March 2003 Archives
March 31, 2003
Shelter brands?
Leica offers hope for stick-in-the-mud analogue brands. The gorgeous MP rangefinder camera is packaged explicitly as a device for digital refuseniks – '100% mechanical' boasts the brochure. Jean-Jacques Viau, marketing manager for the MP says in the FT (I think you'll need a subscription or a free trial) "We could be the shelter for people who react to the changes of model every six months."
I know that I treasure the mechanical charms of my old Nikon as a tactile, 'clunk, whirr' contrast to all the digital gadgets in my life. I wonder if there's any mileage in hybrid products for people who want digital flexibility and control as well as the older pleasures of hand-made, mechanical instruments? Why can't I snap a digital prism onto my Nikon, for instance?
False alarm
Friday we spent some time at the lovely Watford General Hospital mentally preparing ourselves to meet our (third) baby about six weeks early. In the end we were sent home, baby unborn, following a check up and lots of reassurance that it's "better to be safe than sorry". Click the picture for an MPEG4 – you can hear the baby's healthy 142 heartbeat!Update: here's Juliet's latest column at Tigerchild in which she explains why we wound up in hospital in the first place.
(you might need to right-click and download to play the video (like you're going to bother) – I can't get the MP4 format to work in my browser – why not?)
refrigeration figures
From a feature about low-tech refrigeration for rural Africa in The Ecologist I learn that "refrigerators and freezers account for 25% of the UK's average household electricity bill" and that "US refrigerators use about 7% of all US electricity; that's 25 large power plants' worth". Can these numbers possibly be right? They look to me like they might be the kind of mad extrapolation that gives the environmental movement a bad name.
Tangled web
Andy Rowell and Jonathan Matthews in The Ecologist have done some forensic Googling to uncover an unsavoury and potentially deceptive (but not surprising) pact between the former Living Marxism entryists at Spiked, the three hundred and fifty year-old Royal Society and the agri-business lobby to promote GM agriculture. The unlikely co-conspirators have set up a lobbying group called Sense in Science and, as usual, the question is 'who's duping whom?'
The article doesn't seem to be on The Ecologist's web site so you might have to go out and buy it.
Sarcastic link title of the month award
Via demented (in a nice way) Snackpot and branding newsletter LucJam I learn from Food Navigator that targeting kids is getting more difficult. The article is interesting (lifestage vs. demographic segmentation and so on) but LucJam's link is much more entertaining than anything in the target article: 'Generation Y not sure what they want to eat'.
Hacking networked reality
I think Google Hacks is an important book. It's important because our lives are increasingly dependent on the Internet and because the fabric of our networked lives – from the web to wi-fi to mobile phones – is getting richer, more meaningful and more tightly woven. Content, applications and communities are more interconnected than ever and a new layer of interconnection is emerging on top of the infrastructure we've taken for granted for most of a decade.
As the usefulness and accessibility of the network climbs, its value to us all is necessarily always at risk – from growing complexity, from the opacity produced by proprietary dead ends and from old-fashioned corporate and political short-sightedness. Google Hacks is a tool. It reminds me of The Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy resource book subtitled 'Access to Tools' and inspired by the legendary Buckminster Fuller. The Catalog, first published in 1968 (and edited by Stewart Brand), was all about taking control, making interventions – hacking real life. It was stuffed with the most practical of tools, from composting toilets to the early personal computers; from personal aeroplanes in kit form to really useful pen knives you could build a house with. Google Hacks is a tool for hacking the new, networked reality.
The book contains 100 specific, clearly worked examples of ways to take advantage of Google's openness (the Google API) to achieve concrete results – some projects are useful, some intriguing and some just playful. I'm no techie (You'll certainly find better technical reviews elsewhere) and most of these hacks are entirely beyond me but the book has loads of insights into the way Google works for non-techies and plenty of low-tech projects I could try for myself.
Since I can't pretend to be reviewing this book properly and since you'll be reading about it everywhere, here's O'Reilly's press release for some background information (click 'more...')
Continue reading "Hacking networked reality"
March 29, 2003
Making homes smart
Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and top researcher at Intel, was star turn at a fascinating seminar run by the iSociety research group at the Work Foundation. The topic was 'the smart home'. Bell's current project is aimed at understanding the use of technology in homes across Asia. She understands how deep-rooted religious, social and cultural practices influence the reception of technology in homes.
If there was any conclusion it was that attempts to add intelligence to our homes had better be respectful of the needs and beliefs of their inhabitants, otherwise they'll just join the long line of forgotten household gadgets – egg slicers, the thing with the plunger that makes cream. The whole thing reminded me of Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, a book about the way humans adapt their habitations and continually turn them to new uses, usually despite the architects and planners. If we're to augment our homes in the ways advanced by the technology vendors the kit will need to fit properly into the lifecycle of a home.
