BigShinyThing

Alan Kay — educator, scientist and co-designer of the OLPC device — in a recent interview:

The things that are wrong with the Web today are due to this lack of curiosity in the computing profession. And it’s very characteristic of a pop culture. Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn’t really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past. I’m saying there’s a lot of useful knowledge and wisdom out there for anybody who is curious, and who takes the time to do something other than just executing on some current plan. Cicero said, “Who knows only his own generation remains always a child.” People who live in the present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it starts removing the possibility of having a future.

[Via if:book]

Google has announced a souped-up version of online application suite Google Apps. The (un)creatively named ‘Premier’ edition offers enhanced functionality, more online storage, phone support and a bunch of other corporate-friendly features. All with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, for a flat USD50/person/year. Not just a tempting offer for small businesses who want to avoid spend on IT infrastructure — Google has already signed up Procter and Gamble and General Electric as flagship clients.

Sounds like value to us — importantly Google have also published programming interfaces for their office suite, so that third-party developers (or switched-on corporate IT departments who see which way the wind is turning and want to continue to justify their salaries) can enhance and tweak functionality. All that virtual team collaboration stuff? Already in place. Blackberry integration? Soon, probably. Yawn, then take a deep breath: next comes the modern bit.

Google Apps is the first mainstream system to give business users tools which really begin to acknowledge the cloud, tools which aspire to the benefits of those long-used by Linux hackers and wikipedians; tools with which to engage and work with strangers or competitors for mutual advantage. They aren’t there yet — Google’s initial focus is to get some traction in the mundane worlds of word-processing and data-crunching — but the trajectory is easy to plot: on- and up-wards into business-focussed social media. The challenge is to reshape — or re-create — traditional business processes into a form where they can really profit from such tools.

Companies find it difficult enough to move from Flash-heavy websites crammed with stale corporate nonsense, to actual conversation with their audience. It will be much harder for most to find a path on which they can make their borders more porous, their processes more diffuse, their knowledge more open, and yet still have an edge. But adoption of tools like Google Apps — even in their current early form — might serve to redirect people’s attention up from their desks, out through their screens, and into the cloud where the world is. It’s a start. Wait and see.

According to Dealbreaker:

Viacom executives are in London negotiating the purchase of LastFM, the London based “online social music network” (read: internet radio station), according to a music business source familiar with the negotiations. The purchase price is said to be $450 million dollars.

Viacom has been reportedly looking to expand its online presence. Reports have claimed that Viacom executives were disappointed that they did not pickup YouTube. LastFM recently signed a deal with Warner Music Group giving the internet radio station the rights to play WMG’s entire music catalog. Shortly before YouTube signed its deal to be acquired by Google, the video sharing network signed several rights deals with video content owners. There has been some speculation that LastFM’s recent dealmaking might have cleared the way for an acquisition by a larger media or internet company.

Neither Viacom nor LastFM returned calls this morning seeking comment on the rumor.

We can believe this. LastFM is fantastic and for the owner of MTV to buy it makes perfect sense. Last.fm’s music recommendation model is a brilliant way to break new acts — in the way that MTV was waaaay back in the day. What’s more, the MySpace generation isn’t interested in shiny music videos any more — to them, it’s all about the music. Ironically, we may be seeing radio kill the video star.

Via Plasticbag.

In a piece entitled Why Advertisers Still Don’t Get It, Business Week has confirmed our Esther Dyson nugget about good products selling themselves. According to the article:

It’s time to remember that advertising needs brands more than brands need advertising. A good product creates its own relationship.

The example of a good product is the usual one from the usual place — the Apple iPhone — but Business Week also takes the opportunity to roundly skewer advertising as good advertising for, well, ads.

Miami hot shop Crispin Porter & Bogusky’s latest marketing wheeze has been to re-animate the long-dead eponymous founder of Orville Redenbacher popcorn. Apart from being downright creepy (oh we’re sorry — we mean edgy), the campaign — like CDP’s previous Subservient Chicken — seems to have done little to actually sell popcorn.

But for all the campaign buzz and blog-talk, nobody seems to care about Redenbacher’s revival. One might even wonder if, by becoming the reborn star of his commercial, Orville might attract too much attention to himself and none to his product. The hype surrounding the communication might fail to draw new enthusiasm for the product itself. I wonder if this commercial isn’t a sort of subconscious metaphor for how we keep propping up the lifeless tool of advertising, which is no longer the inspiration it used to be.

