Blogging ‘set to peak next year’

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From BBC NEWS

The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.

The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010.

Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on…

The ‘Rule of Law’: Attorney-General’s statement translated

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The Attorney-General’s Statement reads:

“It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest.”

TRANSLATION: The rule of law is of course very important, except when it’s inconvenient for the government. In the past few years we have found it increasingly inconvenient btw.

“No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.”

TRANSLATION: All those reports about Labour MPs being up in arms because of threatened job-losses in their constituencies if the arms deal with Saudi Arabia doesn’t go through are just media speculation. And even if they are true we paid absolutely no attention to them. What do you think we are — politicians???

“The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.”

TRANSLATION: The Saud regime may be the most despotic, corrupt, tyrannical and bigoted in the Middle East (now that the Taliban have been temporarily deposed), but we need to have those bastards inside our tent because they loathe and fear Al-Qaeda even more than we do. Also we need to keep them on-side as we try to slither out of Iraq.

Sometimes, one has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief. Yesterday, a Labour Prime Minister was interviewed by detectives investigating a corruption scandal engulfing his administration — and it was judged a triumph by his staff that he wasn’t cautioned. This meant he was ‘just’ a witness, and not a suspect in the inquiry. And at the same time, his government’s chief law officer halts an inquiry that was on the brink of revealing illegal payments of perhaps £1 billion to a posse of Saudi princelings and their hangers-on because they were (as the BBC’s Security correspondent intimated this morning) livid at the prospect of having their ‘privacy’ invaded.

Combatting reputation-faking on eBay

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Interesting article on Technology Review

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Carnegie Mellon University researchers are relying on an old adage to develop anti-fraud software for Internet auction sites: It is not what you know, it is who you know.

At sites like eBay, users warn each other if they have a bad experience with a seller by rating their transactions. But the CMU researchers said savvy fraudsters get around that by conducting transactions with friends or even themselves, using alternate user names to give themselves high satisfaction ratings — so unsuspecting customers will still try to buy from them.

The CMU software looks for patterns of users who have repeated dealings with one another, and alerts other users that there is a higher probability of having a fraudulent transaction with them.”

There’s a lot of commonsense solutions out there, like being more careful about how you screen the sellers,” said Duen Horng ”Polo” Chau, the research associate who developed the software with computer science professor Christos Faloutsos and two other students. ”But because I’m an engineering student, I wanted to come up with a systematic approach” to identify those likely to commit fraud.

The researchers analyzed about 1 million transactions involving 66,000 eBay users to develop graphs — known in statistical circles as bipartite cores — that identify users interacting with unusual frequency. They plan to publish a paper on their findings early next year and, perhaps, market their software to eBay or otherwise make it available to people who shop online.Catherine England, an eBay spokeswoman, said the company was not aware of the research and would not comment on it. But England said protecting the company’s more than 200 million users from fraud was a top priority.

More detail here. Christos Faloutsos’s web site is here.

Sonsini — latest

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Well, well… The NYT reports today that…

Hewlett-Packard’s board has ended a crucial advisory relationship with Larry W. Sonsini, the powerful Silicon Valley lawyer, according to a person with close connections to the board.

The move is the latest repercussion from the company’s spying on directors and journalists, which has led to the criminal prosecution of its former chairwoman and a senior company lawyer by California authorities, several federal investigations, $14.5 million in civil fines as well as considerable embarrassment for a company that prided itself on ethical behavior.

After the year’s end, Mr. Sonsini and the firm he helped build, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, will no longer serve as outside counsel to the board. The law firm will still do legal work for Hewlett-Packard. A company spokesman said yesterday that “Wilson Sonsini will continue to have a relationship with H. P.”

Mr. Sonsini and his firm were not involved in the spying, which began after Patricia C. Dunn, the H. P. chairwoman, directed company lawyers and investigators to find the source of board leaks. But he was caught up in the events, and was criticized for failing to prevent the incident from damaging the H.P.

H.P.’s search for another lawyer to serve as outside counsel is expected to set off a scramble among Silicon Valley firms. “It’s not a big revenue item for a law firm, but being able to say to other clients that ‘I give advice to H.P.,’ is a prestige thing,” said a lawyer who did not want to be identified because he has done work for the company.

A spokeswoman for the Sonsini firm, Courtney Dorman, said, “There is a lot of ongoing work with H. P.” The firm handled the transactional work for H. P.’s recent $4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury Interactive, a business software company.

Mr. Sonsini, who serves as chairman of the firm he joined in 1966, had no comment. Ms. Dorman also said that the firm’s chief executive, John V. Roos, had no comment.

Andrew Gowers interview

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Becky Hogge has published an interesting interview on openDemocracy.net with Andrew Gowers, who chaired the Treasury review of intellectual property. Sample:

“[The report is] not radical in the sense that it does not throw into question the fundaments of the IP system”, explains Gowers. “But it is kind of radical in the sense that it doesn’t take anything for granted. My view is that for far too long intellectual property has been a priesthood on the one hand and a lobbyists’ playground on the other. A priesthood in the sense that it is enacted by these quite funny men of a certain age in legal chambers, dusty files all around them and so forth. And a lobbyists’ playground in the sense that the people who are IP holders, the people who say more IP protection is good are well-organised and well-focussed, articulate and well-financed. And the people who actually pay for it, in terms of consumers, are diffuse. So up until now it’s been a one way argument.”

