- links for 2008-05-11
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Fantastic set of pictures showing Ibrox Park being rebuilt in what must have been the late 70s or early 80s. The three new stands cost £20m, and were funded entirely by supporters.
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- links for 2008-05-06
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Fun-looking GTD app for the Mac
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Hammersley found the full version of Nike’s “Take it to the next level” ad - it’s very clever, and Now I Will Buy Their Boots
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- Where we find the time
When I tell friends that, chez Tosh, we tend to watch TV while using our laptops as well, they tend to ask - with concerned faces - after the state of the household. So, speaking at Internet World earlier this week, I was relieved to find we’re not that unusual. Panel chair Mike Butcher asked who shared the habit; three-quarters of the room stuck their hands up. Hurrah.
That question, and some of the subsequent discussion, got me thinking about a talk given last week in San Francisco by Clay Shirky. It was, as ever, wildly clever, and re-reading it this week reminded me of some of its wonderful sense. Do go read it all.
Shirky sums up, with great elegance, where people are getting the time to build the web - to read web pages and watch YouTube, create Wikipedia pages, upload those Flickr pictures, issue pokes on Facebook and play games across the ether. It’s all to do with the “cognitive surplus” that has, for decades, been used up or masked by TV (it used to be suppressed by gin). We’ll “spend” some of that TV-viewing surplus doing other things online, thinks Shirky.
“It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?”
A big deal, indeed, and especially if you own a media company which, previously, filled some of that cognitive gap - either with TV, or another product. Huge, unifying cultural events remain important - hence the rise of “watercooler TV” talent shows and the importance of big sporting events to broadcasters. At the other end, narrow niche content that’s very appealing to a small number of people should also thrive.
The pressure, as far as I can see, goes on the squishy middle; generalist entertainment or information that might pass the time but fulfills no specific need, and which hits no heights in terms of quality. Unfortunately, a lot of traditional media content fits that bill, and the web gives us access to the very best examples of it anyway.
This is why the ongoing shift in media consumption presents such challenges. It’s not just YouTube hurting TV. It’s not just Craigslist hurting newspapers. If you’re generalist and, because you’re not a very good generalist, have relied on geographical monopoly to stay alive, then… life’s going to be hard, and Shirky has done a very good job of explaining why.
- links for 2008-04-30
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Richard Silverstein’s happy to be joining the CiF roster, and makes some interesting points about validation of expertise - or otherwise - in this new world
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- Did AOL steal my work? I need your help…
OK - one for all you copyright gurus out there…
In an incident that may make you laugh, given my day job, I reckon a damned MSM company - AOL - has stolen a photograph I took to illustrate a post, as seen above.
The image was nothing special - this snap of Alcatraz I took while in San Francisco a few years ago - but the AOL blog Gadling used it to illustrate a piece (if you click through, that’s not my image on there now). As you can see, they stuck my name on the bottom of the image and linked back to the original Flickr page, but my position is they did that in breach of the Creative Commons license I use on Flickr, which clearly forbids using the image for “commercial purposes”.
Sticking my image on their corporately-owned, advertising strewn page is, in my book, a commercial purpose. They’re using my content as part of their editorial proposition.
I complained on April 12, when I found they’d been using the image (for around two months) and they removed it quite quickly. It took until yesterday to send me an email, however, saying:
“The picture in question was taken from a public gallery on Flickr and used for an editorial purpose, not a commercial use. Gadling used a thumbnail sized photo which linked back to the original source and which provided you with attribution. The important distinction here is that it is not the user of the photo that must be examined. In this instance, the use of the photo was for an editorial purpose and therefore allowed under the creative commons license you granted.”
Now, to my mind this is close to the old “it’s on the internets so must be free” excuse of old. They’re augmenting that by saying I shouldn’t look at the publisher of the page - big ol’ ugly AOL - but the use, which was editorial. Does that make it free? I doubt it, but I can’t be sure.
So I’m interested in this on two levels. First, are they right? Is this particular level of CC license such that, in fact, a large corporation can use your work on their commercial site without paying up? If that’s the case, I think there are lots of CC users out there who should know. What is the commercial purpose that CC license forbids if it’s not something like this? I’ve no problem with anyone using an image licensed for commercial use… but this? I’ve heard lawyers in the UK snort derisively at the whole CC idea… is it, in fact, pretty much useless?
Second, if AOL are wrong, I’d be surprised if they haven’t used a bunch of images in this way - there may be quite a few people being ripped off. It must be a rich source of free photography for them.
That said, it’s not the money I’m interested in - I’ll happily donate that to charity, if someone with expert knowledge can help me prove the principle. This seems like something that would be interesting to pursue. If anyone can help, or knows someone who can, do let me know in the comments, or by email.
- links for 2008-04-28
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The future has arrived, on jailbroken iPhones at least.
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- links for 2008-04-26
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I’ve been sitting thousands of miles away gawping at some lovely photography around the area I was brought up
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- Fake Steve Jobs on the future of digital media
Forbes magazine journalist Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, has given an entertaining keynote here on the last day of Web 2.0. I think - although I may have missed someone - that he’s the only big media staffer to be given time on a stage during the event.
What he writes on his blog becomes, of course, great keynote fodder; geek humour, plenty of visual gags to keep the crowd entertained. And, by God, Steve Jobs is rich raw material.
Of interest to me is that Lyons’ story is also a cautionary tale for big (old) media’s digital departments who might be tempted to ignore colleagues in print. I hadn’t known that Forbes Digital knocked him back several times for a job, even just a blog, before he kicked off his site. Even if they’d said yes, it doesn’t sound a lot like they’d have let him adopt the controversial persona he adopted for his Blogger.com site, initially written anonymously.
The games he played before being stripped of that anonymity isn’t a tale that Forbes Digital bosses will enjoy hearing played back. Having been rejected, again, by his magazine’s digital arm, he emailed a boss at Forbes as Fake Steve to ask if he’d be interested in taking him on. The Forbes boss, not knowing he was emailing someone who was already an employee on the old print side, sent back a fawning email saying, in essence, “yes”. In the meantime, Forbes Publisher Richard Karlgaard joined in the chase to unmask Fake Steve, all the while also emailing over storyline ideas for Fake Steve.
Lyons makes them all sound like utter halfwits. He refers to Forbes a couple of times in the keynote while flicking wanker gestures over his shoulder. His corporate paymasters must have a strong sense of humour.
Beyond the gags and clear conversion to the blogging world, Lyons retains a very traditional media perspective. In a slightly half-baked way towards the end of his talk, he offers up that big media is really starting to get the web, and presents as slightly inevitable that - now they’ve grasped what’s going on - they’ll come to dominate it.
Maybe, he offers as consolation to this crowd, some blog publishers will become big media too, by implication suggesting that will be the web world’s contribution to the media landscape.
It’s an odd message to come now, at the end of a conference where big media has been almost entirely absent, where all the energy and thinking about how content evolves is coming from technology companies, not journalists or traditional media. Unless Yahoo counts as traditional media, which has been suggested…
That portion of his keynote is greeted with silence. I don’t think many here really believe him.
- links for 2008-04-25
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I’m obviously wildly excited. I hope they recreate the Liberator - although it was blown up in 1980 or so. I had a model one when I was wee.
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- links for 2008-04-24
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“LocationAware’s goal is to help drive the standardization of how a user’s geolocation is exposed to a website through the browser.”
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