Well golly. This isn’t some disgruntled blogger dissing a whole industry. This is Business-flippin-Week! It’s as if in the face of Apple’s success, a whole tide of ‘well we never liked you anyway’ anti-advertising antipathy has begun. Again.

[Rather important note: the Business Week article is, of course, written by one Marc Gobe, head of Desgrippes Gobe New York, a brand design firm. We think we're going to rather enjoy the forthcoming advertisers vs. designers hair-pulling.]

As anyone who has ever worked in a team will attest, much of the effort in group creation goes into the meetings, haggling, biting and scratching around the project, rather than into the project itself. With luck, the final creative product will emerge from the scrum relatively intact, and possibly even fit-for-purpose. Generally, unless the history of the end-product is written up by some third-party, its consumers remain blissfully unaware of the scrummage and niggles which led to its creation. So things have been since the dawn of time, and so they remained until the development of social media tools for group co-creation.

Choose some topical news on Wikipedia: Anna Nicole Smith’s sad demise for example. Or the history of militant Islam. The Wikipedia entries themselves seem relatively sedate and restrained. But take a deep breath, then click on the ‘discussion’ link at the top of the page. Welcome to the world behind the curtain of ‘the authentic’ — a seething cluster of white-hot forums where the content of postings is revised, fought over, denegrated and spat on, by as unruly a rabble of obsessives, freaks and zealots as you could find anywhere on- or off-line. Given at least tacit agreement as to the task at hand, empowered, focussed readers can generate excellent conent. But things get messy when the task is more open-ended. Mosey on over to Penguin’s A Million Penguins project: an attempt to produce a wiki-based collaborative novel. A nasty nasty mess on the surface — but as noted by the good people at if:book:

Far more interesting is the discussion page behind the novel where one can read the valiant efforts of participants to communicate with one another and to instill some semblance of order. Here are the battle wounded from the wiki fray… characters staggering about in search of an author. Writers in search of an editor. One person, obviously dismayed at the narrative’s dogged refusal to make sense, suggests building separate pages devoted exclusively to plotting out story arcs. Another exclaims: “THE STORY AS OF THIS MOMENT IS THE STORY — you are permitted to make slight changes in past, but concentrate on where we are now and move forward.” Another proceeds to forcefully disagree. Others, even more exasperated, propose forking the project into alternative novels and leaving the chaotic front page to the buzzards.

How ironic it would be if each user ended up just creating their own page and writing the novel they wanted to write — alone.

Reading through these paratexts, I couldn’t help thinking that this [the discussion page] was in fact the real story being written. Might [it] contain the seeds of a Tristram Shandyesque tale about a collaborative novel-writing experiment gone horribly awry, in which the much vaunted “novel” exists only in its total inability to be written?

The if:bookers are themselves active explorers of collaborative marginalia — check their Future of the Book site for some lovely examples of ‘networked books’ and commenting tools. We’re particularly excited about the possibilities opened up by their CommentPress plugin for Wordpress, which enables comments at paragraph rather than posting-level on sites built with WordPress (as is BST itself).

The BBC reports that Doctor Robert Adler, inventor of the ultrasonic remote control, has died.

Before Adler’s innovation at Zenith, remote controls were wired, or used flashing lights that were effected by sunlight.

Back then, according to Zenith’s official history of the remote, TV sales people were dead against remotes which needed batteries (how we can learn from the Teachings of the Ancients!) because:

If the battery went dead, the sales staff said, the customer might think something was wrong with the TV. If the remote control didn’t emit light or show any other visible sign of functioning, people would think it was broken once the batteries died.

Respecting this insight, Adler’s remote:

was built around aluminum rods that were light in weight and, when struck at one end, emitted distinctive high-frequency sounds. The first such remote control used four rods, each approximately 2-1/2 inches long: one for channel up, one for channel down, one for sound on and off, and one for on and off.

Bless. Adler went on to win 180 patents in a variety of fields. According to his wife, who survives him, “the remote was not his favourite invention, [...] he rarely watched television and was ‘more of a reader’”.

Robert Adler, we salute you.

Whatever you’re doing on the 14th, we offer an alternative take on romance for your enjoyment: Scanner’s 2002 Valentine’s Day radio piece The Sounds of Love, featuring (in no particular order):

Bats; Albatrosses; Tungler frogs; Asian Lions; Billygoats; Mute Swans; Elephants; Puerto Rican Tree Frogs; Peacocks; Swallows; Beluga Whales; Capuchin Birds; Blue Tits; Cats; Bees; Grey Lions; Toads; Satin Bowerbirds; Grey Seals; Hammer Headed Fruit Bats; Swallow Gulls and Elephant Seals

Scanner played an awesome spatialised version of this at the recent Future of Sound launch. Find more of his works on the compendious, tremendous UbuWeb.

