HogeTown

Citizen journalism the winner in News Ltd vs Google

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

There’s a lot to chuckle about in Gordon Farrer’s piece about how much of a threat News Ltd poses to Google.

In no particular order, they are:

• content aggregators care much about Rupert Murdoch putting content behind a paywall,
• increasing the amount of media content in controlled spaces (ie the iPad) could significantly undermine Google’s business model,
• it will become easier to stop people breaking DRM and other copy-protection measures in the future, not harder, and
• the implication that radio stations, TV channels and other internet sites don’t read newspapers and re-use the content.

They’re all worth having a laugh at for various reasons. I’m surprised a technology writer doesn’t make more about how Google structures its search algorithim. I’m also surprised a technology writer thinks the golden age of copy protection is apparently ahead of us, not behind.

But the most interesting thing in Farrer’s piece is that citizen journalists, bloggers and tweeters have more to fear from News Ltd and other old media organisations locking up content than the other way around. Farrer makes the not unreasonable comment that if traditional news content was successfully locked away, tweeters, bloggers and citizen journos would have to go elsewhere for content to ‘riff’ off. It’s a big if but even if he was right in saying it could be done successfully, it doesn’t matter. News Ltd, Fairfax and other big media outlets should be more afraid of citizen journos having reduced opportunities to riff off their content than the other way round.

People are already paying less attention to traditional media, they’re digesting less traditional media and diversifying their sources when they do. They’re paying more attention to their Twitter feeds and Facebook updates than ever before because they feel that the content is relevant and that it matters. Locking conternt up further encourages more of that, not less. News Ltd and Fairfax et al should do everything they can to encourage bloggers and tweeters to hang off their every word.

To do otherwise risks speeding up a virtuous circle that has already begun and risks leaving old media out in the cold.

Tags: blogging, digital publishing, fairfax, internet, iPad, Media, newsltd, newspapers, Publishing, twitter
Posted in Journalism, Media, Publishing, Technology | No Comments »

Printed on Greenpeace approved pixels: Random House e-book fail

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy is a great book. Random House not so good on the e-book basics though.

Tags: digital publishing, ebooks, Publishing
Posted in e-books, Publishing, Reading, Technology | 2 Comments »

Why Cory Doctorow (and others) are wrong about the iPad

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Cory Doctorow has a great rant on Boing Boing about why he won’t buy an iPad and why he thinks you shouldn’t buy one either. It’s a great article, full of passion and well thought through arguments. Problem is it’s mostly bunkum.

He makes a number of points in the article that are worth looking at one by one.

Incumbents made bad revolutionaries
His argument here seems to be that Apple is more interested in using the great technical features of the iPad to either restrict its use or find a way to make people pay for it.

The example he uses is the Marvel iPad comic app. The argument is the app – and by extension the iPad – is bad because, for example, you can’t lend someone else your comic. Put aside the fact that it’s really an anti-DRM rant (which I mostly agree with) he forgets one simple thing. The device actually makes it extraordinarily easy to lend someone your comic – hand them your iPad. It is in this way exactly as easy to lend someone a comic on your iPad as it is with a physical comic book.

And if Apple gets this right, they’ll help craft – or at least speed up – the development of a whole new computing and media model - tablet computing.

That leads nicely into the next argument…

Infantilizing hardware
Tonight I had leftover pizza for tea. I heated it in the microwave and then put it under the grill for a minute to crisp it up. I punched some buttons on the microwave and it did what it needed to do – help me consume my dinner. I don’t need to be able to take it apart, repait it and install Linux on it. I just need it to work – like my television, my bed and my table.

But Cory’s argument here seems to suggest that if I’m only using a device to consume something I’m somewhat less likely to survive in the brave new world of the 21st century than someone who can take a device apart and put it back  together.

I can enjoy consuming a book even if I don’t know how to pull the spine off, reorder the pages and put it back together again. It  should be okay that not everyone wants to take everything apart all the time.

