Loud

"The crazy common point in both operating rooms and cockpit crews, the thing that makes this all so..."

2009-07-09T06:31:59-07:00

“The crazy common point in both operating rooms and cockpit crews, the thing that makes this all so damning is that research into both fields has shown that errors occur most often when a senior, experienced person is performing. In other words, even in these highly trained professions, it is not just about being skilled or knowledgeable enough – in fact, the more skilled you are, the more it can hurt you!”

- The Hacker Chick Blog: Plane Crashes, Software Failures, and other Human Errors

"Which brings me to the reason why I use XHTML: The validator enforces my preferred coding standards..."

2009-07-09T03:51:59-07:00

“Which brings me to the reason why I use XHTML: The validator enforces my preferred coding standards for HTML – lowercase elements, quoted attributes and closed elements. That’s it. Not much really. I know it’s marketing XHTML rather than technical XHTML. I don’t care. Or rather I do care, I just make a conscious pragmatic decision based on a small personal advantage. I’m both pedantic and like having a tool chain which enforces that, XHTML suits my style.”

- Thoughts on the whole XHTML/HTML5 affair | Morethanseven

Some thoughts on FREE

2009-07-01T08:32:00-07:00

This is a collection and rewrite of some of my tweets on the issues of free in an economic sense as well as the lacklustre debate surrounding Free (the book).

Apologies for the incoherent nature of the post. Twitter isn’t an ideal writing platform.

One of the most frequently cited argument in the favour of everything digital being free is an abstract economic theory that states that the prices of products in a competitive market will stabilise at the marginal cost.

Without getting into a discussion on the validity of said theory there is a lot to be said on how that theory applies to media.

What’s missing is that in this context a product is thought to be a fungible commodity, that it can be replaced with another good that serves the same function to the buyer. The theory does not apply to all economic goods.

Using digital for the direct sales of content is actually a way to make it completely non-fungible.

In DVD sales there is a good which has its price driven down by retail competition (DVD copies between stores are identical = fungible).

If you can create demand for specific digital content and sell it yourself, that demand cannot satiated by any other good, digital or not.

The problem of course is in the initial stage of finding content that you can create demand for.

Another problem is in customer backlash against higher prices, but in Harlequin’s case they solve that by offering something print can’t, i.e. short works that are more expensive per word – roughly 7 cents per thousand words versus 30 cents per thousand – than anything else they publish but is reasonable if not desirable as a differentiated offering.

And this is in an industry that is (mis)reported to be as close to being commodified as any content industry can.

(Aside: I’ve been reading Georgette Heyer’s fantastic regency romances recently and can’t recommend them enough.)

Most of the people taking sides in the Gladwell/Chris Anderson spat do so based on personal feelings not arguments.

NB: Free (the book) will be available for free on the day of the launch and for a while after. Chris Anderson may be a dishonest debater but he’s not a hypocrite.

Gladwell’s argument, although it uses media as an example, isn’t that media’s too important to be free but that Free (the book) ignores capital expenses and undervalues operational expenses.

Chris Anderson’s counter-argument is to accuse Gladwell of being frightened and point out a guy working for Wired for free, the tactics of a naïf. He does not address any of the substantial points of Gladwell’s review let alone other general flaws in his thesis.

Gladwell isn’t arguing that Free won’t and isn’t an important part of the economy, just that it won’t be the be all and end all.

It’s an ignorant guru trifecta with Godin in the mix saying that Chris Anderson is right because the internet is really, really cool.

He forgets that the brunt of the costs of the internet revolution are borne by each household’s connection costs.

He also forgets that almost any non-trivial use of the web as a publishing platform requires a handover of cash to somebody somewhere.

“There is no poetry shortage” according to Godin, because poets work for free.

I disagree, one of the things I learnt during my comp. lit. degree was that historically, poetry has been dead since the early 20th century.

So there is a distinct and marked shortage of good poetry.

Free labour/products can actually drive out quality in a dynamic that is similar to the akerlofian market for “lemons”.