Enjoy.

Originally transmitted by the BBC on 13th February 2002.

Hoxton wall canvas

Originally uploaded by bigshinything.

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Ian Richardson, renowned for his portrait of Machiavellian chief whip Francis Urquhart in 1990 political thriller House of Cards, died in his sleep at his London home. His death came as a shock as he had not been ill and was due to begin filming his next role in TV show Midsomer Murders next week, his agent said.

Richardson’s portrayal of Urquhart was best remembered for his oft-repeated quote: “You might very well think that — I couldn’t possibly comment”.

Dear BBC — we think releasing House of Cards in its entirety online would be a fitting tribute.

Source: BBC.

First, a bit of background. Stay with us. It’s worth the trip.

In his magnum opus Being and Time, philosopher Martin Heidegger has a lot to say about tools. He argues that when we are actively engaged in performing a task through use of a tool, we lose consciouness of the tool itself, which, in his terminology, ‘withdraws’ into the task. The tool is only experienced as a thing-in-itself again when put down. Think of the experience of a skilled carpenter using a hammer, or a geek geeking in front of a computer. They’re not aware of the tool, they’re working at the task.

But something special happens with tools which are never put down — which, like the tool of language, are always on, always reliably available. Particularly when the task at hand isn’t something finite — such as making-a-chair, or building-a-house — but is, rather, the task of being-in-the-world. Consider the fishes of the sea:

The extraordinary efficiency of the fish as a swimming device is partly due, it now seems, to an evolved capacity to couple its swimming behaviors to the pools of external kinetic energy found as swirls, eddies and vortices in its watery environment. These vortices include both naturally occurring ones (e.g., where water hits a rock) and self-induced ones (created by well-timed tail flaps). The fish swims by building these externally occurring processes into the very heart of its locomotion routines. […]

Now consider a reliable feature of the human environment, such as the sea of words. This linguistic surround envelopes us from birth. Under such conditions, the plastic human brain will surely come to treat such structures as a reliable resource to be factored into the shaping of on-board cognitive routines.

Where the fish flaps its tail to set up the eddies and vortices it subsequently exploits, we intervene in multiple linguistic media, creating local structures and disturbances whose reliable presence drives our ongoing internal processes. Words and external symbols are thus paramount among the cognitive vortices which help constitute human thought.
[Andy Clarke & David Chalmer -- The Extended Mind ]

Or, as Clarke puts it elsewhere:

Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace.

In essence, our brains are good at using reliably-available [that caveat is important] features of our surroundings as part of what Clarke calls the ‘extended mind’:

…you say to someone you know, do you know the time, and they say yes. And then they look at their watch. You can sort of challenge them well, did you really know the time when you said yes? They’ll say “yeah, I knew how to get the time” and I think that’s often what we do mean when we say yes, we know things, [we actually mean that] we know how to get them from our long term memory, from some reliable environmental resource, from wherever.

[Andy Clarke -- interview]

To distill further — we’re good at experiencing having-accessible as knowing — with the tools (wristwatch, language, social media) themselves no longer even experienced as being outside ourselves. See where we’re going with this? With always-on social media, we have accessible not just encyclopedic (wikipedic?) knowledge of the world, but vortices of social networks and interrelations as fluid as the ones exploited by Clarke’s theory-fish. And we’re innately equipped to utilise those networks and interrelations as part of our ‘extended mind’.

This is [part of] the argument behind our claim that these media are post-communication: they’re enablers that sit beside (not within) the idea of communication, in our box of tools-for-being-people. If true, this is a huge and humbling thing to be a part of. If wrong, looking at emergent media — in particular social media — this way, at least pins it down for long enough to probe at concepts which are otherwise, well, slippery as a fish.

Your set text for this week, should you choose to accept this mission: Clarke’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again.

Ok, it’s a one-off, and it’s a bit niche, but for a good cause…

London’s only arts radio station, Resonance FM, is in dire need of funding — unless they can raise around £60k in the next few months, it’s bye-bye to a weird and wonderful London media institution.

As part of their fund-raising drive, Resonance are auctioning off the 24th February episode of their Saturday afternoon programme Glue Peter to the highest bidder. Plus you get some merchandise and stuff.

You can send your bid by to gluepeter@googlemail.com, but don’t forget to check the current highest bid first by visiting their Myspace page.

You can also donate by visiting the Resonance FM website and following the instructions.

[Note please do NOT contact BST about this -- we're just helping spread the word].

