Policy wonks (what is a wonk exactly?) Damian Tambini and Jamie Cowling survey the increasingly obstacle-strewn path to charter renewal for the BBC in FT Creative Business (you’ll need to subscribe to FT.com to see the article). It is fascinating to watch the quick collapse of the corporation’s untouchable status over the last few months. Forces are at work.
Month: March 2003
Digital radio’s revenge
Top media analyst Mathew Horsman says Cinderella media technology DAB may yet thrive but it could do so at the cost of the 3G operators. You need to subscribe to FT.com to see the article (I think – try it!).
cloning
With all the fuss about human cloning, I was pretty sure I’d find a good selection of books of essays on the topic. I could only find one: this post-Dolly volume from 1999. It turns out to be very good: very difficult to say no to a book whose cover promises “essays from experts ranging from Stephen Jay Gould to Andrea Dworkin”. There are dozens of good pieces here but I’ll quote Dworkin because, remarkably, she manages to collapse human cloning into the same narrative of despair she’s been selling for decades:
“And so I think the men who will clone the compliant women will control them both reproductively and sexually; and, in the process, they will destroy all human meaning: the men will abandon change for absolute control, any chance of intimacy for absolute power. Through cloning, especially, men will defeat death; and change, too, will die. Life will be power without love or freedom or grace.”
Clones and clones: facts and fantasies about human cloning, Martha C. Nussbaum, Cass R. Sunstein eds.
London’s economic strength
The Statesman last week has a pullout transcript of a round table discussion on the topic of ‘London’s economic strength’. There’s a PDF version here. The participants include Ed Balls, Chief Economic Adviser to The Treasury, Anne Seex, Chief Executive of Norwich City Council and various academics, agency heads and policy types. In the chair is David Walker whose Analysis programme I blogged yesterday.
And on… and on… A plug
When he was UK MD of Ariston, Giuliano Gnagnati brought you those mesmerising TV ads (“Ariston… and on… and on…”). Ariston was an obscure Italian brand ? sales and brand awareness soared. These days he’s running his own equally unorthodox online whiteware store Whitebox. You can buy a pretty good selection of the big brands plus Giuliano’s own Whitebox brand of economy machines and there’s a comparison feature that rates the machines honestly (for instance, there’s no attempt to push the Whitebox machines and they’ll often rate below competing brands). There’s a whole layer of really good survivor etailers out there ? no bullshit and no hard sell. Whitebox is one of them.
Country Code rebellion
Thanks to Kevin Werbach for linking to this excellent piece from The Register about this week’s meeting of the obscure group of organisations who look after the national top level domains (like .uk, .ca, .at etc.). Try not to nod off. This group and ICANN are squaring up for a punch up on a planetary scale.
War analysed
Always excellent David Walker opens the new series of BBC Radio 4’s Analysis with a subtle look at our definition of the national interest in the context of the planned attack on Iraq.
He talks to: Lord Owen, Lord Skidelsky, Professor Philip Bobbitt, Professor David Coleman and Professor Paul Hirst. You can listen to the show until next Thursday evening (13 March) here. Warning: if you haven’t made up your mind about the war yet, this programme won’t help. If you’d like some provocative material for your next row about it, there’s plenty here.
While we’re talking about Analysis, isn’t this programme the perfect candidate for a permanent archive of audio files? Could it hurt anyone to keep a whole series (or even more) online at a time? Taking down a programme of this quality just because the next one’s come along seems crazy.
Oh God, I’m a moonie
Dave Green has got my number. He’s written a well-timed (but quite gentle) debunking of our collective blogging obsession and succeeded in making me feel distinctly uncomfortable about my twice-a-day habit, about the usefulness of the things I write and especially about the queasy comradeship of bloggers. We are, after all, cult members. Damn him! (and I can’t even trackback to his article!)
Toyota triumphs
I learn from the FT’s latest survey on the motor industry (which requires a subscription) that, in the midst of the longest recession of the modern era in its home territory, the mighty Toyota is in the ascendant. This year the business will make profits twice as large as any car manufacturer has ever made before and this is prinicipally because of an extraordinary rise in market share in the USA of over 50% in the last ten years while the big three US manufacturers (GM, Ford and Daimler Chrysler) continue to shred each other’s margins in a disastrous price war.
Barry Cox on broadcast
The third and fourth of Barry Cox’s lectures on the future of broadcasting, as reprinted by The Guardian. The third concerns the failure of competition in digital TV in the UK and the fourth the implications of next generation media technologies. These lectures are the most interesting intervention on the future of UK media I’ve read for a long time. His prognosis is discouraging and his prescription radical but, agree with him or not, Cox is the most important independent commentator on broadcast in the UK now.