The BBC and voting

We should probably keep an eye on this. Matt Jones, dreamer of this parish and information architect at the BBC, is working on an ambitious project intended to get us ‘reengaged’ with voting and with democracy in the widest sense. Here, Sian Kevill, Matt’s ‘sponsor’, who works in the office of the e-envoy, writes about the project at Open Democracy. Some people think projects like this represent the future of the BBC’s public service obligations in the networked era.

The end of language?

Azeem wonders if children submitting essays in txt msg language is a bad thing or just language evolving. I’m usually one of those ‘language is a living thing’ guys in these matters, laughing at the grammar pedants and vocabulary fascists (I like David Crystal on language change). There has to be some kind of limit, though, and I guess this might be it. No language is infinitely flexible, otherwise is ceases to be a language. Language evolves but, necessarily, within the bounds of shared comprehension.

As new vocabulary and new structures arrive they test the limits, keeping understanding in a constant state of tension – parents never quite understand their teenage kids but they manage to communicate and the language advances. Introductions and innovations are absorbed quickly (usually within a generation) but txt language requires too great an effort from non-speakers. It’s too jarring, too remote from the norm. But presumably it’ll fade away as interfaces become more transparent anyway…

Cable trauma

My latest Bowbrick at Large in The Guardian is about gloom and desperation in the TV business and the continued failure of the cable industry to wire up Broadband Britain. I really didn’t like it much when I sent it off. Weak, really. Anyway, it seems to have struck some kind of consumer chord – It’s only been up a couple of hours and I’ve had several emails along the lines of: “Too right, mate. The nightmare I’ve had getting service from NTL!” and “Telewest are such rubbish! 50 minutes on hold, then they deny I have an account at all!”.

Can you commoditise a commodity?

G Beato in The Guardian laments file sharing’s commoditisation of music. The piece is heartfelt but unhistoric. Music is ancient – older than language – but has changed more in the 75 years since recordings became available than in most of its history. More still in the fifty years since the 45 became pop’s day-to-day currency. Commoditisation began when songs could first be pressed into wax on an industrial scale. Music has been a commodity ever since.

File sharing, at worst, commodifies more efficiently. At best (and this is just me speculating), by ripping music from those nasty physical tokens, it may improve its status. What I like about the article, though, is Beato’s rhetorical alignment of the file sharers with the record labels against the increasingly marginalised artists. If he were honest with himself, though, Beato would admit that we have no idea how artists and music will really be affected.

Belgium in the West

There’s an excellent profile of Kofi Annan by Philip Gourevitch in the March 3rd issue of The New Yorker but it’s not at the web site, which is annoying. In looking for it, though, I learn from Simon Schama’s article about the history of European anti-Americanism that Baudelaire called America “the Belgium of the West”, which is funny.

McDecline

When McDonalds lost the disastrous McLibel case I used to say that it wouldn’t be the greens or the anti-globalisers that’d bring down the fast food giant but much more prosaic and unpredictable business problems – lifestyle changes, weird new competition (Frappuccino anyone?) and an exhausted brand. Hey! I was right.

“In the past, owner-operators were McDonald’s evangelists. Prospective franchisees were once so eager to get into the two-year training program that they would wait in line for hours when applications were handed out at the chain’s offices around the country. But there aren’t any lines today, and many existing franchisees feel alienated. They have seen their margins dip to a paltry 4%, from 15% at the peak. Richard Adams, a former franchisee and a food consultant, claims that as many as 20 franchisees are currently leaving McDonald’s every month.”

Business Week has an excellent survey of McDonalds’ mounting problems and a useful timeline (free registration required).

Business Week on Linux

Business Week goes big on the Linux Uprising:

“…and don’t be fooled by Linux’ harmless-looking penguin mascot, Tux: This stuff is shaking up the balance of power in the computer industry. It poses the biggest threat to Microsoft’s hegemony since the Netscape browser in 1995”

Amazingly enough, the tone of the article is a throwback to the hyperbolic language of the boom. You can almost feel the urgent need for some good news from the TMT sector. The penguin’s in the hot seat now. He better not let us down!

Dead Herring

In 1993 and 94, when I was learning about the net and about how to run a business and all the scary money stuff, I discovered a weird American business magazine in the same imported magazine outlet I went to for Wired and Mondo 2000 and all those xeroxed geek zines. It was called The Red Herring. It was from San Francisco and it became a major source of inspiration. It was more grown up than those other titles – definitely more Stanford B-School than The Haight – but no less exotic. Its territory was ‘over there’ – Silicon Valley – an almost mythic place I’d never visited but had been reading about for a decade. Ten years later, even after I’ve visited these places and driven along Highway 101 in my rented car and learnt that San Jose has approximately the charm of Slough, it still makes me sad to learn that the Herring is no more.

Wraparound

Check out this collection of 360 panoramas from Hans Nyberg in Denmark. He gathers Quicktime VR panoramas from around the world, like this gorgeous wraparound view from the top of The Monument in the City of London and these excellent, immersive street level views of the London war protests. Hans is also a bit of an expert on the creation of panoramas so I’m going to try to stitch together some images to make my own.