yelvington.com

With more than a whiff of the Halfbakery about it, the Naked UNbrella or Eco-Brolly appears to be a way of turning a newspaper into an emergency umbrella. It starts off as an 8cm plastic tube, and with a bit of unfolding of ribs and stretchers (I checked) you have something that might well keep a bit of a shower off. Follow the link to Yanko Design to see how it works. Rap a plastic bag around the paper first and I'm pretty sure you'd have a tolerably good umbrella - at least as good as those £5 ones I buy whenever it rains and promptly either lose or find has been destroyed by a slight breeze.

(From time to time I like to point out that while my ultimate employer, Associated Newspapers, happens to operate a number of newspapers including Metro this is my personal blog and my happening to be amused by something shouldn't be taken as anyone else here endorsing it. This is one of those times.)

"Google, Verizon, HP, Cisco and some others" are getting together to buy up patents, apparently on the basis that if they buy up all the tech patents they can't get sued spuriously by patent trolls. Seriously guys, this is 101 stuff - you buy up patents to stop the trolls suing you and you'll end up paying the market rate, ie the expected value of those patents to the trolls as lawsuit ammunition. At best, this policy will massively lower the barrier for entry to anyone who wants to take up a patent trolling career, since currently to make money you actually have to get a decision in your favour, which is expensive.

(What might work is a one-off, unrepeated patent troll amnesty where the big tech companies get together to buy them out, like the dictator amnesty that's sometimes proposed. But no-one seems to be suggesting that.) 

You've doubtless seen the Telegraph article about a man who sued his (ex)-friend for creating a fake Facebook profile in his name "including false information about his sexual orientation and political views" (gotta love that choice of words). What interests me is this bit: apparently his lawyer claims that:

"Mr Firsht values his privacy highly and it was the gross invasion of his privacy, namely having his personal details, including false details concerning his sexuality, laid bare for all to see on Facebook that caused him the most distress."

First: how is it invasion of privacy to make something up? It's not a "personal detail" that Neville Chamberlain used to molest budgerigars, it's a lie I just invented. So perhaps Mr Firsht's alleged homosexuality. Second: trying to safeguard your privacy by kicking off a court case about the cause celebre of the tech-blogging world is a move right out of the Alisher Usmanov school of keeping things quiet. Yesterday I didn't know or care who Mathew Firsht was, or that anyone was spreading lies about his sexuality. Today I'm writing about it. Perhaps later we'll see it up on Techmeme.

(HT Oliver Luft's news aggregator at Journalism.co.uk

News of a hilariously misconceived auto-filter run over the news comes from RightWingWatch in the US - apparently the American Family Association's OneNewsNow site was set to filter the word "gay" from an AP feed and replace it with "homosexual" throughout. (Why? I have no inkling what conservative cause is aided by this arbitrary substitution). No-one having thought it through properly, this left all of the articles about sportsmen Tyson Gay and Rudy Gay...well, you can see how this one ends. Screenshots over at the original article here.

To my mind the main driving force behind the housing market boom for the past thirty or so years has pretty obviously been homeowners' gradual accumulation of books. In the ten years I've been living in London I've reliably found it necessary to buy a bigger house every three years or so as my library has spilled out into the rest of the rooms and become unmanageable. I assume other homeowners are making similar calculations - a house, after all, being primarily somewhere to keep your books - and that this dynamic drives the so-called "property ladder" as people upgrade from a flat with a second bedroom large enough to take a few Ikea bookcases to a house with a couple of spare reception rooms that can be fitted wall-to-wall with shelves.

It can hardly be coincidence, after all, that the housing crash in both England and the US began at precisely the moment Amazon's Kindle came to the market, throwing the future value of large houses with lots of spare rooms into serious question. If in future books are to be read on a single device the size of a slimish volume, all I need is a studio apartment with a cupboard large enough to contain a few petabytes or so of drive, and I have no doubt other canny property investors have realised much the same and put their now-overlarge houses on the market in a collective panic, perhaps hoping to beat the rush. Too late, of course - it's hard to outwit the market.

And now economists Tim Harford and Tyler Cowen come along to throw yet more oil on this housing crisis fire - Tyler suggesting that throwing books away is the socially responsible course, and Tim claiming that book disposal is the emotionally mature response to reaising you can't cling on to every single thing in case you need it. What about the property crash guys? You're just making things worse. 