Also, free is only an advantage for promotion and attention for first movers. It disappears quickly when everybody’s using it.

Godin’s point about attention deserves some special attention. By offering a product for free when everybody else does not is a remarkably effective way of getting and holding attention that can then be leveraged for love or money.

When everybody’s offering stuff for free, like in the blogosphere, the lack of a price ceases to become an attentional advantage and merely becomes the price the producer pays to participate – a marketplace entrance-fee, if you will.

Market dynamics are a complex and unpredictable thing, governed by several factors. By offering products for free you have to offset that cost somewhere because otherwise you’re just shrinking the overall market.

Another factor is average quality. According to Akerlof’s theory of a “Market for Lemons” uncertainty and asymmetrical information on quality can lead to a market where no goods are sold for any price.

The media industry is being crushed between these two forces. On one hand the market is shrinking as they are forced to offer their products for free to keep the attention playing field level. On the other hand uncertainty, asymmetrical information and often blatant dishonesty means that advertising inventory can’t be sold at any price. You can’t even give it away.

I work in web marketing and so a large part of my job is to analyse and study advertising opportunities on the web and I, like most of my colleagues, have ended with the only advertising venue that has even a shred of trust remaining (and not much at that), namely search engine advertising with name-brand search engines.

The analytics and statistical methods used to measure traffic across media sites are meaningless and have absolutely no value to an advertiser. The only thing you can do is buy ad impressions and measure yourself, you can’t rely on any stats other than those generated on your site and measured using your tools.

What many companies in this situation have found out is that it is cheaper to start publications/blogs/video series of their own. You spend less money at the outset on content production than you would on advertising with an external publication and there is absolutely no information asymmetry.

Free isn’t a solution. Free isn’t a business model. It isn’t a force of nature. It’s a symptom of human psychology that can sometimes be (ab)used for the benefit of corporations. When the problems of an industry are endemic and implicit in its structure, free does little but escalate the decline.

Last minute Addendum. For further reading on free in new media my best recommendation is to start of with Alan Patrick’s three part series on Freeconomics:

There’s a lot more on the subject out there, of course, but that’s a start.

"We bring in experts—our classroom teachers—but just one expert per room, for twenty or thirty or..."

2009-06-30T09:20:23-07:00

“We bring in experts—our classroom teachers—but just one expert per room, for twenty or thirty or more student novices—and then provide the experts with no means for showing off their expertise. They aren’t acting like mathematicians or historians; they’re experts at telling novices about math and history. It wouldn’t be a bad method if you were trying to train future lecturers. If we wanted all our students to become lecturers, then it might make sense to expose them to twelve years of lecturing; they would certainly learn a lot about different lecturing techniques. But if the assumption is that they’re going to learn about math or music, then you need to put them with mathematicians or musicians.”

- The E. F. Schumacher Society • The Company We Keep: A Case for Small Schools

"We often act as though schools were the protectors of children whose families have abandoned them. I..."

2009-06-30T09:07:34-07:00

“We often act as though schools were the protectors of children whose families have abandoned them. I hear that all the time these days. We blame parents—if not parents, then teachers, but especially parents—for the breakdown of schools and society. But thirty-five years of experience have convinced me that parents have not disappeared from the lives of their children, that families are, probably even more than they once were, the critical factor for children and in many cases provide their only relationships. The evidence suggests that families are indeed first and foremost in the hearts of the young. For many young people, family members are the only adults they claim to know well and can count on. It’s the rest of the surround that has disappeared for children.”

- The E. F. Schumacher Society • The Company We Keep: A Case for Small Schools

"As Alfie Kohn—the author of many books on discipline, raising children, and schooling—reminds us, we..."

2009-06-30T09:01:00-07:00

“As Alfie Kohn—the author of many books on discipline, raising children, and schooling—reminds us, we learn the most remarkable amount in the absence of rewards and punishments, without tests or competition of any form, because it seems we just want to grow up—if being grown up is made to seem even somewhat attractive.”

- The E. F. Schumacher Society • The Company We Keep: A Case for Small Schools

"In other words, when all goes even remotely well, we are remarkable learners. Our capacity to be so..."