It should be cheap, reliable, modular, interoperable and easily replaced or upgraded. Homes exist on timescales measured in centuries, a family will occupy a home for decades and make continual, incremental changes. Wi-fi hubs, entertainment systems and central heating controllers can't aspire to this kind of longevity but should aim to fit into these cycles unobtrusively, helpfully, without expecting families to bend to new ways of living.
Houses will get smarter in much the same way they acquired their current intelligence – looms of copper wire, electric light, telecoms, wireless and television, modern additions like insulation and heating, older ones like plumbing and drainage – piecemeal and over a long period of time. The best the smart home business can hope for is to get their kit onto the makeover shopping list, to become must-have lifestyle items and to slot into the cycle of home fashion... like decking and rag rolling, really.
March 27, 2003
Tait on Puttnam's rebellion
Richard Tait in FT Creative Business on the likely parliamentary clash over media ownership rules and the so called 'Murdoch Clause'. Written before Lord Puttnam announced his intention to oppose "in every respect" the relaxation of the rules designed to permit Sky to buy Five (link to Tait's article requires FT.com subscription or a free trial).
I like this guy a lot
Interviewed by the estimable Wendy Grossman in New Scientist, a geek who uses statistical methods and clever database code to skewer torturers and dictators.
Sleight's hands
Lunch today at Blacks with Ross Sleight. Ross has been doing important things in the digital departments of various ad agencies since 1994 – apart from the obligatory (and exhausting) detour through the dot.com valley of death with fascinating but doomed Fingertips.com, of course. These days he works at Chime's Heresy, where he is trying to work out what a 'customer relationship' really is. Click the picture for an MPEG movie of Ross waving his hands (1.8MB)
Enlightened old men
I wonder if there's a generation of scientists, artists and technocrats ready to succeed Freeman Dyson, Arthur C Clarke and all those other admirable, enlightened, imaginative old men who came of age before the bomb. Clarke dreams of a time when a majority of humankind can't quite remember which way to point when asked where planet Earth is. Dyson of extending the range of life, infinitely adaptable, to the the furthest edges of the universe and of rearranging the Solar System.
They, I'm sure, would have no patience with the narrow-minded campaign to retreat from manned space flight. BBC 4 has an excellent documentary about Dyson's Orion project. He planned to send people across inter-stellar distances by exploding hundreds of Hydrogen bombs behind their space ships. The programme will probably repeat half a dozen times so you have time to catch it and you can hear Dyson speaking at the programme's web site.
March 26, 2003
Early-onset adolescence
My son Oliver, who is four, has just learnt the word 'private'. He spontaneously created this sign for his bedroom door. We suspect early-onset adolescence.
You've got hate mail!
I've had lots of email in response to my latest Guardian article, which is a pretty unremarkable slice of nostalgia, but it's not the nostalgia that's got people going, it's the couple of positive lines about the USA at the end. I won't quote any of the really rude messages but something from Steve H in San Francisco:
“I don't mean to deflate your baloon, but my country really is not the "optimistic, open, self creating" place you describe it to be, far from it. I have seen friends murdered, had people pull guns far too often on me, seen people get the shit kicked out of them by police with batons leaving them a bloody mess...the list goes on and on, there is terrible racism and injustice here. This is a rough place. Yes there is optimism, but far too often it is borne out of ignorance and/or denial. There is great, great suffering here under the phony facade you see in your lecture halls. You just don't know. Anyways I had to write and warn you about this place. You have it DAMN GOOD in Europe/UK...in many ways much better than America and don't you forget it young man!”
March 25, 2003
Blame Waldman
Simon Waldman, the big boss at Guardian Unlimited, thinks we should start to assemble a kind of community history of the UK Internet business on the occasion of its sort-of-tenth anniversary. I think it's a good idea and it got me thinking, so my Bowbrick at Large column this week is a snapshot from my own Internet history and a reflection on what I've learnt about America over the years:>pr?
“Looking back on those strange meetings from the other side of the bell curve of boom and bust, on each occasion my main motivation wasn't the money or the likelihood of getting a US foothold for my business. I think I was falling in love with this exotic and utterly alien way of being, with the whole business of American optimism, openness and self-creation.”
Gawker on the war
What does a slick and frothy Manhattan gossip and media blog like Gawker do in times of war? It covers the war, naturally – and quite well, too.
