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Much debate over the past couple of days on what it means for mainstream news (whatever that is now) that, as Jemima Kiss puts it, "rumour has it that Twitter 'beat' even the US Geological Survey in reporting the earthquakes in China".

Mathew initially suggested that Twitter may have become "the first draft of history" and then goes on, a day later, to clarify that this is a long, long way from saying Twitter is killing traditional media. Indeed.

I'd suggest thinking about the impact of Twitter on mainstream/traditional/whatever media in this way.

Q: what problems does a news company solve when it puts journalists into the field, sets up expensive international bureaux or otherwise goes about gathering the news from around the world?

A: it tells its readers/viewers/PSKATA what's going on; it tells them what it means; and it validates that the story is true. 

Twitter is yet another possible shortcut to the first of these solutions. Currently it has negligible impact on the second or third.

If something's going on in China, no-one needs to wait until the BBC or even the US Geological Survey finds out. The guys in China that it's happening to are going to tell us. Which means that...sure, we'd like a news source that we trust to confirm that any given news story is real (or the possibilities for Twitterers around the world to yank our collective chain become unmanageable). And we still need a guide as to what it means. But Twitter is another - even faster - way in which we don't necessarily need news reporters to just tell us that something's going on somewhere. By the time they know, we know.

As the world's only famous corporate raider, Carl Icahn - the man on whom, urban legend never tires of claiming, the character of Gordon Gekko was based - enters the interminable Microhoo fray, I am reminded of my long-standing hope that next on his list of takeover targets will be the McDonalds corporation. Because then, you see, every newspaper will do a headline saying "Icahn has cheezburger?", and afterwards every newspaper will have to run yet another explanation of what a lolcat is (or by then was). And we can all laugh at them.   

Adrian Monck points today to News Spectrum, a news visualisation tool, and suggests we "go and have a play". From the Neoformix blog:

"It is a visualization of the words used for two topics in the latest results from Google News. One topic is coloured blue, the other red, and the associated words are coloured and positioned based on how highly they are associated with the two topics. Click on any word to see the related Google News results. This is a generalization of my recent Obama McCain News Spectrum that allows you to enter your own terms of interest."

I've been having a play. My very first thought was to see what happened if you enter not two news topics but two news sources. As it happens the results are...fascinating.

Locative wikipedia entries are now on Google Maps. Here for example is Google Maps with Wikipedia annotations for my bit of London.

And so we move another step towards an annotated world, in which I simply point my phone at things - buildings, parks, streets - and ask "what's that?"

(The other big Google Maps news, currently limited to the US, is of course real estate search - which brings us down a different road altogether in which I point at buildings and ask "how much do you want for it?")
 

Reading the ever-fascinating Grant McCracken recently, I discovered the following about Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen:

"Paul Allen, the Microsoft cofounder, has a yacht that is 416 feet long.  It cost something like a quarter of a billion dollars. It carries two helicopters. It's so large it cannot dock anywhere on the French Riviera. (That's why it needs those helicopters. They are the only way to get to port.)"

As I commented to Grant, think for a moment about what this means for Microsoft. Even in his leisure time, the company's co-founder has chosen to over-engineer something so cumbersome that it is incompatible with any existing user interface and requires a hugely expensive work-around to be of any use at all. Microsoft's problems are truly in the DNA.

It keeps coming true. Umair keeps saying it. Recently YCombinator's Paul Graham said it as well. Build something actually useful and worry about the business model later and - so long as it really is a useful something - you'll figure out a way to make money out of all those users in the end.

Google famously came up with a business model relatively late in life. Craigslist only implemented one at all to increase the listing costs for spammers and scams to prohibitive levels.

Now Mozilla reckons it can use its browser to collect better behavioural surfing data than the incumbent (Hitwise, comScore, Alexa) providers. There's a lot of money to be made of providing genuinely reliable market data for the web. Opt-in collection at the browser level ticks all the boxes - comfortable fit with the way the product is naturally used rather than a "monetising" add-on, genuinely useful, not evil.

Here's hoping they can make it work. The web needs accurate market data (it's laughable, really, that this most measurable medium really has worse data than TV and print). Mozilla deserves the money and - unlike Phorm, unlike Facebook, unlike even Google really - I trust them to do something good and useful with both the data and the money they stand to make from it. Ultimately, that's the position you need to be in to operate a service that relies on being trusted with millions of peoples' data*.