2009-06-30T08:58:00-07:00

“In other words, when all goes even remotely well, we are remarkable learners. Our capacity to be so is linked to our equally remarkable capacity to imagine being another. We are designed to learn from others, to be apprentices to adults. All we need are those adults and a setting that seems to accept us and, in turn, seems acceptable to us. This allows us to trust sufficiently to explore and imagine, predict and wonder. The more trust the better; the less trust, the narrower our vision. Such a setting allows us to try out roles, make choices, and then take on an acceptable level of responsibility for our own actions and ideas.”

- The E. F. Schumacher Society • The Company We Keep: A Case for Small Schools

"Even the language we use to speak about schooling suggests a different agenda from the one we..."

2009-06-30T08:53:00-07:00

“Even the language we use to speak about schooling suggests a different agenda from the one we rhetorically claim. When we speak of teachers being “burned out,” we are unconsciously imagining them as appliances, one more or less like the other. There is another description we could have used; we could have said that teachers are exhausted. Both may be true. Teachers who are treated like appliances may be burned out, and those who are treated like human beings may be exhausted. We need to make that distinction. Again, when we talk of “delivering instruction,” of “measuring outcomes,” we are using language for inanimate objects, and we betray our lack of respect for the recipients of that schooling.”

- The E. F. Schumacher Society • The Company We Keep: A Case for Small Schools

"To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking..."

2009-06-30T08:26:38-07:00

“To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.”

- The E. F. Schumacher Society • Buddhist Economics

"Inside Iran, people can load new software on their PCs to try to get around blocks. Find a copy of..."

2009-06-19T07:36:21-07:00

“Inside Iran, people can load new software on their PCs to try to get around blocks. Find a copy of something like the xB browser online, or modify your current browser to work with software like Tor, and you can try directing all your Web access through intermediaries that aren’t blocked. If you find one that works, all your surfing can end up unblocked. If people were using today’s mobile phones for Internet access instead of PCs, this wouldn’t be possible, because most mobile phones, even if they can hook up to a wireless Internet access point, won’t run outside code, or only run outside code approved by the vendor.”

- Why the PC matters :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It

"Google has a long history of launching or buying projects, only to get bored and abandon them months..."

2009-06-18T04:31:31-07:00

“Google has a long history of launching or buying projects, only to get bored and abandon them months or years later. With Wave, as with so many Google projects, the company seems to be flinging things against the wall to see what sticks. No real thought has been given to its future beyond, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” When asked about marketing Wave during the launch Q&A, the Google reps said “We really haven’t thought about that too much.” What about advertising? “We haven’t thought about that yet.” What about competition? “It’s not something we really thought a lot about.” So what have the Googlers thought about?”

- Google Climbs to New Heights of Arrogance With Wave

"Of course, I have to point out that all this real-time communication stuff only matters to the..."

2009-06-18T04:30:08-07:00

“Of course, I have to point out that all this real-time communication stuff only matters to the fraction of people on the planet with good bandwidth. Here in Uganda, I’m so glad when an email actually makes it out of the queue that I don’t even bother to think about ‘rewinding’ conversations and dragging and dropping video! In all seriousness, it’s this reduction in basic utility for all users that worries me. Most Google’ products are by-in-large accessible no matter what kind of computer you’re on (except maybe Google Earth). With Wave they seem to be going down a path that might be a little more exclusive in nature. Not a deal-breaker but a concern none-the-less.”

- The Backlash Against Google Wave - Appfrica

"Real-time collaboration – what a nightmare! Most excited was Lars Rasmussen, the developer of..."

2009-06-18T04:28:00-07:00

“

Real-time collaboration – what a nightmare!

Most excited was Lars Rasmussen, the developer of Google Wave, about the real-time collaboration. You can see changes made on a page within seconds. I have heard for the first time that the online collaboration’s biggest challange was real-time changes, but on the contrary, that is the smallest problem. Bringing people to collaborate online is a huge challenge because of trust and the habit of a meeting culture, just to name a few. More importantly, I would argue that the growing speed of the Internet through lifestreams and tools such as Twitter and Friendfeed is made for a minority. Isn’t collaboration a process over hours, days and weeks?