March 24, 2003
BBCi cuts deep. Nobody notices
Unlike the rest of the media, Owen Gibson in The Guardian has noticed that the BBC has trimmed the size of its interactive division (BBCi) by a third and frozen new investment.
Wolff on the war
Execellent writing on war frenzy in the American media from Michael Wolff in The Guardian.
‘The story now is about the war as a fighting-man event, not a political event. It's 90% a Pentagon story. No context, just blow by blow. The excitement is about going along, about having access, wearing war clothes, eating war food – a desire, finally, to be part of the scene, to be an "embed", to hang out in Doha at the $225,000 briefing stage. It's all spectacle. The war is not just a ratings gift, but a personal, professional plum.’
In the distant past (starting in 1994), Wolff played the dot.com game with a clever but ultimately doomed media play called NetGuide. I met Michael a couple of times. Once in the mid-nineties in a dark corridor at one of those terrifying Venture Capital smack-downs – this one was in New York – where you join a queue of bushy-tailed entrepreneurs to present your idea to a roomful of half-asleep vultures and they give you the metaphorical (sometimes literal) thumbs-up or -down in a 'break-out room' afterwards.
Wolff was on a roll. He was already funded and he had the untouchable Greek God look of a nearly-billionaire. The next time I met him was several years later in London. His business had been brought low by the usual combination of hubris, opportunism and venality (and members of the Maxwell family). He'd written an excellent book about the experience (Burn Rate) that turned out to mark the beginning of the end for the whole sorry dot.com adventure and he'd returned to the (presumably) saner world of New York journalism, from which he now despatches this kind of sanity on a regular basis.
Too easy
Timothy Garton Ash is doing heroic work on both sides of the Atlantic – more important than ever as the fog of war thickens – to articulate the complicated, nervous, ambivalent support for Blair and the war amongst lefties and liberals who think the 'no war' stance is just too easy...
The Guardian, New York Times (requires free registration).
March 22, 2003
Reporter/cyborg
On Tuesday, in The Guardian, before the war began, I wrote:
“Our proximity to the fighting is unarguable. The collision of network-era news gathering tools, weblogs and interconnected internet communities will produce a kind of ecstasy of information and communication. The war will be fought as if it were on the other side of the thinnest sheet of glass. It will be as if we are there.”
I didn't anticipate the 'video phone' coverage, though. Something about the personal, portable nature of the kit makes the images transmitted even more immediate than I'd imagined – almost intimate... The choppiness and urgency of the footage gives you the sense you can almost feel the reporter's pulse and breath. The reporter and his technology are merging. A Gulf War reporter is a borderline cyborg.
These cheap cameras seem to be velcro'd to aircraft carrier masts, to the outside of tank armour, to fighter pilots' helmets and, of course, to dozens of reporters. I think we'll remember this war as the war of the ubiquitous video phone.
I don't understand how these things work but the chunky, lossy compression suggests clever, adaptive transmission and very low bit rates. Presumably the video is transmitted via sat-phone channels intended only for voice (possibly even analogue transmission?).
This story, from an NBC reporter in Kuwait City, doesn't get me any closer to understanding how the video phones work but lays out the Gulf reporters' new tech tool kit. This one is better. I learn that TV reporters in the field are using essentially the same kit as any amateur (a Mini DV camera, a Mac Powerbook and simple editing software) to produce their own packages for transmission back home (but I still don't know how those video phones work!).
A natural blogger
My friend Paul Murphy's blogging properly now and it's excellent. Just the right balance of the personal and the public. Self-conscious but not pompous. Ironic but not sarcastic. Textbook blogging and very entertaining – and loads of groovy pictures.
March 21, 2003
Blogrolled by DeLong
Brad DeLong is a Berkeley economist and a member of the blogging elite. He's a living (blogging) reminder that sometimes brevity sucks. One of these days I'm going to have to read the twenty yards or so of content here and here and figure out just what kind of economist he really is.
In the meantime I'll be satisfied with some very entertaining writing, titles like chapter heads from a Victorian textbook and about 200 entry categories. I'm inspired by all those categories – he's practically got one for every entry – and why not? Bowblog just showed up in Brad's blogroll which is cool.
Libeskind in New York
Choosing an architect to replace the twin towers was always going to be a pretty high stakes game. The fact that it was happening in New York City, one of the most politically and culturally charged places on earth, could only make the whole thing more intense. Hal Foster (architecture critic and generally cool postmodernist) communicates the drama in this excellent review of the selection process in the LRB (the full story is only available to paying LRB subscribers).