*A note perhaps not just for Google but for HMG

David Brooks writes in today's NYT (HT MR):

"In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism."

I'm not sure that quite takes it far enough. I think the real challenge to religion as a cultural artefact is going to come from people accepting the agnostic evidential position that the existence of the divine is fundamentally empirically insoluble, but go on from there to nonetheless reject theism, viz that even if god turns out to exist, "he" has no business passing judgement on humanity either individually or collectively. The antitheist who arrives - to his considerable and quite justified surprise - at his final judgement asks only of the judge "by what right?".

Atheism seems to me a needless acceptance of religion's framing of the debate. We don't know whether god is there, any more than we know Russells' teapot is there. So let's say just for the sake of argument the china teapot fans are right. The real argument then becomes "so what?", and one possible answer is "so nothing". Creation does not necessarily confer rights of judgement, especially on terms that happened to be written down in antiquity by - as Joseph Heller so memorably has Chaplain Tappman put it - "people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall".

Did I mention we have baby foxes in our garden? Well we do. They're lovely. (I fear I'll go all Tony Soprano when they grow up and run away. Still, at least they can't fly. Not that flying foxes wouldn't be pretty cool.)

An entertaining plea for less strident car ads from Giles Coren comes in today's Times. He suggests a future script for the things:

"Here's a car, it's much like all the others. If your own car is beyond repair this is one of the many essentially identical vehicles you might consider as a replacement."

Seconded - all future car ad script to take that form please.

(Admittedly any sort of enthusiasm for cars is utterly mysterious to me, from that alleged "sport" Formula Driving Round And Round In A Big Circle Until All But One Of Those Ludicrously Fragile Cars Has Crashed Or Broken Down Again, to what happens on Top Gear to the appeal of Jeremy Clarkson. Maybe car ads are exciting to people who care about cars. Then again, those people also seem to know about cars and will presumably therefore make informed buying decisions, so I'm back to square one as to what showing millions of hours of ads for dozens of utterly indistinguishable means of getting from A to B is really imagined to achieve. Perhaps simply no-one likes to buy a car they've never heard of.)

Ah, wifi in the garden, one of the better inventions of the early C21st. Apart from wifi I expect the main achievement of our generation will be remembered as the perfection of that strange waddle that allows a person to carry a full cup of hot coffee in an overcrowded public place. People have got incredibly good at that in the decade or so since Starbucks became ubiquitous and I occasionally wonder whether there's any proper use humanity could make of that widespread, entirely newfound and rigorously practiced talent.

Or indeed what else we could have learned instead in the same amount of time. I doubt it's a whole Wikipedia's worth of social surplus (already, I'm sure you'll agree, the standard measure of wasted man-hours - we should clearly start measuring our wasted hours in nano- or pico-wikipedias). But it might be close.

The title of this post refers to the silliest piece of direct marekting I ever received. It came on a spam email a year or so ago. 100 cars! Clearly what every customer dreams of is an improbably valuable prize that's also a logistical headache.

Today I got a close second through the post, an "exclusive 3 for 2" offer - from a shoe company. (You can see it here.) Sure, I know what they mean...but hey. 3 for 2 on shoes. Tell your three-legged friends.

Lloyd Shepherd picks up the John Lanchester article I referenced yesterday, and highlights yet another excellent passage:

"The problem with ‘balance’ is partly a problem with the way science is reported. ‘Balance’ works, sort of, as a way of discussing politics in a two-party system. (Though it has to be said that the remorseless polarisation, whereby I say yah because you said boo, is one main reason for the decreased interest in party politics.) Since the climate debate has been polarised on left-right lines in the US, it has seemed appropriate to the media to treat it as a polarised issue, one on which there are two schools of thought, which, in respect of the science, it isn’t: there is one school of thought, and a few nutters."

I liked that bit too - it reminded me of a tale my geography-studying friends used to tell at university. Apparently one lecturer would begin his course on glaciation with the statement that were "nominally two schools of thought concerning glaciation - the extreme views of Kelloway, and the truth", and go on to demolish the former in short order.

Whenever I'm confronted by this "balance" chimera in news reporting - especially as it pertains to the willingness of journalists to pander to the agenda of the (let's face it, unremittingly evil) global warming deniers - I remember that lecturer, and reflect that that's what "balance" really looks like, when the commentator has the expertise and the confidence to cut through the fog of dissenting views and present the audience with an accurate picture of the current expert consensus. (Or as we say more commonly in English, "the truth".)