Update: (in case anyone is worrying that Jeff Bezos saw  what was going to happen to the rest of us poor saps and shorted property just before he launched Kindle, fret not - Jeff went long, very long, property last year buying a $30m mansion in Beverley Hills.)

Skewz, which I stumbled on via MR this morning, is yet another way of tagging the news - this time with perceived political affiliation, so stories are tagged by users with their apparent "bias" as either "liberal" or "conservative". Since urban legend has it that half of the Sun's readers in the 1980s thought the paper supported the Labour Party this sort of tagging may be more useful than is initially obvious.

Shiny Media is, understandably, far from chuffed that the BBC's Panorama spent three hours filming Shiny journalists for a programme (disclosure: one of whom, the editor of the splendid Hippyshopper, is a very dear friend) and then failed to credit the organisation or its websites.

"Researchers from Panorama contacted the Catwalk Queen team (btw Catwalk Queen is the UK’s most-read pure fashion website - compare it with Vogue, Cosmo and the others etc on Google Trends) and asked if they could film the team talking about why and how Primark had become so popular in the UK. The Panorama team then spent three hours filming at shiny offices, which basically cost Shiny nine hours worth of blogging.

The team’s opinions were widely used throughout the show and in many ways their views held the piece together. However while every other single person on the show received a credit along with their work title (Mary Portas got a plug for her business, Yellowdoor, twice), the Catwalk team were not credited in any way. Instead only their names were used and they were billed as fashionistas or Primark fans."

Which behaviour leads Charles Arthur (HT for the quote above) to observe that journalists often treat bloggers pretty shoddily and Neil McIntosh points out the many ways in which the BBC could foster more innovation in UK media but, err, doesn't. (When your website is funded by the country's only hypothecated poll-tax to the tune of seventy-five million quid it is...quite staggering to overshoot that budget by another thirty-six million. But I digress.)

For my own part, I have to confess this looks like a single error by the Beeb rather than something systemic. When I've been interviewed by anyone at the Corporation they've always handled my detailed and presumably slightly unusual request for credit - to credit me solely as the writer of this blog and not imply that my views might represent those of my employer - completely professionally. And yet...even if it was an isolated error to use the Shiny Media journalists without attribution rather than a more general malaise, it's one that deserves apology and restitution. (Does the BBC website even have a dedicated erratum column? Can't find one, except on a programme-specific level.) Everyone loves the Shinies for building up the UK's only commercial blogging network and it's a shame to see them buggered about.

(Still, hopefully in the usual way the backlash from Panorama's lack of attribution will get them more exposure than the original programme ever would. Now let's try to get the Pope to condemn them for something and see the thing really take off.)

Those of you who were kind enough not to groan too loudly at my last foray into Lolcat-punning (thx Charles, love your work) might join me today in wondering why the news that TLDs have been opened up - so that pretty much anything can be registered as a top-level domain - seems to have prompted no-one to run the headline "ICANN has .cheezburger?"

Update: obviously other bloggers have come up with the headline before. Bloggers are funny and clever. I'm talking mainstream/mass media here, who are either less funny and clever or - understanding what writing for a mass audience entails - don't design their headlines solely to amuse approximately twelve geeks.

I used to think the most depressing couple of sentences were the reply of Admiral Jellicoe when asked what he had done to combat German submarines attacking the British fleet - "we have done nothing. There is nothing we can do." The mere notion of having to give that answer to any important question leaves me momentarily reeling. I think Tyler Cowen may have pipped the Admiral to the post today with a new entry though - "I observe that humans aren't very good at solving large-scale collective action problems". Assuming I'm right in thinking that our survival increasingly depends on such solutions, that's really not a very cheery thought.

TechCrunch reports that news aggregator Topix is to launch classifieds from six content partners - Eventful, Zap2It, Livedeal, InfoUSA, Apartments.com and Informa Research. Which looks to me a slightly odd list. Topix has investment from Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, three of the five also behind Classified Ventures and three of the four behind CareerBuilder. And yet only one of the six cited sources - Apartments.com - is a Classified Ventures business (which incidentally may or may not work well alongside the existing property listings deal announcedin April with Trulia) and one of the others - Zap2It - operated by Tribune. I wonder what happened to Cars.com, CareerBuilder et al?

(HT: Journalism.co.uk)

My friend and colleague Nik has a video up of the new Second Life Northcliffe House (home of my employers DMGT). SLURL included at the end of the vid.