“The presentations in December made for terrific theatre: two parts The Fountainhead, one part Gangs of New York. On the one hand, the willingness of prestigious architects to collaborate was impressive, especially in the case of the 'Dream Team' of Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl. On the other hand, to be in the running one had to be a designated über-architect, presumably with the technical expertise required of grands projets: stock in the Dream Team, Lord Foster and the Skidmore Owings & Merrill group went up, while stock in Daniel Libeskind and others fell. But also, implicitly, one should be an echt New Yorker, and here Foster went down (maybe out), Libeskind up a bit, while the Dream Team, SOM and the 'Think' group led by Rafael Viñoly, a veteran of big buildings who works out of downtown Manhattan, held even.”
March 20, 2003
Fantasy social classes
Got this link to a review of Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class: and how it's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life from the Demos Greenhouse.
“The Creative Class is not just distinguished by its members' professions, but by their lifestyles. Florida paints a picture of a group of people whose creativity permeates every aspect of their lives, who thrive on diversity and change, who collect experiences rather than possessions, and for whom the ability to express individuality and find an outlet for creativity is more important than any material gain.”
I'm sure there's some reality to the trends tracked by books like this one but I'm also sure that there's a decent book to be written about the 'fantasy social classes' industry itself. There seems to be a quite profound human need to imagine a better, brighter, more engaged – generally more funky &ndash: class of people. And then, of course, to imagine oneself a member of it.
(See also: The Soul of the New Consumer: Authenticity – What We Buy and Why in the New Economy, in which a new generation of hyper-engaged consumers seeks truth in Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, in which socially liberal yuppies change the world through Frappuccino and Fair Trade chocolate).
A quiet City
Yesterday was my 40th birthday. Juliet and I went to the Coliseum to sob through the ENO's gorgeous Tosca (a City in turmoil, gripped by fear – torture, love, war and betrayal). We stayed at a hotel practically next door in St Martin's Lane. The hotel was half empty and there were plenty of empty seats at the Opera (Americans staying at home, apparently).
Our cab driver this morning made an illegal u-turn by Trafalgar Square and jumpy, armed police practically arrested him (British police don't usually carry guns). The streets of the West End are Sunday Morning quiet (and it's not just the congestion charging). No panic, no bulk buying, no drama at all really – just the barely tangible signs of a City's building anxiety. It's this kind of tiny shift in mood that slows an economy, trips up a recovery. Watching the rolling news in our hotel room, the empty streets of Baghdad echo and amplify London's barely noticable slow-down.
(here's an excellent Ten things you never knew about Tosca from the University of Chicago Press, by the way).
Essential
As the bombing begins, Azeem reminds me to revisit Where's Raed, a blog kept, apparently, by a young Iraqi from within Iraq – from Baghdad itself, in fact.
Digital cinema
This feature about digital cinema is mostly about the production end (George Lucas has made his last non-digital film and so on) but I think it supports my thesis that the economics of running a High Street cinema are about to change completely. Whether I'm right in thinking that this will produce a new wave of independent cinemas is another matter...
March 19, 2003
It's been ten years
Thanks to Neil McIntosh for linking to this piece about Mosaic's tenth birthday. It is my fervent ambition that one day I will be required, like Jim Clark, to say something like this:
"The economic appetite is gone," he says. Netscape "changed my life so incredibly, it's hard to comprehend. I made more than a billion dollars from a couple of years work."
In 1995 I booked Clark to speak at a conference in London's lovely Wembley Conference Centre. I don't remember his speech, which everyone said was very boring, but I do remember the fact that he came to Wembley by helicopter from Heathrow, stayed twenty minutes and then choppered back to the airport for an onward flight. Clark had already made his first billion from Silicon Graphics and was well on the way to his second.
Wars, real and virtual
This week, in my column for The Guardian's web site, I finally caved in and wrote about the war. We can't take it for granted that our increasing interconnectedness and access to information will give us any new insights or improve our identification with those on whom we inflict war...
Dyke kicks Sky into touch
A great rift has opened up between the BBC and Sky and more than a decade of servitude is over. The BBC will, from the end of May, broadcast its channels unencrypted on a new Astra Satellite with a smaller, UK-only, footprint.
Most people, including me, don't really understand what this means (do I have to get a new dish? Will I continue to get the BBC channels with my Sky subscription? Will my Sky subscription be cheaper?) so there hasn't been much dancing in the street yet but the BBC is now essentially free to build its own multichannel, free-to-air digital TV service with close to 100% UK reach (instead of the approximately 70% provided by Freeview's compromised terrestrial network). Emily Bell in The Guardian and Richard Tait in The FT both focus on Greg Dyke's audacity and on Sky's limited room for manoeuvre in constructing a response. Tait goes into more detail on the new arrangements but you may need an FT.com subscription to see his article.
