Fortnightly Mailing

The Economist's (April 2006) survey of new media, with audio files

The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change both the media industry and society as a whole.

The 22/4/2006 Economist has a "pull-out" survey of new media, by Andreas Kluth, The Economist's Technology Correspondent.

Among the audience, by Kluth, and It's the links, stupid - an accessible, realistic, and I felt authentic, piece about blogging - are freely available on-line. For the rest, unless you have a subscription to the Economist, you have to pay for access.

Sitting alongside the survey are 5 audio discussions, available for free download as MP3 files, as follows:

• Author interview, with Andreas Kluth, Technology Correspondent of The Economist (10 minutes, 4 MB) Play Download.
• Blogs as leading indicators, with David Sifry, Founder and CEO, Technorati (18 minutes, 8 MB) Play Download.
• The demand for everything, with Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired (33 minutes, 14 MB) Play Download.
• Wide world of wikis, with Jerry Michalski, Founder and President of Sociate (22 minutes, 9 MB) Play Download.
• From Gutenberg to Mcluhan to What's Next, with Paul Saffo, Director, Institute for the Future (26 minutes, 11 MB) Play Download.

The impression you get from the survey, and from the audio discussions, is that the penny really is finally dropping outside the "internet classes" that in the developed world citizens are becoming producers of digital content, rather than mainly being consumers of it.

Personally I find myself smiling wrily (smugly?) at this, having been heavily involved in 1996-1998 in a working group in Sheffield on the development of a strategic framework on the information society for the city. The strategic framework, which formed part of a much longer ICT strategy, contained as a strapline:

"Sheffield will help develop all its people to become producers as well as consumers in the ICT economy"

At that time it was an uphill struggle - basically we totally failed - to get the powers that be to accept such an approach. They tended to say things like "are you trying to tell me that everyone's going to turn into a javascript programmer...??". The document languished.

Wireless power limit raised to bridge digital divide

According to the excellent e-commerce and IT law newsletter OUT-LAW.COM, from law firm Pinsent Masons, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries Ofcom has allowed fixed broadband internet providers to double the power of their signals, with a view to helping bridge the digital divide.

"The new rules apply to the 5.8GHz frequency, which is used by fixed WiMax radio technology for wireless internet connections. The frequency is subject to light regulation from Ofcom which allows the registration of terminals at its website."

According to Ofcom's announcement [33kB PDF]:

"Concern has been raised that a so-called digital divide exists in the availability of services, particularly broadband, in rural and urban areas in the UK. Ofcom's Communications Market Report: Nations and Regions showed that the gap is closing and 41% of adults in rural areas have broadband internet at home compared to 45% of adults in urban areas. Changing regulation in this band, enabling greater geographical coverage, could help to increase access to wireless broadband in rural areas."

According to OUT-LAW.COM:

"Ofcom has also said that it will soon change its regulations so that users of equipment that communicates via ultra wide band (UWB) technology will no longer need licences. The very short range systems are commonly used for video wireless or camera wireless systems. The rule change will bring the UK into line with an EU Directive which demands that regulations be changed by 21st August."

GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself

Source: GWEI web site

There serious political (and artistic?) intent behind Google Will Eat Itself, which purports to be buying Google shares with advertising revenue raised from carrying Google Adsense ads on a network of web sites. At the current rate of progress GWEI will own Google in a little over 200,000 years.

A Race to the Bottom - Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies

Report prepared by the London-based Privacy International following a six-month investigation into the privacy practices of key Internet based companies.

"The ranking lists the best and the worst performers both in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 across the full spectrum of search, email, e-commerce and social networking sites."

Google is singled out for particularly trenchant criticism, and is put in the  "Comprehensive consumer surveillance & entrenched hostility to privacy" category. As you would expect, Google contests this assessment, and here is a piece by Matt Cutts (a Google staffer) countering the Privacy International claims. Meanwhile, Privacy International accuses Google of smear tactics against it. Services covered in the report include:

• Amazon
• AOL
• Apple
• BBC
• Bebo
• eBay
• Facebook
• Friendster
• Google
• Hi5
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• LiveJournal
• Microsoft
• Myspace
• Orkut
• Reunion.com
• Skype
• Wikipedia
• Windows Live Space
• Xanga
• Yahoo!
• YouTube

An interim report is available in PDF format [60 kB PDF], with a fuller report due in Autumn 2007.

Women In Art

There is a fair chance you'll already have seen this beautifully made animation. But I had not, and I am also soft touch for Bach Cello Suites. So it qualified as an "Oddment". Thanks to Jools Duggleby for sending me the link.

