December 2002 Archives
December 31, 2002
New religions
If you were to invent a new religion – a post-enlightnment, post-Darwin, post-DNA, post-space travel religion – what would it look like? Would it scrap a conventional, external deity in favour of some kind of meditation-enhanced ego? Would it have an extra-terrestrial creation myth? Would it have a 'chief scientist' and be active in gene science? Would it clone human beings?
December 24, 2002
Oh no it isn't!
Happy Christmas From Steve Bowbrick!
.Have a great new year, stay in touch and do let me know what you're up to.
December 23, 2002
Creative Commons
Let me get this straight right up front: I think the public domain is critically important to human advancement, I think the net is its most important representative on this plane and I think copyright is out of control. I also think that Creative Commons is a fascinating and practical new approach to networked copyright (Danny explained it here and mirrored a useful flash presentation).
But... then let me go on to say that I dislike orthodoxy of every kind and that, in the clamour to roll back or abolish copyright law and in the profusion of alternatives, I see an emerging orthodoxy – the public domain is in crisis, creativity and innovation in peril, copyright owners returning us to the dark ages. The story neatly collapses together lots of hot geek issues – like open source, unbundling Microsoft and Web Services – and it pulls together lots of clever and useful minds – like Kahle, Lessig, Barlow and about half a million bloggers – but it's not an open-and-shut case.
Where, for instance, is the actual damage caused by extended copyright protection for books? Who is actually suffering under the silly provisions of the DMCA and won't the whole thing be thrown out bit by bit by various courts? Are the record labels hurting anyone with their suicidal mis-application of resources in file sharing?
I blogged the public domain in more detail in June here.
Readership in need of renewal
Peter Preston highlights the effects on newspaper publishing of the UK's falling birthrate and aging population.
Joe Strummer
I'm certain we'll see better obituaries for Joe Strummer from some of the great writers of that period (many of whom are presumably now drowning their sorrows) but, in the meantime, here's one from the NME whose crass content management system just can't help offering 'Joe Strummer ringtones' under the headline.
Intoxicated
I make no apology for the fact that this weblog has taken a domestic turn lately. It's Xmas. The pleasure of watching the faces of our three and four-and-a-half year-olds watching Cinderella this afternoon was so intoxicating – I wish this dumb camphone would work in low light. I could have shown you! You'll have to make do with the ugly sisters (click the little picture for a bigger one – the limitations of the Ericsson sometimes make for quite lovely images).
December 20, 2002
How do they do that?
This £9.95 toy records twenty second sound clips and incorporates them into its programme of lights and sirens and racing around. Oliver, aged four, takes this entirely for granted, of course. This morning, the car raced up to me in the kitchen and announced "Daddy, you are under arrest".
Tily in the gloom
The questionable low-light capabilities of this Ericsson cam-phone (have you wondered why the TV ads all seem to be set in the Sahara or Southern California in high summer?) and the sepulchral gloom of Blacks in Dean Street produce interesting results. Here's Stuart Tily, another.com's new capo, looking like a Rembrandt merchant (you might need to adjust the brightness to see him at all).
December 18, 2002
Time for a photolog
I will use these instructions to create a photolog using MT in five steps when I get around to it. I will. I will. I will.
Matt's meme for Christmas Number 1
Partly to celebrate Matt's meme and partly to test Ben's 'More Like This from Others' thingie, Im blogging Ben's link to The New York Times' Ideas of the Year. Do I have any idea how this works? No.
King of the fishes
Olly, our four year-old, is on his way home dressed as a fish after his impeccably multi-cultural, non-denominational Xmas concert yesterday.
Category theft
I've been thinking about adding a few more categories to my blog for ages but the prospect of coming up with useful set was too boring – besides, it's hard work thinking up categories for things that don't exist yet – much easier to retrospectively categorise. Anyway, the nice people at the iSociety Blog have solved the problem for me. They've already invented a good set of categories so I've lifted them wholesale and they're now in use with very little modification. Now I just need to make them visible...
Continue reading "Category theft"
Oxford conference on code, the net, ideas
I just registered for this conference. Looks like a good opportunity to hear Lessig et al in action – organised by the ambitious (and well-funded) Oxford Internet Institute.