As Jack Lail points out, it looks like the guy who broke news of Tim Russert's death on Wikipedia has been fired because, hey, you're only allowed to break news if you've been sprinkled with the magic journalism powder*. If the best this branch of The Cathedral can do to preserve the imaginary distinction between newsgatherers and non-newsgathereres is to have amateur newsgatherers fired, things are worse for professional journalism than we thought. 

*I'm sure Steve Yelvington called it this once, in late 2004. Now can't find the reference. I outsource my memory to Google and this is what happens...

June 22nd is one of the most important dates in the history of the modern world, and I like to hope it represents one of the last important setbacks for the age of reason, for it was on June 22nd 1633 (375 years ago yesterday) that Galileo Galilee was forced by the Vatican to recant the heliocentric model.

It was not, of course, until Oct 31st 1992 that the Vatican got around to apologising to Galileo and admitting that the earth probably did travel around the sun after all.

(Most interestingly of all, this fantastically-overdue apology was itself the product of an internal enquiry instigated by Pope John Paul II in 1979 and lasting an inexplicably drawn-out 13 years. One can but wonder what those 13 years were spent actually doing. Did they build their own primitive telescope from scratch to check whether Galileo was right? Or did they waste more than a decade asking themselves the question, over and over, "is there really no way at all we can persuade humanity that the earth is still the centre of the universe and that we were right all along?")

Happily (and this is of course not an original point, it was made far better by Bertrand Russell in his exemplary Why I am not a Christian and recently most eloquently by Douglas Adams in is there an artificial god?) there is a lesson we can all take away from this debacle. The history of superstition over the last few hundred years has been a history of intellectual retreat; a history of the adherents, leaders and apologists for superstition either having to admit that they were mostly wrong or looking absolutely ridiculous when they don't. As we learn more about the nature of the universe, the need for myth recedes and the credibility of the people pushing those myths diminishes. Over to Mr Adams:

"This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise."

June 22nd is an excellent day to remember how the intellectual, psychological and emotional crutches that saw our distant goatherding ancestors safely across their unmapped deserts become less useful every day. The earth really does go around the sun, and irrespective of what may have been said under duress the best of us knew it was true more than 375 years ago.

I wonder which fallacy they'll have to abandon next. And how long they can keep retreating before there is nowhere left to go.

I just rang up my bank to try and blag some (admittedly pretty minor - £25) charges back.

They put me on hold and played Mozart at me for five minutes.

A brief and amicable argument about implications of the outstanding bank charges test case later, they agreed to give me my £25 back. 

Listening to Mozart, according one 1993 study, raises IQ by a shade under 10 points.

What I want to know is - did my bank's inefficiency just help me outwit its staff?

Putting people on hold and playing Mozart at them could turn out quite expensive for banks.

Over at the ever-stimulating Micropersuasion, Steve Rubel points to FriendFeed as the next search disruption. Here's the meat:

"Social contextual search addresses Google's Achilles Heel - superfluous content. Right now when users scour the web they can't easily separate content they trust - i.e. what's been created by their friends - from everything else. It all gets piled into pages of indiscernible blue links that all compete for attention. However, if you can just search just what your friends think and prioritize it over everything else, you have a very powerful recommendation engine...As an early Friendfeed enthusiast I find myself increasingly turning to its terrific search engine when I need product and service information."

Which makes me go...hmmm.

• Because the people I trust for my product reviews aren't necessarily "friends" in the sense that I want them in my Friendfeed (back, indeed, to the old Facebook debate about who you accept friend requests from).
• Because my own experience is that this is already a solved problem, solved in fact by Google (and Rollyo before them) with custom search that lets me specify precisely the sites I want results from - see in the left hand bar of this blog for one that searches my blogroll, for example, that I find very useful for getting results that are just media/tech/economics commentators I trust (but who I wouldn't necesarilly presume to call "friends").
• Because the product and service information on my friends' blogs and twitters is often out of date and if I want a friend to recommend an ISP or a window cleaner or a good ocakbasi place in N22 I want the one they recommend now, not the one they raved about in a post last year which never got updated when it all went wrong.
  
• But most of all, because knowing the context that it's me asking, the things my friends say are good for them might be things they'd never recommend for me.
  