March 17, 2003
Cheer up, it might never happen...
Dave Birch, who should know, on the coming collision of wireless networks, GPS and RFID tags in The Guardian. Dave's pretty level headed about the implications but I'm sure that this has the potential for a major technology panic.
As I've pointed out here a dozen times before, though, every new technology is born into a complex human context that almost invariably diverts it from its manifest destiny – in this case to close off individual freedom once and for all.
This is why, for instance, we're still here after 60 years of nuclear proliferation, why the record industry is still here five years after people started swapping MP3s and why we'll never be replaced by a race of robotic clones. Despite our fears to the contrary and the occasional nihilistic counter-example (Stalin, say), human beings universally and collectively tend to neutralise apocalyptic change before it can do too much damage. I predict that most RFID implementations will ship with only a fraction of the Big Brother features they're capable of.
March 14, 2003
Lovely prints
Thanks to the excellent Kookymojo for this link to a fascinating site about Iris fine art ('giclee') printers. I have one of Michael Light's gorgeous black & white moon prints which I thought was made on an Iris but I now learn used another digital method called Direct-Digital Color Coupler (I wonder if they changed the method since I bought mine) and I can confirm that these prints are uncannily good. By the way, isn't Google labs' glossary brilliant?
March 13, 2003
For the record...
You'll have read this in dozens of places already (like, for instance, The Hollywood Reporter and The Bristol Evening Post) but I thought I ought to mark the really quite important news that the BBC is making deep cuts at BBCi, its online and interactive division, and that these cuts will come principally from the department's web activities – two thirds of the interactive factual and learning division in Bristol, for instance.
The Corporation is doing this well ahead of the upcoming Government review of BBCi's activities – I understand that the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (the ministry responsible) hasn't even finished setting terms of reference for the review, let alone appointed someone to do it.
This is, I'm sure, a tactically cunning preemptive strike. It's almost inevitable that the review, when finally convened, would have recommended some cuts, even if only because BBCi has been allowed to grow more-or-less ad lib across multiple departments.
Hard-pressed UK media owners may also be relieved to see a bite taken out of their state-funded, inflation-protected number 1 competitor but it would be a mistake to read this as a response to their complaints. The online publishers' puny lobby hasn't made a dent so far.
Business idea
Movies are distributed to cinemas via satellite (or even the Internet) these days, right? I mean, I assume trucking cans of celluloid around the country is more or less finished (correct me if I'm wrong...). So, the economics of running a cinema must have been transformed in the last few years. I notice that, after a major crisis during the nineties, the independent cinemas are enjoying a bit of a revival.
So, would you visit an independent cinema showing an intelligent mixture of first run blockbusters, indie pictures, oldies and cult movies; making use of digital distribution to keep costs down and flexibility up; serving good coffee and food and maybe using its flexible space to run other events (concerts, art shows, parties)? Do you think you could spin this simple idea into a chain of cinemas (perhaps run on a franchise basis)? Could cinemas be the next urban lifestyle phenomenon?
Beats 'win a year's supply of Lion Bars'
You can enter a competition in this week's New Scientist to have your mitochondrial DNA sequenced. This is one of those mind-bogglingly 21st Century things that we now take utterly for granted but would once have taken twenty technicians and a roomful of those black cubes covered in little blinking red lights about a year and a half to do. I'm certainly up for it (mind you, submitting the competition form seems to produce a fancy 404 page – "we can send a man to the moon and sequence the human genome but we can't...").
Butterfly about to emerge
I learn from The Guardian that Richard Wilson's Butterfly is nearly finished and this Sunday evening at 7.00 he'll be talking about it (among other things) in a panel discussion at The Wapping Centre. You need to call 020 7253 3334 to get your name on the list. Maybe I'll see you there. I blogged Butterfly a couple of weeks ago and put some photos (and a movie) here. Wilson is busy editing the time-lapse film of the whole process and it'll be on show Sunday evening (if he gets it finished) and then in the Wapping exhibition space until 21 April.
Thompson grills Lessig
Bill Thompson's interview with Lawrence Lessig in The Guardian. Weirdly, I watched Bill record this interview and here's a pic to prove it... Bill is on the left.
March 12, 2003
Domestic dilemma
Billie is painting, Olly is at a friend's house for tea, Juliet is waiting in an interminable queue at Watford General Hospital to see her consultant (our third baby is due 1st May) and I am shopping for a Mini DV Camcorder. My friend Paul, who knows more about it than I do, says I should look for the these features: dv in and out, manual focus, mic-in plug, adjustable white balance/exposure, decent manual zoom and avoid the e-wizardry that seems common now (Bluetooth, email, MPEG). I like the look of this Sony DCR-PC101 and Apple are featuring this Canon MV5i. I want a really small camera and I don't want to spend more than about £1000 ($1500). What do you recommend?