Boing Boing is a site supported by ad revenue. I bet there’s a strong correlation between the rates for those adverts and the number of people simply consuming the site – page hits or unique visitors. I hope the number of people actively interacting with the site by adding comments also factors in there but I doubt simple consumers of the site take a back seat when it’s time to crunch the numbers.

Wal-Martization of the software channel
According to Wikipedia there are around 150,000  third-party applications in the App Store. If Apple was the only computer maker in a regulated market I’d be more likely to accept the claim that “the iStore lock-in doesn’t make life better for Apple’s customers or Apple’s developers.”

But again this is an anti-DRM argument, that’s not (or shouldn’t be) restricted to the iPad. Clearly developers and customers aren’t stupid. That’s why more than three billion downloads have been made from the App Store.

The Wal-Mart analogy is a bad one too – at least on one level. The development of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and now the iPad has not seen a massive takeover of an existing market, it’s fostering a massive expansion of a new, previously small market.

Journalism is looking for a daddy figure
It’s not the device’s fault if journalists and bloggers get sucked into the spin from Apple’s marketing team. Indeed, arguing that Rupert Murdoch is silly because he thinks putting up a pay-wall will save his newspaper empire in the long-run should not be confined to discussion about the iPad.

Gadgets come and gadgets go
I’ve got some sympathy for the argument that “the real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.” But that’s the real crux of the whole post. Until he gets to here, Cory seems to be arguing that the iPad can’t won’t and shouldn’t change things. But here, he pretty much gives up the ghost and you almost get the sense that he knows it will.

Tags: digital publishing, iPad, rant
Posted in e-books, Publishing, Reading, Technology, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Penguin gets it

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

A quick preview of some of Penguin’s plans for books on the iPad. Shiny!

It’s followed by a less shiny but more interesting talk from Penguin CEO John Makinson about how publishers will become more relevant, not less, and how they’ll be taking a giant leap into a distribution model that lets them play around with pricing and access a lot more consumer data. You can see that video over at PaidContent.org.

Tags: digital publishing
Posted in e-books, Publishing, Reading, Technology, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The biggest button of all

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

In February 1962 John Glenn became the the first US astronaut to go into orbit. His Mercury 6 capsule is on display in the National Air and Space Museum and this photo I took of it is my current favourite from my whole trip.

I like that even behind the perspex designed to protect the capsule you can see the designer’s clear priorities based on the jolly big ABORT button within easy reach.

The capsule Yuri Gagarin had used the year before to become the first human in space was designed to have him eject following re-entry and parachute his way back to Earth. A handy design feature that doubled as a built in abort button. Smart but kinda takes the fun out of it, don’t you think?

Tags: space
Posted in Technology | No Comments »

The Marvellous March of Technology

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Amateur photography is one area of the digital revolution that didn’t suffer the same take-no-prisoners approach of the big media companies towards music and video. And we’re all better off for it. On our three week overseas trip we took a total of 951 photographs. Pre-digital, we would have been talking about having to purchse and then pay to develop 40 rolls of 24-photo film.

One of the joys of digital photography is that it allows for opportunistic photos like these:

Kate took the photo of this kid who was on the six hour flight from Washington to San Francisco with the rest of his family. He couldn’t have been more than two-and-a-half. His mum had gotten up to go to the bathroom and left him watching his portable DVD player. Funny thing was every now and then the kid would tap the thing like it was a keyboard.

And the morning after I took a photo of this:

We stopped in for breakfast at this great little diner and the whole time we were there this old guy was using his iPhone. And he was a pro – resizing websites on the fly with the pinch technique and tapping away at e-mails.

But it all got me thinking about how different things would have been 10 years ago. While some people might have had a digital camera, I didn’t. And there weren’t any portable DVD players or iPhones around to take cute pictures of. But even if they were – if I was using a camera where I’d paid $4 for film and another chunk of change to develop I may not have taken either .

But because I have a digital camera and there are plenty of portable DVD players and iPods around I could take a picture of them without concern I was “wasting” film, copy them to my laptop and blog about it all.

Ain’t technology grand.

Tags: blogging, digital photography
Posted in Technology | No Comments »