July 2002 Archives
July 25, 2002
WAP blogging For a slightly
WAP blogging
For a slightly less hermetic blogosphere
I'm posting this from my mobile using clever Wapblogger. Not sure if I can stand tapping out many entries like this but it does get us a little closer to blogging actual experiences instead of more bloody web pages!ravings of a recent convert
ravings of a recent convert
All the world's a blog
When you start to think about it, everything's a blog. Blog-form seems to be very basic – large parts of the web can be neatly analysed down to blog-form. It (obviously) took me years to figure this out but the original bloggers understood it instinctively. Once you remember that the web is and was always meant to be a 'post & publish' medium, that TBL's first web client was a combined editor-browser (who first took the editor out? – was it Andreesen? Microsoft?), you can begin to imagine the whole web refigured as a blog. My day job (cult favourite another.com) easily decomposes into a dozen or so discrete blogs – Robin even thinks you could present the email itself in blog format (is that stretching it a bit?). I can see a toggle on every page: blog view <–> standard view. Logging in essentially opens your editing interface. When you're composing an email you're just posting to our mailblog. Very few web sites are not amenable to this way of thinking. Very few don't meet the 'post & publish' entry qualification. Can you imagine the entire web remade in blog-form? Have I lost it entirely? (Incidentally, TBL's (Tim Berners-Lee – inventor of the World Wide Web) Weaving the Web is a n exciting read and a useful reminder of the web's founding principles).July 24, 2002
hyper-growth Just like the old
hyper-growth
Just like the old days
I got comments working – so now you are required to tell me what you think about all this blather (and I can dump the dopey 'what do you think?' anchor). Enatation was the only site still accepting registrations when I researched the topic. Presumably all the other guys have stopped accepting new users because they can't afford the bandwidth for the epic number of clicks their hobby sites are now attracting. Of course, two years ago they'd have called a venture capitalist and drawn down two or three million dollars to fund them through to IPO. The slightly flustered 'closed' signs swinging behind the plate glass at the annotation sites are telling us something. I don't have any figures to hand (do you?) but I think the blogosphere is probably just entering the scary hyper-growth phase. The phase that comes immediately after the dogged pioneers and just before the steady flow of settlers – when the network effects really start to bite. Enatation was so trivially easy to install that I surpised myself. Copy, paste, copy, paste, save. Done. Blimey. Why did we ever spend millions of pounds building web sites? Don't answer that.
July 20, 2002
A chink of light for file sharing
The FT reports that, in one market at least, file sharing may finally be damaging CD sales. In the US, three years after downloading became widespread and a year after the total number of tracks downloaded first exceeded the number sold, CD sales are down only 5% – the jury is still out. In Germany, though, sales are sharply down (9.2% year-on-year against a European background of increasing sales) and CD burning looks like it's become a national hobby (a quarter of households has access to a CD burner).
Continue reading "A chink of light for file sharing"
July 17, 2002
new words Crixton Kids living
new words
Crixton
Kids living in Cricklewood in unglamorous North West London have borrowed some South London street glamour from newsworthy, spliff-friendly Brixton and renamed their neighbourhood ‘Crixton’. How old is this new word? Google offers only five links – it must be brand new. The language is alive and well.
What do you think?
July 15, 2002
Not whining but drowning
Hard copy from March's PC Forum makes compelling reading (how do you blog hard copy?). The pace of change in the real world adds melancholy footnotes to the proceedings. Joe Nacchio was CEO of Qwest and an undisputed knight of the new economy until he joined the list of (super-rich) dot.com casualties in June. Questioned in a hostile conference session (incidentally the session during which Dan Gillmor blogged Nacchio's ‘whining’) he essentially admits defeat, three months before Qwest's effective bankruptcy.
“...you're going to need a model that recognizes the ability to get returns on capital based upon who spends it. You're also probably going to need a subsidy.”
Nacchio says it's impossible to make a profit from telecoms infrastructure without subsidy, the 'Internet model' of open access and unbundled content and services leaves nothing for the carriers. Game over.
Konrad Hilbers is CEO of Napster. His account of the company's attempts to arrive at a sensible licensing arrangement with the majors while keeping his off-the-air business alive is almost poignant.