Pinochet’s economic ‘miracle’

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Just when I was thinking I’d like to dance on the old brute’s grave, along comes Greg Palast and does it for me.

The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.

Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende – who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.

In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.

Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor.

Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”

It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation gone berserk….

You might argue that Greg Palast is not exactly a dispassionate commentator. But, interestingly, his view is largely supported by Oxford academic Alan Angell’s more detached account:

The second justification is that Pinochet created a model free-market economy. It is certainly true that there was massive privatisation and effective reduction of inflation. But the negative features are huge. The overall growth rate of the seventeen years of his rule was dismal – a little over 2% per annum. He engineered two massive recessions – that of 1975 (which could partly be blamed on the situation he inherited), and one of 1982-83 (which was due entirely to the regime’s economic policies).

There was enormous social suffering – unemployment at its peak was over 30%, and over 40% of the population were in poverty at the end of his regime. His government reduced social spending, with dire consequences for the quality of public health and education. Moreover, despite the commitment to neo-liberalism, the largest state asset, the state copper corporation Codelco, was not privatised, and Pinochet’s regime received colossal financial support from a state company nationalised by the Salvador Allende regime.

I could go on: the much-vaunted pension privatisation is now under attack, the central bank only achieved real independence under democracy. In truth, only after the recession of 1982-83 did the regime adopt sensible macro-economic policies.

It must also be stressed that these economic measures were accompanied by corruption which benefited Pinochet’s supporters – and also, we know now, the man and his family himself. The privatisations were used to reward supporters, and there was little transparency or effective regulation. The rich benefited enormously in Pinochet’s government leaving Chile with the legacy of one of the most unequal income distributions in the world.

The claim that Pinochet ruled for the benefit of the country can no longer be sustained. Undeniably, Chile has seen great economic progress since 1990 but this, I would argue, is the product of the policies of the democratic governments and not the legacy of Pinochet.

Transcript

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I’m always intrigued by the way journalists rework interviews to give them a ‘shape’. Sometimes this involves weaving quotations in ways that are (perhaps unintentionally) misleading. So some time back I resolved that I would put up a transcript of every interview I gave, just for the record.

Below is a transcript of an email interview I’ve just given to a journalist on a New Zealand publication.

Q: Blogs are constantly being talked of as being “on the verge” on mainstream influence. Yet, outside a few cases in the United States (Dan Rather’s “memogate” etc), they don’t seem to have lived up to their promise. Is 2007 the year of the blog, or the year the blog boom finally busted?

A: Silly question — typical of old-media journalism. The significance of blogging isn’t measured by the emergence of publications which have the same clout as old-style media outlets (though the Huffington Post seems to be doing that too), but by the profound change in the media ecosystem brought about by thousands of editorial voices that would hitherto never found a voice or a means of publication. This is a different world from the one in which most journalists were conditioned. So forget the “has blogging peaked?” line; it’s a bit like asking “has oxygen peaked?” The real question is: has old-style print journalism peaked?

Q: Will blogs become (or are they already) recognised news-breakers?

A: Blogs and mainstream journalism have — and will continue to have — a symbiotic relationship: bloggers lack the resources and training to be major news-breakers; what they are good at is informed comment and keeping mainstream journalism honest (see the Trent Lott and Dan Rather cases) and up to the mark.

Q: The Guardian (the UK paper I read most online) seems to have co-opted the blogging model quite well – at least with sports coverage and breaking news like the tube bombings. Can we expect to see more of this cross-pollination by newspapers?

Yep. But the key determinant of success or failure will be the extent to which proprietors and editors understand the profoundly different ecosystem in which they will have to operate. The trick — as the Editor of the Guardian puts it — is not to be ‘on the Web’ but ‘of the Web’.

The most threatened journalistic species right now is the highly-paid, opinionated newspaper columnist. For many of them there are people out there on the Net doing it better — and more cheaply! Note how Time Magazine ‘bought’ Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

Q: Newspaper circulation has declined (according to year-on-year November ABC stats) by another 5 %, on average. To what extent is this due to readers migrating online, and how much is due to a net loss of readers? How ugly do you think these figures will look next year?

A: I’m not an expert on circulation, but the picture varies with different cultures. In Western societies, newspaper circulation is in inexorable decline, mainly because — for whatever reason — young people don’t buy or read papers. My understanding is that newspaper readership is holding up well in Asia, but — as I say — I’m no expert.

Q: Can newspapers and, to a lesser extent broadcasters, make up their lost advertising revenues through online operations?

A: To some extent, but only to some extent. The central strategic problem for print publications is that their classified ad revenues will all be sucked away by the Net. If they were smart they’d have built online advertising businesses like Craigslist years ago. But their managements were too dumb and/or ignorant to understand the threat. They thought it was all about news. It wasn’t and it isn’t.

Q: How much of a threat does YouTube pose to traditional television networks?

Traditional TV networks have their own dire problems — broadcast TV is in inexorable decline because (i) its audiences are fragmenting (because of channel multiplication) and (ii) increased competition for people’s attention from other media and sources. YouTube merely adds to the broadcast TV problem. It might even be part of a solution for some: a few smart TV broadcasters are trying to harness YouTube to widen the ‘reach’ for their products.

Q: And predictions for 2007?

A: If you want to know the future, go buy a crystal ball.