Technovia

Google Gears for Safari beta release

It's been a long time coming, and it still looks very much a beta, but at last those of us who use Safari have our own version of Google Gears.

Richard Dawkins reads his email

Journalism is picking up the phone

My friend Danny recently reminded me of one of the smarter things that I've said. I'm glad Danny keeps track of those odd moments of lucidity, because I tend to forget all about them.

This particular gem came out of an argument we had years ago about the difference between blogging and journalism, and, as I put it, "journalism is picking up the phone".

There are two points to this. The first is that journalism involves research. It means more than just putting down what you think about something or doing a cursory Google search. It means actually making the effort to find out to find out some facts about what you're writing about, seeking out some experts and quoting them. For some kinds of journalism - notably news - that's all there is to it: if what you're reading is something that's "said by you" rather than someone else, you're failing in the job.

But it also implies something more than that. Saying that journalism means "picking up the phone" means that journalism is a social thing. Most of the job isn't writing - it's finding and cultivating sources, getting to know people, and getting to that point when you can pick up the phone and talk to someone about what you need to know.

As Danny points out, this means that lots of things which bloggers do are really journalism, and, contrariwise, lots of professional journalists don't really do journalism. Opinion columns, rewrites of feed-driven news stories, lifts from others are all not journalism: there's no aspect of "picking up the phone".

That's why I find stuff like the Telegraph's multiple-screen news room and constant feed-driven input (direct into journalist's brains in version 2.0) worrying. It encourages journalists not to get out, not to get to know people, not to nurture and develop sources. It just encourages them to rewrite the same stuff that everyone else is writing, never leaving that glorious high-tech news room.

SoundExchange Head Likes Pandora But Says It Needs Audio Ads | Listening Post from Wired.com

SoundExchange Head Likes Pandora But Says It Needs Audio Ads | Listening Post from Wired.com: "Simson makes some decent points in the video, then shows that he has no grasp of the concept that infinitely-replicable digital goods differ from physical goods that must be manufactured. 'Music can be free when Mercedes are free,' said Simson."

And the writer has no grasp of elementary economics. Digital goods don't have a zero cost to reproduce: they have lots of very small costs, from the cost of the computer you use to the cost of the electricity it takes to run, to the cost of the bandwidth to download a file. All very small, but still not free.

But more importantly, it costs someone's time to create the initial copy. This means that, while the price of any individual digital copy after the first one will trend towards zero, it will never actually reach it. It will never actually be free.

Anything which takes a human being time and effort to make will never be truly free, unless their labour has no value. They may choose to give it away; they may offset the cost of their time with some other activity; but it is never truly free in sense of having no price or having no value.

Techdirt: Has The Recording Industry Given Up On DRM For Streaming Music?

Techdirt: Has The Recording Industry Given Up On DRM For Streaming Music?:

"If these services are officially allowed to download MP3s to your desktop, is there anything illegal in then keeping the files?"

Umm... yes? The file is downloaded to your drive for a specific purpose (streaming it to your PC). You're not licensed to do anything else with it, including keeping it for another purpose (like sticking it on your iPod).

This is another example of the "I can do it so it's OK to do it" attitude that I complained about in my post on MuxTape.

Code isn't law, people.

LEAKED: First Shots of iPhone Nike+ Interface [Nike+]

LEAKED: First Shots of iPhone Nike+ Interface [Nike+]:

Yes, the Nike+ for iPhone is coming soon. I might even buy one. Except for the fact that I don't run. Nice interface, though.

(Via Robert Scoble's shared items in Google Reader.)

Time to give MobileMe another go

I'm told by people who I trust that MobileMe is now performing as it should, so I'm going to give it another week's trial and see how it goes. Will it really be "Exchange for the rest of us" this time? Tune in in seven days...

So Muxtape is shut. Golf-clap to the downloader writers

One of the things which irritates me immensely is that attitude that something is fine to do if it physically can be done. There's a great illustration of this in the thread discussing the Greasemonkey muxtape downloader script, in the interchanges between jstn (of Muxtape) and the authors of the script.

And now, surprise surprise, Muxtape is closed while it "works out some issues with the RIAA. Would those issues have something to do with the scripts which let people download music from it, rather than just streaming as the service intends?

Here's the point: If you hack a service to do something which is illegal, you are almost certainly going to cost that site time and legal fees. You are not being big. You are not being clever. You are being an asshole. Start taking some responsibility for your own actions and stop acting like a big, stupid smirking baby.

How much of a success is open source?

How much of a success is open source? In his musings on open source, and how ideas cross the chasm, Alan Patrick ponders the origin story of open source, and how it relates to a particular brand of utopianism.

"The problem of course, is that many of these Utopians are the dreamers and idealists who got in early and inspired so many others to join the movement in the first place. Without these enthusiastic early adopters, these ideas would never get off the ground to be in a position where the leaders do have to grasp the nettles."

Part of the problem, too, is that too many promises were made by open source evangelists who understood neither project management nor people management. Anyone who's even passingly familiar with project management knows that piling more "eyeballs" on a problem doesn't make it shallow: what you need are the right eyeballs, in the right context, at the right time. This becomes more and more true as projects become deeply complex: someone picking up the code of, say, MySQL today will have quite a long learning curve before they can meaningfully contribute to the project.

Next quarter may be good one for Apple in European smartphone market

While the iPhone has been the big smartphone hit in the US, in Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) Nokia continues to lead the pack, with a market share figure of 71.2% according to the latest figures for Q2 2008 by Canalys.

BlackBerry-maker RIM and Windows Mobile specialist HTC are in second and third place, with 7.2% and 7% respectively. Motorola and Samsung follow these two with 3.4% and 3.2%, while "Others" - including Apple - combine together to reach 8%.

However, it could be good news for Apple next quarter:

"Both HTC and RIM have been making steady progress toward the one million shipments per quarter mark in EMEA and are now very close to each other in market share terms, but it is possible that they will be overtaken by Apple in Q3 following the launch of the iPhone 3G in many countries in the region."

That, of course, implies that Apple will go from a market share of less than 3% to over 7%, which would be impressive growth. It would also be an indication that the iPhone has really arrived as a worldwide competitor.