POD at HUP
I'll say this slowly. You may now buy print-on-demand books from Harvard University Press. They've made a list of 100 out-of-print classics available to be bought one at a time. And these are not crappy xeroxed copies:
“The books in this program are printed as facsimiles of the last edition," says John Walsh, production manager at the press. "There will be no compromises to typefaces, or to font sizes and margins, and the books appear in their original trim size. Acme has carefully scanned every page of the original. The books are printed on papers that match the weight, shade, caliper, and opacity of those earlier editions. They are bound in cloth, with headbands and reinforced endpapers.”
This looks like a really important story to me but I don't think I've seen it covered anywhere else (and, by the way, the printers involved really are called Acme)
March 11, 2003
Total Information Washout
This week's Bowbrick at Large in The Guardian is about the broken dreams of the Internet advertising business. For about ten minutes back in what we'll one day remember as the dawn of Internet time, the big advertisers – the pre-eminent engines of the 'old' economy – dreamt of perfect data. Their consultants and gurus had convinced them that the net's potential was to build huge, detailed, cross-matched databases of the likes, dislikes, clicks and IDs of every customer and potential customer they'd ever encounter on the Internet.
Of course, in one way, they were dead right. That is precisely the potential of any suitably interconnected network of computers. In another – the important one – they were wholly wrong. They, like millions before them (and presumably millions after them), argued solely from the potential of the technology, totally ignoring its context. Actually doing business on the net – trying to build and deploy these databases in the real world – turned out to be a minefield littered with bear traps surrounded by quicksand. Impossible.
Every one of the projects to build big, integrated databases of personal information has either failed or been radically scaled back (Doubleclick, Engage...). Consumers, web site owners and investors rejected the collection and cross-matching of web site data outright. Billions of pounds of shareholder value have been destroyed, thousands of jobs lost. The Total Information Internet was a washout.
March 10, 2003
Alien!
Juliet's latest column at Tigerchild is up. This week, with seven weeks until the birth of our third child, she's having a G.E. Kane moment.
Wonks on the BBC's future
Policy wonks (what is a wonk exactly?) Damian Tambini and Jamie Cowling survey the increasingly obstacle-strewn path to charter renewal for the BBC in FT Creative Business (you'll need to subscribe to FT.com to see the article). It is fascinating to watch the quick collapse of the corporation's untouchable status over the last few months. Forces are at work.
Digital radio's revenge
Top media analyst Mathew Horsman says Cinderella media technology DAB may yet thrive but it could do so at the cost of the 3G operators. You need to subscribe to FT.com to see the article (I think – try it!).
cloning
With all the fuss about human cloning, I was pretty sure I'd find a good selection of books of essays on the topic. I could only find one: this post-Dolly volume from 1999. It turns out to be very good: very difficult to say no to a book whose cover promises "essays from experts ranging from Stephen Jay Gould to Andrea Dworkin". There are dozens of good pieces here but I'll quote Dworkin because, remarkably, she manages to collapse human cloning into the same narrative of despair she's been selling for decades:
“And so I think the men who will clone the compliant women will control them both reproductively and sexually; and, in the process, they will destroy all human meaning: the men will abandon change for absolute control, any chance of intimacy for absolute power. Through cloning, especially, men will defeat death; and change, too, will die. Life will be power without love or freedom or grace.”
Clones and clones: facts and fantasies about human cloning, Martha C. Nussbaum, Cass R. Sunstein eds.
March 07, 2003
London's economic strength
The Statesman last week has a pullout transcript of a round table discussion on the topic of 'London's economic strength'. There's a PDF version here. The participants include Ed Balls, Chief Economic Adviser to The Treasury, Anne Seex, Chief Executive of Norwich City Council and various academics, agency heads and policy types. In the chair is David Walker whose Analysis programme I blogged yesterday.
And on... and on... A plug
When he was UK MD of Ariston, Giuliano Gnagnati brought you those mesmerising TV ads ("Ariston... and on... and on..."). Ariston was an obscure Italian brand – sales and brand awareness soared. These days he's running his own equally unorthodox online whiteware store Whitebox. You can buy a pretty good selection of the big brands plus Giuliano's own Whitebox brand of economy machines and there's a comparison feature that rates the machines honestly (for instance, there's no attempt to push the Whitebox machines and they'll often rate below competing brands). There's a whole layer of really good survivor etailers out there – no bullshit and no hard sell. Whitebox is one of them.