“The brand is not suffering yet, though we're watching it very carefully and balancing the quality of licenses that we get versus the time that passes by”
This is two months before Napster sought bankruptcy protection and was sold to Bertelsmann for $8M. Hilbers' balancing act is a delicate one. The implication is that there's a deal out there but that Napster might be dead before it's achieved – or, worse, that the record labels might deliberately stall him until it's too late. Although, in principle, it's still game on for Napster, are the labels any more ready to deal now that Bertelsmann owns the firm outright?
What do you think?
July 09, 2002
an obvious money-spinner Introducing the
an obvious money-spinner
Introducing the Cage-o-Gram
Today's silly idea is to sell thousands of copies of this astounding recording of John Cage's diaries and thus bring the planet back into balance. I reviewed this one elsewhere, so I won't go on about it here. I've made it my mission to bump the album up the Amazon charts, like Andrew Sullivan does with those big, fat books. Obstacles to the achievement of my goal are many – not least: the album seems to be unavailable in the UK right now and is a preposterously expensive 8-CD set (although this will, of course, maximise my sales commission if you do buy a copy). There's also the potential to mix up this John Cage with the stammering lawyer in Ally McBeal. So I'm adding a new feature to my weblog called the 'Cage-o-Gram', which you'll find over there, on the right, above all the other links (there must be a better way of editing that bit of the page than twiddling my template?). Every now and then, I'll pull a gem from the diaries and quote it there. You will inevitably (although perhaps not straight away) click one of the Amazon links (choose a country near you) and buy it. It will probably change your life.
What do you think?
Indirect Current
The North London Line (timetables here) is one of London's marvelous oddities – it doesn't go anywhere. Or at least not in the purposeful, busy sort of way that the main lines do. It sort of idly wanders through North London, going all the way from Kew by the river at the Western end to North Woolwich, also by the river, at the Eastern end. It doesn't pretend to a giant Central London shed like the great 19th Century lines, all of which point urgently out into the provinces from their expensive land on the edge of the West End. It's more modest. When I first lived on the North London Line (in West Hampstead), it was a very shabby affair – creaky slam-door trains, run down stations and never a ticket collector to be seen. Later Ken's GLC annexed the line to his grand transport strategy – it even made it onto the tube map – and then rail privatisation brought new trains and video cameras and a new name (Silverlink – everyone still calls it the North London Line).
The line still occasionally makes it into the news when nuclear waste is moved along it from the docks to a junction somewhere in North London for the journey to Sellafield but the big time was never really going to arrive. The North London Line is never grander than two tracks wide and the embankments and cuttings are so thickly lined with vegetation that you could easily be in the Cotswolds for most of its route – church spires glimpsed through trees, men leaning on shovels in their allotments – all observed at approximately walking pace. It's this dilatory, not-at-all thrusting progress that always makes me wonder where passengers on the North London Line are actually going. I fantasise that they're all flaneurs, poets (lots of them seem to be reading Blake, Auden) – or at least on their way to auditions. Of course, this is silly. They're doing the same as me – going to work – but this is my reverie.
Anyway, to get to the point, standing on the platform at West Hampstead the other day – watching the guy who stands on the platform edge singing, as if the people waiting on the other platform were his audience – a train going in the opposite direction pulled in and I noticed that it had a name – one of those heavy-looking plaques (reserved, surely, for the grander cross country Express trains, not sliding door locals). The plaque said 'Nikola Tesla'. For some reason I found this collision: electrical visionary – inventor and engineer of genuinely mythic stature (Google him if you don't believe me) – and the ever-so-humble, hidden-away North London Line mind-blowing (I'll leave the irony of the fact that the train carrying the name of this practically religious pioneer of alternating current is powered by direct current to someone who knows what they're talking about). Whose idea was it? Are all the trains named after pioneers of electricity? Or famous Serbians? Or inventors? Did someone pay for the inscription? Did I imagine it? If I carried my camera around with me for the next five years would I ever see that train again? London still has the power to amaze.
July 05, 2002
industry awards Strike a medal,
industry awards
Strike a medal, hire a band
New media awards come and go – these days mostly go. Most of them are thinly disguised promotions – wobbly coat-hangers on which to hang sponsorship – or your basic industry knees-up. Since 1995, though, Milverton Wallace has been running a useful conference and more recently a genuine annual awards programme – together called NetMedia. Although he does his best to get down in the trough and scare up the sponsorship dollar, he doesn’t seem to have noticed that these events are supposed to be run for the sponsors and ‘partners’ and that when the money runs out (as it tends to do in an industry crash) you’re supposed to beat a retreat and hide out until the money comes back. NetMedia is a Europe-wide programme for online journalists and media owners. The honours go to obscure articles in Norwegian local news web sites, to massive media conglomerates who rewrite the landscape and to cross-disciplinary teams who work together to break important news or inform the public – real achievements. The whole thing seems to have been kept going by the force of Milverton’s will and a persistence that must have its origins in his life as a journalist (if my mobile rings after ten at night, my wife says “that’ll be Milverton”). I think he deserves a medal or a plaque or at least a holiday.