Telecoms mast toppled – singularity deferred
Here's a tough reminder that technology always exists in a (potentially hostile) human context. People respond to technology and to change in complicated and often contradictory ways. As a result, technologists and businesses cannot assume unhindered forward progress. It's this kind of human friction that practically guarantees we'll never arrive at the dreamed-of 'singularity' but also that we'll probably never create a breed of self-replicating robots that turn on us as prey!
“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy” Tim O'Reilly
I'll join the throng bookmarking this cogent defense of file sharing from publisher Tim O'Reilly. Tim is the man who made a fortune by selling his early portal, the Global Network Navigator, to AOL and has been able to pursue the life of the Libertarian Gentleman Publisher ever since. His books (with their beautiful Dover Press animal woodcuts) are the backbone of the geek culture and his conferences and events increasingly organise the whole geek mindset.
A 'documentary musical'
I have no idea what it's like to live in a young offenders' prison like the notorious Feltham but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the arrival of Crime TV veteran Roger Graef, poet Simon Armitage, pioneer documentary director Brian Hill and Channel 4 to make a 'documentary musical' in which the prisoners themselves, their wardens and counsellors perform rap tunes about their lives and aspirations made a dent in the routine. The result, Feltham Sings, shown on Channel 4 tonight, was chilling and moving and often surreal (a particularly disturbed boy rapped about suicide while two of his warders sang a chorus about paracetamol) and reminded me of what Channel 4 was invented for.
December 17, 2002
Barbie is among us
My daughter Billie is three today and yesterday we had a party. Barbie came. I mean the real Barbie. Then she left and fifteen dumbstruck three and four year-olds won't ever be the same again.
December 16, 2002
Speechless
Matt Webb's account of what happened to him fourteen years ago left me speechless. Link via LINKMACHINEGO.
RSI and accupuncture
Danny's got RSI. You can actually see me getting RSI in real time here. My RSI – numbness and loss of strength in my left arm and a horrible pain in my shoulder (I was pretty sure I'd had a stroke) – coincides with leaving my job and my Aeron chair and taking up residence in my ergonomically-unsound shed. The cure? Accupuncture (plus a proper keyboard for the laptop). My excellent NHS GP gives me five minutes with the needles and I feel miraculously better. But the NHS won't fund accupuncture and the inflexibility of its command and control system forbids my doctor from charging me for it so he's giving me this effective and extremely cheap treatment for nothing.
Soho Lunch with Juliet, Azeem and Duncan
December 15, 2002
Hail Freedonia!
With the unreality of Firefly's Freedonia, the British pop media is now entering its third continuous week of multi-page coverage for the fact that the Prime Minister's wife was made to look stupid (I mean really, really stupid) by not one but two scumbags – a 'lifestyle guru' whose CV includes a period spent as an enforcer for the terrifying Exegesis cult and a con-man of such comicbook extravagance that Esther Rantzen says he's one of the worst she encountered in a long career exposing such pond life. Meanwhile – in case you missed it – on Friday, the EU nations agreed to admit ten new member states on May 1st 2004 – bringing the Union's population to 370 Million and its GDP to $9 Trillion. As a story it couldn't really be any bigger – but you'd struggle to find it in most of the UK media this weekend. Presumably some time this week somebody will notice that we just had a hand in creating what could become the greatest economic power in history. Google News, as ever, is a great instant poll on the relative importance of stories like this. Trawling the results, two really good articles stand out: Michael Myer's The Death of Europe and Will Hutton's Observer leader East is East and West is rich.
December 14, 2002
An infinitely hot and dense dot
Geeks – at least those with any vision – dream of 'the singularity'. For the social software geeks, this singularity will arrive when information space collapses into a sort of zero-dimensional dot. The distance between related concepts will approach zero. The relevance of any given link will rarely drop below 100%. Connection will be automatic and total. Ideas will swarm and clump together quietly and instantaneously. The like-minded will exist in a state of total and perpetual communion. Hallelujah. In Ben and Azeems fascinating to-and-fro over categorising blogs, theres something of this dream. They seem to see, in the exceptional information-efficiency of the blogosphere, the seeds of a hyper-connected future. Im not so sure. I'm almost convinced that there's some evolutionary value locked up in the friction and inefficiency of human communication. I'm as excited as the next man about the potential of social software to speed up interconnection and make groups more useful but I think we might need to preserve some of the noise and the information loss. It might be what makes us human.
December 13, 2002
Government content exciting, huh?
