assess the impartiality of BBC news and factual coverage of business with particular regard to accuracy, context, independence and bias, actual or perceived; to assess whether the BBC portrays a fair and balanced picture of the world of business and of its impact on society more generally; to focus primarily on business coverage in mainstream output though specialist business programming should also be considered; and to make recommendations to the BBC Trust for improvements where necessary.”

The Trust discussed the panel’s report at its meeting on Wednesday 23 May.

Text and appendices available here.