”

- Google Wave: Real-time trouble and the persistent belief in tools : crisscrossed blog

"There’s an old joke: in heaven the police are British, the mechanics German, the cooks French,..."

2009-06-18T03:34:05-07:00

“There’s an old joke: in heaven the police are British, the mechanics German, the cooks French, the lovers Italian, and the Swiss organise it. In hell the police are German, the mechanics French, the cooks British, the lovers Swiss, and the Italians organise it. An internet version might be: in theory, topic experts would supply our information, social networks would connect us for common humanity, and Google would organise it for authority. In practice, we get our information from the most attention-driven sites, social networks bundle us for marketing, and Google organises it for ad sales.”

- Far too often, new media serves up popularity without accuracy | Technology | The Guardian

"It was a giant middle finger to iPhone developers. And that’s the closing impression that Apple gave..."

2009-06-13T14:23:51-07:00

“

It was a giant middle finger to iPhone developers. And that’s the closing impression that Apple gave us for WWDC. Clearly, they had absolutely no interest in fielding even a single question from the topic that we have the most questions about.

This went far beyond reluctant tolerance. It’s hard to interpret it as anything else except blatant hostility. We could probably have a more open discussion with Kim Jong-il about North Korea’s nuclear policy.

”

- Marco.org - Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple

"What if the real problem is the notion of applications on mobile phones?"

2009-06-11T03:47:17-07:00

“What if the real problem is the notion of applications on mobile phones?”

- adaptive path » blog » Rachel Hinman » Discovering the Chiaroscuro of Mobile

"Am going to stick my neck out along with my ass and say that the rigidity requirements of XHTML..."

2009-06-03T10:30:44-07:00

“Am going to stick my neck out along with my ass and say that the rigidity requirements of XHTML fosters a mind set for producing clean code. That mindset, along with the structured code, may play an important role in detecting and mitigating security vulnerabilities.”

- molly.com » The Real “Why XHTML” Discussion

"And where is transgression in social media? It is simply not allowed to exist in many cases. No,..."

2009-05-27T04:06:48-07:00

“

And where is transgression in social media?

It is simply not allowed to exist in many cases. No, wacky viral videos and satire along the lines of the Daily Show do no not count – the former often serve Capitalism, the remainder and all of the latter are our current carnivalesque release-valve on norms that really couldn’t care less about political change. Porn doesn’t count either, because it’s so fully and perfectly Capitalist in the first place.

Blogs you don’t like: don’t subscribe/unsubscribe – you get the Daily Me; Facebook people get unfriended if they say the wrong thing; unsavoury Twitter followers are not followed or blocked. Bland self-approval of the group takes over. There are no racists on my spectrum right now. As far as I am concerned, they don’t exist. But that’s not the real story, clearly. Racists are poised to take Stoke in the next by-election. They don’t appear on my spectrum because I have deliberately blinded myself to their existence on a day-to-day basis. Diversity of opinion is purely opt-in (with strong incentives to opt-out) in socialmediaworld.

”

- twopointouch | Surrender! Foucault and Twitter

"But for the crowd to be wise, participants must bring an independent point of view to bear...."

2009-05-27T04:05:55-07:00

“But for the crowd to be wise, participants must bring an independent point of view to bear. Following the crowd is best strategy for an individual until too many people follow the crowd, and then it’s a terrible strategy. The irony.”

- Are social networks destroying knowledge? « Laserlike

"The reality is much more startling. In order to place #34 on the social networking charts, you need..."

2009-05-26T09:06:53-07:00

“The reality is much more startling. In order to place #34 on the social networking charts, you need 30-35 downloads a day. At the standard app store pricing of .99, and after Apple takes its cut, that means your app needs to bring in a little over $20 a day to chart at that position. And social networking is a popular category.”

- The Incredible App Store Hype : Stromcode