Mike Butcher blogs a deal between the UK Government and MSN to offer Government content to MSN users. Mike draws out an analogy with the recent discussion of Azeem Azhar's BPL idea. I think the comparison is valuable but the big difference it that so much Government content is paralysingly boring so it's unlikely that the content industry will throng to repurpose it. Most interesting is the potential for MSN (or anyone really – preferably Google) to offer a better interface to Government content than the Government currently seems able to do. See my whinge about NHS Direct's dire interface to its own extremely important and useful content.
So what is next?
I wrote a piece for The Guardian. I was asked to to write about what I might do next but it was rushed and I wound up cataloguing the current buzzwords – Wi-fi, Social Software, Web Services and Moblogging. I mean it when I say these are the things that excite me right now but the problem with this kind of list is that what you actually wind up doing might belong to one or more of these big technology categories but what really defines your venture is impossible to capture in advance. another.com, for instance, belonged to the 'web-based email' category and also to the 'identity services' category but what made it unique was something else all together – something to do with personalisation, fun, youth, lack of deference and resistance to categorisation. You just can't capture all that stuff in a 'what's next' piece.
Jack's Google tips
From the outboard brain department, here's Jack Schofield's October piece documenting the neat things you can do to improve the results of your Google searches. I searched for this article for about twenty minutes using The Guardian's search function and then it occurred to me to use Google... Duh. Jack's a great exponent of the 'Google-as-universal-interface' school of thought.
Old geezer? Moi?
The FT ran a little piece about my departure from another.com in their 'People' section. This is the section usually populated by old geezers in bad suits taking jobs running Northern engineering businesses or 200 year-old City firms. Have I finally acquired old geezer status? Don't answer that (I do own several bad suits).
Mitnick on Markoff
The most interesting thing about The Guardian's Mitnick piece is that he doesn't seem bitter – except maybe about Markoff:
“My argument is not that I shouldn't have been punished, but that the punishment didn't fit the crime," he says. "I wouldn't have sat in prison for five years, I wouldn't have been held without trial for four-and-a-half years, if it wasn't for Markoff creating this fear... When you write a story and it ends up on the front page of the New York Times, the department of justice is reading that. The director of the FBI is reading that, the director of the CIA is reading that. The government needs to send a message that they can't just have some desperado hacker on the loose who could start a nuclear war.”
December 12, 2002
Anyone give me odds?
This may be my weblog's first authentic scoop. A 'friend' (pictured) – an author and publishing insider – tells me, with some credibility, that Michael Crichton's Nano-frightener Prey will be followed by two more books – each focused on extinction-level threats to humankind – from Robots and Geneticists respectively (but not necessarily in that order). The implication is that Crichton has made a close reading of uber-worrier Bill Joy's 2000 Wired article in which he lays out the existential threat from nanotech nasties, self-replicating robots and out-of-control genetic engineering (He's wrong, of course). Joy's paranoid-determinist vision will be published as a book next Autumn.
December 11, 2002
Five myths about web services
I'm sure I'll find Bob Sutor's Five Biggest Myths about Web Services very useful when I finally decide what to do with webservices.net. Link via Werblog
Moblogging without going out
I'm blogging this for several reasons. First, since I can now (sort of) moblog from my camphone I'm trying out a visual blogging technique where I pointlessly apply the principles of moblogging to ordinary blogging and take pictures of web sites I have visited instead of just linking to them. Second, I very much like the idea of getting a cease and desist notice from Henry Kissinger and third, I admire the mission of The Memory Hole. Thanks to Danny for the link.
December 10, 2002
Fraudster?
When did we all adopt the Daily Mail-ism 'fraudster' and abandon the perfectly serviceable noun 'fraud'? I can find 'fraudster' in none of my dictionaries – even those supposed to contain 'new words' – so its origins are obscure. Google, inevitably, reports 14,900 instances, so it can't be brand new.
Winter of Discontent update: unrest spreads
School teachers, tube workers, firefighters. Now monks? How will we know they've gone back to work?
Intensely New York
I have no idea whose link I followed to find Hugh MacLeod's gapingvoid.com but I think these cartoons drawn on the backs of business cards are just about the most New York things I've ever seen.
