Robbing the young

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I am lucky enough to own a house which has escalated in value to the point where it is apparently ‘worth’ a lot of money. Big deal! The only way of turning it into ‘real’ money would be to sell it and live in a tent. More importantly, the price escalation which has led to its current valuation is what will make it difficult or impossible for my kids to buy homes of their own. I therefore view house prices with a good deal of dyspeptic cynicism, and refuse to participate in dinner-party conversations on the subject. So good on Peter Wilby, who has written an excellent rant on this very subject, in the process highlighting yet another reason why young people are turned off by newspapers. Excerpt:

Anybody over 50, who has already done most of their retirement saving, has every reason to be gloomy when the Footsie dives. Those under 40, with most of their saving ahead of them, should jump for joy. Their pension schemes will pay less for the assets that are going to finance their old age. So they will get more bang for their bucks. The same, more obviously, applies to house prices.You would not know any of this from reading the papers. Whether it’s house prices or share prices, the press treats a rise as cause for celebration, a fall as an occasion for alarm. We are led to believe that inflation is a thing of the past, a relic of the 1970s and old Labour.

This is nonsense. Inflation is alive and well; it has merely moved from goods and services to assets. In other words, the press presents the world through a middle-aged, middleclass prism. When young people read that house prices have shown “healthy increases”, they must think journalists live in a parallel universe. No wonder they don’t read newspapers or feel any affection for them. If any paper hopes to woo the under-30s in large numbers, whether through new media or old-fashioned print, it will have to get to grips with what Faisal Islam, economics correspondent of Channel 4 News, calls “the great generational robbery”.

In the New Statesman this month, he wrote of how 22-year-olds, through rent payments, are paying off the mortgages of older landlords who benefited from cheaper house prices; of how, when they eventually buy houses, it will represent a transfer of many millions of pounds from young to old; of how, through rising taxation, they are paying their parents’ pensions. Why do we so rarely read of this in the daily and Sunday papers? Why do papers such as the Telegraph and Express fuss so much about inheritance tax which matters to people in their 50s and 60s, whose parents are approaching the end of their lives, not to those in their 20s and 30s? Newspapers think they are trying hard to attract younger readers, with new designs, consumer guides to iPods and long features about pop and film celebrities. It is all window-dressing. In their coverage of politics, social affairs and business, they betray underlying assumptions and attitudes to drugs, sex, money and much else that seem quite alien to the most young readers.

I’ve just read Faisal’s piece, and very good it is too.

Daffodils 2.0

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One day I will get this right. They’re such a tempting subject — and so difficult to get right.

Here they are, run through the PhotoShop drybrush filter.

Izimi: self-hosted user-generated content

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Interesting service — izimi. The blurb claims that

izimi is the future of Internet publishing. izimi enables you to publish and serve files, photos, music and videos, in fact anything, straight from your PC to anyone with a browser.

* Why do you have to upload your content to other people’s servers in order to publish and share it?
* Why must you give up control of your files to a third party?
* Who dictates what files you can upload, how many, and how big they can be? If not you, why not?

izimi places the power right in your hands, where it should be – it’s a truly democratic web. With izimi there’s no need to upload your content to any server: you decide what you’ll publish, there are no limits on quantity or quality (we won’t degrade your videos, photos or music), and you retain ownership and control.

Download the free izimi application to start publishing anything you like, to anyone you like. Use it for photos, videos, music, documents, anything – all it takes is a few clicks. izimi gives you simple URLs that you can use in email, IM, or any website, blog, or forum…

Only available to PC users, though. Wonder how the technology works: it sounds like P2P, but the FAQs say it isn’t.

izimi is made up of two elements: the izimi application and the izimi website.
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The izimi application – the izimi application runs in the background on your PC and works a little like a web server. You choose what files to publish, you can add rich descriptions and tags to help other people find them, and you simply click publish’. Izimi create a friendly URL for each item published. izimi’s web services operate a bit like a domain name server (DNS), pointing other users’ browsers direct to the publisher’s PC in response to requests for specific URLs. The izimi application on the publishers PC then serves the file to the user. In some circumstances certain firewall or router configurations won’t allow a user’s computer to serve published media directly, and in these situations izimi’s web services become a sort of traffic controller to direct and stream content from the publisher’s PC to users.
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The izimi website – The izimi website (www.izimi.com) is like an index of all izimi users and their published content. At izimi.com anyone (not just izimi publishers) can search for people and published content, rate, comment, add friends, and do all the community activities commonly associated with social networks.

Hmmm… These guys may be good at software but they know nothing of apostrophes.

Viacom, YouTube and Joost

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This morning’s Observer column…

Think of it as mud-wrestling, but at a higher level. Viacom is suing Google for a billion dollars because YouTube (which Google purchased a while back for $1.6bn) continues to host clips of Viacom’s video properties. The documents launching the suit express moral outrage wrapped in three coats of prime legal verbiage. The gist, however, is clear: nasty bully Google is getting rich on the back of poor little artists and the companies that support them…

The revolution acknowledged

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Jeff Jarvis blogged Alan Rusbridger’s speech to the assembled staffs of the Guardian and Observer (for which I write). Here’s a snippet of Jeff’s account:

Yesterday, Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, told the staff of his newspaper that now “all journalists work for the digital platform” and that they should regard “its demands as preeminent.”

This came in each of three all-hands meetings with the editorial and business staff held at a theater 15 minutes from the paper’s offices, the first such meetings since the Guardian went through its last metamorphosis to its medium-sized Berliner format. (I happened to be consulting at the paper yesterday and I went along for the ride. Rusbridger gave me permission to blog the company event.)

So that was the line that struck me: preeminent. I suspect it was the line that resonated with staff members a few hours later. Rusbridger said that some would find the content of yesterday’s meetings no-big-deal and others would find unease. But the message was clear, although it was shoehorned into much else in the presentation; you had to listen to hear it. He also said that the paper will serve the public 24/7; it does not yet do that. So the Guardian, he said, will be a 24-hour, web-first newspaper. To do that, the paper’s management needs — he called it the F word — flexibility. And that means that jobs will change. It’s all in a parcel…

The interesting thing about the Guardian is that it’s owned by a Trust rather than being a commercial company. Some people mistakenly think that this ownership structure makes the paper more cosy and resistant to change than a more straightforwardly commercial outfit. In fact the opposite it true: the Guardian has moved faster and more aggressive to embrace change than any other British publication.

Remember old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. We do.