"Balance" is what you default to if the reporter, commentator, anchor or other journalist simply doesn't have the expertise to adjudicate between two ostensibly plausible points of view and call "bullshit" on the one that's wrong. "Balance" is a chimera to disguise the fact that while a global-warming-denying pseudo-scientist knows a lot less about global warming than a real scientist, he still knows plenty more than the guy on the TV who gets to interview him. Enough, say, to pull the wool over the eyes of that interviewer and by extension the public for more than a decade with the pretence that there's still a debate going on about man-made climate change. There simply isn't a debate - there is, as Lanchester reminds us, "one school of thought and a few nutters".

I pointed earlier in the year to Jeremy Burke's research showing that "the desire to appear unbiased leads to information loss". It's still true. Better than balance, we need the news presented to us by people who, like the geography lecturer of yore*, have the expertise and confidence to get the extreme minority view out of the way in a couple of sentences and go on to explain to us what legitimate experts consider the truth.

*1994 doesn't feel like yore really. Not yet, anyway.

Found via a Facebook ad (those things do work after all!), PickUpPal puts drivers in touch with people who want to share a trip. So if I'm driving from London to Yorkshire this afternoon*, I can have a look on the site and see if anyone wants a lift - and get paid for it. Or if I want to get to Oxford on Saturday I can see whether anyone is going from near my house and/or for less than the price of a couple of train tickets. Like the brilliant Park at my House, PickUpPals uses the web to provide a peer-to-peer solution for a real-world problem that has historically only been solveable by businesses. This is exactly what the web is for - saving people money and hassle by coordinating effort properly. Love it.

(Turns out Mashable reviewed it earlier in the year as "eHarmony for hitchers". So I'm late to this party. So it goes.)

*Alas, I am not

Yesterday's Times reported that Microsoft is not pursuing any further acquisitions after the Yahoo deal broke down and will "go it alone". Today's reports that Microsoft has approached Facebook about a possible takeover. Errr...

More than a year ago MySpace News launched as a feeble aggregator, a Digg clone that I (and everyone) called a squandered opportunity. The last thing the web needed (then or now) was another generic news filter - as Scott Karp points out, publishing and republishing the same news story in thousands of different publications and filters merely serves to diminish the marginal value of each version.

What MySpace has always needed to do is tap its vast, unique resource of user-generated content and turn that content into a coherent news channel. I am, therefore, very impressed with Screen Junkie, their celeb site/channel that launched in the UK this week.

As Jeff and others have been arguing for really quite a while now, what news outlets really need is to deliver genuinely unique news and comment rather than rehashed wire copy or generic reviews of the same national or global phenomena; they need original material and unique sources; and they need authentic voices rather than allegedly neutral, balanced anchors. With Screen Junkie MySpace seems to have cracked the puzzle that has eluded a lot of respected, veteran news outlets. By tapping the real, unique benefits that its vast army of daily content-creators provide, MySpace takes the concept of news content creation in the information age a pretty considerable leap forward.

From an excellent piece on climate change by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books, HT the Guardian's Charles Arthur

"Our material culture is based on science in a way so profound that our attitude to it approaches a kind of faith. Arthur C. Clarke said that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is a remark beloved of SF fans, and endlessly quoted in discussions of what might happen if there were ever to be contact between humans and aliens (or time travel etc). Its real sting is that it is a description of the world we already inhabit. Electric light and power, and television, and computers, and fridges, not to mention cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust: we don’t know how they work, but we’re happy to benefit from using them. We may have a rough understanding of scientific method, and even a rough Bill Brysonish sense of some of the science involved, but that is about it; our attitude contains significant components of faith and trust and incomprehension, while at the same time we are grateful for the wonders modern science has brought us."

So true. The relationship between tech support and everyone else increasingly reminds me of that between priesthood and laity - they intercede on our behalf with the incomprehensible and capricious forces that govern our lives. (This can't be a remotely original thought: still, I don't recall where I might have seen it before.)