December 09, 2002
Knocking Docherty
I think Danny's wrong to knock David Docherty's 'Cookie Monster' analogy. David may have been on a hiding to nothing from the beginning at Telewest, but the nub of truth in his frustration is that the conduct of Internet users is important (how could it be otherwise?). As actors in the networked economy we have obligations and our good faith will be critical to the success or otherwise of digital music, film, whatever. If a whole generation of users really has decided that it'll never pay for music again (which is arguable), then music will inevitably be driven off the net.
As usual, I'm mister middle-of-the-road. Where David and the suits see a field of high concept 'broadband content' and Danny and the geeks see an untenanted void waiting for settlers to fill it – I see a bit of both. In fact, I think it's economic lunacy to suggest that either could be sufficient unto itself. No one but no one will bring dark fibre to my curb without some value added 'content' to subsidise the utterly commodified pipe and users will never accept the media owners' vision of content-driven broadband heaven unless it looks a lot like the net. As usual, the outcome is more likely to be a messy ecology than a nice, clean monoculture.
December 08, 2002
BBC Online under the microscope
A long overdue enquiry into the BBC's investment online should be a good thing for all parties but it must strike a delicate balance. If it turns into a mugging for the corporation orchestrated by its competitors it will not serve the interests of industry or citizens. Likewise, a whitewash that leaves the BBC's hugely out-of-proportion investment unexamined will not answer vital questions about the proper role of a public service broadcaster in the networked era. If this enquiry is real, it presents an unlikely-to-be-repeated opportunity to straighten out the regulatory and funding context for BBC Online and to set some goals:
- Hub for a new online content industry. The BBC's massive investment in online content and infrastructure should stimulate a new downstream ecology of content and application creators – an online 'indie' sector like the one brought into being by Channel 4 in the 80s would be a good thing.
- An engine for participation. BBC Online should invest in a new generation of content and applications that promote participation, connection and creativity amongst wired citizens – not just programme support material and one-way content.
- Public service online. If BBC Online is to assume a statutory public service obligation (as it should), then the burden should be shared by other online businesses – and until the funding climate for private sector net businesses recovers, Government money may have to be made available to support them.
BBC Online should not fear the inquisition. It's likely to be critical and may close off some of the department's activities but the current uncertainty is more damaging. Lambert's report on News 24 is hardly flattering but, by taking the project seriously, it has secured the channel's future nonetheless. A close examination of BBC Online should have the same effect.
Continue reading "BBC Online under the microscope"
What were you doing in 1964?
Rachel Frank runs an online wine store called Arthur's Bar. It's a good site – excellent customer service, next day delivery, single bottles (most sites require you to buy a case or more) and they have lots of specially-sourced wines you won't find elsewhere but there's one product that really stands out. Rachel's father, David Hallgarten, is a whisky blender and he bottles the only 35 year old blended Scotch whisky in the world. This stuff is gorgeous and very unusual. Most top whiskies are single malts. This is a blend – but to my taste it's as good as any single malt I've tasted. The current batch was distilled in 1964, which is the year after I was born. You can't buy it anywhere else and you'll need to remortgage your house to buy a bottle (or move to a caravan and buy two) but if you're trying to think what to buy me for Xmas, you can stop thinking now.
December 07, 2002
You read it here first...
After four years on the rollercoaster running another.com – and nearly ten years in the industry – I'm a free agent again. If you know me, you already knew this, but here's the press release (or download a PDF) that will go out on Monday 9th. another.com is now making a profit so I'm off to look for new projects and challenges. I'll remain a director of the business and I'll certainly still help out from time to time. Stuart Tily, the firm's CTO since the beginning, is now running the firm from an office in Brighton.
Continue reading "You read it here first..."
December 06, 2002
I want Danny O'Brien's job
Danny and Quinn interviewed Brewster Kahle.
(Things I have written about Kahle and the public domain recently: Public domain in Peril? Not again!. "It's just not that big!").
December 05, 2002
"I don't know why we call it a mouse..."
I just found Douglas Engelbart's 34 year-old SRI demo in which he introduced the mouse, word processing, outlining, graphical displays, a nifty chord keyboard and dozens of other concepts that we now take for granted all put together in a single RealVideo file a couple of years ago by Mike Lee.
Mog is dead!
Judith Kerr, much-loved children's author, on why Mog had to die.
HTML help!
Can anyone vaguely HTML-literate view source and tell me why the GIF at top right doesn't display in Mac OS X Mozilla 1.2? It works in Explorer. Apologies in advance for inevitably embarrassing rookie error.