Country Code rebellion
Thanks to Kevin Werbach for linking to this excellent piece from The Register about this week's meeting of the obscure group of organisations who look after the national top level domains (like .uk, .ca, .at etc.). Try not to nod off. This group and ICANN are squaring up for a punch up on a planetary scale.
War analysed
Always excellent David Walker opens the new series of BBC Radio 4's Analysis with a subtle look at our definition of the national interest in the context of the planned attack on Iraq.
He talks to: Lord Owen, Lord Skidelsky, Professor Philip Bobbitt, Professor David Coleman and Professor Paul Hirst. You can listen to the show until next Thursday evening (13 March) here. Warning: if you haven't made up your mind about the war yet, this programme won't help. If you'd like some provocative material for your next row about it, there's plenty here.
While we're talking about Analysis, isn't this programme the perfect candidate for a permanent archive of audio files? Could it hurt anyone to keep a whole series (or even more) online at a time? Taking down a programme of this quality just because the next one's come along seems crazy.
Oh God, I'm a moonie
Dave Green has got my number. He's written a well-timed (but quite gentle) debunking of our collective blogging obsession and succeeded in making me feel distinctly uncomfortable about my twice-a-day habit, about the usefulness of the things I write and especially about the queasy comradeship of bloggers. We are, after all, cult members. Damn him! (and I can't even trackback to his article!)
March 06, 2003
Toyota triumphs
I learn from the FT's latest survey on the motor industry (which requires a subscription) that, in the midst of the longest recession of the modern era in its home territory, the mighty Toyota is in the ascendant. This year the business will make profits twice as large as any car manufacturer has ever made before and this is prinicipally because of an extraordinary rise in market share in the USA of over 50% in the last ten years while the big three US manufacturers (GM, Ford and Daimler Chrysler) continue to shred each other's margins in a disastrous price war.
Barry Cox on broadcast
The third and fourth of Barry Cox's lectures on the future of broadcasting, as reprinted by The Guardian. The third concerns the failure of competition in digital TV in the UK and the fourth the implications of next generation media technologies. These lectures are the most interesting intervention on the future of UK media I've read for a long time. His prognosis is discouraging and his prescription radical but, agree with him or not, Cox is the most important independent commentator on broadcast in the UK now.
The first lecture is here and the second here.
March 05, 2003
The BBC and voting
We should probably keep an eye on this. Matt Jones, dreamer of this parish and information architect at the BBC, is working on an ambitious project intended to get us 'reengaged' with voting and with democracy in the widest sense. Here, Sian Kevill, Matt's 'sponsor', who works in the office of the e-envoy, writes about the project at Open Democracy. Some people think projects like this represent the future of the BBC's public service obligations in the networked era.
The end of language?
Azeem wonders if children submitting essays in txt msg language is a bad thing or just language evolving. I'm usually one of those 'language is a living thing' guys in these matters, laughing at the grammar pedants and vocabulary fascists (I like David Crystal on language change). There has to be some kind of limit, though, and I guess this might be it. No language is infinitely flexible, otherwise is ceases to be a language. Language evolves but, necessarily, within the bounds of shared comprehension.
As new vocabulary and new structures arrive they test the limits, keeping understanding in a constant state of tension – parents never quite understand their teenage kids but they manage to communicate and the language advances. Introductions and innovations are absorbed quickly (usually within a generation) but txt language requires too great an effort from non-speakers. It's too jarring, too remote from the norm. But presumably it'll fade away as interfaces become more transparent anyway...
Cable trauma
My latest Bowbrick at Large in The Guardian is about gloom and desperation in the TV business and the continued failure of the cable industry to wire up Broadband Britain. I really didn't like it much when I sent it off. Weak, really. Anyway, it seems to have struck some kind of consumer chord – It's only been up a couple of hours and I've had several emails along the lines of: "Too right, mate. The nightmare I've had getting service from NTL!" and "Telewest are such rubbish! 50 minutes on hold, then they deny I have an account at all!".
March 04, 2003
Can you commoditise a commodity?
G Beato in The Guardian laments file sharing's commoditisation of music. The piece is heartfelt but unhistoric. Music is ancient – older than language – but has changed more in the 75 years since recordings became available than in most of its history. More still in the fifty years since the 45 became pop's day-to-day currency. Commoditisation began when songs could first be pressed into wax on an industrial scale. Music has been a commodity ever since.