In fact, if I need a recommendation from someone I trust - I'll ask. You can't treat personal media like mass media and expect  to get a good result. Sure, sometimes I treat my friends like restaurant reviewers or IFAs or old copies of Computer Shopper. But trawling through their old blog posts looking for stuff they once liked and hoping it'll suit me too doesn't work for me.

New research into benefit fraud, designed to accompany the existing literature on tax evasion, perhaps throws a little additional light on the whole weary "stealing music isn't wrong" debate. From the paper

"Our results suggest that moral values evolve endogenously and are determined by prices (i.e. the cost of acting morally). Citizens who have comparably more opportunities and low cost to commit a certain offense, develop the attitude that it is a minor offense. This suggests that citizens excuse or rationalize their own deviant behavior. Put differently, they self-servingly adjust their moral values." (HT Tim Harford)

One thing is reminds me of, of course, is Scott Adams's old experiment to produce cognitive dissonance in people who habitually ignore copyright laws but refuse to think of themselves as doing anything wrong. Snippet:

"The fascinating thing about cognitive dissonance is that it’s immune to intelligence. No matter how smart you are, you can’t think your way out of it. Once your actions and your self image get out of sync, the result is an absurd rationalization."

But the thing it most reminds me of is Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man":

Safe in the hand of one disposing Pow'r,
Or in the natal, or the moral hour.
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood,
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

If there are low costs and easy opportunities to do commit an offence, we're more likely to commit it; and once we've committed it, so long as we think of ourselves as good people (the sort of people who don't commit offences) we'll find a way of rationalising it. It regularly amuses me how furious it's possible to make people by pointing out that copyright violations could be considered in any way (legally, morally) wrong. But the music industry are just parasites (sure);  but some artists are doing pretty well distributing their work copyright-free (true); but we need to develop new models that are relevant to the digital age (of course we do).

Or in other words...whatever is, is right - because once we do a thing, we find a way to make it right, at least to ourselves.

The Telectroscope is, of course, the "secret tunnel" under the Atlantic that for the last few weeks has connected Londoners and New Yorkers via webcam. A lovely bit of steampunk art, for the past three weeks the screens let people in both cities wave at each other, hold up little placards and generally connected each city with the other.

In a week when George Bush's "farewell tour" of Europe has (fairly inevitably) been disrupted by anti-war protest, it seems to me a shame that the Telectroscope is coming down after connecting only London to New York. Few things seem so likely to advance the cause of peace and cross-cultural understanding than a permanent realtime link in every city on earth to every other, perhaps with an interface like the Telectroscope's but with the link at the other end shifting once a day or hour or minute to a new destination.

As Scott Adams hypothesised during one of his semi-regular attempts to win the Nobel Peace Prize,

"What I’d like to see is a pen pal web site designed to end war. The idea would be to connect citizens in different countries at such a high rate it would be politically impossible for the two countries to start a war.

You might support your government in a war against a country full of people you don’t know. But would you support a war that has a good chance of killing your e-mail friend Phlubanakawahaha and his entire family? There is some theoretical level of citizen-to-citizen contact that makes war between two countries virtually impossible."

A Teletroscope in every city seems like the easiest public implementation of this idea. Social networks eliminate distance and repersonalise otherwise distant others. Imagine for a moment a screen somewhere in a major public space in London that displays the daily lives not only of the people of New York but of Beijing and Ulan Batur and, yes, Kandahar and Baghdad. I have a theory that public opposition to The War Against Terror* would have been a bit more vociferous if Londoners had spent a few years watching its victims go peacefully about their daily lives on the Telectroscope and then had to watch them die in realtime on the same screen.

Update: I'm now wondering whether outdoor ads - the big posters you get in the street, the video posters on some underground stations - could be fitted with webcams and put to this very purpose during periods they were unsold. As outdoor advertising moves towards digital it should become fairly easy for unsold spaces to show the citizens of other cities going past their own posters - thus making the point that we're all just people going about our day in much the same way and probably shouldn't let our governments send us to kill each other. (Except it wouldn't work in Sao Paolo, where outdoor ads are banned.)

(Photo credit: cowfish) 

*this is what it was really called for the first few hours after the 9/11 attacks until someone noticed the acronym

Fox News Chicago is running a very interesting experiment - LiveNewsCameras, a site that lets anyone see what any of their news cameras sees at any time.