December 04, 2002
Blogging from my camphone
I wondered if I could 'blog real life' from my new camphone. Cynical Matt Jones says 'don't hold your breath', optimistic Azeem Azhar says 'watch this space', clever James Cronin claims to have some code to do it, helpful May Woo points out that info-celebrity Joi Ito in Japan is already doing it. Thanks everyone. Meanwhile, I can't actually get the phone to work...
DIY Coffee Table Book
Which brings the number of links on the left of this page to a frightening twenty, if you take into account the two external ones. It is way to much. So, dear reader, as I stare at this design (which dates back to the beginning of year 2001) and long for a change, I've decided to re-think the site architecture as well.
Docherty repulsed!
I can't help but warm to David Docherty's image of greedy Cookie Monsters spoiling the broadband party for the unfortunate content creators. The geeks, in particular, never warmed to David and his increasingly shrill Guardian columns gave away the scale of the challenge he was set. Broadband content in the UK is a total wash-out for reasons that are now becoming clear. The pressure on David to deliver must have been enormous. I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did.
Bragg snooze
What winds me up about Melvyn Bragg's appeal for Ofcom's scope to be extended to include the BBC is not the sentiment itself, which is unexceptionable. It's the fact that Bragg's establishment status should buy him a double page spread in a national paper on a topic now so well-worn that most readers will have snoozed right through it while the genuinely pressing matter of the redefinition of 'public service' for the networked era doesn't get any mainstream coverage at all.
Ofcom could valuably examine the online activities of the Beeb and the other important players and could do useful work helping to rethink the public service requirements of Big Media now that half the population is regularly online and TV viewing is in decline. Sadly, though, it can't. The Communications Bill explicitly forbids Ofcom from examining the net. MPs could amend the bill to change Ofcom's remit but, on the strength of yesterday's second reading in the House of Commons, it doesn't look likely.
dot.com lunacy
During the dot.com boom, some crazy people blew upwards of £5,000 of their precious VC funding on believe it or not deluxe Swiss-made professional espresso machines! Click here for the caffeine junkie's bargain of the year try to imagine your kitchen with this baby in it.
December 03, 2002
Blogging real life
Matt Jones likes hiptop nation. I like it too and, now that I've got my MMS camphone, I want to know if I can blog real life. Is this possible yet? Can I post to my MT blog from my camphone? OR via a third party app?
Nocturnal logic
Four O'Clock this morning. Olly, our 4 year-old, wakes for a half hour tantrum. Nothing will quieten him, nothing make him happy. Everything is wrong. Nothing can make it right. If mummy tries to help he wants daddy and vice versa. He wants to be in our bed until we agree to let him and then he wants to be in his own... until I try to take him there. He wants a drink until I try to go and get it. He yells 'go away daddy', heartbreakingly, until I go away, then he wants me back. The whole thing is a lesson in the implacable illogic of a small child. This is pre-rational behaviour primitive, unarguable, terrifying. Discussion is pointless, reason redundant. Right now, the least helpful question in the world is 'what's wrong?' but it's all you can ask.
In the end, it passes, like it always does, and he's sleeping again. In the silence I wonder how on earth human beings ever jump the giant gap from scary, tearful there to happy, settled here. Or if we ever really leave it behind.
'Bible codes' recycled
The very human desire to find pattern in random data meaning in a cold, unmeaning world is alive and well. The pop media have decided it's time to recycle the not-particularly-urban myth straight from the pages of 'Puzzler' Magazine, in fact of premonitory codes 'hidden' in foundation texts like the bible. So I'm happy to note that most of the top hits at Google for "bible code" are links to sceptics' sites. Since I'm hardly the first to point out that you can produce these amazingly predictive strings from almost any text, provided it's long enough, I'm writing this mainly to improve the Google pagerank of this excellent analysis.
December 01, 2002
Essential broadband reading
The clever people at The Work Foundation have done some ethnographic research (the first in Britain, they think) into the use of broadband. Their conclusions are fascinating. In summary, pretty much everything that the access industry has been saying in its broadband marketing is wrong. I urge you to read the PDF file referenced here. I particularly like the subtlety of the distinction they draw between 'always on' and 'always there'. I made the case for 'always on' in The Guardian a couple of months ago but 'always there' is more descriptive of real user behaviour - computers are turned off, people go out and live their lives but broadband connections are 'always there'.