File sharing, at worst, commodifies more efficiently. At best (and this is just me speculating), by ripping music from those nasty physical tokens, it may improve its status. What I like about the article, though, is Beato's rhetorical alignment of the file sharers with the record labels against the increasingly marginalised artists. If he were honest with himself, though, Beato would admit that we have no idea how artists and music will really be affected.
March 03, 2003
Belgium in the West
There's an excellent profile of Kofi Annan by Philip Gourevitch in the March 3rd issue of The New Yorker but it's not at the web site, which is annoying. In looking for it, though, I learn from Simon Schama's article about the history of European anti-Americanism that Baudelaire called America “the Belgium of the West”, which is funny.
McDecline
When McDonalds lost the disastrous McLibel case I used to say that it wouldn't be the greens or the anti-globalisers that'd bring down the fast food giant but much more prosaic and unpredictable business problems – lifestyle changes, weird new competition (Frappuccino anyone?) and an exhausted brand. Hey! I was right.
“In the past, owner-operators were McDonald's evangelists. Prospective franchisees were once so eager to get into the two-year training program that they would wait in line for hours when applications were handed out at the chain's offices around the country. But there aren't any lines today, and many existing franchisees feel alienated. They have seen their margins dip to a paltry 4%, from 15% at the peak. Richard Adams, a former franchisee and a food consultant, claims that as many as 20 franchisees are currently leaving McDonald's every month.”
Business Week has an excellent survey of McDonalds' mounting problems and a useful timeline (free registration required).
Business Week on Linux
Business Week goes big on the Linux Uprising:
“...and don't be fooled by Linux' harmless-looking penguin mascot, Tux: This stuff is shaking up the balance of power in the computer industry. It poses the biggest threat to Microsoft's hegemony since the Netscape browser in 1995”Amazingly enough, the tone of the article is a throwback to the hyperbolic language of the boom. You can almost feel the urgent need for some good news from the TMT sector. The penguin's in the hot seat now. He better not let us down!
March 02, 2003
Bowblog - like reading the Sunday papers on Monday
Couple of good articles from sections of The Observer I don't usually look at. I like the look af Matali Crasset's playful interior and product design in the colour magazine. Of course, you lose the pictures in the online version but there are some here. Some really good sports writing (like I know good sports writing from bad) from The Sports Monthly. LeBron James is the schoolboy basketball player said to be the greatest ever. Tickets for a recent inter-school game went for $2,000 and Nike and Adidas are now scrapping over the sports shoe contract – the kid is likely to pocket $7M once he makes up his mind.
Dead Herring
In 1993 and 94, when I was learning about the net and about how to run a business and all the scary money stuff, I discovered a weird American business magazine in the same imported magazine outlet I went to for Wired and Mondo 2000 and all those xeroxed geek zines. It was called The Red Herring. It was from San Francisco and it became a major source of inspiration. It was more grown up than those other titles – definitely more Stanford B-School than The Haight – but no less exotic. Its territory was 'over there' – Silicon Valley – an almost mythic place I'd never visited but had been reading about for a decade. Ten years later, even after I've visited these places and driven along Highway 101 in my rented car and learnt that San Jose has approximately the charm of Slough, it still makes me sad to learn that the Herring is no more.
March 01, 2003
Wraparound
Check out this collection of 360 panoramas from Hans Nyberg in Denmark. He gathers Quicktime VR panoramas from around the world, like this gorgeous wraparound view from the top of The Monument in the City of London and these excellent, immersive street level views of the London war protests. Hans is also a bit of an expert on the creation of panoramas so I'm going to try to stitch together some images to make my own.
Butterfly encore
On Tuesday I took my son Oliver to see Richard Wilson's Butterfly at the Wapping Project. Maybe I didn't read the publicity properly but I really wasn't expecting anything so exciting. We talked to the artist and pestered his crew as they coaxed a beautiful, shiny light aeroplane from an unrecognisable lump of crushed aluminium and steel – the plane at the centre of a web of colourful tensioned straps. It was beautiful and quite moving.
I took lots of pictures – I put most of them here. I also used Apple's iPhoto to create a 640x480 Quicktime movie (1.7 Mbyte) from the stills (Juliet helped me edit it!).
New York decides
I don't want to gush but I'm really thrilled for NYC (and for the rest of us emotional New Yorkers) that the City settled on Libeskind's replacement for the Twin Towers. A perfectly measured memorial to the lost as well as a thrilling and contemporary reworking of the skyscraper myth for the 21st Century. Brilliant. I want to be in the long queue to ride the lift to the viewing deck on opening day. Thanks to Demos for the link to this visualisation from the NY Times. Click on 'Envisioning Downtown' once you've read the article.