Whoah. This out-Bruckheimers CSI. TechCrunch reports that:

When famous computer scientist Jim Gray went missing a few days ago, the coast guard launched a large scale search that found absolutely nothing. On Thursday, they gave up.

Then Amazon stepped in. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. It’s a tough task — the boat would only be about six pixels in size in an image, and there was a lot of cloud cover obscuring large parts of the area scanned. But volunteers are pouring in to help out.

That’s pretty amazing. But to us, the most amazing thing is the phrase [Amazon] arranged for a satellite sweep of the area [...].

Reality check, folks: this suggests that in 2007, an online bookshop has sufficient clout to book time on Low-Earth-Orbit surveillence satellites. You know, the kind that are handy plot devices for Tom Clancy and the writers of 24. What next? Some crowdsourced triangulation of my cellphone location arranged by eBay’s Special Ops team in preparation for an airstrike using A10s leased from the US Airforce by PayPal?

People, we live in scary scary times. But we hope they find Jim alive.

[UPDATE: OK, turns out the satellite is run by commercial 'remote sensing' business DigitalGlobe, not the military. We're not sure if we find that reassuring, or the other thing...]

[UPDATE 20070208: One of the project members emailed us anonymously to clarify exactly what took place: in his/her words:

Gizmodo got this 100% completely and totally wrong: Amazon didn't "arrange" for anything.

The New York Times piece on the search gets this correctly: a group of very high-powered Silicon Valley people (like Sergey Brin) helped get several other groups like Digital Globe and NASA to do satellite passes. MechTurk was just a clearinghouse for doing the work.

I think the confusion comes from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' blog where he said a few days ago that "Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly." The "we" there wasn't Amazon, it was probably a dozen people at various companies helping coordinate that effort.

Thanks for the email!]

ZDNet reports that Ile-de-France, the political district of greater Paris, has plans to give 175,000 schoolchildren and apprentices a USB drive loaded with open-source software. The keys will be given to 130,000 secondary school pupils and 45,000 first year apprentices at training centres at the start of the 2007 school year. The aim of the project is to give “students a tool of freedom and mobility between their school, cybercafes and their home or friends.” The operation will cost around €2.6 million [hard to see how but hey]. The president of the regional council, Jean-Paul Huchon, is a self-confessed ‘partisan of the rebalancing of the supply of proprietary and open-source software’ who previously welcomed the launch of the Firefox 2 browser and led the support for a creation of a competitiveness hub based on open source.

And if they’re doing it, why aren’t you?

MIT Adverlab have found a 1985 patent for a phone shaped like an (Apple Mac) Apple.

It might well be more carbon-conscious to have a meeting in Second Life than hopping on Upper Class to New York — if you can cope with the resulting increase in your business’s ‘naffness footprint’. But have you wondered at the ecological footprint of SL itself? Nicholas Carr has. His conclusion? An SL avatar consumes as much electricity as the average Brazilian, or, as a comment on his site notes,

that’s the equivalent of driving an SUV around 2,300 miles.

For comparison, the server that BST runs on — which also provides our email, websites and much more — consumes a bit less than half the power needed to maintain your average punky fetish elf in SL.

Draw your own conclusions.

[via the iDC mailing list]

A few things we should set straight around here, just for the record. There seems to be some confusion in the back rows of the classroom about exactly what’s going on with all this social media/emergent media talk. So, boys at the back, stop picking your noses, and Smithson, I saw you scribbling banner ads at the top of your exercise book. Just stop it. Now.

Pay attention.

1. This is not a digital revolution. It’s social. Your Freeview box is digital. Your computer is digital. Everything else is people.
2. Second Life isn’t the start of something. Email was the start of it. Or the telegraph. Most likely, it started with the written word — Socrates was always suspicious that there was something big going on with this ‘writing’ thing. Your set text for this week is Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. You will be examined on this.
3. What started with the written word only hit its tipping point with email. Suddenly realtime, mutable. We’re still living in the shockwave of the social change this enables (we don’t get to choose the timescale of the histories in which we live).
4. Before that tipping point, we spent centuries wrestling with the idea of communication, a tricky, elusive thing. Realtime social media is about something else — it enables a different way of being, not [only] a new way of saying or representing. The kids get it, some of the rest of us get some of it:
   

   For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self. Let’s posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of the person as a

   bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background.

   Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie, of being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood…because they still had a selfhood, something relatively impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in.

For the rest of this semester, we’re going to explore the idea of post-communication media. There will be more reading assigned, and some exercises. Do your homework.