Closure of BBC Jam - usage and other data - results of Freedom of Information Act enquiry

Jam, the BBC's £150m on-line learning service was scrapped earlier this year. Having written a piece asserting that usage data was needed to judge the extent to which use of the service was taking off, I requested usage and other data from the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act.  In the continuation post below I include the BBC's introduction to its response of 24/4/2007, followed by  the main questions put (in bold), together with the full responses (in italics). Any annotations by me are underlined.

For me, the "killer fact" that the data reveals is the low average weekly use made of the service per registered user, summarised in the chart below, which I made from the data provided by the BBC. (It is so low that I only half trust my calculations, and am waiting for someone to show me the "killer error".)

User friendly Linux; how people use communications technologies; free client and server software to build virtual worlds. From the Economist Technology Quarterly.

This week's Technology Quarterly from the 9/6/2007 Economist has several articles of interest, all of which seem to be accessible without a subscription:

1. Bringing free software down to earth, which is about entrepreneur and self-financed astronaut Mark Shuttleworth's successful efforts to fund the development of Ubuntu, a user-friendly version of Linux, which is distributed alongside a suite of Open Source applications for desktop PCs and laptops.

2. Home truths about telecoms, about anthropologists' findings concerning the way people use communication technologies. This is a "must read" article, which challenges assumptions about the convergence of digital technologies, and which offers evidence that:

• users are showing a growing preference for semi-synchronous writing (text, chat, email) over synchronous voice;
• private communications are invading the workplace rather than the other way around;
• migrants are the most advanced users of communications technology.

3. Online gaming's Netscape moment? , about Multiverse Network, set up by some of the original founders of Netscape, which has created client and server software (based on open standards), and free for download by anyone who wants to build and host a virtual world.

Software and community in the early 21st century. Not just 65 minutes of a "fat dude" talking.

From time to time [links below] I have covered the work of Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia Law School, in Fortnightly Mailing. I came across this video of a presentation by Moglen at the 2006 Plone Conference in Seattle (Plone is an Open Source content management system). Although speakers who exude such confident certainty as Moglen always set my teeth on edge, I do not agree with one viewer's sceptical comment "This has no point. It is 65:05 of this fat dude talking. I don't understand".  Worth watching if you want to do either or both of:

• marvel at someone who can speak without notes or visual aids for over an hour, developing a complex and sustained line of argument;
• hear a politically fierce exponent of the Open Source movement in full flow.

The  video should appear in the continuation post below.

 31/10/2004 - The dotCommunist Manifesto
15/12/2006 - Two contrasting views about software patents. A debate between Eben Moglen and Blackboard's Matt Small
9/9/2006 - The Web 2.0 emperor is naked. Gavin Clarke reports in The Register on the views of Tim Berners-Lee and Eben Moglen

Jim Farmer on "Making college textbooks more affordable"

First of a series of Guest Posts by Jim Farmer in Michael Feldstein's e-Literate. This one picks up on the recently published US Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance report “Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable” and examines the way in which (US) HE students use the on-line materials to which they get time-limited access from a text-book publisher through their ownership of the text-book. One sentence jumped out at me:

"In a 1999 presentation to the National Council of Higher Education Programs, an Open University official confirmed the estimated cost for the development of Open University’s media-rich, fully tested, baccalaureate program was US$1 billion."

and my instinct is that some extra zeros may have slipped into the presentation referred to by Jim, unless what is being referred to is the whole or a really substantial proportion of the Open University's entire provision.

Getting RSS feeds into one place. Solving the problem with "Yahoo! Pipes"

Last September I wrote a dissatisfied piece about SpeedyFeed, through which you could get several RSS feeds into one place. The trouble with it, as far as I could work out,  was that you could not get the feeds to merge in date order. I've had a note to myself to take a look at Yahoo! Pipes for some months and I finally got round to it just now. Within a few minutes I was able to solve the problem, and above is a screen-shot of the what the Yahoo Pipes interface looked like to cause 4 RSS feeds to be firstly combined, and secondly sorted in date order. The output from the "pipe" is itself an RSS feed.

Currently I am using Google's Reader to merge some of the RSS feeds from web logs that I keep an eye on, and to integrate the mergeds feed into my home page; and Reader does the merging in date order OK, and it renders the merged feeds in a clever and clear way. But anyone with a logical mind, and better still some programming know-how should be able to make Yahoo! Pipes do a great deal more, probably making it worth spending USD10 on this newly published ~60 page O'Reilly Short Cuts Guide by Mark Pruett.