What do you think?
July 03, 2002
Now this is a good idea
According to the FT, a new DTI report on speeding broadband adoption is not very optimistic. It concludes that wider availability and falling prices will not be enough to persuade most households to try it. Starting from the premise that a more thoroughly broadband Britain is a social and economic 'good thing' (one of those assumptions that’s crying out for a good kicking – no time here, though), the report contains one very good idea that I’d like to see acted upon. The authors recommend a Government-funded pilot for a sort of ‘broadband Channel 4’ – a Ł5-10M year one investment in public service broadband content. So far, so worthy. Why is this classic piece of pump-priming a good thing and not just more fiddling at the margins (the Government’s track record on broadband has been widely rubbished and Britain still lags most Western economies in take-up). It’s a good idea because it should provide a healthy counterweight to the BBC’s own effort to redefine public service provision for the networked era.
With charter renewal efforts under way (the first hurdle is two years away), there is much good work being done within the beeb but it’s taking place against the thin (and getting thinner) background of commercial broadband content and an independent content creation sector wiped out by the crash. What’s needed now is someone to compete with Auntie for funds and talent while we work to define an industry and a medium. Half a dozen really good public service broadband projects from outside the BBC would soak up a lot of under-used talent, raise the creative temperature nicely and might just put Britain on the broadband map. According to the FT, ministers are luke warm about the whole report. Pity. If we moved on this recommendation alone, ‘Broadband Britain’ might sound less hollow.
July 02, 2002
urbanism World City Last night,
urbanism
World City
Last night, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Spencer de Grey and Archie Galloway discussed the future of London as a ‘World City’ at a Foreign Policy Centre evening beneath the luminous Great Court of The British Museum. Nations need World Cities to attract a rich enough mix of economic activity, trans-national institutions, investment - but nothing is forever and World Cities come and go. Chief qualifications for World City status are: size (Frankfurt, a small city, struggles to attain critical mass despite many advantages) and diversity (economic, social, cultural). Neither are permanently granted: London’s population is still shrinking, its diversity is threatened by loony property prices, anachronistic planning laws and now by poisonous populist nonsense about immigration and asylum. In this fleeting moment, London has an historic opportunity to boost both size and diversity, making use of the flow of economically-dynamic, educated and courageous people arriving daily beneath trains, in airless containers – at the mercy of traffickers and bandits. Britain is for the time being popular but it won’t last forever. Inevitably another country, another national super-brand will displace Britain in the imaginations of the migrants and the flow will be diverted. We will lose this opportunity to refresh our stock of enterprising, youthful, active agents of change. Meanwhile, more accepting, less paranoid nations will thrive, saying no to stagnation. London is not full.
What do you think?
(Richard Sennett wrote one of the best books about Cities that I've read: Flesh & Stone – The Body and the City in Western Civilisation. Saskia Sassen's The Global City is the standard work in the new study of cities as living, connected entities rooted in a wider economic context).
warchalking Matt's Meme A sketchy
warchalking
Matt's Meme
A sketchy etymology (backwards) for Matt Jones' astonishingly infectious 'warchalking'. Warchalking: depression-era hobo private language married by Matt to > war-driving: Wi-Fi era update for > war-dialing: 1980s phreaker lingo for automatic redialing derived (really?) from > Wargames-dialing: from the 1983 film in which acoustically coupled teens nearly start a proper war > wargames: the much older word for battle simulated on a tabletop or on the training grounds...
What do you think?
July 01, 2002
Self promotion
self-promotion
'Virtual Logos'
Esther Dyson is a force to be reckoned with in high tech. Founder of the near-legendary Release 1.0 Newsletter and of the PC Forum conferences, founder Chair (and now principle critic) of ICANN and founder member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In her July 12 New York Times Syndicate column she wrote about another.com's 'clever idea'. Is that cool or what?
What do you think?