So as well as the usual array of 24-hour news channels, the site also lets you monitor traffic cameras across a number of US cities; airport cameras at LAX and elsewhere; follow three different live chase cameras; and look at a number of - somewhat eerily deserted - news studios.

Which all raises an interesting question - if the cameras are rolling, why not stick the feed up somewhere and see if anyone wants to look at it? Access to traffic cameras at my own convenience rather than when my local TV news happens to schedule a traffic update would be obviously useful, and in London live footage of the underground stations I use would be helpful too. England is infamous for its infestation of public CCTV cameras - if we must have the things, public online access to the resulting video streams seems like an excellent idea.

You'll have read by now Nick Carr's article "is Google making us stupid?" (which lurked for a while behind The Atlantic's strange delaywall).

Key excerpt, illustrating the gist of the piece:

"As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

Which is, perhaps, one way that the shift of media to digital has shortened our attention span. Nick makes a persuasive case: I am finding it increasingly common to see "TL;DR" comments added to the end of long blog posts by people who apparently no longer have even the attention span to type out "too long; didn't read" in its wearisomely verbose entirety. (Though paradoxically many of them have the time and leisure to create, or at least find and copy, bored-looking "TL;DR" lolcats.)

However, as I've said before here, the shift to digital has had some very positive effects on our attentions spans too, particularly in non-text media. TV shows used to be written with the clear assumption that audiences would have a whole week to forget what had happened between each episode, so each episode was a mini-plot in itself with only a passing nod to any sort of wider plot arc. Compare, say, Gilligan's Island (a series of 98 half-hour long misadventures which could be presented to the viewer in almost any order interchangeably) with Lost (all plot arc, developing a wider story from one episode to the next). At least part of this shift of TV into longer, arc-driven forms is due to the greater facility for viewers to follow a protracted plot when freed from the tyranny of scheduled programming. With on-demand (or DVDs, or BitTorrent) the viewer can watch an entire season of Lost or Dexter or The Wire in a weekend, and the fact that audiences are increasingly choosing to watch TV in this concentrated, sustained way is affecting the form of structure of our TV programming.

The shift to digital has, perhaps, created an on-demand and attention-deficient attitude to text. But the facility to catch up with missed TV episodes at any point, and to delay watching the next one rather than being forced to fit around a broadcast schedule, seems to be the driving force behind a new televisual golden age. This is the happy culmination of a trend that began with video recorders and now lets us - as the ads say - pause and rewind live TV. Pre-digital, broadcast TV was necessarily disposable; short-form; swift-moving. TV that can be watched on demand seems to lend itself instead to a longer form, with long-term plot arcs and the legitimate expectation of sustained concentration on the part of the viewer. There are, as ever, pros and cons. As the digital shift erodes our attention to print, it improves our attention to more visual forms. It's not necessarily a trade-off with which we should be entirely happy; but it's not all bad news either.

If you haven't come across it before, Knewsroom from Kluster is a neat new twist on community-edited news - offering not only to pay contributors for conceiving, creating and sharing stories (surely Jason Calcanis already tried that one with Netscape) but offering a prediction market in which stories and topics will be most popular each day. Springwise, where I originally found the story, explains how the Knewsrooms prediction market works:

"Investing...in topics is like investing in mutual funds on Wall Street, Knewsroom explains, offering a lower risk but lower rate of return; betting on stories, on the other hand, is more like investing in individual stocks, with a higher risk but a higher potential return. Whichever way they choose to invest, readers get rewarded each day at deadline, when Knewsroom runs its matrix algorithm to determine the Top 5 topics and the Top 5 stories in each section. Contributors who bet on a winner get a share of all the 'watts' (the Newsroom currency) that were invested in that winner along with a cut of the ad revenue generated that day, which gets credited to their Knewsroom MasterCard."

Which is a fascinating idea - people will get rewarded not just for finding and creating the news or even (like on HubDub) for predicting what the news will actually be but for ascertaining correctly what the most popular news stories will be the next day. Which is kind of what newspaper editors are paid the big bucks for. It'll be fascinating to see whether the wisdom of the crowd can achieve here what prediction markets so consistently seem to achieve - a more accurate picture of the future. So far the Knewsroom news popularity market has been written up by commentators as an exciting innovation but really little more than an amusing and potentially remunerative parlour game.  In reality, this sort of information is the crown jewels of news publishing. If Knewsroom's prediction market can really predict tomorrow's most popular news stories, that's some seriously valuable news.