I strongly recommend the whole article, which isn't really about our slightly dysfunctional relationship with technology but our profoundly dysfunctional relationship with global warming. Another favourite bit:

"I don’t think I can be the only person who finds in myself a strong degree of psychological resistance to the whole subject of climate change. I just don’t want to think about it. This isn’t an entirely unfamiliar sensation: someone my age is likely to have spent a couple of formative decades trying not to think too much about nuclear war, a subject which offered the same combination of individual impotence and prospective planetary catastrophe." 

I've been using the Internet since anyone except TBL had noticed there was a web on it. Indeed, one of the very first things I ever did with it was play games with friends over a network (some early version of Warcraft? Fantasy Empires? Something like that.) So I guess I shoudn't be quite so childishly impressed that a Wii, a wireless router and a copy of Mario Kart lets me race against my mate in Yorkshire. While I'm in London. But actually, really...how fucking cool is that?

(The facility to race in realtime against people in Osaka or Seoul, with names that aren't rendered in an alphabet I can understand, impresses me a lot less for some reason.)

More from Spook Country - this time protagonist Hubertus Bigend is explaining the state of the music industry to an ex-musician from a band called The Curfew. It is probably the best short history of the industry I've seen.

"In the early 1920s," Bigend said, "there were still some people in this country who hadn't yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That's less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a 'recording artist'" - making the quotes with his hands - "took place towards the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing that which they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn't reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star, as we knew her" - and here he bowed slightly, in her direction - "was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media."

"Of-?"

"Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world."

"As opposed to?"

"Comprising it."

Much (most) of what we call media is currently in an - historically - anomalous situation. Pretty much all of the major forms of popular entertainment can be instantly and endlessly reproduced by amateurs. TV, film, music, even a lot of games, to the point that they become effectively public goods. The market for cinemas is broken because - beyond the advantages of the size of the screen - the business is all about gatekeeping something that has become ubiquitous. So for TV, so for music, so - we seem forever on the verge of finding - for books.

But this apparently natural, allegedly inevitable transition to ubiquitous media - media as "free as the air", as Prince liked to say before he realised the real fun was in suing his fans - could be the merest blip in the history of media technology. You can at least envisage the beginnings of a swing of the pendulum the other way when watching Beowulf in 3D at the Imax (try downloading that experience off the Internet to watch at home). Sure, a big room in which you show films that you pretend are new or exclusive is now obvious nonsense...but envisage a media technology that really provides an experience that can't be replicated at home, at least for the next thirty years (except by millionaires), and you've suddenly got a business model again.

Not that this will help the music industry a jot. Charging money to reproduce music was indeed "a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years". But we draw the wrong conclusion if we try to learn from that the - beguilingly attractive - lesson that all media is on the road to becoming inevitably as free as the air. All you need to believe today is that more media technologies are already on their way. Of course they are.

From William Gibson's brilliant Spook Country:

"Then why aren't more people doing it? How's it different from virtual reality? Remember when we were all going to be doing that?" The yellow rectangle was made of die-cast hollow metal, covered with glossy paint. Part of a toy.

"We're all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn't need the goggle, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right? The locative, though, lots of us are already doing it. But you can't just do the locative with your nervous system. One day, you will. We'll have internalised the interface. It'll have evolved to the point where we forget about it. Then you'll just walk down the street..." He spread his arms, and grinned at her.

"In Bobbyland", she said.

"You got it."

This is the big one, the one that'll make the web and the Internet and games that take nigh on half a billion dollars in their first week look like a minor distraction, a sideshow or at best a precursor to the main event: an interface that seamlessly overlays a locative virtual environment on the corporeal world. So I can walk around New York playing Grand Theft Auto XIV with the other half million people who have bought into that particular virtuality, while you're playing some LRP World of Stacraft with a different half million guys in the very same space. Over to the endlessly fascinating Grant McCracken:

"I love the idea of sharing New York City with people who are playing an Area/code virtual game as a result of which the city takes on new drama and urgency that completely involves them but remains invisible to me."

You can already see the beginnings of this in PacManhattan and the - now sadly defunct - Botfighters. Incidentally, if you're long virtuality you should be short as hell on real estate. When I take my exodus to the virtual world and start living in a castle made of pixels I'm not taking half a million quid's worth of bricks and mortar with me. From that point my postal address will probably be a shipping crate.

New word coined in a Freudian slip by a friend over dinner last night while watching the election results

Proletise \PRO-luh-tyz\, intransitive verb: to try and persuade the underclass